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LatwPIAT posted:The World of Darkness Dice Mechanics! I find AnyDice to be quite handy for this sort of thing. For example, this (program link) shows the % chance (Y axis) of reaching at least a certain number of successes (X axis) at difficulty 6 with no specialty, with a given size of dice pool (line colors). The numbers on the color legend indicate average and standard deviation, respectively. The tables are pretty nice too, for somewhat more precise values.  code:LatwPIAT posted:
You're quite generous in not giving us the fully disorganized experience of reading this chapter. I looked up the dice mechanics to make sure I was generating this graph correctly, and the first things the book tells you about rolling dice are what a dice pool is, how it's determined, and what typical trait ratings mean. It also says, on that same page (pg. 385) "see Botching, below." It only tells you how to count successes on the next page. The book tells you that dice showing 1s subtract successes the page after that... but it's under an Optional Rule heading, with further reference to "see Botching, below". The "Botching and Rule of One" section, which actually explains what a botch is, and contains the rule that each die showing a 1 subtracts a success, isn't until a full 8 pages (pg. 393) after the first "see below". This is the system's basic dice rolling mechanic, spread across 9+ pages. It might seem pedantic to complain about mere ordering with such fervor, but this awful organization is anathema to understanding. Would it have killed Brucato to finish explaining the basic mechanic before going into optional rules, action types, teamwork, and complications?
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Jan 19, 2016 15:56
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MJ12 posted:Except why would you take any other maneuver when one of the available ones is Death Strike, an attack at a Difficulty (target number) of 5 rather than the normal 6, which deals Strength + 2 Lethal damage-i.e. many of the people you fight will have their effective soak against it reduced by anywhere from 2 to 5 points. Note that having a sword lets you deal Str + 2 lethal damage, but a sword can be taken away from you while your Martial Arts cannot. Well, not easily. I think you mean Dex 5 Martial Arts 5, for Fury. Also, assuming equivalent skill, Murderer gets 3 successes average, not 2. I mostly bring this up because LatwPIAT posted:After Initiative has been determined, the player that goes first chooses their attack, followed by the second player, etc. DEX+Firearms or DEX+Energy Weapons for shooty things, DEX+Athletics for throwing things, DEX+Melee for stabby weapons, DEX+Brawl for punchy attacks, and Arete for magickal attacks. There's also DEX+Athletics for special melee attacks, DEX+Martial Arts for fancy punches, and DEX+Do for magickal punches. You may remember there's an Archery skill, but it's not mentioned here. Then, once everyone have chosen their attacksand targets, everyone gets to choose whether to defend. However, defending yourself is an action, so if you've already declared an action this combat round, you need to succeed on a Difficulty 6 Willpower roll to change your mind, or spend 1 Willpower point if the ST will let you, because combat really needs that level of ST arbitration. Then once everyone have chosen their defensive actions, if any, all those things are resolved. Dexterity is every splat's second power stat. This kind of thing happens in just about every World of Darkness (and now, Chronicles of Darkness) game line. Dex to hit things, Dex to not get hit, Dex indirectly to damage because extra attack successes roll over into affecting damage, etc.
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Jan 20, 2016 07:08
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So is the smoking all just fetish and torture stuff, or does it let you do things like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHLw2lyLnA8
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Mar 28, 2016 10:01
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Count Chocula posted:Because it's a guideline for the character, not a straitjacket? You can do all those things while programming a computer. And maybe you can make a VA who hacks reality without using a computer, like The Drummer from Planetary - he sees the universe as information, and can manipulate that information just by tapping his fingers, but he still sees the universe through a computer code paradigm. I always saw the Traditions as loose groupings - Paradigms are INDIVIDUAL, the Traditions are just shorthand. So a hardcore Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist are all in the Choir, even tho their paradigms are different. Traditions overlapping is a feature, not a bug! If I'm setting a game in California, this discussion could be the seed for a plot about the Virtual Adepts and the Cult of Ectasy both trying to recruit promising mages at Burning Man (maybe throw in the Sons of Ether, too). While it's true that there's a lot of room for more esoteric interpretations of the Virtual Adept paradigm, I'm of the opinion that example characters (or the example spells) should exemplify the core of their respective tradition or paradigm. If the book is chock-full of examples that all exist at the periphery of their traditions, how are we supposed to get a clear idea of what a typical VA looks like? Using yoga and weed to cast spells and omitting any mention of how these might be tied back into the core VA beliefs is not useful in the least. I don't even really care that those actions might be possible for a VA player character at the periphery of the VA paradigm, because they're not helpful as examples. "The Traditions are just shorthand" itself seems valid enough, since they're pretty much a bunch of disparate groups who would probably be engaged in active thought-war with one another if not under Technocratic threat, but I don't get using that to try to defend the example characters and example spells—when the examples are all so idiosyncratic, it obscures what that shorthand is supposed to mean.
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Mar 29, 2016 11:37
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Kurieg posted:Beast the Primordial Oh boy. Judging by the World of Darkness thread, a number of people were hoping for this game to be an RPG where you play Universal Monsters. It'll be fun to go into exactly how and why we were disappointed. I'm also looking forward to your comparisons between the two versions, since the preview was enough to turn me off from buying the final game entirely. Kurieg posted:I would remind you that this is a fictional comatose teenage girl that they are attempting to villify. Ah yes, the best character in the game—one who is more or less a misplaced Changeling: the Lost protagonist—is one of the enemies.
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Apr 9, 2016 10:06
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Mors Rattus posted:Demon: The Descent I'd like to take a moment to note Demon: the Descent's developers: Rose Bailey and Matt McFarland. The latter being the same person who developed Beast: the Primordial. I'm not sure what content he's responsible for in Demon, but despite being responsible for various badness in Beast and his responses to the internet reaction to Beast, it seems like he did some solid work here. Kickstarter backers probably got whiplash coming from Demon to Beast.
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Jun 11, 2016 15:17
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On one hand, that quote indicates that it's the Gentry who tend to respect Beasts, rather than the reverse. On the other hand, Beasts having the wary respect of the Gentry while also warping the Hedge in the same way that they (or high-Wyrd changelings) do is a big ol' warning sign for any of the Lost. It's the GET OUT mysteriously scrawled in blood on the wall of a backwoods cabin they've just inherited. Emy fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 03:11
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 Double Cross: What Are These Dice Even Doing I got Double Cross entirely because of this thread, and I've been doing a few preparations to play and/or run it (depending on my luck). Among those preparations was simulating use of the check system—I wanted to know what kind of results a character could expect to get when rolling something they're good at, and how valuable each of the three types of roll bonus present in Double Cross (dice bonuses, flat bonuses, and critical value reduction) would be in various situations. So what I'm going to do is start out by talking about something completely different to introduce the sort of graphs I'll be using (made with AnyDice) and provide a point of comparison. For this digression, I'll use what I consider a much more typical check system, that of the  In the Chronicles of Darkness, you roll a pool consisting of your stat + skill + any other modifiers. The result is described in terms of the number of successes. 8s, 9s, and 10s all count as one success each, and with 10s you count them as a success then get to reroll them (a rule known as 10-again). The results of that are shown above. In all, it gives a fairly smooth distribution. It's not a bell curve, but for the most part the mode (most common value) is pretty close to the average. That average itself is extremely predictable, too. As shown on the graph legend, the average increases by exactly 1/3rd of a success per die.  Failure is quite common with 1 or 2 dice, with reliability increasing as your dice pool goes up. It's easy to see the exact chance of failure (0 successes) on the normal graph, but there will often be circumstances where you want to check your chances of getting, say, at least 3 successes. I use this viewing mode all the time, because it makes it simple to see that 3 or more successes happen a bit less than 25% of the time on 5 dice, or a bit more than 50% of the time on 8 dice.  Chronicles of Darkness dice have a slight complicating factor, which is that the 10-again rule I mentioned can be modified so that 9s, or even 8s can be rerolled. Fortunately, Chronicles of Darkness lacks many of the dice tricks that other games like Exalted might feature, and also eschews the old World of Darkness's variable target numbers, so the benefit of N-again is known exactly. With 10-again, each die is worth 1/3rd of a success (~0.333). With 9-again each is 3/8ths of a success (0.375), and with 8-again each is 3/7ths of a success (~0.429). As seen above, the benefit certainly exists, but is not huge. Also, it only affects the chances of getting more than one success, because all dice that can be rerolled are already worth 1 success under any of the roll-again rules. Alright. Let's get into Double Cross. For an example, we'll roll sample character Speeding Bullets using her "Blinding Bullets" combo, she can use after making some guns out of cosmic sand with Hundred Guns. The combo consists of Concentrate (a power that makes her power use better), Miniscule Dust (a power that boosts ranged attacks by improving her perception), Penetrate (a power that makes the attack ignore armor), and Multi-Weapons (a power that lets her use shoot several weapons at once for a damage boost). Mechanically, this attack is quite straightforward, especially since her character sheet has a "Combo" entry adding the bonuses, attack effects, and costs together. The relevant part for us is that for her accuracy check, she rolls 8 dice with a critical value of 8.  Wait, what? Double Cross's roll system was included in Cyphoderus's writeup, but in the unlikely event that you don't remember the mechanics from a Japanese RPG that had its roll system described in a FATAL & Friends post more than 3 years ago, I'll generously recapitulate. Explanation time: In Double Cross, you roll a number of d10s determined by your stat, and then add your skill; the result of this calculation is called your "score". Dice bonuses will increase the number of d10s you roll, and score bonuses are simply added at the end along with skill. I'm totally ignoring the existence of flat bonuses for all of these graphs, because they don't change the score distribution, they just shift it to the right; +1 score bonus is always worth exactly +1 score. Much like in CofD, there's a system by which dice at or above a certain number (by default 10) are rerolled. Also like in CofD, the number at which rerolls occur can be reduced. Unlike in CofD, it's totally batshit. When at least one of your dice pool is showing at or above the critical value (default 10), take all those dice and reroll them as a new pool, except you give your final result a +10 bonus. This can happen multiple times, and all of the non-critical dice from the previous pool are ignored. That's what leads to the discontinuity in the above graph. It's not because Speeding Bullets has a crazy power combo, it's just a consequence of how the critical hit system works. With a critical value of 8, all 8s, 9s, and 10s are rerolled. It adds 10 every time, so the ones digit of the final result cannot be 8, 9, or 0. The dot at 50 score on the above graph is not actually a possible roll, AnyDice just stops rolling there because of the function depth limit I've imposed, so the "chance of a result of 50" on the above graph is really the sum of all chances of >50 results. (When a crit is rolled, the entire previous pool ceases to matter aside from how many crits it got. Using that to dramatically reduce the number of possibilities AnyDice was searching is the only reason my program executes fast enough to avoid the 5 second timeout limit that site has. Jasper Flick, the maker of AnyDice, helped me with fix that—my original attempt at simulating Double Cross rolls was much more computationally expensive and suffered a timeout failure if I let it reroll more than once.)  Here's the "at least" version of the same graph. I much prefer this, especially with a distribution as wonky as Double Cross's. The legend on the previous graph listed the mean, but here I can actually see that Speeding Bullets rolls single digits on her attack only very rarely. She gets >15 around 75% of the time, and >21 about 50% of the time. Now that I've mostly finished my explanations, it's time to post more graphs, with a few short summaries of what I think the important points are for players.  Above is a graph with varying dice pools. Increasing the number of dice improves the reliability with which you can hit at least 1 crit substantially, but suffers diminishing returns. At critical value 10, the default (which you'll probably be rolling on most of the time), adding dice improves your average score more until you hit 3 dice. After that, flat score bonuses are equal or better for your average result.  Above is a graph with 8 dice and varying critical values. Decreasing the critical value increases your average score a lot, gives you a much better chance of double crits and above, and each point of critical value reduction is worth more than the last. The Concentrate power, which reduces your critical value by its level when combined with other powers, is very good. I can see why the simplified character generation method forces you to buy it.  As the previous graph, but with 6 dice instead of 8. Those two missing dice are worth more the lower the CV is, and the CV isn't worth as much score with fewer dice.  Using extremely low pool sizes here to demonstrate something, which is that CV gives a greater average score improvement than adding an extra die here, but the extra die is much better for reliably hitting <10 score targets. Score targets in this system for average tasks are around 8, and go up to 14 for very difficult tasks. Anything above that, I suspect you're only likely to see in opposed checks vs other Overeds.  There are a number of powers in Double Cross that give people a +1 critical value penalty. I initially thought they were tres lame, but this graph shows exactly why they aren't. Yeah, critical value can go to 11. And if it does, you straight-up cannot crit. No matter how lucky you are, your roll can't go above 10. Flat bonuses still exist, and your enemies can always roll poorly, but it's a very substantial malus.  Lastly, once you've made your attack using the above weirdo math, you roll damage dice. One d10, plus another for every 10 in your attack score. This results in some rather reasonable and pretty predictable-looking damage values. (Which is very good. Encounter tuning would be literal hell if the damage curves looked like Speeding Bullets's combo attack roll up there.) Emy fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 11, 2017 23:39
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It turns out I totally forgot something, which I've also edited into my prior post. There are a number of powers in Double Cross that give people a +1 critical value penalty. I initially thought they were tres lame, but this graph shows exactly why they aren't. Yeah, critical value can go to 11. And if it does, you straight-up cannot crit. No matter how lucky you are, your roll can't go above 10. Flat bonuses still exist, and your enemies can always roll poorly, but it's a very substantial malus. Night10194 posted:I really want to know what they were called in Japanese to translate it into 'overed'. It turns out it's just "オーヴァード", the English not-quite-word "Overed" transliterated into Japanese.
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Feb 12, 2017 00:20
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oriongates posted:Whispering Vault is especially bad about that because I find the rolling system almost completely opaque probability-wise and while I can manage some basic functions with anydice I have no idea how to translate "roll Xd6, take the highest single roll or the highest sum of matching dice" into something that it would understand So, I assume it's something like this?  "At least" mode graph of highest single-or-sum-of-matching-dice on 1d6 through 6d6. IDK what normal ability scores are like in Whispering Vault. AnyDice link. edit: the normal mode graph of that is also a treat. 
Emy fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 03:14
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Count Chocula posted:Wait, the nWoD didn't have a government agency doing unethical psychic research on kids before? Or would you just use Cheiron Group or Project Valkyrie? It seems like something you'd need in the setting- see Mind's Eye (new low budget horror flick), Scanners, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Stranger Things, Firestarter, MK Ultra, etc. I don't know if there was unethical research being conducted on kids, specifically, but I do recall the Wintergreen process that VASCU uses came about as the continuation of MK-ULTRA, and the entire edifice surrounding it was shady as hell.
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Feb 16, 2017 02:48
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Wapole Languray posted:Scum aren't Space Gypsies. Really, they're more bohemian artist punk types. Think Space Burning Man and you got it. Love body modification, hedonism, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Also run black markets and have amazing parties. That quote Halloween Jack posted isn't something he made up himself, it's taken directly from the book, first sentence of the description under the Scum faction heading.
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Mar 16, 2017 09:49
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Strange Matter posted:Is Middenarde the game where you can measure the energy of a serf rolling down a hill in Joules, powering your wizard's diabolical plans? Or am I confusing it with another GRITTY MEDIEVAL GAME? You can measure the (kinetic) energy of a serf rolling down a hill in Joules because of physics. You can use it to revive the dead because Middenarde never says the energy you're using has to be electrical.
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May 23, 2017 20:55
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