The Gaming Den

Yeah, Strength is used in less tests than a lot of things, but it has gobs of synergy lying around in sneaky places. For example, good luck killing a golem or vampire who goes all-in on Strength with Aura of Decay and Giant Size as optional powers to go along with their Adv. Fort. That's a soak pool of 24-30 depending on what kind of armor you wear plus a similarly McFuckinhuge pool for rotting your way through incoming wooden objects or punching people in the mouth. Also, you can lift somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 tons and have enough dice to plow through most walls like Kool-Aid Man.


With that said, a sword that deals aggravated isn't all that bad given that it's a game with abstracted wealth and people can carry "mundane" items made out of wood/iron/silver instead. I'm generally in favor of giving items that are a pure numeric upgrade the stink-eye, but such mild examples are already featured on the Preah Khan, so it's probably OK to allow them with the understanding that magical weapons don't get stronger than that without having weird bullshit attached like being a bane weapon or waxing and waning with the moon.

• Withering doesn't seem to allow any kind of resistance roll. This seems problematic when a starting character can easily be rolling 12 to 14 dice on a Withering roll.
• Blood Puppets also doesn't allow a resistance roll, but it only targets human extras so I guess that doesn't matter. Strangely, the Path of Blood description states that Blood Puppets can be used on creatures with things LIKE blood, such as zombies, dryads, and plants, but the actual spell text says that only Human Extras are valid targets.
• Can a character with Hide in Plain Sight activate its benefits in combat? What happens if a character with this power attacks while it is active? Since activating this power is a Simple Action, could a character make an attack with their first Simple Action and then activate this power with their second?

echo

The answer to those HIPS questions as far I can tell boils down to "Yes." Veil is pretty strong and such hit and run tactics pair nicely with a feeding schedule.

Can we get rid of Devotions in 2e? Most of my players never actually read that section of the magic chapter. For people who do, remembering their prerequisites is a pain when throwing characters together on the fly. Few if any of them are so good that they actually need to be harder to access than advanced disciplines, or that you feel good about skipping out on passive discipline bonuses.

Now that lots of disciplines already have more than 6 powers, why not food the devotions in? Will to Power can just be an Advanced Authority and Flesh of Stone can just be an Advanced Fortitude. And all the Devotions with special rules treating them like Sorcery can just be sorcery.

Edit: Swords are also superior to guns if you want to avid making noise or killing civilian bystanders.

I don't have a problem with Devotions as they stand, but I suppose I also don't have a problem with them getting repackaged as Advanced Universal/Sorcerous either so long as they can make be bundled sensibly as vanilla Universal or Sorcerous powers.

I'd like to see how they would all actually fit if just put into one discipline though. One thing I liked about Devotions was that they were a good spot to put powers that sometimes didn't fit into any single Universal.

Cleanse the Body, Empty Body and Telekinesis are staple powers, but don't really fit any Universal and are such ubiquitous powers that they can't be bound to any single sorcery either.

It would be cool to have magic swords with built-in Veil effects. Destiny 1 looks like an appropriate place for a sword people don't notice until it's used or one that looks like a knitting needle.

Is Light of Ennui supposed to have any in-game effects besides suppressing Frenzy? For example, do people stop attacking you if under its effects?

echo

Only if the MC feels like throwing you a bone, since Data and Mr. Spock can still decide to kick your ass for the good of the crew. At most tables it's probably better at preventing blood feuds than stopping them--the ability to turn everyone to Daria for a while makes Androids exceptional bearers of bad news.

echoVanguard wrote:Is Light of Ennui supposed to have any in-game effects besides suppressing Frenzy? For example, do people stop attacking you if under its effects?

echo

In addition to shutting down frenzy it should work as a crowd-control ability if you wanted to keep extras from experiencing any strong emotions, like calming an angry mob or frightened bystanders.

I'd mostly expect combat to cease, though it needs some further explanations/riders since that is a bit overpowered since it is a free action that takes no power points.

Maybe if someone under the affect of Light of Ennui was attacked they'd get to make a new Willpower roll each time with 1 less difficulty each time they're attacked. That's definitely not spelled out in game though.

Whipstitch wrote:Only if the MC feels like throwing you a bone, since Data and Mr. Spock can still decide to kick your ass for the good of the crew. At most tables it's probably better at preventing blood feuds than stopping them--the ability to turn everyone to Daria for a while makes Androids exceptional bearers of bad news.

Data and Mr. Spock are named characters presumably with some decent Willpower and Edge such that they could resist successfully so not the best example.

I don't really give a shit. The thing about named characters is they make for a good shorthand and when you say spock and data to nerds they grok that emotional repression is implied.

Okay, a different tack. Yes, Light of Ennui probably shouldn't stop from attacking any characters whose major schtick is being already unaffected by emotion.

Perhaps having Light of Ennui makes you immune to it affecting your own behavior. That seems appropriate.

The reason why I called it a matter of MC judgement is that in horror, sci-fi and action movies there is an awful lot of things that have murderous, amoral extra with no written motivation as their shtick. Maybe they're contract killers who just need to pay the rent, maybe they're hungry or maybe they are Android spawn, whatever. The waters are muddied even before you start considering things like whether the fight was started over a heated pizza topping dispute or because the nosferatu delegate started up negotiations with trying to break someone's neck.

Honestly, Light of Ennui just doesn't strike me as a good power overall. The only effect we can be absolutely sure it does is make Frenzy impossible, and that kind of undermines the entire idea of Master Passions. A character who just didn't want to have to deal with the downsides of their Master Passion could just turn it on and leave it on all the time.

It's also in a weird spot in the progression. Let's face it, Aura of Decay is awesome. Like, completely and totally awesome, both thematically and mechanically - its ability to ignore net hits on an attack roll is pretty sweet. But in order to get Aura of Decay, you either need Light of Ennui or Abyss of the Body - in essence, a choice between having a power that may not actually do anything depending on your MC, or having a power that gives your teammates cholera. Compared to powers that have absolutely no downsides like Touch of Darkness or Hide from Notice, these powers seem pretty lame. I'd advocate adding text to Abyss of the Body that lets you declare a number of creatures equal to 3 + Potency exempt from your diseases as a Free Action, and replacing Light of Ennui with something....well....good.

echo

Also, Drive should probably merged into Athletics. It would solve a lot of problems at once, and has a ton of precedent in film. The Progress of Glass bonus could then be rewritten to say "A user of the Progress of Glass gains a +1 bonus on any Athletics or Stealth roll in which they can utilize a mirror to view a reflection or show a confusing reflection to others. Note that a character is always using mirrors while driving. This bonus increases to +2 with Advanced and +3 with Elder Progress of Glass."

echo

I think Light of Ennui could be filled out to something more impressive if you concentrated more on what an effective debuff making people incapable of caring is just generally speaking. I mean, really, since your ability to make yourself do stuff you don't want to is pretty much dependent upon wanting other things which will result from doing the thing you don't want to, it's easy to argue that a power that removes your ability to care about all things would simply send you into an immediate and almost literally paralyzing depression. Honestly, the balance issue I see is a way to mechanically represent the concept of Light of Ennui without being horribly overpowered.

EDIT: Also it's weird that it prevents Despair frenzies, particularly those of the BSOD variety.

Doing away with the Devotions is a possibility. What it would entail is making a considerable number of extra advanced offerings in each Universal, which might be OK. Basically, each Universal Power would have about five Advanced aspects available (the two listed currently plus half of the devotions currently in play).

So the way that would shake out is that if you got an Advanced Veil aspect, you'd get to choose from:

• Lost and Found - maintain Veil on dropped, placed, or discarded items.
• Hide in Plain Sight - activate Veil while being observed.
• Façade of Nonchalance - extras in the area do not notice supernatural shenanigans.
• Familiar Stranger - onlookers perceive you as an expected person.
• Holistic Ventriloquism - displace apparent location by up to 2 meters.

That actually looks pretty good to me. Thoughts?

-Username17

Seems more optimal in every way, and fixes the problem with supernatural types that gain Devotions as part of their core powerset having fewer synergy bonuses than types that do not.

echo

echoVanguard wrote:. But in order to get Aura of Decay, you either need Light of Ennui or Abyss of the Body - in essence, a choice between having a power that may not actually do anything depending on your MC, or having a power that gives your teammates cholera. Compared to powers that have absolutely no downsides like Touch of Darkness or Hide from Notice, these powers seem pretty lame. I'd advocate adding text to Abyss of the Body that lets you declare a number of creatures equal to 3 + Potency exempt from your diseases as a Free Action, and replacing Light of Ennui with something....well....good.

echo

Neither power is as bad as all that, especially Abyss of the Body. First off, characters with Abyss of the Body don't necessarily have cholera. They have one magical disease whose transmission they control, and are treated as asymptomatic carriers of any other disease they happen to contract. There's no bit in there where it says that you start play with the 1918 Spanish super flu.

As for Light of Ennui, I'd note that it's also a defensive power against magic induced emotions. It does a good job of snuffing out Repel, Dark Night of the Soul, Poison Heart, Flames of Panic, Glimpse of the Abyss, and Shorten the Fuse. So while there's powers I like better, it's not exactly trash and is a decent social power for characters who prefer Contentions over Appeals and like to bring mooks to their fights.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Doing away with the Devotions is a possibility. What it would entail is making a considerable number of extra advanced offerings in each Universal, which might be OK. Basically, each Universal Power would have about five Advanced aspects available (the two listed currently plus half of the devotions currently in play).

So the way that would shake out is that if you got an Advanced Veil aspect, you'd get to choose from:

• Lost and Found - maintain Veil on dropped, placed, or discarded items.
• Hide in Plain Sight - activate Veil while being observed.
• Façade of Nonchalance - extras in the area do not notice supernatural shenanigans.
• Familiar Stranger - onlookers perceive you as an expected person.
• Holistic Ventriloquism - displace apparent location by up to 2 meters.

That actually looks pretty good to me. Thoughts?

-Username17

It certainly makes things simpler, and I don't see anything important being lost.

Assuming we're keeping all the Devotions, I'd recommend remapping them like this:

Authority: Will to power, phantasmagoria, shorten the fuse
Celerity: war form, sands of time, adaptive resilience
Clout: Flight, Telekinesis, Burrowing
Discernment blind the senses, Tracking echoes, purify the mind
Fortitude: flesh of marble, cleanse the body, empty body
Magnetism: Desire reflection, Chain of eyes, betrayal of the tongue
Veil: familiar stranger, holistic ventriloquism, facade of nonchalance

However, I'm not convinced that keeping all the currently extant devotions is a good idea, nor that divvying them equally to the disciplines is. For instance, right now Celerity as a Talent has one shared power cost no matter which powers you use. We'd have to change that if we fold in war form and sands of time. Meanwhile, the mechanics for disguise powers are given in the Veil write up, so it would make sense to keep everything that uses the Veil mechanics in the Veil talent. As to the latter: adaptive resilience is a boring numbers buff with added accounting. I see no reason why it should exist. The Familiar Stranger should honestly be a Basic Veil power, either alongside or in place of Mask of a Thousand. Tracking Echoes is way too hard to adjudicate and we don't need it. I could easily cut 3 more if you want to keep it symmetrical.

Edit: I feel that many of these names are too broad and too floral. Holistic Ventriloquism should probably just be Displacement. Cleanse the body should be called Mend the Body, because people will expect Cleanse to let them do things like cure disease and neutralize drugs. Tracking echoes or echoes of the muse are both superior to tracking echoes of the muse. Facade of Nonchalance doesn't actually make sense. Facade of Normalcy or Shroud of Nonchalance would be more syntactical.

I would probably swap Flight and Adaptive Resilience.

In creating my list, I put every power into one of the two Talents it was previously associated with. That swap would violate that rule in both directions.

Additionally, Clout already has Telekinesis, Force Fields, and "contact telekinesis" in Devastation. Flight looks like a reasonable extension of the ability to project force. Clout is also home to Clinging, so having mobility powers is not unprecedented.

FrankTrollman wrote: So how's this?

• Baali: Command, Aura Perception, Cloud Memory
• Dryad: Bitter Fruit, Aura Perception, Telepathy
• Khaibit: Summon Spirits, Aura Perception, Reanimate

And then every character gets 4 Basics and an Advanced that come from:

• Baali: Discernment, Authority, Any Infernal Sorcery
• Dryad: Discernment, Veil, Any Astral Sorcery
• Khaibit: Discernment, Fortitude, Any Orphic Sorcery

Does that seem open enough? Too open?
-Username17

My instincts tell me it's a little too open. 3 fixed powers is less than half of the 8 a normal monster gets, and a level of flexibility others will be jealous of. I'd say at a bare minimum you want 4 fixed powers per splat, so your monster template is half fixed, half chosen.

• Baali: Command, Aura Perception, Light of Ennui Cloud Memory
• Dryad: Bitter Fruit, Aura Perception, Telepathy, Rising Mists
• Khaibit: Summon Spirits, Aura Perception, Reanimate, Bite of the Serpent

Light of Ennui reinforces the Baali's "soulless" theme, Rising Mists fits with the Dryad's new association with Veil, and having poison spit was one of the cooler and weirder things that made a Khaibit a monster rather than just a dude. Alternatively, you could restore the "core discipline" mechanic by giving out Grass Rope, Compel Spirits, and Mesmerism

I can't think of a reason to have 5 fixed powers specifically.

The best I can say for it is that it leaves with "2 basic, one advanced" as the selectables, which has a certain feel to it. You could achieve that by combining the suggestions above, or by adding Basics from more Sorceries. I like adding Eyes of the Night and Learn the Heart's Pain, because they reinforce the idea that witches seek knowledge and thus end up with unusual forms of perception. Which would suggest that Dream Vision might be more Dryad-appropriate than Enchanted Slumber.

6 Fixed powers, on the other hand, has a lot to recommend it. First of all, it means a starting Media Res which will have half fixed powers and half selectable, which feels about right. It also reduces the amount of advantage being given to witches as far as possible while still accomplishing the core thing people want to do, which is get an extra Advanced Sorcery of their choice. "One Basic, One Advanced" is already a unit with meaning-- that's a Bloodline or a School. So you could add flavor and combat decision paralysis by listing several prominent Schools in each Witch writeup. I would combine all three suggestions, giving us something like this:

• Baali: Command, Mesmerism, Aura Perception, Light of Ennui, Learn the Heart's Pain Cloud Memory
• Dryad: Bitter Fruit, Grass Rope Aura Perception, Telepathy, Rising Mists, [Dream Vision]
• Khaibit: Summon Spirits, Compel Spirits, Aura Perception, Reanimate, Bite of the Serpent, Eyes of the Night

Another benefit of "6 fixed" is that, if you wanted to, you could probably loosen the bonds on the other monsters for symmetry.

I like 6 fixed for Witches, and am largely in alignment with Orion's notions on Powers (including dumping, renaming, and their redistricting).

I'm ambivalent on Enchanted Slumber vs. Dream Vision for 6-power Dryads since they already have Telepathy on top of Aura Perception for their extra perceptiveness.

I'd put Shorten the Fuse on the chopping block along with Adaptive Resilience and Tracking Echoes, it's just too specific and even has a bit of overlap with Dark Night of the Soul.

Sorcerous powers should probably have more flowery names than Universal powers as a flavor distinction.

If we're addressing power lists writ large for playable monsters it would be prudent to resolve Patience of the Mountains, presumably proceeding with dumping it and assigning immortality riders to a few powers as discussed. I think most people are on board with dumping PotM, don't know if it was settled though. Dumping PotM would free up 1 discipline for a lot of monsters if setting up 6 power lists happily enough.

I was thinking it'd be tricky to pare down all monsters to 6 starters but upon reviewing them it actually looks rather doable.

Enchanted Slumber is better. Otherwise they overlap scarily much with Deep ones.