The Gaming Den

Laertes wrote:So it's a combination of how steep the learning curve is and how quickly the class's potential is maximised? Got you. That sounds like a good idea, a tricky thing to balance and a questionable thing for setting verisimilitude.

The idea goes back to 1st edition and even before. You had beginner classes, and then you had advanced classes that did more stuff. Actually, AD&D had even more tiers, where they wanted the really new players to tough it out playing Fighting Men until they mastered the game enough to play Rangers and shit, and then once they proved themselves able to handle that kind of stuff it was time for Magic Users, and for people who were beyond even that there was crazy bullshit like the Illusionist and Cavalier. 2nd Edition went with less tiers and more explicitness, where there were basic classes like the Fighter, advanced classes like the Ranger, and Class Kits for expert play.

Now, one of the places where 2nd edition really put their foot in it was the bizarre insistence that Mage was a basic class while Paladin was an advanced class. And that goes hand in hand with the kits thing, where some of the kits were crazy complex like the Bladesinger and others were just a modest reshuffling of your proficiencies like the Amazon.

But at its core, the concept of dividing classes into ones which are simple for players who are new or often drunk and ones which are complicated for players who are neither of those things is a good one. K's Barbarian from Races of War and my Monk from the Dungeonomicon are both very popular for fan made internet pieces, and they are quite explicit about being "easy mode" and "hard mode" respectively.

One trap that D&D has fallen into repeatedly is deliberately making the easy mode classes be shitty. That's extremely unnecessary. First of all, players should be balanced whether they are new to the game or not. And secondly, the expert classes are almost certain to be better than the basic classes when used in expert hands anyway. On account of player skill presumably actually matters and expert classes have more moving parts and the expert players can probably leverage some asymmetric advantages somehow. If anything, the target balance point of an expert class can be lower than it is for the classes you write for younger siblings.

-Username17

Agreed; the basic classes should be balanced for a higher point because they'll end up played to a lower skill level, and because they're fundamentally a footstool to allow your little brother to play with you anyway so there's no shame in making it a more explicit footstool.

(As an aside, is it just me or is there an attitude of "lol gtfo l2p n00b" that's pervasive in the gaming community, to the point where the view that new players should have to "earn their fun" seems widespread?)

Presumably you would combine this view with a proper implementation of the "class names are just labels, they don't actually have any setting implications" principle? Otherwise you end up with barbarian tribes entirely filled with newbie-level NPCs or other such silliness.

No, people are generally really helpful and encouraging. People tell newbs to play a Fighter because it's simple to explain and use. It also used to work well, back in the 90's, and is passable at low levels in d20 games (which is all you'll play 90% of the time anyway).


And Barbarian is a terrible name for the Berserker, but they wanted classes called Barbarian and Monk in 3e, being grognards, so there you are.

Bard => Enchantress.
Barbarian => Berserker.
Cleric => Chosen of ....
Druid => Druid.
Fighter => Warrior.
Monk => Ascetic.
Paladin => Beacon.
Ranger => Assassin.
Rogue => Rogue.
Sorcerer => no. Useful chassis for Psi though. Psion => Sorcerer.
Wizard => Witch, Necromancer, Elemental, Illusionist, Summoner, Wizard, etc, etc.

But it's D&D, so we're stuck with their crappy names rather than mine.

tussock wrote:Bard => Enchantress.
Barbarian => Berserker.
Cleric => Chosen of ....
Druid => Druid.
Fighter => Warrior.
Monk => Ascetic.
Paladin => Beacon.
Ranger => Assassin.
Rogue => Rogue.
Sorcerer => no. Useful chassis for Psi though. Psion => Sorcerer.
Wizard => Witch, Necromancer, Elemental, Illusionist, Summoner, Wizard, etc, etc.

But it's D&D, so we're stuck with their crappy names rather than mine.

I could get behind Enchanter/Enchantress, Berserker and Warrior. Ascetic could be decent... but I feel like most people just wouldn't grasp the concept from the name alone... which is no good.

Laertes wrote: Presumably you would combine this view with a proper implementation of the "class names are just labels, they don't actually have any setting implications" principle? Otherwise you end up with barbarian tribes entirely filled with newbie-level NPCs or other such silliness.

Not at all. Class labels should presumably have in-game meaning. If someone is a Necromancer, you should be able to speak of them in-character as a Necromancer. The Barbarian is a particularly shitty class name and needs to go away, but "Berserker" works fine. There are no problems calling characters "Berserker" in-character.

Tussock wrote:Bard => Enchantress.
Barbarian => Berserker.
Cleric => Chosen of ....
Druid => Druid.
Fighter => Warrior.
Monk => Ascetic.
Paladin => Beacon.
Ranger => Assassin.
Rogue => Rogue.
Sorcerer => no. Useful chassis for Psi though. Psion => Sorcerer.
Wizard => Witch, Necromancer, Elemental, Illusionist, Summoner, Wizard, etc, etc.

Most of those are bad. I'll start with the ones I agree with. Barbarian and Fighter do need to go. Berserker is a pretty good class name, so that's the direction you should go. Personally, I don't think "Warrior" should be a PC class, and that if you insist on having mundane warrior classes at all, then you should grab names that imply a certain level of badassery like "Hero," "Knight," or "Samurai." Of those, I think "Hero" works the best. Knight and Samurai are decent class concepts, but probably are specific enough to wait for expansion material. "Warrior" is too generic, and has the same basic implications as Fighting Man: characters that are basically bullshit placeholders with swords. And you do actually need such a class, to represent the spear holding followers that Warlords (or Marshals or whatever) get for free and which you can hire as mercenaries from settlements.

Anyway, "Beacon" and "Ascetic" are dumb class names. People know automatically what "Paladin" means, and there is no reason to not use the word "Paladin." Hell, Paladin is a much better name for a sacred warrior who drops healing and protection effects than "Cleric" is. "Monk" is more problematic, because when you image search "monk" only one of the five suggestions it gives you is "Shaolin." What that means is that while the word monk does mean supernatural martial artist in some contexts, it means other things in other contexts. You have to explain to new players that you mean this:

and not this:


But once you do make that declaration, everything is fine. Certainly more so than if you called them ascetics, because that word doesn't give you a bad ass matrial artist suggestion on image search at all. I admit that the word monk is problematic, but I've yet to see a suggested replacement that wasn't worse.

Bards get to stay being named Bards in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason that Druids do. Because there aren't any fucking Bards or Druids anymore, so when people think anything of the term at all, they just think of the meaning imparted to it by fantasy adventure games.

I have honestly no idea why you'd want to change the name of Rangers. That doesn't make any sense. A Warrior with some wilderness abilities and magic is pretty much exactly what a Ranger implies, and that's a perfectly serviceable character concept from 1st level all the way until you force people to take a level of badass and become Mind Lords and Demigods.

Sorcerer is a fine name for a type of spellcaster. So is Wizard. So is Psion. You're going to want to have a bunch of spellcasting classes, and in expansions you're going to want to classplosion that list even more. Because it's really really easy to make a new type of spellcaster who can conceptually handle level appropriate opposition.

Clerics are one of the biggest problems in the game. The problem of course, is that conceptually there is no reason for Clerics of different religions to be the same character class. 2nd edition really ran right into this problem when they made the Complete Book of Priests. By the time you do all the customization to make the priests of two religions, you have different weapon lists, different spell lists, different abilities, different hit dice, and even different basic bonuses. The logical conclusion of the Priest is not a character class, it is a build-a-class system. A much better system would be to make being a Cleric a title, where it's like a feat or something that gets you the favor of outsiders aligned with your religion or something. Clerics of the God of Death should simply be Necromancers, while Clerics of the God of War should be Heroes or Berserkers instead. Now, you do need to have White Mages, and Clerics of Pelor should be that class (whatever you call it). But there is absolutely no reason to tie being the favored priest of a deity to any particular character class. Each god should have a favored class that they want most of their priests to be. The days of having Clerics of Mielikki and Druids of Mielikki were stupid days, and we should put that shit behind us as quickly as possible.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Laertes wrote: Presumably you would combine this view with a proper implementation of the "class names are just labels, they don't actually have any setting implications" principle? Otherwise you end up with barbarian tribes entirely filled with newbie-level NPCs or other such silliness.

Not at all. Class labels should presumably have in-game meaning. If someone is a Necromancer, you should be able to speak of them in-character as a Necromancer. The Barbarian is a particularly shitty class name and needs to go away, but "Berserker" works fine. There are no problems calling characters "Berserker" in-character.

Now see, I disagree with this. My reasoning is as follows.

If there's a class called "Necromancer", then you'll end up with people who took Necromancer levels to get their class features but aren't actually summoners of the undead; and you'll have people who summon the undead but who don't have Necromancer levels.

They're just labels for mechanics. The actual labels need to be applied depending on the setting, and to the extent that that doesn't happen, your players don't actually care about the setting.

Laertes wrote:Now see, I disagree with this. My reasoning is as follows.

If there's a class called "Necromancer", then you'll end up with people who took Necromancer levels to get their class features but aren't actually summoners of the undead; and you'll have people who summon the undead but who don't have Necromancer levels.

They're just labels for mechanics. The actual labels need to be applied depending on the setting, and to the extent that that doesn't happen, your players don't actually care about the setting.

What?

3.5 D&D does have a class called "Dread Necromancer." It's a very good class that does what it's supposed to do. No one takes that class if they don't intend to do some good old fashioned necromancy. And if you split up what the different casters could do more completely which you should definitely do anyway, then everyone who wanted to get their necromancy on would also take the Necromancer class.

In short, we already have an example of there being a Necromancer class, and even though it was released quite late in the cycle it successfully shares identity with the term "Necromancer" reasonably well. If it came in at the beginning and had some actual role protection, it would be totally identified with the name. What you're talking about could theoretically be a problem, but your example is really really bad. There already is a specialist Necromancer caster class for 3.5 and it doesn't have much of the problem you're talking about and if you built it into the game from the start it wouldn't have that problem at all.

-Username17

Laertes wrote:
Now see, I disagree with this. My reasoning is as follows.

If there's a class called "Necromancer", then you'll end up with people who took Necromancer levels to get their class features but aren't actually summoners of the undead; and you'll have people who summon the undead but who don't have Necromancer levels.

They're just labels for mechanics. The actual labels need to be applied depending on the setting, and to the extent that that doesn't happen, your players don't actually care about the setting.

In Frank's framework, as I understand it, there would be no multiclassing, so if you are in the Necromancer class it will give you mandatorily necromancery abilities and while you might be able to take zombies or ghosts or something instead of skeletons as a selectable option during chargen or when levelling up or even when casting whatever your equivalent of Animate Dead is, but you wouldn't get the option to take a bunch of non-necromancy-related abilities to, e.g., stack onto an otherwise Wizard or Monk build for various stat bonuses.

If you wanted to do vaguely spooky and/or "dark flavortext" debuffs and buffs or save-or-dies without summoning the undead, the correct solution would not to be to make a Necromancer character option that can't summon the undead but is mysteriously somehow supposed to be using the same resource system as other necromancers, instead you could classplode - make a new character class actually suited for doing whatever it is you want that includes necromancy thematic elements but not armies of the undead, and presumably has a resource management system that hasn't been built with the assumption "armies of the dead" were going to be part of the character.

A quote from Frank on this concept, from a thread about ability management systems

FrankTrollman wrote:

Mask_De_H wrote:Hmmm, why not add the railroads in later, then?

As in, you start out all at-will (or whatever is decided for subclasses) for a few levels with the ability grab bag, then once you've claimed enough abilities, you go onto the Railroad Tier and your previous abilities/hat becomes your subclass? It allows for a period of organic growth, gives you the railroad, and creates a hard shift in how the mechanics are viewed (in which you could phase out the accumulation of lower tier abilities). That then acclimates players to mechanical paradigm shifts, which you'd do again in the Logistics and Dragons tier (in expansion material)

For the same reason you wouldn't just let people try to staple whatever set of resource management system they wanted on whatever powers they wanted. The resource management system is part of an ability. It's an integral portion that cannot be changed or altered without making it a completely different ability. Swapping the resource management system back end on an ability is as liable to make sense at the end of the day as making a new spell effect with epic spell seeds.

If your Necromancer works by having Essentia that they distribute between their minions and keeping in reserve to shoot curse blasts at people with, that's fine. But you can't fold that in half-way on a character. Each minion ability they have is not only predicated on having Essentia to be poured into it, but also to have other abilities to compete for that Essentia with. The whole point is that there is a curse blast waiting to use the Essentia the skeletons don't get, but also that the Necromancer actually cares about using their curse blast in the first place. If you just grab these items one piece at a time, it makes as much overall sense as the characters who spent a feat to open a chakra in the Magic of Incarnum book - which is to say: very little.

The other issue of course is that if people want to play a Necromancer, they fucking want to play a Necromancer. And they do not, for example, want to be told that they get to spend the next three months playing a caterpillar who will get to play with the actual necromancy rules at the end of that if the campaign is still going by then.

---

Basically, the game where you have distinct classes that have different resource management systems and stuff is a game where your classes are not terribly miscible. The game where you have open ability gain and can swap between classes on a lark has very little in the way of resource management other than the haphazard individual limits like how Rage happens arbitrarily three times in a day. And these are both fine games to write and play and they are not the same game.

-Username17

edit: beaten

FrankTrollman wrote:3.5 D&D does have a class called "Dread Necromancer." It's a very good class that does what it's supposed to do. No one takes that class if they don't intend to do some good old fashioned necromancy.

I thought it did primarily new-fashioned necromancy, not the old kind.

Frank:
I wrote a long and (to my mind) well-argued response to your point, but on rereading it seems that it's a null issue. The problem whereby a skills-and-sneak-attack character is called a "rogue" even if they've never broken the law and a weary, watchful outdoorsman can avoid being called a "ranger" by dint of being built with a different mechanical chassis seems odd to me. Thinking about it, though, I think it's an artifact of the extent to which D&D isn't sure if it's a single setting or if it's a generic system. And I am informed that that particular can of worms has not been resolved yet, so I shall endeavour to avoid stirring it up.

Nonetheless, thank you for putting up with my halting and semifluent D&Dese.

Laertes wrote:Frank:
I wrote a long and (to my mind) well-argued response to your point, but on rereading it seems that it's a null issue. The problem whereby a skills-and-sneak-attack character is called a "rogue" even if they've never broken the law and a weary, watchful outdoorsman can avoid being called a "ranger" by dint of being built with a different mechanical chassis seems odd to me. Thinking about it, though, I think it's an artifact of the extent to which D&D isn't sure if it's a single setting or if it's a generic system. And I am informed that that particular can of worms has not been resolved yet, so I shall endeavour to avoid stirring it up.

Nonetheless, thank you for putting up with my halting and semifluent D&Dese.

Mundane classes certainly have this problem much worse than caster classes. If you have a class called "Illusionist," it is actually trivial to make sure that they get enough Illusions that they are going to use some of them and also that other people get no Illusions or few enough Illusions that you wouldn't confuse the issue. Even abstractish names like "Sorcerer" and "Wizard" are trivial to work around - you just announce that "Sorcery" and "Wizardry" are arbitrarily different flavors of magic, like in Master of the Five Magics. Swordsmen have more of a problem.

By far the worst example is "Fighter." That is a bad class name, because fucking everyone in D&D fights. The name distinguishes the class in absolutely no way from what any other class could or would probably do in any situation. "Warrior" is not a whole lot better, although it mostly excludes people who fight purely with psychic death beams.

Rogue, Ranger, and Hero are better terms, because they at least imply some skill set. But obviously there's going to be a lot of overlap between those character concept. One can imagine that the Ranger is the most likely person on that list to use a bow, but nothing is actually stopping the other characters from being archery focused. Those are better terms than things like "thief" and "executioner" because they do not pigeonhole specific careers. And they are better than terms like "warrior" and "barbarian" because they imply certain skill sets. Unfortunately, those skill sets overlap more than a little, but that's pretty much unavoidable when you're talking about mundane problem solving.

Berserker and Ninja are better terms still because they very explicitly promise an adventurer's skill set and also suggest that they can start transitioning into magic powers even before they paragon class their way into Morning Lord or Soul Stealer.

But yes... broadly speaking there is a genuine problem with class based systems that classes won't be able to perfectly describe every character in every story. Of course, skill based systems have that problem as well - you're always going to have to arbitrarily assign tasks to certain skills, and that is going to make it so that you can't be good at one thing without being good at some other things that won't make sense for every character. Since I know you're into Ars Magica, imagine the difficulty of making a character who was an innumerate linguist. Such characters certainly existed at the time, but study into the skill that lets you read ancient languages happens to also give you knowledge of geometry in that system (on the grounds that the normal curriculum of learned people of the period covered both).

-Username17

That's a good way of putting it, yes. Ars Magica does not have the granularity to represent the distinction between someone who learned numeracy as a job skill and someone who learned it as part of the Seven Liberal Arts, and so can't represent an illiterate mathematician. You can bodge it, but then the Oberoni Fallacy applies. Shadowrun (a game we both enjoy) has the same thing with the interminable arguments about how granular firearms mechanics should be.

I started gaming way back many years ago with old Vampire (I was the sort of kid who listens to Marilyn Manson and dyes his hair) and while that game had many issues, this wasn't one of them. It makes no sense to say "my character is a Nosferatu but I could represent it better using the Gangrel mechanics." There is a very precise mapping between the world and the mechanics. However, that carries the cost that you absolutely cannot run any game but Vampire with it. Not that it stops people of course.

I'm aware that you have been rewriting D&D extensively and so this question is less rhetorical than it might appear, but: if you were going to rewrite D&D from scratch, how many distinct nonmagical classes would you write?

Laertes wrote: I started gaming way back many years ago with old Vampire (I was the sort of kid who listens to Marilyn Manson and dyes his hair) and while that game had many issues, this wasn't one of them. It makes no sense to say "my character is a Nosferatu but I could represent it better using the Gangrel mechanics." There is a very precise mapping between the world and the mechanics. However, that carries the cost that you absolutely cannot run any game but Vampire with it. Not that it stops people of course.

I played Vampire live action long enough to have my openly Setite character become Malkavian primogen. I played a Nagaraja live action (lunch box included). I have kind of a lot of experience with Vampire. And um... yes. Yes it has exactly the problem you're talking about.

A lot of the bloodlines are literally redundant, and a lot more of them are simply bad at what they are supposed to do. The disciplines are not created equal, and a lot of the clan disadvantages are brutal or meaningless. For fuck's sake, the Tremere "disadvantage" is that you've drunk some elder blood at some point and know how delicious it tastes. That's... not a lot of drawback compared to "being crazy" or "being a hideous monster."

The most obvious example is probably the Giovanni. They are just plain bad at their fucking job, because Necromancy doesn't work super well without backup related disciplines and their other two disciplines are unhelpful bullshit that synergizes in no way. How many bloodlines were introduced to fix that fucking hole? Eight? And they don't all do it well.

The amount of flavor text that was spilled on different clans and bloodlines was not remotely equal. Some factions really could do everything other factions could do narratively, and do it better. The Antitribu were created to fill a need that shouldn't have existed, and once they had been the amount of redundancy in the setting was beyond coherency.

I'm aware that you have been rewriting D&D extensively and so this question is less rhetorical than it might appear, but: if you were going to rewrite D&D from scratch, how many distinct nonmagical classes would you write?

That answer is of course variable depending on what you consider non-magical. For example, I would expect Berserkers to be able to spend their rage bar on things like "turn into a bear" as they reach higher level, so while they would start as a non-magical character, they wouldn't stay one for long. Rangers, same deal.

But basically, I would expect two mundane basic classes: Hero and Rogue. And I would expect to do at least one hybrid class out of that, which would exist exclusively because people would demand that there be one. But I would also expect there to be a number of expert classes that were at least initially non-magical (Berserker, Ranger, Marshal, Knight, Samurai, etc.), but that many of them could and should be brought in later.

-Username17

I played Vampire live action long enough to have my openly Setite character become Malkavian primogen. I played a Nagaraja live action (lunch box included). I have kind of a lot of experience with Vampire. And um... yes. Yes it has exactly the problem you're talking about.

A lot of the bloodlines are literally redundant, and a lot more of them are simply bad at what they are supposed to do. The disciplines are not created equal, and a lot of the clan disadvantages are brutal or meaningless. For fuck's sake, the Tremere "disadvantage" is that you've drunk some elder blood at some point and know how delicious it tastes. That's... not a lot of drawback compared to "being crazy" or "being a hideous monster."

The most obvious example is probably the Giovanni. They are just plain bad at their fucking job, because Necromancy doesn't work super well without backup related disciplines and their other two disciplines are unhelpful bullshit that synergizes in no way. How many bloodlines were introduced to fix that fucking hole? Eight? And they don't all do it well.

The amount of flavor text that was spilled on different clans and bloodlines was not remotely equal. Some factions really could do everything other factions could do narratively, and do it better. The Antitribu were created to fill a need that shouldn't have existed, and once they had been the amount of redundancy in the setting was beyond coherency.

The core of Vampire worked, by which I mean the seven Camarilla clans. Their stuff functioned as advertised, more or less. Malkavians were fluffed as crazy, and they were. (In my LARP they were actually scary too, but I understand that that wasn't common.) Brujah and Gangrel were fluffed as thugs, and they were. The mechanics matched the fluff. You didn't need to import other rules to make the setting work. That was my experience of Vampire and I'll stand by that.

But the further you go from that central core, and the further you go into "this is obviously an NPC faction so nobody actually has to use the rules"-dom, the worse and worse Vampire's system got. Necromancy was terrible. Some of the little factions that dropped off the Special Snowflake Conveyor Belt (I'm looking at you, Kiasyd and True Brujah) were downright stupid. Towards the end it was almost wearily predictable that every tiny little clan and bloodline would have its own unplayable discipline.

Please don't think that I'm holding up Vampire as a pillar of good design; the most important skill any Vampire GM needed to learn was how to handwave. However, the seven Camarilla clans worked.

(Regarding your Malkavian primogen, what the fuck? Was this a case of Fishmalks, or did your GM just need to be beaten with a rubber hose?)

Am I correct in understanding that Nagaraja were basically just asian Tremere with an extra gross out, and the lunchbox was for carrying around the flesh they need to eat?

Laertes wrote:The core of Vampire worked, by which I mean the seven Camarilla clans. Their stuff functioned as advertised, more or less. Malkavians were fluffed as crazy, and they were. (In my LARP they were actually scary too, but I understand that that wasn't common.) Brujah and Gangrel were fluffed as thugs, and they were. The mechanics matched the fluff. You didn't need to import other rules to make the setting work. That was my experience of Vampire and I'll stand by that.

Well, you mentioned one of the failure points right there: Gangrel didn't really do anything mechanically that other types didn't do better. I liked the idea of a wilderness vampire as much as the next guy, and I fucking wanted to turn into a fucking bat - but let's be real here: Celerity was what made you win in combat and other things could go fuck themselves. The fucking Toreador were game mechanically better at being a thug than the Gangrel were. By kind of an embarrassing lot actually. Fortitude was the least effective of the physical disciplines at making you win, and everything decent in Protean was ridiculously back loaded.

I would say that the Nosferatu, the Brujah, the Malkavians, and to a lesser extent the Ventrue actually delivered on their promises. And let's be honest: the Malkavian and Brujah promises were things that probably should not have been made.

If you were going to do it all from scratch: physical disciplines and thaumaturgy would be open to everyone and clans would be defined by which sets of magic fucking powers they got. Looked at from that perspective, the Nosferatu and Ventrue need an extra clan discipline. The Brujah need two. The Malkavians are fine (well, something has to be done about Fish Malks, but other than that, they are fine). And basically everything else needs to go and be replaced with something that isn't dumb.

Prak wrote:Am I correct in understanding that Nagaraja were basically just asian Tremere with an extra gross out, and the lunchbox was for carrying around the flesh they need to eat?

Yep. I would eat pork during the game. It was "disgusting."

Edit:

Regarding your Malkavian primogen, what the fuck? Was this a case of Fishmalks, or did your GM just need to be beaten with a rubber hose?

Actually, I found that I had blood bound slightly more than half the Malkavians in the city, so I had them elect a patsy as Malkavian primogen, had him declare me an honorary Malkavian, and then challenged him successfully for leadership. The ousted Malkavian primogen was furious.

-Username17

Was that the time when you spiked the communal blood punch with your own?

name_here wrote:Was that the time when you spiked the communal blood punch with your own?

No. It was the time I carried a giant thermos of hot coffee, which in-game was blood. It happened to be my blood and I had addictive vitae because I was a Setite. Good times.

-Username17

Well, you mentioned one of the failure points right there: Gangrel didn't really do anything mechanically that other types didn't do better. I liked the idea of a wilderness vampire as much as the next guy, and I fucking wanted to turn into a fucking bat - but let's be real here: Celerity was what made you win in combat and other things could go fuck themselves. The fucking Toreador were game mechanically better at being a thug than the Gangrel were. By kind of an embarrassing lot actually. Fortitude was the least effective of the physical disciplines at making you win, and everything decent in Protean was ridiculously back loaded.

Celerity was so good that we houseruled it and it was still the stat which, to a zeroth approximation, predicted how good you were in a fight. However, Gangrel are better than you think they are because aggravated damage; potence and celerity are easy to learn out-of-clan but protean is much harder. A Gangrel with claws, Celerity and Protean striking from ambush is a question to which there is functionally no answer.

Fortitude is better than you think because it allows limited maneuvering in diffuse daylight with the use of heavy clothes, which is really good if your Ventrue player takes the same approach to fighting fair that an average Shadowrunner would. Which they usually did.

My main issue was actually with the Toreador: They just didn't have a theme. They were either Brujah-lite or Ventrue-lite.

And basically everything else needs to go and be replaced with something that isn't dumb.

This. This a million times. I own a copy of Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. It occupies pride of place on my shelves, keeping all the other books clear of contamination. As long as that book exists, nothing else will ever quite be that bad in comparison.

Actually, I found that I had blood bound slightly more than half the Malkavians in the city, so I had them elect a patsy as Malkavian primogen, had him declare me an honorary Malkavian, and then challenged him successfully for leadership. The ousted Malkavian primogen was furious.

I can imagine.

Putting Ward Against Kindred on a sword is cheaper and better than learning claws. If you actually used the Red Fear rules, fire was so incredibly nasty that it was basically an "I Win" button.

Protean is just dumb.

Fortitude is better than you think because it allows limited maneuvering in diffuse daylight with the use of heavy clothes, which is really good if your Ventrue player takes the same approach to fighting fair that an average Shadowrunner would.

Fortitude isn't the worst discipline or anything (and it's actually quite decent in the Larp rules), but it doesn't make you win fights. Like, at all.

-Username17

Disciplines don't make you win fights in any case. Properly constructed ambushes make you win fights. I have yet to encounter any game which does not reward players for an overwhelming alpha strike from ambush.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:Am I correct in understanding that Nagaraja were basically just asian Tremere with an extra gross out, and the lunchbox was for carrying around the flesh they need to eat?

Yep. I would eat pork during the game. It was "disgusting."

Edit:

Regarding your Malkavian primogen, what the fuck? Was this a case of Fishmalks, or did your GM just need to be beaten with a rubber hose?

Actually, I found that I had blood bound slightly more than half the Malkavians in the city, so I had them elect a patsy as Malkavian primogen, had him declare me an honorary Malkavian, and then challenged him successfully for leadership. The ousted Malkavian primogen was furious.

-Username17

I approve. I wish there were some way in life that anytime my VtM Larper friend started talking about his latest boring brute vamp character, I could instead hear about one of your characters.

Laertes wrote: My main issue was actually with the Toreador: They just didn't have a theme. They were either Brujah-lite or Ventrue-lite.

I always assumed that Toreadors were vampire rock stars while Ventrue were vampire politicians.

So while the Ventrue is trying to convince Nikita Khrushchev to withdraw his nukes from Cuba the Toreador is snorting blood-soaked cocaine from Marylin Monroe's navel in front of fifty-thousand screaming fans.


Which reminds me that there really needs to be more Vampire Chronicles set in the sixties.

Laertes wrote:My main issue was actually with the Toreador: They just didn't have a theme. They were either Brujah-lite or Ventrue-lite.

IIRC, Toreadors were the Anne Rice vampires, and that's their whole theme. Their Curse is something lifted wholesale from Interview with a Vampire and even their disciplines were seemingly chosen by the criteria "Louis or Lestat do that".

FrankTrollman wrote: But basically, I would expect two mundane basic classes: Hero and Rogue.

I never understood the rogue class. It's not a class, it's a skill set. It's existence just makes everyone think that the mundane fighter-type (whatever you want to name it) shouldn't get skills.

The martial power source is by far the most limited just in concept. If you can have a wizard class that gets all things arcane, then there should be one and only one martial type class that can potentially pick up all the stuff that martials can do. The divide between skill-guy and dumb brute is something that should have been left behind long ago.