The Gaming Den

ckafrica wrote:Any chance for an alternative of the Tarot deck in the character advancement

Suggestion in lieu of poker deck equivalencies: go back to the prototype version of the system and just write out the abilities (+1 to any skill, +1 Research, etc) on index cards (if you are as cheap as I am, you can even cut the index cards into thirds and it'll all still fit)

FrankTrollman wrote:OK. San Francisco by Night is up.

-Username17

Very cool (and a city I recognize for once!)

Minor nit: seasons 4 and 5 of BtVS happened at UC Sunnydale, not 3.

endersdouble wrote:
Minor nit: seasons 4 and 5 of BtVS happened at UC Sunnydale, not 3.

Fixed.

-Username17

You could use a 500 deck which has 11-13 for an extra 12 cards.

Oh,by the way, here is a fucking awesome piece of information.

All of these really old movies that are now public domain are now on youtube in full format, stuff like Nosferatu, Frankenstein and Last Man on Earth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcyzubFvBsA

Is Nosferatu, I'm watching it now, it's interesting. The others are linked in the user's list of uploaded videos.

Reading over the rules in preparation for my game, I noticed a few oddities:

Sidhe has a Ritual power source, but no description of what the ritual is

Vigor probably needs to be capped somehow. For PCs it's not too terribly powerful but it breaks some monsters in half. Soulless, in particular, each have 13 power points, which means a str 2 human can become a STR 15 zombie. That's... ridiculously hard to kill.

Speaking of which, since Continuous is back, it seems like it should see more use. I'd put Soulless on continuous, and maybe some of the plants as well.

Swarms are damage 1, without a to-hit roll? In other words, they do no damage to things with STR 5 or so?

Ideologies lack any rules text, not even a "+1-2 to the threshold of persuasion to oppose ideology)

Frozen Note doesn't specify damage type, but I assume Nonlethal. Speaking of which, talk about a weaksauce attack. It's a supernatural power that is substantially weaker than a small handgun. I get that it's a basic discipline, whereas the other attack spells are Advanced, but I can't imagine any PC wanting to use this.

ETA:

My players want to know what "Operations" does, and how it's distinct from Rigging or Driving.

Giant size gives "a point of armor" -- is that a die of soak, or a hit of soak? For that matter, why is there no armor in the "equipment" chapter?

Silver, Wood, and iron ignore "supernatural soak bonuses." Do other sources of Aggravated, such as the Touch of Darkness, ignore soak bonuses?

Also, some questions about Empty Body arise:

First, what happens if you have Empty Body but not Patience of the Mountains? Do you starve to death? Do you eat with a silver fork?

Second, can you fly/air walk? If not, what surfaces can you walk on?

Orion wrote:Vigor probably needs to be capped somehow. For PCs it's not too terribly powerful but it breaks some monsters in half. Soulless, in particular, each have 13 power points, which means a str 2 human can become a STR 15 zombie. That's... ridiculously hard to kill.

Yes. I had originally planned to have a maximum power point expenditure by Potency like nWoD, but I dropped it and Vigor slipped through that crack. Fixed. It has a 3 + Potency cap per scene.

Swarms are damage 1, without a to-hit roll? In other words, they do no damage to things with STR 5 or so?

Yeah. But if you're up against Str 5 enemies you're probably dumping Tongue of the Serpent on top of that and totally ruining their life anyway.

Frozen Note doesn't specify damage type, but I assume Nonlethal. Speaking of which, talk about a weaksauce attack. It's a supernatural power that is substantially weaker than a small handgun. I get that it's a basic discipline, whereas the other attack spells are Advanced, but I can't imagine any PC wanting to use this.

Yeah, normal damage. I don't share your assessment of its utility. While it is essentially a base damage zero weapon, it also has a hit threshold of zero even at extreme ranges. Even at Short Range it's basically better than a gun - if you get 2 hits your target soaks two damage. That's not bad. And the fact that you can still do that at Way Out enemies is a good deal. But yeah, added some explanatory text to highlight its advantages.

Silver, Wood, and iron ignore "supernatural soak bonuses." Do other sources of Aggravated, such as the Touch of Darkness, ignore soak bonuses?

No they don't.

First, what happens if you have Empty Body but not Patience of the Mountains? Do you starve to death? Do you eat with a silver fork?

You have to go to the Deep Astral or something to eat. Otherwise, yeah you'll starve to death.

My players want to know what "Operations" does, and how it's distinct from Rigging or Driving.

OK, I put up a short description that mostly just differentiates Operations from Driving, Rigging, Electronics, and Artisan.

Specialties are Piloting, Industry, and Repair.

-Username17

Hmm. Light Pistols suck more than I had realized. Fair enough.

A LOT of attack spells are missing action types. All the Save or Dies seem to be Complex actions, and I assumed Frozen Note was also (which makes it suck). But then I found that direct damage like Tears and Fire Starting tend to be Simple. I'm gonna assume that disciplines with unlisted actions are simple actions, except for Transformation, which really seems like it should be Complex.

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The language in the writeup of guns implies that STR should somehow modify the damage of melee weapons. Unless I'm blind, it doesn't. Aren't Vigorous punches supposed to hurt?

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Quicken Sight implies that multiple attacker penalties are a big deal, since you need an advanced discipline to avoid them. But, PCs get so many skill points, especially in Media Res, that a *non*combat character should have like at least Combat 3. How often do you get attacked by more than 4 dudes?

Ah yes. Now we're getting into the niddlies of writing a system as you are writing and wargaming it. It leads to a constant need for revision and hanging implications of how things used to work all over the place.

Orion wrote:The language in the writeup of guns implies that STR should somehow modify the damage of melee weapons. Unless I'm blind, it doesn't. Aren't Vigorous punches supposed to hurt?

My original writeup involved taking a page from SR and having base melee damage be based on a fraction of your strength. I found that this caused people to absolutely fucking explode when subjected to swords held by even moderately strong enemies. Even Soulless basically just walked up and punched people into oblivion with just one hit. Their lethal poison didn't even matter because their target was incapacitated in one simple action, leaving them free to take down another character. It was pretty bad. So what I did was I just forced people to get by with their net hits. Wargaming a boxing match seemed to generate actual boxing match times - actual boxers (high strength, good agility, high combat skill) can trade blows for extended periods of time, and still occasionally drop a knock-down punch in there. Meanwhile, the same boxer can pretty reliably get a 24 second knock out against a scrub - which qualifies as terrifying in the "real world". Strength adds to your melee dice pool, which makes your melee damage bigger on average and much more swingy. Large dicepools generate spike results pretty frequently.

There will probably be a Tactics-based "feinting" mechanic that negates close combat defenses so that sucker punches can happen and low-end slap fights can end.

Where it's going to come in again is an as-yet unpublished and unfinished section on going through barriers. The big point there is that your strength-based roll increases damage for that purpose while your agility-based targeting roll does not. This means that at the high end trolls are better off ripping the doors off its hinges than you are trying to shoot the locks.

Quicken Sight implies that multiple attacker penalties are a big deal, since you need an advanced discipline to avoid them. But, PCs get so many skill points, especially in Media Res, that a *non*combat character should have like at least Combat 3. How often do you get attacked by more than 4 dudes?

Quicken Sight refers to an SR or nWoD style defense depreciation from getting attacked multiple times. Doesn't really make any sense now that I've gone to targeting thresholds intead of defense rolls.

What I'm going to do is put in a rule for attacking multiple enemies with melee or autofire attacks, and Quicken Sight is going to manage that. Which means that Frankensteins and Returned are going to be action movie superstars who will kung fu or shoot (respectively) their way through dozens of enemies.

But yeah, it's all a work in progress.

-Username17

Are we using Shadowrun's rules for defaulting on a skill? Specialization seems to work under a different rule for Technical skill, but I assume it's just a +1 die pool for the others?

Without thre revelent tools to do the skill, you default to Atribute + skill -1. Physical and social skills require a body and the ability to communicate, and it is really hared to default on those because every PC monster class possesses a Body with a mouth. Technical skills require the gadgets and gizmos of the trade or you default; aweful hard to examine a waveform in a conductor without an oscilloscope.

Do points spent on Vigor buff your effective Willpower when using Telekinesis?

If you have Devastation, can you lift anything 5 of you could lift telekinetically?

Orion wrote:Do points spent on Vigor buff your effective Willpower when using Telekinesis?

If you have Devastation, can you lift anything 5 of you could lift telekinetically?

Telekinesis is a Potence devotion, so I don't see the harm in letting Potence affect it.

By the way, I threw up some Chase mechanics and explained the Specializations a bit. They are intended to be Shadowrun specializations - so +2 dicepool when they apply.

-Username17

Hicks wrote:Without thre revelent tools to do the skill, you default to Atribute + skill -1. Physical and social skills require a body and the ability to communicate, and it is really hared to default on those because every PC monster class possesses a Body with a mouth. Technical skills require the gadgets and gizmos of the trade or you default; aweful hard to examine a waveform in a conductor without an oscilloscope.

uh... I'm pretty sure he was refering to "defaulting" to another skill at a penalty when using a skill you don't have. that is the term for that in shadowrun and GURPS, probably other games.

By the way:

• What powers are missing action declarations?
• What Merits and Flaws do people want?
• Are there more combat maneuvers and social declarations you want?

-Username17

There's a minor typo in the Long Chase sequence. It should be:

"If neither character commits to a stunt, then the lead grows if the quarry is physically moving faster and shrinks if the chasing character is."

For a special attack/defense option: can there be a feint/distraction ability? Something that allows for an attempt at a safe disengage or chance to cold-cock somebody more easily? Also, what about throwing objects at people? It seems that PCs should be able to fling a knife/bottle/car at someone.

Mildly offtopic: I have always resolved chases with a "closed fist" simultaneous bid system. Is there anything particularly bad about it except the necessity of tokens?

Starmaker wrote:Mildly offtopic: I have always resolved chases with a "closed fist" simultaneous bid system. Is there anything particularly bad about it except the necessity of tokens?

Token bidding games can be interesting but they are generally poor at handling mismatches. The classic token bidding game where you get a benefit equal to the number of tokens you bid unless your opponent bids one less in which case your bid counts against you is an interesting game of chicken - unless one of the members can bid two more than the other guy can in which case it's not even a game.

So in a game where one player can be an expert driver and another can run at super speed and another can leap from wall to wall like spiderman, the closed fist bidding game is either a totally unfair nonsequitur or it's just totally unfair. I honestly don't even see how that could work.

-Username17

Specializations: I get the supposed reason why the Technical skills lose a die if not used with a specialization, but is that something the game rules actually want? Like, do we care enough to add another thing to remember that doesn't seem like it adds a whole lot beyond the rules for defaulting? It seems like those considerations, insofar as we care about them, would be covered by you learning the skill in the first place.

Chases: How do we generalize the rules to more than two participants, so that there's the victim getting chased by the monster getting chased by Blade? Should we get some examples? Also, regarding the relative leads of chases, what if you had the same ANSWER system (with the actual distances modified) and moved up (or away) by one step per net hit in the opposing stunts? So if you manage to get up to A range you're in the "caught" status you describe, and if you do a rock-awesome stunt getting three more hits than your pursuer, they drop to W range. And if they fall to R range (which I assume stands for "ri-cock-ulous") the victim gets away. Is that too much granularity? Just a thought.

EDIT: On hiding, I'm gonna throw out to examples so we can see if we get the results we want. A normal extra is hiding from a supernatural. They've got the attribute but few (or no) ranks, so they get one to two hits. If the seeker gets zero hits, they never find the extra, if they get any hits at all they find the hider in, at longest, a simple action.

A luminary cat burglar is hiding from a monster. They roll twelve dice and they get four hits, so the base time is a minute. This means that if the monster gets any hits at all, they need to spend only a minute looking. I don't know about you, but it seems like the seeker has way too easy of a time with this. Also, maybe throw in a chart with some modifiers, like if the area being searched is unusually large. This will require considerations of how big of a penalty someone should take for searching a whole house at once (but nearly guaranteeing success if the target is in the house) vs. searching a single room (which the person might not even be in, resulting in guaranteed failure). I dunno, I get the feeling this needs some work.

I second this. Also, the seeking character should declare how much time they are going to spend looking before rolling. This is an absolute must if the person playing that character knows where the hiding character is.

FrankTrollman wrote:you get a benefit equal to the number of tokens you bid unless your opponent bids one less in which case your bid counts against you

...no, I meant it like this: the pursuer and the pursued take (say) six tokens each, hide a number of them in their right hands, then reveal them simultaneously and roll their checks vs. the chosen difficulty.

Starmaker wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:you get a benefit equal to the number of tokens you bid unless your opponent bids one less in which case your bid counts against you

...no, I meant it like this: the pursuer and the pursued take (say) six tokens each, hide a number of them in their right hands, then reveal them simultaneously and roll their checks vs. the chosen difficulty.

Forgive me for being obtuse: what possible benefit would that have?

-Username17

Incidentally, my analysis of the hiding rules is based on my interpretation of them as being based off the time chart. If that's not the case, then I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about, but also would like it to be clarified so I could get an idea.

EDIT: Also, do we have any teamwork rules? I just thought about it in the context of lots of soldiers searching around a base for the super who got loose, but it's obviously broadly important. Are we going the teamwork hits = central character dice, or what?

FrankTrollman wrote:

Starmaker wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:you get a benefit equal to the number of tokens you bid unless your opponent bids one less in which case your bid counts against you

...no, I meant it like this: the pursuer and the pursued take (say) six tokens each, hide a number of them in their right hands, then reveal them simultaneously and roll their checks vs. the chosen difficulty.

Forgive me for being obtuse: what possible benefit would that have?

-Username17

I think the idea goes like this: each guy decides how fast he's going to try to run (independently); that's the # of tokens. You then roll to see how well you succeed at running that fast; the idea being that if you bid high, you're going t ohave trouble making the roll but leave your pursuer in the dust if he bids low (or vice versa.)

I'm not sure how the system works. Take a pool penalty equal to your bid; net distance change is net hits * difference in bids, maybe? But I don't think the math works if you phrase it thta simply. But that's the general idea (I think?)