The Gaming Den

How are thrown weapons handled?

Does the troglodyte feeding schedule that requires bloody flesh mean the flesh of a sentient, or can it be from a recently killed dog (or other animal)?

A character who practices the Veil of Morpheus is able to perceive their surroundings normally while they sleeping, able to wake themselves at will.

Does a person using Denial of Privacy see their own surroundings, or the surroundings of those who they are watching?

Verbena do not remember their dreams, even when woken in the middle of them.

Can a Verbena remember other people's dreams using Veil of Morpheus?

Frank, A page or two back, I saw you asking for a new Transhuman to replace the Children of Aether because of the overlap with Golems. I want to play a ghost, mostly because I think ghosts are cool. The whole "no hands" thing can be totally worked around by socializing/intimidating/dominating people to do stuff, "Solid Darkness", "Telekinesis", and even fashioning gloves made of still living plants.

Geist
Power Source: Orphic
Power Schedule: Lunar
Master Passion: Loneliness

Blah-blah, no time for text. Luminary may become a Geist by dying under relevant conditions (passion, betrayal, unfinished business)

• Core Disciplines: Fortitude
  • Patience of the Mountains (Basic Fortitude)
    Revive the Flesh (Basic Fortitude)
  Basic Disciplines
  • Aura Perception (Basic Auspex)
    Hide from Notice (Basic Obfuscation)
    Dread Gaze (Basic Presence)
    Frozen Note (Basic Symphony of Silence)
  Advanced Disciplines
  • Rejuvenation (Advanced Fortitude)
    Empty Body (Auspex / Fortitude Devotion)

virgileso wrote:How are thrown weapons handled?

Good question. What I'm currently modeling is giving large objects a bonus on attack rolls, and generally give thrown weapons incredibly shitty base damage. Maybe have your basic bottle give a die or two and have a base damage of zero. So it's easier to hit someone with a Molotov than it is to shoot them, but before the explosion it does really a lot less damage. Probably have a thrown car have a base damage of about 1 and give a lot of bonus dice - like 4-6. Making the numbers come out OK is hard.

Does the troglodyte feeding schedule that requires bloody flesh mean the flesh of a sentient, or can it be from a recently killed dog (or other animal)?

Troglodyte feeding is one of the things I am bumping into the hardest. Afer all, just having to eat pork raw isn't even a disadvantage if you have Patience, and they do. On the flip side, eating chunks of dudes is not something that people really "get better" from. Which means that if they hae to take it from live people it's the Revenant problem all over again and Trogs would be KOS pretty much everywhere.

The solution I'm coming to is that they have to eat people, but that those people can have been dead for some time. I'm thinking that a human corpse has 15 power points in it, and you don't have to eat all 70 kilos of it to get that power.

Grek wrote:Does a person using Denial of Privacy see their own surroundings, or the surroundings of those who they are watching?

Yes.

Can a Verbena remember other people's dreams using Veil of Morpheus?

Yes.

Hicks wrote:Frank, A page or two back, I saw you asking for a new Transhuman to replace the Children of Aether because of the overlap with Golems.

You misunderstood my sarcasm I'm afraid. The claim was made that Trolls and Akuma were practically the same, because Trolls only have 5 discipline powers that Akuma don't have (to go with their different power schedule, weakness, stat line, master passion, and appearance). My sarcastic reply highlighted the fact that since a playable type has at base 8 discipline powers, that really any two types with the same core discipline would be in the same boat no matter how different they were.

In truth, I'm pretty happy with Golems and Children of Ether. And I'm pretty happy with Akuma and Trolls.

A not about how I update these things: the master document got too big and too out of order, so I split it up into 11 separate chapter documents. Then I copy-paste the entire document over the chapter that is being edited. So I'm going to do the various updating I have to do after the pole on renaming the 2nd tier demons gets finished.

-Username17

Asura won, and the Sidhe have been duly renamed.

-Username17

So, quick question: if I'm a starting character with 1 potence, I can buy my strength up to 7. If I also take advanced potence during character creation, my strength is now 9, right? And if I pump power into Vigor, my strength goes way into crazy town, yes? Far exceeding my theoretical maximum of 7?

Gelare wrote:So, quick question: if I'm a starting character with 1 potence, I can buy my strength up to 7. If I also take advanced potence during character creation, my strength is now 9, right? And if I pump power into Vigor, my strength goes way into crazy town, yes? Far exceeding my theoretical maximum of 7?

For that scene, your Strength could be 13 before you even punched into Giant Size or War Form.

-Username17

My own playtesting efforts can be found here: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=50655

Also, Frank:
For the scene described above, if I happened to be a Transhuman and a cop shot me with aargh, bullets, my only weakness, what is my soak pool? And if the answer is "small", why does this not make Trolls and the like go down like dominoes when faced with mundane cops?
Can you take more than one specialization in the same technical skill? In any skill?
Can you advance skills past 6 with Karmic Advancement?
Could we get a fricken key in the document for those funky ASCII characters that are supposed to be tarot suits?
None of my players had the faintest clue what backgrounds are or do. That could probably use some elucidation in the rules. And examples.

All I saw was the list of characters, no other info. And from everything I've seen, your soak pool against bullets is Strength+Edge, which makes Trolls have a minimum of 12 (Str range 5 to 10, Giant Size +6 Str, Giant Size +1 armor, don't know if they have an Edge score).

Your cap on skills and attributes is (6+Potency), unless I'm mistaken.

I definitely agree that backgrounds need more detail. I ran a one-shot last week, and even with the details given, they were completely lost.

For the scene described above, if I happened to be a Transhuman and a cop shot me with aargh, bullets, my only weakness, what is my soak pool? And if the answer is "small", why does this not make Trolls and the like go down like dominoes when faced with mundane cops?

I'm a little unclear what you mean here. I think you're talking about the character in the example with a very large strength, where they probably have a base strength of 7 and an Edge of 3, so they would resist an appropriate bullet with 10 dice. Still a lot of dice, but indeed not insurmountable. A bunch of guys with iron weaponry (including bullets and shit) are indeed pretty threatening to trolls.

Can you take more than one specialization in the same technical skill? In any skill?

Yes.

Can you advance skills past 6 with Karmic Advancement?

Right now, no. Do you think you should be able to?

Could we get a fricken key in the document for those funky ASCII characters that are supposed to be tarot suits?

Sure.

None of my players had the faintest clue what backgrounds are or do. That could probably use some elucidation in the rules. And examples.

The skill section in general needs to be about thousand words longer than it is. It... is in the pipeline.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:I'm a little unclear what you mean here. I think you're talking about the character in the example with a very large strength, where they probably have a base strength of 7 and an Edge of 3, so they would resist an appropriate bullet with 10 dice. Still a lot of dice, but indeed not insurmountable. A bunch of guys with iron weaponry (including bullets and shit) are indeed pretty threatening to trolls.

That is pretty much what I'm talking about. So neither having Fortitude nor having Vigor active nor Giant Form nor Flesh to Marble nor War Form give bonuses to soak if you're weak to bullets and someone's shooting them at you. Just checking.

Can you advance skills past 6 with Karmic Advancement?

Right now, no. Do you think you should be able to?

No, not really. My players' dice pools are ridiculous as it is. They were just wondering, since we had a +1 to Bureaucracy left all alone at the end of advancement and the only person with tokens left had a 6 in it already. Side note: Combat takes forever.

Thanks for the rest of the stuff, I'll get more playtest details up when I don't have exams going on.

Gelare wrote:Side note: Combat takes forever.

That bothers me. I threw in some hax to combat the Rocket Launcher Tag syndrome in the earlier drafts. If you are finding that it went too far, would you think that up shifting all the damage values (that is: have zero net damage equal a Petty wound instead of 1) would speed things up to the point of being worth doing?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Gelare wrote:Side note: Combat takes forever.

That bothers me. I threw in some hax to combat the Rocket Launcher Tag syndrome in the earlier drafts. If you are finding that it went too far, would you think that up shifting all the damage values (that is: have zero net damage equal a Petty wound instead of 1) would speed things up to the point of being worth doing?

-Username17

Honestly, the problem isn't that there isn't enough Rocket Launcher Tag. There's plenty of that, since most thing with a half-decent spread of disciplines can target you with something that you're weak to - a Troll with Dread Gaze worked wonders on getting rid of that annoying Willpower 1, Strength 3 Daeva. Here's the thing:

1) Every round you go up the initiative counts from 0 to max for doing movement. So everyone has to take the time to get a full and clear mental image of where everything and everyone is, and they decide where to move.

2) And then you go down the initiative counts from max to 0 for doing actual actions. Which involves a whole new set of descriptions, considerations, etc.

3) Also, counting out 20 dice for punching or soaking, tracking down the ones that fall off the table, and counting the fives and sixes takes a not insignificant amount of time - and since punching someone is now a simple action (a change away from SR4 that I support, by the way) and most attacks come with a matching soak roll, resolving the slugfests between the marble-skinned Android and the vigored Troll took a lot of time all by themselves, and they didn't even deal any damage.

In case anyone's interested, I've edited into my In The Trenches post a blank copy of the (quickly and inexpertly crafted) character sheets we used. If anyone wants to use or modify that, feel free.

Frank,

Does your answer to Gelare imply that Discipline-based Strength bonuses don't soak super-effective attacks?

I always assumed that a werewolf could use, say, Vigor to get +4 STR and use it soak silver, because he's not getting "a magical bonus t soak" but rather a magical bonus to STRENGTH.

Ah, see? Glad I'm not the only one who had that question. That is what I read Frank's answer as implying, and it sure does make it super easy for normal, even unremarkable people with normal guns to kill Trolls and especially Spriggans dead to death. I don't care especially hard either way, but it is good to know.

I have a simple request for Frank:

Could you please edit the first post of the aWoD thread in the invention forum so that each of the chapter headings in the Index becomes a link to the post# ?

Finding chapter headings by scrolling is annoying on my laptop.

CTRL+F works on mine. Search "Bullets!" for the monster writeups, "limits of magic" for the discipline lists.

That seems easy enough that I can do it between reading pages of Immunology. Done.

-Username17

I am finished with Immunology, so I can do more focused writing again. I added a few touches to Chapter 10. There's a key, and a word about Ideology mechanics, and some extra Merits and Flaws.

-Username17

Fleshed out the Background description and put a set of examples at the end of the skill chapter. Does that make more sense?

-Username17

Added Clarification statements about Discipline dispelling. How does that look?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Fleshed out the Background description and put a set of examples at the end of the skill chapter. Does that make more sense?

-Username17

Yeah, it does. A lot.
Just some editing stuff: Marionette's chemistry background got cut off, and the last sentence of Dean's ballistics background could use some cleaning ("And when they have the specs on enchanted rifle and Dean wants to look up what kind of weapon they are dealing with, he just does it because his Background knowledge pushes the Research threshold down to zero.").

FrankTrollman wrote:Added Clarification statements about Discipline dispelling. How does that look?

-Username17

"A Summons can be disrupted as if it were a Sorcery with a power source identical to the character using it. The disruption can be leveled at the summoning character or the target."

If Summons is disrupted, does the target lose their knowledge of where the summoner is, does the target lose the ability to reply, or does that only apply to the compulsion to go there?

If Summons is disrupted, does the target lose their knowledge of where the summoner is, does the target lose the ability to reply, or does that only apply to the compulsion to go there?

Any information already sent doesn't retroactively get lost, but no new information would be transferred.

Also, I put up Paris.

-Username17

I disagree. You SHOULD sometimes want to refrain from breaking a summons, so you can follow the girl in the trance to the monster lair. Breaking the compulsion should leave them confused about where they are and what they were doing.