The Gaming Den

Skills

• Punctuation goes outside quotes that aren't speech. In this case, the third sentence after the tagline should end with: "skilled".
• Drive, Perception, Artisan, Medicine, Research ;; You need a space after "Specializations:" on all of these skill entries.
• The Stealth skill is very... weak in description. No actual problems though.
• Animal Ken ;; The last sentence doesn't have a period.
• Bureaucracy ;; A classic TOME style paragraph drop. This paragraph needs to be finished.
• Skulduggery ;; What? What does this help you do? How is this different from Fear Mongering? Shouldn't this be a Persuasion specialization?
• Tactics ;; This skill needs an actual description. Also, how is it sdignificantly differnt from Bureaucracy? In what cases do you use one and not the other? Basically the explanation for this skill is flimsy at best.
• Operations and Drive ;; Planes almost always have sticks as well as a million little switches to flip and buttons to press or toggle. You should probably make a choice about how planes are always in one or the other. Actually, the same for helicopters. In fact, as far as real world vehicles that would use Operations, I can only think of some kinds of construction equipment stuff and also super huge watercraft (like military vessels and tankers and such). I think this whole split is kinda funky myself, and you should probably go into more detail about it.
• Sabotage ;; This description probably needs to be longer than one sentence. Also, what does "Traps" mean? I assumed it meant just breaking traps, but then under Specializations you talk about it like it lets you build traps too, which is what Rigging or Artisan should be doing.
• You'd assign Willpower + Chemistry to make up a fake chemical explanation? I guess. Seems weird to me. Maybe you should explain the stats more when you introduce them. Seems like a Logic or maybe Charisma thing.
• Using Attributes Without Skills ;; You have the first instance of "-1 die" written without a space.
• The strength chart, I'd put some measurements in pounds as well, but that's just me. Also, maybe don't switch from kilos to tonnes, because tons is also a measurement but it's not metric and so you might confuse people there. Particularly if they're reading the passage out loud to a friend while at the game table.
• Oh, yeah, your "Buying Hits" instance of the hits/awesomeness table needs fixing as well, if you care about that. The columns are messed like with some of your other tables.

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Continuity Error: (of sorts) Your section on Covenants says that they're not called anything because they don't exist within an over-structure. However, in your example of first person writing, the girl gets asked what covenant she belongs to by the vampire that she meets.

Lokathor wrote:
Continuity Error: (of sorts) Your section on Covenants says that they're not called anything because they don't exist within an over-structure. However, in your example of first person writing, the girl gets asked what covenant she belongs to by the vampire that she meets.

After playing around with it for a while, I have decided that I should probably remove that line. The players end up calling them covenants in character anyway. So there's no real way to do the whole out of character segregation thing I originally wanted to do.

-Username17

Monsterous Society edit addition:

[*]Coteries ;; The last paragraph here uses a lot of series titles but doesn't underline any of them like it should.

Also, under Character Generation, "Hellboy" and "Queen of the Damned" need underlines.

For that matter, so should Dragon Ball Z in the introduction.

I know this is late to bring up, but I don't understand why the lack of an over-arching superstructure which the covenants fit into would lead to their not being a word for them. I could understand if the terminology wasn't standardised, but if there is ever occasion to talk about them, then they will have a name.

I mean, for most of recorded history civilizations didn't fit into that kind of structure, and yet we have words for them, many words. Nation, empire, country, state, tribe, government. the lack of an organiziong structure for the covenants should make a similar list of terms which technically ave differing roots and implications but are commonly used as semi-interchangable whether or not it coincides with their original etymology.

I'm working on the Danger chapter at the moment. Quick suggestion: "Instant Death" on the damage chart should be changed to some other letter, because then POSITT? doesn't have two uses of I standing for two different words. Something like "You're Dead" might work.

EDIT: What's up with Flashbangs? Shouldn't they deal Normal damage?

Frank, what's your justification for making one of the Tragic Flaw choices for Golems Naive? Judging by the Frankenstein flavor paragraph and the actual book Frankenstein, it seems like Naive would fit much more naturally there.

Frankensteins are made when their creator desires children but is unwilling to devote the necessary time to be a proper parent for the "child." This gives Frankensteins a generally immature demeanor, since they've never received the guidance necessary to make them socially mature and aware. That really screams "Naive" to me.

My only real experience with Golems comes from reading The Golem's Eye, so I don't know if I'm really qualified to offer a replacement, but it seems like the write up you give them and their status as Servants would suggest something like
Servile: The character has been bred (or made or conditioned) to view their desires as subservient to others. They're always the ones who, in group discussions, sort of hang around the edges and only speak if they're asked to. In these cases, their answers are usually along the lines of "Oh...Whatever you guys think is best." The threshold to make them abandon their own goals and follow another's suggestions is reduced by 1.


Rereading that, I realized that the mechanics are more or less identical to Flake, which Mi Gos get. Maybe the bug people could instead be saddled with Delusional (Hears Voices)? Or is that too much of a change...?

A golem is like a robot, but magical instead. They're often naive in the same way that Wall-E is naive. They do what they think they should, but they don't know much at all and so their perceptions of good and bad are highly warped from what others would think is good and bad.

On top of all that, because of their drastic physical differences from most other living creatures, they can't even apply their own experiences to others. Golems don't understand that if you hug the rabbit too hard then it won't breathe no more, because they've probably never been hugged too hard, and they also don't breathe.

But how is that different from a Frankenstein? In the book, Frankenstein actually does just that-he accidentally kills a young boy by suffocating him when he's just trying to keep him from crying out. That's not even a "didn't know his own strength" a la Hercules or Lennie from Of Mice and Men: it's a straight up "doesn't understand that humans need to breathe" incident.

I'm not saying that Golems can't be naive. But I don't understand why naivity is specifically native to Golems and not also Frankensteins.

I wonder if it might be workable for some supernaturals to have two tragic flaws. But for the second, they could get a merit as normal in exchange...

As promised, it is the weekend, and I am in fact running through doing edits.

Yes, "acknowledgement" is spelled correctly.

The primary difficulty of Frankenstein's Monster is the thing where his sallow skin and jaundiced eye keep causing people to reject him, which is why they get that as their core flaw. Anyone can take extra flaws if they want to.

-Username17

That part was weird, Spellcheck said it was wrong, and then it was correcting the word into seemingly the same word. It was late though so I trusted the machine and took the note and kept on going.

Lokathor wrote:That part was weird, Spellcheck said it was wrong, and then it was correcting the word into seemingly the same word. It was late though so I trusted the machine and took the note and kept on going.

"Acknowledgement" and "acknowledgment" are both accepted spellings of the word. Like "grey" and "gray" are. It's possible that your spell checker only has one or the other, or has some version marked as preferential somehow.

-Username17

Getting What You Need

• Keeping Things Quiet ;; Last sentence, "it actually makes them stick out like a soar thumb", I'm not 100% familiar on the spelling of the phrase, but do you mean sore thumb?
• Formal Request Montage ;; "or some other story set in Czech Republic", I think you mean 'the Czech Republic'.

Not much to say about that chapter really.

Bit of an odd omission. The three basic types of lycanthrope correspond to wolves, rats, and large cats - but of the three, only the rat has a stat block in the Animals section. The werewolf comes with Beast Form out of the box, so wolves should certainly have listed stats. Bagheera don't come with Beast Form, but I can imagine that being a reasonably common choice. It would probably make sense to have a line for generic large jungle cat.

There are stats for large dogs, aren't there? I doubt that big cats or wolves would have significantly different stats.

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B9 ... OThl&hl=en

Very basic 1 page character sheet thing I whipped up for my friends and I to use the other day. It's got the shorthand for the Origin Story creation process along the bottom kinda like how the nWoD sheets do it. Thought folks might like to see or use it.

I'll also probably make a quick-reference sheet for combat speeds and movement penalties, combat ranges, argumentation types, and anything else I think you might need a lot but not be able to just remember.

Lokathor, did you miss mine?

Prak_Anima wrote:ok, so you add the net hits to the weapon damage, then the opponent soaks, then you look at the chart. ok, cool.

means I need to change something on the sheet, but...

here's the current 2 page sheet.

Sheet got fixed, I took out the wound names, and just copied over the damage chart

I did, I could vaguely remember there being a sheet somewhere, but I couldn't remember how far back to look so I just make a simple one since we were all new players.

My only objection with your sheet is that I don't like the dots style representation of stats and skills. I usually would just rather have a number box to fill in.

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Request: One of my players was a Heroin dealer who was also addicted to Heroin. I'd like to put in another reminder that street drugs should be given a writeup.

Question: Said heroin addict became a Mi Go, which gave him automatic Patience of the Mountains, which gave him Poison Immunity. So, does Heroin not work on him but he's addicted to it anyways.... or he's no addicted to it any more... or what? This matters because he took it as a level 3 obligation in exchange for a level 3 mob asset.

Lokathor wrote:I did, I could vaguely remember there being a sheet somewhere, but I couldn't remember how far back to look so I just make a simple one since we were all new players.

My only objection with your sheet is that I don't like the dots style representation of stats and skills. I usually would just rather have a number box to fill in.

Fair enough.

This can play out a few ways:

1] He remains addicted but gets no effect. He is constantly jonsing for some heroin that he can no longer take and retains his level 3 addiction.

2] He is no longer addicted to heroin at all and can't get any effect out of it. Make him pick out a new obligation. Probably a Duty: "Sell heroin to little kids."

3] Heroin doesn't count as a poison and the only difference is that he doesn't get fucked up if someone sells heroin that got cut with rat poison.

4] He remains addicted and gets all the good effects and none of the bad. He'll probably want to inject stupid crazy amounts when he figures this out, so his addiction is now "Find stupid crazy amounts to shoot up."

Secodning the request that the skill cap be specified (right now it says "max 6 for starting characters")

It should probably also say somewhere that Discipline activations never benefit from specialization or passive discipline bonuses. At least, that's how I've always played.

FrankTrollman wrote:I'm looking at Androids reaming of Electric Sheep, yes. Probably going to have the next batch of updates this weekend sometime.

So a bit on what does and does not have blood, a reminder that everyone sleeps, some updates to the combat rules, and the line edits to chapter 3.

-Username17

Did anything happen with the Danger chapter having updated combat? Only Chapters 3 and 4 were edited on the weekend.

Lokathor wrote: Only Chapters 3 and 4 were edited on the weekend.

What got changed with Chapters 3 and 4? I did a cursory skimthrough and didn't seem to notice anything major. Did I just miss the new/changed stuff, or is it more minor alterations?

I assume all the edits that I pointed out and nothing else. Spelling, space here, comma there, so on and so on.

Yeah, I only got in the Chapter 3 and 4 edits and about half the chapter 5 edits this weekend before real life stuff caught up with me. There was a little rewriting involved, but mostly it was Lokathor's typographicals. The Chapter 5s are a bit hairier because some are "need to write an explanatory paragraph".

As for the skill maxima, the original intention was a flat cap of 6. But people really seem to want to advance skills past starting caps. So I've been wargaming an advanced cap equal to 6 + Half Edge (rounded down). And that seems to work OK.

Also: I'm going to change Aura Perception to be non-interactive across worlds. So it'll work like OWoD Aura Perception (where you didn't get to touch ghosts you saw with it) and not Eyes of the Dead (where you did).

-Username17

As it stands now, an ordinary civilian standing 5 meters away from *two* attackers blazing away with automatics has a <50% chance of being hit. If he's moving quickly due to celerity, he essentially can't be hit. Furthermore, it only takes 6 dice to usually soak an SMG shot; PCs should start with at least STR 2 Edge 3 and every PC type but witches (and reborn, but they have other defenses) starts with +2 from fort.

OK, I've been going over this, and I agree and don't agree.

First of all, target speed doesn't affect the threshold. Neither does visibility. Also, you're targeting an area, so even aside from the fact that it's often literally your best bet to nail someone in the dark, if there are a large number of targets, it can be way more effective than actual bursts.

But at the core, things aren't doing enough damage. So I'm adjusting the damage/wound chart accordingly.

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Also: new Aura Perception, Edge Caps, and Skill Maximums are in.

-Username17