Criticisms of nWoD fansplats?

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 1:53 am

I'd like to hear some honest criticisms of nWoD fansplats. Genius, Dragon, Princess, Leviathan, etc.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:37 am

...there's one where you all play princesses?

This is either awesome or terrible, and I'm not sure which.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:54 am

It's nwod, it can be both.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:10 am

The fan projects suffer from a combination of too many cooks and not focused enough developers and take a really long time to get finished. I started on the ground floor with Leviathan: the Tempest, and left the project when some people wanted to go in a direction I didn't. Then I took the pieces I liked from my own contributions and wrote the entirety of aWoD around them. The actual Leviathan is still unfinished.

The only one which is really in a playable state is Genius: the Transgression. And that one still suffers an incredible lack of focus. See, in Genius you are expected to build a robot army to conquer Uzbekistan, so you can use it as a platform to build your space elevator so that you can put a death ray in orbit so you can hold the entire US hostage for one hundred billion dollars. That's a real thing you are supposed to do. Also there is a rant about things to kick powergamers in the nuts. Yes. Really. A game about mad scientists building world-destroying super weapons to attempt to conquer the world, and the author is worried about power gaming. It's... not very coherent.

-Username17

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:31 am

Huh. Genius sounds interesting. I've always wanted to find an RPG where I could pull a Doctor Wily and attempt to conquer the world with 8 gimmicky robot masters. A shame if it's as incoherent as you say. Are there any decent RPGs available where playing a megalomaniacal mad scientist is viable?

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 8:04 am

I had to look up Priness: The hopeful.

Personally, I was surprised. The flavor is pretty decent. There are gigantic logic gaps present but nothing insurmountable.

Also here's a list of a lot of nwod fansplats.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 8:11 am

So are the fansplats actually taking place inside nWOD? Or are they just using Storyteller 2.0 for their ruleset?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 12:41 pm

TheFlatline wrote:So are the fansplats actually taking place inside nWOD? Or are they just using Storyteller 2.0 for their ruleset?

Because of the way World of Darkness is quasi-segregated and the lines are only sort-of playable together, the answer is "yes". To the extent that you can figure out what is supposed to happen when you use a Werewolf Gift on a Promethean, you can figure out what is supposed to happen when a Mage Rote is used on a Princess.

But of course, the splats don't even do a good imitation of being on the same power level as other splats. Geniuses are powerful even by Mage standards, and the different writeups of Angels vary from being fake sauce like a Werewolf out to Mage tier. But that is not news to the nWoD. Splats in the official books basically come in three tiers:

Werewolf Tier:
Congratulations, you lose at life! Your magic powers can probably help you to win a bare knuckle boxing match against "a pretty tough guy", but any actual threat can probably steamroller you. Outside of your niche, you're basically just a dude - although one can make a valid argument that because you have supernatural weaknesses and enemies, you're actually worse than a normal person. Hunters live here. Every so often someone will jerk off to the kind of brutal killing machine you can make with Slashers, but basically they live here too. So do Immortals. And most of the other "toss off" quasi-splats like Skinshifters and Mediums.
Vampire Tier:
Step carefully! Most of your magic powers are traps and you can only pull your weight in a narrow eco niche. But if you take the right set of powers and juggle skill points well, you can pull your weight. Expect to be asked to raise various magical paths to 2 or even 4 just to get powers that other splats (or even normal humans) get for free, but if you steer clear of that bullshit, the other players will totally respect you. Changelings live here. So do Prometheans.
Mage Tier:
OMGWTFBBQ! Your powers start off big and broad and as you dump points into things they get both bigger and broader. You're playing quadratic wizards/linear fighters, and you get to be the wizard. It's World of Darkness, so many of your options are traps and no one can explain what a bunch of your options do, but you still have literally dozens of available builds that make you kick ass so hard that other players may resent you. Geists live in this tier as well.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 3:45 pm

random vaguely on topic question for Frank, can you still turn vampires into lawn chairs ridiculously easy?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 4:05 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:random vaguely on topic question for Frank, can you still turn vampires into lawn chairs ridiculously easy?

No one knows.

The core Mage power use guideline chart now references a bunch of Atlantean terminology that doesn't mean anything to anyone who isn't Bill Bridges. And not, for example, anything that has any concrete meaning in the real world or even English or Math. If you want to turn a vampire into a lawn chair, is that "Compelling", "Patterning", "Weaving", or "Ruling"? I am not even making that up, that is seriously all you have to go on. nMage doesn't really talk about what happens when you use your powers against other things as much as it should, but it strongly implies that Vampires are actually nearly immune to nMage Magic - there's a whole Death Arcanum now that you need to do things to the Undead, and most of it doesn't really seem to do much to Vampires as near as anyone can tell. But that's not consistent or anything, there are Mind rotes that specify that they do work on Vampires because they still have minds even though they are not alive.

So the basic question of "can I use Matter to turn a vampire into a lawn chair?" is unanswered. You can make an argument that you can, because vampires are made of matter even though they are animate. But you can make the same argument for transforming a human into a lawnchair. nMage isn't as coherent with its backstory as oMage is (yes, really), so that's not an argument that has a real answer.

-Username17

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:36 pm

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Huh. Genius sounds interesting. I've always wanted to find an RPG where I could pull a Doctor Wily and attempt to conquer the world with 8 gimmicky robot masters. A shame if it's as incoherent as you say. Are there any decent RPGs available where playing a megalomaniacal mad scientist is viable?

Exalted. It's terrible for many, many reasons, but not only has rules for building crazy toys, it actually forces you to be crazy via the mechanics. It's not good, but it can be fun. It helps a lot if you avoid thinking about the morality too much, and forget balance right from the start (both of which pair well with Evil Genius-style gameplay).

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:31 pm

Oh, this is going to be horrible.

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 9:24 pm

What exactly makes Genius so bad, anyway?

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 9:25 pm

Genius is definitely over-the-top. The pdf is a good read, though.