aWoD: Continued

[Lokathor]

DnD is (maybe?) an okay example of the sort of thing that people want. At least, the kind of things that they'll buy. There's all the FR Regional books, and the It's ____ Outside books and such, and each one mixes in all sorts of stuff within a theme.

And yeah, my friends and I played nWoD a lot for a while (Mage/Hunter/Mortal/Vamp). There's a lot of stuff so dumb that I didn't even want to spend 30MB on having the PDF exist on my drive.

Stuff people almost always want more descriptions about:
[*]Equipment stuff and magic baubles.
[*]Places to go and people to talk to.
[*]Critters to see and people to fight.
[*]Obscure Disciplines to uncover from old musty ruins and learn.

---

Question: What does "Core Discipline" do for a person? The phrase is used in each of the monster type writeups... but apparently at no other point in the entire document. Are those the ones that a creature gets that don't count as Sorceries so they can't be countered/negated?

[Quantumboost]

Question: What does "Core Discipline" do for a person? The phrase is used in each of the monster type writeups... but apparently at no other point in the entire document. Are those the ones that a creature gets that don't count as Sorceries so they can't be countered/negated?

It means you have both (well, two of) the Basic powers for that Discipline. I don't think it means anything more or less than that.

[Username17]

Yeah, the Core Discipline notation just means that you get two basics (and an advanced, unless you are something shitty like a Mantrap). It's in there simply because when polled on the subject, people found that they were better able to remember the disciplines when the Basics came in two lists instead of one. There is no particular reason for something to be named "core" - but it demonstrably makes it easier for people to conceptualize how the monster types work, so it stays. If you grab Trogloyte, you know that you're in for a lot of Auspex because it says "Core Discipline: Auspex" right on the package. You could figure that out from just reading the list and figuring out that 3/8 of the starting disciplines were Auspex related, but cutting list lengths below 6 or 8 really helps people learn the information.

Anyway, yeah. It's Cold Outside is a pretty solid book even though a lot of the fluff text is kind of poorly written. Patterning a book on that, rather than something fucking lame like Reign of the Exarchs or VII, makes a lot of sense. Were I to do a Limbo book, it would hash out something like this:

• Intro Fiction - 3k
  Part I: Getting In
  Five places that have Infernal gates - 12k
  Plot Hooks to involve Limbo - 6k
  Persona non Grata: Focus on Changelings and kidnappers (includes Artemis) - 9k
  Fiction Piece - 3k
  Part II: Being There
  Five places in The Dark Reflection - 14k
  Flora and Fauna of Limbo - 5k
  Playing an Asura - 4k
  Faction History of the King With 3 Shadows - 6k
  Persona non Grata: The Three Shadows of the King - 3k
  Fiction Piece - 3k
  Part III: Getting Out
  Five places in The Dark Reflection with portals out (includes Goblin Market) - 12k
  A set of challenges - 10k
  A set of magic items and sorceries - 8k
  Persona non Grata: focus on antagonists - 5k
  Fiction Piece - 3k

Total: 106,000 words.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Another thing that would be super top tier cool would be if we can get some art. Either a TGD member (or more than one) who's good at art or knows someone or some such, or we might just be able to use old public domain art in some places.

Basically, artwork makes a book come alive.

[Lokathor]

Question: Does Potency add to your skill maximum as well as your stat maximum?

[Lokathor]

Running The Game

(I just lost The Game)

• Basic Mechanics ;; The table here uses some funky bbcode hax, which is why it has that extra white line along the size. Unlike an HTML table, after each "row" tag there's a cell without needing a "col" tag. Also, you could use "mrow" and "mcol" tags to have cells bolded if you like. Maybe you know all this but I'm just bringing it up.
• Basic Mechanics ;; "1: Completely Pedestrian. Driving a car," and then it drops. The comma should be a period or something. Also, Professional needs a period after it.
• Basic Attributes ;; You list each attribute pair with the "resistance test" attribute on top and then the other attribute, until you get to the Social ones, in which case they're switched. If it's not a major deal, you might want to swap the order you list Charisma and Willpower in.
• Edge ;; Does edge have a maximum of 6? If so, does that maximum go up as your potency goes up? These things should probably be stated.
• Edge ;; Not a problem exactly, but for the SR players you might want to mention if you have to buy the extra dice ahead of time or not. Also, is seems that you never get the "6 again" effect that you get in SR4 from edge, is this correct?
• Edge ;; "Edge refreshes between chronicles", but you never defined what a chronicle was. I assume it's what DnD calls an Adventure and not just what DnD calls a Session, but I honesly don't know.
• Spending and Recovering Edge ;; You begin talking about how you can spend it to gain an extra combat action, but you didn't say that you could do that above in the part where you talk about what you can spend it to do. Similarly you mention that you can spend an edge to avoid death, but you didn't say that you could do that in the above paragraph.
• Power ;; Question of Technicality, do mortal characters still have a power of 10 that they just can't access themselves? This might be important if there's ever some kind of "power siphoning" effect. I haven't read all the disciplines, and of course people might want to make their own effects obviously.
• Potency ;; If potency has a strict cap, this should be stated. If it has no cap, I'd add in a flavorful sentence or two about how elders slowly gain potency over time and that the truly deep horrors of (the) reality(/ies) keep staying that way because they've got potency of 10+ (or whatever is "huge"). Basically I'd talk about Potency a little more in general, because it's not well explained what it does if you haven't played SR/nWoD before.
• Advancing Goals ;; I'll bring it up now because you touch on it here: are all the supernatural types automatically ageless immortals? Even werewolves and witches? leviathans? Might want to touch on that somewhere, because it seems like most people might assume that only vampires and promethians live forever unless they have that Fortitude thing ('body of the mountain' I think it's called). Dunno what you were thinking on this subject though.
• A Special Note on "Super Heroes" ;; Batman needs an underline, and "the" is part of the title of "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", so it should be capitalized and added into the underline. Same goes to when you use the title name in the first post actually.
• Wealth and Material Comfort ;; "Scarlet" should have 2 t's, "Scarlett"
• Fame and Acknowledgment by Strangers ;; You spelled "Acknowledgment" wrong, according to my spell checker.
• Bug Hunt ;; Aliens and Evil Dead 2 aren't underlined.
• Character Generation ;; "Hellboy" and "Queen of The Damned" need underlines.
• Character Generation ;; "not just passive interests r reactive interests", that 'r' should probably be 'or'.
• The Power Fantasy ;; Doom and Unreal... possibly need underlines. Maybe not. Doom is an actual game, but if referring to the series than it's not needed obviously. Unreal.. I dunno if that's just the series name or if it was the first game in the series or whatever.

[Orion]

An observation more than a complaint, as this has upsides and downsides.

Patience of the Mountains is powerful; like, really powerful. Probably the single best Basic Discipline there is except for Quickness in a combat game. Take a look at this list of disciplines that are *negated* by Patience.


Bitter Fruit
Mind Root
Enchanted Slumber
Denial of Privacy
Horrid Reality
Abyss of the Body
Body Colony
Swarm Body
Magnify the Swarm
Tongue of the Serpent

Plus possibly

Theft of Vitae
Crimson Death
Blood Puppets

They should almost write "immunity to magic" on there. I exaggerate, of course, direct damage still works as do entangle effects, but if all the PCs have Patience, relatively few spells actually work against them, which means they're going to see those a lot.

Now, I can see both sides of the argument here. On the one hand, most of my adventure ideas involve monsters doing something nefarious with drugs/diseases/mind control/dream fuckery, and this makes PCs immune to most of that, meaning that the bad guys' core powers won't be a direct threat. This forces me to staple either fire starter/lightning bolt/death note onto everything threatening, or Quickness+a big gun. On the other hand, as a benefit, it explains *why* the PCs do well investigating these kinds of supernatural rackets, and means there's less worry about TPK by poisoned door or something.

But in my group we've hit on a really awkward dynamic: Everyone but one character has Patience. Now, for the sake of being corrupt and atmospheric, I'm putting drugs and disease and stuff all over the damn place, but it adds up to basically constantly victimizing the Bagheera.

Thus, I'd recommend that DMs think about the concentration of Patience in their group and try to either

--Get everyone to take it, so they can ignore poison gas and disease-coated dungeons.
--Get no one to take it, so they can be afraid of Verbena
--Get only one guy to take it, so the immunity can be his schtick

But try not to let just one player skip it.

[Nachtigallerator]

As written, Patience doesn't protect against disease, it only makes you immune to poison - so, Bitter Fruit and Tounge of the Serpent. Virtually anything else on your list either isn't stopped by Patience (where did you get the idea that Mind Root is a poison or disease?) or doesn't apply to PCs at all (Blood Puppets).

EDIT: Given that Bitter Fruit can produce explosives, it's not exactly useless against Vampires.

[Orion]

Wow, I could have sworn that I'd read and explicit immunity to disease somewhere, maybe in the text of Abyss.

Anyway, Immortality that *doesn't* grant disease immunity makes no sense whatsoever. How can you "not age or decay" if you aren't immune to disease?

Mind Root, I treated as a disease effect because it's a parasite, and any Paladin player would call bullshit if you gave him Malaria.

The Veil of Morpheus stuff is stopped by patience because you don't sleep, and the bugs can't hurt you if you are immune to poison/disease.

Honestly, I'd rather see Patience explicitly give disease immunity but NOT immunity to poisons; then you could rule, if you wanted, that Mind Root, as a macroscopic parasite, didn't count.

(Also: the blood magic is listed because many PCs with Patience don't have blood. Like Robots.

[Nachtigallerator]

Wow, I could have sworn that I'd read and explicit immunity to disease somewhere, maybe in the text of Abyss.

Anyway, Immortality that *doesn't* grant disease immunity makes no sense whatsoever. How can you "not age or decay" if you aren't immune to disease?

We're talking supernatural disease here, and not all diseases are about age or decay - you wouldn't call having cold "decay". There's not just arteriosclerosis or something else that accompanies aging, there's also viruses, which quite simply abuse your body cells for reproduction. That has nothing to do with not having an aging process.

Mind Root, I treated as a disease effect because it's a parasite, and any Paladin player would call bullshit if you gave him Malaria.

Mind Root is a biological mind-control device implanted in your brain. Would you give a Paladin immunity against invasive brain surgery?

The Veil of Morpheus stuff is stopped by patience because you don't sleep, and the bugs can't hurt you if you are immune to poison/disease.

Right. You could houserule Enchanted Slumber to over-rule Patience sleep immunity, it seems to be more of an utility discipline.

Honestly, I'd rather see Patience explicitly give disease immunity but NOT immunity to poisons; then you could rule, if you wanted, that Mind Root, as a macroscopic parasite, didn't count.

(Also: the blood magic is listed because many PCs with Patience don't have blood. Like Robots.

Not having blood is a good point.. I guess a Promethean player would have to work out what else in his character is affected.

[Quantumboost]

Also: the blood magic is listed because many PCs with Patience don't have blood. Like Robots.

Leviathans have blood. So do Vampires who have any power points to take. What you're complaining about isn't a PotM problem, it's a some-Prometheans and Ghosts and Evil Plants problem. Also some zombies or out-of-power vampires, depending on exactly how that works.

Actually, I'd like to see a clarification on how Path of Blood things interact with things that may-or-may-not have blood myself.

[Orion]

Dude, there is NO WAY any thousand-year-old Fallen are running around if they're susceptible to viral infection.

[Nachtigallerator]

Dude, there is NO WAY any thousand-year-old Fallen are running around if they're susceptible to viral infection.

I don't think the source material has 1000 year old Fallen. Besides, the point was that "no aging" is not the same as "immunity to diseases", especially not immunity to crazy supernatural stuff that turns you into goo.

PS: I just noticed that the ideal way to *cure* disease and poison is Bitter Fruit. So, even if our hypothetical Fallen from 1000 AC contracted bubonic plague, he could've looked out for the next Verbena. There doesn't seem to be a game system for mundane disease at the moment, so .. probably the system already assumes plot immunity for luminaries.

[Username17]

Patience of the Mountain does not make you sleep immune. Characters with Patience of the Mountain do not become fatigued by exertion, but Vampires still sleep every day.

-Username17

[virgil]

Any special rules for fighting underwater?

[virgil]

My players are expressing a lot of confusion in the movement system. They want to run up to their gun-totin' foe who's 18m away, but want to go at exhausting run speed so they don't have the melee combat penalty. "I don't walk the distance, I sprint as fast as possible" is what they argue. The disconnect between speed and velocity doesn't make logical sense to them.

They're also confused/annoyed if someone with Basic Celerity and Nimble Feet moves 44m to 60m and get a -2 penalty to swing their axe, yet if they didn't turn on Nimble Feet they wouldn't suffer that penalty in melee combat.

[Orion]

A new rule inspired by my last game session:


Weapon Option: Third Round Silver

It's traditional for town militia in many a Schwarzwald-inspired fantasy to make every third bolt in the quiver silver-tipped, and this tradition carries over to dark fantasy paramilitaries as well. Sometimes in the name of savings or versatility, someone makes magazines of mixed bullets or produces a sword or hammer with two striking surfaces. We don't want to encourage every PCs magazine to look like a pez medley, so if your character mixes more than two attack types the result will always be the least advantageous possible. But since Silver and Uranium go together like chocolate and uranium, a character who mixes exactly two materials gets the following options:

Aiming: If you take at least one aim action, you automatically hit with the correct surface. You can aim a sword if you really want to.

Called Shot: Just like shooting past armor, you can take a 1-hit penalty to land the right bullet.

Explosions, Spray-n-pray, Suppressing Fire: These attacks deal aggravated damage if any part of them would, but do not get bonus damage or penetrate magic defenses.

EDIT: In all other cases, you use the least beneficial material.

Bonus Physical Merit!!!

Subtle Knifing: You always strike with the correct side of a double-edged sword.

[Orion]

Spray and Pray is hilariously underpowered

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.

The bottom line is, as it currently stands, an out-of-the-box Baali in the open unlikely to take more than a box or so from a half-dozen mafia goons blazing away with *silver bullets*

And remember, spray/pray is a complex action. Instead of spraying an area, you could just take 2 shots with your normal dicepool, which is *at least* 7 (AGI 2 Combat 2, +3 for automatic). That's more than twice as good against anyone your offense is relevant against, so Spray/Pray doesn't ever make sense unless you can hit 5 or more targets in the open, which will never happen because at that point they can use each *other* for cover. Your other option, of course, is to use aimed shots (which will have an effective dicepool of at least 10.)

I get that tearing up mobs of automatic-wielding goons is what action heroes DO but right now you don't even *need* dodge, fortitude, runspeed, armor, or any other investment of character or action resources to invalidate it.

I recommend that one or more of the following happen:

Bullet Saturation More than one character can use spray in pray at once, violating the normal teamwork rule and directly adding their dicepools together. The maximum group size is equal to the group's lowest Combat (or highest Tactics? That might be too strong)

Harrying Volleys Every Spray-n-pray counts as an assist for every subsequent ranged attack made against the target that round. So if 4 goons blaze away at you, they'll probably roll 3/4/5/7 or something. And yes, this means the enemy Vampire has a better chance to plug you with his shotgun if his spawn pin you down with a bullet spray.

Spread Training Allow some characters to roll AGI+3 for spray/pray. This could be a Merit, a rider on Quicken Sight, a rider on Quicken Thought, or something else? Maybe increase the minimum STR by 1 when you do this.

Shoot Faster! Make it a simple action so it competes with one attack rather than two. This *seems* right balance-wise, since "attacking two guys" is currently the best AoE attack, but it leads to too much dice-rolling if you allow two sprays per attacker. Maybe make the current one a "short spray" and allow a complex "long spray" to roll more dice or get +1 damage?

[Lokathor]

Two questions I put into my editing fixes post, but that post seems to have been ignored a bit so I'll just restate my questions:

Does Edge have a limit? 6? 6+Potency? No Limit?

Do all the supernatural types live forever or just some of them?

[Orion]

You only live forever if you have Patience of the Mountains. But it's a basic discipline that pretty much any supernatural could acquire easily enough.

[Orion]

some more rules that need clarification: Do androids dream of electric sheep?

You either need to add a paragraph saying that unless specified otherwise, everybody has an analogous structure to whatever a discipline calls for--Androids have to defrag, and Freddie Kruger can chase them--Theft of Vitae draws out their machine oil; or create a"nonliving" tag that gives immunity to blood and dream magic (and inability to benefit from blood bondage)

Also: Last session my Str 2 fallen PC wanted to use a Shotgun (minimum str 3). I gave him a -1 die penalty, but in general that seems a little too lenient. I couldn't find the rule anywhere.

[Nachtigallerator]

some more rules that need clarification: Do androids dream of electric sheep?

You either need to add a paragraph saying that unless specified otherwise, everybody has an analogous structure to whatever a discipline calls for--Androids have to defrag, and Freddie Kruger can chase them--Theft of Vitae draws out their machine oil; or create a"nonliving" tag that gives immunity to blood and dream magic (and inability to benefit from blood bondage)

It seems sensible to rule that androids do dream of electric sheep. If Patience of the Mountains means you still sleep, that applies to androids as well - they have no other trait that changes that. They are already favored over living beings with respect to Frozen Note (which I wouldn't even do - delicate electronics is delicate, and cold can totally damage wires and stuff - there is a real-life computer equivalent to heat stroke) and losing benefits from Blood Bondage seems like a pretty irrelevant drawback, since they already have one of the disciplines Blood Bondage simulates.

[Username17]

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

[Lokathor]

Monsterous Society

• Covenants ;; The way you list the benefits here, bolded and then a hyphin thing, that's not consistant with the listing in "A Life In Horror" (periods after each short explanation), "The Four Worlds" (no punctuation after each world name), and "Basic Attributes" along with "Character Generation" (uses a colin).
• Coteries ;; When you're quoting something but it's not speech then the punctuation goes outside the quotes. The bit about Fred should have the period on the outside of the quotes.
• Circle of the Crone ;; The tagline here needs a period at the end of the sentence. "an it harm none" should probably be "and it harm none", but I'm not sure about that.
• The Hashshashin ;; "Human Trafficking" is spelled with only one "f", it needs two.
• Your PC sections are all size 18, and then your NPC sections are all size 20. Not a huge deal, but you might have forgotten since you wrote this all in stages. You should probably make the NPC groups be size 18, so that when you switch back to size 20 with "Political Aspirations" people can tell that you're moving on to a new section. In general, your subsections (if we could call them that for a moment) are usually smaller than size 18, so visually it's not as consistant. Then again, paying attention to who these guys are is about as important as knowing what a Promethian is, so that's pretty okay.
• Status and Office in the Camarilla ;; The tagline here either needs one less or one more period. Based on how you've got the italic closing tag situated here, I think you intended it to be one less. (Yeah, I'm converting this into my own LaTeX PDF as I go though, which means that I am paying attention to this at the bbcode level as well; I'll take a moment to mention that most of your size and bold tags on section names aren't nested properly, but I've been ignoring that because it doesn't really matter on the whole)
• Status and Office in the Carthian Movement ;; Under "Revolutionary Committee", you apparently spelled "acknowledgment" wrong.
• Political Aspirations ;; "that despite (or perhaps because) of the very", the ")" should be moved to enclose the "of" as well.
• Acquiring Power Over Humans ;; your tagling doesn't have an opening quote. That, or it has a closing quote that it doesn't need.

I'll have Skills looked over for sure, and possibly another chapter or two after that as well. I've already put Skills into my PDF I just didn't collect notes on all the minor edits as I was doing it. My first impression though is, "social skill descriptions need work".

[Grek]

Zeka ;; A commissariat is an organization, not a person. Commissar is the word you are looking for. Commissariat is to Commissar as Directorate is to Director and as Agency is to Agent.