WoD Combat will never be good.

[Koumei]

1190504800[/unixtime]]Or do you think the authors said this several times because they didn't really mean it?

This is White Wolf. I seriously wouldn't put it past them, considering the amount of substance abuse that goes into the making of their games.

[shirak]

Read Frank's explanation

[Modesitt]

Read Frank's explanation

Or read the last time I called him on this. Note how he doesn't say anything in response to the "unable to be learned" quote.

[Username17]

It's just the Prestige Classes and Prereqs argument all over again. You are forbidden from learning an out-of-clan bloodline with experience or diablerie. You are not forbidden from raising an out-of-clan bloodline discipline, nor are you forbidden from getting the first level of one as a starting character or from Storyteller Fiat.

The disciplines you start with aren't "learned", only disciplines you purchase with XP. So EXTREMELY SPECIFIC rants forbidding the learning of disciplines mean precisely fuck all.

And stop ranting about how "clan disciplines" is different from clan disciplines. We have numerous portions of the book that put quotations around clan disciplines - it's just how Vampire: The Requiem emphasizes text. It's writing style, it doesn't mean shit.

We already had that discussion, I brought up page 114. I honestly don't know why you keep bringing it up.

-Username17

[Username17]

You can start in a bloodline at char gen, so if you happen to be in one, you can spend one of your dots on a bloodline discipline.

OK, this bullshit has to stop. I direct you to character creation on page 92 of Vampire: The Requiem. It's an ordered list, you do it in a specific order.

• Step Five is adding the Vampiric Template. At this point you choose your disciplines. You can choose one "bloodline discipline" at this point in the process.
  
  
• Step Six is assigning Merits. One of the Merits is "blood potency". You must spend Merit points to raise your Blood Potency to 2.
  
  
• Step Seven is calculating advantages. One of the "advantages" is Willpower. Once you have that you can spend it.

Activating a Bloodline requires a Blood Potency of 2 and the expenditure of a Willpower Dot. Which means that by definition you can't join a Bloodline until you've gone through step six and step seven of character generation. But you get your fucking Bloodline Discipline in step five. So you definitionally aren't a member of any bloodline at that point.

-Username17

[Prak]

1190066441[/unixtime]]A lot of people don't understand that they can send people away or drop them out of the fight or throw them out a window with a single success on an uncontested die roll with many many abilities. And so like suckers they wade around hitting things with actual attacks, which is boring (because it's basically just a comparison to see whether your team's pile is bigger than their team's pile), and unsatisfying in the extreme.

-Username17

speak for yourself frank, I as very satisfied when a character of mine smacked another member of his pack(Alpha challenge) with a ball of spikes at the end of a 10' steel pole, dropped him with a face torn to hell, pieces missing, and won alpha. Comparing numbers is all any game is about in combat, so why the fuck are you so down on WoD? D&D is about comparing your lucky roll and a handful of modifiers to the other guy's static number and a handful of modifiers. Maybe in roleplaying you can do something revolutionary that's never been done before, but in combat, it's all about who's got the biggest dick, in wod, that dick is a stack of d10s, in D&D that dick is a d20 and some modifiers, in besm, that dick is power ranks. I don't see why you're bitching about a system because you just compare numbers. Hell, numbers is all any game usually comes down to. Magic is just numbers with flavour, Monopoly is numbers about real estate and monetary acquisition. It's a game, it's about comparing numbers. get over it.

[Username17]

Because in WoD, those "numbers" are "the number of people on your team", not "the numbers on your character sheet".

If you roll 8 dice you are pretty bad ass (supposedly). But in reality, you do no more damage than 2 people rolling only 4 dice (which is bottom of the barrel, literally children with BB guns). Or 4 "people" rolling only 2 dice (untrained toddlers with sling shots).

There's no amount of bad assitude that can allow your character to seriously stand up to a couple of cop cars filled with popos. And for a game supposedly about immortal creatures who rule the world, that fucking sucks. Being out numbered 2 or 3 to one is a death sentence no matter how big of a bad ass your character is. You don't win against small groups of people with guns. Unless you have a big social or mental discipline in which case you just have half of them fight the other half or even just have all of them bend knee and join your army as slaves.

Yeah, since you can't dodge or soak damage in that game, you can win a 1 on 1 fight by just hitting really hard and winning initiative. It's one dimensional, but you can win. But if there are multiple opponents, it doesn't fucking matter what you do in "combat". Going first just means you have a chance of taking one of them with you when you die.

-Username17

[Username17]

Great googly moogly. I just read the Vampire: the Requiem Errata, just to check if Modesitt knew something I don't. But no. The head hurting thing though is that they errataed heart staking:

Driving a stake through a vampire’s heart is extraordinarily difficult. The feat requires a melee or ranged attack with the stake. In combat, the attacker suffers a –3 dice penalty to strike so precisely and an exceptional success is required to actually thrust through the vampire’s body and into the heart. The staked vampire immediately collapses into torpor, appearing stone dead for all that a mortal can tell.

What the fuck man?! Staking requires five successes? You're doing lethal damage, why not just attack the target at that point? Even Courtoise can't save you, staking is just practically impossible, even with Crossbows.

-Username17

[Modesitt]

It's an ordered list, you do it in a specific order.

Fucking White Wolf.

[Koumei]

Yeah, I think cursing White Wolf is the last step on the list there, actually.

[Modesitt]

# Step Five is adding the Vampiric Template. At this point you choose your disciplines. You can choose one "bloodline discipline" at this point in the process.

# Step Six is assigning Merits. One of the Merits is "blood potency". You must spend Merit points to raise your Blood Potency to 2.

On further reflection and reading - You're still wrong and it's because of this. Blood Potency is listed as something you do in Step 5, not Step 6. There is no merit called 'blood potency', it's more like a fighter ability that says "You may take this ability instead of a bonus feat".

The example character creation in Vampire does Blood Potency at Step Six, but we all know that example characters usually have an error or two. If you look to Mage (Which allows you to buy up Gnosis in the same manner as BP and also lists it at Step five), its char gen example has them actually buying up Gnosis at Step 5. The same is true for Werewolf and Promethean, games which came after Vampire. Chances are this was an error fixed late in development and they didn't get a chance to fix the char gen example.

[Username17]

1190635558[/unixtime]]

# Step Five is adding the Vampiric Template. At this point you choose your disciplines. You can choose one "bloodline discipline" at this point in the process.

# Step Six is assigning Merits. One of the Merits is "blood potency". You must spend Merit points to raise your Blood Potency to 2.

On further reflection and reading - You're still wrong and it's because of this. Blood Potency is listed as something you do in Step 5, not Step 6. There is no merit called 'blood potency', it's more like a fighter ability that says "You may take this ability instead of a bonus feat".

The example character creation in Vampire does Blood Potency at Step Six, but we all know that example characters usually have an error or two. If you look to Mage (Which allows you to buy up Gnosis in the same manner as BP and also lists it at Step five), its char gen example has them actually buying up Gnosis at Step 5. The same is true for Werewolf and Promethean, games which came after Vampire. Chances are this was an error fixed late in development and they didn't get a chance to fix the char gen example.

Holy shit. At this point, your straw grasping has gone straight on to pathetic. Step Five gives you one dot of Blood Potency for free. You can buy further ones with Merit Points. You don't have Merit points until step six.

And it doesn't matter anyway, because buying yourself a Bloodline requires not only a Blood Potency minimum, but also the expenditure of a Willpower that you won't get until step Seven. It's really super clear.

And it doesn't matter anyway, because it's just a game, and not a well designed game at that. I seriously don't know why you argue so vehemently and incorrectly against the Starting Bloodline Allowance on page 92. It's black and white, it's totally explicit, and beginning disciplines are clearly segregated from learned disciplines.

The game is broken a thousand ways, and the ability to have a single unique trick without having to interact with the stupid nWoD storyline is one of the few cool things in it. What's your problem? Why is it so important to you that thhere be some some obscure loophole by which the statement

That is, you may choose to spend two dots on clan Disciplines and a single dot on an out-of-clan or bloodline Discipline, but not two dots on out-of-lan or bloodline Disciplines and only one on a clan Discipline.

somehow not mean that you can take a Bloodline Discipline? That's exactly what it says. That's exactly what it means. And there isn't another interpretation, no matter how hard you try to shave meanings and misinterpret emphasizing quotation marks or shell game the character creation order.

So seriously, why is this so damned important to you?

-Username17

[Modesitt]

Holy shit. At this point, your straw grasping has gone straight on to pathetic. Step Five gives you one dot of Blood Potency for free. You can buy further ones with Merit Points. You don't have Merit points until step six.

The author of the other WW gamelines disagree\. In all cases, the Super Stat(Blood Potency, Gnosis, whatever) is talked about at the end of Step 5 with more or less detail.

The next part of adding the werewolf template to this character lies in determining his supernatural aptitudes. Those aptitudes include the character’s Primal Urge and his Essence, both of which have a standard starting point. Primal Urge starts at 1 for all characters, and Jack decides not to increase it at this time.

Maculda’s Gnosis begins at one dot. Although Caitlin hasn’t yet reached the step where she chooses her Merits, she decides now that she’s going to spend three of her seven Merit dots to raise Gnosis to two dots.

Step Six: Merits
Caitlin has only four dots left, since she already spent some on raising Gnosis.

Caitlin spent three of her merit points during Step 5. They were gone before step 6.

but also the expenditure of a Willpower that you won't get until step Seven.

Given that people can clearly spend merit points before Step six, they can spend willpower dots before step seven. When you get to Step Seven, you remember that you already spent one and mark your sheet appropriately.

somehow not mean that you can take a Bloodline Discipline? That's exactly what it says.

Let's say I'm selling cookies. I have chocolate chip, oatmeal, and cinnamon cookies. I have a little sign that says: "Cookies for sale! $1 each! Limit three per customer. You may not buy more than one oatmeal or cinnamon cookie". There's also a sign over my stand that says "Only white people can buy cinnamon cookies". Does this mean a black person can come up and buy a cinnamon cookie? No, it doesn't, because there are restrictions on what non-whites are allowed to have.

So seriously, why is this so damned important to you?

Because there's enough wrong with the game that you can make rational arguments about why it sucks and not just make shit up. When you make bad arguments, you discredit your side. To use a rough analogy, Rathergate completely discredited any criticism of Bush's military record. You can't discuss it without someone bringing it up.

[Fwib]

Well, so far, despite knowing nothing about nWoD (or even much at all about oWoD) I think Frank makes the better arguments.

On the other hand, if the text blatantly contradicts itself...

Does the text contradict itself?

[tzor]

I'm used to oWoD. (That's starting to look like an ascii train.) In any event I believe the original standing order in the oWoD was to kill all rule lawyers because we all know the rules are beyond broken and white wolf couldn't proof read much less get things consistant.

Seeing the quotes from the nWoD I am more convinced that they long ago went over the deep end and now live in the center of the earth.

I told them a long time ago, never let a Malkavian write your game rules. But did they listen? No!

[Prak]

1190573929[/unixtime]]Because in WoD, those "numbers" are "the number of people on your team", not "the numbers on your character sheet".

If you roll 8 dice you are pretty bad ass (supposedly). But in reality, you do no more damage than 2 people rolling only 4 dice (which is bottom of the barrel, literally children with BB guns). Or 4 "people" rolling only 2 dice (untrained toddlers with sling shots).

There's no amount of bad assitude that can allow your character to seriously stand up to a couple of cop cars filled with popos. And for a game supposedly about immortal creatures who rule the world, that fucking sucks. Being out numbered 2 or 3 to one is a death sentence no matter how big of a bad ass your character is. You don't win against small groups of people with guns. Unless you have a big social or mental discipline in which case you just have half of them fight the other half or even just have all of them bend knee and join your army as slaves.

Yeah, since you can't dodge or soak damage in that game, you can win a 1 on 1 fight by just hitting really hard and winning initiative. It's one dimensional, but you can win. But if there are multiple opponents, it doesn't fucking matter what you do in "combat". Going first just means you have a chance of taking one of them with you when you die.

-Username17

except that by your own description, the numbers in wod are both. My character sheet numbers are matched by your group numbers, and while this does lead to silliness like a mokole in crinos(or whatever) being taken down by a bunch of "knights", to be fair, the mokole was a "cliath" and that shit happens all the fucking time in myth and folklore, usually with only one knight, just this mokole was stupid enough to go looking for trouble. In folklore, myth and literature, the vampire/werewolf/frankenstein's monster/whatever is seriously defeated by a bunch of dirt farmers with their pitchforks lead by a single guy who knows what the fuck he's doing! Maybe that's why vampires are so afraid of fire in WoD, because in the middle ages, the amount of fire that makes a vamp shit his pants now back then meant that the vamp was about to bite it, hard.

[Judging__Eagle]

The numbers may match, but the fact that you have more people attacking means that the enemies defense is getting lowered until that attacked creature gets to act again.

In a recent game of Scion, my character simulated being 10 people in melee.

He attacks once per each of the ten 'ticks' in a 'round'. So, although I have less attack dice than the scion with a the retarded attack spear and I deal less damage than him as well; I deal more damage per round than he does b/c my character is quite literally ten ninjas.

I think he sits at around... 4 dice from dex, 5 from melee and 1 from the weapon itself, so 10 dice to attack.

The damage comes out to be 3 from str and 2 from the weapon; plus 3 auto-successes due to having Epic Str 3; so 5 dice + 3 levels of damage.

The fact that an enemy is at lose -2 to -6 on their defense has the side benefit that my character is a combat de-buffer. Which is hawt, since the act of de-buffing isn't taking up any actual resources or taking away from my character being a living chainsaw.

Now, my stamina and defense value are significantly lower than anyone else in the group, but seriously, no one knows that yet, and I'll be cranking out my Epic Stamina next.