Reviving Dead Man's Hand

[JigokuBosatsu]

Hmm. Starting to remember that the whole power schedule/weakness dynamic didn't ultimately do it for me with AS, and less so here. Though I do understand you're trying to mate the systems, so no biggie.

One thought I had was that perhaps whatever obviously superior (and therefore more common) race/class combos- Duszek Strangler, for example- could be the bog standard character option, and the less obvious ones- Duszek Doctor- could be rewarded with a higher starting power level, to encourage more balanced character choice? Might be more complicated, I suppose, but as part of more detailed writeups of the races, could really help with balance.

EDIT: I was going to mention one more thing. Maybe I just love the mythic resonance of liminal things, but I think that the idea I mentioned for Teslavania- that of a "Middlemarch" area where another world overlaps- would be even better in this setting. Maybe the "Frontier" could be more than just an idea- but actually an area where the indigenous peoples' magic works in their expected way, but also containing totally taboo areas that are near gates to other worlds, and some seriously weird medicine shows up. You could have similar areas in other parts of the game world- "Darkest Africa" and "The Black Forest".

[Chamomile]

In that case, Wendigo is a class. Which really works better anyway.

That's just it, though. Wendigo should not be a class. In a supernatural action-horror game, the most important part of your character is that you are a vampire or a werewolf or whatever, but in a western game, the sidhe wilderness guide has way more in common with the ifrit wilderness guide than with the sidhe lawman, especially in terms of what they're capable of. There's no reason to hand out powers to different races at all, let alone power sources and what material they're weak against. Why do we even have material weaknesses at all? It's really not all that in-genre for westerns, steampunk, or fantasy to have party members who are vulnerable to a specific material. If you do want to keep it for mechanical reasons, there's no reason to keep the materials from After Sundown when we could use something like elemental powers instead, since shooting lightning bolts and fireballs from revolvers is apparently supposed to be a major thing for DMH.

[Username17]

Not only would I definitely not use the AS power schedules and weakness lists, I also wouldn't even use the AS Power lists. It's a different genre and people are supposed to be making Mana Engines that imbue Caster Shells with Thunder Strikes. You're just stealing the skill engine for the most part. You might even want to change the base TN if you decide that you want to make the difference between someone who is more skilled and someone who is less skilled more or less pronounced (generally speaking, the lower the base TN, the lower the variance and thus the larger a bulge a character who is more skilled has over a lesser character).

For actual character abilities, you'll probably want to give each race a short writeup that is more akin to a D&D racial writeup than an AS anything. Off the top of my head, I would suggest giving like three abilities and a comparable set of stat mods to each race. You could make it easier on yourself by giving each race an ability geared towards Wilderness Exploration, an ability geared toward Solving Mysteries, and an ability geared towards Combat.

Thereafter, you're going to put up a skill-list, and a bunch of Occupations. Occupations unlock abilities of their own (which need some sort of name, like knack or something), and what those abilities will generally do is to allow you to use some basic skill in order to do something new. Not unlike a Sorcerous Discipline from AS. You could either try to balance all the knacks or try to balance all the knacks into a series of different cost brackets and then charge different amounts for them. In any case, you would be allowed to choose a certain number of knacks from outside your Occupation.

The Wendigo would be both a Race and an Occupation or two. You have Wendigo Reavers and you have Turned Reavers. The Turned are the people who have been kidnapped by the Wendigo and forced to be cannibals. Then they get remade into Reavers just with slightly different basic racial abilities. There might even be some sort of ability trade-in (where for example, you lose your Vanir social cache if you have been painted white and now run around trying to eat the flesh of Beings).

-Username17

[Grek]

So, how is Wendigo ANYTHING a playable character at all? Is the rest of the party expected to have no issue with the cannibalism thing?

[Prak]

First, why don't Ifrit get fire walking? Why shouldn't they be immune to flames? Or was that a hypothetical example, since they are listed as getting exactly that?

It was an explanation as to why "Race gives Universal, Job gives Sorceries" wouldn't quite work.

Second, are you even trying to balance the starting powers? Because if you try to go for something even remotely balanced, you can't give some starting characters advanced powers and others only basic.

No, I started with just giving them things that made some sort of sense.

race notes

I'll look these over as I work some more. I'm not entirely sure we need weaknesses, or that they're even appropriate. I mean, sure, we'll need some way to have vampires and zombies and such (antagonist splats, I guess), and they'll likely have weaknesses, but I'm not sure, say, the Skriatok needs more weakness than "must touch gold and drink some booze every so often."

---

One issue with power schedules in DMH is that you're no longer one of an elite cadre of supernatural creatures in a world of humans. This means that feeding can't work as it did before; instead, in most cases it has to be a short ritual that uses up valuable or hard to find resources.

Yeah, power schedules get wonky. Skriatok have their gold, but the way they're described, they could seriously just have a gold ring and just not worry about recharging unless they get mugged, and then they have three days to get it back. You could really just say that, except for a very few circumstances, like Wendigo, everyone is one a "Lunar" schedule, or something like it.

---

It's also worth considering the nature of undeath and the presence of other worlds. Given the setting, I don't think that there's a reason to have Maya or the Dark Reflection: it's already deserts, ghost towns, and wilderness. That leaves the Gloom.

The problem with 'everyone is an elf' is that you have to ask what it means to be an undead Duszek or Ani-Yunti. Since undeath is such an important part of the setting, It's worth designing things such that most characters can become undead. That's fine for Deep Ones, Lutin, Jotun, Anansi, Wakyambi, and Tatanka. Duszek, Jogah, and even Ani-Yunti could be spirits from the gloom. Wendigo and Mazenians occupy a sort of vampiric state, which is fine.

The other ones start to get a bit strange.

Just having the gloom works well, though we may want to add some non-grimdark worlds, I'm just not sure what they should be.

EDIT 3: Concerning power schedules: This isn't After Sundown. Your main mechanical teeth comes from your profession, not your race, so your power schedule should be based on what kind of job you have and not what weird parts you have. Odds are everything is going to be a Ritual power schedule that involves some variety of locking and/or loading.

Yeah, the few powers people get from their race are likely going to be always on, continuous, or ritual, with outliers like Wendigo that can easily have a Feeding Schedule and I'm frankly not sure if they should even be a player race as they'll be the only ones eating people. Occupation powers will have a lot of rituals, maybe some lunar (I could see spirit based power coming online on some kind of celestial schedule, if not on that of the moon), and possibly some feeding, depending on what gets set up. I'm suddenly realizing I need some way to fit dragons in...

Concerning other worlds: I think we need a Heaven and a Hell for angels and demons to come from (since a paladin shooting the teeth off a demon was one of the first visuals Prak mentioned for this), and maybe some other planes just for kicks (maybe we want an Abyss, too, so we can import the Blood War or something), but just because this is based in After Sundown's mechanics doesn't mean we need to give it anything to do with After Sundown's fluff. The Gloom is cool and I wouldn't mind seeing it in DMH, and undead are most definitely a thing that needs to happen in a fantasy western, but we don't need to import any of the worlds from AS at all. We could with that one model someone posted a while back where the Elemental Plane of Water is just a big magical ocean somewhere, and the Astral Plane is just the sky, and stars are the demi-planes, and the positive energy plane is the sun, and Baator is just a giant pit somewhere, and etc.

The question is "How many worlds is too many?" There needs to be some sort of godly realm, where gods, like Sundar, the Shining, live, along with their angels and those mortals who earned entrance into heaven. There should be a hell plane, where demons and evil gods live, and to and from whence evil mortals can be sent or called. There needs to also be a spirit realm, where you can find elementals, spirits of animals, and all that animist stuff is, and that humans get a glimpse of when they go on vision quests and such. That seems like a good start, though, as D&D shows, you can go on making planes pretty much infinitely.

@Frank: Yeah, in working up the races, Attributes and a handful of minor powers are really looking like what needs to be done. The question is, oh master of conceptual space , whether the races need to be grouped, and whether I'm on the right path in how I'm grouping them. The problem with the writeups you did was that the races don't have particularly obvious groupings, and that some groupings wind up heavily from one region or another. I'd like it if I could set it up so that each grouping has a Eastern Eurasian, Western European and New World race in it, but, well, Giant has an Northern European and two New World races. The Old Ones are all staunchly Old World, and pretty much western European (a result of "well, they're not yet in a group and they sorta fit together).

And, yeah, Wendigo is definitely not a player race. They work in a supernatural horror game because pretty much everyone eats human flesh, but in a Western, they're the only ones, and there aren't any humans for them to eat so that they can be buddy buddy with the other supernaturals because no one cares about the powerless plebes.

[Prak]

Worked on those race entries some more. Got down to Kachina, but there are some holes, and people who've done more with AS than wish they had people who'd play it should check over balance so far.

[Grek]

Here's a proposed discipline list. ??? means that I couldn't think of anything, so a power would need to be found/written. All names are shit and subject to change

Universal

Fortitude
Basic
-Resist Elements: Like Fire Walking, except for any one element out of Fire, Cold or Electrical. Can be taken multiple times
-Revive the Flesh
Advanced
-Indomitability
-???
Elder
-Endless Persistance
-Skin of Night

Discernment
Basic
-Supernatural Senses
-Aura Perception
-Sensory Damper
Advanced
-Quicken Sight
-Thaumaturgical Forensics
Elder
-Rapid Thought
-???

Medicine
Basic
-Vile Concoction (Bitter Fruit refluffed to be alchemy instead of plants, with different skills)
-Revive the Flesh
Advanced
-Cleanse the Body (no longer a devotion)
-Purify the Mind (no longer a devotion)
Elder
-Resurrection
-???

Clout (Ports over directly!)
Basic
-Vigor
-Clinging
Advanced
-Devestation
-Giant Size
Elder
-Earth Quake
-Force Field

Gunplay
Basic
-Quickness
-Trick Shot: Lets you do stupid gun tricks.
Advanced
-Alacrity
-Long Shot: Increases the range of your gun based on net hits
Elder
-Blur
-Crimson Bullet (refluffed Crimson Death)


At least two more universals.

Primal: Invokes the untamed, untamable and often unfriendly powers of nature.

Dream Magic
Basic
-Pain Drops
-Enchanted Slumber
Advanced
-Dark Night of the Soul
-Horrid Reality
Elder
-Object of Envy
-Dreamscape

Fire Magic
Basic
-Hand of Flame
-Fire Shell: Allows you to enchant Fire based caster shells.
Advanced
-Fire Starter
-Flames of Panic
Elder
-Hell Storm
-???

Cold Magic
Basic
-Frozen Note (needs renaming)
-Ice Shell: Allows you to enchant Fire based caster shells.
Advanced
-Prison of Ice
-Solid Water (refluffed Solid Darkness
Elder
-Frozen Day
-???

Calling
Basic
-Attract
-Repell
Advanced
-The Beckoning
-Contradiction
Elder
-Depolarize
-Siren Song

Shadow Magic
Basic
-Silent Toll
-Shadow Casting
Advanced
-Cloak of Shadow
-Blind the Senses
Elder
-Shadow Walk
-Shadow Body

Arcane: Calls up power from what appears to be the afterlife. Originates back East, is said to defile the spirit world.

Hypnotism:
Basic
-Command
-Mesmerism
-Suggestion
Advanced
-Cloud Memory
-Conditioning
Elder
-Possession
-Mob Mind

Ivocation of Something Something Arcane Beasties
Basic
-Curse of Failure
-Learn the Heart's Pain
Advanced
-Binding: Lets you summon up an angel/demon/whatever the fuck we end up putting in the Arcane magic world
-Banishment: As Banishment, except sending people to the Arcane world instead.
Elder
-The Arcane Gateway Spell (A refluffed Scorch the Gateway in need of a name)
-???

Illusions
Basic
-Hide From Notice
-Mask of a Thousand Faces
Advanced
-Lost and Found
-Hide in Plain Sight
Elder
-Smoking Mirror (needs renamed)
-Fictional Self

Alchemy
Basic
-Scrying: Brew a potion to see any person or place you can name within 100 meters per Potency.
-Poison Shell (Caster Shell is imbued with any poison off Tongue of Serpents list)
Advanced
-Lantern of Peace (renamed Light of Ennui; Enchants lantern oil to do this)
-Betrayal of the Tongue (in potion form)
Elder
-Homunculus (refluffed Doppelganger, emerges from cauldron)
-Philosopher's Stone (refluffed Gold and Honey)

Necromancy
Basic
-Reanimate (Yes, moved down to basic)
-Vile Shell (Caster Shell is imbued with any poison off Abyss of the Body list)
Advanced
-Aura of Decay
-Withering
Elder
-Zombie Mastery
-Soul Investment

Spiritual Magic - Involves contacting the Spirit World, where inscruitable but friendly spirits live.

Spiritualism
Basic
-Compell Spirit
-Summon Spirit
Advanced
-Denial of Privacy (needs refluffed)
-Dream Vision (yes, bumped up to advanced)
Elder
-Divination
-Astral Projection

Beast Magic
Basic
-Beast Form
-Tongue of Beasts
Advanced
-Transformation
-War Form (no longer a devotion)
Elder
-Songs in the Dark
-???

Storm Magic
Basic
-Storm Calling: Howling Winds plus Rising Mists
-Thunder Shell: Allows you to enchant Electric caster shells.
Advanced
-Lightning Strike
-Tumultous Rain
Elder
-Tornado Calling: (Refluffed Victory of Typhon)
-???

Blood Magic
Basic
-Gift of Health
-Blood Shell: Allows you to enchant caster shells that hurt you but do aggravated damage.
Advanced
-Blood of Acid
-Theft of Vitae
Elder
-???
-???

Plant Magic
Basic
-Small Witness
-Grass Rope
Advanced
-Puppetry
-Magnify the Swarm
Elder
-Abomination
-Seeds of Destruction

[Korgan0]

So, as has been mentioned above, we could have several character archetypes, each with some set of sub-professions based on power source, and just like races in AS, each automatically gets some number of powers from various schools that match the power source, along with perhaps other bonuses to stuff. Maybe we could have another set of disciplines that are unique to archetypes, so that all wilderness guides get powers from the Wilderness Guide discipline and then get powers from the (for instance) Brave (primal), Avatar (spiritual) and something (arcane) lists.

How should magitech stuff fit into that system? It could be an entirely separate subsystem where everyone has a separate gadget resource somehow and tinker/technological (like the lawman with a mechanical arm) characters get some kind of bonus to that gadget pool, or it could be an additional power source with the same kind of discipline setup. I have now idea how a mechanically different gadget pool would function, but it means that magical players have access to magitech stuff as well, which could well lead to intrusion on roles and magitech characters not feeling like special snowflakes. Admittedly, this assumes that we want characters who have using magitech as a key part of their shtick- if we want magitech to be something in the background that doesn't work as a key power source then maybe having independent gadget pools of some kind is the way to go.

[Prak]

No, magitech is just stuff, just like magic items in AS. Having an entirely separate pool is absurd, and there's no "Humanity" even if only because I don't want to come up with a term for when there are no humans and I hate them.

Characters get magitech one of two ways:
1) Make it.
2) Buy it.

Of the two, the latter is limited by your funds, and the former isn't inherently limited. I could see a system where you simply cannot have more magitech things functioning on you than your Edge or Potence, and ammunition and integrated stuff (so The Made don't get shafted) doesn't count against that.

[Username17]

Magitech is definitely going to want some sort of personal-juju powering it, otherwise it's not magitech, it's just alternate history tech. Someone carrying a caster full of caster shells should mean a lot more than that they have enough money to afford a caster. Using one should mean that you're something of a gun arcanist and that you have bonded with the caster such that you can fire the shells to make stuff happen.

So you want to go back and have some sort of general purpose rule about what magic does and what it costs, which in turn has implications about why the settlers use spell engines and caster shells. The obvious would be that magic has to be ritualized for a long time (relatively speaking), meaning that it's basically limited to things that people can make use of out-of-combat unless people "cheat" by taking the time to enchant a caster shell so that they can break the effect open later on. The Tatanka might have something similar, in that they ritually store time in their humps, allowing them to use magical effects on short notice without spell engines.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

Characters get magitech one of two ways:
1) Make it.
2) Buy it.

What about "Steal/Loot it."?

[Prak]

@RadiantPhoenix: Ok, one of three ways.

@Frank: How is a bullet that acts as a scroll of Lightning Bolt that anyone can activate less magical than a gun with which you bond in order to use said bullets? I really don't understand that line of thought.

But... that aside. People won't really be using a lot of their Power, especially not in combat, so what if each magitech item you have lowers your accessible power by X. Then you have a hard limit before you can't use your personal tricks, like the Tatanka celerity-ish stuff, or Divine Lawman smite-attacks.

[Username17]

@Frank: How is a bullet that acts as a scroll of Lightning Bolt that anyone can activate less magical than a gun with which you bond in order to use said bullets? I really don't understand that line of thought.

If bullets that shoot lightning bolts are available and usable by anyone, but merely expensive, then you're just playing with Buck Rogers tech. You have blasters, and some people have blasters, and then they shoot lightning out of their blasters. It's not magic.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

If lightning guns are just things that anyone can have, that adds a whole new layer of balance issues to work out. After Sundown cannot be directly translated into Dead Man's Hand with only fluff changes, but there's no reason to load up on mechanical differences when there is a different explanation that works just as well for what the game needs to accomplish and lets us use practically all the powers from Chasing the Storm as-is.

[Username17]

If lightning guns are just things that anyone can have, that adds a whole new layer of balance issues to work out. After Sundown cannot be directly translated into Dead Man's Hand with only fluff changes, but there's no reason to load up on mechanical differences when there is a different explanation that works just as well for what the game needs to accomplish and lets us use practically all the powers from Chasing the Storm as-is.

Not to mention that it brings up Magic User vs. Fighter bullshit all over again. If a shaman can have their own magic that they know, and can also use any magictech just by buying it at the general store, then what reason is there to be a cowboy?

People who have tribal magics have role protection built in. Magitechnicians need the same.

-Username17

[Korgan0]

Maybe magitechnological devices gain their power through having spirits or something infused in them, so their users have to bond with the spirits inside in order to use them. This means that magitech users can advance in a non-mundane way without having to go to the magismith or spending hard-earned cash- they can attune themselves better to the spirits within their castergun or robot limb or what have you, which could then unlock more abilities of some kind.

[Stubbazubba]

Will there be a distinction between steampunk-tech and magitech, or will it all just be magitech?

[Username17]

There's a lot you can learn from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's chargen setup. I wouldn't suggest copying everything (certainly not random career assignments or nonsensical career exits), but the core bit of picking a race, then picking an occupation, and then selecting skills that modify what you can do with your stats is a good setup.

-Username17

[Prak]

Stubbazubba: Ideally, there will be both Magitech and Steamtech, which makes me realize that Frank's right, there needs to be some kind of bonding between user and magitech, otherwise there's little difference between Steamtech and Magitech.

Frank: I'll look into WHFRPG, thanks.

[Username17]

WHFRP has a lot of terribad ideas. One thing that will absolutely jump out at you is that the difference between a skill and a talent is pretty much nonexistent. A skill is an ability that may or may not have a roll associated with it, a talent is an ability that may or may not have a roll associated with it. It's a pointless distinction.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I don't know about WHFRP 3rd, but in WHFRP 2nd they were pretty good about making all skills require checks, and all talents do other things. To be quite honest, while WHFRP 3rd has dice pools, they have dice with fucking comets on them and I don't know or care what the success curves look like in all cases. In the few cases I checked, they were rather like older versions of Rolemaster where a generic fight with an Orc was generally settled by someone rolling a critical botch and slicing a hole in the space-time continuum.

Anyway Skills vs. Talents may be a weird distinction, but it's not really the problem. The real problem is that the dynamic range of the system was just bad.

Joe Schmoe has a stat of 30ish and a skill of +0%. His success rates vary from 60% (easiest), to 30% ("standard", whatever the hell that was supposed to mean) to 0% (hardest).

The Great Muckity-muck has a stat of 55ish and a skill of +30%. His success rates vary from 115% (which was I think actually 95%, easiest), to 85% ("standard") to 55% (hardest).

This isn't really what you want the difficulty curves to look like. A "first level" character is so unskilled that a baker of average intelligence can only make bread half the time. Meanwhile, a maxed out knight succeeds roughly the same amount of the time (45% to fail is not really that different from 25% to fail, in practice) regardless of difficulty.

The odds want to move a lot more than that - you want more or less the kind of curve you get in Shadowrun, where as you grow in skill level your odds of success change sorta-sigmoidally. But I thought were were playing an RPG in which the RNG was somhow done with poker hands anyway? No?

[RadiantPhoenix]

How does this poker hands thing work for PvE skill-use, anyway? Do you just assign each task a hand and say, "if you get this hand or better, you succeed."?

[Prak]

How does this poker hands thing work for PvE skill-use, anyway? Do you just assign each task a hand and say, "if you get this hand or better, you succeed."?

Wha? So far as I know, poker hands were only ever discussed as a thematic addition to Karmic Advancement, not for skill resolution.

[DrPraetor]

Sorry, that was confusion on my part, I thought we were using the mechanics of the original Deadlands.

As I recall, in Deadlands you rolled dice to see how many cards you got and then you played some hybrid of Poker and Asshole, I don't remember exactly how it worked? But for an "easy" task you'd get more cards and the universe would get fewer, or you'd get a bunch of cards and succeed if you got a pair, or something like that.

It was cool, but use dice pools of D6s instead.

[Stubbazubba]

Oh, but I think it's an awesome idea. At least to look at. However, it would require a re-write of the core mechanics in AS, so, probably a no-go.