After Sundown - some rules questions

endersdouble · Post by **endersdouble** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 4:21 am

Just had our first real After Sundown session. Some rules concerns/questions.

My players are having a lot of trouble pricing good Destiny/Secrets. One item we brainstormed (and I called a level 3 Destiny) was an ID card that any extra sees as situation-appropriate authority--police badge, health inspector, whatever. This seems pretty powerful but not unreasonably so...but it's hard to judge. Thoughts?

We are worried we are (dramatically) misrunning combat. In particular, melee fights seem strangely inconclusive. Suppose cloned Luminaries with S 4, A 4, Combat 4, Edge 3 (so pretty competent In Media Res) are in a knife fight. As we read the rules, each knife attack rolls eight dice (S+C) and needs four hits to succeed (half of A + C). Binomial CDF gives us success probability of about 1/4; each hit will do 1 damage (unless we get five hits--fairly unlikely), which gets soaked with seven dice, which will soak it to -1 (no damage) with about 75% probability. So as a rough approximation, about every sixteenth attack will do actual damage; at two attacks a turn (not much else useful to do but just swing in a knife fight that we saw) it takes eight turns to actually have any effect. Surely we're doing something very wrong?

As a comparison, using powers seems ludicrously more effective. Suppose one of those Luminaries has Theft of Vitae (and we aren't worried about Vow of Silence); let's say they have Larceny 3. Then we roll 7 dice against target's 7 (we're assuming "opposed roll" means the strength is a Resistance roll and gets Edge, but this is never explicitly stated and maybe should be?) getting an expected 0.68 net hits per roll (remember, we don't suffer any penalty for losing the roll, it just doesn't work.) Each net hit is an "unsoaked damage level"--we assume "level" here should be "box" and "unsoaked" means no soak roll, though it's not clear. So this character should drop his knife (no penalty we see here) and suck blood out through the air while the other guy ineffectually stabs. Again, we think we're probably making a mistake.

(Either that or the fighter-type should get a gun; the fairly-similar-to-firearm fireballs that Path of Flame gets were a lot more effective, since range means easier hits and they have much higher base damage.)

Wound penalties apply to "actions"--is this all rolls or just explicit actions in combat/disciplines? In particular, do you take the penalty to soak?

XP system mentions "positive quality"--probably should be "Advantage?"

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 5:32 am

If we're asking questions in this thread...

What is the maximum length of time the "Scene" designation should apply to? Especially in Scenes where nothing really is happening.

For example, if we have some character who has activated Flight purely for the purpose of speedy transportation, how long should he be able to fly before he has to spend more power points?

As regards endersdouble's questions:

I have noticed that melee combat between reasonably competent entities tends toward the padded sumo. In contrast, ranged-focused characters with rifles can often one-shot even Luminaries.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 5:53 am

1. Someone has Gallifreyan Psychic Paper? Sounds reasonable. I'm not sure that there really can be a great all encompassing list of potential magic gadgets. The acceptable genres you could grab things from are so vast that listing everything would be longer than the book. For example: someone just grabbed something from Dr. Who. And not to put too fine a point on it: but how "good" a magic item is does vary greatly depending on

2. Combat: if you want to go into melee with someone who is even nearly as good as you and you aren't swinging a fire hydrant you ripped out of the sidewalk with your superhuman strength, I suggest Feinting. If it works, it drops the threshold to stab a dude down to zero, which means that a competent combatant can eviscerate even fairly tough people. It's how the game handles fencing, and it is perfectly acceptable to surrender as soon as someone gets a good feint in rather than waiting for the death blow. This is the equivalent of sword fights in swashbuckling moves where major characters surrender with the enemy sword pointed at (rather than in) their heart.

3. Scene length is explicitly variable. But if I had to put a hard cap on it, I'd make a scene of simply traveling last no longer than the time from one meal time to the next. So you could fly from breakfast to lunch if all you're doing is zooming across the plains in a cut scene.

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 6:50 am

endersdouble wrote:Wound penalties apply to "actions"--is this all rolls or just explicit actions in combat/disciplines? In particular, do you take the penalty to soak?

Pretty sure that Wound Penalties shouldn't apply to Soak rolls or other Resistance Tests.

endersdouble · Post by **endersdouble** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 3:33 pm

1. Someone has Gallifreyan Psychic Paper? Sounds reasonable. I'm not sure that there really can be a great all encompassing list of potential magic gadgets. The acceptable genres you could grab things from are so vast that listing everything would be longer than the book. For example: someone just grabbed something from Dr. Who. And not to put too fine a point on it: but how "good" a magic item is does vary greatly depending on

guessing that'd end with "what kind of things happen in the campaign" or similar. Which is fair. It just means we're left kind of randomly guessing. (And I guess the concept is farther spread than we realized; I think we got the idea from an artifact in Mage: the Ascension and I've seen it elsewhere too; none of us watch Doctor Who.)

2. Combat: if you want to go into melee with someone who is even nearly as good as you and you aren't swinging a fire hydrant you ripped out of the sidewalk with your superhuman strength, I suggest Feinting. If it works, it drops the threshold to stab a dude down to zero, which means that a competent combatant can eviscerate even fairly tough people.

Reasonable; guess my players didn't notice Feinting as an option that was a good idea. Short of that, though, it feels like melee attacks don't do enough damage. Would it be totally broken to add (half of, maybe?) strength as base damage? I think this means Kaiju and the like would seriously paste the hell out of people, but for human-ish luminaries, I suspect this'll mean more reasonable damage from hits. (To me it feels thematically wrong if being subtle and tricky is the only way to win a knife/fist fight. Should I not be able to just be decently stronger than my enemy and hit him as hard as I can?)

Any comment on the minor language/rule issues, which I'll quickly reiterate to save you time:

"unsoaked damage level" -- we assume "level" means "box' and "unsoaked" means "unsoakable".

"opposed test" means the defender is making a Resistance roll (and gets edge)

"positive quality" means "advantage"

wound penalties -- should apply to Resistance rolls/defense pools or just active actions?

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 7:37 pm

Even my dogs feint while play fighting and mechanically the need to set equals up a bit helps make things a teensy bit less rocket tag . It's really not a big deal.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 2:42 am

endersdouble wrote:wound penalties -- should apply to Resistance rolls/defense pools or just active actions?

Wound penalties should apply to any actions that you take, including resistance and avoison.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 5:52 am

Resistance rolls are not normally considered actions.

Avoision is an ambiguous tax non-payment and I don't really think that After Sundown normally considers it at all.

Mage copies Doctor Who like whoa. All the time. Actually, the newer Doctor Who material is often a pretty good source in general - Weeping Angels are kind of stupid if you overthink them, but they are nicely horrifying and creepy.

-Username17

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 1:45 pm

I think it's worth noting that your scenario makes some interesting assumptions. In particular, someone with Combat 4 is presumably a highly trained, seasoned combat veteran. Someone with Edge is by definition someone important and lucky enough to be hard to put down. So, in terms of the fiction, what you have going on is that one on one knife fights between expert duelists tend to take a long time. I'm not sure if that's realistic, but it seems pretty genre appropriate. After Sundown combat is really all about looking for some kind of asymmetric advantage, anyway. Besides feinting, surprise attacks and ganging up are decent ways to crack defenses. (Also guns).

If you want to see what happens when random thugs try to knifecrime each other, you should really be looking at something more like Strength 4, Agility 3, Combat 1. That gives you a dicepool of 5 to score 2 hits, which is way easier than getting 4 hits on 8 dice. Similarly, without adding Edge, you're far more likely to inflict a decisive wound on your first hit. Once someone has significant wound penalties, the fight is basically over and should probably turn into a surrender or attempted flight anyway.

In terms of design, there are two reasons you get that kind of Padded Sumo. One is that the Combat skill scales faster defensively than offensively. You need Combat 3 to get an extra hit on attack, but only Combat 2 to force an extra hit on defense. In other words, the system is deliberately designed to make melees go longer the more skilled the participants are. If that really bothered you, you could make the TN to be hit AG/2+Combat/3 or something. The other reason this padded sumo happens is that in After Sundown, good weapons are radically more effective than sucky weapons. This takes a lot of getting used to if you're coming in from D&D, or even from Shadowrun, but it's important to the game's balance. A number of powers give you ready access to your weapons (War Form, Mirror Pocket, Veil, and Hand of Fire), and their value is contingent on it being actually important to have those weapons. Therefore, a katana actually has to be way deadlier than a knife. The game's math for high-powered combats tend to be written with katanas in mind, so anybody who doesn't explode to a sword tends not to care much about a knife. If you wanted knifecriming to be more effective, I'd just add a Slasher advantage that gives +1 damage to knives.

ETA: Personally, I'd make Psychic Paper Destiny 2. Most Destiny 3 items open radically new options to players, like plane-hopping. Anything psychic paper can get you could probably be accomplished with the right powers anyway. That said, If I were MCing, I'd still make someone roll a social skill each time they used the paper to make their performance convincing. If you let it automatically fool extras, a rank 3 might be justified.

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Sat Jul 06, 2013 4:49 pm

After Sundown wrote:Veil does not affect cameras or other objective traces of a creature’s passing, merely prevents observers (even indirect observers) from noticing what is there.

How do Veil powers interact with people watching you through a camera? Veil doesn't work on cameras, but it does work on indirect observers, and I would consider someone watching me through a live feed to be observing me indirectly. I've thought of three possible interpretations:

Veil offers no protection whatsoever against people with cameras. It is trivially easy to pierce a veil by holding up an iPhone and spotting the difference.
Veil is a purely mental ability with some limited range. A man with a camcorder won't notice until he gets home and watches the tape, but mall security is out of range and sees the real appearance immediately.
Veil prevents indirect observation by any means and at any range until it is turned off. A man half a continent away watching a Veiled creature through live satellite feed would be fooled until the Veil was turned off the Veil, but reviewing the tapes would still show the creature's actual appearance.

I'm less worried about more genre-appropriate means of seeing through Veils like mismatches between a creature's appearance and its footprints, but the ease of waving a camera around in worlds that remotely resemble the modern day could be a huge nerf to Veil.

On a somewhat related note, can someone with Beast Form choose "human" as their animal to transform into, allowing true shapeshifting into a single, specific human form?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 06, 2013 7:27 pm

Veil will keep the guy who is watching the camera from noticing you. It will not prevent a photo record of your presence from being made. So it's option 3.

Veil prevents indirect observation by any means and at any range until it is turned off. A man half a continent away watching a Veiled creature through live satellite feed would be fooled until the Veil was turned off the Veil, but reviewing the tapes would still show the creature's actual appearance.

That one.

On a somewhat related note, can someone with Beast Form choose "human" as their animal to transform into, allowing true shapeshifting into a single, specific human form?

That seems... vaguely abuse-able. I probably would say "no", but I could imagine character concepts that would benefit from it.

-Username17

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Jul 06, 2013 10:44 pm

So, can Rising Mists block sunlight ala pea soup fog? If so, can you huddle some place dark and then whip up the weather pattern?

rampaging-poet · Post by **rampaging-poet** » Sat Jul 06, 2013 10:51 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Veil will keep the guy who is watching the camera from noticing you. It will not prevent a photo record of your presence from being made. So it's option 3.

Thanks, that makes sense.

On the Beast Form issue, turning into a human definitely seems more useful than most animal forms, but it doesn't seem out of line with what Mask of a Thousand Faces gets you. Both are of similar utility in hiding your true identity. Although Beast Form defeats cameras, you only get a handful of alternate identities and it doesn't let you hide arbitrary equipment. It also costs a Power Point to activate while Mask of a Thousand Faces does not.

downzorz · Post by **downzorz** » Sat Jul 06, 2013 11:18 pm

Quoting myself here:

"...there are only about six hundred thousand supernaturals..."
Does this mean that there are six hundred thousand supernatural Luminaries, or six hundred thousand overall? Because a world where the supernatural landscape is like 60,000 luminaries and 540,000 spawn is a really different one from the world with 600,000 luminaries and upwards of five million spawn.
On a similar note (not that this is necessarily answerable, due to it mostly being a device for explaining "special people" in media) what does the Luminary vs Extra distribution look like in the first place? One in a hundred? One in a million?

Also, Horrid Reality. If you hand someone a knife in the dream, do they wake up with it in their hand? What if you stab them and leave it in them? Can you do surreal things in the dream and have them apply (if you bring a dream-creation that turns someone into a 2D image, do they become Flat Stanley upon waking)?

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Jul 07, 2013 12:28 am

rampaging-poet wrote:On the Beast Form issue, turning into a human definitely seems more useful than most animal forms, but it doesn't seem out of line with what Mask of a Thousand Faces gets you. Both are of similar utility in hiding your true identity. Although Beast Form defeats cameras, you only get a handful of alternate identities and it doesn't let you hide arbitrary equipment. It also costs a Power Point to activate while Mask of a Thousand Faces does not.

Also, it allows demons and fey to assume a specific human form.

Pedantic · Post by **Pedantic** » Sun Jul 07, 2013 4:38 am

The one thing I can't figure out is the hiding rules. What is the relationship between the involved rolls and the base time precisely?

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After Sundown - some rules questions

After Sundown - some rules questions

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