[nWoD] Demon: the Descent

[Fucks]

Kickstarter is live and has a link to the complete rulebook on Google drive. What do you think?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200 ... ge-edition

[The Yann Waters]

It's the one nWoD line I've been looking forward to since Changeling (which in turn was the only line I was interested in before), even though the demons in question don't really bear much of a resemblance to the Second Children from the original "Voice of the Angel" vignette. Note, by the way, that the text of the preview draft is still going through some tweaks: for example, the healing power "On the Mend" and the bit about the God-Machine being single-mindedly out to kill any pure demon infants born in freedom are being revised.

[Username17]

They took the time to make a new combat system, and it's still hot garbage. It's still the same "groups of people fucking own you" bullshit as before. They enshrine the common house rule that weapon damage is auto-hits that only apply if you get at least one real hit, but the nWoD is like nine fucking years old, everyone knows that doesn't fix anything.

Then they give initiative penalties for holding a weapon in your hand. They know Quickdraw is an actual thing, right? That characters drawing and sheathing weapons every attack in order to go faster is extremely stupid, and yet is almost 100% of what that rule does.

Frankly, that's all I read. I opened up the new attack rules, got about a page and a half in and realized that after nine fucking years of being told at length how and why the nWoD combat system is shitty and deterministic they managed to internalize fucking nothing. This is still shit made by Chuweros who eat shit and fuck shit. Only now it is 2013 and not 2004 and they don't even have the excuse that it's new.

It is not a difficult thing to make nWoD combat less fucked. The fact that they have bothered to write a whole new combat system yet failed to do that is inexcusable. Every one of these people should be publicly shamed. They took upon themselves the task of changing nWoD combat to be less ass, and they set themselves a very low bar and they fucking failed anyway.

-Username17

[Fucks]

Very rant-ish, nice one. Not right on the topic of this thread, but who cares?

[Username17]

Very rant-ish, nice one. Not right on the topic of this thread, but who cares?

It actually is. See, nWoD rules are fucked. You read them and immediately think to yourself "Why is my mind full of fuck?" And then you try to play with them and then you're all "Why is everything fucked?" And the answer of course is that the nWoD rules are fucked. Like, super fucked.

It's so obvious and so well known that even Onyx Path can't keep a straight face when saying that nWoD rules are even moderately passable. So they put together a big nWoD rules overhaul, which they called Rage Against the God Machine or something equally pretentious. Demon is the game they are debuting the new system with. That's why their google doc is almost six hundred fucking pages. Because it has the new core system in it in addition to being a nigh endless nWoD-style shovelware project.

So to a first approximation, the way you'd see if the authors had in fact actually learned anything at all would be to look at their new system. And their new system is an offense against God and Man. They haven't figured out how to make nWoD combat not be deterministic and lame, and their embelishments prove that they not only can't do math, they can't even dress themselves. For fuck's sake, you get a modifier to the die roll that determines when you get to choose what to do in combat based on the tools you will be using in the future once you've made that choice. That's a divide by zero error before the players have even determined when they are allowed to declare what their actions are going to be.

-Username17

[The Yann Waters]

Then they give initiative penalties for holding a weapon in your hand. They know Quickdraw is an actual thing, right? That characters drawing and sheathing weapons every attack in order to go faster is extremely stupid, and yet is almost 100% of what that rule does.

Eh, I'm not really seeing how rules-lawyering like that would even work, given the changes to Quick Draw. The Merit only allows drawing or sheathing a weapon reflexively whenever the character's Defense is actually applied to some roll; that is, when they come under attack. In practice, it's mostly just good for getting a blade or a gun out when ambushed.

[TheFlatline]

*clicks on kickstarter*

Seriously?

The Doom font?

[TheFlatline]

Then they give initiative penalties for holding a weapon in your hand. They know Quickdraw is an actual thing, right? That characters drawing and sheathing weapons every attack in order to go faster is extremely stupid, and yet is almost 100% of what that rule does.

Eh, I'm not really seeing how rules-lawyering like that would even work, given the changes to Quick Draw. The Merit only allows drawing or sheathing a weapon reflexively whenever the character's Defense is actually applied to some roll; that is, when they come under attack. In practice, it's mostly just good for getting a blade or a gun out when ambushed.

Holstering or slinging is a free instant action. If you have a gun or weapon in your hands, it impacts your initiative score *next* round. Quickdraw is a free reflex action. So the idea is that you have init of 8, and a shotgun that gives init -2 if it's in your hands at the end of your turn.

So you go on init count 8, draw for free, which drops your init to 6 next round, fire, then drop/sling/holster your weapon as a free instant action, which boosts your init back up to 8.

Bullshit rules complication: If you look at "shoot first", it specifically says that shoot first combines with quickdraw to give you an attack on the increased init count on your first round. So that means that when you "go" on init count 8 and pull a shotgun, even if the new init count doesn't apply until next turn as is stated in the rules, you're still going on init count 6, because otherwise "shoot first" is pointless.

You don't even have to rules lawyer. nWOD's combat is fucked.

[Longes]

Demon is the game they are debuting the new system with. That's why their google doc is almost six hundred fucking pages. Because it has the new core system in it in addition to being a nigh endless nWoD-style shovelware project.k

That's not quite true. God-Machine Chronicle came out about half a year ago, for mortals.

[Prak]

I'm honestly more offended by the fact that the first level which gives a physical book is $60. I've kind of given up on caring that WoD systems suck.

[The Yann Waters]

So you go on init count 8, draw for free, which drops your init to 6 next round, fire, then drop/sling/holster your weapon as a free instant action, which boosts your init back up to 8.

But that's not possible unless the GM is at least implementing some rules hacks. Without Merits like Quick Draw, drawing or holstering a weapon always takes up a regular instant action (so characters have a choice between either that or attacking, but not both), and as said, the GMC version of Quick Draw is triggered by Defense (and also only applies to a single Specialty, incidentally). Frankly, I don't know where that idea of "free instant actions" comes from. Once someone has the weapon out, holstering it again requires another Quick Draw opportunity or a full turn spent doing nothing else.

(What Shoot First offers in combination with Quick Draw is precisely that trigger, without the usual requirement of being targeted first. It's still not as efficient as having the gun out in advance, but at least allows firing a shot without delay.)

God-Machine Chronicle came out about half a year ago, for mortals.

In fact, that system update section from Demon should be pretty much the same hundred-page appendix from GMC which was already made available as a free download.

I'm honestly more offended by the fact that the first level which gives a physical book is $60. I've kind of given up on caring that WoD systems suck.

Well, the Kickstarter is for the deluxe book. The eventual POD version will no doubt be priced along the same lines as the rest of the nWoD cores.

[TheFlatline]

What you're saying is even more stupid.

So quickdraw isn't actually quickdraw unless you get attacked. And then you get your choice of defense/attacking/doing something or drawing your weapon.

How fucking stupid is that?

[Omegonthesane]

What you're saying is even more stupid.

So quickdraw isn't actually quickdraw unless you get attacked. And then you get your choice of defense/attacking/doing something or drawing your weapon.

How fucking stupid is that?

"I use my Quick Draw skill to run like a sissy little coward at the start of combat leading you into the ambush trap of berserk 5-year-olds with kazoos!"

[TheFlatline]

Actually 15 4-year olds with pointy sticks could drop any nWOD supernatural in a round or so.

[Username17]

Actually 15 4-year olds with pointy sticks could drop any nWOD supernatural in a round or so.

The fact that there isn't a soak roll or a damage roll means that there really isn't any checks on large groups of bullshit, and the game collapses into a singularity the moment an unruly mob shows up to do anything. The new deus ex machina rules try to obfuscate that a bit by reducing dice pools such that low level characters ever miss, but you still only care about aggregate damage and the damage from weapons gets added in at the end. They've made it slightly swingier on an individual attack, but when you have big groups on either side the results are just as deterministic.

In the old rules, a four year old with a pointy stick would roll 4 dice and do one wound per hit. That hits 76% of the time and averages 1 and a third wound per attack. Any minivan full of small children would pop you like a zit. In the new rules, a four year old with a pointy stick rolls 2 dice and does 1 wound per hit, but they also add 2 wounds if they get any hits. So that hits only 51% of the time, and the average is 2 and two thirds - their chance of missing has been roughly doubled but their average damage output has been literally doubled. You can get the one round beat down from a number of children that fit in a mid-size sedan.

The core problem where combat was stupid and terrible and boring and deterministic and didn't scale has not been fixed. Indeed, they actually managed to make it worse. It's an impressive achievement.

---

The bottom line is that Onyx Path is not really a game design house. It's a man with a business plan. Richard Thomas realized that White Wolf was circling the drain and didn't have the cash flow to maintain a company with actual employees and salaries and shit. But it did have enough fanatic followers to support one man in reasonable luxury.

So what Richard Thomas did was to lease the essentially worthless IP back from the Icelandic videogame company that owns them. Then his business model is to "ransom" various books for money, and then have them hacked together by cheap as free fan labor, and then have them printed up by established print on demand services.

He really isn't getting that many suckers, but he's soaking his kickstarter backers for an average of $74 each, and he doesn't need that many fanatics to write fucking content for him. The whole Demon project will gross him about a hundred grand when all is said and done, and probably more than half of that is take home after he's paid kickstarter and the printer.

But just remember that the bottom line is that his target audience is the less than two thousand people in the world who think that nWoD is a good platform to bring about a game about demons. They obviously don't care about the playability of the actual game, or they would have given up on nWoD at least two presidential elections ago. And the people writing this crap are unqualified. And of course, the man actually getting all this together is a blatant scam artist.

Demon: the Descent is a scam. A very simple and obvious scam that has already grabbed as many suckers as it needs to pay for the scam artist's rent and cocaine.

-Username17

[Fucks]

Another company doing the Demon: the Descent-setting with a different ruleset would be cool then?

[Username17]

Another company doing the Demon: the Descent-setting with a different ruleset would be cool then?

It is being done by "another company" with "another ruleset." There's no setting. There's no rules. There's no cool ideas. There's no anything. Demon: the Descent is just cobbled together from forum posts and sponsor ideas. It's all turtles, all the way down.

Anyone who wants can pay $750 and become a developer and dictate part of the setting or rules. And since no one producing the damn thing gives a second fuck, that's all there is to it. There's no editorial oversight. There's no playtester filter. There's no gatekeepers of good taste. There's no anything. You get the writers you're willing to pay for, and Demon the Descent is being written by labor that is willing to work for negative money.

The idea of doing world of darkness style hijinks with demons isn't particularly new, and Demon: the Descent brings nothing, nothing, nothing to that table. For fuck's sake, K wrote an Old World of Darkness Demon fan splat in his younger days, and it's still more interesting and less fucked up mechanically than this turd. And he gave it away for free.

-Username17

[FatR]

What do you think?

See, Demon the Fallen was not an especially good game, with its bigger-than-average disbalances and distinct scarcity of story ideas in the published books.

But at least it undestood, that the majority of players associate the "demons walk the Earth freely" theme with the coming of apocalypse. While it still had Masquerade, it was pretty obvious that this was just a temporary measure while newly escaped demons sniff around, and soon shit will get very real. Factions' goals were world-shaping and powers you had allowed you to do all sorts of overtly flashy stuff.

Now, I'm not sure what audience the "Supernatural gang warfare game #9" that is Demon: the Descent is supposed to capture. Except for hardcore WW brandslaves, which are not a numerous breed. For fuck's sake, "You've escaped an eldrich abomination you could never hope to comprehend, now go, try to pretend that your guerilla actions on Earth matter to it" is the exact premise of Changeling: The Dreaming. Its splats are basically boring as fuck generic character classes, its powers are your usual nWoD's shitty fare. So... why anyone might possibly be enticed to pay actual money for it? I don't feel like reading it even for free...

[TheFlatline]

Another company doing the Demon: the Descent-setting with a different ruleset would be cool then?

Not really.

The last line for me in Demons/Angels is still In Nomine. I don't even know if SJGames still publishes it, but it was probably one of the most interesting spins on the mindset of demons and how angels become demons.

The rules system is kind of fuckerated (roll 3D6, or the D666 to be spooky, and the 3rd die is a magnitude of success/failure determined by 2D6), but there's appropriately celestial shit like Corporeal Song of Shield 1 (as in beginning level) makes you completely immune to physical damage, and then goes up from *there*.

When they announced Demon the Fallen, I looked and it seemed to be a cash-in on the "bad boy" impression that WW had at the time and just rolled with it. But instead of having real guts and publishing a Demon RPG under the Black Dog label, they applied the cookie-cutter "bad guys that are secretly heroes under all the angst" bullshit.

[Prak]

I actually really liked DtF, because I'm totally into that whole "the demons are the good guys, and god is an evil bastard" thing. I could do with less angst and more embracing the "Lets be bad guys" thing, though.

I'm actually more interested in what people think of Demon the Descent's themes. As noted above, I'm totally into the demons thing. Not so much the cold war era spy thriller thing. The biotech thing is also a bit... iffy to me, since it strains the occult side of things in my mind. I'd go for more of a psuedo-technological veneer that's powered by pure magic, like Eberron Warforged.

On the other hand, the setting seems a bit more solid than the weird psuedo-abrahindu thing DtF had going on, and I'm actually quite tempted to adapt it for DtF.

[Omegonthesane]

The rules system is kind of fuckerated (roll 3D6, or the D666 to be spooky, and the 3rd die is a magnitude of success/failure determined by 2D6), but there's appropriately celestial shit like Corporeal Song of Shield 1 (as in beginning level) makes you completely immune to physical damage, and then goes up from *there*.

Nitpick - Corporeal Shields blocks "everything except air" rather than simply making you immune to physical damage. In other words, you can't participate in physical combat while the shield is up, and if the enemy kill you with mind bullets, your friend can't use Corporeal Healing on you until the shield is down because it doesn't distinguish between friendly and enemy materials.

I agree the system is fucktarded however, for all the fun it was able to generate. Doesn't even approach nWoD levels of fucktarded, with the exception of the Critical Hit/Miss equivalents, which are explicitly excuses for the GM to fap as they are literal Divine Intervention (or Diabolical Intervention) requiring no particular consistency with normal results. This has included "Your divinations that you rolled 666 on now give you consistent but false information for the rest of the scene, in at least one case incentivising you to murder an innocent human".

[TheFlatline]

Yeah I wasn't going to get into the corporeal songs too deeply but you're right, level one basically negates physical combat entirely.

The thing I loved about the setting is that it's far more nuanced about Angels/Demons than even "good/bad". God is on another plane of existence even than the celestials and they're left having to try their best to figure out His will in an almost absolute absence of any communication, and the mirror between celestial and humanity establishes quickly.

In fact, the only thing that separates demons from angels in In Nomine is that angels *believe* that they have a place ordained in creation by God and that they must not act outside of it; that theirs is an existence of servitude, and this cannot be questioned, while demons choose to question that existence. There's some bellyaching about humanity being God's chosen, and a few other things, but really the War comes down to selflessness and selfishness. Within that simple distinction you can totally have prick asshole villain angels and utterly "good" demon philanthropists. It's a question of motivation.

[Fucks]

Another company doing the Demon: the Descent-setting with a different ruleset would be cool then?

It is being done by "another company" with "another ruleset." There's no setting. There's no rules. There's no cool ideas. There's no anything. Demon: the Descent is just cobbled together from forum posts and sponsor ideas. It's all turtles, all the way down.

I didn't notice there's a major difference between former WW and OPP... or a WoD's pool system with d10s and the system used in nWoD.

[Fucks]

What do you think?

Now, I'm not sure what audience the "Supernatural gang warfare game #9" that is Demon: the Descent is supposed to capture. Except for hardcore WW brandslaves, which are not a numerous breed. For fuck's sake, "You've escaped an eldrich abomination you could never hope to comprehend, now go, try to pretend that your guerilla actions on Earth matter to it" is the exact premise of Changeling: The Dreaming.

Same goes with Geist, Promethean, and Mummy. Damn. There's a pattern.

[Username17]

I didn't notice there's a major difference between former WW and OPP... or a WoD's pool system with d10s and the system used in nWoD.

That's the problem here, isn't it? Richard Thomas is OPP, and he used to work for White Wolf. Their new God Machine system is out... and it's just as shitastic as nWoD was. They can, and have, and will continue to shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic. But the fact remains that anyone close enough to the inner circle that they could get their hands on the table top IP for any of White Wolf's old properties are too far in to be able to properly identify and tackle any of the numerous problems which made White Wolf go bankrupt through the expedient of alienating their fanbase by making shitty games that didn't grab peoples' imaginations all through the 21st century.

If there was anyone who could remember which hole their dick was supposed to go into in any kind of position to move forward with any of White Wolf's old properties, White Wolf wouldn't have sailed off a cliff so spectacularly in the first place. New companies and systems have been created, and will continue to be created, but none of them will address the core issues and none of them will be worth the virtual ink they are written with. All of the people in that circle are people who thought that Justin Achilli's terrible ideas were good enough that they signed off on moving forward with Time of Judgement and nWoD without protest. Time has passed and people change, but there's no reason to believe that any of those people have learned anything in the interim.

-Username17