After Sundown Expansion Material

[virgil]

The biggest thing I'm looking at doing is revamping dice pools. Just for starters, normal stats are going from 4 to 9. It really helps at the low end to have "normal people" have numbers available to the system that are worse than them.

Is this new normal just for PCs, or can the typical street ganger deadlift 450kg and most NPCs can buy professional-level results at something? Are thresholds going to be unchanged accordingly, and the world just got that much more competent?

[Username17]

The biggest thing I'm looking at doing is revamping dice pools. Just for starters, normal stats are going from 4 to 9. It really helps at the low end to have "normal people" have numbers available to the system that are worse than them.

Is this new normal just for PCs, or can the typical street ganger deadlift 450kg and most NPCs can buy professional-level results at something? Are thresholds going to be unchanged accordingly, and the world just got that much more competent?

No one got more competent, the zero point has just been adjusted so that there's room to go down from low normal human levels. All the other numbers are adjusted to account for the fact that characters are rolling 3 more dice whilst in the human range.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

What's the progress status on this? I'd be interested to see it, since I'm in the process of making my own Vampire heartbreaker and After Sundown is probably a better base for that than anything White Wolf has ever made.

(Even though my game won't be a kitchen sink like AS, but a vampires-only game that is what I wanted VtM to be, i.e rethought from the ground up.)

[Username17]

What's the progress status on this? I'd be interested to see it, since I'm in the process of making my own Vampire heartbreaker and After Sundown is probably a better base for that than anything White Wolf has ever made.

(Even though my game won't be a kitchen sink like AS, but a vampires-only game that is what I wanted VtM to be, i.e rethought from the ground up.)

Right now I'm having this big "perfect is the enemy of the good" problem where I also want to rewrite basically the whole thing. I've done deconstructions of a bunch of oWoD and nWoD materials, and I find myself kicking myself for not fixing certain issues. I want to get rid of Intuition and Logic (which are bad names) and replace them with Perception and Intelligence (which people grok immediately). Obviously Perception has to go as a skill and needs to be replaced with a new physical.

I want to upratchet the starting attributes to 4, so that there's more room at the bottom.

I want to reformat the sorceries so that it is clear which things are "spells" that are subject to countermagic and which things are "enchantments" that are subject to being dispelled later on.

Each discipline I want to portray with more Basic and Advanced options, with the Elder powers excised from the magic powers and only discussed in a later chapter about big ritual magic. Because the game does need a chapter about big ritual magic and stuff like Victory of Typhon can be there where it doesn't confuse chargen. While I'm at it, I want to cut the Devotions out like a cancer and even go the opposite way where a few powers appear on multiple lists. So for example: Flight could be available as a Clout effect and also as Storm Magic.

I want to rewrite portions of the action chapter to be clearer. In particular the hiding and chase rules. But I also want to get rid of initiative passes. It's a remarkably slow mechanic to represent super speed, and I want to break down the speed powers into concrete special effects that resolve quickly. Super speed should decrease the number of rolls you make rather than increase them.

I want to clean up world interactions and specifically get rid of the idea of being coterminous outside a bleed. So just sidestep the entire Shadowrun issue of what happens when an astral form is camping in your aura and astrally percept. I know that in some setups if you can see ghosts they can touch you, and that's *cool*, but it's much more of a clusterfuck than just having specific powers that do things into and out of the Shallows.

Also, people want real fairies. With like wings. And not just goblins and ogres.

I need to bite the bullet and write a chapter about how to actually put a group together and play the game. In fact, it's already started.

I need to make a bigger bestiary which includes creatures from the other worlds. Dragons and Hellhounds, shit like that.

A thing I'm working on at the moment is going through making an Anatomy of Failed Design on Vampire: the Masquerade, to see if I need to kick myself any more.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

I see. That's certainly an ambitious laundry list, but all of it seems good to me.

Except one thing: I'm all for more room at the bottom in principle (A game that can't differentiate the strength of a sickly human and a cat has failed) but if you go to a 4-9 scale for traits in the human range like you've planned, won't you end up with awkwardly large dice pools at the high end, especially when discipline bonuses enter the picture? On the order of 20+ dice?

[Whipstitch]

I think that's just another reason to cut most of the minor discipline bonuses rather ditch 4-9. I don't like fielding questions about whether those bonuses help you control your master passion or magical powers anyway, particularly since some skills are much easier to buff than others. With that said, I understand the concern given that kaiju and Clout stackers already toss around a barrel of dice.

[Prak]

Is there anything people can help you with, Frank? Even if it's just spitballing possible solutions?

It sounds like the sorceries should be written up a bit closer to the D&D spell chapters, with "Spell Lists" like Clout and Animalism, and then the powers written up alphabetically something like-

Flight
Advanced Spell
Clout, Chasing the Storm

The character can fly. Like they were a superhero. For 1 power point, the character can fly for the duration of a scene so long as they maintain a speed of at least an Ordinary Walk. If the character wishes to be able to slow down to a Careful Walk or hover (not move at all) without falling out of the sky, they have to spend another power point. Taking off or landing in cramped areas may require an Agility + Athletics stunt. A flying character moves 3 to 5 times as fast as one walking or running along the ground, and flying is not particularly tiring unless they actually make a Draining Sprint. Flight can be dispelled as a sorcery with 3 hits. A character whose flight has been dispelled falls.

[OgreBattle]

A thing I'm working on at the moment is going through making an Anatomy of Failed Design on Vampire: the Masquerade, to see if I need to kick myself any more.

Would it help to do a AoFD on After Sundown itself? You can then flagellate yourself in the quest for perfection.

[Mord]

Would it help to do a AoFD on After Sundown itself? You can then flagellate yourself in the quest for perfection.

Frank finally meets a worthy adversary...

[koz]

Would it help to do a AoFD on After Sundown itself? You can then flagellate yourself in the quest for perfection.

Frank finally meets a worthy adversary...

I, for one, would love to read that. Even more than my request of WtA vs. WtF.

[Mask_De_H]

You can never truly be an effective critic of your own work. It'd need to be a solo AH joint or something.

[Username17]

You can never truly be an effective critic of your own work. It'd need to be a solo AH joint or something.

Yeah, it's a problem. I wrote AS several years back, so I have the distance of time to help me. And there are a number of instances where I say "What was I thinking?" But it's pretty hard to really tear into it the way it needs to be for an AoFD.

I think that's just another reason to cut most of the minor discipline bonuses rather ditch 4-9. I don't like fielding questions about whether those bonuses help you control your master passion or magical powers anyway, particularly since some skills are much easier to buff than others. With that said, I understand the concern given that kaiju and Clout stackers already toss around a barrel of dice.

Yeah, a lot of generic dice bonuses from disciplines can be changed for more prosaic passive abilities. But even with a lot of things reducing the number of hits you need or letting you bypass tests rather than dice pool bonuses per se, Giants are still going to end up rolling a lot of strength dice.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Yeah, a lot of generic dice bonuses from disciplines can be changed for more prosaic passive abilities. But even with a lot of things reducing the number of hits you need or letting you bypass tests rather than dice pool bonuses per se, Giants are still going to end up rolling a lot of strength dice.

Do they have to? I liked where you were going with size-based threshold mods. I feel like if that were broadened and codified a bit more you could create room at the bottom (at least for Strength) just by having a general size modifier that adds/subtracts hit threshold, damage hits, soak hits, etc., and then rats and cats and children just have various negative size modifiers and being big just gives a positive size modifier, and the Strength score is closer to a 'how strong you are for your size' kind of thing.

[OgreBattle]

Rereading descriptions of Maya, Limbo, and Gloom, it seems like all three could play host to dinosaurs

*Maya dinosaurs: Maya is full of giant monsters, many dinosaurs are giant monsters

* Limbo: The dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor hitting earth, lots of ash everywhere. Classic imagery of erupting volcanos so the immolated dinosaurs are now in Mictlan

*Gloom: dinosaurs all died, dead things are in Gloom. Ghost dinosaurs.

Limbo and Gloom sometimes feel like the same place though, like how dead/destroyed things end up there. So WWII Dresden is in Limbo, but would the people who died there be in Gloom instead?

[Grek]

Rereading descriptions of Maya, Mictlan, and Gloom, it seems like all three could play host to dinosaurs

If this were actually true, you'd know that Mictlan and the Gloom are the same place, and that the place full of fire and ashes is called Limbo.