After Sundown: Still being workshopped

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Kaelik
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After Sundown: Still being workshopped

Post by Kaelik »

It has mostly drifted off the top pages, and I think there has been a certain amount of fracturing of Forum communities, and migration to Discord. (but we still love you fbmf) But there are at least 4 extensive houserulings/attempted reworks of After Sundown in some various stages of work, including the Definitive AS 2e from Frank.

A lot of the changes have been at various points agreed on between Orion, Lokathar, and Frank in various threads, others of course have not.

I've been doing some of my own work and was planning on co-opting Lokathar's rewrite and making drastic changes of my own design, and frankly only using his because his formatting is better for the powers.

Still I thought I'd reborn the issue in this thread for the specific purpose of saying: Hey should we be actually collaborating or something? I don't know Frank's specific current status, but if there was specific rewriting or reworking he thought others could do I'm certainly open to doing it.

Alternatively, after I've done a bunch of material, I'll make sure it is posted somewhere, so if anyone wants to take anything they can.

But yeah, just thought I'd raise the issue, since there might be a lot of overlapping effort going into this stuff.
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes »

Some stuff for dicepool threshold analysis:

Code: Select all

function: dicepool X {
  result: Xd{0,0,0,0,1,1}
}

\ use "at least" \
loop A over {1..12}{
  output [dicepool A] named "size: [A]"
}
AnyDice program for After Sundown's dicepool system if you wanna try to figure out example DCs. Summary of chances of hitting a certain DC given a specific dicepool size:
"size: 1",0.33333333333299997,0.4714045207909138,0,1
#,%
0,100
1,33.333333333300004

"size: 2",0.6666666666659999,0.6666666666663333,0,2
#,%
0,100
1,55.5555555556
2,11.111111111200003

"size: 3",0.999999999999,0.8164965809273178,0,3
#,%
0,100
1,70.3703703704
2,25.925925925999998
3,3.7037037037999987

"size: 4",1.3333333333326,0.9428090415823108,0,4
#,%
0,100
1,80.2469135802
2,40.7407407407
3,11.111111111099998
4,1.2345679012199984

"size: 5",1.66666666666725,1.0540925533891172,0,5
#,%
0,100
1,86.8312757202
2,53.909465020599995
3,20.987654320999994
4,4.526748971199993
5,0.41152263374999265

"size: 6",1.99999999999988,1.154700538379315,0,6
#,%
0,100
1,91.22085048011
2,64.88340192041
3,31.961591220809993
4,10.013717421109991
5,1.7832647462099906
6,0.13717421122999074

"size: 7",2.333333333332836,1.2472191289249046,0,7
#,%
0,100
1,94.14723365341
2,73.66255144031
3,42.935528120709996
4,17.329675354409996
5,4.5267489712099955
6,0.6858710562599954
7,0.04572473710099545

"size: 8",2.6666666666644776,1.3333333333326978,0,8
#,%
0,100
1,96.09815576894
2,80.49077884474
3,53.17786922734001
4,25.864959609940012
5,8.794391099040013
6,1.966163694680013
7,0.259106843590013
8,0.015241579149013001

"size: 9",2.999999999998548,1.4142135623727508,0,9
#,%
0,100
1,97.39877051263
2,85.69323781943
3,62.28217243303
4,34.96926281563
5,14.484580602530002
6,4.2422394960300025
7,0.8281257938500026
8,0.09653000052600258
9,0.005080526360502574

"size: 10",3.333333333329465,1.4907119849994954,0,10
#,%
0,100
1,98.26584700842
2,89.5950820505
3,70.0858608952
4,44.0735660215
5,21.312808007
6,7.6563531983000015
7,1.9661636946700014
8,0.3403952650600015
9,0.035563684508001514
10,0.0016935088911015153

"size: 11",3.6666666666678447,1.5634719199406706,0,11
#,%
0,100
1,98.84389800561
2,92.48533703647
3,76.58893461367
4,52.744330979370005
5,28.899727345070005
6,12.208504801070006
7,3.862893529080006
8,0.8823180748000063
9,0.1371742112290063
10,0.012983567301006305
11,0.000564502908206305

"size: 12",4.000000000002072,1.6329931618558238,0,12
#,%
0,100
1,99.229265337074
2,94.604857359514
3,81.887735421214
4,60.692532190714005
5,36.847928556414004
6,17.772245649014003
7,6.644763953014003
8,1.8758432261640028
9,0.3855554990240029
10,0.05438044854800289
11,0.004704190976602893
12,0.00018816756102289257
Mord
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Post by Mord »

The last time we discussed After Sundown around here, the biggest problem that presented itself to me is that categorizing the different kinds of powers is still a catastrofuck.

source link
Grek wrote:@Mord: Innate and Permanent are two slightly different things. Innate powers are stuff like Will to Power, Clinging and Fire Walking. You learn the power and it gives you a permanent passive benefit. May be Permanent is for things like Empty Body, Giant Size and Light of Ennui - Vow of Silence-breaking things that are normally activated, but which certain weird individuals have an always-on version of. But yes, a table would be good. [mrow color=#e7eace]Tag[/td][td]Requires Training?[/td][td]Detection?[/td][td]Dispelling?[/td][td]Obviously Magical?[/td][td]Supernatural Weakness? [mrow color=#42f4eb]Astral[/td][td]N/A[/td][td]Magnets.[/td][td]Salt.[/td][td]N/A[/td][td]N/A [mrow color=#962a45]Infernal[/td][td]N/A[/td][td]Water.[/td][td]Sand.[/td][td]N/A[/td][td]N/A [mrow color=#7b6b8c]Umbral[/td][td]N/A[/td][td]Flowers.[/td][td]Seeds.[/td][td]N/A[/td][td]N/A [mrow color=#dad9db]Talent[/td][td]Only if from different power source.[/td][td]No.[/td][td]No.[/td][td]No, but may draw attention.[/td][td]Disables this power. [mrow color=#dad9db]Sorcery[/td][td]Teacher or spellbook.[/td][td]Yes.[/td][td]Yes. Increases casting TN.[/td][td]Always.[/td][td]Disables this power. [mrow color=#dad9db]Innate[/td][td]Only for non-starting powers.[/td][td]Only during Ritual.[/td][td]TN 3 during Ritual only.[/td][td]Only during Ritual.[/td][td]Only blocks Ritual. [mrow color=#bbc6b8]Enchantment[/td][td]N/A; see the other tag.[/td][td]Yes, but at +1 TN.[/td][td]Yes. TN 3 to remove.[/td][td]Maybe.[/td][td]Unaffected. [/td][/tr]

That table is a fucking nightmare and it's actually necessary for it to exist when you consider all the little shades of nuance that AS has baked in to the interaction between its splats and powers.

I think a major opportunity for improvement in AS2 is to figure out a more effective way to communicate that "Ghosts always have Empty Body on and it can't be turned off by any means" as opposed to "Daeva can learn Empty Body and if you throw sand on them they become solid again."
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Post by Username17 »

I think a major opportunity for improvement in AS2 is to figure out a more effective way to communicate that "Ghosts always have Empty Body on and it can't be turned off by any means" as opposed to "Daeva can learn Empty Body and if you throw sand on them they become solid again."
This is true.

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Post by erik »

Make them separate powers.
Empty Body = always on. Phase Body = can toggle/dispel.

I did this a few years ago. And that change was one of several I did.
Last edited by erik on Wed Feb 14, 2018 11:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Tgdmb has a discord?
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Post by erik »

There goes the neighborhood.


I actually don't get discord for this kinda stuff. Chat is less useful than a message board when you want to do large info dumps.
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Post by Username17 »

erik wrote:Make them separate powers.
Empty Body = always on. Phase Body = can toggle/dispel.
This is a solid idea. Now the original reason I did sorcery as being able to come in permanent and inherent or castable but temporary and dispelable flavors was that I had reductionist and math related numbers of powers that I wanted to exist. So the fact that some people can grow and some people just are already huge could use the same mechanics for "simplicity."

But you're right that isn't actually simpler than having those be separate powers from the getgo. There's no particular reason there has to be any particular number of powers and Giant Size and Unfettered Growth can simply be different things. One lets you grow big by spending an action and some magic to get supersized for a single scene, and the other is just that you're a fucking alligator person or something and just are massively large all the time. With obviously the temporary growth being something people can dispel and the always-on growth being something that they cannot.

I was watching Shape of Water (which is a great film and you should see it), and it stuck me that yes you have monsters that just look monstrous all the time. And you have monsters that look exactly human but can pop out some monster powers. And player characters should normally be steered towards the latter. But the former is, or should be, an option that you can run with. For the Leviathans specifically, it means that you can and should have some things where you simply are more monstrous in appearance and have boosts to armor and natural weaponry and crap.

Player characters are mostly going to go with the War Form option, where they turn into a big monster, but creatures exist in the setting that simply have claws all the time, and those might as well be separate stand-alone listings that are inherently not things that can be dispelled.

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Post by Pariah Dog »

First a question, some abilities like War Form mention being a Protean power? Reading the AS thread did not find any mention of what this means aside from the obvious of "This is a form of shapechanging"

Also rather than splitting the power in two woudln't just adding an INHERENT keyword to them work with a descriptor in the power section saying powers with the INHERENT keyword are always active and cannot be disrupted or disabled.

On the War Form thing that mean possibly creatures with an inherent war form?
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Post by Chamomile »

OgreBattle wrote:Tgdmb has a discord?
Sort of. Someone ran a Discord and tried to recruit for it from a number of different locations. TGD was the only one that got a significant population. That server exploded due to some unimportant shenanigans, so I started a new one to replace it. It's in my sig. I've thought about advertising it places other than here, but there aren't really any other tabletop communities I'm actually a part of and I don't care enough to integrate myself into another community just to eventually advertise a chat room that I created mainly because the other one was fun, so hey, why not. Which means that the Discord ultimately ended up being almost exclusively Denners.
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Post by Kaelik »

Pariah Dog wrote:First a question, some abilities like War Form mention being a Protean power? Reading the AS thread did not find any mention of what this means aside from the obvious of "This is a form of shapechanging"
Protean Powers: Some powers are Protean abilities: ones that change the character's form. A character who knows any Protean secrets can return to their real form with a Complex action and a power point even if they have been transformed by hostile magic. Furthermore, if a character has multiple Protean abilities, they may activate more than one simultaneously, and the entire transformation takes the action of the longest transformation. So if the character has two different abilities that both take a Complex Action, they may activate both as a single complex action.
All protean power means is the stuff here, 1) can return to own form (negating transformation power) 2) can voltron as many protean powers you have into a single action.
Pariah Dog wrote:Also rather than splitting the power in two wouldn't just adding an INHERENT keyword to them work with a descriptor in the power section saying powers with the INHERENT keyword are always active and cannot be disrupted or disabled.
The point is that giant size and empty body should be undispellable and unturn off able for some people, but not for others.
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Post by Kaelik »

I mostly meant that all the TGD personalities probably all post a lot of things they might otherwise have posted on TGD 2-3 years ago in discords, since in my experience discord has proliferated into an always on thing in a way that skype groups or IRC didn't.

I have my own discord with people I play D&D or AS with, and a lot of the things I might once have posted end up there. Similarly I also post in Cham's discord, and there's also a DND wikia one.

I assume other people have their own fragmentary personal chats as well.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by Pariah Dog »

Re-reading the Powers section shows I did miss that on Protean, my bad.

I get that the point is its dispellable for some but not for others. I'm asking why not apply a Keyword of inherent to the ones that always have it and add to the part talking about powers 'An inherent power is always on and cannot be dispelled or deactivated'? Could be a little blurb at the start of the powers section.

Like Ghost:
Empty Body (INHERENT)
Other spooky ghost shit

or Kaiju
Giant Size (INHERENT)
Destroy Toyko
Other Godzilla powers.
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Post by Kaelik »

Pariah Dog wrote:Re-reading the Powers section shows I did miss that on Protean, my bad.

I get that the point is its dispellable for some but not for others. I'm asking why not apply a Keyword of inherent to the ones that always have it and add to the part talking about powers 'An inherent power is always on and cannot be dispelled or deactivated'? Could be a little blurb at the start of the powers section.

Like Ghost:
Empty Body (INHERENT)
Other spooky ghost shit

or Kaiju
Giant Size (INHERENT)
Destroy Toyko
Other Godzilla powers.
Because PCs and other NPCs should be making the choice themselves whether it's inherent or not.

And if you can choose on taking the power whether it has inherent or not, then you did separate the power, you just left it with the same name.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by Mord »

Pariah Dog wrote:Also rather than splitting the power in two woudln't just adding an INHERENT keyword to them work with a descriptor in the power section saying powers with the INHERENT keyword are always active and cannot be disrupted or disabled.
That approach leads us to Grek's ugly table - fucked if I'm going to remember the difference between "inherent," "permanent," and "enchantment."

Having the powers with different names has the potential to be just as confusing if you have too many. I prefer the option of spelling out in each critter entry exactly what conditions apply to each of their powers. Codifying these as tags like "inherent" or "enchantment" can be useful for people creating new powers or taking a high-level view of the system, but for players' purposes, I think it would be easiest to spell out the information encoded in a tag like "inherent" every time it comes up. Sometimes, using fewer words increases the difficulty of understanding the concept more than just bothering to spell it out.
Kaelik wrote:I assume other people have their own fragmentary personal chats as well.
So, being that you made this thread and all, do you have any suggestions on how to integrate these various branches?
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Post by Kaelik »

Uh... everyone's private discords? No.

I was posting to see if anyone else's AS work wanted to cooperate and if that would make things easier, or not.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by Zaranthan »

Mord wrote:Codifying these as tags like "inherent" or "enchantment" can be useful for people creating new powers or taking a high-level view of the system, but for players' purposes, I think it would be easiest to spell out the information encoded in a tag like "inherent" every time it comes up. Sometimes, using fewer words increases the difficulty of understanding the concept more than just bothering to spell it out.
Once again, Magic: the Gathering's reminder text is the greatest invention known to gamers. Have strictly defined keywords, but repeat the definition briefly every time it's mentioned.
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Post by OgreBattle »

There any examples of After Sundown combat from somebody's game to look at? Would like to see how it is turn by turn as I really like the idea of the movement system used but haven't seen it in action.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Is there any concern among others that characters who have always on size powers, would also get temporarily on size powers?

I know that there's a good chance that at least one player per group who wouldn't be just satisfied with "being a wolf the size of a charter bus", if they could be even bigger.
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Post by erik »

You can just have them not stack. A Giant Sized creature with Unfettered Growth can just become smaller, much like how a wraith with Empty Body who gets Phase Body can switch over to be corporeal.

If using this notion then the name Unfettered Growth should probably be amended to reflect its reversible nature.
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Post by Pariah Dog »

Judging__Eagle wrote:I know that there's a good chance that at least one player per group who wouldn't be just satisfied with "being a wolf the size of a charter bus", if they could be even bigger.
That would be me. Had a campaign in DnD where I was turned into a large size creature permenantly, had a custom magic ring made that let me Reduce person back to normal or enlarge up to huge actually being BigMcLargeHuge benefits facestabbery.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Totally unrelated to my last question, but how would be the best way to handle truly immense creatures such as "a kaiju's kaiju", "an Khemetian polisanddroid" or "an poltergeist-floated skiápolis". The idea of "moving cities" in the various non-Earth correspondences recently came to mind, and having them built upon the back of a Kaiju 10-40 km long, carried on the shoulders/head of a proto-Egyptian sculpture, or mausoleums built on slabs of stone held up by bound poltergeists came to mind.

example, a sketch I did just now:
Image
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Post by OgreBattle »

Judging__Eagle wrote:Totally unrelated to my last question, but how would be the best way to handle truly immense creatures such as "a kaiju's kaiju", "an Khemetian polisanddroid" or "an poltergeist-floated skiápolis". The idea of "moving cities" in the various non-Earth correspondences recently came to mind, and having them built upon the back of a Kaiju 10-40 km long, carried on the shoulders/head of a proto-Egyptian sculpture, or mausoleums built on slabs of stone held up by bound poltergeists came to mind.

example, a sketch I did just now:
Image
ALways nice to have a visualization.

Maybe treat it as a chase scene, you're running around trying to do something to the giant monster you're on, the giant monster is trying to accomplish some goal or shake them off before the PC's reach its hurty spot.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Been looking for the After Sundown PDF link, found one but it was dead
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Post by Trill »

OgreBattle wrote:Been looking for the After Sundown PDF link, found one but it was dead
https://www.gitbook.com/book/lokathor/a ... wn/details
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