World of Darkness and Folly

[Username17]

OK, like many people who had ever played in the World of Darkness under any circumstances, I was extremely unhappy by the half-assed way that White Wolf tied up all the loose ends and restarted the setting.

Heck, New World of Darkness seems to have learned nothing from the mistakes of the past and it's written by people who can't or won't do basic math or even read their own material. I mean, characters with Auspex get Darkvision for free but they have an option to buy the ability to pay blood to get Darkvision. I'm not even kidding.

And yet... it's still the gateway drug into roleplaying for hot chicks the world over. So I need a better grasp on it. I don't need help breaking the game - that's easy. I need help not breaking the game.

Like, can you play with Mages or Promethians at all? Vampires works vaguely alright as long as everyone takes mental and social disciplines and noone ever fights anything, but it seems hard for me to imagine werewolves being content with such a setup.

-Username17

[MrWaeseL]

Are Werewolves in the WoD system really as badass as portrayed in that Bloodlines video game?

[Sir Neil]

Yes. Werewolves rocked. So did the Akashic Brotherhood. Unfortunately, that was in the old World of Darkness.

***
Not breaking the game... hmm. I haven't opened a NWoD book yet, but I bet rpg.net has plenty of threads on how to make characters who suck, if that would help.

[User3]

Hmm.. I can't think of any way you could avoid breaking the game and still enjoy playing. It basically involves gross ignorance of the rules, and doing everything for 'character' reasons. No really. Just pretend the rules don't exist. I mean, as far as I can tell, thats what half the STs out there expect.

(Admittedly i'm more familiar with oWoD, where I *can't* calculate the probability of success on the fly for anything marginally complicated. And that makes me sad).

[RandomCasualty]

Honestly I think the new World of Darkness just totally sucks. The new system is far worse than the old one.

[Lago_AM3P]

And yet... it's still the gateway drug into roleplaying for hot chicks the world over. So I need a better grasp on it. I don't need help breaking the game - that's easy. I need help not breaking the game.

Wuh... buh...

Hot gaming chicks... don't like it when you break the game and lord over your superior rules knowledge...

I... I...

How could you lead me down this path?! FRANKTROLLMAN, YOU SON OF A BITCH! You lied to me!

(post edited due to extreme swearing and man-tears)

[SirWayne]

The most astoundingly useless WoD character I've seen [outside a game of Hunter] was this guy who played a Mage with most of his dots in social skills and Firearms, and who took that Flaw that you got Paradoxed for every spell you cast outside your sanctum, whether it was coincidental or not. He was this typical "tortured antihero who can't use his power for fear it would destroy him" seen in like every anime or action movie since 1990, yet everybody ate it up.

So that's my "advice," specialize in something useless like throwing knives or tasers and take flaws that specifically negate all your advantages, and then play it up as excellent character development. Bonus points if you can write tortured emo poetry.

[Digestor]

Fallen autumn leaves of my heart's gaze
I'm left cold and frozen, my soul is ablaze
I no longer see light, only my wrists under the blade
I wish it didn't come to this, but being past 9 pm... my parents... forbade.

xXxXx </3 LypheIzDeph </3 xXxXx

[Modesitt]

I have little to no experience with Vampire.

Mage: Mage's have an exponential power curve. The difference between Starting Level Character and Master of An Arcana is about 54 experience. Cockblock starting characters' Gnosis to help stave off that problem. Beg, borrow, or steal a copy of Tome of the Mysteries, it's the best Mage supplement.

Arcana to stay away from:

Matter lets you print money at Matter 3 and it just gets crazier from there. You will break the game without even trying.

Mind is the alpha and omega of Arcana. Most of its spells are covert and awesome. It gets a true save or die at Mind 4.

Time is horribly broken. Postcognition is Covert as are many other VERY useful spells. This means there is no reason you can't just sit there and cast Postcognition over and over until you get the result you wanted. It also has Shifting Sands. Your GMs head WILL explode when you cast that spell. You may want to take Time 2 so you can pre-cast spells.

Life: Life's really damn good for a Cleric Archer - Literally. Check out how Archery works in Armory(A very good book, btw). Your initiative will be awesome thanks to Body Control, your dice pool will be mindblowing with the help of Dexterity buffing, and you can even take advantage of shapechanging shenanigans. Check out Tome of the Watchtower for Thysrus/Life mage merits, but avoid the rest of the book like a goddamn plague.

So what's that leave you with?

Death: Death is a hodge-podge of effects from Entropy, Spirit, Matter, Prime, and Life. This means it's kinda cool and flexible. It's flexible with some really useful effects such as Corpse Mask, yet there are no obvious and easy ways to create super power or a save or die.

Fate: Fate makes you a little better at things you could already do. Oaths suck because they count as spells active. Everything else is just you asking the GM for help and him maybe helping out. BUT, virtually every mage should take Fate 2 at some point in their careers because it gets several very useful conjunctional effects: Conditional Duration and Target Exemption. Use them, love them.

Forces: Nerf Influence Electricity and it's just a good Arcana. Invisibility is awesome but it's not overpowered. Forces is flexibility without being TOO good.

Prime: Prime gives you counterspells, dispels, aura alteration and, oh yeah, ANYTHING YOU WANT at Prime 3+. It's very effective, but since it's practically a one-trick pony with its illusions, I don't consider it too broken.

Space: It's pretty good. You get scrying, teleportation, and wards. Given that buffs are rarely 1 round/level like in D&D, scry&die isn't quite as effective. Everyone will want Space 2 for casting spells beyond sensory range.

Spirit: It's just not very good at the whole 'Binding spirits to your will' thing. Fuck it.

---

Werewolf: I disagree, social games are easier with Werewolf then other settings. Every single werewolf is a king-size can of whoopass waiting to be opened regardless of background, meaning players don't feel as much a need to powergame as in other WoD settings. In addition, Werewolves strike a balance between Mage and Vampire in terms of supernatural power flexibility.

---

Promethean: I played in a short Promethean campaign and I've read the core book. There are two things that really piss me off. The first is how it discourages multiple Prometheans of the same type from playing together. As in, you get ACTUAL PENALTIES if another PC of the wrong type joins your troupe. Second, the rules for Wastelands. They're elegantly summed up by the following conversation:

Jew: I'm certain one of my people was involved in the writing of the rules for Wastelands.
Mode: Why?
Jew: Mode, I know my people. Only another Jew would think this much accounting was fun.

But overall, it's mechanically fine. Nonetheless, I don't consider it to be playable. The game is about playing someone who doesn't understand what it means to be human while your storyteller tries to explain to you what it means to be human. Our Storyteller was just overwhelmed by the entire idea of what he was trying to do and the players all felt like fish out of water because the characters we were trying to play were so alien in outlook. We ended the game because we just weren't having fun. We felt like we were in one of those movies that you're supposed to like because it's "powerful" or "has a message"(See: Crash) but actually blow monkey butt.

[Lago_AM3P]

Jew: I'm certain one of my people was involved in the writing of the rules for Wastelands.
Mode: Why?
Jew: Mode, I know my people. Only another Jew would think this much accounting was fun.

Boooooooooooo.

[TavishArtair]

I mean, characters with Auspex get Darkvision for free but they have an option to buy the ability to pay blood to get Darkvision.

Can you cite a page reference for that?

Also, what's wrong with the combat in particular such that people can't participate in it? I have done fight scenes in the World of Darkness with vampires, with werewolves, with werewolves AND vampires, and with a few other setups, and they worked out fine. Werewolves kind of tend to have a bad habit of becoming Frenzied Berserkers, but they can resist this of course, and the way their Gauru (or Crinos, whatever) form, Death Rage, and the average length of a combat scene interact, the dynamic usually works out alright.

I have to agree that Mage is a bit wonky, though, but it always has been, to be honest. And yes, Mind is one of the best Arcanum, if only because you can boost the dicepool for the damage rotes with the same Arcanum. The wonkiness, in general, however, can be controlled slightly better than that of Ascension, in my opinion.

[Username17]

Can you cite a page reference for that?

Sure.

This power allows a vampire to see in pitch-black darkness.

Honestly, it seems to me that Obtenebration was written entirely by people who simply forgot to read Heightened Senses all the way through.

Also, what's wrong with the combat in particular such that people can't participate in it?

nWoD combat is... crap. It's like a game of rocketlauncher tag except that you don't even need a rocket launcher as long as you have some friends. Defense is essentially meaningless, because all it does is marginally increase the number of dice pointed at you before you drop, and dice accumulate towards this running total integrated over time and number of participants.

Being attacked by one enemy for one turn is essentially meaningless, because it's difficult to imagine a character being able to put enough dice in the basket to drop you in one go. But if two guys attack you for two rounds you're looking at four times the whupass - and the enemies don't have to be competent or interesting to drop you like a piece of litter.

And physical powers are crap. A poin of Vigor or Resiliance is objectively worse than just having a point in a relevent physical attribute. There aren't enough powers in the book for you to be able to beat up five hoodlums with baseball bats. You just can't do it.

Combat is totally uninteresting, completely unrealistic, and weighted so heavily towards numbers that it doesn't even matter what your plan is.

-Username17

[User3]

White Wolf suck at crunch?

Did we just go back in time 10 years?

[Modesitt]

Defense is essentially meaningless, because all it does is marginally [decrease] the number of dice pointed at you before you drop

On its own, that's true. The key is that you can stack defense and other modifiers to completely wipe out an opponents' dice pool.

A typical Mage has an Armor spell that provides an armor rating of 3/3. If he's wearing Ye Olde Kevlar Vest, that's 4/5. He probably has a defense of 2 or 3; I'll assume three. This means that in melee he subtracts 8 dice from his opponent's dice pool and five from ranged combat pools. Assuming moderately competant opposition(3 Attr+3 Skill+3 equipment), that leaves the opponent with a mere one die in their melee attack pool. All a PC needs to do is pull one die of negative modifiers out of his ass and his opponent would be rolling a mere chance die. Other opponents still wouldn't be rolling much.

In ranged combat, his opponent still has five dice, but ranged combat modifiers are much easier to procure in the form of concealment and they're not reduced by successive attacks.

---

While I agree that numbers tend to reign supreme, it's not true that numbers are insurmountable. Mages can be frighteningly effective against multiple opponents. A Mage can take a -2 penalty to target two subjects intead of one or -4 penalty to target four subjects instead of two. If you have one more dot than necessary to cast a spell, you can opt to target an area such as 'Everyone within two yards of that point'.

Case in point: In my first mage campaign, my character was unintentionally min/maxed for the rote Life Force Assault. Her dex was three but boostable to seven, her Athletics was four, her Life was Four, and she was a member of the Adamantine Arrow. This added up to a base dice pool of 16. If she threw in a Willpower point and her Destiny pool, I could throw a base pool of 25 dice. I'd subtract between two and four dice for that for the Stamina of my targets and another two to four dice for multiple targets. I still had a very real chance of simply killing two or more enemies out right with a single spell. Granted, I could only do it once per session and it was pointless because that the campaign very rarely had combat, but the option was there!

And physical powers are crap. A poin of Vigor or Resiliance is objectively worse than just having a point in a relevent physical attribute.

Agreed. The Vampire physical powers were all nerfed to an excessive degree in the transfer oWoD to nWoD.

[dbb]

I always found that one of the easy and fun ways to play WoD without completely breaking the game was to be The Diviner. I don't know if this still works in nWoD, though.

Particularly in Mage, but to a lesser extent in the other games, a lot of the low-level powers just resolved to "noticing stuff". And because these are also the powers that tend to be very vaguely defined (especially in Mage, home of handwaving), most of the time, the stuff you actually notice tends to be the stuff the Storyteller (or the other players, if you're LARPing) actually want you to notice.

So if you take a whole bunch of these low-level sensory types of powers, everyone wins. The Storyteller wins, because he has a fantastic conduit to pass information on to the party in almost any situation imaginable. The rest of the players win, because they imagine they're getting more information than they otherwise would have as a result of your being willing to take something other than massive whoopass type powers. And you win because both the Storyteller and the players will love you for playing this role, and also respect and admire you for "not being a munchkin".

--d.

[Username17]

I'm pretty well convinced that Mage is a steaming pile. The book is longer than the other books because it's filled with a magic system so complicated that it isn't even finished. It's unreasonable to expect that players or storytellers will be able to know what characters can do in that game - even before Arch Mastery where the book flat out says that eve the authors don't know what you can do.

It's unplayable. Not because game balance got drunk and drove into a tree before it even heard about this p[arty - but because seriously noone knows how the game works. It's unplayable in the literal sense: upon reading the rulebook you are not empowered with the knowledge of how the game works.

----

A friend has suggested a mod on Prometheans where their Azoth score:

1. Doesn't affect other supernaturals
   and
   
2. Affects the world in a manner consistent with your morality score.
   

This to actually encourage you to be a good person instead of requiring you to kill yourself if you don't want to be the big jerk. That works better, but center to th point of Promethian is the fact that I personally don't find it interesting even though Aiko is totally hot.

---

Vampire, as I eluded to earlier, kind of works if you just pretend combat is not a possibility at all.

---

Werewolf: does this do anything good at all? I can't bring myself to read the whole thing, I think I liked it better when you played Captain Planet.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

You know, keeping with the theme of WoD, if someone was going to post pictures of women I sort of expected them to be hot, bitchy Eurasian goths in PVC. You know, like Katey-B. That's whats Lago likes.

So I see this misleading bullshit:

This to actually encourage you to be a good person instead of requiring you to kill yourself if you don't want to be the big jerk. That works better, but center to th point of Promethian is the fact that I personally don't find it interesting even though Aiko is totally hot.

And then I click on the link, expecting hot, HOT gothic android hotness. Instead, I get to look at magical girl crap. While someone is looking over my shoulder. Since I am in the US Navy, even hinting that you like anime of any sort is bad for your non-teased work and social life.

Frank, you jerk, you already owe me for ruining my life in this very thread. Do this like twenty more times and I won't believe what you say.

[bitnine]

1166461308[/unixtime]]Particularly in Mage, but to a lesser extent in the other games, a lot of the low-level powers just resolved to "noticing stuff".

Heh, except for Mind 1, where pre-rev you'd be multitasking and boosting ability scores and picking out rotes that made you wonder "what the deuce, the other spheres just cover perception at this level and I get this?"

'Course, I'm not all too useful here, as I've got a large pile of oWoD books and houserules on MtA in particular, and just the nWoD Mage book which I've read once or twice a while ago. I just can't get into it... Yes, oWoD Mage you more or less had to complete with a houserule suite, but it made up for that in my book with the sheer promise and conception of the system. I haven't delved all too deep, but nWoD looked like it traded that promise and brilliance for playability. But then didn't deliver, which makes it a little bit of a stretch to really term as a trade. Hm, was I terribly off in that take on the system?

[RandomCasualty]

1166638847[/unixtime]]
Yes, oWoD Mage you more or less had to complete with a houserule suite, but it made up for that in my book with the sheer promise and conception of the system. I haven't delved all too deep, but nWoD looked like it traded that promise and brilliance for playability. But then didn't deliver, which makes it a little bit of a stretch to really term as a trade.

Yeah, they just screwed up nWoD badly. The storyline is way worse, the mechanics just plain suck. Old WoD basically just pretty much put everything in the hands of the Storyteller, which kinda worked, because everyone knew that the rules were just guidelines and nobody made a big deal because the premises and storylines were pretty cool.

nWoD tries to create concrete D&D style rules and falls on its face. The rules don't even look like they were playtested at all. I think they just handed a writer a keyboard and told him to type something up without even thinking about it. As Frank said, simple numbers are pretty much the way to go in nWoD. You really can't create a good combat badass in that system, as even relatively inept people will probably beat you down if there's enough of them. And that kind of setup is OK in a game like Shadowrun where characters are supposed to be mortal, but when you're trying to have a world with godlike vampires and combat monster werewolves, it pretty much sucks.

Mage was butchered the worst of all though. No technocracy, no reality war... just the bland "you're cool and can cast spells" storyline and the creation of a single group of black hats and white hats who fight. Totally lame. At least conceptually the old game sort of made sense.

[Catharz]

1166637362[/unixtime]]
And then I click on the link, expecting hot, HOT gothic android hotness. Instead, I get to look at magical girl crap. While someone is looking over my shoulder. Since I am in the US Navy, even hinting that you like anime of any sort is bad for your non-teased work and social life.

Frank, you jerk, you already owe me for ruining my life in this very thread. Do this like twenty more times and I won't believe what you say.

[Sir Neil]

That works better, but center to th point of Promethian is the fact that I personally don't find it interesting even though Aiko is totally hot.

Sailor Mercury has a better outfit, and is a battlefield control specialist.

[Username17]

Oh, I'm totally with you on the Sailor Mercury thing. However, Magical Pokaan is essentially "White Wolf: The Anime". I mean, when it came out we were like "Holy crap! This is just like White Wolf except that they have a robot girl for some reason!"

And then they came out with Promethian to rectify the situation.

The setup is that there's a mage girl, a werewolf, a vampire, and a robot girl. They all live together in a treehouse and have angsty adventures. So in a discussion of White Wolf, and specifically Promethian, I think it is fair game to acknowledge that Promethian is part of the canon because of Aiko-chan.

Because let's face it - at this point White Wolf is ripping off Magical Pokaan and not vice versa. And that means that they get the:




-Username17

[Catharz]

1166657065[/unixtime]]
Because let's face it - at this point White Wolf is ripping off Magical Pokaan and not vice versa. And that means that they get the:




-Username17

That's funny, because I first heard about that show of 4chan. I dowloaded a season, watched two episodes, and deleted it all. That's approximately how I feel about White Wolf too.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Forgive the intrusion, but to me, this seems to be an awful lot of work to pick up chicks.

Judging by the description you guys are giving about white wolf, there isn't a woman on the planet hot enough to justify playing this crapola.

Seriously. If one of you guys called me up and said "Hey Arioch, we have Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu over here. They're in the mood to play World of Darkness and then they said something about having an orgy with a goofy looking former jock with a beer gut, if only they could find one", I'd tell you to sodomize yourself.

[RandomCasualty]

1166658293[/unixtime]]
Judging by the description you guys are giving about white wolf, there isn't a woman on the planet hot enough to justify playing this crapola.

Well honestly, the game isn't so bad as long as you've got a good storyteller. WW was never a system that you could play with RAW only. It was effectively a list of basic guidelines that a good storyteller used as a rough base and it could be a lot of fun in the right hands.

Of course generally White wolf games succeeded in spite of the poor system, as opposed to because of it. But people never really played WW because of the system, it was because of the setting. Of course, now with the nWoD, the setting even blows... so I dunno. Then again, most girls seemed to like the old WoD much better. I have yet to actually meet anyone who plays nWoD, everyone I've talked to has said it more or less sucks ass and was nothing more than a desperate moneymaking stunt by White Wolf.