Mister Vampire OOC

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Nov 27, 2013 12:57 am

Whipstitch wrote:FWIW, I'm not going to get too butt hurt if PCs say "I'm not good at this/this doesn't affect me" and go do their own thing, declare follow mode or just plain declare they are staying home for the night and act like a fancy contact for a few scenes or even an arc. I'd rather have people throw shit at the wall like that and see if Cham is a good juggler than have PCs present but idling. The former could drum up interesting shit while with the latter people end up talking to themselves.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but so far there hasn't even been -that- much investigation, and most of it has actually been successful. We've got a name, which means we can probably get an address, which means if nothing else Marco could grab a few goons and just try and pop a sack over this asshole's head and then hit him until candy and secrets come out.

That's actually not a bad idea...

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Wed Nov 27, 2013 10:39 am

Prak_Anima wrote:
Whipstitch wrote:FWIW, I'm not going to get too butt hurt if PCs say "I'm not good at this/this doesn't affect me" and go do their own thing, declare follow mode or just plain declare they are staying home for the night and act like a fancy contact for a few scenes or even an arc. I'd rather have people throw shit at the wall like that and see if Cham is a good juggler than have PCs present but idling. The former could drum up interesting shit while with the latter people end up talking to themselves.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but so far there hasn't even been -that- much investigation, and most of it has actually been successful. We've got a name, which means we can probably get an address, which means if nothing else Marco could grab a few goons and just try and pop a sack over this asshole's head and then hit him until candy and secrets come out.
That's actually not a bad idea...

Andrus is nominally statted for some kind of combat - probably ambush - so he could even be one of the goons...

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Nov 27, 2013 7:25 pm

I think Harley is minimally statted for combat.

...hm, come to think of it, I have a new goal for Harley- acquire kaiju hyena puppies.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Tue Dec 03, 2013 3:34 am

Sorry for not following up on any of this convo; been hella busy.

Actually, between Pain Drops and Water Prison Harley is about as good as anyone else in the group at performing non-lethal takedowns in open combat, and in the right environment Puppetry is potentially a pretty powerful trump card--it's a more vaguely worded power than I would like, but it's not hard to interpret it as being pretty scary if you sucker your prey into getting to close to some kudzu or a tree. At the very least, I wouldn't expect someone with near-mundane physical stats to do very well in such an encounter. Meanwhile, Bitter Fruit and Enchanted Slumber both go remarkably well with inviting someone to dinner or honeypot tactics--your power set is more Poison Ivy than Ms. Quinzel, after all. Normally I'd recommend just pointing you or Grek at him straight away and let you do your things, but unfortunately the nezumi power set is about as good as any when it comes to sponging off Pain Drops, insect bites and ignoring attack riders.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Dec 03, 2013 9:27 am

I've also been meaning to follow up by having Harley hand the name off to contacts, I've just kept forgetting.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Wed Dec 11, 2013 11:03 pm

So I take it Ortega didn't have any Fortitude soak dice?

echo

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Dec 11, 2013 11:16 pm

Nope.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Thu Dec 12, 2013 6:05 pm

Also, the combat flow is this:

1. Attacker makes attack roll, compares total hits to threshold. If total hits >= threshold, net hits = (total hits - threshold). It's ok if this is zero.
2. Attacker adds weapon damage to net hits from attack roll to calculate attack damage.
3. Defender soaks total attack damage.

In this case, step 1 went fine, but Ortega soaked only the net hits (and STILL almost got killed). In my opinion, this is actually ok - we can say J-Rock was punching with an effective Strength of 0 in an attempt to not splatter the bum across the wall.

However, I also calculated my fisticuffs pool incorrectly - I used Strength instead of Agility in my to-hit roll, resulting in a dicepool of 15 instead of my actual fisticuffs pool of 14. Subtracting 1 net hit from the damage roll with an effective str of 0 results in an Incapacitating wound instead of a Terminal wound, which is what I was going for, but the dice pools are sufficiently swingy that there's no way to know what would have happened.

echo

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Thu Dec 12, 2013 9:21 pm

Without the Finesse Fighting advantage you are stuck using Strength, not Agility. For example, Romero combos Finesse with Ambidexterity and escrima based jkd resulting in a crazy two fisted wire fu style that doesn't really work if you're not a reincarnated warrior outlaw with super speed and tactile telekinesis powers..

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Dec 30, 2013 11:52 pm

So I was thinking about how the way the times are working out, we might end up resolving the missions just before dawn, which would be pretty cool. This also got me thinking about what day it is, because I have a thing for dates and maps and knowing when/where things take place. It turns out random.org has a random date generator, so I set it to give me any random day in the year of 2014. It gave me April 1st.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Tue Dec 31, 2013 7:30 am

Yeah, in a lot of games I would probably have asked about about time of year myself by now, but well, it's LA. Their idea of crappy weather is 55 degrees and rainy.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Tue Jan 14, 2014 12:01 am

I feel like I should ask what the hold up is again. I'd have thought that giving you a door to kick down would make things faster, as opposed to slower.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jan 14, 2014 12:31 am

The knowledge that I should never again branch out from combat inclined characters, on my end....

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Tue Jan 14, 2014 7:03 am

If you'd rather play a combat-oriented character, I wouldn't mind if you swapped out Harley at the end of the mission.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jan 14, 2014 7:06 am

I think there are a number of things going on for me. I need to take the time to reread through the last page or two of posts and have Harley do something.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 10:01 pm

Checking in to say that I'm loathe to give this sucker up but don't really like talking to myself either.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jan 31, 2014 10:44 pm

I don't know. Maybe it's new system+new character archetype+pbp format, but I'm just lost with this.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 4:52 am

I think it's mostly the format. Pbp games die pretty much constantly.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Feb 01, 2014 11:20 am

I'll go ahead and reaffirm that if people start playing again, I am entirely willing to start GMing again.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Fri Sep 26, 2014 6:20 pm

So I keep thinking about what my ideal PbP game would be and coming back to this one. I know it's been damn near a year but I'd be interested in playing again even if it ended up as a solo game.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Oct 04, 2014 10:21 am

I was kind of hoping that if I waited long enough, other people might agree. I am entertaining the idea of running a PbP solo game right now. Can you elaborate on exactly what it is you want from the game? Might give me some ideas. You were the scorpion dude, right?

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Oct 04, 2014 4:24 pm

I was the reborn guy, actually, and I wrote him up with the intention of being well-rounded and ambitious so there's a bunch of stuff we could do. He's an Ulmi gangster with Prideful and Master Passion: Greed, so running around like Mr. Wolf or consolidating gangs like a GTA protagonist is an easy sell if it'll get him higher up the social ladder or otherwise advance his interests. He's not above more mundane political/bureaucratic work either-- as I once said up thread he understands that you get in power mostly by making it hard for people to imagine life without you. I'm unsure what kind of power structure the Makhzen have in this version of LA, but he'd certainly be up for climbing to the top of it.

Last but not least, there's that whole business where past lives and prophecies are real things, so he could have any number of enemies for any number of reasons. He doesn't remember all his past lives and likely never will, so I wouldn't even object to you making up crap about his past lives yourself if you wanted, since it doesn't necessarily have to change how I portray the current version of the character beyond how he reacts to the information.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Oct 18, 2014 6:32 pm

So I've been toying with converting this to a solo campaign for a while and after thinking on it I'm pretty sure I'm down to run GTA with fangs as a PbP. It'd require a handful of structural revisions since the campaign is shifting from "people from different, moderately opposed factions work together to push out all factions not represented in the coterie" to "single dude beats up every faction in the city, becomes prince," but none of it is going to be too difficult to rewrite, nor will it be too time-consuming to run updating once or twice a day in PbP.

So, I'm down if you are.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Oct 18, 2014 8:46 pm

Count me in. As far as structure goes I'd imagine that I would probably want to end up building some kind of supernatural coalition party anyway--keeping friends is a helluva lot easier if you're at least willing to cut people in on the graft rather than discard them at the first opportunity.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Oct 20, 2014 7:41 pm

Alright, I've got the new thread up, let's get rolling.