Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

[Morat]

Out of curiosity I've decided to read a published Vampire adventure.

Setting
Clash of Wills takes place entirely in a fictitious County of Galtre. The author assumes the lands of Galtre to be located between London and Nottingham in England.

Dark Ages Vampire, you had one job...

I have no idea why you'd do that. There are real counties between Nottingham and London. Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire. Very notably, literally all of the counties in that area use the "shire" nomenclature. So if you were going to make a fictitious county in that area, it would have the suffix "shire."

And why would they bother in the first place? I get why Jane Austen made up fake places, if e.g. Lady Catherine de Bourgh was the daughter of a real earl or the colonel with the stupid wife wasn't the commander of the _____shire Regiment, that could get uncomfortable. But, what, were the descendants of Simon de Montfort going to sue because they set it in Leicestershire and he was the earl in 1230?

Of course, the adventure is about shit in an Earldom, and Earldoms have the name of the primary city rather than the county.

Hate to nitpick, because I agree with your point, but that wasn't consistent. At the time, there were earls with county titles like Norfolk, Devon, Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Cornwall.

[Username17]

And why would they bother in the first place? I get why Jane Austen made up fake places, if e.g. Lady Catherine de Bourgh was the daughter of a real earl or the colonel with the stupid wife wasn't the commander of the _____shire Regiment, that could get uncomfortable. But, what, were the descendants of Simon de Montfort going to sue because they set it in Leicestershire and he was the earl in 1230?

Yeah, if the people of Leicester can accept the outrageous libel of their hometown king that is Shakespeare's Richard III, I'm sure that they can accept some vampire book claiming that some Earl of Leicester was a vampire in their fictional history. You're not defaming anyone who's alive today.

Of course, the adventure is about shit in an Earldom, and Earldoms have the name of the primary city rather than the county.

Hate to nitpick, because I agree with your point, but that wasn't consistent. At the time, there were earls with county titles like Norfolk, Devon, Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Cornwall.

I was perhaps unclear. The area being described is actually pretty small - just a few counties in the East Midlands. And all the Earldoms in that area are named after cities rather than the shires the cities reside in.

These pieces of nomenclature are actually interesting and there's no reason to drop them. There's a "Sheriff of Nottingham" because Sheriff comes from "Shire-Reeve" and the area around Nottingham is Nottinghamshire. If you're going to set your dark ages adventure in between Nottingham and London, you should use some of the nomenclature and history of the area. You got Sherwood fucking Forest and the stronghold of the Plantagenet.

As for "Galtre" there actually is an area called "Galtres," which is a forest in York.

-Username17

[Antariuk]

Yikes, this is "DSA, Orkland" levels of bad. Longes, you should do an OSSR of that thing, just because.

[Longes]

People on onyx path forum seem to care about Nagaraja in Dark Ages Vampire and about Vitreous Path remaining proprietary, rather than going towards necromantic communism and freedom of paths. This confuses me. Nagaraja are a tiny bloodline that is less relevant than the goddamn Baali. So seriously, wtf?

[Username17]

People on onyx path forum seem to care about Nagaraja in Dark Ages Vampire and about Vitreous Path remaining proprietary, rather than going towards necromantic communism and freedom of paths. This confuses me. Nagaraja are a tiny bloodline that is less relevant than the goddamn Baali. So seriously, wtf?

As someone who played a Nagaraja live action (with lunch box), I can tell you with total certainty that no one cares about the Nagaraja. I played a Nagaraja and I don't care about the Nagaraja. They were created to fill a game mechanical niche. If the rules were slightly better they wouldn't need to exist.

-Username17

[Schleiermacher]

What game mechanical niche was that, I seem to recall the Nagaraja were the borderline-unplayable flesh-eaters?

I assume it has to do with Necromancy. Something like 90% of the deep-end bullshit around VtM bloodlines and minor sects is ultimately about Necromancy.

[Mechalich]

What game mechanical niche was that, I seem to recall the Nagaraja were the borderline-unplayable flesh-eaters?

If I recall deep-diving the lore correctly, the Nagaraja largely existed so that the True Black Hand would have access to necromancy, which it needed due to its multitude of links to the underworld. Also because their necromancy was somehow 'better' or 'purer' than Giovanni necromancy their existence was used to discredit the Giovanni somehow.

[Prak]

Also because their necromancy was somehow 'better' or 'purer' than Giovanni necromancy their existence was used to discredit the Giovanni somehow.

Are you saying someone looked at Vampire and said "You know what this game doesn't have enough of? Pretension."

[Dogbert]

3.x/Pf, as a system, was made to reward system mastery.

Fixed that for you.

Monte Cook has gone on record for saying personally that, back in the day, they made 3.X with the same philosophy as M:tG (remember he was involved in its inception), something he called "Ivory Tower Design." They intentionally made a game with only a handful of actually viable choices and then stuffed it full of trap options (which he liked to call "Timmy Cards") so, let no one tell you otherwise, 3.X WAS made specifically to assemble "killer builds" so you could survive the longest the same way you'd assemble your M:tG deck.

While I agree with you that there should be a better way to go about things (preferably one that doesn't punish non-number crunchers), 3.X is not bad as long as you see it for what it is.

P.S: For some reason, formatting borked up... no idea why.

[Wiseman]

Someone fucked up their tags. (Fixed now).

EDIT:

Monte Cook has gone on record for saying personally that, back in the day, they made 3.X with the same philosophy as M:tG (remember he was involved in its inception), something he called "Ivory Tower Design." They intentionally made a game with only a handful of actually viable choices and then stuffed it full of trap options (which he liked to call "Timmy Cards") so, let no one tell you otherwise, 3.X WAS made specifically to assemble "killer builds" so you could survive the longest the same way you'd assemble your M:tG deck.

Also, could you link me to that quote?

[Kaelik]

Formatting is fucked because Prak has too many close quotes or is missing one.

EDIT: Everything fixed now.

[Prak]

Too many open quotes, actually, but it's fixed.

[Leress]

Someone fucked up their tags. (Fixed now).

EDIT:

Monte Cook has gone on record for saying personally that, back in the day, they made 3.X with the same philosophy as M:tG (remember he was involved in its inception), something he called "Ivory Tower Design." They intentionally made a game with only a handful of actually viable choices and then stuffed it full of trap options (which he liked to call "Timmy Cards") so, let no one tell you otherwise, 3.X WAS made specifically to assemble "killer builds" so you could survive the longest the same way you'd assemble your M:tG deck.

Also, could you link me to that quote?

Here:

http://web.archive.org/web/200802211744 ... mc_los_142

[Longes]

Also because their necromancy was somehow 'better' or 'purer' than Giovanni necromancy their existence was used to discredit the Giovanni somehow.

Are you saying someone looked at Vampire and said "You know what this game doesn't have enough of? Pretension."

A long long time ago, in the Dark Ages, there was a clan of vampire necromancers called "Cappadocians". Cappadocians were all about raising zombies and manipulating dead matter, so they embraced a roman Giovanni family, who were mortal necromancers with the power of controlling the ghosts. Then Cappadocious' blood fell of the back of the truck, all Cappadocians suffered unfortunate accidents and Giovanni remained the only true necromancers of the vampire society.

Meanwhile, Nagaraja are Tremere. No, really. Nagaraja are a group of indian Mages who wanted eternal life so they turned themselves into vampires. But that broke their power to use magic so they invented Necromancy as blood magic. All Nagaraja claims of superiority are null and void, because they are even younger mortal upstarts than Tremere and Giovanni.
However, the special Nagaraja discipline had a massive flaw. 4 powers were all about decay and spreading entropy, while 1 power was about eating ghosts. But no powers were about seeing ghosts, so... Then in Revised edition Nagaraja magic was rewritten as a Necromancy path and brought balanace to the force.

[Dogbert]

Thanks for the fix... and the url, which had been originally lost, seemingly.

[Username17]

However, the special Nagaraja discipline had a massive flaw. 4 powers were all about decay and spreading entropy, while 1 power was about eating ghosts. But no powers were about seeing ghosts, so... Then in Revised edition Nagaraja magic was rewritten as a Necromancy path and brought balanace to the force.

This is complete horse shit. The original Nagaraja had Auspex, Necromancy, and Nihilistics. It is impossible for them to have been missing anything crucial granted by Necromancy because they also had Necromancy.

The various attempts to reblenderize the disciplines in Revised were of course a bundle of tears and fail, but that's not really Nagaraja specific.

-Username17

[Longes]

Having doublechecked things - Frank is right. In fact, Nihilistics was actually better designed than the Vitreous Path, because Nihilistics allowed you to see ghosts at 1 dot, and eat ghosts at 2 dots. It was also broken as fuck because it gave an extremely strong, free, unsoakable attack at 4 dots.

Necromancy in Vampire kinda sucked. It required GM to run a second world that is completely disconnected from every other player, had massive risks to the necromancer, and gave very little reward.
In addition to that, there was a number of redundant powers (ability to see ghosts is the first dot of like two or three paths), crappy powers (path of zombie making lets you jerk around corpses at 1 dot) and crappy paths (Path of Cenotaph, that lets you find and screw around with fetters. Great for a vampire NPC in the Wraith game, shit otherwise).

[Username17]

Necromancy was ridiculously powerful. It was the only real means of coming back from "final death." Which considering that everyone in the setting that you cared about knew about Torpor and could upgrade Torpor to Final Death just by jumping up and down on your corpse for a while, was handed out like candy. Necromancy was very specifically able to strip a soul out of a body and to put a soul in to a body. So if you didn't mind sacrificing someone (and Vampire games tend to have body counts like Tarantino movies, so you didn't), you could bring back one of the "finally dead." That was huge. It tore the entire setting a new asshole.

Now, how exactly it was supposed to work was pretty up in the air. I mean, the body you were in probably didn't have the same stats as the ones you came from, and might not even be a Vampire. Various essays were written about how fucked or awesome you were if you got your soul slapped into a body with a radically different set of physical and magical qualia - but they were all contradictory. White Wolf desperately needed to have a convention where they decided how many souls people had and what the fuck happened when you ended up with 2 out of 3 of your selves or whatever the fuck. Never happened.

Necromancy did a thing that the entire rest of the setting pretended was impossible: shit all over the concept of "final death" for Vampires. The ways and hows of that were pretty much left to MTP because the instructions were vague, incomplete, and contradictory. But the one thing that was very clear at the end of the night was that Necromancers could bring a character back after they'd been burnt to dust.

Now the thing that made Nihilistics totally bad ass was not that could do a lot of damage with it. Doing lots of damage in oWoD Vampire is extremely trivial and not very interesting. The thing that made Nihilistics totally awesome is that you could tear up and eat souls that other people left around to get re-embodied. So you could kick it up a notch and make "final death" be "really ultra we mean it actually dead like Uncle Ben" without having to commit Diablerie.

Also the Night Cry thing where you summoned a bunch of Specters to tear up the place was totally nuts. It was a function call to an obscure part of another game your Storyteller probably hadn't read, but by the book it basically let you sick a half dozen player character equivalents on a target of your choice. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the powers to even fight back against those things were extremely obscure and in the same discipline. So if you were a Nagaraja and you were mad at some "not Nagaraja" you could probably do your Nightcry and there was jack diddly shit that anybody who wasn't you could do about it. What it actually did in your home game is anybody's fucking guess. Because as I said, it's a function call to an obscure section of another game your storyteller has not read. So expect some mind caulk and spot rulings to happen here.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Necromancy was also weird in that it was the only thing that really *united* the World of Darkness, since every single supernatural interacted with it at some level, and they *still* couldn't get the mechanics to work out right.

I do like how in Vampire 3rd Edition/Dark Ages they decided to just make Mortis and Necromancy basically the same blood magic discipline but without making that explicit. It was like one step forward, two steps back.

[Mord]

I'm one of the suckers who paid for a copy of the Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition. It finally got delivered this week, and a cursory review of the MC screen - not even the book, which I have not had time/will to crack open yet; the freaking screen - reveals mediocre-at-best art, truly atrocious editing, and exciting new awful design on top of the awful design left uncorrected from earlier editions. Some highlights from the art:

• The new iconic Virtual Adept has plagiarized the Assassin's Creed hood.
• The new iconic Euthanatos is wearing a black wifebeater with some kind of weird knock-off of the Soviet hammer and sickle on it. WTF?
• The new iconic Dreamspeaker appears to have exactly one (1) breast.

The editing and general design:

• Honest to fucking God, there is a "p.XX" reference in the MC screen. It's in the "General Circumstances" section of the "Magickal Difficulty Modifiers" table, for the line item "Domino Effect," which appears to be a totally new concept, so it was extra necessary to have a real page reference here.
• Speaking of the difficulty modifiers: there is a -1 difficulty bonus when you are "Manipulating Mythic Threads/hypernarrative." What the fuck does that mean? I thought I knew this game, but apparently not.
• On the Damage table, one hit gets you 0 levels of damage, two hits nets you 2 levels of damage, 3 hits nets you six levels, and from there it ascends by twos. WTF? Why the four-level jump?
• Witnesses remain undefined for Paradox purposes, and they have tweaked the Paradox rules on a botch once again. I think that in 4 editions of M:tAs, we have now had four different Paradox botch rules that vary from each other only slightly.
• On the difficulty modifiers table, "Outlandish to Godlike Feat" carries a +1 to +3 difficulty penalty. An Outlandish feat is already defined as requiring 10-20 successes, while a Godlike feat requires 20+. I don't need to calculate the expected value of the dicepool to know that your odds of success start to drop precipitously once you do anything that requires more than 10 successes. Past that point the game becomes a matter of "are you casting this as a ritual with helpers, a week of prep time, and all other positive circumstances you can scrounge, or do you fail?" The game would have been better served if they had just cut off the possible scope of Effects at a certain point and said "past this, you use these different rules and separate formula for ritual magic."
• Jesus fucking Christ the math is so bad here. Since the base difficulty calculation still has the form of "highest Sphere + {3, 4, 5 based on vulgarity}" this means that you can push difficulties over 10 without too much trouble, and the screen presents no fewer than 3 alternative calculations for this:
  • Maximum difficulty is set at 10, ignoring any modifiers that would go over. (This is apparently the rules default, which is terrible.)
  • Maximum difficulty is set at 10, but every +1 to difficulty over 10 adds another required hit for minimum success. (Even worse!)
  • Maximum difficulty is 9, and every +1 to difficulty over 9 adds another required hit to succeed. (Why did they throw this out from Revised? Cargo cult design is why.)
• Whoever was responsible for the Gauntlet Ratings chart that made it to print deserves a special place in RPG hell, in whatever circle punishes the innumerate. Here is the table, with an added column for actual chance of success for each line item for an Arete 5 Mage who spends no Willpower or Quintessence:

Area // Difficulty // Hits // % Chance of success
Node // 3 // 1 // 96%
Deep Wilderness // 5 // 2 // 76%
Rural Countryside // 6 // 3 // 39%
Most Urban Areas // 7 // 4 // 7%
Downtown // 8 // 5 // 0.24%
Technocracy Lab // 9 // 5 // 0.03%

• Even a goddamn Oracle (Arete 9) has about a 1% chance to step sideways from a Technocracy lab, and has a 9% chance to botch without spending from the power pool. Once again this is a case where you should have a separate set of rules for Mighty Rituals of Vast Power. I pity the poor MC who didn't take the time to calculate these probabilities in advance and lets the party inadvertently smear themselves all over the pavement when they try to jump into the Umbra to escape the ItX killbots.
• Last but not least, the editing in the "Paradox Backlash Roll" table is just an atrocity. Terms like "Permanent Paradox" and "Paradox Realm" are randomly bolded or not as the editor's meds dictated, and the description of what happens on 21+ successes on a Paradox roll is incoherent to the point that I'm pretty sure that as written, it's less of a big deal than the effects of a 16-20 success Backlash. That whole table has its "ands" and "ors" confused in general, but you can reconstruct most of the intended meaning from context until you hit that last line item for 21+. Sheesh.

The fact that M20 sucks shouldn't surprise anyone, but I honestly didn't expect that even the freaking reference screen would reek of failure.

[Prak]

See, I don't have a problem with a Virtual Adept ripping off the Assassin's Creed hood. That seems pretty in character, really. The Dreamspeaker only having one breast might be intentional.

[Mord]

See, I don't have a problem with a Virtual Adept ripping off the Assassin's Creed hood. That seems pretty in character, really. The Dreamspeaker only having one breast might be intentional.

I like the Assassin hood, and the VA is certainly the least silly-looking of the new iconics, but it's just way too transparent a reference. Of course, I much prefer that Onyx Path cribs from an established and popular IP like Assassin's Creed when the other option is to ask a middle-aged man who unironically calls himself "Satyros" what he thinks a Millennial hacker cult would look like.

The way the boob is (not) drawn makes me think it just got lost in overenthusiastic shading, but it could very well be an intentional nod to the concept of mystic hermaphroditism or an Amazonian trope. I would think in either of those cases the (non) boob would be considerably more prominent, but maybe they thought that would be too edgy.

Regardless, though the iconics are by and large silly, they're depicted with a great deal more competence and stylistic coherence than the truly awful crap that made it into V20. (Yes, I own that one also. Yes, I have since learned my lesson.)

[Longes]

Speaking of the difficulty modifiers: there is a -1 difficulty bonus when you are "Manipulating Mythic Threads/hypernarrative." What the fuck does that mean? I thought I knew this game, but apparently not.

It's a new rule, basically Chaos Magic. You mimic the real world memes and stories and that makes magic easier. Akashic cosplaying as Neo will have an easier time activating bullet time, Verbena with a black cat and long nose will find it easier to curse people, etc.

On the Damage table, one hit gets you 0 levels of damage, two hits nets you 2 levels of damage, 3 hits nets you six levels, and from there it ascends by twos. WTF? Why the four-level jump?

Probably because you are not getting those results in combat unless you are using Forces (which bumps up damage by 1 success). Remember, your maximum casting dicepool at chargen is three.

Whoever was responsible for the Gauntlet Ratings chart that made it to print deserves a special place in RPG hell, in whatever circle punishes the innumerate.

It's a feature, not a bug. Mages are not werewolves, and aren't supposed to step sideways easily. Not supposed to step sideways at all, if GM is running Avatar Storm. You want to go into Umbra from your downtown penthouse - do a ritual and get those successes one roll at a time.

[Mord]

It's a feature, not a bug. Mages are not werewolves, and aren't supposed to step sideways easily. Not supposed to step sideways at all, if GM is running Avatar Storm. You want to go into Umbra from your downtown penthouse - do a ritual and get those successes one roll at a time.

This was exactly my point. If it's not supposed to happen without a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power, the rules should make it explicit that it can't happen without a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power. Otherwise you're going to end up with shitty story situations where players attempt to do something the rules present as possible, but is in reality phenomenally unlikely.

The cherry on top of the shit sundae here is that the buggy difficulty/botch interaction in 2 of the 3 presented resolution systems means that attempting something that difficult at all puts you at elevated risk of narratively catastrophic failure.

The Gauntlet table isn't a new evil (I think it was pulled from 2e), but it's the poster child for everything wrong with the variable TN+variable hits resolution mechanic and the botch/difficulty interaction at the same time.

[Longes]

It's a feature, not a bug. Mages are not werewolves, and aren't supposed to step sideways easily. Not supposed to step sideways at all, if GM is running Avatar Storm. You want to go into Umbra from your downtown penthouse - do a ritual and get those successes one roll at a time.

This was exactly my point. If it's not supposed to happen without a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power, the rules should make it explicit that it can't happen without a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power. Otherwise you're going to end up with shitty story situations where players attempt to do something the rules present as possible, but is in reality phenomenally unlikely.

The cherry on top of the shit sundae here is that the buggy difficulty/botch interaction in 2 of the 3 presented resolution systems means that attempting something that difficult at all puts you at elevated risk of narratively catastrophic failure.

The Gauntlet table isn't a new evil (I think it was pulled from 2e), but it's the poster child for everything wrong with the variable TN+variable hits resolution mechanic and the botch/difficulty interaction at the same time.

Also, lowering the Gauntlet is like Spirit 2. If you are have Dimensional Science instead of Spirit (i.e., a Technocrat), you can even lower it to 0. The 3-5 success rituals are about 10 minutes long, so while you can't immediately sidestep (and the game doesn't want you doing that), you can enter Umbra in about 30 minutes from virtually any location.