The Gaming Den

Neurosis wrote:Doubt sounds exactly like my current Delta Green campaign, just with different rules.

Does it have san-loss or san-loss equivalent or even *squee* multiple sanity meters like the hot mess that is Unknown Armies?

To my knowledge Frank has not settled on any specific mechanics, and I don't recall a sanity mechanic being considered. There was a very long discussion of how powers might in general work such that the mechanics would support the PCs being unsure about them - conclusion was that it more or less couldn't be done if the powers were to be any good.

It was mostly a thought experiment arising from the Mage Paradox point of view debate: what if the magic user was the one who could not directly witness anything magical? The prime example of a power was finding useful stuff in a container with unknown contents, another was making bullets miss.

Doubt had a bunch of nice villain concepts but not much else going for it. I was certainly disappointed in the proposed types of PCs.

Doubt is a fairly different game than After Sundown along a lot of axes - about the only thing they share is that they are both Urban Fantasy/Horror. There are no SAN mechanics, but there are Humanity mechanics and Flow Rating, which are pretty much the same thing.

The mechanics of magic use in Doubt have evolved somewhat from Frank's original idea -- Flow powers are capable of producing visual effects similar to more classical magic such as that used in After Sundown. The difference, however, is that such effects are not perceptible to Sleepers or physical recordings, making it impossible to prove after the fact that what you thought you experienced really happened. Witnesses and recordings, if they show any evidence at all of what happened, will always only show plausible and prosaic events.

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schpeelah wrote:Doubt had a bunch of nice villain concepts but not much else going for it. I was certainly disappointed in the proposed types of PCs.

Does this include the updated archetypes in this thread specifically?

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Update: all conceptual realms have been fleshed out and some new powers have been added.

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Added yet more powers (all Conspiracy Theorist powers are now complete), added the first few traits, replaced Automatic powers with Suggested Starting powers, and introduced the concept of progression templates, allowing players to build and advance characters in a more class-oriented fashion if they desire.

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Removed tradition-specific flow methodologies and made flow methodologies more generic and shared by all traditions, to remove redundancies in the case of things like engravings and implants.

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Added/Updated all powers for the Fated archetype.

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added Contacts and rules for purchasing, acquiring, using, and losing them.

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Added all Generic Flow powers, updated table of contents and reformatted many core posts.

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Updated Equipment and added weapons, armor, and drugs.

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Updated the Combat section with rules for various types of combat actions, as well as properly delineating sizes and falling damage.

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Added all Chosen powers (Spirits, Faerie, and Ancestors) and changed the Spiritual conceptual realm from the Elemental Chaos to Gaia.

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Added conditions and reworked damage into formalized damage tracks.

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Red_Rob wrote:I'd read a short story collection in this setting.

I've been listening to a lot of fiction serial podcasts and it seems like Doubt would be a great concept for a podcast/light ARG.

Lots of good updates so far.

Judging__Eagle wrote:Lots of good updates so far.

Thanks. I'm in the process of transcribing and formatting everything here into a pdf so we can start distributed playtesting and the search for artists.

echo

After reading the oMage v nMage thread, I'm chomping on the bit to give these rules a try. The concept is evocative, so I'm going to riff on the fluff for a moment:

Reading this over, it occurs to me that it's a real shame Sleepers aren't called Convicts instead, because non-Doubters could be seen as being trapped/imprisoned/obliviously in a world of their own convictions.

Juxtaposing sleep with awake hints at the interactions and sympathies of Awakened and Sleepers, only. Whereas being a Convict clearly explains what a sleeper is to all Doubters: someone blocked from perceiving Flow. How doubters sympathize with Convicts is a really good motivation for some gameplay: Are Convicts dangerous obstacles that staunch the Flow and limit your ability to cast Doubt? Is your role as a doubter one of rehabilitating the Convicts around you, opening their perception to the Flow? Are you a warden, who thinks Convicts are lesser creatures that must be corralled and protected? Are you a Flow-Cowboy and (some) Convicts are actually Doubters-turned-prisoner, sentenced to a world without perception of the Flow? If one of the themes of the game explores loneliness, then this last interpretation lets you reskin Cowboy Beebop and that's a win-win. The other interpretations let you readily import ideas from Mage or Shadowrun or Dr. Strange.

Some of the skills have been updated in the main post. Social skills have been collapsed from five skills to three (Charm and Intimidate have been combined into Magnetism, Fast Talk and Oratory have been combined into Eloquence, and Empathy has been renamed to Insight). Additionally, some of the Professional skills have been renamed to be more clear or less wordy (Tracking / Scene Reconstruction has been shortened to Inductive Reconstriction, History / Psychology has been shortened to Profiling, and Data Analysis has been shortened to Research). Note that rules or powers which describe making Charm or Intimidate rolls are still correct, even though both use the Magnetism skill, since the rule interaction still only applies to Magnetism usages of that particular intent.

Defenses probably need to be reworked, because asking people to take the mathematical mean of three derived numbers three times is annoying, but I haven't got any better ideas yet.

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Harshax wrote:Reading this over, it occurs to me that it's a real shame Sleepers aren't called Convicts instead, because non-Doubters could be seen as being trapped/imprisoned/obliviously in a world of their own convictions.

This is actually very intentional. Sleepers are normal people who are blind to both the opportunities and dangers of Flow perception, while Doubters are people who have been "infected" with manipulated flow vectors and lose access to their pasts, families, and a large portion of their identities in return for being granted powers.

Doubters have been "awoken", with all the positives and negatives that implies, to vast and dangerous ideas and perceptions that in many cases are extremely inimical to human existence and sanity, and Sleepers are normally totally safe from such dangers until and unless endangered by entanglement with Flow Manipulation. This can happen due to the proximity or attention of a Doubter or Lost One, a random interaction with an Irrational or evidence of its existence, or even speculating too intently on various arcane or paranormal ideas or concepts.

The attitude of Doubters towards Sleepers is intended to be one of protection and worry, not resentment or antipathy. Doubters must constantly safeguard Sleepers, not only protecting them from outright attacks and manipulations, but also working to warn them off from hazardous lines of inquiry and dangerous knowledge even while maintaining relationships with them and utilizing their expertise and influence to investigate and defend against incursions by Irrationals. If the rules and the fluff don't convey that, I'm very open to suggestions on how to make that happen.

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Fixed an incorrect interaction between bonuses/penalties and caps/boosts.

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It was somewhat interesting to see characters in the new Dark Tower movie using powers verbatim out of the powers list I posted. I guess someone involved in the production of the film might be a fan of Doubt.

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So, real talk: is there a real downside to either not forming Claves with other doubters, or having the doubters split into 2 separate Claves? Like.... if at least 3 players are is in 2 separate claves and at least 1 of them has any flow, every player but one can top off their flow just by doing harmless magic in the presence of each other. Which is great because magic powers are awesome and the fiction has spells being cast all over the place. But it seems like you wrote Doubt to make flow hard to get without shenanigans, which is a shame because the interesting part of the game is using probability magic.... which nobody gets to use if you're dependent on getting supernatural enemies to use magic on you first all the time.

Hicks wrote:So, real talk: is there a real downside to either not forming Claves with other doubters, or having the doubters split into 2 separate Claves?

Not being in a Clave has a regular Humanity cost, as mentioned above. Doubters can be in multiple Claves, and Claves can interact, but this is a metagame functionality; basically, the Clave is a representation of the player's gaming group. If you take the same character to multiple games, then that character is considered to belong to two Claves (and both Claves are entangled), and if both gaming groups have a cross-over game, their Claves can interact in-world.

Use of Flow powers by members of your Clave or any Clave with which you are entangled doesn't grant Flow points to you as an observer, because you're already entangled with the emergent probability vector. The idea is that you want the players to seek out manipulated Flow from malevolent sources to keep them working towards the goals of the game (stopping bad guys, investigating mysteries, and protecting Sleepers).

That doesn't mean that Flow is hard to get, though - a single point of Flow goes a long way, and players should get them pretty regularly both during combat and whenever they complete a scenario. That said, there's probably room for making some powers only cost one flow point per period of usage (such as not requiring an Awakened player to spend a flow point for every attack they make during a combat).

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Dude. Flow goes up to twenty five, and you get one flow for every non clave magic interaction. And most powers require a flow to do anything. As it is, you made a game about wizards who can't wizard until they've been roflestomped by enemies. Magical protections require one flow per round. Like do you even understand how stingy that is? How the hell are the PCs supposed to use magic for anything like charms and investigation and basically anything outside combat, when they only get 1 mojo for every round of magic they are inflicted with?

Hicks wrote:Dude. Flow goes up to twenty five, and you get one flow for every non clave magic interaction. And most powers require a flow to do anything. As it is, you made a game about wizards who can't wizard until they've been roflestomped by enemies. Magical protections require one flow per round. Like do you even understand how stingy that is? How the hell are the PCs supposed to use magic for anything like charms and investigation and basically anything outside combat, when they only get 1 mojo for every round of magic they are inflicted with?

I believe he just addressed how maybe some of the Flow costs are too harsh for the intended rate of mojo receipt.

The fact there's a high Flow cap shouldn't really be taken as meaning you should expect to spend the whole game with a full tank.