Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

[Lokey]

AS seems to be a bit higher power level than I would really want to deal with in a world next door game, but you have to deal with the dicks you have and all.

So 23 or so years down the line someone at WW published a good fortitude idea. Granted took me a couple minutes, but Alabastard is going in the right direction (ignore dice penalties for wounds). Granted I don't remember if AS bothers with dice penalties to being wounded. Ah, it's already there, Indomitability... Maybe there's still not enough here to bother being a separate discipline (other than a desire to have tough but not strong characters).

Clout (potence) veers off into comic book stuff a little too much for my taste. Not sure mechanically where +1,2,3 str gets you (double with activation?)...well gets you from this tv is heavy to who needs a jack to change a tire pretty fast.

Josh_Kablack (chasing car on foot comment): I tend to be leery of involving the Flash in games, because it's something you always have to consider from too many different angles when you build an encounter/whatever. It's not a problem when everyone is the Flash, but when only some of your players are things start to break. Sure you want a good GM that can roll with that, but there's enough brain power here to make a non-broken out of box system, surely.

Generally on disciplines: I'd like that various powers to be available from the start, even if they suck. Even though I think you can buy powers a la carte, design-wise think it works better, I think we can cover enough ground in a less than a dozen disciplines to make characters that can do things without dying.

[hyzmarca]

I didn't innovate much in terms of layout, it's pretty close to simply being the Shadowrun layout, which in turn isn't massively different from the Vampire layout. I'm very open to ideas on how to improve layout, I don't think there have been a lot of advances in that field since the 1980s. When AH and I do comparison OSSRs of similar White Wolf titles produced years apart, one of the things we harp on at times is that the chapter organization is nearly exactly the same in, for example, Orpheus (2003) and Geist (2009).

Okay. The big problem, and one that I've ran into during Vampire chargen, is that powers use stats and skills. So in order to know what stats and skills I want, I also need to know what powers I want. These dependencies mean that you have to move between three different sections of the book, many times, during chargen.

In Shadowrun it isn't that bad, since everything magic uses Magic and either Sorcery or Conjuration. And everything shooty uses agility and the appropriate firearm skill.

In After Sundown, like in Vampire, all of the magic things use different stat and skill combos, so I need to know exactly what magic things I want to do before picking my stats and skills. I mean, fuck, conjuring fog requires an Agility + Rigging or Logic + Operations test. If I just looked at the skill description, I'd have no reason to give MacGuyver skills or heavy equipment skills to my Jack the Ripper expy who conjures fog for cover while he slices and dices cockney prostitutes with an antique straight razor.

And then I have to decide if conjuring fog is actually worth spending points on those skills and stats that I might not otherwise want.


There's really only two ways to deal with this problem.
1) You simplify the dependencies. Make 1 magic stat and a couple of magic skills. You probably do not want to do this.

2) Put tables in the chargen section.
This is easier. If you include tables of all the skills, stats, and powers in the Chargen section, which lists dependencies, the reader does not have to flip between three different sections constantly. These tables don't need detailed descriptions. They just need 1 sentence descriptions and a list of dependencies.

[Prak]

Some of this might still be inexplicable to people who weren't in Frank's Shadowrun game?

Edited from an e-mail exchange (but perhaps interesting to other people as commentary):
Examples of Play:
Pride and PrejudiceThe Sting and Zombies: Goes through the plot of the movie the Sting, and explains how each scene would be run in game, with alternatives based on how the players would have to react to a setback or failure at each stage (with shout-outs to the stuff that doesn't quite work.)
My Fair LadyOcean's 11 with Vampires: As above with a different movie, and running an intrusion mission rather than a long con.
The second is the default for Shadowrun and the game provides remarkably poor support on how to actually run that scenario!
I know that Frank knows (or at least was able to improvise through) both of these plots, but a step-by-step breakdown on how to use the rules to run these movies would I think be a big help to someone trying to learn how to run a game.

This is a good idea, I think, but if it were me, I'd probably do examples of play with public domain movies, just to be safe. Describing the plot and how to run it with a rules system probably qualifies as fair use, and it's unlikely that Warner Bros is going to even find out about After Sundown to even make a decision about whether to sue/send a C&D, but there are a good number of movies in the public domain, and not just movies made before 1921.

[Lokey]

I know the DMCA overreaches by miles, but it doesn't go that far. Far safer than houses.

Need to think more about how to better present material and make that first character build decision tree easier before contributing anything useful (that would of course be unencumbered by any sane legal claim).

[Username17]

Clout (potence) veers off into comic book stuff a little too much for my taste. Not sure mechanically where +1,2,3 str gets you (double with activation?)...well gets you from this tv is heavy to who needs a jack to change a tire pretty fast.

Well that's exactly it. If you're going to have super strength be a power on par with being able to hypnotize people it pretty much has to be some level of comic book super strength. Because hypnotism is also a comic book super power. And a pretty fucking good one at that. If you can pick up a motorcycle and beat people to death with it, that's still not actually all that impressive from a game balance standpoint compared to being able to mind control gangland thugs to point shotguns in a direction of your choice.

There's a whole pulp genre in which some people had hypnosis and some people were super strong to the point that they could like kick down a door or move furniture without help. But if you read stuff like The Shadow, you find that the "strong heroes" generally need a shit tonne more than that to be even vaguely on the same level as "mind control guy." In many cases, the "very strong normal human" levels of super strength doesn't actually matter much in terms of actual obstacles passed and is just a thing for the author to fill up wordcount when they don't have anything plot related to say. Such characters generally have their actual super power (the one they beat challenges with that they could beat by having one more friend with a pistol and crowbar) be super intelligence or super charisma.

So yes, it is entirely in-genre for characters to have super strength well below Spiderman levels and have this be built up as their one big trick right alongside characters who can control minds. But these characters are only ever able to pull their weight (if they do) by invoking authorial fiat. It's basically the Fighters Can't Have Nice Things problem. In a cooperative storytelling game, the super strength has to be as narratively useful as mind control if it costs as much as mind control. And it takes comic book levels of super strength to do that.

Put tables in the chargen section

Yeah, that is a thing that needs to happen. I'm thinking a chart which lists each discipline, showing the basics and advanced powers along the left-hand side, with each column being one of the skills labeled at the top. And then there's an X or ✓ for each skill that could be used for that power.

You could look at the chart for what skills a power would have, and you could then look up and down the columns to see what other powers you could trigger of the skill to see if it took you in a direction you wanted to go.

I think the game needs more material on each supernatural individually, of the sort you would get in a game where everyone plays vampires or werewolves:
[*] What happens when vampires/dryads/werewolves go to the dentist/cardiologist/veterinarian? With all respect to Frank's love of brevity, I think you need a page to a page-and-a-half for each supernatural type on their individual quirks.

Sadly, I think you're probably right. That's about 40,000 words unfortunately. Not difficult to write, but a pretty thick chapter. I could probably get it down a bit by having a rant about Lycanthropes generally and then a much smaller rant about Nezumi and Nanaue. Still, long chapter is long.

I know that Frank knows (or at least was able to improvise through) both of these plots, but a step-by-step breakdown on how to use the rules to run these movies would I think be a big help to someone trying to learn how to run a game.

This is actually a good idea as well. And also a lot of wordcount. Fuck!

Doing justice to The Sting or Ocean's Eleven specifically almost cries out for a "flashback" mechanic. It's not something that is unfamiliar territory to vampire fiction. Is that something people want?


Not so much "I remember fighting the mid-seventies Slayer" so much as "but actually we had already arranged for a distraction at midnight."

In all cases the original person is dead and gone, "curing" a possessed person lobotomizes or kills them. But for player characters, they are hung up about the life details of the person they replaced.

I could see splitting Fallen up into demonic possession vs. tainted normal. I'm not sure it's really necessary though.

-Username17

[Prak]

Flashbacks are a pretty common thing in vampire and heist fic, and I'd love to see one that worked. Off the top of my head, I could see something like "make a relevant roll, if you succeed, spend a point of Edge and say what you set up, if you fail, you actually didn't arrange a distraction"

[Blicero]

"but actually we had already arranged for a distraction at midnight"-type mechanics are getting a bit too dissociated for my tastes, but I do not know if I am representing the majority opinion.

You might want to consider throwing in a sentence about how part of the reason for the randomized advancement is to prevent divergent overspecialization. You give a vaguely raelizarms-based argument with "No one really knows what lessons they will learn from the future and
supernatural creatures don’t always get to decide ahead of time what powers they will develop or when they will do so", but it's useful to see the intent for a mechanic like that that some people seem to dislike.

[hyzmarca]

"but actually we had already arranged for a distraction at midnight"-type mechanics are getting a bit too dissociated for my tastes, but I do not know if I am representing the majority opinion.

In a simulationist game, its probably more realistic, because your characters are smarter than you are.

Like, I can't think of every possible complication of a complex casino heist, because I'm not a professional casino robber.

Having a planning roll when one of your characters is a master planner works just about as well as having a nuclear physics roll when one of your characters wants to build a nuclear reactor. Because I sure as shit can't build one of those in my basement in time for a LARP. Getting the fissile material alone...

Planning is really one of the places the limitations of roleplaying come out, because your characters should, rightly, be substantially more competent than you are.

Regarding the advancement issue, the reason that hyperspecilization happens in point buy games is that everyone wants to be good at their shtick, and they can't without hyperspecilization. One way to compensate for that would be to use a hybrid advancement, where their sthick levels up automatically, and the points are for everything else.

[Josh_Kablack]

Terminator 2 and Jurassic World both have memorable chase scenes involving vehicles and creatures who can keep up, while being far short of The Flash level superspeed.

[OgreBattle]

Super strength also boosts your durability, so having shotgun shells only scratch you can make up for throwing motorcycles not being as powerful as mind controlling shotgun wielding gangsters.

"make a relevant roll, if you succeed, spend a point of Edge and say what you set up, if you fail, you actually didn't arrange a distraction"

Seems like the most straightforward mechanic for "just as planned" character. Could also be used mid-battle to be Shikamaru and other tactical fighters.

Terminator 2 and Jurassic World both have memorable chase scenes involving vehicles and creatures who can keep up, while being far short of The Flash level superspeed.

The current After Sundown chasing mechanics seems to pull that off well enough, though I've only read it and haven't played it.

[Mord]

That's actually 3 powers which fills out the basics for a discipline: Nimble Feet, Speed of Thought, and Hands Without Shadow. Hands Without Shadow can indeed use autofire rules, so punching many times in a blur doesn't actually have to involve rolling the dice a great many times.

So is "Speed of Thought" strictly for dodging and "Hands Without Shadow" for attacking? I'm using this scene from The Matrix for reference. Neo is doing the E Honda thing with his arm, but he's using it for blocking/parrying.

In terms of how people experience reality, how do you have a power that allows you to react at hyperspeed with any level of control (e.g. like Neo pwning Agent Smith in that clip) without having a concomitant slowdown in your perception?

It is of course possible to have your perceptions slow without an accompanying increase in speed. As in this sequence. But, it seems like hyperspeed dextrous activity (as distinct from hyperspeed covering of distance, but the same goes for that power as well) is a power that builds on having slowed perception in the first place.

Unless your hyperspeed distance power is supposed to result in you throwing yourself bodily into walls.

[Lokey]

Terminator 2 and Jurassic World both have memorable chase scenes involving vehicles and creatures who can keep up, while being far short of The Flash level superspeed.

Haven't seen JW, link on what you have? T2 was the chase from the asylum?

T2, that wasn't outside Olympic sprinter really, they can do 40km/hr, but not for long--plus he took a shortcut so was probably not even running that fast. Think there's some situational stuff there.

The short burst thing I was talking about would include the kind of T2 thing I guess, just have to be careful of fast guy isn't better than everybody problem that can easily crop up.

[Username17]

Having a planning roll when one of your characters is a master planner works just about as well as having a nuclear physics roll when one of your characters wants to build a nuclear reactor. Because I sure as shit can't build one of those in my basement in time for a LARP. Getting the fissile material alone...

Basically this. You'd make a planning test and the hits would give you a pool that you could make declarations of what you'd done/planned for earlier during the actual mission. Alternately, one of the effects of Edge could be that unrelated preparations you'd made were useful in this circumstance and you'll now tell the other people at the table what they were.

This sort of thing is more realistic than forcing the players to come up with every contingency themselves, because the characters are werewolf ninjas and the players are software testers. It's also more in-genre because most (good) movies, books, and TV shows choose to show and then tell - first demonstrating the trick and then going back and saying how it was done. And of course, it eats up a lot less table time if the players aren't actively discussing twenty different contingencies that don't happen.

-Username17

[Nath]

Flashbacks are a pretty common thing in vampire and heist fic, and I'd love to see one that worked. Off the top of my head, I could see something like "make a relevant roll, if you succeed, spend a point of Edge and say what you set up, if you fail, you actually didn't arrange a distraction"

While the heist flashback is going to be "last night", the vampire flashback is more likely to be "last century".

Hellywood RPG (only published in French AFAIK) has a flashback mechanism that fit well within its occult Noir genre. It allows each player to take control of the narrative once per session for a flashback. Some qualities grant additional flashback - like Femme Fatale which requires the extra flashback to be related to a former lover.

As far as I remember, the rulebook doesn't give a lot of hints on how to properly use the flashback. In my experience, it was best used for a character to get a "new" contact or a knowledge skill right when the adventure required it.

Depending on the players' imagination and the GM willingness to get his story hijacked, it can me amazing. A witness can only tell you about some name the bad guys mentioned as they were leaving? A character can find about him and where he is likely to be found by having a flashback of the first time they encountered (either as foe or friend). But doing so, he may describe a character completely different from what the GM originally intended him to be. Needs a shelter nearby? Flashback to that old companion of yours in the good old days ("Lando..." "Lando system?" "Lando's not a system. He's a man." No flashback here but you get the idea). It can do wonder in giving an incentive for player-characters to make things personal in exchange for clues and help. It can also backfire with the players always trying to maximize advantages (though the Lando Calrissian is a good example of how the GM can retake control of the story when a player grants himself a powerful ally).

[Username17]

A question: would it be enough to have a paragraph about character motivations for each chronicle setup or should there be a list of examples?

Character Motivations for New in Town
The broad story arc of a New in Town chronicle is probably going to center around the new town, so it's important that any prospective characters be ones who are motivated to stay in the area even when things get difficult or dangerous. Characters can be running from a dark past in another domain, on a longterm mission, or new to Kin society altogether. Characters should be new to the Kin society of the city, but it's probably better if there's something tying them to the specific domain lest the question of “Why don't we move to Tucson?” fails to generate a convincing answer. Characters could have family in the region (a Vampire's maker's maker might be one of the locally important Kin, for example), or they could have school or employment in the mortal human world.

It wouldn't be hard to put half a dozen "They fight crime!" lead-ins for each of them, but is it required?

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Not required, but I think it would be useful enough that it's worth including.

[Prak]

Yeah, that's my thought as well. There is a segment of the gaming populace that has a hard time making characters in the sense of narrative, even if they're very good at making characters in the mechanical sense. I tend to just splice together a few bits and pieces of characters from media, like the time I wrote up a character background that was one part Iron Man, two parts Voltaire's latest album, and one part my love of playing artificers. But I have a friend who is very competent from a mechanical standpoint (to the extent that I probably need to talk to him about sandbagging...), but couldn't write a character background to save his life.

So writing up some simple origin boiler plates could help a lot of players who aren't so great at motivation and such.

[Grek]

One thing that the second edition really does need is kryptonite reform. Water can be found almost anywhere on the globe, can be transported around without comment, periodically falls from the sky and can be summoned on demand via sorcery. But it can be completely negated if you know the right Advanced Sorcery. Compare Sunlight, which is present 50% of the time while outdoors and cannot be transported in any meaningful fashion, and Alcohol, which never falls from the sky and which may well be difficult for a character to acquire if they're broke, a teenager or living in dimension where distilleries don't exist. Having Water as a weakness isn't supposed to be a complete disadvantage (unless you can negate it entirely), nor is having Alcohol as your weakness supposed to be a minor but real advantage.

To fix Sunlight, all UV light needs to count for the purposes of powers. Witch hunters run around with blacklights and the vampire weakness becomes as portable as anything else. Water can be fixed by having Water Prison, Prison of Ice and other such abilities be suppressed by anything that would suppress the caster's powers. Alcohol on the other hand needs completely replaced, as it is the only thing on the list that difficult to acquire for both ordinary high school students and triffid commandos. I suggest as the alternative:

• Smoke
  Be it lit incense or a burning torch brandished by an enraged villager, evil creatures are repelled by burning things. Even cigarettes and car exhaust can be problematic if applied directly, leading some with this weakness to avoid cities entirely. Smoke dissipates to invisibility (and ineffectuality) after about a minute once the source is removed.
  Effective against: Evil Plants, Lycanthropes, Animates, Giant Animals

But another problem with the current kryptonite mechanics is the lack of support for technological characters. In my first campaign alone, I had two prospective players walk away from the game after they heard about the kryptonite mechanics for Icarids and Animates. Player #1 wanted to play a mad scientist who cybernetically augment himself. He refused to play when he learned that the kryptonite for Icarids was still Salt, Water and Iron, no matter how he fluffed it, because it made his character look comically incompetent to have his cyborg parts short out every time he showers. Player #2 walked when she learned that her killer android character was weak to Corn, Stakes and Vodka, rather than having something more thematic as a weakness.

This is of course balanced against the desire to avoid a proliferation of weaknesses and the requirement for successful scoobies to bring a wheelbarrow with them to carry all of their gear. And that says that we want to avoid adding a new set of "tech" weaknesses, even if doing so seems like the obvious fix. Instead, we probably want to expand the equipment lists and add powers to Technomancy which offer solutions instead. The "Why does my robot get hurt by wood?" and "Can I play a cyborg?" problems can mostly be solved by a non-dispellable, non-disruptable Basic power that lets you have equipment (like armour, or finger blades, or computers) invisibly implanted into your body. There will still be some weirdness like the loss of physical soak from Fortitude for Androids, but its minor enough that most people won't care.

[OgreBattle]

How about robot people aren't vulnerable to wood or water but have to deal with an essence kind of mechanic where showing robocop where he used to live or Frankenstein hanging out with small children stresses them

[DrPraetor]

@OgreBattle: I'm pretty sure those are supposed to be master passions, or disadvantages, rather than weaknesses.

The issue with water vs alcohol is one of quantity. A unit of alcohol (the amount a typical person metabolizes in an hour), is a single shot of whiskey, but you need a full pint of water.

Also you can use alcohol surreptitiously by getting the monster to drink it, which is potentially an issue.

Now - maybe - the water weakness is substantially worse even so?

Sunlight is entirely different, because it cuts off environments rather than being a weapon your enemies bring against you.

[Prak]

One thing that the second edition really does need is kryptonite reform. Water can be found almost anywhere on the globe, can be transported around without comment, periodically falls from the sky and can be summoned on demand via sorcery. But it can be completely negated if you know the right Advanced Sorcery. Compare Sunlight, which is present 50% of the time while outdoors and cannot be transported in any meaningful fashion, and Alcohol, which never falls from the sky and which may well be difficult for a character to acquire if they're broke, a teenager or living in dimension where distilleries don't exist. Having Water as a weakness isn't supposed to be a complete disadvantage (unless you can negate it entirely), nor is having Alcohol as your weakness supposed to be a minor but real advantage.

To fix Sunlight, all UV light needs to count for the purposes of powers. Witch hunters run around with blacklights and the vampire weakness becomes as portable as anything else. Water can be fixed by having Water Prison, Prison of Ice and other such abilities be suppressed by anything that would suppress the caster's powers. Alcohol on the other hand needs completely replaced, as it is the only thing on the list that difficult to acquire for both ordinary high school students and triffid commandos. I suggest as the alternative:

• Smoke
  Be it lit incense or a burning torch brandished by an enraged villager, evil creatures are repelled by burning things. Even cigarettes and car exhaust can be problematic if applied directly, leading some with this weakness to avoid cities entirely. Smoke dissipates to invisibility (and ineffectuality) after about a minute once the source is removed.
  Effective against: Evil Plants, Lycanthropes, Animates, Giant Animals

But another problem with the current kryptonite mechanics is the lack of support for technological characters. In my first campaign alone, I had two prospective players walk away from the game after they heard about the kryptonite mechanics for Icarids and Animates. Player #1 wanted to play a mad scientist who cybernetically augment himself. He refused to play when he learned that the kryptonite for Icarids was still Salt, Water and Iron, no matter how he fluffed it, because it made his character look comically incompetent to have his cyborg parts short out every time he showers. Player #2 walked when she learned that her killer android character was weak to Corn, Stakes and Vodka, rather than having something more thematic as a weakness.

This is of course balanced against the desire to avoid a proliferation of weaknesses and the requirement for successful scoobies to bring a wheelbarrow with them to carry all of their gear. And that says that we want to avoid adding a new set of "tech" weaknesses, even if doing so seems like the obvious fix. Instead, we probably want to expand the equipment lists and add powers to Technomancy which offer solutions instead. The "Why does my robot get hurt by wood?" and "Can I play a cyborg?" problems can mostly be solved by a non-dispellable, non-disruptable Basic power that lets you have equipment (like armour, or finger blades, or computers) invisibly implanted into your body. There will still be some weirdness like the loss of physical soak from Fortitude for Androids, but its minor enough that most people won't care.

Honestly, I still think that the weaknesses need proliferation. The Golf Bag Problem is actually genre appropriate, as I've mentioned before...

[Grek]

I respectfully disagree. At most, I could see one more set of weaknesses added for technological opponents. But even that is more than the ideal, and should be avoided if possible. Even with just three we failed to balance the availability vs ease of application vs effective defenses for each weakness type. What makes you think that adding Borax to the list is going to improve that?

[Chamomile]

While I can respect that someone might want to make a waterproofed robot, I still very much want robots who aren't waterproofed on the table. If you can't have a scene where the robot who is otherwise convincingly human gets pushed out into the rain by a plucky scooby, thus causing them to short out and spark and twitch in an unnatural manner, you don't really have the evil robot genre fully supported.

[Prak]

What about adding a "Different Weakness" advantage? Hell, maybe you could add an "Extra Weakness" disadvantage as well. If I were writing, I'd come up with half a dozen or so additional weaknesses and say "Pick one from this list" and include the usual weaknesses on it as well.

This allows waterproof robots, chinese vampires weak to jade, whatever you want to list, without removing water-shorting robots from the game.

[hyzmarca]

Robot Dreams ended with Susan Calvan headshotting Elvex with an electron gun. It wouldn't have harmed a human, being too low power, but since robots have positronic brains, it essentially caused an matter/anti-matter anhilation reaction in his head.