The Gaming Den

The problem where not having the right bane weapon is an automatic game over is just an extension of another problem, which is that every combat encounter can only be failed in death. And that's a problem that After Sundown has half-solved because it has chase rules and a means of transitioning from combat to chase, so all that really remains is to make sure that players can grok that they're outmatched before anyone's died.

If your only objection to having monsters with unique weaknesses and a closet full of weapons that exploit those weaknesses is that it happens to exacerbate an existing problem, than rather slapping a band-aid fix that kind of keeps the main problem in check but not really (death is still the outcome if PCs run into encounters that happen to be mechanical counters to their build, that just have lots more points than them, or that just get lucky) I'd recommend actually solving the root problem, even if the band-aid fix suggested didn't chuck out an apparently very popular element of the genre.

That's a bit hard to parse, or I might just be tired Chamomile and it'd be banal to list the contributing problems of why is every encounter to the death and so on.

Stakes are insta-gib for vamps on Buffy, while other media and games they range from bad to you ruined my shirt. There's no making everyone happy there.

And I'd need to review the system more to comment further, think there's a lot more in the pdf than in the I Made it Myself thread

Lokey wrote:That's a bit hard to parse, or I might just be tired Chamomile and it'd be banal to list the contributing problems of why is every encounter to the death and so on.

Stakes are insta-gib for vamps on Buffy, while other media and games they range from bad to you ruined my shirt. There's no making everyone happy there.

And I'd need to review the system more to comment further, think there's a lot more in the pdf than in the I Made it Myself thread

Whether stakes are insta-gib or if they're merely very annoying depends entirely on if your protagonists fight vampires or if your protagonists are vampires.

In a game where your protagonists are expected to get hit with their banes regularly and survive, then those banes obviously aren't immediately lethal. In a game where your protagonists don't have banes, and are expected to Cuisinart their way through monsters that do, banes are insta-kill so that your protagonists would have a reason to use them at all.

In stories where you're fighting one vampire and it's a big deal, or one hunter and its a big deal, banes are somewhere in between. The stake is almost lethal for the vamp protagonist so that he can have the romantic scene where the female lead nurses him back to health. Vhen Van Helsing is leading a team against Dracula, the stake isn't automatically lethal because that would cut the fight too short.

FrankTrollman wrote:If a Rakshasa can only be killed by brass or only killed by a blessed crossbow bolt, the player characters are going to get torn to shreds and the game ends if they get into a fight and don't have those particular weapons.

I don't subscribe to this dichotomy. Even with death off the table, there are a lot of ways to meet a confrontation. You can dissaud an enemy by inflicting pain, visiting destruction on the things he cares about, issuing creditable threats, or by being diplomatic. As others have mentioned, you can run from a fight, and you can frustrate your pursuers by distracting, crippling, entangling, or obstructing them. Failing all that, you can attempt to exert such terrific effort as to simply subjugate your enemy outright. Bury him, cut off his limbs, kick him into a volcano, lock him in a vault, or tie him to the end of a rocket and launch him into space.

Furthermore, this is all to assume that a bane should be the one weakness in otherwise strict invulnerability. Seems that, if you wanted, a bane wouldn't have to be necessary to kill an immortal... Just necessary if you want to kill him in a way that is at all practically reasonable. Of course, that's a worldbuilding decision.

Either way, mechanisms which offer reasons for characters to occasionally defer on a fight with a powerful adversary and then come back functionally more powerful for round two are a welcome tool for building a certain genre of narrative progression. Act 1: there is a new villian in town. Act 2: we rush to fight the villain, but lose! Act 3: we're on the out-and-out while the villain wrecks havok. Act 4: we manage to regroup and bounce back, but will we make it in time to curtail our foes' ultimate machination? Act 5: showdown.

Edit: actually, come to think of it, the process of actively seeking out and frustrating an undying enemy long enough to discover her weakness was, if I remember right, one of the seasons of buffy.

hyzmarca wrote: This assumes that the characters can't just run away. Or can't know that they should run away.

Me and my Group have an very poor record of running away while still being able.
Not shure how typical that is

Well, there are a couple things here. There are four separate categories of substances you're supposed to care about in AS, each with three entries-

Detection materials tell you that magic is around.
-Water
-Magnets
-Plants

Counter materials let you shut down active effects.
-Sand
-Salt
-Seeds

Weakness materials ignore magic soak dice.
-Wood
-Silver
-Iron

Suppression materials make supernaturals unable to use their magic.
-Sunlight
-Water
-Alcohol

So there are seriously 11 things you're supposed to care about, one of them twice, and 10 things you're supposed to carry around. Well, unless you know Chasing the Storm, because then you don't have to carry water around, you just drop it on people from the fucking sky.

No one's getting around carting dufflebags or foot lockers full of shit to hunt monsters anyway. Also, virtually the same argument that says "fire can't be a weakness" suggests that water shouldn't be a suppression material. Admittedly, it's an advanced power, rather than basic, and there isn't an "immune to water" power to supplement the "water on command" power.

But the other point I wanted to make is that weakness materials aren't an "insta-gib" or "the only way to kill it" thing, they just ignore whatever soak the monster gets from magic. This is a big deal for Werewolves, Spriggans and Trolls, but starting Nezumi don't give even half a shit if you have silver.

Korwin wrote:

hyzmarca wrote: This assumes that the characters can't just run away. Or can't know that they should run away.

Me and my Group have an very poor record of running away while still being able.
Not shure how typical that is

It's very typical. Players in RPGs are very reticent to run away even when they should. Lacking the "net" of a tv show or novel that guarantees them an escape and a victorious rematch, players are extremely reluctant to "accept a loss" and will fight on long after an MC has dropped some serious hints that they are outgunned. Even if you made a system where escaping was very likely to work, players still wouldn't use it very often.

Another issue is that actually duplicating the four act structure of a monster hunter episode (investigate crime, fight and lose to monster, research and gear up, fight monster and win) has some serious problems in a tabletop RPG. First of all, you don't need to have the monster win in act 2 to demonstrate that it's serious business - the audience has read the damn rules and knows whether it's serious business or not. Secondly, the "we have to rescue Dean" thing involves Dean's player going and playing Smash Brothers for Act 3 and most of Act 4.

There are certain narrative tropes of television that do not port to table top RPGs well. And right now we are talking about several of them.

-Username17

What do you think of the Hero Point system in Mutants and Masterminds, Frank? The Mastermind can offer a player, or the group, Hero Points to take a loss, which they then get to use as narrative currency.

Looks like M&M3e renamed them Victory Points.

Prak wrote:What do you think of the Hero Point system in Mutants and Masterminds, Frank? The Mastermind can offer a player, or the group, Hero Points to take a loss, which they then get to use as narrative currency.

Looks like M&M3e renamed them Victory Points.

Like Fate points in Fate, they feel weirdly structural. It's a very "dissociated" mechanic to use 2008 buzzwords. The player is making a choice based on information unavailable in-world and things are working demonstrably differently for the player characters than for NPCs. Makes the world less "real" and the game more of a game.

On the plus side, such mechanics do give the players buy-in for telling stories where shitty things happen to their characters. But I'm not really happy with the trade-off in having the player's motivation no longer sync with their character's motivation. When you do FATE points and the like, you're thinking of the character as "he" instead of "I."

-Username17

Honestly, you're never going to go full dufflebag at all. Instead, you're going to carry around two canteens (water & alcohol), a hatchet and a shotgun. You load the shotgun with special hand packed shells which contain a combination of iron/wood/silver shavings and seeds/sand/salt, because that way the answer to all supernatural hostility is to shoot it with the shotgun. You behead corpses that might regenerate instead of staking them, because beheading works on everything regardless of weakness. Everything else stays at home or in the mystery machine. Its a very manageable list of supplies, if you're serious about monster hunting.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak wrote:What do you think of the Hero Point system in Mutants and Masterminds, Frank? The Mastermind can offer a player, or the group, Hero Points to take a loss, which they then get to use as narrative currency.

Looks like M&M3e renamed them Victory Points.

Like Fate points in Fate, they feel weirdly structural. It's a very "dissociated" mechanic to use 2008 buzzwords. The player is making a choice based on information unavailable in-world and things are working demonstrably differently for the player characters than for NPCs. Makes the world less "real" and the game more of a game.

On the plus side, such mechanics do give the players buy-in for telling stories where shitty things happen to their characters. But I'm not really happy with the trade-off in having the player's motivation no longer sync with their character's motivation. When you do FATE points and the like, you're thinking of the character as "he" instead of "I."

-Username17

The term "dissociated mechanics" gives me flashbacks to fucking edition wars on /tg/. There was Touhou Futa coming out of the trees man! Outta the fucking trees!

But then how would you make those mechanics actually fit in character? The oWoD Nature mechanics potentially cause disruptive bullshit, while the Co'D beats system is the MC deciding what bad stuff happens to you and you get a fifth of an XP if you play along. Basically, how do you incentivize a narratively shitty situation that the players recognize as such without forcing that disconnect?

I'm half-remembering something from Double Cross, a Japanese TTRPG I copped, where you have a pet NPC who you can burn for one of several big fuck off bonuses at the expense of the NPC dying or hating you (and thus, the MC being able to compilcate things with said NPC).

Mask de H wrote:But then how would you make those mechanics actually fit in character?

Such things fly without any particular problems in Champions, Toon, Feng Shui, Teenagers From Outer Space and so on. You don't even need specific mechanics, just the genre buy-in alone is enough to get players to accept being captured and put into a death trap. The players have to accept and internalize that the enemies are not rational and silly things are going to happen.

Basically, for a player to accept an offer of surrender on the part of their character, they need two things:

• A fairly iron clad promise to the player that they'll be able to keep playing.
• A reason for the character to go along with it.

If either or both of those are missing, the players won't do it and will fight to the death. In Champions, the promise to the player is "You'll escape from the resulting death trap because this is a comic book" and the reason for the character is "You'll allow yourself to get chained up in the death trap because this is a comic book." And that's all you need. But if the genre of the story is "serious" that won't fly.

-Username17

Korwin wrote: Me and my Group have an very poor record of running away while still being able.
Not shure how typical that is

It depends on the group and the game. I know a GM who talked to the players about how just when they think it is all lost they will find a way to achieve a hard won victory. So the next time they thought that were outclassed and needed to run they took heart in his words. And all got killed.

He was very confused about why they didn't run, and they were very angry at him.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Mask de H wrote:But then how would you make those mechanics actually fit in character?

Such things fly without any particular problems in Champions, Toon, Feng Shui, Teenagers From Outer Space and so on. You don't even need specific mechanics, just the genre buy-in alone is enough to get players to accept being captured and put into a death trap. The players have to accept and internalize that the enemies are not rational and silly things are going to happen.

Basically, for a player to accept an offer of surrender on the part of their character, they need two things:

• A fairly iron clad promise to the player that they'll be able to keep playing.
• A reason for the character to go along with it.

If either or both of those are missing, the players won't do it and will fight to the death. In Champions, the promise to the player is "You'll escape from the resulting death trap because this is a comic book" and the reason for the character is "You'll allow yourself to get chained up in the death trap because this is a comic book." And that's all you need. But if the genre of the story is "serious" that won't fly.

-Username17

Which is a bit odd, because After Sundown draws on gothic horror, comics and Buffy, and I don't think the "captured by villain, daring escape" is that much less common in gothic horror and Buffy.

You can potentially make daring escapes a power source. Which works for certain flavors of supernatural creature. .

Some things are always worth trying


IIRC, in Supernatural they had most of that pile of crap in baby's trunk since the beginning...was probably dad's anyway. Hard to encapsulate that series' high and low points in just a few words, but plenty of material there worth borrowing.

"I've been fighting all my life and always wanted to surrender without a fight." Meh. You don't have to play that way, but ya, most people probably do. Blame the 80s.

Prak wrote:Which is a bit odd, because After Sundown draws on gothic horror, comics and Buffy, and I don't think the "captured by villain, daring escape" is that much less common in gothic horror and Buffy.

Yeah, but "captured by villain, eaten, skin worn by villain" is also a thing that happens in horror.

Maybe more a thing that happens to bystanders than to the protagonists, but at the point you're saying "getting captured is ok, we're protagonists", then you have to be fully in "this universe runs on tropes, not logic" mode. Which is sort of an assumed default in some genres (super heroes), but not in most.

In fact, I'd say it's more a stretch in a horror/supernatural setting than most. Get captured by human bandits? Maybe they'll want to ransom you, or even let you go when they're far enough away from any authorities you could alert. Certainly room to bargain there. Get captured by eyeball-eating ghouls? Yeah, they're probably going to eat your eyeballs, and it's not clear what leverage you could even use to bargain with.

That's a thing that happens in modern slasher horror, not so much the gothic horror of Dracula.

And getting captured intentionally as a means to find the villain's lair/learn his plans is also a thing.

Prak wrote:That's a thing that happens in modern slasher horror, not so much the gothic horror of Dracula.

Renfield gets permanently mindfucked by Dracula, one of the girls gets turned into a vampire. The surviving protagonists fight to the last bowie knife, never surrendering or running away.

Prak wrote:That's a thing that happens in modern slasher horror, not so much the gothic horror of Dracula.

Dracula is one inspiration (even there, most vampire stories involve a number of people not getting rescued and getting drained/enthralled instead, they're just often not the protagonists). But AS also has demons, mummies filled with bugs, killer robots, and a lot of other stuff. I don't know that you can say it's purely gothic horror.

Longes wrote:

Prak wrote:That's a thing that happens in modern slasher horror, not so much the gothic horror of Dracula.

Renfield gets permanently mindfucked by Dracula, one of the girls gets turned into a vampire. The surviving protagonists fight to the last bowie knife, never surrendering or running away.

The protagonists have multiple encounters with Dracula, and only kill him in the last one.

hyzmarca wrote:

Longes wrote:

Prak wrote:That's a thing that happens in modern slasher horror, not so much the gothic horror of Dracula.

Renfield gets permanently mindfucked by Dracula, one of the girls gets turned into a vampire. The surviving protagonists fight to the last bowie knife, never surrendering or running away.

The protagonists have multiple encounters with Dracula, and only kill him in the last one.

Yeah, because Dracula, the villain, keeps running away.

Frank could give the full list of genres he's trying to emulate, but my point is that the "captured, narrowly/daringly escape" thing is not out of place in the works AS seems to pull from. Sure Renfield gets mindfucked, but Renfield's no Luminary, and I'd actually say that Dracula taught him either Gift of Health or Thaumaturgical Forensics and turned him into a Cultist.

I'm using Dracula because that's the gothic story I have any real familiarity with, but I do know that gothic literature involves lots of heroes and heroines trapped in castles and captured and escaping, often with their guile. AH could say how much that features in Lovecraft (which gives us the Mi Go), but the Demons pretty much come by way of Silent Hill, which is notably, at least at first, survival horror, and involves lots of "trying to escape." Killer robots are straight from Raygun Gothic/50s Sci Fi and comics, which do involve lots of running.

But my real point is that it's just weird people will buy into "welp, time for us to be captured!" in Champions, because comics, but don't see the genre convention in AS as something to buy into.

Prak wrote:the Demons pretty much come by way of Silent Hill, which is notably, at least at first, survival horror, and involves lots of "trying to escape."

But protagonist of Silent Hill is not captured. He's stuck in an evil city, but he's a free agent that runs around the place killing monsters and gathering keys. Harry Mason doesn't willingly surrender to the Pyramidhead at any point. Being hit on the head in a cutscene and knocked out doesn't count.