NWoD Question for STs

[DualShadow]

Greetings people of the playground, I have some questions about Storytelling in NWoD. I have read many of the books and found a soft spot the system and all that but I wanted to know:

What are the general (if any), house rules that people uses, either to make it more fun or to fix minor aspect of the system for any reasons, may it be personal opinion or to fix something that doesn't run well.

It can be for all known aspect of the game, WoD, Vampires, Werewolves, Changeling and so on and so forth.

If anyone wanna share some tips about managing the game and what kind of known cheap abuses the player can pull-off it would also be appreciated.

[Pigkappa]

What are the general (if any), house rules that people uses, either to make it more fun or to fix minor aspect of the system for any reasons, may it be personal opinion or to fix something that doesn't run well.

My houserule for dramatic failures:

A roll is a dramatic failure if more than 50% of the dice rolled 1 and the roll is not a success.

Note that dramatic failures are still highly unlikely, but you can suffer one even if you have more than 0 dice.


If you want to suggest the players some sort of plot road, you may want to alter some XPs cost. For example, I was storytelling for an Ordo Dracul party and I wanted the players to fit in well into the covenant, but that's hard when the coils cost a lot of experience points (and are mostly useless, too, with a few exceptions). So I lowered their price a little (and still no one took any coil u_u).

what kind of known cheap abuses the player can pull-off it would also be appreciated.

The merits that allow you to make multiple attacks are extremely dangerous. You can spend a lot of XPs in Strength, Brawl and Vigor, but you are still unlikely to have more than 15 dice when you punch someone.
At roughly the same experience cost, you can reach 35+ dice with the Kung Fu **** merit.
If you have Protean ***, you can likely kill everything in one hit.

A widespread solution is to say that to use Kung Fu ****, you need to move in a precise and complicated way that doesn't allow you to hit your opponent with the claws from Protean ***.

If anyone wanna share some tips about managing the game

Choose one kind of supernatural sphere and focus on that one. Don't play with a mixed party. Each sphere is already complicated enough that you need a lot of time to make the players get a feel of how those beings think and act, and they aren't likely to get it at all if you mix them.

Don't let the PCs roll social skills before some interaction has happened. If they are convincing, you can just let the roll go at all. Social rolls are good if something isn't going as it should be (a Subterfuge **** character whose player is just rambling something stupid; he should try to do best next time or change his stats) or if you are in a hurry (maybe because the party isn't together and you want to speed up the game).

When you are interpreting an NPC, do it as if you were an actor. This is difficult and I do this very little myself because I'm bad at any social activity, but when you do it right, it makes the game much better. I'm currently doing this for the most important NPCs only (main example: the Baron de Cimitière in my chronicle is a sociopath who never looks into the eyes of the one he's speaking to, and speaks with long pauses), namely the ones the players should be scared of.

The NPCs are often active and intelligent people, and you should make them act when something important happens. Again, using V:tR as an example, if there's a breach in the Masquerade it's likely that some Elder is going to find that out, and you have to figure out the way they react. Example from my chronicle: the PCs made a huge mistake and fed in public without even speaking to the witnesses before it was too late. The Elder with the deepest roots into the local media managed to organize a sudden media strike and went to the Prince saying what he wanted to have if he was to stop that piece of news by diverting the blame onto his community. The Prince was forced to agree, but in turn used this event as a pretext to say that the convenant of the PCs (the Ordo Dracul, which he already hated and was particularly weak in the city) was irresponsible and banished it from the city.

[The Glyphstone]

The merits that allow you to make multiple attacks are extremely dangerous. You can spend a lot of XPs in Strength, Brawl and Vigor, but you are still unlikely to have more than 15 dice when you punch someone.
At roughly the same experience cost, you can reach 35+ dice with the Kung Fu **** merit.
If you have Protean ***, you can likely kill everything in one hit.

A widespread solution is to say that to use Kung Fu ****, you need to move in a precise and complicated way that doesn't allow you to hit your opponent with the claws from Protean ***.

Another way to fix this is a variant of how the MET/LARP rules handle said multi-attack merits - rather than getting multiple attacks, you get multiple draws (or in this case, rolls) to a single attack and pick the best among them. So it grossly reduces the maximum damage you can do in a single flurry of attacks, but raises the odds you'll do the maximum damage you can do on that one attack.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Not gonna lie, when I saw "Kung Fu ****" and "Protean ***", I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what poor innocent words had been caught by the censor. Then I realized that you were just describing merit dots.

[Fouredged Sword]

Protean + sniper combat style. Bows have damage based on strength+2or3. I had a starting character (deva) who pulled out a custom made bow and did 7 or 8 auto lethal damage on a hit. She almost always went first. Pure protean and clarity (because you can get the ability to add the two together for truely silly strength)

[comicshorse]

Okay I've definitely missed something here. How does Protean help you using a bow ?

[Selrahc]

Okay I've definitely missed something here. How does Protean help you using a bow ?

He's talking about vigor and celerity.
Celerity is a fairly obvious one, vigor goes by the slightly circuitous route of a confusion between Protean and Potence, which was the OWoD name for Vigor.

[Pigkappa]

Also, beware of mages at high experience levels. 5 dots in a single Arcanum are enough to make world-changing events happen, and while that makes mages interesting, it also makes hard for a storyteller to have any degree of control over what they can do.

[DualShadow]

I thnak you all for you nice answers, it will help me to make a good impression for the first time I present it to my players.

[comicshorse]

Greetings people of the playground, I have some questions about Storytelling in NWoD. I have read many of the books and found a soft spot the system and all that but I wanted to know:

What are the general (if any), house rules that people uses, either to make it more fun or to fix minor aspect of the system for any reasons, may it be personal opinion or to fix something that doesn't run well.

It can be for all known aspect of the game, WoD, Vampires, Werewolves,

Our ST got rid of all vampires not showing up on camera's in NuVampire. Just so it wouldn't come up every damn session

[Nerd-o-rama]

Our ST got rid of all vampires not showing up on camera's in NuVampire. Just so it wouldn't come up every damn session

Friggin' red light cams. Clearly a tool put into use by the conspiracy behind Task Force VALKYRIE.

[wayfare]

One bit of advice from my experience -- if you are looking for a more "heroic" and far less "gritty" campaign, allow the lower of Dex/Wits apply to ranged attacks nad the higher value to apply to melee attacks. Its not very typical for the world, but for a combat focused game (which most WoD is not) it works fine.

[Eisenfavl]

I use a fair number of the Danse Macarbe optional rules. Social effects of disciplines are purchased, clans get their +3 situations, social combat and mental combat show up a fair amount, in the rare times actual combat occurs I use tilts.
Mages are ridiculously powerful. Ignoring the fact that they can kill half the world, they can simply shoot missiles at everything as starting characters.
Heavily enforce 'need military contacts for high level equipment' ban on resources. Otherwise, players will run around in Dragon Scale with prototype weapons and ignore your structured social plotline, because they can shoot their way through the wall and prototype flamethrower the vampire.