General WoD Discussion #4: Rage Against the God-Machine

[SiuiS]

Don't usually go for the "inter-splat pissing game" myself. But you march any corpse up to a splat that explicity controls the boundary between life and death and is housing a primal, archetypal being that represents a facet of the entropy value of the universe, and that won't go well.

Sure. But, uh, is this the geists... Or the mummies?

This. You can't heal it with magic, but it's bashing damage, and generally only a couple of points of it. It's a joke.

There are a couple of other sources of resistant damage (pattern scouring gives 3 Mana for 1 resistant lethal, and Tremere liches take resistant aggravated if they run out of souls) but it's the only source of resistant bashing I know of. Resistant lethal/aggravated do actually live up to the hype.

Right, that would have been better as "Mage is the only game with resistant damage". My faux pas.

I'm pretty sure having literally every Merit of three dots or less is game breaking, too.

Except, you don't. Not at one time. And the game comes prepackaged with Costs for that sort of chicanery. A game where the ST let's everyone make narratively worthless serial pacts for merit dots is not a game where that action breaks anything; it's the kind of game you all got together to play.

Faerie superheroes is fine and dandy as a changeling game, and superpowers are not game breaking in a superhero game. They're the point.


Also, familiar with breath weapon on a Thyrsus. "Oh hey, guys, did you know I can burn all my essence, his essence, my willpower, his willpower, and all his mana to boost his stats and then amp up his breath weapon? Hey, how closely packed are those werewolves?"

Not only mixed-splat games. Also games for the splat on the side that gets overshadowed.

I.E., Mage games can handle all this just fine. But a Changeling/Werewolf/Promethean game that has Awakened mages in it is going to have problems.

Uh, semantic quibble, maybe, but a game where you have one splat and also another splat, is a cross-splat game. If there are cryptids that transform into wolves, thats one thing. IF there are uratha, in a changeling/mage/geist/vampire game, that is a different game entirely.

That's a choice. I don't think that is the default assumption. Some of the gamebooks strongly imply it - Changeling and Mage specifically both sort of insinuate their meditation/dream rules are sort of default, and also expansions on that default. But in general I think any given splat has just their own guys.

[Almarck]

Well I imagine that crunch wise mage will get less of a buff compared to other splats with some things getting nerfed or fixed.

I'm actually scared of the new paradox rules since it means that any really strong use of magic is correspondingly harder or going to have more paradox dice. Letting the gm the ability to alter the spell in unwanted manners is pretty neat and thematic.

also given the new rules it's quite possible the city bomb if ever attempted by the new rules would be overloaded with so much paradox that the mage just outright dies from the overload


what I expect is that mages will be able to interact with certain spheres unlike their core residents (given example I was told of was expelling claimed where werewolves can't). Likewise other splats will get powers not recplictable with Supernal magic (in the werewolf example, having automatic bane weapons on lesser spirits they outrank)

[Andreaz]

Well I imagine that crunch wise mage will get less of a buff compared to other splats with some things getting nerfed or fixed.

I'm actually scared of the new paradox rules since it means that any really strong use of magic is correspondingly harder or going to have more paradox dice. Letting the gm the ability to alter the spell in unwanted manners is pretty neat and thematic.

also given the new rules it's quite possible the city bomb if ever attempted by the new rules would be overloaded with so much paradox that the mage just outright dies from the overload


what I expect is that mages will be able to interact with certain spheres unlike their core residents (given example I was told of was expelling claimed where werewolves can't). Likewise other splats will get powers not recplictable with Supernal magic (in the werewolf example, having automatic bane weapons on lesser spirits they outrank)

Well, what do we know so far?
1) Paradox is now about overreaching
2) Just about every mage gets a legacy, and soon. By chargen time most cases. Legacies now give much more than 3 toys and a way to recover mana. They give 5 toys, a way to recover mana and a set of yantras (dice bonuses to casting).

[Blackdrop]

Oh, something I just read on TVTropes. Apparently spirit babies have been dropped from Werewolf 2e because "sexist". Someone care to explain that? Because I'm not understanding it at all.

From this Q&A session from the Onyx Path website

They have some really unfortunate implications that we want to move away from — penalising sex with the “wrong” people, casting Wolf-Blooded as breeding stock, punishing female characters far more than male, and a whole mess of problems around their impact on people who have lost pregnancies. I want to stress that nobody on the original design team intended any of this, but a we’re older and wiser we decided to drop a highly problematic element of the game.
Ultimately, we removed Unihar because removing them removes a bunch of unintential messages that people found very off-putting. They won’t be coming back.

[Sith_Happens]

Hours 2

Remind me which one that is?

[SiuiS]

Well I imagine that crunch wise mage will get less of a buff compared to other splats with some things getting nerfed or fixed.

I'm actually scared of the new paradox rules since it means that any really strong use of magic is correspondingly harder or going to have more paradox dice. Letting the gm the ability to alter the spell in unwanted manners is pretty neat and thematic.

also given the new rules it's quite possible the city bomb if ever attempted by the new rules would be overloaded with so much paradox that the mage just outright dies from the overload


what I expect is that mages will be able to interact with certain spheres unlike their core residents (given example I was told of was expelling claimed where werewolves can't). Likewise other splats will get powers not recplictable with Supernal magic (in the werewolf example, having automatic bane weapons on lesser spirits they outrank)

Aye. I find Mage now has a much stronger sort of pulp mystery feel to it, and that appeals to me. It's not Grand Designs and Master Plans from the start. It's "how does this do?", which is an area I've actively been penalized for exploring in 1e Mage even by some otherwise amazing and intelligent STs.

Not sure about the lack of bane weapon though? I think at risk, changing a spirit to react to your objects (or changing your objects) as though they were bane items is possible out of the Gate. As I recall, rewriting a bane (temporarily) was sort of trivial (in the chargen investment sense; not narratively or resource expense wise).

Well, what do we know so far?
1) Paradox is now about overreaching
2) Just about every mage gets a legacy, and soon. By chargen time most cases. Legacies now give much more than 3 toys and a way to recover mana. They give 5 toys, a way to recover mana and a set of yantras (dice bonuses to casting).

Ooh, neat. They weren't going to make them exhaustive though, so expect a lot of home brew!

From this Q&A session from the Onyx Path website

Respectable. I actually liked the unihar, far more than the métis, but I see their point.

Also, autocorrect and then a definition look up made me realize that métis is sorta racist. <__<

[Almarck]

The bane weapon thing is that all werewolves automatically treat natural attacks as being bane weapons all the time if they outrank or match the rank of the spirit. There's no gift or investment, other than increasinf how much renown you have which increases your effective rank. Right out of the gate wwerewolves are born to hunt and kill lesser spirits and get better at it as they grow more powerful.

They also have the power to touch spirits of course.

Also, you're talking about a mage rewriting a ban on the old system. Banes are something new, essentially the critical flaw or weakness of the spirit (bans are prohibitions or mandated behavior) that causes a bunch of things particularly aggravated damage.

[SiuiS]

Remind me which one that is?

I know. Werewolves do aggravated damage with natural weapons to spirits they outrank.

Mages can potentially do the same thing, it's just not default. But the position that "well, your wizard has to use magic to wiz so it doesn't count" is an arbitrary and silly one. I'm also confident there is a legacy to do similar. Or there was. *shrug*


Sith, hours the changeling contract doesn't have anything at level 2 that does damage. Level 3 does but only to objects. Is there a Geist power that is called Hours? We may have crossed wires.

[Almarck]

Ah gotcha. Granted I consider the fact that the werewolf an just go straight to punching instead of needing to wait for the spell to work significant enough. Assuming of course banes can be changed like bans in 2e (I imagine atleast higher levels of arcana would be needed)

[magic9mushroom]

Right, that would have been better as "Mage is the only game with resistant damage". My faux pas.

I think it is, yeah.

Except, you don't. Not at one time. And the game comes prepackaged with Costs for that sort of chicanery. A game where the ST let's everyone make narratively worthless serial pacts for merit dots is not a game where that action breaks anything; it's the kind of game you all got together to play.

Faerie superheroes is fine and dandy as a changeling game, and superpowers are not game breaking in a superhero game. They're the point.

I'm not talking about normal pledges. I'm talking about the really stupid CharOp pledge which nobody ever allows, which goes something like this:

Type: Vow
Tasks: Medial alliance (2)
Boons: Adroitness (all) (24*1 each), Blessing (all) (some huge number*1-3 each)
Duration: Season (2)
Sanction: Poisoning of Boon (all) (24*1 + some huge number*1-3 each)

Hours 2 terrorism is casting Hours 2 on a leaf or insect while you're holding it over a railroad track or road. Hours 2 renders the leaf or insect immovable and indestructible, so the cars and trains that run into it will be wrecked. Sin against Clarity 1, sure, but that's damned powerful. And there's also the old "Hours 2 on your shirt" exploit.

Also, familiar with breath weapon on a Thyrsus. "Oh hey, guys, did you know I can burn all my essence, his essence, my willpower, his willpower, and all his mana to boost his stats and then amp up his breath weapon? Hey, how closely packed are those werewolves?"

Oh, right. There isn't a cap on Essence per turn, allowing spirits to nova. The rest is just ways to pump Willpower/Mana into more Essence. Have I understood correctly?

In any case, see above. It's in much the same vein as said UberPledge, and I doubt STs will allow either once they realise what's going on. So it isn't exactly just Mage that's broken (spirits aren't Mage-only, for starters), or really an accident.

Uh, semantic quibble, maybe, but a game where you have one splat and also another splat, is a cross-splat game. If there are cryptids that transform into wolves, thats one thing. IF there are uratha, in a changeling/mage/geist/vampire game, that is a different game entirely.

That's a choice. I don't think that is the default assumption. Some of the gamebooks strongly imply it - Changeling and Mage specifically both sort of insinuate their meditation/dream rules are sort of default, and also expansions on that default. But in general I think any given splat has just their own guys.

Well, nWoD is designed from the ground up to be modular, and every core book contains the various X splat/Y splat's stereotypes of the Big Three and some rules discussing crossovers (Lupine Vitae noted as being worth more, Create Sunlight noted as being super-effective vs. vamps, etc.). And then there's Tremere Liches, which explicitly came from vampires, and the various other crossover-based stuff (though most of it isn't in core books, unlike the Tremere).

IIRC the way it works is "all crossovers are optional, but the default is that everything exists, whether or not you run into it".

From this Q&A session from the Onyx Path website

Well, I don't understand that much at all. I think significant reaching is going on to paint miscarriage as sexist - obviously, it does cause more problems for women than men, but it's hardly like WW invented miscarriage - and to paint potential consequences for inbreeding as somehow objectionable (Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs, anyone? Hapsburgs?). Having it happen to literally every werewolf-werewolf pregnancy is simplistic, yes - it should probably be a comparatively-rare event - but the idea isn't offensive unless you find reality offensive.

I could go on but I would probably offend people and I hear that's infractionable.

[Sith_Happens]

Hours 2 terrorism is casting Hours 2 on a leaf or insect while you're holding it over a railroad track or road. Hours 2 renders the leaf or insect immovable and indestructible, so the cars and trains that run into it will get tiny, inconsequential holes in them.

Fixed that for you.

[SiuiS]

Ah gotcha. Granted I consider the fact that the werewolf an just go straight to punching instead of needing to wait for the spell to work significant enough. Assuming of course banes can be changed like bans in 2e (I imagine atleast higher levels of arcana would be needed)

I fully agree. Mages are masters of execution of elaborate plans. Most other books have the task done by the time they've decided what to do, though.

I'm not talking about normal pledges. I'm talking about the really stupid CharOp pledge which nobody ever allows, which goes something like this:

Type: Vow
Tasks: Medial alliance (2)
Boons: Adroitness (all) (24*1 each), Blessing (all) (some huge number*1-3 each)
Duration: Season (2)
Sanction: Poisoning of Boon (all) (24*1 + some huge number*1-3 each)

Ah. Yes, I suppose that's technically possible.

Oh, right. There isn't a cap on Essence per turn, allowing spirits to nova. The rest is just ways to pump Willpower/Mana into more Essence. Have I understood correctly?

In any case, see above. It's in much the same vein as said UberPledge, and I doubt STs will allow either once they realise what's going on. So it isn't exactly just Mage that's broken (spirits aren't Mage-only, for starters), or really an accident.

You're all over the place. Is it an exploit, or just how spirits work?

A Mage can get a specific spirit that is shaped to his wants and needs as a familiar and operate within his own build and nothing more to achieve a high burst. A werewolf cannot do that with spirits and a Geist probably cannot do that with ghosts.

Anyone can do that with ghosts though, if the ghost was once Lost and the person makes an oath. Which is gonna be the plot point for one of my antagonists actually, but that's a digression.

Well, I don't understand that much at all. I think significant reaching is going on to paint miscarriage as sexist - obviously, it does cause more problems for women than men, but it's hardly like WW invented miscarriage - and to paint potential consequences for inbreeding as somehow objectionable (Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs, anyone? Hapsburgs?). Having it happen to literally every werewolf-werewolf pregnancy is simplistic, yes - it should probably be a comparatively-rare event - but the idea isn't offensive unless you find reality offensive.

I could go on but I would probably offend people and I hear that's infractionable.

I think your problem is you are hung up on the term sexist.

It's technically true though. It's an issue that mechanically punishes one sex more than another.

Fixed that for you.

Hahahah!

[Almarck]

My big hope for spirit Arcanum is that it is so much less easily broken in the update. The ability to take spirits as a familiars is significant to the point that I almost feel that the mage himself is less important than all of his familiars. Mostly I am talking about being able to take a spirit of up to rank equals arcana or creating one being an issue. Made significant because choosing the right spirits means outright replacing the needs of certain arcana.


Fire for fire based forces.
Clock spirits for time.
Ect.


Not perfect but I feel that it's a little cheesy to do that. Especially since if you're commanding spirits to do that you don't risk paradox.

[SiuiS]

Where did you find the ability to take spirits of rank up to your Spirit arcanum dots? I couldn't find anything except "rank 1", an example character who had a spirit long enough for it to gain rank (but no rules for it) and the potent familiar merit.

Anyway.

Familiars, I'm not familiar with the idea they are more important. Certainly, they can be equal – Flouresce and Nights-Neon-Rhythm were brothers more than master and familiar, for example – but outside of the CharOp monkey familiar wherein the Mage puts all available power into giving the monkey XP with his potent familiar merits... I'm just not seeing it.

Yes, it's potent. But ony if it's a focus, which I think is okay. That's sort of the point. Spirits are also both alien and autonomous; you don't get to have a fire spirit hanging around as a familiar that doesn't sometimes cause problems. It doesn't Black wing away when you're not looking. It causes but if and fire if at all possible. And clock spirits don't have purview over time, they have purview over clocks. Actual time spirits are abstract enough to be too high on the hierarchy to take as a familiar.

Tou can do incredible things with Spirit, yeah. You totally can do the function of any other arcanum, up to a point. But that fact is overly reductionist; you're paying with Story, Complications, Deals, and Drama for a one-time or short-term effect, where the other mages pay mana, maybe paradox, and get the effect immediately.

That is a fantastic trade in every way. It introduces social drama, conflict and plot hooks all over the place, even leaving out that spirits resent humans, likely resent shamans, and are both functionally stupid in their mono focus and so self-absorbed they can't do long term metathought. A familiar is a good leverage point there – you can work it into the hierarchies, or feed it up to have certain powers, or even just have it wander like a lone thug terrorizing and extorting – but you're not going to get too much. It took a 70 XP Thyrsus to get a familiar who could do the basic functions of "heal self" for him, and that was just one spell it 'replaced'!

[Almarck]

Understandably it's a trade but the power to make your own spirit court is a thing. Also I am talking about specific spells. One allows you to ritually imbue and modify a spirit to make it more powerful and I believe it lasts.

Anyways, mostly what I want for spirit to increase the number of personal powers instead of making more and better flunkies. I don't know but it's probably just me and what I would like for spirit magic to do...

[magic9mushroom]

Fixed that for you.

Maybe you have a tiny, inconsequential hole in your head.

Leaves are (or can be) several cm across, and you put it there with the broad side facing the direction of travel. The effect on the car would be essentially the same as being driven, at speed, into an impaling pole. The best case scenario for a car hitting it is that it smashes the front and back windscreens but doesn't hit anything else. If it hits one of the people, then logically by the end of the crash they're either stopped (and have died of whiplash, if they were travelling with any speed), or have a several-centimetre diameter (or larger) hole in them (and will die immediately of blood loss). And if it hits any other component of the car... well, they're still attached to the rest of the car, so horrible forces will be applied to it as they're shoved toward the back. Same goes for a train; trains are not made of sand as you seem to think, and shoving a pole through them is going to have severe repercussions.

Do you even physics?

[comicshorse]

Hours 2 terrorism is casting Hours 2 on a leaf or insect while you're holding it over a railroad track or road. Hours 2 renders the leaf or insect immovable and indestructible, so the cars and trains that run into it will be wrecked. Sin against Clarity 1, sure, but that's damned powerful. And there's also the old "Hours 2 on your shirt" exploit.

Which surely means you can't move as that would involve your shirt moving so you're effectively paralyzing yourself, no ?

P.S


Which is the point, its to paralyze the other guy not create invulnerable body armour. I'll just be in this corner, feeling stupid

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

I meant that Geist being overridden (which I thought was a thing, never actually read let alone played it) is less of an issue because Geist is a comparably tiny game to the others, especially Changeling, which is popular enough that it got almost enough books to be one of the Big Three lines. I didn't mean that it tended to override other lines.

[SiuiS]

Understandably it's a trade but the power to make your own spirit court is a thing. Also I am talking about specific spells. One allows you to ritually imbue and modify a spirit to make it more powerful and I believe it lasts.

You've lost me. Are you talking about an existing Mage spell, or are you talking about stuff for 2e?

[Almarck]

Existing 1e spells.

But anyways enoug about mages from me.

Edit: hang on thats a lie. Whens mage 2e coming out? I got a ffiend who is a big mage fan.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

It's listed for Summer 2015 on their Schedule website. About the same time as Promethean 2.0 weirdly enough, and a fresh new updated full Second Edition blue book. Other upcoming nWoD products this year include: Sothis Ascends for Mummy, a Demon Translation game for porting Demon: The Fallen into Demon: The Descent, the Beast: the Primordial main book, Secrets of the Covenant for V:tR, the Demon Storyteller's Guide, the Hurt Locker blue book, Dark Eras for all splats, The Huntsmen Chronicle fiction prequel to Changeling 2.0, Changeling 2.0, and Half Damned for V:tR which this is the first I've heard of it, but apparently has rules for Ghouls, Revenants, and Dhampyrs as playable characters!

Edit: this is all their PLAN though. Considering that means they're planning to publish 4 whole new Second Editions in addition to the second edition Big Blue Book (Werewolf, Mage, Promethean, Changeling) all in one year, I wouldn't be surprised if some things got pushed back a season or two.

[magic9mushroom]

You've lost me. Are you talking about an existing Mage spell, or are you talking about stuff for 2e?

Spirit 5 spell in 1e.

[SiuiS]

But once you a scarce them they no longer qualify for being a familiar.

[Sith_Happens]

Do you even physics?

I thought we were talking about killing trains, not catgirls.

[Almarck]

If said train had a cold iron battering ram, would that destroy the leaf?

More seriously any one here play vampire 2e?

[SiuiS]

That combination grill/plow on the front of a train is called a cow catcher, actually.

I'll let that sink in

[magic9mushroom]

If said train had a cold iron battering ram, would that destroy the leaf?

It should be able to destroy the leaf, but it'd be up to the ST whether the pieces stayed immovable and ripped through the train anyway.

[Rater202]

Latest Beast news from Onyx Path and RPGnet threads: Beast's don't have a fuel stat like other splats do: Instead, they can optionally burn dots of their Integrity Stat, Satiety, to do things with Nightmares and Atavisms.

It hasn't been confirmed, but between that and with how satiety has been said to be expected to fluctuate enough within a session that you shouldn't even bubble in dots on your character sheet, it's been speculated that it doesn't have breaking points.

[Almarck]

Man. It seems like OP is really getting creative with how morality bars work now. First memory which started at 3 and affected even your about to recall your own backstory, then covers which were in essence ratings for his effective a disguise is a d yiu could take multiples, next was harmony 2.0 which cannot even have exp spent into it and could break upwards since it has two sets of breaking points. And now beasts use their stat as a resource

[Leliel]

Well, I don't understand that much at all. I think significant reaching is going on to paint miscarriage as sexist - obviously, it does cause more problems for women than men, but it's hardly like WW invented miscarriage - and to paint potential consequences for inbreeding as somehow objectionable (Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs, anyone? Hapsburgs?). Having it happen to literally every werewolf-werewolf pregnancy is simplistic, yes - it should probably be a comparatively-rare event - but the idea isn't offensive unless you find reality offensive.

I could go on but I would probably offend people and I hear that's infractionable.

Because it's not miscarriage. It's giving birth a screaming demon made of hate for its parents, and it creates a dynamic where sapient people are viewed as breeding stock. And the whole "punishing romance with the wrong people" angle, which is racist.

There's a lot more complexities than what I had in mind when I wrote that line, but suffice to say, it's sexist too along with all the other unfortunate implications.