Crazy sexy sax man.

[mordicai]

Freyja's day I couldn't do anything besides whimper & pass out. Saturn's day the most I could accomplish was a few blog posts & some movie watching. Today I was a lot better, but I still canceled my game on account of, well, if I had some bad situation go down, I'd rather it was here & not elsewhere. I'd been sleeping on the air mattress (so my

Comments

[primroseport]

So how do you deal with "powers" and supernatural abilities in your NWOD homebrew game? I'm going to run one soon, using NWOD, but in the whole The Fall/The Cell/Dark Tower-style setting that we both fancy. And I'm being real generous about what kind of characters they can be (namely, anything). But Now I'm not sure how to handle anything that isn't basic traits. What kinds of powers do you PCs have and how do they work? In general

[mordicai]

Basically I say: You get a Potency & an Essence. Like Primal Urge/Blood Potency/Gnosis/whatever & Blood/Rage/Whatever. Then I let 'em buy anything from any of the books that are roughly balanced-- Promethean, Vampire, Werewolf, mostly. & I let 'em skip around. If you want Obfuscate 4 to be a doppleganger without invisibility...sure, okay, if that is your concept.

[mordicai]

& I think Potency/Essence is even unnecessary-- you can just say things that cost a point of blood or whatever cost a point of willpower.

[primroseport]

Interesting. I already know one guy wants to be a mage (non-WOD mage), so I'm pretty much gonna have him take a simplified Mage template. My other thought was to use the Endowment creation guide system and the Dread Powers from Hunter. They're basic and "skinnable", and in fact the various example descriptions they offer show how broad the powers are. Agonize? Sure, that's /anything/ that cripples your enemy with pain. Mesmerize? Anything that... mesmerizes. Etc. Want a flood of ants to pour out of your orifices and protect you from bashing damage for three rounds? That's 1+3=4 dots, multiplied by five (or whatever) for the total experience to purchase in-game, or just 4 merit or "cool power" points at creation.

Hmmm. I think this will work. And, yeah, fueling using willpower. And I guess if they want technology or artifacts rather than a power, it will have to have some kind of power source or recharge time.

Hmmm.

Thanks

[mordicai]

I don't like Mage; I think the rules are a nightmare. Just me, but for a book about flexible spellcasting, having 80 % of your book taken up with rules & spells is...well, even DnD doesn't do that any more!

I think Dread Powers are a fine way to go, but they might be a bit powerful? That is my impression of them, anyway. Anyhow, no reason a device can't work the same way, heck, if they have to concentrate to figure out the alien runes, or whatever.

[primroseport]

I think those spells are really just very basic and broad spells that cover virtually anything anyone would ever want to do, and give workable mechanics the ST can choose to use. I think having those spells to work with results in the ST/player having a pretty clear understand what is possible at what level, such that even with the book closed, s/he can work out what would be needed for whatever random spell is called out. But we've had this conversation before

[mordicai]

I sometimes think about doing this: Just giving magic guys ANY Sphere they want-- "Birds." "Earth." "Shadows." & then just...I dunno, rating them by cost? Small, medium, large? & then letting them take dots in that to do...fuck, whatever.

Anyhow, you can make items out of vampire powers too! I think our point is the same though: gutting out the fluff (unless, you know, the fluff is evocative, in which case, right on) to use the crunch for similar purposes. I don't care if you have Vigor because you are a vampire or from krypton or have a cyborg arm. SAME DIFF.

[primroseport]

For sure. Last night I had a breakthrough: I know the setting and some of the characters and events of the first one or two sessions, and I have the gist of the overarching mystery that has brought them together, though I'm intentionally keeping it vague for myself, to preserve that "Lost" or "Twin Peaks" sort of weirdness and enigmatic quality.

I'll blab about it later!

[mordicai]

Blab away; I have things to blab about myself!

[primroseport]

So here's a question. Does tying "powers" to willpower make willpower run out too fast? How do you keep the players having a reserve of anything left the next day so they can still blast something that needs blasting or try extra hard to do something

[mordicai]

In my experience, people always have Willpower left; also, being low on Willpower is a GREAT way to prod your players into screwing themselves over by playing to their Vices.

What if you let the PCs use Risk to advance their Virtue or Vice? I've toyed with that idea-- I usually just discard it because I like less rules versus more rules.

[primroseport]

Hmm. Yeah, I've been on a less rules kick, which is partly why I want to let PCs determine what happens with no rolls. Oh, did I talk about that? I'm inspired by Conan RPGs "Fate Points" and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen's story negotiation to give PCs more direct input into what happens. I experimented with this in the Requiem game I ran, where, since I was winging most of it (only one step ahead of the players, and sometimes not even that), I started letting their blurted out ideas about what they next discover or encounter be reality

[mordicai]

Explain how this works with the Negotiation. I am inclined to be like "How many dots do you have in that? Okay good enough."

I have thought of this, but some old school gamers are...reluctant to do this.

Well, they can get points out of Virtue, too; I'm not down on that. I'm saying Vice puts forward short term game, since you get it right away. & it doesn't have to be like, KILLING NUNS! for Wrath or anything. I am really into Vice, since many players are inclined to make flawless characters. Reward flaws!

Vice isn't equal to evil. Sloth doesn't have to be over the top-- just enough to impact the story.

[primroseport]

My two more regular gaming groups are very much into the idea of negotiated gaming. One group is familiar with Baron Munchausen, having played it before. In that game someone prompts you to tell a story of your daring whimsical exploits (Lord Mordicai, tell us of the time you defeated an entire Prussian division with three plucked chickens) and you have to start telling it with no preparation. Meanwhile, the others "wager" from their purse of coins, interrupting to challenge something you said or ask a question (But isn't the Moon Empress allergic to cheese? I could have sworn...) and you can incorporate that into your story or avoid it by matching the wager, etc

[mordicai]

Do these storytelling ventures effect the PLOT? They sound more like fun parlor games-- not to say that it isn't like, the point of gaming in part, but I'm just saying like-- or is the adventure told through this frame story?

I had a confab with some players about that degree of PC control-- of having "points" (we dubbed the "Effervescence" for the thought experiment) that would be total shot in the dark rolls-- basically a Chance die for...ANYTHING. "Don't I recognize that guard?" becomes-- "spend an Effervescence...." on a roll of a 10 yes! That is the guy from the bar who bet you "anything you want!" in pool but then you beat him-- you still have his marker! but on a 1 it becomes "Uh...oh, yeah. That is Darth Vader, slumming it."

The PCs I spoke to about it weren't psyched. !

[primroseport]

Hahaha--those examples are lol.

But yes, plot is negotiable. One of the prime motivations for this game was to have the plot be very sketchy so that I respond to what the players want to do, and don't feel like I have to scrap a neat-o idea I had planned for the endgame. Being of a writerly nature, I have tended to overwrite the future of the game and then feel blindsided when things changed. I broke out of that habit with a couple of pick-up games and games set in cities with far too many characters for me to have planned it all--so I made shit up in response to player input.

If it feels a little bit like Lost, where shit is happening and nobody clearly knows why, so be it. Chaos and transience is built into the world actually--things not making a whole lot of sense is a fact of life there. To give the chars some initial direction, they begin with a "quest", which they can use as a trajectory for the rest of the game, or ignore once the trail goes cold, which it will.

I'm basically talking this out by talking to you! Thanks