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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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Orpheus projectors when they are out of their bodies because then they are effectively ghosts. And of course other ghosts. Beyond that most CWoD splats have at least some powers that can harm, ward off or bind ghosts.
 
notthepenguins said:
nWoD?
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Yep, nWod.

Also, interestingly limited in terms of what can effect them. Which makes having a Ghost Familiar even cooler :p.

With Dread Companion, the sense of touch is unlocked.

If you were a dork, you could yell, "Falcon punch" at someone from halfway across the room and then have the ghost punch them for you, and they'd be all like, "What the hell was that."
 
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The Laurent said:
If you were a dork, you could yell, "Falcon punch" at someone from halfway across the room and then have the ghost punch them for you, and they'd be all like, "What the hell was that."
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No, a Falcon Punch is when you actually lunge forward and clock them one.

What you want is to stand there shouting 'ORARARARARARA' while your opponent is inexplicably battered by invisible fists.
 
One fun thing about a lot of nWoD properties (though to different extents) is how the genre/power level can shift pretty rapidly from level to level.

You can ride on a steel unicorn after a running house on stilts through a thorny forest wielding the bow of a hunter-goddess goblin-thing to hunt down a mad loyalist sorceress planning a horrific ritual, and get beaten up by a bunch of purely-mortal thugs wielding baseball bats in the same chronicle. Hell, in theory you could in the same session, though there'd be some schizophrenia there.

Combat is dangerous enough, and especially for, say, Changelings, greater power rarely gives 'You lose' buttons against just vanilla challenges, that each level can be valid. Like, there's no 'Your bullets cannot hurt me' Contract which automatically makes it so that you can suddenly fight armies of mortals or something. A guy with a shotgun is a threat even if you're vastly powerful.

I mean, if you are vastly powerful, you have ways to deal with him, but you don't have ways to just play around with him. You can't say, "Take your best shot, I'll tank your blows and laugh in your face and hold back for five minutes and then kill you."

No time and no margin to fuck around like that.

But at the same time, yes. You can have a Fae Mount and a powerful Token and be hunting a mad sorceress with a Mobile Hollow.
 
The Laurent said:
One fun thing about a lot of nWoD properties (though to different extents) is how the genre/power level can shift pretty rapidly from level to level.

You can ride on a steel unicorn after a running house on stilts through a thorny forest wielding the bow of a hunter-goddess goblin-thing to hunt down a mad loyalist sorceress planning a horrific ritual, and get beaten up by a bunch of purely-mortal thugs wielding baseball bats in the same chronicle. Hell, in theory you could in the same session, though there'd be some schizophrenia there.

Combat is dangerous enough, and especially for, say, Changelings, greater power rarely gives 'You lose' buttons against just vanilla challenges, that each level can be valid. Like, there's no 'Your bullets cannot hurt me' Contract which automatically makes it so that you can suddenly fight armies of mortals or something. A guy with a shotgun is a threat even if you're vastly powerful.

I mean, if you are vastly powerful, you have ways to deal with him, but you don't have ways to just play around with him. You can't say, "Take your best shot, I'll tank your blows and laugh in your face and hold back for five minutes and then kill you."

No time and no margin to fuck around like that.

But at the same time, yes. You can have a Fae Mount and a powerful Token and be hunting a mad sorceress with a Mobile Hollow.
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If you can manage to get to wyrd 9 while remaining sane, you can always take sublime, which makes it explicitly impossible for mortals to attack you (excluding self-defense). Vainglory 3 has a similar effect, albeit a more temporary one, so any mortal combat just stops working.

Beyond that, a high wyrd changeling with the right contracts can get nearly invincible to low level threats. Say wyrd 6. Seperation 4 gives 6 defense right there, which applies to firearms. Combine with natural defense of say 3 and mortals have to be pretty tough to even hit you. Elements 5 gives this changeling 3 armour, stack with elements 2 for 4 armour, making anything that does hit not do much.

Still, all of this stuff is pretty high up in the game. If you've made it to the point where you can do this sort of stuff, then you're earned that near invincibility.
 
Hydroplatypus said:
If you can manage to get to wyrd 9 while remaining sane, you can always take sublime, which makes it explicitly impossible for mortals to attack you (excluding self-defense). Vainglory 3 has a similar effect, albeit a more temporary one, so any mortal combat just stops working.

Beyond that, a high wyrd changeling with the right contracts can get nearly invincible to low level threats. Say wyrd 6. Seperation 4 gives 6 defense right there, which applies to firearms. Combine with natural defense of say 3 and mortals have to be pretty tough to even hit you. Elements 5 gives this changeling 3 armour, stack with elements 2 for 4 armour, making anything that does hit not do much.

Still, all of this stuff is pretty high up in the game. If you've made it to the point where you can do this sort of stuff, then you're earned that near invincibility.
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And even then, it's only for certain builds and only against certain threats, or threats expressed certain ways. Plenty of Changelings might not have those particular contracts, or might have less or more dice for it.

Cora Graves, for instance, if you actually got to shoot her in the back of the head, would die like any other woman despite being, by any standards, massively OP. :V
 
That's mostly Changeling to my understanding, especially come nWoD 2E, and mostly due to their lack of direct asskicking Contracts. The general combat mechanics do flatten the power curve somewhat, but especially for say, Vampire 2E, they can scale beyond mortals pretty sharply at higher levels.

For example:
  • Celerity allows you to just take another action whenever the fuck you want, explicitly allowed to interrupt another's action (frex, popping Celerity mid axe-swing to step out of range and become an invalid target). Combined with being able to boost your speed with it, you can easily go 'lol nah' to a whole swathe of enemy attacks, unless they have Celerity to counter it back.
  • Dominate 1 allows you to make your enemies just kill themselves. Dominate 5 lets you straight-up possess them.
  • Majesty 5 makes mortals basically unable to try to harm you.
  • Obfuscate 3 makes you invisible, even in plain sight. Obfuscate 5 lets you do basically whatever the fuck you want, Obfuscate-wise, to people in your lair.
  • Protean 5 makes you immune to anything that isn't fire/sunlight/banes.
  • Resilience reduces damage by Resilience + 1 for 1 vitae, which is ridiculous.
  • Vigor makes you silly-strong in general, all the time, and you can double-dip with blood expenditure.
And then the Devotions...
  • Force of Nature makes you an insane murder-machine.
  • Juggernaut's Gait is a legit turn-long and extendable perfect defense, though the blood cost for sustaining it is only really viable as an elder.
  • Riot turns that gang of mortals trying to beat you up into a gang of mortals murdering each other.
  • Vermin Flood just murders them by doing (Animalism) lethal damage every turn that ignores armor
et cetera. I know Mages are even sillier, and I doubt Werewolves are worse at physical beatdowns than Vampires are.
 
notthepenguins said:
That's mostly Changeling to my understanding, especially come nWoD 2E, and mostly due to their lack of direct asskicking Contracts. The general combat mechanics do flatten the power curve somewhat, but especially for say, Vampire 2E, they can scale beyond mortals pretty sharply at higher levels.

For example:
  • Celerity allows you to just take another action whenever the fuck you want, explicitly allowed to interrupt another's action (frex, popping Celerity mid axe-swing to step out of range and become an invalid target). Combined with being able to boost your speed with it, you can easily go 'lol nah' to a whole swathe of enemy attacks, unless they have Celerity to counter it back.
  • Dominate 1 allows you to make your enemies just kill themselves. Dominate 5 lets you straight-up possess them.
  • Majesty 5 makes mortals basically unable to try to harm you.
  • Obfuscate 3 makes you invisible, even in plain sight. Obfuscate 5 lets you do basically whatever the fuck you want, Obfuscate-wise, to people in your lair.
  • Protean 5 makes you immune to anything that isn't fire/sunlight/banes.
  • Resilience reduces damage by Resilience + 1 for 1 vitae, which is ridiculous.
  • Vigor makes you silly-strong in general, all the time, and you can double-dip with blood expenditure.
And then the Devotions...
  • Force of Nature makes you an insane murder-machine.
  • Juggernaut's Gait is a legit turn-long and extendable perfect defense, though the blood cost for sustaining it is only really viable as an elder.
  • Riot turns that gang of mortals trying to beat you up into a gang of mortals murdering each other.
  • Vermin Flood just murders them by doing (Animalism) lethal damage every turn that ignores armor
et cetera. I know Mages are even sillier, and I doubt Werewolves are worse at physical beatdowns than Vampires are.
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Oh, I thought so, but I was hesitant to say 'Changeling' and then have fifty people jumping on me pointing out how it wasn't unique to Changeling and that if I got gud, scrub, and knew more about Mage/Mummy/Whatever I'd know it was a common thing. :V

So I hedged my bets and wasn't good anyways. :p
 
The Laurent said:
One fun thing about a lot of nWoD properties (though to different extents) is how the genre/power level can shift pretty rapidly from level to level.
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I think you meant "devs cannot into combat", or "shitty balancing". 1st edition NWoD was even worse, with pepper spray being a deadly weapon to pretty much ANYTHING in (close) range. And it was free to boot! Then there's the fact that IIRC firearms and explosives cannot be dodged normally because of "lol realism"... Oh wait, all of that is still technically true in the new edition.

The Laurent said:
Combat is dangerous enough, and especially for, say, Changelings, greater power rarely gives 'You lose' buttons against just vanilla challenges, that each level can be valid. Like, there's no 'Your bullets cannot hurt me' Contract which automatically makes it so that you can suddenly fight armies of mortals or something. A guy with a shotgun is a threat even if you're vastly powerful.
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DTD's Demon: "Lol Amateur".
 
HeavyBane said:
I think you meant "devs cannot into combat", or "shitty balancing". 1st edition NWoD was even worse, with pepper spray being a deadly weapon to pretty much ANYTHING in (close) range. And it was free to boot! Then there's the fact that IIRC firearms and explosives cannot be dodged normally because of "lol realism"... Oh wait, all of that is still technically true in the new edition.



DTD's Demon: "Lol Amateur".
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I can sorta agree that 1e is not entirely balanced, but I like the low-down feel of some of that stuff. It could be done better, but I don't disagree in theory at least with what they were trying to do.

Also, how would you have handled firearms without getting into stupid wuxia bullshit? Now, firearms always hitting is clearly not how it works, not even close (though some of that is covered by the fact that most people shouldn't be rolling a lot of dice), but leaping away from bullets hither and yon takes away from the fact that combat's supposed to actually be dangerous and something you shouldn't leap into, because the concept is that WoD isn't a combat simulator that I guess lets you also talk to people if you REALLY WANT TO, ala D&D.
 
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The Laurent said:
Also, how would you have handled firearms without getting into stupid wuxia bullshit? Now, firearms always hitting is clearly not how it works, not even close (though some of that is covered by the fact that most people shouldn't be rolling a lot of dice), but leaping away from bullets hither and yon takes away from the fact that combat's supposed to actually be dangerous and something you shouldn't leap into, because the concept is that WoD isn't a combat simulator that I guess lets you also talk to people, ala D&D.
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Gun nibble is a consequence of the fact that the Storytelling system's combat is designed for back alley brawls and hobo knife-fights. Hence, when two people get into a fight, they're both getting punched up or cut up. When two untrained people do it, there's a lot of flailing at each other, but it's still over in under a minute. It's a good system for two drunks flailing each other.

Guns? I'd look to Unknown Armies. If they have a gun and you do not, you're fucked. When guns come out, people die. If someone points a gun at you, you should probably do what they say, or else hope you're close enough to latch onto their arm and stop them killing you. If you're downrange of a gun, you better keep your head down because taking a bullet to the shoulder means you're headed straight to intensive care.

Hence, low dice pools, rules text which hammer home that in most cases where you use a gun in WoD it's not like firing on the range and thus much of the time you'll be taking penalties, high damage if you manage to score even a single success, and you get to apply your Defence against firearms as long as you're actively defending - ie, cowering behind cover or running away. My ideal model for gun combat for nWoD is one where guns are a bloody, murderous way of solving problems very quickly and pulling out a gun is a massive terrifying escalation. One where the optimal way to kill someone dead is to shoot them with a gun, and then rules and mechanics and system integration that hammers home that solving your problems by shooting them solves your short term problems and then gets other people trying to shoot you and some day you'll catch a bullet and die in a gutter.

(Vampires are fucking scary to mortals because vampires treat being shot like being punched - and fire is scary to vampires because they treat it like mortals treat being shot. Mages are terrifying to everyone because magic spells use the gun damage system and hence the Awakened structure their entire society so they don't start throwing spells at each other because when they do that, people die and then monsters from the Abyss break through to add to your problems on top of your sucking chest wound)
 
The Laurent said:
Also, how would you have handled firearms without getting into stupid wuxia bullshit? .
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Going off the 1e rules here, but cover penalties seem to help here.

If you're in a serious non-ambush gunfight, everyone should be in cover, or running around, which should impose enough penalties that missing becomes fairly common for average-skill people. Like lets take a somewhat average soldier, with 2 Dex and 3 weapons skill. If your opponent is in decent cover that's a -3, so you're rolling 2 dice. That's a 50% chance to miss right there. And your own cover also penalizes you soewhat, so decent cover gives an additional -2. If you have decent cover you're rolling with a -5 penalty, pushing this average person into chance die territory. If he's slightly above average, say 3/3 or having a speciality with his gun, he's still got only a 30% chance of success on each shot. 50% with 3/4 or 3/3/specialty.
 
HeavyBane said:
I think you meant "devs cannot into combat", or "shitty balancing". 1st edition NWoD was even worse, with pepper spray being a deadly weapon to pretty much ANYTHING in (close) range. And it was free to boot! Then there's the fact that IIRC firearms and explosives cannot be dodged normally because of "lol realism"... Oh wait, all of that is still technically true in the new edition.
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Remind me what the deal with pepper spray was?
 
If you're really that worried about someone pepper spraying you, put on a pair of goggles and be done with it. Can't reach your eyes, so it makes you effectively immune to it. If you're in the northern parts of the world you should be able to get ski goggles for like $20 for a cheap pair.
 
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