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White Wolf's World of Darkness

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Imrix said:
There's a gun in Titanfall 2 called the X-55 Devotion, and it's been been held as one of the most OP guns in the game pretty much since release. MJ12 basically made an expie that picks up on every single notable feature of it, mechanical, aesthetic, and meta.
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And just like the Devotion I had to just put a bunch of soft balancing factors in it to make it reasonable, because holy shit 3 extra reasonably coincidental free attacks per round is ridiculously OP despite the spheres it uses not being that high. (there is a reason why the Golden Gunman rote is so ludicrous).

Technically it should be a 6-point Device, not an 8-point one, for example. :V
 
MJ12 Commando said:
And just like the Devotion I had to just put a bunch of soft balancing factors in it to make it reasonable, because holy shit 3 extra reasonably coincidental free attacks per round is ridiculously OP despite the spheres it uses not being that high. (there is a reason why the Golden Gunman rote is so ludicrous).

Technically it should be a 6-point Device, not an 8-point one, for example. :V
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And that you can't use autofire while spooling up.
 
Scia said:
And that you can't use autofire while spooling up.
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Can't use autofire or strafe with it period, you just get a lot of really nasty bursts. This is opposed to the more hilarious method of doing good in gunfites as a wizard.

See, as a wizard, you find it relatively hard to get big Exalted-tier dice pools. But. And this is a big but. You can pretty trivially reduce difficulties. The maximum you can lower a difficulty is 3-but you can also compensate for difficulty increases. For example, the difficulty increase from using autofire. Therefore, it is reasonably viable as a gun wizard to cast a persistent Forces 1/Mind 1 effect to adjust your reflexes and predict recoil to lower the difficulty of Firearms rolls, gather like 7 successes on it, and then proceed to win a gunfight by repeatedly firing machine pistols on full automatic, then discarding them.

Firing on full auto adds +10 dice and +2 difficulty, but each success rolled on the attack roll adds +1 damage (this may stack with the normal +1 damage for extra successes rule). So you can, as an ambidextrous gun wizard with some decent stats (let's say you have Dexterity 5, Firearms 3 because why not have Dex 5), make two attacks at 16d and 15d respectively, each of which deals base 5L damage. Base 5L doesn't sound too good, except you're rolling an average of 10 successes-which means it's more like 16L (or 25L if you read the full-auto rules another way). 16L is straight-up in the "has a decent chance of inflicting instant death on an unarmored individual" level which you really want to be in (the best way to avoid damage in oMage is to kill motherfuckers before they can shoot you). Alternatively you can spray an area and split those successes between other people... which means you can hose down literally two dozen motherfuckers. If you have the time, you can add Entropy 1 to that mix and lower the difficulty of your damage rolls or straight-up add health levels of damage to your attacks.

But then you're empty and need to reload. Fear not. There's a skill called Fast-Draw, which allows you to reflexively draw and ready a weapon at even 1 dot. Take 1 dot of Fast-Draw, and you can reenact the Matrix lobby scene because you will be wielding one-handed machine pistols and SMGs, then throwing them away once you run out of ammo, which will be 'literally in the same turn.'
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Firing on full auto adds +10 dice and +2 difficulty, but each success rolled on the attack roll adds +1 damage (this may stack with the normal +1 damage for extra successes rule).
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This may be me misunderstanding, but I thought that, while it doesn't stack with the normal "extra damage for extra successes" rule, the upgrade is that it replaces it with doing +1 levels of damage per extra success.
 
Just finishing a read-through of the Silver Ladder book. Pretty good, and then right at the Appendix/Antagonists, it just starts to fall apart. :p

I mean, some of the character ideas are fine, but they accidentally use "Correspondence" once instead of Space, all but one of the stat sheets are over-Gnosis'd and underpowered.

IE, They'll have Gnosis 5 (impressive), but no Legacy and nothing more than a rating in their ruling Arcana. Not even a high one, in one case. What sort of Gnosis 5 Mage has Death 3, Matter 3? And that's it.

And then suddenly the last guy, for no reason at all, has Mind "6".

I know it's typical WW-ish, but I do wonder, is it really that hard to check this shit?
 
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The Laurent said:
Just finishing a read-through of the Silver Ladder book. Pretty good, and then right at the Appendix/Antagonists, it just starts to fall apart. :p

I mean, some of the character ideas are fine, but they accidentally use "Correspondence" once instead of Space, all but one of the stat sheets are over-Gnosis'd and underpowered.

IE, They'll have Gnosis 5 (impressive), but no Legacy and nothing more than a rating in their ruling Arcana. Not even a high one, in one case. What sort of Gnosis 5 Mage has Death 3, Matter 3? And that's it.

And then suddenly the last guy, for no reason at all, has Mind "6".

I know it's typical WW-ish, but I do wonder, is it really that hard to check this shit?
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Has WW/OP ever written up a good set of antagonists, stat wise I mean?

Edit: I don't really understand how this happens. I've seen them write up good antagonists, fluff wise, but as soon as a stat block comes up it's like they loose their damn minds. It happens over and over, how did they let it happen so many times?
 
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cmwatford said:
HEdit: I don't really understand how this happens. I've seen them write up good antagonists, fluff wise, but as soon as a stat block comes up it's like they loose their damn minds. It happens over and over, how did they let it happen so many times?
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They're allergic to numbers and certitude. Any time they try to pin down anything quantitatively or concretely, it burns them like sunlight does Kindred.
 
Generalissimo said:
Realized by standards of the setting we're all incredibly awesome.
Like by definition of literally awe inspiring.

Call yourself a :turian:Scholar:turian: mister Becket?
I've read Chronicle of the Black Labyrinth without going insane!
(or more insane than I was already)
In setting nobody has Book of Nod, Revelations of the Dark Mother, Erciyes Fragments, Chronicle of the Black Labyrinth, Hunter Apocrypha, and Silver Record. . .
. . . all in one convenient bookshelf collection.

Even possessing multiple versions of Book of Nod with a copy dedicated to lending out.
By standards of World of Darkness people regularly die and kill for less.

With mechanics of the setting my Library rates ten dots.
Probably not close to anywhere what others around here posses.
Willing to bet some of you have more impressive collections. . .
. .. but mechanically there is zero way of ranking different +10 libraries?

Of course it gets better.
I am guessing standard general occult rating around here is about nine-ish.
Am very certain plenty of you have 10 Lore in multiple subjects.
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Which is hilarious.

A starting vampire finds a library with all the sourcebooks. What does he do?
 
Get killed because even though he knows all this stuff he doesn't have the knowledge of how to use the disciplines, has no resources and no way to contact the people of power. Even if he does, he's a fledgling and most likely killed by a more powerful vampire who takes all the sourcebooks and has a much better opportunity of using all the information in them.
 
Bel said:
Get killed because even though he knows all this stuff he doesn't have the knowledge of how to use the disciplines, has no resources and no way to contact the people of power. Even if he does, he's a fledgling and most likely killed by a more powerful vampire who takes all the sourcebooks and has a much better opportunity of using all the information in them.
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So what if its a more powerful vampire?
 
Well to be fair there is a fair bit of blackmail material in there. Like 'so and so prince actually diablised their sire'...but whose going to believe you? And if you bring it up, you mist likely die because people that powerful don't fuck around.
 
Quantumboost said:
They're allergic to numbers and certitude. Any time they try to pin down anything quantitatively or concretely, it burns them like sunlight does Kindred.
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A friend of mine once talked to one of the original makers of WoD. Said maker said that during the original planning phase, he said "Okay, we'll make an RPG, but it won't have quantitative trait levels at all [like they have in those other games were you have X strength and Y intelligence etc.]", and after some long, long arguments with someone else (sponsor? boss? other designers? I don't know), he backed down to a "okay, you get your quantitative ratings of traits, but they will be expressed as dots, not as numbers".
At this point I wonder what RPGs would've been like if he got his way and one of the influential game lines was non-quantitative.
 
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The Laurent said:
Just finishing a read-through of the Silver Ladder book. Pretty good, and then right at the Appendix/Antagonists, it just starts to fall apart. :p

I mean, some of the character ideas are fine, but they accidentally use "Correspondence" once instead of Space, all but one of the stat sheets are over-Gnosis'd and underpowered.

IE, They'll have Gnosis 5 (impressive), but no Legacy and nothing more than a rating in their ruling Arcana. Not even a high one, in one case. What sort of Gnosis 5 Mage has Death 3, Matter 3? And that's it.

And then suddenly the last guy, for no reason at all, has Mind "6".

I know it's typical WW-ish, but I do wonder, is it really that hard to check this shit?
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White Wolf's writers have never been perfect with keeping old and new separate, and I don't know how they keep getting away with it. One of the early nWerewolf books had a setting appendix which briefly forgot it wasn't writing about the Garou and provided characters using oWoD Auspices like Ahroun and Ragabash. That was right at the start of nWoD, and they're still up to it now? It's not exactly subtle lol.
 
Ben Who Devours said:
White Wolf's writers have never been perfect with keeping old and new separate, and I don't know how they keep getting away with it. One of the early nWerewolf books had a setting appendix which briefly forgot it wasn't writing about the Garou and provided characters using oWoD Auspices like Ahroun and Ragabash. That was right at the start of nWoD, and they're still up to it now? It's not exactly subtle lol.
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Man, have you read the Mummy: The Curse NPC register - several NPCs have Utterances which don't exist. :V
 
On the topic of oWoD, I need some help/advice regarding how to explain certain things within a Paradigm - in this case conservation of mass when Shapeshifting from a Progenitor's point of view.

Contextwise, I am a fairly new oWoD player playing a Progenitor Scientist with Life (Currently Rank 4) as her primary Sphere and with a focus in Medicine and Biotech. I find that she can do quite a lot on paper - for example turn into a winged, lightning-breathing godzilla-expy. Or just growing a pair of wings which is what initially led me to run into this issue.

During a previous game-session, the amalgam ran into a trapdoor while infiltrating a Fae's mansion. It was suggested that my character could just grow a pair of wings - to which I immediatly stalled, unable to reason how she would do that.

Aside from doing it as a long-term process where she gains additional mass to fuel the shapeshifting, I can't figure out a way to explain her gaining any form of additional mass (like a pair of wings) for any manner of shapeshifting in a very limited span of time (like a scene).

... Or in other words: How do Progenitors explain someone turning into the hulk?
 
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Nevindar said:
On the topic of oWoD, I need some help/advice regarding how to explain certain things within a Paradigm - in this case conservation of mass when Shapeshifting from a Progenitor's point of view.

Contextwise, I am a fairly new oWoD player playing a Progenitor Scientist with Life (Currently Rank 4) as her primary Sphere and with a focus in Medicine and Biotech. I find that she can do quite a lot on paper - for example turn into a winged, lightning-breathing godzilla-expy. Or just growing a pair of wings which is what initially led me to run into this issue.

During a previous game-session, the amalgam ran into a trapdoor while infiltrating a Fae's mansion. It was suggested that my character could just grow a pair of wings - to which I immediatly stalled, unable to reason how she would do that.

Aside from doing it as a long-term process where she gains additional mass to fuel the shapeshifting, I can't figure out a way to explain her gaining any form of additional mass (like a pair of wings) for any manner of shapeshifting in a very limited span of time (like a scene).

... Or in other words: How do Progenitors explain someone turning into the hulk?
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Progenitors are not very good at unplanned combat-time shapeshifting. They tend to require prep (like pretty much all technomages).

One way of doing this is to declare that your body is already extensively modified with sacs of programmable stem cells. With a few minutes, you can order the stem cells to extrude from your back and form wings, using an already designed template. Paradox effects from doing this are... well, mostly cancer. Pretty much just cancer.

However, wings aren't a good solution anyway. Have you considered instead jabbing yourself with a high energy cocktail of steroids and retroviruses which will temporarily supercharge your leg muscles, allowing you to jump like a flea. No, you're not turning into a flea, do ho ho - it's just a metaphor. The paradox taking the form of insectoid traits or the desire to drink blood is an entirely expected side effect.

And of course, for the better solution, why change yourself? Just toss a modified vine seed up there, coated in fast-grow nutrient reagents, which will grow down after anchoring itself in the stone and wood above, and provide you with a rope. This is magically simpler (as you're just modifying a plant rather than a human), and also less vulgar (even in a fae's realm - because you're evoking the story of Jack and the Beanstalk).
 
Nevindar said:
On the topic of oWoD, I need some help/advice regarding how to explain certain things within a Paradigm - in this case conservation of mass when Shapeshifting from a Progenitor's point of view.

Contextwise, I am a fairly new oWoD player playing a Progenitor Scientist with Life (Currently Rank 4) as her primary Sphere and with a focus in Medicine and Biotech. I find that she can do quite a lot on paper - for example turn into a winged, lightning-breathing godzilla-expy. Or just growing a pair of wings which is what initially led me to run into this issue.

During a previous game-session, the amalgam ran into a trapdoor while infiltrating a Fae's mansion. It was suggested that my character could just grow a pair of wings - to which I immediatly stalled, unable to reason how she would do that.

Aside from doing it as a long-term process where she gains additional mass to fuel the shapeshifting, I can't figure out a way to explain her gaining any form of additional mass (like a pair of wings) for any manner of shapeshifting in a very limited span of time (like a scene).

... Or in other words: How do Progenitors explain someone turning into the hulk?
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By using a specially created substance made out of (insert animal/creature here) DNA and various other chemical, the Progenitor forces her cell to undergo rapid specialization and growth, gaining new organs in the process. However the cells are short lived, and will rapidly deteriorate after a certain amount of time.
 
Alternatively, go ALL YOUR FLESH ARE BELONG TO US and assimilate dead or defeated enemies into your terrifying warform! Be the Alex Mercer you want to see in the world.
 
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