GhanjRho
Acanthus
Are you aware of the Terrible Form merit? A 4 dot style merit, with each for granting one of (in order) modification, technology, propulsion and process. It's in Flowers of Hell.
White Wolf's World of Darkness
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Nope it's in the Corebook, page 122.
It is a glorious Merit.
It's also kinda broken, like many other things in 2e.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Only to be expected when the developers think that balance is a myth.
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Well, some of them do.
Dave at least tries to balance the fucking thing.
The sad thing is that I like the ideas behind Second Edition, and I still think that it can be a good game.
But fuck Conditions, so fucking hard.
Oh well, they're getting better at it, and it is a good thing to hear that Mage 2e will be Conditions-Lite.
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It's not that broken. I mean, the game is meant to be a game of subterfuge, and in fact the moment you stick your head out too far it gets bitten off, so by the time you're in a situation to take advantage of all of that cool new Demon Form stuff, you've fucked up somewhere and will need to hide and run real fast. Embeds are where it's at, yo.
So, people have discussed CWod, Cwod Revised, Nwod, CWod 20th, and GMC/NWod2nd in this thread.
But what do people think of Monte Cook's version of Wod?
Was it any good?
Or was it not worth the paper it was printed on?
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Also what about "Another World of Darkness"/"After Sundown"?
But what do people think of Monte Cook's version of Wod?
Was it any good?
Or was it not worth the paper it was printed on?
edit:
Also what about "Another World of Darkness"/"After Sundown"?
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Mages were hilariously broken. It was entirely possible to get permanent stat bonuses at level one, IIRC.
It runs on the D20 system, it was always going to have bugs in the crunchy bits.
What about the Fluff/Setting?
nDemon, as I've said to @EarthScorpion, is a flawed game for various reasons. I love it to bits but it's flawed, and this is its biggest flaw.
Its balance is explicitly exclusive to itself, just like Mage: the Ascension's balance was, until Revised, basically entirely exclusive and done via the setting itself. In oMage, the balance for why you wouldn't run around with 30 successes of Murder all the time for the 1 paradox you'd take was because the Technocracy would notice you on its orbital anti-magic satellites and like, drop a one-ton tungsten spike on your head, please go soak 60 levels of forces damage. Of course, if you were in mixed play that means that either your buddies are being slaughtered by TPK-800s, or you're the one slaughtering everyone.
Similarly, Demon the Descent is balanced by the idea that you will always be on the run from the Machine, which although not omnipotent and omniscient, has eyes that could be everywhere and an endless supply of Agents, and does not work in mixed play for those reasons. Imagine a party of a werewolf, a mage, a vampire, and a demon. Either the first three are always being tormented by mechanical angels from a clockwork god, or the last one gets to take advantage of how he can play the intelligence game almost as well as a mage can, kick ass better than a werewolf, play social shenanigans just as well as a vampire, and has almost no real exploitable weaknesses in the way werewolves or vampires or Prometheans do.
It would honestly be better off as a standalone line instead of a nWoD game.
It's why flaws like Enemy aren't great things to have unless everyone in the party has buy-in.
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Oh, I understand and agree. But I was talking about, and am going to be playing, a game without any of the other splats, so I was just saying that, within that context, Terrible Form isn't really that unbalanced, just making you stronger in Demon Form, which is certainly effective but isn't entirely broken like implied.
It's why I didn't even OFFER a chance for elements of D:tD to be used in my Quest. It'd just complete eat everything else. I mean, as is I'm going to be changing Mages a lot if they ever have any role whatsoever in the Quest, downsizing them as it were, but Demons...a Mage that's weaker can still have some of the same thematic elements and structure...Demons are too 'mythos of the universe' and too powerful.
Which reminds me. Maybe in a few posts, because I don't want to double-post, I could share the...Medium Template I guess, that I made in the Quest. It's not complete and playable, but, well, why not. It's sorta the Changeling answer to Proximi, in a way?
Speaking of, what does everyone think of Sleepwalkers and Proximi?
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Fuck Monte Cook's WoD.
Good. Now that this is established let's get into it. The game has nothing to do with WoD, there is no Masquerade to uphold, it is not a dark mirror of our own world, but instead a badly done post-apocalyptic parody of the actual world of darkness, demons were horrible and some of the suggested forms for them were "Vagina Centipede", "Aborted Dragon Fetus", "Flayed Skin Filled With Dragons".
The system ran on a system very similar to DnD 3.5, and thus had many of the same flaws as that system. Furthermore it did things like:
1. Hope you didn't like the Elder based society of vampires because they are a new thing.
2. Mages were even more broken than normally, getting permanent stat boosts and killing hordes of enemies in a single turn was pathetically easy.
3. You had things like "Awakened" who were a lot like the Imbued of CWoD, except that they were more like weird psychic anchors that... Did stuff? It was rather unclear. [1]
4. Also Vampires don't have a Beast now, they instead have a soul of some terrible person in the past.
5. Thousands of other silly things
_
After Sundown is okay I guess, sometimes I open it up and laugh at the names that are clearly things from WoD that have been scrambled in a program.
Descent of Entropy, Veil of Morpheus, Lure of Destruction, Hands of Flame...
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Holy shit, it's ages since i've last posted on SV.
I must say, it's good to be back.
I must say, it's good to be back.
Eukie
Powered by furious Canadian redheads
Sadly, Matthew McFarland seems to work on more projects to a greater extent, and McFarland has written essays on why he thinks that game balance doesn't exist and you shouldn't even bother.
That's a flaw, but I think the biggest flaw is that it's an utterly pointless game that revels in being pointless. It's a game that outright tells the ST to build scenarios about doing things for reasons you can never know, to ends you can never know, with ramifications you can never go. It encourages empty victories, because the God-Machine has to be oh-so mysterious and oh-so unknowable. This isn't a contrary reading or uncharitable interpretation; one of the examples is actually "shut down the God-Machine's local lettuce supply", which is supposed to be abstract, and the characters are never supposed to know why the God-Machine needs lettuce, or what will happen when it doesn't get the lettuce.
It makes for a game where there's no point in getting invested in the conflict, because nothing comes of it. Except in the abstract, there's no difference between fighting the God-Machine, and not fighting the God-Machine, because you don't know the consequences. It's the exact opposite of how you should run a game about playing spies. Without purpose, goals, or accomplishments, there's nothing for the players to become emotionally invested in.
It cites le Carré as an inspiration. Specifically it goes for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Now, I haven't read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, but I know it's about revenge. It's about getting revenge at someone for an assassination of a friend; a personal goal against the backdrop of espionage in Berlin. I have read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is perfectly open about what Smiley's goals are, and what they will accomplish. In fact, let me quote the trailer for the film version:
"There's a mole, Jim. Right at the top of the circus, and he's been there for years."
"For thirty years we've been the only thing standing between Moscow, and World War III!"
Goal: Find the mole,
Purpose: The mole is compromising MI6,
Why Is This Important: MI6 is preventing WWIII (WWIII is a bad thing.)
The reader/viewer is left with a very good understanding of the why of the book's events. The benefit of ousting a mole from the top of MI6 is not unknowable, nor unknown. There's no attempt to hide it, even. nDemon seems to think that being a cog in the machine of espionage, with no goals or accomplishments, is actually fun. It isn't. It's a game about doing an un-fun thing in an un-fun way.
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Indeed.
I like the spirit and idea of Second Edition.
I will not make a comment as to how that spirit translates to reality.
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Well, we'll see how much I agree with that after I actually play it, which I will in the next week. So, I'll just leave this here and come back with comments on how much this stands up (or doesn't, depending) later.
The punchline is Beast.
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I actually broke down laughing when I read this.
Being on 4chan when the draft had just been released was hilarious. Everyone agreed that it sucked, but they kept pointing more and more flaws out, and ever so often it would die down and some unlucky anon would appear and ask "So what is it that makes Beast so bad?" And it would start over again.
It was so fucking hilarious, I am still having trouble imagining what the hell they thought when they wrote Beast, what was the design vision? What was the entire fucking idea behind it?
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
"Shit we ran out of classic monster archetypes to milk for money. Quick, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks!"
Carrnage
Human
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they should have gone the route everyone else does and rob Lovecraft's grave.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
I'm separating bad GM advice from being a bad game in this sense, although I'm sure that bad GM advice doesn't help, simply because good GM advice and bad GM advice is system-agnostic in a way. The God-Machine's actual reasoning can be irrelevant and frankly should be because it's supposed to be so distant and work on a scale where we're like individual atoms in terms of our importance, but like I said when commenting on someone asking about Demon scenarios-the reasoning of the random white blood cell in its bloodstream is super important. Even if it's "you are bad and need to die."
The advice doesn't work because it should be make the God-Machine unknowable but make all of what you see have visible and discernible stakes. Am I sabotaging the God Machine's lettuce supply because it's being used to summon Killfuck Soulshitter? Or is it because it's magically keeping an orphanage afloat by making people generous and inclined to donate because the God-Machine knows a kid's there who will be important for its plans 20 years later?
Look, they should have looked at how lots of people were hyped for Demon and just made HITMarks: The Chaingunning, the game where you play killer robots sent into the past for a long-term mission to ensure the creation of an AI-except you're not sure what iteration of the AI sent you. Also, millions of secret killer robots are secretly among us.
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Bottom line: it's okay for powers to have utterly ridiculous effects on the setting as long as the impact on your actual game is controlled.
Which is to say, McFarland is okay with you having the ability to assassinate the President of the United States by throwing a cheeseburger warper on the floor because it will take a lot of time and thus the consequences will not feature in your campaign so it might as well not have happened.
The WoD has historically been pretty simulationist, so this is a kind of novel stance that ties into what's been said before re: "Demon doesn't mesh with the WoD as a whole."
Carrnage
Human
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World of darkness: there's like three mundane humans, everyone else is something supernatural pretending to be human.
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"Fuck, I can't think of any more silly Bloodlines/Lodges/Legacies/Whatever! What do we do?"
One week later
"I'm helpiiing!"
Dark Abstraction
Infrequent Participant
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So wait, Beast is definitively going to be a piece of shit? I haven't followed anything about it; last I heard, the devs were rewriting parts cause of backlash from the 4chan leak.