TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
excuse you, penelope mathers saves lives
(ngl, the fact that we're the town's heroes is probably the most effective argument for just torching the thing that there is)
White Wolf's World of Darkness
excuse you, penelope mathers saves lives
(ngl, the fact that we're the town's heroes is probably the most effective argument for just torching the thing that there is)
You're not the heroes Cheam needs or wants, but you're the heroes it deserves.
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm still the hero if I save everyone at the end of the day. Even if I almost got us all killed! That's how it works right?
For reference: We baited a Faerie, with plans to kill it, then THREE showed up, the Hedge manifested, and I yelled at the Faeries like I could do anything other than die before hiding.
We survived because they couldn't smell us over all my perfume.
The quote last page of "I accept all of the credit but none of the blame" is very instructive here
With the popularity of Detroit Become Human and Nier Automata, I was wondering what do WTA Garou think of Androids and other synthetic humans like Replicants? If they are very common would they be servants of the Weaver?
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'm not terribly knowledgeable on W:tA, but robots are definitely the kind of thing that gets associated with the Weaver. On the other hand, perfectly orderly automata suddenly going "does this unit have a soul?" and breaking their programming sounds like the Wyld fucking with the Weaver's designs.
So I was reading through Blood and Smoke (aka: VtR2) and I really don't like humanity. This is my first game that I've read in the series, but humanity is a really neat idea, with so many problems that just break characters.
For example: There doesn't seem to be a penalty for having low humanity, and actually becoming an npc is easy to avoid, so why worry about it? A lot of people will just be fine with lower humanity, and that would be okay except...
High humanity requires a bit of an investment, but is massively broken. Every single time you need to make a detachment check you get a beat. At 9-10 humanity break with 2 touchstones you only have a 5% chance of failing. You get these breaks for just seeing a human eat food, so you don't need to worry about morality to get these detachment checks. On average, you'll gain about 20 beats, for every time you drop a single point in humanity. However to recover your humanity, you only need to spend 6 beats. An average gain of 14 beats.
This means that to become the strongest vampire the fastest the route forward is clear. You raise your humanity to 10, then get a job as a waiter or waitress at an all night restaurant and spend the beats to keep your humanity high. Inside a month you now have enough beats to get pretty much anything you want.
This is the boiling water over an anthill problem all over again, except it is written right into the rules and exists for all breaking points above 4 humanity, so even if you stick to more reasonable rules a high humanity player will be gaining humanity faster than he loses it and getting benefits at the same time. Also by ignoring the rules you get rid of the drama side of a vampire feeling sad that he can't eat food again and such like things. You are essentially removing the need for taking banes to skip detachments because a there are no downsides to making detachment checks. Only upsides of more xp.
And unlike earlier editions which from what I have read on wikipedia had humanity as a morality system, in Blood and Smoke it is a measure of detachment from being human. This means that while in earlier editions you had to try to make amends, in Blood and Smoke you just need to spend the xp to keep your humanity high.
I'm really not a fan of it. It has a neat idea... but mechanically it's too clunky and too much of a magicarp power situation.
For example: There doesn't seem to be a penalty for having low humanity, and actually becoming an npc is easy to avoid, so why worry about it? A lot of people will just be fine with lower humanity, and that would be okay except...
High humanity requires a bit of an investment, but is massively broken. Every single time you need to make a detachment check you get a beat. At 9-10 humanity break with 2 touchstones you only have a 5% chance of failing. You get these breaks for just seeing a human eat food, so you don't need to worry about morality to get these detachment checks. On average, you'll gain about 20 beats, for every time you drop a single point in humanity. However to recover your humanity, you only need to spend 6 beats. An average gain of 14 beats.
This means that to become the strongest vampire the fastest the route forward is clear. You raise your humanity to 10, then get a job as a waiter or waitress at an all night restaurant and spend the beats to keep your humanity high. Inside a month you now have enough beats to get pretty much anything you want.
This is the boiling water over an anthill problem all over again, except it is written right into the rules and exists for all breaking points above 4 humanity, so even if you stick to more reasonable rules a high humanity player will be gaining humanity faster than he loses it and getting benefits at the same time. Also by ignoring the rules you get rid of the drama side of a vampire feeling sad that he can't eat food again and such like things. You are essentially removing the need for taking banes to skip detachments because a there are no downsides to making detachment checks. Only upsides of more xp.
And unlike earlier editions which from what I have read on wikipedia had humanity as a morality system, in Blood and Smoke it is a measure of detachment from being human. This means that while in earlier editions you had to try to make amends, in Blood and Smoke you just need to spend the xp to keep your humanity high.
I'm really not a fan of it. It has a neat idea... but mechanically it's too clunky and too much of a magicarp power situation.
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
Forgive me if I'm mistaken about things. It's been years since I last opened a VtR book of any edition, so my memory might be wrong, but I remember that Humanity acts as a dice cap to your Social Dice Pool when interacting with humans.
Also, your examples are... well, it's unlikely to happen due to how extreme they are. Setting aside how difficult it is to reach, much less maintain Humanity 9+, intentionally forcing a Humanity break just because a player wants a beat is poor form. If player tries that shit on my, I'd be tossing the book at their faces. That sort of taking munchkinery/min-maxin is something I as an ST won't allow on my table.
I'm also certain that no player is going to play as a waitress at a diner for an entire month, much less devote sessions for it. Sure, I'd allow Player A to have his character work the graveyard shift in a diner, but that's relegated to background/downtime. I would probably just have them roll a Humanity Break at the start of the session, if it was important enough aka player describes, acts out the scene, and emotes. Using a session for this, having Humanity Break rolls again and again and again because a lot of people are eating is nothing more than a meaningless time waster that could have been used for something more important. By conventions of narrative detail, by Player A's character working at a diner is not important enough to consider, as such should just be glossed over.
There's also the point that if a player were to just keep on pumping his Humanity to a high level, he'd be using the experience points on something which could have instead gone to other stuff like Disciplines and Attributes.
Vampire, from my point of view, is a continued grind against the inevitable corruption into a monster. Everyday you watch someone eat food is a reminder about your lost humanity, and you can either keep on fighting a losing battle for your Humanity or descend slowly into apathy and monstrosity by embracing the Beast. If he's wasting his valuable experience to remain more human, well more power to him, and I'd certainly craft stories to support this. But having Player A go to a diner to farm beats for experience, or any other similar actions, goes against the intended theme and spirit of the game which results in a flying book to the face.
But as I said, the probabilities are in favor of a high humanity vampire in VtR. Let's compare two vampires a humanity 5 vamp, and a humanity 10 vamp.
At the start of the night They go out to feed. High humanity vamp uses blush of life for this he also gets a beat for feeding on someone who doesn't know they are being fed on. If he does this by taking someone out to dinner he also gets a beat for people eating. Low humanity vamp gets no beats. As the night goes on They have to do a mission. High humanity vamp gets beats for using more than one vitae a night and one for each super human feat they pull off. The low humanity vamp gets nothing. They get out and have to cover up what they did. This gives a beat to the high humanity vampire for lying to protect the masquerade, and possible altering anthers behavior using a discipline to keep what they did a secret from the cops. Low humanity vampire gets nothing.
The session ends. The player who is playing high humanity vamp has made about 10 checks in the night. Even if they failed one, which is unlikely they have gained 10 beats, and only spent 6 recovering their humanity. Low humanity vamp doesn't get any beats from any of it. That's one game session.
It's not an XP sink, it's an xp generator.
I don't have a copy of the book on me right now, but I think you're misreading the XP cost to buy Humanity. Everything costs a multiple of 5 Beats, and IIRC Humanity is 15 per dot.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Storyteller is not a simulationist system, and is only somewhat gameist (as much as those categories hurt me inside). It's not a game where you're supposed to go around cutting ten foot ladders in half in order to make two ten foot poles and generate infinite money.
The answer is to kick the player gaming the system out because he's clearly not interested in engaging with the point of vampire but is in fact trying to exploit the system with bizarre loopholes.
You're half right. Somehow I misread that XP was 3 beats, and it is indead 5. It means that you gain XP from breaking points above humanity 7 and you lose xp (slowly) at humanity 5&6. Below that you lose it faster.
Humanity still only costs 2 xp though
So someone who tries to raise their humanity to 10 shouldn't be allowed to play? That's one way to solve the problem I guess. Except why bother having a humanity system if an attempt for the player to interact with it breaks the game?
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No. The one who raises it to ten, and lowers it, and then raises it back to ten as an XP generator should be banned from playing. Because he's an asshole exploiting the system.
Yeah, no. This is the same problem as in Exalted - if your system does not produce the world you intended to see, the system is borked and needs fixing.
So in your games you only let someone raise their humanity to 10 once, then if they drop below that they are never allowed to raise humanity again? Not being aware of a problem does not make the problem go away. 3.5 dnd taught me that. Even if noone is paying attention or meaning to, someone with high humanity is going to end up stronger in the long run than the rest of the party, even if they never meant to.
Aslo in blood and smoke high humanity only gives you a +2 bonus to understanding mortals.
To be honest, I've never seen or heard of this happening to begin with until now, so I'm 90% sure you're misreading something, but yeah, honestly, if you keep raising your humanity back to ten after losing it, I'm putting my foot down, because vampire is a game about the slow downward slide, not gaming the system's failure points to maximize your mechanical performance and XP gain. This very much seems not to be a problem of mechanics, but of player behavior exploiting the system for personal gain to the detriment of the group.
So in your game it is impossible to have high humanity. Using that house rule does fix the problem, but just make sure you tell your players that there is no point to having touchstones, or to raising humanity at all. Trying to keep high humanity will be useless because they can only reach 10 humanity once, and they can't ever recover from a single bad roll. Better to drop to humanity 3 and stay there.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
I'm pretty sure that the misreading here is that lower level breaking points are harder to succeed at than higher level ones. So Jakinbandw's plan might technically work if he just goes from diner to diner watching people eat, but the instant his character decides to use his vampiric powers, sees someone get killed or hurt, or drinks blood without consent he's losing humanity without gaining enough beats to buy it back up. And given that this supposes that he's in an actual game that goes beyond 'watching people eat simulator,' his plan is... unlikely to work, to say the least..
I mentioned that. Humanity breaks 7 and above gain xp, 5&6 break almost even with a very slow loss. And considering how common high break points are for vampires (feeding on someone who isn't aware of it?) you'll get enough to make xp on average as long as you don't go around murdering everyone. Also, I'll point to the ordo dracul ziva who let you spend vitae to increase your dice pool on rolling detachment checks, and lower the price of buying humanity. That's the route to go if you wanted to really minmax this, instead of stumbling onto it accidentally (Though still likely because Ziva allows you to become human again, a goal of at least some players I would expect).
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
@Jakinbandw, can you point out the pages on the book where it says that Vampires gain beats from Feeding while the victim is unaware? Or where Humanity 7+ breaks are automatic Beat farming? Because as far as I know, aside from the basic ones universal to all splats, you only get beats from Feeding due to Dramatic Failures and Exceptional Success. And I'm fairly certain you can't gain beats from spending Vitae or from using Disciplines (and even then, only on Dramatic Failures). As well as the Beat from Protecting the Masquerade.
Page 107 lists what you need to make detachment checks for, and how many dice you get to roll. If you have more than one touchstone (which I called out in the original post) you add 3 dice to your pool. Page 108 specifically says:
Feeding on someone without their knowledge is a detachment check, as is using more than one vitae a night for a high humanity vampire.
As for checks of 7+ being beat farming, it's simple math.
(0.7)^(number of dice). If the result is less then 0.1 you are gaining beats, if it's more you are losing them. With Ziva the number you need to be less than jumps up to 0.2. It's fairly simple really.
Edit: page 83 makes it even more clear:
Edit 2: fixed math. Mixed chance of success and failure for some dumb reason. Doesn't change what I'm saying, only changes if someone double checks my work
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notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Adding to this, do you assume that offscreen Detachment checks are rolled?
That's how it's written. It says 'Any time you face a detachment check', not 'at the end of a session where you faced a detachment check.' If they meant the later, they wrote it more unclear than any other part of the book.
That's an interesting question. Would you let someone murder someone off screen and not need to make a detachment check? Detachment rolls all sit on the same table and are given equal levels of importance, so a murder is equally important as going for a night without human contact for a high humanity vampire.
That said, no. I don't assume that. It's just that even in play, and I stated earlier, high level detachment checks can come up very often, where the lower ones are more rare (how often do you go on a mass murder rampage?). From what I understand, it would work perfectly for a vampire that focused on diplomacy over combat, which is a valid character choice from what I understand of how vampire works?
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
I think this is where the misunderstanding comes from. I can't speak for everyone here, but my group does 1 Detachment Check/Breaking Point Check per session, regardless if any other triggers happen. Exception if it was a very large difference between Humanity Breaking Points, like 3 to 4 levels of difference.
Someone else can explain more thoroughly, but most of us use narrative conventions and conservation of detail for rulings. Having multiple triggers for Breaking Points slows down the game a lot, while causing Beat/Experience bloat.