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Corpses and Coteries: The Tabletop Games Thread Rises
Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
When the night is darkest, the dead will rise to plague the living with questions about which feat to take in 5E and interminable arguments about polearms.
Inhuman predators will stalk the streets in burial gowns stained dark with Code Red.
Bestial spider-women with tits of uncertain floppitude lurk in the bottom of the darkest wiki pages.
Dare you enter?
(old thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/223394/dinos-and-druids-a-tasty-romp-through-table-top-games/p1 )
Jacobkosh on
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If what you're specifically into is Masquerade - with all the familiar Clans, the Camarilla and Anarchs (and, very lightly, the Sabbat) and the assorted main characters like Beckett and the long-running metaplot, Vampire 5E seems like it's actually pretty great as a system. The problems that got Vampire and White Wolf a lot of attention last year were to do with the dinguses running the company and some of the dinguses they hired, not with the game itself, which was designed by Ken Hite, who created Night's Black Agents and a few other very well-regarded games. I haven't played but it sounds like a tight game with innovative mechanics and makes a lot of welcome changes to the ongoing story, like moving the Sabbat into th background (and out of scope as player characters) to instead foreground the conflict between the Anarchs and the Camarilla.
If playing specifically in the Masquerade world is value-neutral to you and what you're really after is just a game about the night-to-night experience of being a vampire and getting into plots and intrigues, then Vampire the Requiem 2E (not 1E, avoid 1E) is a fucking excellent system that I have played and give my highest recommendation. It's a really punchy, visceral game that gets at the horror of being a vampire and the hard choices that life would force on you without being a gloomy depression fiesta. Like the other Chronicles of Darkness games, Requiem is meant to be taken less as an established setting and more as a toolkit to build your own - to create and populate your own cities with their own twists on the formula, and some nerdlinger can't complain that you're contradicting Book #27 or whatever.
Really, the two games are much more alike (especially now, with V5's lore changes and some new mechanics that mirror what VtR has done) than different, but they do have differences. Stereotypically, Masquerade has more of a widescreen, globe-trotting vibe, with international occult conspiracies spanning centuries, while Requiem goes for more of a street-level, The Wire vibe, taking organized crime as its unifying metaphor. But, especially in these latest editions, you can do gritty street-level Masquerade games and big epic Requiem games pretty easily, so eh.
In both games, you might, like, hunt a serial killer, but in Masquerade he's more likely to be a vengeful Sumerian mummy enacting an occult blood ritual while in Requiem it's more likely to be a plot by the city's Nosferatu clan to create fear and panic so they can more easily feed, or to cover up the murder of their rivals.
If you want to get Masquerade's vibe, play Bloodlines, which is a terrific distillation of its whole approach and feel. If you want to get a sense for Requiem, check out this (not long!) Actual Play thread ( https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/vampire-the-requiem-never-let-go.198667/ ) by Rose Bailey, who went on to become the lead designer of the second edition.
Also currently shipping costs outside the US are absurd.
Are those bolts?
shame I missed the 150 tier that lets you make a faction but "just" the hardcopy is more than enough
Star Trek nerds: How long has the Federation been a thing at the end of TOS?
I would certainly recommend it, system wise. V20 is the most complete edition but it uses the old rules and those were Bad. It's also kind of overwhelming on the lore front.
They are, but I don't think they're getting a second printing. I'd skip them tbh, as someone who has both.
what made the old rules Bad? I'm only familiar with them so I have no idea how 5e made them Good
...man, that's not in the rulebook?
Founded 2161, original series ran 2265-2269.
Original series was also written without precise time declarations so nobody would push their glasses up and actually according to Moore's Law technical advancement couldn't possibly have
I'd say the biggest issues were game balance and over complex (and therefore drawn-out) combat.
For instance, one discipline was called Celerity, and it gave you an extra turn for each dot you had in it. Even one dot of that literally fucking doubles your damage output, five quintuples it. Another one, Potence, simply gave you automatic successes on any feat of strength, including combat. Essentially if you didn't have one or the other of those, you were shithoused. In V5, Celerity and Potence are instead 5 discrete, super-speed/strength themed powers. They still have some really fun scaling powers, but they're not just "have these powers or get destroyed" any more. Other things that have been made slightly less ridonk are blood magic and the shadow powers.
Re: the combat, it used to be something like roll to hit, roll their dodge, roll damage, roll their soak to resolve a single round from one side. Now imagine that this character has Celerity 2, so you can double that amount of rolls. Now imagine they have Celerity 5. In the new system, you roll strength + brawl (for instance) vs their strength + brawl and the margin of success + weapon bonus is damage. There's also nice touches like the fact that the attack stat for firearms is composure (a social stat) which means that even if you have a social heavy build you can kick out some kind of damage if you really need to.
It's got a lot of things that need to be built out more but even after hanging around in a V5 rules Discord for a while no one's really managed to find any gaping holes in it.
I didn't have it handy, it may be. So ~100 years. Any starfleet crew would probably be third generation federation members at this point.
It's sort of a Voyager long, deep mission concept. I was thinking of a human that has only just gotten used to the existing Federation species, and is reluctant to meet even more new ones, but even at this point things are probably pretty cosmopolitan.
Cthulhu Dark did a similar thing, where you had an insight die that you could add in for any roll (or use for rerolls)
But if your Insight die rolled higher than the rest of your dice, then you had a chance of increasing your insight score, and if you get to a certain insight score, you completely lose your mind and become non-playable (and there is plenty of nasty stuff along the way as well)
On that last bit, they've acknowledged that and are trying to figure out someway of lowering them.
It's pretty great! It feels more like you're playing a game, because you constantly have these little gambles of "should I use this power now and risk my hunger going up?" and the little endorphine boost of "ha! fuck you! I'm turning into a wolf for free!".
It also provides some balance against stacking dice pools too heavily. If you go "ok I'm throwing all of my weight behind this and rolling a million dice", you're also increase the risk that it's going to go badly wrong for you because the chances of a hungry crit go up.
The biggest problem with it is that as a DM you have to constantly be ready to come up with "what does a fucking hungry crit look like on a research roll"
So they bring nothing to the game? No tidbits of lore? or ideas?
Hey
Yes!
I mean it's not 200 blank pages but there's nothing super memorable in there. They have the stats for the Banu Haqim and Ministry in there, but no special disciplines etc. They're kind of missing the fun stuff to read, like characters. It's mostly just conceptual stuff about how those factions work.
Do vampires need to pee?
Because if so, that's gonna be an unpleasant time with a socket wrench in front of the urinal
Don't vampires have superhuman strength? Perhaps that's why the bolts are necessary?
I have yet to see photographs of people (or, more commonly, heavily filtered/edited photographs that are supposed to no longer look like photographs) work in a board or roleplaying game
I'm not entirely sure why it doesn't work, but it sets off some sort of uncanny valley switch for me or something
Like, in addition to your expected digital/physical painters, they highlighted a sculptor and a collagist and a paper doll craftsperson
I have no idea what the actual plan for showcasing any of that art is, but it seems very interesting