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White Wolf: Geist - Dead Like Persona Fandango [now available for Sin Eating]
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The most embarrassing moment was when I set everything up perfectly to snipe an enemy, using magic to silence the shot. The only thing I couldn't manage was getting any of the dice to roll a success. =\
Playing Regularly: D&D 4E "Iomandra Campaign", "Rise of the Runelords", "Custom Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil", [DMing] "Upheaval"; Team Fortress 2.
omgyouhaveragnarok You should definitely tell me all the good character options from it.
In the case of Exalted, I like the setting but not the system... nWoD is the opposite. I like nWoD's version of storyteller, but it'd be nice to have something that my 8 and 10 year old nieces could play without having nightmares.
Adventure! uses a very loose and flexible variant of Storyteller System. Pulp era stuff like The Shadow and Indiana Jones. As dark as underground dinosaurs and Nazi gorilla zeppelins can be.
edit: beat'd
dinosaurs
Anything in the World of Darkness, which is most of WW's stuff, is going to be grim gritty dark horror stuff.
For kids, you could always try WoD Innocents, though!
(note: The above is not for children. Or for any adult who can possibly get squicked out.)
this is off-topic but now thanks to AIM'ing arcanis i now know about this....
somebody shoot me in the head.
My secret fantasy of a system where you can run Watership Down is now fulfilled.
Nobody must know of this. BRB, statting up El-ahrairah.
Edit: And to be fair, they did totally fall for the SNL Land Shark bit...
Edit edit: Uh... is that rabbit going for the jugular?!
Well, it would be the smart move.
Playing Regularly: D&D 4E "Iomandra Campaign", "Rise of the Runelords", "Custom Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil", [DMing] "Upheaval"; Team Fortress 2.
I think the most interesting part of Bunnies and Burrows (I haven't actually read it mind you), is that not only do I think it could be fun for a one or two shot (which is one of the things GURPS seems good for, if chargen didn't take eternity), but that I imagine it would really make a pick-two-or-three-random-books-and-run really interesting.
Bunny and Burrows, In Nomine!
Bunny and Burrows, Vampire the Masquerade!
On topic: One time I found a copy of "AEON" for $10 used and I had to buy it. Apparently it's really called "Trinity" now. There's Adventure! set in the 1920s, and then Abberant set in the 2000s and it's set in the future. You're a psychic guy with special powers. I don't know, I couldn't really figure out the feeling they were trying to impress on me. Some of it was interesting, some of it made me roll my eyes a bit. It doesn't seem like they're shooting for the pulp feel, or the superhero feel, or what I would have assumed to be the sci-fi equivalent in a sort of campy way; vampire-in-space template I guess. Anyone have any thoughts on it?
Honestly, I've been reading through a lot of Exalted as well lately, getting all my ducks in a row for the campaign I'm running at the moment, so the contrast in pretty sweet.
Exalted is a finicky system. It's incredibly easy to make an enemy too hard, or for your players to have an incredibly wide power range right from the start, or to mess up the feel of the setting, or any number of things.
With Scion, it's a lot easier to scale things. Every single effect has a clear and identifiable effect on how the game will run, and as an experienced GM it makes things a breeze to run. I can just grab a template out of one of the four books that they have out now, tweak it to make it a unique monster, maybe slide the powers up or down a bit, and all of a sudden I have a credible threat.
The combat is significantly less complex, eliminating complex stuff like Combos, Flurries, Charms, multiple power pools(okay, there's still Legend and Willpower, but Legend isn't split into two groups that make you glow depending,) and the abilities that affect other realms of conflict are remarkably simple.
Not to mention the powers are a lot more mythic. With a first-level power, you can fall from orbit without dying. Or with another one, you can walk through a burning fire and not get touched. It's only a few steps from there to flying or shooting lightning bullets.
Just every time I compare the two, I see Scion as being so much cleaner and less complex. And then, if I need an adventure idea, all I need to do is look at a book of mythology. It's like an entire adventure book with plot hooks and NPCs and monsters and everything! Ragnarok, which is what I really want to talk about, takes this one step further.
It takes the whole Ragnarok cycle, covers it in brief, offers references for more detail, stats up important NPCs and Gods and Monsters, throws in a few new, awesome twists, and shows you how you can really run an entire myth cycle in a game. It's super inspiring. Even if you don't want to run Ragnarok, it's got stats for stuff like the Fenris Wolf and the World Serpent, new ideas for crazy relics, and how to amputate yourself in order to gain even more power!
It's just a fantastic book, and I can't think of any Scion game in which I wouldn't at least look at it for ideas briefly. If you're an Aesir Scion, it's a great start for ideas that REALLY play to your Legend and the myths of your ancestors, if you're any other group, it gives you a good idea on how to twist your own myths to the modern era of Scion, and if you're the GM, then it's just a spectacular collection of plothooks, monster stats, NPCs, and awesome. Not to mention that the premade campaign is REALLY REALLY good.
Maybe I'm just a huge sucker for mythology, but right now, in the RPG world, I can't think of a single product that I enjoy more than Scion, and I have a lot of excellent books on my shelf.
tl;dr Rainy is hot for sexy norse myths.
I never got a chance to run demigod- or god-level games of Scion, and I heard there was some trouble balancing autosuccesses in attack or defense stats with creatures or characters that didn't have those autosuccesses. Have you any experience with that?
Playing Regularly: D&D 4E "Iomandra Campaign", "Rise of the Runelords", "Custom Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil", [DMing] "Upheaval"; Team Fortress 2.
Then again, a lot of that is that by the time you get to the highest levels, combat is typically going to be either autowin or autolose depending on who's got the biggest Epic Dex and Epic Strength. I still think Scion's a lot of fun, don't get me wrong (And I'm still really unhappy that I had to drop out of the games), but I just like the feel of Exalted more.
Just a personal preference thing, I guess.
As someone who's never played any of White Wolf's stuff, how much will the rules system sodomize me?
And as Jacques said, Scion is really really really newbie friendly. WW did their best to set it up as 'My First RPG,' and the rules are pretty simple/easy to understand. My only piece of advice is to remove the 'Untouchable Opponent' Knack from any game you play in, because it's utterly broken at high levels, otherwise it's all gold.
There's a few minor quibbles in the rules themselves, but rather than confuse you by mentioning them now, just bring them up if you run into them. They're all small and mostly ignorable.
EDIT@Ultra Vires
Epic Successes progress geometrically(1-2-4-7-11-16-22-29-37-46) so once you get into the high ends, a Scion with more Epic Dex is going to be hitting Scions with less Epic Dex all the time. There's a few knacks and abilities that will let you take one or two hits before you start taking damage, so even a non-combat focused Scion can hold off against a powerful God for a turn or two.
So basically, it requires the GM to keep an eye on the party. Know their limits, and make sure that you aren't throwing an enemy that is untouchable at them. I've introduced three overpowered foes to my players so far(An insane Scion, an invisible guy, and a ridiculously armored Nemean shark) at them, and each time they've managed to take them out, although it did take them some effort, although there's been a few KOs, tense moments, deaths, and in general danger. I did make sure that each one was JUST within the party's reach.
Once the party gets more imbalanced, as it inevitably will the higher you go, you'll need to either stat up different levels of enemies(not all the Scions are focused, why should all their foes be?) or provide opportunities for each character to shine in combat(maybe the combat god needs to protect the hyper-intelligent riddle solver as he tries to open an ancient ark containing a relic, while the social character trades jibes to make the manipulative Scion of Loki who's been dogging the party and would do anything to wake up the sleeping giant that's just a few rooms away in place.
The thing is, however, that Epic Attributes make it REALLY EASY to match up foes to your Scions. Anything more than a one-dot difference will result in a slaughter once you get past the first stage of Demigod, so it's easy metric to match foes to your combat god, your sword-wielding MENSA member, and your Beautiful Man-child of Aphrodite. The warriors will go straight for each other because otherwise their friends will die in short order, and everyone else fights who they can handle.
Oh and most of the monsters statted in Demigod and God need serious help, because the devs didn't see fit to give them Dexterity at all. It's easy enough to fix, just slap an appropriate amount of dex onto the Titanspawn, and you're set.
I hadn't anticipated using the Epic Attribute ratings of the party to match them up against appropriate challenges. I really should have. That's a neat angle.
Playing Regularly: D&D 4E "Iomandra Campaign", "Rise of the Runelords", "Custom Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil", [DMing] "Upheaval"; Team Fortress 2.
Click picture to see press ready (read: huge) version
PDF-only due its limited audience. Pretty cover tho'.
V:TR sourcebook for eighties. Clash of styles, "weird" subcultures, profiliration of night clubs, yuppies, coke, rise of religious right, rapid technological advancement, cold war, nuclear annihilation, etc. Stuff like that. This is serious project, but PDF-only.
Vampires that look like Paula Abdul and use too much hairspray. So much easier to set fire to.
And some how, it will survive the WoD curse of Critical Failures.
(And sign me up :P)
What I'm basically saying is I'm interested as hell and some should run a PbP on the boards so I have the excuse to buy a book or two.
this is quite accurate
Storyteller requires more of the players in terms of inventive thinking and applying their skills, and it requires the DM to think on his feet more and be able to ad hoc rule on challenges and NPCs.
Right now, I am in a weekly game that uses the Storyteller system, and is set in the universe of Macross Frontier.
The PCs are a group of mecha pilots, which required us coming up with a mecha combat system.
Some people (Der Waffle Mous) are curious about this, so I figure I'll explain a bit.
First thing we decided was to divorce "mecha combat" from "personal combat". They would exist on two completely different scales, and weren't directly compatible. We didn't need to inflate all the numbers by 10 or anything like that. It wasn't necessary, for example, to figure out how much damage a Valkyrie gunpod would do to a human being. It would do exactly 10 Fucktons of He Dies damage.
All that mattered is how mecha compared to each other, and how to balance that. For that, we used personal scale combat as an example.
We used the PCs' standard mecha of choice (the Nightmare) as a base to compare to.
So, a VF-171 Nightmare Plus has 8 points of Structure (equivalent to a human with a Stamina of 3, who would have 8 Health) and has Durability 2 (as a human wearing a flack jacket would have).
The Gunpod has a damage of 4 (equivalent to an Assault Rifle).
That sort of thing is what we did to figure out our base numbers.
In the nWoD games we run, we use an alternate damage rule (the damage of a weapon adds base successes, not dice, so there's no "gun nibble") and we continued to apply that rule to mecha combat.
So, for example, a gunpod if it hits ALWAYS does at least 4 damage + successes.
We decided, however, that mecha being real fast and stuff that people can apply their Defense vs. Firearms checks (which, in personal combat, they cannot).
That was where we started. From there, we added other rules for things like relative range, uses of the Drive and Computers skill, missile launching rules, etc.
We've played a few game sessions with it, and ironed out some kinks, and it's working great.
I could talk more about it if people are interested.
I am.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23