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Gaming Discussion => Other RPGs => Topic started by: Shadowhunter on May 14, 2012, 10:31:42 PM

Title: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Shadowhunter on May 14, 2012, 10:31:42 PM
Seems as if I'm in the minority of players that actually enjoy the nWoD gaming system. At least I like it in general.

But I've noticed that many people dislike it or say it's a bad system. Personally I've found it to be pretty flexible and pretty good.
So do enlighten me, what's so bad about it?
I'm interested in peoples opinions about the mechanics, not the flavour. What your opinion on VtR/WtF/CtL/MtA/Promethean whatsacallit.. flavour-wise is isn't what I'm after, since that's fluff.

Disclaimer: I'm an optimizer in D&D/SWSE because it's necessary and it is fun. I'm not in WoD. I play WoD with a different mindset and my gaming group usually don't go with, for example, 12/7/4 dots to skills but rather "put what you think is reasonable for your character in skills".

Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Bozwevial on May 14, 2012, 10:54:59 PM
From what I've heard, lots of things. Apparently there is some sort of check you have to make when you meet another vampire to keep from flipping out and trying to murder them, and vice versa, which strikes me as poor design in a game that is primarily about politics between vampires/the vampire condition/what have you. Especially when every vampire in the room makes a check against every other vampire in the room, which...why?

The combat is also silly. As in, a bus full of children armed with BB guns can take on a werewolf silly, because there's no soak roll and your to-hit roll is your damage roll. So that's great if you're trying to play Scooby-Doo or The Goonies or something, but not so much if you want your vampire to be able to survive a drive-by shooting from a local paintball group.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Libertad on May 14, 2012, 11:00:35 PM
I personally own several books, but have not found a group to play with yet (as my primary group prefers other RPGs).  I can list a few problems people have with the system, including my own:

Loads and loads of dice: this isn't unique to World of Darkness, but even a reasonably competent character rolls at least 7 dice for their favored actions.  Not necessarily a problem in and of itself, some people prefer less dice-rolling.

Relative lack of balance: the designers don't care as much about balance or fairness, leaving more arbitration to the hands of individual groups and Storytellers.  This can be quite problematic when certain options are just so much better that they quickly dominate encounters.  Good examples are the Combat Marksmanship Merit in Armory and the Elephant-Human hybrid people in Changing Breeds (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3421366&pagenumber=12#post393450172).

The Predator's Taint: A rule specific to Vampire the Requiem.  Gets a lot of flack because it can cause most vampire PCs to fly into a homicidal rage on a failed roll every time they meet a new vampire.  Naturally, these bad die rolls often end in TPKs or blood enslavement.  Many groups just toss out the rule.

Combat: the number of combatants really matters.  Bozwevial's right about the "no soak rolls."  In fact, straight combat monsters are often the least powerful character archetype.  A lot of Vampire minmaxers just make well-connected Ventrue with Dominate.  Dominate is a powerful ability because non-supernatural mortals don't have effective resistance against it.  Even worse, sever of the designers and many gamers associate min-maxers with hack-and-slash combat types, meaning that the Ventrue "social min-maxers" can get off scott-free in some groups.  They can say that they're "role-playing" as they toss a handful of d10s and say "I convince the cop to shoot himself" with no hint of irony.

No effective "Core" social combat system: For a game that emphasizes character development and "social" PC concepts, the combat system is a lot more detailed than the Deception/Persuade rolls.  The rules for Seduction are a bit more involved, but there's no "social combat" where participants try to influence each other or crowds with verbal maneuvers and special attacks (in the vein of "your intentionally overblown and nonsensical rhetoric leaves your opponent flabbergasted").  There are rules for this kind of thing in Requiem for Rome, Mirrors, and Danse Macabre, but nothing right out of the box.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Captnq on May 15, 2012, 12:29:03 AM
oWoD: It had a plot. It contradicted itself, but half the fun was figuring out what was a lie and what was true.
NWoD: Make up your own story! We hate people bitching over cannon so there is no more Cannon! It's all True or false depending on what you want!

oWoD: We decided to quit while we were on top.
nWoD: But then jump the shark, anyways! It's the best of both worlds.

That about sums it up. I liked the old setting. I hate the new one. Don't want to give them any more of my money.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: veekie on May 21, 2012, 02:45:25 AM
I got a few more on top of what Libertad's already mentioned:
Swing - This might be a common complaint from people starting out in d20, or even d6 systems. You can't count on your abilities, because the d10 dice system would still regularly throw out failures and the like even on the most routine and trivial tasks. This is a big issue given how significant they flag various skill dots at. At 5 dots you're a master of the craft...with two dice more than a hobbyist and still able to flub the skill you are expert in. The dice explosion modifiers(9-again, 8-again) don't really help here either, they help you score exceptional successes, but not to achieve basic competency.

Ability models - Now, Vampire gets off lightly here, since a good number of the disciplines are stock superhuman abilities that are generally applicable, but the other supernatural lines get arrays mostly filled with hyperspecific abilities that would come up once, if ever, barring a few combat useful things buried in the mix. Its the cost/benefit consistency, especially given how you have to acquire them(buying up dots in a supernatural talent is pretty costly, and often the 4-5 dot option is either a combat monster or does kinda nothing much).

And finally, to reiterate, the lack of social combat at all doesn't do it any favors, particularly with the kind of game its trying to be. Mechanics wise, just use Exalted instead.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: midnight_v on May 21, 2012, 02:54:50 AM
I'd like to advocate just giving in and playing "After Sundown"

Hmm... I guess I'll need a link. Damn.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Libertad on May 21, 2012, 03:10:47 PM
I'd like to advocate just giving in and playing "After Sundown"

Hmm... I guess I'll need a link. Damn.

ZOMG, they made a game off the movie? (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442740/)

Or were you talking about this? (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52316&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0)

Oh yeah, and I've got some more stuff about nWoD while we're at it:

Monster creation: sometimes you want to really give your players a good scare, show your troupe of vampires/werewolves that they're not the only monsters on the block.  The core rules lack a good system for creating your own monsters; the most they've got is ghost/poltergeist creation.  Hunter: the Vigil has the best system so far, but it requires shelling out $40+ for a couple of pages in a massive setting book.  The other options are the spirit creation rules in Werewolf and Book of Spirits, but they're kind of bare-bones and meant for spirits.  Vampire's got a Night Horrors series, and Mage has Encounters with the Abyss, but nothing in the way of "creating."  I do recommend getting Hunter on other merits, especially if you ever want to run a "monster hunters" game.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Agita on May 21, 2012, 06:34:56 PM
Ugh, World of Darkness. Libertad and veekie hit a lot of the salient points. The whole die system needs to be taken behind the shed and shot - too random, too many dice, too slanted towards failure. Balance is practically nonexistent.
Another point that hasn't been brought up yet is the layout and editing of the books. On layout, when you have the mechanics for a merit in the merits chapter appearing in the setting chapter of a book, with no mention or even reference to them anywhere else, whoever was responsible for layout needs a slap. On editing, more than a few times stretches of rules text just simply don't mean anything. This isn't directly tied to mechanics, but indirectly has a lot of influence on their quality - the former because you have to be able to find the damn rules to use them, and the latter because they have to make sense to be usable. And, of course, editing feeds directly into balance - anyone with two brain cells to rub together would've seen that Combat Marksmanship is an abysmal idea on the first skim.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Libertad on May 21, 2012, 07:38:32 PM
The Experience point system requires minmaxing to be truly effective.

Experience points are accumulated and then spent to gain new and higher ranks.

Example: increasing the level of key Vampire Disciplines costs a number of experience equal to 5 x the next higher level.  Levels are represented in dots.

Say you want to have 3 dots in each of your three key disciplines.   At chargen you have 3 free dots to distribute.  Put them all in one discipline, and spend 60 experience on the other two.  Put one free dot in each discipline, and it costs you 75 experience.  WoD characters gain 1-5 experience per game session, with an average of 2-3 points.

Under this system, it won't just be minmaxers trying to cut costs; it will be people who don't want to accidentally overshoot the costs when playing games with a definite beginning and end.  In fact, your jack of all trades types will actually be less good at their role over the long term unless they load up on starting dots in one or two traits at the beginning.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: veekie on May 22, 2012, 04:57:35 AM
Oh yes, the editing staff, or whoever's in charge of them need to be dragged out and shot repeatedly. Some concepts don't even tally across their descriptions in the chapters, and whoever thought it was a brilliant idea to tilt the Paradox page in Mage 45 degrees, or use gold on white lettering should just be fired repeatedly.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Captnq on May 22, 2012, 10:40:07 AM
Oh yes, the editing staff, or whoever's in charge of them need to be dragged out and shot repeatedly. Some concepts don't even tally across their descriptions in the chapters, and whoever thought it was a brilliant idea to tilt the Paradox page in Mage 45 degrees, or use gold on white lettering should just be fired repeatedly.

Heh.

I know some of the editing staff, specifically Eileen. Went to school with her. Lets just say she RPs just as good as she edits and leave it at that.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: RedWarlock on May 22, 2012, 11:09:02 AM
Actually, I find the base system fairly well-designed, but different from what people versed in other styles of games come to expect. It's not that far off from d20 modern in terms of base character functionality, it just has a slightly different focus. The base WoD book is the equivalent of the base heroic character classes, capped at maybe level 10. I haven't played all the systems in full, but I own the core 3 plus changeling, and a few addendum books. Changeling seems to be a more 'stable' game, at least in some respects (more even focus between combat, social, and mental challenges, definitely), though my initial focus when I first got into it was Werewolf, which I enjoyed for the combat focus, coming off of D&D.

The dice system isn't that bad, especially if you look at the odds. (two dice is approximately a 50/50 chance of success, which seems like a fine baseline to me.) It also helps if you think of this as a system that promotes fear through low chances of success, much like a horror movie. (some could find it frustrating, but it's all in how you handle the stress of the situation. If you come into it expecting to be a capable super-hero, you're going to be frustrated. If you come into it expecting to be a horror-movie victim or survivor by-the-skin-of-your-teeth, it changes in tone.)

It IS a very loose combat system, and nothing in the way of CR, but that's also helped by the fact that the dice ARE so swingy. Even a 10-die pool could result in no successes, which is helpful if you have a majorly powerful opponent who would (with equivalent stats in a d20 game) otherwise destroy you without effort. You're usually the weaker strength in sheer numbers, but you have more flexibility and choice in your actions.

Feel free to tear me a new one for it, but this is my opinion.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Dictum Mortuum on May 22, 2012, 11:20:36 AM
First off - I really really really like the classic WoD, because I grew up playing vampire and mage. We're talking for really long campaigns that lasted years.

When nWoD Vampire came out, I disliked it - I gave it a read after some years and found out that actually, we were already "using" some of the rules (of course, not exactly, but close enough) and in particular blood potency.

Of course, if you rule out the system, the two games are not really that different - nWoD is the same thing, just without a "story" behind it.

Now, I have nothing against playing nWoD or cWoD vampire.

On the other hand, I really really HATE nWoD mage.

I also like the Promethean! That game has some very good atmosphere.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: veekie on May 22, 2012, 01:10:15 PM
Quote
It IS a very loose combat system, and nothing in the way of CR, but that's also helped by the fact that the dice ARE so swingy. Even a 10-die pool could result in no successes, which is helpful if you have a majorly powerful opponent who would (with equivalent stats in a d20 game) otherwise destroy you without effort. You're usually the weaker strength in sheer numbers, but you have more flexibility and choice in your actions.
Except it does the reverse. Getting high successes is probable from dice explosions on big dice rolls, but getting your minimal 1 success on routine tasks IS exactly the problem. It just winds up that people take the big risks all the time because you might as well get the big payout if you're likely to lose on the small.

What you get, is your expert locksmith will have a regular chance of failing to pick a dime store padlock, and your new york taxi driver can still fail to drive properly on an open road. On the other hand you could bumrush the vampire with a knife, because with dice explosions, you are actually more likely to kill it that way than if you played smart.

My group is of course, biased on this due to whimsical luck, but it winds up more action-comedy than horror simply because the professional thief regularly gets stymied by simple office locks, but when the big bad shows up we one-round it  with 1 high dice hit that explodes(to the effect of 1 success per dice chucked) and chunky salsa-ize the thing.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Libertad on May 22, 2012, 02:22:57 PM
This is subjective rather than an objective flaw, but it's another thing I'd like to address: the Virtue and Vice system.

The system is basically the Morality/Action Point system for World of Darkness.  There are 7 Virtues and Vices each, based off of the Heavenly Virtues and Deadly Sins.  When your character acts in accordance with this Virtue or Vice, he regains Willpower.  Willpower is spent to activate powerful abilities and add more dice to your dice pool.

Actually, the Vices are the same, but the Virtues are a little different.  Now, some of the problems with the Virtues are that they aren't inherently "positive," or good qualities.  Vices only work when your actions hurt others in a significant way: Vices are basically taken out of control.  A person with the Greed Vice is never, ever satisfied with what he has and needs MORE, while a person with the Pride Vice is incapable of admitting wrongdoing and will never back down from the most petty of conflicts. (http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness/index.php?title=Virtue_and_Vice_(NWOD))

Now, the Virtues aren't necessarily good qualities: on the contrary, they can be furthered for bad ends.  Fortitude is basically just unwavering conviction to an ideal or principle.  And not all ideals are good ideals.  And Faith is really just a belief that there's inherent order to the universe.

There are alternatives to the system in the Mirrors sourcebook, but the way that Vices are described risks putting characters in straightjackets ("you have the Lust Vice, meaning that you have almost no self-control over your baser urges").

In addition to Virtue and Vice, there is also the Morality Score.  Every player character has a score rated from 0 to 10, with a starting score, or average, of 7.  Evil actions are placed at certain points on the scale.  Minor things are higher on the scale, while more heinous actions are positioned lower.  When you do an action lower than your current morality on the threshold, you have to roll dice with the risk of lowering your score.  If the PC can justify the crime to the GM ("it was in self-defense!  I had no other choice!") he can gain bonus dice to roll (keyword: bonus dice, not automatic success).  People with lower moralities have a higher chance of picking up degenerations (mental illnesses and other unstable behavior), while supernatural characters suffer additional penalties.

The Morality Score can be good in that it gives consequences for PCs acting like dicks (kidnap and torture enough people, and your vampire's dark side takes over and you become an NPC at the extreme end).  But many players and GMs are uncomfortable with placing actions on a defined scale, and its harder to get back your morality once you've lost it.  Mortals can "buy" morality with experience, or gain it automatically with enough good deeds.  Supernatural characters can only buy it.  And buying morality's expensive.  Another problem is that the social and power structures of certain monster player organizations (vamps in particular) are made a certain way that high-morality PCs will get screwed over in the long run, while getting to low Morality is all too easy.  Additionally, injuring another in self-defense is a Morality rating 7 crime, while murder's a Morality rating 3 crime, invalidating high-Morality combat character types.  It's much harder to be a good person in the World of Darkness, and you're expected to suffer for it.  It takes a narrow, specific kind of character to be high Morality, and the fellow PCs and Storyteller must be in on it to have a worthwhile and enjoyable game.  Makes sense for the genre, but it's not to everyone's tastes.

From a mechanical standpoint, the ideal morality for many WoD groups is 5-6.  Positive benefits of a high morality for supernaturals don't kick in until you've got an 8, while the major penalties for low morality kick in around 4.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: RedWarlock on May 22, 2012, 03:00:41 PM
Except it does the reverse. Getting high successes is probable from dice explosions on big dice rolls, but getting your minimal 1 success on routine tasks IS exactly the problem. It just winds up that people take the big risks all the time because you might as well get the big payout if you're likely to lose on the small.

What you get, is your expert locksmith will have a regular chance of failing to pick a dime store padlock, and your new york taxi driver can still fail to drive properly on an open road. On the other hand you could bumrush the vampire with a knife, because with dice explosions, you are actually more likely to kill it that way than if you played smart.

My group is of course, biased on this due to whimsical luck, but it winds up more action-comedy than horror simply because the professional thief regularly gets stymied by simple office locks, but when the big bad shows up we one-round it  with 1 high dice hit that explodes(to the effect of 1 success per dice chucked) and chunky salsa-ize the thing.
My thought is, why are you bothering to check on routine tasks in calm circumstances? What is it you're failing or succeeding at? Almost anybody can drive a car through simple traffic, whether they have a dot in the Drive skill or not. It's only when they're hurried, or panicked, or facing some greater-than-everyday challenge that the dice even come out in our games.

And the chance of failure is always a risk, because the attempt of the dice-roll represents as much random circumstance or chance external to the character as it does the fluctuations of internal ability. Failing the drive check could mean there was a traffic jam, you ran low on gas and had to refuel along the way, a minor fender-bender, or something else minor but non-life-threatening that costs you the challenge despite fairly normal circumstances. But the risk of loss needs to also be more than just 'you don't get there', it's 'you don't get there before they do this' or something else, because failure isn't a simple pass/go, it's got consequences. The ST has to keep the challenges and what needs to be tested relevant to the game's tone, or we turn this into Bosses and Boardrooms and don't ever make it into the vampire hierarchy, etc.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Unbeliever on May 22, 2012, 11:01:18 PM
I was going to post something longer, which was a litany of what is wrong with WoD in a lot of ways.  Some posts have hit on the same points I would have, but I have others, such as the terrible organization of the books, as well.

Here's the thing specific to nWoD, though.  And, I say this as someone who used to give White Wolf a lot of my hard-earned dollars.  Almost everything that people have brought up was there, and acknowledged, in oWoD.  Given the golden opportunity to fix at least some of it they hardly managed to do so.  And, on top of that, they jettisoned the character, flavor, and heart of the oWoD in favor of something bland and tasteless. 

So, you have rules that are at best marginally improved, but still pretty terrible, for a game that is less interesting. 


@Libertad
I have advocated adopting a trait vote type of approach to morality, a la Burning Wheel.  That, and about half of BiTS are the two things I will whole-heartedly steal from BW.  The rest I can live without. 

Virtues and Vices are actually a pretty good system, worlds better than oWoD's nature/demeanor thing, which to date I don't really grok how to play around with (a common complaint among elements of the White Wolf corpus).  And, I've been playing White Wolf games since the 90s.  I do think their descriptions tend to go into the mindlessly extreme, which might be what you're responding to.  It's a general issue with WW's melodramatic approach to everything.

@Dictum
I love me some Promethean, too.  I also want to put Slasher up there as one of the nWoD's greatest books. 

tangent
The other thing I have with White Wolf games, Vampire in particular, is that I don't really know how to run or play a good one.  I'm not quite sure what it looks like.  My ideal would be for something like "Game of Thrones" with fangs.  But, I'm not sure how to really pull that off at the table ... This may be a personal failing, though. 
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: veekie on May 23, 2012, 12:57:50 AM
Quote
My thought is, why are you bothering to check on routine tasks in calm circumstances? What is it you're failing or succeeding at? Almost anybody can drive a car through simple traffic, whether they have a dot in the Drive skill or not. It's only when they're hurried, or panicked, or facing some greater-than-everyday challenge that the dice even come out in our games.
Yes, EXACTLY, because said New York Taxi Driver would fail too often at navigating routine rush hour traffic, which is a non-trivial roll...and at the same time the newbie driver still can clear the same drive with luck.
You need a mechanism to determine what is routine for a given character, for a trained doctor(Medicine 3+), performing sutures is a routine task, for someone with only basic first aid knowledge(Medicine 1), it is not. But the doctor is only marginally more likely to succeed.
The doctor has 6 dice and the first aid responder has 4, assuming adequate tools +1 equipment and -1 difficulty for the small injury, you're looking at 75.24% vs 72.35% to stitch it up and stop the bleeding. And 3% vs 0.5% for getting an exceptional surgery. The doctor would fail often enough that he'd be looking at a malpractice suit(though on the bright side the prosecutor has similar odds).
What the doctor should be able to do in his sleep, he is likely to mess up anyway.

This only gets worse with more difficult rolls(as that is reflected with larger penalties), as long as you retain at least 1 dice, you have 30% odds of making it. Easier rolls on the other hand, don't get any easier, you're adding fractions of percents.

So how do you adjudicate what is routine and what is not then? The rule system certainly doesn't give you any clue as to what to call routine, and your success frequency doesn't either.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: RedWarlock on May 23, 2012, 01:56:46 AM
So how do you adjudicate what is routine and what is not then? The rule system certainly doesn't give you any clue as to what to call routine, and your success frequency doesn't either.
You're missing the point. Routine means routine, look it up in a dictionary. The common english definition works perfectly well here, no need to push the system into semantics.

What I'm trying to say is, the doctor doing sutures in a regular hospital/ER/etc environment doesn't even make the check, because it's all his home turf environment. No need to check for failure (and thus risk said malpractice suit), because no failure is expected. On the other hand, if he's being attacked, or he's sewing up somebody in a storm sewer after escaping a fight, or he's having to do it on himself because his team was just slaughtered, that's when the need to check for failure comes around.

It's a horror game. The checks should only need to be made when the situation is horrific. In horror movies and fiction, people get scared, otherwise-routine tasks become as likely to fail the first time as not, because the situation is out of their comfort zone, and they can't be as perfect and precise, and even a master/expert/chief-surgeon has a chance to flub it. (and on the opposite end, even a novice has a chance to succeed, although not necessarily well.) The nWoD system is not a full reality simulator even to the vague extent d20 tries to be, it's a device, a storytelling tool for creating horror fiction.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Unbeliever on May 23, 2012, 02:26:42 AM
^ that doesn't make sense, though.  There is no general mechanic embedded in the game to determine when something is horrific, how it is horrific, and so on.  The battle-hardened cop from Baltimore is more likely to fail at the task than the suburban Harvard med student, even though by the "horrific" analysis one of them should be shaking like a leaf and the other should be a hardened veteran.  It also seems sort of weird to think of the ER as a low-stress problem-free environment.  If that were true, no one would die there.  Insert similar arguments for court cases, police investigations, and so on.  I have never yet seen a White Wolf game where all die rolls were made under stress, and there are numerous mechanics where they aren't. 

As Veekie notes, the dice mechanic of nWoD bleeds out the differences between characters.  Under pressure, with a zombie horde attacking, you'd still expect the Dean of Harvard Medicine to be much better at suturing than a 10 year old.  Apparently, the numbers don't work out that way.

But, it's worse than that.  For all this talk of horror, 90% of nWoD games have the players be the monsters.  What scares a 200 year old vampire who has murdered people on a weekly basis?  What counts as their "comfort zone"? 

These are all the sorts of questions that a system is supposed to handle, or at least give a vague glance towards.  There are literally, to my knowledge, 0 mechanics in nWoD for scene- or narrative-driven increases in difficulty.  They are all straightforward simulationist stuff.  Just take a look at page 154 of the nWoD core rulebook -- all those modifiers are based on things like Off-hand attacks, prone targets, range, concealment, etc.     

If the system is supposed to be a "storytelling tool for creating horror fiction" it is not only woefully inadequate.  I am not an expert of nWoD (though I am pretty close to one with oWoD), but I know of no rule, guideline, or even attempt to steer it away from what would be considered the "standard" semi-simualtionist RPG approach.  There are none of the narrative-driven mechanics one would expect. 

I think such an approach might be a much better game than White Wolf has managed to put together.  Frankly, I advocate a rules-lite approach with WW b/c I think their rules tend to just get in the way of the more interesting stuff in the system.  But, rules-as-written, that's not the way the system is set up. 
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Agita on May 23, 2012, 02:57:35 AM
What veekie and Unbeliever are saying, basically. To be fair, the 10-year old would have a lower chance of making the check, but only because his attributes are lower and he's untrained, leaving him to make a chance roll. However, his minimum roll is still 1 die, giving a 10-year old a 10% chance of successfully performing that surgery under the supposedly stressful conditions.

Or, hell... a two-year old in a full operating theater would have a 10% chance of performing a successful surgery.

Under the bottom line, if you want horror, you don't want swing. Swing means there is much more left to luck than is usual in the horror genre. What you want is monsters that are consistently stronger than the PCs, which means a relatively predictable RNG (i.e. a steep bell curve), with characters ultimately winning only through setting up a favorable situation  and/or exploiting the monster's Achilles heel and/or a bit of luck. FATE-derived games aren't perfect for this due to the very meta nature of the mechanics, but they have the bell curve and the other elements in theory, so they're already a better fit than anything WoD has ever produced.
Hell, Exalted does horror better, say with a heroic mortals game (traditional horror) or even Dragonbloods (action horror). Alternatively, if you want the various WoD game lines' "you are monsters now", there's plenty of those (Abyssals/Infernals, any Akuma, Fair Folk, Abyssal/Infernal half-castes, demonbloods/ghostbloods/faebloods in descending order of badassitude).
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Unbeliever on May 23, 2012, 11:00:58 AM
I'd add that this isn't my biggest beef with nWoD.  Although I think a mismatch between what the game seems to want to be (viz. RedWarlock's ideas) and what the game actually is is a big issue. 

My bigger issues are things like the extremely rocket tag nature of gameplay b/c there's nothing even approaching defenses, the way powers are structured, and the shoddy experience point system. 
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: caelic on May 26, 2012, 08:31:12 AM
Ugh, World of Darkness. Libertad and veekie hit a lot of the salient points. The whole die system needs to be taken behind the shed and shot - too random, too many dice, too slanted towards failure. Balance is practically nonexistent.



...luckily, when you do shoot it, it won't be able to soak. ;)
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: ariasderros on May 26, 2012, 08:49:29 AM
Ugh, World of Darkness. Libertad and veekie hit a lot of the salient points. The whole die system needs to be taken behind the shed and shot - too random, too many dice, too slanted towards failure. Balance is practically nonexistent.



...luckily, when you do shoot it, it won't be able to soak. ;)

............
Respect given.
 :clap
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Fadier on May 26, 2012, 09:40:29 AM
I used to play with a GM who loves WoD. Infact playing a short lived oWoD Mage game was the first RPG I played.

The thing that stood out for me in nWoD was that they had streamlined the base mechanics. Before oWoD's mechanics were jumbled around from setting to setting, but with nWoD the mechanics seem a bit more streamlined. Attributes seemed more appropiate with each catagory having a power, flexability and resistance version (rather than 3 words that seemed appropiate)


Though I cannot comment on this much more than this as the only nWoD (Changeling) I played the GM got the rules HORRIBLY WRONG. For a start he really did not care about rules and tended to flub things. For example one character was big so instead of buying the large merit the GM just gave them a size rating of 8. They were larger than a grizzly bear, and had the ability to grow even larger. This never came up even when we were exploring a vapires underground lair.

Somehow he thought that changelings could spend a point of glamour to add 3 die to a specific Attribute/Skill for an entire scene (I think this was his mix up with the new Willpower rules). I discovered this when looking up some changeling mechanics that said things like 'For one strength die roll you can spend any amount of glamour to gain that many die on your roll'. When asked he shrugged it off and said something akin to 'thats still useful you can get more than just 3 extra die'.

The long story short I just spent glamour to improved my Dexterity and Firearms skills in each combat so I was operating with a die pool of something like 15 + weapon bonus.

He also was making us roll our defense rather than just a static reduction in die pool. You think the mechanics are swingy? Try it with rolling defense.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: midnight_v on May 26, 2012, 10:57:54 AM
I'd like to advocate just giving in and playing "After Sundown"

Hmm... I guess I'll need a link. Damn.

ZOMG, they made a game off the movie? (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442740/)

Or were you talking about this? (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52316&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0)

Oh yeah, and I've got some more stuff about nWoD while we're at it:

Monster creation: sometimes you want to really give your players a good scare, show your troupe of vampires/werewolves that they're not the only monsters on the block.  The core rules lack a good system for creating your own monsters; the most they've got is ghost/poltergeist creation.  Hunter: the Vigil has the best system so far, but it requires shelling out $40+ for a couple of pages in a massive setting book.  The other options are the spirit creation rules in Werewolf and Book of Spirits, but they're kind of bare-bones and meant for spirits.  Vampire's got a Night Horrors series, and Mage has Encounters with the Abyss, but nothing in the way of "creating."  I do recommend getting Hunter on other merits, especially if you ever want to run a "monster hunters" game.

  The second one, obviously! I had forgotten that they DID make that movie.... wow.
In anycase I'm not super big on the WoD, but damn, wanna play as the monsters, interesting backstories, decent mechanics?
Try somehting new. In fact I think The After Sundown guys at least 1 of them did work for WOD at some point.
 
I swear brand Identity is the ruin of making good choices, and thus one of the ruins of capitalism.
Title: Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
Post by: Amechra on June 07, 2012, 11:56:42 PM
Part of me is sad that no-one has actually ever completed the rewrites they were doing of Exalted into Risus...

You know what, I might have to work on one. Along with a WoD one. Because I can.