Author Topic: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?  (Read 13965 times)

Offline Agita

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Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
« Reply #20 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).
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Offline Unbeliever

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Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
« Reply #21 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. 

Offline caelic

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Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
« Reply #22 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. ;)

Offline ariasderros

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Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
« Reply #23 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. ;)

............
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Offline Fadier

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Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
« Reply #24 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.
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Offline midnight_v

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Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
« Reply #25 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?

Or were you talking about this?

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.
 
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Offline Amechra

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Re: What's everyone's beef with nWoD?
« Reply #26 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.
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