More roleplaying geekery - WoD/IoD
Oct. 1st, 2010 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aumentouSo, World of Darkness (or more accurately, Isles of Darkness, the UK-wide live game confluence) dot build system, and MC system. Two parts of the character creation system. Both are crap, and both encourage min-maxed stupidity.
First, dot build. WoD (and by extension IoD) normally sell you stuff in "dots". You have between 0 and 5 dots in a thing (or between one and five for Attributes, which are things you can't be without like Strength). There's also this principle: each dot costs more than the last. So attributes cost "new dots" (which is to say, the amount of dots you'll have after you've raised it) * 5 Xp each. Raise your strength from 1 to 2, that's 10XP. Raise it from 4 to 5, that's 25 XP. It mostly works, at least in principle.
The dot build system involves observing this functioning principle and chucking it out of the window. You get given a number of dots, and each dot is just that - a dot*. When you're done assigning dots you sprinkle on some actual XP to finish the character.
*with the exception that the fifth dot is two dots. Stupid approximation.
This encourages stupid min-maxing. Let's look at our old pal strength again. Strength is a physical attribute, which means it starts at one, it can go up to five, new dots cost new dots *5, and it's in a group with dexterity and stamina, the other two physical attributes. When defining your character, you rank your physical attributes, mental attributes, and social attributes, as groups, and you get 5,4, or 3 dots to each group depending on how you ranked them. So if you ranked physical first, you'd have five dots to spend there.
So you go to your physical, you decide you want the character to be stronger than average (strength of 3), significantly more dexterous and agile than average (dex 4), and tougher than average (stamina 3). This isn't an unreasonable desire - a fairly larger number of, say, professional soldiers must be statted like this. So you put two of your dots in strength, two in dex, one in stamina, and make up the rest with XP. Well, your XP cost there is 20 (to raise dex to 4, plus 15 (to raise stam to 3). 35 of your starting XP, just to have the stats of a mundane soldier? Okay whatever.
But there's a better way. Because if you instead put two dots in strength and three in dex, you can get those two built up straight away. If you then buy the stamina score with XP, you can get exactly the same fucking stats for 10 XP less.
...which is a lot, if your starting budget is dots + 50. It gets worse when you consider that you have three sets of attributes to do this with. It gets worse again when you realise that you can usually get by with quite a few attributes at 1 or 2. You don't really need that strength 3 if you take a cheap merit somewhere else. So now you have a strength 2 average person or strength 1 wuss who is somehow still remarkably agile.
It gets even worse when you consider that you have 24 seperate skills, and that some of them are so ubiquitous in the modern world that they ought to be mandatory without a good excuse. A real-life skillset would include average levels of empathy, academics, socialise, and a half dozen others. IoD-optimised skillsets are narrow and deep - experts in one thing who somehow never learned how to have drinks with friends.
It is also in principle quite fucking stupid that the system can build identical characters and charge more for one than the other.
A storyteller recently told me that he insists characters be sensibly constructed just on the dots alone, and that the XP can do what it likes afterwards. This appeals to me in some ways - the idea that the dots represent an earlier stage of development than the XP supplement is kind of intuitive. However, it comes with the rather hefty downside that it makes things more expensive, and it's the people with normal XP levels that suffer.
There is, of course, a solution. Axe the dot build. Start with attributes at 1, other stuff at zero, and a large pile of XP. Spend according to the usual rules. Yes, you can still specilaise, but now specialisation will actually cost you like it would if you bought it in game. Rather than starting with your specialities and then back-filling with acquired XP to make a rounded (semi-)human being, you'd start with a human and then alter them as you thought was appropriate.
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Now, MC. This is an IoD thing where people who have done useful work for the organisation gain a higher "membership class", or MC. This is like becoming a premium member or something. Afterwards, all their characters get more XP to spend on creation, and always will. It could be the last thing you did was ten years ago, but you're still MC whatever with whatever more XP to spend than new players.
Each point of MC gets you 20 XP more. Each third point gets you a 40 point "bump" bonus for no reason at all. These "bumps" are ludicrous, but the system itself is so fucking batshit it's hard to tell. It's fair enough that there should be some sort of reward for doing voluntary work for the system, but some of the problems are:
1) It's an in character reward for an out of characteraction. Yes, it's nice that you help out, but why does that mean you get a more powerful character? Why not, oh, I don't know, have some sort of out of character reward, like money or something? This is a bit of principle: the MC system lets you buy experience with your personal time. What's the difference between buying it with your time and buying it with cash?
2) It never goes away. Even if the last time you did something useful was fifteen years ago, your MC persists and you're still being rewarded years later. Last time I got paid for doing work I got paid at the end of the month for that month. I don't work there any more and they don't pay me. Why should this be different?
3) It clutters the place up with high-XP characters and hence drives new players away.
In a player-versus-enemy (PvE) game, it's hard to work out how tough the monsters should be when the player characters are an eclectic mix. If we establish that the local mooks are about as tough as starting PCs, then that means starting PCs behave very carefully, whereas Dave the Ineffable, (with 400 extra XP behind him and the ability to teleport your head five yards to the left while leaving your body in place and the ability to be ethereal while doing that) is going to find things quite easy. This means that either the whole place is a newbie playground and Dave rampages through it, or the stuff is dangerous enough to bother Dave, and that means Dave has to be involved in every plot that leads to conflict, because if he isn't there you can't handle it. As a new character you end up looking at the plot and deciding that somebody else had better handle that shit, because you clearly can't. Or to put it another way, your character is encouraged not to go near the actual game.
In a PvP game it gets even worse. Fucking with Dave is clearly doomed, so either your character arrives at an accomodation, or they leave, or you die. If Dave is a nice character this makes the game dull. If Dave is a twisted nutter who needs putting down for the good of everyone within head-teleporting range, it means either you play someone of equal moral flexibility, or you get used to physrepping your characters heads with paper mache. Again, there's not really much reason to hang around playing this game.
4) It's always the same players with the power. Okay, now I'm getting personal. Having variations in the power of characters in a game is okay, depending on the setting. It makes sense that the Princess of the Eternal and Unpleasantly-Befanged Night has some wacky powers, because it's a stupid title and if she wasn't tough enough to stop them someone would pull her head off just so they never had to use it again. But if and when you finally manage to off a character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours, you know what happens? The fucker respawns as another character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours. When the big characters in game 1 are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you consider game 2 where they are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you start to think that maybe game 3 would be better because player Z doesn't like that one so there will be some variety, that's not a good thing. In the best case, where the people with the big number MCs are nice, it's still boring. In the worst case, if the people with the big number MCs are dicks, there might be fuck all you can do to stop them.
5) It encourages precisely the sort of munchking min-maxing that the dot-build system encourages.
Got there in the end! In order to do something interesting in the game, your character has to have value, whether as a useful ally or a dangerous enemy or both. This means they need to have power, power being defined as "things they can do that other characters think are impressive". If you munchkin the crap out of a starting character, you might be able to do something or you might not, but it's your best bet to have something the character is good at that they can trade on. If you don't munchkin the crap out of the character you can expect to have no useful assets in game, which will leave you uninvolved as the other characters quite rationally decide your character has no value.
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Conclusion of sorts: If you're a storyteller, and you want players to reduce the min-maxing stupidty, you can do two things: 1) remove the dot-build system and use XP from the ground up, imposing rules and guidelines as you see fit. 2) Do something to reduce or remove the effects of MC. Anything you can would be good.
Rant over.
First, dot build. WoD (and by extension IoD) normally sell you stuff in "dots". You have between 0 and 5 dots in a thing (or between one and five for Attributes, which are things you can't be without like Strength). There's also this principle: each dot costs more than the last. So attributes cost "new dots" (which is to say, the amount of dots you'll have after you've raised it) * 5 Xp each. Raise your strength from 1 to 2, that's 10XP. Raise it from 4 to 5, that's 25 XP. It mostly works, at least in principle.
The dot build system involves observing this functioning principle and chucking it out of the window. You get given a number of dots, and each dot is just that - a dot*. When you're done assigning dots you sprinkle on some actual XP to finish the character.
*with the exception that the fifth dot is two dots. Stupid approximation.
This encourages stupid min-maxing. Let's look at our old pal strength again. Strength is a physical attribute, which means it starts at one, it can go up to five, new dots cost new dots *5, and it's in a group with dexterity and stamina, the other two physical attributes. When defining your character, you rank your physical attributes, mental attributes, and social attributes, as groups, and you get 5,4, or 3 dots to each group depending on how you ranked them. So if you ranked physical first, you'd have five dots to spend there.
So you go to your physical, you decide you want the character to be stronger than average (strength of 3), significantly more dexterous and agile than average (dex 4), and tougher than average (stamina 3). This isn't an unreasonable desire - a fairly larger number of, say, professional soldiers must be statted like this. So you put two of your dots in strength, two in dex, one in stamina, and make up the rest with XP. Well, your XP cost there is 20 (to raise dex to 4, plus 15 (to raise stam to 3). 35 of your starting XP, just to have the stats of a mundane soldier? Okay whatever.
But there's a better way. Because if you instead put two dots in strength and three in dex, you can get those two built up straight away. If you then buy the stamina score with XP, you can get exactly the same fucking stats for 10 XP less.
...which is a lot, if your starting budget is dots + 50. It gets worse when you consider that you have three sets of attributes to do this with. It gets worse again when you realise that you can usually get by with quite a few attributes at 1 or 2. You don't really need that strength 3 if you take a cheap merit somewhere else. So now you have a strength 2 average person or strength 1 wuss who is somehow still remarkably agile.
It gets even worse when you consider that you have 24 seperate skills, and that some of them are so ubiquitous in the modern world that they ought to be mandatory without a good excuse. A real-life skillset would include average levels of empathy, academics, socialise, and a half dozen others. IoD-optimised skillsets are narrow and deep - experts in one thing who somehow never learned how to have drinks with friends.
It is also in principle quite fucking stupid that the system can build identical characters and charge more for one than the other.
A storyteller recently told me that he insists characters be sensibly constructed just on the dots alone, and that the XP can do what it likes afterwards. This appeals to me in some ways - the idea that the dots represent an earlier stage of development than the XP supplement is kind of intuitive. However, it comes with the rather hefty downside that it makes things more expensive, and it's the people with normal XP levels that suffer.
There is, of course, a solution. Axe the dot build. Start with attributes at 1, other stuff at zero, and a large pile of XP. Spend according to the usual rules. Yes, you can still specilaise, but now specialisation will actually cost you like it would if you bought it in game. Rather than starting with your specialities and then back-filling with acquired XP to make a rounded (semi-)human being, you'd start with a human and then alter them as you thought was appropriate.
--------
Now, MC. This is an IoD thing where people who have done useful work for the organisation gain a higher "membership class", or MC. This is like becoming a premium member or something. Afterwards, all their characters get more XP to spend on creation, and always will. It could be the last thing you did was ten years ago, but you're still MC whatever with whatever more XP to spend than new players.
Each point of MC gets you 20 XP more. Each third point gets you a 40 point "bump" bonus for no reason at all. These "bumps" are ludicrous, but the system itself is so fucking batshit it's hard to tell. It's fair enough that there should be some sort of reward for doing voluntary work for the system, but some of the problems are:
1) It's an in character reward for an out of characteraction. Yes, it's nice that you help out, but why does that mean you get a more powerful character? Why not, oh, I don't know, have some sort of out of character reward, like money or something? This is a bit of principle: the MC system lets you buy experience with your personal time. What's the difference between buying it with your time and buying it with cash?
2) It never goes away. Even if the last time you did something useful was fifteen years ago, your MC persists and you're still being rewarded years later. Last time I got paid for doing work I got paid at the end of the month for that month. I don't work there any more and they don't pay me. Why should this be different?
3) It clutters the place up with high-XP characters and hence drives new players away.
In a player-versus-enemy (PvE) game, it's hard to work out how tough the monsters should be when the player characters are an eclectic mix. If we establish that the local mooks are about as tough as starting PCs, then that means starting PCs behave very carefully, whereas Dave the Ineffable, (with 400 extra XP behind him and the ability to teleport your head five yards to the left while leaving your body in place and the ability to be ethereal while doing that) is going to find things quite easy. This means that either the whole place is a newbie playground and Dave rampages through it, or the stuff is dangerous enough to bother Dave, and that means Dave has to be involved in every plot that leads to conflict, because if he isn't there you can't handle it. As a new character you end up looking at the plot and deciding that somebody else had better handle that shit, because you clearly can't. Or to put it another way, your character is encouraged not to go near the actual game.
In a PvP game it gets even worse. Fucking with Dave is clearly doomed, so either your character arrives at an accomodation, or they leave, or you die. If Dave is a nice character this makes the game dull. If Dave is a twisted nutter who needs putting down for the good of everyone within head-teleporting range, it means either you play someone of equal moral flexibility, or you get used to physrepping your characters heads with paper mache. Again, there's not really much reason to hang around playing this game.
4) It's always the same players with the power. Okay, now I'm getting personal. Having variations in the power of characters in a game is okay, depending on the setting. It makes sense that the Princess of the Eternal and Unpleasantly-Befanged Night has some wacky powers, because it's a stupid title and if she wasn't tough enough to stop them someone would pull her head off just so they never had to use it again. But if and when you finally manage to off a character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours, you know what happens? The fucker respawns as another character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours. When the big characters in game 1 are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you consider game 2 where they are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you start to think that maybe game 3 would be better because player Z doesn't like that one so there will be some variety, that's not a good thing. In the best case, where the people with the big number MCs are nice, it's still boring. In the worst case, if the people with the big number MCs are dicks, there might be fuck all you can do to stop them.
5) It encourages precisely the sort of munchking min-maxing that the dot-build system encourages.
Got there in the end! In order to do something interesting in the game, your character has to have value, whether as a useful ally or a dangerous enemy or both. This means they need to have power, power being defined as "things they can do that other characters think are impressive". If you munchkin the crap out of a starting character, you might be able to do something or you might not, but it's your best bet to have something the character is good at that they can trade on. If you don't munchkin the crap out of the character you can expect to have no useful assets in game, which will leave you uninvolved as the other characters quite rationally decide your character has no value.
----------------------
Conclusion of sorts: If you're a storyteller, and you want players to reduce the min-maxing stupidty, you can do two things: 1) remove the dot-build system and use XP from the ground up, imposing rules and guidelines as you see fit. 2) Do something to reduce or remove the effects of MC. Anything you can would be good.
Rant over.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 03:32 pm (UTC)MC....well, I hate MC. I was really happy while Changeling ran with less MC focus. And you pretty much bang out every reason I have an issue. I'd probably not have an issue with MC that acted like extra xp - you can save it up as long as you want, but when it's gone, it's gone. Sure, it's an in game reward for OC action (though arguably so is stuff like getting a downtime response). But it's never going to swing the play balance that much, and there is less permanent power creep.
Trouble is that changing it at a local level upsets all the high MC characters that cannot compete at a local level. And at a national level, it's the high MC players that tend to be in the decision-making roles. Plus there are players who want to be high-MC one day, and players who can't cope with the idea of changing the current 'perfect' system.
My big issue with the Iod stats is having attributes in social and mental traits. Because really people can't play much different from themselves in these areas, leading to them actually only being used in fuelling dice pools, rather than actual social/mental uses. And high-social characters that nobody can stand, Low-social characters that ooze charisma, Idiot-savants, etc.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 03:50 pm (UTC)I think the core of this whole discussion is that we're not happy with how nWoD MET is a tabletop system grafted onto a live action framework. We're not comfortable with the overwhelming emphasis it places on soft skills as a result.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 04:32 pm (UTC)Are we not? Personally, I don't mind it that much. Rolling an intimidation check with modifiers and then acting appropriately based on the result seems perfectly fine to me, though I acknowledge the 5-30 seconds of effective time freeze while you do the draw is a bit immersion breaking. Relying on hard skills for stuff like that basically means anyone can pass intimidate checks if they feel like it, all of the time, and ditto with resists to any other social thing.
I can see another problem if you take the soft social skills out too, because the characters have social interactions in downtime with NPCs. How do you model those?
No, I'm pretty sure my problem is with rules that don't work well, rather than that the system has rules.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 04:42 pm (UTC)Dan and I have been building (mostly hypothetical) combat bunnies with changeling, and we've yet to build one with balanced within one from each other) physical attributes, despite that being the most likely outcome if a reasonably-human person trained a lot. You get so much XP-bang for your dot-buck by dotting things at 4 that there isn't much point doing otherwise... and the fact that you're [b]going[/b] to be facing people/things built at wyrd 5 and with 5 dot contracts just means that every +1 is precious.
Or to put it another way, when you're building a <500XP from baby stats character, wasting a hundred or so on a balanced build is just not plausible if you want to be good enough at anything to compete in any field.
"I'd probably not have an issue with MC that acted like extra xp - you can save it up as long as you want, but when it's gone, it's gone."
That would actually fix quite a bit. At least then the challenge would be to off one character and take the offending XP pile out of the game.
"Because really people can't play much different from themselves in these areas, leading to them actually only being used in fuelling dice pools,"
That's kind of a seperate problem, but it is a problem as well. It's possible to play a less capable character than the player (though I've found downgrading int really hard), but how would you play a more capable one?
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 04:50 pm (UTC)That's not live action roleplaying. That's (charitably) tabletop roleplaying, standing up.
"Relying on hard skills for stuff like that basically means anyone can pass intimidate checks if they feel like it, all of the time, and ditto with resists to any other social thing."
Umm... no. It relies on the player being able to actually intimidate the other player (or do a good enough job that the player on the receiving end reacts appropriately, given the character they're playing). I've done it, and been on the receiving end of the same.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 05:13 pm (UTC)And a more meaningful victory.
"...less capable character..."
I find int quite difficult to downgrade - it's frustrating to watch people get things wrong when you've figured them out - it can be an issue with specific skills as well. Social is easier, though requires more constant effort to check yourself.
In terms of more capable, the only option that I've seen with regards to INT is ST hinting. Which works OK for understanding stuff in a situation, but deciding players long-term plans for them is a bit lame. Socially... is always likely to be difficult WRT other PCs.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 07:17 pm (UTC)I dare you to go on a WoD board and say that.
Seriously though, why does it matter?
Lets return to that intimidate thing. My character is an ice elemental and therefore scary. She has spent about 50% of game time so far covered in magical weaponry, whic his a pretty good reason to be afraid. She's also put more people on the floor bleeding than any other character in the game (that's still alive). Yet somehow, nobody acts scared until I get my intimidate pool out. Why? Am I too fluffy and nice?
I advance this argument: it is absolutely impossible to hard skill a WoD game, because the characters have magical powers humans don't have. It's impossible even to hard skill the basic interactions, because the characters are alien. I cannot, for example, hard skill the sheer unnatural emotional coldness of an ice elemental, nor can I hard skill the Voice Of Cold ooh-I'm-scary effect. Therefore if I'm going to play this character, we have to have soft skills.
Alternatively, we can play a game where every skill is hard. There's one of those called "real life", which I gather has really good immersion, but they say the plot is a bit lacking.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 11:32 pm (UTC)If it doesn't, why bother with the additional stress of the live stuff?
It matters to me because the only real benefit of live RP is the immersion. And having a ruleset which requires the breaking of immersion for basic actions undermines the whole thing.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 01:12 am (UTC)Seriously, can you think of a way to do this setting without soft skills?
no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 09:18 pm (UTC)That'd apply to all characters (including secondaries), so while it wouldn't reduce the size of the xp gap from MC we've currently got (with no bumps), it'd make that gap a smaller proportion of the xp.
Also, if we get any MC1 or MC2 players who travel it means they're on what the rest of IoD used, so they won't need a second character sheet & xp log for traveling.
Currently: MC1 = 50xp, MC9 = 210xp (a gap of 160xp, or MC9 being 4.2 times the xp)
With first bump: MC1 = 90xp, MC9 = 250xp (still a gap of 160xp, but MC9 is now less than 2.8 times as much).
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 07:50 pm (UTC)You see to be arguing that the soft skills that dominate other areas of the game impair the hard skills elsewhere. I wouldn't disagree. I've *seen* you intimidate someone with your hard skills (at Eos), which inclines me to think that soft skills social mechanics are essentially a crutch that supports bad roleplaying (not yours, by the way).
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 11:34 pm (UTC)Also, while I don't think that more XP is a desirable thing overall, I do think that a smaller gap between newbies and cam regulars is a good idea. For preference I'd do it by altering the MC system so that there weren't people wandering round with base +300 XP and so on, but handing a little extra out at the bottom would reduce the gap too...
Also, I discovered the other day I can't mock myself up as a human WoD character with less than dots + 90, so I don't see it as particularly bad as long as most of it's going into human stuff rather than supernatural.
I really, really want to see the dot-build system go. I mean, apart from anything else, it'd be nice to see a character with a power stat less than 3 in mage or changeling.
How about this: You start with attributes at 1 and everything else at 0. You build the character with no dots but with, lets say, 400 XP on a human template. Then you add the supernatural template, with whatever it gets in free merits etc just added and power stat at 1. Then you get your 50xp that can be spent on supernatural upgrades or more human upgrades.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 11:38 pm (UTC)Am I? I'm pretty sure that's not what I was trying to argue. My theory is that it's not possible to pretend to be someone with superior mental/social skills than the player without soft skills. This is a bit unfortunate even if we're all playing humans, and impossible when we're playing supernaturals with related supernatural properties.
Basically, without soft skills I think you're incredibly restricted in what you can play. You can play yourself, or you can play a less capable version of yourself. That's it. It would render the entire game of changeling moot, basically.
"I've *seen* you intimidate someone with your hard skills (at Eos),"
Yeah, but I was wearing four and a half stone of armour. I mean, I could've killed them by falling over on them.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 03:29 pm (UTC)If those characters were built on our stylesheet, they'd have a starting total of 170 and 220 xp before adding several years of play - still way beyond your power level. Does the game need characters of that power level? Arguably, no. That's not what you're arguing, however. That's an argument for a power cap (my game's got one...).
Removing dots and using an pure-xp build system would be fairly intimidating to new players. It would also probably require a similar level of system-mastery to exploiting the dots-build. The dots build system is not really to blame for starting characters with power stat 3, either (other than that's the maximum a character can usually afford). That's the weakness of a mechanical system that places too much emphasis on it (it doesn't happen in Requiem and Forsaken).
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 03:38 pm (UTC)That's true in virtually any of the situations you've already identified as problems. It's also not the only problem in Mage.
The more xp a character has, the more cost-effective it is to sink it into Gnosis (which makes you better at casting improvised spells) than buying Rotes (which allow you to cast a specific spell with a three part pool that doesn't include Gnosis). Now, the setting tells us that Rotes are jealously guarded secrets - why would anyone bother to learn them if they could just increase their Gnosis and cast improvised? If xp is a precious resource, Rotes (which are hard to acquire) become valuable because they're cheaper and increasing the appropriate pool is cheaper too.
Equally, more xp makes buying up one's inferior arcanum affordable too. An Acanthus with Forces 3 (for example) should be a big deal, but a shedton of xp (and the superfriends mentality) make it commonplace.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 03:50 pm (UTC)People *should* be intimidated by Elizabeth's track record, yes. But by the same token, people *were* intimidated by Diego and I'm absolutely sure you can intimidate someone without four stone of armour. I put it to you that they're waiting for you to pull cards because they're poor (or inexperienced) roleplayers.
"Basically, without soft skills I think you're incredibly restricted in what you can play. You can play yourself, or you can play a less capable version of yourself. That's it. It would render the entire game of changeling moot, basically."
There's this thing called Freeform. Its been around a while. It's not what you describe it as. That aside, it's possible to have soft skills in a live action game without them breaking immersion as violently as they do in MET - take every fest system you've ever done as an example.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 03:53 pm (UTC)You'd have to hack out a lot of powers that are designed for tabletop gaming, but you could do it.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 04:18 pm (UTC)How does it work if I want to play an extra-scary character then? A little badge saying "creeeeeeepy aura"?
"That aside, it's possible to have soft skills in a live action game without them breaking immersion as violently as they do in MET - take every fest system you've ever done as an example."
None of those had soft skills to be "a bit scary" or "to read minds" or any of the other stuff that changelings do on a daily basis. In fact, I don't recall any social or mental soft skills at all, unless you count literacy which was a straight downgrade to every player that didn't have the skill.
Seriously, how do you play someone that's more imposing than yourself, or more suave than yourself, without soft skills? Ask everyone else to titter and say "ooh, Mr Darcy, you are SO clever!" a lot?
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 04:23 pm (UTC)But that isn't the point. THE SETTING is not a collection of splats and powers.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 04:31 pm (UTC)You've missed 40% of the magic system in every fantasy event you've ever played at then? Soft skills effected through ref mediation, done in a far less immersion-breaking manner than in MET. I can think of several ways in which to replicate Changeling's "detect fear/sorrow/anger" powers in a more immersive way.
"Seriously, how do you play someone that's more imposing than yourself, or more suave than yourself, without soft skills?"
You step up. We're all of us capable of more than we give ourselves credit for. Roleplaying is an opportunity to test that.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 04:34 pm (UTC)"Removing dots and using an pure-xp build system would be fairly intimidating to new players."
Not, it wouldn't. You have to explain the XP system to new players whatever you do. As things stand, you have to explain the XP = new dots * multiplier thing AND you have to explain the dot build system. Two things to explain. Drop the dot build, only one thing to explain. Result: actually simpler. Only potentially confusing to previous WoD players, and if they managed the more complicated dot build, they should manage this.
"It would also probably require a similar level of system-mastery to exploiting the dots-build."
Unless there are specific powers in the game that are broken, there aren't really exploits in a straight XP system. The fact that each cumulative dot is a straight +1 but costs more than the dot before it is itself a balancing mechanism. The dot-build system allows and indeed encourages exploit by having each dot be a straight dot, rather than more expensive than the last.
The dot build system IS an exploit waiting to be used. XP just isn't.
"The dots build system is not really to blame for starting characters with power stat 3,"
Yes, it is. It is absolutely and completely. You can take power stat 3 for six merit dots. There is absolutely nothing else you could spend six merit dots on that is anywhere near as good as power stat 3, and (not at all co-incidentally) there is nothing you can spend six merit dots on that is as XP-expensive as power stat 3. The reason people start with power stat 3 is because it is absolutely the most efficient way to spend your dots. The only reasons not to start with power stat 3 are:
1) you want a 2+ dot merit only available at creation.
2) your storyteller doesn't let you.
3) your specific game gives you a reason not to have power stat 3 (Vampire, say, where you might want to feed on animals).
The dot build power stat = three merit dots bit is the biggest exploit in the entire dot-build system. It's also the one that encourages the most stupid shit. Most real human beings have a bunch of one and two dot merits, by WoD standards. But somehow when people build characters they wind up with exactly one merit, which is then supplemented by more AFTER their transformation into a supernatural entity. Every WoD character that comes out with power stat 3 just from dots is person who at one point had no money, no friends, no house, no contacts, and was a wuss. Even homeless drug-addicts have more merit dots than that - they need contacts and allies to stay alive!
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 04:54 pm (UTC)Not really. The storyteller can't invoke rule 7 to stop people from spending their MC and creating characters who are, for example, impervious to physical harm and socially overwhelming (example from the changleing game, there).
"The more xp a character has, the more cost-effective it is to sink it into Gnosis..."
Point taken, but if it's true then you're arguing in support of the following:
1) MC needs removing (there's too much XP in game).
2) starting characters need a limit on how much they can spend on supernatural upgrades, and
3) the dot build system needs offing because it offer gnosis 3 for free.
All of which comes back to this: why not start with a pile of XP, attributes at 1, every thing else at 0, and spend almost all the XP on human template stuff, like I suggested a minute ago? That way mages would be humans with a bit of magic, as opposed to walking embodiments of their arcanums.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 04:56 pm (UTC)The setting is a plotline plus a collection of weird magical shit. Without the weird magical shit it's not really a setting any more.