In the field of "what were they thinking?" I'd like to raise the comic relief elements of the Vampire: the Masquerade game. This being, allegedly, a deep game of personal horror where PCs struggle to appease the Beast without falling prey to it's clutches.
So, they included the Malkavians, the Ravnos and the botch mechanic.
Now, I'm quite sure Malkavians weren't intended as a mechanism for immature munchkins to wreak havok on a million unsuspecting games, but that's certainly what happened. And, when told to stop ruining the game, they inevitably respond by saying, "I'm only running my character they way he would behave." Well, fine. In that case, the Storyteller should have the primogen act the way they would, and kill the offender. The Camarilla is not a nice society where everyone sits round having drinks of chilled blood, reminiscing about the old days, and laughing at those kookie Malkavians. It's a society of predators, driven by unholy lusts for blood and power, and if you aren't functional in that society, or you make too many enemies, you die. Simple as that.
The sad thing is, mental illness can be genuinely scary.
The Ravnos are a lesser problem, although that may be because they are much less common. However, there is a danger with them that they'll turn into the classic D&D thief, who constantly robs from his fellow PCs, just for kicks. Sorry, not horrific at all. Nor, frankly, is it funny. Worse still is the statement in the book that if a Ravnos is ejected from a domain (or, one would presume, killed) a whole bunch of other Ravnos will descend on the domain to express their displeasure.
Of course, both of the above problems I've mentioned exist in D&D, in the form of the Chaotic Neutral alignment and the classic thief. However, D&D doesn't claim to be a horror game.
Then, of course, there is the botch mechanic. In theory, a nice idea, since it provide a mechanism for things just going wrong. Ignoring for the moment the fact that botches are unrealistically common in any Storyteller game, let's consider what happens when a player rolls a botch: the player's laugh.
Okay, that's not always the reaction. Sometimes there's terrible outrage, despair at things going wrong at just the wrong time, or resignation. But, in my experience, the most common reaction is laughter. Very horrific.
Then again, in my experience more Vampire games are played as superheroes with fangs than creatures of darkness, so perhaps these elements are entirely appropriate, and it's the horror elements that are out of place.
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteWhite wolf silliness
Don't forget the time when everybody and his dog seemed to be vampires. How many clans were they up to before they revised the list? 50?
As for Malkavians, the clanbook keeps saying that Malkavians should be scary and unsettling, but then does a 180 and goes all silly, not very consistent signals there. I think the problem is alot in the fact that other players seem to encourage the Malkavian player to be silly, to the point where the player becomes the comic sidekick of the group. Well sometimes anyway.
I've only seen one Malkavian played correctly, and that scared the shit out of me. When I tried to play one I failed utterly and horribly, I would like to have another shot at it someday though.
As for Ravnos, I thought they killed them off just because of the points you made? Or have I missed something?
Botches
Oh sweet botches. Now here is the one big fault in the Storyteller system, they have tried to correct it since the first edition, and in Exalted it is actually working. (You only fumble if you have no successes and roll atleast one 1.) But in Vampire it contines to be something that appears atleast once a session, which I think is why people treat it the way they do, once you start fumbling 10% of the time you just can't take it seriously.
On another note
Another thing I find extremely annoying, which truth to be told has nothing to do with White wolf in itself but instead some of the GM's running it, are GMs who keep demanding fifteen bloody successes to do anything useful. If I roll against difficulty nine and get two successes, I bloody well expect to succeed in what I do not be told that oh it's hard so you need more successes. It is hard because you put a bloody nine as the difficulty, stop asking me to roll five successes as well. Again, Exalted does away with this by having a flat target number of 7 for all dice. (Same as Trinity I think?) This makes things much easier, cause the GM can't just arbitrary decide to fuck you over after you announce your four successes at difficulty 10.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteBotches in Vampire: Revised
The Revised books adopted the same botch rule as you described for Exalted (although, of course, most of them came first). That is, you only botch if you have no successes and roll some 1's. The reason botches remain more common in Vampire is connected with the second point you mentioned, that success levels in Vampire are not fixed. You're obviously more likely to roll no successes against difficulty 9 than against difficulty 7.
The whole re-roll 10, subtract 1's thing also annoys me, but from a mechanical rather than flavour point of view.
I definately agree that a fixed difficulty number is better than a sliding scale, if you're also going to require multiple successes to succeed. At least, if the Storyteller is going to used floating difficulty numbers, he should also declare the number of required successes up front, for the very reason you said. Lucky rolls should be accepted and rewarded, not screwed over. (Then again, it always pisses GMs off when a single lucky roll destroys their carefully crafter plot/villain/whatever.)
Insta-kill
Another flaw in Vampire, and one that D&D has as well, although moreso in the first two editions, is the presence of insta-kill attacks. That is, attacks that are capable of killing another character (PC or NPC) with a single dice roll. Particularly, attacks that are very hard to resist in general. The whole save-or-die thing should go.
To relate another tale of woe, in the epic Vampire game I ran, the characters were almost god-like by the end. This is hardly surprising; I was over-generous with XP, and the game ran 5 years of regular gaming.
However, it emerged that there were many many means of instantly killing another character, several of which could be avoided only if the opponent knew that they were coming. And, most of these attacks were obscure clan secrets, so unlikely to be found. Of course, building attacks in Vampire is much easier than defences, but PCs have no qualms about killing NPCs, whereas GMs are obviously reluctant to kill long-running PCs, so these attacks could be used by PCs, but wouldn't ever be used against them. (The only time I really cut loose with powers in a Vampire game was the second part of the two-parter, in which I achieved a total party kill.)
Anyway, if Roger were ever to comment here, he could tell you about the multitude of insta-kill powers his character had. I think there were about 6 distinct methods, where he had to roll a single large dice-pool against Willpower, with a single success knocking the opponent into Torpor.
Bad stuff.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteFixing Vampire
You mentioned that you felt Vampire was unplayable out of the box, so big were the flaws. So, care to enlighten us what you did to change it? Or did you just decide it was irredeemable, and put it away again?
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteInsta kill
I can't really comment on your Vampire game, as any game that runs for five years will, as you pointed out, have characters of insane power level. This can break most systems out there, or atleast the one where you are the main 'heroes'. (i.e not Call of Cthulhu and other grittyish games.)
Now for regular games I usually doesn't pull the punches too much, of course it depends on the game, I give players in heroic games a bit more slack, but if you play my SLA game you can expect to have your characters die horribly at a seconds notice. (As Andy is well aware off.) But still the longer the game runs and the longer one player has played one character, the more reluctant one gets to whack him off unless it is a really dramatic death.
PC vs NPC
If PC's start cheesing out and using obviously sneaky and underhand ways to kill NPC's, including rule bending and muchkinism, they can be sure that next time the NPC's will be using the exact same methods to tackle the PC's. PC's arn't the only ones to learn by their misstakes. Don't get me wrong, I won't be using this to get back at the players, but if they knock off the goons of some big baddie in a certain underhanded way, that big baddie will make sure the next set of goons he send out won't fall for the same trick.
This can be a problem though, leading to a proverbial arms race between the PC's and the NPC's, if the PC's start buying 17mm rifles, the bad guys will come up with heavy armour and will also be sporting 17mm rifles, which usually leads to a large number of dead PC's. But hey, if you open Pandora's box...
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteFixing Vampire
To be honest, that is pretty much what I did. But then again I've never played vampire much, I got the first edition rulebook something like five years ago, read it through, decided I liked the idea but the system was crap and left it at that. It wasn't until I moved over here that I started to get into Storyteller. I wasn't really honest when I say it is unplayable, as WW has changed quite a few things. The botch rule is a big step in the right direction, but I still think they should go for the Exalted system fullblown, with the target always being 7. (This does make willpower less powerfull as well, so it's not as easy to muchkin that part.) The only big thing I still have against Storyteller is the combat system.
Storyteller combat
Rolling to hit and then rolling damage is absolutely totally poo, narrating Storyteller combat is just too confusing that most GMs I've seen just, well, don't. You hit him and do ... No damage!
Damage should be a factor of the number of successes you got on your attack roll plus the base damage of the weapon, the bigger and badder the weapon the less the factor would be. For instance a gun should have a damage factor of 2 or 3, while a fist might have a damage factor of 4 or 5. I havn't done a list or anything, these are just numbers pulled out of my ass, and not tested whatsoever.
Most importantly, any attack that hits should do atleast one damage. Then if the person soaks it, fine that's because he's undead/shapechanger/mad whatever.
Armour should not add soak dice, that's a pretty damn crap piece of armour that works about 50% of the time, instead it should be a direct number that either subtracts from the total number of damage done or increases the damage factor. (I think the last option might be the best, but again it needs to be tested.)
Initiative in Storyteller combat is fucked up to say the least. If you have the highest initiative you can just wait until everyone's declared their actions then whack the shit out the poor sod who didn't decide to dodge. Ok, I understand why they have done what they have done, to give a quicker person the ability to react to the actions of others, but if you look at it, being the fastest person around doesn't mean you automatically know what everyone else will be doing. It's a big enough advantage to go first that it should stop at that. If people feel the need to know what others are doing, let them hold their action, and use it at a later point.
Hmm, now I will have to run a game to back my rantings won't I?
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteRe: Fixing Vampire
Oooh, I just have to reply to that one!
Vampire: Revised system vs. Exalted system
I agree on this point - I think the Exalted system is better. That said, I think it'd probably be a lot of work for them to convert over. Not to mention that Vampire has quite a few tasks that have a difficulty of 4 or so, which don't easily convert to a fixed difficulty of 7. Of course, you can fix that by adding dice to the pool, or just saying their simple enough to automatically succeed, or something.
Willpower
Over-powered in Vampire, to the extent that PCs almost invariably start with Courage 5, just to get the highest Willpower they can for 'free'. So, agreed there.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteMinimum damage
I agree here as well. Then again, it was trivially easy just to say, "all attacks do a minimum of 1 damage before soak."
Damage Calculations
I'm not sure what you mean by this. At present, additional successes to hit give you extra dice to roll for damage. So, if you fire a heavy pistol (damage 5, I think) and get three successes, you roll 7 dice for damage (5 + two excess successes).
Armour
They could just have armour make you harder to hit :-)
Mechanically, having a piece of armour give 2 soak dice is almost equivalent to having it automatically reduces the damage by 1.
Analysis: The difficulty of a soak roll is 6 in Vampire, so 2 dice give a 1% chance of removing 2 successes from your Stamina soak (roll 1 & 1 - yes, armour can make your soak worse in wierd cases), an 8% chance of removing 1 success from your Stamina soak (roll 1 & 2-5, or 2-5 & 1), a 26% chance of having no effect, a 40% chance of 1 success, and a 25% chance of giving 2 successes.
Alternatively, you could have armour reduce the difficulty required to soak damage, or have it increase the difficulty of causing damage. I can't be bothered analysing these cases.
It really all boils down to how you want to deal with such things. I'm currently leaning towards the view that armour should make damage harder to do (either with AC bonuses or, more likely, by increasing the difficulty required to cause damage), and that there should be no soak roll at all. Instead, use a strain system similar to that used in Children of the Sun, where the max strain is determined by Stamina and Fortitude. Or something.
There are too many dice rolls in Storyteller combat, especially since each roll is of many, many dice, all counted independently.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteInitiative
Note that if you don't declare a dodge, you can abort your action to a dodge with a successful Willpower roll.
As for the other complaint, I'm forced to agree. I can see what they were trying to do with this system, but it involves a lot of waiting.
(As an aside, I wasn't fond of the Children of the Sun mechanism either, where there seemed to be long waits while multiple actions were resolved, then a really short flurry of activity when my character finally got to take his 1 or 2 actions. However, I suspect that was because my character was crap in combat.)
Dodges
Speaking of dodges, this is a flaw in Storyteller combat. Since you're rolling your Dex + Dodge pool against the opponent's Dex + whatever, you're actually not that likely to successfully dodge, unless you take no other action. Of course, if you do that you've got no chance of surviving, since you will eventually blow a dodge roll. So, there's very little point in even attempting to dodge. Better to become so fast and so bad-ass that you take out all your opponents before they get to act.
In this instance, I prefer the Shadowrun mechanic of a dedicated Combat pool, being a bunch of extra dice that characters can call on to assist in any actions they take in a turn. However, I haven't decided how I'd go about grafting such a system onto Vampire.
(Speaking of Shadowrun, I'm still wading through it. Which is pretty bad, since I set myself a goal of finishing it over the weekend exactly one month ago.)
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteDamage Calculations
Hmm, well what I was getting at was something along these lines:
You have a gun doing 5 damage, with a damage factor of 2. You shoot some poor sod and score a total of three successes. 5+3 = 8. Now this is divided by the damage factor for a total of 4 points of damage. Slap some hollow point bullets in that gun, and damage factor might go down to 1. If your opponent is wearing a kevlar vest, damage factor goes up to 5, and so on...
More numbers to keep track of I guess, so it might not be a good substitute for rolling dice. (Speedwise that is, but you get rid of the annoying randomness of damage.)
Armour
So, what you are saying is that a 2 point soak armour will have a 65% chance of actually protecting you? I'd sue the makers of that piece of shit if I were the one getting shot. Well probably not because I'd probably be dead but still. (Not to mention that it actually has a 10% chance to actually hurt you, not literally but you know what I mean.)
re: Children of the Sun
I totally agree, in hindsight I should really have let everyone do one action at a time, going round the table in initiative order, that would have made it more interesting for everyone.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteRe: Damage Calculations
I think I like the relatively high randomness of firearm damage. My (entirely unsupported) theory of firearm damage is that where you get hit is much more important than how hard or the caliber of the ammo in use (although, of course, I do recognise that there is a rather big difference between a .22 and .50 round). Therefore, I suspect I'd want a system where the quality of the hit (excess successes after dodge) was far more important than the firearm used. Perhaps this could be achieved by halving all current firearm damage values, but adding double the excess successes, or something.
Then again, I also take the view that dodging firearm shots should be effectively impossible, but that cover should have a much greater level of effectiveness than currently. Oh, and the autofire rules suck (not the first game I've levelled that complaint against).
I understand the example you've outlined, and mechanically it makes sense. I guess it's just a difference in philosophy.
Re: Armour
I hadn't done the analysis before. It's a tad odd, isn't it?
What I particularly like is the notion that a character with Stamina 4 or higher can (with current rules) declare a speciality of Tough, allowing him to re-roll 10's. Doing so makes armour more effective for this character, since it then gains an 8% (approx) chance of providing more than 2 soak successes. So, being especially tough also makes you better at using armour.
I agree - armour rules in Storyteller are crap.