Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786820I'm glad you noticed my equation between shoplifting and casual murder. I was making a satirical comment on how RPGs are generally about being racially-motivated well-armed mass murderers that specialize in home invasion. Most players characters, if they existed in real life, would be heinous monsters any sane person would want to see put in the electric chair.

You have to to make the story move forward. If you just went home it would be a short game.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786820I read the Mirrors book. The Conscience (as a karma meter) rules are pretty much what Morality tried and failed to accomplish in the first place and I certainly prefer it over that damned Integrity meter. It's still problematic for being a combined karma/sanity meter, but it's a huge step in the right direction that GMC shat all over.

Conscience is indeed the same morality meter as usual, only with the hierarchy of sins being more logical to me. It's more humanistic in nature.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786820Are you talking about the social combat rules that force characters to spend a week of in-game time trying to convince a bouncer to let them into a club?

Yeah, it takes a while. Are you talking about the Door system in GMC/B&S or the system in Danse Macabre which is just like regular combat? There is another social combat system in Mirrors as well. Crap, I just can't be bothered to read them all.

I think social combat makes sense in a political setting. I think Court/Ship in Fate Worlds in Shadow does this better btw. It seems more streamlined and focused than any WoD system.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786820Ditto. I have no idea why people threw such huge fits over these and why suddenly being able to make your own was any improvement.

They never come up in my games. I like it better to ditch those as well (as is suggested in Mirrors) and gain willpower when you complete a task, like surviving a fight, escaping from prison, convincing someone to give you intel or finding the lair of a serial killer.

Quote from: smiorgan;786855I get your satirical point.

I disagree with "most player characters". With the exception of a few mission-focused amoral characters the people I roll with just don't play like that. But then we don't play D&D where the primary reward system is killing things and taking treasure.

Agreed. But what if players run into monsters, evil cults, serial killers, mobsters or other nasty stuff? You gotta kill to survive sometimes.

Quote from: smiorgan;786855I know you were being glib, but you're technically wrong if you argue VtM equates shoplifting with murder. In 1e, petty crime comes at 8 on the Hierarchy of Sin, and murder comes in at 2.

Yes, true. And that conscience system changes the hierarchy a little bit. Murder in self defense is higher on the list and killing for pleasure is lower for example. It just makes more sense.

Quote from: smiorgan;786855You're also wrong if you say Humanity is a madness meter. Losing humanity points does not force gains in derangements, nor does it force more and more reprehensible actions. Losing Humanity also doesn't make you more likely to lose more humanity in and of itself, unlike Call of Cthulhu and SAN.

It does in the Integrity system. Lower Intergrity means penalties on degeneration rolls. So the lower you are, the quicker you fall. The Forbidden Lore system is different. That system sacrifices social interaction and increases the chance for getting derangements for a boost in your occult skills. The Sanity system in Mirrors is a joke. You have to come up with your own degeneration check based on your char beliefs and pas experiences.

Anyway the default system is morality and sanity in one. Instead of seeing bad stuff makes you mad, it is doing bad stuff makes you mad.

Quote from: smiorgan;786855I think vampire's framework is fine, it's the execution that's questionable. Frenzy leads to derangements, and so the player has to manage Frenzy. But in most cases doing the things that trigger Humanity loss are choices the player makes, and nothing to do with madness. It's just the Virtues that are broken.

You have to explain this to me. I don't get it. Bad stuff you do can lead to degeneration which can lead to derangements. Bad stuff can be intentional (player choice) or unintentional (frenzy). Virtues and vices are tied to willpower.

In any case, World of Darkness' karma meters don't do much good and don't make the personal horror work better. Characters do terrible things over the course of of play as a matter of course and karma punishes them with madness. Personal horror is about being disgusted by your descent into villainy, not reveling in it or being punished by outside forces.

Nightlife implements the humanity mechanic better by simply making character's existing magical weaknesses worse as humanity declines rather than interfering with their roleplaying. As characters act more monstrous, they look and feel more monstrous. By making losses automatic, it also removes the annoying "a die roll determines if my characters feels remorse or not." Whether the character feels remorse or not is up to their player, and if they really do feel remorse they would stop doing bad things rather than keep doing them and turn into a monster. It's good because there aren't any outside consequences for losing humanity and nothing to stop you from losing it further except to stop doing bad things.

Urban Shadows' corruption mechanic is great because it exists to give characters temptation. They can gain corruption to get an edge, but going too far is bad. If there isn't reward in being corrupted, there's no temptation.

A good humanity mechanic should reward characters for acting monstrous so that they'll be continually tempted to sacrifice it and not realize the true consequences until it's almost too late.

You mean how I handled potency at my play by post?  The more potency you have the more powerful you become.  The down side is that your slowly fading away from the mundane world, but fading into the hidden worlds where the real monsters live.  

Sure you can try to surface, but the more you try the more effort you need.  That effort can leave you weaken and worst it is not a solution.  Eventually your going to fade away to your currently level of potency.  Your constantly bubbing up and down the potency levels like a man that is drowning in the ocean.  Thus why I call the process of getting potency points drowning.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;786887You have to explain this to me. I don't get it. Bad stuff you do can lead to degeneration which can lead to derangements. Bad stuff can be intentional (player choice) or unintentional (frenzy). Virtues and vices are tied to willpower.

That's the nWoD way. I was referring to rules from VtM 1e.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786902I
Nightlife implements the humanity mechanic better by simply making character's existing magical weaknesses worse as humanity declines rather than interfering with their roleplaying. As characters act more monstrous, they look and feel more monstrous.

Urban Shadows' corruption mechanic is great because it exists to give characters temptation. They can gain corruption to get an edge, but going too far is bad. If there isn't reward in being corrupted, there's no temptation.

First Urban Shadows sounds interesting. I will check it out. My list with games to check out becomes ridiculously long.

In the new vampire 2nd edition it is an option to take bane to replace certain sins from your hierarchy. So you can make a vampire who doesn't slide down anymore when stealing or killing, but he or she now can't enter a house, smells like decay or attracts bugs. That is pretty cool.

Quote from: Snowman0147;786908You mean how I handled potency at my play by post?  The more potency you have the more powerful you become.  The down side is that your slowly fading away from the mundane world, but fading into the hidden worlds where the real monsters live.  

No, with the Forbidden Lore mechanic you lose contact with reality. With reason 0 you are so detached from reality the player loses control of the character.

I am sorry if that wasn't clear. There are so many subjects going on in this topic, both about the settings and about different rule systems. It's hard to keep track of it all.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;786022Maybe it's just me, but I always felt the covenants in Witchcraft are more true secret societies than the splats in the WoD. I also find it more open and free than the new WoD, which is supposed to be toolkit. Just a shame there are so few books of that setting.

It's my understanding that the various unpublished WitchCraft books are going to be released as PDFs. That should help, at least.

And, of course, everything published for All Flesh Must Be Eaten is compatible with WitchCraft.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786670Furthermore, superpowers impose a humanity tax for learning and using them rather than anything approaching a real "temptation to use the dark side" mechanic (I think the superpowers themselves were meant to be the actual temptation, but this is not explained well when the point of the game is playing a monster in the splatterpunk genre). In any case, Nightlife's humanity mechanic is a diamond in the rough and with a few simple changes it would actually accomplish what World of Darkness spent 20 years failing to.

That's actually why I had a hard time believing that what pass for the good guys in Nightlife stand a chance against the bad guys, who can cheerfully max out their powers at the cost of a human side they don't care about in the first place.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;786916No, with the Forbidden Lore mechanic you lose contact with reality. With reason 0 you are so detached from reality the player loses control of the character.

I am sorry if that wasn't clear. There are so many subjects going on in this topic, both about the settings and about different rule systems. It's hard to keep track of it all.

Still game over either way.  Not to mention the more forbidden lore you have the more powerful you are as well.

Quote from: Snowman0147;786908You mean how I handled potency at my play by post?  The more potency you have the more powerful you become.  The down side is that your slowly fading away from the mundane world, but fading into the hidden worlds where the real monsters live.  

I mean it in the sense of a carrot as opposed to a stick. Characters could burn humanity to gain additional benefits as opposed to having their humanity penalized for normal character progression.

The karma meters were designed as a stick, not a carrot. I prefer eating a carrot to being hit with a stick. Don't you?

Quote from: jan paparazzi;786914In the new vampire 2nd edition it is an option to take bane to replace certain sins from your hierarchy. So you can make a vampire who doesn't slide down anymore when stealing or killing, but he or she now can't enter a house, smells like decay or attracts bugs. That is pretty cool.

That's one of the mechanics I mentioned, that was designed specifically to get around being punished by the karma meter for playing the game, as an example of bad design.

The rules should have punished characters for losing humanity by giving them banes instead of insanity. "A monster I am, then a monster I become." It's still a stick and not a carrot, but it's a huge improvement over the stupid insanity rules as opposed to being a revolting murder-people-guilt-free card in a game where the theme is supposed to be self-disgust.

EDIT: Had I been in charge of development, I would've replaced Morality with Conscience and dumped the derangements. Rather than rolling to determine whether the PC feels remorse, he'd roll Conscience to resist acting like a dick. If he fails he gets to act like a dick and loses a dot of Conscience. The only penalty of low Conscience is that it would act as a cap on social rolls (borrowed from Humanity) as the character gradually becomes more and more apathetic to others around him. On the other hand, players could elect to give their character a dot of Insanity instead of losing a dot Conscience to reflect that they regret what they've done and now suffer trauma because they care.

As you say above, one of the big appeals of Urban Shadows is that they have made several core aspects of WoD into both simple yet powerful mecahnics.

Corruption basically allows a PC to gain a boost in power (often leading to more Corruption) but at a real cost. If used unchecked, the consequences are high for the PC.

I also liked how Debts operate to deal with the social intrigue that pervades WoD in a concrete way. PCs are tangled up pretty quickly in a web of obligation and are forced to become more entangled to deal with the resulting complication.

These are both great inspiration for stories too. Once each PC has a position on Corruption and a series of Debts owed to and owing, its easy to spin these into stories.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786939EDIT: Had I been in charge of development, I would've replaced Morality with Conscience and dumped the derangements. Rather than rolling to determine whether the PC feels remorse, he'd roll Conscience to resist acting like a dick. If he fails he gets to act like a dick and loses a dot of Conscience. The only penalty of low Conscience is that it would act as a cap on social rolls (borrowed from Humanity) as the character gradually becomes more and more apathetic to others around him. On the other hand, players could elect to give their character a dot of Insanity instead of losing a dot Conscience to reflect that they regret what they've done and now suffer trauma because they care.

I do agree with you. I don't think you should get crazy for acting evil. Losing your humanity would cost you social interaction, if I had any say about it. I do think you are just switching things around with this solution. Instead of going crazy unless you take a bane, now you get a bane unless you want to become crazy. Not that different. And conscience isn't that different from morality. It's not as big of a difference between WoD morality and CoC sanity for example.

You are probably looking for something like Shadowrun, where you have the option to use many implants at the cost of your humanity. So that's always a balancing act.

I like that stuff about corruption and debts. That seems to me mechanics that could drive a game instead of slowing it down. I saw cool mechanics in Court/Ship (Fate Worlds) about keeping secrets and acquiring secrets of others. That seems like an auto must have in any vampire game. Instead those vampire developers only come up with rules you don't need, because you could do that stuff already just by roleplaying it.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;786956Losing your humanity would cost you social interaction, if I had any say about it.

I can't be arsed to look it up, but I'm pretty sure VtM1 had a rule that any social skill dice pool was capped at your Humanity score.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;786678I couldn't agree more. We never rolled for it. It punishes players for manslaughter, which is also self defense. Now how many times will my players kill when they are attacked by a monster, cultist or serial killer? Every game session. It happens every time. So defend yourself and go nuts or get yourself killed.

I do like the sanity meter in GMC. More flexible. I hate it in B&S. That one is really "gothic".

How do you feel a bout the settings? I never cared much for the crappy rules anyway. I just houserule (or ignore) morality, virtue/vice and predators taint. I am still a little hung up about the setting background (or lack of) in nWoD. I just can't stand the subjective lore in the games. Nothing is certain, conflicting myth, multiple story seeds, left open or just make up your own details. I could kill for a good explanation about what the God Machine is and why it does what it does. But they leave it open as usual.  :rolleyes:

I don't use any of the extra rules in supplements as well. I just don't see the point in a lot of rules they make. I mean now they make rules for becoming a personal myth or legend. Why do you need rules for that? Can you just let some NPC's act impressed everytime they meet you?

Rant! :mad:




Ouch! Is Nightlife pretty complete? Oh, four books.

We just switiched out the Humanity Path for others that are available online and in the rules for Sabat and stuff. Effectively treating your Path like an alignment and if you take actions against it penalties come.
Not so very tricky.