Quote from: rgalex;1113220While not the greatest sin in the world, I (my group) are sick of games that have XP awards that assume we're playing every day for years on end.  

We just played our first game of Vampire 5e on Tuesday night.  It's going to be a mostly weekly game that will probably run for 4-6 months.  The book suggests 1xp/session and a 2nd point if you finished a story arc.  XP costs for increasing most things are measured in multiples (Skills = Next Level x3 so a level 3 skill costs 9xp).

Now, we don't need to go from zero to super hero ASAP, but damn, come on.  Everyone likes "leveling up" and getting another die, dot, +1, ability, whatever.  Is it too much to have it be at a reasonable rate if the game goes the spend xp route?

I don't like leveling up. Often in medium to heavy crunch games it just means more overhead to bother with, usually with players bee-lining to stupid risks like "Leeroy Jenkins" for LOLz & Profit!, detracting from the fictive world I was focusing on.

But I do agree White Wolf's compounding XP costs are just stupid. It obfuscates a basic measuring stick to calibrate one's campaign. Part of it is trying to counter the power creep from the Pavlovian RPG response of "gotta end a session with an XP cookie treat!" So I understand their desire. However, just give it to GM's to calibrate in a simple expression, like '1 XP to 1 dot', and dole out less treats. :rolleyes:

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1113212Realistically, the religious would either die out or adapt their beliefs. Double-thinking their way around the inerrant writ of their ancient sacred texts is required to follow any dogmatic religion.

A while ago I suggested that Christianity in CthulhuTech wouldn't die out, but just start worshiping Cthulhu by claiming Jesus is the son of Cthulhu and Wilbur Whateley was another messiah/prophet. If we adopt the viewpoint from "Litany of Earth" that Lovecraft's writing was racist propaganda and the deep ones are really an innocent persecuted minority, which I would adopt anyway because CthulhuTech's "Raping Storm" nation-state (yes, it literally has a nation-state called the Raping Storm whose whole shtick is that they run rape farms) is misogynistic to the point of self-satire, then it makes perfect sense that the deep ones would join this new Church of Cthulhu in order to survive the horrors of the strange aeon wars.

Christians teaming up with deep ones, star-spawn, and shoggoths to fight the filthy alien crab pagans and forcibly convert everyone to the worship of Cthulhu sounds like 40k lite. Therefore it is awesome by default.

  This is the kind of thing that makes me want to do my Anti-Lovecraftian setting that reinterprets Cthulhu & Company through a scholastic Catholic, Tolkienesque lens.

Quote from: rgalex;1113220While not the greatest sin in the world, I (my group) are sick of games that have XP awards that assume we're playing every day for years on end.  

We just played our first game of Vampire 5e on Tuesday night.  It's going to be a mostly weekly game that will probably run for 4-6 months.  The book suggests 1xp/session and a 2nd point if you finished a story arc.  XP costs for increasing most things are measured in multiples (Skills = Next Level x3 so a level 3 skill costs 9xp).

Now, we don't need to go from zero to super hero ASAP, but damn, come on.  Everyone likes "leveling up" and getting another die, dot, +1, ability, whatever.  Is it too much to have it be at a reasonable rate if the game goes the spend xp route?

Totally.

Chronicles of Darkness 2e introduces the idea of characters gaining XP whenever they overcome a debuff (to use MMO jargon), and changes XP costs to linear rather than scaling. The rules are clunky as hell but beneath the layers of clunk is the kernel of a good idea.

Your suggestion of handing out a whole +1 is even better, probably. In fact, the White Wolf games are so poorly designed that you're probably better off using your common sense whenever possible.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1113227This is the kind of thing that makes me want to do my Anti-Lovecraftian setting that reinterprets Cthulhu & Company through a scholastic Catholic, Tolkienesque lens.

I'm curious to see what that entails.

Quote from: rgalex;1113220While not the greatest sin in the world, I (my group) are sick of games that have XP awards that assume we're playing every day for years on end.  

We just played our first game of Vampire 5e on Tuesday night.  It's going to be a mostly weekly game that will probably run for 4-6 months.  The book suggests 1xp/session and a 2nd point if you finished a story arc.  XP costs for increasing most things are measured in multiples (Skills = Next Level x3 so a level 3 skill costs 9xp).

Now, we don't need to go from zero to super hero ASAP, but damn, come on.  Everyone likes "leveling up" and getting another die, dot, +1, ability, whatever.  Is it too much to have it be at a reasonable rate if the game goes the spend xp route?

Modiphius' 2d20 Conan game suffers from this. They do start you off well above the masses, but then the XP awards of roughly 25 XP/hour of play kick in and you realize that most advancements take 200+ XP.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1113226Part of it is trying to counter the power creep from the Pavlovian RPG response of "gotta end a session with an XP cookie treat!" So I understand their desire.

Speaking as one of those Pavlovian canines myself, I have to admit that if two or more sessions go by without my character being able to do anything new or better, I certainly tend to get a bit antsy. And I've always subscribed to the belief that once a character has "leveled up" or the equivalent, you should always give him at least one encounter in which he can use that new oomph to win easily something that would previously have been a challenge. The whole fun of first learning that fireball spell at fifth level is to effortlessly toast the goblins that would have been a serious threat two levels ago.

That said, god-mode gets boring too and real fast, so I agree that it is to be avoided. If a game is going to give ways for PCs to rapidly increase in power, it has to give ways for opponents to keep pace easily.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1113227This is the kind of thing that makes me want to do my Anti-Lovecraftian setting that reinterprets Cthulhu & Company through a scholastic Catholic, Tolkienesque lens.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTalesI'm curious to see what that entails.

Me too please!

Quote from: HappyDaze;1113234Modiphius' 2d20 Conan game suffers from this. They do start you off well above the masses, but then the XP awards of roughly 25 XP/hour of play kick in and you realize that most advancements take 200+ XP.

Lol.  Yeah.  I just finished running a 2d20 Conan campaign.  This Vampire one is replacing it.  For Conan I handed out 100xp/hour we played and a bonus 100 if they finished an adventure.  They were getting roughly 300xp/session with the bonus 100xp every 2-3 sessions as we were playing very episodic adventures.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1113236Me too please!

If I ever develop it as more than a sketchy concept conceived in reaction against the tendency of gamers to Lovecraftianize everything, I'll be sure to post it here.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTalesChristians teaming up with deep ones, star-spawn, and shoggoths to fight the filthy alien crab pagans and forcibly convert everyone to the worship of Cthulhu sounds like 40k lite. Therefore it is awesome by default.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1113227This is the kind of thing that makes me want to do my Anti-Lovecraftian setting that reinterprets Cthulhu & Company through a scholastic Catholic, Tolkienesque lens.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1113238If I ever develop it as more than a sketchy concept conceived in reaction against the tendency of gamers to Lovecraftianize everything, I'll be sure to post it here.

I had a character in a very long-running Call of Cthulhu campaign who was a Catholic, whose religious sentiment was re-awakened by his experiences. It was an interesting twist to look at things. He saw the evils coming as the Biblical end of the world, which seems a much more straightforward than adopting Cthulhu as Christian.

Why would Christians start to worship Cthulhu?

I mean I could see Mormons, Scientologists or Hindus doing it but it seems to me that Cthulhu fits pretty squarely into the Satan side of the equation.

Not to mention that the Van Helsing character is iconic for a good reason, the church has been hunting down and killing cultists for millennia.

Quote from: Shasarak;1113248Why would Christians start to worship Cthulhu?

I mean I could see Mormons, Scientologists or Hindus doing it but it seems to me that Cthulhu fits pretty squarely into the Satan side of the equation.

Not to mention that the Van Helsing character is iconic for a good reason, the church has been hunting down and killing cultists for millennia.

Agree with you on this one...seems like a perfect "witch hunter" opportunity. I, too, like about 95% of Eclipse Phase, but some of the assumptions are just dumb. I haven't seen the 2nd edition yet, though.

Quote from: Shasarak;1113248Why would Christians start to worship Cthulhu?

I mean I could see Mormons, Scientologists or Hindus doing it but it seems to me that Cthulhu fits pretty squarely into the Satan side of the equation.

Not to mention that the Van Helsing character is iconic for a good reason, the church has been hunting down and killing cultists for millennia.

   Oh of course--if not constructs or aliens, the Mythos is full of demons who have spent themselves so fully in wickedness that they can't even leave the bodies they've assumed any more.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1113263Oh of course--if not constructs or aliens, the Mythos is full of demons who have spent themselves so fully in wickedness that they can't even leave the bodies they've assumed any more.

Especially the ones that go around preaching how you should love thy neighbour, those ones are the really cunning demons.

So wicked.

o_O

Quote from: Shasarak;1113248Why would Christians start to worship Cthulhu?

I mean I could see Mormons, Scientologists or Hindus doing it but it seems to me that Cthulhu fits pretty squarely into the Satan side of the equation.

Not to mention that the Van Helsing character is iconic for a good reason, the church has been hunting down and killing cultists for millennia.

Have you read the biblical descriptions of angels? Noticed that God cannot show his face without incinerating you?

Sound like mythos monsters to me.

Also, treating all mythos monsters as actively, constantly and deliberately malevolent towards humans misunderstands the definition of cosmic horror.

Nyarlathotep is the only monster who seems to actually enjoy toying with humans. However, it's impossible to determine whether this is because he understands and enjoys causing suffering or is just how some (but not all) humans perceive him. For all we know Nyarly is the cosmic equivalent of a little kid playing with bugs in his family's backyard or the graphical user interface of the outer gods' universal operating system.

"Beyond the Walk of Sleep" depicts a mythos monster that is able to hold a polite conversation and bears no ill will toward humanity. It even thinks poor white folks are subhuman, just like the protagonist! (I'm not kidding, the protagonist of that story literally puts a poor white dude in a cage like a lab animal.)

etc?

I fucking hate metal dice.