/cofd/&/wodg/ Chronicles of Darkness and World of Darkness General

I keep finding references in 2e books that imply armor doesn't apply to aggravated damage but kind find any solid rules info on it. Does anyone have a quote from a book or dev that clears this up?

I think it's not that armor doesn't apply against agg damage so much as most sources of agg damage ignore armor.

Armor isn't going to protect a Vampire from fire or sunlight, after all. But a Werewolf in kevlar can still block a silver bullet.

Because it's not true. General Armour works against aggravated damage. As says, it's just that many forms of aggravated damage bypass the combat system entirely.

Gentlemen, we require more Insect themed Bloodlines.

Well, on the one hand, it doesn't talk about Atwantis on every goddamned page.
On the other hand, it was so desperate to find its own identity away from Ascension that it just broke into Unknown Armies' house and stole a couple of shirts.
Seriously, my problem with Awakening 2e is the same as my problem with Requiem 23 - I can't get excited when it takes them twelve years to demonstrate base fucking competence in writing their goddamn game. Seriously, the 1e main lines are like if they just published that first draft of Beast and ignored the backlash for a decade.

Nothing can compare to the Melissidae

But UA and Ascension have more in common than UA and Awakening...

Also what "them" are you talking about, the 1e and 2e editions are literally made by different companies. A lot of the writers are still around but both Requiem and Awakening have different lead devs now. Of course they're going to be different.

The Mabry vomit spiders.

Thanks for clearing that up.

I find the idea of a Mekhet Bloodline that claims descent from the aqrabuamelu/girtablilu (Scorpion men) intriguing.

I want to make a Free Council Mage named Lovelace--based on Ada Lovelace, the creator of the first computer program--who's Praxis is viewed through the metaphor of hacking and coding language. There's just one problem.

I know like nothing about computers. How do I play a character who's worldview is that this is the Matrix and they can rewrite it however they want?

Like this youtube.com/watch?v=RJq3OiP6Sow

>I know like nothing about computers. How do I play a character who's worldview is that this is the Matrix and they can rewrite it however they want?

It's wrong though.
They can't re-write it however they want.
There is a group of sadistic sysadmins, and a hostile virus to contend with.

>How do I play a character who's worldview is that this is the Matrix and they can rewrite it however they want?
There's a movie about this.

Starring one of the leads from the movie Speed.

Watch the Net.

Maybe in the fact that magic in MtAsc and UA are anthrocentric, but UA and Awakening both approach the "cosmic power and high ambition are toxic when combined" theme in two different ways.

I have no idea what that poster is talking about with the "every 1e nWoD core is equivalent to the Beast Kickstarter draft", though. If they feel that way, I have no idea why they're even still paying attention to White Wolf/Onyx Path.

>Animal Minion (Life ••••)
>Practice: Patterning
>Primary Factor: Duration
>Withstand: Stamina
>Suggested Rote Skills: Animal Ken, Science, Survival
>Rather than triggering instincts and directing an animal along a course it might normally take, an Adept can take full bodily control.
>She does so with raw domination, a puppetmaster commanding a marionette. While she can’t force the creature to do something outside its physical capabilities, she can make it do anything of which its body is capable.
How the hell is this not a Ruling spell?

That's literally the definition of the Practice of Ruling!

>Control Instincts (Life ••)
>Practice: Ruling
>Primary Factor: Duration
>Withstand: Composure
>Suggested Rote Skills: Animal Ken, Intimidation, Persuasion
>For all their intellectual powers, humans are animals, too, and animals are governed by instincts. An Apprentice of Life can control these instinctual responses like a puppeteer pulling strings. In so doing she can make any animal or plant behave in any fashion natural to its type.
This is a Compelling.

The Summons spells are all 3 dots too.

Some lingering hiccups from Mage 1e's "dots are just a balancing factor, right?" but it's not nearly as bad as it was, at least.

I'm gonna have a shitton of houseruling to do.

Starting Thyrsus who specialize in Life can't heal Lethal? Your Cabal's Life specialist can't heal wounds from any fight that involved weapons?
>Every weapon deals lethal damage to mortals. A baseball bat, club, or mace does just as much serious trauma to the human body as an edged weapon or a bullet.

>How the hell is this not a Ruling spell?
Because you're rewriting a natural creature into a robot without animal instincts.

>Starting Thyrsus who specialize in Life can't heal Lethal? Your Cabal's Life specialist can't heal wounds from any fight that involved weapons?
you can use body control to rapidly speed up healing

"Total control over a subject" is Ruling. That definition is bending over backwards to justify it being a Patterning spell after-the-fact.

If it's "not balanced" at 2 dots, that's literally what Reach is for.

Hell, if you want it to be balanced for an Adept I could literally see, on a Ruling spell, "+2 Reach: your control is so absolute that the subject animal is no longer influenced by instincts beyond what you've ordered it to do".

>"Total control over a subject" is Ruling.
Literally not what the section on what ruling Is says
Ruling spells grant fuller control over phenomena than a mere Compelling spell. Water can be made to flow uphill or into unnatural shapes (Matter), animals (or even humanbeings) can be commanded (Life or Mind), or time can be momentarily made to accelerate or slow down (Time). A Ruling spell can’t fundamentally alter its target’s abilities: Water can be directed, but not turned solid or gaseous. Time can be altered, but not overwritten. An animal can be commanded, but not made stronger or fiercer.

control instincts is ruling

There's a difference between forcing an animal to attack its owner(Ruling), and rewiring the animals brain to make it wholly your slave(Patterning).
One of them is a fundamental alteration of the animals Pattern, and thus, requires the Patterning spell.

Fuck you, HACK THE PLANET

>Starring one of the leads from the movie Speed.
What is this, the mid90s? I think we all know who Sandra Bullock is.

There is also Ghost Summons. Predictably, it calls ghosts. It should be Ruling, not Perfecting.

>An animal can be commanded, but not made stronger or fiercer.
Instinct-puppetry isn't command.

>Water can be directed, but not turned solid or gaseous.
By this definition, a Life Ruling could, say, tell a larva to do anything a larva could do while still being a larva, but couldn't make it spontaneously become a butterfly.

I don't think house ruling Mages to be even MORE powerful is a good idea.

they're significantly more balanced in power now

Are they still the strongest?

And Stealing Fire changes sleeper into a sleepwalker. That should be Patterning, not Perfecting. I would stomach Weaving, but I don't see how could Perfecting possibly fit.

I had to ignore the sample spells to make things actually follow the Practices in 1e (which removed bullshit like Diplomat's Protection), I guess I can do it again with 2e.

Anything that's "too powerful" can be balanced with Reach. That's what it's there for. You can DO it, but you'll get fucked with Paradox unless you're an Adept (or whatever).

not really, no

But you see, a Sleepwalker is an improvement/refinement of being a Sleeper, so therefore it's Perfecting!!

its perfecting because it improves them
Perfecting spells are the opposite of Fraying spells in many
ways: they bolster, strengthen, and improve rather than
weakening and eroding. A Perfecting spell might repair
damage to an object or a person (Matter or Life), allow
a machine to function perfectly with no wear and tear
(Matter), or make a modest destiny into an earth-shaking
one (Fate).

did you even read how the practices work? because you're coming at it from a lot of wrong directions

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

It's much more "changing their fundamental nature" than it is "bolstering or improving a Sleeper". A Sleepwalker is no longer a Sleeper. Note that none of those examples change what the subject IS, just make it stronger or run better. Sleepwalkers aren't just "Sleepers, but stronger".

user was making a Matrix joke.

Something's bothering me about Mage 2e. Do you have a base pool for spell casting? For example in 1e, it was Skill + Arcanum + Attribute (rote) and Gnosis + Arcanum (improvised). Do we not have this anymore? From what I gather, you build your dice pool out of yantras (to offset any penalties + get more bonus up to +5) at which point your spell casting pool never exceeds 5 dice. Is this correct?

In related bits, how do rotes work? Specifically, when it says Suggested rote skills, I take it you pick one of said skills to be your Mudra? Then if said skill is an Order skill, you add 1 die to dice pool?

>did you even read how the practices work? because you're coming at it from a lot of wrong directions
The Practices definitions are the same as the ones from the Creative Thaumaturgy devblog released a year ago. I absolutely know what the Practices are.

then why are you so wrong?

your pool can get higher than +5
it can never get lower than -5

For improvesed spells
When casting the spell, the mage creates a dice pool based
on her Gnosis and her dots in the highest Arcanum included
in the spell.

enhance spell factors gives it a penalty
adding yantras and shits give its a bonus

Basic pool is Gnosis + Arcanum, for rotes you get to add a skill as well.

Yantras can add some extra bonuses on top of that.

Ooooo. Thanks. That is a big relief.

Your base pool is Gnosis+Arcanum+Yantras. The Yantras are a circumstance/equipment bonus. Their primary purpose is offsetting penalties from increasing spell factors (for example, making your Duration three turns instead of 1 turn imposes a -4 die penalty, so if you get +5 from yantras you end up with a net bonus of +1 from yantras). The +5 cap is the maximum bonus you can get after offsetting penalties, so you can't boost your Gnosis+Arcanum+Yantras pool to +15 at Gnosis 2 and Life 3.

The Rote skill is set by whichever Master created the Rote. The skill in question has to make sense for the spell, hence suggested skills (and to fill the ST in on sensible Rote skills for Rotes the Orders have that were created by a Master from that Order centuries ago). If the Rote's creator picked a skill that's one of your Order's specialties, you get a bonus die, regardless of whether the Rote's creator belonged to that Order (although naturally, a member of an Order will probably make Rotes using that Order's specialties because hey, bonus dice).

The skill bonus for a Rote counts as a Yantra bonus, actually. It's just a really big Yantra bonus (that one goes up to +6, assuming 5 dots and an Order Specialty, while most other Yantra bonuses cap out at +2 or +3).

It's perfecting them by fixing up that shardo f the abyss in them

I'm not? The Practices boil down to the following:
1 dot:
Unveiling: Add senses/methods of gaining information
Knowing: Gain information directly
Compelling: minor/"natural" control - force the sort of thing something could normally do in that situation

2 dots:
Shielding: Protection for things under the purview/from things under the purview
Veiling: Hide things under the purview/from things under the purview
Ruling: major/unnatural control (up to and including making water flow up instead of down)

3 dots:
Fraying: Minor damage.
Perfecting: Improvement/bolstering/repair.
Weaving: Change something's traits.

4 dots:
Unravelling: Major damage.
Patterning: completely change what something fundamentally IS, rather than just traits of the thing.

5 dots:
Making: Create something out of nothing.
Unmaking: Annihilate something - create nothing out of something.

You'll note that control stops at 2 dots, after which you get into improvement, creation, damage, annihilation, and change.

They really had to put a transgender sidebar into this book? Really?

Where?

Just so you would make this post, you whiny baby.

Stop being so offended.

...

And that's the one place in the entire 300-page book that it gets mentioned.

Unless the genderless centuries-old Morphean offends you for reasons other than the authors not being allowed to use singular they.

H-hey, at least they got over that 90's "people are more inherently magical the less white they are", right? Right?

>Purge Illness removes diseases that are already in the body
>Shielding
Oh hey, this is wrong too.

It works at 2 dots if you make it a Ruling, though.

Is it bad that the first character I feel like playing is a Seer?

Reminder: create a Proximus Dynasty of magical curseslingling gypsies to commemorate the good old days.

Nah they got a lot of depth.

diseases are life
you're shielding yourself from them

>Not Alan Turing
hes way more Free council. Hes a gay Autistic genius that invented the computer.

Why can't I shake off the feeling the 2nd edition books are all practically counting on being bought by fans of the old editions? You can't seriously expect completely new players to be able to make heads or tails of this, can you? I get it that each book now needs 70 pages dedicated to the core rules, but why at the expanse of the "at the most basic, who these people are and what they do" chapter that always opened nWoD core books?

>but why at the expanse of the "at the most basic, who these people are and what they do" chapter that always opened nWoD core books?
that's been moved from the introduction to chapter 1

I feel like a lot of these problems are first-dot spells copypasted at their first-dot levels even where that doesn't make any sense.

Ruling to force their immune system to beat the disease, Fraying/Unravelling/Unmaking to kill the disease, Weaving to change the host's traits from "diseased" to "healthy", but Shielding?

Shielding them against illness would prevent them from getting sick in the first place. It would let you go into work where all your coworkers have the flu and never even develop a sniffle. Or it could shield you from the symptoms of a disease you've already got ("My cells are now shielded against influenza virus infection"), but it wouldn't straight-up purge the pathogen from your body.

In a far diminished form. You don't understand how much less useful information is there for new players because you already know what there's to know. Someone who's never touched Werewolf: The Forsaken who decided to start with the 2nd edition wouldn't have any idea what the fuck is going on.

Now that CofD is no longer the flagship World of Darkness brand, existing fans are pretty much going to be the only customers.

>Someone who's never touched Werewolf: The Forsaken who decided to start with the 2nd edition wouldn't have any idea what the fuck is going on.
they'd have to be completely stupid, it's written out throroughly in the first two sections

That would make sense as a Shielding, but that's not actually what the text says the spell is doing.

Arcane Beats/Xp is a pretty interesting idea. Is that in other CofD games, too?

Dave's mentioned that sidebar for over a year. It's fairly accurate and applicable to the game, not new or very preachy, the issue and related matters like unusual pronouns or token minorities in the book are subtle and minor, and by WW/OP standards, it's barely worth a discussion even if you strongly disagree with the premise.

There's more than ample substantive material to review and analyze that discussing how Life and Mind allows your character to easily be a gender-fluid, hermaphroditic bisexual without raising an eyebrow in the Pentacle is a waste of time and energy.

However, I would like an explanation for the Free Council art piece. I could care less about chaps and rainbow pride flags as a general matter, but what the heck does what looks like a early 1990's San Francisco gay pride parade have to do with the Free Council? They could have easily commissioned better art to represent the diversity, revolutionary outlook, and old and new traditions of the Order.

To varying degrees of emphasis. I don't think werewolf has woof beats, but vampire has blood beats, and changeling's gonna have wyrd beats, iinm.

And of course it started with Hunters and Practical XP.

>people who can turn into a giraffe and wander around the savanah for weeks at a time while still being able to get their morning coffee tend not to give a fuck about gender after a while

Who'dathunkit?

>magical curseslingling gypsies
Nah, they should be based off of Baba Yaga and Koschei.

How are Proximi Dynasties different from the the Pentacle Orders and the Seers exactly?

How come that Unknown Armies, a game which has what is essentially a character class dedicated to being so transgender you become magic and another one dedicated to being such a liberated woman you start flying, and which the arguable hero of whose metaplot is basically the god of queers, never felt that need to preach to its readers in textboxes? How come it managed to make the humanity, sympatheticness, and both social and spiritual importance of femininity, queer power and trans philosophy emerge organically from the writing, ending up with the reader thinking "this is some deep shit, I ought to read more about this", rather than "who are these condescending cunts and when did I piss in their cereal?"

It's not about subtlety versus directness. It's about talent. Unknown Armies is such an in-your-face text the author regularly insults the reader in the second person while explaining the rules. It's just that Greg Stolze is a hundred times the writer anyone in Onyx Path ever will be. What the flying fuck.

My current major grip about Mage 2e is the inability to heal lethal damage until Life 4.

Not only is that a major nerf for mage society overall, but since starting characters max out at three dots in one of their Ruling Arcana, Thyrsus PC's lost one of their biggest advantages and draws.

Among other issues in the new book, Dave has apparently ensured the good ol' days of "mage supremacy" have come to an abrupt end.

I don't really think that I've seen any examples here that are actually in need of changing, or things that aren't following the practices.

I know space was limited, but a *lot* of sample spells demonstrating the depth and breadth of the Arcana were missing.

Mage 2e definitely needs a spell grimoire or "how to" supplement.

Yeah, Thyrsus Life specialists literally cannot magically regenerate the results of any fight involving weapons.

They can make you naturally heal it faster (at the cost of a shitton of Reach), but they can be a Spirit specialist and still do that. Disciples of Life being able to heal Bashing instantly is ehhh.

Wait Mage is out?

Who leaked it? AmyV strikes again?

A Proximi Dynasty gives you access to a list of spells(purchased as merits) that you can cast. There is no mechanical relation to the Pentacle Orders and Seers, beyond that certain Dynasties are in service to certain orders(Slaves of the Throne, for example, are servants to the Seers).

You can heal lethal before life 4, you fucktard.
>Body Control (Life ••)
>Practice: Ruling
>Primary Factor: Duration
>Suggested Rote Skills: Athletics, Medicine, Survival
>With this spell a mage can control her subject’s bodily functions to a degree that would make even the most inwardly-focused monks envious. She can do far more than slow heart rate; she can control her subject’s metabolism, heighten reflexes, and consume less oxygen. For the spell’s Duration, each level of Potency gives one rank in each of the following:
>Breathing: Each rank slows down the subject’s breathing, halving the amount of oxygen she needs to function normally.
>Heartbeat: By slowing down the subject’s heartbeat, she can double the interval at which a toxin affects her.
>Metabolism: Regulating the subject’s metabolism allows her tosubsist on half as much food, and doubles the amount of time between checks for deprivation or fatigue.
>Reflexes: Add +1 to the subject’s Initiative.
>Scent: The mage can change the subject’s scent to any that her body could naturally produce, eliminating (or increasing) body odors, controlling pheromone release.
>>Each level of Potency also halves the healing time of bashing wounds by controlling internal bleeding, preventing bruises or helping them to heal quickly. With Potency 3, for example, she would recover one bashing wound per minute.
>+1 Reach: The subject also gains 1/0 armor for the spell’s Duration as her body becomes much more resistant to minor injuries.
>>+2 Reach: The subject also halves the healing time for lethal damage for each level of Potency.
Cast Body Control, use +2 Reach
Or is that not magical enough, for you?

Not Amy, someone else.
Will be out legit soon.
Dark Eras dropped at about this time on a Tuesday evening. We can pray for a miracle like that to occur twice.

It took two days for someone to notice?

Yeah, but the whole "made the first algorithm" thing. Although a woman with Alan Turing as her spirit animal would be apt. Though any Alan Turing themed Mage would want to go with "Snow White" as their Shadowname.

The Free Council is the most SJW of Orders. Like, I'm not even being sarcastic, that's one of their hats. Gay Bondage Wizards is a Free Council (and Arrow) Legacy. That guy (those guys, since there's one in the back) is probably a Whipping Boy.

>Unless the genderless centuries-old Morphean offends you for reasons other than the authors not being allowed to use singular they.
I am irrationally angry that it doesn't use they. It was the fucking 2015 Word of the Year. Down with prescrivitism.

The reasoning, based on the Creative Thaumaturgy "Determine Effect and Cost" section, is that they didn't want magical healing to outpace magical damage-dealing. You deal Bashing damage with 3 dots, Lethal damage with 4 dots, or Aggravated damage with 4 dots and a Reach, so you heal Bashing damage with 3 dots, Lethal damage with 4 dots, or Aggravated damage with 4 dots and a Reach.

There are three problems with this approach, though:
1) That's not how the Practices are laid out to begin with: Damage is specifically subdivided into Fraying and Unravelling, but there's no such subdivision in healing Perfecting is healing, and Patterning is an upgraded version of Weaving, not Perfecting.
2) Any Arcanum can do damage using Fraying and Unravelling. Life is the only one that can heal damage, so it having to be "balanced" against damage-dealing spells is kind of ridiculous.
3) There are a load of ways to do damage nonmagically. Baseball bats, knives, guns, brass knuckles, any of these things deal Lethal, and you can also use magic to make them deal MORE damage. There are no ways to improve healing nonmagically.

>Three persons Awaken. Except they are the same person. The end result is a Mage, with the memories of three persons, their full lives up until the point of Awakening.
>All three of them have friends and family who know them. They all recognize the person as their friend, but it's three isolated social circles, with zero overbleed.

Teiresian Metamorphosis: A qashmal with this Numen can change the gender of a living being. ...

A qashmal can also use this Numen to join two humans together in one hermaphrodite being, a true rebis, wholly male and wholly female. ...

The rebis takes both sets of Attributes and Skills, using the higher every time. If one of the components of the rebis is a mage, the rebis still has all his or her Gnosis and Arcana. If both components are mages, the rebis uses the higher of the partners’ Gnosis and Arcana dots. If two mages joined as a rebis are of different Paths, the rebis keeps both Paths (meaning that the mage might now have as many as four Ruling Arcana and no Inferior Arcana).

>Gay Bondage Wizards is a Free Council (and Arrow) Legacy.

More arrow than council.

>Or is that not magical enough, for you?
No, it actually isn't. At level 5, it still means an hour and a half per box of lethal damage. Half the reason people played Thrysus back in the day was because they could heal it in an instant.

Or maybe this went wrong (or right, depending on your viewpoint)

Rebirth: This Numen is possessed only by conceptual spirits of choirs associated with reincarnation, or karma. Rebirth represents a process that, once begun, must be completed within one week (seven days), or else the benefits are lost. The spirit must first Claim a human body, either mortal or Awakened (a mage).

The spirit must then kill and devour two more people within the next seven days. (If the Claimed victim was a mage, the other victims must also be a mage.) During this time, the spirit stores the souls of those it kills. Once it kills its third victim, it then restores one of those victims to life with renewed youth in a
transformed version of the Claimed body: the body is biologically 18 years old, although it ages normally from then on. ...

Once this Numen has played out, the spirit is involuntarily subject to the effects of the Discorporation Numen.

>halves the healing time per level of Potency
>Primary factor is Duration, so Potency is 1 by default
Ooh, heal 1 Lethal per day and risk Paradox doing it! Wow! You'd need Potency 8 just to get to "heal 1 Lethal damage in under 15 minutes", or what werewolves get by default. That's a penalty of 14 dice, which is not something a starting Thyrsus is going to be able to pull off. You'd need -10 dice just to heal 1 Lethal per hour (well, 45 minutes).

then it's a good change, cause thyrsus aren't clerics

It's the 4th edition problem all over again. People were so hung up on the "we must resolve mage supremacy" issue they took it all the way to the other end and made them sort of pathetic.