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

Good point, Mages after all have the best crossover capability of all of the game lines besides maybe Hunter (who are EVERY OTHER SPLAT CAN BE THE ENEMY!)

Having Mystery as a theme is really helpful for discovery of other things.

It offers no better crossover capability than "the hunt" as a theme.

Veeky Forums will never understand that "this thing is not the worst ever" is not exactly a defense.

Hunter is literally whatever you want, and since the core 2e book is basically Hunter already with the inclusion of Dread Powers for monster building, Hunter 2e is already going to be better from that.

Not true! Hunter is essentially about occultism and exploring the supernatural. Often due to the nature of Hunter, this is on hostile terms, but not always.

You're defending the game, just half-heartedly. Yes, it's not objectively the worst game ever made, and some people exaggerate some details. It's still a bad game, and people can rightfully be miffed that it's a misstep in an otherwise solid set of gamelines.

When the solution to making Beast more playable is "add in something that should be in CofD games in the first place," something is very wrong. When a WoD/CofD fan podcast spends nearly two hours going over the game and one of the hosts straight up says "Do Not Buy Beast" at the end of it, something way out of character for said podcast, something is very, very wrong.

Is that croc alright

>When a WoD/CofD fan podcast spends nearly two hours going over the game and one of the hosts straight up says "Do Not Buy Beast" at the end of it, something way out of character for said podcast, something is very, very wrong.

Does anyone have a transcript of this?

He's married.

Don't buy it for the problems it has, not the ones it doesn't. Honestly, I think that Darker Days spending an episode ragging on Beast is beating a dead horse and probably just repeating the same kind of stupid shit I keep seeing in these threads posted by people who haven't even glanced over the book. Again: Complain about the problems it actually has. I can do that just fine. I literally did that in the post you linked to.

Also, adding in more lines won't make Beast playable. Although a Hunter style focus on personalized monster creation for the STs probably would, although it still suffers a worse version of the same problem that plagues Geist in that you have basically zero incentive to do anything but sit around and abuse your super powers for your own amusement and personal gain.
Although at least Geist explicitly made that a character type.

It depends on the attainment, but most of them are pretty obvious. "Spend a mana, do a thing"

>Not true! Hunter is essentially about occultism and exploring the supernatural. Often due to the nature of Hunter, this is on hostile terms, but not always.
I was referring to werewolf, which has just as much crossover potential as mage, since any supernatural game (and even mortals or hunters) can be prey.

You never mentioned that you were talking about Werewolf.
Also, that's true, but Werewolf doesn't *explicitly* encourage you to poke your nose in supernatural occurrences outside of your purview by giving you Experience Points just for that.

>You never mentioned that you were talking about Werewolf.
You jump to conclusions.
You get experience for performing the sacred hunt, which can be called on anything and is a required aspect of the game.

That's not jumping to conclusions. The person you were quoting () was talking about Mage and Hunter. Also, yes, the Sacred Hunt can be called on anything. But in the corebook the only one that's useful for most crossover is the Iron Masters. Even then, "you can kill anything" isn't really crossover any more than Vampires feeding on anything

Vampires can't feed on anything, they need a merit for that.
"You can hunt anything" is as much of a crossover theme as "You can investigate anything."

I'm going to guess you're aspel now, based on your shitty doublespeak and refusal to acknowledge you were wrong so much.

I assure you it's not, since they read the book. You seem to think people aren't reading the book when the actual issue is that you're taking the book directly at face value instead of giving the setting and its demands any deeper thought. People exaggerate, but there are deeper problems with its execution than "there is nothing much to do."

Did the shitposting about temporal sympathy stop?

Yes, because everyone has accepted that Temporal Sympathy is broken as fuck.

Yes, but Mages are actually rewarded for investigating new things. Werewolves aren't. It's not doublespeak.

I seem to think that people who say things the book explicitly disagrees with haven't read it, yes, or at the very least can't read good. The game has real problems. "It's clearly for sociopaths who want to violently murder their bullies and anyone who plays it is dangerous" is not one of them, yet that's a sentiment I've seen thrown around.

Don't
Just don't

Why does it even matter? We knew things were going to be busted going in it, that is just the nature of the game. I know there was talk about everything being reevaluated, powers and all that being toned down a bit for 2e, but when there are abilities that can majorly alter the story, and fluff that reinforces it, it seems rather difficult to actually reign things in.

Just enjoy it for what it is, and do what mages do: make friends with mages that can both unfuck you if you get screwed and fuck the guy who fucked you.

The real problem is that some anons are attempting to apply their high-school level understanding of physics to a concept that isn't beholden to that rather than just reading the rules tightly.

Also,
>broken as fuck
is a bit rich, coming from a system that already has significant skewed balance issues baked into the base mechanics (see: the kindergarteners on a bus vs. a (1e) werewolf or the persistently high percentage of failure for relatively easy tasks compared to increasing skill level)

Don't forget the CofD core rules making it trivial to gain Condition after Condition after Condition by gaining a Condition that gives exceptional successes on three successes... which makes it easier to make more Conditions.

...

in mage asscencion can you fill your entire quintessence/paradox wheel with quintessence if you just have enough time with a node, and Prime 1? the quintessence absorption rules seem really vague.

>12nd

You can only get a Beat once a scene regardless, and you only roll when there's a reasonable degree of risk.

>(see: the kindergarteners on a bus vs. a (1e) werewolf or the persistently high percentage of failure for relatively easy tasks compared to increasing skill level)
Solving these is actually baked into the system, but people are stupid and ignore that. Kindergarteners would use the Swarm rules--and even have rules in Innocents that amount to "you always lose against adults, fuck you"--and mundane average tasks that you can reasonably complete aren't even rolled and generally have bonuses.
"The system doesn't cover this thing that it shouldn't need to cover!" is not really a valid complaint. It's not like a D20 rat, which *is* a reasonable occurrence.

>You can only get a Beat once a scene regardless, and you only roll when there's a reasonable degree of risk.

You're still sitting on a big fat stack of Conditions and gaining exceptional successes like crazy.

It's like you barely read the system and you know that in a white room it's technically possible so that means that it's always going to happen.

You only gain arcane beats from negative conditions, barring an exceptional success on the casting roll

He meant the core rules, using Inspiring. And also cheesing to get Exceptionals on three with spellcrafting as well.
It's still once a scene and still only when it's a meaningful roll, though.

You gain a Beat for resolving a Condition only once per scene, but that's still not stopping you from generating Conditions all the time.

Have you ever actually played an RPG?

Most RPGs don't let you create chains of critical successes again and again.

Maybe, like, Fate Core.

I didn't ask if you've read RPG books. I asked if you've actually /played/ them.

Yep.

My next game is going to be a Hunter chronicle focused on a bunch of teenagers at a wealthy boarding school.

Give me your best ideas, /wodg/.

>What are your biggest inspirations for your games?

Sad to say, probably Stephen King.

>What are your biggest inspirations for your games?
Sci Fi and Modern Fantasy TV series
Sanctuary is VERY Mysterium

The main protagonist is a mage and all the other players are part of his supernatural harem

I love high school Hunter. Why a wealthy boarding school, though?
Read Hack/Slash. Cassie's mom works.
Also maybe some scarecrows attack. Or someone is poisoning the French fries to make the children smarter so they can solve a problem.
Their teacher is an alien.
Female students are going missing, and the popular girl is getting *super* pretty lately...

>What are your biggest inspirations for your games?
Some other gothicpunk or modern fantasy that fits the ideal of what I'm looking for. The film Constantine is one of the best movies that could work for Hunter, for example. Hellboy's a fun one. The Underworld franchise. I like a lot of that supernatural stuff. That recent-ish Wolfman film with Benicio Del Toro was really good.

Then there are other angles. Other Veeky Forums stuff, like Delta Green. Even some of the supernatural aspects from things like Shadowrun. Dresden Files for books. Unfortunately there's not a lot of good World of Darkness-type stuff in books. Anyone have any good suggestions?

Honestly, I like a lot of the stuff they added. Most of my games (or ideas for games) include almost all of the books on at least some level. The only stuff I don't add is Mummy and Beast (though I might change my mind on the latter depending on how it does, I'm not familiar with it), and sometimes Demon. I was raised Catholic and I like to add some actual religious stuff to my game, and the God-Machine is just a bit too techno-punky-eldritch-horror-playing-God for my taste. A bit too out there compared to the rest of the World.

I've recently been trying to find a way where the God-Machine PLAYS at being God while the actual big man upstairs is like "meh, It's a pretender, but I'm not allowed to really interfere directly. And its 'angels,' are about as strong as my own, unfortunately." But that feels a bit strange to me, to be honest. Does anyone have any good suggestions on how to handle that?

>What are your biggest inspirations for your games?

Edgar Allen Poe. The whole...I don't really go in for the "gothicness" so much but I think the Fall of the House of Usher & his poem the Conqueror Worm have really left a mark on how I approach horror as a genre. Also I literally named a spirit "Masque of the Red Death" lol.

Beyond that, probably and unfortunately a little bit of Lovecraft & Cthulhu mythos stuff, the Music of Erich Zann & the hounds of tindalos by that not-lovecraft guy.

Aside from all the book malarkey I really like david cronenberg movies, the radio drama of pontypool which i liked a little more than the film, the film Anti-Christ, some other stuff. I tend towards either quieter stuff that's more about figuring out what the hell is going wrong with "my friends/my family/my world/my body," i guess more psychological-type deals.

And generally I incorporate a lot of other non-horror stuff that I like & read into my games.

I mean, you could run with something akin to certain interpretations of Mage lore.

IE the true god/s control the supernal symbols that effectively constitute the 'starting point' of reality.

The God Machine meanwhile, is an inevitability because you basically can't tweak the content of the universe enough that it never comes into existence without preventing material reality from existing entirely which would defeat the point.

And in turn, manifesting an Ochemata strong enough to overcome the strongest the God Machine has (and/or will eventually create and send back in time), would destroy material reality.

The God Machine meanwhile, if it ever encroaches outside the lesser realities it was born in, lacks its "hostage" that is the entirety of creation, and immediately gets swatted.

This would also go a long way to explaining why the God Machine goes to such exorbitant lengths to construct concealment infrastructure when mankind couldn't really defeat it even if they tried. It isn't trying to hide from man, its trying to hide from the man on the other end of the microscope looking down at man.

I like this.

i dont know. Big worlds full of odd things that dont always make sense. Alot of them are bad and evil, some of them aren't. The only thing I really draw from a touch is john constantine

Would this apply to Chaos Mastery

The God-Machine is the Demiurge in classic Gnosticism. God is either rendered impotent (Sophia emanating alone and creating the Ialdabaoth, or getting beaten as in Dogma) or simply can't or won't interfere with the world. Meanwhile it's powerless as the Demiurge controls and manipulates the world.

Also, while I love the Mage approach, there's also Promethean (or a mix of the two): God-as-creator is the Principle, and all it can do is create Souls and send it's Qashmallim out to do it's bidding, even though it's equally as insane and broken as the God-Machine. I actually like them to be two halves of the same whole. The Principle is the core of it, and essentially operating broken, while the God-Machine is the rest of the system and functioning mindlessly, a hive with no queen. The Principle gets all the truly high level Supernal power, but is completely unable to do anything drastic because the God-Machine got all of the power in the Material.

You can of course also blame this on one of the many fuck ups. Take your pick of Mages, Mummies, or Werewolves.

Hopefully, but we can't be sure.

>Take your pick of Mages, Mummies, or Werewolves.

I choose all three.

>What are your biggest inspirations for your games?
I take local news and imagine what if supernatural thing actually cause that. I build short story around it and let players investigate it.

Banging on the machine doesn't fix it!

I just like the idea that three colossal fuckups all happened at pretty much the same time solely by chance, no matter how much each individual group wants to say, "No, it is we who ruined the world, making us the most important!"

Like, c'mon, if you didn't do it, some other bunch of fuckos would.

I prefer everyone being responsible.
Mages fucked up and left everyone in a secondary reality.
Then Mummies fucked up and broke Time.
Then Werewolves fucked up and broke the Dimensions.

To be fair, I have no idea what Mummies did, just that their shit isn't around anymore. Mages technically ruined shit first, according to Dark Eras. Then the werewolves were like "dad is getting pretty old, you know what we should do to fix that? WE SHOULD KILL HIM". Mummies were actually last.
Whatever happened with the God-Machine itself was maybe first, maybe not.

Time wise I think werewolf happened first.

>Whatever happened with the God-Machine itself was maybe first

Probably. Everything else is just an echo of that.

NO, Stone Age Dark Eras has Mages existing before the Gauntlet went up.

Sorry sorry ment to say werewolves happened before mummies. My phone messed up.

What?
No.
The world is already Fallen in Neolithic Mage, but Urfarah and the First Pack are still running around. There's also hints and implications of the Nameless Empire to the south. We're not yet to the First Sothic Turn.

Not a hex.

Yes it is. Stop trying to game the system

But... It's not. That's not a gaming thing. Hexes are different spells. That's like saying any negative Fate spell is a hex. It would only apply to the tilts.

Hex effects explicitly state so, jackass. Stop accusing people who read the rules as gaming the system.

These three are like the Three Stooges of reality.

How are this and Chaos Mastery related?

Every time someone reads the rules and another dude yells about "s-stop gaming the system!" it's pretty much always Edward/Drawde/Aspel/Rory.

Hexes are spells that cause tilts or reduce dice pools.
Chaos Mastery's effects are:
>Cause a Tilt
>Cause a Tilt
>Cause a Tilt
>Reduce Actions
>Deal Damage

You know what how about these questions get asked in FAQ threads on the OPP forums and these threads just stick to stuff like "How can I use the God-Machine and God in my game?" or "what is your inspiration?" Those questions are a lot more interesting than "by doing things the game doesn't intend me to do I can break the game!"

You want to know the answer to any and all of those questions? "Only if your ST lets you".

Chaos mastery
>removes armor
>inflicts a condition
>inflicts a condition
>Changes a die
>Deals Damage
NOT A SINGLE ONE IS IN HEX.

Specifically mentions hex.

>Every time someone reads the rules and another dude yells about "s-stop gaming the system!" it's pretty much always Edward/Drawde/Aspel/Rory.

Why do you hate it when people scrutinize the rules?

ALSO specifically mentions hex.

Except for the fact that highest Arcanum included in the spell is independent of the particular mage. If the spell has compelling elements of Fate and ruling of Mind, it's highest Arcanum is always Mind. It doesn't matter that mage has 3 dots in Mind and 5 in Fate, it's still Gnosis+Mind.

>"It's clearly for sociopaths who want to violently murder their bullies and anyone who plays it is dangerous" is not one of them, yet that's a sentiment I've seen thrown around.
No one here said that. The teaching the lessons angle is completely retarded. If the game was just about playing bad guys, it would be OK, but writers couldn't stand that. They hastily tried to invent reasons why beasts are actually nice people and failed spectacularly.

>"Hexes inflict Conditions"
>Spell inflicts conditions
>Not a hex
It also specifically says it reduces the die.

ALSO SPECIFICALLY MENTIONS HEX.
No, he just makes taking people presumptuous, incorrect readings of the rules.

That's the highest PRACTICE. BUT ARCANUM.
HEXES. INFLICT. TILTS.

Do you know what it didn't say? Impose a die penalty equal to potency.

>No, he just makes taking people presumptuous, incorrect readings of the rules.
Even if I'm wrong about this, I've repeatedly corrected people and been able to cite chapter and verse. I feel like I've probably corrected you and you're salty about it.

Stop trying to turn Chaos Mastery into the next Temporal Summoning. I don't care if it's crazy broken. Welcome to wizards.

Actually, I usually agree with you! But the fact is that you are completely off base right now.

>What are your biggest inspirations for your games?
My own imagination mainly.

>Except for the fact that highest Arcanum included in the spell is independent of the particular mage. If the spell has compelling elements of Fate and ruling of Mind, it's highest Arcanum is always Mind. It doesn't matter that mage has 3 dots in Mind and 5 in Fate, it's still Gnosis+Mind.

Literally wrong.

The rules passage says HIGHEST ARCANUM, not highest practice.

>I've repeatedly corrected people and been able to cite chapter and verse

And you're normally wrong each time.

Look, I honestly don't give a shit at this point. I'm sick and tired of all day seeing people go "well I can totally spam this and kill everyone in the room!"
It's times like this (and "I can spam so that I can get a billion Beats!") that I remember that Veeky Forums plays less than I do. And oh, look, now we're back to arguing about whether you can add Fate 5 to your Craftsman's Eye and roll that instead of your paltry Matter 1.

Didn't you drag it back?

I'm the one arguing about hexes, and I play. A lot actually. I've got a session tomorrow. I'm just pointing out that chaos mastery isn't a hex. Because it's not.

Nobody said you could get a ton of Beats in a single scene, fuckface.

Someone said you could get a ton of CONDITIONS in a single scene.

But you CAN use Chaos Mastery to blow the fuck out of everyone in a room as written.

And you CAN add Fate to Craftsman's Eye to use your Fate for the dice pool instead of Matter. That's literally what's written in the book.

Well there are some classics like the vampire staked under the school and werewolves in the forests.

That said you should totally include that one frat that is ran by pentex

One teacher's a privateer.

Copied from the M20 description of Prime 1 (for what it's worth, personally I like it for the most part):

"A beginning study of Prime allows the mage to perceive and channel Quintessence from Nodes, Tass, Wonders, and magickal
Effects. She may spot energetic ebbs and flows, can sense and at least try to read Resonance and Synergy signatures, and could
also absorb Quintessence into her personal Pattern. Mages without at least one dot in Prime cannot absorb Quintessence
beyond their Avatar Background rating. A Prime-skilled mage, however, may do so.

When infusing her Quintessence into an object, that mage may also consecrate the object with her personal energy. When she shapeshifts, steps sideways, or otherwise alters her
Pattern’s metaphysical nature, that consecrated object will then change with her. In the process, it also picks up her personal Resonance… which, because it both identifies her and becomes essentially connected to her, is not always a good thing."

So how I interpret that as meaning that if you only have prime one, you can't channel more quintessence into yourself than your avatar rating. The exception to that would be if you're a mage whose primary sphere is prime (like if you are celestial chorus, syndicate, some other group, or have the sphere affinity (prime) merit. Then in theory, you should be able to store up to the maximum quintessence of 10. But I'm pretty sure that unless you start storing quintessence in something like an amulet, or staff, or trinary computer rig, or whatever your mage believes they can store quintessence in, then you can't go above 10.

>inb4 90s anime and the sopranos

How dare you, sir. I'm only inspired by the finest 80s anime and Hill Street Blues.

>HEXES. INFLICT. TILTS.
Hexes can inflict tilts. Not everything that inflicts tilts is a hex.

If it really is such a problem, just filter the comment chain using whatever Veeky Forums extension of your choice. If people want to talk about it, they will, and there is absolutely no reason to shitpost in an attempt to stifle discussion.

>Mages without AT LEAST one dot in Prime cannot absorb Quintessence beyond their Avatar Background rating. A Prime-skilled mage, however, may do so.