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

Guns being deadly makes sense. Firearms being *significantly* more deadly than melee weaponry to the point wherein someone with a melee weapon who is threatening a gunman at arms reach has no recourse to the gunman backing away and shooting is a little silly.

Defense in Chronicles of Darkness is equal to the lower of Wits and Dexterity, plus Athletics on top of that. That is a non-negligible value that anyone with a melee weapon has to contend with, and it could very well push melee attacks to a chance die short of an All-Out Attack (which removes Defense) or spending Willpower (which also works with firearms).

As far as accuracy is concerned, firearms merely have to contend with full cover (if someone is using cover, they are hiding and thus not attacking) and concealment (which provides, at the very most, a -3 penalty for substantial concealment like hiding behind a car, and the one hiding takes a -2 penalty to their own attacks).

"The ST can say no" does not stop the mechanics from being what they are (easily abused, in this case).

What's the point of Techne? Is having an Order Tool really so important that they'd need a merit for you to use whatever tool you want? They only give a +1 to spellcasting. The 8-Again when using Teamwork is nice, but is it really worth 2 dots?

Do you think anyone cares? Why do you keep repeating yourself? Most people are either completely fine with things the way they are or have made small houserules to make it something they're comfortable with. You're talking to people who already know what you're saying and either don't agree or don't care. On top of that, you're saying that systems that literally tell you that the ST should prevent abuse are easily abusable.

You repeatedly deny any character any choice other than the one that you decide they must take. Any time someone points out a flaw, you try to argue that you can do something simply because the rules don't say you can't. You make arguments that any ST would reasonably tell you "No" to. You act like the book should be 400 pages of incredibly detailed descriptions that cover every possible scenario, because if they allow for any wiggle room--which they MUST do simply by virtue of the developers and writers not having infinite time or infinite wordcount--you stretch a tiny loophole until you can drive a tractor trailer through it, then argue that you've for some big flaw in the system.

Why are you even in this thread? You clearly don't like the system. You don't even seem to understand the setting.

When you start out, you have, at most, a base dice pool of 4.(Unless you're a shithead min-maxer who trades in all their merit dots for Gnosis 3.)
Without the Techne merit, your tool yantras are limited to the things listed under that heading and complex mechanisms/systems.
With the Techne merit, you can choose something, specific to you character, that also counts as a Yantra; cooking, hacking, writing, painting, exercising, voodoo, etc. Anything is viable, unless your ST says otherwise.

Why specifically do you need an Order Tool? Can't you already use anything as a Yantra as is? I mean, I only have so many Yantra slots. Why would I want to use an Order Tool over any other Yantra?

Or am I just misunderstanding how Yantras work? I thought I could basically use whatever I want. Like if I'm casting a Fate spell I could use the Tarot or dice.

Techne seems like a very weak Merit to me. It might be useful at one dot, but two is simply too much. Compare it to, say, Lex Magica, which gives increasingly powerful benefits as your Silver Ladder Status rises, or Prelacy which likewise confers potent advantages (alongside Seers of the Throne Status itself, which augments your Resources to a great degree).

>Do you think anyone cares?
Because someone in the previous tool had dredged up my arguments concerning the combat system from years ago, and I was behooved to respond.

>Any time someone points out a flaw, you try to argue that you can do something simply because the rules don't say you can't.
I am the one trying to point out flaws in the mechanics here.

Chronicles of Darkness is attempting (key word: "attempting") to be some bizarre simulationist/narrative blend with nitty-gritty rules for everything from mid-battle earthquakes to the rules for using pepper spray, so I am well within my rights to point out when the omission of a rule results in strange scenarios, such as people moving away from and past each other in combat without reprisal.

>You act like the book should be 400 pages of incredibly detailed descriptions that cover every possible scenario
You seem to think that I am a fan of overly rules-heavy games, when in fact, my preferred systems are rules-light to -medium, and think highly of the better PbtA games (Urban Shadows, Worlds in Peril, and Fellowship are what I am thinking of specifically).

The difference between such games and Chronicles of Darkness is that the former are fiction-first and based on common narrative triggers, whereas Chronicles is heavily grounded in scores of mechanics and the resolution of such mechanics.

Assuming you have Gnosis 2 (because you dislike the prospect of Gnosis 3), you will have two Yantra slots. Only one can be performed reflexively.

Use both Yantras on Order and Path Tool. Done.

Techne is a poor Merit at two dots.

You are not misunderstanding. Techne is an obviously overpriced Merit.

Nothing is stopping an Acanthus mage from using their smartphone's reflective surface as a Path Tool (Acanthus treat all reflective surfaces as valid materials) and then using an appropriate Order Tool as well.

You might even substitute one for a Dedicated Tool.

Is anyone else here hype as fuck for Scion? I know nothing about 1e, but "mythological urban fantasy" scratches an itch I didn't know I had and provides an outlet for people who don't like horror in the CofD.

>Chronicles of Darkness is attempting (key word: "attempting") to be some bizarre simulationist/narrative blend with nitty-gritty rules for everything from mid-battle earthquakes to the rules for using pepper spray, so I am well within my rights to point out when the omission of a rule results in strange scenarios, such as people moving away from and past each other in combat without reprisal.
And all of those are incredibly narratively handled, and their rules are not meant to be accurate simulations. More than that, you're pointing out omissions that are obvious. Again, you're arguing that you can walk through a wall because the game doesn't say you can't.
And before you say that's not what you're saying, it's called a metaphor. It's an analogy.

You should know very well that CofD is not trying to be mechanically heavy. You've played mechanically heavy games.

And once again I ask why you feel the need to be in this thread when you don't like the game.

>Nothing is stopping an Acanthus mage from using their smartphone's reflective surface as a Path Tool (Acanthus treat all reflective surfaces as valid materials) and then using an appropriate Order Tool as well.
I would not allow that. That does not constitute "reflective" enough for the use of a magical tool based on reflectiveness.

>Why are you even in this thread? You clearly don't like the system. You don't even seem to understand the setting.

Mage: The Awakening 2e had been released a few weeks ago, and I have come to take a look at it.

Mage: The Awakening contains my second most favorite RPG setting (Planescape is the first). The way it presents its wondrous magic, the Supernal Realms, and the other mystical planes of existence captures my imagination like few other settings can. As well, one of the major themes of Mage is "senses beyond the mundane," with mages perceiving the underlying energies and fabrics of reality through dazzling sensations and visions, and I find that majestic.

Mage: The Awakening inspires within me a sense of awe and wonder that makes me come back to it each time, even when I know that its rules were and always will be an incorrigibly broken mess.

I have strong hopes for Scion if it will be discarding the clunky mess that is the Storyteller system and attempting to build a better system.

>And all of those are incredibly narratively handled, and their rules are not meant to be accurate simulations.
Chronicles of Darkness manages to be more heavily rules-grounded than D&D 3.X, and that is saying something.

>Again, you're arguing that you can walk through a wall because the game doesn't say you can't.
"Walking through walls is impossible" is a hard-coded rule of nonmagical reality. "Someone taking a swipe against someone who is trying to move past them" is far more up in the air, and is something that could be addressed with a rule.

>not trying to be mechanically heavy.
It absolutely is. A CofD supernatural's character sheet rivals a 3.X sheet in terms of sheer mechanics.

>That does not constitute "reflective" enough
There is no reason not to allow a reflective surface from counting as... reflective. Besides, you can get a smartphone case with a mirror on the back, or use a tiny compact mirror.

>"Someone taking a swipe against someone who is trying to move past them" is far more up in the air, and is something that could be addressed with a rule.

"Human beings are solid objects" is a hard-coded rule of nonmagical reality. You can't walk through people.
Granted that CofD doesn't rely on the use of a battlemap, I'd say if 2 characters were in a hallway and one of them wanted to move past the other, but they were in combat, the one who wants to pass would be fucked unless the one standing still decided to let him pass for some reason--you generally don't let your enemy get behind you.
>There is no reason not to allow a reflective surface from counting as... reflective.
The monitor you're looking into right now is, technically, reflective. It wouldn't work as a yantra, imo, because you can't make out anything reflecting in it beyond vague blobs.

I'd rule that for an object to count as "reflective", you have to be able to make out what's being shown in the reflection. Otherwise, you aren't really forming an Imago with it, you're just looking at it.

Can we please talk about literally anything other than Mage?

Please don't reply to a million posts at once. It's an eyesore and makes you seem autistic.

>"Human beings are solid objects" is a hard-coded rule of nonmagical reality. You can't walk through people.
At no point have I ever said anything about stepping through people. I have, on the other hand, spoken of stepping *past* people.

>I'd say if 2 characters were in a hallway and one of them wanted to move past the other, but they were in combat, the one who wants to pass would be fucked unless the one standing still decided to let him pass for some reason
Some sort of combat-related rule for such a situation would help here...

>I'd rule that for an object to count as "reflective", you have to be able to make out what's being shown in the reflection.

The Aztecs used polished obsidian mirrors as ritual implements, and such mirrors produce awfully imprecise reflections. Additionally, in page 267 of the core Chronicles of Darkness rulebook, we have an example of a creature that can indeed use a smartphone as a "reflective surface."

Either way, however, you are disregarding the main point of it being *trivial* to have both a Path Tool and an Order Tool on hand, therefore making the Techne Merit quite overpriced.

When there are multiple posts directed towards me, and when a certain poster chides me for ignoring even a single post, I am under an obligation to respond to them.

I can assure you that nobody gives a fuck what you're saying. You've been shitting up these threads for three days now.

>Can we please talk about literally anything other than Mage?

Sure
I'm in a V20 game that started this last Thursday. The ST was kinda frazzled by the group make-up, because we have a Gangrel who's entire city block is his Domain, a Caitiff who has an entire hospital as her Domain, a Ventrue who works in the same hospital as that Caitiff, a Caitiff dwarf private detective, and a poncy asshole Brujah(me, my own words). I pushed for us to be Anarchs, because it made more sense for my dude than the Camarilla, but the group voted and we ended up being Cammies.

The session started with us waking up chained to wooden chairs in a small warehouse, with no windows. We couldn't remember how we got there, or anything. After taking a bit to start talking and introduce ourselves to each other, a guy in a purple suit walked in and started talking to us. He grabbed us, though we didn't learn why; I asked and he said I was just "convenient". He got a phone call and walked off, mentioning someone named Mikhael and a Tremere.

I pumped my Strength up with 3 blood(8th generation a best) and broke everybody out, then we walked out of the warehouse and saw the guy standing a few yards away. I ran at him and tried to do a knock-out punch, but missed. He grabbed me and put a gun to my head, said not to move or he'd shoot--I frenzied, and he shot me in the head, NEARLY killing me, then ran off.

I spent almost all my blood healing up(the ST said that hitting 0 blood would mean an instant frenzy, which I disagree with since there was no fresh blood around), then we walked out of the compound-thing the warehouse was in. The Gangrel spent a few minutes trying to Quell the Beast on a guy with a truck who was driving past, while the rest of us talked to some gang kids who were standing around trying to act tough. I wasn't having any of their shit, told 'em I wasn't having the kind of day where I'd just put up with their shit, then walked over to the truck.

The Gangrel tried one more time, then I reached in and banged the guy's head against his steering wheel and pushed him over. We all got in the truck, I nearly drained the guy in a frenzy, but then the rest of the group decided to stop the truck and pull me off him, the Gangrel using Quell the Beast to end my frenzy. We ended up dropping the guy off at a hospital, because despite my guy having no qualms about killing him, I didn't wanna have to deal with the rest of the group's bitching(both in- and out-of-character) about my morality.

The rules aren't an "incorrigibly broken mess". They don't cover situations that you want to do, but you only want to do those situations because they're technically allowed within the mechanics. That is not how games work.

I also do not understand why you would love Mage's setting when you repeatedly fail to understand it.

>Chronicles of Darkness manages to be more heavily rules-grounded than D&D 3.X, and that is saying something.
No.
>It absolutely is. A CofD supernatural's character sheet rivals a 3.X sheet in terms of sheer mechanics.
This is flat out wrong.

>I have, on the other hand, spoken of stepping *past* people.
Yes, and the Storyteller can tell you that you do not have enough room to safely manage that. Not everything is covered in the mechanics. You would not be allowed to do that in PbtA systems either.

>Additionally, in page 267 of the core Chronicles of Darkness rulebook, we have an example of a creature that can indeed use a smartphone as a "reflective surface."
Mage is a game of symbolism. A phone's symbolism is not that of a mirror.

Dude. Dude. DUUUUDE. It's 2hufag. We all know he's autstic as shit. It just so happens he's a helpful and polite sort of autism. Seriously, for all the shit he gets, I've never seen the guy snap at someone once.

Fuck this, I'm gonna go play Unknown Armies

>Additionally, in page 267 of the core Chronicles of Darkness rulebook, we have an example of a creature that can indeed use a smartphone as a "reflective surface."
I'm not the guy who said you couldn't use a smartphone as one/anything else you're arguing with in that post.
I'm just saying that something like an old door handle which, while *technically* reflective, doesn't give you a clear enough image to tell what you're looking at based solely on the reflection, doesn't make sense for a yantra to me.

Pic related is a polished obsidian mirror. That seems reflective, enough, to me; there's also pictures on google of them being used as straight-up mirrors like you would see in a hallway, with a fancy frame, and they seem pretty reflective to me.

Not who you're talking to, but if you turn the screen off/lock your phone it can definitely be used as a mirror.

Maybe it's just my particular model, but I wouldn't feel bad telling a player that they could use a phone as a mirror. It might end up disqualified some other way, but I don't see why you'd say that a mobile phone can't be a mirror. If it needed to be of a certain size/quality or have certain ornamentation then I can definitely see an issue, but if it just has to be a mirror at all, then a smartphone would work.

I have. Repeatedly.

They're also intentionally and specifically created to be reflective, not incidentally reflective.

Smart man. It's the game Mage should be.

>tfw Unknown Armies and Delta Green are slowly overtaking the CofD for you

>(8th generation

Lmao, all the stereotypes are true

>The rules aren't an "incorrigibly broken mess".
High praise for a White Wolf/Onyx Path game that still clings to its dinosaur of a system framework, which is poisoned down to its very core dice rolling mechanic and the probabilities associated with such.

>They don't cover situations that you want to do, but you only want to do those situations because they're technically allowed within the mechanics.
I do not think it is unreasonable to be able to desire some sort of way of adjudicating how character A can prevent character B from getting away from or past them. Even Fate Accelerated has that in its tiny booklet, and that is a rather light game.

>I also do not understand why you would love Mage's setting when you repeatedly fail to understand it.
The mysticism, the esoteric planes of existence, and the senses beyond the mundane all draw me in with their cosmic beauty.

>You would not be allowed to do that in PbtA
Yes, because such games are fiction first, and this actually *is* covered in the rules. Trying to step away from or past a melee weapon-wielder would, due to the fiction involved in such, trigger some sort of "You are trying to do something dangerous, so make a roll for it" move in any PbtA game that pays some degree of attention to physical combat.

>Mage is a game of symbolism. A phone's symbolism is not that of a mirror.
Yantras call upon the symbolism and the semiotics important to the mage themselves. As long as they can work it into their Imago, the Tool should work, and it is hardly a stretch for an Acanthus to envision themselves gazing into their own smartphone.

The reflection visible in such an obsidian mirror is less precise than the reflection one would receive from a convention bathroom mirror, and roughly the same quality of reflection one would receive from a black-screen smartphone in the same angle and lighting.

This is beyond the main point of "Path and Order Tools are trivial to have on hand."

>helpful and polite
He's done nothing but shitpost and troll these threads and deliberately try to shit all over DaveB.

What a villain

Which stereotypes? About 8th gens? Or about WoD players?

I modeled my dude after a specific character, to an extent, and said dude is in his 500s, plus a poncy asshole when he's actually drinking blood. (And it's implied he's a close in blood-relation to the oldest vampire alive, in the source show)
An example of the guy he's modeled after:
youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0GxtWSoAc

My character may fit a stereotype, but it's not at all linked to me having a history with WoD. This is my first game of it that I was actually committed too(played another game about a year ago, with the same ST, but I went through about 5 concepts for a character before I landed on one, and it only lasted one session)

>This is beyond the main point of "Path and Order Tools are trivial to have on hand."
I was never trying to argue against that point. It's true.

Please stop. You are literally making people hate this system. Please just stop. I am literally begging you to stop. I do not want to hear you. No one else wants to hear you. Please, just, create an account with Tumblr and make a blog and discuss these things. Make a post on the forums and keep your system breaking to that thread. Please, please, please stop posting in this thread about nothing but breaking the mechanics. We all know that they're fragile. We don't care. Most of us would not want more mechanical constraints. Adding more rules to the system is not helpful or conducive to what anyone wants from the system, it just makes it a more byzantine and confusing mess. Please, please refrain from posting about the mechanics unless someone asks for mechanical advice. Specifically asks you for mechanical advice. Please do not tell us how this or that is possible within the framework of the rules. Please do not browbeat the developers for failing to live up to your ridiculous standards. Please stop arguing that the game is broken because you're able to do things that were never intended to be done or will reasonably happen.

Please, just don't. Focus your attention elsewhere. Create your own system. Show us how you would make a game. Not in this thread, though. That is what blogs are for. You have upset a great deal of people, and you have stifled any conversation that isn't about you. Tell us your character. Tell us your ideas for an actual game. Tell us what you've actually played, or what your players are like if you somehow are running a game. But please. Please, for the love of the Towers, please do not tell us what you think about the mechanics. You already have turned people away. You did the same with Wulin when you discovered that system. You browbeat everyone around you into listening to you talk about all of the little problems and chased people away from the system who hadn't even tried it yet. Please, do not do that.

>Firearms being *significantly* more deadly than melee weaponry to the point wherein someone with a melee weapon who is threatening a gunman at arms reach has no recourse to the gunman backing away and shooting is a little silly.

/k/ here again. Well aimed gunfire can be immediately incapacitating. If someone takes a step back, fires well and then stops his opponent...

Well, that's a problem with the initiative system, isn't it.

Say your Kukri wielding turbo-chad has the initiative, attacks the gunman at arms reach and then reduces his health levels to the point that he can only move slowly and has to choose between moving or acting.

Isn't this a function of how initiative works?

And no one cares about your fucking touhou girls and it's REALLY out of place in a CofD/WoD thread.

You mean the stereotype that generation is always the best background to buy? That never changed.

>tfw a /k/ommando doesn't know the 10 feet rule

The one stat to rule them all...

>Healing Spells. Why so high Practice? People have made compelling arguments, seriously considering making Knit able to heal lethal.
As one of the people who voiced this particular complaint, I'd have no issues with slapping a Mana cost on the Lethal-healing function to make sure starting Life-specialist Thyrsus can heal Lethal without being able to heal it every turn all day long and render their group werewolf-tier invincible at the cost of blowing their turns.

It just didn't sit right with me that Mages had to wait until Adept-level to heal Lethal, even for the ones who specialize in the Life Arcanum (given that it's going to come up any time they get into a fight involving weapons, or get attacked by a monster with claws or teeth or whatever), especially when Perfecting doesn't have a four-dot improved version (based on the definitions, Patterning is improved Weaving, like Ruling is improved Compelling, but Perfecting is its own thing the way Veiling or Shielding are).

>We all know that they're fragile. We don't care.
Some of you would repeatedly deny various questionable mechanics, perhaps touting, "But it is fine, because the ST can always veto it."

>Most of us would not want more mechanical constraints. Adding more rules to the system is not helpful or conducive to what anyone wants from the system, it just makes it a more byzantine and confusing mess.
Please refer to my point regarding overly rules-heavy games here. Fate 4's Chaos Mastery being vastly superior to Forces 4's Thunderbolt, for example, is not a matter of "They did not write enough," but rather them writing *too* much into Chaos Mastery.

>Please stop arguing that the game is broken because you're able to do things that were never intended to be done or will reasonably happen.
A game should be stress-tested to see where it cracks, such that those cracks may be repaired.

>Tell us your character. Tell us your ideas for an actual game. Tell us what you've actually played, or what your players are like if you somehow are running a game.
After having been booted out of a crossover Chronicles of Darkness game due to the GM and the group disagreeing with me, one of the players of that group had left the group as well and had offered to run a one-on-one game for me. Speaking of what my character is like would do no good, because we would have no common ground at all and could not appreciate one another. On the other hand, speaking of mechanics does give us a common frequency of the system's rules themselves.

>You browbeat everyone around you into listening to you talk about all of the little problems and chased people away from the system who hadn't even tried it yet.
I would rather have people know *exactly* what they are getting into than enter a house with a fragile floor and roof unwarned.

"Reactionary gap" is the technical term. It's 21 feet if you don't have your sidearm out. Now in this hypothetical situation where OHSHITFUCKTHEREHEIS! *dakka intensifies* where both the gun and the melee weapon are ready, there, just as in real life whoever gets their attack off first usually wins.

He's not considering intiative, just the case where one has the initiative and the other doesn't.

Because he's some contrarian neckbearded asshole.

>tfw mutton-chop master race.

Oh man, I remember this from back when I still played this.
That, and 10 Willpower on every player character, and a slew of nigh-irrelevant Flaws.

We deny those things because we have never had those problems in our games. You are going far beyond stress testing. The house is completely stable until you start taking a sledgehammer to the support beams, which is what you've been doing.

Tell us about your character. We do not care about how you feel about the mechanics. No one has the same feeling that you do in regards to them. I guarantee you that the majority of this thread would rather hear about your character.

>On the other hand, speaking of mechanics does give us a common frequency of the system's rules themselves.
Considering these last couple of threads? Could have fooled me.

>Tell us about your character. We do not care about how you feel about the mechanics. No one has the same feeling that you do in regards to them.
Speak for yourself, fuckboy.

Those don't fall under path or order. You'd need Techne to use them.

For one, a firearm-wielder is likely to have the Initiative advantage solely due to the Firefight 1 Merit, which confers a large bonus to Initiative. The melee version is Light Weapons 1, which grants the same bonus to Initiative, but reduces the weapon's damage rating to zero.

Compare the following:
Light pistol: Damage 1, initiative -0
Knife: Damage 0 (becomes 0 with Light Weapons 1), initiative -0

Heavy revolver: Damage 2, initiative -2
Machete: Damage 1 (becomes 0 with Light Weapons 1), initiative -2

The melee weapon-user is at a disadvantage here, even if they do start within arm's reach.

Furthermore, even if the melee weapon-user does start first, they will have to contend with a Defense, a value that is quite likely to be higher than the paltry +2 the melee weapon-user receives from an All-Out Attack (which also makes it impossible to charge).

The best shot the melee weapon-user has is to take a -2 penalty to try to impose the Knocked Down Tilt, which is going to be somewhat dicey given the -2 penalty on top of Defense. They can spend Willpower to improve their chances, but the gunman, who probably wishes to stay on their feet, can likewise spend Willpower to raise their Defense. Even *if* the gunman gets knocked down, they can make a Dexterity + Athletics roll (at no penalty) to kip up without using their action.

I remember when I dared to make a character with less than 8 willpower

I was specifically wondering why I'd want to use a Path or Order Tool. I swear somewhere in the book I saw something about Order Tools helping to reduce Paradox, but that doesn't seem to be in the Tool write up for them.

Please stop. People in actual games have played through this situation. We already know how the game works, in practice, not in theory.

>A game should be stress-tested to see where it cracks, such that those cracks may be repaired.
And do you think bitching about them endlessly in a general thread on Veeky Forums is going to cause the devs to overhaul the system?

All it's likely to do is cause the unfamiliar to decide the game is shit and they shouldn't bother playing it, if anything. And pointless, multiple-thread-spanning internet arguments that ruin the threads for everyone else.

Those are standard Yantras. Anything else is a special case.

And now, look at it with the kind of stats you can expect from 0xp player characters, and mooks, who build to suit a character instead of min-maxing.

>Gunner
>Wits 3, Dex 3
>Athletics 1-2, 3 at the most
>Firearms 3
>Defense of 4-5, probably

>Melee brawler
>Str 3, Wits 3, Dex 3
>Athletics 2-3, Brawl/Weaponry 3
>Defense of 5-6
Not taking any specialties into account, at all

>Mook
>All attributes 2
>Athletics 0-2, Firearms 0-2, Brawl/Weaponry 0-2
>Defense 2-4

Dedicated Tool Yantras reduce Paradox. They tend to fit your Path, to some degree, because it's (as a general rule) probably the first thing you ever picked up to use in helping you cast a spell.

>He's not considering intiative, just the case where one has the initiative and the other doesn't.

Between weapons of equal Size, firearms have a edge in terms of comparing Initiative and damage ratings, particularly when Firefight 1 is compared to Light Weapons 1.

>I was specifically wondering why I'd want to use a Path or Order Tool. I swear somewhere in the book I saw something about Order Tools helping to reduce Paradox, but that doesn't seem to be in the Tool write up for them.
You are looking for Dedicated Tools in pages 122-123.

>Please stop. People in actual games have played through this situation. We already know how the game works, in practice, not in theory.
Anecdotes can return any number of outcomes, from "it works" to "it does not work" to "it can work sometimes." That is not useful data without a control, and the control in this case is the rules as they stand as written.

>And do you think bitching about them endlessly in a general thread on Veeky Forums is going to cause the devs to overhaul the system?
Of course not. It can, however, help players bring up issues with their STs, and STs address those issues. Besides, the official threads for errata and FAQ on Mage 2e have been closed.

The gunner should Quick Draw their gun, avail of the high Initiative from Firefight 1, and directly blast the mook, possibly with Willpower spent. The melee PC has to contend with Defense (and the fact that Light Weapons 1 comes with an arbitrary downside that Firefight 1 does not have), which will certainly make them less effective at the job.

I'm the mook irl

The only tools besides order tools you can use are Coins, Cups, Mirrors, Rods, and Weapons of your path materials.

Most people are. Hence why they're mooks.

>that game.
Really well done... but I have to admit, having built-in cheat codes to make female npc's breasts bigger would have modern gamers throwing a bitchfit.

...that being said, I always played at about 1.25x size. Too big and they started looking lumpy, but of course, the models weren't probably made with that in mind.

Do you think they of we all stopped responding or acknowledging 2hu-fag, he'd go away? Because he's fucking cancer.

Create a blog. Write on your blog all the ways that you can stress test the system. Please, do it there. If anything, it would be much more meaningful than somewhere as ephemeral as a Veeky Forums thread. Please, I am literally begging you to take this discussion elsewhere. You can theory craft all you like on a blog. You wouldn't even be limited to a post of only 2000 characters. If people actually have an issue with the system, they already have brought it up with their STs. They do not need your help with that. The official threads were closed because they were filled with exactly this kind of post.

I am laughing at your tears.

I feel like the "modern gamers are so offended lol" meme is childish. Most of the time, they're getting offended over honestly reasonable things. Rarely is it ever even as much of a "bitchfit" as people make out, either, with there being more complaining about the people complaining. And VtMB would not be hurt by making the designs less slutty. Although perhaps not turning everyone into a lace frilled debutante puffy shirted romance novel cover, like the early designs of the MMO.
Although Fabio vampire does seem like a neat idea...

Also, the models look shit if you increase the breast size at all. It's good for a laugh, but actually playing that way makes the ugly models uglier.

The person who told me to play this game is a sjw, literally everyone I know on the sjw side likes it. They think the money thing is a bit immature but that's about it.

It passes the Bechdel test a lot better than most modern games.

The bechdel test is a lolworthy joke and plenty of women live entire lives that wouldn't pass it (as opposed to masterpieces like Snakes on a Plane, which do).

Only because a female character is basically a dyke.
I agree, though. Everyone I know who likes it is also an SJW, and all my reasons for hating it have little to do with the presentation of women. It's schlocky there, but the mechanics and later half of the story are much worse.
Hell, I have a friend who hates WoD and fucking loves that game and schlicks to all the female characters because she's a thirsty lezzer who wants to be or be with Damsel.

What passes isn't important, it's how many things DON'T pass such a simple test.

I'd take a million 2hu posts over any of the usual CofD/WoD General fare. This is honestly the best the thread's been in weeks. People are actually taking about the game instead of derailing into political nonsense.

Continue man. It's a great of a read.

>Tell us about your character.
What is there to say? They are an Acanthus of a Proximi Dynasty and Legacy sworn to watch over the little-known Emanation Realm (new to Mage 2e) of Fate and Spirit that stretches between the Shadow and the Hedge. They are a mediator between the spirits and the fae, neither of which know precisely what the strange and alien creatures before them are, and could use someone with a calm and patient mind to help smooth over the differences.

Continue regarding what?

Right now, I am currently going over Fate and Time spells again, and I am simply flabbergasted over how much *stronger* than they are than their equal-dot counterparts in Death, Forces, Life, Matter, Prime, and Spirit. (Mind and Spirit, as established previously, are good runners-up.)

Take Time 2's Veil of Moments with a Rote. In any other Arcanum, rendering oneself immune to new Conditions and Tilts and forcing a Clash of Wills against virtually any supernatural effect would be nigh unthinkable, but in Time, it is just a 2-dot spell whose hindrances can be overcome by a starting Rote.

It even grants agelessness, and someone trying to dispel it will probably trigger the Clash of Wills anyway.

CofD is actually super mechanically heavy for what it's trying to do. While a lot of 2hu's thoughts and conclusions are sketchy when applied to social situations (which doesn't matter to his design philosophy and wherein the true disagreement in this thread lies), but CofD being a blend of narrativist and simulationist play is dead on. It's a game with theatre of the mind combat and rolls based on abstract actions that still wants you to track ammunition and range fields. It's not even a new observation, people have been writing about it when they saw the same thing in Storyteller.

Ideally it should be time to send Storytelling and Storyteller out to pasture and work out a new system from scratch, but that's never going to happen now that the games are licensed. I wonder if we'll ever end up seeing a CofD setting for the StoryPath ruleset.

Sure, if you like trolling, shitposting and literally making official devs cry.

Oh, come off it, Dave's got thicker skin than that. There's even some extra errata that's coming out of this. All of this is still better shitposting than Aspel arguing with half the thread and people complaining about whatever dumb sidebar they read this week. It's certainly better than Beast chat.

There's quite a lot to say about that. What was their Dynasty. What is their Legacy. What is the Emanation Realm like. What is the character's personality like. There is a ridiculous amount to talk about there that doesn't have to do with browbeating us about how terrible the game's mechanics are.

It doesn't really ask you to track ammunition or range. It's a game that repeatedly suggests ignoring the rules and reminds you that they exist only if you feel you need them. It's got a lot of crunch, and it's more mechanical than Fate, for instance, but it's far from a rules heavy crunch game, especially considering you never really NEED to game the system. If you think this game is crunchy, take a look at Shadowrun or Dark Heresy or D&D/Pathfinder. And that's not even touching on games like GURPS, Mutants & Masterminds, or Tri-Stat, where character creation involves several pages of scratch paper and good note taking just to keep from misplacing a few numbers and having to start over.

Storyteller isn't as narrativist as the name would imply, but there are FAR less moving parts than other games.

>that still wants you to track ammunition and range fields
To be fair, the Hurt Locker is trying to implement a system for abstracted ammunition and range: drive.google.com/file/d/0B2K8R3qXyDyoWEo5eVNMN0MtUWc/view

Still, this does not prevent the rest of the system being a confused blend of narrativist and simulationist. Every single Chronicles of Darkness game line still reprints, for example, the precise damage a character takes for overdosing on ammonia, or moderately long (really!) blocks of text on precisely how firearms suppressors and handcuffs works.

Have a look at page 226 of Mage: The Awakening 2e, for example. The *entire, text-only page* is dedicated to half of the rules for flashlights and the rules for personal computers (apparently, the dice bonus between a low-end and top-end computer is a whopping +3, the difference between a novice programmer and a hacker who can get into government and military systems, as per page 32 of Chronicles of Darkness), smartphones, survival gear, climbing gear, crowbars, firearm suppressors, and gas masks. By all accounts, this game is trying to be strangely simulationist by devoting a whole page to such relatively trivial things.

It is completely absurd that the game would go to such lengths to describe such nitty-gritty details, when that word count could be used on actually, as the name of the system implied, Storytelling-related guidelines.

>Ideally it should be time to send Storytelling and Storyteller out to pasture and work out a new system from scratch, but that's never going to happen now that the games are licensed.
Scion 2e will use a new system only vaguely patterned off Storyteller. It seems promising enough.

>There is a ridiculous amount to talk about
There is, and that is exactly why it is pointless to bring it up in this thread. The fine details of my character concern nobody in this thread. The game's mechanics do.

>It doesn't really ask you to track ammunition or range. It's a game that repeatedly suggests ignoring the rules and reminds you that they exist only if you feel you need them.
If that was the case, the Hurt Locker would not feel the need to rewrite the ammunition and range rules.

You claim that Chronicles of Darkness is *not* trying to be crunchy. I counter that with, once again, page 226 of Mage 2e, as I mention in .

Building a starting supernatural Chronicles of Darkness character is, quite frankly, even *more* crunch-intensive than building a 1st-level 3.X/Pathfinder character, and that is saying something.

>There is, and that is exactly why it is pointless to bring it up in this thread. The fine details of my character concern nobody in this thread. The game's mechanics do.
This thread is not simply for talking about mechanics, that's why very few of the opening questions ever mention them. For instance, "what is the worst game you played" is not asking about mechanics, it's asking about the group, and the story, and what happened in the game. It concerns other people in the thread because we are much more interested in that than we are you telling us how shitty the game is.

>Building a starting supernatural Chronicles of Darkness character is, quite frankly, even *more* crunch-intensive than building a 1st-level 3.X/Pathfinder character, and that is saying something.
I have literally never had a problem with it.

A fucking Avatarfag cancerous weeb attentionwhores another thread into the ground.

I have literally zero experience with Werewolf, and right now I'm trying to figure out their entire dynamic so I don't just represent them as insane packs of murdering spirit-abominations in my upcoming game.

I've got a handle on most of their relationships with Spirits, powers and so forth, but right now I'm trying to figure out the relationship between various factions and groups of Uratha.

Most other groups seem to be farily relatable given Governance structures, however the only point of reference I can think for with regards to Werewolves is basically urban gangs.

Am I on-point? Or is there a more subtle inter-relation between various Werewolf groups which I'm missing. Also from what I'm interpreting, most packs would make sense to be of Werewolves from just one Tribe, otherwise it'd cause issues with Prey?

Werewolves are like gangs. Gangs or cults. Honestly, that's one of the less obvious similarities between Werewolf and Geist. Werewolves do tend to hide their packs as other mortal groups, though. A bar's regulars. A self help group. A baseball club. An indie game studio. You actually might want to check out The Pack.

Also, it's actually more beneficial if Werewolves are from different tribes. Werewolves can hunt ANY Prey, it's just that the Tribes get bonuses for specific Prey. Which means that having more variations of the Siskur Dah to draw on is better for your little circus. If a Claimed is causing you trouble, having the Storm Lord's Siskur-Dah is super useful, while the Eaters of the Dead helps take down Vampires and other undead.

That's not to say all packs are inter-tribal. Most likely aren't, and the Lodges definitely want you to be part of their rowdy band, but PC packs are expected to be.

Having come into this just now and only having the patience to read this thread and the last half of the previous one, I have no idea why the fuck everyone is mad at this 2hu poster.

The only valid counterargument beyond mindless rage and tears I've seen raised is . What the fuck is going on.

This whole discussion has actually been tremendously enlightening, I might try and suss out some kind of attack of opportunity rule for my next game. Lets be clear, I've seen the exact scenarios this 2hu-poster is outlining take place in an actual game, not a whiteroom. You can START a melee combatant IN MELEE with some guy with a gun and he's still going to just back away and shoot them, forcing them to charge every turn (Which as 2hufag raised actually prevents a number of combat maneuvers), while the gunman maintains their defense and a higher weapon damage (For the same weight-class anyway). As a melee combatant you need to not only win initiative, but also instantly cripple (IE -2 wound penalties or more) or kill your opponent with your first strike (Something far more difficult to do mundanely in 2e than it was in 1e, where it was already ridiculously hard)

I'm thinking something like, if you all out attack you can also deal base weapon damage if your opponent leaves melee or tries to fire any 2 handed ranged weapon, until your next turn? Unless you are grappled, stunned, otherwise disabled obviously. Unfortunately EVEN THIS ridiculous measure would leave open a pistol user just Arm Wracking or stunning you.

oWoD martial arts rules from KotE if anyone wants them.

I have never been in any situation where it wasn't either possible to trap the gunman or just run away from him. I've also never had a fight in the middle of a field or empty street in WoD. I'm also like 90% certain that if you start your turn next to someone, you have to contend with their Defense, even if you go "I back up".

Also, if you really want an Attack of Opportunity, how about something that requires Dexterity 2 and Brawl or Weaponry 2 and if someone tries to move away from you, you deal 2B or 1L to them an stop them from moving.

Although, again, I'm pretty sure if you start your turn in melee, you have to contend with their Defense.

That's nice

Literally not how it works. Read the rules, Aspel. You don't even have to be far, you just need like 10 feet of room to go 'lol nope, no Defense for you'.

Even in a 25 foot square room, that's plenty of space.

Well then there's a much easier fix. Not that 25 feet of open space is just all over the place.

Can you seriously not read? If you're like 10 feet away, they don't get their Defense.

That's passive-aggressive

Actually, in Mage 2e's book there's no mention of Defense against Firearms EVER applying. Same with the corebook.
This actually does seem like a drastic oversight, though.

Regardless, the point I was making is that "plenty of space" is not always available.

Why?

Doesn't defense represent the ability to block, parry or otherwise misdirect melee attacks?

Without supernatural aid, how can one defend against a bullet?

Getting behind cover before the other guy can get a bead on you.

Moving erratically so someone is less likely to be aiming at you when they pull the trigger.

Providing a smaller profile to the enemy by twisting your body to the side instead of facing them head on.

Diving to the ground.

All of these will lower your chances of being hit in certain scenarios.

"You cannot apply your character’s Defense against firearms attacks without supernatural assistance, whether it’s from a spell, an Attainment, or some other power that grants Defense against gunfire."
pg. 217

Hard and fast rule.

>Getting behind cover before the other guy can get a bead on you.

Should have done that beforehand.

>Moving erratically so someone is less likely to be aiming at you when they pull the trigger.

Doesn't actually work that well.

>Providing a smaller profile to the enemy by twisting your body to the side instead of facing them head on.

Good way to get a lateral wound through your chest cavity which is non-survivable.

>Diving to the ground.

Now you're on the ground. The gunman drops his point of aim slightly if you have no intervening cover. This is why infantrymen avoid open fields or "linear danger areas" like the plague.

>All of these will lower your chances of being hit in certain scenarios.
>certain scenarios.

Should have used your move to get behind cover, then.

>Doesn't actually work that well.
Tell me how effectively using your arms allows you to "block, parry or otherwise misdirect melee attacks" against someone using a claymore, please.

>Good way to get a lateral wound through your chest cavity which is non-survivable.
Tell me how effectively using your arms allows you to "block, parry or otherwise misdirect melee attacks" against someone using a fire axe without having their ulnar arteries severed and bleeding out, please.

I don't see why people are so aggressively defensive with the 2hu user. All the arguments against what he says can be summed up with "but the ST knows better than to follow the rules" or "there's no way that would actually happen in a game" even though if you just follow the rules, it will, and not every ST will know the system well enough to know which rule to follow and which to not.

>Magic generally doesn't reach beyond the boundaries of earth's atmosphere

Why? I mean, you can teleport to the Pocket Dimension, and Pocket Dimension isn't even part of physical reality.