06-03-2018, 03:28 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
|
Re: Question by a newbie
Hello and welcome, Motherriverwolf!
You do need dice if you are playing around a table with people, or you need software that can simulate dice rolls if you are playing online. If you would like to play online, I often play in chat forums; SJGames also has a play-by-post forum you may like to check out. If you'd rather be face to face, get some of your friends together and pitch them the idea, or maybe hang out at local comic or gaming shops. As for your other questions, it sounds like you're pretty new to the genre of tabletop RP gaming. Sorry if the information below is too basic. The basic idea is that you and a bunch of friends get together to collaborate on telling a story. In the game of In Nomine, the story is about angels and demons fighting for human souls, or about humans trying to live their lives while angels and demons are doing the fighting, or other stories of that type. The group involves players and a game master. The players construct a character. Character generation in In Nomine starts by deciding what type of being you are -- the usual expectation is that a player will be playing an angel. An angel player's basic choices are: 1.) What Archangelic Word do I serve? This defines the goals you will have -- Stone builds human communities and strengthens Heaven's defenses, War protects soldiers and fights demons directly, Flowers defuses human violence and tries to convince demons to return to Heaven. Other Words have different focuses. 2.) What Choir of angel am I? This will determine the main methodology you will use to reach your goals. A Seraph can hear truth, and it hurts them to lie. A Mercurian can sense human relationships, and it hurts them to be violent. 3.) How have I prepared to meet these challenges? A players spends points on resources, like Forces and attributes (the essential elements of their self, measuring how tough or smart you are), skills (are you better at fighting, or diplomacy, or fixing gadgets?), Songs (powerful but expensive supernatural effects), relics (holy items with innate powers), etc. 4.) Where is my character coming from? Write a name and a bit of a backstory to tell us how you got here. One person in the group -- probably you, since you're here posting -- is the game master. You, instead, set the players challenges. Many of the Superiors books have bare-bones ideas for scenarios to play through. To add more detail, you as the game master write up some of the non-player characters (NPCs). You don't need as much detail for them as for the players, usually -- a lot of NPCs can get by with a name, a level in a skill that will be relevant to their role in the plot, and that's about it. As play continues, players and NPCs roll dice, trying to hit at or below target numbers. For In Nomine, it's 3d6 -- that is, three six-sided dice. Make sure one is marked separately, or at least rolled separately. Total two of them, getting a number from 2 to 12, and the third is a "check digit" from 1 to 6. If the 2-12 total is less than the target number, the roll is successful. In IN, a skill target number, for instance, is the skill level plus the level of a controlling attribute -- say, Medicine/3 + Precision-3 giving a target number of 6. Since the average roll on 2-12 is 7, this roll would have a little under 50% chance of succeeding. The check digit tells you how dramatic the results are: CD1 means a little effect, while CD6 means very successful or very unsuccessful. A special case on dice is if you roll three 6s or three 1s. In the former case, the Devil takes an interest in your situation. He won't likely show up personally, but if the rolling party was a demon -- or a pretty bad human -- what would normally have been a disastrous roll (12, with CD 6, fails almost anything, terribly!) turns out to be great. Meanwhile an angel who rolls 666 is having a really bad day. The game master gets to be creatively unpleasant, although not usually permanently so. On the other hand, 111 is fantastic -- God takes a hand, and miracles attend the success of an angel who made the lucky roll, while a demon who rolls 111 can forget about that sweet critical success, and is instead about to get a taste of divine justice. So the players like to have high skills and attributes, at least for the skills they plan to use a lot -- at least one combat skill, say, and at least one utility skill. You, the game master, examine the tools your players have, and you pose them a problem. For instance, the angels are all gathered in your home city doing their various jobs, and there has been a rash of non-mugging, physical assaults in the city's housing projects. They don't seem to be connected to any one gang's territory, and nothing much is taken; people are starting to get panicky about some sort of violent underground fad. What will your players do? Patrol, hoping to catch instigators? Move in and take on the identity of locals, hoping to hear word around the grapevine? Analyze police reports trying to anticipate likely areas? When it turns out to be a couple of demons of Fire and the War trying to turn the projects into a powder keg that will blow into a series of riots, how will they deal with the attempt? Kill the demons off? Get their current bodies arrested? Gather the neighbors to build community bonds that resist such provocation? These are the questions that In Nomine plays with. |
|
|