07-24-2017, 09:49 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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My experience as a player in Changeling: The Dreaming was comparable. I didn't end up keeping it on my shelves, because its mythos didn't speak to me as much, and I couldn't imagine running a campaign in it. But playing it was a lot of fun.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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07-24-2017, 10:21 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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07-24-2017, 10:30 AM | #13 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
Yes, and I'm not trying to dispute your reaction to it. There are systems I have negative reactions to that a lot of other people like, too. There are even people who don't like GURPS! I'm not sure if I can comment on your points without sounding pedantic or disputatious, which I would rather avoid; in any case I need to think about them.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
07-24-2017, 12:01 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
Certainly it's a partial inspiration. But I would also point to Heinlein's "Waldo," Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Crowley's Little, Big, and Stirling's Emberverse series as portraying worlds where, for one reason or another, it's becoming impossible to rely on technology.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
07-24-2017, 02:46 PM | #15 |
☣
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: my new campaign ideas
Same here. I didn't really care for WoD when I played it, but I couldn't tell you the system was a factor. Those two are lower on my list because the setting of the others would, I think, be more interesting to me. The WWI one could be interesting, but I don't have much interest in yet another take on science vs. magic.
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
07-24-2017, 04:40 PM | #16 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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There are two things I like about GURPS Mage as opposed to Storyteller Mage. One is the dice system: I find it easier to grasp what my odds of success are like with the 3d6 bell-curve than with a pool of d10s and a variable target number. The 3d6 is less "swingy" than the d10s, and a bit more predictable. The other is the character modelling: there was something in White Wolf's ideas about how people behave that I've never quite grasped. This makes it hard for me to deal with the representation of personalities in Storyteller, whereas I can do it fairly easily in GURPS or Hero System.
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
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07-24-2017, 05:19 PM | #17 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: my new campaign ideas
Yeah the variable die pool, variable target numbers and variable required successes made it really difficult to get a feel for the probability.
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07-24-2017, 05:50 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
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Say, for example, you are rolling seven dice against a difficulty of 5. Each die succeeds on a 5-10, which is 0.6 successes contributed per die, a total of 4.2. But each die cancels out a success on a 1, which is 0.1 successes contributed per die, a total of 0.7. The difference is 3.5, so that's the expected number of successes. Generalizing from that, if you roll N dice against difficulty m, you get N(10-m)/10 successes. It's tricky to figure out the chance of an out and out botch, but that's fairly small in any case. I did produce a complete table of odds many years ago, setting it up on Excel, but I would have to reconstruct the whole process; I didn't save it. But figuring odds aside, my experience was that the results of dice rolling didn't produce crazy unintuitive narratives, quite unlike my experience with Godlike's seemingly similar dice mechanics.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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07-24-2017, 06:04 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: my new campaign ideas
Quote:
Just speculating, it might be that Hero gives maximum resolution to the combat scenes and tactical decisions; everything else feels a little sidelined. So characters in Hero seem to spend less time revealing personality or engaging in social interaction. On the other hand, it's true that Mage is a lot about superpowers! Perhaps the difference is that in Mage you're explicitly required to think about the style with which you perform superhuman feats, and the organization where you learned them, and its relationships with other organizations, and the typical personalities of members of the organization, whereas Hero looks at powers through a more purely mechanical and tactical lens. Or maybe it's that, like Call of Cthulhu, the various OWoD games have an explicit "you're so ****ed" mechanic, and you always have to trade off power against personal problems. In any case, the Mage campaign I ran and the Changeling one I played in both had characterization and personal quirks and social interaction all over the place. But that might be because of the people I was gaming with.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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07-24-2017, 06:19 PM | #20 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: my new campaign ideas
Yup, Godlike's "One Roll Engine" is just weird.
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The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. |
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