[DF/MH] Anyone Interested in Monster Levels?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by scc

If a PC get's bitten by a werewolf they do NOT pay template costs,it's in Basic somewhere

That doesn't fit the DF/MH paradigm, though. Something that gives you a few disads but also massively boosts your powerfulness, should be paid for with points. Point debt if necessary.

[scc]

Originally Posted by RogerWilco

I think Infectious Attack sort of says the opposite:

That's for one PC using their Infectious Attack on another, when it's an NPC who bits them different rules come into play. The bottom right hand corner of B499 is an example where it talks about the CHARACTERS getting rewards, like Reputation. There's another section that covers this, but I can't remember where in Chapter 18. But it's the same rule that says if a PCs losses an eye they gain the One Eye Disadvantage

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

That doesn't fit the DF/MH paradigm, though. Something that gives you a few disads but also massively boosts your powerfulness, should be paid for with points. Point debt if necessary.

And now you see why I'm asking if anyone is interested in a that would reduce the points value of those sorts of templates down to 25 or 50 points

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by scc

And now you see why I'm asking if anyone is interested in a that would reduce the points value of those sorts of templates down to 25 or 50 points

I have been able to see that all along. It's the others in this thread who had problems.

[PK]

Originally Posted by scc

It's a classic scenario of a Monster Hunters party, the villain, a master vampire, has kidnapped one of them, turned them and is forcing his allies to fight their friend. Then they manage to kill him without killing their friend and everything goes back to normal.

Well apart from the fact that their friend is now a vampire and what sort of GM just hands a PC a 200 point racial template for free?

(Please note that I'm answering as the author and a fellow GM, with the understanding that you're certainly free to disagree and do things however you want in your own game.)

The canonical answer for MH is that someone turned into a vamp does not get to become the inhuman vamp template from MH1! That template represents a vamp who's managed to master his problems and come around to sanity and the desire for redemption.

No, a hunter who gets vamped is now a feral vampire. He becomes an NPC controlled by the GM until his friends can fix it or put him down.

If you're really bent on keeping him as a PC, a fairer way to represent that is to modify the inhuman "vampire" template with the issues that plague brand-new feral vamps. Start with that template, and then add -3 IQ [-60], Bad Temper (6) [-20], Berserk (15) [-5], Bestial [-15], Bloodlust (6) [-20], and Uncontrollable Appetite (Blood) [-30].

That results in a 50-point template, which is a much more reasonable starting place for a newly vamped PC. He'll also be so driven by rage and hunter that he'll probably attack his friends and innocents . . . which is kind of the point. In MH, getting turned into a vampire is not supposed to be a blessing. It's a fate worse than death. Treating it like a "power-up" undermines a lot of what the genre is about.

[PK]

Originally Posted by scc

If a PC get's bitten by a werewolf they do NOT pay template costs,it's in Basic somewhere

What you're looking for is Supernatural Afflictions (p. B296). However, note something it makes clear: if this is something the GM is foisting on you, you don't pay for it, but if it's something you want to add (as a power-up, essentially), you do.

This is part of the reason MH spells out that freshly turned vamps, weres, etc., are mindless and feral. A PC who gets bit by a werewolf should become a feral, out-of-control werewolf NPC. So the issue of whether he pays points is moot; NPC point totals don't matter.

[Phantasm]

To back up what PK is saying, for an "in-universe" example, consider the werewolf episode in season 2 of Buffy, when they revealed Oz was the werewolf for that episode and how his transformations were handled throughout seasons 3 and 4: Oz was feral when he changed and unable to tell friend from foe. He even attacked his girlfriend once, before Buffy could stop him with a tranq gun. By the end of season 4 he could control when he wolfed out, but was still quite feral when he did.

By the season 8 comics (set at least 2 years after the show ended, from what I could tell), Oz was more in-control, and some werewolves in the comics were shown talking while wolfed out. (Not sure if Oz was one of them.)

Now replace "werewolf" with "vampire", only having the character remain in that transformed state, where the vampire is savage, thirsting for blood, and unable to hold onto his humanity. It'd take a very strong Will score (and probably a Self-Control Rating on his Compulsive Behavior or Uncontrollable Appetite) to keep from attacking friends and innocents to bleed them dry.

Think of it as a kind of Jeckyl/Hyde transformation, only permanently stuck in Hyde mode.

[scc]

Originally Posted by PK

(Please note that I'm answering as the author and a fellow GM, with the understanding that you're certainly free to disagree and do things however you want in your own game.)

The canonical answer for MH is that someone turned into a vamp does not get to become the inhuman vamp template from MH1! That template represents a vamp who's managed to master his problems and come around to sanity and the desire for redemption.

No, a hunter who gets vamped is now a feral vampire. He becomes an NPC controlled by the GM until his friends can fix it or put him down.

If you're really bent on keeping him as a PC, a fairer way to represent that is to modify the inhuman "vampire" template with the issues that plague brand-new feral vamps. Start with that template, and then add -3 IQ [-60], Bad Temper (6) [-20], Berserk (15) [-5], Bestial [-15], Bloodlust (6) [-20], and Uncontrollable Appetite (Blood) [-30].

That results in a 50-point template, which is a much more reasonable starting place for a newly vamped PC. He'll also be so driven by rage and hunter that he'll probably attack his friends and innocents . . . which is kind of the point. In MH, getting turned into a vampire is not supposed to be a blessing. It's a fate worse than death. Treating it like a "power-up" undermines a lot of what the genre is about.

I'd do something different. The newly turned PC would get a minimum of new advantages, 25 or 50 points, with an opposing minimum of disadvantages. After that the Player would purchase more advantages in increments of either 25 or 50 points and may chose to offset the cost of that by taking on more disadvantages, representing them growing less human. This also means that Vampires aren't fixed in their abilities and the PCs may well run into one (Or more) that lack the classic weaknesses of the kind and possibly have strange and unusual advantages.

[muduri]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

One thing I've done is let the player go into "point debt", where the player's earned XP goes towards paying off the upgrade, which means that while he's initially now 200 points above the rest of the party, he's not going to grow as a character while the rest of the party catches up to him.

YMMV, of course.

I've tried this too and so far it's worked reasonably well. In a rapid-advancement campaign where characters are getting 10 or so points per session, I've also adjusted the level of payback so that relatively cheap templates only put say half of their earned points into their point debt.

The opposite approach, not that this would be applicable for templates acquired during play, is the Bildungsroman, where a character starts at a point disadvantage but earns say a +50% multiplier on points per session so that they end up as high king or archmage or whatever. Although we ended up with an upper limit where "interesting" threatened to turn into "totally unbalanced"!

[scc]

OK, I've completed a set of transtionary levels for Vampire's based upon the MH1 template. It doesn't give everything that template does and includes something not on that list and I'll probably want to come up with some complicated rules for how certain traits are gained (Such as those dealing with being undead). Disadvantages marked with a dagger are optional, if the PC can find an appropriate trainer he may, with the GM's permission not gained those. This of course increases the points cost of a level and if there's is some sort of time constriant (Such as the levels must be taken at set intervals or the trainer only has so much time) this could be a problem for the PC.

Vampire Racial Template 40 points
HT+2 [20]; Vampiric Bite [30];
Divine Curse (Cannot enter a private home without permission)† [-5]; Draining (Blood) [-5].

Level 1: 40 points
ST + 2 [20]; Per + 1 [5]; Unkillable 1 (Achilles’ Heel, Fire, stake, or sunlight, -50%) [25];
Weakness (Contact with holy water and artifacts; 1d per minute)† [-10];

Level 2: 34 points
DX+1 [20]; Immunity to Metabolic Hazards [30];
Supernatural Features (No Body Heat*; No Reflection; Pallor*) [-16];

Level 3: 30 points
Per+1 [5]; Basic Speed+1.00 [20]. Doesn’t Breathe [20]; Temperature Tolerance 5 [5];
Unhealing (Partial)† [-20];

Level 4: 20 points
DX+1 [20]; High Pain Threshold [10]; Injury Tolerance (Unliving) [20];
Vulnerability (Heat/Fire x2)† [-30];

Level 5: 14 points
ST+3 [30]; Night Vision 9 [9]; Can burn HP for extra effort [1];
Weakness (Sunlight; 1d per minute; Variable, -40%)† [-36];