In Nomine Second Edition: What have we learned?

[dataweaver]

Personally, I rather like the automatic success rules from CPG. One characteristic that I think is important in giving humans (in general, and human PCs in particular) their own niche is to give them innate benefits that differ from what celestials get in kind, rather than merely differing by degree: saying that humans get automatic success for routine tasks (and scaling "routine" according to their skill level) makes skills work differently for humans than they do for celestials. This is one of the human counterparts to the various innate abilities that celestials have and humans don't. Another such benefit is the dirt-cheap cost that humans pay for Status: a human gets something superior to a Level 6, Status 1 Role for free (rather than it costing 6 points), and can improve the Status for a mere 2 points per +1 (rather than the +6 that a celestial would have to pay).

All that said, I'd still go for something in 2e to the effect of starting all characteristics at 1 instead of 0 for everyone and giving humans another Force across the board; this would put the average human characteristic at 5 and the average starting celestial characteristic at 7, as opposed to 3⅓ and 6 respectively under 1e's rules (and would bump Soldiers up from 4 to 5⅔). This, combined with giving humans a larger pool of Resource points to spend (say, twice as many as an equivalent-Forces celestial would get) and a wider selection of Advantages to spend them on, would address much of the "weaksauce" nature of human PCs.

[Archangel Beth]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

need to optimize the bajeezus out of the humans and/or have the celestials' players "take a dive" in order to leave the human party members with something to do.

Two celestials and a human walk into a kitchen -- the human saves the apartment building from being burnt down in the Quest for Frozen Pizza ("no, I'm pretty sure you have to take it out of the box first." "but won't it melt on the hot parts in the oven?") by suggesting they order delivered pizza.

Originally Posted by Omegonthesane

My statement there was a little hyperbolic - but even if bringing in a completely mundane PC, I feel they would need to have a big enough net power boost - even if not in raw power - to justify the hit the player party is taking by one of them not playing a "real" PC.

That says some very interesting things about the type of game being played. I'm not saying they're wrong things (or right things), but I think it's worth looking hard at the type of game that one is playing right there.

Personally, playing up Alien Celestials Who Have Issues Posing As Humans is probably the best way to incorporate humans into groups as valuable characters. (It also means that celestials who want to be as good as humans in J. Random Social Situation, without the GM going, "Hey, Int roll there" all the time, will need to dump more points into Role. How many combat wombat Cherubim (no, really, wombats...) dump points into Role instead of Large Weapon?)

The second thing that I'd do, to incorporate humans into combat-heavy groups, is make guns more potent. Ideally, one wants to do this in a way that flattens them -- it doesn't make a celestial much more potent to be packing a gun, but it boosts a human quite nicely. (I would tend to handle that with social pressures/assumptions, as a GM; e.g., rule that projectile weapons don't work the same way in the celestial realms, so no one really thinks about wanting a gun except as a prop for a Role, and putting points into the skill is something that requires either a Role or a lot of justification in backstory that the GM feels is worthy. But one might do a flat +X bonus. Or one might combine the two concepts and rule that humans, born into a world with gravity and friction, just plain get a bonus to missile weapons, from rocks to bows to guns to cannon.)

Actually, I fib. The first thing I'd do to make humans more viable as characters is play GURPS IN, with a layer of regular IN for Forces and Kyriotates.

[Azel]

Yeah, as AA tactfully notes, one must question if IN is the right system for them for the type of game they want to play. The system makes no bones about certain assumptions. And at some point you have to ask whether fighting the core system so much is really worth the trouble (especially since GURPS IN or IN Anime is available).

I like IN's soft tethers. The dissonance conditions, celestial relationships, celestial cloak & dagger cold war, human cultural differences being a real barrier -- it's a total gift to me as a GM to wrench the game away from PCs grinding out system mechanics. But it's not a resource everyone wants to use.

I don't really run IN parties in a "death squad" because I usually don't run campaigns in the middle of war zones. I also have parties split up routinely, and boy do humans shine in covert operations. Circumventing disturbance conditions and native familiarity really favor humans. Humans are also crazy flexible, almost unpredictable, because they don't have hardwired behavior issues like dissonance conditions and discord luggage.

Remember: a celestial with a gun (or 'big stick') will make lots of noise regardless; even missing the target, the weapon eventually hits *something*. A human with celestial favor can get away with lot quietly. There's less disturbance in shredding paperwork and manipulating social opinion than doing the work yourself...

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

Two celestials and a human walk into a kitchen -- the human saves the apartment building from being burnt down in the Quest for Frozen Pizza ("no, I'm pretty sure you have to take it out of the box first." "but won't it melt on the hot parts in the oven?") by suggesting they order delivered pizza.

Oops; I left out one word above:

need to optimize the bajeezus out of the humans and/or have the celestials' players "take a dive" in order to leave the human party members with something fun to do.

That said, I do take your point: play up the alien nature of celestials, and you can keep humans in the party interesting despite the deck being heavily stacked against them in traditional measures of competence.

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

Actually, I fib. The first thing I'd do to make humans more viable as characters is play GURPS IN, with a layer of regular IN for Forces and Kyriotates.

Why? In particular, what design decisions were made in GIN that made humans more viable as characters; and how well could those decisions be adapted for use in a hypothetical IN2e? ISTR that one of the decisions was to put the baseline celestial attributes much closer to human norms; but I doubt that was everything.

[Archangel Beth]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Oops; I left out one word above:

need to optimize the bajeezus out of the humans and/or have the celestials' players "take a dive" in order to leave the human party members with something fun to do.

That said, I do take your point: play up the alien nature of celestials, and you can keep humans in the party interesting despite the deck being heavily stacked against them in traditional measures of competence.

Again, examine your assumptions about fun. For certain values of "fun," the player would do better to take a non-human or a boosted human (Soldier, Saint, Undead, CotG, what-have-you). For other values of "fun," the player would rather have the "native resident of Earth" showing these celestial interlopers exactly how it's done. (And maybe get power-ups that are hard-won and treasured.)

I mean... look at all the celestial powers. Look at the Choir/Band Attunements. In Nomine makes no bones about being imbalanced and relying on the GM to allocate spotlight time for the benefit of the players and the group. Personally, I think this is kind of required for any superpowered-entities game; if Superman and Spiderman show up in the same story, they are only "equal" in entertainment value because the authors make them so. And Aquaman. Poor Aquaman. It's hard, being a Soldier of Jordi.

Why? In particular, what design decisions were made in GIN that made humans more viable as characters; and how well could those decisions be adapted for use in a hypothetical IN2e? ISTR that one of the decisions was to put the baseline celestial attributes much closer to human norms; but I doubt that was everything.

GURPS IN uses points -- 100 points for adventuring humans, and 100+celestial+Choir/Band+Superior Duty/Favor package [or Disfavored package]+Choir/Band Attunement for celestials. Part of the Celestial racial template is +4 to all stats. (In GURPS 3rd, that's 45x4 points.) This makes them powerful, but the difference isn't as pronounced, mostly due to the 3d6 bell-curve and where it differs from the 2d6 bell-curve of a d666. (My spouse does the math on that stuff, so I'm mostly trying to recall the stuff he said about it.)

Also, a 100-point human can get a stat at 14 -- usually DX or IQ -- without much sweat. (My mages routinely did IQ 15, Magery 3, for instance.) They won't be as well-rounded as an average celestial, but in their focus areas, they can match that average celestial much better than IN humans manage. Since celestials have to buy vessels and roles out of their 100 points, they're actually tying up a lot of their resources in those rather than sinking them into skills, which also evens the odds.

I recall that Vessels were a bit more fragile than in regular IN -- or at least harder to get up to the obscene levels of hit points that regular IN sports for the combat wombats. (Vessel/6, CorpForces 6... Hooboy. They catch trains. In their teeth. And spit them out again. (Not quite, but it can feel that way.))

Mostly it was the granularity -- GURPS is more fine-grained than IN, because of the 3d6 vs. 2d6 model. So you can make celestials have clearly superior stats without either making them auto-succeed everywhere or making humans kind of pathetic without special Human rules.


For a hypothetical IN2e? In all honesty, I don't think that making humans "closer" to celestials in powers is really possible if one wants to preserve the quirky charm of the d666 and the brainfeel of the number of Forces that people get. Yeah, you could make the default human Forces = 6, which at least has the benefit of matching 3s with the default celestial Forces = 9... But then you lose the symmetry of 5s, if it's 6 going up to 15 max Forces instead of 5 to 15.

Adding more options, like "Guns. Humans Has Them." and starting with default human Forces of 6, Soldiers at 7, Saints at 8... Those are probably better approaches, with discussion about the sort of game they produce. (Didn't the GMG have some of these? I forget.) But in the end, I don't think the IN system is going to be as satisfying for the person who wants human equality, and going over to GURPS -- even GURPS 3rd edition -- would be more satisfying for that kind of game and player.

And if one tears out the d666 for something like 3d6... Well, you're halfway to GURPS anyway! Shoo, shoo, go on and go all the way! O:D (Well, nearly all the way; Kyriotates are more elegant in IN.)

[Rocket Man]

Beth said what I had in mind, and far better than I would have. So I'll just add one summary passage:

GURPS is a game built for humans, into which celestials can be plugged. In Nomine is a game built for celestials, into which humans can be plugged. That in itself explains a lot of the difference.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Oops; I left out one word above:

need to optimize the bajeezus out of the humans and/or have the celestials' players "take a dive" in order to leave the human party members with something fun to do.

Game idea:

"They say the two of us work together. But really, it's his job," (speaker points at the newly-fledged Malakim) "to smite Evil, and it's my job to keep him on a short leash."

I know a lot of folks who'd enjoy playing that human...

[Rocket Man]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Game idea:

"They say the two of us work together. But really, it's his job," (speaker points at the newly-fledged Malakim) "to smite Evil, and it's my job to keep him on a short leash."

I know a lot of folks who'd enjoy playing that human...

Not sure if that sounds more like a buddy-cop movie or a top-rated anime series. ;)

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by Rocket Man

Not sure if that sounds more like a buddy-cop movie or a top-rated anime series. ;)

Miami Guns (a buddy-cop anime series... not "top-rated," though)

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

Again, examine your assumptions about fun. For certain values of "fun," the player would do better to take a non-human or a boosted human (Soldier, Saint, Undead, CotG, what-have-you). For other values of "fun," the player would rather have the "native resident of Earth" showing these celestial interlopers exactly how it's done. (And maybe get power-ups that are hard-won and treasured.)

I mean... look at all the celestial powers. Look at the Choir/Band Attunements. In Nomine makes no bones about being imbalanced and relying on the GM to allocate spotlight time for the benefit of the players and the group. Personally, I think this is kind of required for any superpowered-entities game; if Superman and Spiderman show up in the same story, they are only "equal" in entertainment value because the authors make them so. And Aquaman. Poor Aquaman. It's hard, being a Soldier of Jordi.

But again, I'm not looking for "balance". You may not be aware of this, but I frequently have posted to the GURPS board to the effect that its "game balance through point accounting" philosophy is an illusion.

What I am looking for is to avoid radical imbalance, which is not quite the same thing as seeking balance. It has to do with how much work the GM has to do in order to spread the spotlight around without it feeling forced. The reason why Aquaman gets the bad rap that he does is because giving the spotlight to him often does require the author to force the issue.

As well, there's a fundamental difference between books/comics/etc. and RPGs: in an RPG, the GM doesn't have full authorial control.

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

For a hypothetical IN2e? In all honesty, I don't think that making humans "closer" to celestials in powers is really possible if one wants to preserve the quirky charm of the d666 and the brainfeel of the number of Forces that people get. Yeah, you could make the default human Forces = 6, which at least has the benefit of matching 3s with the default celestial Forces = 9... But then you lose the symmetry of 5s, if it's 6 going up to 15 max Forces instead of 5 to 15.

"The symmetry of 5s"? This is the first I've heard of that; what is it, and why is it important?

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

Adding more options, like "Guns. Humans Has Them." and starting with default human Forces of 6, Soldiers at 7, Saints at 8... Those are probably better approaches, with discussion about the sort of game they produce. (Didn't the GMG have some of these? I forget.)

Yes, it did.

Originally Posted by Archangel Beth

But in the end, I don't think the IN system is going to be as satisfying for the person who wants human equality, and going over to GURPS -- even GURPS 3rd edition -- would be more satisfying for that kind of game and player.

You might be surprised. First of all, the person who wants human "equality" (or, more precisely, the person who wants human PCs to have a fighting chance) isn't necessarily someone who's interested in point-accounting or game balance. Myself, for example. And a lot of stuff gets lost in translation from In Nomine to GURPS.

Perhaps that's a result of the way that the translation was done, and a 4e-compatible translation would do a better job; after all, many of the changes that took place in 4e were the direct result of lessons learned when writing GIN. But the two games have such radically different design philosophies* (even setting aside the power disparity between humans and celestials, which I don't consider to be a fundamental difference) that I suspect that translating one to the other will always end up leaving out something crucial.

Some examples of this:
• The fundamental division of the character between Corporeal, Ethereal, and Celestial, complete with Body Hits, Mind Hits, and Soul Hits. Yes, GURPS has equivalents of all six characteristics; but it's not the same.
• The comparative lack of point accounting. Yes, there is point-accounting in IN; but compared to GURPS, it's nothing. I like not having to worry about point totals for Attunements and Distinctions**, and I like the comparatively streamlined cost structures for Songs. To name just two examples.
• The general assumption that things like allies, contacts, enemies, patrons, social regard, reputation, legal sanction, and so on are all story elements rather than character traits. The most notable exception to this is Status; and that's mainly because of how Roles work. I'm not satisfied with the way that In Nomine handles this sort of stuff***; but I definitely like the fact that they aren't character traits.

Sure, I could tweak GURPS to incorporate several of these features; but to mirror what you said earlier: by the time I've done that much, I might as well just go all the way and play In Nomine. :)

* The key difference is that In Nomine is primarily concept-driven, while GURPS is primarily accounting-driven.

** I'm ignoring the bit about points being assigned to the celestial meta-trait and choirs/bands/Superiors, since GIN essentially gives you these things for free anyway — which is itself a tacit admission that the design philosophies conflict).

*** I've been looking long and hard at the Relationships Map from the Smallville RPG as a basis for handling this sort of thing.