Post originally by Roy Morgan at 2005-02-19 16:29:44
Converted from Phorums BB System
“1(part A, the ALPHA, Biggest Mistake): It only costs 25 XP to get from rank 4 to 5 in a skill. See last paragraph on page 35 of WoD for proof of this using XP on a Trait. I would figure that Skills are the same under this rule (as the same rule for 2x cost of the illusive rank 5 is used for Traits and Skills). It costs twice to buy with starting allotment of points (5/4/3, 11/7/4), XP is handled normally (4-5 is one dot, and costs 15 XP).”
Interpretation error on my part, which I repeated in the matter of attributes.
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Find the right tree to bark up. We were discussing the SCALE of attributes, not the starting points.
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“Actually, I was discussing the starting points vs. the scale of the system. I was barking up the right tree, you just decided not to see that particular tree. It's a great way to not answer a question or give recognition to an issue, BTW.”
‘I was discussing’ is the key phrase here. In the pose that led up to your reply, no one was discussing starting points, just scale. I recognized the issue when it was relevant, below this.
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Point: You can now see why I think starting characters in this game are pathetic, considering how much harder it is to succeed at anything in this game, even on unresisted rolls. Which is fine if you're a power-tripping GM, but rotten if you're a player.
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“I'm sorry, I fail to see how this will help the GM any more than the players, unless the GM is not scaling the opponents correctly.”
‘Power-tripping GM’, Zeke. They rarely bother with scale. Good GMs aren’t even mentioned in this line.
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Which is fine for Victim Horror, but not a lot of help if you want characters to survive for a little while.
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“Actually, characters will survive just fine if they don't try to kill everything in sight.”
No question of that, but it’s not the issue at hand.
“They are monsters, they are in a society, and the game (VtR) favors social conflict over physical conflict.”
So did VtM.
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Now we get into something that addresses the perception of the scale of attributes. And you’re right, the SCALE itself doesn’t change. I believe I said something about that, remember?
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“The scale does change, it just lies to itself and says it doesn't
“
The scale itself does not change. The outlay of purchasing points for attributes does, mostly for the worst. Which becomes apparent the moment you start rolling dice.
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In practice, it is indeed harder to get higher attributes. It’s also MUCH easier to fail at even easy actions, since successes are so much harder to get than in the old system. And you have to get them now with fewer dice on harder actions. Yes, one success will grant you victory, but often you can’t even get that. Playtesting was downright embarrassing sometimes. It also left my old VtM group (of some eight or so years) insisting we go back to the old game, or at least that we start working on fixing this one. The latter won out.
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“Well, I'm glad the latter won out. I never said that combat was better in nWoD, I said it was quicker. It's just as busted as oWoD, IMO, and I'm trying to fix it, too."
That ridiculous "primary/secondary/tertiary" division of starting attribute and skill points is the frequent culprit of min-maxing in both games. In house rules for oWoD (and consequently in nWoD), it was the first thing to be blown to Bad Idea Hell. Besides, it encourages stereotypes, which is something WW claimed their game system was trying to eliminate. Which only proves that it's easier to say you're doing something than to actually do it. While it does make things harder on the GM in chargen than before, in either system low attributes were a really bad thing to have, and this tends to self-correct everyone but the min-maxers. And they tend to be easier to spot as a consequence, if the GM's doing his job right.
"The setting kicks the living @!#$ out of oWoD, though.”"
Personally, I didn’t mind the setting of oWoD. It became a complicated mess when WW started farming out the writing of books for the setting to authors who were usually not involved in the writing of the original books (and thusly knew little or nothing about the setting’s details). Though, honestly, that still wasn’t terribly unrealistic, considering what a complicated mess real-life history is when you look at all the short-sighted decisions, groups created to oppose some great wrong (in their view, anyway) that stuck around long after they were needed (echoed in miniature in the tendencies of modern bureaucracies), and wild-eyed fanatics who spawned their own cults out there. Throw in near-immortal beings behind the scenes, and the whole mess just gets messier.
NWoD is a much CLEANER setting right now. But then, so was oWoD at first. If WW follows the same farming-out policy as before, that will change in a hurry. Hopefully, the deliberately paced release schedule we’re seeing is indicative of far more care being used in the production of material from now on.
Now if they’d just use that same deliberation in fixing the combat system…
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That’s what I would call impossible, if characters in the old system were created strictly according to the 7/5/3 attributes, 13/9/5 abilities (skills), 3 disciplines, 15 Freebie Points VtM chargen system.
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“22 Freebies due to Flaws.”
Remember, both Merits and Flaws were purely optional. Many GMs didn’t allow them.
“But I did overcalculate due to anger.”
Kudos to you for admitting it. Consider it forgiven.
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Here’s some math. Costs for Exp for skill levels are, from 1-5, 3-6-9-12-30 (remember, the fifth dot costs the same as spending two dots for skills in chargen). And you have to buy each level separately, so it comes out as 3-9-18-30-60, if you start from scratch and go to five. Even just buying that all-important fourth level when you’ve bought three with your skill pool from chargen is really expensive. Costs for using the skill pool? 1-1-1-1-2! Totaling 1-2-3-4-6! Easy min-max for this junker of a chargen system? BUY ALL YOUR HIGHER SKILLS WITH THE SKILL POOL, THEN THE LOWER ONES WITH EXPERIENCE POINTS!! How’d that get by you?!
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“How did page 35 of WoD get by you? XP cost is the same as all other times when going from 4-5. So that's 3-6-9-12-15, or 3-9-18-30-45 to buy rank five from nada.”
See above. My apologies for the interpretation error, and the tone. After correcting someone else’s misinterpretation for almost an hour and a pretty rotten few days at work, I was pretty peeved when I wrote that.
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Right. And if they were a bit more conservative and didn’t max out those few skills? They could end up having 1 in nearly half the skill list just from Exp-bought skills, and still be decent at seven or eight skills. And they’d avoid those really nasty unskilled penalties, particularly if they dropped most of those 1s into Mental Skills.
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“Alright, I used to be a min-maxer and found that we don't have any brains when we make characters. We think "5 is max, then I be 5!". If we must drop it from 5 to 4, we can still argue: 11(3 skills, 2 at 4, 1 at 3)/7(2 skills, 1 at 4, 1 at 3)/4(one skill at 4). This is still 6 skills, 4 at 4 and 2 at 3. With the 11 1 rank XP bought, we still are sitting with 7 non-skill penalties. Great at 4 things (spread between all 3 categories), Good at 2 things, novice at 11.”
“But it's not 7 or 8 skills, it's still 6. Someone with lots of 3s and 2s in skills is not min-maxing. And the min-maxers are still unskilled at 7 skills, not just 4. Sorry, I think you put too many numbers in there, try again and check your math.”
Remember, I said DECENT. Not great. Not even good. Lower those scores to 3 and you get a different set of numbers.
Primary: 3 skills at 3, 1 at 2. Or 1 skill at 3, 4 skills at 2. Secondary: Two skills at 3, one at 1. Or 1 skill at 3 and 2 at 2. Tertiary: 1 skill at 3, 1 at 1. Or 2 at 2. With the former set of numbers (before the ‘or’ in each case), you have twenty skills filled in if you use your 35 Exp to buy 1 dot skills, and only are unskilled at 4 skills. With the latter, that unskilled skill count drops to 3.
Now that could be considered following a strategy rather than min-maxing. But it a sense, it IS min-maxing, as the player in question has minimized his chances of ever rolling anything with unskilled penalties. Min-maxing isn’t just about having high numbers. And anyone who’s played this game will want to avoid those very harsh unskilled skill penalties, especially in the Mental skill category.
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Having played the Buffy RPG and read the Angel RPG, I’d recommend Angel over anything by WW now, even if you’re like me and just want to play a solid supernatural game that’s fun. Repeatedly watching easy unopposed rolls come up empty in VtR is definitely no fun. Pick up Angel instead of nWoD and VtR. Better game, and you’ll save money, too.
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“This is something we agree on. Angel rocks, and it's funny because I hate the show and wasn't a big fan of Unisystem. It got so many good reviews, I just had to pick it up and see what all the fuss was about. I found out that the fuss was about one of the best low-powered supers systems I've ever seen! Crazy good.”
“I recommend getting VtR for the setting, and if possible, convert to Angel/Cinematic Unisystem. NWoD does have many rules issues (and I even stated this in my review), and I would love to see an Angel version. That would roxxors!”
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Seconded. Best of all, you won’t need to waste money on the nWoD core book. You’ll still save 20 bucks.
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No. Stop trying to sound clever. You’re terrible at it.
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“Dude, it's hard to do math correctly and be clever! Those are two different sides of my brain, and one side of mine is always thinking about a girl.”
Which is an understandable consideration. It’s why I settle for sounding deliberate most of the time, with occasional bursts of mania (usually accidental).
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See above. And check your math. The last dot would cost 50!
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“Just to make sure this point goes across, I'm doing this for the third time on this post, while dot costs at CC are double for rank 5, to get from 4-5 with XP is normal one dot cost. See example, last paragraph AND last line on page 35. I suppose what I'm trying to say is RTFM before you dis.”
“The last dot would be 25.”
Been here already. I’m only apologizing for it once.
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But your attributes won’t. And they can potentially add to every skill, right?
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“True, but with a not quite min-maxed spread (only taking on a free +1 to make a 5), you will have, from biggest to smallest (before spending all XP on attributes): 5, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1. Spending XP to bring those 1s up will make you have 5, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2. This will leave 5 XP, so if you want, we could bump one of them up to 3 instead of having one bumped from 1 to 2. In the end, they will still suck, because you will be rolling 1 die on all unskilled rolls involving those 6 attributes. It's also good to note that the high attributes (5, 4, 4) will all be in seperate categories. This means that 2/3 of the time, you will be rolling 1 die when min-maxed. I'll give a slightly better percentage than that if you threw your 5 in Dexterity, but that was a rant on another thread.”
“So your attributes will suck and your skills will end up sucking (2/3 of the time) because of it. If you min-max your attributes, you might as well dump your XP into Skills.”
“Do me a favor, in the future, don't belittle my opinion. I know the book and the system fairly well.”
You’re still very good at misinterpreting what I say. Trust me, when I belittle your opinion, there won’t be any need for interpretation. You’ll know it.
And it sounds by now like we BOTH know the book and the system quite well. But again, min-maxing isn’t just about having the highest score in one area. It’s also about avoiding weaknesses that can be exploited. Risk can also be minimized.
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I’d sell it if it weren’t so easy to convert d20 material to it, and I couldn’t houserule it into usability. I mean, the Merits list reads like a Feat list. The first thing that sprang to mind was ‘RAVENLOFT!’
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“I didn't really go with "feat list" but I did see Bloodlines as "Prestige Classes". I actually looked at Merits and thought "Backgrounds got combined with Merits! YAY! Now it makes sense!"”
Personally, I preferred the days when Backgrounds were separate from Merits. Since Backgrounds rarely, if ever, came into play, the low cost for them fit their usefulness. Most of their effects tended to be outside the game. But that may have just been my group.
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The chargen system encourages min-maxing. Which is a good thing, considering how pathetic starting characters are, in a game that makes succeeding at anything much harder than it should be. Just make sure you get a higher starting total of Exp. You won’t improve much on 35.
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“No, it doesn't. I'll be the first to say nWoD's system is buggy, but chargen isn't. The more well rounded your character, the better he will do when being faced with the multitude of experiences occured in a roleplaying game.”
Right. But see my comments above. The strategy produces a well-rounded character, by nWoD standards, and requires as little preparation and background as any min-maxed character. You can even just copy the number-sets down, interchange the ‘or’ cases, and go to town. Like I said, risk is another thing to be minimized.
“If you REALLY want me to get all uber-logical, I'll post and compare a min-maxed character and a well-rounded character, compare their average rolls, what they do, etc. I'm pretty tired right now, but if you really want that Roy, I'll do it later.”
I saw your later post. The conclusion that VtR does not encourage min-maxing isn’t quite correct, but it’s a very nice, well-conducted analysis. My proverbial hat’s off to you for it.
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At least you presented a reasonably intelligent argument. Kudos to you for that.
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“Based on how many times you gave me a "you're dumb" response, the above really caught me by surprise. Then again, I suppose "reasonably intelligent" isn't really a compliment. A dog is reasonably intelligent. You can tell how much I tear thing apart, eh?”
Yes, and you often do it needlessly. Zeke, your whole tone is condescending, from the first word to the last, in most of your debating posts that I’ve read. Cast the beam out of thine own eye, before reaching for splinters in the eyes of others.
That isn’t criticism, by the way. It’s advice.
And from me, ‘reasonably intelligent’ is a compliment. I don’t compliment easily or often. Side effect of my workplace.
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Et toi.
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“[just messin']I don't speak spanish[/just messin']”
Nor French. But I won’t hold that against you.
“Hasta”
Au revoir.