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Blood & Gold?
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@Jennkryst As someone who was brand new to the system, I don’t think it would have made things less difficult particularly.
let it be a challenge to you
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@helvetica I’ve been toying with a Victorian game.
I guess I could be talked into having it not be on the east coast, should I make it happen.
I’m also not that hard to talk into adding WtA I guess. But WtA and MtA would essentially be parallel games, so I’d probably launch with just Mage.
As for a pure XP-based CG, that’s a can of worms. I won’t say it’s not doable, but I’d have to really play with it to see how breakable it is. I suspect it’s only really doable on games where the ST actively rejects excessive min-maxing.
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@sao Yeah, it probably would have made things easier in having only one pool to track (xp) (instead of the 7 to like… 11? Different things you can put points in, depending on what do), but make things harder in other ways.
@Polk said in Blood & Gold?:
As for a pure XP-based CG, that’s a can of worms. I won’t say it’s not doable, but I’d have to really play with it to see how breakable it is. I suspect it’s only really doable on games where the ST actively rejects excessive min-maxing.
People are already excessively min-maxy. I mean, kind of. So you wouldn’t necessarily be policing this any more than you already are.
The current way I at least theory-craft it is figure out what the most min-max’d can be with normal chargen, figure out the XP cost of that, adjust a little, and then give that to people as the standard.
Or, figure out what you want a standard build to look like, calculate the XP, and give that to them. If they min-max for higher dots… they also end up with fewer skills. Sure, they can sword good, but give them food poisoning because they don’t know how to cook. Or they get scammed out of their resources because they can’t resist con artists. Hope they take drive, because it is a rainy city, be a shame if they kept getting in crashes.
This math is easier to do in like… nWoD or CoD than it is in oWoD or X20, but it still works out.
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@sao said in Blood & Gold?:
@helvetica I find WoD chargen soooooo harddddd
It may be a cultural thing, but I’m used to app staff who address all changes at once. But the system is over-saturated with choices, which leads them to address one or a few things at a time. I don’t blame them, it’s too much to address all in one go, but it lends itself to an unending conversation about choices I’m unlikely to remember or care enough about to even play. Honestly, I’m unlikely to try WoD again.
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Also, what if we fix part of the min-max problem by going…
shifty-eyes
Full blown roster?
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@Jennkryst I mean, I would play a roster CoD game. My biggest bar to playing right now is trying to find the time to make characters and wikis and blah, blah, blah because of real life commitments and all of that. And I never really did the min-maxing thing, but it would alleviate the issue for those who object to the nonsense it often produces.
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@Polk said in Blood & Gold?:
@helvetica I’ve been toying with a Victorian game.
I guess I could be talked into having it not be on the east coast, should I make it happen.
I’m also not that hard to talk into adding WtA I guess. But WtA and MtA would essentially be parallel games, so I’d probably launch with just Mage.
I remember there were at least two Victorian-era oWoD games. One was set in London in 1888 (I think because the staff wanted to run plots involving Jack the Ripper) and another set in New York anti-bellum.
Victorian Era Mage is quite interesting. Science and technology is really accelerating, depending on the time either the Order of Reason or the shiny new Technocratic Union would be around, the Electrodyne Engineers would be forging ahead recklessly upsetting the Timetable and making the rest of the Order/Union increasingly worried, there’s still plenty of superstition around, especially in the Old West and less developed areas. The Traditions are far, far less united and friendly with each other; the Order of Hermes is probably still salty and resentful that they “only” got the Forces seat and that the rest of the Traditions don’t just follow their orders, dammit! They worked for King Arthur! OBEY. We know best!
At the same time, there’s still a lot of crossover between the Traditions and Union; stuff like Spiritualism is a blend of science and magic, a lot of Ecstatics probably LOVE all the new mind altering drugs available (Imagine a CoX who uses Laudanum as a focus), if it’s after the Civil War then the Celestial Chorus would be making vast inroads into American consciousness, and there’s plenty of room for Shamans and Blood Witches to do their thing. Plus, there would be a TON of Crafts around: Native American magic men, Snake Oil salesmen whose stuff actually works, Old Country immigrants (think Irish and Chinese laborers and their styles of willworking), etc.
I’d set such a MU* in the Southwest, maybe Arizona, after the Civil War with a rail link to the Transcontiential Railroad. Maybe in the mid-to-late 1870s or early 1880s. Enough that folk could still have fought in the War, but far enough away that the wounds are healing. It’s also the start of the Guided Age, with the seeds of what would become megacorporations being planted. I forget exactly when Pentex was founded, but I think it was around that era.
I find your ideas interesting and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
As for a pure XP-based CG, that’s a can of worms. I won’t say it’s not doable, but I’d have to really play with it to see how breakable it is. I suspect it’s only really doable on games where the ST actively rejects excessive min-maxing.
It might be easier to go with a dot pool instead of pure XP-based. You get X amount of dots for Attributes (maybe with an automatic 1 dot in everything to start), X amount for Skills and X amount for Willpower/supernatural guffins. That’d be a middle ground between the rather rigid and exasperating standard WoD Chargen and having to juggle numbers in a pure XP Chargen.
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@STD I would be down for a roster oWoD Mage Victorian game. That sounds amazing.
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@Sanguine I tend to like very particular kinds of characters, so roster-ONLY isn’t something that’d interest me as a player.
But… what about baseline sheets?
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@STD said in Blood & Gold?:
It might be easier to go with a dot pool instead of pure XP-based. You get X amount of dots for Attributes (maybe with an automatic 1 dot in everything to start), X amount for Skills and
Okay, so I thought you were being cheeky about using standard chargen up until this point.
The problem doing it this way, on my end, is that it still produces almost the same problem as standard chargen, just… without freebies messing up the math even more. 5 dots of abilities is worth somewhere between 13 xp and 23 xp, depending on where you slot them.
A neat compromise would be doing an array, though. Just a ‘you have one 4, three 3s, five 2s, and seven 1s’ which is…
88 xp for those specific skill points (the standard 13/9/5 gets you 27 dots… and oh my God I went down the rabbit hole, let me delete the next three paragraphs before I derail the thing completely.
Arrays and Rosters, and maybe just a pile of xp if folks are feeling spicy. LETS GOOOOOO
Edit because I was typing for a while and missed follow up. Roster types for people who don’t want to build from scratch, but the option can be there for people who do.
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@Polk I could go with that, or a mix of both. The baseline could give people a boost that prefer to make their own and are limited with time. I do like making new characters but haven’t had the time and energy to do more than make my D&D character lately and that’s so much less intensive than making a WoD or CoD character.
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@Sanguine The more I Think about it the more I think a baseline sheet would help with @Jennkryst’s flat XP model.
It’s harder to foul it up if you start with 2s in all Attributes, and a certain baseline of abilities that you can’t not buy.
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@Polk It’s a really neat idea and it could cater people like me who enjoy playing a character kind of from the beginning of their journey, either just before awakening, or maybe just after, and people who like to be more established.
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Another idea, is allow the standard chargen model, and then let me (or someone else, I guess) MATH all of the sheets, figure out what has been spent, and then balance the scales with however much extra is needed to hit whatever the decided total starting xp line. This would theoretically let people underspend, even, and buy things on grid as they learn ICly, or whatever.
While this doesn’t fix the issue of chargen being confusing… pre-built option and array can help. Having different chargen methods is fine, as long as they all get to the same place in the end.
The baseline idea is really just a version of that. Make sure your characters who graduated high school have the academics 2, or whatever other basics you decide people ought to have.
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@Jennkryst I like the point bank where when I learn something with RP being able to grab it when I deliberately underspend in CGen.
