My Saturday nights now · 4:04am Feb 3rd, 2019
After like a month, my friends and I have begun another RPG session. It's World of Darkness, using 20-year-old rules because that's what we've got. :B Which sucks, since the books aren't really meant to be used together and some things (lookin' at you, Mage: The Awakening) really suck.
But our team is hilarious.
We've got a Corax (were-raven, for the uninitiated) who's supposed to be the Courier from Fallout: New Vegas.
We've got a home-brew character who's basically Elisa Maza from that one episode of Gargoyles where she turned into a gargoyle.
And we've got me: Starlight Glimmer, the vampire politician. :B
Oh, and we're investigating strange goings-on in South Park. :V This is the first time our GM has ever run a game, and she's going with what she knows! Kenny has already died (once), and we fought Cartman, who had been turned into a were-bear somehow. I made him crap his pants and cry. :D
This game is meant to be the sequel to the previous RPG we ran, in which I played Applejack as a vampire hunter. :V I'm not good at coming up with characters, okay?
I don't plan to make regular updates a thing, I just wanted to share the setup. V: Toodles!
"This is the first time our GM has ever run a game..."
Wow, look at the flashing red lights on the dashboard of doom. As somebody who has run (counts on fingers) about a half-dozen systems, you *can* have fun with a new GM, if everybody knows each other and is willing to be flexible. Had a friend in college who was addicted to making a Oh-God-How-Complicated-Can-You-Make-This new game system which he thankfully eventually gave up on (after one whole game session resulted in zero characters generated), and we went to D&D 3.0 or 3.5, not sure which. We passed the position of power back and forth more than a few times, and I wound up presiding over a group for nearly every weekend over twenty years. Still, we *all* have that first session to look back on and wonder how we survived. Grats!
Man, Mage used to be my group's go-to back when we were in high school. It wasn't until we started actually playing other systems that we realized how garbage it was
That setup you've got sounds like fun though! Running a game in the South Park universe sounds like a blast.
Iiiiif you're interested, my friends and I run a podcast where we record all of our tabletop RPGs. It's called Rag-NERD-rok, and I think it's pretty darn good, even though I'm a bit biased.
That is so awesome. I get paranoid-sad looking at new bottomshelf RPGs and wondering how many people will ever play them, and the churn of years old ones is unthinkably depressing. It's great to know these things can actually have an extended life.
South Park being in the World of Darkness makes a disturbing amount of sense. No doubt a Tzimisce was behind the distinctive features of Canadians.
Have fun!
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We used to LARP back in high school, and my friend who owns all the books, LARP or P&P, is the sort who stubbornly holds onto his past. :B
This game sounds quite, quite silly-- but at least it sounds like you're having fun.
Oldschool White Wolf is my jam, though. I never was the biggest Vampire fan, but Werewolf's heavy metal furry ecoterrorism was all kind of gonzo fun. Though I will note that Mage doesn't suck-- it just tends to work better as its own thing. At least it can mesh into a crossover game a lot easier than Changeling: The Dreaming does. (But that's another rant entirely).
Funnily enough, a friend of mine has been running a crazily intricate WoD game for the past couple years now. One fun bit about it is that, while it started in the 'present day' of 1991 (in itself a great move 'cause Vampire is a super 90' game), there are also alternating 'flashback' sessions set centuries earlier, and (because vampires) some characters introduced in the historical game wind up showing up in the modern one, and there's all kinds of hijinks there.
We've also killed off like 70 percent of the NPC's in Chicago By Night by now, but that's what happens when the werewolves declare war on you.
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I always thought Changeling worked better in LARP, because most of the drawbacks of being one are spatial. Y'know, your fae form being larger than your human one, stuff like that. It's a lot easier to say "My character ducks unnecessarily as we enter the room" than to actually remember you have to do it.
Mage sucks because when I play something called a "mage", I want to fling spells at shit. :| All the rules for backlash and stuff are just fine, but when level 1 of your powers is "you can detect changes around you", and this is difficult to pull off, and it's ungodly expensive to get to level 2... Just, no thank you.
I made Starlight as a Mage to begin with, and she had jack shit to do. Change her into a vampire, and I've got two dots each of Dominate and Presence, and I can actually sway people to do my bidding. And I had points left over in character creation! It's amazing, and it's a lot cooler than trying to be a Mage. :|
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Honestly, the nWoD Changeling (Changeling: The Lost) for the record is hands-down superior to old version. It's all about PTSD from getting abducted by weird alien creatures beyond human ken instead of ... the terrible boringness of real life. See also: How much ass Hunter: The Vigil kicks in comparison to Hunter: The Reckoning.
As for Mage? Honestly, it probably depends on which edition you're fiddling with. I don't know the game well enough to know the little differences between each edition, buuuut one of the big things with Mage is thinking outside the box. Like, Vampire powers are pretty direct in their application, which fits the game. Mage is more about thinking of weird loopholes to mess with reality.
For example, Correspondence 1 lets you know exactly where things are. Which ... seems kind of weak, sure. Unless you're lost in a forest and need to get to the road before some angry lycanthropes eat your face. Or if you need to chart the quickest getaway route after your magic-artifact-heist. Or, you could go all Equilibrium, and use your perfect spatial awareness of where everyone in the room is in order to do some Gun-Kata stuff so you can shoot people without even looking at them, and so on.
Though honestly, Mage's best suited for playing the likes of John Constantine, not Starlight Glimmer. Just a matter of styles and themes and whatnot. But again, it all comes down to the group and the GM. If you're having fun, go on and roll with it.
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Yeah, see, if I'm in a situation like that I have one level of Correspondence, I'd think the simplest thing to do would be to teleport myself (or my pursuers) significantly closer to the edge of the forest. That's neat. Just knowing which way to run is useful, but not particularly exciting. And Mage is frustrating because you're just so much less capable right out of character creation.
Starlight as a Ventrue? Ugh... Why would you ruin a perfectly good pony by using that clan?
Of course, I'm probably biased based off of my experiences playing Vampire: the Masquerade over the years. And Vampire: the Requiem... And Vampire: Eternal Struggle (formerly Jyhad). Seriously, Ventrue are the cancer of the vampire world. Almost as bad as you think batpones are.
Please tell me that you at least made her feeding restriction to be "Commie bastards."
On another note, Mage... is overpowered. As long as you are creative. Matter 2 (IIRC) can let you turn an area of air in pure chlorine. Good luck mortals. Correspondence 2, Life 1 will let you teleport a small cactus into the crotch of someone's pants. Most creatures will have to stop and pay attention to that. Forces 2 (maybe Life 2 as well) can let you do something called "The Curse of Friction," where you turn movement into heat. If the target moves, they start taking heat damage, beginning at their joints. Vampires react particularly poorly to their bodies heating up dramatically based on how fast one moves...
Actually, I'm surprised you didn't go with Tremere. Most of the benefits of being Ventrue, as well as most of the benefits of an overpowered magic system. Have your mind control and your fireball flinging too...
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I was sticking with the mind control. Dominate + Presence is too good to pass up. Plus, she's a politician! Ran a cult a while back, got raided by the feds, almost died, came back as a vampire, that kind of thing. :B
I'll note that you need at least two dots in a sphere to achieve any of those effects you're talking about. Good luck getting that second dot, let alone a second sphere. I don't know why Whitewolf is so stingy with experience points. :|
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Why do you think I brought up the Tremere? Dominate, Auspex, and (the horribly OP'd) Thaumaturgy. Ah, well. I always played other things anyway, 'cause I never felt right playing with Thaumaturgy.
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Does the super old version of Mage that you're using start you at ultra low levels? Every time I've played Mage, the book's basic character creation process, for a starting mage, has generated a character with at least three dots in their best sphere and usually several other twos. I wonder if they beefed it up to deal with exactly the problem you mention.
Honestly, I love Mage to death — but with a giant asterisk. My biggest problem with the game is that it's almost totally unplayable as a game. Unless your GM is significantly smarter than their players, the PCs' ability to think outside the box is going to steamroll most challenges the GM comes up with — your plan will go off the rails the instant magic gets applied, and anything you throw in as a counter has the problem that Mage is ultimately about who can be more clever with their power levels, and the GM is outnumbered in brainpower 4 to 1.
Almost all of the solutions to that problem are between bad and horrible. There's the classic "You can't do that" — but then you're not playing Mage, and your character is horribly useless compared to any other WOD protagonist. There's going SUPER strict on Paradox — which is the "oh yeah that dungeon corridor was trapped, roll for damage" style of WOD play, leading to the same degenerate play state, of PCs slowing the game to a crawl as they meticulously clear out every sleeper for blocks around before taking any action anywhere. There's using the PCs' own tricks against them, which is a recipe for hurt feelings and/or TPKs because the PCs' reality-breaking bullshit is literally their only advantage against the world, and they're giant glass cannons. There's throwing horribly OP creatures against them who can tank everything the players dish out, which sort of kind of works, except you're always walking the razor's edge between adversaries who can ROFLstomp them at the first bad roll, and adversaries whose weaknesses can be exploited to turn the encounter into a joke.
I mean, the first character that comes to mind when I think of my group's prior Mage games was M.'s Correspondence-4 mage Dave Davidson. Literally Dave's entire shtick was portals; he was hyper-optimized so that he could do basically nothing else. (I think the book even lets you portal at 3; I think there was some reason he bumped it up, though.)
The only thing he ever did with his four dots was to create portals linking two different places. And yet nothing could stop the guy. A monster charged him, he'd create a small portal to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, blasting it back with a super-high-pressure jet of water. Or he'd create a portal to outer space inside its chest and watch it deflate as its organs got sucked out by vacuum pressure. If it stayed back around a corner, he'd drop a pebble through a pair of portals linking back to each other high in the atmosphere, using gravity to accelerate it to railgun speeds, and then he'd redirect the exit portal next to the enemy's head and splatter it across the map.
Once, an entire pack of vampires ambushed us in a sewer in the middle of the night. He took a small bouncy ball, enchanted it so that every time it impacted a surface it would create a portal there to the skies over Africa, and then threw it as hard as he could. Within seconds, the entire sewer was bathed in sunlight from a dozen different angles.
I mean, how do you stop that? And then, once you do come up with a counter for Dave, how do you deal with the other PCs who are standing alongside him rocking their own, extremely different, styles of broken?
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Have the vampires dragging along a midnight snack. Does he want to do all this magic while observed?
I know, I know... Too much of that and you run afoul of player frustration, but my thoughts are that constant high magic is not how WoD is supposed to be played.
Also, Technocrats.
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Yeah, character creation starts you with one dot in your school's Sphere, one of your choice if you're Hollow, and a second dot is along the lines of 10 points? And a new Sphere is like 14? And you get 15 freebie points. :| Point is, you can maybe get a second dot, new or otherwise, and that's it, and you get no extra skills or stats.
5008128
That's … wow. I don't know if you're using a homebrew, or misreading the book, or using some sort of un-errata'd first edition, or what, but you're EGREGIOUSLY underpowered. The older Mage: The Awakening says that, among a giant ton of other benefits, you get the following on character creation:
And the revised version Mage: The Ascension gives you five free Sphere dots plus a sixth from your Tradition — presumably under similar rules but I can't immediately find the book wording to quote.
This is BEFORE freebie points. Yes, you can spend freebie points on spheres, but in almost all cases you shouldn't have to in order to have a huge amount of options at the beginning.
EDIT: At least based on this blog post, even Awakening's first edition (e.g. the very earliest MTA book) gave you six dots. Did you skip the step about choosing one of the Orders, which is what gives you five of the six? If so, you were doing something like trying to play a new D&D campaign as a first-level Peasant rather than picking a character class.
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Yeah, no, this is original Mage: The Ascension (I think I said Awakening because I always get the two mixed up), not revised. You get one dot.
5008208
Oh, oops, guess I mixed those up too. :P
I guess all I've got, then, is upgrade to second edition and/or Awakening, because it's explicitly first edition chargen fucking you up, not the system as a whole.
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5008339
Hmm. I think I can see where things have gone awry. As, in reading the 2nd edition rulebook ('cause that's the PDF I happen to have), there's a paragraph that says you get one dot and leaves it at that.
However, in other places, including the character creation cheat-sheet (page 138, I think), it notes you start with five dots in spheres, plus a free one depending on your Tradition. So, you're not gonna be exploding the moon right out the gate, but there's enough in there to get up to some hijinks if you're creative enough.
Still, a White Wolf book having crappy editing? Say it ain't so! (Preferably on page XX).
Sounds like a blast! Hope in time you all level out of the frustration of being underpowered due to the edition's poorly balanced start.
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I made a were-bear crap itself, I ain't underpowered. :V
5008937
So you're saying the problem is your friends? :V I guess that makes it your job to fix everything. ;D
5008963
Well, the Corax threw a record at it, which got embedded in its shoulder, but then he had to retrieve it because he's dumb. And the gargoyle did her best to whack it with a magic staff, but she kept rolling bad.
It's up to Starlight "The Freight Train" Glimmer to take care of shit. :V