Game designers often lecture (or bemoan) that nobody can possibly make a realistic game.
But in the words of Queen Victoria, I am not interested in the possibility of failure.
Instead of looking at ‘is this showing what would happen if you really mounted a dragon while wearing armour’, I prefer to look simply at the ordinal Mathematics (i.e. relative values).
If someone’s a shit-hot martial artist then I really don’t know how many people they might kill in a minute, but I know that more training should up the expected kill-count.
Better ‘Persuasion’ should mean a better chance at persuading people.
Wearing armour should increase a character’s chance of surviving a battle.
Players won’t notice much about the chances of doing something, and probably don’t care if a torch illuminates 10’ or 5 metres.
What they all care about however, is that holding a torch lets them see better in the dark.
As long as ordinal relations hold, the system has done its job of responding to a change in the plot.
My favourite WoD RPG will always be Changeling.
I’ve run one campaign, and I wish I had time to run more.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have time to re-write it, like I did with Vampire, but I have plenty of concrete plans for changes.
Seelie vs Unseelie
The book began by saying ‘Seelie’ does not mean ‘good’, and ‘Unseelie’ does not mean evil, then instantly forgot its own advice.
Every paragraph associated the Unseelie fae with bedlam and banality, with slavery and death.
The Unseelie clearly received the role of the ‘bad guys’ at every turn.
Some RPG systems are obviously more of a faff than they need to be, and some take more time than others.
This feels obvious, but I want a better way to measure it than using my gut.
I want to give a little flesh, with a Maths-flavoured guesstimate, similar to ‘Big-O notation’ (a method for guessing how fast a sorting algorithm works).
faff
noun:
An unnecessary or over-complicated task, especially one perceived as a waste of time.
verb:
To waste time on an unproductive activity.
A few RPG creators might make bank, but for the most part, we don’t.
For the most part, people don’t even want to make it their entire career - they have a particular vision of a game they want to make.
I think if indie designers want to see their ideas succeed, they should release them and start working with others, because nobody has all the skills needed to create an RPG.
So there you are, storytelling a twisted tale of modern horror about a coterie of vampires, when an odd ability crops up.
One of your players has focused on controlling people so much with the Dominate Discipline that she can now enter other people’s bodies, taking them over as if they were her own.
So we know that the ‘soul’ - that is, the mobile part of the mind, the non-brain part of the mind, has just shifted over into a new body.
One might expect the experience to be quite harrowing, for the vampire to collapse like a newly born deer or a stroke victim, and later slowly learn how to walk and speak.
But apparently it’s quite easy; the vampire’s mind (or soul) steps into the new body like a comfortable suit.
We can only conclude that all the muscle memory is part of the body - and where else could it reside except the brain?
So the brain allows a translation of the soul and the soul just does the general work.
So while dyspraxia is about clumsiness in thought and clumsiness in the body, a dyspraxic vampire should, in theory, be able to wander into the body of a dextrous athlete and become dextrous.
When Star Trek fans wanted to make a Star Trek (ST) chess-board, there were two schools of thought - one reconstructed the rules from actors who were moving pieces randomly, and another created a game from the same board, but with their own rules.
All-in-all, I think the second method produces more interesting results, and in fact is more authentic, because onlookers seeing someone play ST chess will think ’that looks like some real nerd shit’, which is what it’s meant to look like, and probably what the actors at the time were thinking.
RPG Vloggers chatting about Gygax note on real-world time-synchronization have got me thinking about really using this rule.
In case you haven’t heard the idea - Gygax demanded that every day which passes in the real-world, one day passes in the game.
The troupe starts and ends their games somewhere safe, like a tavern in town.
It sounds like a bizarre concept at first, but when you view it from another angle, it makes perfect sense.
Vampires could never feel really plausible, but Vampire: The Masquerade created a lot of fantastic reasons to buy into the World of Darkness.
Enough that once the reader allows the vampires and their magical powers, the masquerade they all keep - the mass conspiracy that they don’t exist - feels easy to swallow.
Pull yourself, dear reader, back to the 90’s, where the only way to get on television was to apply to prove you could read pre-approved lines, and the only way to publish a letter to the country was to have a newspaper accept your message.
I feel the World of Darkness could have done better by having the various spirit worlds accessible only through some trance, where someone enters that world in spirit-alone, and leaves their body behind.
Unintended Teleportation
Garou traversing the umbral planes, Giovanni vampires wandering into the land of the dead, and Changelings, wandering the dreaming lands of happy Boggan villages, all imply the same thing: anyone traversing through the spirit-realm can essentially teleport, i.e. they can move from one place to another without going through the spaces between.
If a group of changelings establish a trod which goes to the Summer Lands, and then establish another in a second city, then the results are inescapable: they can travel from their local trod to the Summer Lands, then from the Summer Lands to the second city.
They can now teleport to that second city.