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[Kadzar]

So I just finished my second game of Call of Cthulhu. My character, the Canadian archaeologist Dr. Steve "Vancouver Steve" Stevens, is no more, gunned down by gangsters.

In his place, his illegitimate daughter, Ophelia Cordova, will appear, trying to find out his whereabouts and likely getting involved with some eldritch horrors in the process.

We had our third session yesterday. Due to a re-reading of the rules, the GM informed me that my last character technically wouldn't have died, so we agreed that he would have been captured instead, like the detective who was with him.

Maybe I'll eventually get to play him again, but, for now, I'm playing his daughter, who enrolled in Miskatonic University as an excuse to get close to her real father, and then found herself investigating his disappearance.

So, when someone from the university put the call out for someone to investigate the disappearance of another archaeologist, that got her attention. Maybe the two cases were unrelated, but considering that her father went missing around the same time as this guy, along with another archaeologist from this same university, she figured it was worth finding out if this all wasn't just some coincidence.

She was joined on this search by a med student she knew from classes or whatever, a detective and the 13-year-old girl sidekick, and a janitor who's secretly an assassin. After spending some time asking questions of someone who last saw the professor and turned out to be delusional, we set off in two cars visit the last known whereabouts of his dig site.

After a few hours, we, in the lead car (driven by the janitor assassin, with the med student and me riding along), narrowly avoided a deer, which the other car (detective and sidekick) collided with. We stopped to make sure they were alright, and, when we looked at the deer, we had to make sanity checks and saw it had some strange black liquid on it. The occupants of the car weren't too badly hurt, and the car, while messed up, was still technically drivable, so we continued on our way.

We made it to the farmhouse we'd be staying at, despite no one having any decent score in Navigate, so we had to rely on Luck, and the GM told us we narrowly avoided a TPK when we were presented with two paths to go down and the assassin happened to pick correctly. Then, it turned out we lost the other car, since they didn't realize we planned to stay at the farmhouse (which we learned about from the rest of the members of the archaeologist's dig team). So they stopped in the nearby town, and finding there were no hotels there, were eventually directed to the farmhouse. This was mostly uneventful, and just meant we claimed all the spare beds and the detective had to sleep in the barn and the sidekick slept in the car.

So nothing happened until about 3 am, when all the animals started making noises, and we went outside to find the farmer about to be gored by a charging boar. I put it down with the .38 revolver in my purse, and the med student gave CPR to some weird farmhand who only spoke gibberish, and his mouth turned out to be full of some black stuff similar to what we found on the deer. Also, we found the farmhand lived in some shack that was heavily soiled, possibly indicating some sort of mental disorder (I assume. I didn't make any rolls to confirm or anything). And then I think we ended the session as we went back to bed.

[Telgin]

Isn't that the system that gave us the "Revenge of Darth Janitor" story? Or is that another Star WaRPG?

I think that's the West End version.

The best version, quirks and all.  The Force was broken and an unarmored human could be as tough as a land speeder, not to speak of wookies, but I loved this system.

I haven't heard of this story though, so I need to track it down.

[Kagus]

Isn't that the system that gave us the "Revenge of Darth Janitor" story? Or is that another Star WaRPG?

I think that's the West End version.

The best version, quirks and all.  The Force was broken and an unarmored human could be as tough as a land speeder, not to speak of wookies, but I loved this system.

I haven't heard of this story though, so I need to track it down.

This'un.

Doesn't say much about version though, as the comment about "Star Wars D6" doesn't really seem to indicate whether that game was played in D6 or if the D6 version is irrelevant. I guess someone would have to track down the original thread on 4chan.

[Mephisto]

Ye gods, am I actually going to link to a 4chan archive on the Bay12 forums?

It would seem so.

Warning: <insert obvious warning about trawling random 4chan threads>


Ouch. At least they seem to be taking it in stride. "Buy the RPG that has been banned in China."

[pikachu17]

Supposedly the Lucky feat combined with disadvantage becomes super advantage.
How is this supposed to happen?
Wouldn't you roll disadvantage then roll lucky and choose the highest; or roll disadvantage and reroll the lowest, but still have disadvantage?

[GiglameshDespair]

Supposedly the Lucky feat combined with disadvantage becomes super advantage.
How is this supposed to happen?
Wouldn't you roll disadvantage then roll lucky and choose the highest; or roll disadvantage and reroll the lowest, but still have disadvantage?

Spending a luck point lets you roll an additional d20, then choose the die you want to use, no matter how many dice are involved in the roll. The extra die you roll isn't the second die from advantage or disadvantage, but something separate. So you roll twice for disadvantage; spending a luck point gives another d20. You then choose which of those three you want to use.

It's a strange way of working, but that's how it goes RAW-wise.

[IronyOwl]

Disadvantage: Roll 2 d20s, take lowest.

Lucky: Spend luck point, roll extra d20, choose "which of the d20s you take."

A careful reading suggests that "which of the d20s" might be referring to "the d20 from the action" and "the d20 from lucky," in which case you'd roll disadvantage, then compare the lowest of that one to your lucky roll. But it's ambiguous enough that you could argue the lucky feat overrides the normal rules for disadvantage, thereby giving you three d20s to freely choose a result from.


Of course, that's all rather irrelevant to what makes the game sensible and fun, so it's a bit of a pointless conversation.

[Kagus]

The difficulty comes from the wording of Lucky. "Roll an extra die and then choose which one to take". It doesn't specifically differentiate between rolling three dice (advantage+lucky) and rolling three dice (disadvantage+lucky); meaning that, RAW, using lucky on a disadvantage would let you choose between all three dice.

There's a Sage Advice that addresses that eventuality, but I don't remember the specific wording and I think he actually admitted that "Yeah, this was kinda poorly worded". Which is incredibly rare.

You could also just houserule that Lucky is +1 positive die, so it either adds to advantage dice or subtracts from disadvantage dice. But that's kind of a poor patch since Lucky is technically supposed to let you choose the specific die you want, not just automatically take the highest.

EDIT: Or I could get double-ninjad

[Egan_BW]

It makes a perverse sort of sense. Being lucky lets you make the best of a bad situation.

[wierd]

(bad joke)

And here I thought the "lucky" trait was what the Bard took so that he could finally succeed in his "endeavors" with the bar maids of the realm...

(/bad joke)

[heydude6]

I’ve been thinking of getting into World of Darkness lately and I thought I’d ask for some advice here. From what I know, there’s Old world of darkness as well as New world of darkness. What troubles me though, is that I’ve heard from various places Nwod is kind of shit compared to Owod (kind of like 4E vs 3.5E DnD). For those who have played it, are there any truth to those rumours or is it still a fun game?

[IcyTea31]

It's subjective, but in my experience NWoD is the one people actually play nowadays. And in the case of individual gamelines, some are clearly better than their successors or predecessors, on others it's a closer race.

It's definitely not like comparing D&D 3.5 and 4E, maybe closer to 5e and Pathfinder.

[Rolan7]

My group did NWoD almost exclusively for a couple years.  Mostly vampires, but also demon-possessed and a shorter campaign as ghouls.  I never played OWoD (outside the VtM:B video game) so I can't compare the mechanics, but I do think NWoD works very well.

In a way it's the opposite of 4e in that it doesn't emphasize tile-positioning.  Sorta like 5e, you're allowed to play without a map and just describe where your character is in relation to others.  We usually used a grid anyway because we were used to 3.5e, but I liked going gridless personally.

My favorite things about the system are the exploding dice, and the template system.  A rando human with a gun is actually very dangerous if you aren't careful.  Any attack can theoretically hit for hundreds of damage - in practice, sometimes that desperate kine gets lucky and ruins your night, vampire template be damned.  Being a vampire makes it a lot easier to recover, and makes bullets a non-issue, but a vampire uses the same skills to win a knife-fight as a human does.

I would guess that the concerns you're hearing might be about the fluff of the setting, which changed very drastically.  In a lot of ways I prefer the OWoD lore, but it was kinda... defined.  NWoD leaves a lot more up to the Storyteller.  In a nutshell:

OWoD:  Cain definitely existed and God made him the first vampire.  The distance from Cain is the most important factor in a Vampire's power.  Demons aren't necessarily evil, just rebels on the run from angels.  I think many were banned for trying to help humanity too much.  The world is gonna end because the original vampires literally have "plot device" as a power, and they're going to wake up, it's just a story about the last days.  Brujah are counterculture because they're descendants of Carthage who resent Rome/establishment.

NWoD: Nobody knows where vampires came from.  "Generation" is now just "blood potency", which increases naturally over the years or by sheer experience...  It makes feeding more difficult, so old vampires often take a nap to *reduce* their potency.  "God" is an undefined force, described as a machine (this vague cosmology is one of the biggest complaints, though I find it just different).  Demons are malicious entities which tempt mortals to sin.  Brujah are a Mexican biker gang with no redeeming qualities.  For some reason that last part bothers me the most.

Anyway, all those (kinda edgy/creepy) WoD stories I shared in this thread are NWoD.

[Iduno]

Yeah, WoD had some good (and also some very terrible, depending on game/author/publisher) fluff, and the starts to some good rules. Odds are good you'll fail at any given test you roll, because the math on dice wasn't done, but that's becoming more common. Aside from the themes of "you're pretty much a villain, but some other people are possibly worse, and they're your bosses" and "the players shouldn't be able to do things because they aren't in charge, it's the GM's game", you've got OWoD: here are the factions and storylines and politics; Go do what you're told. vs NWoD: No, we got rid of that because it's too constraining; we replaced it with underpants gnomes' plan, except without step one. NWoD did improve more rules than they de-improved, so that's good.

It's good for a comedy game, or using the character generation rules and making up your own game. The later in the development cycle, the less complete and well-thought-out the game is. Vampire is playable for a game where you're 1/13 of a Dracula, Mummy is also a book.

Notable: WoD loves specifying things too much, and ends up with hilarious results like "vampires are 1/100,000 people" because half of the types of vampires aren't allowed to take powers that let them feed secretly, so they're just kidnapper/murderers, combined with "there are 13 types of vampires, each type has factions, and some of those have subfactions with a dozen ranks with multiple vampires in them per town." Which is fine, as long as your city has (quick calculation) at least 150 million people, give or take.

[heydude6]

It's good for a comedy game, or using the character generation rules and making up your own game.

Is that really an endorsement?