Rewards in WoD
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@Arkandel said:
Well, you might not have been a fantastic top ladder player since you're lawyering and that doesn't give you sufficient time to devote to perfecting your gaming, but you'd not have a demonstrably harder time in learning the basic controls, moving around, etc (which is what going from 0->1 would reflect).
Maybe not. I've been a proponent of diminishing returns, and did not like GMC's elimination of it.
Admittedly, this may be a bias. -
@Ganymede said:
Maybe not. I've been a proponent of diminishing returns, and did not like GMC's elimination of it.
Admittedly, this may be a bias.Oh, I agree with you there. I didn't like that part of GMC; not only does it not make sense (you should find it harder to continue improving at something) but it also doesn't follow the theme's own paradigms (Renown requirements are IC increasingly higher, so why not the cost?).
I just don't agree with this particular implementation, I find it worse than both 1.0 and GMC's.
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@Arkandel said:
@Ganymede said:
Maybe not. I've been a proponent of diminishing returns, and did not like GMC's elimination of it.
Admittedly, this may be a bias.Oh, I agree with you there. I didn't like that part of GMC; not only does it not make sense (you should find it harder to continue improving at something) but it also doesn't follow the theme's own paradigms (Renown requirements are IC increasingly higher, so why not the cost?).
I just don't agree with this particular implementation, I find it worse than both 1.0 and GMC's.
Typically because the actual benefit of an extra dot is not representative of the effort. There's no difference between the jump from 1-2 and 3-4; it's a single die. Same benefit, same cost.
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I flip-flop on liking GMC's style of dots/costs and not.
Mostly, I only dislike it when I get around to going 'hmm, my character should really have XYZ skill at 1-2 even if it's never going to come up' and the immediately following thought of 'fuck that, I could get my fifth dot of XYZ for the same cost and actually use it'.
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@Tempest said:
I flip-flop on liking GMC's style of dots/costs and not.
Mostly, I only dislike it when I get around to going 'hmm, my character should really have XYZ skill at 1-2 even if it's never going to come up' and the immediately following thought of 'fuck that, I could get my fifth dot of XYZ for the same cost and actually use it'.
And then you get a storyteller who looks at your character concept and says, "this character concept should have X, I'll make X a part of the scene" and when you go to roll it, lo and behold, untrained penalty. I'm not saying it's your case, but the amount of annoying bitching this sort of thing has caused in the past is amazing.
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Oh, I can imagine. People'll bitch about anything.
Gameplay-wise though it's not like it's much different than having a pool of 7 dice and failing a couple of times because dice hate you, which we all know happens.
Failing can be just as fun as winning!
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It's not, but people will grumble because, "my character is a career criminal, it's not fair that I have to BUY LARCENY". No, really.
Like, I had a character who had been in jail for a long time, and I made him without Larceny. As soon as I had any XP to spare, I took a dot. Even if he's just the bruiser, a dot of Larceny makes sure you at least don't take a PENALTY.
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As long as the concept fits the dots I see nothing wrong with your PC not being well rounded.
For example my character is pretty broke - Resources 0. So I often have him trying to bum lunches out of people. I'll never buy Investigation even with XP to spare, even though it's a damn useful PrP skill, since just he's not the investigative type; that's gotten him in trouble with the law when he failed spectacularly at it.
What the problem is is when people only play up, not down. So for instance they can't fake physical dots (sooner or later they'd need to roll brawl+strength) but they'll avoid portraying low social dots.
From a meta-point of view, it's challenging to roleplay someone being bad at some things without making a caricature out of them.
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@Coin said:
It's not, but people will grumble because, "my character is a career criminal, it's not fair that I have to BUY LARCENY". No, really.
Wow, yeah, that's a whole level I haven't had to encounter. I guess that's the benefit of not being staff. I've encountered (and understand) the stuff like 'my character is a career criminal AND has XYZ skills/whatever and shouldn't need Resources 3 to acquire XYZ item'. Actually complaining because you don't have skills to back up your character's purported job is pretty laughable.
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@Arkandel said:
What the problem is is when people only play up, not down. So for instance they can't fake physical dots (sooner or later they'd need to roll brawl+strength) but they'll avoid portraying low social dots.
From a meta-point of view, it's challenging to roleplay someone being bad at some things without making a caricature out of them.
I am pretty guilty of this with one of my current PCs. She has Presence 1, Manipulation 2, and a spread of 4 dots in social skills. (Socialize 2, Empathy 1, Subterfuge 1). I didn't really -mean- to do it, going in. I just made the mistake of going 'hey, I want to play a not very social, easy to overlook character, whose limited social interactions are going to be heavily influenced by cues from her high Auspex-----oh wait, I'm a fucking idiot and 99% of the RP I'm going to be doing is social. Hm. Yeah, I need to get around to raising that stuff.....eventually.'
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@Tempest said:
@Arkandel said:
What the problem is is when people only play up, not down. So for instance they can't fake physical dots (sooner or later they'd need to roll brawl+strength) but they'll avoid portraying low social dots.
From a meta-point of view, it's challenging to roleplay someone being bad at some things without making a caricature out of them.
I am pretty guilty of this with one of my current PCs. She has Presence 1, Manipulation 2, and a spread of 4 dots in social skills. (Socialize 2, Empathy 1, Subterfuge 1). I didn't really -mean- to do it, going in. I just made the mistake of going 'hey, I want to play a not very social, easy to overlook character, whose limited social interactions are going to be heavily influenced by cues from her high Auspex-----oh wait, I'm a fucking idiot and 99% of the RP I'm going to be doing is social. Hm. Yeah, I need to get around to raising that stuff.....eventually.'
A lot of people have "low social stats" in real life and do just fine. When you roll, though, you're putting your character's abilities to the test. It's typically fine to roleplay someone social who is affable and or kind of scary or whatever in a passive sense; but if you have to roll and your stats don't back it up, that just means that under pressure, in that particular type of situation, your character's confidence and abilities crumble.
At least, that's one feasible way of doing it, in my opinion. Being social doesn't mean you're good at it. I like to cook, but the times I've been able to cook anything beyond the most basic stuff and have it come out well have been rare (and sometimes you get that 10 on a chance die).
Then you have the people who play UP their social stuff that they don't have, at which point I want to strangle a mother fucker.
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@Arkandel
I am pretty sure in Kingsmouth's case the diminishing returns were to help prevent the dino problem, without completely leveling the beats for everyone.
I thought it was a good compromise since it game folks an advantage for being early adapters but late comers like me could functionally cut the gap with out it feeling completely hopeless. -
@ThatGuyThere said:
@Arkandel
I am pretty sure in Kingsmouth's case the diminishing returns were to help prevent the dino problem, without completely leveling the beats for everyone.
I thought it was a good compromise since it game folks an advantage for being early adapters but late comers like me could functionally cut the gap with out it feeling completely hopeless.I am pretty sure you are right. It's not their intention I'm against, it's the implementation.
There are better ways to do the same thing - Eldritch for instance simply caps weekly gains and progressively reduces automatic XP for people after the first six months. So active players can still bust their ass if they want to progress at the same rate, but newer characters would find it much easier to catch up. It's a more elegant solution which achieves the same thing.
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True though one thing to consider is that Kingsmouth did not have passive XP.
You filled out beat sheets each week for what you think you deserved, and staff would add if they noticed you missed something, like i often did with aspirations.
While I never got close to the declining returns part, RL ate me, I thought the system as a whole worked rather well. -
I hate to admit it, but I find I'm not a fan of 'no passive xp, go do shit to earn it'. Mostly, I just don't like having to check in with staff and tell them what I've been doing every 7 days. "Fuck you, I did one bar scene and TS'd 3 times, stop looking at me like that and give me my xp."
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@Arkandel said:
There are better ways to do the same thing - Eldritch for instance simply caps weekly gains and progressively reduces automatic XP for people after the first six months.
Kingsmouth caps weekly gains, and there's no automatic XP.
Frankly, I like their +beat system. I'm toying with making it a personal diary. So far, it's more like a way for me to document my PCs foibles and unreasonable luck at getting laid.
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The core WoD 2E Beat system does have a passive gain built on, but it won't take you far. Even in table top there are better ways to earn.
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@Ganymede It depends on what you are doing and, more importantly, why.
Auto-XP is quite friendly to alts, for instance, because otherwise good luck doing 'enough' stuff on multiple characters to get any progress at all and as noted it can be combined with diminishing returns to allow a more natural catch-up for new PCs as well.
But that's not why I consider Eldritch's (or TR's for that matter) to be a superior system.
One of my concerns with any adopted system for a MU* is to let it work more or less as it is in the books. The more you deviate from it with house rules and patches 'to make it better' the least you're taking advantage of the instant rules recognition new players can enjoy. So if you are changing the source of XP (rather than how they may be utilized) you're not touching the mechanics in any way; Beats, Conditions, etc are applied exactly the way it happens in the books, it's just that your character may see more of them come up than expected if there are auto-gains.
That implementation is much neater. Then again I'm usually in favor of liberal policies when it comes to having or rerolling alts.
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@Arkandel said:
Auto-XP is quite friendly to alts, for instance, because otherwise good luck doing 'enough' stuff on multiple characters to get any progress at all and as noted it can be combined with diminishing returns to allow a more natural catch-up for new PCs as well.
I should probably also mention that Kingsmouth only allows 1 PC per player, so this is a non-existent issue there.
There are two differences between Kingsmouth's system and the GMC system:
- You can claim Beats for more situations than what's in the GMC book.
- These claimed Beats are capped based on "subject matter."
- After you reach a certain number of Beats, it costs more Beats to translate into an Experience.
Whereas, Eldritch has the following changes:
- You have a cap on Beats per week.
- You get Beats simply for existing.
Yes, there are fewer mechanical changes on Eldritch, but its policies were made based on other concerns. Kingsmouth's system is just as appealing to me. I'm not making a value judgment here on some philosophical preference; these are two different games with different concerns.
I'm mentioning that there are other options -- neither better nor worse.
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@Ganymede said:
I'm mentioning that there are other options -- neither better nor worse.
No, I agree. I guess if you take alts out of the equation entirely then the benefit is smaller. I do still prefer the rules to remain as unchanged as possible, but it's not as important as when compounded by other gains.