1 Sphere, 2 Sphere, 3 Sphere, 4!
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@Ganymede
I would start with Mortals, using the Hunter rules, and gauge interest in Psychics. I honestly don't like most of the supernatural stuff for Hunter, so I wouldn't use Endowments and that stuff. I think, especially for a zombie game, straight up normal humans with at most minor psychic powers would be the most fulfilling.@HelloRaptor said in [1 Sphere:
@Coin said:
@HelloRaptor
Jerk.Probably.
Definitely.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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My 2 cents:
The story should be about people. A lot of players who play with supernatural Endowments and psychic abilities and thaumaturgy want the story to become about their phenomena. It's about their hellfire and demon wings and ability to make the air cold. These should be, at best, and even in Second Sight were described as, doing what you normally could do, but with an alternative capability.
I can put my ear to the door and hear what's going on inside, but you clairvoyantly do the same thing, and she uses technology to accomplish yet the same feat. Different strokes, for different folks, but the story should be the same, the Storyteller tells you what is going on inside, given success.
All things being equal, no single element of the game should trump any other element, so surviving whether by pikes, guns, traps, staying out of reach, walling yourself off, running, convincing someone to do the fighting for you, or psychically throwing zombies away, should accomplish the same goal: to not get bit, to not get scratched, to not contract an illness and die, and rise again. To find water, and shelter, and food.
Working together should bring about things like infrastructure, and that should be a game unto itself. The casual player should be able to log in and have fun, but the canny player should be able to find other like-minded players and create something of value to them. Enough people working on it, can make the local water plant produce clean water, just the same as digging a well, or tracking a fresh spring down. Enough people on it, can make electricity by wind power, pedal power, solar power, water power, etc. The casuals should be able to get by without doing any of the above, just not reaping better benefits in the process. (E.g., they can have gear, just not the best gear in the game.)
The true story is in whether any given faction tries to take from others - that's what makes it survival horror. Do people sacrifice one another, so they can escape. Do people hold up traits like character, honor, decency, and try to avoid barbarity. Are the rules for doing so any better than what the barbarians are doing? E.g., is the ex-lawman's willingness to execute people at the end of his guns in the name of justice any different than the cannibal gang willing to eat their neighbors for a good meal. Your Morality system should be a central emphasis for both casual and hardcore players.
I think regional issues are super important to the overall story. Who is checking on the local nuclear reactor? Is the pressure in the damn upriver going to eventually be a problem? Is there any kind of fallout from burning cities, burning states, such that weather becomes a factor. Was there enough widespread destruction that nuclear winter happens? It isn't just about finding a place to grow crops. That works if you are distant enough from civil engineering that you aren't in a situation where the things we have - that we never consider - that protect us from man-made dooms like floods don't, unmanned, become catastrophes. If the collapse of civilization is fast enough, has no warning, then a lot of systems are left unchecked. Not everyone turns the light off and walks out with a secured facility. And I don't know about you, but I sure don't know how to turn off a freakin' nuclear reactor.
This isn't even mentioning things like blizzards, hurricanes, tornados, pick your region, and the like, which now can come upon us without warnings we had in the past. Can you tell if the sea is rising for some reason fast enough to make escape from coastal regions possible?
The average person likes to believe they are pretty capable, but when the chips are down, the people who know how to swap out a part on an engine, or even the difference between types of engines, know the difference between something poisonous and safe to eat, know how to check water's safety, know how to start a fire unassisted, know how to keep smoke from signaling others that you're there, know how to live in the wild without power bars and mountain bikes, know how to survive in cold or hot conditions for really real and not with their REI purchases, know how to conserve and make choices like what's more perishable and what's more collectable. They're few and far between, and not every PC will have the Streetwise, Survival, Investigation, or Academics and Science to know. Even ranch hands and farmers don't necessarily know what you think they should. Every skill should count, from Larceny to hide your food, to Politics, to sense if the new Mayor is in fact a cannibal, and the Merits that you allow should be extensions of them. Again, the casual player can ignore nearly everything, but the hardcore player should be enjoying the process of wielding what they have traded their Experience for, and reaping the failures of what they're not covered for.
Finally, I highly suggest creating an actual inventory system so that people can play that mini game of collecting things. These give tangible benefits already within the system, like bonuses to rolls in Skills. By making everything have uses, from a bar you swing at something's head, to the rounds in a gun, to the number of times a door to your hideout can stand an assault, you can obtain something and have to re-obtain it, meaning that the benefits are constantly wanted while the casual player simply goes without them.
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@Ganymede: I'm with @Coin on this one for the most part. Mortal+/Hunter sounds like an excellent place to start. If you want to bring in Endowments later, I don't personally think that's a terribad idea as long as you're mostly sticking to ones that make sense with the theme (ie, since your zombies as you described them are sci-fi Last Of Us zombies, maybe TFV's arsenal and...I'm not sure what else? I need to re-read Hunter).
EDIT: I think some altered/customized Cheiron Group Thaumatechnology would be pretty bad-ass, especially if you wind up having Resident Evil-style super zeds.
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@Wizz said:
@Ganymede: I'm with @Coin on this one for the most part. Mortal+/Hunter sounds like an excellent place to start. If you want to bring in Endowments later, I don't personally think that's a terribad idea as long as you're mostly sticking to ones that make sense with the theme (ie, since your zombies as you described them are sci-fi Last Of Us zombies, maybe TFV's arsenal and...I'm not sure what else? I need to re-read Hunter).
EDIT: I think some altered/customized Cheiron Group Thaumatechnology would be pretty bad-ass, especially if you wind up having Resident Evil-style super zeds.
That's one of the beauties of one of the first WoD books that came out, Antagonists. The Zombie Creation Kit is probably the best thing ever for that.
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After discussing with Bennie, I'm leaning towards Mortals, period. Maybe we'll start with Mortal+ powers, maybe not. Maybe we'll start with Endowments or Gutter Magic, maybe not. Haven't really thought all the way through; I'm occupied with coming up with system and proposed code to handle property and resource management.
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@Ganymede said:
After discussing with Bennie, I'm leaning towards Mortals, period. Maybe we'll start with Mortal+ powers, maybe not. Maybe we'll start with Endowments or Gutter Magic, maybe not. Haven't really thought all the way through; I'm occupied with coming up with system and proposed code to handle property and resource management.
Leave off the +. Start with Mortals. It's easier to add crunch to your game than to take it away. If you'd like help with anything let me know. I'm interested in seeing a Mortal game get off the ground.
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I like the idea of at least GMC mortal+ content. It adds a little bit of that edge against the darkness and I personally prefer playing something other than a straight mortal.
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@Glitch said:
I like the idea of at least GMC mortal+ content. It adds a little bit of that edge against the darkness and I personally prefer playing something other than a straight mortal.
My only problem with that it starts feeling like a superhero game then. Psychics against monsters.
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@Admiral Or, a TV show like Supernatural/Constantine/Sleepy Hollow/ect which, in my mind is kinda cool. Rituals, artifacts, and all kinds of interesting plot hooks.
Then when it's all over and the rest of you are ready for Dead Animal Pickup, I'm gonna go balls deep into Dahl. But only because she asked me to. Sweet-like. - Riddick (2013)
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@ThatOneDude @Glitch @Admiral
I'm leaning towards allowing limited Mortal+ things. All will be outlined in a handy manual I'm putting together.
My first goal, though, is to get the game set up. And then, I'm forcing myself to learn how to handle code I borrow from others, so that I don't need to bug them constantly to maintain it. I intend to adapt some code for my own purposes too, but I haven't been able to locate a coder yet willing to assist on a more full-time basis.
Still, though: no harm in trying to get started.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede, if it's a MU, Theno is currently working on GMC game-wide code including Conditions, Tilts, Aspirations, etc. It might be all you need in one easy package.
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@ThatOneDude said:
@Admiral Or, a TV show like Supernatural/Constantine/Sleepy Hollow/ect which, in my mind is kinda cool. Rituals, artifacts, and all kinds of interesting plot hooks.
Eh... Supernatural is at its weakest when the main characters have powers. Sam having psychic powers was totally groanworthy. What was more interesting was the psychic villains they faced, to be honest.
Sleepy Hollow's two main characters have no powers, and the 'protagonist' characters that do have powers are generally derided as the weakest/most annoying characters on the show. I'm looking at you, Katrina.
Constantine is the exception here, and I think it's a fantastic show. I just don't see the 'hedge mages solving problems' thing as working well without a custom gutter magic system.
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@Admiral Right, but I use the show(s) to reference not just the "powers" the characters have, but, the whole theme of relics found to do X, book to do X, ect ect. Rituals and all the things lead to ways of providing plot hooks and the like.
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@ThatOneDude said:
@Admiral Right, but I use the show(s) to reference not just the "powers" the characters have, but, the whole theme of relics found to do X, book to do X, ect ect. Rituals and all the things lead to ways of providing plot hooks and the like.
I'm fine with relics and artifacts and funky stuff. I just prefer the characters themselves to have no innate magic powers.
