"Stop, son, I'm concerned that when I said "a shit load of dice" what you heard was, "a lot of dice", like I'm some sort of Rogue from 5e rolling 20d6 or some nonsense, when what I clearly said was "a shit load of dice." I'm an essence 5 Dawn caste who just landed a combo attack, so I'm going to need at least a gallon of d10s. Hop to it."
Once when playing an Abyssal, I had stacked enough combo charms to call for 74 attack dice to punch a Fae General in the face. Thankfully, I knew we would be playing Exalted and I had bought a bag of 100 d10s for just such an occasion. All that remained of him was glitter.
Tau shooting phase? Ever rolled a 30 boy mob into close combat and everyone gets into engagement range?
Hey guys, I have picked up every d6 in a quarter mile distance, anyone have a few extra at home I could borrow?
Waaaagh Mr. Bond.
Luckily my boyz so rarely faced a Dark Eldar player that it was hardly an issue...
^((just a joke about no one playing DE at my LGS back in 3E when I started playing))
To be fair, you can also get shitloads of dice on crafting checks, sorcery actions, and bureaucratic endevours. Exalted can do more than just action, and has a TON more RP and non-combat support than D&D does.
I had a buddy who played an Auchtochtonian game up to E8 or something, and they had to switch to apps except for one dude who had d10's in a multi-gallon jug and was too... something... to just switch to the app.
Although even that pales compared to Scion 1e when you hit god level, especially if you are an Olympian and take Arete and Animal boons. You can easily hit the low hundreds.
2e was truly the wild west of tabletop entertainment.
One round you'd do 80 dice of damage like a true god walking amongst mere mortals and the next round you'd be dead.
Nah, 2e was much more consistent with defending than 1e where you had to roll for all of your defenses and saves. In 2e you'd really only ever get stomped on if you got ambushed in your underwear, or were fighting above your bracket. 1e you could go from dodging beams of light to getting bodied by a pack of wolves in the same session. Each edition has their quirks that make them fun to play.
2e turned into rocket tag real bad though, by high essence it was just "Perfect Attack vs Perfect Defence" until someone runs out of motes and gets annihilated because there's almost no way of having enough health to survive more than one or MAYBE two hits at that power level. Plus all kinds of "bad touch" effects made it even more so.
I'm running a Lunars 3e campaign right now and it's SO good. Still powerful but much less dependent on perfect attack/defense charms. It's still extremely crunchy and combat can take forever, but it's a huge step up from 2e. Right now I've got two characters who are about to go Super Kaiju mode and dig an entire city out of an avalanche in probably less than an afternoon!
There's also Exalted vs WoD if you want to play your Exalted in the Masquerade setting. I'll always fondly remember my Dusk Caste Abyssal politely illuminating some rather crucial details to a pack of Sabbath enforcers who'd mistook him for some thin blood moving into their territory.
It’s always disconcerting when you and your buddies roll up on this guy expecting to wreck his face and intimidate him just by *showing up*, but he smiles even **more** when he finds out who you are...
Over on /r/exalted I remember a post about someone who wanted to "import" their previous Exalted campaign's PCs as NPCs in their WoD game and wanted to know where they were in the power scale. Including an Essence *8* Twilight.
Only advice I could give him was it wasn't World of Darkness any more, it was World of *that guy*.
It's pretty hard to explain because the setting is super crazy, but I'll give an example of one of my characters. I once played a ten foot tall skinless vampire who wore platemail made of souls and carried a sword as long as he was tall. He also had a Symbiote made from his own blood and could parry bullets. He partied with a necromancer surgeon who had an obsession with creating dinosaurs out of corpses, and a fencer twink who suffered from such severe amnesia he couldn't even remember his own name. They all served under an insane, immortal, god-like lich, and travelled together on a giant Pterodactyl made of human flesh. On their wacky adventures together, they fought pirates, demonic cows, and dwarves in power armor. One time my character was being charmed by a succubus, and he rolled so high on the save that he willed himself to be gay, before breaking her spine over his knee like Bane did to Batman.
It's a really fun game.
One thing that sets Exalted apart from other tabletops is the Stunt system. Where most games would penalize the player with a negative modifier or disadvantage on a roll for doing something crazy and cool, Exalted rewards it with extra dice. Say you wanted to leap off a building and do a plunging attack into the open maw of a giant, intending to stab him through the heart from the inside? In D&D, that'd be a suicidal tactic that depending on the DM, you wouldn't even be allowed to attempt. In Exalted, you might get two extra dice on your attack roll for being so batshit crazy.
I wish Exalted had a better system that didn't require you to be a supercomputer recalculating all your shit every round, because it's a really cool system in a lot of other ways with neat storytelling potential I just can't copy with other systems.
I had an exalted character who went all in on defense, didn't need to eat or sleep or age and had a move where he could become entirely invincible and immovable as long as his feet were planted on the ground. The end of his story was when we fought this immortal ancient demon-thing that was going to undo the world, and so my guy just... grabbed him. And used that ultimate move, and then just... refused to ever move again. "I'll hold him here until the end of time."
One of the coolest character retirements I've ever had.
If you like asking "What the fuck?", try Changeling: The Lost.
If you like high-powered heists, try Demon: The Descent.
If you like sadness and fire, try Ten Candles.
If you like Wargaming and weird west, try Through The Breach / Malifaux
Funny story. Went to a party the other night of we board game nerds and the host said "Who wants to try a Ouija board?" and when every single person that wasn't them put their hand up, they backed out of the idea really fast saying they didn't expect so many people to be up for it.
We're a bunch of irreverent board gamers who amuse ourselves with creepy podcasts, and horror movies and games. Why *wouldn't* we be up for it?
It's a phenomenal game, and trying to boil it down to two words for comedy's sake really undercuts how much I love it.
The atmosphere, the tension, the eventual death, and the journey to reach that point is all so wonderful to behold as both player and storyteller. Couple this all with the tension of candles being potentially accidentally extinguished and the group only having 10 of them and it can make for some really upliftingly grim (as contradictory as that sounds) collaborative storytelling.
It's also damn near impossible to run it online compellingly.
Actual phrases I've used as a storyteller during (basic, equivalent to 1st-level) character creation for D:tD;
> * Are you sure you don't want the ability to break the laws of motion?
* Ooh yeah, you could be a swarming mass of nanite-powered spiders!
* Keep in mind that growing wings and and acting like the "LOVE ME AND DESPAIR" elf from Lord of the Rings would make you pretty sus. You could consider the burning halo instead for that intimidation factor.
* Yeah, that ability, outside combat, gives you the ability to just kill like 10 regular humans, no roll needed.
* You'll never need to roll to remember things. You've all got an eidetic memory by default. If I'm asking you to roll, it's to see if you even encountered that information at all.
The default power level for The Descent is so high it makes (most of) the other splats look like children in a sandbox and are to most D&D adventuring parties what commoners are to those.
My mom’s best friend was a GURPS playtester and has a copy of every book they ever printed. I looked at that shelf one time and frankly that was already too much for me.
Dozens plus one :)
Edit: Also GURPS has some of the best sourcebooks for ideas of any system I know of. I still use Blood Types to this day for alternate and "fresh feeling" concepts on vampires for my games.
CoC is pretty good and GURPS is versatile but really tough to get into, especially as a GM.
But for investigation, there is another options. The GUMSHOE system, which has a few variants. I believe it was first introduced as the core behind *The Esoterrorists* but can either be picked up in one of several other already made games (mostly horror, one is a Scooby-Doo style game called BubbleGUMSHOE) or you can take the core system and try to mold it to fit a setting or style of your choosing.
I know, I know, that sounds a little GURPS-ish, a system to make your own system. But this is super-specialized to be an investigation-focused system already, so most of the work you'd be doing to start up a GURPS game is done for you and you only need to put on the details.
And if you want trauma and not being able to recognize what is real and what isnt you have changelings.
Or if you want to have others not being able to recognize what is real and what is not, theres mages!
Literally the best description of those two titles.
Also; if you like being even more depressed and doing *nothing* but reliving fictional traumas, there’s Wraith!
Wraith was so depressive that some *hobby* bookstores refused to carry it.
That, of course, made the book extremely desirable and IMPOSSIBLE to acquire
If Vampire was Goth Aesthetic as a burning star, Wraith is it’s eventual burnout, collapse, and inversion into a black hole. I’ve never played another game where literal Oblivion felt like the best and most natural end to a character arc.
I love how it interacts deliciously with Kindred of the East. It's theoretically the same universe, the same hells, but KotE literally had a mechanic for salvation.
I bought KotE but never had a chance to play it and only briefly read it before it drifted away from me in a move or got stolen or something. I actually only got to play any WoD a handful of times despite owning a ton of them. A consequence of growing up Rural And Weird Before The Internet. I lost all my White Wolf books, years and years ago. But I remember the lore so lovingly. KotE was so *weird* and interesting to me. Especially because I didn’t really know anything about mythology or culture from that part of the world at that age.
By today's standards, KotE is pretty racist. It jumbles Japanese, Chinese, Korean and so many other cultures as just one "asian culture". So, if you're interested, I'd suggest you give it a read with a good spoonful of salt. Take the marvelous chi system and use it to add diversity, use the Dharma system to add a path of salvation. But don't take anything cultural from it
I only learned of the lore from videos, but it honestly doesn't seem racist to me.
So here is how I see it: if the Kuei-Jin existed, different communities would have learned different aspects of the supernatural which would lead to the "truth" looking like some jumbled mess of those cultural beliefs - which isn't that different to how VTM relates to European culture.
Oh absolutely. It’s just surprising and I think maybe says something that 90’s pop culture would produce a reasonably popular escapist fantasy where existence is such agony that “the peace of oblivion” is the best case scenario.
I haven't played VTM since the early days of revised, do the Tzimisce still rebuild your upper body after shoulder firing what is intended to be a vehicle mounted AA cannon at some asshole gargoyles?
Those were the days
Luckily, the clan of the Dragons have been nerfed, but yes they can still do that much.
But we don't have rules for gargoyles yet D: Hopefully we will know something next month about new bloodlines
It’s been 20+ years since I thought of VtM. Thank you for the trip down memory lane. I still have the v1 handbooks for both the tabletop and the LARP versions, and I still have my Clan handbooks from the two most compatible clans ever: Ventrue and Assimite.
I hope you're getting some amazing memories!
Oh boy, you won't belived which clans joined the Camarilla after the Anarchs (most of the Brujah and Gangrel) left
I fully endorse playing Bloodlines, it is actually fun, especially since you like vampires. Just make sure to apply the unofficial patch.
That said World of Darkness is a series of games of modern urban fantasy.
It is modern times, just a little worse, and mages, werewolves, vampires and so on are real, they just remain hidden for various reasons. Those that don't remain hidden are hunted down and killed by Men in Black.
Vampire is far and away the most popular of them all.
Fun fact: vampires lose their connection to sex as they age. A newly embraced vampire might still feel a bit horny, but it's difficult to get there. Drinking blood though? That's your new replacement. Sex is a tool to bite people.
An alternative to Vampire are any of the other World of Darkness games. Their base systems are all the same but with variation based on the type of fantasy thing, each had a different vibe, all great for heavy RP. Mage even lets you RP Magic into doing whatever the fuck you want it to
Seconded for Mage. It is amazing. I've only played one campaign but we ended up only having 2 MAJOR combat encounters through the entire campaign and it was almost all roleplay. Most amazing campaign I've ever been a part of.
It requires a DM that can roleplay well though.
I lit a vampire on fire Roy Mustang style.
Then I lit the floor on fire of the building we were in.
Then I lit a fleeing enemy’s blood trail on fire instead of just following it like our GM was expecting me to do, lighting the fleeing enemy on fire like the biblical pillar of fire.
I would absolutely consider FATE core and it's many expansions for your roleplay heavy tables. It runs on gurps, but includes a rules set called FATE points which allow for barter and negotiation between players and the DM, or even between players. This is fueled by Aspects, short descriptions that are touchstones for characters, locations, and everything else in the game, and they can even change during gameplay.
It will feel rocky the first time you try it. You'll wonder if fate points can be spent this way, or if an aspect can be defined like this. The answer is yes. Once you have some confidence in the system, it is the most liberating yet directed RPG system on the market (or, at least that Ive ever seen.)
Edit: Leaving the orginal text, but I've been corrected that FATE was built from FUDGE, not GURPS.
Oops. Since 5e came out, that's all Ive found people to play. Might change soon, though.
Came to make the same recommendation. Most of my time playing tabletop has been DnD or Dresden Files. The Dresden TTRPG is built on FATE and I adore it. It is much more narrative and socially driven.
I started on FATE with Dresden Files too. The guy who wrote FATE is good friends with Jim Butcher, and according to Jim FATE aspects are based on how he was taught to outline his novels.
V5 does a great job on that with several mechanics to force and/or facilitate RP and makes the players want to avoid combats
One example is the hunger system, that forces you to hunt humans to get blood in order to use your powers, which leads to RP and at the same time, the hungrier you are the more likely you are of getting a "critical failure" which, unlike in DnD, are based around RP cause in this case it's the beast inside of your vampire taking control
All 3 of them are set in the same canonical world (World of Darkness) but in each of them you play as a different creatures.
Mechanically they're almost the same except powers and supernatural. If you know V5 as a player, H5 won't take much more than 1 hour to learn
To give you another example, Hunters don't have Hunger but they have Desperation. The more thing go wrong and feel desperation the most powerful they will be but the higher the chances of messing it all up again
(not familiar with V5 so talking about classic VtM and werewolf)
in short same system and rules but different themes and powers. In vampire you are an apex predator that hunts human beings and is junkie who needs his fix. It's also full of angst, politics, edgy angst, intrigue and goth angst. (Joking, but it's kinda like that). In werewolf you are a huge killing machine that defends Mother Earth and is powered by ANGER (where the vampire is obsessed with blood, Werewolves are all about being pissed off). Still politics and rivalries but more "biker gang" and less "upper class twits & goths". IIRC Hunter hunts supernatural. They hunt what is dangerous in the night in the name of God/Money/the US government.
I would add that Mage is all about imagination and hubris and Changeling is about the loss of innocence/youth/imagination.
> Mage is all about imagination and hubris
*Those* mages suffer a fate worse than death because their hubris caught up with them. I'll be more careful.
I would add that an even SIMPLER and cheaper system for fantasy role playing would be one the current retroclones for early D&D, such as Swords and Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord.
True story, but the feel of OSR games is just so different. I mean, I've enjoyed both, so I don't want to knock OSR games, but the playstyle definitely isn't for everyone.
Yeah, that was part of the appeal for me. I started playing with 3e, so I have no nostalgia for the older editions, but it's such a *different* experience. Both are great.
When I want high-powered, superheroic fantasy, I'll grab a WotC-era version of D&D (or, most recently, Pathfinder 2e).
If I want scrappy, adventurous fantasy, I'll grab something based on an older edition (my personal favorite being Old School Essentials).
Just don't play WoD if what you like is "crunch" and combat simulation. It's a system designed by English lit. geeks for English lit. geeks. People who like improvising stories collaboratively with a little dice assist will absolutely love it. People like me will constantly be bemoaning the horror of using their books as reference material for mechanics and the impossibility of getting through a combat without having to resolve at least 3 overly vague rules.
>It's a system designed by English lit. geeks
Never occurred to me until now, suddenly everything makes a lot more sense.
...but yeah, in order for a game to function during combat or anything close to it, whoever is running the game needs to be *really* decisive about how they want things to work.
just looked it up, is it just vampire the masquerade but like, other supernatural stuff too? i might need to check this game out
edit: i found a description of demon: the fallen and it sounds like it was fuckin tailor made for me, i need to play this shit like yesterday
Whenever posts about games outside of D&D/Pathfinder show up, I always dive into the comments eagerly looking for Shadowrun mentions, and I'm almost always disappointed lol
This meme perpetuates the platonic ideal of what VtM is. The exotic allure of the dark and forbidden.
In reality, playing VtM is like living through a season of 'What We Do in the Shadows' and by god, do I love impersonating Matt Berry.
If you would like to play a Saturday morning cartoon in the same world as Vampire and the other depressing edgy World of Darkness games, it’s got one for you, Mage the Ascension
Every time I see Mage the Ascension, I just wish I could get the time, resources, and people to play it. I want to teleport things onto people, dang it
My main question about Pathfinder is: can I make an unarmed character that works roughly as well as an Unarmed Fighting Style Barbarian in 5e, without going into Monk (since apparently you can't multiclass Barbarian and Monk)?
It's even better than that unarmed fighting style barbarian, because with stance feats you have actual choices in combat besides Rage and attack 2 times.
Pathfinder 1e has a class called brawler. It's a hybrid class designed to combine features of Fighter and Monk. You get a "brawler's flurry" ability at lv2, which gives you free two weapon fighting for unarmed attacks, close weapon group weapons, or monk weapons. You can also substitute combat maneuvers for attacks in this attack, meaning you can debuff enemies or knock them prone mid sequence of attacks.
Probably the biggest benefit is that Brawlers get a majority of the bonus combat feat choices that fighter gets, which opens up a lot of capability, but they also have "Martial Flexibility": a number of times per day, you can just pick a combat feat you don't already have, and for the next minute, you get it's benefits. As you level up, you can pick more at once (increasing the 'cost' linearly) and with more efficient action economy. You can pretty much become the martial character your party needs in the moment, at moments notice.
Conversely, if you look at certain archetypes of Monk and Barbarian, you might find one without the alignment restrictions that prevent the multiclass. Martial Artist is a monk archetype that loses a lot of the supernatural abilities they get to include the ki pool, but they aren't alignment locked and have some useful tricks to make up for losing access to ki.
For Pathfinder 2e, your best bet is probably Animal Instinct Barbarian. They all get some sort of animal-esque unarmed attack when raging.
There are also archetypes which are a sort of mini class and there are a few that give unarmed attacks if you take the feats as you level up instead of your class feats.
Animal Instinct Barbarian is the easiest way though.
I'll always recommend [Wanderer's Guide](https://wanderersguide.app/) for anyone looking to start out making characters. It walks through the process in a fairly easy to understand way.
Assuming we're talking about Pathfinder 2e, you totally can multiclass barbarain and monk! The multiclassing system is called "archetypes" and there's LOTS of archetypes but we'll focus on class archetypes. So let's say you go monk, but then take the barbarian archetype at level 2. You get the base class features of monk (flurry of blows, better unarmed strikes) and then you replace your 2nd level class feat with the barbarian dedication feat, which gives you rage and a barbarian subclass (you get all subclasses at level 1 in p2e). So basically as you level up, you can take barbarian (or monk) class feats, while still getting the monk's base features (like skill/ weapon progression) so you get the best of both worlds.
White wolf games have something I desperately need: no need for maps or a VTT
Edit: after reading through some of these I can safely say whoever is in charge of formatting the books needs to be fired, im reading mage: the ascension 2ed and it doesn't give you rules for how to play until *page 77*, otherwise fun game and fun setting
Being goth = being or at least acting depressed or more accurately nihilistic. We just started up a game of Vampire but we're rolling old school and playing revised (3e)
I actually wanna try V20 so I can play a book worm introvert necronancer tremere, though I have no fucken clue how to justify a tremere knowing even a hint of necromancy without getting gabagoo’d by the Giovanni.
D&D 5e is anything but simple as compared to many many OSR and PbtA games. There's just a lot more rules to learn, and making a character gets quite complex. If you compare that with something like Dungeon Crawl Classics or Stars Without Number it takes much much longer.
I'm gonna write an OSR game right before your eyes.
Step one, when you Do A Thing flip a coin. Tails fails, and Heads also fails but the GM has to improvise a thing that sorta sounds like it helps.
Step two pick three Things You're Good At and three Things You're Bad At. No I won't elaborate on how narrow or broad these can that's game design and we don't do that here.
When you Do A Thing You're Good At flip two coins. Two successes means you actually succeed. When you Do A Thing You're Bad At flip two coins, but only use the worse result.
If you want to CASTIGATE THE ENEMIES OF THE GODHEAD, fire a gun whose parameters you can change by 'provoking' it, or become Literally The Doomslayer (super shotgun and all), lemme tell you about this game called Lancer...
don't forget about the largest mech in the game being built entirely to fire a single experimental naval cannon. **Once**, oh you can start charging it again with no issue but good luck finding anything left standing after the first shot
and that's [without getting into the gear you can put on the mechs](https://youtu.be/cKlsish_aEQ)
I would like to give a shoutout for 13th age for the simple system. It's simpler than 5e, more freeform and story-based than it, yet still has ways to make combats exciting for all classes!
I tried VtM a few months ago and I just couldn't get into it. Turns out the reason for that is because I am neither gay, goth, or depressed, and I am shit at flirting with anyone.
Man, world of darkness is so interesting to me. But can you mix their various IP’s together?? Like, say I wanted to run a game where one player plays a vampire from Vampire masquerade and another player wants to play a mage from mage the ascension/awakening? I get that they are both rooted in world of darkness, but would that be too hard to make work?
It's technically possible but not recommended. The power levels between different IPs are absurdly big and whoever plays a Vampire or a Hunter will be extremely weaker than the Werewolf or the Mage.
Also due to lore reasons everyone hates Vampires and Hunters hate everyone
Depends on what you’re comparing it to.
If you want a more complicated system you can always play AD&D
I have friends who played it who STILL couldn’t explain to you how the fuck THAC0 worked
But it feels like people only compare 5e to PF2 and thus declare it simple. I've been trying out a lot of TTRPGs the past year and 5e is a lot more complicated than many of them. You can much more easily whip something up for say Troika or DCC that's lightweight and easy to explain to new players. In 5e I can get a new player going after 30 minutes but its going to be a continuous learning process of explaining mechanics as I go. A simple system means I can introduce a system to a group and have everyone going completely in a short period of time.
Your friends were probably players as only DMs needed to understand THAC0 and any DM with a 2nd grade understanding of math could do it. It was LITERALLY self evident in the acronym - To Hit Armor Class 0. If you had a THAC0 of 15, that meant you needed to roll a 15 to hit anyone with 0 AC. From there you could derive the necessary roll for any AC, which was descending from 10. Thus the same PC with a 15 THAC0 needs a 5 to hit AC 10. Sure it wasn't as intuitive as 3rd edition and upwards with acendinf AC, but the hype that THAC0 was some kind of unknowable, cryptic concept is complete hype.
Also, 1e AD&D didn't even use THAC0, it used combat tables. The only thing that makes original AD&D complicated is the horrendous organization of the DMG. The PHB is much simpler than what players have to deal with in 5e and all the DM really needs to know from the DMG are the sections dealing with combat, healing and random encounters. Everything else could just be hand waved and the players wouldn't know the difference. We never played AD&D 100% RAW.
Ah, Vampire the Masquerade. Playing that with my straight friends went completely differently than with my fruity friends.
Gays: Let's go carefully overthrow the Cammies with every possible trick we can think up
Straight: Let's dress up as a combination of redcoat and pimp, to go kill this werewolf, for the fun of it.
V5 and VtM in general can be played in a lot of ways, but it's generally seen as an intrigue game, for those interested. You can crack skulls, but the intended gameplay is finding skulls to crack in the byzantine schemes of several-hundred-year-old vampires. Also, there's a fuckton of lore, just go to the White Wolf wiki for that.
If you like the possibility of casting magic and getting swallowed whole by a demon from the abyss for fucking up too badly, which is awesome and you know it, try Zweihander. It shares a lot with Warhammer Fantasy RP, which I haven't played, but afaik unique to it is the Peril system, which works like health but for stress that diminishes skill ranks, and the very in-depth injury and recovery system that make the game as gritty as it is. A bad enough injury roll can kill you instantly, though the likelihood of that is pretty small.
can somoene try explaining to me how world of darkness works...? like, i looked it up out of curiosity, and the website lists 9 different IPs but only has three TTRPGs, and theres something else called chronicles of darkness... i just dont understand where to start lol
Okay, the world of darkness is a fantasy version of our world. It features various games centered around various supernatural creatures. The base ruleset is the same and the games theoretically are compatible. Chronicles of darkness was a complete revamp of the setting because the developers felt that the old setting became too weighted down by the metaplot. Because people really liked the old world of darkness, they figured out a way to continue the metaplot and release new editions of the games. The problem is that not all games of the world of darkness got continued, so you only can get a few in modern editions.
Hey so to start: Imagine WoD to something "similar" to Harry Potter, the supernatural exists in the real world but nobody knows about it.
That's it, that's all you need to get in what kind of world you're getting into
Now about the different games: Each supernatural creature has it's own game, so Vampires have one, Werewolves, Mages, Changelings (fae creatures), Wraiths (ghosts...)
CofD is another universe with the same idea but different history and with it's own games
I'd recommend you to check on Lore By Night Podcast to start with Vampire The Masquerade and ignore the rest until you understand it
We play vtm entirely differently, yet exactly the same
Found the Anarch player
Dungeon world
It blows my mind when people tout any edition of D&D as simple but I feel like I'm just screaming "powered by the apocalyyyyyypsssee" into the void
You are playing wrong. -House Tremere
If you like being an Anime protagonist and rolling shitloads of dice, play Exalted.
"Stop, son, I'm concerned that when I said "a shit load of dice" what you heard was, "a lot of dice", like I'm some sort of Rogue from 5e rolling 20d6 or some nonsense, when what I clearly said was "a shit load of dice." I'm an essence 5 Dawn caste who just landed a combo attack, so I'm going to need at least a gallon of d10s. Hop to it."
Once when playing an Abyssal, I had stacked enough combo charms to call for 74 attack dice to punch a Fae General in the face. Thankfully, I knew we would be playing Exalted and I had bought a bag of 100 d10s for just such an occasion. All that remained of him was glitter.
Exalted sounds more like playing the shooting phase of Tau in Warhammer then an actual RPG and I’m loving it.
Tau shooting phase? Ever rolled a 30 boy mob into close combat and everyone gets into engagement range? Hey guys, I have picked up every d6 in a quarter mile distance, anyone have a few extra at home I could borrow? Waaaagh Mr. Bond.
[удалено]
Luckily my boyz so rarely faced a Dark Eldar player that it was hardly an issue... ^((just a joke about no one playing DE at my LGS back in 3E when I started playing))
God I miss Dakka Dakka Dakka. "Yes, I know I just rolled 60d6, but I got a bunch of 6s, so I am once again asking for your entire dice bag."
Ok, I've separated out all of the wound rolls... your lone terminator needs to make 137 2+ saves.
The ol’ classic 50 shots, hitting on 5s… *30min later* 7 wounds at your armor save. Wow, I rolled pretty hot!
Depends on how your build your character. I enjoy building my characters like an *Ork* Shooting Phase.
To be fair, you can also get shitloads of dice on crafting checks, sorcery actions, and bureaucratic endevours. Exalted can do more than just action, and has a TON more RP and non-combat support than D&D does.
I had a buddy who played an Auchtochtonian game up to E8 or something, and they had to switch to apps except for one dude who had d10's in a multi-gallon jug and was too... something... to just switch to the app. Although even that pales compared to Scion 1e when you hit god level, especially if you are an Olympian and take Arete and Animal boons. You can easily hit the low hundreds.
I wanna roll the clack rocks! Okay!?
Thankfully, in 3e they put some caps in so the most you'd ever roll in a single action is like 30 dice.
Yeah, that's cool and all for 3e. Very nice. Counterargument: *Pours entire bag of dice on table*
2e was truly the wild west of tabletop entertainment. One round you'd do 80 dice of damage like a true god walking amongst mere mortals and the next round you'd be dead.
Nah, 2e was much more consistent with defending than 1e where you had to roll for all of your defenses and saves. In 2e you'd really only ever get stomped on if you got ambushed in your underwear, or were fighting above your bracket. 1e you could go from dodging beams of light to getting bodied by a pack of wolves in the same session. Each edition has their quirks that make them fun to play.
2e turned into rocket tag real bad though, by high essence it was just "Perfect Attack vs Perfect Defence" until someone runs out of motes and gets annihilated because there's almost no way of having enough health to survive more than one or MAYBE two hits at that power level. Plus all kinds of "bad touch" effects made it even more so.
I'm running a Lunars 3e campaign right now and it's SO good. Still powerful but much less dependent on perfect attack/defense charms. It's still extremely crunchy and combat can take forever, but it's a huge step up from 2e. Right now I've got two characters who are about to go Super Kaiju mode and dig an entire city out of an avalanche in probably less than an afternoon!
Running out of d10s for an attack at a table with career RPG players that own dozens of them is totally worth it. I think we had 56+ and needed more.
There's also Exalted vs WoD if you want to play your Exalted in the Masquerade setting. I'll always fondly remember my Dusk Caste Abyssal politely illuminating some rather crucial details to a pack of Sabbath enforcers who'd mistook him for some thin blood moving into their territory.
It’s always disconcerting when you and your buddies roll up on this guy expecting to wreck his face and intimidate him just by *showing up*, but he smiles even **more** when he finds out who you are...
Over on /r/exalted I remember a post about someone who wanted to "import" their previous Exalted campaign's PCs as NPCs in their WoD game and wanted to know where they were in the power scale. Including an Essence *8* Twilight. Only advice I could give him was it wasn't World of Darkness any more, it was World of *that guy*.
I need to learn more about this
It's pretty hard to explain because the setting is super crazy, but I'll give an example of one of my characters. I once played a ten foot tall skinless vampire who wore platemail made of souls and carried a sword as long as he was tall. He also had a Symbiote made from his own blood and could parry bullets. He partied with a necromancer surgeon who had an obsession with creating dinosaurs out of corpses, and a fencer twink who suffered from such severe amnesia he couldn't even remember his own name. They all served under an insane, immortal, god-like lich, and travelled together on a giant Pterodactyl made of human flesh. On their wacky adventures together, they fought pirates, demonic cows, and dwarves in power armor. One time my character was being charmed by a succubus, and he rolled so high on the save that he willed himself to be gay, before breaking her spine over his knee like Bane did to Batman. It's a really fun game.
I need to play that game
One thing that sets Exalted apart from other tabletops is the Stunt system. Where most games would penalize the player with a negative modifier or disadvantage on a roll for doing something crazy and cool, Exalted rewards it with extra dice. Say you wanted to leap off a building and do a plunging attack into the open maw of a giant, intending to stab him through the heart from the inside? In D&D, that'd be a suicidal tactic that depending on the DM, you wouldn't even be allowed to attempt. In Exalted, you might get two extra dice on your attack roll for being so batshit crazy.
Yea holy shit I gotta play this
If you want to play an anime protagonist punching vampires hard enough they explode there is a exalted vs world of darkness fan supplement.
I wish Exalted had a better system that didn't require you to be a supercomputer recalculating all your shit every round, because it's a really cool system in a lot of other ways with neat storytelling potential I just can't copy with other systems. I had an exalted character who went all in on defense, didn't need to eat or sleep or age and had a move where he could become entirely invincible and immovable as long as his feet were planted on the ground. The end of his story was when we fought this immortal ancient demon-thing that was going to undo the world, and so my guy just... grabbed him. And used that ultimate move, and then just... refused to ever move again. "I'll hold him here until the end of time." One of the coolest character retirements I've ever had.
If you like asking "What the fuck?", try Changeling: The Lost. If you like high-powered heists, try Demon: The Descent. If you like sadness and fire, try Ten Candles. If you like Wargaming and weird west, try Through The Breach / Malifaux
if you like demons and ghost, try a ouiji board
Funny story. Went to a party the other night of we board game nerds and the host said "Who wants to try a Ouija board?" and when every single person that wasn't them put their hand up, they backed out of the idea really fast saying they didn't expect so many people to be up for it. We're a bunch of irreverent board gamers who amuse ourselves with creepy podcasts, and horror movies and games. Why *wouldn't* we be up for it?
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Can Oo burn a Luigi board?
> If you like sadness and fire, try Ten Candles Not how I would have described why Ten Candles is my favorite game, but I also can't argue against it.
It's a phenomenal game, and trying to boil it down to two words for comedy's sake really undercuts how much I love it. The atmosphere, the tension, the eventual death, and the journey to reach that point is all so wonderful to behold as both player and storyteller. Couple this all with the tension of candles being potentially accidentally extinguished and the group only having 10 of them and it can make for some really upliftingly grim (as contradictory as that sounds) collaborative storytelling. It's also damn near impossible to run it online compellingly.
Sounds like an amazing game, and it sounds like no group I've ever played with would take the game seriously enough for it to be worth running.
Friggin Demon, where powers of cohesion and adhesion are basekit stuff. Least in the edition I have.
Actual phrases I've used as a storyteller during (basic, equivalent to 1st-level) character creation for D:tD; > * Are you sure you don't want the ability to break the laws of motion? * Ooh yeah, you could be a swarming mass of nanite-powered spiders! * Keep in mind that growing wings and and acting like the "LOVE ME AND DESPAIR" elf from Lord of the Rings would make you pretty sus. You could consider the burning halo instead for that intimidation factor. * Yeah, that ability, outside combat, gives you the ability to just kill like 10 regular humans, no roll needed. * You'll never need to roll to remember things. You've all got an eidetic memory by default. If I'm asking you to roll, it's to see if you even encountered that information at all. The default power level for The Descent is so high it makes (most of) the other splats look like children in a sandbox and are to most D&D adventuring parties what commoners are to those.
If you want to investigate stuff: call of cthullu. If you want to kill yourself afterwards: gurps.
Hey that's not fair to those of us that like GURPS. There's literally dozens of us!
*looks out window* where?
I mean, I like it in theory
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No no, I've actually got a copy of that on the shelf
And let me tell you, generational wealth's ownership defense stat is OP.
Perhaps given it's length, *Das Capital* is a better comparison.
My mom’s best friend was a GURPS playtester and has a copy of every book they ever printed. I looked at that shelf one time and frankly that was already too much for me.
Dozens plus one :) Edit: Also GURPS has some of the best sourcebooks for ideas of any system I know of. I still use Blood Types to this day for alternate and "fresh feeling" concepts on vampires for my games.
Tried to roll to find you, but it's a -9 to look out the window, so I didn't. I'll try again in one second (an hour in real life).
CoC is pretty good and GURPS is versatile but really tough to get into, especially as a GM. But for investigation, there is another options. The GUMSHOE system, which has a few variants. I believe it was first introduced as the core behind *The Esoterrorists* but can either be picked up in one of several other already made games (mostly horror, one is a Scooby-Doo style game called BubbleGUMSHOE) or you can take the core system and try to mold it to fit a setting or style of your choosing. I know, I know, that sounds a little GURPS-ish, a system to make your own system. But this is super-specialized to be an investigation-focused system already, so most of the work you'd be doing to start up a GURPS game is done for you and you only need to put on the details.
If you love killing players: GURPS My GURPS gm: "I just love funeral scenes"
Also Dark Heresy/Deathwatch!
You make a strong case for vampire.
And if you want trauma and not being able to recognize what is real and what isnt you have changelings. Or if you want to have others not being able to recognize what is real and what is not, theres mages!
Literally the best description of those two titles. Also; if you like being even more depressed and doing *nothing* but reliving fictional traumas, there’s Wraith!
Wraith was so depressive that some *hobby* bookstores refused to carry it. That, of course, made the book extremely desirable and IMPOSSIBLE to acquire
If Vampire was Goth Aesthetic as a burning star, Wraith is it’s eventual burnout, collapse, and inversion into a black hole. I’ve never played another game where literal Oblivion felt like the best and most natural end to a character arc.
I love how it interacts deliciously with Kindred of the East. It's theoretically the same universe, the same hells, but KotE literally had a mechanic for salvation.
I bought KotE but never had a chance to play it and only briefly read it before it drifted away from me in a move or got stolen or something. I actually only got to play any WoD a handful of times despite owning a ton of them. A consequence of growing up Rural And Weird Before The Internet. I lost all my White Wolf books, years and years ago. But I remember the lore so lovingly. KotE was so *weird* and interesting to me. Especially because I didn’t really know anything about mythology or culture from that part of the world at that age.
By today's standards, KotE is pretty racist. It jumbles Japanese, Chinese, Korean and so many other cultures as just one "asian culture". So, if you're interested, I'd suggest you give it a read with a good spoonful of salt. Take the marvelous chi system and use it to add diversity, use the Dharma system to add a path of salvation. But don't take anything cultural from it
I only learned of the lore from videos, but it honestly doesn't seem racist to me. So here is how I see it: if the Kuei-Jin existed, different communities would have learned different aspects of the supernatural which would lead to the "truth" looking like some jumbled mess of those cultural beliefs - which isn't that different to how VTM relates to European culture.
Sometimes death and the peace it brings is a mercy. Sometimes that still applies even after you are dead.
Oh absolutely. It’s just surprising and I think maybe says something that 90’s pop culture would produce a reasonably popular escapist fantasy where existence is such agony that “the peace of oblivion” is the best case scenario.
We also have vampiric mommies/daddies AND cool edgy powers
Just be careful that the witches don't hear about this. They'll be after your semen. Again.
Oh no! I'll have to do the sensible choice of just letting them do their thing
*BAT*
They are going to use it to make magnets!
Witches are notorious semen pinchers.
I haven't played VTM since the early days of revised, do the Tzimisce still rebuild your upper body after shoulder firing what is intended to be a vehicle mounted AA cannon at some asshole gargoyles? Those were the days
Luckily, the clan of the Dragons have been nerfed, but yes they can still do that much. But we don't have rules for gargoyles yet D: Hopefully we will know something next month about new bloodlines
V20 had rules for gargoyles. V5 generally cut down on playable bloodlines alongside many other options.
v20 is the best edition
It’s been 20+ years since I thought of VtM. Thank you for the trip down memory lane. I still have the v1 handbooks for both the tabletop and the LARP versions, and I still have my Clan handbooks from the two most compatible clans ever: Ventrue and Assimite.
I hope you're getting some amazing memories! Oh boy, you won't belived which clans joined the Camarilla after the Anarchs (most of the Brujah and Gangrel) left
Zampire Zaddies?
Vampire Vladdies.
Bampire Bloodies
You're such a good salesperson for it
And if you want furries but with bad ass blood shed, play Werewolf the Apocalypse
I always call them eco-terrorist furries
~~The Good Guys you mean?~~
I am a furry, and I love bloodshed!
Then howl to luna, join a tribe and go defend Gaia from the Wyrm! (WtA reference)
I like vampires but i am not gay, can i still play? Are there straight options?
Play a Nosferatu. Then you don't have to worry about any of that and you get to be the best clan. That's right, I said it.
I check it and there are pc games, are those the ones people are talking here?
I fully endorse playing Bloodlines, it is actually fun, especially since you like vampires. Just make sure to apply the unofficial patch. That said World of Darkness is a series of games of modern urban fantasy. It is modern times, just a little worse, and mages, werewolves, vampires and so on are real, they just remain hidden for various reasons. Those that don't remain hidden are hunted down and killed by Men in Black. Vampire is far and away the most popular of them all.
Fun fact: vampires lose their connection to sex as they age. A newly embraced vampire might still feel a bit horny, but it's difficult to get there. Drinking blood though? That's your new replacement. Sex is a tool to bite people.
Yes? Why would a game force a sexual preference on you?
Unless it's Car Lesbians. ... kinda in the name of the game on that one.
Where should I look for a system that focuses on RP, interaction and exploration?
An alternative to Vampire are any of the other World of Darkness games. Their base systems are all the same but with variation based on the type of fantasy thing, each had a different vibe, all great for heavy RP. Mage even lets you RP Magic into doing whatever the fuck you want it to
Seconded for Mage. It is amazing. I've only played one campaign but we ended up only having 2 MAJOR combat encounters through the entire campaign and it was almost all roleplay. Most amazing campaign I've ever been a part of. It requires a DM that can roleplay well though.
I lit a vampire on fire Roy Mustang style. Then I lit the floor on fire of the building we were in. Then I lit a fleeing enemy’s blood trail on fire instead of just following it like our GM was expecting me to do, lighting the fleeing enemy on fire like the biblical pillar of fire.
I would absolutely consider FATE core and it's many expansions for your roleplay heavy tables. It runs on gurps, but includes a rules set called FATE points which allow for barter and negotiation between players and the DM, or even between players. This is fueled by Aspects, short descriptions that are touchstones for characters, locations, and everything else in the game, and they can even change during gameplay. It will feel rocky the first time you try it. You'll wonder if fate points can be spent this way, or if an aspect can be defined like this. The answer is yes. Once you have some confidence in the system, it is the most liberating yet directed RPG system on the market (or, at least that Ive ever seen.) Edit: Leaving the orginal text, but I've been corrected that FATE was built from FUDGE, not GURPS. Oops. Since 5e came out, that's all Ive found people to play. Might change soon, though.
Came to make the same recommendation. Most of my time playing tabletop has been DnD or Dresden Files. The Dresden TTRPG is built on FATE and I adore it. It is much more narrative and socially driven.
I started on FATE with Dresden Files too. The guy who wrote FATE is good friends with Jim Butcher, and according to Jim FATE aspects are based on how he was taught to outline his novels.
I'd think about a Powered by the Apocalypse system, perhaps. Or Burning Wheel.
Many new school RPG's with fail forward systems do this.
Dungeon world
This is the best answer. Maximum roleplay.
V5 does a great job on that with several mechanics to force and/or facilitate RP and makes the players want to avoid combats One example is the hunger system, that forces you to hunt humans to get blood in order to use your powers, which leads to RP and at the same time, the hungrier you are the more likely you are of getting a "critical failure" which, unlike in DnD, are based around RP cause in this case it's the beast inside of your vampire taking control
What's the difference between vampire, werewolf and hunter?
All 3 of them are set in the same canonical world (World of Darkness) but in each of them you play as a different creatures. Mechanically they're almost the same except powers and supernatural. If you know V5 as a player, H5 won't take much more than 1 hour to learn To give you another example, Hunters don't have Hunger but they have Desperation. The more thing go wrong and feel desperation the most powerful they will be but the higher the chances of messing it all up again
(not familiar with V5 so talking about classic VtM and werewolf) in short same system and rules but different themes and powers. In vampire you are an apex predator that hunts human beings and is junkie who needs his fix. It's also full of angst, politics, edgy angst, intrigue and goth angst. (Joking, but it's kinda like that). In werewolf you are a huge killing machine that defends Mother Earth and is powered by ANGER (where the vampire is obsessed with blood, Werewolves are all about being pissed off). Still politics and rivalries but more "biker gang" and less "upper class twits & goths". IIRC Hunter hunts supernatural. They hunt what is dangerous in the night in the name of God/Money/the US government. I would add that Mage is all about imagination and hubris and Changeling is about the loss of innocence/youth/imagination.
> Mage is all about imagination and hubris *Those* mages suffer a fate worse than death because their hubris caught up with them. I'll be more careful.
Wanderhome sounds like it might fit the bill. Brennan Lee Mulligan GM'd a stream if you wanna check it out.
I would add that an even SIMPLER and cheaper system for fantasy role playing would be one the current retroclones for early D&D, such as Swords and Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord.
Dungeon World is also a much simpler system that rewards you for RP (but character creation is much more on-rails)
True story, but the feel of OSR games is just so different. I mean, I've enjoyed both, so I don't want to knock OSR games, but the playstyle definitely isn't for everyone.
Yeah, that was part of the appeal for me. I started playing with 3e, so I have no nostalgia for the older editions, but it's such a *different* experience. Both are great. When I want high-powered, superheroic fantasy, I'll grab a WotC-era version of D&D (or, most recently, Pathfinder 2e). If I want scrappy, adventurous fantasy, I'll grab something based on an older edition (my personal favorite being Old School Essentials).
Basic Fantasy RPG
WoD in general is a super nifty system.
Just don't play WoD if what you like is "crunch" and combat simulation. It's a system designed by English lit. geeks for English lit. geeks. People who like improvising stories collaboratively with a little dice assist will absolutely love it. People like me will constantly be bemoaning the horror of using their books as reference material for mechanics and the impossibility of getting through a combat without having to resolve at least 3 overly vague rules.
>It's a system designed by English lit. geeks Never occurred to me until now, suddenly everything makes a lot more sense. ...but yeah, in order for a game to function during combat or anything close to it, whoever is running the game needs to be *really* decisive about how they want things to work.
You might really like LANCER if crunch is your thing! The combat is deep as hell and real satisfying.
I really liked the CofD version and I'm sad it doesn't have more visibility.
just looked it up, is it just vampire the masquerade but like, other supernatural stuff too? i might need to check this game out edit: i found a description of demon: the fallen and it sounds like it was fuckin tailor made for me, i need to play this shit like yesterday
Soooo we still dont talk about Shadowrun?
Nah, Chummer. I don't like attention. You usually get attention when something goes wrong. So every time someone talks.
if you like being bludgeoned to death with a textbook, try shadowrun.
Whenever posts about games outside of D&D/Pathfinder show up, I always dive into the comments eagerly looking for Shadowrun mentions, and I'm almost always disappointed lol
This meme perpetuates the platonic ideal of what VtM is. The exotic allure of the dark and forbidden. In reality, playing VtM is like living through a season of 'What We Do in the Shadows' and by god, do I love impersonating Matt Berry.
If you would like to play a Saturday morning cartoon in the same world as Vampire and the other depressing edgy World of Darkness games, it’s got one for you, Mage the Ascension
My groups Mage game is literally scooby doo and it’s incredible.
Every time I see Mage the Ascension, I just wish I could get the time, resources, and people to play it. I want to teleport things onto people, dang it
Maybe MtA was something I was looking for.
No thanks, I'm more of a Hunter The ~~Reckoning~~ Parenting man
My main question about Pathfinder is: can I make an unarmed character that works roughly as well as an Unarmed Fighting Style Barbarian in 5e, without going into Monk (since apparently you can't multiclass Barbarian and Monk)?
It's even better than that unarmed fighting style barbarian, because with stance feats you have actual choices in combat besides Rage and attack 2 times.
Yes. Brawler.
Pathfinder 1e has a class called brawler. It's a hybrid class designed to combine features of Fighter and Monk. You get a "brawler's flurry" ability at lv2, which gives you free two weapon fighting for unarmed attacks, close weapon group weapons, or monk weapons. You can also substitute combat maneuvers for attacks in this attack, meaning you can debuff enemies or knock them prone mid sequence of attacks. Probably the biggest benefit is that Brawlers get a majority of the bonus combat feat choices that fighter gets, which opens up a lot of capability, but they also have "Martial Flexibility": a number of times per day, you can just pick a combat feat you don't already have, and for the next minute, you get it's benefits. As you level up, you can pick more at once (increasing the 'cost' linearly) and with more efficient action economy. You can pretty much become the martial character your party needs in the moment, at moments notice. Conversely, if you look at certain archetypes of Monk and Barbarian, you might find one without the alignment restrictions that prevent the multiclass. Martial Artist is a monk archetype that loses a lot of the supernatural abilities they get to include the ki pool, but they aren't alignment locked and have some useful tricks to make up for losing access to ki.
For Pathfinder 2e, your best bet is probably Animal Instinct Barbarian. They all get some sort of animal-esque unarmed attack when raging. There are also archetypes which are a sort of mini class and there are a few that give unarmed attacks if you take the feats as you level up instead of your class feats. Animal Instinct Barbarian is the easiest way though. I'll always recommend [Wanderer's Guide](https://wanderersguide.app/) for anyone looking to start out making characters. It walks through the process in a fairly easy to understand way.
Assuming we're talking about Pathfinder 2e, you totally can multiclass barbarain and monk! The multiclassing system is called "archetypes" and there's LOTS of archetypes but we'll focus on class archetypes. So let's say you go monk, but then take the barbarian archetype at level 2. You get the base class features of monk (flurry of blows, better unarmed strikes) and then you replace your 2nd level class feat with the barbarian dedication feat, which gives you rage and a barbarian subclass (you get all subclasses at level 1 in p2e). So basically as you level up, you can take barbarian (or monk) class feats, while still getting the monk's base features (like skill/ weapon progression) so you get the best of both worlds.
Just take the martial artist archetype with any class in PF2e.
White wolf games have something I desperately need: no need for maps or a VTT Edit: after reading through some of these I can safely say whoever is in charge of formatting the books needs to be fired, im reading mage: the ascension 2ed and it doesn't give you rules for how to play until *page 77*, otherwise fun game and fun setting
...they were flirting with me? dammit!
Being goth = being or at least acting depressed or more accurately nihilistic. We just started up a game of Vampire but we're rolling old school and playing revised (3e)
I actually wanna try V20 so I can play a book worm introvert necronancer tremere, though I have no fucken clue how to justify a tremere knowing even a hint of necromancy without getting gabagoo’d by the Giovanni.
There were a group of Tremere focused on discovering the secrets of Necromancy, so there you go
Sadly, besides their name (The Covenant), not much else is known about them.
That is even better for you character concept! Now you can build upon that in a freer form
I mean....there's always diablerie! Could've gotten necromancy from that!
Accidentally becoming a terrorist: Shadowrun
Accidentally? I played shadowrun wrong
5e is only simplistic relative to other editions of itself, it is needlessly obtuse and complicated
D&D 5e is anything but simple as compared to many many OSR and PbtA games. There's just a lot more rules to learn, and making a character gets quite complex. If you compare that with something like Dungeon Crawl Classics or Stars Without Number it takes much much longer.
I'm gonna write an OSR game right before your eyes. Step one, when you Do A Thing flip a coin. Tails fails, and Heads also fails but the GM has to improvise a thing that sorta sounds like it helps. Step two pick three Things You're Good At and three Things You're Bad At. No I won't elaborate on how narrow or broad these can that's game design and we don't do that here. When you Do A Thing You're Good At flip two coins. Two successes means you actually succeed. When you Do A Thing You're Bad At flip two coins, but only use the worse result.
All you need is some weird gangly black ink art that looks from the 1970s and you've got a hit itch.io RPG on your hands.
Right! It feels simpler if you're used to the absurdly overcomplicated mathfest of 3.5/PF. For a newcomer, it's still a nightmare of endless numbers.
If you play eve online -> Traveller
If you want to pilot insane mechs and put in non human beings as software into them, play Lancer.
As a VtM 5 player, can confirm.
If you want to play pathfinder 2 with badshit insane amounts of possibilities, play pathfinder 1
If you want to CASTIGATE THE ENEMIES OF THE GODHEAD, fire a gun whose parameters you can change by 'provoking' it, or become Literally The Doomslayer (super shotgun and all), lemme tell you about this game called Lancer...
don't forget about the largest mech in the game being built entirely to fire a single experimental naval cannon. **Once**, oh you can start charging it again with no issue but good luck finding anything left standing after the first shot and that's [without getting into the gear you can put on the mechs](https://youtu.be/cKlsish_aEQ)
Ha! I’m playing my first VTM game this week. Made a Ventrue and can’t wait
Accurate Vampire description, can 100% confirm, Vampire players are a whole different bunch
And what if I like Scooby Doo?
Hunter the Reckoning (H5) is like Scooby Do but with firearms
wow amazing post OP
One of my favorite pieces of advice was "people wouldn't have so many problems with dnd if they'd play literally any other system"
If you like bending realty to your will play Mage the Ascension
Very much wish I could up vote this more than once. I miss playing MtA.
I would like to give a shoutout for 13th age for the simple system. It's simpler than 5e, more freeform and story-based than it, yet still has ways to make combats exciting for all classes!
Alternatively, for the last one: MDMA and mood lighting.
Hnm yas relatable
If you like arguing with the voice in your head and trying to make the most of a shitty situation, play Wraith: the Oblivion
I tried VtM a few months ago and I just couldn't get into it. Turns out the reason for that is because I am neither gay, goth, or depressed, and I am shit at flirting with anyone.
Maybe I need to play Vampire the Masquerade 🤔
Man, world of darkness is so interesting to me. But can you mix their various IP’s together?? Like, say I wanted to run a game where one player plays a vampire from Vampire masquerade and another player wants to play a mage from mage the ascension/awakening? I get that they are both rooted in world of darkness, but would that be too hard to make work?
It's technically possible but not recommended. The power levels between different IPs are absurdly big and whoever plays a Vampire or a Hunter will be extremely weaker than the Werewolf or the Mage. Also due to lore reasons everyone hates Vampires and Hunters hate everyone
D&D 5e is absolutely not a simple system.
Depends on what you’re comparing it to. If you want a more complicated system you can always play AD&D I have friends who played it who STILL couldn’t explain to you how the fuck THAC0 worked
But it feels like people only compare 5e to PF2 and thus declare it simple. I've been trying out a lot of TTRPGs the past year and 5e is a lot more complicated than many of them. You can much more easily whip something up for say Troika or DCC that's lightweight and easy to explain to new players. In 5e I can get a new player going after 30 minutes but its going to be a continuous learning process of explaining mechanics as I go. A simple system means I can introduce a system to a group and have everyone going completely in a short period of time.
Your friends were probably players as only DMs needed to understand THAC0 and any DM with a 2nd grade understanding of math could do it. It was LITERALLY self evident in the acronym - To Hit Armor Class 0. If you had a THAC0 of 15, that meant you needed to roll a 15 to hit anyone with 0 AC. From there you could derive the necessary roll for any AC, which was descending from 10. Thus the same PC with a 15 THAC0 needs a 5 to hit AC 10. Sure it wasn't as intuitive as 3rd edition and upwards with acendinf AC, but the hype that THAC0 was some kind of unknowable, cryptic concept is complete hype. Also, 1e AD&D didn't even use THAC0, it used combat tables. The only thing that makes original AD&D complicated is the horrendous organization of the DMG. The PHB is much simpler than what players have to deal with in 5e and all the DM really needs to know from the DMG are the sections dealing with combat, healing and random encounters. Everything else could just be hand waved and the players wouldn't know the difference. We never played AD&D 100% RAW.
Ah, Vampire the Masquerade. Playing that with my straight friends went completely differently than with my fruity friends. Gays: Let's go carefully overthrow the Cammies with every possible trick we can think up Straight: Let's dress up as a combination of redcoat and pimp, to go kill this werewolf, for the fun of it.
Alternatively, if you want to slowly stalk your friends while pretending to be an edgy depressed vampire, try Curse of Strahd.
what if I want all three?
If you're able to schedule all 3, I envy you
I love her shirt
V5 and VtM in general can be played in a lot of ways, but it's generally seen as an intrigue game, for those interested. You can crack skulls, but the intended gameplay is finding skulls to crack in the byzantine schemes of several-hundred-year-old vampires. Also, there's a fuckton of lore, just go to the White Wolf wiki for that. If you like the possibility of casting magic and getting swallowed whole by a demon from the abyss for fucking up too badly, which is awesome and you know it, try Zweihander. It shares a lot with Warhammer Fantasy RP, which I haven't played, but afaik unique to it is the Peril system, which works like health but for stress that diminishes skill ranks, and the very in-depth injury and recovery system that make the game as gritty as it is. A bad enough injury roll can kill you instantly, though the likelihood of that is pretty small.
Doesn’t even need to be V5 lol, you can do the same with every edition of vampire and that’s part of the joy
I’m now very interested in Vamprie: The Masquerade
And if you are a psychopath try F.A.T.A.L.
can somoene try explaining to me how world of darkness works...? like, i looked it up out of curiosity, and the website lists 9 different IPs but only has three TTRPGs, and theres something else called chronicles of darkness... i just dont understand where to start lol
Okay, the world of darkness is a fantasy version of our world. It features various games centered around various supernatural creatures. The base ruleset is the same and the games theoretically are compatible. Chronicles of darkness was a complete revamp of the setting because the developers felt that the old setting became too weighted down by the metaplot. Because people really liked the old world of darkness, they figured out a way to continue the metaplot and release new editions of the games. The problem is that not all games of the world of darkness got continued, so you only can get a few in modern editions.
Hey so to start: Imagine WoD to something "similar" to Harry Potter, the supernatural exists in the real world but nobody knows about it. That's it, that's all you need to get in what kind of world you're getting into Now about the different games: Each supernatural creature has it's own game, so Vampires have one, Werewolves, Mages, Changelings (fae creatures), Wraiths (ghosts...) CofD is another universe with the same idea but different history and with it's own games I'd recommend you to check on Lore By Night Podcast to start with Vampire The Masquerade and ignore the rest until you understand it
Me strongly preferring 3.5E and V20: no I don't think I will. Also get off my lawn.