World of Darkness and Fading Suns question

[Ashrum the Black]

Howdy all! Thought I'd put this to the group as you are all such well rounded gamers, and see if I could get some recommendations. The new WoD book has been released and has been gathering good reviews and such.

I'm looking to start possibly a fading suns campaign, but the system itself is a little long in the tooth and has a lot of contradictory information in the verious supplements. A lot like the old WoD books did torwards the end.

The question is, how easy would it be to port over the ruleset for WoD to run fading suns? The old vampire and fading suns were similar enough it would have been a snap to port some parts over. Is the new system just a cleaned up version of the exalted rules, which should port easy enough to use as the engine? What has changed between the old and the new on the WoD front?

Thanks for any answers!

-Ashrum

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Caveat: it has been years since I last looked at FS or WoD books.

That said, it strikes me as being a non-trivial port.

I agree that it looks easy with the houses and occupations and skills and whatnot. But when it comes to things that we will euphamistically call "superpowers" I'd have a hard time doing a conversion. Neither FS or WoD were slaves to balance, which can be good and can be bad (I'd argue that lack of balance causes more problems than it solves).

But, hey, if it's a rainy Saturday afternoon, give it a shot! My only advice would be to exclude the alien races at first. Get the humans out of the way and see how things pan out from there.

 

[Ashrum the Black]

I'm actually looking at just whole sale replacing the FS gaming system and setting the new WoD system down in its place. I'm familiar with both FS, and the old WoD books, and know they aren't great for game balance and such. Which is why I was looking at the new WoD books as a replacement for the aging VP system of FS.

I'm looking to see if the new rules for WoD are streamlined and balanced (at least as much as WoD ever is balanced) I don't want a system like D20 that has a rule for every occasion, but I do want a system that has one mechanic for how to do things instead of the three you can find in various FS books, and the eight in old WoD books if you look around hard enough.

So how does the new WoD system compare to the old. Does it handle things and set them down clearly, or is it already on its way to jumbled mess as the old system was?

-Ashrum

 

[KaosDevice]

So how does the new WoD system compare to the old. Does it handle things and set them down clearly, or is it already on its way to jumbled mess as the old system was?

At first blush it seems to me that they have really toned things down. As anyone who looked at the 'Endo of the WoD' stuff they put out to close down things in WoD MK1, things got really tweaked to high heaven there at the end. On the flip side Fading Suns has came out with a D20 version of itself which I haven't had the luxury of seeing. A friend of mine checked it out though and was somewhat unimpressed. I personally, would be more tempted to do a port of Fading Suns to GURPS, but that's the way this nerd rolls.

 

[TheLostSoul]

I own the FS 1st ed. book and a whole lot of the Old WoD stuff, as well as the New WoD books. The new Storytelling system, has IMO, been cleaned up alot and is alot faster in play. All roles are made vs. a difficulty of 8 and difficulty is determined by adding or subtracting dice from ones dicepool. Combat is also more simple, with a single roll to determine both hit and damage.

As for porting the VP system over to Storytelling. I think it can be done, but there is a great deal of work that needs to be done. Most is simple, but when you get to Thurgy and Psi abilities, you get in to some serious work. Your best bet would be to model them along the line of the old WoD: Sorcerer books. As a series of paths. There are no real system for mortal magic in the new WoD, yet (Mage: The Awakening is sheduled for an August release), but you can adapt, with some work, the old system to the new.

Cybernetics can be a problem. Due to the lack of such technology in the new WoD it could get very problematic, but if you adopt FS resources system to the Storytelling system, I think it would solve itself. Another possible problem is that there are no rules for shields in the WoD core rulebook, but a possible solution to this is using the rules for cover to represent the use of a shield. There is currently a discussing of this on the White Wolf boards.

I have thought about using the Storytelling system for a mini campaign based on Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space universe (mainly Chasm City). The main problems I have stumbled into are the aforementioned.

There is currently a new version of the VP system underway, but it will probably not be released until late this year or early next year, as Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg are very busy with the new WoD stuff. It is going to be a new cyberpunk setting set in the Diaspora, focusing mainly on Earth, but will contain information about the solar system colonies asd well as the first few extrasolar colonies. This is about the extend of the information I know about the new game. At present it is going to be named Sathra Inc..

 

[Baron Opal]

Fading Suns with Storyteller

If you want to use the storyteller system, see if you can pick up a copy of Trinity (was Aeon). It's long out of print, but I'm sure finding a copy on EBay would be easy enough. Trinity is a sci-fi setting that would be easy to adapt to Fading Suns, you would just have to map out the Theology / Psychic powers to the written Psion Order powers.

Cybernetics are not covered very well, but are addressed in American Offline, the Orgotek splatbook.

Also, several mechanical issues with the Storyteller system were revamped for Trinity and subsequent games. Trinity / Aberrant / Adventure are my favored games for a near-future or near-past style game.

Baron Opal

 

[Bront]

I generaly liked the FS system, but perhaps that was because I had a good experience with the game, that was more likely related to the RP element of it.

I have looked at FS D20, and it's not bad. It lost a little bit of flavor, but it was generaly well done and easy to deal with. It is 3.0 and not modern based though (probably not an issue within itself, and fairly easy to fix)

 

[Ashrum the Black]

Yeah, i was uninpressed by the d20 version of FS as well. Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I own most of the early Trinity books so I may delve in there for some things on theurgy and Psi. As for the rest well, I've done some mods before and I've found just take them one section at a time.

-Ashrum