20th Anniversary Edition Vampire: the Masquerade... Got it in .pdf format today

[TheAuldGrump]

Well, not everyone agrees that the new edition improved the rules. Also, there is a lot less work for them to keep the same rules then to have to update it all. While I personally see nWoD as better rules, this having the old rules seems right to me.

Given that I personally loathe the new rules, I have to agree. If the book had been with the crappy new rules then I would have sold my copy (just arrived yesterday) on E-Bay, and would have been most vociferous in my discontent.

The old rules had two axis of calibration inherent in the system, the newer system has only one. (Difficulty and number of successes.) And I hate the subtractive method of contested actions. Having two defensive characters 'swapping tens' ensured that I would never attempt to play the game in earnest.

The Auld Grump

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I owned a lot of Vampire TM stuff as well back in the day. The story and plotting was great. What i did not like was the Gehenna release which had multiple ways things could end. I felt at the time it was a little bit of a cop out and they should of just themselves picked one ending and really expanded the heck outta it.

Ive never touched a NWoD book as that gaming group more or less disbanded with the end of OWoD

Not to mention that some of those adventures were among the worst examples of Railroad Rides ever published. 'You ride along with the vampire that is going to attack Baba Yaga. No, your character wants to go along with her, and watch her kill the crone. No, there is no roll, you just do what she says....'

The whole Reckoning thing would have stunk if they put it on a block of dry ice.

The Auld Grump

 

[TheAuldGrump]

"1s" taking away successes and no roll agains without specializations still runs into the problem that succeeding was exceedingly difficult to the point that nWoD made it a penalty for the Gangrel and the Nosferatu.

That was primarily a problem with Storytellers who routinely increased the difficulties to make the game more 'challenging'. Leaving the difficulty of standard actions at six allows the math to function as intended. If the difficulty is routinely left at 6 then the problem largely goes away.

That said, I have encountered Storytellers that typically increased the difficulties to 7 or 8, not just the checks that should have been challenging. And who would then wonder why the PCs were failing so often....

In short, the problem was largely because of GMs who did not use the system as intended.

The Auld Grump

 

[Achan hiArusa]

That was primarily a problem with Storytellers who routinely increased the difficulties to make the game more 'challenging'. Leaving the difficulty of standard actions at six allows the math to function as intended. If the difficulty is routinely left at 6 then the problem largely goes away.

That said, I have encountered Storytellers that typically increased the difficulties to 7 or 8, not just the checks that should have been challenging. And who would then wonder why the PCs were failing so often....

In short, the problem was largely because of GMs who did not use the system as intended.

The Auld Grump

I had that problem with ANYTHING that increased the difficulty, even when playing by the rules. I have one more than one occasion rolled, or seen rolled an autofire attack (diff 6 + 2 = 8) which gives +10 dice, do absolutely no damage at all. Anything that changed the difficulty might as well have been impossible. And the better you were at anything, the more likely you were to botch because of the 1's rule. Experienced characters botched more often than new characters because they had so many more chances to roll 1s. I even had my statistics professor examine the math and he told me at a given difficulty number the chance of success doesn't increase, but the chance of botching does after I explained the system to him.

 

[Stormonu]

Of the OWoD rules, the 1's rule I absolutely hated. However, having had experience with Star Wars d6, for a while we used a "wild die" to determine possible botches (using one die that was a different color than the others, if it came up a "1", you had a "complication"). Eventually, we dropped botching rules entirely.

(And I finally got my hard copy. OMG, it's beautiful).

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I had that problem with ANYTHING that increased the difficulty, even when playing by the rules. I have one more than one occasion rolled, or seen rolled an autofire attack (diff 6 + 2 = 8) which gives +10 dice, do absolutely no damage at all. Anything that changed the difficulty might as well have been impossible. And the better you were at anything, the more likely you were to botch because of the 1's rule. Experienced characters botched more often than new characters because they had so many more chances to roll 1s. I even had my statistics professor examine the math and he told me at a given difficulty number the chance of success doesn't increase, but the chance of botching does after I explained the system to him.

One important change with the Revised edition was that if there had been any successes, even if they had been cancelled by 1s, then it was just a failure, not a botch.

Also, since first edition, you could always take a single success instead of roll if your Skill+Attribute was equal to or greater than the difficulty. So, much of the time you could just say 'I'm taking my time, and I don't need to roll'.

Finally, and this is something that I had to address more than once, the severity of a botch is not affected by the number of 1s rolled. A botch is a botch, whether the person is getting one 1 out of two dice rolled or seven 1s out of eight dice rolled. If you really want to celebrate that seven 1 botch, make it cosmetic, not severity.

The Auld Grump

 

[Achan hiArusa]

One important change with the Revised edition was that if there had been any successes, even if they had been cancelled by 1s, then it was just a failure, not a botch.

Also, since first edition, you could always take a single success instead of roll if your Skill+Attribute was equal to or greater than the difficulty. So, much of the time you could just say 'I'm taking my time, and I don't need to roll'.

Finally, and this is something that I had to address more than once, the severity of a botch is not affected by the number of 1s rolled. A botch is a botch, whether the person is getting one 1 out of two dice rolled or seven 1s out of eight dice rolled. If you really want to celebrate that seven 1 botch, make it cosmetic, not severity.

The Auld Grump

I'm not talking about the severity of the botch and counting up ones. I am talking simple mathematics, the more dice you roll, the more dice you roll the more ones you can get, the more ones you get the more likely you will botch (its only 10% with one die but almost 50% with 10 dice, even if you don't botch with at least a single success) and by corollary the easier it is to fail. I just eliminate the whole thing problem and go with a hybrid nWoD/Shadowrun 4th approach with roll-agains, 1s not eliminating anything, and requiring half or more of your die to roll 1s before you get a botch (and having partial successes where if at least your dice are half ones and you have at least a single success works really well storywise) instead of the Three Stooges effect of the original game. Then I just make skill specialities be 9-agains and keep the chance die for special occasions.

Otherwise I agree having variable difficulty numbers along with number of successes allows for more fine tuning in the game.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I'm not talking about the severity of the botch and counting up ones. I am talking simple mathematics, the more dice you roll, the more dice you roll the more ones you can get, the more ones you get the more likely you will botch (its only 10% with one die but almost 50% with 10 dice, even if you don't botch with at least a single success) and by corollary the easier it is to fail. I just eliminate the whole thing problem and go with a hybrid nWoD/Shadowrun 4th approach with roll-agains, 1s not eliminating anything, and requiring half or more of your die to roll 1s before you get a botch (and having partial successes where if at least your dice are half ones and you have at least a single success works really well storywise) instead of the Three Stooges effect of the original game. Then I just make skill specialities be 9-agains and keep the chance die for special occasions.

Otherwise I agree having variable difficulty numbers along with number of successes allows for more fine tuning in the game.

Except that botches don't work that way.

It is not a matter of 'Botch if you have even a single 1' it is 'Botch if you only have failures and at least one 1'.

Let us take 'six' as the example difficulty - each die has a 1 in 10 chance of being a 1 and a 50% chance of being a success.

More dice does make it more likely that you will get at least one 1, but also increases the chance of getting at least one success, and the odds, on each die is greater for a success than for a 1. 1: botch (if not cancelled by at least one success), 2-5: failure, 6-9: success, 10 reroll and add, if specialty.

Until you reach difficulty ten the odds are at least twice as likely that you will have at least a failure rather than a botch - at nine difficulty each die is twice as likely to get a success than a botch, and since you need to have no successes rolling ten dice makes it unlikely that you will botch. (And with ten dice you can always say that you take it slow and easy, even at a difficulty ten.)

Your math needs a little bit of work - more dice is almost always better, unless penalized in some manner.

A 10 difficulty, where the numbers really break down, should be saved for things like snowmobiling across a pyroclastic flow.... Failure near certain, botching and success equal chances. Five successes needed to get all the way across.... (Nature's way of telling you 'don't do that'. )

The Auld Grump

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Except that botches don't work that way.

It is not a matter of 'Botch if you have even a single 1' it is 'Botch if you only have failures and at least one 1'.

Let us take 'six' as the example difficulty - each die has a 1 in 10 chance of being a 1 and a 50% chance of being a success.

More dice does make it more likely that you will get at least one 1, but also increases the chance of getting at least one success, and the odds, on each die is greater for a success than for a 1. 1: botch (if not cancelled by at least one success), 2-5: failure, 6-9: success, 10 reroll and add, if specialty.

Until you reach difficulty ten the odds are at least twice as likely that you will have at least a failure rather than a botch - at nine difficulty each die is twice as likely to get a success than a botch, and since you need to have no successes rolling ten dice makes it unlikely that you will botch. (And with ten dice you can always say that you take it slow and easy, even at a difficulty ten.)

Your math needs a little bit of work - more dice is almost always better, unless penalized in some manner.

A 10 difficulty, where the numbers really break down, should be saved for things like snowmobiling across a pyroclastic flow.... Failure near certain, botching and success equal chances. Five successes needed to get all the way across.... (Nature's way of telling you 'don't do that'. )

The Auld Grump

I checked it independently with a document that used the binary theorem with a Monte Carlo simulation to determine both nWod and cWod dice probabilities, because right now I don't want to do it myself. And more dice is not necessarily better.

http://6690420477917606960-a-180274...s.com/site/hofetherspace/Home/probability.pdf

It does agree with you that at a difficulty of six that the probability of a botch goes down as the die pool goes up by revised rules. At diff 7, the best probability of a botch is at 2 dice, at diff 8, the best probability of a botch is at three dice, at diff 9, six dice, and at diff 10, 10 dice. So anything that increases the difficulty will hurt characters with increasing levels of skill more, even if it is as simple as a +2 difficulty modifier.

So we have the case that a highly skill character will more likely screw up at a nearly impossible task than a mediocrely skill character. That's a Murphy's rule.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I checked it independently with a document that used the binary theorem with a Monte Carlo simulation to determine both nWod and cWod dice probabilities, because right now I don't want to do it myself. And more dice is not necessarily better.

http://6690420477917606960-a-180274...s.com/site/hofetherspace/Home/probability.pdf

It does agree with you that at a difficulty of six that the probability of a botch goes down as the die pool goes up by revised rules. At diff 7, the best probability of a botch is at 2 dice, at diff 8, the best probability of a botch is at three dice, at diff 9, six dice, and at diff 10, 10 dice. So anything that increases the difficulty will hurt characters with increasing levels of skill more, even if it is as simple as a +2 difficulty modifier.

So we have the case that a highly skill character will more likely screw up at a nearly impossible task than a mediocrely skill character. That's a Murphy's rule.

Again, if you get to roll ten dice, at a diff ten you are better off going with the one automatic success a turn. Heck, for a diff of eight or higher I would generally recommend this. Then spend Willpwer. Combat is an exception, but if you are facing a diff ten to hit, wound, or to dodge... you are better off running.

I don't think that my players ever had to roll a diff nine or ten - any time it came up I would put my figure of Charon on the table, and ask if they were sure that they wanted to do that? (Heh, silly typo - I had Charo there instead of Charon.... I know which I'd rather encounter....)

There are also some folks that interpret the rule 'a roll of 10 always succeeds' to mean that it cannot be cancelled by a 1. I was never certain of that interpretation, but ran with it anyway.

But I have played with Storytellers that had the typical difficulty as eight. He also gave low experience, then never allowed folks to spend the XP they had. He was surprised when all his players dropped his game on the same week.

The Auld Grump, plus, he wanted to 'tell a story.'