Monte Cooks WoD is for 3.5

[eyebeams]

In the old system, you had the following options:

1) Attack with your full pool.
2) Defend with your full pool.
3) Combine attacks and defenses, or just attacks at a penalty equal to the total number of actions for the first, -1 for each additional action.
4) Defend only, at -1 per attack.

You resolved attacks with opposed rolls. Extra attack successes added dice to a separate damage roll. You rolled soak against some results. The total number of steps was:

1) Attack
2) Defend
3) Damage roll
4) Soak roll

The new system gives characters a Defense score that subtracts from dice pools and a damage rating that adds to dice pools. Attackers roll the modified pool. This reduces the number of dice rolls to:

1) Attack.

There are no multiple actions without special abilities. Yeah, that saves a few steps

One thing to consider is that while single shots/blows are designed to be basically survivable, rolls of 10 explode (and so do 10s rolled on those rerolled dice) so that all attacks can inflict any amount of injury.

So, let's discuss KOOL BARRET GUN LOLZ:

A sniper with a Barret Light 50 attacking an unaware target (who isn't running or seeking cover) inflicts a horrendous amount of damage. If he's pretty skilled he has 8 dice. He gets a die for sighting, 3 dice for aiming and 3 dice for spending a Willpower. One dot in the Sniping Fighting Style and Composure 3 (the minimum) increases the Aim bonus to 4. The Barret itself inflicts 5 damage (8 again). 8+4+3+1+5=21 dice, and you roll all successes again.

So our skilled military sniper attacks inflicts an average of 9 lethal damage. This instantly incapacitates and eventually kills everybody but the toughest person in the world (with Stamina 5) and badly injures a vampire.

Alternately, you could inflict lethal damage to a vampire with a headshot. Taking the penalty into account, average damage (7) knocks an average vampire Stamina 2) into torpor instantly.

If you want to compare the baddest dudes, we can compare the best sniper and toughest guys. The best sniper in the world has 5 Composure (his max Aim becomes +6) and a base pool of 10 -- 11 with a specialty. 11+6+3+1+5=25 dice. Oh yeah -- maxed out sniper means that his rife bonus dice automatically succeed. He inflicts 15 points of lethal damage.

The toughest mortal in the world (with 10 HL) is instantly incapacitated and dies in 2 minutes without medical intervention (average people are merely instantly killed). The toughest Blood Potency 5 vampire around, with Stamina 5 and Resilience 5 (active) has 15 HL and is as badly wounded as Average Vampire. Funny how that works out, eh?

Oh, at 6 points of armor piercing, the gun effectively makes body armor a waste of time.

Basically, this situation exists because of playtesting and the desire for a balance between danger and playability. There was a point in playtest where damage was brutal and too awful, and a stage where it was trivial. My group suggested that what we found the most fun was where one hit *might* kill you, but you could bet on surviving a handful of attacks in a single scene. This means that instant death doesn't happen too often, but there are dangerous outliers in any roll. This requires some adjustment in thinking when you're used to D&D, where damage propagates more predictably and even critical hits have maximums.

Now in typical combat with small arms (2 dice) and average-skilled people (4 dice) running around (-2 dice), you're looking at typical dice pools of 4 and 1-2 points of damage a shot. An average guy goes down in 4 shots or so and bleeds to death in 7 minutes. He can go down much faster or much more slowly. A vampire takes twice as much time to fall into torpor. Again, the idea is that realistic results are possible, but that the largest block of results will tend to allow a few turns of action.

 

[Imaro]

Maybe we are talking apples and oranges I am talking about "desperate defense" in oWoD vs. Dodge in nWoD. In which you get your full dice pool vs. attks.

 

[eyebeams]

Maybe we are talking apples and oranges I am talking about "desperate defense" in oWoD vs. Dodge in nWoD. In which you get your full dice pool vs. attks.

They're not really similar as basic nWoD Defense works against multiple attacks, though at a penalty. In the old game aborting to defend uses up your action and only applies to a given attack. If you're acting more than once, it's one of your multiple actions. If you only defend this penalty isn't too high, though. nWoD characters are a bit more robust versus multiple attacks at the cost of not being able to get in multiple attacks without some specialized abilities.

 

[Set]

I'm not especially excited about this game. Trying to play core D&D with level adjustments is already wonky and unbalanced. Compare a level 5 pixie fighter to a level 9 human wizard, and there's really no comparison. A vampire's got a what, +8 level adjustment?

I'm guessing that WoD vampires won't have level drain, or any of the other pricey stuff, since WoD vampires tend to have to pick and choose from a menu. The one who summons swarms of rats to attack his enemy isn't likely to also be able to charm gaze humanoids, and the one who has a +8 strength won't likely be the same one who can turn to mist, since they specialize in different areas.

Monte, along with Sean Reynolds, managed to make LA+0 ghosts for the Ghostwalk setting, while keeping them faithful to the concept, so I would not be surprised if he did the same for this setting, starting as newly fledged / sired / whatever vampires and moving up through a racial class that grants greater attributes and access to 'vampire feats' or some sort of powers tree that allows one to control animals, or people, or weather, or whatever.

Frankly, I'd be shocked if Monte's WoD was some sort of lame attempt at making Monster Manual-style vampires and werewolves into monster classes, since *that's already been done.* Monster classes for these critters can be found in Libris Mortis, or even online.

About the only major issue I'd have with a d20 adaptation to the WoD would be the use of some of the, IMO, dumber aspects of d20. The idea of the blood-fueled superhuman metabolism of a vampire being replaced with a Con score of zero, just because they are undead, or of a Nosferatu no longer being able to control bugs because they are 'mindless' vermin, conveniently immune to mind-affecting powers, detracts from the genre. These are problems Monte could avoid completely, by ignoring the Con 0 thing, or making Vermin Int 1 in the setting and therefore trainable, like real-world insects, or end up having to make the usual sort of hand-wave exceptions that d20 is forced to make around such nonsense rules (uh, use the Charisma score for Con-based variables, since we belatedly realized that the creature was unworkable without such a score... uh, Summon spells allows one to control vermin, even if they are technically immune to being controlled, 'cause they're alien vermin from another dimension, yeah, that's the ticket... Unless you're a Druid, in which case, I got nothing, and oh look, is that Elvis? [runs off to avoid further questions]).

 

[painandgreed]

Uh, no. Bullets, particularly large-caliber ones, rip tunnels and holes in flesh. Moreso if you're dealing in crazy stuff like hollow-points and Glaser rounds, doubly so if you have something like large-ought shot in a shotgun. Automatic weapons do this quickly. The idea that, somehow, the undead are immune (effectively) to bullets but not knives and swords is...amusing.

Not really. While bullets do cause damage in primary cavitization, they are primarily peircing weapons. Death is caused by blood loss when the damage isn't to the brain or spinal column. In that vampires don't bleed unless very singnificant damage is done to them, taking half damage from guns when not a head shot, would be fairly accurate for verisimilitude. In a system without hit location and special effects of damage the death spiral and associated penalties are a decent approximation of physical damage taken. The large caliber weapons you speak of do enough damage that even after halved, it is still significant.

 

[Felon]

That was not Campbell's point, Jim. His point was that, in the context of nWoD rules, vampires regenerate from bullet wounds very easily. Which they do.

After you can make all the criticism you want about the power of firearms, but the bottom line is, undead don't exist in the real world. We're talking about a game element within the specific context of its rules.

The remark by Campbell that drew the rebuttal about ballistic fallacies was likely "vampires take bullets like ordinary people take punches since their organs are no longer vital". Whether it was his point or not, it is true that there are plenty of plenty of ways to inflict heavy tissue damage with firearms. Bullents aren't deadly just for their ability to poke little holes in vital organs.

Undead don't exist in the real world, but the game tells us how vampire physiology, so we do have something to critique and criticize. If they wanted vamps to be resistant to bullets, they probably just should've gone with a full-on magical explanation, rather than something pseudo-scientific which opens itself up to deconstruction. Ballistic damage can indeed shred and explode meat and bone.

Now, it's been a while since I played WoD, but I don't recall firearms being especially weak. Just the opposite, acutally. In the very first version of the Vampire rules, any extra successes on an attack counted as extra damage. Like a lot of WoD rules, the min-maxing strategies were obvious: strength was of secondary value if dexterity served both attack and damage. I had a 13-year-old kid gangrel that had minimal strength and maxed-out dexterity, and he did ridiculous damage with his claws.

Then a revised rulebook came out, it had those extra successes only counting as extra damage with ballistic weapons. Little Billy faced sudden, brutal nerfing. It was just another one of those discrepencies you get when game designers intend for Strength to add into melee weapons, but then they wind up without an adder to apply to firearm damage.

D20 has this very issue as well, it should be noted. Strength adds to melee damage, and to muscle-powered might longbows, but nothing adds to firearm damage. Try introducing .45 automatics into your D&D campaign, and you will find your fellow gamers seriously underwhelmed.

 

[Jim Hague]

Not really. While bullets do cause damage in primary cavitization, they are primarily peircing weapons. Death is caused by blood loss when the damage isn't to the brain or spinal column. In that vampires don't bleed unless very singnificant damage is done to them, taking half damage from guns when not a head shot, would be fairly accurate for verisimilitude. In a system without hit location and special effects of damage the death spiral and associated penalties are a decent approximation of physical damage taken. The large caliber weapons you speak of do enough damage that even after halved, it is still significant.

Actually, IIRC (at work, no books), doesn't nWoD have effective hit location in that there's a penalty to hit but increased damage for individual body parts? You make a good point here, and it's the same one I was going at - big bullets make big holes. I wouldn't expect an undead horror to run screaming from a gang member with a .22 zipgun, I would expect them to be afraid of discovery by the mortal authorites, who have significantly more firepower and manpower to bring to bear...

It's a verisimillitude issue with me, one that got really bad at the end of the OWoD - mortals are supposed to be what the supernatural is afraid of, inverting the usual horror trope in that regard. But when the supernaturals have nothing to mechanically fear, then it breaks down.

 

[Felon]

Not really. While bullets do cause damage in primary cavitization, they are primarily peircing weapons. Death is caused by blood loss when the damage isn't to the brain or spinal column.

"Death" and "damage" are not the same thing, in either reality or the game. Who cares if a creature is dead if it's actually been rippsed to pieces? Blow big holes in a vamp's torso, take off its arms and legs, and the mess left over won't like it was done with a piercing weapon.

I've yet to see a game system where anyone bleeds out and dies after a fight.

 

[EditorBFG]

I expect they'll be quite a bit different in this book, though. More varied, more interesting, more detailed, and yes, far more playable. After all, the general idea seems to be that players will be playing vampires, demons, werewolves, whatever. And I imagine Monte Cook has therefore put some thought into the playability of said beings (plus whatever else is available for PC use)

This is what I expect as well. I think Monte is too smart to have LAs and all that for a large group of playable characters. He and Sean Reynolds are smart guys, who know their crunch backwards and forwards and are not afraid to screw with d20's holy bovines-- as someone else pointed out, tehy did Ghostwalk and made PC ghosts with no LA.

That said, as you say (in the part I didn't quote), I will wait and see. I'm pretty sure I want this book, but like most of us I'm gonna flip through it in the store to see how the handled things. If it just reprints D&D vampires, I'll leave it on the shelf.

IME so far, nWoD makes a very good system for playing humans, or slightly augmented humans, in a modern supernatural setting. I haven't had a chance to try out VtR, WtF, MtA etc., but I am of the mind that Monte Cook's take on the WoD will appeal to me more than any of those would. And for "modern D&D", I'd much rather stick with d20 Modern (especially with the supplement 'Postmodern: Fantastic Classes' and a couple of others), or maybe True20.

Thank you for the kind words on Fantastic Classes-- I worked hard on that thing!

Depending on how McWod handles humans, I imagine modern stuff might be worth porting in. Also, I think playing things like the Shadowborn Hero and the Zealous Hero in a WoD-type setting would be a kick in the pants... which is part of why I am looking forward to a d20 take on it.

 

[mmu1]

They're not really similar as basic nWoD Defense works against multiple attacks, though at a penalty. In the old game aborting to defend uses up your action and only applies to a given attack. If you're acting more than once, it's one of your multiple actions. If you only defend this penalty isn't too high, though. nWoD characters are a bit more robust versus multiple attacks at the cost of not being able to get in multiple attacks without some specialized abilities.

So what you're saying is that you actually can split your action into two or more, then abort one of them in order to Dodge, yes?