WoD stuff.

[ArghMark]

In a few weeks I'm thinking of running a Changeling: the Lost game. I'm just wondering what you guys think of the next questions.

1. Probabilities. It seems quite difficult to succeed, especially to have dramatic successes. Anyone actually know the probabilities involved?

2. Anything about WoD or Changeling that i should really note? I like the setting a lot but Its been a battle to get a group willing to play it.

Yours,

Mark

 

[ValhallaGH]

1. WoD games are set up so that they punish you for rolling dice; your RP 'should be good enough that you don't need to roll dice', you simply narrate what best fits the scene, and the Storyteller adjusts it as appropriate.
If you want to roll dice, any given die has a 30% chance of success (70% chance of failure). Chance dice have a 90% chance of failure.
For a Simple Success, the chances of failure are 70%, 49%, 34%, 24%, 17%, 12%, 8%, etc (7^x / 10^x where x is the number of dice in the final die pool). This is for final dice in the pool, not for the initial die pool (penalties subtract from dice rolled, before the roll). For success, simply subtract those from 100% (i.e. 30%, 51%, 66%, 76%, etc).

For an Exceptional Success, the probabilities are a lot more complicated due to X Again rules. Whether the roll is 8, 9 or 10 again has a serious impact on the probabilities of exceptional success.

2. WoD is all about the story. Everything is subservient to telling a good story, especially dice rolls. That said, don't rail road your players, and don't go around inventing mechanics to disguise your Storyteller Fiat; I've played in campaigns that made those mistakes and they are still horror / joke stories I share with other friends.
If you do choose to let dice get rolled, my advice is to follow what the dice indicate. In my experience, dice rolls tend to be better narrators than any gamer I've played with. The sudden shifts in fortune, new injuries, success and failure. The only exceptions I've come across have all been in WoD games.

Good Luck.

 

[timbannock]

That's a pretty spot-on analysis.

As a Storyteller, you really need to consider the examples under each power/skill for modifiers, both bonuses and penalties. These are there for a reason, but seem to be forgotten quite often (or the ST conveniently only remembers penalties, and never bonuses). If you use these religiously, you may find the system is more "balanced" than at first perceived. But it's still a truism that the nWoD system is more about roleplaying and less about dice-rolling...only roll the dice if there is a significant chance of failure and the roll is critical to the story. That's an credo (or whatever) that I try to live by in any game.

Oh, and check out the combat hacks in WoD Armory Reloaded. There's great ideas there, and plenty of discussion about the rulesy parts of the game, many of which relate to more than just combat.

 

[Terramotus]

Be very careful if you're trying something new with a bunch of hardened D&D players who are new to WoD, in particular with how many dots you allow them to purchase in any given skill. The NPCs aren't exactly min-maxed stat-wise. Our party quite accidentally broke the game. It was pretty easy to specialize in a few skills, knowing the other party members would pick up the slack and have the points left to create combat monsters.

Our DM/Storyteller ran parts of an example adventure mixed in with her own things. After being toyed with once too many times by arrogant vampires one night we rampaged through Chicago, staking and burning every vampire who got in our way, ultimately meeting with a Vampire Lord of some sort. He was supposed to be impossible for us to harm, and to teach us that "this isn't Legend of Zelda" where you fight the boss at the end.

IIRC in the first round he went first, caused some serious damage to one of the party members and dominated another (me). We still managed to stake his minion and inflict enough damage that he was forced to flee or face certain death, even with me trying my darndest to kill the rest of the party on behalf of my new best bud.

We then realized how powerful we were and started plotting to take over the city. After assessing the wreckage of the plotline we ultimately decided that Vampire wasn't really the game for us. As far as we knew we were following the rules exactly - we just are too in love with killing stuff and the RAW didn't restrain us enough to prevent us from steamrolling over practically anything in our path. We may have been glass cannons, but DAMN were we powerful cannons. Rather than start houseruling things to make it all work we switched game systems. I think we tried to turn WoD into something it wasn't.

 

[Darkness]

1. Probabilities. It seems quite difficult to succeed, especially to have dramatic successes. Anyone actually know the probabilities involved?

Check out these charts.

 

[Crothian]

THe game doesn't punish you for rolling dice. Usually one just need a success to do something so it is rarely a problem. I've played it for years using the many different games and we've had no problems.

Figure out what the players like and what you want from a campaign and meld them. There are some great Changeling adventures that are PDFs that I would highly recomend if you need help in that area.

 

[ArghMark]

Thanks for the answers!

I have another question for people who know about Changeling.

The first and second dots of the Smoke power let you change your tracks and then make them disappear entirely.

Now, I understand this as a very traditional fae thing to do. But does it stop ALL tracks? The main book would lead me to think its just about footprints. But changelings leave many kinds of tracks -

I.e. electronic tracks, camera recordings, and so on.

I'm thinking for the sake of 1. It's cool and 2. Its cool and feels very fae-like, that the power is all pervasive. Whats the use of changing your footprints if most changelings live in a city? So instead of just changing footprints, it also changes anything the PC's do for a scene in terms of people chasing them down.

Imagine the police trying to track your credit card usage when the data is corrupted to look like something else, or simply isn't there. A video camera shows a tiger walking through when a security guard saw a man, or the camera shows nothing at all.

Good idea or bad?

 

[Achan hiArusa]

What you were calculating is the percent chance of getting a number of failures equal to your die pool. Since you only need a single success, probabilities are additive (really they use the binomial theorem). So you chances of failure are (not including 10 agains):

luck die--90% (+10% of really bad thing happening)
1 die--70%
2 dice--40%
3 dice--10%
4 or more dice--automatic

However that is not neccessarily true, so we must use the binomial theorem to get the correct answer for the percentage chance of failure:

luck die--90%
1 die--70%
2 dice--42%
3 dice--19%
4 dice--7.6%
5 dice--2.8%
6 dice--1.0%
7 dice--0.36%
8 dice--0.12%
9 dice--0.041%
10 dice--0.014%

Now this does not include the fact that 8, 9, or 10 agains can bump the die probability to the next level. There is a 10% this will happen on a 10 again, 20% on 9 agains, and 30% on 8 agains which would require feeding these numbers back into the binomial theorem and calculating chance of rerolls (and would require the sum of a Riemann-Zeta function since its for every 8, 9, or 10).

But that doesn't count the fact that I know people whom the dice are out to get.

 

[eyebeams]

Pretty much the most important thing to keep in mind is that in most cases one success is sufficient to accomplish a task - multiple successes should be better performance, not required. There are exceptions here and there in the rules (extended actions, teamwork and a few others) but for the most part that's the guiding principle.

Players should also be spending Willpower *frequently* and you should provide opportunities to regain it in play. In many games people are timid in using or granting it, which leads to an underuse of the Virtue/Vice mechanics.