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Remember, kids. It's boring-ass rules and not boring ass-rules. That's a totally different game. For those that don't know me really well, now is pretty much where I usually start regretting that I started this. We're past my scant commentary on gaming fiction and atmosphere and into the mechanics, the exceptions to normal rules, weapons charts, grappling rules, and all the rest. I'm gonna keep chugging through this, though, because there's some interesting stuff here; put on some tea and read under the cut.
Okay, so we're doing Chapters 6 & 7 today, which took me a while to get through. Every now and again, I'd catch myself skimming and either put the book down until I could focus or just doubled down and re-read everything I glazed over. It's easy to ignore stuff you think you already know! I've really tried to focus, though, because otherwise there's no point in reading the book at all, and that means reading the whole thing.
When I'm looking through the rules, there are a few things I'm reading for. The first is just how intuitive the system is when doing something besides a cut and dried dice pool roll and the second is how easy the rules are to reference if you're not operating from memory.
Chapter 6 is mostly fairly intuitive extrapolations of the basic dice pool mechanic - things like extended, contested, and reflexive actions, number of successes needed for extended actions, modifiers to the dice roll, and spelling out whatever rules hadn't been fully spelt out in the previous chapters. One of the things I noticed is that the suggestion I had in a previous chapter - that the modifiers to the dice roll are told to the player after they've resolved to make the roll for exactly the reasons I proposed.
In between Chapters 6 and 7, there's a number of sub-systems where the location obvious - object size, durability, and damage are in Ch. 6, non-combat equipment suggestions are in 6, melee and ranged weapons and armor are in 7 (Combat), vehicle stats, crashes, and chase rules are 6, rules for fire and electrical damage are in 7 (no surprise), but drugs, intoxication, poisons, disease, fatigue, and food and water deprivation are in 7, too. Basically, 6 and 7 are functionally the same chapter but 7 has a lot more to do with what it probably going to happen during combat time scales.
Pretty much all of Chapter 6 makes sense and I think that if you made a new player guess how to handle things like dice rolls over time or contested dice rolls, they'd probably come up with something very similar. I think that's a good sign, really. The edge cases are well-marked and easy to find in the text, and are clearly explained, but there isn't anything really interesting about what the chapter actually says.
Chapter 7's a little different in that regard, in that there are a few things that kind of surprised or amused me. The first is something we discover right off the bat. Remember us chatting about Initiative a while ago? It does indeed use an Attribute set of Dexterity and Composure, but Brent was right about only rolling one dice. For whatever reason, initiative is still derived by rolling a single d10 and adding Dex + Comp. The only reason I can think of is that most rolls are going to be in the 2-5 success range and rolling a d10 and adding the two Attributes creates a better spread of values. I'm not going to do the math on that. If you know, though, feel free to tell me.
There's a Combat Summary Chart on page 154 that gives you the brief idea of what's going on in the chapter regarding combat options, which I think is a really good idea to make available. It's the kind of thing you could pretty easily run off in photocopy for use at the table, or just leave a bookmark in. The grappling rules predictably take up about two full pages, but they make pretty decent sense. I just know that grappling is notorious in gaming circles, but it's pretty clear.
There are special staking rules which seem a little too finicky, but I guess that makes sense given that it's an easy out of offing a vampire. I'd basically rule that if you succeed on the staking, you'd kill pretty much anything else, too, given the nature of what you're doing even though I think technically you could succeed on a stake without actually killing the victim.
Ranged and melee weapon charts cover most of the basics (Armory gets really in depth, but you can operate pretty easily with what you find in here.) There's a very small, general list of archaic and modern body armors, too.
There's one kind of goofy thing in the Melee Weapons Chart, and it's that Size is also the amount of Strength you need to use a weapon without a penalty. Spears, which really aren't too tedious to use compared to, say, a Greatsword (Size 3) are Size 4 and need 2 hands. Someone of average Strength, then, is going to specifically have a hard time using a knife tied to a stick because it's long. I'd probably tone it down to Damage 2 (L), +1 Defense, Two-Handed, and make it useful at Strength 2.
The book also notes that katanas are especially well-made and difficult to break, and they get their own special mention on the Melee Weapons Chart. I kind of rolled my eyes; the Katana Myth lives on.
The rules for taking damage on your health track are four and a half pages long. I didn't try to write up the rules myself, but this is one of the few times where the description of what's going on isn't as to the point as normal. The information is clear enough, but it's very wordy. The Explosives Chart should be, I feel, closer to the Melee, Ranged, and Armor Charts. I read the rules for the rest of the stuff, and if anything else is particularly weird, I didn't catch it. Honestly, my eyes were starting to glaze over. It's the kind of thing you read when you need it, but like the rest, it's pretty easy to get and nothing stands out as out of synch.
Falling damage tops out at 10 (L), which I figured was a little low, actually. Once you hit terminal velocity, though, there isn't really a way to mitigate your damage except through unusual means, so you'll probably just die - which seems about in-line with how I understand falling from great heights. It does mean that something with 11 health levels, though, can literally fall out of the stratosphere and survive. I don't know if this is a problem or radical.
So, after two chapters of ramming a shitload of rules towards us, the writers probably felt like we could use a refresher course, and wrote up a 4-page example scenario. If you haven't actually played before, or didn't feel like reading the rules straight through, it's actually not a bad idea to read it.
What's kind of interesting about the scenario is that it illustrates something in the fiction that I was thinking when I was looking at the rules - the painted combat scenario has no overt supernatural influence at all. There's nothing really, besides fluff, that makes the core game anything more than a d10 based dice pool game set in a modern era. (There's not much tying the system to the modern era, either, except that you'll be less likely to use the electricity rules and more likely to use the illness and deprivation rules.)
Anyhow, it runs through most of the basics in a realistic way - there's a gumshoe and a mob boss puts a hit on him, so an assassin targets him outside his office with an impressive Dex 3 + Firearms 4 + (Lt SMG) +2 dice pool. You get an example of autofire, charging into melee range, chance dice, spending Willpower, 10-Agains, initiative, adding someone who's firing into an existing fight, cover, driving, and damage to cover, vehicles, and people. It doesn't hit absolutely everything, but by the time it's done, you get a pretty intense fight that's more flavorful than just rolling dice until someone's bashing rolls over into lethal.
Okay, so, dry, but useful and pretty well laid out. Once again, the equipment lists are scattered pretty liberally around, but at least they're confined to two chapters and they're easy to see. If you know they're there, it's not bad. Is there anything else? No. I'm doing character development at the end - it'd break up my pacing too much and there's very little that makes me stop and consider deliberate character writing, so basically the way it'll work is that I'll finish and go back to use the book I've read to make the character and explain how it was in practice. You really don't need the book after Merits to do it, though, I've noticed, except to know what your equipment stats might look like.
Okay, so we're doing Chapters 6 & 7 today, which took me a while to get through. Every now and again, I'd catch myself skimming and either put the book down until I could focus or just doubled down and re-read everything I glazed over. It's easy to ignore stuff you think you already know! I've really tried to focus, though, because otherwise there's no point in reading the book at all, and that means reading the whole thing.
When I'm looking through the rules, there are a few things I'm reading for. The first is just how intuitive the system is when doing something besides a cut and dried dice pool roll and the second is how easy the rules are to reference if you're not operating from memory.
Chapter 6 is mostly fairly intuitive extrapolations of the basic dice pool mechanic - things like extended, contested, and reflexive actions, number of successes needed for extended actions, modifiers to the dice roll, and spelling out whatever rules hadn't been fully spelt out in the previous chapters. One of the things I noticed is that the suggestion I had in a previous chapter - that the modifiers to the dice roll are told to the player after they've resolved to make the roll for exactly the reasons I proposed.
In between Chapters 6 and 7, there's a number of sub-systems where the location obvious - object size, durability, and damage are in Ch. 6, non-combat equipment suggestions are in 6, melee and ranged weapons and armor are in 7 (Combat), vehicle stats, crashes, and chase rules are 6, rules for fire and electrical damage are in 7 (no surprise), but drugs, intoxication, poisons, disease, fatigue, and food and water deprivation are in 7, too. Basically, 6 and 7 are functionally the same chapter but 7 has a lot more to do with what it probably going to happen during combat time scales.
Pretty much all of Chapter 6 makes sense and I think that if you made a new player guess how to handle things like dice rolls over time or contested dice rolls, they'd probably come up with something very similar. I think that's a good sign, really. The edge cases are well-marked and easy to find in the text, and are clearly explained, but there isn't anything really interesting about what the chapter actually says.
Chapter 7's a little different in that regard, in that there are a few things that kind of surprised or amused me. The first is something we discover right off the bat. Remember us chatting about Initiative a while ago? It does indeed use an Attribute set of Dexterity and Composure, but Brent was right about only rolling one dice. For whatever reason, initiative is still derived by rolling a single d10 and adding Dex + Comp. The only reason I can think of is that most rolls are going to be in the 2-5 success range and rolling a d10 and adding the two Attributes creates a better spread of values. I'm not going to do the math on that. If you know, though, feel free to tell me.
There's a Combat Summary Chart on page 154 that gives you the brief idea of what's going on in the chapter regarding combat options, which I think is a really good idea to make available. It's the kind of thing you could pretty easily run off in photocopy for use at the table, or just leave a bookmark in. The grappling rules predictably take up about two full pages, but they make pretty decent sense. I just know that grappling is notorious in gaming circles, but it's pretty clear.
There are special staking rules which seem a little too finicky, but I guess that makes sense given that it's an easy out of offing a vampire. I'd basically rule that if you succeed on the staking, you'd kill pretty much anything else, too, given the nature of what you're doing even though I think technically you could succeed on a stake without actually killing the victim.
Ranged and melee weapon charts cover most of the basics (Armory gets really in depth, but you can operate pretty easily with what you find in here.) There's a very small, general list of archaic and modern body armors, too.
There's one kind of goofy thing in the Melee Weapons Chart, and it's that Size is also the amount of Strength you need to use a weapon without a penalty. Spears, which really aren't too tedious to use compared to, say, a Greatsword (Size 3) are Size 4 and need 2 hands. Someone of average Strength, then, is going to specifically have a hard time using a knife tied to a stick because it's long. I'd probably tone it down to Damage 2 (L), +1 Defense, Two-Handed, and make it useful at Strength 2.
The book also notes that katanas are especially well-made and difficult to break, and they get their own special mention on the Melee Weapons Chart. I kind of rolled my eyes; the Katana Myth lives on.
The rules for taking damage on your health track are four and a half pages long. I didn't try to write up the rules myself, but this is one of the few times where the description of what's going on isn't as to the point as normal. The information is clear enough, but it's very wordy. The Explosives Chart should be, I feel, closer to the Melee, Ranged, and Armor Charts. I read the rules for the rest of the stuff, and if anything else is particularly weird, I didn't catch it. Honestly, my eyes were starting to glaze over. It's the kind of thing you read when you need it, but like the rest, it's pretty easy to get and nothing stands out as out of synch.
Falling damage tops out at 10 (L), which I figured was a little low, actually. Once you hit terminal velocity, though, there isn't really a way to mitigate your damage except through unusual means, so you'll probably just die - which seems about in-line with how I understand falling from great heights. It does mean that something with 11 health levels, though, can literally fall out of the stratosphere and survive. I don't know if this is a problem or radical.
So, after two chapters of ramming a shitload of rules towards us, the writers probably felt like we could use a refresher course, and wrote up a 4-page example scenario. If you haven't actually played before, or didn't feel like reading the rules straight through, it's actually not a bad idea to read it.
What's kind of interesting about the scenario is that it illustrates something in the fiction that I was thinking when I was looking at the rules - the painted combat scenario has no overt supernatural influence at all. There's nothing really, besides fluff, that makes the core game anything more than a d10 based dice pool game set in a modern era. (There's not much tying the system to the modern era, either, except that you'll be less likely to use the electricity rules and more likely to use the illness and deprivation rules.)
Anyhow, it runs through most of the basics in a realistic way - there's a gumshoe and a mob boss puts a hit on him, so an assassin targets him outside his office with an impressive Dex 3 + Firearms 4 + (Lt SMG) +2 dice pool. You get an example of autofire, charging into melee range, chance dice, spending Willpower, 10-Agains, initiative, adding someone who's firing into an existing fight, cover, driving, and damage to cover, vehicles, and people. It doesn't hit absolutely everything, but by the time it's done, you get a pretty intense fight that's more flavorful than just rolling dice until someone's bashing rolls over into lethal.
Okay, so, dry, but useful and pretty well laid out. Once again, the equipment lists are scattered pretty liberally around, but at least they're confined to two chapters and they're easy to see. If you know they're there, it's not bad. Is there anything else? No. I'm doing character development at the end - it'd break up my pacing too much and there's very little that makes me stop and consider deliberate character writing, so basically the way it'll work is that I'll finish and go back to use the book I've read to make the character and explain how it was in practice. You really don't need the book after Merits to do it, though, I've noticed, except to know what your equipment stats might look like.
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