I never really played Vampire as much of a combat game. My experience with WoD in general is that Werewolf was the more action style part of the WoD universe.
That said there were some very epic combats in Vampire. The problem with it was that when the characters and NPCs started becoming powerfull it all boiled down to "who won the initiative". Because once high skilled Celerity and such kicked in you could be ripped to pieces before you could do anything.
I would say my favorite modules for Vampire was the "Giovanni Chronicles". Those were absolutely outstanding and I rate them up there close to the quality of "The Enemy Within" campaign of 1st edition Warhammer.
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World of Darkness in either the old or new incarnation is a very rules light system, especially once you compare it to a rules intensive system like Pathfinder.
I am a huge fan of WoD and I can tell you that there isn't much that gets into the nuts and bolts of the combat system. You could look up WoD: Combat but that mostly adds new options. Alternatively there is the Vampire Revised Stroyteller's Handbook which was a great supplement about running games. The combat system however works just like any other roll. You roll a number of dice determined by adding your Attribute + Skill vs a certain Target Number (usually 6) and every die that comes up a the TN or higher is a success and any 1s that are rolled cancel out successes. Any dice left over that hit the TN determine if you hit your target and how well you did so.
New WoD simplifies things and has a section in the book that gives a detailed example of combat. I am kind of a fanboy of the new stuff over the old because of all the streamlining they did in terms of both system and setting.
Thing is... IIRC... you have a dice pool equal to the number of dice you have for your primary action. You can choose to blow all of them on an attack, but if you want to parry or dodge, you need to keep some of them for that. Then of course, there are dozens of ways to get several extra actions (rage, celerity etc), which complicates things. You can also split your dice pool into several actions as is, so if you have 10 dice from dexterity + melee, you can make two attacks at four dice, and still have two dice left if you are attacked. Note that once someone has no more dice in their pool, every attack with even a single success is assumed to hit. If you botched, however, you lost all further attacks. It was a good while since I did this, and I have probably mangled it, but still. Just understand that it's a non-mini system meant to be used for storytelling, not dungeon crawling, and thus does play it more fast and loose.
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Thing is... IIRC... you have a dice pool equal to the number of dice you have for your primary action. You can choose to blow all of them on an attack, but if you want to parry or dodge, you need to keep some of them for that. Then of course, there are dozens of ways to get several extra actions (rage, celerity etc), which complicates things. You can also split your dice pool into several actions as is, so if you have 10 dice from dexterity + melee, you can make two attacks at four dice, and still have two dice left if you are attacked. Note that once someone has no more dice in their pool, every attack with even a single success is assumed to hit. If you botched, however, you lost all further attacks. It was a good while since I did this, and I have probably mangled it, but still. Just understand that it's a non-mini system meant to be used for storytelling, not dungeon crawling, and thus does play it more fast and loose.
You are correct for First and Second edition Vampire. However, they changed this rule in the Revised Vampire, which is what V20 is based on. The rule was switched to every successive action taken in a round reduces the dice pool by 2. For example if you make a melee attack you would roll Strength + Weaponry but if you then wanted to dodge you would roll Dexterity + Dodge -2, if you then wanted to dodge another attack you would roll Dexterity + Dodge -4. If your pool was reduced to zero dice you couldn't perform any more actions that round. The same rule applied if you fired a gun more than once in a round.
They also fixed Celerity. It used to be that the expenditure of Vitae granted a fresh dice pool that could then be divided up again, which got really broken with melee focused characters, such as in Dark Ages games. With Revised and now V20 the rule is that Celerity grants a fresh dice pool but it mush be rolled all on a single action.
As I said, it was a while. It really isn't that complicated, though. If you can deal with Pathfinder, WoD is easier.
Ah, Werewolf the Apocalypse... Charmed Existence merit to remove one 1 rolled from each roll, crinos form, rage for extra actions, say, 4-5 of them, adds up to 40-50 attacks with one die each, which could not botch. With each of them doing 10+ aggravated damage, there wasn't much that couldn't be turned into paste. It was a horrible rules abuse, of course, but there was a special feeling to rolling a few hundred dice of damage...
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Splitting your dice pool in V20 is actually done by taking the smallest of all pools you would otherwise be using, and then dividing those dice among the actions you are performing as you see fit. See page 248, 2nd paragraph under Multiple Actions for proof.
Ah, I didn't realize that the rule had been changed. I was under the impression that V20 was the same rules set, without alterations, as Revised.
I never really looked at V20 because I made the switch to Requiem and still think that the release of V20 was a bad move from a business standpoint because they have split their fan base now between Requiem and Masquerade, which is unfortunate because Requiem is so damn cool.
That's all off topic however, and I agree with the above statement that combat is pretty straightforward and once you run a couple rounds you will get the hang of it. like said above, if you can do Pathfinder you can do World of Darkness.
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Now, to be less off-topic - I have plenty of free time on my hands and a solid grasp of Vampire's rules, so if there are more questions needing answers or examples desired I would be glad to help anyone with just about anything.
I also have far too much knowledge about World of Darkness and eagerness to help with any questions.
To get off topic for a moment again, I think one of the things hurting WoD is the lack of any kind of organized play support. They don't need some kind of big network like Pathfinder Society but something sanctioned and supported but not tracked by the parent company like Shadowrun Missions would do wonders to build the fanbase back up. The company just didn't seem to weather the mid-2000s industry slump. Of course, now they are supporting the old game again rather than just sticking with the new lines so any kind of organized play would be problematic. They need to stick to one or the other and stop trying to have two versions of each of the big three.
Again, I'm kind of a WoD fanboy and spend far too much time thinking on such things. lol
Did any of you play much of Mage, Wraith or Changeling?
I really liked how they set up Mage, but only really played Vampire and Werewolf.
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I enjoyed the hell out of Mage but some players did use the magic system as an excuse to argue with the Storyteller and that gets old very fast. The free-form magic is a little daunting and intimidating but once you wrap your head around it, it plays pretty smoothly.
As a brief new WoD aside, the intimidation factor of magic was lessened significantly in the new Mage the Awakening. I don't mean to keep sounding like I'm trying to sell nWoD, I just am a total geeking fanboy about it most of the time.
I owned both the Wraith and Changeling core rulebooks and had a Wraith player in a crossover game I ran. Wraith was pretty solid but setting-wise ended up being pretty far removed from the core setting of the World of Darkness so it felt kind of disconnected. The other thing is characters are considerably more powerful than other games, which makes crossovers difficult. Crossover old WoD games are difficult enough with the minor differences from one game line to another. Changeling didn't diverge from the setting but did diverge from the "gothic-punk" tone of the other games, making it seem more like a distant cousin than a sister to the rest of the games.
I tried to get a Changeling game off the ground once but it never really went anywhere. The system was kind of wonky where it took parts of magic form Mage and disciplines from Vampire and mashed them together. It just never really resonated with me. I do not find it surprising that when the game lines were all consolidated in 1999, Wraith and Changeling were the ones dropped.
Wraith, however, got a great sendoff in 2004 as the World of Darkness was blowing up with the limited run of Orpheus. It's a freaken amazing game and ran exactly six books. The story and take on the setting is so damn cool.
Ah, that's not exactly what I meant.
What I mean is, is there something out there that explains how combat works? Because honestly, I don't fully grasp it.
I ran a fairly long V:tM game a few years back. Is there anything specifically you are having trouble with?
As others have stated it's a pretty loose, free-form system compared to Pathfinder. Playing without minis and a battle map elmiinates a lot of the "tactical" aspects and combats are over pretty quick most of the time.
I glanced at Mage: The Awakening when it came out and didn't like the whole scions of Atlantis metaplot thing.
Back in OWoD I owned Vampire (2nd), Mage (1st-Revised) and Changeling (1st and 2nd). I played Vampire briefly, played and ran Mage and never did anything with Changeling, other than the occasional NPC and one player tried playing a Sidhe in the Mage game I was running, but it just didn't work well. He ended up switching to a Mage character. I also allowed someone to play a Stargazer werewolf briefly in one Mage game, which worked a little better, and played a Silent Strider in another short werewolf game, but never bought any of the books. Ones of my friends had Wraith, but playing a ghost didn't really appeal to the rest of us. I also played a mage in a couple of cross-over games.
I will say, as much as the die-hards of the assorted systems hated it, I think crossover games worked best with Mage as the base, simply because it could explain the different supernaturals within its system (and allow them to run under their own rules without much problem) and setting.
This is why I actually really liked the new World of Darkness. Having that central rule system makes it much easier to run crossover games if you want to (though the latest game, Mummy: The Curse, would be a bastard to try and fit in due to power level concerns). Best WoD game I've played in was one were no two of us were playing the same template. The only houseruling the GM had to do was okaying a couple of homebrew templates (given that he'd had a hand in their creation, it wasn't a concern) and ruling on how things like my werewolf's abilities affected the group given that they say they work on my "pack" (solved by saying I'd accepted the group as my pack due to never having really been raised by other weres).
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The Atlantis metaplot is kind of silly, I agree. I don't know why they included it since the other lines took pains to move away from a metaplot. Part of the idea of the reboot was to move away from the heavy backstory and metaplot that the old world had.
That being said, the crossover game we just wrapped up had a Mage in the group and we just kind of ignored the bits about Atlantis and instead used the watchtowers and whatnot as the only real explanation. Atlantis is more an origin theory and doesn't factor into as much of the game as it seems from reading the book.
Speaking of crossovers, the game blends beautifully. We started with a Vampire, a Werewolf, a Mage, a Changeling, and two Hunters. About mid way through the campaign one of the Hunters became a Promethean. The game ran smoothly without issue, which is much better than the long running crossover game I had many years ago in the old world. The core system may have been the same but the interpretation of it was a little different in each line. Not so much that we didn't have a blast but each player needed to track their individual characters a little differently. That's not an issue with the new game at all. I haven't seen Geist or Mummy yet so I don't know how well those fit.
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Speaking of crossovers, the game blends beautifully. We started with a Vampire, a Werewolf, a Mage, a Changeling, and two Hunters. About mid way through the campaign one of the Hunters became a Promethean. The game ran smoothly without issue, which is much better than the long running crossover game I had many years ago in the old world. The core system may have been the same but the interpretation of it was a little different in each line. Not so much that we didn't have a blast but each player needed to track their individual characters a little differently. That's not an issue with the new game at all. I haven't seen Geist or Mummy yet so I don't know how well those fit.
Our group had a Promethean, Bard (homebrew template), Hunter, Changeling, Werewolf, and another couple of homebrew templates who were essentially heralds for gods the GM had created. We also had a Geist drop in and out. Geist fits in perfectly, both in terms of power level and ease of fitting them in (Geists aren't ghosts like Wraiths were, they're people who died and came back with a spirit bonded to them).
Mummy though... it's kept the old WoD Mummy aspect of huge earth shattering power and so on, and also completely changed the dynamic of play... when a Mummy awakens, they have an obscene amount of power, but practically no memory or knowledge of who they are, and are essentially raging magical killing machines running on instinct. They then steadily lose power as they regain control and memory, and once they completely regain their knowledge they're essentially powerless and go back to sleep until it all happens again. They also wrote the game in such a way that it actually requires players to let the GM flesh out their character for the most part instead of the GM controlling the world and the players controlling their characters... you have all these flashbacks and so on where the GM reveals stuff about your character. Makes for a rubbish long term campaign.
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Mummy though... it's kept the old WoD Mummy aspect of huge earth shattering power and so on, and also completely changed the dynamic of play... when a Mummy awakens, they have an obscene amount of power, but practically no memory or knowledge of who they are, and are essentially raging magical killing machines running on instinct. They then steadily lose power as they regain control and memory, and once they completely regain their knowledge they're essentially powerless and go back to sleep until it all happens again. They also wrote the game in such a way that it actually requires players to let the GM flesh out their character for the most part instead of the GM controlling the world and the players controlling their characters... you have all these flashbacks and so on where the GM reveals stuff about your character. Makes for a rubbish long term campaign.
That's disappointing, I was really looking forward to picking it up. let's hope Demon is better designed.
How well do Hunters work in the new WoD? I hated Hunters in the old WoD because so much of their stuff was "We can kill/stop/completely invalidate every other supernatural just because."
I liked the original hunters in the system who were just mortals who had figured out what was going on and maybe had a couple tricks up their sleeve (True Faith, Hedge Magic, etc). I found them to be a lot of more interesting than the newer ones who were suddenly imbued with godlike power to kill everything else.
Hunters in the new world skew more toward Hunter's Hunted as opposed to Hunter the Reckoning. I really enjoy Hunters since they are mortals facing untold horrors. The two in my crossover game were from a long term World of Darkness/Hunter the Vigil game I ran before my epic Vampire the Requiem chronicle. The game functions on multiple levels depending on how you want to play it as far as character power and scope through a system they call Tiers. It's really quite an elegant game and plays more like an extension of characters made with just the core rulebook than it's own line. I've had a lot of fun with Hunter in all of its incarnations.
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"It's like we are playing The Reckoning, but all the Messengers bothered to say and do during the imbuing was 'dude, look out, whatever that is wants to eat you! Grab that shotgun off the mantle, and good luck... you're going to need it.' and yet somehow it all works out."
An apt description, except it doesn't always work out. I ran a sizable chronicle using just the core book that was an absolute blast. After a break to play Shackled City we returned to the game but upgraded the characters to Hunter with them falling in with The Union.
I am also a big fan of how the new World of Darkness narrows the divide between normal guy and "average" supernatural creatures - I actually had a player with a non-combat character manage to beat down a (not terribly old) vampire with a high initiative roll and some good luck on his willpower-boosted all-out attack... a feat which the odds of pulling off in the classic world of darkness are astronomically slim.
I quite like the fact that supernaturals aren't superheroes anymore. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Masquerade and it's over the top abilities, but I really prefer Requiem's subtler approach. The same is true for the other games as well, though Werewolves are still pretty damn brutal.
It makes for games to have a more subtle change between normal and not-normal, which for me, is way creepier.
I quite like the fact that supernaturals aren't superheroes anymore. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Masquerade and it's over the top abilities, but I really prefer Requiem's subtler approach. The same is true for the other games as well, though Werewolves are still pretty damn brutal.
It makes for games to have a more subtle change between normal and not-normal, which for me, is way creepier.
Werewolves are indeed pretty damn brutal. I can build most templates without too much effort and have them be effective. Werewolves I tend to find I have to actively try to not make them utterly insane. Though that last game did have a ridiculous power level, so I just went nuts on my Ithaeur aspected were and built him to be a spirit summoning/fetish crafting utility machine while still bringing the pain as needed (turns out 30+ dice on an attack is pretty darn good).
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(turns out 30+ dice on an attack is pretty darn good).
lol Yeah, I'd say so. In the game we just wrapped the Werewolf, who was built as an occult investigator/private eye not combat, could match pace for the most part with the Vampire who was based on melee and range. Of course, neither was a match for the gunslinging Hunter who dual-wielded Desert Eagles. He was pretty gross when it came to dice, of course, the player couldn't seem to roll real well no matter how many dice he had. Of course the Vamp was also a sniper and she ended up getting a Barret Light 50 anti-material rifle from the Mage, who was a weapons designer. She could take down anything at range with that damn rifle.
WoD has great storytelling, though it can take a while to realize: yes, the system really is that uncomplicated.
I've heard a lot of praise for the new mechanics, though, so much so that what I understand to be what happened was that people were applying the new mechanics to the old theme.
This may be incorrect.
The old books however, had some great tutorials that walked you through basic play examples, if you flipped through the pages.
(turns out 30+ dice on an attack is pretty darn good).lol Yeah, I'd say so. In the game we just wrapped the Werewolf, who was built as an occult investigator/private eye not combat, could match pace for the most part with the Vampire who was based on melee and range. Of course, neither was a match for the gunslinging Hunter who dual-wielded Desert Eagles. He was pretty gross when it came to dice, of course, the player couldn't seem to roll real well no matter how many dice he had. Of course the Vamp was also a sniper and she ended up getting a Barret Light 50 anti-material rifle from the Mage, who was a weapons designer. She could take down anything at range with that damn rifle.
Hah, yeah hunters get some insane combat stuff... they're one of the systems I'm not as familar with, but the hunter in my game had an ability that boosted his abilities with the gun when he met certain conditions... the GM decided to allow the conditions to be James Bond style puns before firing... Funny now and then, but it did start to get irritating when he was struggling to pull a pun together every single round of combat.
My character was a member of the Iron Masters (I think that's the name), so unlike most werewolves he was good with technology, and focused on using a desert eagle that he'd bound a spirit of honour into. Massive boosts from that, then a few other fetishes he'd created that he could use to boost his dice pool and his shift into near human form for the boosted dexterity. He used to outright destroy things when I'd let him loose. The initial character build was done by a friend of mine who was far more familiar with the system than I when we started, then I very quickly devoured all the rulebooks and started developing him myself, which is when he started to get really fun. I've actually got a write-up on him over on my blog: The Unusual Suspects - Varian Blackthorne
What I remember most from WoD was that the combats we played went more like I declare my action, wait, how many dice is that, what am I doing, does anyone have the rules straight, oh, why don't we just forget about fighting each other and talk it out instead.