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Messages - TheMouse

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DFRPG / Re: The Laws of Magic and psychic abilities
« on: March 10, 2012, 03:21:04 AM »
In general, you are allowed to do things without using magic that the Laws would forbid you doing with magic. For the most part, the Laws are against doing a certain set of things by means of magic. The big exception being, of course, Outsiders; since this isn't about that, we can discount it.

Psychic powers aren't magic. They're a supernatural power, but that power isn't magical in nature. Since the Laws apply to magic, and since psychic powers aren't magic, the Laws don't generally apply to psychic powers.

This is why the Laws aren't broken if you kill someone with a gun. Or if you stab someone with a unicorn horn, to use an example of using something supernatural that is none the less not an act of magic. Neither is casting a spell, so neither breaks the Law.

So I wouldn't have using a psychic power to control someone's mind give you the Lawbreaker hit. It's not magic, so the Laws needn't apply in a metaphysical or rules sense.

On the other hand, if a Warden sees you put the mind zorch on someone with your psychic powers, expect them to cut your head off. Maybe not 100% of the time, since they might conceivably be open minded enough to look into it and differentiate between magic and psychic brain-zorching. But easily 99% of the time, expect a head-chopping.

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DFRPG / Re: Crossover central
« on: March 03, 2012, 10:27:21 PM »
I've been thinking of a way to fold in the Demons from Supernatural, but haven't had any luck. 

It seems easy to me.

Demons are just like they are in Supernatural. Don't change anything. They make deals for souls, etc.

There are also Fallen. These are just the way they are in Dresden. Since they most likely don't interact much with demons, and they are mostly stuck on Earth, there's really no conflict. The Fallen can generally beat the crap out of demons, and demons would mostly be terrified of them for that, as well as in awe of them for being the siblings of the Lightbringer.

Outsiders are the way they are in Dresden. Someone who didn't know better might call them demons, but they're not. They're more rare, more frightening, and from somewhere else. Still no conflict.

Buffyverse demons aren't terribly difficult either. They're corporeal monsters from another dimension. People call them demons and the dimension Hell, but it doesn't really matter that they're wrong.

Hellgods are things that rule these other dimensions. With the exception of Glory, they basically never ever come to Earth, so you can hand wave them. They're basically gods of the other dimension If you wanted to include something like Glory, it'd just be a Hellgod bound by powerful magics into flesh and trapped here, so you get to make up the rules of the curse and make a unique creature that's likely in the same rough ballpark as the Fallen.

The Old Ones from Buffy are basically gods. With the exception of Illyria, they're almost entirely dead or gone. Don't worry about them.

That stuff all fits together basically seamlessly. The one place you get a hiccup is DF demons, if you want to make them denizens of Hell. Because we've already got a place we're calling Hell. So just call this Hell a place in the Nevernever, and these demons are basically Nevernever spirits that like to call themselves demons because they know it messes with people.

So we've got "demons" living in three "Hells." One is a corporeal realm beyond the closest layer of the Nevernever, one is an incorporeal realm in the Nevernever, and one is "somewhere else," a place that the dead go when they've sold their souls; this last one seems closest to what a Christian would understand as Hell, but the other two would very likely look the part.

Then you've got malicious spirits, damned souls, and corporeal entities, along with the Fallen, a couple varieties of what amount to gods, and Outsiders. It's a little busy, but compare it with old school D&D with its many outer planes and stuff that lives there.

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DFRPG / Re: Crossover central
« on: March 03, 2012, 04:35:09 PM »
The key to a crossover like this is to avoid trying to cram absolutely everything from every setting into what you're doing. Focus is important to avoid a huge mess.

I'd start with a short list of things from each setting that you'd consider the most important. Then work on getting those primary elements working together well. This is the key stage, because if you can't get the elements you most want to include to work together, you need to rethink your goals.

Then, once you have the major things established, you can start finding less important things. If any of these conflict with what you've got and there's not an easy fix you like, toss them out the window. They're all bonus material, so it doesn't matter if you don't include much.

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DFRPG / Re: Tony Stark writeup
« on: February 17, 2012, 10:19:02 PM »
You know, when I saw Feeding Dependency for Tony Stark, a part of me was expecting the dependency to be for booze.

Booze and women. Preferably at the same time.

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DFRPG / Re: Romero-Style Zombies
« on: February 09, 2012, 10:30:36 PM »
I've mentioned why I'm against the "take it out, or do nothing" approach before: Consequences, I feel, are a good and convenient way to model the fact they can take a lot of punishment but keep coming--just without an arm or leg by the end.

My suggestion serves two purposes:

1. Non critical attacks against zombies are often portrayed as doing more or less nothing to stop them. My suggestion is an easy way to do exactly that without complication.

2. Tracking Consequences for literal hordes of zombies will get very tedious very quickly. My way keeps the bookkeeping to a binary status: They're fine, or they're down.

In short, it's a simple way to quickly and easily represent how zombies are often portrayed in movies that requires very little effort.

However, if you were against that, I'd represent a horde of zombies almost like an environmental hazard with armour and a stress track. Everyone inside the area of effect has to resist the attacks and damage. Causing stress and Consequences is about ending the threat a lot more than it is about causing harm to an individual zombie. This accomplishes much the same thing as the above suggestion and allows you to dial up and down the threat by changing armour, stress, and number/type of Consequences.

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DFRPG / Re: Romero-Style Zombies
« on: February 09, 2012, 04:09:27 PM »
For some inspiration on a good scenario for zombies, I highly suggest the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Dead Man's Party. Lots of dumb, shambling zombies. Magical mask. Built in end-boss. It's great for a zombie situation.

As for rules, instead of stress, give them a threshold you need to overcome. If you don't cause 3 stress in one hit, you do surface damage that isn't even worth tracking. You either do enough to take the thing out, or you do nothing. Of course, that's past whatever armour rating you decide to give them from toughness.

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DFRPG / Re: Using Shields (the physical kind, not magic kinds)
« on: February 05, 2012, 03:01:21 AM »
Also, armor isn't always practical. Anything that's better than Armor:1 and not made of magic is going to be bulky and obvious, and thus unusable in a situation where wearing bulky and obvious armor is going to draw unwanted attention.

In many of the situations in which armour isn't practical, a shield also isn't practical. They weigh less than really hefty armour, but that weight is distributed far less well around your body. Shields are likely to draw attention from people such as law enforcement; they're also weapons in addition to being armour, so good luck carrying it around most places without getting into trouble.

Although now -- for some reason -- I have this mental image of someone wearing 15th century harness waiting in line at the metal detector, trying to get into a court building.

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DFRPG / Re: Using Shields (the physical kind, not magic kinds)
« on: February 03, 2012, 04:38:36 AM »
Shields trade away the ability to use two handed weapons for a defensive boost and an off-hand weapon.

Something to think about is that shields are awesome. When people are wandering around with swords and spears and trying to kill you, a shield is something you want. That's why everyone seems to want the things when you look at historic warfare. The Romans used shields to absolutely huge effect. In Europe, until the advent of hefty armour (and after its invention for the not insanely wealthy), shields were everywhere.

The things are also weapons. Rather amazing weapons, actually, if you know how to use them. And I'm not just talking about the ones with spikey bits or dagger blades worked into them. Spartans actually sharpened an edge on their shields and used them to kill people that got inside the range of their spears; I saw something that suggests that just the weight of the things swung correctly was plenty to kill someone or shatter bones, and that's without the sharp edge.

However, one thing to think about is that shields don't magically stop whatever hits them. If someone's swinging a heavy weapon at you and you block squarely with a shield, you can have your arm broken right through the thing, without it breaking. You're probably going to be knocked back somewhat, and you just might end up falling on your ass or getting knocked into something.

At the end of the day, a small bonus to defend or a small armour rating seems the way to go. +1 or armour:1 seems okay for most shields that aren't huge. And of course that only applies to attacks from the front, and it mostly applies either when you know that particular attack is coming or when you're holding it at the ready because you expect some sort of attack. Weapon:1 or 2 also seems reasonable.

What are you trading away for this? The ability to use a two handed weapon like a long sword, a halberd, or an assault rifle.

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DFRPG / Re: Dealing with Supernatural and High Combat
« on: January 26, 2012, 03:29:46 PM »
I like to think of this in terms of evolution.

In our universe, there aren't any trolls or vampires. So if things went sideways and suddenly there was a troll smashing cars, we'd freak out. The result would be YouTube videos galore, and some group of people would come and at least try to kill the troll. Things would escalate quite a lot, and it'd be a mess. In the end, humans work together to kill large threats as a matter of species survival, so one pesky troll would end up dead with hundreds of rounds of ammunition in it, and quite probably with it missing big chunks due to explosives of various sorts.

That's not the Dresden-verse.

There, humans have lived alongside the supernatural since forever. When we discovered fire, we hoped that it would keep away the things in the night. When we made swords, we hoped that they could kill the things in the night. But our best method of survival, on an evolutionary scale, has been to stay well away from where the monsters are, and stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes, and shout, "LALALA! I don't seeeeeeeee yooooooooooooou!" whenever the monsters wander into our midsts.

This is a species survival trait. It's like how you don't need to learn to be afraid when a dog barks and rushes at you; our distant ancestors were eaten by large four legged things with big teeth, so we're naturally intimidated by them.

A troll is the same thing. It's an instinct for the folks in the Dresdenverse to pretend the troll isn't there as much as possible, because that's how you avoid it.

Of course, not everyone has the same instinctual reactions. Some people aren't afraid of dogs the first time one leaps toward them barking and furious. Some people are born wanting to do mad things like base jump. And some people are born without the instinct to run and hide from the troll.

In conclusion, most people have a primal urge to hide from that which goes bump and then pretend it hadn't happened. There might be some people who don't have that urge, but we call them, "Player characters."

I also tend to figure that intelligent supernatural beings with a motivation to not bring humanity down on their heads would fall back to behaviour previously considered antiquated. Ritual type behaviour, far from mortal eyes. So instead of fighting it out in public, they might call for some sort of duel in a ritual spot, a spot chosen for being out of the way.

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DFRPG / Re: Quick Question concerning Iron and Fae.
« on: January 06, 2012, 04:03:33 AM »
Yup. High Concept Compel. It covers everything from wizards blowing up technology to faeries being affected by the touch of iron to swamp monsters needing to moisturize their skin constantly. Basically, any little thing that you might want to add a minor sub-system to the game to handle, you instead manage by using a Compel.

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DFRPG / Re: Ambush, Backstab, One Shot, One Kill Scenarios
« on: January 04, 2012, 03:22:12 PM »
The last paragraph on page 328 covers this. Supporting NPCs only take up to Moderate Consequences before you Concede the fight.

You Concede, not the NPCs. So your Concession can perfectly well be, "Yeah, the dude dies. Splat." Because the character is an imaginary person you use as one of many avatars with which to interact with the game world, and the fact that he doesn't want to die doesn't even enter into it.

So do 7+(stress track + armour + extra available Consequence value) stress in one hit, and they go down. By the rules, with no fumbling around. With surprise, some Maneuvers, supernatural strength, and a good weapon, you should be able to manage this within the bounds of the combat system as written.

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DFRPG / Re: Removing Stunts for Refresh / Powers
« on: December 29, 2011, 03:57:51 PM »
Unless there's a really, really good reason for it, I always use this GMing guideline:

Make your character and play it for a bit. If, for whatever reason, you feel that the choices you made were bad after a few sessions, you're free to rework your character however you need. Just make sure to tell me that you plan to do it, and show me the sheet when you're done.

So if we got a couple of sessions or even a couple of stories into a game and one of my players came to me with that situation, my response would be, "Sure. Just tell me what you changed after." I find it much preferable to have a little hiccup like that at the beginning of a game than to get a few months in and have everything explode.

Even if we made it a few months in before these feelings of inappropriate decisions happened, I'm still good with changing things. I'd just want it to be more of an organic change to the character rather than an initial course correction. Which sounds exactly like what you're doing. So I'd want to wait until appropriate Milestones happened, at which point I'd be totally fine with letting you shift things around.

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DFRPG / Re: So How much Stress would a Subway Train cause?
« on: December 11, 2011, 03:45:25 PM »
Getting hit by a train, as has been mentioned above, isn't necessarily a stress-dealing attack.

I usually figure that normal attacks and the like don't do things like that. You can stab and shoot and bash and lots of other things, but you don't get to deal huge piles of stress just because there's a thing in sight that would splat someone.

Instead, the train is the result of an attack. That's right, stabbing a vampire made a train come into the station. Enough stress happened for either a Concession or Taken Out result, and someone said, "Hey, maybe the vampire gets hit by a train!"

Is it dead? Maybe. It really depends. If the GM's player (the GM, in other words) Conceded, probably not; it's probably just out of the fight for the remainder of the scene or even the rest of the night (depending on the specifics offered in the Concession). If it's Taken Out, it could very well be dead.

Now, is the Taken Out result death, or not? There're sensible arguments both ways.

The game world argument -- Subway trains that hit people more or less knock them literally to pieces. It's very believable that this would cause the necessary sort of injury -- decapitation, perhaps -- to end a vampire.

The game system argument -- The train is 100% narrative spray paint on the fact that the vampire was Taken Out with an attack. It took sufficient damage to remove it from the conflict, and the player thought it'd be cool to stuff it under a moving train. The only thing that matters is the actual attack.

Both arguments are valid, and it totally depends on your group to determine which one is more important to you.

Now, a train could possibly be part of an attack roll, in the same way that a truck could be. In this case, the train gets a weapon rating. And you have to remember that, "Getting hit," and, "Getting nailed dead on and sucked underneath," are two different things. The latter would be the result of a particularly damaging hit. You can get hit in the arm with a fast moving train, in the same way that you can get shot in the hand or the foot with a high powered rifle.

In typical Fate fashion, there are lots of ways to do one thing. The right answer is very situational, so use your judgment.

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DFRPG / Re: Neutral Grounds other than Bars?
« on: November 26, 2011, 03:31:33 PM »
Maybe this is my years playing Vampire: the Masquerade speaking, but I'm pretty fond of after-hours museums for such things. In particular, I'm very fond of some ancient supernatural beings standing by particular exhibits and laughing at their inaccuracies.

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DFRPG / Re: Who would you recruit into the Einherjar?
« on: November 23, 2011, 04:23:01 PM »
The vast majority of Einherjar are going to be people you've never heard of. They're just brave warriors who've died in battle and were spotted by a Valkyrie. I would imagine that the World Wars alone would potentially have produced thousands and thousands of them.

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