this one’s for all the gamer geeks

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Tonight’s Random Game Concept that sprang up in my head:

(Old) World of Darkness game, cross-genre. Let the players make any kind of PCs they like — Kindred, mages, changelings, mummies, whatever, and you play a short prologue.

Then the barriers get torn down. All of them. The walls between this world and the Umbra, Shadowlands, Dreaming, Yin and Yang Worlds, all the rest of it.

And you run the rest of the chronicle as a post-apocalyptic Exalted game.

It’s a new Mythic Age, not the one from the Exalted books. You’re throwing out all the setting information, so you don’t have to worry about why your ex-mummy Solar Exalted is cooperating with an ex-mage Sidereal, etc. You get all the fun of apocalyptic world destruction, with GIANT MAGIC POWERS, a legitimate reason why the PCs might be able to really reshape all of reality. It would be EPIC BEYOND WORDS.

. . . I think I want to run this.

0 Responses to “this one’s for all the gamer geeks”

  1. electricpaladin

    I’d totally play that. It would be awesome.

  2. tekalynn

    I’d play that.

  3. alecaustin

    That sounds pretty awesome. Usual caveats about the mechanical balance of the various Exalted splats apply, of course, but the session-management issues wouldn’t be notably worse than running an old-WoD crossover game.

    (Well, okay, the scale of the fudging required might get larger, given the dice pools involved…)

    • Marie Brennan

      I’ve been running Scion for a year and a half. I’m no longer afraid of ginormous dice pools and hideously mis-balanced powers in desperate need of house-ruling.

      • alecaustin

        Point taken. I’ve never played or read Scion, so I don’t know how the dice pools compare.

        • wshaffer

          We’ve hit the point where my more ridiculous rolls involve more dice than I can comfortably hold in two cupped hands.

          • alecaustin

            Are we talking pools in the teens, 20s, or 30s, though? (Even sans mecha, ~30 die attack rolls aren’t uncommon for combat-focused exalts.)

          • wshaffer

            My typical rolls are usually in the teens or low twenties, but I’m not as skilled at stacking up ludicrous dice bonuses as some. But I recall somehow arranging at least one roll that required more than 40 dice.

          • alecaustin

            Hurrah for dice inflation! (Wait…)

            Seriously, though, it sounds like Scion is even more inflationary in dice rolled than Exalted (at least before spending hundreds of xp on your characters, or letting people have gear that they really shouldn’t have).

            Then again, Exalted has perfect attacks and defenses, which aren’t busted at all…

          • Marie Brennan

            A base dice pool for Scion wouldn’t usually go above 15, with 27 being the cap for one specific pool (Willpower + Integrity + Legend). But, you can add a Virtue to the roll (up to +5), and you can have a Relic which allows you to add your Legend to the roll (up to +12), and if you stunt that might be another 1-3, so a roll might go as high as 35 dice, or 45 if it was W+I+L and you happened to have a Relic that boosted Integrity rolls.

            What’s truly inflationary, though, are the automatic successes that come from Epic Attributes. The rating goes from 1-10, and the successes added go 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 16, 22, 29, 37, 46. There is a very fine line between “equal fight” and either “steamroll the opposition” or “total party kill,” depending on who has the edge.

          • alecaustin

            Oh, they added the Aberrant auto-success attributes too, huh? Makes sense flavor-wise, though the balance designer in me is cringing even now.

            Exalted has the exact same combat dynamic, though 2e improved it a bit. I had a Lunar who was trying not to break cover (and thus wasn’t in war form) get incapacitated from unhurt in a single hit once, and that was *with* extra health levels and lots of magical doodads.

    • icedrake

      Just assume an order of magnitude multiplier on all dice rolls. That should solve the problem.

      (for a very particular value of “solve,” at least)

  4. beccastareyes

    Ooh, fun.

    • beccastareyes

      It reminds me of an d20 Modern game I played in once, where our PCs were manipulated in breaking the barrier that kept the mundane world from noticing magic. As a result, the GM said we could start to take higher power D&D classes post-catastrophe.

      • Marie Brennan

        Heh. We did something like that in a new!Mage game I played a little while ago, and we keep nudging the GM to say that now we want to play the sequel . . . .

        • beccastareyes

          I admit there’s a part of me who likes taking a world, shattering it into little pieces, and then telling the PCs ‘okay, now what?’*.

          * With some dangly plot threads if the players look back at me and shrug.

  5. jadasc

    So not my thing at all. But good luck!

  6. ninja_turbo

    Just one more reason I need an awesome Bay Area job.

    Sounds like it would be a grand old time. Would you be upgrading PCs to Exalted splats, or having them make new characters when the Everything comes down?

  7. icedrake

    “epic” is certainly the word that comes to my mind, yes.

    • tooth_and_claw

      Lol.

      I am playing that, and have been for 4 years or so. We started as a modern WoD Exalted game, but the mists and all else came down somewhere in the beginning of year 2, and well . . . we’ve been running strong since.

      It is as ridiculously fun as you’d image.

  8. Anonymous

    I’m more familiar with nWOD than oWOD. How does Mummy work?

  9. Marie Brennan

    It started out as an adjunct to Vampire, and I don’t know those mechanics very well, except it wasn’t very cool to play a mummy. Then a storm happened in the Shadowlands that destroyed most of them, but the ones who survived it are a lot more awesome. The general premise is that you’re playing a modern human for whom one part of their soul (in the Egyptian sense) was seriously defective — e.g. a drug addict who took no care of her body whatsoever — and so when you died, a fragment of one of these old Egyptian souls approached you and offered to bond with you and bring you back to life. Subsequently you are AWESOME in whatever respect you used to suck at before, and you serve the Judges of Ma’at by trying to bring Balance to the world, generally by smiting bad guys.

  10. rabidfangurl

    If you weren’t far, far away from me, my totally-feminine-but-still-utterly-kick-ass Silver Fang werewolf would want in on this.

  11. d_c_m

    AWESOME!!!!! I like it and would love to play in it.

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