Creating/GMing investigations without setting the truth in advance - RPGnet Forums

Creating/GMing investigations without setting the truth in advance - RPGnet Forums: "Creating/GMing investigations without setting the truth in advance"

Roll-over ideas for Gurps

Gurps roll-over

Base rule: 3d6+skill <=21

Critical succes

A roll of 17 or 18 is always a critical success
A roll of 16 is a critical success if your effective skill is 15+
A roll of 15 is a critical success if your effective skill is 16+

Critical failure

A roll of 3 is always a critical failure
A roll of 4 is a critical failure if effective skill is 15 or less
A roll of 11 or less (including effective skill) is a critical failure

If skill is 5, a roll of 6 or lower is considered a critical failure

Health tracking:

Count wounds from 0. Each multiple of HT gives -1 to the check etc.

Other thoughts

Each attack consists of one attack roll from the attacker and one defense roll from the defender. With a pure roll-over conversion, nothing will change apart from the roll-over rule. That would also mean that the possibility of a long combat will increase since a high defense makes it possible to counter every blow.

One roll option would be to make the attack roll contested (3D6+Attack vs. 3D6+Defense). I don’t know how that would affect the statistics though.

Advice on the 13 practices

1 Dot
Practice of Compelling - The Practice of Compelling is used when you wish to make something within the purview of the Arcana do what it’s supposed to do. It generally cannot do damage or create penalties/bonus, only cause the target to do what it’s already capable of doing.

Examples: Traffic Lights changing, TV changing stations, Spirit helping/hindering within its influence, speeding up pulse rate

Practice of Knowing – The Practice of Knowing gives direct knowledge of something based on the Arcana’s purview. This isn’t involving sensing something, you just know. It also tends to be mundane information, esoteric information being more the domain of Unveiling.

Examples: Knowing what time it is, determining the composition of a wall, diagnosing an illness, knowing what to mix to make the color chartreuse

Practice of Unveiling – Contrast to Knowing the Practice of Unveiling enhances ones ability to sense the purview of the Arcana and is more likely to reveal the esoteric secrets that resonance and Mage Sight can reveal.

Examples: Sense any conscious minds around you, locate a ghost in an old mansion, tell if a spirit possesses a person, locate the remnants of a Space created Portal

2 Dots
Practice of Ruling – The Practice of Ruling allows for a bit more control of the Arcana’s purview. With this level you can push the target to do something that it wouldn’t normally be capable of on it’s own. The ability to do minor harm and improve the capabilities of the purview begin here.

Examples: Make the heat from a heat hotter, making a car’s transmission shift gears easier, change a key to fit a lock, make a boring commute go faster

Practice of Shielding – Shielding is the most obvious and consistent of the Practices. It is used to protect yourself (or others at advanced practices) from the effects under the purview of the Arcana. This is mostly used for the infamous Mage Armor but other effects can fall under this practice.

Examples: Protecting yourself from fire, shielding yourself from a mind probe, Making it impossible to look into your past

Practice of Veiling – The Practice of Veiling does exactly what it says it does, it veils. It allows you to hide elements that fall under an Arcanum’s purview from being sensed or detected by any means.

Examples: obscure the background noise while talking on the phone, making a wound looke ‘not that bad’, hide the resonance of a Spirit that is in the Twilight, keep someone from detecting the secret door behind you

3 Dots
Practice of Fraying – The Practice of Fraying is the beginning of the damaging practices. It covers degrading elements and capabilities and can even cause a direct damage attack.

Examples: eroding the metal joints of a door frame, weakening a ward around a sanctum, weakening the gauntlet, short circuiting a computer

Practice of Perfecting – The Practice of Perfecting does exactly what it says: it perfects something. While Ruling allowed you to slightly improve the Arcana’s purview, Perfecting allows you to greatly improve it as well as repair it well beyond an sort of natural ability to do either (a limit imposed on Ruling magics).

Examples: make a car run indefinitely with no need for repair, improve the sharpness of a blade to near mono-molecular level, strengthen a friendly spirit, make a situation just seem to go right

Practice of Weaving – The Practice of Weaving is a bit odd, it’s job is to allow the mage to alter the capabilities of something within the Arcana’s purview without altering past the Arcana’s purview. It allows you to take on properties to targets that the target would not normally be capable of.

Examples: Make fire fuel off of carbon dioxide, let a saltwater fish survive on air, allow oil and water to mix, change steel to be a pliable as rubber

4 Dots
Practice of Patterning - Patterning is one of the more vague practices though in many ways it mimics Weaving. The Practice of Patterning allows you to change phenomenon within an Arcana’s purview between roughly related types. This allows for a wide versatility of effects.

Examples: Make fire resonate cold, allow alcohol to run a car’s gas tank, make a spirit material,

Practice of Unraveling – The Practice of Unraveling is much more than just advanced Fraying. Where Fraying is a blunt object, Unraveling is a scapel that allows the mage to remove and take away the things he feels need not be there allowing for a more subtle change to things.

Examples: removing the mention of an event from a book’s text, creating a bubble of timelessness, removing the antibodies from a vial of blood, cutting away events from the coming future

5 Dots
Practice of Making – The Practice of Making is rather forward and obvious. It allows you to create anything within the purview of the Arcanum.

Examples: Do I really need to?

Practice of Unmaking – In my games this will be referred to as the Practice of Annihilation just to create a more unique name. It covers exactly what it says, it annihilates and unmakes things reducing them to non-existance.

Examples: Like making only reversed.
This text is blatantly stolen from Deimos_Masque over on the White Wolf forums. I found it useful and will use it in my upcoming campain as well!

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General Considerations
Any time you cause damage to something you do so at the progression of Bashing, Lethal and Aggravated. The Practice of Fraying is usually required to do damage to any sort of living thing (or unloving thing in case of Vampires) though inanimate objects can be effected as early as the 2nd dot.

When effecting targets that are not you the progression is Yourself/Touch, Single Person/Line of Sight and Group.

Some exceptions are giving to the practices in the core rulebook, but those exceptions seem to be more for clarification than an attempt to realign the practices. Those exceptions will be handled as they come up in game.

Transmute Gold

Re. my last entry, this was found on the WoD-wiki

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Q: The description for Adept of Matter states "I can turn lead into gold to satisfy their trite expectations." However, Transmute Gold only allows for the mage to transmute the precious material into a non-precious material, not the other way around. Is that supposed to be how it works?

A: Yes, there's missing text with the Transmute Gold description. The mage can transform a common substance into a precious one. Success determines the purity of the transformation. Even though the Size of the object doesn't change, only a portion of it is of a good quality. For instance, with one success, one quarter of the object might become decent karat gold, while the rest is cheap karat. With an exceptional success, the whole thing is pure.

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So for a permanent transformation, go with Matter 4, and add 1 level for Advanced Prolongation.

Turning lead into gold

This is a short look at how to turn lead into gold in Mage: The Awakening by White Wolf.

Now, there is no set rote for transforming something into gold, but there is one for transforming gold or other precious metals to an ordinary metal (Transmute Gold, p202) which is a Matter 4-rote.

Question is, would transform ordinary matter into gold be the same arcana and level? Judging from the Matter 5 rotes Raw Creation and Greater Transmogrification where you can either create gold from nothing, or change liquids into gold, I'd say that it is a Matter 4 rote.

However, for the sake of argument I'll look into both versions, starting with it being a Matter 4 rote, quite similar to Transmute Gold.

The spell is prolonged (1 scene), and to make it permanent he needs a Matter of 5 (or 6 if we go by the Matter5-version).

Also, there is a -10 dice modifier on the rote. It is possible for a powerful willworker to have a dice-pool large enough, but in most cases, extended casting is the way to go.

Looking at p120, we see that to make something Indefinite, we need 5 more successes than the base success, which gives us 6 successes. If we say that we need Matter 4 to transform something into gold, we need at least a Gnosis of 3 (remember that we acually need Matter 5, since advanced prolongation requires your arcanum to be 1 higher). With a Gnosis of 3, each roll in an extended casting takes 1 hr.

If we on the other hand say that we need Matter 5 to make Gold out of other materials, we actually need Matter 6 (see above), which requires a Gnosis of 6. Each roll will now take 30 minutes.

I havn't seen any offical stand on what level of Matter is required, but my research continues.

Mage-statements

There was a war.

You Lost

You where driven from your paradise.

Your knowledge and your art destroyed, shattered all over the world

You are hunted, the agents of your enemy hunts you down, try to make give up, or die

They steal your knowledge, make sure that no one ever sees it again.

They destroy it, they hunt you.

You want to build, you want to get back you the promised land.

Some of you want to fight back. They are warriors, longing for the day they can take back what’s theirs.

Others believe in power through knowledge. Only by finding the secrets lost can you be victorious

Some of you moves in the shadows. They know that you are hunted, that brute force cannot win the war. They hide in the shadows, defending what’s yours through stealth and cunning

In recent days, there has been a growing movement stating that this all happened in the past. Yes, we should find the secrets, but only to make a better place here and now. The old stories are gone, we are creating new stories today. Let’s face them with open minds.

Feint in Dungeons and Dragons

In my quest for a nice, thematic swashbuckler, I stumbled upon the feint-rules, which I havn't given much thought before. It turned out that a succesfull feint takes away the dex-bonus from your opponents AC for your next attack.

Now, combine this with the fact that a Rogues sneak attack is applicable whenever the opponent has lost his Dex-bonus to AC in any way.

So, for my Swashbuckler character that I have posted below, I'll add improved initiative and a couple of levels of bluff. Improved initiative lets you do a feint maneuver as a move action. Consider for instance this best-case scenario for him when he has reached 2nd level, taking a level of Rogue. He is in a fight, and it is his turn to go. In his move action, he feints. Let's assume that he succeeds and his opponent is now only using his flat-footed AC. For his attack, he uses combat expertise to incerase his AC and lower his attack bonus. Since his opponent is flat footed, that should be OK. If this attack would hit, the damage would be 3D6 (1 from the weapon, 1 from sneak attack and 1 from the feat Deadly Defence). Not bad for a 2nd level character.

A fencer in DnD

After some searching and tweaking, I found something that I do believe will make a fair swordsman, Pirates-style. So far he is only a lvl 1 character, but I'll show him as is, and then write a little about my thoughts on how to progress him. The idea is an agile, tricky fencer that wins through cunning and speed over power. He may be a bit on the dark side as well, more pirate than musketeer.

Nagea Hamden
Human Swashbuckler 1
Str: 10/+0
Dex: 16/+3
Con: 10/+0
Int: 14/+2
Wis: 14/+2
Cha: 10/+0

For: +2; Ref: +3; Will: +2
HP: 10
AC: 15 (Touch: 13, Flat-Foot: 12)
BAB: +1 Melee: +1 Range: +4

Feats:
Proficient Light Armor, Proficient with simple and martial weapons,
Weapon Finesse (From swashbuckler), Combat Expertise, Deadly Defense

The last one is from Complete Scoundrel, and gives an additional +1D6 damage when fighting defensivly OR when using Combat Expertise to give yourself at least a +2 to AC (and hence, -2 to attack)

His skills are fairly standard. He put maximum skillpoints into tumble, jump, bluff, climb, sense motive, use rope, balance, climb. His bluff will come in handy when trying to feint, and tumble is always nice for moving around the scene of combat.

He is using a rapier as a weapon (+4 ,1D6, 18-20/x2).

The plan is to multiclass him swashbuckler/ rogue. The main thing with the rogue is the sneak attack. In a couple of levels there are a couple of nice feats to get (and, not having the books here, I cannot remember their names). One lets you add your sneak attack damage in case of a critical hit, which is nice. Especially if you are using a rapier (threat range 18-20) and then make it keen (making the threat range 15-20).

Other nice feats to choose from is one that lets you stack you levels in Swashbuckler and Rogue when you are calculating things like sneak attack damage or the Grace feat.

So, while not a fighter (in my view still the most effective character to start with. Str 18, Greatsword, power attack and weapon focus. All of a sudden you are dealing damage in the 10-20 range as a level 1 character, which is quite good), he is still a competent character. Hard to hit, and capable of dealing some damage on his own. There are a couple of ways for him to go higher up. Want him to be a defensive fighter that is dangerous to approach: Give him combat reflexes and the feat that gives +4 to all AoO. (also from Complete Scoundrel). Or go a slighly darker way, where you are using your sneak attack to give bleeding wounds, for instance.

As said, there are some variations on this character, but all in all, it is possible to make a decent fencer that can hold his own and deal some damage.