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World of Darkness

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[Cruxador]

I'm currently playing Exalted with a Tyrant Lizard familiar (T-rex) It spits poison and has 6 limbs, but someone pointed out we're hitting a power milestone soon, at which point I'll be able to give it wings, and then I really will have a dragon as a pet.

what's the point of a T-Rex with six limbs? They've already got twice as many as they really need with just the four.

[Kagus]

I'm currently playing Exalted with a Tyrant Lizard familiar (T-rex) It spits poison and has 6 limbs, but someone pointed out we're hitting a power milestone soon, at which point I'll be able to give it wings, and then I really will have a dragon as a pet.

what's the point of a T-Rex with six limbs? They've already got twice as many as they really need with just the four.

Depends on the limbs, I suppose... If you get to pack on a couple powerful legs on it, it'd look pretty awkward, but can't very well say no to a kicking T-Rex now can you?

[Trekkin]

Suddenly and in no way at all related to the quoted post I am interested in Exalted.

Oh, it's a wonderful setting, but it is extremely involved.

I've always wanted to run what would initially be a Mortals game starting on Luthe as a way to gently introduce people to the setting (via Orwellian dystopia, I admit, but still, that's at least quick to understand), but I've never had time.

[TWO CATATA]

The ventrue-malkavian, thinking herself to be an ancient Babylonian named Lilith, wrote those character in blood using 6 people as canvases

Clearly complete madness as no such person of that name ever existed, this can be safely redacted from your post.

[Rowanas]

I'm currently playing Exalted with a Tyrant Lizard familiar (T-rex) It spits poison and has 6 limbs, but someone pointed out we're hitting a power milestone soon, at which point I'll be able to give it wings, and then I really will have a dragon as a pet.

what's the point of a T-Rex with six limbs? They've already got twice as many as they really need with just the four.

Depends on the limbs, I suppose... If you get to pack on a couple powerful legs on it, it'd look pretty awkward, but can't very well say no to a kicking T-Rex now can you?

I actually took it because it allows you to take multiple actions with smaller penalties. I still don't get to duplicate attacks, but now my dinosaur can devour the fallen as a misc action and still attack without suffering horrendous penalties.

[Telgin]

So, I've been trying to find a good game system to use for a one-shot, one-on-one, play-by-post horror game, and finding one that does what I want has been surprisingly tough.  I think, ultimately, the problem is that I don't know exactly what I want...

The short version is that I'm going to be the GM and the single player will be navigating what amounts to a haunted mansion in search of someone who disappeared.  The more easily accessed parts of the mansion are just creepy, but deeper in are ghosts and zombies that could harm or kill the player.  I don't really want the player to use combat as a first solution to encountering said zombies though, and they may be unable to fight the ghosts at all.  I'm not sure where the missing person will be yet, exactly, and that was more of a reason to lure them into the house in the first place than anything.  The real mystery is learning why the mansion is haunted.

This is all an oversimplification, and it's actually a fantasy setting without even any humans.

Anyway, the problem I'm faced with is finding a system that will give the right level of tension but without undue risk of ending the game early because the single PC rolled badly in combat and died.  A secondary but still important concern is finding a system that can make the poking around outside of combat interesting.

I was considering GUMSHOE One-to-one since it's designed for a single player and presumably handles the first problem well.  It's even designed for investigations, so it has the second bit covered.  But it's hard to tell how hard it would be to reflavor the game system, since it's pretty clearly intended to be a hard boiled detective game and not post-apocalyptic fantasy.

Kind of a niche question, but if anyone has suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

[pikachu17]

What's the name of the horror game you play with a Jenga tower? Probably not what you're looking for, but that made me think of it.

[Telgin]

Dread, and yeah, that was actually one I was really interested in.  But... I have no idea how to play it online.  There might be a Tabletop Simulator Jenga tower, but that would be hard to do with a play-by-post format on a forum.

[pikachu17]

Well, the point of Dread is having something that shows clearly that your next action may be your last. You could just roll d100s instead, and when they add up a certain number you die. Not quite the same, no, but a fairly good approximation, I think.

[Trekkin]

I would be remiss if I didn't at least point out that new World of Darkness is designed to run precisely that sort of horror, and it's not got the rocket tag problem.

[Telgin]

I tried looking it up, but what I found was a little confusing.  Looks like that's the Chronicles of Darkness book?  It also looks like there are quite a few settings / spinoffs of the World of Darkness setting and system, but is Chronicles of Darkness its own thing?

[Grim Portent]

Basically you've got Chronicles as the core rulebook for playing humans in the WoD, then the others as standalone expansions to play various supernatural beasties in the setting.

It used to be known as the New World of Darkness, but the system's undergone a few tweaks and renames. You've basically got the (Old/Classic) World of Darkness (1st edition) the New World of Darkness (2nd edition) and the Chronicles of Darkness (basically a 2.5 edition more than a 3rd as I understand it.)


I've played Vampire from early in the revamping of nWoD, when they were going to name all the splats 'Chronicles of  X' rather than 'X the Y-ening 2nd Edition,' but they changed their minds.

I thought it was an ok system. Plenty of neat mechanics, encouragement and discouragement to flow with your vices and weaknesses when it makes sense to. It's a good system for characters who're flawed and human, with their own little tragedies and sins and virtues.

[Cruxador]

I tried looking it up, but what I found was a little confusing.  Looks like that's the Chronicles of Darkness book?  It also looks like there are quite a few settings / spinoffs of the World of Darkness setting and system, but is Chronicles of Darkness its own thing?

Basically, Chronicles of Darkness is the new name for the second edition (which totally redid the fluff), since they made a new version of the old edition, which is now seeing active support. It used to be that people just said new World of Darkness or old World of Darkness, but since that could be confusing to new players, they went ahead and made it even more confusing.

They do have a book (or multiple? I haven't followed the franchise closely this decade) with alternate settings, but the main splats (e.g. Mage: the Ascension, Changeling: the Lost, etc) each have rules, mechanics, and fluff for parties of specific supernatural beings. That likely wouldn't be what you're using, but the core book sets up nicely for mortals who merely encounter the supernatural.

There are two mechanical hurdles with WoD that I see. The first is that it's pretty drilled in to its modern fantasy setting, and you'd need to homebrew a bit to adapt it to your own setting. Those setting books I mentioned might help with that, but this is an area in which I don't have the knowledge to point you in the right direction.
The other problem is that it's not well balanced for one-shots. The most prominent mechanical pacing device is the slow slide into madness as you lose grasp of your humanity. So you'd want to come up with a way to adjust the speed on that according to your pace if you want it to be a theme - if not, all the supernatural splats tinker with how it works, so you definitely can too. But it's more to do, especially if you're not familiar with the system.

Although maybe I'm getting old, but it seems bizarre to me that someone would know relatively obscure systems like Gumshoe and Dread and not be familiar World of Darkness.

[Telgin]

I played the original version of GUMSHOE because it had a free SRD and a friend recommended it, which is how I came to know about the one-to-one version.  No free version of that one though. 

I found Dread and a lot of indie games by researching the topic, but don't remember seeing World of Darkness specifically.  The sites I was looking at might have been indie biased.

That said, I've heard of Vampire and some of its spinoffs, but wasn't familiar enough to know that was the same as World of Darkness.

I'm kind of weird in my knowledge of game systems.  I mostly play GURPS and didn't even play Dungeons and Dragons until many years after first playing GURPS and the Star Wars D6 game.

[Rolan7]

Our group played New World of Darkness for... well since before June 2016, thanks for the unexpected quote TWO CATATA!  And yet I'm still not sure what the version is officially called.  My friends claim they understand, but they seem unable to give a straight answer without launching into a bunch of clarifications.

We played Vampire the Requiem and it was before Strix Chronicles.
Then we played a Demons game in the same system, where the Demons weren't rogue angels.  That book (The Possessed, I believe) was either officially unfinished or obviously unfinished

Fakedit:
Thanks for the second explanation, though my brain shuts down a little now whenever the topic comes up DX
The version we played...  Which might be Chronicles of Darkness, even though we called it New World of Darkness?  We didn't have beats, so maybe it was "NWoD 2nd edition"
I'm actually a little mad about this.  Marketing!  You had one job!
Well, that and do damage control over the Chechyna debacle...
Did White Wolf HAVE a marketting department?  I recall being particularly confused because they released two significantly different versions with identically-covered core rulebooks, except that the latter had the version number removed.

Well, they're being reorganized by their parent company Paradox now, due to that fiasco...

We were and are very happy with the New World of Darkness setting, though yes it is designed for modern fantasy.  Shooting someone is a huge deal, they're actually shot (unlike DND where everyone is surrounded in a shell of unexplained hitpointium which means whatever you choose it to mean).  If they're not supernatural, it's days of hospital care or back alley healing.
Which is usually for NPCs, PCs are usually supernatural, but we did a quasi-Hunter game which was mixed with Cthulhu investigation... that was an interesting campaign.

I like the dice system of it (roll successes, but with possibility of "explosion" on 10) which I feel adds to the "gritty realism".  We occasionally had very good plans fail spectacularly due to an enemy rolling fantastically well.  It's a critical system which is technically without limit, and can in practice occasionally go pretty far.  It's nice.
And it certainly rolls in our favor as well, and that feels just as good (or better).