[SS] Ability Ranks Beyond Grandmaster?
Courage75:
Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule, Eero. I really appreciate your continued feedback in relation to my monthly Werewolf game. It's been ongoing since 2007 and has come along way since I first started it. I feel that I could probably write my own system for it by now, but SS is working well and my players would probably lynch me if I suggested another system conversion.
I have a few comments in relation to your suggestions. I'm pretty happy with most of it, I just need some further clarification on some points.
Discorporation & Destruction
Your take on discorporation and destruction of spirits is interesting. There is already a Discorporation Numen which pretty much the same effect as your Secret of Discorporation, apart from the Harm healing ability. It wouldn't kill the fiction to give all spirits this Secret, though - I'd just have to narrate it that the PCs discorporated the spirit rather than the spirit only suffering discorporation if they are knocked out by Harm.
Alternatively, would it be kosher to rule that werewolves cannot destroy spirits through extended conflict - i.e. there is simply no leverage to do so? The best a werewolf could hope for is to discorporate the spirit, unless there are extenuating circumstances such as the pack's spirit ally draining the target spirit of Corpus during the battle, or the target spirit expending all its Corpus in the struggle. I understand that this probably messes with the extended conflict mechanic though, where participants can face death unless they win or negotiate out.
By the way, yes we did discuss the problem of the "auto-heal" mechanic that I designed for werewolves that was stuffing up extended conflicts a while back. Do you consider making spirits virtually immune to death via extended conflict to be in the same category?
Passive Ability - Power (C)
I agree that I should probably shave the three passive Abilities for spirits into one Ability. I'll probably make it Power (C), since that was the one I had before. For the record, spirits cannot learn Abilities like people do - they are too alien to "learn" something that way. They use their relevant inherent Ability instead, which is always Power (C).
Influences
I really like the idea of Influences as Abilities! I don't know why I didn't think of this before. I have some concerns about modelling them, however.
In the original system, spirits would have ratings in their Influences equal to their Rank. If they had more than one Influence, the ratings could be divided. For example, a Rank 2 Owl spirit could have Influences of Owls 2 or Owls 1 and Death 1, for example. Generally, the higher the rating, the more powerful the Influence was. So Owls 1 makes a pre-existing owl in the physical world stronger, Owls 2 provides control over minor actions of the owl, Owls 3 provides full control over the owl, Owls 4 could create a brand new (young) owl, and Owls 5 could create a parliament (love that word!) of owls. Also, the higher the rating, the longer the effect of the Influence, in seconds/minutes/hours/days/permanent depending on the rating. Usually, there was a balance between the effect and the duration, so with Owls 3 a spirit could control an owl for a few seconds, or strengthen an owl for several hours, etc.
Now, I can't remember if I ever used Influences in the original system and I haven't really used them under SS, so I am happy to get a bit more creative with them. I think it would be cool if a Rank 1 owl-spirit could instantly create a parliament of owls for a scene, but it would cost a lot of Corpus. Mechanically, I'm happy to say that as long as the spirit has Influence, it can do anything it wants with it, provided that the spirit makes a successful check on the relevant Influence Ability and the circumstances are favourable (summoning owls at the bottom of the sea, for example, wouldn't work so well). So that Rank 1 owl spirit with Owls (C) at Rank-2 (would this be Mediocre (0)?) could attempt to summon a parliament of owls if conditions are right, but would probably want to spend precious Corpus to do so in order to be successful. However, the Rank 4 owl-spirit could probably do it much easier with Owls (C) at Expert (2).
As for the number of Influences, I was thinking that different spirits could have higher ratings in certain Influences, depending on the spirit itself. As a base, a spirit has an amount of Influences equal to its Rank and all rated at Rank-2. It can then combine them into a higher rated Influence or two. For example, a Rank 3 snake-spirit might have the Influences of Snakes (C), Seduction (C) and Wisdom (C) all at Competent (1). Alternatively, the spirit might have Snakes (C) at Expert (2) and Wisdom at Competent (1). Or Snakes (C) at Master (3).
Animals as Influences are pretty easy to imagine, but what about more abstract concepts? How about death, sorrow, the colour yellow, iron, fire, darkness etc? In the fiction, spirits can invoke their Influences on things that already exist in the physical world. For example, a spirit with Fire (C) could increase the size of an existing fire. I suppose this could translate to other concepts as well. With Sorrow (C), a spirit could make a depressed person spiral into a deeper depression, or impose a depression on an upbeat person, or even inflict Instinct Harm with heart-breaking sorrow.
Bans
I like your thoughts on bans. Since all spirits have a ban in the fiction, I'm thinking of making it a given. If a werewolf discovers the ban of a spirit, she can use it against the spirit and all the conditions apply. However, the bans of high ranking spirits (Rank 3+) are difficult to discover. For a Rank 4+ spirit, the werewolf would probably need to purchase the Secret of Ban for the particular spirit.
Spirit Armour & Temporal Shaping Boons
I dig these - very cool! I like how Spirit Armour makes spirits a lot tougher to defeat by default - this is what I am after. Also, the twist with the bonus dice is interesting, but how would this appear in the fiction? The spirit takes a "hit" in the same place and this incites it? Or something like a "second wind" for a spirit in extended conflict? Or we don't map it at all in the fiction, it is purely a mechanical conceit?
I think that while Temporal Shaping may not always work in the physical world, it should always work in the Shadow. So a rat-spirit might not be able to summon a horde of rats in a... struggling to think of a place actually... er, an aeroplane (?), but in the shadow, it can always make an Effect out of its' Rats (C) Influence in the Shadow. This gives the spirit the "home ground" advantage of being in its natural environment.
Eero Tuovinen:
Quote from: Courage75 on October 04, 2010, 11:03:04 PM
Alternatively, would it be kosher to rule that werewolves cannot destroy spirits through extended conflict - i.e. there is simply no leverage to do so? The best a werewolf could hope for is to discorporate the spirit, unless there are extenuating circumstances such as the pack's spirit ally draining the target spirit of Corpus during the battle, or the target spirit expending all its Corpus in the struggle. I understand that this probably messes with the extended conflict mechanic though, where participants can face death unless they win or negotiate out.
Yes, this is feasible. Just say that werewolves do not normally have the leverage to destroy spirits, but only to discorporate them, and there needs to be a specific circumstantial reason for destruction to be possible, whatever it would be. I wouldn't tie this to the mechanical conceit of Corpus Pool, though, but rather would require the condition to be fulfilled in the fiction.
Quote
In the original system, spirits would have ratings in their Influences equal to their Rank. If they had more than one Influence, the ratings could be divided. For example, a Rank 2 Owl spirit could have Influences of Owls 2 or Owls 1 and Death 1, for example. Generally, the higher the rating, the more powerful the Influence was.
Yeah, WW is fond of using these supernatural attributes as qualitative grading; each dot gives you more things you can do as well as more reliability in doing it. There's no particular reason why you couldn't do that in SS as well; just say that a spirit can't create owls out of thin air without Grandmaster (4) rank in the Influence, for example. The main effect of this sort of thing is to make things more predictable and constrained, as characters are strictly limited to an enumerated number of abilities that come in a clean progression.
The more typical SS way of doing it is to simply make all the cool tricks into Secrets: have a Secret of Insubstantiation (Owls) that allows the spirit to make an Influence check to create owls. I find this preferable for many purposes due to the flexibility it leaves me with determining the actual Ability rating: I can have a mechanically weak character (low Ability) with plenty of unique tricks, or I can have a strong character constrained in the things he can do, or any other combination.
Also, as you say - if there's no reason to limit what spirits can try to do with their Influences, then don't limit it. Limitations might be interesting, but if they're not, then just don't do it.
One way to do this that comes to mind is a mechanical compromise between detail and general mechanics: you could say that all uses of Influence are either subtle, blatant or massive, and then price them accordingly in Corpus. Say 1 Corpus for doing something subtle, 7-[Ability check] for blatant and 5 points for massive effects. Then just make sure that the categories you have are sufficiently clear and sensible: creating owls out of thin air would be blatant, I imagine, while merely spying through owls would be subtle, and encouraging all owls in the state to flock to one place would be massive. Something like that. You could even require the spirit to have specific Secrets for doing blatant and massive effects with their Influences if you felt like it; perhaps they need to get a license to do stuff like that ;)
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Animals as Influences are pretty easy to imagine, but what about more abstract concepts? How about death, sorrow, the colour yellow, iron, fire, darkness etc? In the fiction, spirits can invoke their Influences on things that already exist in the physical world. For example, a spirit with Fire (C) could increase the size of an existing fire. I suppose this could translate to other concepts as well. With Sorrow (C), a spirit could make a depressed person spiral into a deeper depression, or impose a depression on an upbeat person, or even inflict Instinct Harm with heart-breaking sorrow.
Seems pretty straightforward to me, just needs to use a bit of poetic logic. "Yellow", for instance: it's useful in making things yellow or non-yellow and in influencing things that are usually yellow such as oranges - although probably not as useful as it would be to have the Influence directly for the substance of the thing itself instead of just its color. Making yellow-haired people like you, certainly. Being invisible against a yellow background, too. Probably no summoning powers at all, as being yellow simply isn't that important for an orange or a New York taxicab. Not a very serious power all in all, so perhaps there simply isn't any spirit with Influence over yellow? Perhaps spirits only have Influences over things that make instinctive stylistic sense in urban fantasy, such as Owls, Sorrow, Fire and such? Perhaps the spirit of Yellow and spirit of Cowardice are the same thing?
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I dig these - very cool! I like how Spirit Armour makes spirits a lot tougher to defeat by default - this is what I am after. Also, the twist with the bonus dice is interesting, but how would this appear in the fiction? The spirit takes a "hit" in the same place and this incites it? Or something like a "second wind" for a spirit in extended conflict? Or we don't map it at all in the fiction, it is purely a mechanical conceit?
I suppose you could explain the mechanical effect as representing how an opponent Harms the spirit in a place that "is no longer there" due to prior Harm, and this then disorients the opponent. That would make more sense as a source of penalty dice, though - perhaps the Secret should give penalty dice to the opponent who caused the Harm? Whatever, I don't usually worry about charting the mechanics to the fiction before play, as it's all the more fun to think up an explanation on the spot.
Courage75:
Thanks Eero, those comments are very helpful.
It has taken me a while, but I think I finally understand how I should be running a game under SS. This is not because you haven't explained it - you have, in the SS booklet and on here. The problem was is that I just didn't "get" it. In converting Werewolf: the Forsaken to SS, I have aimed for a very tight map of mechanics to fiction, but I see that is not really the strength of SS. If I had the chance to do it over, I'd definitely simplify a lot of the crunch of the built to model a more simulationist game when really I should have been focussing on the narrative intent of the system. In fact, this is pretty much what I am doing, piece by piece, and I quite enjoy it.
Anyway, I can see now that SS is pretty much designed to be run so you can modify it on the fly. There is no need to build oodles of crunch that you or your players are never going to use just because there was a mechanic for it in the original system.
So, thanks Eero. If we ever meet in person, I'll happily shout you a beverage of your choice!
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