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Play by post World of Darkness

   
Play by post World of Darkness

I was wondering how most people handle WoD in a play by post setting. Particularly, how does one deal with the dice pool penalties? It would be impossible to list all of the penalties that might effect the actions your players might take, and waiting for the storyteller to tell you what, if any, penalties apply before rolling would seriously slow the game.

Any ideas?

Edit: I would also love any other nuggets of wisdom you guys might have for a guy looking to cut his PbP teeth on a MAoRI game.

Thanks!

We make our rolls and post as if the results are correct. E.g., I roll Str + Athletics, get one success, and then post as if I successfully jumped the wall. When the ST comes along, if she needs to add penalties to the pool, she just backs the dice off the end of the string and edits the posts if necessary or, more typically, asks us to edit our posts.

Dice Roll: 8d10s8e
d10 Results: 5, 10, 9, 9, 8, 9, 3, 1, 6 (Total Successes = 5)


Ten Again rerolls are added on to the end of the string (so the 6 is the Ten Again reroll). If the ST needed to add a 3 dice pool penalty to the above roll, the 1, 3, and 9 would be dropped, resulting in only 4 successes.

As the ST, you can also always ask your players to re-roll. So if a player goes ahead and rolls to jump that wall but doesn't note the -2 penalty for it being a slippery surface or something, you can ask them to cancel that roll and do it again, with the penalty.

Here's a house rule I find really helps.

Drop the specialties. Instead, a player with 4+ in a stat has the ability to add a success to a roll, as if spending a willpower point, on a roll involving that stat. 5+ gives them a second use of this ability.

This DOES count as a willpower use- so choosing this option denies you the ability to use a willpower point on something else that round. You recover these success "charges" at the same time you gain your daily willpower point (generally after waking up for the day).

This only counts the base stat. Boosted stats, by the many various means, won't grant (more of) this effect.


So it's a small, but potentially useful, way to be certain of success. Or at least certain of avoiding a botch. It's quite nice from what I've experienced. Enough so that I might switch over to using it real world. Skips over rerolling dice. Skips over determining if/when a specialty would apply. Gets you straight through the action.

I tend to do the same as Kim_Possible. Slightly more work the ST, but I think the flexibility and doing away with the ened for any back-and-forth really helps speed things up. Just make sure your players are clear what's going on...

I also tend to be fairly loose with the rules, and go by what feels appropriate a fair amount of the time. Not everyone's comfortable with this kind of play, though.

Pardon a newb question.. I haven't done much here yet, and I am looking at running a WoD. How do people do dice rolls? Is there something built in here, or do you have your players roll in realtime and post, and go on faith/honor system?

There's a built in dice system for this site. For the majority of systems. You can look it up in the "help" section at the very top of the board at all times.

And don't you *dare* try to run a game here until you've read the guides (in my signature) and actually played in a game or two for a while. Seriously. Don't. The players here deserve better treatment than that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DTorakhan View Post
Pardon a newb question.. I haven't done much here yet, and I am looking at running a WoD. How do people do dice rolls? Is there something built in here, or do you have your players roll in realtime and post, and go on faith/honor system?
I second what TanaNari said. There are a lot of great players on the site--and lots of DMs who will help you along--but if you know the basics first, it'll be a lot easier to get help, and you won't be asking questions that have already been answered.

Also, try This link. It's an archive of threads from a game here called School of Darkness, which aimed to help players get acquainted with the system. The whole forum seems to have been archived now, so you probably won't get direct answers to questions there, but there's a lot of good information there to sift through. I ran a demo game there a while back, and learned enough to run a full fledged game; I really suggest it as a place to look around.

As for dice rolls, the simplest way is to make a narrative post, then put your requests for rolls in a spoiler tag. For example, you tell your bit of the story, then in a spoiler tag write: "Okay, I want a wits+composure roll from everyone (for perception) and an intelligence+subterfuge roll for the two characters trying to lie their way into the club."

Then those characters post their rolls, and you continue the story accordingly. Make it clear what penalties or bonuses they get to rolls before you ask for them, and there won't be any trouble with players posting before you're ready.

As the original creator if the above mentioned School of Darkness feel free to PM me if you have any questions/concerns on running a NWoD game here. I'm always available to assist as I can. Sometimes general back and forth questions can serve better of explaining things rather than just reading the guides. Though of course reading them is not a bad thing. A lot of work has gone into them by members of the community here and are well worth a read-through. PbP is a very different experience compared to Tabletop, and if you have never run before in PbP you will have a very jarring experience if you expect to treat them the same.

Thanks; I'll definitely be doing some reading and the such. And sorry for kinda hijacking the OP's questions ^.^;;





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