Mage: the ascension and other newbe questions

[ConsciousSoul]

Hello Everyone,

I am currently evaluating FG2 for purchase (now that the ultimate license is available, since I am not interested in charging my players for any money), but it's a big purchase and before I do this, I wanted to make sure I could adapt the software to my needs. Perhaps some of you could help me with some answers.

The game I am running, and have been running for over 6 years now, is based on the old, 3rd edition version of world of darkness - more specifically Mage, although many NPCs are from the other books: vampires, mommies, werewolf, etc. The main players however, as well as many NPCs, are mages.
The new version of Mage (The Awakening, as opposed to The Ascension) have been dumbed down considerably, spheres replaced by rotes, etc. and we are not interested to play using this version of the game.

In my Mage games, players nearly never roll dices. Everything is about mood, psychological thriller, understanding and solving the story mystery, survival and horror. In a 12 hours session, my players might roll their dices perhaps for 15 or 20 critical rolls, and that's about it. So I want to use a virtual tabletop much more as a support tool for my players: uploading many graphical images, photos, visual aids and props that helps the imagination; each NPC has one or many pictures and descriptions, etc.

here are my questions / challenges :

1) My major point first :
Is there a way for players to "receive" the NPC pictures and data / story that the GM choose to give them, as they are introduced to new NPCs? Once they have met the npc, they should be able to continue to browse the NPC picture and story on their own without me, add notes to the NPC as the story evolve, etc. On the GM side, you'd be able to reveal more story to each NPC in addition to whatever notes they added for that NPC. Ideally, a player could keep track of which NPC has met which NPC when, and access each NPC database from one NPC to the other as they browse the links - but only the NPC that they have yet met and only the part of the NPC story or images that the GM has chosen to share as the story develops. NPC could be associated with more than one image, again, reveled as the story develops.

This is really my major point. Is it possible?

2) There seem to be no ruleset for the OLD version of Mage. I need to be able to use the old version of the character sheet, if nothing else so that each player can see his data and I can see all of the data; it doesn't need to be fully linked with dice rolls (although it would be nice). Are there some ruleset for the old world of darkness character sheets, including vampire, werewolf, and mage? Or even better - a simple character sheet allowing me to record any skills or attributes I want, on a 0-5 dot scale, or on a 0-10 dot scale? That would be perfect, as it could be used virtually for anything.

3) Dice rolls: I have also simplified the dice rules for Mage, and I use a version that is much simplier than both the old and the new version. But it presents some challenges for a virtual table top. What I need is:
- Only rolling d10, from 1 to 10 d10 at a time,
- 1 are botches and reduce the number of success; they should show as a skull on dice (if custom dice are possible, not critical but would be nice!)
- 10 are rerolls, and each reroll should show as an additional dice roll, which can then be a 1 or a 10 of itself (open ended roll)
- Success are added, botches are removed, what matter is the end result number of success. If success are positive, I need to know the number of success. If zero, it's a failure.
- If success are negative, then it's a failure if there is at least one success present, and a critical botch if there is no success at all.

- When you roll, the DM asks you to roll your number of dots from your attributes + number of dots from your skills. So this might be complicated to have in a ruleset, I would imagine? This rule apply to ALL skills, except willpower (already on a base of 10) and some powers (which are use as is, without adding an attribute). Can this be handled by FG2 ?

Thank you again, I hope this post isn't too long & detailed ;-)
:D

[Foen]

Hi and welcome to the FG forums, I hope you find us friendly and helpful!

The short answer to your question is that most of what you want is achievable, but only with some significant customisation/programming, so it will depend on your own skills with XML and scripting languages, plus a good deal of patience.

By way of a longer answer:

1. Browseable NPCs, Images and Notes

Rulesets allow the GM to share images and NPCs (generally speaking), but they have to be re-shared each session and the screen remain open during the game unless the GM closes them. Players cannot open or close these windows and they cannot edit or annotate them (aside from drawing on images).

Some rulesets include notes that the GM and players can make available, and this would give you some of the functionality (players can open and close, and browse), but typically players cannot edit each others' notes nor can they annotate the GM's published notes: they'd have to keep their additions in their own notes. i think you could get 80% of what you need using that facility.

If you were prepared to customise your own ruleset, you could build most of what you need, but I am not sure how easy it would be to allow multiple players to edit the same document (FG implements a read-only model for one player in respect of another player's shared material). Possible, but quite hard.

2. I am not aware of any existing ruleset for the old WoD game system, but you could probably modify a ruleset for the new WoD system to do what you want. My recommendation would be to use the WoD ruleset I built, because you could add a character sheet for your version of Mage as a plug-in extension, so you can keep your code changes localised (but you'd still have to edit the main code if you wanted to implement the stuff in 1 or 3).

3. The die roll mechanics you outline are possible in FG with on exception: you cannot change the faces on the dice. Provided you are happy to have 1s and 10s, and are willing to modify the die rolling logic, then you should be OK. My existing WoD ruleset already has a die pool, where skills and attributes can be combined before a roll is made, so it sounds like that would work for you too.

The bottom line on all this is that your requests are possible but would require some significant coding if you want to automate things. If you just want to use FG as a table, and re-roll dice manually and use manual note-taking, then you could probably just run with either of the existing WoD character sheets (or the generic ruleset) with minimal modifications.

Hope that helps

Stuart

[ConsciousSoul]

Hello Stuart,

Thanks for the helpful reply.

One clarification: I do not need to allow multiple players to edit the same document... What I need them is to get a common image and a common note file for each NPC from the GM, read only; and they can then ADD whatever notes each player want to add to each NPC file, only for himself. The game is very secretive and each player may choose to share, or not to share what they learn... so it makes sense that each player maintains his own notes for each NPC. But what I want is for each player to have a startup point from the gamemaster: when it's a new NPC, I can send them the photos and notes, and later add more photos and notes; and what I send is common to all. They get to add whatever they want to this and it "builds" their own library of NPC.

As for customization... well, I have a background in programming, so I know if I could only find the time, I could probably do so... but my time is very limited. You said that some rulesets includes shared notes? Which ones?

I have seen your ruleset for the new WoD system on the wiki; but I can't test it on the demo. How do you get to "edit the main code" or "create a plug in extension" ?

I'd be quite happy with 1s and 10s; if it would follow the proper dice rules I use. But again - I am not sure how to handle modifying the die rolling logic.

Hum... guess i'll have to read some more hey?
Thank again for your input!

[Foen]

No problem, glad I can help.

I think the WoD ruleset includes shared notes, as that is a feature I've been including in rulesets for a little while now. As regards your first point though, the GM would share a note (which would be read-only by all players) and then each player would have to create their own private note if they wanted to supplement the information. Also, the shared notes facility wasn't built with high-volume usage in mind, so it has no organising/filing facilities and you'd pretty soon end up with a very long list of notes. There is a search (on title) facility though.

Once you install a ruleset, it usually creates a large number of xml and script files in a ruleset directory. It is these files that you can edit to modify the code. Rulesets also support extensions, which are smaller cllections of xml and script files that can be loaded to over-ride the ruleset. The WoD ruleset uses that method to implement non-mortal characters, so further WoD game lines can be added without having to edit the main code. The GM then selects which gamelines need to be available in the campaign when it is launched.

As I mentioned previously, there is no reason why you could add an old WoD gameline to the ruleset this way, but you'd probably want to amend the core ruleset as well for your die mechanics and possibly NPC sheets/combat tracking.

Stuart