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Aberrant RPG - NWoD Aberrant conversion


Du0

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Anyone interested in passing some ideas back and forth on this?

I've already laid some ground work for how I want the mechanics to work.

Quantum is your core power stat of course and it's added to your stamina to resist toxins and diseases in addition to the normal stuff core stats do.

Powers, Megas and Enhancements are purchased with Nova Merit Points (I figure 15 is a good amount). Level 1 powers are 1 pt per dot, level 2 powers and megas are 2 pts per dot. These Merits follow the normal merit rules of double point cost for the 5th dot so:

Domination, a level 2 5 dot power costs 12 Nova Merit Points, 2 per dot for the first 4 and 4 for the last.

No level 3s just yet and no combination powers like body morph or Telepathy. Conceptually they still exist but you need to purchase a variety of powers to cover the broad range of effects. So telepathy has become a lvl2 Mind Probe, a lvl2 memory alteration and a lvl 1 mind speaking power.

Powers are divided into Power/Finesse/Resist groups. All powers become Att+Skill+Quantum. You choose the attribute and skill you want the power keyed to when you purchase it, so Telekinesis might be keyed to Dex or Wits and migh use the athletics or expression skill. Powers never suffer unskilled penalties.

Some powers have a variable cost for greater effect with higher levels encompassing the lower rated effect.

Example: Qbolt

oo- deals bashing damage but costs no QP to fire

oooo- can deal lethal damage for 1 QP

ooooo- can deal aggravated damage for 2 QP

Armor can be rated 1-5 and adds its rating to defense. Normally it's free but can be activated reflexively for 1 QP.

For 1 or 2 QP per scene Forcefield is 4 or 5 dots. At 4 it converts all lethal damage to bashing, at 5 it converts all damage to bashing.

Invulnerability is 3 dots and doubles your defense against the selected form of attack. No extras means no broad categories.

Morality functions a lot differently. It might become a Humanity stat. when morality falls Novas have the option of getting Aberrations instead of derangements.

this is all just examples, but any thoughts so far?

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IMO, the WoD2.0 framework is ill-suited for the Aberrant setting. Lumping together armor and avoidance works for a street level horror game, but is going to be exceptionally clunky for a setting that routinely goes into the higher levels of firepower. Ditto for lumping accuracy and damage together; for one, every extremely powerful attack is now hard to avoid, as well.

You can work around this by using the damage adds and armor adds from the armory rule book, but then the question becomes one of balancing. Pretty soon, the whole thing becomes more complex than its worth.

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hey sky, yeah, been a while, good to hear from you again.

Metaphys, you'd be right if what I'm looking for is a complete port of the aberrant setting, rather I'm trying to adjust some parts of the fluff for the nWoD setting.

Actually I'm running a game right now where the characters can go either way, all dark fantasy horror with fey and vampires etc or they can go dark sci fi horror with extradimensional beings, aliens and viruses that turn people into vamps and zombies.

I don't want to bring the avengers into the nWoD I want the original X-Men or maybe the new mutants.

One of the problems I ran into with the last few Aberrant games I ran was either too much tweaking on the player end (everyone was either indestructible or able to phone in the combat), or too much rules tweaking on my end to get what i wanted out of the system. There was also catastrophic whining when i wanted to ease those problems by running lower powered games.

By adopting the nWoD setting and translating a lower key aberrant I can get what I want. Also, combining damage and accuracy into one roll saves so much time I almost tear up when I'm running;)

One of the things I definitely wanted to eliminate with this was the axis/axes that the other templates hinge on. Novas were the first character type (i recall) from WW that really let you just piece them together from whatever you could find, so I'm trying to keep that feel. I never liked trinity psykers and Adventure needs no tweaking. If I want pulp type heroes in a game I'll just run A!

All that said if you guys have any ideas on how to convert certain level 3 suite techniques into level 2 powers, some are probably not appropriate like Accelerate Time, but temperature control and some of the Cyberkinesis. A toned down TK chart would be nice since Q doesn't provide autos anymore. I think one suxx to lift a person... use size rather than weight. So one suxx for size 5 and maybe another size 5 per suxx, so a garbage truck on an exceptional suxx.

Megas are 2 suxx on 8 or 9 and 3 suxx on a 10, 10 again applies.

by not allowing Nova Merit Points to be spent on regular Atts I don't foresee anyone having more than 3 in any mega att. It will of course be possible to tweak the crap out of this but lack of familiarity and a desire for versatility should keep that to a minimum.

I think Chrysalis would make an ok "extra xp for powers or morality" thing. So they can use it to buy "morality" back up and eliminate aberrations. I think in this setting aberrations immediately jump to the terrifying, animas are never golden glowy things, they're damaging auras of hellish flame and radiation or extra limbs, sloughing flesh etc. Things players will rarely be content to say "meh" about but when they want to spend it they have to enter the suspended animation of Chrysalis... I'll think about it.

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actually I thought scion was awful. Hero was ok but Demigod made it so there was no such thing as competing attributes past a certain point and the egyptian legend regen powers made things ridiculous even at low levels. But I digress.

That's fine for gods where the purview of one shouldn't impinge upon another but it makes for a poor specials game.

Again, I know how much we all liked the planet cracking power of Aberrant and it handled that aspect well enough but I'm trying to bring some of what i liked about the core concept and setting into another setting and set of mechanics. Neither of those things is negotiable.

With no snark intended, I'm doing a conversion for low level powers and such for use in the nWoD and asked if anyone was interested in passing ideas about for that purpose, not for ideas about other mechanical systems to use instead or reasons why what I'm doing is impractical.

Villify and lambast me if you like. Light me on fire with flaming dialogue if you like but make a seperate thread for the purpose if you care to do so.

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I like the idea of a merged game. We've had a few threads about it here abouts somewhere...

Setting is important. Are abbies/mutants/whatever just one more race in the WoD? Are they public? This has implications for power balance or at least the kind of game you want to run.

You'll have to decide power balance. Do you want PC level vamps to be more or less equal to PC level abbies? (I'd argue not, but that's a different conversation).

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This download has a homebrew that's pretty close to what you want.

Ok, I've found what I think is the single best mutant game. From what I can tell, it's basically a homegrown mutant game, based Marvel mutants. It's simply called "Mutantkind in the World of Darkness."

It's free, and I've put it online at the following link:

http://boxstr.com/files/2919344_bpoau/mutant.zip

I love this system, and I would really love to play a game or two in it. Unfortunately I cannot GM a game. Any takers?

And IMHO they *could* be combined.

1) The Abbies are public, everyone else is still secret.

The question is how rare are abbies? Visitors from another dimension (just the PCs) or total?

Or alternatively, 2) Abbies become another *thing* in the WOD... with the other factions (and probably other novas) struggling to keep them in the closet.

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Core assumptions for the game are that science, or more accurately Science! can be used to explain most of what goes on in the world (but not everything).

Vampires might be alien hybrids, an evolutionary offshoot or some such but they and all other supernaturals of the WoD variety are an extremely rare occurence. When you talk about werewolf packs there might be one per continent with a few lone wolves. Vampires are exceptionally rare individuals with great and unique powers, basically a vampire is going to be some kind of methuselah entity.

Mages fall into the Omega category. The primary "good guy" conspiracy operates using specials and handlers, not exactly "one of us one of them" more like a SWAT team and a some support technicians for every three or four. Classifications for specials are Alpha, Epsilon and Omega.

Alphas are frontliners, bricks and blaster types. Epsilons typically have recon or support powers, healing, telepathy, ESP. When the organization (Temporary name Rubra) fields a team it's usually to recruit, occasionally to observe and in the event of a problem, pacify. The third classification is Omega and these are high end matter/energy/space/time manipulators, shapeshifters and the exceptionally rare Regulators (Disrupt, Q Leech, etc. They're not playable)

Aliens more often account for unknown quantities than other specials or supernaturals (IE Rubra has sufficient experience to differentiate a problem with Specials from something else).

Specials/supers are not publicly recognized or known. Occasionally, inexplicable things happen but conspiracies keep things quiet rather than mystical stuff like lunacy or "arcane-forget-it-happened".

According to the modified setting "Bible": organizations like Rubra have employed Specials to insure the ascendance of man since time immemorial. They've been known as heroes in every era and made the world a place where even the concept of mundane could exist. Now, werekin keep to the shadows and the immortals keep their urges in check and their own numbers low and amuse themselves with their political games. The reality altering Mages have been subject to a growing paranoia that their own power threatens existence and so remain weak. Those few that do dare to reach beyond those self imposed limits are swiftly sanctioned by Rubra or their own people, and that's only if they aren't destroyed by whatever forces they unleash.

Why would specials struggle to make the world a better place for normies? Because when they turn their backs on their own humanity the descend into madness and turn into monsters.

Much of what the players would deal with in the early phase of the game as Hunters would be learning about the existence of the unexplainable and the slow burn of the horror at realizing they are ill equipped to explain it. The slow demoralizing realization that they will never know where the monsters originated and the cold comfort of knowing they must kill to survive but without understanding anything about their foes.

Then they will network and eventually come into contact with Rubra. Rubra describes an interest in the group. Why do some groups band together? The psychological link of those who are different, that exposure to the unknown allows some psyches to evolve where others retreat from the knowledge that the world is a much bigger place and when that happens they can take the next step and become Special.

Then they choose powers and are introduced to the threat Omegas present. In this setting Omegas are universally problematic. Some aren't murderous but still dangerous and so Rubra sends the PCs out to bring the rogues in to be detained or reeducated and perhaps someday, depowered. Along the way they meet other threats, Aliens, reanimated dead that seek humanity (maybe vamps, maybe prometheans), previously banished extradimensional beings that psychically feed on the worst of the human condition (maybe demons maybe changelings maybe spirits).

They struggle to explain these things and at the same time recognize how close they are to being more like them than their own mothers or children. They have to fight to maintain a balance. A single battle in the middle of a populated area could result (after a series of bad rolls) in them being a permanently flaming skeleton with wings of black smoke. Only pursuit of the norm can stave off this degeneration. They can attempt transcendance, pursuing a Chrysalis but that takes time and understanding and Rubra frowns on it because more than one Omega was the result of one of their own operatives doing just that...

wow that was a much more involved post than initially intended but I think it brings things into focus.

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Looks nice.

Would it be possible to change Node to a 1-10 trait eliminating any reference to attunement, change Sacrifice to Psyche and eliminate the facets?

I'm not exactly computer literate. I might be able to do it myself, maybe not.

I think MrGone on the WW forums made a hunter sheet with a generic core power stat block in case a hunter is changed. I might try to run that down.

Thanks so far.

When I've put together a little more for power ratings and stuff I'll post it for feed back.

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For anyone with time or the inclination:

Write up an NPC for me. Alter to taste and flavor of the setting as I described it above. Who might run Rubra? Is there a Bond-style Q in there?

I've been toying with the idea of changing Michael Donighal into a Michele. An extremely severe and short woman that is a little more Primoris and a little less Mal. I'd like to see some of the traditional villians reworked so their personality is carried over but they're on the other side of the law... maybe. If you're interested give me a write up and a little about the place the character holds in this new world and how they got there.

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Would it be possible to change Node to a 1-10 trait eliminating any reference to attunement, change Sacrifice to Psyche and eliminate the facets?

Node is already 1-10... the concept I had was that Attunement would represent every living thing's connection to the underlying subquantum universe. On the Aberrant sheet it would run backwards, and every time Node overlaps Attunement, you gain Taint.

In terms of changing stuff, I made that several years (and hard drives) ago. I'm not sure I have the original files/programs needed to alter those. Mr Gone's site has several different sheets which may be of use, including a few different Aberrant sheets.

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So as I try to put my little conversion booklet together I find the voice I'm writing with to swing like a pendulum from my own to something inspired by terry pratchet. I'd like to go back and edit it to make it sound a little more uniform but I like both. Anyone else have an issue like that while writing, like a character just pops up and starts speaking for you?

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