These would be health levels that you couldn’t heal, but would be a buffer between you and real damage.Īs mentioned above, there is no longer a soak roll, but the difficulty of a damage roll is the target’s Stamina + Fortitude + Armor. So I decided that for a blood point, a character could add their Fortitude to their normal Health levels temporarily. (You still roll it to avoid fire and sunlight). I decided that Stamina + Fortitude + Armor would be the difficult of damage rolls, but this meant that Fortitude would be less useful overall. I also wanted to nix the soak roll, and so I had to address Fortitude first. When I make a change like this (and I don’t seem to be able to resist) I always give players a chance to adjust accordingly. So far, the players seem to be happy with it, though one player moved her Celerity 3 point to become a Fortitude 4 point (from out of clan to in-clan), which was fine by me. I have also not been allowing split actions, and so the extra Celerity dice would not be useful for that either. I decided Celerity would cost no blood, since frankly this is quite a nerf. This would also add to pretty much all attack rolls, move around rolls, and so on.

This would be the equivalent of the LARP preempt ability that Celerity grants, and it just makes sense that characters with Celerity would act first. I had changed initiative to Dexterity + Wits (rather than Wits + Alertness), so Celerity would also add to initiative rolls. What I decided was that Celerity would simply add to all Dexterity rolls. We have two players who don’t give a damn about the system and would rather it not get in the way, one who is in his very first tabletop RPG, and a fourth who is up for whatever, so I decided to go with simplification. In the past I’ve adapted the LARP rules for Celerity, as I actually like them better than the V20 or previous rules, but in writing them up for this game, I realized they would just add another layer of complexity. I used to like the variability and flexibility of the OWoD system, but that was also back when I played with the same group every week, and we had tons of hours to devote to gaming minutiae. One thing I really like about NWoD is that this is all simplified to one weighted roll per attack. Not only does Celerity make it less fun to be in a fight when you don’t have it, but there is more time spent as a player sitting on the sidelines messing with your smartphone or whatever while everyone else has multiple actions.Ī second issue is that resolving a single attack requires at least four dice-rolls: the attack roll, a defense roll, damage roll and soak roll. Each round of combat involves multiple turns for a number of the characters. In the past, this has been the point where we have a whole session where two hours or more are all one fight.

Multiple Sabbat packs will be attacking an ancient vampire and his minions, and a second ancient might join the fray. My V20 game that I’m currently running seems to be coming to a head.

Douglas underhill vampire combat