FAQ

Attunements

• The Attunements list is missing.
  • It's not. It was deliberately deleted. The Attunements page explains why, but the upshot is that a list encourages shopping for powers rather than themes. Attunements are alive and well. A lot of the ones you remember are still around, plus or minus some alterations to fit the setting. A lot of new ones are out there, and more will become available as people do.stuff() that opens or closes new paths through history.
• How do I get one?
  • A couple of ways.
    • Existing organizations recruit however they do. If you ran across a Blood Moon Battlemage and suddenly need your own bright red circle, you can do some research on them and start exemplifying their ideals. They'll find out, at whatever speed their intelligence services permit. There are many variations on the theme, organizations recruit differently because of different goals and means, but it's a good starting point.
    • Spend enough crowns to skip past the roleplay/story versions of joining and walk in the door with one. This will be fairly easy up front, as a nod to returning players, but some weird and obscure groups will close once the new campaign is on its own feet.
    • If you have a theme idea, you can submit it to Plot and we'll see what we can do with it. If we can make it work, we'll write it into the world and give you a head start on it. Feel free to suggest Attunement Powers but be prepared for some disappointment here - history suggests that this ends with "lol two Arcane Kills and two Phases per rank" or something else that's a) crazy powerful and b) really boring.
  • Either way, once you've threaded the in-game or out-of-game needles that bring you into the organization, you'll have your Attunement activated and start tracking Favor against it. You'll get at least your first Attunement Power and maybe more than that, if you have Favor banked up.
• I can't think of any Attunement I like and I don't want to start a hundred Favor behind when I do find something I like.
  • You're not alone. A lot (a lot) of people just go blank when you ask them what they want - this is a broader scale case of arguing about what we're having for dinner. It's okay. You can accumulate Favor without having a place to spend it, and then spend it when your cool thing does occur to you or show up during the course of the game. What you can't do is stroll in at Rank 10 and then start issuing orders to Rank 1 members of the same organization - Rank and Authority are only related by coincidence and your brand new Dusk hitter is right down there at the bottom of the chain of command until there's some reason for Dusk to believe you can lead effectively.

General

• Can I start with an Attunement?
  • For now, sure. This can (and probably will) change as things solidify and we're past the painful transition period. They cost some amount of crowns, and if you're a returning player that just lost a high-level character you'll have enough crowns that you can afford something. Out of the gate, we're keeping the doors pretty wide open for Attunements. If there was something in the previous campaign that caught your eye, it's probably-but-not-definitely around. There's lots of new stuff too, and we're always happy to hear requests for themes we didn't think of.
• There was a thing I loved in v1 that isn't here anymore.
  • Please raise it. Some things were deliberately cut out, generally because they a) didn't fit in the v2 setting or b) were unused or problematic in v1. We've kept or ported the things that made the engine run, so to speak, and we've done our level best to keep or port over what we could from v1. We've definitely missed something. It's axiomatic that this much work crammed into these few hands is going to overlook or forget something entirely. Without knowing what, specifically, you're missing, we can't tell if it was deliberately omitted or just missed. Either way, we'll be happy to explain why it's gone and port it if it was just overlooked.
• $class is too powerful because it pays less for $skill than $otherClass or has a skill $otherClass doesn't have
  • We know. We've moved the balance lever up a step from "skills". No one, ever, has succeeded in completely balancing classes at that granularity. Nero got close and every Nero character above the build waterline is identical. People place different values on the same skill and that detail alone guarantees that there'll never be universally accepted full balance between classes. Rather than go line by line and make sure that everyone pays the same build for the same skill regardless of context, we've zoomed out a bit and used these criteria instead:
    • Is the class, overall, fun to play and interesting to players who like that kind of thing?
    • Is the class, overall, roughly in line with other classes, overall?
      • Class balance, in other words, is something we're using to make sure no one is playing Sauron or Snoopy when everyone else is playing Hobbits. We're electing to skip past the perennial frustration of making sure that Timmy's Paladin doesn't have one more armor point than Sally's Champion. If you find an example of a class that's strictly superior to or inferior to another class, that's something that needs attention - there should be place for every class and strict superiority is a problem. If you're doing a line-by-line, point by point comparison for your own use, there's nothing wrong with that. If you think heavy armor is a Big Deal™ I'm not here to tell you differently. I am here to tell you that this is not universal and some things you think are trivia really matter to someone else. No one's ever going to be perfectly satisfied that all is in perfect balance, and we're not aiming to spend a lot of blood chasing an impossible dream. If it's fun, interesting, and not overshadowing or overshadowed by some other class, it's balanced enough.
• I found a rule/interaction/omission that combines with another rule/interaction/omission and players will exploit it to become Superman/trample everyone else/ruin the game.
  • Maybe. There are a lot of rules and we haven't had the time or inclination to chart them all against each for interactions, desired or otherwise. Some obvious, egregious problems are already tagged, some are forbidden, some we can't predict until we see them in action and have better information on which to make decisions. More broadly, we didn't set out to tighten rules down until they're exploit-proof. Literally no one has ever succeeded at this. I don't think it's possible even in theory. We wrote assuming that our players were interested in playing a game and having fun with it, and that afforded us some rare latitude in adding things to the economy of cool. Starting from the base presumption that all players are inherently out to profit themselves and their characters at literally any cost hasn't produced the desired results and probably never will - some of the best/worst rules technicians take it as a personal challenge and it's bad for everyone when we do. Starting with the assertion that our playerbase is more full of reasonable people than rules techs sets a different tone out of the gate. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't, but it's a deliberate, considered deviation from the standard.
    • With that in mind, our bar isn't "can Tony or Mike find a way of reading this that does what they want instead of what Plot wants" - that answer is yes for any almost any value of "this". The bar is "can a well-meaning player read this in some way that produces undesirable effects" and where that occurs, we need to update it. Not as punishment for finding an infinite loop or an autokill, just to clear it up for the next well-meaning player that stumbles into it.
    • Having set those guidelines, we can (and should) deal with "deliberate, malicious exploitation resulting in a bad game experience" correctly, as a sportsmanship issue. Most of us that are doing this are very keenly aware that we're doing it, why we're doing it, and what we're going to do to the inevitable correction when it shows up to stop us. I'm not vain enough to believe I can succeed where everyone else has failed at defeating lawyers. I'm hopeful that maybe, together, we can calm some of the underlying factors that produce them in the first place.

Guns and Gunslingers

• 50-round capacity is insane and this might as well be airsoft because no one will ever play anything else because of how crazy powerful guns are.
  • Couple of things.
    • You still can't shoot any faster than you can legibly call damage and this has always been the practical throttle for ranged attacks.
    • In v1 rules, with some practice and good mag placement you could get more darts out the door than 50/minute. I can do 50 without effort. If I pushed it I could get to 60, maybe 75. It's a big number and looks scary, but one step under the hood it's actually weaker than v1 Gun rules.
• No one can or will keep track of 50 darts in 60 seconds and consequently people will just cheat.
  • No, probably not. It's a lot of math in a hurry and hard to track 50 shots in 60 seconds. It's much easier to count magazine swaps, though. If you've swapped mags two or three times (depending mag size) you're probably done for a bit. If you're using hand-loaded revolvers, you will never, ever be in danger of approaching the dart limit. (I've also got a wicked cool holosight that tracks shots against seconds and I'm very excited about it.) "People will just cheat" is the base self-fulfilling prophecy we're laboring to avoid in the rules.

Rogue

• Why can't Rogues use guns anymore?
  • Couple of reasons.
    • Trickster was a bit much in v1. Ranger-class ranged weapon damage, excellent defenses, crippling backstab offense and invisibility to both deliver that backstab and escape the consequences of it. Rogue has plenty without firearms.
    • Also, the rapid proliferation of guns wasn't something we loved, and adding them to a mathematically advantaged class guaranteed they'd be everywhere. Stripping guns off everyone but Gunslinger means the only guns we see will be on people devoted enough to flinging foam that it was worth being the only thing they do.

Paladin

• Paladin is (too powerful/too cheap/better than Mage/too something or not something enough).
  • Paladin is a big swing and we're watching it closely. Loosely, it's much more constrained by roleplay than by Skill Points and I don't know that anything like that has ever really been attempted. It's worth keeping in mind that while that Paladin is paying for mana in RP and your Mage isn't, no cosmic power is going to strip your Mage's mana pool for being a murderhobo. Paladin is the only class rewarded with power for good RP and that's easy to see, but it's also the only class that loses power at all.
• People are just going to cheat on Codes and Conviction Loss.
  • Maybe. Codes have to be approved through Plot, so don't worry about Joe writing a Code that says "THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE" and PK'ing because his Code says he not only can but must. Codes that lean towards causing strife just won't be approved. Plot (obviously) can't be around all the players all the time to call out Code violations; we're taking the somewhat unusual step of electing to believe that our players aren't, overall, cheaters and thieves that came out to steal imaginary points from us. Some will get turned in by their fellow players. Some can and will evade detection for a good long time, but that necessarily means that they're not acting in anti-social ways or hurting the game; the rest will come to our attention for various other activities and those we'll handle the same way we'd handle any other failure in sportsmanship.
• Cleanse is better than (big stack of Mage spells).
  • Sort of. It's more effective than the big stack of curatives available in Mage. It's almost necessarily less efficient than spot cures. It's very rare that one poor sucker is suffering from one or more of each of the things that Cleanse fixes, which means some percentage of your Cleanse mana is just wasted. Cleanse saves you triage time, hard to come by as a frontline fighter, at the cost of awful efficiency and a bigger percentage of your overall mana pool. The downsides of Cleanse aren't obvious and that makes it look better than it will play in practice. There's one case we're specifically watching - a really skilled sword/shield fighter that doesn't use mana-assisted melee and uses mana mainly for Cleanse and curatives rather than amping combat. There may be a damaging manifestation here but it's too early to tell.