After you take a look over that blog post, remember Evil Hat's philosophy on deadlines: If we don't have them, then we can't miss them, so we can focus on having a 100% quality product.

EDIT: And, if I recall correctly, one of the chapters is just in the starting phase or the first draft. The one about being on the road. THIS IS ABSOLUTE HEARSAY THOUGH.

At which point it becomes a kick in the face to one of the primary benefits of thaumaturgy over evocation

I get that you disagree. That's pretty obvious. I'd like to hear your full reasons so I can see where you're coming from.

I think it would represent another kick in the face to evocation maneuvers

Why would it do that? If I were to use this in a game, it would apply to evocation maneuvers as well. I'm not sure where you're coming from with this ...

Sorry to commit thread necromancy, but I read a blog post of Ryan Macklin's recently and I thought it might be helpful in this instance.

Basically, the better you succeed, the more free tags you get on an aspect - which would probably work out for what you want, Belial. Here's how it works:

Whatever way you introduce an aspect through a maneuver you do it with a skill roll against a certain threshold. Normally, if you just beat the difficulty, you introduce it as a fragile aspect - tag it in one turn or it goes away. A second shift beyond that might be enough to make it sticky - it will last until someone uses it. Now what about shifts beyond the second? What Ryan Macklin proposes is that each two shifts beyond the first two allow another free tag later on down the line for you to use.

Throw in another houserule that adds the ability to use an unlimited number of free tags from a single aspect (as long as they are only free tags) and you can then tag that aspect you've created on your next turn for a large amount on one roll.

Example: You're fighting a mook and you maneuver to place "Knocked Off Balance" on him. He rolls Average (+1) and you roll Superb (+5). Fair (+2) is enough to place the aspect, Good (+3) makes it sticky, so it will last until the mook gets rid of it and Superb (+5) is another two shifts, so you have two free tags, which you pass to your pal Lenny.

Lenny smacks him upside the face with his Gauntlet of Smiting (Weapon:2) and double-tags Off Balance for +4 on his attack. Which is, of course, a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am knock out of the park for him.

I really fall on the side where the Catch does reduce what you have to resist for feeding damage, but, looking over the inline example in Feeding Dependency, I gotta say there are reasons to go with Tedronai's interpretation.

For example, if you used Inhuman Strength and Inhuman Toughness in the scene, that’s a total of 4 refresh, so you’d be rolling your Discipline to meet or beat a target of 4.

Seeing as Feeding Dependency itself attaches to powers in the same way that the Catch does to Toughness powers and there's no argument over whether it reduces the amount of refresh you resist against, I'd actually think that it works the same way for Toughness. Once again, in the inline example, it didn't use the whole Toughness suite as the refresh total - it only used your specific powers within it that were used.

I'd say a hit through your Catch means you don't use whatever Toughness power, so really it's reducing the threshold by the total amount of your Toughness powers. However, if you were hit - even once - by an attack that your Toughness power was effective against, then you would have to resist against it's full value.


LIKE I SAID, I personally tend towards the Catch reduces, but it's pretty open to interpretation.

@Falar: I was afraid that it would be like that.

With a bunch of mature people that don't play to win, and play for a story, it could work out really well. One of the main places where I played could have had some amazing truth and betrayal and redemption story arcs for characters, but people weren't willing for their characters to "lose", so it never could really work out.

Sigh. Ah, the Imperium.

Honestly it's not terribly difficult to avoid becoming pregnant as a normal human. There are a number of easy options either partner can use and that's not taking into consideration anything supernatural or a white court vampire feeding off of a same sex partner.

Not terribly different now, but that's a relatively recent development for ease. The Pill wasn't even approved in the United States until 1960, so anytime before that and it's going to be much more difficult to make absolutely sure of non-conception. Given that Harry was surprised by the rather small number of children a certain WCV had, I'm guessing that either they're not very fertile or they have some supernatural method to decrease accidents. Even if that supernatural method is merely an innate sense of when, exactly, to Pull Out, that's still supernatural. Especially, seeing as coitus interruptus has a worse than 25% chance of failure, being able to control with that method would be ... yeah ... rather supernatural.

Eh. It depends on your players, honestly. I played mechanic-less PbP for a long time before I got into anything with mechanics. And there's a wide range of what, exactly, that means. On the one hand you have the journal RPs, which I'd say are farther away from what PbP is from here, and then you have single-threaded forum RPs, which is basically exactly what we do here, but without as much mechanics focus, and on the third hand, you have multi-threaded forum RPs, which is basically what we have here, but each line of story is a separate thread.

From my own experience, which is limited, of course, single-threaded forum RPs can have problems keeping things clear as to what's happening where and with who. Multi-threaded forum RPs can have the problem of looking like there's not a lot going on so people don't post because not a lot's going on. Both of them can have problems with players who always think they should succeed, which is my main reason on souring on the whole mechanic-less route. This is probably more of a problem of poor admins than it is a problem of the type of game, but I prefer mechanics now.

Also, I'd say, it depends on what you're looking for in a PbP roleplay whether a mechanic-less one will suit you. Most (but I'm definitely not saying all) of the multi-threaded ones I ran into have a lot of just sitting around doing character interaction. Plot and a gripping story was not really the focus, except on rare occasions. Single-threaded PbP tended more towards the straight plot, but, without a core admin or proactive and creative players, it would devolve into traction as reactive people didn't take the story anywhere new.

As an aside, I've only actually RPed once, face-to-face, and that was in the previous year, but I've been doing tabletop online through IRC for about five or six years. Mechanic-less PbP for about five years before that. Much of my playing experience is with the fan-created Final Fantasy RPG, but I've also played a little Shadowrun and even less Fantasy Craft. I've GMed the Serenity RPG and a Cortex fantasy homebrew of my own making. Even in mechanic-less RP though, I tend towards the GM role.