NWoD: The God Machine rules update.

To say that some kinda of rules update for the core NWoD system has been needed for a while, is an understatement.

With eight(!) separate splats, countless expansion books for each splat, and one core book to connect them all. NWoD has become a little bloated and unwieldy. Especially when you consider that the Core book itself has a huge number of expansions covering a variety of subjects from expanded armouries to books about deamons, the spirit world, artefacts, and lord knows how many city books. It was getting to the point that to make yourself a fully rounded character you'd have to check through between four and five books.

That kinda book keeping can be slow and annoying to deal with at the best of times. So thank god for the God Machine Chronicles. One of a new series of books for the splats introducing new mechanics and collected merit lists. This one dealing with the core system, which will act as a springboard for the later books which will provide splat specific changes.

So what has changed?

For a start, they've done away with the old EXP system. Instead introducing the 'beats' system. Beats are awarded for fulfilling certain criteria, or at the GM's discretion. Five beats get you 1 experience. The experience costs have been changed to reflect this change. For instance, there is no longer changing exp costs based on dot levels.

Previously, the cost of increasing an attribute, let's say strength for this example, increased as more dots were put into it. So to go from three dots to four cost 20 exp (new dot times five). Now, there is a universal cost of 4 experience to increase an attribute. Want to go from one dot to two? 4 experience please. Want to got from four dots to five? 4 experience please.

Skills and merit costs have been similarly changed too. Skills costing 2 experience and Merits cost 1 experience.

Other new introductions are the change to the morality system and the new 'Conditions' system. Conditions replace the derangements previously attached to morality, however they also can be gained from a variety of sources, rather than just morality degeneration. Additionally, there are both positive conditions and negative conditions. Some of which can be taken at character creation as a permeant trait. I like this system, it's a lot more interesting then the derangements which always struck me as kinda badly though out. They were all mental illnesses and the only way to gain them was to have your morality drop. Normally though committing a sin.

Or to put it another way, the implication was that the mentally ill are terrible people.

The morality system changes are very interesting. "Morality" has been replaced by "Integrity" which rather then working from a singular set of 'sins' are drawn from a set of choices made by the player. Finally players get to craft their own moral code and live by it!

I'm hoping that when the follow up books come out for each splat, there'll be new options unique to each supernatural species.

A huge number of merits from a bunch of the core supplements have been collected together into the new list.  Given new dot costs and a couple of corrections for some of the already existing merits. There are also a ton of new merits all of which I love. Including a general 'safehouse' merit and the inclusion of the 'profession' merit from Hunter: the Vigil line. Now your characters can have an actual job as opposed to being murder hobos!

But my favourite inclusion is something called 'Truest Friend'. This effectively gains the player a loyal companion which is protected from the GM (can't be killed without player permission). Is damn near impossible to turn against the player character (-5 to the role to turn them, which is huge!), and spending time with them restores Willpower points. Thematically it's a wonderful thing, but also because it can be attached to the retainer merit and change the dynamics between the characters, making the retainer a friend or a love interest rather then an employee or work college.

Fighting styles have been put into their own category now, so GMs who wish to ban them can do so much easier. The expanded list contain both defensive and offensive styles which can provide a lot of different options.

Additionally, they've added a new category called 'supernatural' merits. These are psychic powers and lesser magics for use by lesser supernaturals and possessed people. While they do become inaccessible once a character takes on one of the mainline Supernatural natures they're a welcome inclusion. Especially as new rules state that any merit lost are automatically converted into equivalent experience to be spent on new things!

Combat rules have changed, ranging from the introducing their own selection of conditions called 'tilts' to changing the way weapons work and a change to the defence rules. Defence is still calculated the same way, lower of Wits or Dexterity. Defence is applied as a penalty to the attack roll of the guy trying to smack you. But now when you attempt a dodge action you roll Defence plus Athletics. Successes are removed from the attackers successes. Meaning that you could theoretically reduce the damage to nothing. I'm really not sure what I think of this. Sure it's giving a little more agency to the player, but it also comes with the downside that you don't apply your defence to the other guys roll.

Or to put it another way it's possible that the attacker can get more successes and do more damage from you using your turn trying the dodge manoeuvre then just attacking him normally. It just strikes me as an odd choice.

Then again this change in defence might go hand in hand with the new Weaponry rules. Pre-God Machine the weapon would be added to the rolled dice pool. Now the weapon's ratings are added to the successes after the dice are rolled. Making weapons a hell of a lot more deadly. Although it should be noted that this is done after successes have been deducted from a dodge move. No successes means no additional damage. So now the attack dice pools aren't unbalanced between brawl and weaponry users. Although Weapon users will always do more damage.

Weapons also now come with initiative modifiers. The bigger a weapon the slower you'll be reacting. No longer will players all grab whatever weapon gives the highest attack bonus (the chainsaw), because they'll get stomped by everything faster then they are.

Finally there are the tilts. Effectively they are a mechanical representation of the changing nature of a fight. They were first introduced in Vampire: The Requiem- Danse Macabre supplement and make a triumphant return here. They can only be gained in combat and outside of combat some of them can become Conditions. They can represent anything from Weather effects to drugs and poison to statuses to be inflicted. They're split into two categories, environmental, which effects everyone, and personal which effects a single character.

Personal Tilts range from annoyances to 'oh god I'm going to die'. I'm concerned about the Tilt 'Beaten Down' personally. It's a Tilt which is inflicted if the defender takes bashing damage in excess of his stamina or any lethal damage. It's effect being that to attack you must spend a point of Willpower. I understand what it's trying to represent, the exhaustion and weakness which comes from being hurt. But it still strikes me that this could very easily be abused. Willpower is pretty finite resource ranging from three to six with most starting characters. It's not all that easy to recover ether. Beyond ending the combat the only way to cure this Tilt is to surrender. Upon which point the character regains a point of Willpower and gets a beat. But can take no further action in the combat.

I like the concept, don't get me wrong. But I find the triggering requirements a little harsh. Taking a single point of Lethal brings on the Tilt. I'm probably going to houserule it.

The book provides a helpful table of all the Tilts for easy reference, but it only contains the effect of the Tilt. To find out the trigger or how to cure it you'll have to look it up in the book. It's still nice they included the table but you still have to be on your toes for when they activate.

Not only have there been changes to the combat system, they've introduced what could be considered a brand new social system. Really it's just a brand new complicated way to track how well you're doing with your conversations and politicalising. I'm still trying to get my head around it. But I've never been much of a social player. I'll report back once I understand it better.

Lastly, the book presents some unified 'spirit' rules, which come in three flavors. Ghosts, the echos of the dead, they're a pretty common antagonist for Mortal or Hunter stories or make NPCs for Giste games, though they can show up in any of the game lines. Spirits, the personification of ideas and objects, think the Kami from Shinto mythology, mostly deal with Werewolves but also Mages, can make pretty entertaining antagonists, a good stand in for more traditional deamon antagonists and the like. Lastly there are Angels, beings who are made by and serve the God Machine. I'm a little fuzzy on what their deal is, though with Deamon: the ??? coming out at some point this year I should have answers before too long.

Spirits work as they've always done, five playable ranks of power, and five more above those. Though anything beyond rank five is effectively a god and unusable in game. The three types have their own style to them. Working of different goals and requiring different things to recharge and increase their rank.

They've collected a new list of Numima (powers) together and combined it with a new system called Influences and Manifestations. Which represent how much power a ephemeral has over the enviroment. I like the idea, but like with the social system its taking me some time to get to grips with it.

So that's the rules update in a nutshell. If people want I can do a more detailed examination of sections of it. I will be revisiting the social and ephemeral sections anyway.

Up next: Great Ork Gods.

NeverDead? Never fear!

Recently I picked up a second hand title for the X-Box 360 called Neverdead. It had caused a bit of a buzz at the time of it's release due to it's primary mechanic. That being that Bryce Boltzmann (the player character) can never die.

He can be dismembered, decapitated, disarmed, broken, battered, burned, exploded, crushed, eaten, sure. But die? Pshh, whatever.

The usual disconnect between the story and the game was thrown to one side. The game took advantage of the recurring element of super hard demon hunters taking hits that would knock a building down and played it tongue in cheek. Of course he can take those hit! He's immortal! Then again hits like that do have a habit of making all of Bryce's limbs fly off as though the demons are playing Fallout 3 and just went into V.A.T.S mode.

So, how do you loose a game when you can never die? That's easy, there are two methods of 'loosing'. The first is to introduce an allied NPC to follow you around that you need to keep alive instead! The game replaced the health bar with an escort quest and then toted it as a feature.

It some respects it's actually kinda funny, the NPC is actually better at taking hits than Bryce is. Leading to points where I've had my head knocked off by the slightest of breezes, and Miss NPC is tanking hits like Superman while I attempt to find my torso.

The second method is that there is a enemy type which doesn't nothing and re-spawns infinitely while a fight is going on. But once you loose a limb or your head they rocket over and eat them. Giving you a limited amount of time to destroy them and reclaim your limb. If it's your head then it's a matter of completing a QTE or getting sent back to the last checkpoint. It feels pretty pointless and doesn't really have any consequences beyond making you redo a fight from the start again.

If your limbs do get consumed (which is likely, given how distracting the fights can be. More often than not I didn't notice I'd lost anything until the limb was already gone.) Then you can regenerate by clicking the Left Analogue stick. Unfortunately this is on a cooldown timer that activates once the limb/head is lost. Some skills can reduce the cooldown time but there's always a little waiting required. Which of course carries the risk of getting your head eaten.

With this in place the game has to make it's best attempts to mess you up. Which unfortunately it does by dropping as many enemies on you as possible with spawn points. Which it never lets up with throughout the entire run. Combined with the lack of enemy variety this can make some fights stale quickly. Although the developers have been smart enough to add a few environmental switch ups. Both in the form of destructible scenery to do large chunks to Deamons caught in the blast zone, and environmental dangers such as subway trains. Even so removing the spawn points ASAP can make things a lot more manageable.

The game also offers a large selection of skills to buy with XP gained from killing Deamons and grabbing collectibles. They unlock as you complete levels and can be changed and bought at any time in level. I like this system, it gives the canny player the chance to switch up their skills as the situation calls for it. Providing both passive and active bonuses to a variety of things. With the best skill stopping your limbs from detaching. True immortality. Unfortunately to get that you have to buy all the other skills first and then gathering the 10,000,000 EX required to buy it. Which would mean 16-17 total playthroughts of the game. Still, it gives you something to aim for.

So with the major selling points of the game explained, let's move onto the narrative stuff.

I'll say this much. The games story is pretty piss poor. It's focus is on the relationship between Bryce and Archadia (the allied NPC). They can play pretty well off of one another in some cases. But it's not enough to carry the story on it's own. Especially when they introduce the other main character, Nikki. Who is very. Very. Annoying. I cannot express how irritating she is at the start, and only becomes less annoying because she says less towards the end. She also wears the most ridiculous costume. Which is hand waved because she's a 'popstar'.

The story can be summed up as: Drunk cocky arsehole with tragic backstory kills deamons to get revenge for dead wife. There's not much more to it then that. There is a couple of twists, but nothing that really breaks the mold. It's the usual stock 'oh by the way I'm actually evil, surprise!' stuff which is never really all that shocking.

Nothing much is actually explained, so don't expect to have many answers by the end of it. The lack of explanation almost feels like there should be some kind of supporting material. Like a comic book or some kind of in game info files. Which there aren't any, so it's kinda strange really.

But weak plot aside, the gameplay is quite fun. It's fast and can be very hectic at times. The destructible scenery adds some nice flavour to the set peaces and the skills can change up your playstyle on the fly.

I wouldn't recommend buying it full price, but picking it up second hand might make for a nice distraction over the weekend.