Soaking Aggravated Damage (Vampire)

The rules as written make Kindred very fragile against aggravated damage. This is to be expected when dealing with fire or sunlight; even with Fortitude you're not soing to survive more than a few rounds. The problem I see with it is that a Gangrel or Lupine can kill you instantly with a claw strike, and you be lucky if your one or two dice soak provides any protection from the astronomical dice pools a good hit can produce. Adding stamina to the soak pool (as suggested in the Storytellers Handbook page 17) seems like a good fix, but makes fire and sunlight somewhat easy to shrug off. The ruleing in Dark Ages seems even more strange. I have my own house rule, but I'm interested to see how other STs deal with this.

I do the "add Stamina to your soak role if you have Fortitude" thing.

I'll allow the addition of stamina if the character has fortitude.

Some games I want the players to feel fragile. Not necessarily weak- but fragile, where every dangerous encounter has that edge of possible death and every roll of the dice for combat is an enormous risk.

Some games I want players to feel tougher. Games where I make violence more commonplace or where I feel that combat solutions are appropriate to the theme and setting.

Those games I add a houserule about health, adding a health box for every level of stamina and fortitude the character possesses, lining them up next to the existing boxes in a second (and rarely third) column from top to bottom (incapacitated always remains a single box). Damage is then noted from left to right, top to bottom. So the minimum health a character would have includes an extra bruised box. The maximum would shift with generation- but in theory it'd be possible to see twenty seven health (with ten stamina and ten fortitude); six bruised, six hurt, six injured, five wounded... and so on.

It causes a pretty big shift in character durability. Stamina and fortitude not only add to soak pools, as is appropriate based on the damage type, which makes incoming damage less likely, but it allows the characters a couple more turns to respond. One-shot, one-kill stops being possible. The NPCs receive the same bonuses though, so combat in general takes more turns to resolve itself. Good for some, very specific, games that deal with specific subjects.

I've also tweaked rules for individual disciplines... like having Protean Claws do Lethal damage instead of aggravated (or having them default to lethal but allow them to be buffed up to agg using blood, along the costs of Quietus powers) when I wanted something to be less deadly. Or allowing firearms to do lethal instead of bashing when I wanted an environment to be more dangerous.

Of course, all these things were laid out in advance of the game starting and the characters being created- so players knew what they were building Changing stuff like that mid-game is always a result of a mutually agreeable discussion between myself and the players after seeing how individual powers or mechanics worked in the setting that we were trying to run. In my experience, people can be pretty open to balance tweaks and house-rules if the reasons for them are explained and evidenced. 

I do half Stam (round down) + Fort when soaking agg in vampire.

Soaking with full fort + stam can make players not feel the dangers of agg  damage.

I just remove the damage from claws/teeth etc. from the list of things that cause aggravated damage. Makes it alot less deadly (although still deadly enough) to go up against werewolves, while leaving sunlight and fire appropriately (to me) dangerous.

I keep it as written.  Vampire's are critters who are completely un-natural at the end of the day and the power of the blood is the only thing that keeps them ticking.  Aggravated Damage, whatever it's source, is supposed to be nasty.  Vampire's score on the scaling down of firearms damage from Lethal to Bashing (unless it's to the head) so I figure the trade off is worth it.

One of the house rules that had been created in a game I joined was that claws and such like that did Agg you got to role Stam + Fort but if it were fire or sunlight only Fortitude could save you (for a little while anyway).  Thus more 'mundane' forms of  Agg were a lot less lethal to characters. However often I find the downside is that it often encourages a sort of 'superman' complex in players and they start to get a bit crazy with being so 'tough' as it were.

I use the "normal" Fortitude only soak most of the time. Why? Because Gangrel's and especially werewolves should be deadly opponents.

On a related note: How do you handle number of successes in the attack roll being turned into extra damage dice?

I think it is kind of a question of... How deadly, how quickly, for what kind of cost?

Of the thirteen major clans presented in VtM and Dark Ages, only two (offhand, correct me if I am wrong) of them have the potential to deal convenient aggravated damage at character creation using the default creation rules and allowances based on the in-clan discipline spread.

Gangrel using Protean rank two... And Assamites using Quietus rank two.

The Gangrel pay one blood to pop the claws, which basically last until canceled.

The Assamites pay blood per attack they want to make, which is consumed each time damage is dealt.

And of course all vampires can use their teeth (which isn't exactly easy). Only other ways involve some extreme number shifting that most storytellers won't allow (True Faith, weaseling their way to a rank 5 discipline, somehow buying off the rotschrek check and using a flamethrower, etc).

How game-breaking the use of Protean 2 can get depends almost entirely on the type of player using it and the type of setting the storyteller has built. I have run into situations where I decided to rule that the claws did Lethal or some where I simply didn't let players who I knew tended to like combat oriented games roll a Gangrel because of the disruption potential if they started poking their fingernails into everyone they encountered.

Relative to some other games, the combat systems for the WoD games is pretty simple. Most of the depth associated with it comes from the descriptions the storyteller concocts to describe the dice results, rather than the system itself producing that detail. The upside is that it's versatile and it's fairly streamlined and it's definitely easy to learn. The downside is that sometimes stuff gets a bit lumped together in ways that make some sense from a simple balance perspective but make little sense from a thematic perspective- like allowing a level two discipline to potentially do more damage than sunlight exposure and the resulting flaming death that should accompany tripping what is presented as being a biblical curse.

Gangrel should be deadly, they're certainly presented that way. I'm just not sure they should do more damage per turn than God and the Daystar. At least not with a zero XP basic creation rules sheet.

Loxosceles:

Of the thirteen major clans presented in VtM and Dark Ages, only two (offhand, correct me if I am wrong) of them have the potential to deal convenient aggravated damage at character creation using the default creation rules and allowances based on the in-clan discipline spread.

- Potence/Celerity combo discipline gives aggrevated damage (Brujah clan book)
- Tremere blood magic i am certain can cause aggravated damage on vampires (from the usage of fire if nothing else)
- Tzimitze bone craft gives them melee weapons with aggravated damage
- Followers of Set (maybe not the first 13) with Serpentis 2/3 allows their tongue to cause STR+POT aggravated damage

genty:

Tremere blood magic i am certain can cause aggravated damage on vampires (from the usage of fire if nothing else)
- Tzimitze bone craft gives them melee weapons with aggravated damage
- Followers of Set

DICE:

Asamites and Gangrel too.

Yeah I know ;) I just went directly for the "correct me if i am wrong" part.

genty:

- Potence/Celerity combo discipline gives aggrevated damage (Brujah clan book)

What's the cost on that though? And what ranks of each discipline does it require?

Is it something that a base creation rules character could reasonably purchase?

Edit: Found it, Burning Wrath from the Brujah clan book, Celerity 3, Potence 3, 15 experience... so not something that can normally happen at creation.

genty:

- Tremere blood magic i am certain can cause aggravated damage on vampires (from the usage of fire if nothing else)

If the ST allows Lure of Flames as a primary path rather than the Path of Blood... and keep in mind that the first couple levels which would be accessible during creation are a candle and a palm-full of fire, respectively. Each does one health level of Agg per turn and has a reduced soak difficulty.

genty:

- Tzimitze bone craft gives them melee weapons with aggravated damage

Body Arsenal is a rank six discipline.

genty:

- Followers of Set (maybe not the first 13) with Serpentis 2/3 allows their tongue to cause STR+POT aggravated damage

Alright, good point- there's a third clan that can deal aggravated damage using at creation without a lot of number-crunching rules-jacking. Although the cost versus return part of it puts it around the same level as the Quietus powers- lower activation cost but a rougher system for actually doing the damage and a damage cap that isn't based on a standard attack roll. So it's still substantially weaker than Protean Claws.