Soaking Aggravated Damage (Vampire)

We always run things as follows:

the only reason I use the 1/2 Stam + fort rule in some, not all, but some of my games is for the over the top feeling of being unstopable.

Sometimes we run very combative games.  When we do we use the 1/2 stam rule.  When we play a base V:tm game we use the rules in the book.

It all comes down to the feeling you want your players to have and how deadly you what and have set your game.

A ST I played under let you roll full Stam + Fort, but you had to spend blood on a 1 to 1 to get you full stam.  If your Stam was 3, you could spend up to 3 blood to get up to your full stam + fort for the scene.  It worked well, and gave the players at least some way to help in a fight with Werewolves and Gangral.

Assamites only do aggravated damage with Quietus 4, everyone is forgetting about that. And Tremere depends on edition and setting, because they used to have a rule that they must follow Path of Blood as primary path.

Loxosceles:

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?

Burning Wrath: Potence3 Celerity3. Costs 15xp. Spends one blood point and all brawling damage (including split dice pool, celerity actions) does aggravated damage during the next turn. So activation is just like celerity.
Maybe nothing that a newly created neonate can purchase.

Loxosceles:

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.

Cauldron of Blood will cause aggravated damage, although a level 5, so nothing for the neonate.
Fire in the blood/Flesh of Fiery Touch (both level 3 rituals) does aggravated.

Loxosceles:

Body Arsenal is a rank six discipline.

Good point.

Loxosceles:

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.

Koldunic Sorcery may have something as well, I am not familiar with it. But sure, 3-3.5 clans that can do aggravated, but all of those clans are combat oriented. Looking to the other clans most of them have several ways of evading damage, dominate/presence/obfuscate etc. But going into combat with a vampire capable of doing aggravated damage is kind of like trying to fist-fight a guy wielding a knife (or quoting the untouchables: "bringing a knife to a gun fight").

genty:

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

How do you handle this one? With a little dice pool those extra successes can become quite lethal. A former ST of mine handled it by dividing the extra successes by 2, rounded down.

That's... Kinda the point. I think.

The Vampire game line really only has three types of damage; Bashing, Lethal and Aggravated. It's a pretty steep gradient between the three that doesn't allow for a lot of levels of distinction.

Bashing is generally regarded as something to be ignored- easily healed, gets halved. Players only seem to regard it as a threat if it's backed by such substantial raw numbers that it overcomes the halving issue. Extreme numbers of enemies or some maxed out brawling enemy with a metric buttload (slightly larger than the standard american buttload) of potence.

Lethal is kind of regarded as normal. It's threatening enough to pay attention to but it's also accessible enough that their own characters will most commonly try for it, should the character be dealing damage at all.

Aggravated is sort of a high-end catchall for things that are supposed to seem more dangerous, more deadly and more threatening. The problem is that this is open ended, thematically and mechanically. It's everything from a Gangrel Neonate that was embraced three hours previously to a 1200 year old Assamite assassin. It's a disposable lighter and it's the ancient biblical curse which causes the sun to bring nothing but pain and death.

The ease of access to aggravated damage is all over the place, activation costs, experience required to find it, methods of application. I'm not of the opinion that everything needs to be in perfect balance all the time every time when looking at white-room scenarios and number crunching... but I do think there are some balance issues that end up causing some confusing moments when it comes to theme and environment. When a newly embraced Gangrel can do higher numbers per turn of the same kind of damage as exposure to sunlight or being engulfed in a burning building... that's an immersion problem for me. It doesn't make sense based on the descriptions and the feel of the threats represented. Thus... houserules.

Edit: And for Vampire games, unless there's an adjustment to firearm damage or damage type, a better saying is "Don't bring a gun to a knife-fight."

Loxosceles:

Edit: And for Vampire games, unless there's an adjustment to firearm damage or damage type, a better saying is "Don't bring a gun to a knife-fight.

And thus the reason for aiming to the head = lethal damage.

I've seen elder Sword master vampires being killed by a town guard wielding a big weapon (STR+number of success+8 dice for weapon and a little bad luck with soak rolls = torpor elder).

On the other side, if you bring vampires into this day and age, or even some 100 years ago all vampires are capable of causing big loads of aggravated damage using man made weapons. Everything from rocket launchers to flame throwers. Now look to the vampires that cant cause it on their own, but can outrun, outpunch, outhide/sneak, dominate, prescene the gangrel/assamite.

There's a reason why Vampires don't mess with Sunlight, Fire, and Werewolves. They know better.  I see no flaw it.

1.Sunlight: Avoid it.  Simple.
2.Fire: Avoid it. Simple.
3.Gangrel: Why piss off a fellow Kindred? Just calm him down with Dominate or Prescence.
4.Werewolves: Why are you in the woods?  RUN!

WolfMan86:

There's a reason why Vampires don't mess with Sunlight, Fire, and Werewolves. They know better.  I see no flaw it.

1.Sunlight: Avoid it.  Simple.
2.Fire: Avoid it. Simple.
3.Gangrel: Why piss off a fellow Kindred? Just calm him down with Dominate or Prescence.
4.Werewolves: Why are you in the woods?  RUN!

well said

Also, weapons that do aggravated damage are readily available to normal citizens.(Except Military, Government, or Hunters.  But even then, they have a limited supply)

Fire:
-Flamethrowers aren't easy to get.
-If you have a gas can and a match, you can start a fire.  But by the time you start, the vampire has dominated you or used celerity to hit you multiple times
-Ammunition that does fire damage aren't easy to get.  Its illegal.  And the vampire would probably have a list of weapon dealers who sell these types of rounds.  The weapons dealer informs the vampire of the purchase and the vampire hunts that person down before he can even load a clip

Sunlight
-From 6am to 8pm, stay in your haven. 
- I've yet to have a player come up with UV rounds and try to use them.  I would make it extremely difficult for him to find them.  They probably don't even exist in the OWOD.

Werewolves
-Guns, Guns, Guns
-Swords, axes, and whatever else
-or the best option: Stay out of the woods and have plenty of human ghouls/body guards to defend you.

Gangrels
-Dominate, Presence, Blood Magic, Celerity(RUN AWAY), Potence(Combined with a called shot to the head with a Axe), Obtentration, etc.
-Vampires are pretty imaginative.  They'll find a way.

To go back to which vampire clans can do aggravated damage from charactergeneration on, All of them can since they have fangs and those with Potence are twice as lethal. According to the rules Grappling is a STR+Brawl test. So not only can they do big amounts of damage with a bite, they also can immobilize the victim easily with the automatic successes of the discipline.

In our group we use STA+Fortitude(+Armor) For all damage types.

WolfMan86:

-Ammunition that does fire damage aren't easy to get.  Its illegal.  And the vampire would probably have a list of weapon dealers who sell these types of rounds.  The weapons dealer informs the vampire of the purchase and the vampire hunts that person down before he can even load a clip

Easy to get, legal, online.  Can be gotten in pistol, rifle, and shotgun flavors...

WolfMan86:

1.Sunlight: Avoid it.  Simple.
2.Fire: Avoid it. Simple.
3.Gangrel: Why piss off a fellow Kindred? Just calm him down with Dominate or Prescence.
4.Werewolves: Why are you in the woods?  RUN!

We only soak agg with Fortitude in the games I've played, this has never seemed like a game-hurting problem.  It's just something that defining the setting and challenges vampires must face.

Our houserule: Firearms Do Lethal.  It just makes more sense, given the wounds they inflict.  Downgrading their damage to bashing always struck me as an effort to melee weapons and bare-handed brawling more viable in comparison, and it felt forced.

People seem to be missing my point. Since it was more than one person, I have to assume my explanation was faulty.

The three damage types are soaked with different dice pools according to the rules, are healed differently and have different effects. The first two damage types, bashing and lethal, are defined by fairly clear cut delineations about where they start and where they stop. Aggravated damage is open ended, it only has one limit on the near end, then goes off into infinity to encompass everything above that point.

For the tone of the game, it doesn't really make much sense. It's almost as if there should be additional damage types to encompass things that are so much bigger or so much more powerful than the near side of aggravated. Protean Claws (a rank two discipline) doing the same kind of damage as a disposable lighter, doing the same kind of damage as sunlight, doing the same kind of damage as a nuclear explosion... Aggravated is too big of a catchall, when it comes to the variability of damage sources which it encompasses.

Access to aggravated damage can be something of a balance issue, depending on the details of an individual game. I can envision many scenarios where a storyteller might want to tone down some access to it, turning protean claws or werewolf and vampire fangs into lethal sources so that their PCs aren't being killed inside a single attack. So that combat doesn't end up being resolved based solely on initiative order.

The use of Potence on grappling attacks and the rules where grapples use strength as a "to hit" portion are... they're another old debate and another balance issue. Justifying one potential balance issue with another, bigger controversy is sketchy logic.

Using flame throwers is not something that's remotely easy for vampires. To the point where it's more likely to have the opposite effect, as the would-be-flame-tosser ends up going into an uncontrolled panic and attempts to run from the device that's probably strapped onto them.

My position is that any storyteller who wants to shift around damage types done by various sources in order to bring it closer to what they consider to be the descriptive results is fully justified in doing so. Especially where aggravated damage sources are concerned, since the ease of access and activation costs for them are all over the place with minimal apparent justification or reason.

Considering how hard it is to do aggravated damage in NWoD, I think the boys at White Wolf realised their misstake in letting anyone and their granny deal it.

Still, aggravated damage makes some sense being hard to resist (sun/fire) - but those tend to, ironically, being the least dangerous bane, Potence backed claws/swords/bites tend to ash a vampire long, long before a bonfire or the sun at noon would have a its chance.

We've also abolished it (including for fire, it just didn't fit in our "vision" of vampires) for all but sunlight, but then again, we're currently only running with the 8 "basic" disciplines, which don't really deal in aggravated damage for it to be an issue.