Watc h of Da r knes s (nWoD/Unisystem mish-mash)

Anyhoo, the following rambling passages are my attempt to organize my thoughts about
a Monte Cook's World of Darkness/Delta Green/Night Watch mish-mash (note: all this
material has been presented elsewhere in various other postings/e-mails, but you likely
haven't seen it before).

This is what started me down the road in the first place:

I'd been trying to figure out the best way to word this before I get it posted, but
since that seems to be holding me back from actually banging the words out I'm
just going to get the ideas out and then hopefully expand/elucidate where I'm
confusing folks.

In any event, I really like the concept of the "Night Watch" as presented in Sergei
Lukyanenko's novels (and at least the one movie I have seen).

I also really like the concept of the "nightmare event" from Monte Cook's World
of Darkness (for more on that, read the review here, which sums it up pretty
nicely).

Thus, my fevered brain has come up with the following mishmash...

The Watches exist in much the way presented in the novels, with the exception
that Vampires are generally agents of the Dark, Werewolves (or maybe just
shapeshifters in general if the mechanics will allow) agents of the Light. Mages
can be agents of either.

There are segments of humanity that are aware of the Watch - those are usually
Awakened, who are either highly skilled individuals (per MCWoD) or psychic
(using the Awakened rules along with the Psychic Feats and Skills from
the Advanced Player's Manual - Appendix I, I believe).

So towards the latter half of the 20th century, each group became aware of the
other's existence (in terms of Others and Awakened).

Then came the Nightmare Wave.

Something extradimensional intruded into Earth (pretty much described

in MCWoD). For my purposes, I'm going to say that it is the Old Ones (or
something just as freaky).

The only holdover from when I wanted to write this up as "game fiction" is the
discussion that the agents of Light, Dark and humanity had after the Nightmare
Wave hit. Basically, the head of the US paranormal bureau (whatever you want to
call it) wanted to know how they were to know if this wasn't some grand trick of
the Dark. The response of the Dark Mage who attended the meeting was that of,
"Had the Dark won its war against the Light, we wouldn't be having this
discussion - Darkness would simply reign."
 So now you have the Others - both Dark and Light - and Awakened working
together waging war on this Unbidden-ness - basically operating on the
assumption that if they manage to make the "invasion" as catastrophic as
possible in terms of losses to the Unbidden, they will be able to "convince" said
beings that such a conquest isn't worth the effort.

I plan on taking nasties (probably Aberrations) from the D20 Menace Manual,
the various Monster Manuals and Fiend Folio as the physical representations
of the Nightmare Wave.

Now, obviously the easiest way to get this done is to use the MCWoD RAW (well,
with the said addition of the Psychic Appendix for psychic Awakened) in terms of
magic, the various "classes," etc., and just bump up the different nasties in terms
of HD.

What I'd really like to do is use the nWoD rules to accomplish the same thing, but
I don't know if are actually possible. What exacerbates this situation is that I only
have the nWoD Core and would need to get - at the very least
- V:tR, M:tA and W:tF. I suspect that I would also want Second Sight (to handle
the psychic stuff for Awakened) and probably Armory (for those Awakened not
going psi).

I'll probably keep the clans/tribes/factions/whatever from the various V/W/M

books either way I run it, likely as groups from before the time of the Treaty. That
way characters could have allegiance to not only Light or Dark, but another
faction that may have differing interests from either group - how does the
character then react?

And then about six months later, I struck out in new directions...

While I enjoy the D20 system for fantasy and such, I'm thinking that a different
system might be better, if for no other reason than to drift a little bit away from the
"dungeoneering" mentality that seems to really be a part of D20.

While I was preparing for an ill-fated PbP WitchCraft game that never occurred, I
started to really figure out what Unisystem was all about in terms of what was
possible with it.
Since I wanted the core book to page through I managed to get it as well
as Armageddon in exchange for the AFMBE stuff I wasn't using.

In my paging through Armageddon, I was struck by the similarities in concept

that were present for the Armageddon Avatars and the Scion...Scions. As I
started to think that Scion could be better run by the Unisystem presented
in Armageddon ("Classic" Unisystem), I got to thinking that the nWoD core
books could also be converted over to Unisystem with marginal effort - the
systems are similar inasmuch that the resolution boils down to Attribute + Skill
and whatever bonuses you might get; obviously for nWoD this is a dice pool
rolling for successes, where Unisystem uses a single D10 roll against a TN of at
least 9.

This really started to occur to me because I dislike the magic system that is
 in WitchCraft - it's just too damned freeform to me, where there is just the most
marginal of equivalents to base whatever you want to accomplish against what is
already established with regard to cost, range, etc. To that end, I started to think
of the Rotes from Mage: the Awakening, and how they might pretty much
directly convert over - which then got me thinking that the rest of it might go
pretty smoothly.

I figure that by using the fluff stuff (and mechanical bits that might convert over)
from the nWoD books will give me better footing to accomplish what I wanted to
do in terms of having the various mages, weres, vamps, etc., have established
societies that are all intermingled (a la the Watch series) - while at the same time
dropping a system that really isn't all that geared toward combat.

IN ANY EVENT, I think that I'm going to start getting my mind really wrapped
around how I might accomplish this. At the very least, it'll give me something non-
D&D to wrap my head around.

After running some numbers and doing various investigations of nWoD and how it could
align with Unisystem (and about three months later), I came up with the following ideas:

Summing up for those that don't want to read all the previous crap I have mused
upon, I have considered running MCWoD as written, considered using nWoD as
written, and then considered using bastard creations of my own. The last I really
gave any thought to (previous to this thought) was combining aspects of
Unisystem and nWoD - keeping the majority of the task resolution from
Unisystem and stealing bits and pieces of the various game lines from nWoD to
achieve my goal. Oh, and then I would likely have to be porting in the nasties
from various d20 sources (because they have cool art for freakish horrors).

The more that I thought about doing that last bit the more I started to realize how
over my head I was. That was promising to be considerably more work that I
really would hope to put into it, particularly sense I'm not 100% certain I could
ever get my gaming group interested in playing.

As the Unisystem/nWoD idea soured on me, I got to thinking that probably the
easiest thing to do would just be run MCWoD as it was written (back to my
original thoughts on the matter, in effect). However, as I started repaging through
the book and remembering the whole levels/class vibe of the characters, that
struck me as something that I didn't want to be doing either. I wanted handguns
to represent a reasonable threat during just about all gameplay. I wanted the
characters to not necessarily be running for their lives every encounter, but that
the same time knowing that it was at least possible that they could get hurt in any
given combat. With the RAW, that's simply not possible in MCWoD, where the
HP of the characters quickly exceeds the capability of firearms doing any serious
damage.
However, the tactically freeform simplicity of the MCWoD magic system wasn't
something that I wanted to divest myself of either (my personal feelings are that it
is quite possibly the best magic system I have ever seen).

I don't remember how I got to my present epiphany, but it struck me that most of
what I was looking to accomplish could be done with Savage Worlds. Combat
 that flowed smooth; challenging to the players while still letting them feel like they
had control of what their characters could do. Significantly reduced skills. No
levels or classes (or HP).

I'm 99% certain that by converting over the "classes" in MCWoD to Savage
Worlds templates I can accomplish what I want.
I figure that each class provides a free Edge in the form of the Rite, Gnosis,
Discipline, whatever at Novice level.
Bonuses to attributes are divided by half and work as steps up for equivalent
attribute.
Weaknesses that a given creature may have work as a Hindrance that doesn't
provide points.
Further powers can be bought as Edges as normal, and the character gets
another "freebie" every 10 XP.
If applicable for abilities that are somewhat level dependent, 1-5 = Novice, 6-10 =
Veteran, etc.
Damages should be roughly equivalent, so that doesn't pose a problem.

For the magic system, Mages start with 60 components, which get spent as
normal during casting. Every 10 components adds a +1 to the TN for the
Spellcasting roll (so a 42 component spell would be +4 to TN, so the Spellcasting
roll would need to beat an 8). Rotes provide a +2 to the Spellcasting roll. More
components can be obtained by "purchased" XP granted Edges or the "freebie"
ability granted every 10 XP.

I think that having Weres & Vamps start with 10 Vitae/Essence should be
acceptable for fueling their powers; I think that Awakened would have the option
to be psychic (but not be required), and that could be done with the
standard SW Arcane Edge rules.

After getting some feedback about what I was going to attempt:

I started a thread on RPG.net about my most recent brainings, and one of the
responses addressed the following:

-Regarding mages, you don't need to translate mechanics from the

original system to Savage Worlds, just something that gets the intended
feel across to the players. Breaking down the components thing to that
level of granularity is definitely above and beyond what SW was designed
for in terms of crunch.

The more I think about this, the more I am starting to feel this is the case.

If I ditch the MCWoD magic system, I will be giving up a significant amount of

"freestyle magic" capability casting. However, I'm pretty sure that in play it won't
come up too much, so now I just have to come up with a decent workaround.

I got to thinking about the "Super Sorcery" power from Necessary Evil and that
sounds somewhat like what I want to achieve... I wonder if I can just jack up the
starting Power Points and then have all the various powers be bits-n-pieces of
Spells that could be cast.
 I'm going to need to cross-reference the stuff from SWEE against the NE stuff,
and then bounce that against some of the component costs for similar MCWoD
spells to get a good baseline of what a starting character should be able to do.

I've come almost full circle in what I might attempt to use for a system, as I've discovered
that True20 seems to scratch most of my mechanical itches; as I have serious doubts
that any of this will ever come to fruition, I'm not super concerned (altho' it would give me
less conversion to do, obviously).