An ST Fireside.

For everything venue-related, but is OOC.
Locked
User avatar
Hyperion
Posts: 387
Joined: Sat Jul 10, 2021 2:46 pm

An ST Fireside.

Post by Hyperion »

Hey guys, myself and Hestia wanted to quickly give you all an update on our discussions on rulings we are making regarding power combinations, scar combinations, and overall balance of the Venue.

Firstly, I want to touch on why there are a lot of calls being made about combinations of things, while there aren’t any written house rules. I would like to first, expound upon the context that Deviant the Renegade is in; in terms of Eternal Noire. To quote something I told Hestia upon joining. “Deviant is very fun and very unbalanced.” What is meant by this is Deviant in and of itself is a very fun system. It is flexible, adaptive, and touches on storytelling topics that are visceral, grounded and real while being separated enough from the real world to avoid existential gloom. On the flip side, however, it has a lot of moving parts, and many of those moving parts when combined together destroy any semblance of ‘game balance’.

Between Variations, Scars, Forms, Clades, Origins, Merits… There are easily Ten-thousand combinations of ways things could be achieved and there is no feasible way (Nor timeframe) where myself and Hestia can sit down and map out all of these combinations to determine which ones are game-breaking. Because of this, when something we haven’t expected comes to us, we often spend several hours looking into how interactions would work to make informed decisions about combinations. It is from these informed decisions that many soft ‘bans’ on combinations of powers/effects have come into play. I use the word ‘soft’ because of one reason that is shared with why we aren’t making hard house rules on some of these things: It is month two, out of twenty-four, not even 10% into the Chronicle. Myself and Hestia are aware that Deviant is a game that will have the player characters eventually becoming strong enough to face down the conspiracies, but that time isn’t two months into the setting. We both strongly believe that in the long run, nearly any combination of effects and powers should be allowed, and encouraged, but in the immediacy, we are having to limit certain combinations due to the drastic increase in power they provide.

These decisions are based on two major factors. Balance within the Deviant game in a chat setting, and the broader consideration of the five other splats in the cross-over friendly, persistent world that is shared by all PC’s. Within Deviant, myself and Hestia have both said that if we were on a tabletop, these limitations wouldn’t need to exist to such an extent, as the environment of the Tabletop is much different in comparison to a Chat like EN. However, we are on a chat, a persistent living world that is being formed by the actions of the players, that from week to week is ever-changing and the systems in place have to adapt to the environment. In the broader sense, it is our responsibility as ST’s to ensure that our splat is relatively close to all other splats in power, and not outpacing nor underpacing the others so that everyone has a fair field of play to engage in stories across the board.

So, with all that said. The Nitty-gritty of it is, we are doing what we can to avoid hard house rules, to allow for later adjustments to what is allowed to match the ever-increasing potential danger of the Venue. If needed we could look into getting a rough list of things we aren’t ok with, right now; so we can later inform players when things should be alright. I would also like to take this moment and note. Deviant is in Beta, and like all Beta’s there are going to be things that need to be balanced out, bugs to iron out, and the occasional crashing.

As always, if you all have any feedback, both Forum Private Messages and Character Threads are places you can reach out to us for discussion!
Locked