Alpha Testing TFN 1.2 (Possible spoilers inside)

Alright you crazy blood suckers. Malkav managed to light a fire under my ass to get this update finally moving so I've retired my widescreen monitor and put my 4:3 back just so I can play TFN again. I reimaged my machine so only TFN is on it along with my old Bloodlines tools and Photoshop. I've found the motivation to play this crazy game and release TFN 1.2 to the public.

First things first. I've begun Alpha testing as a Samedi due to most of the patch updates were spent making the Samedi adventure much more realistic. Basically, if you are spotted by the police, security, or hub citizens you will be reported immediately and the police will come. I would have to say that this new system works VERY WELL, almost too well. Playing as a Samedi, especially at the lower levels is very challenging because of the new realistic change.

When I'm done with my playthrough, I'll be fixing some last minute bugs, creating the Baali female skin set, and putting together a Beta Team (more on this later). For now, I'd like to announce the new changes and bug fixes in TFN 1.2.

TFN 1.2 Changes

Bug Fixes
- Fixed "Surfside" reference in Lilly's diary, Therese and Newscaster dialogue
- Dirty Cop .VCD file too long
- Readjusted supernatural values for targeted disciplines
- Created VCD files for Blood Dolls and Prostitutes
- First visit to Santa Monica will display loading tip about brandishing weapons
- Reworked Daimoinon 3: Conflagration so that it damages supernaturals more
- Reworked Daimoinon 4: Infernal Servitor so that it effects supernaturals
- Presence no longer affects allied enemies on bloodhunt map
- Serpentis claws auto equip upon changing and use Unarmed feat instead of Melee feat
- Daimoinon firey hands use Unarmed feat instead of Melee feat
- Santa Monica Pier lights no longer show through walls
- Fixed Pyramid quest where refusing Strauss failed the quest twice
- Fixed downtown CDC guys not leaving after Pestilence quest
- Fixed Venture tower debris not appearing in the street downtown
- Purchasing masquerade redemptions from Silvia Black works properly
- Fixed Santa Monica warehouse ambient music
- Turn down particle effects for the Shade by 25%
- Heavy Cloth armor picture now displays correctly
- Sneaking past first shovelhead in tutorial is much easier

New Content
- Added Female Baali to PC list
- Street civilians sighting a Samedi will summon Police
- Street cops sighting a Samedi will attack immediately
- Shop civilians sighting a Samedi will run in fear but will not summon Police
- Shop security sighting a Samedi will attack immediately
- Rebalanced Samedi merit/flaw system
- Rebalanced Baali merit/flaw system
- Street cops will run in fear if player uses supernatural 3 (or higher) disciplines
- All sewers use the same eerie ambient music
- Made bloodloss timer based on Humanity and Stamina score
- Mentioned new bloodloss timer in tutorial pop ups and added to humanity description
- Put Jack upstairs in Last Round if you are Samedi
- Put Larry near abandoned hospital if you are Samedi
- Bypass speaking to bums on Plague Bearer quest if you are Samedi
- Pier Arcade hooker/customer NPCs replaced by video game player NPCs if you are Samedi
- Created "Fang of Vukodlak" occult item for Unarmed feat characters, sold by Regent
- Created new patrol path for pier cop
- Added rats to basement of Ocean House Hotel
- Brother Kanker reskinned
- SM Blue Blood now has a car that leaves when he does
- Moved Hollywood net cafe computer to the back
- Moved Ming's conversation in alley near Bradbury Hotel

Ideas for new content (These ideas won't make it into TFN 1.2 but could be in future patches)
- Create more histories
- Create more haven options
- Create outside club music for Asylum, Confession, Asp Hole, and Glaze
- Give hub cops different guns, randomize it
- Reskin cop heads, different hair color, mustaches, etc...
- New passwords for entire game
- Add new clan based dialogue to entire game
- Make new weapon descriptions describing the merits and flaws of each weapon
- Add Inspection based hidden treasures in all maps (Ocean House Hotel)
- Add treasures to containers that require high lock picking
- Add wandering zombies in the graveyard

Yay for progress!

Everything sounds good, I'm just a little wary about the new histories. What kind of histories did you have in mind?

*shakes arms into the sky*

*goes back to testing CQM 3.1*

Dragatus wrote:

Yay for progress!

Everything sounds good, I'm just a little wary about the new histories. What kind of histories did you have in mind?

New Histories? TFN 1.2 won't have any new histories. I was thinking about adding MORE Histories in later patches but I wouldn't change any of the ones that are already in TFN. I like the Histories we have now. If I do add more Histories, I would make sure to post them so the forum can help me tweak them before adding them to the game.   

*gives a big howl of approval to progress on TFN*

You don't even know how happy I am...

Feral wrote:

*gives a big howl of approval to progress on TFN*

You don't even know how happy I am...

Haha awesome!! I'm going to ride this train as long as I can. Do you think anyone will actually play it?

Ok guys, I added 4 rats to the Ocean House Hotel basement. This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time and I finally did tonight. They squeak and run around the basement and are eatable. They run from the other clans except Samedi and appears it's working great!

Praise the Lord, our Dread Father has returneth   
And he brought gifts

LOL Philosopher!

Ok So I just turned down the particles effects of the Shade by 25%. Hopefully that will help the frame rates of slower machines quite a bit. I had it turned down by 50% but it looked terrible and choppy so I upped it back to 75%. This should hopefully be a good compromise.

ThePhilosopher wrote:

Praise the Lord, our Dread Father has returneth   
And he brought gifts

Gifts? Like in bloody big wooden horses?

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Zer0Morph wrote:

Feral wrote:

*gives a big howl of approval to progress on TFN*

You don't even know how happy I am...

Haha awesome!! I'm going to ride this train as long as I can. Do you think anyone will actually play it?

I will for sure. When that bloody mess of my PhD thesis is finished, at least... Sometimes I would prefer to be a wolf in RL.

VtMB is one of the immortal games: every time you mention it somebody reinstalls it.

Zer0Morph wrote:

Dragatus wrote:

Yay for progress!

Everything sounds good, I'm just a little wary about the new histories. What kind of histories did you have in mind?

New Histories? TFN 1.2 won't have any new histories. I was thinking about adding MORE Histories in later patches but I wouldn't change any of the ones that are already in TFN. I like the Histories we have now.

Yes, I understood all that. I wasn't asking about histories in 1.2, but about the histories you would add in future patches. See, I have this ideal that from a general perspective all histories should be equally viable, and that includes the "no history" default. It's fine if a specific history is better than others for one specific character build, but I have a problems with histories that are either strictly superior than "no history" or superior for a large number of builds or have a supposed drawback that is very easy to work around.

The sort of histories I like are attribute & abiltiy shufflers (like the existing TFN histories), discipline repalcers which substitute one discipline with another (Malkav figured out a way to do that), and quickstart disciplines that give you an early advantage at the cost of making your character weaker than normal in the late game.

Quote :

If I do add more Histories, I would make sure to post them so the forum can help me tweak them before adding them to the game.   

Sounds good, you have a deal.

Dragatus wrote:

Yes, I understood all that. I wasn't asking about histories in 1.2, but about the histories you would add in future patches. See, I have this ideal that from a general perspective all histories should be equally viable, and that includes the "no history" default. It's fine if a specific history is better than others for one specific character build, but I have a problems with histories that are either strictly superior than "no history" or superior for a large number of builds or have a supposed drawback that is very easy to work around.

The sort of histories I like are attribute & abiltiy shufflers (like the existing TFN histories), discipline repalcers which substitute one discipline with another (Malkav figured out a way to do that), and quickstart disciplines that give you an early advantage at the cost of making your character weaker than normal in the late game. 

You must be my brother from another mother because I agree with 100% of what you said above. I really can't add anything to what you said because you took the ideas right out of my head. I can't stand any video game that has something in it that isn't viable later on which is why I revamped ALL of the weapons. Saying this gun is better than this other gun in every way makes me think, why do we have that crappy gun in the game at all then?

The exception for this is the armors which are clearly better as you progress and I haven't found a good way to change that yet.

Brother! *hugs Zer0*

If you want to make it so better armors have a drawback simply make Lockpicking based on Wits and Defense based on Dexterity. Voila! Now the Dexterity penalty of armors has a combat related drawback. The problem then would be that Heavy Clothes & Leather would still be strictly superior to Light Clothes & Leather. In order to fix this you could change the stats a bit like this:
- Light Clothes: 0 armor, +2 DEX
- Heavy Clothes: 1 armor, +1 DEX
- Light Leather: 2 armor, +0 DEX
- Heavy Leather: 3 armor, -1 DEX
- Body Armor: 4 armor, -2 DEX

As a side effect people would also no longer be able to bloodbuff their way through lockpicking so Security becomes a more valuable investment. A second side effect is that Bloodbuff would now be a pretty nice combat discipline, since the attributes it provides give you Melee, Unarmed, Defense and Soak. The third side effect would be that Wits would become the "breaking in stat", controlling both Hacking and Lockpicking, which would give it a more clearly defined purpose. And that in turn would make it more staisfying to invest points into it.

Designing armor in a way that better armor also hinders movement and therefore defense is of course a good idea. The way you suggest it also has the benefit of making the light armor more valuable for sneaky characters, while the heavy ones are better for open fighters.
Though with a DEX bonus of +2 as you suggest it, I wouldn't even think about buying another set.
If we can pull it off, I'd force the player to return to the haven for changing clothes. And then have different clothes for different purposes, and directly influence feats instead of attributes.
Fancy clothes: armor 0, defense -2, persuasion +1, seduction +2
business clothes: armor 1, defense -1, persuasion +1, haggle +1
normal clothes: armor 2, no other effect
camouflage clothes: armor 3, sneaking +1, haggle, persuasion, and seduction -1
combat clothes: armor 4, haggle, persuasion, seduction -2

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Draggy, I didn't understand one thing

If Dextery gives defense, and heavier armors take away from Dexterity and give defense, wouldn't the end result be the same?

For example, you posted

Dragatus wrote:

- Light Clothes: 0 armor, +2 DEX
- Body Armor: 4 armor, -2 DEX

So Light clothes give 2 Dex which in turn gives 2 defense.
Body armor gives 4 defense but removes 2 dex which in turn removes 2 defense = 4 -2 = 2
The end result would be the same, no?.

Malkav,
That could work surprisingly well.

There's a difference between Defense and Soak. The end result for both is that you take less damage, but the method differs. Soak reduces the damage you suffer from attacks that hit you while Defence makes it harder to hit you in the first palce. Or at least that's how it would work in p&p. I'm not entirely sure how it translates into Bloodlines.

Theoretically a high Defense would be better for duels with powerful bosses (who can hurt you even with armor) while a high Soak would be better for fights against multiple opponents (because you can't dodge them all), but again I'm not sure how that acctually works out in the game rules. So I'm not entirely happy with it.

I really like Malkav's idea though. I'd just make it slightly different because while we have 5 armors we only have 4 different looks. So instead of having fancy & business clothes I'd have a single set of social clothes and then light & heavy combat armor which would both use the same visuals.
- Normal Clothes: 1 Armor, no modifiers
- Fancy Outfit: 0 Armor, +1 social feats, -2 Stealth
- Stealth Suit: 0 Armor, -1 social feats, +2 Stealth
- Battle Gear: 2 Armor, +1 Intimidate, -1 social feats, -2 Stealth
- Heavy Battle Gear: 4 Armor, max 2 Dexterity, +1 Intimidate, -1 social feats, -2 Stealth

I'd still make Defense based on Dexterity and Lockpicking on Wits. And for Heavy Battle Gear I'd give a cap on Dexterity instead of a penalty. A penalty hurts everyone more or less equally, which isn't so interesting. But a cap would be harmless for low DEX characters while presenting a severe penalty to high DEX characters. That makes it a more "focused" item, designed for a more narrow set of characters instead of something equally good/bad for everyone.

"Social feats" are Persuasion, Seduction and Haggle. I decided to throw in Intimidate on the combat gear in order to compensate for the fact that it otherwise gets outclassed by Persuasion. This would also give incentive to combat types to pick Intimidate over Persuasion as their conversation tool of choice.

Players would start with Normal Clothes as their default armor at the start of the game. Stealth Suit, Fancy Outfit, and Battle Gear should all be for sale at all the vendors from Downtown onwards. They should have roughly the same price, which I'd set around $750. Heavy Battle Gear is basically Body Armor and gets the same treatment as always. Though maybe it could also be sold by Mercurio at the end of the game for around $1000.

As a rule of a thumb I'd use Light Clothes visuals for the Stealth Suit, Heavy Clothes visuals for Normal Clothes, Light Leather visuals for the Fancy Outfit, and Heavy Leather visuals for Battle Gear. However, this would have to be checked on a clan by clan and gender by gender basis to make sure we get sensible results. For example the female Ishtarri's tier 1 outfit is too colorful to make a good Stealth Suit.

I really like these ideas ALOT!! I'm playing with them in my head to see what I think would work best. Also, I noticed that the Heavy Clothing picture doesn't show up when selected, it stays on the picture previously used instead so I'm trying to work out that bug. I know this bug has been around for awhile but since we're talking about redoing how armor works, it's something worth looking into for a fix.

I'll keep you posted on the fix and when I get a plan together for the armors, I'll post it so we can tweak it together.

Yup, the idea of intimidate bonus on combat gear is good.
For the looks, we can use the SWAT model for combat gear or heavy combat gear, regardless of clan and gender. But if I'm not mistaken, every set of clothes must have a different armor rating because that's the way the game internally keeps track of them.
One question still remains if we use something of the kind I suggested. The player must return to the haven for changing. I'll have to think about that. Might make it necassary to mail order any clothes the character doesn't own right from the start, and use a "dialog" with the mirror or something to give the right clothes and remove the ones not worn. Unless we can hide the armor from the inventory outside the haven.

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I was wondering about that too, Malkav. As of now, the character can swap armors on the fly. We can make the armors drop-able but that might mess things up if someone decides they want to be naked. We may have to do it through dialog like you said.

Childe of Malkav wrote:

For the looks, we can use the SWAT model for combat gear or heavy combat gear, regardless of clan and gender.

Good idea.

Quote :

But if I'm not mistaken, every set of clothes must have a different armor rating because that's the way the game internally keeps track of them.

Really? Are you sure? Can you check? If it's true, I guess we'd keep either Fancy Outfit or Stealth Suit at 0 armor and increase all the others' armor values by 1. For gamepaly purposes I'd rather have Fancy Outfit at 0 and Stealth Suit at 1, but f the Stealth Suits are generally lighter clothes it would make more sense for the Fancy Suit to be the one with 1 armor. Either way Normal Clothes would be 2, Battle Gear would be 3, and SWAT Armor, would be 5.

And about having to go to the haven to change, I support the idea, but even if you guys don't figure out a good way to do it by the time TFN 1.2 gets released, I'd still like to see the specialization armors in it. To a degree we can fight against swapping on the fly by simply making the armors expensive. If a set of armor costs $1000 or even $2000 people are going to think twice before buying a second one. Unless of course the character is Haggle focused and can afford it, but then it becomes a specialized benefit of going for a money build (or Inspection build if that's how you get your gear).

On my Alpha playthrough of the Samedi I went with an Inspection build. I just got to Downtown LA and my Inspection is already 7 so I had the IMI Mark IV and the Colt Anaconda along with the Sledgehammer for free because I found them in Santa Monica. Of course my Samedi, which I named "Harry the Rat", is going straight Unarmed for combat b/c you can now buy the Fang of Vukodlak from the Regent which makes your fists do Lethal damage, so I went with that instead of going melee. On top of that I spent the XP getting my Haggle to 4 and since I don't need to buy ammo, since I'm Unarmed, I have all of this money to spend on books, so my Samedi is getting overpowered quick!

So many more options available for custom builds in TFN 1.2.  

PS: Since the Samedi got reworked and they start with a 2 in Obfuscate, I spent my free point raising it to 3 which made navigating the city a lot easier. Plus I got extra experience for completing the Astrolite train station without ever being detected.

Zer0 you're a hopeless munchkin

ThePhilosopher wrote:

Zer0 you're a hopeless munchkin

I know I am, but that's what makes me so sassy in bed!!   

Zer0Morph wrote:

I was wondering about that too, Malkav. As of now, the character can swap armors on the fly. We can make the armors drop-able but that might mess things up if someone decides they want to be naked. We may have to do it through dialog like you said.

Making armor droppable will get things messy. There's an exploitable bug in the game. Zer0, I sent a pm about it. Gotta call it a night now. Alarm clock will be early tomorrow...

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