There are 5 Werewolf auspices, each with a "phase":
- Ragabash, New Moon
- Theurge, Crescent Moon
- Philodox, Half Moon
- Galliard, Gibbous Moon
- Ahroun, Full Moon
How can I sort a full moon phase to each one somewhat equally?
[RPG] How to arrange the Werewolf Auspices to the days of a lunar month
werewolf-the-apocalypseworld-of-darkness
Related Solutions
There are a few issues at work here:
It's not balanced, or at least not with the hair-trigger fineness that, say, D&D4 attempts to achieve. The characters are not meant to be equal, they're meant to be comparable. (Ultimately so much of what a Garou can do in a fight depends on their inherent Garou resilience, form changing, Gifts and aggravated-damage-claws that how the tribes and auspices balance is a detail on top.)
It's about area of specialty. This is the World of Darkness; fighting is important to werewolves, but in the long run it's the least important decision they make. Ahroun are combat monsters; if you're looking for combat balance between a Black Fury Ahroun and a Glass Walker Theurge, then sorry, it's not there and it's not meant to be. The Ahroun would wipe the floor with the Theurge... if the Theurge is so poor at his job that he lets the challenge get to a klaive duel instead of a ritual or riddle-game or having spirits warn him about the threat.
(Compared to any non-Garou, of course, even a Bone Gnawer Ragabash is a lethally dangerous killing machine.)
Rage, in particular, is not all good. The balance between Rage 2 and Rage 6 is that a Rage 2 character only has 2 rage. He won't frenzy, he won't panic and run in fear at a Nexus Crawler, he won't get taunted into a berserk cannibalistic charge every time the moon is full. (Combat characters that run high-rage also need to spend plenty of freebie points and xp on Willpower, if they want to stay alive for long.)
You've left out any mention of skills, but WoD is a modern-world roleplay and skills are very important. All characters get the same number of skill points, yet High Primal-Urge, for example, is a major Lupus advantage... because wolves aren't spending all their skill points on Drive and Law and Language and all those other pointless things the homids all seem so worried about.
With the exact same tribes, rage and willpower, I promise you that the fight between a Brawl 4, Melee 5, Dodge 4 Get of Fenris berserker and a Brawl 1, Melee 0 Dodge 2 Ragabash will be... one sided.
(Which serves the Ragabash right for letting it come to a fight. The Ragabash has Stealth 4, Empathy 4, Law 3. So the warrior isn't going to like the mysterious disasters that happen to him over the next few weeks. Which might just drive him into a frenzy next full moon moot. Which will seriously jeopardize his position in the sept. Being a trickster is about not needing to hit things to make your point.)
Tribe / form Rage and Willpower are only meant to be starting points anyway; both are cheap to buy up with freebie points during character creation.
Only material I know that deals with this theme is The Hunters Hunted ©1992 by White Wolf.
There is newer edition of it. I don't own it, don't have access to it, so what follows is based on the old one. But it is THE book about killing supernaturals (especially vampires) using mortal means.
Page 28 describes The Heavy Firepower Method, only hunt method that actually involves firearms. It describes ways to use already described firearms, without providing additional rules for them, so it should be easy to incorporate. It also provides guidelines for ammo like Dragon's Breath (totally real ammo you can see in action here), that is effective against supernaturals, because it damages them with fire. and of course it mention bows - arrow is essentially a wooden stake that can be placed in heart remotely.
At page 60, there is pretty expensive merit that lets you do aggravated damage with bare fists. But you want to be a sniper. That leads us to Appendix Two, Hunting Gear. Spike-thrower shotgun (page 86) seems to be your friend, as it can fire also specially prepared wooden stakes, or even molotov-like bullets. Described as using wooden spike or molotov cocktail per their rules, but with range and power of a shotgun, so incorporating it into new WoD should be perfectly doable. And I see no reason for it not to be able to shot stakes inlaid with silver and cold iron, to also deal aggravated damage to creatures that are hurt by those metals.
In oWoD/cWoD, there are two considerations when it comes to damage: the amount and the type.
With firearms, there is only one way to increase the damage amount: Larger attack dicepools. Your Net Successes on your attack are added to the damage roll, giving you a better chance to inflict serious pain.
Damage type is split into 3 varieties: Bashing, Lethal, and Aggravated. Aggravated wounds are the most difficult to survive. Ag damage also only comes from 2 sources: fire and supernatural effects. A nice GM might allow you to either have a mage ally enchant your bullets or use a previous kill to craft special bullets from things like fangs or claws. Otherwise, you're reduced to things like silver bullets or the various fire-based rounds described above.
Best Answer
Note: The calculation in normal text is based on a lunation. The corrected numbers for a sidereal month are found in the supertext. Note that approach has an in-built self-correction: When pinning the full moons to the known dates of a lunar calendar, there is a scaling process included. This compensates the 51-hour error between synodic and sidereal month.
Pretext
This is mainly a question of mathematics. A moon in 27.3/29.5 days long. Divided upon 5 Auspices, this is 5.46/5,9 days per Auspice. But how to distribute these? We can't place them all one after another in the listed order, as then the new moon follows the full moon, and those should be half a month apart! We need to distribute a little...
Graphical Method
Generating the 'bar'
Let's start in the middle of a full moon phase, as we can't cut that apart but for marking the center - the absolute full - of it. And now we draw out 2.73/2.95 days, as that is half the phase's length...
Now, we repeat these for the Gibbous (allmost full), Half and crescent Moon, stacking them...
Next comes the new moon, which again can't be divided into a first or second half of the month, so it will be a full 5.46/5.9 days. Then again the phases with 2.73/2.95 day in backward order.
Calender dating
Note the gap at the end to the 28 day/4 week display - this is responsible for the shifting of the phases. But taking this bar and a moon calendar, it is easy to place each day towards one of the phases, and with more math, one could decide exactly when in the night/day the auspices shift.
Example: Tuesday 3rd July 2012 was a full moon, the 18th a new moon and 2nd of August a full moon again according to my moon calendar. Using a properly scaled bar like the one before (with a full, 5.465.9 days full moon at the end) the lunar month looks like this:
Full Math Approach
Taking a Sidereal Month as a base we know that an Auspice is supposed to be 5.9 days or 141.6 hours or 141 hours and 36 minutes.
Let's get the full moon moment of the 3rd July 2012: according to lunaf.com that is 18:52, as the center of the Time. WA says this time has 99.92%, so close enough.
2 days, 22 Hours, 48 Minutes later we should change from full moon to Gibbous Moon. That is 6th of July 2012, 17:40 UTC. 2.95 days till each new phase starts - of in the case of the New and Full moon, reaches its zenith. That can be easily taken to excel or another spreadsheet program! Fill in one date for a full moon in
B2and in the field below add=B2+2.95the 2.95 is assuming average moon length - an error! - then pull it down to fill the column. The categories are to be in the following order: Full Zenith, Gibbous Start, Half Start, Crescent Start, New Start, New Zenith, Crescent Start, Half Start, Gibbous Start, Full Start, Full Zenith. The last entry is again the first entry of the next lunar month, so we get a repetitive pattern, and don't even need to scale anything1.Compensation for variable moon lengths
Our calculation gives 2nd of August 6:52 UTC as full moon zenith, lunaf.com gives 03:27 UTC. The error of 3 hours comes from the variance the synodic month has, ranging from 29.18 to 29.93 days, resulting in Auspiece-lengths of 2.918 to 2.993 days. The chosen month in the example is mathematically 29.358 days long.
Because of this it is advisable to look up the dates of full moons in the years played and then calculate the correct sidereal lengths to correct for this error. The formula gets considerably more complex though. So take a look at this spreadsheet that fixes the sidereal month's length by taking input in the shape of a start and end date for a month.
Illumination + lunar calender method
Another variant would be to look up the illumination of a moon for certain days. The Full moon of course has 100% illumination, the new moon 0%. The swing from full moon to new moon and back to full moon thus swings twice over the scale, a total of 200 percentage points. Each phase thus should cover 200/5=40 percentage points, 20 of these on the waning and 20 on the waxing side. These illuminations can be looked up at some online tools, and then easily compared to a simple chart that does not care for which half in the lunar month one is in, as it mirrors around the 0 and 100 point to swing back:
Note though that illumination does not exactly follow a perfect distribution over the month and visible illuminated area varies depending on the position on the globe. Check where your calendar is dated for, or use Wolfram Alpha to a local position!
Comparison & Verification
Let's run a test: looking up the 27th July of 2012
The Illumination+Calender method shows at lunaf.com or Wolfram-Alpha that at noon it was a 62.01% illumination, which is a Gibbous moon in the waxing half of the lunar cycle.
Comparing this to the other methods we see that the moon just changed into this phase on the 27th (graphical Method) and did so at 9:16with long-term median length / 6:32corrected for month length AM. Close enough, aye? All three methods came to a workable result for the example day!
Careful checking on WA shows, that the actual 60% point was at 7:43 AM in Greenwich at 51°28′40″N 0°00′05″W. This error is relative minuscule and is to a good degree derived from different full moon times.