Quote from: Mike the Mage;1038024In the first few seconds: "Throughout the seventies and eighties, roleplaying games were all fantasy games."

So that's either ignorance or deliberate revisionism.......

This sort of thing has become increasingly common and it pisses me off to no end. Also see "until recently there were no women in gaming" and other variants.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;1038020Not available in the US? Surely there's a trailer.

And yes, it's exactly what you expect.

Burn it all to ash.

It's sad to see White Wolf having fallen to these lows. It started with Justin Achilli and Revised Edition, and has only gotten worse since.

The Twilight fad has killed any interest in vampires, which is sad because Vampire: The Masquerade 1E was freakin' awesome and still is.

Shame to see what was once one of my favorite companies get sabotaged by their very own people like this.

Say what you will about Nu-White Wolf, but the early days of White Wolf back in the 90's were awesome.

I agree that VtM 1st edition with Chicago by Night was great. I still have those guys. But that vibe is long gone. Not kewl enough.

Is it just me? My games were always closer to "Near Dark in a Sandbox" like Chicago By Night 1e. I never *stopped* playing WoD like that.

It strikes me that Vampire/WoD might be a microcosm of what many perceive D&D turning into. The mechanics of the system has always sucked, but the early game was as fun as anything else I've ever played/run if done with a firm hand and a light touch of the metaplot in 1e where almost everything is just rumor.

As for this documentary... yeah I won't be paying money for marketing on shit I actually played when it was relevant.

Quote from: tenbones;1038226Is it just me? My games were always closer to "Near Dark in a Sandbox" like Chicago By Night 1e. I never *stopped* playing WoD like that.

It strikes me that Vampire/WoD might be a microcosm of what many perceive D&D turning into. The mechanics of the system has always sucked, but the early game was as fun as anything else I've ever played/run if done with a firm hand and a light touch of the metaplot in 1e where almost everything is just rumor.

As for this documentary... yeah I won't be paying money for marketing on shit I actually played when it was relevant.

This guy gets it.

I so want to run a VTM 1E game one day. It'd use the original rules and Chicago By Night as well, and it would be a sandbox. More like Black Lagoon or Grand Theft Auto with fangs than so-called "Personal Horror".

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1038231This guy gets it.

I'm the Grand Poobah of the D.O.N.G., of course I get it. Recognize, son.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1038231I so want to run a VTM 1E game one day. It'd use the original rules and Chicago By Night as well, and it would be a sandbox. More like Black Lagoon or Grand Theft Auto with fangs than so-called "Personal Horror".

Yeah. I think you (and we) should reclaim the modern conception of "personal horror" from WoD as you conceive it. Horror is something that is very much a thing - otherwise Cthulhu wouldn't a thing, right? What Onyx Path, and now possibly Paradox, consider "Personal Horror" I find either silly or so over the top it loses meaning. My WoD games (and to that point all my games with horror-elements) can have Black Lagoon and Grand Theft Auto with fangs in them as well as a lot of other elements and still be actual horror.

Hell GTAV's over the top shit with Trevor are perfect examples. Over the top, hilarious, absurd and horrifying all at the same time.

Quote from: tenbones;1038236I'm the Grand Poobah of the D.O.N.G., of course I get it. Recognize, son.



Yeah. I think you (and we) should reclaim the modern conception of "personal horror" from WoD as you conceive it. Horror is something that is very much a thing - otherwise Cthulhu wouldn't a thing, right? What Onyx Path, and now possibly Paradox, consider "Personal Horror" I find either silly or so over the top it loses meaning. My WoD games (and to that point all my games with horror-elements) can have Black Lagoon and Grand Theft Auto with fangs in them as well as a lot of other elements and still be actual horror.

Hell GTAV's over the top shit with Trevor are perfect examples. Over the top, hilarious, absurd and horrifying all at the same time.

I concur with this statement in its entirety.

Let's take back horror from the whiny emo kids at Onyx Path, RPG.net, and Paradox Interactive and Make World of Darkness Great Again!

I love a good horror story. What I don't like is wangsting about lost Humanity and whining like a little emo bitch while listening to Sisters of Mercy and Type O Negative. Bring on the trenchcoats, katanas, cool guns, fast cars, and hardcore horror!

We'll put aside the Sisters of Mercy and Type O Negative, and instead bring on the Black Sabbath and Bathory.

Fuck that V5 nonsense, I say we go back to V1. I would love to have you on board with my potential Chicago game.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1038242... Bring on the trenchcoats, katanas, cool guns, fast cars, and hardcore horror!

... bring on the Black Sabbath and Bathory...

Sweet poetry right there.

Cool vampires are metal. Not emo.

Hey now! Toreadors can have their Sisters of Mercy, and Skinny Puppy...


Brujah can have their Sabbath, and Mastodon blaring when they go beat up the Toreadors.

Quote from: tenbones;1038271Hey now! Toreadors can have their Sisters of Mercy, and Skinny Puppy...


Brujah can have their Sabbath, and Mastodon blaring when they go beat up the Toreadors.

Works for me!

Quote from: tenbones;1038236I'm the Grand Poobah of the D.O.N.G., of course I get it. Recognize, son.



Yeah. I think you (and we) should reclaim the modern conception of "personal horror" from WoD as you conceive it. Horror is something that is very much a thing - otherwise Cthulhu wouldn't a thing, right? What Onyx Path, and now possibly Paradox, consider "Personal Horror" I find either silly or so over the top it loses meaning. My WoD games (and to that point all my games with horror-elements) can have Black Lagoon and Grand Theft Auto with fangs in them as well as a lot of other elements and still be actual horror.

Hell GTAV's over the top shit with Trevor are perfect examples. Over the top, hilarious, absurd and horrifying all at the same time.

I don't think anyone really understands what "personal horror" was supposed to be. Personal horror was supposed to be the player's horror at their character's increasingly monstrous behavior and descent into inhumanity. Unsurprisingly, this only works if players were invested in that sort of narrative and most of the time we got "superheroes with fangs." Nothing wrong with that, but it's the tonal opposite of personal horror. Unsurprisingly, Mark Rein*Hagen's rules did a poor job of supporting personal horror. Rather than showing the descent into vampirism in a meaningful way, humanity loss inflicted arbitrary mental illness and characters with high conscience ratings had an easier time getting away with atrocities.

Mark Rein*Hagen's humanity mechanic and all its derivatives through the years were terrible at their intended purpose. A functional humanity mechanic that actually supports the theme of personal horror (players' willing) only appeared circa 2013, over twenty years later, with the indie game Feed. The way it does this is pretty simple: character traits are described in free-form rather than as fixed attributes/abilities/skills/backgrounds/whatever. As a vampire character loses touch with their humanity, this is represented in a literal fashion as they replace human traits with vampire traits. For example, a vampire who works as a bartender might alienate themselves from that job and replace it with a job at a blood den.

Again, the personal horror only comes into play if the players are actually invested in it. The writer recognized this and included no less than two sample settings where the characters were unabashedly monsters to show off the flexibility of the toolkit. So the mechanic also replicates the functionality of Vampire's paths of whatever you were going to do anyway without any adjustments. The other two sample settings dial the personal horror beyond even what WoD does: the first emphasizes the addiction parallels, the second uses vampirism as a metaphor for wartime PTSD.

The superheroes with fangs thing is pretty old hat and I think it is better supported by actual superhero RPGs. I prefer something more along the lines of Warhammer Fantasy's vampire counts or Shadowbane's generals of oblivion, although those are intended for fantasy settings.

Yep. I'm well aware of all that. But I don't think they're mutually exclusive either. The goal for me, in all my games, is for players to become personally invested in their characters. As a GM it's my job to deliver the context of the world at large, and their reactions are what they are. The way you grow that investment is to have the world react in accordance with its conceits with consistency.

That's how Vampire works best. Vampires *have* their own culture in WoD for that very reason, right? The allure of playing a vampire as a hero-with-fangs is all well and good... until the realities of what you are become manifest in the game as a direct reaction to your behavior. In fact the striving to be the hero-with-fangs makes it all that more horrible when you have to live up to your own beliefs (regardless of the Humanity System*) and the world acts accordingly.

Meanwhile all the degenerate Vampires that have long forgone the notion of pretending to be human, which itself is the slippery slope, sneer at your PCs that struggle to find that balance. Yet those same degenerates find themselves contributing to the very issue that is their worst enemy because they no longer have those same social mores.

*The Humanity System has always been a problem because people look at it legally. Which is funny - because a lot of people that hate Vampire and will happily cite how shitty the Humanity system is (and they're not wrong) will also support the D&D Alignment system which I maintain - both serve the same purpose on the big-scale. If you wanna go around murder-hoboing in Vampire it's trivially easy. But getting below 3-humanity takes work barring doing some really heinous shit. Like in D&D, I think most players will gravitate towards their natural level of moral buoyancy without any legal mechanics required. But it's the GM's job to enforce the world-in-motion to react to that regardless of what the players may think of their PC.


From what I've read and seen from other people's WoD gameplay, there is this penchant for erring too far on one side or the other, and then the entirety of the game gets the label. I could just as easily run the conceits of WoD with any mechanical system without a hitch. But there's definitely an undercurrent of publisher-hate (which is justifiable in some instances) that underpins a lot of the dislike. The overboard pretentiousness in particular that came with later editions can't be underscored.

I would say those issue metastasized into, partially, a lot of what we see today that's bad in gaming. Both in the developmental side and the playerbase.

I remember when Vampire first hit. My friends and I went to a convention in Western PA and just about everybody bought a copy. What made it different at first look was it relentless emphasis on roleplaying. It was more about characters than most RPG very similar to Ars Magica and Penddragon. The two RPGs I was aware of back then that I would consider closest to VtM. But unlike those two, VtM happened to fit perfectly with a minor craze over Anne Rice's vampire series. Along with being able to play monsters as PCs, and mastering the art of the splat book quickly catapulted it and White Wolf to 2nd Place.

While I bought it, I didn't get into Vampire. The setting was not my cup of tea. Later when GURPS Vampire came out I use it as a sourcebook for my Majestic Wilderlands to make antagonists for the PCs. But never was interested in running a campaign using it.

Since it release it simultaneously degenerated into a monster superhero game and become more pretentious with a focus not on roleplaying but storygaming. When D20 hit it wiped out half of its fandom as D20 splatbooks and charops were far more extensive for hobbyists interested in that. What was left were the storygamers and the pretentious level went up a notch.

And to be clear this was not true of all hobbyists playing VtM. Because of it's solid hold on 2nd place it has about a diverse group of hobbyists as D&D did.

I don't think any reasonable person can say the original Vampire game (and to a lesser extent most of the old WoD (Changeling is my personal favorite)) weren't valuable to adding some life to the hobby; after the whole Satanic Panic, most people were pretty disillusioned with D&D and Vampire brought in a whole new crowd. They were fun games, gave a different experience, and attracted a lot more women, which was not a bad thing whatsoever. Then the WoD guys started taking themselves way too seriously, thought they were doing some sort of "performance art", and became obnoxious "One True Way" assholes. I'd pay to see a documentary that actually showed all this...