Quote from: thedungeondelver;729522No.  Nightlife was it's own thing.  Less angsty Sisters of Mercy bullshit and more like The Lost Boys meets Near Dark meets Innocent Blood meets Fright Night.

Well, but that's what I mean. The flavor is different, but the rest reads like a roadmap of every fuckin' thing WW wrote for the next 20 years. Sprinkle on some Anne Rice and angst and you've got the oWoD in the bag, and they're still recycling some of the monster types mentioned in that write up. Their Animates ripoff didn't come out until 2006.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;729522Less angsty Sisters of Mercy bullshit . . .

WoD is Bauhaus, not The Sisters of Mercy.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;729666WoD is Bauhaus, not The Sisters of Mercy.

Then Nightlife is 45 Grave?

Quote from: Black Vulmea;729666WoD is Bauhaus, not The Sisters of Mercy.

WoD had been way cooler if it'd been Type 0 Negative instead.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;729666WoD is Bauhaus, not The Sisters of Mercy.

Fair enough.

Important question: who is Siouxsie Sioux in all this?

It doesn't seem the most original idea, but are people here very biased against Mark Rein-Hagen? There are some interviews with him online and he seems like a very nice guy.

Btw, I understand the bias against WW in general. Yes, they are prententious and yes, they do use 100 words, where others only need 20. I don't like the struggle to maintain your own humanity and I am not that big of a fan of the inter-clique politics that is always the focus of almost any game they make.

That being said, their games are never generic and are always very moody, if you take the time to read it and let it sink in. Every game has it's own distinct vibe and they always take the effort of creating an entire society of supernaturals with their themes and trappings.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;730112It doesn't seem the most original idea, but are people here very biased against Mark Rein-Hagen? There are some interviews with him online and he seems like a very nice guy.

Btw, I understand the bias against WW in general. Yes, they are prententious and yes, they do use 100 words, where others only need 20. I don't like the struggle to maintain your own humanity and I am not that big of a fan of the inter-clique politics that is always the focus of almost any game they make.

That being said, their games are never generic and are always very moody, if you take the time to read it and let it sink in. Every game has it's own distinct vibe and they always take the effort of creating an entire society of supernaturals with their themes and trappings.

To answer your question: yes, people around here tend to have an axe to grind re:Mark Rein-Hagen as one of the father figures of "pretentious role playing", as you put it yourself.

Quote from: Benoist;730126To answer your question: yes, people around here tend to have an axe to grind re:Mark Rein-Hagen as one of the father figures of "pretentious role playing", as you put it yourself.

Heh, it became even more "gothic" after he left. He just put the conspiracy into Anne Rice's work. So in old wod with it's metaplot, there was always a great evil to fight. In new wod that's gone. No more trenchcoat McNinjasword. The new wod was a lot more "bleak" as they call than the old. Luckily, it's gotten a lot better now with Onyx Path. We are allowed to have fun again.

Anyway, I am rambling. I think it's just a matter of reading. If you want to read and quickly get to the point, so you can get it just by glimsing over the book, world of darkness is worthless. If you want to read it to get into the mood for a dark atmospheric game, soaking up the mood, then world of darkness is good. I usually like it more to the point myself, but I can see what they are aiming for. Immersion.

Btw, Democracy looks a lot better than I am zombie.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;730112It doesn't seem the most original idea, but are people here very biased against Mark Rein-Hagen? There are some interviews with him online and he seems like a very nice guy.

Btw, I understand the bias against WW in general. Yes, they are prententious and yes, they do use 100 words, where others only need 20.

In defense, "Obfuscate" sounds cooler than "Pretend and Hide."  But just as Nightlife would have been a better system for urban fantasy-horror, so would Macho Women With Guns.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;730190In defense, "Obfuscate" sounds cooler than "Pretend and Hide."  But just as Nightlife would have been a better system for urban fantasy-horror, so would Macho Women With Guns.

JG

Yeah they do that. A campaign is a chronicle and a quest is a story, a party is a coterie/cabal/pack/cell etc. and of course always the talking about theme and mood.

But you prefer Nightlife above WoD? I mean it has all the supernaturals (vamps, werewolfs, demons), but it is more generic than WoD.

I think WoD gamelines are never meant for crossover. Werewolf is all about investigating the spirit world for example. A vampire or a changeling would feel out of place in a werewolf game. Each game has it's own society and the idea is to move upwards in that society without becoming too much of a monster yourself. Naturally you will fail in one of these categories.

And WoD is never meant to be urban fantasy. It's more Let the right one in than Buffy the vampire slayer in tone.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;730223Yeah they do that. A campaign is a chronicle and a quest is a story, a party is a coterie/cabal/pack/cell etc. and of course always the talking about theme and mood.

That's the key to my personal appreciation of WoD games. When you just mentally ignore the implications of terms like "chronicle" or "stories", discard the literary ambition that makes you sooner or later run contrived railroads jumping from preordained "scene" to "scene" instead of role playing games sessions, and that you forget about WW's adventure structures to concentrate instead on the "by Night", running in essence dynamic environments with factions and politicking and conspiracies and secrets and whatnot, what you end up with is a thoroughly traditional RPG experience.

Quote from: Benoist;730230That's the key to my personal appreciation of WoD games. When you just mentally ignore the implications of terms like "chronicle" or "stories", discard the literary ambition that makes you sooner or later run contrived railroads jumping from preordained "scene" to "scene" instead of role playing games sessions, and that you forget about WW's adventure structures to concentrate instead on the "by Night", running in essence dynamic environments with factions and politicking and conspiracies and secrets and whatnot, what you end up with is a thoroughly traditional RPG experience.

I had the same thing. I felt railroaded. Instead of having a dungeoncrawler, where you go from one fight to another, you have scenes. Each scene has one or multiple outs, usually a clue you have to find and/or extract from a person. You can only continue from one scene to another if you find a clue. So railroading.

I actually play WW games a lot like this, because I like procedurals or mission based adventures. You can do this with the wod, but most common is the political game. This is a more character based game and not a plot driven game as the procedural. Most important thing you must do with a political game is to make a web. This web consists of multiple NPC's (and maybe PC's) and their relations. Guy A hates guy B. Guy B owes guy C, because C helped him in the past. Guy C uses guy D to climb up the ladder etc. This way stories occur naturally.

Quote from: Benoist;730230That's the key to my personal appreciation of WoD games. When you just mentally ignore the implications of terms like "chronicle" or "stories", discard the literary ambition that makes you sooner or later run contrived railroads jumping from preordained "scene" to "scene" instead of role playing games sessions, and that you forget about WW's adventure structures to concentrate instead on the "by Night", running in essence dynamic environments with factions and politicking and conspiracies and secrets and whatnot, what you end up with is a thoroughly traditional RPG experience.

Which again is why people's WoD games usually end up more like Buffy than Let The Right One In.

Well, I always wondered why it work for me. And on the official WW forum people always seem to be slavelike followers of the stuff in the books as written. If you ask them something, they usually reply by rehashing the books.

I always got it completely backwards. I never used any fleshed out setting with a cast of characters, but I did use the story scene-to-scene structures. I should do it the other way around. I do have to flesh out a setting with a large (10-30) cast of characters and I should ditch the scene-to-scene structure.

Btw, to me the difference between gothic horror and urban fantasy is the ugly stuff you have to do. You might kill an innocent civilian in a horror game, but you won't find something like that in an urban fantasy game. It doesn't suck to be a vampire or werewolf in urban fantasy. You are a dark superhero.