Generic, chatty nWoD thread

[crkrueger]

nWoD Changeling is awesome.
Vampire is pretty good.
Werewolf and Mage are just plain awful. Especially considering how great the oWoD versions were.

Without comparing and contrasting WtA to WtF, what about WtF specifically didn't you like?

[Benoist]

Forsaken and Awakening are the weak links for me too, I must say.

[crkrueger]

The Fog of Eternity is not this "all or nothing" thing in Requiem. It's actually a wonderful role playing tool both to build the sandbox through the NPCs memories and the PCs take on it. You might have forgotten. You might remember something. You might even think you remember everything in detail of a past period of activity and get it mostly right... or completely wrong. It's really great as a tool to set up things in the collective and individual memories of the vampires in the by Night, and for the players to play with it and come up with the characters, however delusional, they truly want to play.

It certainly can be a wonderful roleplaying tool - however, it is not the same wonderful roleplaying tool that comes from correctly remembering your passage through time, and those two tools are, to a certain degree, exclusive.

[Benoist]

It certainly can be a wonderful roleplaying tool - however, it is not the same wonderful roleplaying tool that comes from correctly remembering your passage through time, and those two tools are, to a certain degree, exclusive.

You're right.

It's actually better, if you know how to use it.

And no. They are not actually exclusive.

[MrMephistopheles]

That part where you deliberately mischaracterize what I actually said because what I actually said you can't deal with - yeah that doesn't work here, try harder.

You made a direct comparison of the games based on mechanical considerations for elders in your first post with your own words. There's nothing to strawman.

I like Requiem, but it seems watered down next to the Masquerade. I can't help but think they basically shoehorned stuff on purpose into the "no-metaplot" paradigm. How can we prevent 1,000-year old vampires from running the world? - Make sure the 1,000-year old vampires torpor up every 75-150 years, and can't remember everything so who knows if you're 1,000 years old or 10,000? Meh.

If that was not the comparison you wanted to make....then don't make it. BUT you did make it. Running to "You're being a strawman hypocrite!" does not change that. The rest of what you're saying is just more running away from that first statement. Preferring one or the other is one thing. But you specifically went beyond that.

The people in this thread seem to think it's a little more prevalent then you do, but whatever.  I'll stick to nWoD from now on in the thread.

You should probably not pick a thread that I'm participating in when you're trying to be smarmy and act like I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to the threads there. Particularly when the nice fellow that started the thread...if you paid attention...is mentioning inter group discussion starting his irritation outside the forums.

[crkrueger]

If that was not the comparison you wanted to make....then don't make it. BUT you did make it.

and, according to all accounts from people upthread, I was 100% right about that aspect, it was intentional to prevent elders from controlling a campaign in the designer's own words.  As I also said, the fact that I can so obviously see the design goal in the framework bugs me.  However, the wonders of multiple sentences is, I can actually say multiple things, like one other effect of the Fog is the effect on the historical sense of the setting, which you also took separate umbrage at, by misinterpreting (I'm starting to think deliberately) to mean that Requiem for Rome isn't historical.

@forum stuff - You say once a quarter, Shock in that thread says 'Every day it seems', maybe once a quarter seems like every day to him.  Go yell at him if he betraying the Orthodoxy.

[crkrueger]

You're right.

It's actually better, if you know how to use it.

Really? In all situations? No matter what you actually wanted out of a campaign involving immortals, a hazy and indistinct memory is always, objectively better?

And no. They are not actually exclusive.

Eh, maybe it's my German engineering genes clashing with your French philosophy genes, but to me, if I 100% recall events incorrectly, that is actually quite different then 100% recalling events correctly.  At some point they can be mutually exclusive, yes.  I cannot have perfect memory and imperfect memory simultaneously.  At least not speaking English.

[crkrueger]

Forsaken and Awakening are the weak links for me too, I must say.

Yeah, but why?  Forsaken didn't really do it for me either, but I can't really put my finger on why.

I have heard people mention that the nWoD lines, since they are divorced of metaplot and rely upon mere premise, can be hard to get into, and for some people, require a few key books to really get you engaged.

[The Yann Waters]

I had heard about both supplements but I had no idea they were introducing major system changes. I'm looking forward to both.

Do you have a link where this is announced or discussed?

You may want to check up on the WW blog entries like this one. At least over at RPGnet, Emprint compared The God-Machine Chronicle's relation to the WoD core as similar to that of D&D 3.5 to 3.0, and mentioned that it'll only include the mechanical details which have been revised. The Strix Chronicle, on the other hand, will include the complete vampire-related mechanics like VtR did, overhauled.

(Here is that forum thread about the changes to the physical Disciplines, mentioned on the blog. It also touches on some of the changes to weapon damage and armour and such.)

[danbuter]

Without comparing and contrasting WtA to WtF, what about WtF specifically didn't you like?

Werewolves are weak. They are also basically trapped in one area, defending a cairn. I don't like this at all. The cosmology/theme isn't that hot, either.

(And yes, I LOVED the whole theme of oWoD Werewolf (ecoterrorist fighting the Wyrm), and the fact that a werewolf was a combat machine, because they should be, dammit!)

[The Yann Waters]

I have heard people mention that the nWoD lines, since they are divorced of metaplot and rely upon mere premise, can be hard to get into, and for some people, require a few key books to really get you engaged.

Well, without additional books there is no metaplot, only background material. Even that sort of information admittedly tends to be less fixed in the nWoD: consider, say, the three alternative versions of VII from which GMs may choose whichever suits their own Requiem campaigns. But as newbie-friendly ready-to-run settings go, for instance Requiem's section on New Orleans is far more comprehensive than Masquerade's couple of pages on Gary, Indiana.

I've occasionally heard folks complain that they've found especially the earliest nWoD cores terribly dry, though.

[Benoist]

Really? In all situations? No matter what you actually wanted out of a campaign involving immortals, a hazy and indistinct memory is always, objectively better?

Well, given that in one case (Masquerade) you are dealing with a certainty of rememberance, so really one single possibility, and in the other you are dealing with a nigh infinite spectrum of possibilities (remembering completely and accurately, remembering something inaccurately, remembering nothing etc.), I'm tempted to say "yes, in every case, unless your game concept needs that single one possibility at the exclusion of all others to properly work at the game table". Note I said "tempted" though, not that this is objectively the case.

If you want to have some feeling of historical consistency in your campaign you can make it a theme, maybe have an elder of the primogen or whatnot as a record keeper who, for some reason, would be trusted in this function (maybe he is deemed blessed by the Lancea Sanctum and thus implicitly supported by the Invictus, etc, that in itself potentially creating conflicts as some trust his historical records as "canon" while others very obviously wouldn't, and a sandbox like the "by Night" feeds on conflict, by nature), or some other alternative.

The point is that you can still make historical records and legend about Caine or whatever part of your sandbox (I did reinclude some legends about the biblical Caine in my Paris Alchymique, for instance), but you're not stuck with one line of thought or "canon" record for the setting anymore, and can interpret the Fog of Eternity for each particular NPC on a broad spectrum, instead of again, being stuck with that one default "he remembers everything" unless he'd be Malkavian or whatever odd duck. It makes the setting in general, the PCs themselves and however old they are (and they can be quite old now since that doesn't automatically reflect on their powers), and the sandbox surrounding them.

Eh, maybe it's my German engineering genes clashing with your French philosophy genes, but to me, if I 100% recall events incorrectly, that is actually quite different then 100% recalling events correctly.  At some point they can be mutually exclusive, yes.  I cannot have perfect memory and imperfect memory simultaneously.  At least not speaking English.

That bolded part is the problem. It's incorrect: it's not that "100% recall events incorrectly". It's that some will remember half and wonder if that was a dream, others remember nothing but think they got everything right from journals they seem to have written but were fed to them by some other NPC, some are historians gathering these incomplete, many of them false records to try to discover the truth, and yes, some vampires might remember mostly accurately as well. So in one case you have a proposition that INCLUDES the other, and in the other a proposition that is exclusive of everything else.

Hence, the former is in fact not exclusive of the latter, and the former is to me clearly superior from an interpretive, sandbox-building, and conflicts standpoint, and benefits the sandbox campaign concept more at the game table.

And I love both games, by the way. I might actually proclaim Masquerade the superior game overall, from my particular POV, because of the much more prevalent by Night structure with multiple examples to feed from throughout the run of the game, though the massive Damnation City book for Requiem is itself a very interesting take on the subject and can fuel the sandbox in a number of ways, for varying play styles to changing the focus of the game from personal interactions to larger influence games and back and forth.

[Marleycat]

I like Mage the Awakening the best by far it has far more internal constistency than MtAs. Never played Changeling the Lost but reads whizbang awesome.  Love the Blueline also it's versitile as hell. Vampire and Werewolf don't grab me but are solid games nonetheless. Promethean totally unique premise not sure how playable it is. Haven't heard anything about Mummy or Demon.

[The Yann Waters]

Haven't heard anything about Mummy or Demon.

No one's heard much about Demon at this point. It'll be linked to both the God-Machine mythology and traditional demonology, but their backstory won't involve being engineered from animal stock by aliens, as implied by the "Voice of the Angel" snippet in the WoD core.

[Marleycat]

No one's heard much about Demon at this point. It'll be linked to both the God-Machine mythology and traditional demonology, but their backstory won't involve being engineered from animal stock by aliens, as implied by the "Voice of the Angel" snippet in the WoD core.

I'll be tracking it because the God Machine is a big deal for Obrimos mages it's central to their watchtower journey so VERY interested.  If Mummy is well done like the second version count me in also.