This just sounds like Changeling:The Lost but with X-Men knockoff stuff thrown in. I'm not sure how I don't like the Character's and Storyteller's coming up with the conspiracy together idea; that should've been part of the adventure. It seems to have less options as well. In something like C:TL you couldn't play loyalists true, but there was a lot of ways you could customize your character by adding layers; This seems like it's just the two way split to me with the rest being dependent on the powers you come up with.

Just please (insert your favourite deity here) don't let them near Aberrant.

Quote from: Omega;1106389Just please (insert your favourite deity here) don't let them near Aberrant.

Too late.  Far too late.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1106128I'd love to see your contributions to a monster mash game. You sound like someone who knows how to design something for actual playing than waxing gothic emo.

Given the popularity of indie urban fantasy games on DriveThru, it seems like a fairly good time to write a World of Darkness retroclone. Drop the edition wars that divided people. Recapture the good old wild west days of B.J. Zanzibar's archive.

It's just a pet peeve of mine to complain about this. WoD books seem to be written for people who like reading rpg books, but not necesarily like playing them. In 5th Edition there is some discussion about feeding and sex all written down in essay style. Now I understand the connection. It's always been there in vampire fiction, but how does the exploration of such a theme actually come up in a game? How does it effect gameplay? Do you fondle people while feeding? Or is it just pseudo-intellectual windowdressing to make it seem deeper than it really is? I think the latter.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1107621It's just a pet peeve of mine to complain about this. WoD books seem to be written for people who like reading rpg books, but not necesarily like playing them. In 5th Edition there is some discussion about feeding and sex all written down in essay style. Now I understand the connection. It's always been there in vampire fiction, but how does the exploration of such a theme actually come up in a game? How does it effect gameplay? Do you fondle people while feeding? Or is it just pseudo-intellectual windowdressing to make it seem deeper than it really is? I think the latter.

You do 1d4 WP damage on the intended target and gain a equal amount of SP back.  Boom!  Weird just explained vampire fang to neck blood feeding.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1107621It's just a pet peeve of mine to complain about this. WoD books seem to be written for people who like reading rpg books, but not necesarily like playing them. In 5th Edition there is some discussion about feeding and sex all written down in essay style. Now I understand the connection. It's always been there in vampire fiction, but how does the exploration of such a theme actually come up in a game? How does it effect gameplay? Do you fondle people while feeding? Or is it just pseudo-intellectual windowdressing to make it seem deeper than it really is? I think the latter.

These days, it's all about the new wave of vampires that have I EAT ASS slogans on their t-shirts and suck blood from their victims' hemorrhoids.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1107623These days, it's all about the new wave of vampires that have I EAT ASS slogans on their t-shirts and suck blood from their victims' hemorrhoids.

Hey now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating Ass. You don't have to be a Vampire to enjoy that.

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They've released more info on how things work for Kickstarter backers, and as I said, this is the Wod version of creating a superhero. The powers called "Variations" all have to be tied to drawbacks called "scars". Magnitude is how powerful your variations and Scars are. The Biolumiscence power lets you create full on Sunlight at level 3, Deviants can be pretty damn scary to other supernatural creatures depending on the powerlevel the ST sets the game at. The regeneration ability lets you come back from death and heal all lethal damage at the end of a scene and multiple agg levels in a single day.

Today we also got to see some of the rules for creating a conspiracy. They're based around assigning points to a few different categories based on how a Conspiracy prefers to get things done. Each category also has a "Lynchpin" a specific NPC that represents the face or heart of a particular asset of the Conspiracy. I like this because it encourages and puts into framework right away who and what the players have to go after in order to hurt a particular conspiracy and start chipping away at it's power base.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1107621It's just a pet peeve of mine to complain about this. WoD books seem to be written for people who like reading rpg books, but not necesarily like playing them. In 5th Edition there is some discussion about feeding and sex all written down in essay style. Now I understand the connection. It's always been there in vampire fiction, but how does the exploration of such a theme actually come up in a game? How does it effect gameplay? Do you fondle people while feeding? Or is it just pseudo-intellectual windowdressing to make it seem deeper than it really is? I think the latter.

WoD is partly directed at people who buy the books just for reading rather than playing. Which I never understood. I'm not interested in lore for reading, I'm interested in lore for how I can use it to craft scenarios.

The indie vampire game Feed is vastly more competent in the essay department, because it actually analyzes the trends in vampire fiction over the last two centuries and explains how this could be relevant to the GM crafting scenarios. It isn't pretentious and talks to the reader in plain English about what vampires are and how the game uses them. It could certainly have used more proofreading, examples of play, and further rounds of playtesting, but it's miles ahead of even V5.

Quote from: Orphan81;1107652Hey now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating Ass. You don't have to be a Vampire to enjoy that.

More on Deviant.
They've released more info on how things work for Kickstarter backers, and as I said, this is the Wod version of creating a superhero. The powers called "Variations" all have to be tied to drawbacks called "scars". Magnitude is how powerful your variations and Scars are. The Biolumiscence power lets you create full on Sunlight at level 3, Deviants can be pretty damn scary to other supernatural creatures depending on the powerlevel the ST sets the game at. The regeneration ability lets you come back from death and heal all lethal damage at the end of a scene and multiple agg levels in a single day.

Today we also got to see some of the rules for creating a conspiracy. They're based around assigning points to a few different categories based on how a Conspiracy prefers to get things done. Each category also has a "Lynchpin" a specific NPC that represents the face or heart of a particular asset of the Conspiracy. I like this because it encourages and puts into framework right away who and what the players have to go after in order to hurt a particular conspiracy and start chipping away at it's power base.

And power creep rears its ugly head yet again. CoD was created in part to make crossover easier, yet they quickly backpedaled on that in favor of making it needlessly difficult and unbalanced. Every subsequent splat has increased the power creep. Then the writers went so far as to claim game balance was a myth. What is wrong with a point buy system, seriously?

Funny that Onyx couldn't have made those conspiracy mechanics for all organizations a long time ago. Seems like it would have come in handy. Maybe they'll do that in the 3rd edition, whenever that comes out. I'm guessing that 3rd edition will incorporate the innovations from V5, like being able to select from multiple powers at each dot in a discipline or weaknesses getting worse as blood potency increases.

Not that I really care since this franchise is on life support as Paradox exploits it for their video game properties. The new Vampire video game politics more closely resemble Requiem than Masquerade, which might alienate tabletop fans even if it is more consistent with the way Bloodlines 1 gave you multiple factions to deal with. The Werewolf: The Apocalypse video game is going to be comedy gold in today's political climate, and that's assuming it doesn't literally claim the GOP are satanists deliberately trying to cause the apocalypse by fracking.