Quote from: Chris24601;1130440V5 sucks sweaty donkey balls. V5 makes D&D 4E look like a love letter to past players of D&D that tried hard to keep beloved game elements intact by comparison.

It's layout is pretentious; better suited to one of those coffee-table tomes on art or geography that no one reads with way too much white space coupled with fonts that are too small for comfortable reading and far too much relegated to artistic side bars.

Music to my ears. As far as I'm concerned V5 never happened.

V5, considering all the useful fan feedback, and material they could have used (the good stuff at any rate). But what a load of curdling tripe it turned out to be. To me, it looked like like a few post-modern 'fanbois' got together, and just regurgitated parts of their own dreary campaigns. Instead of giving something that the fans what they really wanted.

It's all about the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ of course.

That said, the new photo art in the book. To borrow Chris's phase, was so utterly pretentious. There's a very good reason you don't see photos, no matter how well manipulated, in RPG books.

Like I said... It never happened, it was just a baaaaad dream.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1130451I get what you mean, but this stuff seems very unpractical to me. I love Interview with a Vampire, but themes like that are very hard to implement in a game. Great stuff if you are writing a film script or a novel, but I don't see it working in a roleplaying game. RPG characters generally are adventurers looking for adventure, merchants wanting to trade for money or relic hunters collecting artifacts. Pretty cut and dried. Vampire or WoD have certain themes and moods that you have to get consistently right, which can only be done if you write a story in advance and railroad the players through it. Conceptually it's really cool, but how to implement it?

Honestly, way back when, the chief appeal of Vampire for a lot of people was the fact that it didn't actually require "adventures" the way Dungeons and Dragons did. The richensss of characters in its settings meant that very often just interacting with them was enough that you didn't even need typical plots. This obviously applied to LARP and was a major reason that succeeded but for a lot of gamers at my table, adventures very often was just BEING a vampire and interacting with other characters.

A typical adventure in my old days was often just, "Character goes down to Succubus Club, encounters X, Y, Z characters, and a few random encounters" where you need to feed or not. Oddly, this seems to have been fairly common as THE CHICAGO FOLIOS and the CHICAGO BY NIGHT 5E books have chapters on short scene-based adventures. Usually ones that deal with corruption, temptation, and exploiting your powers.

But one thing I always like to do with my Vampire games is let the players have a lot more power and freedom than typical in D&D. Like if you';re the Ventrue charatcer player, you'd tell me the ST that you want to try to take over the railroads in town or build a strip club to increase your domain. The Anarch PC would go recruiting allies.

Very much my PCs would hatch their own fun and I'd try to show the consequences good and bad.

WOD games allowed the PCs to be proactive.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130441Oddly, I agree with most of what you said [while still loving V5 if you want to hear why]...

Sure, go ahead. It probably won't change anything on my end (the few interesting plot elements can be added into V20 without the need to adopt V5's miserable excuse for mechanics), but someone might be convinced.

Quotebut the Hecata makes perfect sense. It's just no one seems to be bothering to read WHY it happens. The Samedi, Cappadocians, Harbingers of Skulls, and Giovanni sub-families teamed up to exterminate the mainline Giovanni clan and their Elders. The main family that remains is composed of Neonates and Ancilla not involved in the abuses of the Elders.

To quote a friend of my regarding the Tremere's reaction in my campaign to an Assamite goodwill ambassador presenting himself to the Prince and Primogen as part of the negotiations for their schismatic members to join the Camarilla and the whole Blood Curse thing...

"That was hundreds of years ago! Surely no one still holds a grudge... Hahahahahahaha!"

Seriously, given the general "Sins of the Father" beliefs throughout history and the winner of these past diablerie fights systematically hunting the other bloodlines of the clan to extinction (see Tremere vs. Salubri, Giovanni vs. Cappodcians)... the few surviving Cappodocians and their offshoot bloodlines saying "bygones, you bear no sin for the actions of your ancestors” makes no sense whatsoever.

The people behind V5 just wanted to smash all the necromancers into one group and half-assed a reason for it to happen, who cares if it falls apart completely when you look at it for more than a few moments.

As just one example, per canon, there's only supposed to be about 20 Harbingers of Skulls total, a handful of Cappies who escaped the Giovanni purge, the Nagaraja were so small barely anyone outside of the True Black Hand was even aware they existed and the Samedi weren't much better and all them scattered in various locations... vs. a Clan with at least hundreds if not low thousands of members who are organized with still active Antediluvian and Methuselahs (by generation if not age).

But the fringe cases somehow organized, killed the Giovanni patriarch and all the other Giovanni just fell in line?

And to top it off they replace all the other distinctive clan/bloodline weaknesses with the Giovanni's... probably because it's easier to find models for the pretentious photography spreads if you don't have to turn them into actual cadaverous corpses.

That is exactly the sort of idiocy that defines V5. Nonsensical plot happens because the developers can't be assed to develop the individual clans/bloodlines, even when 90% of the work has already been done by the previous editions.

Honestly, I fully expect Bloodlines 2 to use the exact write ups of the V5 clans and disciplines. Their Potence options for increased damage and movement (but not the much more practical applications like lifting things or otherwise interacting with what would be static elements of a video game) for example seem tailor made for it.

For all the crap 4E got for "playing like a video game" V5 is worse.

They should just unstake V20 and send V5 to take a sunbath.

Quote from: Aglondir;1130421Same. I like to place the Setites and the Giovanni in the Camirilla, the Nosferatu as independents, and the Sabbat consisting only of Antitribbu clans (no Lasombra or Tzmisce) making them a mirror image of the Camirilla. And most of the weird minor clans (Daughters of Cacophony, Kyasid, etc.) don't exist.

My group's standard V:tM homebrew was very Camarilla focused. The Tzimisce and Lasombra were in the Camarilla along with the Cappadocians. The Sabbat was much smaller and mostly made up of Caitiff. Werewolves and mages as per canon don't exist, at least not in V:tM.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130440Literally half the page count of the Clans section was pretentious artwork that looks like what you'd find in a clothing catalog. Do we really need a full page of eight random people in various outfits for each of the clans they included? They could have fit the rest of the clans into the core book if they'd just left out the fashion spreads.

Of those spread, none of the Gangrel look like anybody who'd ever actually gone into nature before. None of the Tremere look like people who have ever been in a library after high school.

To the degree that I have read the book, I've just skimmed it, I agree with your criticisms. For myself, even if my approach to WoD didn't conflict with new book setting, the political commentary just rubbed me the wrong way.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130477To quote a friend of my regarding the Tremere's reaction in my campaign to an Assamite goodwill ambassador presenting himself to the Prince and Primogen as part of the negotiations for their schismatic members to join the Camarilla and the whole Blood Curse thing...

"That was hundreds of years ago! Surely no one still holds a grudge... Hahahahahahaha!"

I don't get that response because the premise is explicitly, "They came and murdered everyone and got their revenge."

The only difference is they went after the Giovanni family and not it's subfamilies like the Pisanob who helped murder the Giovanni family themselves.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130485I don't get that response because the premise is explicitly, "They came and murdered everyone and got their revenge."

The only difference is they went after the Giovanni family and not it's subfamilies like the Pisanob who helped murder the Giovanni family themselves.

Because the default practice since always was, erase the entire old clan/bloodline from existence whether it was a sub-family or not. The Harbingers of Skulls were super-old school Cappadoccians. The surviving Cappadoccians were similarly supposed to all be older and mostly in hiding because the Giovanni, including its sub-families, had hunted them to extinction.

If the text were, "The Cappodoccians gathered up all their bloodlines into Clan Heceta and murdered the entire Giovanni clan and the few that are left in the sub-families are all in hiding and fearing for their unlives" then I'd buy what Clan Hecata is... but as it stands, name me one other time in Kindred history where the victors didn't genocide the losers' entire line regardless of their guilt or innocence in the perceived sins of their ancestors.

And those genocides happen for an entirely practical reason... if you don't stamp them all out they might come back in a century or so and wipe you out in bloody revenge for what was done to their sires... just like Heceta did to the Giovanni.

Nope. Sorry. The lazy developers of V5 didn't want to bother with a bunch of independent/Sabbat* bloodlines running around while also not wanting to actually wipe out an actually popular Clan... so they cobbled together a lame-ass explanation to make them all a single group so they could call that done.

Shit design is shit design and deserves to be called out as such. V5 is an overflowing septic tank of shit design.

* If you think a Sabbat book is actually coming... Bwahahahahahaha!!! The Sabbat were put on a bus and driven into an IED because they didn't fit V5's snowflake wangst-fest agenda of oppressed fledgling/neonate vampires fighting the evil power structure. At best those who love the Sabbat will get some scraps to let them play members of those clans as members of the Anarchs or Camarilla.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1130451I get what you mean, but this stuff seems very unpractical to me. I love Interview with a Vampire, but themes like that are very hard to implement in a game. Great stuff if you are writing a film script or a novel, but I don't see it working in a roleplaying game. RPG characters generally are adventurers looking for adventure, merchants wanting to trade for money or relic hunters collecting artifacts. Pretty cut and dried. Vampire or WoD have certain themes and moods that you have to get consistently right, which can only be done if you write a story in advance and railroad the players through it. Conceptually it's really cool, but how to implement it?

Yeah, I totally agree with that. VTM only works if the players actually invest in it.

The Feed RPG does this better because it allows players to do traditional RPG adventures without being unfairly penalized for being evil. Two of the sample campaign settings are literally about being evil monsters: in one vampirism is the result of a demonic pact for power, and in the other you're playing 80s b-movie vampires. It's basically Actual Fucking Monsters but for longer term play. And if you want to play "vampirism sucks," then you can by playing a vampire strain whose powers really do suck and emphasize how horrible their existence is.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130394But if I create my own urban fantasy universe, then I might as well play "Some Other Game" and at that point, Darren MacLerran and all the other pissant punk motherfuckers at Onyx Path and RPG.net win

Actively perverting the metaplot they treat as holy canon is way more infuriating to them and it hurts those toxic fans even more. Just giving up and playing "Some Other Game" is giving those toxic fans exactly what they want and letting them win.

Deliberately running a counter-canon chronicle that blasphemes their little holy canon is much more satisfying in my opinion, especially if the game turns out to be a fun one.

Look, if you don't like a product, then you go buy another in the same category. That's how capitalism works.

Telling everyone that VTM is the only way to play makes you a communist. VTM is communist, communism is bad and anti-capitalist, therefore VTM is bad and anti-capitalist.

If you really want to mock VTM fans, then make a new game that displaces VTM on the market.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130405Box Crayon Tales has an actual vendetta against White Wolf and World of Darkness

I don't have a vendetta. I have creative disagreements. Criticizing WW for well-known problems when I get the rare opportunity does not equate to a vendetta.

Quote from: ShieldWife;1130409Altering canon is one of the most interesting aspects of WoD for me these days. What if this Clan was in this Sect, a Bloodline replaces a Clan, the relationship between the Garou and Triat is different, etc. Those sorts of ideas really interest me.

Which is actually kind of unfortunate for my relationship with who ever is publishing new WoD material, because I'm not really that interested in building upon Revised metaplot and I don't really need new books to come up with games in alternative WoD based settings. So while I still love WoD and the ideas it inspires, I'm not sure if I will be their customer anymore.

In my experience, WoD fans seem to be almost religiously opposed to any changes to canon. They seem to want this bizarre status quo where all the splats are arranged in one way that never changes even as the timeline supposedly moves with the real world.

That's part of why I left the fandom a decade ago. Sometimes I'd come up with suggestions for AU, and people would tell me that's stupid. For example, I remember somebody once suggesting an alternate conflict for Werewolf where the Wyrm wasn't evil but simply trying to fix the pollution problem created by the Weaver's technological advancement obsession by deciding that the previous ecosystem cannot be saved and post-apocalyptic mutants are the only viable future. Another suggested adopting the hengeyokai-style alliance for the Western shapeshifters. Fanboys tore those poor suggestions apart for being heresy.  The WW fanboys are religious fanatics!

Shit like that is why I decided to write my setting as a canonical multiverse. Whenever somebody tells me "your setting is wrong!" then I can tell them to suck it because my setting is multiverse where everyone is invited to party.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1130412I love Goth girls as well, especially the true ones from Romania, they are soooooo Hot!

However I'm not a Vampire fan. Not even remotely. It was one of the worst games ever made, It completely caused a backlash against legitimate GMs, with "Storytellers" subjectively applying the game rules.

It was even worse with the LARPS where they pitted covens and enclaves against each other in brutal win/lose competitions. You know what the worst thing in the world is for a partially emotionally developed emo-goth teen who joined a clan or coven, and who comes from a completely dysfunctional home life, or broken home. Having someone in their own clan backstab or betray them, or finding themselves on the "losing" side of another conflict.

No, Vampire, and its spinoffs were a complete disaster except for a few narcissistic oligarchs and predators that found it perfect ground to exercise their particular talents to the detriment of everyone else.

That sounds absolutely horrifying... and totally in line with the various horror stories I've heard and experienced with WW fandom.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130440Since we're on the free speech formums and not Onyx Path's I say without reservation that V5 sucks sweaty donkey balls. V5 makes D&D 4E look like a love letter to past players of D&D that tried hard to keep beloved game elements intact by comparison.

It's layout is pretentious; better suited to one of those coffee-table tomes on art or geography that no one reads with way too much white space coupled with fonts that are too small for comfortable reading and far too much relegated to artistic side bars.

The first 36 pages are pure fluff designed more to appeal to people who are never going to actually PLAY the game. They spent more pages on "Kindred Fashion" than they did on the Sabbat.

Literally half the page count of the Clans section was pretentious artwork that looks like what you'd find in a clothing catalog. Do we really need a full page of eight random people in various outfits for each of the clans they included? They could have fit the rest of the clans into the core book if they'd just left out the fashion spreads.

If they wanted to make a VtM coffee table book... they succeeded on all counts. If they wanted to make a useful RPG rulebook, they failed utterly.

They also gutted the mechanics. The d10 is literally meaningless since a 6 or better is a straight 50% chance. If their intent was to be accessible to new players they should have switched to d6s or, heck, flipping coins (use dimes for regular and pennies for hunger dice) and the mechanics would have been identical. But they wanted the nostalgia appeal of d10s so they dumbed down the mechanics for easier access, then insist on needing harder-to-find dice to actually play it.

They replaced functional game mechanics (the virtues) with touchstones and convictions that force the GM to work around various mortal NPCs that are supposed to be important to you because they want to make sure the game is an emo wangst-fest and the only option they want you to have to play is the "just been turned" newbie Anarch who's down with the social justice struggle.

I could go on about the banality of mashing groups who hated each other for centuries and stripping out much of what made those groups unique in the process (i.e. Clan Heceta) or merging disciplines for no reason (ex. Necromancy and Obtenebration into "Oblivion") or how you can't actually use basic Potence to just lift things (jumping really high and dealing aggravated damage though... no problem; and people said 4E D&D played like a video game), but suffice it to say calling V5 a dumpster fire is an insult to burning garbage.

I just hope that OP can get the Technocracy Reloaded and a couple other books out for M20 before TPTB make them convert to M5 and ass-rape that setting to death with a chainsaw too.

IMO Feed pulls off V5's intentions a lot better. Touchstones and convictions were a pain in VTR and they're still a pain in V5. Feed's distinction between human and vampiric characteristics feels IMO like a better way to support the intended theme of lost humanity without arbitrarily punishing the player for roleplaying a murderhobo or giving them convoluted excuse for retaining humanity despite being a murderhobo. In Feed, you can either try to cultivate your humanity and lose out on superpowers, or you can throw humanity aside and become a superpowered murderhobo without the game telling you that you're playing wrong or are a horrible person for playing a murderhobo. How the players react to character actions is entirely based on what the party wants to play, and not what WW forces on you.

Feed is free on drivethrurpg, so I encourage anyone who is interested to check it out. If you don't want to abandon VTM lore completely, then it's easy to convert to the Feed mechanics.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130460WOD games allowed the PCs to be proactive.

That's a complete mischaracterization of rpgs. Seriously, have you ever played any games besides WoD? Or even any non-rpg tabletop or party game like Monopoly or Werewolf?

Quote from: ShieldWife;1130481My group's standard V:tM homebrew was very Camarilla focused. The Tzimisce and Lasombra were in the Camarilla along with the Cappadocians. The Sabbat was much smaller and mostly made up of Caitiff. Werewolves and mages as per canon don't exist, at least not in V:tM.

Reminds me a bit of the description of East Asian cainites in the Vampire Revised Storytellers Handbook, before KotE was released. Apparently the Tzimisce sold their services in body modification.

Quote from: ShieldWife;1130481To the degree that I have read the book, I've just skimmed it, I agree with your criticisms. For myself, even if my approach to WoD didn't conflict with new book setting, the political commentary just rubbed me the wrong way.

The recent books suffer from a pretty extreme case of Trump derangement syndrome. I recall at least one author saying that they only write Republican voters as villains.

QuoteThat's a complete mischaracterization of rpgs. Seriously, have you ever played any games besides WoD? Or even any non-rpg tabletop or party game like Monopoly or Werewolf?

I said WOD did for me and my table, I was also 13 when I started playing them.

What was true for me, 26 years ago, isn't now or for all games.

It did certainly open my eyes, though, to new types of gaming.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130496In my experience, WoD fans seem to be almost religiously opposed to any changes to canon. They seem to want this bizarre status quo where all the splats are arranged in one way that never changes even as the timeline supposedly moves with the real world.

And yet I count myself a fan of the WoD and yet have zero problem changing canon as needed.

Garou don't exist in my Vampire game... instead I've got Lycans (built like vampires using a custom Protean discipline) who are a line descended from Lycaon... cursed by God* for hubris, filicide and cannibalism.

* Yes, the myth is he was cursed by Zeus, but if you study how the old polytheistic religions developed out of political necessity it makes absolute sense.

The short version is a lot of the PIE cultures had a supreme sky father (deus phater > Father Zeus, Dis pater, Iupeter, etc.) who created their local people by mating with an earth mother (goddess or mortal). As one culture conquered its neighbors they would syncretize the conquered peoples' sky god with theirs (i.e. we actually worship the same god) and made the local earth mother figure into one of their sky father's wives or conquests (this is Zeus became such a philanderer). Gods too far from the concept of The Sky Father got transformed into his brothers or children.

Swinging back around to Lycaon... in-universe, Zeus was a misunderstanding of the Biblical God filtered through political syncretism by the people who wrote down a story that had happened thousands of years earlier. Lycaon was a tribal chieftain who decided to test God's omniscience by killing his son and sacrificing him to see if God would accept the sacrifice... instead, like Cain and his murder/sacrifice of Abel, Lycaon was cursed. His rage at this punishment twisted him into a bloodthirsty beast and passed this curse down to all his descendants.

Thus, in my Vampire game, vampires and lycans share a similar origin and themes of struggling to maintain one's humanity against a force inside you that you can't control. Coupled with all magic in my Vampire game being either divine (truth faith and natural magics), infernal (i.e. fallen divine powers) or blood magic (i.e. twisting a divine curse) the setting has a sort of conservation of detail that helps with the overall versimultude of it all.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130511Thus, in my Vampire game, vampires and lycans share a similar origin and themes of struggling to maintain one's humanity against a force inside you that you can't control. Coupled with all magic in my Vampire game being either divine (truth faith and natural magics), infernal (i.e. fallen divine powers) or blood magic (i.e. twisting a divine curse) the setting has a sort of conservation of detail that helps with the overall versimultude of it all.

I don't agree with the assertion that such a conceit inherently helps with verisimilitude.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130512I don't agree with the assertion that such a conceit inherently helps with verisimilitude.

The Christianity or the Conservation of Supernatural Detail?

The thing is... It not only helps, it's downright required reading in screenwriting class. When writing science fiction/fantasy it is stressed that you're only allowed a few breaks from reality in establishing your setting before it starts to break suspension of disbelief.

Moreover, these breaks from reality need to established and defined early and then not broken (or at least what will be broken needs to be set up along with the rest).

In many ways, science fiction and fantasy requires even more attention to causality than normal fiction. You can't just have a fairy show up and solve the vampire's problem in act three if you haven't set up that fairies at least possibly exist in act one.

This is also why villains in many superhero series (movie and television) end up being tied to the hero's origin somehow. The villains are thereby explained by the same break in reality that allows the hero to exist.

ex. Smallville establishes mutagenic kryptonite meteor show accompanying Clark to Earth. Almost all the villains are tied either to the kryptonite (mutated by it or tech powered by it) or to Kryptonian influences (pieces of Clark's ship, past Kryptonian visitors, etc.).

ex. The Flash becomes a metahuman due to StarLabs accelerator accident. This also gives super powers to all sorts of other people in the city.

ex. The Red Skull was created by the same super-soldier serum that created Captain America; Hydra's super-tech is powered by the Tesseract, the study of which allowed Howard Stark to create the first Arc Reactor (which Tony then miniaturized to power his Iron-Man suit. The Tesseract in turn was also one of the Infinity Stones that tied the entire franchise together.

In some more fantasy examples, every major opponent in Buffy was a demon of some kind (even the Slayers themselves were empowered by a demonic spirit). In the Vampire Diaries and it's spin-offs both Vampires and Werewolves were created by the spells of powerful witches (and said magic was hereditary) and even ghosts were the result of souls being stuck in a realm created by an extremely powerful witch.

Even most D&D settings apply this standard to some extent. The world is created by a pantheon of gods and these gods each create a particular race that extols the virtues favored by that deity. Divine casters gain power by worshiping one or more of the gods. Arcane casters gain power by channeling the residual energies of Creation for their own ends.

Star Wars basically says "interstellar civilization" and "space wizards." Everything else springs from that. They don't introduce matter transporters, other types of FTL or magic powers that don't come from the Force.

So yes, "all the supernatural forces in the world are either the result of the Biblical God or a twisting of His divine power" helps greatly with versimultude. It establishes a clear rule as to where supernatural powers come from and why. It establishes what cannot happen to so that the players can make reasoned decisions about their actions.

Time travel isn't going to come up. They don't have to worry about futuristic cyborgs with plasma guns gunning them down. Today's tech is what they and everyone else has to work with.

Conversely... Reality is determined by the collective beliefs of humanity, everything ever believed in exists somewhere in reality or the spirit worlds, and Mages are humans of exceptional will who can warp reality with the power of their belief both sets up specific rules (regardless of the tools employed a Mage is warping reality with their personal belief) and that all manner of craziness can be found because people have believed all sorts of wacky things... therefore you should expect that just about anything can show up in relation to those rules (i.e. dragons can't enter the real world while looking like a dragon unless a mage is warping reality to make it so).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130496In my experience, WoD fans seem to be almost religiously opposed to any changes to canon. They seem to want this bizarre status quo where all the splats are arranged in one way that never changes even as the timeline supposedly moves with the real world.

That's part of why I left the fandom a decade ago. Sometimes I'd come up with suggestions for AU, and people would tell me that's stupid. For example, I remember somebody once suggesting an alternate conflict for Werewolf where the Wyrm wasn't evil but simply trying to fix the pollution problem created by the Weaver's technological advancement obsession by deciding that the previous ecosystem cannot be saved and post-apocalyptic mutants are the only viable future. Another suggested adopting the hengeyokai-style alliance for the Western shapeshifters. Fanboys tore those poor suggestions apart for being heresy.  The WW fanboys are religious fanatics!

Shit like that is why I decided to write my setting as a canonical multiverse. Whenever somebody tells me "your setting is wrong!" then I can tell them to suck it because my setting is multiverse where everyone is invited to party.

That sounds absolutely horrifying... and totally in line with the various horror stories I've heard and experienced with WW fandom.

I have seen a lot of that hostility too. Not always, but quite often. I think it was a little bit better during the 20th anniversary era, because the idea of canon was a bit looser since an official canon didn't really exist then. I fear that we've gone back to religious devotion with V5.

How does your multiverse setting work?

QuoteReminds me a bit of the description of East Asian cainites in the Vampire Revised Storytellers Handbook, before KotE was released. Apparently the Tzimisce sold their services in body modification.

I like the more traditional version of the Tzimisce Clan - Dracula, the honorable yet horrible nobles, the revenant family servants, being ultra-traditional, etc.

QuoteThe recent books suffer from a pretty extreme case of Trump derangement syndrome. I recall at least one author saying that they only write Republican voters as villains.

Yeah, amazingly enough, when book writers tell me that they don't want me buying their book or playing their game, I listen to them. Well, WW has always been pretty political but I think it's gotten worse and I've gotten less willing to put up with it too.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130522The Christianity or the Conservation of Supernatural Detail?

Both?

The themes of redemption ring hollow to me because I don't believe a benevolent God would create vampires and werewolves. If it was Zoroastrianism, then maybe it would work better for me.

As for details... if you like world building, then sure it might help to have a unified theory of everything... but that's not really how I roll right now. In order to have gothic vampire castles in space and other awesome multiverse scenarios, I necessarily have to either world build in a very bizarre fashion or take weird stuff for granted without trying to explain it.

I mean, D&D makes oodles of money compared to other RPGs despite lacking a consistent set of themes or conservation of detail. The backstory is insanely convoluted and people still love it, but the majority of players don't seem to care about the campaign settings all that much.

So I don't think it inherently makes things better or more fun.

Quote from: ShieldWife;1130609I have seen a lot of that hostility too. Not always, but quite often. I think it was a little bit better during the 20th anniversary era, because the idea of canon was a bit looser since an official canon didn't really exist then. I fear that we've gone back to religious devotion with V5.

Even under X20/4e, I still saw some one true wayism. The continuing antipathy to (and ignorance of) CoD despite it being out for sixteen years now is a big indicator. CoD haters are still repeating discredited talking points from 2004.

Quote from: ShieldWife;1130609How does your multiverse setting work?

It's a work in progress, but it essentially operates on the premise that any reality you can imagine exists somewhere in the multiverse. If you can control your destination, then you can define more exact parameters. You could visit an Earth where the Confederacy won the Civil War, where Dracula married Queen Victoria, etc. Most transportation methods just pick realities mostly at random, with the only parameters being that the target location is inhabitable (so the traveler doesn't immediate asphyxiate, immolate, or become entombed in rock). If you can use semiotics to carefully specify the world you want to visit, then you can potentially visit realities that are unstable due to contradictory parameters. (This is based on a conceit introduced in the Myst games.)

Because of the fantasy element, the worlds can be pretty bizarre. For example, one suggestion is an urban fantasy setting where most paranormal creatures left Earth for other worlds during the Age of Reason and have begun gradually returning in the modern day.

I use this conceit because it means I can explore different magical and political situations. I'm not limited to a single history like WoD is (where nothing makes sense unless you religiously follow the metaplot and the writers' mary sue characters steal the spotlight), and I'm not limited to Schrodinger's history like CoD is (where the books rarely ever reference one another and thus scenarios referencing multiple books are impossible).

So I can publish individual splats, and then construct various worlds where their politics are completely different. Then, based on audience feedback and polling, I can focus resources on the more popular and profitable splats and worlds. Although at this point I'm more than happy to let other people write books about whatever under my brand (if I ever make a brand, anyhow).

Quote from: ShieldWife;1130609I like the more traditional version of the Tzimisce Clan - Dracula, the honorable yet horrible nobles, the revenant family servants, being ultra-traditional, etc.

You should read the Necroscope books. The wamphyri are the inspiration for the tzimisces and are generally the superior product.

Generally, I like V5 for the following reasons:

1. There's no reason to buy a new edition without changes: I held off on buying V20 because until the very last supplement, there wasn't really any changes to the setting. It was just an Anniversary edition that collected all the information from previous editions without the metaplot. As a guy who had all those books, I didn't really need any of it. Without a metaplot or setting updates, there's just nothing for long term fans.

2. It updates the setting to 2018: The original World of Darkness lasted a few years after the devastating attacks but culture has actually changed as a whole. The rise of the surveillance state, acknowledgement of looter capitalism, conspiracy theories being discredited while real abuses of power happen in the open, and so on all mean that it's very different from 1992. Even the cellphone camera needs acknowledgement for the setting to make sense.

3. The Anarchs finally get treated seriously: In a setting based on the Old vs. Young, Order vs. Freedom, and the Rich vs. Poor, it's amazing how much the Anarchs were shit on. I think literally the only time they ever got any respect in the history of the setting was early Chicago by Night and Bloodlines. Making them a full scale insurrection against the Camarilla that took out Berlin and Las Vegas is a good idea.

4. The Camarilla gets updated into being the Illuminati instead of Vampire United States: I like the new feel for the Camarilla where only the Elite 1% of the 1% are allowed in. It makes them feel more aloof from humanity and helps encourage the plucky rebels against the ManTM. It feels more topical that there's classicism in the vampire world. Toreador and Ventrue elders don't want to associate with dirty Brujah or Caitiff.

5. It acknowledges its global fanbase: The biggest thing I liked about the otherwise shitty Camarilla and Anarch books (I'll be honest, V5 had its rough spots) is the fact that they remember V:TM's fanbase is arguably much-much larger globally than it is in the United States. Its still huge in Germany, Russia, South America, Italy, and other places whereas it kind of died here. These books nicely talk about a globalized interconnected vampire world. The Ashirra, for instance, are no longer the ridiculous cariactures they are. They've also just flat out retconned the Kuei Jinn out of existence and have Tokyo as a Camarilla city.

6. The Chicago update: Chicago by Night 1st Edition is my all time favorite campaign supplement and introduced me into "real" roleplaying. It's a book which has special meaning to me with its deep storytelling, fully realized 3-dimensional characters, diverse cast, and fascinating melodrama. Releasing V5 Chicago by Night had me in full Leonardo Dicaprio meme mode about V5.



7. The grittier, darker feel: I think it's generally accepted that the majority of tabletop games are played by 30+ year olds now the same way that video games are often marketed to them. As such, I feel like V5 has a general sense that it's no longer marketing to middle class white teens the way it did in the 90s. Sex, violence, economic inequality, racism, and so on were always there but they seem more pertinent to the characters as well as tales in V5. They're going street level and I prefer that to ANTEDILUVIANS ATTACK! The characters are designed to be Neonates, the opponents include mortals, and the power level is much darker. We're less Silver Age Superman now and more Netflix's Daredevil.

8. The multi-media campaign: V5 would have my gratitude for the fact it's doing Bloodlines 2 alone as that's one of my all-time favorite games despite its jankiness. However, it's also made a lot of effort to expand into board games, card games, visual novels (Coteries of New York is a guilty pleasure), plus Twitch streams that are quite good like LA BY NIGHT and SEATTLE BY NIGHT. I really think this is a wise stragedy with V5 allowing a common campaign setting as well as rules.

9. The willingness to course correct: The Chicago by Night and Fall of London books both contain a lot of retcons and clarifications that are designed around mitigating the mistakes of the past. They also addressed the issue of the Chechnya disaster and fired an employee who made a very successful game for them the moment allegations against him came out.

10. They told Nazi fans to fuck off: Much like JRR Tolkien did to the original Nazis.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/13/17565898/vampire-the-masquerade-white-wolf-neo-nazi-accusations

“White Wolf is a very diverse team,” Carl said in response to a question in Twitch chat, “and we feel that we are a global company and that we have a global community and that everybody is welcome in that community.

“Unless you are a Nazi,” Carl continued, “or a neo-Nazi, or a member of any other hate group that uses these disgusting philosophies to advance your hateful agendas. If you are a member of one of those groups or support those agendas we don’t want you in our community. You aren’t welcome, and if we find you spreading your hate in our community you will be shown the door. We don’t want your money. You can keep it.”

+10 Experience Points to you, Jason.

I don't understand why WoD threads get so fucking *weird*.

It's not difficult. Pick the edition you like. Change the canon/ignore it/embrace it (tee hee) to the degree that you find gives you the most fun - start throwing dice-pools. BUENO!

My mind keeps drifting towards going FASERIP with WoD...