TheRPGSite

Pen & Paper Roleplaying Central => Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion => Topic started by: Mordred Pendragon on May 12, 2020, 03:51:19 PM

Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 12, 2020, 03:51:19 PM
Title says it all. The RPG Site's often seen as the polar opposite of RPG.net and Big Purple has typically been pro-White Wolf and later pro-Onyx Path after WW committed the sin of thought crime

Who on this forum has the strangest relationship with White Wolf and the World of Darkness?

Not all of the people listed in the poll have animosity with the company and its settings, mind you. After all, CT Phipps is a fierce White Wolf loyalist while I've got a weird love-hate thing going on.

Pundit hates White Wolf, but he's always been an old-school D&D/OSR guy.

For those who are wondering, this poll is meant as a joke
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: trechriron on May 12, 2020, 04:16:29 PM
I feel like all the aforementioned should group up and build the ultimate WoD clone that pushes all the buttons you want pushed and eschews all the crap you hate.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 12, 2020, 04:17:24 PM
Being one of the choices in this poll gave me a good laugh. Definitely made my day.

My animosity with the original White Wolf came from the toxic behavior of much of its staff. Who proved honestly to me that they did not deserve my financial support. It became plain to me that staff I had trouble with were some of the most entitled, snotty, and hypocritical people I have ever dealt with.

My favorite White Wolf game was Mage: The Ascension. Specifically the 2nd Edition. I had some real fun with that game.

But when it came down to brass tacks? I sold off the majority of my White Wolf products to buy D20 products. And I have no regrets about that. The community surrounding D20 I found far friendlier. And so were the authors.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 12, 2020, 04:29:44 PM
Quote from: trechriron;1129694
I feel like all the aforementioned should group up and build the ultimate WoD clone that pushes all the buttons you want pushed and eschews all the crap you hate.

Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jeff37923 on May 12, 2020, 04:30:17 PM
I fuckin' hate WoD. The game and metaplot are shit and the nutbag fringe fanbase permanently turned me off from it. The LARP crowd was and is also hated. White Wolf did a pretty effective job of destroying their own IP though, and I appreciate them for that.

I don't want to OSR WoD, let the fuckin' thing stay dead. Don't look for me to help resurrect it.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 12, 2020, 05:22:00 PM
And honestly? I'm still laughing about the fact that the pro wrestler now owns the trademark to Gangrel. Because when White Wolf went under the first time, there was nothing done to retain the trademarks.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 12, 2020, 05:26:36 PM
Also, seeing a bunch of that White Wolf staff decry FATAL on RPG.net, when they produced Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Which was every bit as bad as FATAL was. It did nothing but reinforce my negative views of that company and the people who worked for it.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 12, 2020, 05:29:35 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129710
And honestly? I'm still laughing about the fact that the pro wrestler now owns the trademark to Gangrel. Because when White Wolf went under the first time, there was nothing done to retain the trademarks.

Awesome

I still think someone needs to do a Mayberry By Night and submit it to The Storyteller's Vault

Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 12, 2020, 05:34:51 PM
That just gave me a huge horrid and hysterically funny idea!

Gomer Pyle: Vampire Hunter.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Brad on May 12, 2020, 05:40:43 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129710
And honestly? I'm still laughing about the fact that the pro wrestler now owns the trademark to Gangrel. Because when White Wolf went under the first time, there was nothing done to retain the trademarks.


The Brood was actually one of the better stables in the late 90s WWF; I never really thought about the White Wolf connection until I found out years later he had licensed it from them. Gangrel was a pretty good worker, wasn't my favorite or anything, but he had decent matches. So at least something worthwhile came out of WW's demise.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 12, 2020, 05:45:45 PM
Quote from: Brad;1129714
The Brood was actually one of the better stables in the late 90s WWF; I never really thought about the White Wolf connection until I found out years later he had licensed it from them. Gangrel was a pretty good worker, wasn't my favorite or anything, but he had decent matches. So at least something worthwhile came out of WW's demise.

He has a wrestlling school with the name in Florida. So he's still making money from the name. Which is great for him.  I've got nothing but a positive impression of the guy. Hard worker to this very day.

Plus. He trained under Stu Hart and was a member of Stampede Wrestling. Which makes him absolutely legit to me.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Orphan81 on May 12, 2020, 05:50:20 PM
I voted for Phipps because at this point it seems he has Stockholm syndrome when it comes to Whitewolf and Onyx Path. I think he's been held hostage by 5th edition since it's been released and now has come to worship it as his new God.

As for me, I'll take my own absence from the Poll as proof I have the healthiest relationship with Whitewolf on the Forum. I love the WoD, but can recognize it's many faults, missteps and mistakes.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 12, 2020, 06:43:18 PM
Quote from: Orphan81;1129718
I voted for Phipps because at this point it seems he has Stockholm syndrome when it comes to Whitewolf and Onyx Path. I think he's been held hostage by 5th edition since it's been released and now has come to worship it as his new God.


Honestly, I think you may be onto something.

CT Phipps is like the bizarro version of BoxCrayonTales

But who would be the bizarro version of me?

Of course, I voted for myself on the poll. Not sure if I have the most unhealthy relationship with White Wolf, but I'm probably the most mentally unwell regular on this forum.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Orphan81 on May 12, 2020, 06:56:06 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1129740
Honestly, I think you may be onto something.

CT Phipps is like the bizarro version of BoxCrayonTales

You should see him on the Official Onyx Path Forums. It's like White Wolf is David Koresh and he's a Branch Davidian.... I kid I kid.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1129740
But who would be the bizarro version of me?

Probably me, because I'm also a Weeb but happen to like both Goth and Punk and things like The Crow unironically.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 12, 2020, 07:06:50 PM
Quote from: Orphan81;1129750
You should see him on the Official Onyx Path Forums. It's like White Wolf is David Koresh and he's a Branch Davidian.... I kid I kid.



Probably me, because I'm also a Weeb but happen to like both Goth and Punk and things like The Crow unironically.

I've seen him on the Onyx Path Forums back when I lingered there.

You and me need to have an Epic Rap Battle one of these days.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 12, 2020, 07:09:06 PM
The correct answer on multiple choice is always "All of the Above" so I'm going to go with that.

I'm actually having a reasonable amount of fun with a back-to-basic VtM20 game.

It ignores the meta-plot and the intrusion of the other game lines;

- The Lupines are not Gaia-worshipping eco-nuts, they're men suffering under the divine curse laid upon their ancestor Lycaon for hubris, filicide and cannibalism and spread via infectious bite. Basically, maintaining the theme of becoming a monster and fighting to maintain your humanity (the Lupines by and large failing in that... becoming near mindless beasts once night falls) as a divine curse instead of making you into a furry Captain Planet.

- There is no magic save that of True Faith, Alchemy/Herbalism (i.e. using the natural properties of God's creations), Blood (twisting the power of the Divine curse), Necromancy (calling on ghosts) or Infernalism (calling upon demons). Other than perhaps Divine intervention, there is no escape from the curse that has been laid upon you.

There's no impending Gehenna in this campaign; the conflict is between the Elders (the most powerful of which are just above PC level at 7th Generation) and the younger vampires (i.e. PCs) with savage Lupines in the wilds and Sabbat packs roaming in the Barrens making just trying to flee the Elders an even more dangerous proposition than trying to overthrow them (or work your way into their favor... its a sandbox with no plot beyond the relationship charts and goals of the major NPCs... so whichever way the PCs go will result in something interesting happening).
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Shrieking Banshee on May 12, 2020, 07:13:32 PM
Get over yourself sammy. Seriously.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Thornhammer on May 12, 2020, 07:59:24 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129717
He has a wrestlling school with the name in Florida. So he's still making money from the name. Which is great for him.  I've got nothing but a positive impression of the guy. Hard worker to this very day.

That so?  Cool, good for him.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: tenbones on May 12, 2020, 08:03:56 PM
Quote from: trechriron;1129694
I feel like all the aforementioned should group up and build the ultimate WoD clone that pushes all the buttons you want pushed and eschews all the crap you hate.


Yep. I want to see this.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Brad on May 12, 2020, 08:05:09 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129717
He has a wrestlling school with the name in Florida. So he's still making money from the name. Which is great for him.  I've got nothing but a positive impression of the guy. Hard worker to this very day.

Plus. He trained under Stu Hart and was a member of Stampede Wrestling. Which makes him absolutely legit to me.

Oddly enough, I watched an interview with him last year about his school; seems like a nice dude. And of course anyone who trained in the Dungeon is legit. RIP Owen...
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: tenbones on May 12, 2020, 08:07:32 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1129740
Honestly, I think you may be onto something.

But who would be the bizarro version of me?

When it comes to WoD, Sammy-boy, you are more certainly, positively, without question in a class, four-leagues beyond any other! LOL. You need to do you Disco Mayberry By Night! DO IT!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 12, 2020, 08:15:38 PM
Quote from: Brad;1129762
Oddly enough, I watched an interview with him last year about his school; seems like a nice dude. And of course anyone who trained in the Dungeon is legit. RIP Owen...


I have always been and always will be a huge Hart Foundation fan. The Hart family is one of the best things to ever happen to Professional Wrestling. Hands down.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Orphan81 on May 12, 2020, 08:16:57 PM
In the way I presented Vampires in my own homebrew Off-brand WoD setting, they were very family orientated to make them different from The white wolf version.

Being embraced brought you into a new family, the supernatural blood tie gave you a loyalty to those who also shared your blood.

Vampires had 4 stages of Life and how it allowed them to create other Vampires. Starting off as a fledgling, a recent embrace, you were unable to truly create other Vampires... except for the potential of feral, blood crazed, zombie like creatures made by accident.

When a Vampire eventually achieved "Adult Status" they would become known as a "Lord" or "Lady"... and would be able to sire one other Vampire as a sort of mate, child, or sibling to themselves. They shared part of their soul with this Vampire and were unable to create any others until they grew older and greater in power, or until their created one died.

Eventually, A Vampire would become a "Master". Master Vampires had no limit on the broods they could create, but were old enough and wise enough, surviving to that age and power.. not to over do it. Still, the Master would stand as a grand Patriarch or Matriarch of a family line.

Ancients were Vampires that evolved into something else entirely... As Vampires carried an embodiment of Death within them, they became Psychopomps that fed on the very essence of Death itself. They would cross over into the Underworld, and feed on restless spirits, becoming gods of death there.

There were clans of a sort, known as "Bloodlines" which were basically founded by very powerful Masters, most of which had passed on to become Ancients. Names like Dracula, Carmilla, Orlov, and the like... Anything a GM would want to invent and use that could give a particular bonus to certain powers, along with a certain inherited family flaw of sorts too. The potential being for GMs able to invent whatever families they wanted for their particular setting.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 12, 2020, 08:20:46 PM
Night's Edge for Cyberpunk 2020 had an implementation of vampires I really liked. And I still own that supplement.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 12, 2020, 08:44:17 PM
Quote from: Orphan81;1129767
In the way I presented Vampires in my own homebrew Off-brand WoD setting, they were very family orientated to make them different from The white wolf version.

Being embraced brought you into a new family, the supernatural blood tie gave you a loyalty to those who also shared your blood.

Vampires had 4 stages of Life and how it allowed them to create other Vampires. Starting off as a fledgling, a recent embrace, you were unable to truly create other Vampires... except for the potential of feral, blood crazed, zombie like creatures made by accident.

When a Vampire eventually achieved "Adult Status" they would become known as a "Lord" or "Lady"... and would be able to sire one other Vampire as a sort of mate, child, or sibling to themselves. They shared part of their soul with this Vampire and were unable to create any others until they grew older and greater in power, or until their created one died.

Eventually, A Vampire would become a "Master". Master Vampires had no limit on the broods they could create, but were old enough and wise enough, surviving to that age and power.. not to over do it. Still, the Master would stand as a grand Patriarch or Matriarch of a family line.

Ancients were Vampires that evolved into something else entirely... As Vampires carried an embodiment of Death within them, they became Psychopomps that fed on the very essence of Death itself. They would cross over into the Underworld, and feed on restless spirits, becoming gods of death there.

There were clans of a sort, known as "Bloodlines" which were basically founded by very powerful Masters, most of which had passed on to become Ancients. Names like Dracula, Carmilla, Orlov, and the like... Anything a GM would want to invent and use that could give a particular bonus to certain powers, along with a certain inherited family flaw of sorts too. The potential being for GMs able to invent whatever families they wanted for their particular setting.


That's some great stuff!  Especially the part about the Ancients.

You should take a look at the OSR for WOD thread, if you haven't already.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 12, 2020, 08:45:30 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1129753
There's no impending Gehenna in this campaign; the conflict is between the Elders (the most powerful of which are just above PC level at 7th Generation) and the younger vampires (i.e. PCs) with savage Lupines in the wilds and Sabbat packs roaming in the Barrens making just trying to flee the Elders an even more dangerous proposition than trying to overthrow them (or work your way into their favor... its a sandbox with no plot beyond the relationship charts and goals of the major NPCs... so whichever way the PCs go will result in something interesting happening).

Great concept... a horror sandbox game!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 12, 2020, 08:46:09 PM
Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1129756
Get over yourself sammy. Seriously.

Dude, if you can't laugh at yourself, then why laugh at all?

This thread is self-deprecating humor at its core.

Sometimes, it's good to joke about yourself in these scary uncertain times. Helps me calm down.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 12, 2020, 11:31:59 PM
Quote from: Aglondir;1129772
Great concept... a horror sandbox game!

Thanks. I pretty much learned the technique over a decade of running Mage.

While I started out in college with the idea of a story arc that would last a semester of weekly sessions, my group quickly grew to around 15 players, so by default it ended up as a sort of pseudo LARP where the mages would interact with each other (because they rarely had the same goals) and any particular player or group of them would come up to see me when they needed to interact with a particular NPC or otherwise resolve something.

Anyway, when I graduated, I started up a new campaign at a local game shop, but rather than just try to invent a whole slew of fresh NPCs, I instead turned all of the PCs from the closing of my college game, complete with all their interests, allies, enemies and unrealized goals. And when that campaign ended, those PCs were layered onto the surviving NPCs.

When I finally got a more stable group together (typically 1-2 joined and 1-2 fell away every year), every couple years we'd decide this batch of characters would be retired and new ones started and one of the hallmarks for the players was when their new PCs actions would bring them across the path of their old PC.

At a certain point, I think around the point my group stablized, I realized that it was just easier to NOT plan any overarching plots, just keep track of all these very nuanced NPCs (because they'd once been a single player's sole focus) and what they wanted and the players just being a potential resource or hindrance based on their own abilities and goals would write the plot for me.

So these days, whenever I start a new campaign, I put way more focus into creating NPCs and their goals than I do on any overarching plot, because the moment a PC crosses paths with one of those goals a plot will develop just by deciding how the NPC will react to its goals being furthered or hindered.

I decided on Vampire and a brand new city this time just for a change of pace and because this set of players both just really didn't grok Mage's core themes and magic system (so the objective reality and "spell list" nature of Disciplines fit their playstyle) and their general preference for darker themes (I run Mage in a style I call 'The Dark Fantastic'; the world is dark and dangerous, but also filled with wonders and you can 'earn your happy ending.').

It's been a fun exercise for my creative muscles and my desire to keep thematic purity and nip certain things in the bud* led to some creative solutions of their own.

* a couple of my relatives who are likely to join the campaign at some point just adore the werewolf cosmology and playing obscure splats (often overpowered relative to the main PC type) respectively would undoubtedly spend a lot of time trying to convince me to let them play a Garou and Kuei-Jin respectively.

By making this campaign's wolves into cursed bloodthirsty monsters (built like vampires; they gain power by feeding and their shape-shifting is entirely the result of a modified Protean discipline they're required to take at least one dot in) and the Kuei-Jin into just another vampire clan, my hope is to either persuade them to not bother with trying to change my mind and roll up something appropriate... or if they're really insistent and I just don't want to expend the effort (saying no to family is harder than for random players) I can give them versions that aren't going to clash with the campaigns themes or level of power.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Ghostmaker on May 13, 2020, 08:22:01 AM
All this shit talking about White Wolf and nobody brings up the Street Fighter RPG?
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Orphan81 on May 13, 2020, 08:30:27 AM
Quote from: Ghostmaker;1129813
All this shit talking about White Wolf and nobody brings up the Street Fighter RPG?

I never got to play or own Street Fighter the RPG, which is sad because I hear so many good things about it. But I do know it was the basis for "COMBAT: The Big Book of Beating Ass" which was one of the best 2nd edition supplements ever created for WoD.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Kyle Aaron on May 13, 2020, 08:37:05 AM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129711
Also, seeing a bunch of that White Wolf staff decry FATAL on RPG.net, when they produced Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Which was every bit as bad as FATAL was.
I dunno, I found their Shoah (https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Charnel_Houses_of_Europe:_The_Shoah) to be in pretty bad taste. A fundamentally depressing topic, too - but then, that's most of the WoD settings, they're either depressing or just fucking weird - or both.

Mage always seemed to me to be... well, basically the Matrix. "Paradox" = "attention of the Agents", same shit really.

Overall all rather too thespy for me. "I exist by drinking the blood of the living, but like, you know, I feel bad about it and stuff." And then there was that session with the Israeli vampires... oy.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: NeonAce on May 13, 2020, 08:42:48 AM
Quote from: Ghostmaker;1129813
All this shit talking about White Wolf and nobody brings up the Street Fighter RPG?


Street Fighter was colorful, fun, and miraculously the best game White Wolf ever made. This was terribly embarrassing and uncool, and probably wouldn't get you laid as much as leather pants in a pulsing nightclub. They've tried to forget about it ever since. :)

In fact, the other day I came up with the cover for the supplement they should have made, but never did:

 [ATTACH=CONFIG]4467[/ATTACH]
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Brad on May 13, 2020, 10:22:26 AM
Quote from: NeonAce;1129822
Street Fighter was colorful, fun, and miraculously the best game White Wolf ever made. This was terribly embarrassing and uncool, and probably wouldn't get you laid as much as leather pants in a pulsing nightclub. They've tried to forget about it ever since. :)

In fact, the other day I came up with the cover for the supplement they should have made, but never did:

 [ATTACH=CONFIG]4467[/ATTACH]

Would buy
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 13, 2020, 02:58:44 PM
Quote from: Ghostmaker;1129813
All this shit talking about White Wolf and nobody brings up the Street Fighter RPG?


I own it. And all of the sourcebooks for it. It was the only White Wolf RPG I kept. Because I pretty much love that game;.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: DocJones on May 13, 2020, 03:20:15 PM
I have the healthiest relationship with White Wolf... none at all.
I heard they came up with a novel game called Hunter in which you hunted down vampires, werewolves, ghouls, mummies, and other evil critters.. but I already owned D&D.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2020, 03:27:39 PM
I'm surprised to be on the list, considering that I don't have any relationship with White Wolf.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 13, 2020, 04:15:05 PM
Quote from: NeonAce;1129822
Street Fighter was colorful, fun, and miraculously the best game White Wolf ever made. This was terribly embarrassing and uncool, and probably wouldn't get you laid as much as leather pants in a pulsing nightclub. They've tried to forget about it ever since. :)

In fact, the other day I came up with the cover for the supplement they should have made, but never did:

 [ATTACH=CONFIG]4467[/ATTACH]

I can definitely get behind this.

Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game is White Wolf's true masterpiece
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 13, 2020, 04:16:32 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1129859
I'm surprised to be on the list, considering that I don't have any relationship with White Wolf.

Yeah, but you do have a pretty fierce hate-boner for them. Sort of like the antithesis of CT Phipps.

Besides, the poll is very tongue-in-cheek
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jeff37923 on May 13, 2020, 04:44:52 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129769
Night's Edge for Cyberpunk 2020 had an implementation of vampires I really liked. And I still own that supplement.


Night's Edge for Cyberpunk 2020 was great and worked very well because it didn't cater to emo goths turned up to 11.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2020, 05:32:06 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1129869
Yeah, but you do have a pretty fierce hate-boner for them. Sort of like the antithesis of CT Phipps.

Besides, the poll is very tongue-in-cheek

I wouldn't say that I hate WW. I like the basic premise behind World of Darkness, but not WW's specific implementation of rules and setting. That doesn't make me much different from Steve Brown (creator of The Everlasting) or C.J. Carella (creator of WitchCraft).
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 13, 2020, 07:09:55 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1129875
I wouldn't say that I hate WW. I like the basic premise behind World of Darkness, but not WW's specific implementation of rules and setting. That doesn't make me much different from Steve Brown (creator of The Everlasting) or C.J. Carella (creator of WitchCraft).

Understandable, to be completely honest.

Like I said, the poll is meant as a joke mostly.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: PencilBoy99 on May 13, 2020, 07:34:23 PM
I really like all the new Chronicles of Darkness products, and I've had a ton of fun running V20 and Vampire LARPS.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2020, 07:43:42 PM
Quote from: PencilBoy99;1129897
I really like all the new Chronicles of Darkness products, and I've had a ton of fun running V20 and Vampire LARPS.


Good for you. Unfortunately, I can't get into any of it. If I was really hardpressed to explain what my problem was, then I would probably have to say that I like the genuinely modular nature of Vigil and Lost plus the more expansive powers in V5, but I'm frustrated that all the games aren't like that.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: VisionStorm on May 13, 2020, 09:37:04 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1129875
I wouldn't say that I hate WW.


You do a poor job showing that by always jumping into any thread anyone mentions WW/WoD/VtM, et al, to mention how much you hate those products. :p
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: remial on May 13, 2020, 10:01:19 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129710
And honestly? I'm still laughing about the fact that the pro wrestler now owns the trademark to Gangrel. Because when White Wolf went under the first time, there was nothing done to retain the trademarks.

I wish I'd grabbed the figure of him, back when I saw him, but stupid me, I listened to my friends who said that would be a stupid thing to do.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2020, 10:02:04 PM
You know who I hate? Mokey Fraggle. That stuck up bitch must die.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: remial on May 13, 2020, 10:07:48 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129856
I own it. And all of the sourcebooks for it. It was the only White Wolf RPG I kept. Because I pretty much love that game;.

yup, I too have the whole like of the game. including Combat. I did a conversion of Street Fighter to Combat once, for all the super powers and such, but lost it in a computer crash many moons ago.

had a friend offer me $200 cash for the complete line back at a time I really needed money. I'd sold a bunch of other books, but I turned him down on that.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: mAcular Chaotic on May 14, 2020, 05:06:33 AM
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 14, 2020, 05:29:06 AM
I am EASILY the sickest.

Because it's my job.

I'll explain.

:)

Basically, I got into White Wolf when I was about 13 years old and pretty much have played it semi-consistently since then. I played Vampire: The Masquerade first then moved onto Changeling: The Dreaming and Mage until about 2004 when the Old World of Darkness ended. I dropped it for a few years afterward to do Mutants and Masterminds and played it along with Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game for West End Game rules until they lost the license. From there, I got into quote-unquote "real life" to finish my masters.

I was interested in V20 but not REALLY interested. I tried to get into Vampire: The Requiem but the two had the problem of no metaplot. As stupid and weird as the Old World of Darkness sometimes was, it was a beautiful and stupid weirdness that I'd grown up with. The characters were old friends of mine and the idea of them returning with Beckett's Jyhad Diary was what REALLY brought me back to the WOD.

It's funny because I'm fairly critical of V5 in a lot of places and I have a bunch of house rules and corrections for it. I didn't have NEARLY the reaction a lot of people seemed to have to it, though, so I seemed like a huge defender of it. That was when they mentioned they were doing a 5th Edition of Chicago by Night.

Chicago by Night was my nostalgia heroin. I knew all of the characters intimately and back and forth. Annabelle, Anita Wainwright, Gengis, and so many others. I actually annoyed the SHIT out of the developers with my questions and fanboy antics. However, its existence got me back into things and I jumped headfirst into it.

I should note that I have a reason to be UTTERLY OBSESSED with White Wolf because it technically qualifies as research material. I write urban fantasy novels for a living and while my superhero novels are my best sellers, I've got 5 interconnected urban fantasy novels about vampires, mages, and shifters. I can write them off as a business expense along with Anne Rice, Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, and Kim Harrison.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Abraxus on May 14, 2020, 07:59:12 AM
Quote from: PencilBoy99;1129897
I really like all the new Chronicles of Darkness products, and I've had a ton of fun running V20 and Vampire LARPS.

Your not the only one. Not much of a Larper yet prefer cOD because of the modular nature of the rules and more importantly the lack of metaplot. Not a fan of it.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1129911
You do a poor job showing that by always jumping into any thread anyone mentions WW/WoD/VtM, et al, to mention how much you hate those products. :p

Agreed and seconded.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1129931
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs

Nothing at all really. It's not my rpg system of choice yet much worse rpgs out on the market. The company stupidly painted themselves into the corner with the overreaching end of times metaplot so it needed to be scrapped imo. After awhile what was the pointing of playing since no matter whatever OWOD rpg one played nothing stops the end of the world. Sure one can play without yet toward the end the damn metaplot permeated everything White Wolf. As much as I sometimes like playing the underdog I and many in gaming circle will admit we don't like continually playing the underdog. It's the same reason why many Palladium fans love Rifts yet hate Chaos Earth because once again same metaplot and nothing one does in character stops the coming of the Rifts.

It's too bad Kevin had to change the original premise of Chaos Earth to fit his damn "vision" as the original concept was Rifts yet a much more limited Nuclear attack. The world comes close to ending yet their is a good chance to turn back the darkness vs "your screwed no matter what" from PB Chaos Earth.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: remial on May 14, 2020, 03:57:52 PM
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1129931
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs

the games aren't the problem, the problem is the most vocal of the fans. the old line was that white wolf games draw broken people, like all you can eat buffets draw fat people.  the other problem is that the authors and the PTB at white wolf, and now Onyx Path, take what the vocal ones are shouting, and run with it.  They think echo chambers like big purple speak for the entire fan base.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2020, 05:23:56 PM
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1129931
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs


WW holds a virtual monopoly over the urban fantasy tabletop market. There aren't any other urban fantasy games that compete or have communities where you can play and discuss the game. (Shadowrun is post-apocalyptic cyberpunk urban fantasy, which is too specific despite its popularity.)

I have creative disagreements with the way WW games are designed in terms of rules and setting. There are no alternatives. Hence, my continuing frustration and suggestion of creating a game to address my complaints.

I have so many complaints, but here are a few important ones:
Any questions?
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 14, 2020, 06:24:33 PM
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Snowman0147 on May 15, 2020, 12:54:33 AM
How in the hell did I not make it on the list?  Doc Sammy you wounded me...

Though seriously the mechanics are shit.  The staff, freelancers are truly horrible people, Onyx Path owner might be a vile cheat that screws workers from their pay, and the fan base lost its fucking mind.  There is a lot to hate about it.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 15, 2020, 01:13:43 AM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1129995
World of Darkness is divided into many sub-games with very different rules, rather than unified rules like The Everlasting, WitchCraft, or really any other roleplaying game ever made. World of Darkness is unique in that it has dozens of different sub-systems to handle the same thing.

Unified rules are vastly overrated.

The best RPGs have systems built to reinforce their settings; ex. WEG Star Wars, D&D, Vampire. The worst are the ones where the mechanics are completely misaligned with the setting; ex. d20 Star Wars or any of the countless d20 settings where the setting fought with 3e D&Ds basic assumptions of level-based advancement, magical healing and armor as your primary defense.

Frankly, kitchen sink urban fantasy is rather rare. Far more common to the genre is a focus on a particular type of supernatural, possibly with a token teammate that is another type (the most common seeming to be a token werewolf ally in a vampire story where the werewolves are traditionally the enemies of vampires).

Also common is a "conservation of detail" origin for all the supernatural elements of the setting; ex. the shared ancestor of the vampires and lycans in Underworld, everything being a demon of some kind in the Buffyverss, Vampire Diaries/Originals vampires and werewolves both being the result of witch's spells/curses, or all the supernaturals in Lost Girl being Fae.

Each of the main WoD game lines is self-contained to focus on particular themes. The Biblical origins of vampires fits perfectly with its themes of guilt/sin and holding onto your humanity in the face of a monster within you struggle to control. The consensus reality with magic as willworking supports what I call "the dark fantastic" themes of magic being both dangerous and wondrous.

The themes of Vampire would be lost if they're not suffering God's curse, but are actually thaumivores resulting from Caine's long ago botched Awakening. The themes of Mage would be lost if the Biblical God were real and therefore every form of magic outside of Christian miracle workers and the natural magics (precursors of the natural sciences) are actually the work of infernal powers.

Neither of those play well with "lets roll massive piles of dice as we play Captain Planet furries in a doomed war against the love-children of Geiger and Lovecraft."

Allowing each to focus on its respective strengths both thematically and mechanically instead of getting lost in a bland stew of a fantasy kitchen sink is a big part of why nothing has managed to eclipse WWs settings; they're evocative in ways more universal settings can never be because they're a ready to play world with distinctive archetypes, not a toolkit filled with generic examples.

Quote
  • World of Darkness is really bad at playing together with multiple different splat types due to incoherent world building and unbalanced rules.
You call this a bug; I call it a feature.

D&D also sucks at having multiple different monster PCs in the same party. There's a reason you're typically limited to humans/near humans of approximately the sams level of ability. Try writing an adventure for a party consisting of a human fighter, a lich, a gold dragon, a balor and a medusa.

By creating the game lines as separate entities, you're limiting your pallet just as D&D limits you to humans, elves, dwarves and similar.

That said, the system is eminently hackable. For a Mage/Vampire crossover we made only direct sunlight do damage to vampires and removed the "must sleep during the day/limited daytime dice pools" entirely.

Quote
  • The metaplot is overbearing in the extreme, and there's no option to ignore it or remix it.
No, the metaplot is entirely ignorable... or I would have had to end my Mage game in 2004 when the metaplot said the world ended. Also, if it was overbearing and unable to be ignored I would have had to include the Avatar Storm in my games instead of ignoring it entirely for years until playing up the Storm's end was a useful plothook for a new campaign.

When I was ready I also managed to mix Gehenna, the Apocalypse and Armageddon into a single narrative where the PC mages managed to stop the whole thing and turn the wheel towards and upwards trajectory where, though still dark, there is now hope for a better tomorrow if you're willing to work for it.

I've been playing a post-Gehenna/Apocalypse/Armageddon setting for 13 years now with all manner of interesting developments (ironically, I'd introduced the concept of a "Spirit Technocracy" made up the disembodied masters about 5 years before the revised Void Engineer convention book introduced them. Mine though were seeking to regain control over the Technocrats on Earth once the storm died down... resulting in a permanent schism with a Technocratic faction semi-allied with the Traditions and another who'd been completely subsumed by the spirits until they were little more than drones).

So this claim is just flat out wrong.

Quote
  • Aside from a few obscure mentions in supplementary books, there isn't a plethora of campaign worlds to play with like there is in, say, D&D or Rifts.
Do there need to be? Again, taken at face value, there's the Vampire campaign world, the Werewolf campaign world, the Mage campaign world, the Wraith campaign world, Changeling, Hunter, Demon and Orpheus campaign worlds. Each presented its own supernatural type as preeminent with the others defined in relation to it.

Gaia and the Triat are not the supreme spirits of the Vampire setting... if they exist at all they're demons who once masqueraded as the pagan gods.

Calling them all a single setting is like saying Forgotten Realms, Eberron and Nentir Vale are all the same setting because all of them have humans, elves, orcs, dragons, clerics, fighters, rogues and wizards.

Quote
  • The setting is arbitrary and doesn't really let you change it up. For example, ghost PCs only exist in World of Darkness and not Chronicles of Darkness unless you homebrew it, and demon PCs are tied to Christianity or to the God-Machine rather than something more open-ended like Vigil or Lost.
Clerics being the only ones with healing magic and all arcane magic being Vancian is equally arbitrary and the system fights you if you try to change it. What's your point?

OWoD also had plenty of different types of demons... each specific to their settings.

Demons in Vampire are tied to Christianity because the whole SETTING is tied to a Christian mythos.

In Werewolf the demons are lovecraftian horrors born of the personification of entropy itelf.

In Mage they're entities from the Astral umbra, the embodiments of mankind's beliefs about demons.

In Demon they're again Christian-themes because Paradise Lost featuring Lucifer as the protagonist is perhaps the most iconic depiction of sympathetic demons in Western culture. The other biggie is Dante's Inferno which also depicts specifically Christian demons.

Quote
  • The fandom is cultish. For example, when Mage: The Ascension 3rd edition came out in 2000, lead developer Jess Henig received hundreds of death threats by email and was terrified to open his inbox for years. (The cult of fandom is part of the reason why I suggested making a new game entirely rather than trying to hack the X of Darkness rules. I specifically want to avoid attracting cultists.)
All fandoms are cultish. Or was D&D 4E embraces by one and all with open arms and no threats whatsoever made against the developers of that edition?

Mage Revised was basically the same thing as 4E D&D... a radical change from previous editions that attempted to for a "One True Way" that was meant to bring the game into line with the bleak hopelessness of the other WoD settings; cutting off the fantastic elements of the spirit world, turned Avatars into symbiotic organisms that humans merely hosted, introducing the concept that magic was dying and then adding the never before even hinted at End Times called Armageddon (so it would line up with Gehenna and Apocalypse) that they claimed had always been on the horizon.

There's a reason he wasn't asked to return to do the 20th Anniversary Edition of Mage. His changes to the setting were an absolute misread of what the customers enjoyed about it; namely that it was NOT like all the other WoD settings.

* * * *

What your main beef could be summed up as is; "it's not a toolkit."

You clearly enjoy tinkering with rules, but you seem blind to the fact that not everyone does.

Not everyone wants to build a motorcycle from scratch. They're not interested in how you could customize it to be the perfect ride for them... they just want a bike that runs  so they can take it out and enjoy the sun, fresh air and countryside.

Your complaint is that the WoD only sells fully assembled motorcycles and not boxes of parts you have to assemble yourself.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Opaopajr on May 15, 2020, 03:36:48 AM
Sailor Luchador Disco Mayberry by Night is so in right now. :cool: We should run it with Streetfighter + Changeling the Dreaming, that way we can use the Cantrip tagging system for multiplied madness. This time you will not be forgiven! In the name of love and justice, fairies will wrassle inspiration into your goth-punk banal hearts. :p
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 03:49:55 AM
Youtube: https://youtu.be/VqgNPA5KdWA

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/World-Darkness-Steve-Wieck/dp/B07J5Y2XWP/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=White+Wolf+Documentary&qid=1589528822&sr=8-1

I recommend everyone who wants a very flattering and congratulatory view of White Wolf's WOD and its effect on gaming to watch this documentary. It talks at great length about all the changes and benefits that it made to the hobby as a whole as well as many individual fans' lives.

Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Ghostmaker on May 15, 2020, 08:30:33 AM
It doesn't help that some fan-made supplements and games are more sane and coherent than 'official' splats.

Changing Breeds, for example, versus Genius: The Transgression or Princess: The Hopeful.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 08:33:41 AM
"The insanity is the point."
-Malkavian
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 15, 2020, 12:41:08 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130042
"The insanity is the point."
-Malkavian

Indeed, the Werewolf line in particular seems built around the idea of over-the-top ultra-violence to the point of parody.

I mean, over on Onyx Path's forums there's a guy arguing that wereDINOSAURS from Africa with spirit gifts taught only to an obscure sect of werewolves who never leave China and a totem spirit from Central America is perfectly reasonable and normal character for Werewolf. Their enemies are basically right out of Captain Planet (we're talking "let's pollute the planet and laugh about all the people we're making sick because that's what capitalism is... hur hur hur!" level of motives and complexity).

There's a reason I've never, outside of theory-crafting, seen actual crossover campaigns with WtA. You can pretty easily merge Vampire, Mage, Mummy, Wraith and/or Changeling into something reasonably coherent and balanced as long as the players and GM are on the same page in terms of what they want the campaign to be about (ALL WoD games benefit strongly from a session zero, but crossovers particularly).

The main outlier is Werewolf with its insistent cosmology, ridiculous 2D villains and inflated combat dice pools while at the same time being really gimped in any campaign not centered around combat. NOTE: there is nothing wrong with WtA as its own entity... but it's basically camp horror in the same vein as Army of Darkness or any of the long running horror franchises after they descend into self-parody and almost invariably result in any campaign they're featured in as PCs descending into campy schlock too.

It's why I've deliberately replaced Garou with Lycans (the cursed descendants of the mythical Lycaon) in my Vampire campaign (and to be fair, Awakened magic doesn't exist either because the focus of this world in on Vampires... I've got a whole other setting for my Mage games where vampires are just another type of thaumivore and werewolves are embodied nature spirits from the middle umbra where Awakened magic reigns supreme).
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 15, 2020, 01:34:15 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130027
What your main beef could be summed up as is; "it's not a toolkit."

You clearly enjoy tinkering with rules, but you seem blind to the fact that not everyone does.

Not everyone wants to build a motorcycle from scratch. They're not interested in how you could customize it to be the perfect ride for them... they just want a bike that runs  so they can take it out and enjoy the sun, fresh air and countryside.

Your complaint is that the WoD only sells fully assembled motorcycles and not boxes of parts you have to assemble yourself.

I do like having pre-made campaign settings. I just don't like the particular arrangements written by White Wolf, with perhaps the exception of Hunter: The Vigil and Changeling: The Lost. I'm disappointed that none of the other games are as interesting.

Also, I've seen WoD fans say they like the games for opposite reasons to what you're saying. For example, I've heard lots of vampire fans claim to ignore/despise the Christian lore.

Anyway, my proposed urban fantasy game is a multiverse. That would allow me to produce a variety of settings exploring particular concepts. For example, the monster mash world has vampires, werewolves, wizards, ghosts, fairies and whatever all rubbing shoulders and interacting in a hidden magical underworld. I'm going to write a bazillion books of lore in order to get potential players invested.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 01:54:02 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130062
I do like having pre-made campaign settings. I just don't like the particular arrangements written by White Wolf, with perhaps the exception of Hunter: The Vigil and Changeling: The Lost. I'm disappointed that none of the other games are as interesting.

Also, I've seen WoD fans say they like the games for opposite reasons to what you're saying. For example, I've heard lots of vampire fans claim to ignore/despise the Christian lore.

Anyway, my proposed urban fantasy game is a multiverse. That would allow me to produce a variety of settings exploring particular concepts. For example, the monster mash world has vampires, werewolves, wizards, ghosts, fairies and whatever all rubbing shoulders and interacting in a hidden magical underworld. I'm going to write a bazillion books of lore in order to get potential players invested.

There's a definite divide on the fact that vampire is built around Judeo-Christian lore being objectively true. Personally, I love it but I think that's something that there's no right answer to as I think the game would be far weaker without it. I also think it's linked to one of the issues that is now being shown with the fact the Sabbat have been all but ignored in 5E. A vocal minority play the game to be monsters, inhuman, and evil.

The fact that they're being denied this and forced to play Louis-esque people with ties to humanity [via Touchstones] REALLY ticks them off.

I feel like the dislike of Christian lore ties into the fact the guilt themes and Fall from Grace element ticks them off.

I do note that this is why it's good there's variety because I've met people who LOVE the God-Machine and others who think there's nothing remotely interesting about playing a "fake" Angel. One of the weirdest complaints I ever had was a guy who thought that Demon: The Fallen shouldn't have canonized Judeo-Christianity as the basis for them.

I'm like, "That's the game, dude."
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Warder on May 15, 2020, 02:03:43 PM
For most unhealthy relashionship i would vote Joshua Gabriel Timbrook. From what i have heard(and keep in mind this is all hearsay from long ago i have no facts whatsoever to back it) he produced a metric ton of artwork for white wolf and suddently there was a disagreement. He left them with a picture of a vagoo they had to publish cause there was a dealine or somesuch and he no longer works with them. Anyhow thats how i heard it, may be complete gobledygook.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 15, 2020, 04:43:40 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130065
There's a definite divide on the fact that vampire is built around Judeo-Christian lore being objectively true. Personally, I love it but I think that's something that there's no right answer to as I think the game would be far weaker without it ... I feel like the dislike of Christian lore ties into the fact the guilt themes and Fall from Grace element ticks them off.

A lot of people who hate Christianity really underestimate the degree to which it undergirds the very Western civilization that allows them to openly hate Christianity. They've lived within the framework of a Christian civilization for so long they honestly believe that what the West regards as basic human rights would have developed without the moral framework of Christian thought.

This despite the fact that the lot of men throughout history was enslavement of the weak by the strong, restrictions on travel and economic opportunities, summary execution for dissidents and those too weak to be of use to the elites, and genocide of conquered peoples as standard policy.

We've also seen all of those start to return in societies that have abandoned Christian principles.

Without the Christian overtones of sin, guilt, unlife as a curse and the struggle to retain humanity, Vampire is just a power fantasy... a Superman (or more accurately Nietzsche's Ubermensch) with fangs. You may as well go play Mutants & Masterminds if that's what you're looking for in a game.

A related thing that ticks me off in that regard is that in games where Christianity is NOT the expectation (ex. most D&D campaigns) the Christian is expected to accept that as part of the fantasy setting's lore... but God forbid (pardon the pun) that someone who dislikes Christianity be forced to accept it as a part of a fantasy setting's lore.

Particularly when Christianity was so overtly a part of the very novel that started the whole Vampire craze in the first place. One of the details I loved in the novel was the genuine discomfort of Mr. Harker (a proper Protestant) of being told that only the symbols and blessed objects of the Catholic Church would have any power to thwart Dracula.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 04:55:55 PM
It's fascinating too that so many have issues with it from a hostile perspective because vampires are The DamnedTM anyway and one of the player options are a sect that revels in it.

Oh well, I guess some people just don't want religion in their entertainment.

But I think it adds to the "authenticity" of the game in a way that, say, making all the vampires descendants of Tiamat and Marduk or virus based creatures wouldn't.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Abraxus on May 15, 2020, 05:14:01 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130065
I do note that this is why it's good there's variety because I've met people who LOVE the God-Machine and others who think there's nothing remotely interesting about playing a "fake" Angel. One of the weirdest complaints I ever had was a guy who thought that Demon: The Fallen shouldn't have canonized Judeo-Christianity as the basis for them.

I'm like, "That's the game, dude."

Just as bad as a player who wanted to get into generic rpgs like Hero System or Gurps ( can't remember which ) and then complained that it was too generic. What part of generic and toolkit does one not understand.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 15, 2020, 05:30:48 PM
Objecting to Vampire being Christian (or more accurately Abrahamic) is silly. All sorts of role playing games assume that some sort of cosmology is true and its very seldom Christianity, but you seldom see complaints about any variety of other religions being true or not in RPG's. I'm an atheist and Vampire's cosmology never bothered me. Though personally I always interpreted Noddism as being more mysterious than established fact. I also always viewed the spirit WoD gaminess as being in distinct universes instead of a single unified setting.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 06:34:53 PM
One thing that White Wolf has done that is very smart is that it's taken advantage of Twitch and social media to be able to savvily restore its fanbase. Let's Plays and taking advantage of things like Geek and Sundry have gotten huge fandoms back into the games.

They've also made the smart decision of getting a VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: BLOODLINES 2 in creation with a much larger fandom than most RPGs there, ready to get back into the world. The visual novel, COTERIES OF NEW YORK, sold very well and took almost no time to make. It's even got a sequel coming out later this year. I understand they're doing cellphone text games as well.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1290270/Vampire_The_Masquerade__Night_Road/

Really, if not for the existence of BLOODLINES, I don't think White Wolf would have been able to make the transition back to prominence.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 15, 2020, 07:04:30 PM
I don't have a problem with Christianity, but I prefer having options in my world building. I remember being one of those few who defended the use of Christian-derived virtues and vices in CoD1e. Looking back on it now, that's mostly because I was too lazy to replace them given the trivial nature of the personality mechanics. So what if they're Catholic? The morality mechanic itself never made sense to begin with, because in real life stealing a candy bar doesn't drive you insane.

Like, I don't mind the GMC conflict as an idea (I've briefly thought of a techgnostic campaign with virtual adepts, nosferatus, glasswalkers, and unchained) but I think calling them angels and demons was a mistake (in fact, I've never liked WW game jargon). I vastly preferred the Spanish netbook Demonio: La Redencion, which was an agnostic take on Demon: The Fallen. Each of the social splats had a different take on the fallen/nephilim's place in the universe, with some believing themselves created by God to be adversaries while others believe God is evil and must be stopped.

Anyway, I simply don't like the execution of the XoD games and I prefer having alternatives that don't need to be hacked beyond recognition to get what I want. In other media markets like prose, visual arts, and video games we have a plethora of options. In the tabletop urban fantasy, we only have XoD. Why haven't any other settings been able to compete with XoD? What makes tabletop different from every other medium?
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 08:14:37 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130108
I don't have a problem with Christianity, but I prefer having options in my world building.

This is where we definitely differ because I *HATE* multiple choice in supplements. I consider it one of the quickest ways to convince me not to buy a supplement. A supplement should tell me who, what, when, where, and how. The world should be absolutely detailed with its power players, what they've involved in, their relationships, and with the mysteries of the setting spelled out.

I know some people who HATE this but it's also why I love metaplot.

Because it gives me an easy way of advancing the timeline of my game world and seeing how players deal with changes.

So it's why I could never get into Chronicles of Darkness.

When I open the V:TR Bloodlines books, I was like, "Wait, how do all of these new bloodlines politically relate to each other?"

Developer: They don't. Some may be canon, some may not, and some might be totally different in your game! DO IT YOUR WAY!

Me: "Listen, jackass, I didn't come here for a cookbook. I came here for a meal."
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 15, 2020, 09:27:48 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130111
This is where we definitely differ because I *HATE* multiple choice in supplements. I consider it one of the quickest ways to convince me not to buy a supplement. A supplement should tell me who, what, when, where, and how. The world should be absolutely detailed with its power players, what they've involved in, their relationships, and with the mysteries of the setting spelled out.

I know some people who HATE this but it's also why I love metaplot.

Because it gives me an easy way of advancing the timeline of my game world and seeing how players deal with changes.

So it's why I could never get into Chronicles of Darkness.

When I open the V:TR Bloodlines books, I was like, "Wait, how do all of these new bloodlines politically relate to each other?"

Developer: They don't. Some may be canon, some may not, and some might be totally different in your game! DO IT YOUR WAY!

Me: "Listen, jackass, I didn't come here for a cookbook. I came here for a meal."

No offense, but the fact you both demand and need a metaplot at all just makes it look like a lack of creativity on your part.

Requiem 1E was the superior game because it had no metaplot, and it's why V1 and V20 ar are infinitely better than the pale imitation that is V5 no matter how much the punks and pretentious hipsters at White Wolf and Onyx Path have conditioned you to think otherwise.

V5 tried to emulate V1 in a shallow way by focusing on the Anarchs and being all punk and preachy, but what most people liked about V1 was the lack of metaplot.

You had a backstory in the first edition of Vampire: The Masqueadem but not a metaplot.

Just because Masquerade 1E wasn't as vague in its backstory and setting than Requiem 1E does not mean that it had a metaplot. The metaplot didn't come in until the later editions of Masquerade.

I'd say Chicago by Night 2E and the "Under A Blood Red Moon" module from 1993 were the start of the metaplot, and it got extremely egregious around the time of Revised.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 09:55:26 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130118
No offense, but the fact you both demand and need a metaplot at all just makes it look like a lack of creativity on your part.

I save my creativity for my occasionally books. :) Sometimes you don't have time to work all week on a Chronicle.

Quote
Requiem 1E was the superior game because it had no metaplot, and it's why V1 and V20 ar are infinitely better than the pale imitation that is V5 no matter how much the punks and pretentious hipsters at White Wolf and Onyx Path have conditioned you to think otherwise.

In your opinion. If you hate metaplot, having a metaplot is bad.

If you LOVE metaplot, it is a good thing.

Quote
V5 tried to emulate V1 in a shallow way by focusing on the Anarchs and being all punk and preachy, but what most people liked about V1 was the lack of metaplot.

V1 lasted a year before V2's release so people didn't really have a chance to develop a love of metaplot or not. Also, it provided CHICAGO BY NIGHT which was all about providing a complicated and dense world full of stories.

Oh ASHES TO ASHES and UNDER A BLOOD RED MOON which was the first metaplot of the setting. Which, as you say, was the beginning and I think very solid entertaining.

Quote
You had a backstory in the first edition of Vampire: The Masqueadem but not a metaplot.

Yes, but the metaplot was when it was at its most popular.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 15, 2020, 10:25:04 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130111
This is where we definitely differ because I *HATE* multiple choice in supplements. I consider it one of the quickest ways to convince me not to buy a supplement. A supplement should tell me who, what, when, where, and how. The world should be absolutely detailed with its power players, what they've involved in, their relationships, and with the mysteries of the setting spelled out.

I know some people who HATE this but it's also why I love metaplot.

Because it gives me an easy way of advancing the timeline of my game world and seeing how players deal with changes.

So it's why I could never get into Chronicles of Darkness.

When I open the V:TR Bloodlines books, I was like, "Wait, how do all of these new bloodlines politically relate to each other?"

Developer: They don't. Some may be canon, some may not, and some might be totally different in your game! DO IT YOUR WAY!

Me: "Listen, jackass, I didn't come here for a cookbook. I came here for a meal."


That's why I intend to marry the best of both World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness by offering both a toolkit of splats for creative GMs and a multiverse of pre-created worlds for lore junkies. You can travel between them if you want to.

Not only that, but my campaign settings would also provide future timelines. Want a campaign setting where the timeline is detailed all the way to 12,090 A.D.? I'm going to make that!

Want a cyberpunk future with cyborg vampires? A space opera with vampire castles in space? A dark future where a darkened sky allows vampires to walk 24/7?

I'll write whatever it fucking takes to steal market share from White Wolf. If I have to recreate Tech Infantry and Dungeons: The Dragoning, then I damn  well will!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 15, 2020, 10:29:19 PM
I don't like the metaplot. I always liked how much more free Vt:tM before revised, and V20 recaptured some of that feeling for me. Sure, 2nd edition created a bunch of what would come to be called the metaplot, but it always seemed more optional to me back then. 2nd edition was full of a bunch of crazy ideas, myths, plot hooks, etc. If you didn't use them, no big deal. With revised, if you weren't following the metaplot then the books became less and less useful to you. I'm no V5 expert but it seems like V5 continues in that vein.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 10:36:32 PM
The biggest benefit of metaplot is that it makes getting new books to be a requirement. You're going to pick them up so you can find out the next part of the story, like continuing to watch a series. If you don't have a metaplot, you don't really need to buy more books in a series. I didn't pick up V20 until Beckett's Jyhad Diary because I didn't have anything I needed from V20. It was all stuff I knew about already and just reprints as well as rephrasing of information I knew from being a dedicated 2nd Edition and Revised fan.

But metaplot meant CHANGES and NEW stuff that REQUIRED me to get it.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 15, 2020, 10:44:22 PM
Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 15, 2020, 11:04:46 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130111
Me: "Listen, jackass, I didn't come here for a cookbook. I came here for a meal."

Quoted for truth. No one buys a novel to read on the last page "just make up an ending that works you."

A) that's what fanfic (or house ruling) is for. B) 99% of the readers don't WANT to spend their free time writing their own ending.

There's a reason that, for all the derision it gets from the toolbox types, that 5e chose to make Forgotten Realms it's default setting. Not everyone wants to start their game from a blank slate; Hell, even those who'd rather do so don't always have the time to do so.

And it's not a lack of creativity that leads to a preference for well developed settings either. It's just where you choose to spend your creative energies.

What I like about settings like Mage or Vampire is that I can put all my creative energies into the specific NPCs and their agendas and not have to spend lots of time just figuring out what cosmology I want for the setting and how my spell casting and supernatural critters work each time I start up a game.

I was able to get my Vampire campaign started with about three hours prep even though, as a desire for a complete change of pace from my usual Mage campaign, I decided to set it in a completely different city.

That's because the Vampire setting gave a solid framework of how vampires (and other critters) work in it and how the vampires of a normal city are organized... so all I had to figure out were specific NPCs and the ways I wanted my city to deviate from those norms and my sandbox was ready to go.

Toolboxes have their place, but over time I've really come to appreciate the time savings of a finished product (or nearly finished in the case of RPGs).
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 15, 2020, 11:32:03 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130125
Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.

I eventually warmed to Revised. Honestly, M20's refusal to canonize the Avatar Storm feels a bit silly to me.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 15, 2020, 11:45:27 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130027
The themes of Vampire would be lost if they're not suffering God's curse, but are actually thaumivores resulting from Caine's long ago botched Awakening.

That is genius! I might steal that as the big reveal for the next V:TM game I run.

I hear what you're saying about Christianity and V:TM. It's definitively baked into the premise, which I can appreciate and enjoy even though I'm not religious.

However, I'm thinking of a Vampire game which is not Christian in origin, where the origin of vampires is shrouded in mystery. Several competing origin stories over the millennia have evolved into mystery cults or sects. One of these might be Christian in nature, another might be a virus, another might be magical, etc.  The gist is to use the conflicts between the sects to replace the Camirilla vs. Sabbat conflict of V:TM. Each sect races to uncover historical and archaeological evidence to establish it's legitimacy, and some even create forgeries to mislead or sabotage their rivals. More of a cold war than an open conflict. As such, the main theme of the game switches from Guilt to Self-discovery. Or to Despair, when you discover everything you believed in is a lie. Or to Paranoia, when you discover that the lie was fabricated by very powerful people who use it to control you.

But I'm starting to get this terrible feeling that Requiem does something like that? Requiem came out right after I exited the WOD, so my knowledge of it is superficial.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 16, 2020, 12:40:27 AM
Full circle

1992?

We loved V:TM back then. We tried a few games of Mage and Changeling when they came out, but we kept returning to Vampire. And we never did cross-over games, since it was clear to us that the different game lines were never supposed to work together, not only due to issues with the powers and systems, but the conflicting cosmologies as well.

1997?

I got disenchanted with the game, mostly because both the published product and our actual play at the table was becoming "The Sabbat War," which seemed cheap and cheesy. I much preferred the early theme of the game, which was the conflict was between the shadowy Methuselahs who were using everyone as pawns in their centuries-long vendettas. Or was that the theme of Jyhad, the card game? I can't recall. Looking back, I know now what I wanted, which was something more like Game of Thrones than World War V.  

1999?

We anxiously awaited each new installment of the metaplot, if only because it was interesting. Not that we used it. We just kept doing the same thing we had always done, but it was clear the magic was gone. The RPG options just kept increasing; half of the group wanted to try new games but the other half didn't. People moved on; the group broke up. Sold my books on Ebay.

2004?

Requiem came out, and we made a half-hearted attempt to get the band back together. After one game we realized why it was never going to work: the half that loved the OWOD disliked this new thing, and the half that walked earlier felt that there were better, newer things out there.

2012

I bought the V20 PDF because it was on sale. I don't think I've ever opened it.

2020, April

Lockdown, so like everyone else, I decide to do some spring cleaning. I discover an old box with thousands of Jyhad cards. Looks like I forgot to sell this junk back in 99. But as I start looking through the box... some of the cards are amazing. Consanguinous Condemnation? Sounds cool, but I can't recall what the hell that was. Treaty of Tyre Revoked. Oh yeah, that's the deal the Assamites were forced to make back in the Middle Ages. That would be a cool thing to actually have happen in a game. The Curse of Nitocris. The Fear of Mekhet. I have no idea what these things were. Were they in books I never owned, or did they exist only in  the card game? And what the hell are they? I think I will just make something up.

Now

I'm looking at all of these cards, their images and quotes. It's like the entire game has been chopped up into atoms and randomized. Divorced from any semblance of structure (or metpalot, if you will) these elements are mine to arrange as I please. I could do anything with this. But there is no nostalgia; this is not a longing for the past, but a look to the future, a big What If... and for the first time in 20 years, I'm seeing the World of Darkness the same way I did when I cracked open that first book all those years ago.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 16, 2020, 05:16:56 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130129
I eventually warmed to Revised. Honestly, M20's refusal to canonize the Avatar Storm feels a bit silly to me.

Here we most definitely disagree.

I believe the Avatar Storm brought nothing good to Mage. And that it actually damaged the property near irreparably.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 16, 2020, 05:24:24 AM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130125
Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.

Mage Revised was basically the same thing as 4E D&D... a fine game if it weren't supposed to be Mage the Ascension. It was only because it ran so counter to previous editions on a "feel" level that made it be so negatively regarded.

That said, M20 (and also many of the later Revised-era books that backtracked hard) was also a return to form with options to ignore, continue or say Revised happened but was a temporary thing.

Also, since I was running ongoing Mage campaigns throughout 2nd and Revised (and right up to the present), I'm going to have to disagree with you on how ignorable the metaplot was because I ignored it so easily that I'm having difficulty seeing just what you found so difficult to ignore?

The Missing Masters was pure fluff text; just keep them around. Done.

Avatar Storm? Don't roll damage for crossing the Gauntlet. Done.

Disembodiment rules in Infinite Tapestry? Ignore the chart and let people stay in the Umbra as long as they want. Done.

As to the magic system changes, since I was on the GM side of the screen, I found it MUCH easier to adjudicate effects with the Revised mechanics (i.e. spending successes on specific elements). It wasn't like basic combat magic wasn't possible, two successes still let you deal damage to any target you could see and you even got a reflexive attack roll using a paradigm appropriate dice pool (ex. Per+Occult for a Hermetic, Dex+Firearms for a Technocrat) to add damage to the attack.

As to the increased difficulty for using a non-rote; ignore the difficulty penalty, done.

Don't like the Resonance mechanics? Don't use them (or apply them only to magic effects where I found them awesome for players to better reflect their styles... not as good as M20s approach to Paradigm, Practices and Instruments, but good for its time). Done.

I also felt that immediate paradox backlash unless you spent effort to hold it off just felt a lot more like how Paradox should have been to me (why would the backlash for violating the natural order be delayed and then bleed off without consequence?) and the default of soakable bashing damage (the limit if you took your lumps as they came) and difficulty increases to actions were both easier to apply and to come up with meaningful descriptions of on the fly because I like poetic backlashes and those are much easier to come up with when the effect that produced the backlash just occurred.

In practical terms, anything up to about rank 3 vulgar without witnesses effort meant you took a +1 difficulty penalty to your next action at most (3 dice of bashing damage at difficulty 6, resisted by Stamina at difficulty 6... people who wanted to use more vulgar effects went 3-4 stamina and then bought it up to 5 to represent their becoming paradox inured; and if you can take a fundamental force of the universe punching you in the gut you can certainly take an ordinary punch too).

But if you really liked 2e's magic and backlash rules; use them instead because it's not like Revised went 4E on the basic mechanics... Attributes, Abilities, Backgrounds, Willpower, Health Levels, Arete, Spheres and Quintessence were all unchanged in terms of stat values.

If your Metaplot mechanics are as ignorable as AD&D's damage vs. armor type mechanics, I hardly consider them to be "unignorable."
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 16, 2020, 07:03:56 AM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130155
Here we most definitely disagree.

I believe the Avatar Storm brought nothing good to Mage. And that it actually damaged the property near irreparably.

The thing about that was they started rolling back the Avatar Storm almost immediately after they introduced it with the Stormwardens and the Rogue Council. They also did the Revised Convention books that, aside from being blatant Technocracy propaganda, were still very popular with their more heroic depiction of the Union. A lot of people who hated the Avatar Storm softened on it as the primary result of it in the Union books was, "The Union is now 90% less psychotic and evil than it was while they were being controlled by Autocthonia, Control, and possibly the Nephandi."

M20 has also managed to do a lot with it.

Take note, I used to HATE the Avatar Storm with a furious passion but "rebuilding the Traditions and/or Union like the Rebellion rebuilding the Galactic Republic" turned out to be a lot of fun.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 16, 2020, 10:16:46 AM
Quote from: Aglondir;1130131
That is genius! I might steal that as the big reveal for the next V:TM game I run.

I hear what you're saying about Christianity and V:TM. It's definitively baked into the premise, which I can appreciate and enjoy even though I'm not religious.

However, I'm thinking of a Vampire game which is not Christian in origin, where the origin of vampires is shrouded in mystery. Several competing origin stories over the millennia have evolved into mystery cults or sects. One of these might be Christian in nature, another might be a virus, another might be magical, etc.  The gist is to use the conflicts between the sects to replace the Camirilla vs. Sabbat conflict of V:TM. Each sect races to uncover historical and archaeological evidence to establish it's legitimacy, and some even create forgeries to mislead or sabotage their rivals. More of a cold war than an open conflict. As such, the main theme of the game switches from Guilt to Self-discovery. Or to Despair, when you discover everything you believed in is a lie. Or to Paranoia, when you discover that the lie was fabricated by very powerful people who use it to control you.

But I'm starting to get this terrible feeling that Requiem does something like that? Requiem came out right after I exited the WOD, so my knowledge of it is superficial.

It had the opportunity to do that, but it never actually did. It touched on it a tiny bit with torpor reducing blood-potency and inconsistently affecting memories (so you could create a noob PC who is centuries old and adjusting to modern life, or create false records of events to use for personal gain centuries in the future, etc), but ultimately discarded all those ideas because fans apparently wanted the same eternal unchanging elder vampires as in VTM.

VTR is basically just V5 but the discipline mechanic sucks.

Your ideas are a breath of fresh air in this stagnant rotting fandom.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 16, 2020, 01:44:50 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130125
Mage Revised was utterly ruined by Metaplot. The Avatar Storm was not ignorable. The whole magic system was altered because of it to accommodate it.

So the good game that was Mage 2nd Edition was effectively ruined in Revised. Because of the developer not treating the metaplot as something that was optional.


Quote from: CTPhipps;1130129
I eventually warmed to Revised. Honestly, M20's refusal to canonize the Avatar Storm feels a bit silly to me.


Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130155
Here we most definitely disagree.

I believe the Avatar Storm brought nothing good to Mage. And that it actually damaged the property near irreparably.


Quote from: Chris24601;1130158
Mage Revised was basically the same thing as 4E D&D... a fine game if it weren't supposed to be Mage the Ascension. It was only because it ran so counter to previous editions on a "feel" level that made it be so negatively regarded.

That said, M20 (and also many of the later Revised-era books that backtracked hard) was also a return to form with options to ignore, continue or say Revised happened but was a temporary thing.

Also, since I was running ongoing Mage campaigns throughout 2nd and Revised (and right up to the present), I'm going to have to disagree with you on how ignorable the metaplot was because I ignored it so easily that I'm having difficulty seeing just what you found so difficult to ignore?

The Missing Masters was pure fluff text; just keep them around. Done.

Avatar Storm? Don't roll damage for crossing the Gauntlet. Done.

Disembodiment rules in Infinite Tapestry? Ignore the chart and let people stay in the Umbra as long as they want. Done.

As to the magic system changes, since I was on the GM side of the screen, I found it MUCH easier to adjudicate effects with the Revised mechanics (i.e. spending successes on specific elements). It wasn't like basic combat magic wasn't possible, two successes still let you deal damage to any target you could see and you even got a reflexive attack roll using a paradigm appropriate dice pool (ex. Per+Occult for a Hermetic, Dex+Firearms for a Technocrat) to add damage to the attack.

As to the increased difficulty for using a non-rote; ignore the difficulty penalty, done.

Don't like the Resonance mechanics? Don't use them (or apply them only to magic effects where I found them awesome for players to better reflect their styles... not as good as M20s approach to Paradigm, Practices and Instruments, but good for its time). Done.

I also felt that immediate paradox backlash unless you spent effort to hold it off just felt a lot more like how Paradox should have been to me (why would the backlash for violating the natural order be delayed and then bleed off without consequence?) and the default of soakable bashing damage (the limit if you took your lumps as they came) and difficulty increases to actions were both easier to apply and to come up with meaningful descriptions of on the fly because I like poetic backlashes and those are much easier to come up with when the effect that produced the backlash just occurred.

In practical terms, anything up to about rank 3 vulgar without witnesses effort meant you took a +1 difficulty penalty to your next action at most (3 dice of bashing damage at difficulty 6, resisted by Stamina at difficulty 6... people who wanted to use more vulgar effects went 3-4 stamina and then bought it up to 5 to represent their becoming paradox inured; and if you can take a fundamental force of the universe punching you in the gut you can certainly take an ordinary punch too).

But if you really liked 2e's magic and backlash rules; use them instead because it's not like Revised went 4E on the basic mechanics... Attributes, Abilities, Backgrounds, Willpower, Health Levels, Arete, Spheres and Quintessence were all unchanged in terms of stat values.

If your Metaplot mechanics are as ignorable as AD&D's damage vs. armor type mechanics, I hardly consider them to be "unignorable."


Quote from: CTPhipps;1130165
The thing about that was they started rolling back the Avatar Storm almost immediately after they introduced it with the Stormwardens and the Rogue Council. They also did the Revised Convention books that, aside from being blatant Technocracy propaganda, were still very popular with their more heroic depiction of the Union. A lot of people who hated the Avatar Storm softened on it as the primary result of it in the Union books was, "The Union is now 90% less psychotic and evil than it was while they were being controlled by Autocthonia, Control, and possibly the Nephandi."

M20 has also managed to do a lot with it.

Take note, I used to HATE the Avatar Storm with a furious passion but "rebuilding the Traditions and/or Union like the Rebellion rebuilding the Galactic Republic" turned out to be a lot of fun.


I always thought Mage tried to do too many things at once and ended up doing none of them particularly well. On the one hand it seems to want to be a bit like Dresden Files or Harry Potter or other urban fantasy where the paranormal lives hidden in plain sight... on the other hand it wants to be Rifts and Shadowrun and Chronicles of Amber and Ready Player One all thrown in a blender.

I always thought the metaphysics were poorly constructed, as evidenced by the countless pointless debates over consensus reality, the purple paradigm, results- versus process-based determinism, obnoxious anti-science attitudes, etc. I've seen people argue that the Technocracy invented waterborne illnesses like cholera, which sounds incredibly stupid. I studied the hard sciences in college and I understand the scientific method, so I'm pretty much the last person who would enjoy Mage.

The recent Mage books also suffer an extreme case "hey there fellow kids" and an obnoxious bitterness towards all technological progress made since the 90s. The Technocracy and Virtual Adepts have degenerated into retrofuturist technophobes who are bitter that social media didn't let them take over the world and constantly complain about the horrors of fake news and anti-vaxxers and whatever is currently trending on twitter.

If you guys enjoy it then that's great, but it really doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm sorry, but I have to make my own game because I really don't want to interact with the sorts of people attracted to Mage.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 16, 2020, 03:11:02 PM
Box, you do you.

I didn't notice a hatred towards modern technology at all. One of my favorite Hermetic rotes takes advantage of our electronic enconomy... by inscribing arcsne sigils on seven credit cards and placing them in a circle around your bills, a spirit of forces, entropy and correspondence siphons fractional rounding of currency from electronic transactions and applies them towards the balance of the bills in the circle. If the Syndicate didn't intend this, so say the Hermetics, they shouldn't have been so shoddy with their currency systems rounding to only two decimal places.

In terms of how magic works though, there's a very good discussion on results vs. process based determinism and hypothetical omniscient vs. average observers on page 534 of M20... and M20 operates from the assumptions of;

A) Process-Based Determinism (i.e. if you want a taxi to ferry you quickly across town you better have life, mind, matter and prime and a paradigm that lets you conjure organic constructs and complex mechanical devices out of thin air... or you could use mind to convince an actual nearby taxi-driver to turn your way, notice you and stop).

-and-

B) Hypothetical Average Bystander (if someone sees you walk into a dark alley and when they go to look they don't find you and on the other side of town an instant later you walk out of a dark ally... it is coincidental, because unless both hypothetical average bystanders were in contact with each other to relay that you traveled 50 blocks in an instant, neither would presume anything magical had just happened).

That framework plus the refinements to Paradigm and retaining Revised's effect building via spending successes makes magic a LOT easier to manage (so much so that I dumped all my pages of house rules when M20 came out).

The fact that you can essentially quantify every other critter type in the game within the subjective reality of Mage generally makes it my default for any crossover campaigns.

Also, for those wondering; the notion that Caine might not have actually been a vampire at all, but suffered a botched Awakening is pretty strongly implied by the text in the Book of Nod.

Lilith performs a cerimony to try and Awaken him and he goes into a vision of being tormented and cursed by angels. Angelic visitors is actually a pretty common form for Avatars to manifest as and such manifestations are common during the Seekings that accompany Awakening and the raising of Arete.

If you really want to run with it though, consider that Creation story isn't about the literal First Man and First Woman, but the first humans to ever Awaken. Adam and Lilith part ways and Eve is "born from Adam's side" in that she was Adam's apprentice who Awakened. Abel too was Awakened, but Caine was not and he murdered his brother out of jealousy then fled into the wilds to find the only other Awakened at that point; Lilith.

Caine though gets so overwhelmed by his guilt and self-loathing during the forced Awakening Lilith put him through that Caine becomes the First Marauder (trapped in his personal reality where he is forever accurded by God). This is why Caine was reputed to be able to create vampiric disciplines at will... because he was actually a true mage (albeit an insane one).

Some Marauders are known to be infectious, their madness can be spread to others who are Awakened; I give you the second and third generations who inherited Caine's god-like power to create disciplines.

Because of how early this entered into human consciousness (prior to the Toba population bottleneck that reduced the total human population to maybe 10k) Caine's particular condition became engrained as a potent mythic thread that needs only minor expenditures of quintessence (a point per day, stolen from mortal blood) to maintain. It is potent enough that passing on Caine's infectious paradigm doesn't even require the victims of it to be Awakened themselves... though it does warp the victim's nascent avatar into a Beast; which is why Awakened magic is impossible for vampires outside of Caine and possibly the other Antediluvians... and also why true magick has such a bitch of a time trying to undo the Curse (you can't undo Marauder-hood with magick).

Now, to be fair, I ONLY use that version when I'm running a Mage campaign because any Mage who wants to do a deep dive on the metaphysics of the vampire condition deserves a truly Mage-centric answer.

When I run Vampire I un-ironically use the Biblical God leveling an actual curse upon the actual Cain because Vampire is a game that explores holding onto yourself and your morality in the face of an all-comsuming temptation towards evil and that isn't well served by "you're actually suffering from the mother of all Paradox backlashes due to the hubris of one of the first mages in history."
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 16, 2020, 03:59:15 PM
I don't think it makes sense to use the Hindu word "avatar," for that matter. An avatar is an earthly manifestation of a deity. The Vedic traditions might use it and believe themselves to be avatars (like Avatar: The Last Airbender), but that doesn't make sense for everyone else. Whenever I hear “avatar storm” I imagine armies of hindu deities fighting.

Consensus reality is inherently nonsensical, especially when it comes to explaining history. (E.g. how did smallpox wipe out the native americans if they didn't believe it existed?) I find it much easier to say "magic just works." You can still have your loonies trying to destroy Western civilization, but you don't have to explain why anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers haven't changed the laws of physics, or how consensus reality interacts with things like civil rights and dehumanization.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 16, 2020, 05:23:24 PM
Oddly it actually makes sense the more you understand about Hindu cosmology as the Avatar is the inner fragment of the Pure Ones and divine beings that predate the cosmos that is located inside a mage. Consensual Reality is nonsensical but it's part of the settings conceit. Sometimes I think it's fine just not to overthink these things when creating a game.

Mind you, I've also felt that "Consensual Reality changes to what MAGES do" but "Sleepers, by definition, do not affect Consensus save for generating paradox since they're not Awakened."

Which is to say all of the rules are the same but reality is reality.

So, I'm going to say I roughly agree with you.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 16, 2020, 05:38:02 PM
Compare this with the game Nephilim. Rather than consensus reality, it posits that physics are different and allow magic. The Major Arcana book states that the nephilim have numerous traditions beyond the western, like Taoist, Haitian, Aztec, etc but sadly the game was cancelled before this was explored. The French version didn't do much with those either.

I liked nephilim's magic system because it was called occult science and used the scientific method to study magic. There were also at least three different kinds including sorcery, summoning, and alchemy. The Enlighted Magic system Chaosium released in ~2014 used a generic new age fluff, but the rules are flexible enough that you can switch it out for other kinds of rituals. In fact, IMO all of Chaosium's magic systems handle paradigm better than MTAs because they built different magic systems for different paradigms rather than try forcing everything into the same Ars Magica-derived system.

In fact, I'd really like to explore the Nephilim setting further but unfortunately the game was cancelled decades ago and isn't coming back. There's nobody to talk to about it.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 16, 2020, 05:44:33 PM
The thing is Consensual Reality is pretty much central to the gameline. If you remove it, there's no reason for the Technocracy and Traditions to be engaged in a dominionist war to the last man for literally centuries. I'd argue that the major reason that Revised did the Avatar Storm was in order to try to get away from the Ascension War as the primary and only plot that could be explored while they were battling over whether humanity believed in fairies or not.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 16, 2020, 05:45:02 PM
Avatar is actually the perfect name as the groups which named it believe it to be a literal shard of The One/God (i.e. a mage is the avatar of God on Earth and those groups had enough clout when the Council of Nine was formed to push for that name in the cross-Tradition magical language they cooked up so the Traditions could pool magical knowledge.

Long story short, to better coordinate against the Order of Reason, the Council came up with a set of shared terms that essentially function as a magical trade tongue. It's basically the Latin to the Traditions' German, French, Chinese, Aramaic, Hindi, etc.

Outside of that purpose no one really calls it that though; each Tradition and Convention Book listed the name by which it was known; ex. Genius, Daemon, Eidolon, Spirit Guide.

This shared language also happens to coincide with system terms for these concepts for ease of use.

Also, you seem to be missing a key point about consensual reality... it's determined by the consensus of EVERYONE, not just what Joe Random happens to believe can happen to himself. So in the modern world the consensus is what the majority of 7.5 billion people happen to believe is possible. Stuff like gravity, the passage of time, etc. are believed in by just about everyone (even if the explanation has changed over time, "stuff falls down not up" has been with us for as long as we've been able to recognize out surroundings).

Further, while the Native Americans might not have been familiar with smallpox specifically, they certainly had the concepts of sickness and disease which would make something like smallpox possible (on top of the much larger populations of Europe, Asia and Africa being aware of it).

Magic is the act of pushing against said consensus; a Mage's enlightened willpower allows them to use practices and instruments they believe in to push past what's actually possible. Do it enough and you might get the consensus to believe it's possible too (which was the Order of Reason's approach to pushing science into the consensus; take the lumps of paradox in order to show enough people their way works and the innovations of science become part of the consensus).

It should also be noted that even the concept of the spheres of magic is arbitrary; a construct devised by the Order of Hermes to facilitate inter-Tradition discussions about magical practices and adopted by the Order of Reason (with some name changes; i.e. they call the Spirit sphere "Dimensional Science") for the same reason.

Prior to that magical Traditions used their own systems of categorization; such as Foundation (what would become Arete in shared parlance) and Pillars (proto-spheres) the Order used during the Dark Ages.

It really holds together a lot better than you seem to think it does.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 16, 2020, 05:56:00 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130177
It had the opportunity to do that, but it never actually did. It touched on it a tiny bit with torpor reducing blood-potency and inconsistently affecting memories (so you could create a noob PC who is centuries old and adjusting to modern life, or create false records of events to use for personal gain centuries in the future, etc), but ultimately discarded all those ideas because fans apparently wanted the same eternal unchanging elder vampires as in VTM.

VTR is basically just V5 but the discipline mechanic sucks.

Your ideas are a breath of fresh air in this stagnant rotting fandom.

Thanks for the info. And thanks for the compliment.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 16, 2020, 06:10:01 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130203
The fact that you can essentially quantify every other critter type in the game within the subjective reality of Mage generally makes it my default for any crossover campaigns.

Also, for those wondering; the notion that Caine might not have actually been a vampire at all, but suffered a botched Awakening is pretty strongly implied by the text in the Book of Nod.

Lilith performs a cerimony to try and Awaken him and he goes into a vision of being tormented and cursed by angels. Angelic visitors is actually a pretty common form for Avatars to manifest as and such manifestations are common during the Seekings that accompany Awakening and the raising of Arete.

If you really want to run with it though, consider that Creation story isn't about the literal First Man and First Woman, but the first humans to ever Awaken. Adam and Lilith part ways and Eve is "born from Adam's side" in that she was Adam's apprentice who Awakened. Abel too was Awakened, but Caine was not and he murdered his brother out of jealousy then fled into the wilds to find the only other Awakened at that point; Lilith.

Caine though gets so overwhelmed by his guilt and self-loathing during the forced Awakening Lilith put him through that Caine becomes the First Marauder (trapped in his personal reality where he is forever accurded by God). This is why Caine was reputed to be able to create vampiric disciplines at will... because he was actually a true mage (albeit an insane one).

That's great!

Is it your work, or from a WW product?  

It's exactly the type of thing that I want to use in my game-- one of many competing explanations for the vampiric condition.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 16, 2020, 06:23:23 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130227
Avatar is actually the perfect name as the groups which named it believe it to be a literal shard of The One/God (i.e. a mage is the avatar of God on Earth and those groups had enough clout when the Council of Nine was formed to push for that name in the cross-Tradition magical language they cooked up so the Traditions could pool magical knowledge.

Long story short, to better coordinate against the Order of Reason, the Council came up with a set of shared terms that essentially function as a magical trade tongue. It's basically the Latin to the Traditions' German, French, Chinese, Aramaic, Hindi, etc.

Outside of that purpose no one really calls it that though; each Tradition and Convention Book listed the name by which it was known; ex. Genius, Daemon, Eidolon, Spirit Guide.

This shared language also happens to coincide with system terms for these concepts for ease of use.

Also, you seem to be missing a key point about consensual reality... it's determined by the consensus of EVERYONE, not just what Joe Random happens to believe can happen to himself. So in the modern world the consensus is what the majority of 7.5 billion people happen to believe is possible. Stuff like gravity, the passage of time, etc. are believed in by just about everyone (even if the explanation has changed over time, "stuff falls down not up" has been with us for as long as we've been able to recognize out surroundings).

Further, while the Native Americans might not have been familiar with smallpox specifically, they certainly had the concepts of sickness and disease which would make something like smallpox possible (on top of the much larger populations of Europe, Asia and Africa being aware of it).

Magic is the act of pushing against said consensus; a Mage's enlightened willpower allows them to use practices and instruments they believe in to push past what's actually possible. Do it enough and you might get the consensus to believe it's possible too (which was the Order of Reason's approach to pushing science into the consensus; take the lumps of paradox in order to show enough people their way works and the innovations of science become part of the consensus).

It should also be noted that even the concept of the spheres of magic is arbitrary; a construct devised by the Order of Hermes to facilitate inter-Tradition discussions about magical practices and adopted by the Order of Reason (with some name changes; i.e. they call the Spirit sphere "Dimensional Science") for the same reason.

Prior to that magical Traditions used their own systems of categorization; such as Foundation (what would become Arete in shared parlance) and Pillars (proto-spheres) the Order used during the Dark Ages.

It really holds together a lot better than you seem to think it does.


I'm a hipster who prefers foundations and pillars. Or Arts and praxes and nemeses as Opening The Dark calls them.

Anyway, the best explanation of the "consensus" I ever read was Malcolm Sheppard's hack Mage: The Dirty Version. https://mobunited.livejournal.com/52042.html Basically, there isn't a consensus reality. Human thought can affect reality, but reality exists outside of human thought.

I'm also a sucker for The Continuum fanbook from the 90s, and that only really works if reality exists outside of consensus since parallel realities are a product of 20th century scifi. http://evildrganymede.net/wp/rpgs/continuum/

Something like Gideon the Ninth wouldn't be feasible in Mage: The Ascension, but would be quite feasible in The Continuum.

Quote from: Aglondir;1130230
Thanks for the info. And thanks for the compliment.


One true wayism runs rampant in the World of Darkness fandom. Anybody who wants to do anything with Vampire that isn't endless angst deserves a chance to shine.

Sure, Angel brooded all the time, but he also worked to save innocents and fight evil. Dark superheroes doesn't have to be a bad thing.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 16, 2020, 07:25:45 PM
Quote from: Snowman0147;1130026
How in the hell did I not make it on the list?  Doc Sammy you wounded me...

Though seriously the mechanics are shit.  The staff, freelancers are truly horrible people, Onyx Path owner might be a vile cheat that screws workers from their pay, and the fan base lost its fucking mind.  There is a lot to hate about it.


Yep, that sounds about right. Frankly there aren't a lot of alternatives for urban fantasy and there are even fewer alternatives for modern horror that isn't Cthulhu. The blue books are hard to replace with something that has a similar focus and tone.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1129995


I have so many complaints, but here are a few important ones:

Entire post...


My biggest complaints are the purple prose, bad layout and lack of focus these games have. Really pretentious writing style. Needing a lot of words to say something simple. Combined with the bad layout that means a lot of flipping back and forth when reading. And after reading you still don't have a clue what to do with the sometimes cool concepts, because it's just vague. What are you actually supposed to do?
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 16, 2020, 07:28:41 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130111
Me: "Listen, jackass, I didn't come here for a cookbook. I came here for a meal."

LOL! :p
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 16, 2020, 08:46:38 PM
Quote from: jan paparazzi;1130243
Yep, that sounds about right. Frankly there aren't a lot of alternatives for urban fantasy and there are even fewer alternatives for modern horror that isn't Cthulhu. The blue books are hard to replace with something that has a similar focus and tone.



My biggest complaints are the purple prose, bad layout and lack of focus these games have. Really pretentious writing style. Needing a lot of words to say something simple. Combined with the bad layout that means a lot of flipping back and forth when reading. And after reading you still don't have a clue what to do with the sometimes cool concepts, because it's just vague. What are you actually supposed to do?


Yeah, that's something I also had a problem with. What I noticed is that the major arcana tribes from Nephilim were better at providing motivations than WW splats, since they were generally built around goals to pursue and quests to quest. For example, the Temperance arcanum are healers: they go around healing people and honing their healing skills. Angel, for example, is a textbook example of a Strength arcanum initiate because he hunts demons.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 08:42:42 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130165
The thing about that was they started rolling back the Avatar Storm almost immediately after they introduced it with the Stormwardens and the Rogue Council. They also did the Revised Convention books that, aside from being blatant Technocracy propaganda, were still very popular with their more heroic depiction of the Union. A lot of people who hated the Avatar Storm softened on it as the primary result of it in the Union books was, "The Union is now 90% less psychotic and evil than it was while they were being controlled by Autocthonia, Control, and possibly the Nephandi."

M20 has also managed to do a lot with it.

Take note, I used to HATE the Avatar Storm with a furious passion but "rebuilding the Traditions and/or Union like the Rebellion rebuilding the Galactic Republic" turned out to be a lot of fun.

CT Phipps, I must ask you a serious question

What if someone were to ST a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and you were invited to play...but they explicitly rejected the metaplot of the original game.

Instead, they start with just the material in the 1E core rulebook and maybe also Chicago by Night 1E and decide to establish a completely separate counter-metaplot instead?

Like, it starts off with the default setting of Vampire 1E in the early 90's and as it goes along, completely different events happen and some of the other splats turn out different as well...and some don't appear at all

Would you be interested in seeing where that ST goes and what direction they take it in, or are you truly completely bound to White Wolf's metaplot that you'd refuse to play in a WoD setting that is a "What If" scenario?

It's not a toolkit setting...but it's not the metaplot WW had, instead it is a counter-metaplot

I'd be interested in how you'd play in a counter-metaplot chronicle that starts out like VTM did in V1, but then it diverges in a different direction, and you could use either the original V1 rules or the V20 rules

V5 is unable to be used for a variety of obvious reasons, both mechanical and setting-wise
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 09:33:00 AM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130276
CT Phipps, I must ask you a serious question

What if someone were to ST a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and you were invited to play...but they explicitly rejected the metaplot of the original game.

Instead, they start with just the material in the 1E core rulebook and maybe also Chicago by Night 1E and decide to establish a completely separate counter-metaplot instead?

Like, it starts off with the default setting of Vampire 1E in the early 90's and as it goes along, completely different events happen and some of the other splats turn out different as well...and some don't appear at all

Would you be interested in seeing where that ST goes and what direction they take it in, or are you truly completely bound to White Wolf's metaplot that you'd refuse to play in a WoD setting that is a "What If" scenario?

It's not a toolkit setting...but it's not the metaplot WW had, instead it is a counter-metaplot

I'd be interested in how you'd play in a counter-metaplot chronicle that starts out like VTM did in V1, but then it diverges in a different direction, and you could use either the original V1 rules or the V20 rules

V5 is unable to be used for a variety of obvious reasons, both mechanical and setting-wise


It's funny you should bring this up because I'm a Moderator for the Onyx Path Forums and just brought up this very subject with regards to another gameline that I used to be a huge fan of, which is to say, Forgotten Realms.

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-classic-world-of-darkness/vampire-the-masquerade/1388717-essay-top-ten-tips-to-running-the-sabbat-in-v5?p=1389271#post1389271

Basically, the long and the short of it is that Ed Greenwood really didn't like the changes that were made to his campaign setting [and it really is his baby, no matter who owns it] for the TIME OF TROUBLES and asked his players whether they wanted to continue playing 1st Edition Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms or update themselves to 2nd Edition. His players unanimously agreed they wanted to stick with the campaign setting the way that Ed wrote it.

Ed still familarized himself with 3rd, 4th, and 5th Edition changes to his setting, though, and continued to give advice on the world after those changes because he's a boss.

The thing about this is that I've actually run a few games that have disregarded the metaplot of White Wolf games and see nothing particularly weird about running another Edition of a game. Indeed, it was the basic premise of V20 that it was "metaplot agnostic" which meant that, for all intents and purposes, it was 2nd Edition Vampire: The Masquerade. Even when they "rebooted" the game at the end of its shelflife with BECKETT'S JYHAD DIARY, they fully planned to make serious changes to the setting and disregard things like the Week of Nightmares and diverge from Revised. It's just Paradox ended up buying the license instead.

Which is a long way of saying, "I'm not overly married to the idea of continuity between editions. Whatever works at your table."
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 10:20:47 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130280
It's funny you should bring this up because I'm a Moderator for the Onyx Path Forums and just brought up this very subject with regards to another gameline that I used to be a huge fan of, which is to say, Forgotten Realms.

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-classic-world-of-darkness/vampire-the-masquerade/1388717-essay-top-ten-tips-to-running-the-sabbat-in-v5?p=1389271#post1389271

Basically, the long and the short of it is that Ed Greenwood really didn't like the changes that were made to his campaign setting [and it really is his baby, no matter who owns it] for the TIME OF TROUBLES and asked his players whether they wanted to continue playing 1st Edition Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms or update themselves to 2nd Edition. His players unanimously agreed they wanted to stick with the campaign setting the way that Ed wrote it.

Ed still familarized himself with 3rd, 4th, and 5th Edition changes to his setting, though, and continued to give advice on the world after those changes because he's a boss.

The thing about this is that I've actually run a few games that have disregarded the metaplot of White Wolf games and see nothing particularly weird about running another Edition of a game. Indeed, it was the basic premise of V20 that it was "metaplot agnostic" which meant that, for all intents and purposes, it was 2nd Edition Vampire: The Masquerade. Even when they "rebooted" the game at the end of its shelflife with BECKETT'S JYHAD DIARY, they fully planned to make serious changes to the setting and disregard things like the Week of Nightmares and diverge from Revised. It's just Paradox ended up buying the license instead.

Which is a long way of saying, "I'm not overly married to the idea of continuity between editions. Whatever works at your table."

Well, I'm going to invite you to the "counter-metaplot" game then.

It's an online game though, if that is fine with you.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 10:29:38 AM
Awesome.

I'd love to hear more.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 10:49:46 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130283
Awesome.

I'd love to hear more.

Excellent.

I'm planning to do a play-by-post format, and I'll send you the details when it is set up.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 11:04:20 AM
On an interesting note, it seems White Wolf will be doing 3 Text Based Interactive Novels to go along with its video games.

https://www.choiceofgames.com/2020/04/coming-soon-three-vampire-the-masquerade-interactive-novels/
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: The Exploited. on May 17, 2020, 11:45:19 AM
I hate WW with a passion, just saying.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 11:46:34 AM
Quote from: The Exploited.;1130289
I hate WW with a passion, just saying.

So do I, which is why I try to actively subvert and defy their canon and themes. :D:p

Really, White Wolf was awesome in the early days but then they jumped the shark hard in my personal opinion
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 11:53:19 AM
Quote from: The Exploited.;1130289
I hate WW with a passion, just saying.

Uh, good for you.

I like it.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: The Exploited. on May 17, 2020, 11:54:32 AM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130290
So do I, which is why I try to actively subvert and defy their canon and themes. :D:p

Really, White Wolf was awesome in the early days but then they jumped the shark hard in my personal opinion

Amen Doc! It started off so well, and then fell into stygian abyss never to return...

 I'm the same, ignore 95% of their crappy meta-plot, and keep the few gold nuggets and build something cool.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Abraxus on May 17, 2020, 11:55:52 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130292
Uh, good for you.

I like it.

I like it as well. Unlike many other similar style rpgs it's also easier. to find players to run and play with as well
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: The Exploited. on May 17, 2020, 12:05:33 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130292
Uh, good for you.

I like it.

Uh, good for you too.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: The Exploited. on May 17, 2020, 12:07:52 PM
White Wolf, the corporate entity I hate, just to be clear...

And their bloated meta-plot. The early stuff is cool, however.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 12:25:38 PM
Quote from: The Exploited.;1130296
White Wolf, the corporate entity I hate, just to be clear...

And their bloated meta-plot. The early stuff is cool, however.

White Wolf notably no longer exists as a corporate entity. It was dissolved in 2018.

White Wolf is now an intellectual brand owned by Paradox Interactive but it has no employees of its own.

It was dissolved post the Chechnya scandal.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 17, 2020, 12:30:14 PM
Quote from: The Exploited.;1130296
White Wolf, the corporate entity I hate, just to be clear...

And their bloated meta-plot. The early stuff is cool, however.


I'm one of those idiots who liked Chronicles of Darkness back when it came out in the mid-2000s. I thought VTR was a decent attempt to return to the simplicity of VTM 1e and streamline things. Unfortunately it never became more than WW's red-headed stepchild and eventually a new metaplot took over again.

I wonder when they'll reboot it again to keep up with the times like every overgrown setting does at some point.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 12:32:47 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130297
White Wolf notably no longer exists as a corporate entity. It was dissolved in 2018.

White Wolf is now an intellectual brand owned by Paradox Interactive but it has no employees of its own.

It was dissolved post the Chechnya scandal.


I think he means the White Wolf brand and Onyx Path, not the literal corporate entity.

I could be wrong on that though.

My issue is with Paradox Interactive's handling of White Wolf and more egregiously, the sneering pretentious punks at Onyx Path.

In my personal opinion, Onyx Path and the later years of White Wolf were a textbook case of the inmates running the asylum, but as always, YMMV
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: GameDaddy on May 17, 2020, 12:59:47 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130290
Really, White Wolf was awesome in the early days but then they jumped the shark hard in my personal opinion


I remember the early days. I was the one to browse a set of rules before deciding to buy it, except of course original D&D. My friends bought those books and said let's play a new kind of game, and I ended up enjoying D&D so much, I bought my own copy of the rules as soon as possible. I did get to browse the little brown books though that my friend owned before I bought them, so knew what was in them, and in general tried to personally review, or otherwise get an in-depth recommendation with the wargames and RPG's that I was interested in.

So, of course  took a look at the original edition of Vampire the Masquerade in the early 90's. I was immediately struck by the subjective nature of the rules. For starters it's a storytelling game, where the GM (excuse me, ...the "Storyteller," not the players, ...is the primary narrator)  The traits are scaled 1 to 5, which allows you to roll that number of dice versus a challenge that is rated 1-10. If any of your traits are good you are going to get three dice to roll, so you are likely to be 90% successful against even the most difficult or ridiculous, of challenges. So the game is broken right out of the box for setting up a challenge, encounter, or scenario, that is actually, ...well... challenging.

Then someone came up with the brilliant rule of critical failures, and that super broken rules works as follows, If you have maximum ranks and are an expert with a trait. Say for example... Brawling. You have five ranks in brawling and are almost superhuman and an expert in fighting hand to hand, you get to roll five dice... Say, you are the Werewolf, and are going to tear the throat out of the Ancient Vampire Leader of an opposing coven... Because he is the most ancient of vampires, this is the most difficult of tasks, and is assigned a difficulty level of 10, meaning you have to roll a ten or better rolling 5d6. I rolled a 22 with three sixes on my very first attempt... which would be completely in line with the fact that I'm one of the best Brawlers in the world. With the critical failure rule, this all changes though. Let's say for example, I roll two sixes and three ones. I have fifteen. That is a clear success, right? ...well, no. Each roll of 1 counts as a failure, so 3 failures and one success. basically the more competent I am and the more dice I roll, the higher the probability that I'll fail any challenge including even the simplest ones, with the sum of individual low rolls offsetting my goal of beating the target number.

At the time, everyone was running around back-slapping Mark Rein·Hagen, telling him what a great game designer he was, and I'm all like "What the fuck is this bullshit???!!??"
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 01:19:17 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130299
I think he means the White Wolf brand and Onyx Path, not the literal corporate entity.

I could be wrong on that though.

My issue is with Paradox Interactive's handling of White Wolf and more egregiously, the sneering pretentious punks at Onyx Path.

In my personal opinion, Onyx Path and the later years of White Wolf were a textbook case of the inmates running the asylum, but as always, YMMV

Not disputing the above, Onyx Path didn't get the license after the dissolution of White Wolf.

Instead, Modiphius did. You know, the Star Trek Adventures and Fallout RPG people.

OPP now licenses from them instead of White Wolf.

My contribution to the history of gaming was that I got my publishers to reprint the Clan Novels by getting them in touch with Paradox.

https://crossroadpress.com/product-category/white-wolf/
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: The Exploited. on May 17, 2020, 01:41:46 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130298
I'm one of those idiots who liked Chronicles of Darkness back when it came out in the mid-2000s. I thought VTR was a decent attempt to return to the simplicity of VTM 1e and streamline things. Unfortunately it never became more than WW's red-headed stepchild and eventually a new metaplot took over again.

I wonder when they'll reboot it again to keep up with the times like every overgrown setting does at some point.

Well to be fair... I bought into VtR for a very short time. And I bought quite a few of the rule books. I was just so sick of the whole VtM splat book and its insurmountable meta plot. That were obviously based on the devs own games (most of the time... Ugh!).

VtR had a good opportunity to do a reset but dropped the ball in my opinion. I'm not a fan at all of 5e.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 03:43:08 PM
Quote from: The Exploited.;1130307
Well to be fair... I bought into VtR for a very short time. And I bought quite a few of the rule books. I was just so sick of the whole VtM splat book and its insurmountable meta plot. That were obviously based on the devs own games (most of the time... Ugh!).

VtR had a good opportunity to do a reset but dropped the ball in my opinion. I'm not a fan at all of 5e.

Agreed entirely

That's why I'm aiming to create a fan project that provides a counter-canon to the World of Darkness and is essentially a giant "Fuck You!" to later White Wolf and Onyx Path.

We're talking a counter-canon/counter-metaplot that kicks "personal horror" to the curb and gives the finger to the Goth and Punk subcultures. No more snooty pretentiousness or thematic puritanism
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 03:52:12 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130328
Agreed entirely

That's why I'm aiming to create a fan project that provides a counter-canon to the World of Darkness and is essentially a giant "Fuck You!" to later White Wolf and Onyx Path.

We're talking a counter-canon/counter-metaplot that kicks "personal horror" to the curb and gives the finger to the Goth and Punk subcultures. No more snooty pretentiousness or thematic puritanism

A little weird. 1st Edition is my favorite edition of Vampire, followed by 5th Edition.

You can be fans of multiple ones.

And at the end of the day, we're all vampire fans.

Mind you, I married a Goth girl. :)
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 17, 2020, 03:58:04 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130248
Yeah, that's something I also had a problem with. What I noticed is that the major arcana tribes from Nephilim were better at providing motivations than WW splats, since they were generally built around goals to pursue and quests to quest. For example, the Temperance arcanum are healers: they go around healing people and honing their healing skills. Angel, for example, is a textbook example of a Strength arcanum initiate because he hunts demons.


I especially noticed this too comparing the blue books to something like Trails of Cthulhu with it's drives and the new Kult with it's Archetypes. Those are all pro-active character models who assume the pc's have valid reasons for investigating the supernatural. In WoD the default state of the pc's is passive. They are sleepers who thanks to circumstances come in contact with the supernatural. Those circumstances are all in the hands of the GM who has to write a way in which the players come into contact with it. That always felt off to me. I think it's that way because of WW novelist approach to GM'ing with a planned theme, mood and story-arc.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 17, 2020, 04:06:39 PM
Quote from: The Exploited.;1130307
Well to be fair... I bought into VtR for a very short time. And I bought quite a few of the rule books. I was just so sick of the whole VtM splat book and its insurmountable meta plot. That were obviously based on the devs own games (most of the time... Ugh!).

VtR had a good opportunity to do a reset but dropped the ball in my opinion. I'm not a fan at all of 5e.

What made you think it dropped the ball? Honestly I never really go into the nWoD or CoD. I thought it did get better later on. At least it had more flavor from 2007-2008 till about 2010 or so. The early years from 2004 till 2007 it was very dry.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 04:18:58 PM
Listen, the only proper way to play a vampire is a 13th generation Toreador named Annalise who is paralyzed by her need to feed on the living.

*Sisters of Mercy plays in the background*
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 04:44:41 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130329
A little weird. 1st Edition is my favorite edition of Vampire, followed by 5th Edition.

You can be fans of multiple ones.

And at the end of the day, we're all vampire fans.

Mind you, I married a Goth girl. :)

Eh, V5 really rubbed me the wrong way with both the setting changes and the mechanical changes.

Like, it claims to be an homage to VTM 1e, but I feel Requiem 1E did better in recapturing the feel of VTM 1E.

V5 just felt like a shallow imitation of 1E's Anarch-focused approach but with all the horrid setting changes and metaplot largely kept intact save for a few specific points that would be impossible to keep as canon. Again, YMMV

Now, I do like to rag on the Goths a lot, but I'll admit not all Goths are bad and I do like the Gothic aesthetic in a lot of ways (the Punk not so much) and the non-pretentious Goths are actually pretty fucking awesome.

Mainly I dislike the tendency of both the Goth and Punk subcultures to be riddled with a lot of insufferable pretentiousness, purity contests, and "conformity pretending to be non-conformity"

Now, those things are problems in all subcultures to varying degrees. But it's extremely common and intense in the goths and punks, to the point that SNL did a sketch on it in the 90's.

Granted, that problem is worse with punks moreso than the goths, though.

Like, I love the spooky Gothic Tim Burton atmosphere in WoD but I don't care for wangst and pretentiousness.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jeff37923 on May 17, 2020, 04:58:44 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130329
And at the end of the day, we're all vampire fans.

Speak for yourself

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130329
Mind you, I married a Goth girl. :)

So did I, but she plays Traveller.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4475[/ATTACH]
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Kuroth on May 17, 2020, 07:28:27 PM
+ Noice one Jeff!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 17, 2020, 08:26:32 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130338
Eh, V5 really rubbed me the wrong way with both the setting changes and the mechanical changes.

Like, it claims to be an homage to VTM 1e, but I feel Requiem 1E did better in recapturing the feel of VTM 1E.

V5 just felt like a shallow imitation of 1E's Anarch-focused approach but with all the horrid setting changes and metaplot largely kept intact save for a few specific points that would be impossible to keep as canon. Again, YMMV

Now, I do like to rag on the Goths a lot, but I'll admit not all Goths are bad and I do like the Gothic aesthetic in a lot of ways (the Punk not so much) and the non-pretentious Goths are actually pretty fucking awesome.

Mainly I dislike the tendency of both the Goth and Punk subcultures to be riddled with a lot of insufferable pretentiousness, purity contests, and "conformity pretending to be non-conformity"

Now, those things are problems in all subcultures to varying degrees. But it's extremely common and intense in the goths and punks, to the point that SNL did a sketch on it in the 90's.

Granted, that problem is worse with punks moreso than the goths, though.

Like, I love the spooky Gothic Tim Burton atmosphere in WoD but I don't care for wangst and pretentiousness.


I think V5 made some good changes. Hunger is more thematic than blood points, and the multiple powers per discipline level should have been the case in first edition. Resonance is a good idea with nonsensical implementation: rather than being limited to blood, it should have been able to apply to the emotional resonance of places, actions, anything! Needing to feed on particular resonances of blood to learn all disciplines doesn't result in good roleplaying. If I want to learn protean, then I should roleplay something symbolic of the power I'm trying to learn: e.g. to learn how to meld into the earth or another substance I should be burying myself in dirt or taking soil samples! You know, like how we learn real skills?

In any case, I think your obsession with the canon is unhealthy. My past relationship with WoD wasn't healthy and that's why I left. That's why I prefer to focus on creating a new urban fantasy universe, one where I don't have to worry about toxic fans obsessing over canon.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 08:37:52 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130392
I think V5 made some good changes. Hunger is more thematic than blood points, and the multiple powers per discipline level should have been the case in first edition. Resonance is a good idea with nonsensical implementation: rather than being limited to blood, it should have been able to apply to the emotional resonance of places, actions, anything! Needing to feed on particular resonances of blood to learn all disciplines doesn't result in good roleplaying. If I want to learn protean, then I should roleplay something symbolic of the power I'm trying to learn: e.g. to learn how to meld into the earth or another substance I should be burying myself in dirt or taking soil samples! You know, like how we learn real skills?

In any case, I think your obsession with the canon is unhealthy. My past relationship with WoD wasn't healthy and that's why I left. That's why I prefer to focus on creating a new urban fantasy universe, one where I don't have to worry about toxic fans obsessing over canon.

But 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 17, 2020, 09:38:12 PM
I sense....anger.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 17, 2020, 10:04:05 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130403
I sense....anger.

Eh, I'll admit I have a bit of anger but a lot of the resentment is intentionally overblown and now tongue-in-cheek at this point.

Again, I'm fond of self-deprecating humor and I've had a big chip on my shoulder about White Wolf in the past. But I think it's best to let go and just play the damn game more than anything else

Box Crayon Tales has an actual vendetta against White Wolf and World of Darkness

Me, I think later White Wolf and Onyx Path suck and they actively promote the more toxic parts of the fanbase a lot of the time, but overall I'm not too angry in actuality

Darren MacLerran is still an utter douchebag, but that's neither here nor there.

Mainly, I want to do the "World of Darkness Counter-Canon" as a creative gaming endeavor and a good "What If?" chronicle more than anything else

If I can get some players, I'll start it up
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 17, 2020, 10:32:30 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130333
Listen, the only proper way to play a vampire is a 13th generation Toreador named Annalise who is paralyzed by her need to feed on the living.

*Sisters of Mercy plays in the background*

I miss Annalise. I wonder where she is now.

*Dead Can Dance plays in the background*
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 17, 2020, 10:54:12 PM
Altering 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: GameDaddy on May 17, 2020, 11:44:01 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130329
A little weird. 1st Edition is my favorite edition of Vampire, followed by 5th Edition.

You can be fans of multiple ones.

And at the end of the day, we're all vampire fans.

Mind you, I married a Goth girl. :)

I 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Aglondir on May 18, 2020, 01:06:27 AM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1130409
A look tentative 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.


Same. 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 18, 2020, 05:23:03 AM
Over in the Onyx Path forum, I did a couple of posts that I think explain why I really love Vampire: The Masquerade.

Quote
Why feel guilt about being a vampire?

Because you're a monster.

But I am actually not going to be flippant with you about this because it's a topic that I've actually spent a great deal of time thinking about. The answer is best described in terms of the early THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES. One of the interesting things about them is INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE was written during the worst period of Anne Rice's life and when she at her most distant from her religious faith.

The primary element that underscores Interview and, to an extent, The Vampire Lestat, is the lack of any underlying moral justice in the universe. God may or may not exist but it is utterly irrelevant to the atheist Lestat and very relevant in his absence to the fallen Catholic Louis. If God is nonexistent or uncaring, that leaves the morality of a vampire squarely on the shoulders of the protagonists as well as the terrible things they do. The full weight of all of your actions and their consequences weighs on you.

Louis hates himself because he's ruined countless lives and doesn't have the decency to kill himself to stop it. Lestat rationalizes the experience and tries to get enough joy to ignore the empathy most people feel for others.

You don't have to play the game like this but my games have always had their player characters having accidentally killed innocent people in their backstories. Maybe they were left alone during their Embrace and ripped their family apart during a frenzy, maybe they were pushed too far and woke up over a corpse, or maybe some asshole Sheriff tied them up in a room with a little girl because fuck you, Anarch. Blood is on your hands and in your mouth.

Some of us very much like the fact you're a vampire means that you're a BAD GUY. That you are a person who makes the world a worse place by your presence. You can try to avert this, do good things to make up for the bad ones, but you've ruined at least a few lives. You don't want to die. You want to live. You want to continue drinking blood, hanging out with your friends, and maybe living the life that was unfairly taken from you.But even if you're VERY careful about who you feed on, people get caught in the crossfire or get sick or die.

And that can be really fucking emotional and satisfying to play if you're sick of being the Good GuyTM in other games.


Also, what kind of vampire should you play:

Quote

I encourage my players to strike a balance here between Nick Knight/Angel and hideous inhuman monster, with the sweet spot being somewhere around Al Pacino. No, that's actually not a non-sequitor, I mean Michael Corleone and Tony Montana. Mobster and crime movies are a good inspiration fodder section for PCs. There's nothing wrong with the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire (especially if they fail at this) and I've had many a player go with it. However, I prefer if player characters tend to land on, "I'm a good person to the people I love but do horrible things elsewhere in my life that ends up splashing on the people I love despite my best efforts." Michael ends up making his family's life worse because his attempts to go straight cause him to do even more awful things. Tony gets his loved ones' killed because apparently cocaine results in Vampire murder frenzies.

Part of why I always liked Original Recipe Lodin from CBN was that he was only 95% an asshole. He'd kill your PC's families, torment them, and murder anyone who got in the way of his power. However, dude had loved ones. Lorraine and his favorite humans that would get endangered by, well, being the Prince.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 18, 2020, 07:02:11 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130403
I sense....anger.

Since 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 18, 2020, 07:04:43 AM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130440

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.

Oddly, I agree with most of what you said [while still loving V5 if you want to hear why] but 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.

Even then, they're on a short leash.

Augustus Giovanni is Antediluvian 2# to go down.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 18, 2020, 09:19:11 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130435
Over in the Onyx Path forum, I did a couple of posts that I think explain why I really love Vampire: The Masquerade.

Also, what kind of vampire should you play:

I 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?
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: The Exploited. on May 18, 2020, 09:36:03 AM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130440
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.

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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 18, 2020, 11:00:15 AM
Quote from: jan paparazzi;1130451
I 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 18, 2020, 02:27:47 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130441
Oddly, 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.

Quote
but 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 18, 2020, 02:58:13 PM
Quote from: Aglondir;1130421
Same. 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;1130440

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.


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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 18, 2020, 03:39:12 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130477
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!"

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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 18, 2020, 04:29:58 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130485
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.
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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2020, 05:22:27 PM
Quote from: jan paparazzi;1130451
I 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;1130394
But 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;1130405
Box 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;1130409
Altering 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;1130412
I 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;1130440
Since 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;1130460
WOD 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;1130481
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.

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;1130481
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.
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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 18, 2020, 06:08:52 PM
Quote
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?


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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 18, 2020, 06:38:00 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130496
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.

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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 18, 2020, 07:13:45 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130511
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.

I don't agree with the assertion that such a conceit inherently helps with verisimilitude.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 18, 2020, 08:59:40 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130512
I 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).
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 19, 2020, 01:28:03 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130496
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.

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?

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

Quote
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.
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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 19, 2020, 08:35:59 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130522
The 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;1130609
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.
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;1130609
How 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;1130609
I 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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 20, 2020, 09:14:00 AM
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.

(https://www.askideas.com/media/73/Gentlemen-you-had-my-curiosity%E2%80%A6-but-now-you-have-my-attention.jpg)

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.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: tenbones on May 20, 2020, 09:29:09 AM
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...
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 20, 2020, 09:31:47 AM
Quote from: tenbones;1130696
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...

Any sufficiently large fandom will eventually get people who hate or love contradictory things. Look at D&D.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 20, 2020, 09:40:23 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

(https://www.askideas.com/media/73/Gentlemen-you-had-my-curiosity%E2%80%A6-but-now-you-have-my-attention.jpg)

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.

Ironically, all the shit you listed are all the reasons I hated V5, oddly enough, except for retconning the Kuei-Jin. That was the one good thing they did.

It's all so pretentious and snobbish, I fucking hate V5.

And the tenth reason was so ridiculous and reeks of a sort of reverse McCarthyism or a lefty version of the Satanic Panic.

If Nazi douchebags buy and play V5, there's nothing that White Wolf can do about it.

All the harping on about it is just cringe-worthy virtue signalling reminiscent of TSR removing demons and devils from AD&D 2E.

Actually, it's more idiotic than that.

It'd be like if Varg Vikernes went on a rant telling Jews and Muslim refugees not to buy his shitty MYFAROG game or if the guys who did Twilight 2000 telling communists to not buy the game and how they're not welcome.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there were some Neo-Nazis who bought V5 and played a session of it just to spite the punks at White Wolf. If I were a dumb Nazi fuck, I'd do just that.

Thankfully I'm too intelligent to be a Nazi, and therefore too intelligent to waste money on a game I don't like such as V5.

No offense, but I think you have Stockholm Syndrome and you're a slave to the metaplot. I do like you, but I'm worried that your brand loyalty to White Wolf is getting every bit as troubling as Box Crayon Tales's hate-boner crusade against them.

Seriously, give a chance to my upcoming counter-canon. It will be a good Rule Zero'd version of Vampire that shows an alternate "What If?" version of the World of Darkness
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 20, 2020, 09:59:28 AM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130700
Ironically, all the shit you listed are all the reasons I hated V5, oddly enough, except for retconning the Kuei-Jin. That was the one good thing they did.

It's all so pretentious and snobbish, I fucking hate V5.

No shit, what a revelation.

Quote
And the tenth reason was so ridiculous and reeks of a sort of reverse McCarthyism or a lefty version of the Satanic Panic.

Fuck Nazis. Nazis are shit.

Guys who hate Nazis are not the same as guys who hate kids who wear black and have bad attitudes.

Quote
If Nazi douchebags buy and play V5, there's nothing that White Wolf can do about it.

They can insult them every other paragraph, which I'm all for.

Because fuck Nazis.

I live in Kentucky. Nazis are not something you call people you disagree with on the internet. They're guys who wave Nazi flags and beat up gay people. Last year one of them killed a black couple in my Kroger because he couldn't break into a church to go on a mass shooting spree. There's dozens of militias in my area of wannabe Tim McVeighs and guys waiting for the next race war.

I'm all for calling em out as the Goth and counterculture subculture in my area was about rejecting the white power conformity. More power to em.

Quote
All the harping on about it is just cringe-worthy virtue signalling reminiscent of TSR removing demons and devils from AD&D 2E.

The person who hates the person who hates Jews is not the same as a person who hates Jews.

I'm all for tolerance until it requires tolerating assholes.

Quote
Actually, it's more idiotic than that.

It'd be like if Varg Vikernes went on a rant telling Jews and Muslim refugees not to buy his shitty MYFAROG game or if the guys who did Twilight 2000 telling communists to not buy the game and how they're not welcome.

Yep. I think its solid to know whether your dollars are supporting a shitbag or not.

Quote
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there were some Neo-Nazis who bought V5 and played a session of it just to spite the punks at White Wolf. If I were a dumb Nazi fuck, I'd do just that.

Thankfully I'm too intelligent to be a Nazi, and therefore too intelligent to waste money on a game I don't like such as V5.

No offense, but I think you have Stockholm Syndrome and you're a slave to the metaplot. I do like you, but I'm worried that your brand loyalty to White Wolf is getting every bit as troubling as Box Crayon Tales's hate-boner crusade against them.

Hate to do it but...

"I like playing the game and support it because I think it's fun."

I know, CRAZY!

I just love Gothic Punk. Have since I was 12. I write books about them and make money off it.

Quote
Seriously, give a chance to my upcoming counter-canon. It will be a good Rule Zero'd version of Vampire that shows an alternate "What If?" version of the World of Darkness

I'll bear that in mind.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 20, 2020, 10:07:30 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130701
No shit, what a revelation.



Fuck Nazis. Nazis are shit.

Guys who hate Nazis are not the same as guys who hate kids who wear black and have bad attitudes.



They can insult them every other paragraph, which I'm all for.

Because fuck Nazis.

I live in Kentucky. Nazis are not something you call people you disagree with on the internet. They're guys who wave Nazi flags and beat up gay people.

I hate Nazis too. Who doesn't hate Nazis?

"I hate Nazis" is as simple-minded and idiotically obvious as saying "I hate cancer." Like, it doesn't even need to be said.

Unless you explicitly identify as a Nazi, people are going to assume you oppose them. Do you get the point I'm trying to make?

Being so vocally anti-Nazi just seems unhinged, like when the McCarthyists were shrieking about Communists.

The Communists were awful as well, and just like the Nazis, you did have violent communist gangs like the IWW militias and commie infiltrators in the 1950's like Alger Hiss, to say nothing of the Cold War, but harping about the commies and seeing them under every rock and tree just proved how insane McCarthyism had gotten.

And I grew up in Appalachia, Southwestern Virginia, to be exact.

Dickenson County, Virginia directly borders Pike County, Kentucky.

I know how vile the morally conservative Protestant redneck savages in Appalachia can be, so you don't need to lecture me about anti-gay sentiment. I'm a bisexual male who leans heavily on the gay side of things.

I hate Nazis and Rednecks but I also hate Communists and Anarchists. Fuck 'em both.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 20, 2020, 10:11:06 AM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130702
I hate Nazis too. Who doesn't hate Nazis?

"I hate Nazis" is as simple-minded and idiotically obvious as saying "I hate cancer." Like, it doesn't even need to be said.

Seriously, where have you been on the fucking internet?

Also, why the fuck do you think I'm lecturing YOU specifically?

We're in agreement, fuck Nazis, but there's no end to the places I've had to deal with guys who are either "ironic" Nazis or are racist homophobe geeks. Usually, they tend to say they're Neo-Confederates even if they're Nazi flag wavers because that's mildly more socially acceptable.

It's a pain in the ass to see they're all over the properties I love. Also, White Wolf HAS had a Nazi problem in the past. There used to be a sizeable Neo Nazi fandom of Werewolves.

Quote
I hate Nazis and Rednecks but I also hate Communists and Anarchists. Fuck 'em both.

I hate communism as an authoritarian totalitarian religious persecution group and see no reason you can't oppose both Nazis and communists. I'm a recovering anarchist, though.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 20, 2020, 10:17:49 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130703
Seriously, where have you been on the fucking internet?

A lot more places than you can imagine.

Don't mistake a vocal minority of idiotic assholes on the internet for the majority opinion.

That is a mistake made by both Alt-Right Neo-Nazis and woke Neo-Bolsheviks.

Performative bullshit like the stuff done by Onyx Path and Nu-White Wolf is just cringe-inducing and off-putting for most people, and I say this as someone who would be killed by Nazis.

I'm also someone who'd get killed or gulag'd by Communists, for that matter.

So fuck 'em both.

We need a Counter-Canon to serve as a fan alternative to V5.

If you're a Nazi, you probably won't like my counter-canon.

But if you're a commie, an anarchist, or an extremist SJW, you won't like it either.

Commie Punks Fuck Off! Fuck The Punk Subculture!

In a perfect world, the 1970's would have ended with Punk dying and Disco surviving instead.



Dumbasses on the internet are not indicative of the real world.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130703
Seriously, where have you been on the fucking internet?

Also, why the fuck do you think I'm lecturing YOU specifically?

We're in agreement, fuck Nazis, but there's no end to the places I've had to deal with guys who are either "ironic" Nazis or are racist homophobe geeks. Usually, they tend to say they're Neo-Confederates even if they're Nazi flag wavers because that's mildly more socially acceptable.

I hate communism as an authoritarian totalitarian religious persecution group and see no reason you can't oppose both Nazis and communists. I'm a recovering anarchist, though.

I'll admit I jumped the gun and thought you were attacking me specifically.

I got so used to be singled out and dogpiled on Onyx Path Forums, I automatically assume it's an attack on me specifically.

There's a reason I intentionally got myself banned last year on there.

Thanks to Onyx Path Forums, I now know what it's like to envy the dead.

It's good to know we're in agreement on the communism part. I hate Nazis and Communists, and I think the Neo-Nazis in your area is because you have the misfortune of living in Central Appalachia, AKA America's cesspit.

I live in that same region and I know the pain.

I can't stand the Goth and Punk shit because I've got a very bad history dealing with those scenes, punk especially, and I've realized prefer metal, disco, and classic rock anyway.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 20, 2020, 10:25:12 AM
They don't have to be off the internet to make the lives of those who dwell in the net miserable.

And White wolf had a net positive effect on my life.

It opened my eyes to a lot of things and subcultures that made me less of an asshole. So, yes, I am very fond of it.

Just saying.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 20, 2020, 10:30:09 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130706
They don't have to be off the internet to make the lives of those who dwell in the net miserable.

And White wolf had a net positive effect on my life.

It opened my eyes to a lot of things and subcultures that made me less of an asshole. So, yes, I am very fond of it.

Just saying.

For me, my experiences with those subcultures have been entirely negative.

Where I stand, the Goth and Punk subcultures seem to be very cult-like and the ones in my area are openly communistic and authoritarian, even if they claim to be anti-authoritarian, at least from my experiences both online and offline.

I edited my previous post to better address more of your points, and I understand we have different experiences on the matter, but what I have to say is worth considering.

Bear in mind, I have no ill will against you personally, and I think you have a lot of potential as a player in a prospective WoD counter-canon chronicle I am planning, especially with your vast knowledge and input as a White Wolf fan who was there from the beginning.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 20, 2020, 11:23:23 AM
So, I haven't read all of the V5 book, though I have skimmed it and picked up tidbits of information here and there. Let me reaction to a few of these points.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

This is pretty much correct. If there aren't changes then it's no different from V20 and there is no reason to buy it. Now, of course, changes are a double edged sword. Changes must be made otherwise there is no point, but that opens up the possibility for removing things that lots of people like or introducing things that people don't like.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

I'm not sure if I completely agree with your assessments, but changes have happened and I guess addressing some of them is a good thing.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

Now, I like bringing more focus to the Anarchs because to me the elders vs anarchs was one of the key interesting features of the original V:tM. But making the Anarchs their own sect with Clans unique to them actually undermines what Anarchs actually are. It turns the Anarchs into the Sabbat. Anarchs are the younger vampires fighting against the power of the elders, but if they have their own Clans then that means that we have elder Gangrel, Brujah, and Setites commanding their childer to fight against the Camarilla for them. The Anarchs only make sense within the Camarilla, otherwise they aren't really Anarchs like the Sabbat weren't Anarchs even though they started out that way.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

The Brujah aren't just Anarchs though. They aren't dirty Caitiff. They have elders and ancients, a history to compare with any Clan. They were philosopher kings of old and elders of the Camarilla will remember that. Similar things can be said for the Gangrel and Setites. That is why Anarch Clans don't really make sense. Caitiff were never really respected in the Camarilla, in many cases they were hunted by scourges. In large part, the Camarilla is V:tM and we don't want them to be too aloof from the player perspective, that is what the elders are for.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

I'm alright with this. Though WoD always had a global outlook, it could have been done better. Then again, I get the feeling that what we have now could be done better too.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

I never used the Chicago stuff so I don't really care, though Chicago has been one of the most focused on locations in V:tM since 1st edition so I can understand how it could excite a lot of people. It's not a negative in my mind.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

I think that maybe it's gone a little too street level for my tastes. In revised we had too much metaplot and methuselahs around every corner determine events that players lived in the shadows of. I don't think that is good. But I also think that the machinations of the elders should be something that players can be exposed to or even participate in. It's a balancing act. I don't think it's wrong to have powerful players either, it's not bad wrong fun.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

That's probably true. Not necessarily something I care about but it's a good point.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

I don't know if I am familiar enough with this one to comment or care.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
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.

Here's where I have the most trouble. If the people putting out V5 don't want right wingers to give them any money, then I will happily oblige that demand and continue playing older editions and their various permutations.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 20, 2020, 11:42:10 AM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1130714
Here's where I have the most trouble. If the people putting out V5 don't want right wingers to give them any money, then I will happily oblige that demand and continue playing older editions and their various permutations.

I feel like this brings up the issue of what exactly is a right winger. All the conservatives I know are viciously anti-Nazi and most of them have come about to being anti-Neo Confederate due to the fact the latter are increasingly hanging around with the former. You lie down with dogs and you get fleas. It's also the fact that there's a greater awareness via the internet that the Confederacy's romanticism was just a big pack of lies and it was always about white supremacy as well as slavery. If you're a conservative, I'd argue you have an obligation to agree with Jason Carl that "Nazi punks fuck off."

It's a sentiment the Dead Kennedys mastered after all when they got a misaimed fandom from said group.

https://youtu.be/x5SYjoZsLQE

Be that as may, the company has made it a point of being socially progressive as a point of its nature. I don't see that as a problem as i don't think anything can state itself to be "art" unless it has some form of message to convey even if it's one as mild as, "Racism is bad, homophobia is bad, trans people are people." White Wolf sometimes went much further with questionable results like, "Environmental terrorism is justified against Satanic megacorporations because Gaia says so" but you have to take the fiction with a grain of salt.

Or, as I explained on Onyx Path's forums, "When I am talking about Nazis, I'm not being hyperbolic. I mean the actual guys who say we should go kill everyone brown and Jewish. Maybe you think there's not a lot of them but there's enough to be worrisome in my area and they have guns."
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 20, 2020, 12:17:04 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130715
I feel like this brings up the issue of what exactly is a right winger. All the conservatives I know are viciously anti-Nazi and most of them have come about to being anti-Neo Confederate due to the fact the latter are increasingly hanging around with the former. You lie down with dogs and you get fleas. It's also the fact that there's a greater awareness via the internet that the Confederacy's romanticism was just a big pack of lies and it was always about white supremacy as well as slavery. If you're a conservative, I'd argue you have an obligation to agree with Jason Carl that "Nazi punks fuck off."

It's a sentiment the Dead Kennedys mastered after all when they got a misaimed fandom from said group.

https://youtu.be/x5SYjoZsLQE

Be that as may, the company has made it a point of being socially progressive as a point of its nature. I don't see that as a problem as i don't think anything can state itself to be "art" unless it has some form of message to convey even if it's one as mild as, "Racism is bad, homophobia is bad, trans people are people." White Wolf sometimes went much further with questionable results like, "Environmental terrorism is justified against Satanic megacorporations because Gaia says so" but you have to take the fiction with a grain of salt.

Or, as I explained on Onyx Path's forums, "When I am talking about Nazis, I'm not being hyperbolic. I mean the actual guys who say we should go kill everyone brown and Jewish. Maybe you think there's not a lot of them but there's enough to be worrisome in my area and they have guns."

This isn't a political forum, so I probably shouldn't go off on the very long tangent about what is wrong with Jason Carl's politics or the statements he's made, or refused to make, regarding V:tM. Suffice it to say that it's way more complicated than just being against literal Nazis. Should people take a stand for what they believe in? If so, then I would take a stand and say that I wouldn't give any money to Jason Carl even if I absolutely loved his product. In retrospect, some of the stuff that WW has put out over the years has been pretty political, and pretty horrible, too. V:tM was never as bad because it was less about real world politics and more about the politics of vampires. Looking back, knowing what I do now, I might have avoided some of WW's products in the past, but I was a dumb teenager and didn't know any better.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 20, 2020, 01:44:29 PM
I don't buy WW products because they don't appeal to me. I find the setting too restrictive (and the rules are horrible). I prefer something like The Everlasting, WitchCraft, or Nephilim. I really have no recourse but to make my own settings.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 20, 2020, 01:56:26 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130722
I don't buy WW products because they don't appeal to me. I find the setting too restrictive (and the rules are horrible). I prefer something like The Everlasting, WitchCraft, or Nephilim. I really have no recourse but to make my own settings.

I very seldom stick exactly to a setting, I always like to change things around. Of course, if somebody else is running it they may go with canon, but my regular gaming group plays fast and loose with canon too. So I judge a setting not so much based on taking it exactly as is, but whether or not it inspires good ideas. Sometimes a setting that inspires me to alter it quite a bit is still good in my opinion because it made me interested enough to do that. I'd put WoD games in that category, full of good ideas and ideas I don't like so much, but so interesting it makes me want to customize it to my tastes.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 20, 2020, 03:03:37 PM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1130725
I very seldom stick exactly to a setting, I always like to change things around. Of course, if somebody else is running it they may go with canon, but my regular gaming group plays fast and loose with canon too. So I judge a setting not so much based on taking it exactly as is, but whether or not it inspires good ideas. Sometimes a setting that inspires me to alter it quite a bit is still good in my opinion because it made me interested enough to do that. I'd put WoD games in that category, full of good ideas and ideas I don't like so much, but so interesting it makes me want to customize it to my tastes.

I have to agree that WoD does still manage to inspire me to change it because of its perceived shortcomings.

Like, VTR2e introduced literal succubi and jiangshi clans eventually (fifteen years after initial release), but because of the poorly-conceived toolkit format they're only ever going to be obscure options in obscure side books. And they still haven't adopted the superior discipline format used by V5. To say nothing of my many other complaints.

EDIT: For example, VTR2e introduces the "pijavica (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pijavica)" loosely based on Balkan folklore (http://www.britic.co.uk/2016/07/28/584633/). In the folklore, the vampire is a poltergeist for the first 40 days/nights of existence before maturing into a human form. In the game lore, they're extinct and you can't play them.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 20, 2020, 06:19:05 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130694
Generally, I like V5 for the following reasons:
Yeah, like I said... was never going to convince me. Let's break these down;

Quote
1. There's no reason to buy a new edition without changes:
There's also no need to change things just for the sake of change; which is why so many of the mechanics in V5 are mediocre, counter-intuitive or just plain don't work.

And if you're only changing things as an excuse to sell a new core book... maybe you shouldn't be choosing to release a new edition at this point. There was absolutely nothing wrong with V20's mechanics that required wholesale dumping of them in favor coin-flips hidden behind d10s, video-gaming up the disciplines (Potence is good for damage and movement, but you can't actually use it to interact with the environment by lifting things... that is straight out of video game logic) and whole new mechanical systems that completely change how the game is played (Chronicle Tenants, Touchstones and Convictions).

To borrow from the old D&D edition wars... if they wanted to make a brand new game based on vampires they should have done that instead of trying to sell their version as Vampire the Masquerade.

Quote
2. It updates the setting to 2018
So did V20... smart phones, hacktivism, etc. is all there. V5 was a money grab and attempt to re-invent the setting to be more woke because the updates had already happened.

Quote
3. The Anarchs finally get treated seriously:
The Anarchs got turned into the Sabbat, complete with their own specific Clans with elders, that completely undermines the point of being an Anarch in the first place while the Sabbat got put on a bus and driven into an IED. If your faction can only be taken seriously by turning it into another faction and removing the original faction, it never deserved to taken seriously. I'd argue they work better as a joke particularly because of your next point...

Quote
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 (emphasis added). 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.
They've always been the Illuminati and what makes point 3 above even funnier is that in real life those plucky Occupy/Antifa/BLM rebels V5 wants you to identify with get the majority of their funding from the same behind the scenes globalist money men who own most of the politicians they're paid to protest against. Nothing about this needed any sort of new edition, much less a complete gutting and trashing of the rules to be able to portray... it just needed a book with these things as plot points.

Quote
5. It acknowledges its global fanbase:
V20 largely took care of those things too. Again I ask... Brand new shitty mechanics were needed to acknowledge their global fans why? Are the global fans not interested in the classic mechanics that they were fans of in the first place?

Quote
6. The Chicago update:
Chicago was always the setting you read, but never bothered to actually play with because there was too much already established to allow players any degree of freedom. I've gotten more use out Chicago by Night (1e, 2e and the NWoD version) as a geography supplement for my MAGE game than I ever got use out of it for Vampire.

Plus they killed off Menele... Not. Cool.

Quote
7. The grittier, darker feel: ... 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.
A) You realize of course that this also what was done with the much reviled Mage Revised right? "Who wants to play Ethernauts exploring weird magical dimensions when you can play grungy street rats trapped in a world of dying magic?" When you change the fundamental assumptions of the game, but insist its actually the same game, you're going to get backlash and longtime fans of how it was will hate it with the fiery passion of 1000 suns because its basically selling the notion of "how you used to play it was wrong."

B) Vampire in previous editions could be as dark and gritty if that's how you wished to play it. A Ventrue whose herd was sex workers he'd trafficked into the country because he was embraced into the early 1800s and could only gain nourishment from slaves. A vampire gang actively fighting gentrification of a neighborhood because rich people with sturdy locks are a lot harder to feed on than crackheads in shitty apartments. A Malkavian with the derangement of "diagnostic hypochondria" who'd managed to gain control over the county's mental health institutions and used them to remove their opposition and get toys for her more sadistic childer to play with. The Brujah who is funding and directing both Antifa/BLM and White Nationalist movements to create violent clashes wherever and whenever they need them. Systematically destroying people of honor and integrity so that compromised and bought of individuals could get their positions... none of those required a new edition or even game mechanics to pull off.

Nor did those elements require changing the game to make it impossible to use for those groups that instead wanted a game of Vampions with trenchcoats, katanas and cool powers going up against ancient Methuselah horrors.

V5 wants Vampions to be declared "badwrongfun" so... Fuck V5.

Quote
8. The multi-media campaign:

9. The willingness to course correct:

10. They told Nazi fans to fuck off:
None of these things required gutting the core mechanics of all the previous editions and telling players who preferred those styles that they were playing it wrong. Bloodlines 2 is going to sell like hotcakes because its Bloodlines 2, not because of any changes made to the tabletop RPG its based on. Correcting course is a corporate policy that has nothing to do with the quality of V5, nor does telling Nazis to fuck off (which one would assume is a given) make the dumpster fire that is V5 play any better.

So yeah... you gave me a bunch of touchy-feely reasons that are 99% associated with the surrounding fluff.

I don't give two warm shits about fluff; Give me the V5 fluff and I could run it using V20 (or "d20 Modern" for that matter) with no issues at all.

I routinely come up with my own fluff as needed for the games I run. I thought the official write up of Boston was lame... so I shit-canned it and wrote up my own cast of NPCs for my Vampire game. Took me about four hours to get the basics laid out and the rest has developed in play as needed.

My issue is that V5's mechanics make the work done by the Arcanis guys for their own game system look competent (if you haven't heard this story the short version is that their "math guy" thought 2d10 would produce identical results to a 1d20 in terms of probability distribution and that was just the START of that system's issues).

Is V20's mechanics perfect? Nope, but they're way more intuitive to new players than V5 is... and if you're going to use something the size of a d10 in a "count successes" system you should have a reason for it like the variable difficulty numbers used in the classic World of Darkness. There is also a ton of flexibility in being able to both assign variable difficulty numbers AND use grades of success as part of the same resolution mechanic (with static difficulties you're adding or removing dice as modifiers which can adjust the number of successes scored... by contrast 3 dice in classic World of Darkness, even against difficulty 2, will never score the five successes needed for certain actions) that is just lost in V5.

I also really hate the mechanical change that you only ever be fully satiated by murdering someone and the subsequent retcon that you're not really a "blood" vampire... you're a "life-force" vampire that just happens to use blood as a medium. You could drink a hundred pints of blood from people lined up and still be hungry in V5 even though you'd physically be bloated up like a tick about to burst.

That's just stupid. But then... that's V5 in a nutshell.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 20, 2020, 06:54:38 PM
Quote from: Chris24601;1130747
The Anarchs got turned into the Sabbat, complete with their own specific Clans with elders, that completely undermines the point of being an Anarch in the first place while the Sabbat got put on a bus and driven into an IED. If your faction can only be taken seriously by turning it into another faction and removing the original faction, it never deserved to taken seriously. I'd argue they work better as a joke particularly because of your next point...

They've always been the Illuminati and what makes point 3 above even funnier is that in real life those plucky Occupy/Antifa/BLM rebels V5 wants you to identify with get the majority of their funding from the same behind the scenes globalist money men who own most of the politicians they're paid to protest against. Nothing about this needed any sort of new edition, much less a complete gutting and trashing of the rules to be able to portray... it just needed a book with these things as plot points.

Yes, these are exactly my thoughts. The Anarchs were turned into the Sabbat, thus leaving no Anarch movement in a sense. The Anarchs are only meaningful as a faction within or overlapping with the Camarilla.

I also agree about all of the Antifa (and other extremist leftist types) types really being tools for the establishment. Though this brings up something that I have long thought about Anarchs in V:tM - they don't have to be leftists. Well, of course from the perspective of Camarilla politics they are left wing, but that is a feudal aristocracy based on bloodlines and undying lords. Anarchs who oppose that don't have to be Antifa, they don't have to be communists or SJW's - in fact they probably aren't. Just because Anarchs are the far left of the vampire world doesn't mean that they are going to be the far left of the human world. Imagine your stereotypical middle aged middle class white Christian guy from the 1950's who gets embraced. Well, this guy believes in democracy, he believes in freedom, he believes in the Bill of Rights - weren't those the sorts of freedoms what he was fighting to protect in WWII? Aren't those freedoms what he wants to protect from the dirty commies? Well, what is this patriotic 1950's American going to think about being ruled by a bunch of aristocrats who were never elected, who aren't even Americans, and who also use their power to control the US political system. Isn't that what the Founding Fathers were fighting against? This guy would hate that stuff and if he maintains his values and manages to get out from under the thumb of his sire, he would certainly support some movement to reform the Camarilla - like the Anarchs. That doesn't mean that he is a punk with a mohawk and a tattoo on his face or that he's going to beat up people at a political march - by all metrics this guy would be very conservative by modern human standards.

In fact, a leftist might have fewer objections to the Camarilla style of rule than many on the right would, speaking in terms of modern human politics.

Quote from: Chris24601;1130747
V5 wants Vampions to be declared "badwrongfun" so... Fuck V5.
Part of the fun of any role playing game from D&D to Vampire to Champions to (pick your favorite) is getting to be a badass. That doesn't mean that there aren't more powerful beings out there, there always are and it's a big part of vampire, but players should feel that their characters are important and have the agency to change the world around them.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 20, 2020, 08:20:39 PM
The Anarchs had the Anarch Free States so they were their own sect.

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2020/04/ten-tips-to-playing-anarchs.html

I made this article recently on that.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 21, 2020, 05:15:20 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130764
The Anarchs had the Anarch Free States so they were their own sect.

No one is arguing that.

The argument is that by making the Brujah and Gangrel (and Ministers) into pillars of the Anarchs and setting the Anarchs more overtly against the Camarilla you've basically turned them into another Sabbat; a sect defined by specific clans with their own elders who target the Camarilla as a whole with more militant actions... whereas before they were defined as being the vampire "youth" who opposed the elders.

And because the Anarchs are now basically the Sabbat, the real Sabbat got put on a bus and driven into an IED so they can be memory-holed. The V5 lore has been very clear that most of the Sabbat who didn't get on the bus defected to the Anarchs and one of the Sabbat's two pillar clans is defecting to the Camarilla while the other has been utterly MIA for more than two years now (we've had more Ravnos sightings; a clan supposedly all but annihilated after the Week of Nightmares; than we have the Tzmisce).

Honestly, this is just one more place where V5 can be compared with the much reviled Mage Revised. They too wiped out factions (the disparates in the case of MRev) and merged the survivors nonsensically. Remember when they put the Chinese Imperial Celestial magicians who'd been warring with the Akashics almost as long as the Euthanatos INTO the Akashics? Or when they put the "all non-Catholics are heathens and we'll die for our beliefs" into the ecumenical pantheistic Celestial Chorus?

Now its throwing all the groups that knew Necromancy together into Clan Heceta even though it makes zero sense (and I believe I've already explained why earlier in this thread, but it may have been over on the OP forums) and wiping out the Sabbat.

MRev also messed over the magic system the same way V5 messed over the disciplines. MRev added enforced roleplay mechanics in the form of resonance traits the same way V5 added touchstones and convictions. MRev too decided to gut Master-level play to force a "street level" style of play onto the game. MRev also had to start backtracking almost immediately due to the fan hatred of the changes.

Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. V5 is making all the mistakes MRev did and will probably be remembered the same way (M20 went out of its way in the default assumptions/future fates sections to basically undo every last MRev metaplot element and restored magick to its 2e glory with a "bad stuff *cough*MRev*cough* happened, but it was overblown and went away and everything's back to normal now.").

I fully expect that if it hasn't been completely run into the ground by then, that V6 will be a return to form just as M20 was after MRev and D&D 5e was after 4E.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Nobby-W on May 21, 2020, 10:03:18 AM
I am irrationally indifferent to While Wolf, with the exception of their masterpiece: Street Fighter.

White Wolf fanboys, on the other hand ...
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: AmazingOnionMan on May 21, 2020, 11:36:03 AM
I don't know about anyone else, but after reading this thread WW will forever be the company which managed to produce furry nazi fanbois.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 01:49:17 PM
Quote from: Nobby-W;1130815
I am irrationally indifferent to While Wolf, with the exception of their masterpiece: Street Fighter.

White Wolf fanboys, on the other hand ...

Quote from: AmazingOnionMan;1130823
I don't know about anyone else, but after reading this thread WW will forever be the company which managed to produce furry nazi fanbois.

I try to keep my complaints focused on my creative disagreements with the setting and rules design, but eventually it's impossible not to criticize the attitudes of the company and the fandom.

Hence why I prefer to focus on constructive pursuits like world building the various fictional settings I want to play with.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: AmazingOnionMan on May 21, 2020, 03:45:52 PM
This will probably pop a few veins around here, but I think VtM is a pretty good game. Conceptually at least, the execution leaves ..a bit to be desired.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 04:34:54 PM
Quote from: AmazingOnionMan;1130831
This will probably pop a few veins around here, but I think VtM is a pretty good game. Conceptually at least, the execution leaves ..a bit to be desired.

I don't disagree. On the other hand, the concept isn't original or unique. It's ripped straight from Interview with the Vampire and heavily influenced by the cyberpunk (in the form of humanity) and horror (in the form of trope reversal) tabletop games of the 80s. In fact, Nightlife did the same concept the year before.

As I have said many times already, if you want a game whose concept is "vampire struggling with their own humanity" and good execution, then your best bet is probably Feed (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/124387/Feed). The way it describes character traits is story-game-y, I guess, but that is precisely what allows it to handle the transition between humanity and vampirism so well. It's also lacking in the pretension of WoD, as the writing goes out of its way to tell you that vampires are extremely flexible as a character type and providing many examples of settings and even fairly extensive research on vampire fiction. If nothing else, then Feed is useful for its research on the vampire fiction as a whole. I would even go so far as to say that Feed is what VTM should have been back in 1991. And it's easy enough to replicate the fluff of VTM if you still care about that.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 21, 2020, 05:44:03 PM
The aspect of V5 I like is the Hunger mechanic. I feel it enhances and brings the whole experience of being a vampire to the fore. Where the blood pool really did not.

The cost of using blood points really had very little impact on a character. To the point that a vampire didn't really care what they were doing in spending those precious blood points. So I think that aspect of the prior four editions of was just broken. Because there was no significant price to be paid for using blood points.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 06:04:39 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130840
The aspect of V5 I like is the Hunger mechanic. I feel it enhances and brings the whole experience of being a vampire to the fore. Where the blood pool really did not.

The cost of using blood points really had very little impact on a character. To the point that a vampire didn't really care what they were doing in spending those precious blood points. So I think that aspect of the prior four editions of was just broken. Because there was no significant price to be paid for using blood points.

Agreed.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 21, 2020, 07:27:34 PM
There are some V5 things that I like or that intrigue me.

I don't completely understand how it works, but I like the idea of a hunger mechanic too instead of just blood points. It sounds like it could be more engaging than just spending blood points. I like that Disciplines have multiple powers at the same level, that is a cool idea. I like the idea of Lasombra in the Camarilla. I like more focus on Anarchs even if I don't like the way they're doing it. It seems like they may have taken steps to fix some of my issues with aggravated damage too.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 07:40:38 PM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1130846
There are some V5 things that I like or that intrigue me.

I don't completely understand how it works, but I like the idea of a hunger mechanic too instead of just blood points. It sounds like it could be more engaging than just spending blood points. I like that Disciplines have multiple powers at the same level, that is a cool idea. I like the idea of Lasombra in the Camarilla. I like more focus on Anarchs even if I don't like the way they're doing it. It seems like they may have taken steps to fix some of my issues with aggravated damage too.


How familiar are you with CoD1e's mechanics? V5 takes a number of cues from CoD1e, but it's not identical.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 21, 2020, 07:49:11 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130848
How familiar are you with CoD1e's mechanics? V5 takes a number of cues from CoD1e, but it's not identical.


Only a little bit. I'm never played Requiem, though I have played Mage. I've actually been looking at 2nd edition Requiem a little bit lately.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 08:10:58 PM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1130849
Only a little bit. I'm never played Requiem, though I have played Mage. I've actually been looking at 2nd edition Requiem a little bit lately.


Long story short, the tabletop market was going through a slump around the turn of the millennium. White Wolf released the third editions and eventually the CoD in attempts to boost sales. (That failed anyway and they got bought out.) CoD was originally intended to be vague remakes or reboots of the 1st edition WoD, with more mysterious settings and a focus on street-level play. The convoluted backstory of WoD was dropped in order to avoid intimidating newcomers. At least until the "dark eras" reversed that decision.

Honestly, the whole ordeal was pretty messy. It still is messy. Both WoD and CoD have their problems. Supporting them side-by-side doesn't do favors for anybody. I wish WW would have done something like D&D5e and released a universal rules system with information on running WoD, CoD, or a mix thereof. V5 already seemed to have gone in that direction, so I wouldn't be surprised if Paradox ordered CoD3e to be V5 compatible (or cancelled it).

You can probably imagine why I decided to abandon WW games entirely in favor of my own original settings.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 21, 2020, 08:27:43 PM
Reboots never work. Not in novels, comics, or even movies. There is always a major portion of the audience left disenfranchised and unsatisfied. It's a no-win situation.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 21, 2020, 08:30:15 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130852
Long story short, the tabletop market was going through a slump around the turn of the millennium. White Wolf released the third editions and eventually the CoD in attempts to boost sales. (That failed anyway and they got bought out.) CoD was originally intended to be vague remakes or reboots of the 1st edition WoD, with more mysterious settings and a focus on street-level play. The convoluted backstory of WoD was dropped in order to avoid intimidating newcomers. At least until the "dark eras" reversed that decision.

Honestly, the whole ordeal was pretty messy. It still is messy. Both WoD and CoD have their problems. Supporting them side-by-side doesn't do favors for anybody. I wish WW would have done something like D&D5e and released a universal rules system with information on running WoD, CoD, or a mix thereof. V5 already seemed to have gone in that direction, so I wouldn't be surprised if Paradox ordered CoD3e to be V5 compatible (or cancelled it).

You can probably imagine why I decided to abandon WW games entirely in favor of my own original settings.

Yeah, I've familiar with the basics. I've played vampire since 2nd edition days and I remember when CoD came out. I never really got into it. There are a few things I do like about 2nd edition Requiem, though I was turned off of it from the beginning because of how it changed Clans from political organizations to archetypes.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 21, 2020, 08:45:10 PM
They cover issue at great length in the World of Darkness documentary I shared a link too.

Generally, the response was [from the owners], "This turned out to have been a terrible idea." Which I don't agree with as Chronicles of Darkness is generally better written, IMHO, and a much-much better rules set.

But it seemed not to hit the sweet spot with a lot of people, including myself, setting-wise.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 21, 2020, 08:52:31 PM
Paradox giving V5 back to the people who ran the property into the ground in the first place with White Wolf isn't a recipe for success either. It just isn't.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 21, 2020, 09:15:56 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130860
They cover issue at great length in the World of Darkness documentary I shared a link too.

Generally, the response was [from the owners], "This turned out to have been a terrible idea." Which I don't agree with as Chronicles of Darkness is generally better written, IMHO, and a much-much better rules set.

But it seemed not to hit the sweet spot with a lot of people, including myself, setting-wise.

I haven't seen that but I'd like to. I don't necessarily think rebooting the WoD with (what would become known as) the CoD was a mistake. Regardless of what anybody thinks about the respective merits and flaws of both settings, WW is a company that needs to make money and there is only so much you can do with a setting before the setting changes start to rub fans the wrong way. They can't just print the same books over and over again, well, they probably can't. Maybe they could have kept WoD around a bit longer and just made some radical changes - like V5 did. Would it have better to make V5 way back in 2004? I don't know, but it would have divided fans then too just like Requiem did.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 09:21:17 PM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1130858
Yeah, I've familiar with the basics. I've played vampire since 2nd edition days and I remember when CoD came out. I never really got into it. There are a few things I do like about 2nd edition Requiem, though I was turned off of it from the beginning because of how it changed Clans from political organizations to archetypes.


They spun off the political organizations into the covenants. This isn't much different than what VTM did with the antitribu or anarchs, except that it doesn't provide a multi-page spread for every combination of clan and sect like VTM did. Would you have preferred if every combination received a splat spread?

They aren't really archetypes either. There aren't many documented and consistent archetypes in vampire fiction. WW was just making shit up. That's why the Mekhet are so weird.
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130860
They cover issue at great length in the World of Darkness documentary I shared a link too.

Generally, the response was [from the owners], "This turned out to have been a terrible idea." Which I don't agree with as Chronicles of Darkness is generally better written, IMHO, and a much-much better rules set.

But it seemed not to hit the sweet spot with a lot of people, including myself, setting-wise.
All the butthurt WoD fans like to claim CoD was a waste of time. If that was really the case, then CCP would have cancelled it after aquiring WW. But they didn't. Paradox still hasn't.

Obviously it's not a terrible idea if they're still allowing CoD to exist. They're full of shit when they say that. Vigil and Lost were the single best games WW has ever made.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130861
Paradox giving V5 back to the people who ran the property into the ground in the first place with White Wolf isn't a recipe for success either. It just isn't.

How would you suggest not running it into the ground? WoD is one of those properties that was designed in such a way that it cannot avoid running into the ground.

Sure, you could mine the IP for video games in perpetuity I suppose. But it's steadily losing ground in the RPG market to newer games like Blades in the Dark because it banks on a shrinking old guard of nostalgic fans.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 09:27:11 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130856
Reboots never work. Not in novels, comics, or even movies. There is always a major portion of the audience left disenfranchised and unsatisfied. It's a no-win situation.


Fun fact: Tolkien complained about the "finality of publishing." He wanted to be able to revise his work after it was published.

Reboots exist for complex reasons ranging from capitalism to legal issues to sheer convolution of the source material. Furthermore, long-running franchises inevitably become bogged down in continuity errors.

Reboots are a way to make a fresh start. They aren't always bad. The 2011 Thundercats reboot was great.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 21, 2020, 09:32:08 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130866
How would you suggest not running it into the ground? WoD is one of those properties that was designed in such a way that it cannot avoid running into the ground.

Sure, you could mine the IP for video games in perpetuity I suppose. But it's steadily losing ground in the RPG market to newer games like Blades in the Dark because it banks on a shrinking old guard of nostalgic fans.

New blood. A new perspective is always invigorating. They could have given it to anyone else but the former White Wolf crew. That way, succeed or fail, it would have at least lived or died in the pursuit of new ideas.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 21, 2020, 09:58:53 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130867
The 2011 Thundercats reboot was great.

One success in a sea of failures is hardly any kind of justification to base a company's future on.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 21, 2020, 10:00:27 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130861
Paradox giving V5 back to the people who ran the property into the ground in the first place with White Wolf isn't a recipe for success either. It just isn't.

If you mean Onyx Path Publishing, they are the people who revived WOD after its lengthy absence.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130866
Obviously it's not a terrible idea if they're still allowing CoD to exist. They're full of shit when they say that. Vigil and Lost were the single best games WW has ever made.

FYI - the Documentary was pretty much one long commercial as it was paid for by White Wolf under the table. So the people trashing COD were White Wolf.

I agree with you about Vigil, though. As a long time C:TD fan, I also think "The Lost" is more what fans wanted from a fairy game too.

Quote from: Box Crayon Tales
Sure, you could mine the IP for video games in perpetuity I suppose. But it's steadily losing ground in the RPG market to newer games like Blades in the Dark because it banks on a shrinking old guard of nostalgic fans.

It should be noted that V5 has outsold all other previous editions of V:TM at this point (due to an international market) and is incredibly, wildly successful. It is now presently the heyday of the World of Darkness, not the 90s. Mike Pondsmith (who is a god) did a similar double take when he found out CD_Projekt Red worshiped him and Cyberpunk 2020 as a God--all of its owners having been addicted to Cyberpunk 2020 during the last days of the Soviet occupation of Poland. Paradox knew there was a market where American game developers didn't.

Basically, it's kind of like Goth itself. Goth disappeared like disco in America and everyone reacted like, "Wasn't THAT embarrassing?" Except, it didn't go away in other countries like Sweden (where Paradox is) and remains a thriving subculture. Vampire: The Masquerade never went away in foreign markets and has steadily grown ever since.

The whole, "V5 is not successful" is basically the "Captain Marvel will fail miserably" of RPGs.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 21, 2020, 10:28:17 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130874
If you mean Onyx Path Publishing, they are the people who revived WOD after its lengthy absence.

You are ignoring an important piece of history. The people who formed Onyx Path were the very same people who ran the WOD into the ground in the first place. Onyx Path was formed in direct response to those people being let go after the original White Wolf dissolved. Onyx Path was formed by those very people.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 21, 2020, 10:59:43 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130877
You are ignoring an important piece of history. The people who formed Onyx Path were the very same people who ran the WOD into the ground in the first place. Onyx Path was formed in direct response to those people being let go after the original White Wolf dissolved. Onyx Path was formed by those very people.


I question the "run it into the ground" summation, though. After all, it ended up being sold well and the biggest failure of White Wolf wasn't CoD but the failed MMORPG that occupied six years of the company's attention.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 21, 2020, 11:35:08 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130874

FYI - the Documentary was pretty much one long commercial as it was paid for by White Wolf under the table. So the people trashing COD were White Wolf.
Then White Wolf is full of shit. Disparaging a decade and a half of their own work and fan investment as a mistake? Seriously, fuck them. I was right to leave this shitty fandom all those years ago.

I can't believe you still like those shitheads. There is something very wrong with you.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130874
It should be noted that V5 has outsold all other previous editions of V:TM at this point (due to an international market) and is incredibly, wildly successful. It is now presently the heyday of the World of Darkness, not the 90s.


I find that very hard to believe, considering a complete lack of corroborating evidence. Do you have hard numbers for sales in the last three decades or is this based on rumors and hearsay?

All evidence we have from various third-party trackers indicates WW has been consistently declining since the early 2000s at least.

In the 90s they sold millions of books according to their website. Nowadays they barely sell a few thousand. They have what, maybe 30,000 fans across the various social media platforms? A number that is steadily shrinking since they're banking entirely on nostalgia to an aging userbase and are now focused on pleasing the tiny and shrinking minority of Scandinavian VTM players.

Their latest kickstarter got around the same number of backers as Blades in the Dark did in 2015. Blades in the Dark was a new IP without an established fandom, and it performed as well as a well-established nostalgic IP.

From all outside indications, WW is fucked. And considering their atrocious attitude to all the investment put into CoD and the scandals they keep falling into, they have horrible business and PR sense.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 22, 2020, 12:48:47 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130878
I question the "run it into the ground" summation, though. After all, it ended up being sold well and the biggest failure of White Wolf wasn't CoD but the failed MMORPG that occupied six years of the company's attention.

You are ignoring the reality that they gave up print through distributors for print on demand and ebooks exclusively. They haven't sold in brick and morter stores in a lot of years. That's not success. That's a continual downspiral.

And yes. They drove the original World Of Darkness into the ground. So much that they made a reboot game to replace it. They gave up on its viability as a product and stopped selling through brick & morter stores.

Onyx Path gave up any pretense of being an actual business the moment they started crowdfunding all of their products. They shoved all the risk on the customer, instead of assuming it themselves. They are barely eeking by on what little good will exists from the fans they have left.

Who took the actual financial risk to produce V5? Modiphius. A company that has never stopped selling to brick and morter stores

Onyx Path doesn't care enough about their products or their customers to make any actual investment or risk themselves. They don't and they never will.

V5 is what is actually available in brick and morter stores. V5 is what now matters. It's actually what is there. The rest is irrelevant.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 22, 2020, 07:45:19 AM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130880
Then White Wolf is full of shit. Disparaging a decade and a half of their own work and fan investment as a mistake? Seriously, fuck them. I was right to leave this shitty fandom all those years ago.

I can't believe you still like those shitheads. There is something very wrong with you.

Yes, I was surprised by it myself. However, there's one scene they chose to show, shoot, and frame, about them announcing the MMORPG will be set in the Old World of Darkness and the crowd cheering.

Quote
I find that very hard to believe, considering a complete lack of corroborating evidence. Do you have hard numbers for sales in the last three decades or is this based on rumors and hearsay?

Pretty much this is the more incredible annoyance factor because so many fans seem invested in the idea V5 is a failure. It gets doubly annoying because it should be self-obviously wrong because V5 sells internationally in stores whereas Onyx Path only sold via DriveThrough RPG. I mean, you don't have to be Warren Buffet to massively increase your sales that way.

Quote
All evidence we have from various third-party trackers indicates WW has been consistently declining since the early 2000s at least.

See above for why it's not true.

Quote
In the 90s they sold millions of books according to their website. Nowadays they barely sell a few thousand. They have what, maybe 30,000 fans across the various social media platforms? A number that is steadily shrinking since they're banking entirely on nostalgia to an aging userbase and are now focused on pleasing the tiny and shrinking minority of Scandinavian VTM players.

Their latest kickstarter got around the same number of backers as Blades in the Dark did in 2015. Blades in the Dark was a new IP without an established fandom, and it performed as well as a well-established nostalgic IP.

From all outside indications, WW is fucked. And considering their atrocious attitude to all the investment put into CoD and the scandals they keep falling into, they have horrible business and PR sense.

Yeah, wrong. Not just wrong INCREDIBLY WRONG.

It won the Origins award for Best RPG of 2019 and Fan Favorite for 2019
https://www.facebook.com/originsgamefair/photos/pcb.2555056247880356/2555055614547086/?type=3&theater

Just see the "What the hell, but we said it was losing fans?" reaction on this page.
https://www.rpgpub.com/threads/vampire-the-masquerade-5th-edition-wins-origins-game-fair-awards.3137/

But they get into the releasing the "best-sellers" of books in this thread and discuss their sources:

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-classic-world-of-darkness/vampire-the-masquerade/1293948-vampire-the-masquerade-5th-edition-sales

Yes. Published information for retail sales comes out from ICv2, in quarters. The most recent one, in which V5 was released, has yes to come out. So we don't know if its in the top five sellers or not.

EDIT: They've literally just been released:

1 Dungeons & Dragons (WotC)
2 Legend of the Five Rings (FFG)
3 Star Wars RPG (FFG)
4 Starfinder (Paizo)
5 Vampire (White Wolf)


Which I point out seems it could be better but it's just behind D&D and Star Wars a few months after its release and has consistently grown since.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 22, 2020, 07:52:28 AM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1130883
You are ignoring the reality that they gave up print through distributors for print on demand and ebooks exclusively. They haven't sold in brick and morter stores in a lot of years. That's not success. That's a continual downspiral.

And yes. They drove the original World Of Darkness into the ground. So much that they made a reboot game to replace it. They gave up on its viability as a product and stopped selling through brick & morter stores.

Onyx Path gave up any pretense of being an actual business the moment they started crowdfunding all of their products. They shoved all the risk on the customer, instead of assuming it themselves. They are barely eeking by on what little good will exists from the fans they have left.

Who took the actual financial risk to produce V5? Modiphius. A company that has never stopped selling to brick and morter stores

Onyx Path doesn't care enough about their products or their customers to make any actual investment or risk themselves. They don't and they never will.

V5 is what is actually available in brick and morter stores. V5 is what now matters. It's actually what is there. The rest is irrelevant.

Fair enough.

Since I actually do believe V5 has been pulled out of the gutter due to Paradox and Modiphius selling to stores, I completely agree that they have a much more viable business strategy.

Well played sir!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 22, 2020, 09:10:44 AM
Every RPG is behind D&D by huge margins. D&D is the big money maker of RPGs and everyone else makes chump change in comparison.

Most book stores have closed down in the past decade and a half due to competition with online ordering and ebooks.

Even then, by all indications CoD has shown itself able to compete comfortably with WoD. If only because people buy it to use with the translation guides and/or to create their own campaign settings.

WoD might be experiencing a slight surge in interest due to the sudden big changes made by Paradox, but that's hardly indicative of a long-term boost or outshining their heyday in the 90s.

I find any statements that WW is bigger now than in the 90s to be highly suspect, bordering on propaganda. I don't think you realize how big WW was in the 90s and even the early 2000s when they entered the d20 bubble. World of Darkness, Street Fighter, Trinity Universe, Sword & Sorcery, card games, board games, magazines, various collectibles, and more were all being published by WW.

Right now their biggest offerings are a handful of underwhelming visual novels on Steam. They promise a sequel to Bloodlines that shows no indication of being thematically similar in terms of black comedy and scenery-chewing character personalities.

WW is a pale shadow of itself at best. At worst, they're just another one of the many independent hobby companies that were snatched up by a video game publisher to be mined for video games and then rendered down for parts.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 22, 2020, 09:25:41 AM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130893
Every RPG is behind D&D by huge margins. D&D is the big money maker of RPGs and everyone else makes chump change in comparison.

Most book stores have closed down in the past decade and a half due to competition with online ordering and ebooks.

Even then, by all indications CoD has shown itself able to compete comfortably with WoD. If only because people buy it to use with the translation guides and/or to create their own campaign settings.

WoD might be experiencing a slight surge in interest due to the sudden big changes made by Paradox, but that's hardly indicative of a long-term boost or outshining their heyday in the 90s.

I find any statements that WW is bigger now than in the 90s to be highly suspect, bordering on propaganda. I don't think you realize how big WW was in the 90s and even the early 2000s when they entered the d20 bubble. World of Darkness, Street Fighter, Trinity Universe, Sword & Sorcery, card games, board games, magazines, various collectibles, and more were all being published by WW.

Right now their biggest offerings are a handful of underwhelming visual novels on Steam. They promise a sequel to Bloodlines that shows no indication of being thematically similar in terms of black comedy and scenery-chewing character personalities.

WW is a pale shadow of itself at best. At worst, they're just another one of the many independent hobby companies that were snatched up by a video game publisher to be mined for video games and then rendered down for parts.

Honestly, I think you seem to have missed just how popular it's become with things like LA By Night on Geek and Sundry and the beginning of the White Wolf channel. There's hundreds of Twitch games with thousands of fans to them.

Plus, we've got VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: BLOODLINES 2 as the 2nd most highly anticipated game of 2020.



It also had an incredibly successful release with COTERIES OF NEW YORK and planned mobile games. White Wolf has modernized and adapted.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 22, 2020, 11:34:30 AM
I know how to spot fads and "how do you do fellow kids" when I see it. Social media promotes fads in lieu of long-term gains. There might be a few thousand viewers, but how many are going to become invested in the brand?

WW modernized and adapted back in 2004 when they released Vampire: The Requiem. That didn't change their fate.

Coteries of New York released to underwhelming critical reception. I doubt it will change WW's fate either.

There's nothing special about the brand that will protect it from the pitfalls that defeat so many promising IPs.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: NeonAce on May 22, 2020, 01:33:39 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130880
Then White Wolf is full of shit. Disparaging a decade and a half of their own work and fan investment as a mistake? Seriously, fuck them. I was right to leave this shitty fandom all those years ago.

I can't believe you still like those shitheads. There is something very wrong with you.


Street Fighter fans are so much more chill, man. Make a Street Fighter that was taught the Dragon Punch by bottle-nosed dolphins when he got lost during a SEAL operation against Shadoloo, then go kick a Yeti's ass. Like a real roleplayer!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 22, 2020, 02:46:58 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130896
I know how to spot fads and "how do you do fellow kids" when I see it. Social media promotes fads in lieu of long-term gains. There might be a few thousand viewers, but how many are going to become invested in the brand?

WW modernized and adapted back in 2004 when they released Vampire: The Requiem. That didn't change their fate.

Coteries of New York released to underwhelming critical reception. I doubt it will change WW's fate either.

There's nothing special about the brand that will protect it from the pitfalls that defeat so many promising IPs.

Right now they're translating the game into like 5 new languages and discussing other expansions.

But if you want to believe it's somehow not doing great, sure, that's on you. I'm happy to imagine what it's like if it was a failing brand.

Are you if it's not?

Edit:

FYI - Coteries of New York received middling critical reception but was the best seller on Steam during its release month and recouped its costs within a week.

https://drawdistance.dev/being-a-pure-evil-business-developer-what-a-year-it-was/

Quote

        Launching Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York. Our first ever created fully licensed narrative experience (text-based adventure, Visual Novel-like game, you choose) released on December 11th. Great (and a little stressful) cooperation with Paradox, the IP holder on this – there were always doubts in our minds, are we following the licensing guidelines properly, is this being true to Vampire spirit? And despite some minor issues, such as some bugs and stuff, the launch was really successful. Both the development and marketing costs recouped in less than a week, Paradox is pleased, players and journalists are moderately pleased – all in all it was a good launch, but also extremely important in terms of acquiring new skills by our developers.

They immediately set out to make a sequel that is coming out this year and White Wolf is now doing 3 text based mobile and computer novels.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1279630/Vampire_The_Masquerade__Shadows_of_New_York/

Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 22, 2020, 03:59:37 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130910
Right now they're translating the game into like 5 new languages and discussing other expansions.

But if you want to believe it's somehow not doing great, sure, that's on you. I'm happy to imagine what it's like if it was a failing brand.

Are you if it's not?


They translated the game into multiple languages back in the 90s too. Some supplements were only released in foreign markets.

"Failing" is a relative term. Is it making a profit? Seems like it, sure. Is it as big as it was in the 90s? No, it's definitely not the phenomenon it was.

Compare M20 Technocracy (https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/200664283/m20-technocracy-reloaded/) with Blades in the Dark (https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/2080350433/blades-in-the-dark/) and the French RPG Nephilim Legend (https://www.ulule.com/nephilim-legende/). Blades in the Dark was a completely new game, and Nephilim is a game that was dead for years since the original publisher went out of business in 2004. Both were able to match or exceed the supporter numbers and funds that WW is able to at the best of times.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1130910
FYI - Coteries of New York received middling critical reception but was the best seller on Steam during its release month and recouped its costs within a week.

https://drawdistance.dev/being-a-pure-evil-business-developer-what-a-year-it-was/



They immediately set out to make a sequel that is coming out this year and White Wolf is now doing 3 text based mobile and computer novels.


Those products were very cheap to make, so I'm not surprised. That's the same strategy used by typical mobile shovelware companies. It may be successful, but at the end of the day it's still shovelware riding on brand recognition. Furthermore, since it's made for casuals, it's unlikely to convert a lot of new people to brand loyalty. Even the first Bloodlines game wasn't able to pull in a lot of new tabletop players, and it's pretty much the most talked about WW product despite being a commercial failure upon release. WW products nowadays seem to be mostly advertising for Bloodlines 2.

The gameplay previews of BL2 feel really bland, especially compared to the colorful characters of BL1. The thing about Troika was that they had good writers with years of experience. They knew the premise of the setting was inherently silly, so they leaned on that in their writing. BL2 doesn't feel nearly as fun.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 22, 2020, 04:01:38 PM
I think comparing games is unimportant and doesn't benefit them to do so. A person can buy multiple RPGs in their lifespan, you know, like books or card games, so the success of one doesn't mean the failure of the other.

So it doesn't matter what the success of the ones you reference are. You can like both.

Quote
The gameplay previews of BL2 feel really bland, especially compared to the colorful characters of BL1. The thing about Troika was that they had good writers with years of experience. They knew the premise of the setting was inherently silly, so they leaned on that in their writing. BL2 doesn't feel nearly as fun.

Bloodlines 2 is being written by the same writer, Brian Mitsoda.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Snowman0147 on May 23, 2020, 12:12:20 AM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1130829
I try to keep my complaints focused on my creative disagreements with the setting and rules design, but eventually it's impossible not to criticize the attitudes of the company and the fandom.

Hence why I prefer to focus on constructive pursuits like world building the various fictional settings I want to play with.


The companies and fans are one of the two main factors why I left World of Darkness.  I want to make both suffer just like how Disney made the Star Wars fans suffer.  Which by the way I think out of respect for the Star Wars fans we should have a moment of silence before we cuss out Disney for destroying the IP.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 23, 2020, 12:53:19 AM
Requiem included a lot of changes that people probably would have said that they wanted, or at least they changed lots of things people complained about regarding V:tM. Many people liked it. Though maybe it fell flat for some because in a way, the original had so much character from its many quirks and flaws. I like many aspects of it, with Clan changes being perhaps my biggest objection. I'm really skeptical that V5 is outselling 2nd edition from the 90's, I'd need to see some evidence for that. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they are selling better than they have in a while. There was a certain zeitgeist of the 90's that meshed well with Vampire and some of the subversive feel of WW games, it's something that I don't think that can really be recaptured.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 23, 2020, 09:50:08 AM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1130956
I'm really skeptical that V5 is outselling 2nd edition from the 90's, I'd need to see some evidence for that. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they are selling better than they have in a while. There was a certain zeitgeist of the 90's that meshed well with Vampire and some of the subversive feel of WW games, it's something that I don't think that can really be recaptured.

Agreed.

I'm pretty sure 2nd Edition Vampire is still the best selling product White Wolf ever released at least in the United States anyway.

From what I gather, V5 bombed in the United States outside of pre-orders and most of its sales are international, mainly in Northern and Eastern Europe.

Still, I'm pretty sure 2nd Edition outsold 5th Edition overall outside of a few foreign markets
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 10:24:15 AM
FYI, here's where it listed Vampire was the 4th best selling RPG of Spring 2019.

https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/43732/top-5-roleplaying-games-spring-2019

I think the issue is a lot of fans keep trying to equate ubiquity with the modern realities of marketing. They keep thinking back to the 90s as the heyday of Vampire because it was everywhere in the holiday. They can't really wrap their heads around that the international market just utterly blows the domestic market of the 90s away. It's an international game now and so when someone says, "It made most of its profits overseas" that doesn't mean anything because the European and South American gamers playing vampires are the same as any other geek.

That's just my take at least.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 23, 2020, 01:51:11 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130978
FYI, here's where it listed Vampire was the 4th best selling RPG of Spring 2019.

https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/43732/top-5-roleplaying-games-spring-2019

I think the issue is a lot of fans keep trying to equate ubiquity with the modern realities of marketing. They keep thinking back to the 90s as the heyday of Vampire because it was everywhere in the holiday. They can't really wrap their heads around that the international market just utterly blows the domestic market of the 90s away. It's an international game now and so when someone says, "It made most of its profits overseas" that doesn't mean anything because the European and South American gamers playing vampires are the same as any other geek.

That's just my take at least.

I get that it's a sales success overall when you factor in the foreign market. Nobody's debating that. I get that European gamers love V5, but even among geeks, there are some cultural differences when it comes to taste.

While Vampire and World of Darkness is beloved in Europe, nowadays it is largely reviled among American geeks outside of the core Nu-WW and Onyx Path fandoms, and a lot of it has to do with the pretentiousness and toxicity of the wider fandom from the Revised era onward.

Granted, the older editions of Vampire and Werewolf and the first Bloodlines game do get a pass and are well-liked to this day among American geeks, mainly out of nostalgia. This is probably why V20 did so well. It was the best of all worlds, and was explicitly metaplot-neutral. You could include the old metaplot or throw it in the trash and play your own WoD chronicle. You weren't bound to it like in V5, and sneering WW writers didn't insult you and chide you for "playing the game wrong" like in Revised.

While you may have positive experiences with the Goth and Punk subcultures, a lot of people don't, and they find their sneering pretentiousness and overall snobbery to be very off-putting. I know not all Goths are like that, but the terrible attitude and purity spirals of both the Goth and Punk subcultures are infamous, and the punks in particular are the far worse of the two.

The "culture wars" of the past decade or so has intensified this polarizing view on goth and punk culture since the extremist Millennial Left often associates itself with punk culture and the 2010's American punk subculture is mired in communist and anarchist extremism. The neon dyed hair and piercings didn't come from nowhere, after all.

Places like RPG.net and Onyx Path Forums do not help matters at all.

I say fuck that metaplot punk shit and let's reset the clock to the beginning. Start all over and act like V5 was nothing more than a very bad dream. Forge our own counter-canon and counter-themes.

Controversial opinion here, but I sincerely believe that "Vampions" is not "playing the game wrong" and in my honest opinion, it's the superior way to play as opposed to pretentious personal horror.

There is a difference between horror and personal horror.

"Personal horror" is more along the lines of pretentious pseudo-intellectual wangst. Crybaby goths and punks who mope around bitching and whining about their lost humanity and acting like snobs.

Fuck that shit. I say kill those crybabies with a katana. If you use a katana specifically, it adds insult to injury for the goth and punk assholes. And those guyliner-wearing fake intellectual snobs deserve that.*

*-(Figuratively speaking, of course.)
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 02:01:27 PM
I should note my bias since I was recently appointed a moderator for Onyx Path's forums.

:)

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-classic-world-of-darkness/vampire-the-masquerade/1388414-v5-wir-the-chicago-folios-and-let-the-streets-run-red
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Snowman0147 on May 23, 2020, 02:10:20 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130997
I should note my bias since I was recently appointed a moderator for Onyx Path's forums.

:)

http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-classic-world-of-darkness/vampire-the-masquerade/1388414-v5-wir-the-chicago-folios-and-let-the-streets-run-red

Congrats your a fucking Zeev.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 02:18:53 PM
Quote from: Snowman0147;1130999
Congrats your a fucking Zeev.

Alas, I don't know what that means. I admit to being a fantastic White Wolf fanboy, though.

I arranged for my publishers to license and reprint the Clan Novels of the OWOD.

https://crossroadpress.com/product-category/white-wolf/

It really makes me sad they won't reprint ALL of the books.

THE WORLD MUST KNOW THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD OF DARKNESS!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 02:43:14 PM
Quote from: Doc Sammy;1130994
I get that it's a sales success overall when you factor in the foreign market. Nobody's debating that. I get that European gamers love V5, but even among geeks, there are some cultural differences when it comes to taste.

Generally, I think there's a misconception about who the World of Darkness' fandom was and that's not because of fans. No, it's one deliberately and repeatedly misconstrued by White Wolf's owners. They've done their best to try and make it seem like V:TM's fandom was primarily the Goth and Punk communities. Which is bullshit. Even in 1995 when it was in its supposed heyday, the primary fandom of V:TM was teenage boys and it was written for them with their trench coats and katanas.

Like Ax Bodyspray, really. It's marketed as a sexy and cool adult thing in order to appeal to its pimply faced true demographic. This is not to insult World of Darkness gamers, I was one of those pimply faced teenage boys, but it's to underscore that there was nothing especially new or different about them among geeks.

Quote
While Vampire and World of Darkness is beloved in Europe, nowadays it is largely reviled among American geeks outside of the core Nu-WW and Onyx Path fandoms, and a lot of it has to do with the pretentiousness and toxicity of the wider fandom from the Revised era onward.

Pretentiousness is a often repeated word here and I'd be interested if it could be defined here. Yes, I've heard a lot of gamers tout how V:TM was "deeper" and more "mature" but hyperbole is part and parcel with our hobby. Call of Cthulhu gamers often claim their game is more mature and intelligent than D&D. Also, yes, we have a lot of toxic gamers out there but I've always felt they've been the minority.

Quote
Granted, the older editions of Vampire and Werewolf and the first Bloodlines game do get a pass and are well-liked to this day among American geeks, mainly out of nostalgia. This is probably why V20 did so well. It was the best of all worlds, and was explicitly metaplot-neutral. You could include the old metaplot or throw it in the trash and play your own WoD chronicle. You weren't bound to it like in V5, and sneering WW writers didn't insult you and chide you for "playing the game wrong" like in Revised.

Bloodlines is something I'd like to comment on because it is the definition of a cult classic. It's sold over 500,000 copies on the platform as of 2015 and may have sold many-many more since that time. I don't see much of a difference between gamers who play in a video game versus tabletop if it's in the same world. So much success has been maintained by Bloodlines that it has also already created a pre-order record.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/110724/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-is-steam-top-seller

Mind you, I pretty much avoided V20 until Beckett's Jyhad Diary because the metaplot was the big reason to buy new books. It's crass manipulation of the consumer, like a cliffhanger, but it works because you want to find out what happens next.

Quote
While you may have positive experiences with the Goth and Punk subcultures, a lot of people don't, and they find their sneering pretentiousness and overall snobbery to be very off-putting. I know not all Goths are like that, but the terrible attitude and purity spirals of both the Goth and Punk subcultures are infamous, and the punks in particular are the far worse of the two.

The Gothic Punk ideal is something that I think is a word that was created not for its similarity to Goth or Punk ideals (though I do love the class warfare of Anarch vs. Camarilla) but just to describe what a urban fantasy/action horror setting would be before urban fantasy entered the common parlace. The World of Darkness was essentially a trendsetter and now it has become incredibly mainstream as an idea.

* True Blood
* Underworld
* The Blade Trilogy (which the writers admitted was inspired in part by V:TM as much as the Marvel characters)
* The Dresden Files

Like video games, urban fantasy/horror universes are no longer a niche market but something "normal" people regularly indulge in.

Quote
The "culture wars" of the past decade or so has intensified this polarizing view on goth and punk culture since the extremist Millennial Left often associates itself with punk culture and the 2010's American punk subculture is mired in communist and anarchist extremism. The neon dyed hair and piercings didn't come from nowhere, after all.

I say fuck that metaplot punk shit and let's reset the clock to the beginning. Start all over and act like V5 was nothing more than a very bad dream. Forge our own counter-canon and counter-themes.

Much like the hippie culture of the 1960s, the punks of the 1980s have since grown up and become content creators of their own. These people have reached much larger audiences and diluted the entire experience.

* Grant Morrison
* The Wachowski Sisters
* Warren Ellis

It's become incredibly mainstream and it's the point that the ultimate reflection of redneck America, professional wrestling, has Goth and Punk girls like Paige or AJ Lee getting their own movies. CM Punk and other characters with their own stories. There was a cute Goth girl on the most conservative television on CBS for a decade.

(https://pmctvline2.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/pauley-perrette-ncis-leaving.jpg?w=620&h=420&crop=1)

It's an aesthetic now.

Quote
Controversial opinion here, but I sincerely believe that "Vampions" is not "playing the game wrong" and in my honest opinion, it's the superior way to play as opposed to pretentious personal horror. There is a difference between horror and personal horror.

"Personal horror" is more along the lines of pretentious pseudo-intellectual wangst. Crybaby goths and punks who mope around bitching and whining about their lost humanity and acting like snobs.

Speaking as an ST of decades, personal horror vs. regular horror is defined by me to my players as, "The horror of what your character does and feels versus the horror of what is done to other people or to you." Your character as a vampire can accidentally kill people or do horrible things that they later come to regret. Playing angst is depending on your taste but guilt and self-hatred are things that can sometimes make a character more interesting.

Michael Corleone for a mainstream non-vampire example.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: GameDaddy on May 23, 2020, 04:41:29 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131001
The Gothic Punk ideal is something that I think is a word that was created not for its similarity to Goth or Punk ideals (though I do love the class warfare of Anarch vs. Camarilla) but just to describe what a urban fantasy/action horror setting would be before urban fantasy entered the common parlace. The World of Darkness was essentially a trendsetter and now it has become incredibly mainstream as an idea.

* True Blood
* Underworld
* The Blade Trilogy (which the writers admitted was inspired in part by V:TM as much as the Marvel characters)
* The Dresden Files

Like video games, urban fantasy/horror universes are no longer a niche market but something "normal" people regularly indulge in.

Have to admit, I did enjoy Underworld, the rest however, ...mmmm no. Early Gothic Punk was considerably different from later Gothic punk, and Early Gothic Punk arrived in the wave of the late 70's with bands like Bauhaus, Joy Division, Love and Rockets,  Berlin, Human League, The Dead Kennedys, The Smiths, Kraftwerk, Adam Ant, and even U2, and in the early 80's Gary Numan, Gene loves Jezebel, Alien Sex Fiend, and Ausgang. The style was deliberately Dark Post-Industrial, and featured lots of Black, Blue and Deep Violet Colors and lighting at concerts. In the mid-80's (what I would call the Mid-Gothic Era) we saw the first adoption from the mainstream and bands like The Cure, and Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, and New Order suddenly rose to the top of the pop charts and was being played at clubs all over the country. Late Gothic came in the 90's, and included the Cure, as well as The Cult, REM, The Black Crowes, and even later Florence and the Machine.

Gothic Punk has it roots in the Bauhaus Art Movement which began in Germany right after WWI and included Art Nouveau, Jugenstihl, which translates directly as "Young Style" as well as elements from the Vienna Succession. All of these movements sought to level the distinction between the fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and manufacturing; their legacy was reflected in the romantic medievalism of the Bauhaus ethos during its early years, when it fashioned itself as a kind of craftsmen's guild. But by the mid-1920s this vision had given way to a stress on uniting art and industrial design, and it was this which underpinned the Bauhaus's most original and important achievements. The movement actually split into two, and one element continued to focus on romantic medeivalism while the other focused on the darker implications and social discordance of unfettered industrial progress. There was also a lot of anger from youngsters and the Bauhaus followers toward the older generation mixed in, becuase the older generation had really messed up a better future that Germany could have had, if only society and law hadn't revolved around the choices of the elder nobles and statesmen, and the religious leaders, who lead with dogma instead of creativity prior to World War I.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they heavily suppressed the Bauhaus social movement, favoring instead the new National Socialist agenda, that agenda of everyone supports "the state",  over the Bauhaus agenda of favoring individual enlightened craftsmen, creators, inventors, and artists. Bauhaus was a cry out and protest against the old order which included religious movement of the The Holy Roman Empire which co-ruled with the Feudal Monarchy in Germany until the socialist unification of Germany in 1871.  The Bauhaus and the Nazi socialists were both against the old order, however diametrically opposed to each other, with Bauhaus focusing on the Individual and socialism, focusing on the Society over the individual. Fairly certain upon reflection that later, more than a fair share of Bauhaus proponents and supporters ended up in concentration camps, or as forced labor for the Nazi war machine, due to their personal preferences and natural tendency to oppose socialism.

Anyway, Gothic Punk came to the United States with the second wave of the Euro music invasion which occurred in the latter half of the 1970's and the music of the Goth Punks were more of the romantic medeivalism variety as opposed to the unique blend art and Industry. However Gothic Punk did immediately adopt Dark Industrialism, because of the Bauhaus roots as well as what you would could call today Urban Fantasy. Plus Gothic Punk mirrored Bauhaus in that the new artists were all giving the middle finger to the more traditional artists and elements of popular society, and Gothic Punks adopted the use of synthesizers and other unusual instruments, along with their social protest lyrics to create innovative and novel experiences and epiphanies of comprehension.

I should do a dissertation on this...anyway, always have enjoyed the music greatly, and found some elements of White Wolf's Vampire the Gathering, inspiring, because it was based on the romantic medieval Bauhaus which reflected a much better time in the past, where art and society were encouraged to progress in spite of the ills of various industrialism, technology, and political systems that supported that unfettered advance including socialism, capitalism, and anarchy, all of which are all very popular with the masses. Gothic Punk was never meant to be "mainstream" or something that "normal" people would regularly indulge in.

White Wolf sued the producers of Underworld claiming they copied from the Vampire game, but the real truth is, they both copied liberally from the much earlier Gothic Bauhaus social movement that history had almost forgotten. In my opinion, Len Wisemen did a much better job, than anyone at White Wolf ever could have done. The other vampire and urban underworld movies were crap, pale imitations from people who had zero understanding of the true history and background.

Here, enjoy some really good Gothic Punk music, and it also includes some very modern bands, I'm sure some of you here have never heard some of these before...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3S7WIgoD7I
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 06:13:01 PM
You realize the Gothic Punk described in the books is very...uh...different than the music style, right?

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Gothic-Punk

I thought we were all pretty clearly talking about the RPG theme. If you don't buy what I'm saying and think I'm being ignorant. Here's the definition of Gothic Punk given in the 1991 1st Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade (green book).

(https://i.imgur.com/N6vaR4q.png)
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 23, 2020, 06:29:53 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131017
You realize the Gothic Punk described in the books is very...uh...different than the music style, right?

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Gothic-Punk

I thought we were all pretty clearly talking about the RPG theme. If you don't buy what I'm saying and think I'm being ignorant. Here's the definition of Gothic Punk given in the 1991 1st Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade (green book).

(https://i.imgur.com/N6vaR4q.png)


Not to be "that guy", but that's from the Revised Edition rulebook. Not the First Edition.

I'll go double-check the First Edition of the corebook, the grayish-green softcover.

Maybe they copy-and-pasted for Revised on that specific section, I dunno. I'll be sure to double-check since I own both on hard copy

Second Edition was largely the same as First Edition, but better organized with errata and new artwork added in, most notably the two-page Clan write-ups that began with 2E.

Revised was completely different from the ground up for the most part.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Chris24601 on May 23, 2020, 06:53:33 PM
Pretentious - attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.

Any role-playing game book that spends more time on trying to make its books look like coffee table conversation pieces complete with multi-page photo-spreads/side-bars coupled with too small fonts and way too much white space and a twenty page piece of purple prose fiction... instead of being functional manual for playing the game is, by definition, pretentious.

It insists on using d10s when all difficulties have been made 6 so it's literally just a coin toss.

It pretends to be the height of gaming despite its mechanics being even worse than those of classic World of Darkness. It presumes that if you do not play the game the way they wish it to be played you are doing it wrong. They presume that people give two juicy shits about their SJW agenda and X-card nonsense when most anyone actually playing it is doing so with friends who have similar beliefs to their own.

The entire thing drips with false elitism and self-importance. It's an RPG about vampires and they act as if it's the cultural equivalent of "Dracula" or "Interview with a Vampire" when it's not even fucking "Twilight."

They also act like V5 being popular with globalist Eurotrash is something to be proud of.

So yes, pretentious.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 06:59:55 PM
You're right, it's from Revised.

This is the 1st Edition version. My apologies.

Quote
And the Lord said unto him, "Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." Andthe Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
-Genesis ch. 4, vs. 15

The world of Vampires is not our world. IL is a GothicPunk™ vision of our world -monolithic, majestic and very twisted. The entire society is corrupt and the mortals are helpless to do anything about it. IL is a world where the forces ofevil and chaos are even stronger than they are in our world (though that may be hard to believe). In general, there is nothing all that different-CD's are in, vinyl is out, the ozone layer is being depleted, and the same soap operas are still playing. The same faces are on Mount Rushmore and the Lady still stands proudly in New York Harbor. It is a world where Vampires exist, and they direct and have influenced the course of history for some time. It is because of the existence of Vampires in this world that it is different.

The Gothic-Punk world is a metaphor for our own world, a warning of what we might become and a reflection of what we really might be. It is our world the way it might be if there actually were Vampires. This chapter describes the selling of Vampire. A Gothic-Punk reality. However, more than the world of mortals is discussed in this chapter. Vampires have a wide and varied culture and society of their own. Such is the focus here.

So, yes, they even trademarked the term.

Quote
They also act like V5 being popular with globalist Eurotrash is something to be proud of.

Well this is just bullshit. Seriously.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 23, 2020, 07:14:51 PM
Well, Vampire 5th edition probably sells well, because the orginal settings still have a lot of fans. The 2nd Bloodlines game looks good, but there is still only one gameplay movie available so I guess it's still really underdeveloped and it will be at least another year before it releases. Probably longer. I saw one funny thing about that game and that is has the Requiem setup of five clans and five covenants/factions. All five clans are original. Only the Gangrel and Nosferatu are missing and are probably saved for an expansion. The five factions are the original Camarilla and no Anarchs or Sabbat. There is the more old money oriented Pioneers (Invictus inspired?), the criminal syndicate of the Baron, the Newcomers who are the academia of the setting (mostly Tremere) and the Unseen who are the thieves/spies guild (mostly Nosferatu). I actually like these factions a lot better then religious/ideology focused covenants of Requiem.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 07:28:20 PM
As I understand it, Bloodlines was supposed to be released in March but they delayed it to not compete with Cyberpunk 2077.

Except Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed.

And then the coronavirus happened. The developer diaries have basically said they're using the time to fix bugs, add new sidequests, and improve the combat.

https://www.bloodlines2.com/?t=news&i=61&l=en

Edit:

Oh and "Baron" is what an Anarch leader is called in V:TM 5th Edition. He might or might not be an Anarch but probably is.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 23, 2020, 07:39:56 PM
Quote from: jan paparazzi;1131023
Well, Vampire 5th edition probably sells well, because the orginal settings still have a lot of fans. The 2nd Bloodlines game looks good, but there is still only one gameplay movie available so I guess it's still really underdeveloped and it will be at least another year before it releases. Probably longer. I saw one funny thing about that game and that is has the Requiem setup of five clans and five covenants/factions. All five clans are original. Only the Gangrel and Nosferatu are missing and are probably saved for an expansion. The five factions are the original Camarilla and no Anarchs or Sabbat. There is the more old money oriented Pioneers (Invictus inspired?), the criminal syndicate of the Baron, the Newcomers who are the academia of the setting (mostly Tremere) and the Unseen who are the thieves/spies guild (mostly Nosferatu). I actually like these factions a lot better then religious/ideology focused covenants of Requiem.


V5 in general seems to take setting cues from Requiem, since it focuses on street-level politics rather than whatever previous editions did.

The Nosferatu, at least the representative, also look like human beings (albeit disfigured). I know there was a merit for that in the tabletop at some point, but it's also how VTR Nosferatu worked (among other possibilities).

I wouldn't be surprised if Paradox introduces the Daeva and Mekhet as the 14th and 15th clans from the translation guide. Or other new clans.

Although in general the preview seemed less colorful compared to Bloodlines 1. Plenty of others on youtube made similar complaints.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 07:46:34 PM
They've said Nosferatu and Gangrel will be DLC. They've also stated that the Lasombra will also become an option [they're now Camarilla].

The Duskborn (Thin Bloods) are effectively the 14th Clan now with them getting special powers and an immunity to sunlight.

Given the way Mr. Damp has been portrayed (crazy serial killer guy), I wouldn't be surprised if this is EXACTLY as crazy as Bloodlines but they're mixing up characters. Elif is basically Jeanette except Tremere instead of Malkavian. Everything I've seen so far and the news broadcasts by Outstar suggests the game will basically function by you going to each section of Seattle, meeting the local bosses, doing adventures for them, and then choosing which faction to side with in the end.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Snowman0147 on May 23, 2020, 07:51:54 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131000
Alas, I don't know what that means. I admit to being a fantastic White Wolf fanboy, though.


Your not though.  You are backing up people that fuck over freelancers and customers alike.  

https://youtu.be/aBN0lFaFwIQ (https://youtu.be/aBN0lFaFwIQ)
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 08:01:00 PM
Quote from: Snowman0147;1131029
Your not though.  You are backing up people that fuck over freelancers and customers alike.  

https://youtu.be/aBN0lFaFwIQ (https://youtu.be/aBN0lFaFwIQ)

Sure, okay.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 23, 2020, 08:07:04 PM
I think your fanboyism tricks you into confirmation bias, so that you think the WoD IP is more popular than it actually is and seek out information that confirms your bias.

VTM is significantly less popular now than it was even in the early 2000s, much less the 90s. I don't know if you knew this, but the 90s and 2000s were not a good time for tabletop games. There was the d20 bubble, the French tabletop market collapsed completely, etc.

Most of this is due to competition with video games. Console games, PC games, flash games, etc. That competition has only gotten worse with the rise of mobile games in the late 2000s.

Most people aware of World of Darkness only know of it through the VTM video games, and most of those people aren't invested in the IP as a whole. They aren't going to buy and play the tabletop. They aren't going to read the lore and learn about, for example, Saulot's secret war with [Tzimisce].

In fact, WoD isn't a good choice for lore junkies either. Namely, other media franchises have inescapable metaplot by virtue of telling stories as their main focus, whereas WoD has to struggle to avoid pissing off fans who dislike metaplot.

I'll probably play Bloodlines 2 if it's not a lifeless mannequin upon release like I fear it could be, but that's not going to get me invested in the lore. Except insofar as I'll write fanfiction that introduces new clans like Chocula, Mekhet and Dukhan, simply as a middle finger to tabletop fans who treat the bloody lore like an actual religion.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Snowman0147 on May 23, 2020, 08:11:34 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131030
Sure, okay.

That is why your a fucking filthy zeev.

You do not care for freelancers getting paid their fair dues.
You do not care about customers being treated well.
Hell I am pretty sure you don't give a rats ass about WoD?
As long you are a moderator you will suck the shit out of Rich Thomas ass and brag about WoD like a little thoughtless hoe.
People like you are bad for the hobby and need to get kicked out.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 23, 2020, 08:36:23 PM
Quote from: Snowman0147;1131032
That is why your a fucking filthy zeev.

You do not care for freelancers getting paid their fair dues.
You do not care about customers being treated well.
Hell I am pretty sure you don't give a rats ass about WoD?
As long you are a moderator you will suck the shit out of Rich Thomas ass and brag about WoD like a little thoughtless hoe.
People like you are bad for the hobby and need to get kicked out.

I feel dumb for agreeing with you. Apparently that's not enough. I won't make that mistake again.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1131031
I think your fanboyism tricks you into confirmation bias, so that you think the WoD IP is more popular than it actually is and seek out information that confirms your bias.

VTM is significantly less popular now than it was even in the early 2000s, much less the 90s. I don't know if you knew this, but the 90s and 2000s were not a good time for tabletop games. There was the d20 bubble, the French tabletop market collapsed completely, etc.

Most of this is due to competition with video games. Console games, PC games, flash games, etc. That competition has only gotten worse with the rise of mobile games in the late 2000s.

Most people aware of World of Darkness only know of it through the VTM video games, and most of those people aren't invested in the IP as a whole. They aren't going to buy and play the tabletop. They aren't going to read the lore and learn about, for example, Saulot's secret war with [Tzimisce].

In fact, WoD isn't a good choice for lore junkies either. Namely, other media franchises have inescapable metaplot by virtue of telling stories as their main focus, whereas WoD has to struggle to avoid pissing off fans who dislike metaplot.

I'll probably play Bloodlines 2 if it's not a lifeless mannequin upon release like I fear it could be, but that's not going to get me invested in the lore. Except insofar as I'll write fanfiction that introduces new clans like Chocula, Mekhet and Dukhan, simply as a middle finger to tabletop fans who treat the bloody lore like an actual religion.

I don't think an IP's value is purely in its tabletop value. Indeed, one of the things that I think Paradox is making the correct choice on is spreading around the love:

* Card games: https://www.facebook.com/whitewolfpublishing/photos/ready-to-rule-the-city-princes-gambit-the-new-fast-paced-casual-vampire-the-masq/10155995695300465/
* Board games: https://www.white-wolf.com/post/chapters-a-new-vampire-the-masquerade-story-board-game
* Video Games: Bloodlines, Coteries, the upcoming interactive texts
* Novels: https://www.tor.com/2020/03/18/vampire-the-masquerade-is-getting-three-audio-novellas/
* Tabletop Games: Ditto

And the new comic book series by Tim Seeley, who did my all time favorite sexy supernatural series in HACK/SLASH.

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/vault-to-publish-vampire-the-masquerade-comic-with-tim-seeley-tini-howard-more/
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 03:09:41 AM
FYI - I just re-watched the World of Darkness documentary and it gave some concrete numbers.

6,900,000 White Wolf books of every line was what was sold from 1st Edition to the Chronicles of Darkness, over the course of about twelve years.

The most successful sales number for any single game product in a year was Vampire: The Requiem. It sold 100,000 copies in 2004.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: NeonAce on May 24, 2020, 03:31:22 AM
Quote from: Snowman0147;1131032
That is why your a fucking filthy zeev.

...

As long you are a moderator you will suck the shit out of Rich Thomas ass and brag about WoD like a little thoughtless hoe.
People like you are bad for the hobby and need to get kicked out.

Sheesh! You know who's not like this? Street Fighter fans! You need to stat up a Ninja with the Cybernetics Unique Background called Cyber-Musashi Prime and kick a fight promoter's ass when he stiffs you on the fight money, then chill with a nice pizza party and some Mt. Dew while playing some King of Fighters on the couch with your buds.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 04:20:10 AM
Quote from: NeonAce;1131059
Sheesh! You know who's not like this? Street Fighter fans! You need to stat up a Ninja with the Cybernetics Unique Background called Cyber-Musashi Prime and kick a fight promoter's ass when he stiffs you on the fight money, then chill with a nice pizza party and some Mt. Dew while playing some King of Fighters on the couch with your buds.

Oddly enough I actually loved this game. My only complaints about it were the fact that the World Warriors were so incredibly overleveled you could never fight any of them.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: NeonAce on May 24, 2020, 05:30:02 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131062
Oddly enough I actually loved this game. My only complaints about it were the fact that the World Warriors were so incredibly overleveled you could never fight any of them.

Yeah, the World Warriors, if you try to work out how many XP they are built out of, are like 600-1200 XP, heh. Still, if you focus on getting your Health up to 20 and choose the right Special Maneuvers you can get competitive with them. Get yourself a nice combo like "Block to Knee Basher", etc. None of the World Warriors in the book are fast grapplers, which can be a solid type of fighter to make.

As for the WoD games, I liked 1e/early 2e Vampire just fine. I'd still play me some Vampire in the "there is no metaplot" mode of any edition if my local group were willing to play it straight-faced enough. Being a '90s guy, all those games were part of my '90s RPing to greater or lesser extents. I had a slight preference for the commonly derided "I'm tormented" mode over the Katanas & Trenchcoats mode, just because you already can hack shit up in every RPG ever and so it was a nice change of pace to try to inject a bit of that in there.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 24, 2020, 11:16:05 AM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131058
FYI - I just re-watched the World of Darkness documentary and it gave some concrete numbers.

6,900,000 White Wolf books of every line was what was sold from 1st Edition to the Chronicles of Darkness, over the course of about twelve years.

The most successful sales number for any single game product in a year was Vampire: The Requiem. It sold 100,000 copies in 2004.

I believe in it's heyday Masquerade was tier A on par with D&D in the 90's. Then it became tier B in the early 00's with some Ennies for Requiem, Awakening, Hunter the Vigil and Changeling the Lost. This was also the period with a lot of edition wars between oWoD and nWoD fans. Roughly between 2004 and 2008/2009/2010. After that it seemed as people were no longer that pissed off about nWoD, but they simply stopped caring about it. And I think it was no longer tier B: a subtopper just after the big boys (D&D, Pathfinder, Numenera, Cthulhu, Fate, Warhammer, Kult) but it became tier C: a niche market. The 2nd edition of CoD was catering to the hardcore fans and not to a broader audience, V5 scores out of nostalgia and the video game was a cult hit, because it was an anti-grind rpg and had a good story and dialogue. All in all it still has it's share of fans but not anywhere near it's heyday, where it was a cultural phenomenon just like Magic the Gathering. A lot of people played it who would otherwise not play anything like this.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 24, 2020, 11:34:48 AM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1131031

Most of this is due to competition with video games. Console games, PC games, flash games, etc. That competition has only gotten worse with the rise of mobile games in the late 2000s.

Most people aware of World of Darkness only know of it through the VTM video games, and most of those people aren't invested in the IP as a whole. They aren't going to buy and play the tabletop. They aren't going to read the lore and learn about, for example, Saulot's secret war with [Tzimisce].


People often say this, but is it true? Roleplaying is and has always been niche. I don't think all those people playing videogames (or even a significant portion) would be playing rpg's if videogames didn't excist. I think if videogames would cease to excist that fewer than 1% of the videogamers would start playing roleplaying games.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 11:43:12 AM
Quote from: jan paparazzi;1131082
I believe in it's heyday Masquerade was tier A on par with D&D in the 90's. Then it became tier B in the early 00's with some Ennies for Requiem, Awakening, Hunter the Vigil and Changeling the Lost. This was also the period with a lot of edition wars between oWoD and nWoD fans. Roughly between 2004 and 2008/2009/2010. After that it seemed as people were no longer that pissed off about nWoD, but they simply stopped caring about it. And I think it was no longer tier B: a subtopper just after the big boys (D&D, Pathfinder, Numenera, Cthulhu, Fate, Warhammer, Kult) but it became tier C: a niche market. The 2nd edition of CoD was catering to the hardcore fans and not to a broader audience, V5 scores out of nostalgia and the video game was a cult hit, because it was an anti-grind rpg and had a good story and dialogue. All in all it still has it's share of fans but not anywhere near it's heyday, where it was a cultural phenomenon just like Magic the Gathering. A lot of people played it who would otherwise not play anything like this.

Yeah,

My argument is not that it's as popular in the United States as it used to be. It's more that it has expanded internationally to more than before and also has moved into multiple different markets rather than stick purely within a single line of tabletop gaming. Paradox Interactive doesn't really want to make tabletop games I don't think but seems focused instead on growing the IP with the tabletop games as a setting bible.

In addition to the mobile games and visual novels, after Bloodlines 2, there's going to be:

* Earthblood: The 2021 Werewolf: The Apocalypse game.

* Swansong: A 2021 Telltale Episodic game about the Convention of Prague.
https://www.pcgamer.com/vampire-the-masqueradeswansong-is-a-new-rpg-from-the-developers-of-the-council/

Maybe these games will bomb huge like the MMORPG that helped kill the property or maybe it will be a success.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1131085
People often say this, but is it true? Roleplaying is and has always been niche. I don't think all those people playing videogames (or even a significant portion) would be playing rpg's if videogames didn't excist. I think if videogames would cease to excist that fewer than 1% of the videogamers would start playing roleplaying games.

If you have the money, you can do both but I think a lot of tabletop gamers have gone onto video game RPGs more with their spare time.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 24, 2020, 12:24:11 PM
What do I see you doing? Shilling for Onyx Path. Acting as an apologist for them at every point. And I personally find that disgusting.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 12:51:50 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1131090
What do I see you doing? Shilling for Onyx Path. Acting as an apologist for them at every point. And I personally find that disgusting.

Shits given: 0
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 24, 2020, 03:30:58 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131092
Shits given: 0

Shills tend not to. After all, their motivations are usually revealed to be entirely selfish.

I'm not surprised. But rather bored at how blatant about it you were about it.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 03:45:58 PM
And onto the Ignore list.

====

But I'll be honest, I wasn't a big fan of the White Wolf V5 books. The Camarilla and The Anarch supplements felt really lacking.

Chicago by Night was awesome.

The Fall of London had its ups and downs but was riddled with typos.

The Chicago Folios was good but also very much a bunch of adventure ideas versus a solid supplement-supplement.

I'm looking forward to Let the Streets Run Red, though.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Darrin Kelley on May 24, 2020, 05:04:13 PM
And there he goes spewing on again with Onyx Path's smegma on his lips...

I'm glad I'm on his ignore list now.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: ShieldWife on May 24, 2020, 06:14:18 PM
I'm curious what they will do with some of the other game lines with a 5th edition. How could they change Werewolf or Mage? I assume at least those two are going to get 5th edition updates.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 07:23:10 PM
Quote from: ShieldWife;1131123
I'm curious what they will do with some of the other game lines with a 5th edition. How could they change Werewolf or Mage? I assume at least those two are going to get 5th edition updates.

Werewolf 5 is coming in 2021 to coincide with the release of Werewolf: Earthblood. The game, honestly, looks terrible so I'm not sure that's a great thing. I approve of making as many video games in the property as possible but take a look.



At this rate, I suppose we'll hit Changeling 5 around 2040.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: NeonAce on May 24, 2020, 07:36:07 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1131118
And there he goes spewing on again with Onyx Path's smegma on his lips...

I'm glad I'm on his ignore list now.

Wow! That's gross. The cool thing with Street Fighter fans is that they're just out to have a good time. Sure, White Wolf left them after 1 year of supporting the game (or maybe the license just expired...), but then they wrote their own 20th Anniversary edition and translate each others' fan materials between English and Portuguese, because the Brazilians love some Street Fighter. They buy WW or OPP stuff if they like it, or don't if they don't. Here's a character: Ze'ev 'Pop' Levin is from the Israeli Special Forces, and has the Animal Companion background to get a pet wolf (named something like "Scrapper" for that whole "Mutt & Junkyard" G.I. Joe thing). His signature is that he loves Coca-Cola soda pop and pops a can after each match, but he also pops anti-semites & Shadoloo operatives in weird online communities in the nose if they ever show up at his matches making cracks about money & his ethnicity. He also likes to jet ski and wind surfing. Though otherwise tough as nails, contortionists freak him out (yeah, it's not Dhalsim's baby skull necklace that freaks him out, it's the contortion!) Face it. It's a great character!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 07:57:44 PM
Quote from: NeonAce;1131133
Wow! That's gross. The cool thing with Street Fighter fans is that they're just out to have a good time. Sure, White Wolf left them after 1 year of supporting the game (or maybe the license just expired...), but then they wrote their own 20th Anniversary edition and translate each others' fan materials between English and Portuguese, because the Brazilians love some Street Fighter. They buy WW or OPP stuff if they like it, or don't if they don't. Here's a character: Ze'ev 'Pop' Levin is from the Israeli Special Forces, and has the Animal Companion background to get a pet wolf (named something like "Scrapper" for that whole "Mutt & Junkyard" G.I. Joe thing). His signature is that he loves Coca-Cola soda pop and pops a can after each match, but he also pops anti-semites & Shadoloo operatives in weird online communities in the nose if they ever show up at his matches making cracks about money & his ethnicity. He also likes to jet ski and wind surfing. Though otherwise tough as nails, contortionists freak him out (yeah, it's not Dhalsim's baby skull necklace that freaks him out, it's the contortion!) Face it. It's a great character!

I really enjoyed the adventure module they put out with its Ramses-dictator villain and very colorful GI Joe meets Kung Fu Movie (which is Street Fighter in a nutshell when you think about it) themes.

Shadow Law (Shadoloo) was also a very well detailed enemy for those who wanted to run a SPECTER-esque villain.

It is a shame that Capcom's license was too expensive to continue.

Alas, all of my Street Fighter books were destroyed by an overflowing toilet in college.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: jan paparazzi on May 24, 2020, 08:53:12 PM
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1131090
What do I see you doing? Shilling for Onyx Path. Acting as an apologist for them at every point. And I personally find that disgusting.


To be honest he seems to have some nuances here and there. But yeah, this is the kind of posts I saw a lot on the WW/Onyx Path and Shadownessence fora. A lot of fanboyish defending of the product at all cost. I once had a guy say to me that Onyx Path was doing a new business model after I said it was weird they were making new oWoD books again with those Convention Books in 2012/2013. 11 years after the first one. That's kinda sorta admitting the old settings sold more and were more popular. But no, new business model. Yeah, right!
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 24, 2020, 08:58:36 PM
Quote from: jan paparazzi;1131146
To be honest he seems to have some nuances here and there. But yeah, this is the kind of posts I saw a lot on the WW/Onyx Path and Shadownessence fora. A lot of fanboyish defending of the product at all cost. I once had a guy say to me that Onyx Path was doing a new business model after I said it was weird they were making new oWoD books again with those Convention Books in 2012/2013. 11 years after the first one. That's kinda sorta admitting the old settings sold more and were more popular. But no, new business model. Yeah, right!

I actually didn't know the Convention books were them. They were very well-written but sadly, felt like Technocracy apologia which I think we don't need more of right now since they're literally a fascist conspiracy based on Steve Jackson's Illuminati.

I'm honestly not a big fan of V20 or many of the other 20th Anniversary WoD products. As stated, I don't have much use for non-metaplot products. I generally think their books are very readable but I'm a V5 man over a V20 man. Some of them are really good (Red List, Red Names, Beckett's Jyhad Diary, Anarchs Unbound) but others didn't do much for me (hunters hunted II, Children of the Revolution).

I've not bought any of their Chronicles of Darkness books save the most recent Hunter: The Vigil. It's just not my jam.

I've backed Kickstarters of products I like.

I have nothing to say on their business model other than I enjoy its products and it seems a fairly safe way to not take a bath on gaming products but it's better to be a full-fledged print run like V5 under Paradox Interactive. I do feel they helped keep the brand alive when White Wolf let the tabletop side die out. Its people seem to be really passionate fans of the hobby so good for them.

I do love they post their progress on all their books every Monday, though.

I am SUPER-PASSIONATE about the World of Darkness but that doesn't necessarily translate to the companies that produce content or individual product. OPP seem like a nice bunch, though.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: NeonAce on May 24, 2020, 09:06:42 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131138
I really enjoyed the adventure module they put out with its Ramses-dictator villain and very colorful GI Joe meets Kung Fu Movie (which is Street Fighter in a nutshell when you think about it) themes.

Shadow Law (Shadoloo) was also a very well detailed enemy for those who wanted to run a SPECTER-esque villain.

It is a shame that Capcom's license was too expensive to continue.

Alas, all of my Street Fighter books were destroyed by an overflowing toilet in college.


Yeah, "The Perfect Warrior", heh. While I love the Street Fighter RPG, it has its hilariously bad stuff too. Mostly art and any original character White Wolf made, or their crazy invention of lore before Capcom fleshed it out themselves over the following years. But, if you just ignored it, or rolled with it like an over the top cartoon, it was all good. Years later, Living Room Games acquired a license to make "Capcom World Tournament", but they never got it together and released before their license expired. There was a demo pack released and some playtesting happened, but the system was a fiddly D&D 3-era d20 based game that didn't deliver the goods in the same way as the WW game, even if they did have amazing Udon art. If you ever feel the call of the ring... Street Fighter Paradise (https://sfrpg.neocities.org/sftsg.html)
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Opaopajr on May 25, 2020, 05:53:55 AM
I never thought there would be a need of more than one vote to give... and yet now I am glad I abstained because the running for this booby prize just heated up. :eek: (I kinda like this topic's honey trap aspect of keeping all the WW bizzare venomous drama in this one space, though. :o :p)
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 25, 2020, 01:11:24 PM
Random observation about Vampire: The Masquerade's fame.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Vampyr_cover.jpg)

The Vampyr video game sold 1,000,000 copies and was a surprising success despite not being a Triple A game. However, it sold 75% of those copies in Europe where it was a top selling game in the UK, France, and Germany. Many more were spread out across the rest of Europe. It also sold its first 500,000 copies via direct digital sales to similar figures. In America, where vampires have long been a pop culture phenomenon, the sales were middling at best bordering on a failure.

So it might be differing cultural attitudes.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 25, 2020, 06:06:58 PM
Quote from: jan paparazzi;1131146
To be honest he seems to have some nuances here and there. But yeah, this is the kind of posts I saw a lot on the WW/Onyx Path and Shadownessence fora. A lot of fanboyish defending of the product at all cost. I once had a guy say to me that Onyx Path was doing a new business model after I said it was weird they were making new oWoD books again with those Convention Books in 2012/2013. 11 years after the first one. That's kinda sorta admitting the old settings sold more and were more popular. But no, new business model. Yeah, right!


Chronicles of Darkness was profitable. Who would have thought? But apparently nostalgia wins out even when it doesn't make sense.

I don't understand why Paradox can't just copy the D&D 5e DMG and make a unified rules system that acknowledges the various campaign settings that have existed.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1131203
Random observation about Vampire: The Masquerade's fame.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Vampyr_cover.jpg)

The Vampyr video game sold 1,000,000 copies and was a surprising success despite not being a Triple A game. However, it sold 75% of those copies in Europe where it was a top selling game in the UK, France, and Germany. Many more were spread out across the rest of Europe. It also sold its first 500,000 copies via direct digital sales to similar figures. In America, where vampires have long been a pop culture phenomenon, the sales were middling at best bordering on a failure.

So it might be differing cultural attitudes.


I haven't found any evidence that VTM has become more popular in Europe. Like almost everything that isn't D&D, it's consistently been declining worldwide in the last two decades. Most roleplaying has apparently moved to chats now, and they don't need bulky rulebooks to tell them how to play.

Vampyr isn't a good example, as it doesn't have a lot of what set VTM apart. Namely, the ridiculously convoluted backstory and the high school cliques. Although I suspect Paradox is going to keep altering the setting until it's unrecognizable.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 25, 2020, 06:58:22 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1131222
Chronicles of Darkness was profitable. Who would have thought? But apparently nostalgia wins out even when it doesn't make sense.

I don't understand why Paradox can't just copy the D&D 5e DMG and make a unified rules system that acknowledges the various campaign settings that have existed.



I haven't found any evidence that VTM has become more popular in Europe. Like almost everything that isn't D&D, it's consistently been declining worldwide in the last two decades. Most roleplaying has apparently moved to chats now, and they don't need bulky rulebooks to tell them how to play.



Well this came out yesterday and they talk about the organizing internationally of the Latin American fans for V5 and expansions of new products in Eastern Europe. But it requires you to devote quite a bit of time to listening since it's the first twenty minutes devoted to celebrating Latin American gaming.

Quote
Vampyr isn't a good example, as it doesn't have a lot of what set VTM apart. Namely, the ridiculously convoluted backstory and the high school cliques. Although I suspect Paradox is going to keep altering the setting until it's unrecognizable.

Vampyr has some of the most pretentious vampires of all time. Yahztee makes fun of their ridiculous names and convoluted backstory relating to the British Empire, Merlin, and Morrigan.

Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: GameDaddy on May 25, 2020, 07:28:13 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131228
Well this came out yesterday and they talk about the organizing internationally of the Latin American fans for V5 and expansions of new products in Eastern Europe. But it requires you to devote quite a bit of time to listening since it's the first twenty minutes devoted to celebrating Latin American gaming.

Hmmm... interesting. They don't have nearly as many fans as they used to. On the WoD youtube channel they only garnered 13,000 views in three months for the LA by Night Season 4 premier video. With over a million sales Vampyre: The Pretentious is a platinum best seller despite having piss poor game play and a ridiculously unbelievable story line and game plot if Yahtzee accurately summarized the game.

Also having HarperCollins in as a supporter of V:TM or WoD is a non-starter. That is a publishing company, not a gaming company. Looks like the Coven is all busy drinking at the fountain of suck now.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 25, 2020, 07:47:52 PM
Quote from: GameDaddy;1131236
Hmmm... interesting. They don't have nearly as many fans as they used to. On the WoD youtube channel they only garnered 13,000 views in three months for the LA by Night Season 4 premier video. With over a million sales Vampyre: The Pretentious is a platinum best seller despite having piss poor game play and a ridiculously unbelievable story line and game plot if Yahtzee accurately summarized the game.

Also having HarperCollins in as a supporter of V:TM or WoD is a non-starter. That is a publishing company, not a gaming company. Looks like the Coven is all busy drinking at the fountain of suck now.

LA By Night on the White Wolf channel is a resposting.

It was originally posted on Geek and Sundry's Twitch channel.

Then it was posted on Geek and Sundry's Youtube channel.

Then it was removed from Geek and Sundry and reposted on White Wolf when they started their own channel. Even Season 4 is still on Twitch first and that's after anyone has lost.

Here's Seattle by Night's Youtube channel, which wasn't nearly as popular and has 80K views.

Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 25, 2020, 07:55:28 PM
There's a big difference between a franchise's own pull and piggy-backing on somebody else's subscribers.

WW games don't have the pull they used to. The urban fantasy genre in general is pretty played out.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 25, 2020, 07:57:44 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1131241
There's a big difference between a franchise's own pull and piggy-backing on somebody else's subscribers.

WW games don't have the pull they used to.

Well I'm not here to convince people that White Wolf is having a Renaissance. I'm not their publicist and it doesn't really think they care what any of us think of their business model or how it's working out for them. I think they're doing great but it's no sweat off my back if they not. I'm just happy about their new product and how happy I am that new material is coming out as well as the thing.

I'm an enthusiastic invested fan who wants them to succeed. Nothing more.

Sorry if I've given off a different vibe.

Quote
The urban fantasy genre in general is pretty played out.

I think that's not true from what I know of the market.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: GameDaddy on May 25, 2020, 10:35:42 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131242
I'm an enthusiastic invested fan who wants them to succeed. Nothing more.

I think that's not true from what I know of the market.


Well, the fan base here in the U.S. is certainly not nearly as large as it used to be. I'm thinking they will pickup some more followers though in South America, based on the YouTube video. There should be a Spanish as well as a Portuguese version of this video, ...yes? Why is this not much more popular in Europe? Currently it's ranked 8th worldwide as of Dec 31st 2019, so not as bad as I originally thought. Still though..

Dungeon World #7
GURPS is #6
Call of Cthulu #5
Shadowrun 5e #4
Pathfinder #3
Dresden Files #2
and D&D 5e #1

Note that this is worldwide sales and popularity, not just U.S. WoD is #12, specifically the version written by Monte Cook.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 25, 2020, 10:45:49 PM
Quote from: GameDaddy;1131258
Well, the fan base here in the U.S. is certainly not nearly as large as it used to be. I'm thinking they will pickup some more followers though in South America, based on the YouTube video. There should be a Spanish as well as a Portuguese version of this video, ...yes? Why is this not much more popular in Europe? Currently it's ranked 8th worldwide as of Dec 31st 2019, so not as bad as I originally thought. Still though..

Dungeon World #7
GURPS is #6
Call of Cthulu #5
Shadowrun 5e #4
Pathfinder #3
Dresden Files #2
and D&D 5e #1

Note that this is worldwide sales and popularity, not just U.S. WoD is #12, specifically the version written by Monte Cook.

Fascinating details!

Thanks for sharing this.

Edit:

Random factoid but the 2nd best selling "Other Fantasy" RPG of 2019 was "Changeling the Lost" after Shadowrun. D&D and Pathfinder excluded for some reason--which would make it 4th on the list.

https://www.geeknative.com/70017/the-other-best-selling-fantasy-rpgs-of-2019/

This is, of course, just DriveThru RPG and not reflective of store or Modiphius website sales.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: GameDaddy on May 26, 2020, 12:18:34 AM
There's more... I decided to take a look at WOTC and see how the 5e sales were doing with Covids and all. Now they are a subsidiary of Hasbro so they are folded in under "Hasbro Gaming".  Revenues for Hasbro Gaming in just the first quarter of 2020 was $340,480,000. This includes D&D (Which I estimated last year brought in about $140M in revenues in 2018), Magic the Gathering, which brings in significantly more than D&D, and of course all the board games, you know, Monopoly, Life, etc. etc. Basically revenues were up about 40% from Hasbro Gaming. Not sure what percentage of that increase is attributed to D&D because Hasbro has been keeping the actual D&D sales and profit numbers confidential. I'll make a guess though based some other details included in their annual report (Which includes number of D&D players, worldwide.  

Hasbro, however reported  a $70 Million Dollar loss for the first quarter of 2020. It turns out in December of 2019 Hasbro bought another company, just about as big as itself, eOne, a Canadian company. Entertainment One Ltd., also known as eOne, is a Canadian multinational entertainment company and a subsidiary of American toy manufacturer Hasbro. Based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the company is primarily involved in the acquisition, distribution, and production of films, music, and television series. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was acquired by Hasbro in December 2019.

Anyways, A few slides for you from the Hasbro Q1 2020 financial report...
[ATTACH=CONFIG]4495[/ATTACH]

Note the $400 Million increase in income from 2019. This came at a heavy cost though, Hasbro borrowed heavily to complete the acquisition and conduct the buyout, and tripled it's long term debt... They also marked down an awful lot of goodwill (over 3 billion dollars) to the eOne acquisition, which will only pan out in the long term if eOne earns revenues at the rate it was before it was acquired. The bad news already, eOne revenues are down 46% in the first quarter of 2020 alone...

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4496[/ATTACH]

And doubled it's long term liability...

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4497[/ATTACH]

Hasbro spent 140 million dollars in the first quarter of 2020 to (hopefully) complete the acquisition of eOne. They also spent over a billion dollars in the offer last year, cashing out the eOne stockholders and with the golden parachutes for the eOne board and management staff. I think they did this mostly with a stock trade though and borrowing money to buy the outstanding eOne stock, which is where the "goodwill" comes in, so their cash-in-hand position is roughly the same as it was last year. They are spending three times as much though, servicing their new debt load created by the buyout, somewhere around 60 million dollars annually where before, they were only spending 22 million dollars a year.

Hasbro is still committed to providing an annual dividends payout to their sharholders. This should be an interesting year for that though, depending on how eOne performs for the rest of the year.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4498[/ATTACH]
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: GameDaddy on May 26, 2020, 12:44:18 AM
CTPhipps I'm talking worldwide sales. Stats on Drivethu RPG sales are insignificant compared to the overall sales of even a single RPG company especially WOTC, and Hasbro...

Hasbro sales were down 11% worldwide in 2019, compared to North America, and Canada. European sales were up actually 8%, Latin American sales were down 46%, Asia/Pacific Sales were down 18%. Domestically emerging brands are down 19%, Domestic TV/Film, & Entertainment are down 29% so far, and eOne is down 132% from their revenues from last year. Right now the Hasbro Games unit is the shining star, the crown jewel in all of Hasbro's holdings. Imagine that, ....Magic: The Gathering and D&D garnering a minimum of 5x the growth of any other Division at Hasbro.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4499[/ATTACH]

Here is eOne's report on their suck performance so far this year. I'm pretty sure all the executives who cashed in their stock and stock options are too busy in their club med yachts to care what is happening to the company now. I think Hasbro bought them thinking they could vertically integrate their US holdings into an international marketplace, which might have worked out, except Europe is shutdown now, and all the socialists there are going to try real hard to keep it closed indefinitely.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4500[/ATTACH]

Here is all the eOne releases that have been significantly delayed, and of course, with the shutdown, there is nothing new in the pipeline yet, meaning they won't be able to hit the same target goals they have achieved in previous years, unless eOne gets some more new movies into production...

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4501[/ATTACH]

I'm kind of looking forward to Ghostbuster's III: Afterlife


Finally Hasbro Games leads the pack, never thought I would see that day... Also don't know why Hasbro is getting into the superhero movie market right now, that market is about all tapped out, and I'll be surprised to see if that dog can still hunt. Also I think that getting into bed with companies like Sony, and uhh, Universal, and uh, Disney. Paramount, and Marvel Studios will be an experience an awful lot like going to bed with a troll after wearing beer goggles, and waking up the next morning and gnawing your own arm off to get away from that monster(s)  that you found yourself sleeping with. ...Just 'sayin.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4502[/ATTACH]
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 26, 2020, 05:38:56 AM
Quote from: GameDaddy;1131268
CTPhipps I'm talking worldwide sales. Stats on Drivethu RPG sales are insignificant compared to the overall sales of even a single RPG company especially WOTC, and Hasbro...

You unfortunately entered the conversation at a bad time since I just said that I wasn't really concerned too much trying to prove White Wolf a success. I just was sharing my thoughts that I felt White Wolf had turned things around.

I'm just a fan, not their publicist.

Though this is fascinating stuff. Honestly, it looks like Hasbro has made some fantastically poor overspending decisions that dramatically increased their overhead and also have been insufficiently building on their brands. Still, I actually think they may be making the right decision with superhero movies as the diverse marketing and merch from those are a fountain for a company that....well, manufactures merch. The x5 element was also unexpected.

You do share a lot of awesome details, though, thank you.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on May 26, 2020, 10:21:32 AM
Quote from: GameDaddy;1131258
Well, the fan base here in the U.S. is certainly not nearly as large as it used to be. I'm thinking they will pickup some more followers though in South America, based on the YouTube video. There should be a Spanish as well as a Portuguese version of this video, ...yes? Why is this not much more popular in Europe? Currently it's ranked 8th worldwide as of Dec 31st 2019, so not as bad as I originally thought. Still though..

Dungeon World #7
GURPS is #6
Call of Cthulu #5
Shadowrun 5e #4
Pathfinder #3
Dresden Files #2
and D&D 5e #1

Note that this is worldwide sales and popularity, not just U.S. WoD is #12, specifically the version written by Monte Cook.

Where did you get this information from?
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: CTPhipps on May 26, 2020, 04:38:40 PM
It's funny we're all so invested in how White Wolf is doing.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Orphan81 on May 26, 2020, 10:09:05 PM
Quote from: CTPhipps;1131345
It's funny we're all so invested in how White Wolf is doing.

Hardcore fantasy nerds don't want Whitewolf to do well because the Goth Girl turned them down in High School.
Title: The RPG Site and White Wolf
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on May 26, 2020, 10:38:38 PM
Quote from: Orphan81;1131381
Hardcore fantasy nerds don't want Whitewolf to do well because the Goth Girl turned them down in High School.

Hey!

I'll have you know I turned down the Goth Girl in high school.

True story.

She wanted to go out with me, but we both had a lot of mental health issues, and I kind of knew neither of us could handle a relationship at that point in our lives (plus, don't stick it in the crazy) and we actually talked it out.

Surprisingly, she took it well and we remained friends until graduation. I think the fact both of us were total outcasts in high school may have had something to do with it.

Well, I later had a girlfriend the summer I graduated, and it didn't work out too well in the long run and the Goth girl later became a heroin addict and had to go to a rehab center in Pennsylvania.

We still keep in touch online, and she's staying clean as far as I know.