TheRPGSite

Hello,

Thought I'd post this. GJ did a very good and indepth review of V 5e.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=765JQ06HUx4

Sounds a bit crap as far as I'm concerned. Not that I had high hopes for it anyway.

And no Sabbat? Fuck that!:mad: (well, not detailed in this 400 page rule book). Meh...

This review gives me hope that the whole WoD5 will crash and burn before they can get around to ruining Mage with their ideas.

Honestly, the most interesting aspect to me would be that V5 crashes so hard that NuWW cancels any plans for a Werewolf5 or Mage5, which functionally leaves Onyx Path able to produce new content, but only for the non-Vampire lines. I'd be very curious to see what WoD without vampires might look like.

I cannot bring myself to care either way. I already found better settings and systems if I ever get the desire to play a vampire game.

If Paradox really cared they would buy back the rights to the video games and remaster or remake. They lack competition because for whatever reason there are very few games with vampire protagonists (http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/protagonist-vampire). The most interesting vampire CRPG of the past decade is an indie dungeon crawler titled Bloodlust: Shadowhunter.

V5 sucks balls and I hope it fails.

Fuck NuWW and their love of the shitty metaplot that ruined VTM in the first place.

Seriously, Martin Ericsson is an even bigger hack than Justin Achilli and personal horror sucks as a theme anyway, unless you're some emotionally masochistic Goth or Punk.

The fact that NuWW has radically altered the mechanics to enforce personal horror as the sole theme is another reason I won't buy V5.

1E and 2E were the best editions for Vampire, Revised and V5 suck balls.

Trenchcoats and Katanas forever! Goths and Punks Fuck Off!

It's more an overview than a review. The guy doesn't say what the game goals are and if it accomplishes them or not.

I've heard this edition tries to go back to 1e and focus on street level personal horror. Is this true?

Wait... the players can take control over the game from the GM?...

ruh roh...

Quote from: Doc SammyThe fact that NuWW has radically altered the mechanics to enforce personal horror as the sole theme is another reason I won't buy V5.

As someone interested more in personal horror than supers with fangs, you got my interest. How it does it? Does it work?

Doc's heating up.

Get him some Waifu-pills stat!!!

Edit: As much as I'd rather see it happen, I think for Paradox to ignore the history of Vampire after all this time would be a commericial mistake in the short-term. I would love to see them re-imagine Vampire with touches of familiar names and ideas without all the baggage.

But that's not gonna happen.

Quote from: tenbones;1054280Doc's heating up.

Get him some Waifu-pills stat!!!

Edit: As much as I'd rather see it happen, I think for Paradox to ignore the history of Vampire after all this time would be a commericial mistake in the short-term. I would love to see them re-imagine Vampire with touches of familiar names and ideas without all the baggage.

Vampire the Requiem says 'hi.'

Seriously, they already tried changing up the mechanics to enforce a personal horror experience. It went over so well that Old White Wolf went out of business and its IP was bought up by Paradox.

It took Onyx Path releasing the "Greatest Hits" inspired V20 that pretty much ignored the entire "Revised" era for a cleaned up 2e with less focus on the metaplot to actually get the Vampire line popular enough again for Paradox to create a NuWW subsidiary and consider making a new edition.

Then NuWW went and made the exact same mistake that killed White Wolf last time. Based on some polling done over at Onyx Path and only about a third of the current VTM players who responded are planning on switching over to V5. It could very well be more divisive for its base than 4E was for D&D.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054282Vampire the Requiem says 'hi.'

Seriously, they already tried changing up the mechanics to enforce a personal horror experience. It went over so well that Old White Wolf went out of business and its IP was bought up by Paradox.

It took Onyx Path releasing the "Greatest Hits" inspired V20 that pretty much ignored the entire "Revised" era for a cleaned up 2e with less focus on the metaplot to actually get the Vampire line popular enough again for Paradox to create a NuWW subsidiary and consider making a new edition.

Then NuWW went and made the exact same mistake that killed White Wolf last time. Based on some polling done over at Onyx Path and only about a third of the current VTM players who responded are planning on switching over to V5. It could very well be more divisive for its base than 4E was for D&D.

So the Vampire fan base actually prefer Supers with Fangs instead of personal horror? Interesting. Shouldn't Paradox just make Vampire like fans want and release a new IP for personal horror or something?

Any written reviews yet? Video reviews make me chew on the screen.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054282Vampire the Requiem says 'hi.'

Seriously, they already tried changing up the mechanics to enforce a personal horror experience. It went over so well that Old White Wolf went out of business and its IP was bought up by Paradox.

It took Onyx Path releasing the "Greatest Hits" inspired V20 that pretty much ignored the entire "Revised" era for a cleaned up 2e with less focus on the metaplot to actually get the Vampire line popular enough again for Paradox to create a NuWW subsidiary and consider making a new edition.

Then NuWW went and made the exact same mistake that killed White Wolf last time. Based on some polling done over at Onyx Path and only about a third of the current VTM players who responded are planning on switching over to V5. It could very well be more divisive for its base than 4E was for D&D.

This guy gets it.

Even the whiny Goths and Punks at Onyx Path Forums generally hate V5. I know, I'm a regular at Onyx Path Forums (my handle there is Camilla)

Thinking of the colossal fuckup that is V5 makes me angry. I better calm myself down with a sixpack of hard cider, a few episodes of Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, and maybe a bit of weed if I still have any gummies left.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054268This review gives me hope that the whole WoD5 will crash and burn before they can get around to ruining Mage with their ideas.

I'm with you there... Seems that even some people, on the big purple, are not too impressed or at least moaning about it.

I've not read the pdf myself, but if GJs review is accurate (which I'm sure it is) then by the sounds of it V5 'aint my thing at all. I've got everything I need from the previous editions at any rate including the V20 stuff. :)

Oh, and I always cut out their stupid meta-plot that went on to destroy the game.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1054284Any written reviews yet? Video reviews make me chew on the screen.

Yeah this.

I don't want to spend 40 minute listening to something I could probably read in 5-10.

Quote from: tenbones;1054278Wait... the players can take control over the game from the GM?...

ruh roh...

:eek: I know!!!

Quote from: Itachi;1054283So the Vampire fan base actually prefer Supers with Fangs instead of personal horror? Interesting. Shouldn't Paradox just make Vampire like fans want and release a new IP for personal horror or something?

In a word... yes.

The problem the people behind Vampire the Masquerade have always had is that the game they wrote (i.e. what its mechanics support and encourage) is not the game they envisioned so they keep having this impulse to change things up to better fit that vision. But their player base that turned the game into the phenomenon it has always preferred the game that was written to the game that was envisioned.

This is because, quite frankly, their vision was crap. Wallowing in self-pity bemoaning your cursed fate (i.e. personal horror) is interesting for, at most, one game session before it gets old. Then you either need to find a way to adapt and survive in your new condition or go take a sunbath if you can't abide feeding on people and only one of those is a viable PC past a single session.

So that's what players naturally assumed the game was supposed to be about; the politics of competing immortals who must stay in the shadows by nature of their condition. And who can really blame them... "oh no, I must feed on people. How will I live with myself?" isn't a campaign... it's a backstory.

White Wolf was never quite happy with this; with the idea that they just lucked into a phenomenon that wasn't their vision. The metaplot of "The End Times" that really took center stage with Revised was a rather ham-handed attempt to create some sense of horror at your impending doom, but because by then the natural course of play was PCs overcoming their elders and their schemes, instead of being seen as cosmic horror bearing down on them they were instead seen as more of an epic-level monster manual.

When that failed to bring the player base into line with how they thought the game should be played, they ended the line and launched the New World of Darkness with mechanics that better reflected their original vision... and proceeded to go out of business because, again, their original vision was crap.

Onyx Path similarly lucked into success with their 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire the Masquerade. It was originally supposed to be a one-off love letter they figured would appeal to the few diehards still out there. Instead it turned out there was so much demand, it turned into an entire relaunch of the line and 20th Anniversary Editions and supplements for the entire original lineup (Werewolf, Mage, Changeling and Wraith) because Onyx Path recognized what the player base wanted and then -Shocker- gave it to them.

V5 was developed by the fringe Eurotrash players who actually bought into White Wolf's original vision and bemoaned the "superheroes with fangs" playstyle and took advantage of their ownership of the license to try and force the playerbase to play the game the way they think it should be played.

The history of RPGs suggests how well that's going to go. The sad part is they didn't even have to look outside their own IP for how this is likely to go, but they still did it anyway.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Chris. As a relative neonate (heh) in the line, I prefer the personal horror/survival angle over supers with fangs, though I agree it gets old fast and thus would struggle for longer campaigns.

It seems it's still possible to please both crowds though, if they direct future expansions to the war of the vampires/elders etc angle, no? Or are the core rules so tied to personal horror that it would be difficult to adapt?

Quote from: Itachi;1054311Thanks for the detailed explanation, Chris. As a relative neonate (heh) in the line, I prefer the personal horror/survival angle over supers with fangs, though I agree it gets old fast and thus would struggle for longer campaigns.

It seems it's still possible to please both crowds though, if they direct future expansions to the war of the vampires/elders etc angle, no? Or are the core rules so tied to personal horror that it would be difficult to adapt?

V5s new hunger mechanics make the ability to do the superhero with fangs approach nearly impossible due to any regular use of vampiric abilities is going to either cause you to lose control of your character (due to the vageries of the hunger dice) or require you to murder several people a night to avoid that happening (because you can't fully satiate your hunger by say, taking a pint from several different people during the night and mesmerize them to forget it, thus keeping your existence a secret from the mortals... nope, you can only fully satiate yourself and have full control of your character in V5 by murdering someone).

Even a minimally active V5 vampire (one who only uses blood to wake each night) would have to kill someone each night to be satiated (and then have to dispose of all these bodies without arousing suspicion. The same vampire in prior editions needed only a single pint of blood, could lick the wound closed after feeding and the bite was so blissful they'd barely even remember the slight pain at the start afterwards; leaving their target no worse off than if they'd donated at the Red Cross that day.

In V5, each time you use a vampire power you gain a hunger die. If one of those dice, and one of your action dice comes up as a 10, you lose control. The only way to get rid of all the hunger dice is to kill someone by drinking them dry. In playtest this led to groups that played by the expectations of past editions leaving a string of dozens of corpses behind them lest they lose control of their PC at a critical time.

The general reaction from roughly 2/3 (if Onyx Path's surveys are any indication) of the player base was not experiencing "personal horror" but frustration as anything interesting to do requires either another dead body to clean up or losing control of your PC on a regular basis (where you might end up with another body to bury anyway).

It was also pretty suspension of disbelief breaking as the number of blood drained corpses just a half-dozen vampires left behind would even be noticeable someplace like Chicago; much less the number that the 80 or so that are supposed to be living there would create in a year's time (that's over 4000 exanguination death a year if they only fed to satiation once a week each). Yet they're supposed to have a Masquerade in effect where the primary capital crime is to leave evidence of the existence of vampires for mortals to find.

So no, you can't really put the superheroes with fangs element into V5. It's not designed to allow it with the V5 ruleset. The "War of Elders" was literally designed to remove the competing elders from the campaign world so that the players could better focus on the "personal horror" of murdering people on a nightly basis.

V5 is a Eurotrash Edgelord dumpster fire. It might be fun to watch the train wreck when it's a one-shot session, but it's virtually worthless for any sort of long-running campaign.

I pray it dies before the stupidity that is hunger dice gets turned into "rage dice" for Werewolf and "paradox dice" for Mage; because God forbid you actually play Mage to be able to work magic... that playstyle needs to be punished by randomly losing control of your character every time you try to be more than a mundane cog in the machinery of the modern world.

That crap might play okay in terms of Vampire's "vision", but it utterly flies in the face of Mage's themes of self-empowerment and changing the world and the nuWW crew has already stated their vision of the World of Darkness is one with more unified mechanics and shared themes (i.e. make everything like Vampire) under the brand of "One World of Darkness."

This is LITERALLY what old White Wolf did when it killed VtM the first time under the brand of "New World of Darkness"; unified mechanics, shared themes, more focus on the personal day-to-day struggle of being a supernatural being. It is literally repeating the same mistake again and expecting a different result.

Worse, Onyx Path still has the license and is producing new material for the "Chronicles of Darkness" (their new name for the New World of Darkness setting to avoid confusion with the classic World of Darkness setting) that delivers everything they twisted Masquerade into for V5.

So yeah, dumpster fire.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054310This is because, quite frankly, their vision was crap. Wallowing in self-pity bemoaning your cursed fate (i.e. personal horror) is interesting for, at most, one game session before it gets old. Then you either need to find a way to adapt and survive in your new condition or go take a sunbath if you can't abide feeding on people and only one of those is a viable PC past a single session.

So that's what players naturally assumed the game was supposed to be about; the politics of competing immortals who must stay in the shadows by nature of their condition. And who can really blame them... "oh no, I must feed on people. How will I live with myself?" isn't a campaign... it's a backstory.

Though I will say - it's a really fun backstory. Not so much for me now since I'm past that stage, but as a teen that sort of thing really appealed to me. Not the wallowing - but being one of the super special few badasses who overcomes the curse and fights on rather than giving in to despair and/or becoming evil. Sort of Blade's whole schtick really - only without the Daywalker immunity to sunlight & doing it from within vampire society.

But I 100% agree. Even in my teenage days I did not enjoy the actual wallowing despite liking to wear a lot of black. (More in a biker way than a goth/emo way.)

Quote from: Chris24601;1054312V5s new hunger mechanics make the ability to do the superhero with fangs approach nearly impossible due to any regular use of vampiric abilities is going to either cause you to lose control of your character (due to the vageries of the hunger dice) or require you to murder several people a night to avoid that happening (because you can't fully satiate your hunger by say, taking a pint from several different people during the night and mesmerize them to forget it, thus keeping your existence a secret from the mortals... nope, you can only fully satiate yourself and have full control of your character in V5 by murdering someone).

Even a minimally active V5 vampire (one who only uses blood to wake each night) would have to kill someone each night to be satiated (and then have to dispose of all these bodies without arousing suspicion. The same vampire in prior editions needed only a single pint of blood, could lick the wound closed after feeding and the bite was so blissful they'd barely even remember the slight pain at the start afterwards; leaving their target no worse off than if they'd donated at the Red Cross that day.

In V5, each time you use a vampire power you gain a hunger die. If one of those dice, and one of your action dice comes up as a 10, you lose control. The only way to get rid of all the hunger dice is to kill someone by drinking them dry. In playtest this led to groups that played by the expectations of past editions leaving a string of dozens of corpses behind them lest they lose control of their PC at a critical time.

The general reaction from roughly 2/3 (if Onyx Path's surveys are any indication) of the player base was not experiencing "personal horror" but frustration as anything interesting to do requires either another dead body to clean up or losing control of your PC on a regular basis (where you might end up with another body to bury anyway).

It was also pretty suspension of disbelief breaking as the number of blood drained corpses just a half-dozen vampires left behind would even be noticeable someplace like Chicago; much less the number that the 80 or so that are supposed to be living there would create in a year's time (that's over 4000 exanguination death a year if they only fed to satiation once a week each). Yet they're supposed to have a Masquerade in effect where the primary capital crime is to leave evidence of the existence of vampires for mortals to find.

So no, you can't really put the superheroes with fangs element into V5. It's not designed to allow it with the V5 ruleset. The "War of Elders" was literally designed to remove the competing elders from the campaign world so that the players could better focus on the "personal horror" of murdering people on a nightly basis.

V5 is a Eurotrash Edgelord dumpster fire. It might be fun to watch the train wreck when it's a one-shot session, but it's virtually worthless for any sort of long-running campaign.

I pray it dies before the stupidity that is hunger dice gets turned into "rage dice" for Werewolf and "paradox dice" for Mage; because God forbid you actually play Mage to be able to work magic... that playstyle needs to be punished by randomly losing control of your character every time you try to be more than a mundane cog in the machinery of the modern world.

That crap might play okay in terms of Vampire's "vision", but it utterly flies in the face of Mage's themes of self-empowerment and changing the world and the nuWW crew has already stated their vision of the World of Darkness is one with more unified mechanics and shared themes (i.e. make everything like Vampire) under the brand of "One World of Darkness."

This is LITERALLY what old White Wolf did when it killed VtM the first time under the brand of "New World of Darkness"; unified mechanics, shared themes, more focus on the personal day-to-day struggle of being a supernatural being. It is literally repeating the same mistake again and expecting a different result.

Worse, Onyx Path still has the license and is producing new material for the "Chronicles of Darkness" (their new name for the New World of Darkness setting to avoid confusion with the classic World of Darkness setting) that delivers everything they twisted Masquerade into for V5.

So yeah, dumpster fire.

You pretty much hit the nail on the head with this one.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054312V5 is a Eurotrash Edgelord dumpster fire.

You rock! That was all I needed to know.

BTW, I've posted about this before (and will again), but Palladium's NIGHTBANE (https://palladium-store.com/1001/product/730-Nightbane-Role-Playing-Game.html) does the Superhero Monster without the Angst extremely well, and the random chargen is tremendously fun because it can generate some truly weird monsters you can become when the sun goes down.

I never really thought of Vampire as a super hero game, although it seemed to go that way in the end. That's why I always gave White Wolf's meta plot a lobotomy. Ironically, they seem to have continued on with a heavy meta plot for V5. Did they not realize what it did to the Masquerade?

But then, I never played anything other then the Sabbat. Who were far more interesting then the *yawn* Camerilla. As they embraced the horror of what they had become and enjoyed every minute of it. Although, I did enjoy hunting down Camerilla princes and elders and draining them dry so we could steal their power.

The Sabbat packs were like terrorist cells that would go in and cause pure mayhem, to the 'masquerade' and then just bug out and watch the carnage unfold. And, at the end of the day, they were the only group willing and crazy enough to fight the rising of the Antediluvians (or Armageddon). While every other clan just counted their cash.

I mean, the Tzimice.... What's not to love about those cuddly deviants? And the Lasombra - Ventrue with actual balls!

I and some friends picked the book up at GenCon.  We like the "new" direction.  The fact that it isn't supers with fangs was a major selling point for us.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054312V5s new hunger mechanics make the ability to do the superhero with fangs approach nearly impossible due to any regular use of vampiric abilities is going to either cause you to lose control of your character (due to the vageries of the hunger dice) or require you to murder several people a night to avoid that happening (because you can't fully satiate your hunger by say, taking a pint from several different people during the night and mesmerize them to forget it, thus keeping your existence a secret from the mortals... nope, you can only fully satiate yourself and have full control of your character in V5 by murdering someone).

Even a minimally active V5 vampire (one who only uses blood to wake each night) would have to kill someone each night to be satiated (and then have to dispose of all these bodies without arousing suspicion. The same vampire in prior editions needed only a single pint of blood, could lick the wound closed after feeding and the bite was so blissful they'd barely even remember the slight pain at the start afterwards; leaving their target no worse off than if they'd donated at the Red Cross that day.

In V5, each time you use a vampire power you gain a hunger die. If one of those dice, and one of your action dice comes up as a 10, you lose control. The only way to get rid of all the hunger dice is to kill someone by drinking them dry. In playtest this led to groups that played by the expectations of past editions leaving a string of dozens of corpses behind them lest they lose control of their PC at a critical time.

Full disclosure first, I haven't read the whole book yet but I've played in 2 sessions.  There may be something I'm missing and if so I'm happy to be corrected. Now...

While you aren't 100% incorrect, the way you describe it makes it sound worse than it is.

Not every use of a vampire power automatically gains you a Hunger die.  There is no blood pool in V5.  Instead, most things that a Vampire would use blood for (powers, healing, waking up, etc) force a Rouse Check.  You roll 1d10 and on a 6+ nothing happens.  A failure means you gain 1 Hunger.

A character's Hunger is a rating from 0 to 5.  

Each point in Hunger gives a Hunger die that replaces a d10 in your die pool on most rolls (IIRC Willpower rolls, Checks and Humanity rolls are exempt).  If the roll succeeds and no Hunger dice come up a 10, you're fine.  If one or more of the Hunger dice is a 10 then you lost a bit of control on that action.  For example, if you are trying to break open a lock on a door and no Hunger dice come up a 10 maybe you kick the door in.  If a Hunger die came up a 10 on that roll perhaps you rip the door off the hinges instead, but then you are back in control.

The same sort of thing happens with failures.  If you fail a test but the Hunger dice don't come up 1s you are fine.  If one does come up a 1, then there are options.  You can take a Compulsion, which could be an activation of your clan flaw.  This gets you Willpower back so long as you act it out appropriately.  Alternatively, the beast takes over briefly and in a messy way, which can be used to explain the failure.  It's the difference between failing to intimidate the lawyer you need to put pressure on because maybe he's too stubborn and you failing because you ripped his throat out.

To lessen Hunger you feed.  You don't need to kill humans to lessen Hunger unless you want to bring your character's Hunger back down to zero.  Depending on your Blood Potency there are a few restrictions.  Young vampires, for example, can feed off animals just fine while older vampires need human blood.  Again though, you only need to kill to get Hunger back to 0.  It's perfectly viable to just sip and lick the wound if all you want is a point or two.

Overall, like I said above, we like it so far.  We're 2 sessions in on a semi-regular game (we are playing this on nights when not everyone can make it out).  While not exactly bringing us back to the 1e or 2e days, it's leaps and bounds more enjoyable than Requiem was for us.

V5 sounds like it took inspiration for Hunger rules from the free indie RPG Feed (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/124387/Feed). The general idea sounds identical. It is too bad they did not take inspiration from the other rules, like the strain and humanity mechanics.

At this point anyone interested in personal horror, or vampires in general, is better off playing Feed over V5. One of the advantages that Feed has over V5 is that while the rules support personal horror (and better than V5), the author recognizes that this only works if the players are invested so the game includes provisions for other sub-genres. The rules explicitly state that by default vampirism is a metaphor for addition then includes four example campaign settings where vampirism is used as a metaphor for addiction (with extra withdrawal rules), b-movie villainy, power corrupts and post-traumatic stress disorder. The rulebook also includes a chapter exploring trends in vampire fiction over the past century and a half. It includes some mechanics that you might label "story game," like players being allowed to provoke other player's characters vampire instincts whenever relevant stimuli come up rather than this being something automatic the GM has to keep track of.

Here is a more detailed review. (http://withinthedungeon.blogspot.com/2017/01/rpg-review-feed.html) The book is free so I recommend reading it for yourself to see if it interests you. I am quite content using it to emulate the setting from Nightlife.

Quote from: rgalex;1054352IWhile not exactly bringing us back to the 1e or 2e days, it's leaps and bounds more enjoyable than Requiem was for us.

Requiem was an abomination.

So how do you think V5 stacks up against VtM? On the couple of session you had so far?

Quote from: The Exploited.;1054363Requiem was an abomination.

So how do you think V5 stacks up against VtM? On the couple of session you had so far?

When I was younger and stupider I engaged in the edition wars on the side of Requiem. Now that I have grown up I recognize how stupid the edition wars are. Arguing over which edition was better is pointless and immature. They both have their merits and flaws, although ultimately I think both suck equally badly and I will never play any of them.

I understand Requiem's desire to reduce the clans to five widely recognizable archetypes and I found that admirable, since the clans in Masquerade were pretty arbitrary and idiosyncratic. The real problem was that clans were even necessary in the first place. World of Darkness vampires all follow an essentially Ricean model with clans tacked on to provide false differences. Most of their disciplines are weird grab bags of powers that cannot even emulate classic vampire fiction and the bloodlines just made this problem worse.

Quote from: The Exploited.;1054363Requiem was an abomination.

So how do you think V5 stacks up against VtM? On the couple of session you had so far?

Right now, I think it stands up well in parallel but probably not a replacement if you really liked the early editions.  That may change over time.

Basically, because of the way we're playing (without the same people potentially being there every time) our sessions are a bit more "individual stories that touch on one another in different ways" rather than "one big Vampire community" like we did with previous editions.

The PCs include a Malkavian, a Toreador, a Tremere, 2 Ventrue and a Brujah and takes place in the greater Cleveland area.  The area use to be locked down by the Camarilla but is in a slow and steady decline due to the outing of the Anarchs.  This is effecting each of the PCs in different ways as they scramble to adjust and keep their lives together.

In the case of the Toreador and Brujah, both fairly young vampires who haven't had decades or more of Camarillia "conditioning", it's a class struggle game.  

For the Ventrue and Tremere the game is much more a "how do we not let our city fall" or at the very least a game of "how do I get out of this ahead of the others".  

The Malk seems to be the only one concerned about the Second Inquisition attention being drawn in so she's working that angle of the setting and playing cleanup for everyone.

Rules-wise, it's not going to set the gaming world on fire.  There isn't anything revolutionary here, but it works.  Nicely so far.  Combat is quick and brutal when it needs to be.  Playing a vampire feels like you aren't just a human with perks.  We all agree that not having to track blood points is a nice feature but some in the group feel that the 0-5 scale is a little too small.  From what I've seen, those that feel that way tend to default to "I use my Vampire powers" to pound in every nail they see sticking out.

The GM said something about trying out some of the advanced combat rules from the back of the book next session.  I'm not sure what those are as I've not gotten to that part of the book yet.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054282Vampire the Requiem says 'hi.'

Seriously, they already tried changing up the mechanics to enforce a personal horror experience. It went over so well that Old White Wolf went out of business and its IP was bought up by Paradox.

It took Onyx Path releasing the "Greatest Hits" inspired V20 that pretty much ignored the entire "Revised" era for a cleaned up 2e with less focus on the metaplot to actually get the Vampire line popular enough again for Paradox to create a NuWW subsidiary and consider making a new edition.

Then NuWW went and made the exact same mistake that killed White Wolf last time. Based on some polling done over at Onyx Path and only about a third of the current VTM players who responded are planning on switching over to V5. It could very well be more divisive for its base than 4E was for D&D.

Yeah. I actually like the mechanics of Requiem (and the other splats that lock into it). I run/ran it as a toolkit for my own kinda cosmology. I don't really *need* more Vampire per se. But I'm always interested in checking out a new system.

I own the 20th Anniversary stuff too. I like them too.

I'm long divorced from the personalities behind Vampire... I think people are too "hung up" on the overwrought (and silly) metaplot of Vampire to just simply pick and choose what works vs. what doesn't.

I don't do the super-hero w/ fangs but I certainly try to provide opportunities for players that want to do that to indulge in it... despite the inevitable ramifications of it in context of the games I usually run. LOL

I must remark that all this talk sounds a bit strange to me. See, I've always heard from some long time VtM fans that they actually enjoy and always do personal horror and politics and their game is not really about Supers with Fangs. Some of them even took offense at the possibility...

...until an official edition comes out that does what they argue they actually do.... and they burn it for not being about Supers with Fangs. Hehe

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054362V5 sounds like it took inspiration for Hunger rules from the free indie RPG Feed (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/124387/Feed). The general idea sounds identical. It is too bad they did not take inspiration from the other rules, like the strain and humanity mechanics.

At this point anyone interested in personal horror, or vampires in general, is better off playing Feed over V5. One of the advantages that Feed has over V5 is that while the rules support personal horror (and better than V5), the author recognizes that this only works if the players are invested so the game includes provisions for other sub-genres. The rules explicitly state that by default vampirism is a metaphor for addition then includes four example campaign settings where vampirism is used as a metaphor for addiction (with extra withdrawal rules), b-movie villainy, power corrupts and post-traumatic stress disorder. The rulebook also includes a chapter exploring trends in vampire fiction over the past century and a half. It includes some mechanics that you might label "story game," like players being allowed to provoke other player's characters vampire instincts whenever relevant stimuli come up rather than this being something automatic the GM has to keep track of.

Here is a more detailed review. (http://withinthedungeon.blogspot.com/2017/01/rpg-review-feed.html) The book is free so I recommend reading it for yourself to see if it interests you. I am quite content using it to emulate the setting from Nightlife.

Sounds pretty confusing. How an actual game plays out? Is there an example somewhere?

By the way, I would also recommend Undying as another take in the personal horror angle. It's focused on feeding to survive and scheming your way in local predator society. Also, it has a downtime phase to reflect plotting & scheming through decades/centuries between sessions. There's a nice overview of it here (https://www.rpgpub.com/threads/undying-2016-a-pbta-hack-of-vampire-the-masquerade.902/).

Quote from: Itachi;1054412I must remark that all this talk sounds a bit strange to me. See, I've always heard from some long time VtM fans that they actually enjoy and always do personal horror and politics and their game is not really about Supers with Fangs. Some of them even took offense at the possibility...

...until an official edition comes out that does what they argue they actually do.... and they burn it for not being about Supers with Fangs. Hehe
 

I never liked personal horror and have always supported Supers With Fangs, because I'm not a whiny and emotionally masochistic Goth/Punk crybaby.

Musically, there may be differences, but Goth and Emo are ideologically the same thing.

Quote from: tenbones;1054373Yeah. I actually like the mechanics of Requiem (and the other splats that lock into it). I run/ran it as a toolkit for my own kinda cosmology. I don't really *need* more Vampire per se. But I'm always interested in checking out a new system.

I own the 20th Anniversary stuff too. I like them too.

I'm long divorced from the personalities behind Vampire... I think people are too "hung up" on the overwrought (and silly) metaplot of Vampire to just simply pick and choose what works vs. what doesn't.

I don't do the super-hero w/ fangs but I certainly try to provide opportunities for players that want to do that to indulge in it... despite the inevitable ramifications of it in context of the games I usually run. LOL

Hey, you know MY bias...

It seems almost universal that RPG nerds really gel'd with NWOD's system. Its split setting-wise, though. We know this already, obvs. Its funny though, I had a player who got a bunch of the clan novel paperbacks off of eBay. She was well into it but when she said she really wanted to play OWOD, I swear to God half the room jumped (one actually fell off the couch!) up to ward her away from her frankly awful desire. At least, system-wise. The rant that ensued from that 'last damn near twen'e minutes!

Quote from: Spinachcat;1054329You rock! That was all I needed to know.

BTW, I've posted about this before (and will again), but Palladium's NIGHTBANE (https://palladium-store.com/1001/product/730-Nightbane-Role-Playing-Game.html) does the Superhero Monster without the Angst extremely well, and the random chargen is tremendously fun because it can generate some truly weird monsters you can become when the sun goes down.

Nightbane's vampires (and dhampires) aren't too shabby either. I've played a couple games of Nightbane over the years and I've seen it the forms done both randomly or by selection depending on what the players and GM's wanted at the time. Some already have a specific idea of the type of form they want (almost always something weird; going with all the "pretty" options was never the appeal if we were playing Nightbane... though some did concepts that used the pretty mixed with something extra disturbing for contrast), others like the randomness all the time even when we got to choose.

Quote from: Itachi;1054412Sounds pretty confusing. How an actual game plays out? Is there an example somewhere?

Weirdly, the Feed rulebook doesn't include examples of play IIRC. Which is pretty weird considering all the examples of ideas, plot hooks, etc that it has.

I would have to check the book and see if I can construct a scenario myself if I cannot find one.

Quote from: rgalex;1054366Right now, I think it stands up well in parallel but probably not a replacement if you really liked the early editions.  That may change over time.

Basically, because of the way we're playing (without the same people potentially being there every time) our sessions are a bit more "individual stories that touch on one another in different ways" rather than "one big Vampire community" like we did with previous editions.

The PCs include a Malkavian, a Toreador, a Tremere, 2 Ventrue and a Brujah and takes place in the greater Cleveland area.  The area use to be locked down by the Camarilla but is in a slow and steady decline due to the outing of the Anarchs.  This is effecting each of the PCs in different ways as they scramble to adjust and keep their lives together.

In the case of the Toreador and Brujah, both fairly young vampires who haven't had decades or more of Camarillia "conditioning", it's a class struggle game.  

For the Ventrue and Tremere the game is much more a "how do we not let our city fall" or at the very least a game of "how do I get out of this ahead of the others".  

The Malk seems to be the only one concerned about the Second Inquisition attention being drawn in so she's working that angle of the setting and playing cleanup for everyone.

Rules-wise, it's not going to set the gaming world on fire.  There isn't anything revolutionary here, but it works.  Nicely so far.  Combat is quick and brutal when it needs to be.  Playing a vampire feels like you aren't just a human with perks.  We all agree that not having to track blood points is a nice feature but some in the group feel that the 0-5 scale is a little too small.  From what I've seen, those that feel that way tend to default to "I use my Vampire powers" to pound in every nail they see sticking out.

The GM said something about trying out some of the advanced combat rules from the back of the book next session.  I'm not sure what those are as I've not gotten to that part of the book yet.

Sounds like it worked for you and the group at any rate. I think for me after reading about the new lore. It's clipped the wings of the elders and sabbat. So, I'd probably just stay with the V20.

Mind you, I'm pretty stoked for Venger's Blood Dark Thirst. But you'd need to be a GM who didn't mind a bit of tinkering and padding it out when necessary.

I certainly think Blood Dark Thirst is a better option than any version of Vampire.

Oh dear lord. I'm officially out of V5 now after watching this. Good bye forever WW!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tUL6VtKFxc&t=635s

Quote from: The Exploited.;1054815Oh dear lord. I'm officially out of V5 now after watching this. Good bye forever WW!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tUL6VtKFxc&t=635s

That was the funniest thing I've seen all week!
I was actually laughing out loud at the Brujah bit.

Quote from: moonsweeper;1054816That was the funniest thing I've seen all week!
I was actually laughing out loud at the Brujah bit.

It's mad isn't it?!

I was listening to it cringing from behind the sofa. It was class!

That rant is funny, as it sounds like the end result is a bit like a miracle from Jesus: turning edge into whine. :D

(I'll be here all week! Try the veal! :p)

Comment: "Wait, they gave me Dominate, but they don't want me to be a fascist?"

Quote from: James Gillen;1054839Comment: "Wait, they gave me Dominate, but they don't want me to be a fascist?"

Now I want to make a Ventrue whose Flaw requires them to feed exclusively on gender snowflakes.

Quote from: Chris24601;1054312V5s new hunger mechanics make the ability to do the superhero with fangs approach nearly impossible due to any regular use of vampiric abilities is going to either cause you to lose control of your character (due to the vageries of the hunger dice) or require you to murder several people a night to avoid that happening (because you can't fully satiate your hunger by say, taking a pint from several different people during the night and mesmerize them to forget it, thus keeping your existence a secret from the mortals... nope, you can only fully satiate yourself and have full control of your character in V5 by murdering someone).

Even a minimally active V5 vampire (one who only uses blood to wake each night) would have to kill someone each night to be satiated (and then have to dispose of all these bodies without arousing suspicion. The same vampire in prior editions needed only a single pint of blood, could lick the wound closed after feeding and the bite was so blissful they'd barely even remember the slight pain at the start afterwards; leaving their target no worse off than if they'd donated at the Red Cross that day.

In V5, each time you use a vampire power you gain a hunger die. If one of those dice, and one of your action dice comes up as a 10, you lose control. The only way to get rid of all the hunger dice is to kill someone by drinking them dry. In playtest this led to groups that played by the expectations of past editions leaving a string of dozens of corpses behind them lest they lose control of their PC at a critical time.

The general reaction from roughly 2/3 (if Onyx Path's surveys are any indication) of the player base was not experiencing "personal horror" but frustration as anything interesting to do requires either another dead body to clean up or losing control of your PC on a regular basis (where you might end up with another body to bury anyway).

It was also pretty suspension of disbelief breaking as the number of blood drained corpses just a half-dozen vampires left behind would even be noticeable someplace like Chicago; much less the number that the 80 or so that are supposed to be living there would create in a year's time (that's over 4000 exanguination death a year if they only fed to satiation once a week each). Yet they're supposed to have a Masquerade in effect where the primary capital crime is to leave evidence of the existence of vampires for mortals to find.

So no, you can't really put the superheroes with fangs element into V5. It's not designed to allow it with the V5 ruleset. The "War of Elders" was literally designed to remove the competing elders from the campaign world so that the players could better focus on the "personal horror" of murdering people on a nightly basis.

V5 is a Eurotrash Edgelord dumpster fire. It might be fun to watch the train wreck when it's a one-shot session, but it's virtually worthless for any sort of long-running campaign.

I pray it dies before the stupidity that is hunger dice gets turned into "rage dice" for Werewolf and "paradox dice" for Mage; because God forbid you actually play Mage to be able to work magic... that playstyle needs to be punished by randomly losing control of your character every time you try to be more than a mundane cog in the machinery of the modern world.

That crap might play okay in terms of Vampire's "vision", but it utterly flies in the face of Mage's themes of self-empowerment and changing the world and the nuWW crew has already stated their vision of the World of Darkness is one with more unified mechanics and shared themes (i.e. make everything like Vampire) under the brand of "One World of Darkness."

This is LITERALLY what old White Wolf did when it killed VtM the first time under the brand of "New World of Darkness"; unified mechanics, shared themes, more focus on the personal day-to-day struggle of being a supernatural being. It is literally repeating the same mistake again and expecting a different result.

Worse, Onyx Path still has the license and is producing new material for the "Chronicles of Darkness" (their new name for the New World of Darkness setting to avoid confusion with the classic World of Darkness setting) that delivers everything they twisted Masquerade into for V5.

So yeah, dumpster fire.

Huh. So the rules require you to be a monster and were written by people that don't want you to play monsters.

That's not the dumbest thing I've read today, but it's close.

I was almost intrigued by V5's loss of the Blood Pool because one of my pet peeves for RPGs is having to deal with resource pools. Mana, Spell Points, Endurance, Blood, what-the-eff-ever. "Superman! Quick! Use your Heat Vision!" "Sorry, Batman, I don't have enough END." Things like exhaustion, fatigue and such work, IMO, better as a narrative rule, like after a long fight or forced travel, than as a turn but turn mechanic. In some cases, like Spell Points, it can make more sense, but I was often bothered by the idea that a warrior can swing his sword all day long, but a mage would use up their ability to do even similar damage pretty quickly. It's one reason I liked Mutants and Masterminds when it came out. Hey you have powers... and you can just use them. How novel is that? But this Hunger Dice thing is ridiculously overdone and actually hampers gameplay.

Anyway, I've preferred the Supers with Fangs approach, as well, at least as far as mechanics go. Personal Horror is fine if that what you want in your campaign, but it should be done through atmosphere and natural consequences, not forced as part of the base mechanics. I can count on one Shop Teacher's hand the number of times I've seen mechanics try to force atmosphere like that and succeed. At least one of them was for largely one-shot games. The original rules, as arbitrarily cringe-y as Humanity rules could be at times, were fine for enforcing the Beast concept without shoving it down players' throats.

Quote from: The Black Ferret;1054905I can count on one Shop Teacher's hand the number of times I've seen mechanics try to force atmosphere like that and succeed. At least one of them was for largely one-shot games. The original rules, as arbitrarily cringe-y as Humanity rules could be at times, were fine for enforcing the Beast concept without shoving it down players' throats.

The paths of course allowed you to basically run with the beast, which as better for the way we liked to play.

Quote from: The Exploited.;1054912The paths of course allowed you to basically run with the beast, which as better for the way we liked to play.

Yeah, that was another thing. Starting with the Sabbat, the whole Humanity/Fight the Beast thing became pointless. It was originally presented as "that's how all vampires are", but every new type they created just were able to live (unlive?) by their own rules, often ones far more liberal and non-punishing. So, what was the point of even having Humanity anymore? Almost like punishingg the players for not being the "villainous" types of vampires. At least in VtM. I am not familiar with Requiem at all.

Quote from: The Black Ferret;1054918Yeah, that was another thing. Starting with the Sabbat, the whole Humanity/Fight the Beast thing became pointless. It was originally presented as "that's how all vampires are", but every new type they created just were able to live (unlive?) by their own rules, often ones far more liberal and non-punishing. So, what was the point of even having Humanity anymore? Almost like punishingg the players for not being the "villainous" types of vampires. At least in VtM. I am not familiar with Requiem at all.

Yeah, this is it... They definitely wanted you to be using whole 'emo tortured soul' vamps that were tying to hold onto their humanity. Personally, I found that to be exceedingly boring. It pisses me off when game developers try and put their moral codes into their games. I mean, it's a game, let people play how they want to.

At least with the Sabbat's arrival, they finally saw some common sense and allowed vampires to be actually played as vampires as opposed to 'the kindred'. So the paths effectively killed the need for humanity... Unless you wanted to use it of course. Interestingly enough, with The Dark Ages came out they, used paths for the normal clans as well. They were probably getting sick of humanity themselves!

I like Verger's take on humanity in his game Blood Dark Thirst. You basically become a more bestial as you do more bad things, but it doesn't try to tell you what to do, and just leave it up to the players. ;)

I guess it could be fun to play Vampires that have to kill people to use their cool powers + punishing humanity rules as a fun low-powered CoC kind of game in which you know you're screwed but try to do some good before you go down while walking the tightrope between being too weak to do useful things and powering yourself up by eating everyone and becoming a monster.

But if you have to constantly kill people just to have a character (if I'm following things correctly) then it takes away the tightrope walk. You're by definition a monster, full stop. Where's the fun in that?

Quote from: Daztur;1054942I guess it could be fun to play Vampires that have to kill people to use their cool powers + punishing humanity rules as a fun low-powered CoC kind of game in which you know you're screwed but try to do some good before you go down while walking the tightrope between being too weak to do useful things and powering yourself up by eating everyone and becoming a monster.

But if you have to constantly kill people just to have a character (if I'm following things correctly) then it takes away the tightrope walk. You're by definition a monster, full stop. Where's the fun in that?

Only way I could make that work would be if you played it as some sort of Punisher-type character who only kills other monsters; murderers, rapists, pedophiles, sex traffickers, drug dealers and the like. Use disciplines like Auspex or Domination to be sure your target is guilty and then take justice into your own hands. It'd still be a tightrope on where you draw the line over who gets to live and who has to die, but you could probably at least argue you're a noble demon rather than a straight up monster.

Quote from: Daztur;1054942I guess it could be fun to play Vampires that have to kill people to use their cool powers + punishing humanity rules as a fun low-powered CoC kind of game in which you know you're screwed but try to do some good before you go down while walking the tightrope between being too weak to do useful things and powering yourself up by eating everyone and becoming a monster.

But if you have to constantly kill people just to have a character (if I'm following things correctly) then it takes away the tightrope walk. You're by definition a monster, full stop. Where's the fun in that?

Killing is only needed if you want to reset hunger completely, so it's far from mandatory or an optimal choice for every circumstance. And vampire powers this time seem weaker/lower powered than previous editions. So yeah, your "tightrope walk" is not only doable, it seems exactly what the authors intended.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1054416whiny and emotionally masochistic Goth/Punk crybaby.

Hey!
I resemble that remark!
[STRIKE]Well, perhaps not the "crybaby" part[/STRIKE]
Well, not entirely, but anyway ... :D

Thing is, i like "supers with fangs" too, AND personal horror, but as i see it, the "personal horror" aspect should be in the constant background ... just like depression ... ;) ... and the "super with fangs" would be one of the possible coping mechanisms.
Personal horror is, as has been pointed out, not something that can nor should be at the forefront all the time, noone can handle that, it is a survival trait to bury or ignore the shit and its effects.

However, just because one do not like Supers with fangs, it do not mean that one like Personal Horror:
You keep forgetting the third aspect where WoD may excel:
Intrigues.

I do not like intrigue-play, i'd rather go hero- or even Warrior-/Soldier-route, but it is one of the main ways in which Vampire the X has been played over the years it has existed.

Quote from: Itachi;1054984Killing is only needed if you want to reset hunger completely, so it's far from mandatory or an optimal choice for every circumstance. And vampire powers this time seem weaker/lower powered than previous editions. So yeah, your "tightrope walk" is not only doable, it seems exactly what the authors intended.

Ah OK, that doesn't sound so bad for me personally then. But you'd have to play it in a strictly CoC mode as in "your character is fucked, what are you going to accomplish before you inevitably die/go insane?" which works if that's what everyone expects going in.

Quote from: Daztur;1055028Ah OK, that doesn't sound so bad for me personally then. But you'd have to play it in a strictly CoC mode as in "your character is fucked, what are you going to accomplish before you inevitably die/go insane?" which works if that's what everyone expects going in.

Or, in an equally "you're eventually screwed" vein, have a Malkavian Prince and run it like a Paranoia game.

"The Prince told us to go to the East Side and take care of the Sabbat there."
"Isn't the East Side So-And-So's Domain?"
"Yeah, it is."
"And didn't he tell us to never go into that domain, upon pain of death?"
"Yeah, he did."
"So, we have to go into an area the Prince forbid us to go to and take care of something he wants done, without letting anyone, including the Prince, know that we did?"
"Yes."

Quote from: The Exploited.;1054267Hello,

Thought I'd post this. GJ did a very good and indepth review of V 5e.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=765JQ06HUx4

Sounds a bit crap as far as I'm concerned. Not that I had high hopes for it anyway.

And no Sabbat? Fuck that!:mad: (well, not detailed in this 400 page rule book). Meh...

Just more coffee table RPG dreck.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1055033Just more coffee table RPG dreck.

Except it's a deeply ugly book with cheesy larp photos throughout. :eek: Think I rather a dollop of fungus on my coffee table.

But I'm sure 'da' kids' will love it!

Quote from: The Black Ferret;1054905I was almost intrigued by V5's loss of the Blood Pool because one of my pet peeves for RPGs is having to deal with resource pools. Mana, Spell Points, Endurance, Blood, what-the-eff-ever. "Superman! Quick! Use your Heat Vision!" "Sorry, Batman, I don't have enough END." Things like exhaustion, fatigue and such work, IMO, better as a narrative rule, like after a long fight or forced travel, than as a turn but turn mechanic. In some cases, like Spell Points, it can make more sense, but I was often bothered by the idea that a warrior can swing his sword all day long, but a mage would use up their ability to do even similar damage pretty quickly. It's one reason I liked Mutants and Masterminds when it came out. Hey you have powers... and you can just use them. How novel is that? But this Hunger Dice thing is ridiculously overdone and actually hampers gameplay.

Anyway, I've preferred the Supers with Fangs approach, as well, at least as far as mechanics go. Personal Horror is fine if that what you want in your campaign, but it should be done through atmosphere and natural consequences, not forced as part of the base mechanics. I can count on one Shop Teacher's hand the number of times I've seen mechanics try to force atmosphere like that and succeed. At least one of them was for largely one-shot games. The original rules, as arbitrarily cringe-y as Humanity rules could be at times, were fine for enforcing the Beast concept without shoving it down players' throats.

Quote from: Daztur;1055028Ah OK, that doesn't sound so bad for me personally then. But you'd have to play it in a strictly CoC mode as in "your character is fucked, what are you going to accomplish before you inevitably die/go insane?" which works if that's what everyone expects going in.

This is why I always recommend the game Feed whenever this comes up. The mechanics about leaving the victim alive versus leaving them dead providing partial versus full satisfaction is taken directly from Feed, so the writers clearly took inspiration from it even if they did not really understand what they were doing.

I always hated the WoD morality/sanity meters which, in the most reductionist terms, gave your character psychosis for stealing a car. Feed does not strictly punish players for becoming more vampiric. In Feed, all character traits operate the same way and as characters lose humanity they replace human traits with vampire traits. This is a lot better, IMO, to deal with personal horror. (IIRC, VTR 2e tried to ape this by having characters lose humanity for not acting human enough, but this was just as clumsy and clunky as the morality/sanity rules have always been.)

The author of Feed knew that personal horror only works if the players are invested, so it deliberately framed the loss of humanity as literally replacing humanity with vampirism without judgment and provided rules for reversing this as well. The rules commentary specifically state that losing control of your character after a certain point is only appropriate for certain campaign styles (e.g. the gradual transformation seen in Dracula or The Lost Boys, where the characters are looking for a cure).

Feed outright includes B-movie as one of the example campaign settings to show off how versatile its rules are. Have you ever wanted to play Jerry Dandridge in his attempts to live in the suburbs and form human connections while feeding discretely and avoiding those pesky vampire hunters? Feed supports that just as easily as it supports something like Being Human.

Quote from: The Black Ferret;1055032Or, in an equally "you're eventually screwed" vein, have a Malkavian Prince and run it like a Paranoia game.

"The Prince told us to go to the East Side and take care of the Sabbat there."
"Isn't the East Side So-And-So's Domain?"
"Yeah, it is."
"And didn't he tell us to never go into that domain, upon pain of death?"
"Yeah, he did."
"So, we have to go into an area the Prince forbid us to go to and take care of something he wants done, without letting anyone, including the Prince, know that we did?"
"Yes."

This actually sounds very much like a typical non-Malkavian game.

jg

All editions of Vampire are Meh.

Meh, I'm telling you!  MEH!

Quote from: Chris24601;1054282Based on some polling done over at Onyx Path and only about a third of the current VTM players who responded are planning on switching over to V5. It could very well be more divisive for its base than 4E was for D&D.

I'd like to see these polls. I'm wavering on sticking to V20 or buying V5, and one of the factors I'm considering is whether the fanbase will rally to this or if I'm looking at D&D4 all over again, strong start followed by rapid fizzle.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;1055659I'd like to see these polls. I'm wavering on sticking to V20 or buying V5, and one of the factors I'm considering is whether the fanbase will rally to this or if I'm looking at D&D4 all over again, strong start followed by rapid fizzle.

Most entertainment is not an investment, and it is not fruitful to think of it as such.

If you don't have the disposable cash (patience, time, friend networks, whatever,) to adopt early, play with what you got in the pool that already has people. There is nothing I see from V5 that is lighting the world on fire. Further I don't see animus to create a new gamer pool incurious or hostile about older stuff.

It's like trying to keep up to date with thematic LEGO sets. The old LEGOs work fine, and the sane among us don't emotionally invest that hard on special pieces. Let it go. Invest in more office stationary and peace of mind to get creative. :)

Quote from: Chris24601;1054282Then NuWW went and made the exact same mistake that killed White Wolf last time. Based on some polling done over at Onyx Path and only about a third of the current VTM players who responded are planning on switching over to V5. It could very well be more divisive for its base than 4E was for D&D.

The thing is, polling for that at Onyx Path is not exactly the most trusthworthy sample.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1054270I cannot bring myself to care either way. I already found better settings and systems if I ever get the desire to play a vampire game.

If Paradox really cared they would buy back the rights to the video games and remaster or remake. They lack competition because for whatever reason there are very few games with vampire protagonists (http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/protagonist-vampire). The most interesting vampire CRPG of the past decade is an indie dungeon crawler titled Bloodlust: Shadowhunter.

I have the same feeling. What system did you settle on for playing something supernatural? I settled for unisystem and I can do anything I want with it and I don't need much else.

I now read the entire thread and I think Vampire was neither about personal horror or about superheroes with fangs. Personal horror does get old after one session and superheroes with fangs just doesn't have any suspense whatsoever. Superheroes makes the horror run away fast. I think it was always a political game. Which ironically no WoD book gives much advice about how to run a political campaign. Most WoD settings are political. Certainly vampire, changeling and mage. Hunter and werewolf not so much. The mortal line could have been really good for investigation, but it lacked focus as well.

My problem with the books has always been a case of too much info and not the right kind of info. And in the nWoD also too much mechanics and subsystems which I don't need because I just roleplay it.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1055882I have the same feeling. What system did you settle on for playing something supernatural? I settled for unisystem and I can do anything I want with it and I don't need much else.

It depends entirely on what you want to play. If you want politics, you play Urban Shadows. If you want soap opera, you play Monsterhearts. If you want personal horror, you play Feed. Those games pick a style of play and write their fluff and rules around that, rather than whatever World of Darkness tries and fails to do.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1055882I have the same feeling. What system did you settle on for playing something supernatural? I settled for unisystem and I can do anything I want with it and I don't need much else.

I now read the entire thread and I think Vampire was neither about personal horror or about superheroes with fangs. Personal horror does get old after one session and superheroes with fangs just doesn't have any suspense whatsoever. Superheroes makes the horror run away fast. I think it was always a political game. Which ironically no WoD book gives much advice about how to run a political campaign. Most WoD settings are political. Certainly vampire, changeling and mage. Hunter and werewolf not so much. The mortal line could have been really good for investigation, but it lacked focus as well.

My problem with the books has always been a case of too much info and not the right kind of info. And in the nWoD also too much mechanics and subsystems which I don't need because I just roleplay it.

Personal horror is not just "oh my gawd, I'm a vamp, must suck your blood, blehh!". It's about what it does to you as you start to embrace your vampiric nature and slide into using your vampire powers casually.

It's the point at which you're deciding how to, say, deal with a betrayal by a close friend -- rip their throat out with your fangs, mind control them to stand in front of traffic, crack their jaw wide with super-strength or... do you just let it go?

Or, even more darker, do you ghoul your child so that you have a constant source of blood at the cost of stealing your child's innocence forever and preventing them from growing up.

That is personal horror. It never gets old. It might get really raw and it might be emotionally draining but that's the type of game that WOD (Vampire) is. The problem with any "dark" game is having both GMs and players who've been to dark places and are sufficiently jaded enough to actually concoct a believable, authentic scenario dealing with personal horror. And that they truly want to explore those depths in the first place. In my experience, most gamers don't meet both criteria and they maybe meet the latter with a false sense of what that would actually entail. It rarely ends well.

In terms of politics, I think every single one of the WOD games are inherently political, as well. In fact, I'd say Werewolf and Hunter are actually even more political than Vampire, purely for the fact that Vampiric politics are very self-serving and inward-focused -- past their own immediate concerns, interests, standing and assets, vampires don't really care.

Werewolves can't afford to think like that. They have to also think in two dimensions: real world and spirit world. Unlike, say, Mages who care little for the specifics of the spirit world other than the relative power level of which given one they're summoning, Werewolves must thoughtfully consider how their actions and their policies affect the spirit world, particularly in territories they control or are sworn to protect. They also are very holistic in their thinking naturally and matriarchies tend to spawn from their culture -- which means when Werewolves make a decision, they consider their Pack, their Lodge, even their Tribe before doing so. Hell, their laws are very much about protecting their people, not just avoiding scrutiny from mortal society.

Hunters live in a very cold war/x-files/bounty hunter/crime syndicate/jacob's ladder type world. At all levels -- Cells, Compacts, Conspiracies -- they are facing external and internal pressures and horrors until they get to the point where they're about the point of facing the fist of God. And as they're part of an underground culture where no-on else believes what they've seen or understands their experience, it can get all too much. The choices they have to make (burning down a foster home with everyone inside because they're possessed, ruining a CEO's life to make him useless for his masters causing him to murder-suicide his family etc...) to get to the ultimate bad guys... you don't come away with that without a core part of maldapting. On top of that, they may find they can't truly trust anyone because they're almost certainly committing unethical or illegal acts. Suddenly life starts to seem like a living Staind song (Pressure comes to mind).

Anyway, this all pretty much comes down to two things: wrong focus of info (agree to a point but I've no time left for further writing) and bad match of GMs (both style and experiences) and players to the type of game.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1055976It depends entirely on what you want to play. If you want politics, you play Urban Shadows. If you want soap opera, you play Monsterhearts. If you want personal horror, you play Feed. Those games pick a style of play and write their fluff and rules around that, rather than whatever World of Darkness tries and fails to do.

Got it. You blame them for lack of focus.

@PrometheanVigil
Wow, you really are a WoD gamer. They tend to be very wordy just as the books are written. Anyways, I disagree with you on personal horror. That isn't roleplaying. It's method acting. Not my cup of tea. I did the "Oh my God, I killed my family during a hunger frenzy!" routine once and was instantly bored with it.
I also think Vampire is the most political, because of the focus on assets. Furthermore every group in Vampire, Mage and Changeling seems to want their ideology as society policy. About the wrong focus of info I guess it's just a case of YMMV. I didn't get much out of WoD books. I find only 20% of the text useful and some other games I find 80% useful.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1056021Got it. You blame them for lack of focus.

Not just that. The rules are questionable at best. There are numerous oversights (http://garglinggoblin.blogspot.com/2013/01/problems-with-world-of-darkness-rpg.html), clunky mechanics, arbitrary superpowers, mechanics that do not support the fluff, mechanics that are simply not fun in practice, etc.

The basic mechanics of the ST systems have remained mostly unchained since their inception in 1992. The published books have shown the flaws at length, but the developers only ever apply the tiniest patches.

A lot of people cite the system not supporting crossovers as a problem, but that is just a nexus of many other problems afflicting the system. Different splats being unbalanced with regard to one another is not a problem itself, what is the problem is that balance could be provided through a point buy system (https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/white-wolf/). Not only that, but all superpowers should use universal basic mechanics rather than doing their own thing and constantly reinventing the wheel; this is what all the precursors to and heart-breakers of WoD have generally done. The Everlasting Codex of Immortals provided guidelines for making up new powers, WitchCraft had its unified essence mechanic, Scion/Exalted had universal mechanics for powers, etc.

The distinctions between abilities, attributes, merits, flaws, disciplines, devotions, conditions, blah blah could stand to be completely overhauled. White Wolf released a bunch of books for CoD discussing how to replace the rules and they learned nothing from writing that.

But the superpowers are probably the biggest issue since obviously that mechanic is the most popular. For example, at some point the writers realized that vampire disciplines were too limited but rather than rewriting the mechanic they added on to it ad hoc. Thus we got alternate powers, combination disciplines/devotions, supernatural merits, abyss mysticism/threnodies, free-form magic, and so forth. Werewolf never really had hierarchical powers so it did not suffer the same problem, but it still suffered from problems like redundant powers or increasingly powerful instances of the same effect that were only fixed in Exalted/Scion (at least until charm bloat sank that ship). The games that relied on syntactic magic systems (http://pseudoboo.blogspot.com/2016/02/mechanics-syntactic-magic.html), like Mage, Dreaming and Geist, were a whole other can of worms. The point buy system I linked to provides a simple universal system for superpowers into which all the existing powers may be placed, using a fixed vs free-form magic skill mechanic similar to what Godbound uses.

5e has seemingly addressed a lot of the problems with over complexity, but it has not fixed other systemic problems like the humanity system being inherently untenable or the superpowers being arbitrarily limited. It tries to be Feed and fails.

I'd like to make an addendum to my last post. If you like a game about dark superheroes, then play an actual superhero game. They are a lot of them and most are vastly better designed than WoD.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1056021@PrometheanVigil Wow, you really are a WoD gamer.

(http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/smiles/negativeman.png)

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1056021They tend to be very wordy just as the books are written.

(http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/smiles/incline.gif)

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1056021Anyways, I disagree with you on personal horror. That isn't roleplaying. It's method acting. Not my cup of tea. I did the "Oh my God, I killed my family during a hunger frenzy!" routine once and was instantly bored with it.
I also think Vampire is the most political, because of the focus on assets. Furthermore every group in Vampire, Mage and Changeling seems to want their ideology as society policy. About the wrong focus of info I guess it's just a case of YMMV. I didn't get much out of WoD books. I find only 20% of the text useful and some other games I find 80% useful.

Then those kinds of scenarios in RPGs are not for you (not just WOD, all games apparently) -- established.

You have the same opinion as I do about the WH40KRPG books. I got even less out of those, probs 10% (being generous), the rest is abominable editing and massively exception-based ruleset (ever since the first D&D, this has been a stain on this hobby). I heavily revised the core rules when hosting the game years ago (revisions were received very well -- to the point experienced players let me know they hated going back to original rules in other games).

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1056021Got it. You blame them for lack of focus.

@PrometheanVigil
Wow, you really are a WoD gamer. They tend to be very wordy just as the books are written. Anyways, I disagree with you on personal horror. That isn't roleplaying. It's method acting. Not my cup of tea. I did the "Oh my God, I killed my family during a hunger frenzy!" routine once and was instantly bored with it.
I also think Vampire is the most political, because of the focus on assets. Furthermore every group in Vampire, Mage and Changeling seems to want their ideology as society policy. About the wrong focus of info I guess it's just a case of YMMV. I didn't get much out of WoD books. I find only 20% of the text useful and some other games I find 80% useful.

I certainly don't pretend to be a method actor... but it makes me ask: when you play an RPG, what do your characters actually care about? Loot and XP? I get that not everyone reacts the same way to in-game issues. Otherwise how does one *play* a horror game and enjoy it as such if the player doesn't feel any real sense of horror whether real or somewhat vicariously through their character? Isn't that the point?

As a GM this is why I sit down and talk fairly deeply about characters during character-generation. I want to know what my players want for their characters so their backgrounds and "things they want" in the game are actually in the game. With the assumptions of what *precisely* those things are and how they'll manifest are completely unknown to them.

One of my goals is to try to give my players an "experience" based on what they're wanting to play and something more from where that concept interacts with the game and whatever emerges from that impact. If one of the themes of the game is Personal Horror... I do my best to make that happen.

I have several players that do that "yeah yeah personal-horror, check. oh my wife died? oh that sucks. I attack and diablerize him!!!!" I'll still find a way to drag them into the "horror-zone". I'll find it. I promise. It might not be what anyone expected - even the players themselves until afterward. But I'll find it.

And that's part of the fun of "horror". I don't think one needs WoD to do this - obviously. I think the real question is always whether it applies to WoD, because the Superheroes with Fangs doesn't have to necessarily exist distinct of "Personal Horror"

My problem with the whole "personal horror" thing is that I have absolutely no interest in playing the sort of character who would make the sort of moral compromises necessary for it to crop up.

Let's take a look at Promethean Vigil's examples;

QuotePersonal horror is not just "oh my gawd, I'm a vamp, must suck your blood, blehh!". It's about what it does to you as you start to embrace your vampiric nature and slide into using your vampire powers casually.

I've no interest in playing someone who would use vampiric power casually. In fact, the type of character who holds appeal to me would completely refrain because I could go longer without needing to feed and be less prone to overfeeding and potentially killing someone out of hunger.

QuoteIt's the point at which you're deciding how to, say, deal with a betrayal by a close friend -- rip their throat out with your fangs, mind control them to stand in front of traffic, crack their jaw wide with super-strength or... do you just let it go?

You let it go as anyone over the age of about 12 has learned to do. If its literal life or death you do what it takes to survive, but if they haven't committed an actual crime... just don't see that person anymore. OOOH the HORROR!

QuoteOr, even more darker, do you ghoul your child so that you have a constant source of blood at the cost of stealing your child's innocence forever and preventing them from growing up.

What sort of messed up piece of shit would consider ghouling their own child for their own gain.

QuoteThat is personal horror. It never gets old.

It got old at the first example because the answer of "behave like an adult human being and not a maladjusted twelve-year old having a power fantasy" applies to every last example... and the corollary to that is, any parent I know who even contemplated doing that to their child for a moment would, in the next moment, decide to take a sunbath before they lost themselves enough to consider it again. Hell, if I thought I was going to be a danger to my family because I couldn't control myself I'd run as far from them as possible and go take a last walk in the sunshine if I realized I was going to end up killing someone by accident eventually.

There's no "there" there unless your desire is to play someone who was already a monster before they ever became a vampire?

You know where I could see personal horror? Playing a human whose family was turned into vampires who needed to feed in order to survive. How far would you go to protect them? Would you be willing to keep them locked up against their will to keep other people safe? What do you do when they keep getting hungrier and hungrier and you don't have enough blood yourself to sustain them? Or if they escaped and were now on the prowl? Could you bring yourself to end them if they crossed some line (and where is that line)? What do you do after you have to kill one of them in order to protect someone else?

There's some real horror there because unlike the examples above, which are basically "Am I going to be a selfish asshole or not?" there's a genuine conflict of loyalties that extend beyond your own survival and the world you're now in is one where all the options are bad ones and you have to live with the consequences no matter which choice you make.

Can we say personal horror = moral dilemmas? No matter if it's of the teen-drama sort (like PrometheanVigil examples) or the more adult sort (like Chris example).

Males sense?

Quote from: Itachi;1056225Can we say personal horror = moral dilemmas?

I guess I'm with Chris in that it doesn't feel like much of a dilemma.

My first play through of ESIV Oblivion, trying to help the Blades defeat the Mythic Dawn and save Tamriel, I (my PC Sera Ravenflame) woke up one morning in Cloud Ruler temple as a vampire, with no non-vampire reload. It was kinda cool trying to complete the game as a vampire (my attempt to get cured failed miserably) without ever feeding, always burning in the sunlight, looking ever more shitty. Eventually I saved the world and defeated Mehrunes Dagon.

High Chancellor Ocato:
"There's a place for you on the Imperial Council!"

Me:
"Yeah, I'm just going to go for a walk now..."

Walking out into the sunlight and just letting it go, letting myself finally burn away, felt great. :)

But if I was playing Vampire then 99 times in 100, going out in the sunlight and burning away would be the very first thing I'd do. Not much of a story, not a lot of point in playing.

Quote from: Chris24601;1056168What sort of messed up piece of shit would consider ghouling their own child for their own gain.

That's the point, jackass.

Quote from: Chris24601;1056168There's some real horror there because unlike the examples above, which are basically "Am I going to be a selfish asshole or not?" there's a genuine conflict of loyalties that extend beyond your own survival and the world you're now in is one where all the options are bad ones and you have to live with the consequences no matter which choice you make.

Quote from: Itachi;1056225Can we say personal horror = moral dilemmas? No matter if it's of the teen-drama sort (like PrometheanVigil examples) or the more adult sort (like Chris example).

Males sense?

There is no difference between my examples and Chris's. They both come under "teen drama" as Itachi has put it. In fact, they did a lot of that in the Walking Dead (Hershel's farm in S2, good example). It just comes off as "well, you don't pass darwin's test, please save us the hassle of eliminating you". Adult content has no time for stupidity.

If we want to get into adult, we start to get into the business world (most gamers do not have the success-driven/ambitious/ruthless mindset so this is a no-go -- found this out the hard way my very first time playing VTR), the world from the Sicario films (pretty raw having people hung from highways as a matter of course because of rampant drug violence), we start to talk about legacies, about having children and how fucked-up it is to have them but that they're already fully grown adults and they may literally be 20 years your senior in age (i.e. you stop seeing humans and just other predators and food). I'll use a specific example from my own games:

-------------------------
The Baron, a truly enigmatic and incredibly powerful Unaligned Ancient (he did a hostile takeover of entire NYC area from the Invictus), had excerpts from a journal written by one of his descendants in the possession of smuggler Bloodline (the PCs raided the warehouse which had them, had no idea who it was actually about). The twist? These were his mortal descendents.

Specifically, the descendants of his illegitimate child he had before his embrace when he was in his late teens with a girl of the same age. Their backgrounds and the particulars don't matter (other than he was a quasi-adopted commoner to her minor noble family): it's that The Baron decided he would never sire another vamp because he had already had a child as a mortal... that he could never hold as his own and never got to be a father for.

And much the same for his grandkids, great-grandkids ad infinitum. He always cared for them from afar -- ensuring their greater success and affluence through the 2nd millenium -- but would never ever be a true part of his own legacy. Strangely enough, it was this care of them (and that lingering pain) that was a core part of why his Humanity score remained so high (5) relative to his age (2, usually).
-------------------------

I've done those (and they're good, great food-for-thought) but they're not what people would think of as "personal horror" because they're existential in nature rather than horrific. So its fundamentally bad faith to claim otherwise (and just comes off as  dismissive because you don't have an actual point).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1056084A lot of people cite the system not supporting crossovers as a problem, but that is just a nexus of many other problems afflicting the system. Different splats being unbalanced with regard to one another is not a problem itself, what is the problem is that balance could be provided through a point buy system (https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/white-wolf/). Not only that, but all superpowers should use universal basic mechanics rather than doing their own thing and constantly reinventing the wheel; this is what all the precursors to and heart-breakers of WoD have generally done. The Everlasting Codex of Immortals provided guidelines for making up new powers, WitchCraft had its unified essence mechanic, Scion/Exalted had universal mechanics for powers, etc.

Yep, that's why I use Unisystem. It's more balanced and easier for the GM.

Quote from: tenbones;1056132I certainly don't pretend to be a method actor... but it makes me ask: when you play an RPG, what do your characters actually care about? Loot and XP? I get that not everyone reacts the same way to in-game issues. Otherwise how does one *play* a horror game and enjoy it as such if the player doesn't feel any real sense of horror whether real or somewhat vicariously through their character? Isn't that the point?

I think it's just that personal horror is not my thing. I didn't like it and none of the other players did. I play it as a straight up horror game. Being scared for what's out there and not being all mopey about stuff your character did.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1055531All editions of Vampire are Meh.

Not really. The first edition was not too bad really. Was not my thing so I traded the book off to someone who liked 1e V rather than 2e V.

Still not sure what they changed between editions?

Quote from: Omega;1056281Not really. The first edition was not too bad really. Was not my thing so I traded the book off to someone who liked 1e V rather than 2e V.

Still not sure what they changed between editions?

The system and the whole concept is Meh.

Quote from: tenbones;1056132I attack and diablerize him!!!!"

According to the dictionary, diablerie is a noun that means "reckless mischief; charismatic wildness. (archaic) sorcery supposedly assisted by the devil." The word diabolism is a cognate. That reminds me...

The White Wolf writers had this weird tendency of taking recognizable words and applying them to completely unrelated contexts. I find this mentally frustrating because most of these words are archaic and therefore I (and probably many others) were introduced to them by White Wolf and assumed they were made up.

When I see them used in their original contexts, I am mentally confused because reading White Wolf had previously indoctrinated me to think of something entirely different. For example: whenever I watch the movie Waltz of the Toreadors, I cannot stop thinking of foppish vampires. It is very difficult to reverse the brainwashing after learning about it.

This misuse is slowly diffusing into the rest of popular culture. I once read a fanfiction article about vampires in the Wold Newton Universe and the author used the word "diablerie" to refer to vampire cannibalism even though they also refer to Vampire: The Masquerade as being wholly fictional within the WNU.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1056445The system and the whole concept is Meh.

Solid argumentation. :confused:

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1056491The White Wolf writers had this weird tendency of taking recognizable words and applying them to completely unrelated contexts. I find this mentally frustrating because most of these words are archaic and therefore I (and probably many others) were introduced to them by White Wolf and assumed they were made up.

That's called pretention. I find the books generally hard to read. That's one of the major reasons I moved on.

I loved the first and second editions of Vampire. V20 was decent too.

Revised and V5 suck balls though.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1056445The system and the whole concept is Meh.

   That arguably makes you a bad critic of the game--if you've got no sympathy with the concept in general, how can you tell whether it does it well or not? (I'm drawing on C.S. Lewis' thoughts on literary criticism here.) By the same token, I'm ill-suited to critique the WoD or OSR games much beyond a note that they're 'not to my taste.'

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1056641That arguably makes you a bad critic of the game--if you've got no sympathy with the concept in general, how can you tell whether it does it well or not? (I'm drawing on C.S. Lewis' thoughts on literary criticism here.) By the same token, I'm ill-suited to critique the WoD or OSR games much beyond a note that they're 'not to my taste.'

One does not need to like a game in order to critique it. Not that "Meh" really qualifies as a critique. Vampire specifically can be critiqued on a large variety of points. The pertinent question to ask is "what does it set out to accomplish and does it succeed in implementation?"

Near as I can tell, Vampire set out to be a game about "personal horror", soap opera melodrama, and high school-level politics. How well does it succeed in implementing that? I don't think it does. Vampire does not include more than the most minimal rules for managing relationships, resources, reputation, favors and so forth. It spends vastly more words on the combat mechanics and superpowers. The humanity mechanic does not support the theme of personal horror. In practice, it punishes characters with arbitrary mental illness for committing crime and ironically a higher conscience allows them to avoid this.

How well does the game succeed at emulating vampire fiction? It does not do that either. The rules for vampirism and superpowers are arbitrarily restrictive. The vampires all follow a vaguely Ricean model with clans tacked on, and the superpowers are arbitrarily structured into a linear hierarchy that ignores many classic vampire powers while adding powers which are not normally associated with vampire fiction. There are numerous sub-mechanics for superpowers which are unnecessarily complicated and only get worse with every new edition.

Besides positing a universe in which many different types of vampires coexist (which is the exact premise of Lost Girl, except they're called "fae"), Vampire has nothing going for it.

Honestly... it's not bad.  I mean, the amount of space wasted on margins and full page spreads of forgettable art is a problem, because that space could've gone to excluded Clans and Disciplines and such (V20 and DAV did it, with some more pages admittedly).  And yeah, the Second Inquisition is a silly international secret society between multiple disconnected organizations of vampire hunters (as if the Vatican or US could keep a secret any more).  But still, this edition is a mechanical improvement over V20.  Not to say it fixes everything, but it feels more like a new edition than V2 to V3 to V20 ever did.  Celerity/Fortitude/Potence get reworked.  Bane Severity makes vamps' Clan Weaknesses easier for STs to moderate.  Blood Potency and Generation are a small reworking, but a good one!  Hunger is neat.  Attributes are modified (no more Appearance (yay!) or Perception (hmm)).  No more bonus points, everything is straight experience points (Advantages have an experience value as well!).  More support on building a PC -group- of vamps, and PC vamps at higher power level to start.  Honestly, there's a lot of modest changes to pretty much everything, but they work pretty dang well.

"But I have V20.  Do I need this?"  Need?  No.  But it should be reasonably easy to convert everything over if you really want to.  Now if you hate VtM and everything about it, this game almost certainly won't change your mind.  It's a superior edition, but whatever reason you have for disliking it is still probably present in this edition too.   Super anti-heroes beating up on puny mortals while whining about their damned state is still just as supported as games of political masturbation fantasies.

I'll pretend the five page (5 freaking pages!  With reference materials!!!!) on considerate playing was a reaction to the SJW outcries in development ("An NPC is a Nazi!  A guy I don't like worked on this!  The whole game is a hate crime!"), but part of that is because I live in an ivory tower where I'd only ever play a game about literal predators committing metaphorical rape with people I knew and trusted to be on the same page as me to begin with*.  

(*Honestly, the idea of turning into a serial rapist/murderer/sociopath to survive is pretty jacked up and a good example of "personal horror".  It's also probably why most games of VtM soon turn into "dark fantasy/supers" instead; because the average person has more fun beating up other supernatural stuff in an RPG than pretending to stalk and assault a random helpless woman.  Repeatedly.  "Well, in my games we always-"  Are you trying to virtue signal your elf game playstyle?  But I really digress.)

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1056637I loved the first and second editions of Vampire. V20 was decent too.

Revised and V5 suck balls though.

Music to my ears Doc.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1056835One does not need to like a game in order to critique it. Not that "Meh" really qualifies as a critique. Vampire specifically can be critiqued on a large variety of points. The pertinent question to ask is "what does it set out to accomplish and does it succeed in implementation?"

Near as I can tell, Vampire set out to be a game about "personal horror", soap opera melodrama, and high school-level politics. How well does it succeed in implementing that? I don't think it does. Vampire does not include more than the most minimal rules for managing relationships, resources, reputation, favors and so forth. It spends vastly more words on the combat mechanics and superpowers. The humanity mechanic does not support the theme of personal horror. In practice, it punishes characters with arbitrary mental illness for committing crime and ironically a higher conscience allows them to avoid this.

How well does the game succeed at emulating vampire fiction? It does not do that either. The rules for vampirism and superpowers are arbitrarily restrictive. The vampires all follow a vaguely Ricean model with clans tacked on, and the superpowers are arbitrarily structured into a linear hierarchy that ignores many classic vampire powers while adding powers which are not normally associated with vampire fiction. There are numerous sub-mechanics for superpowers which are unnecessarily complicated and only get worse with every new edition.

Besides positing a universe in which many different types of vampires coexist (which is the exact premise of Lost Girl, except they're called "fae"), Vampire has nothing going for it.

Agreed with most of it. Vampire doesn't support politics and personal horror very well. I do think that the multiple clans were new and still are kind of cool. Another strong point is the mixture of Anne Rice with conspiracies. The art style was amazing and the production values are usually above par. I think you can argue that 5th Edition does personal horror much better ruleswise.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1056898Agreed with most of it. Vampire doesn't support politics and personal horror very well. I do think that the multiple clans were new and still are kind of cool. Another strong point is the mixture of Anne Rice with conspiracies. The art style was amazing and the production values are usually above par. I think you can argue that 5th Edition does personal horror much better ruleswise.

The concept of clans never took off in vampire fiction. I question whether it really qualifies as "cool" if nobody outside the niche White Wolf fandom cares for it.

Anne Rice had already introduced conspiracies of vampires and Necroscope had government agencies fighting vampires in the 80s. Beyond that, I cannot take conspiracies seriously because of the logistics issues that make them impossible in real life. The conspiracy history and politics in Vampire is laughably absurd and impossible to take seriously.

5e does not do personal horror any better. It still arbitrarily punishes PCs. Personal horror requires investment from the players and if you do not know how to define personal horror, then "I just killed somebody boo hoo" will get old real fast. Losing human traits and replacing them with vampire traits is a much more effective way to depict the loss of humanity within rules. For example, "my girlfriend dumped me, so I turned this innocent bystander into my thrall to replace her, which in game rules is a statistic on my character sheet" is much more evocative.

But that's just it... if players aren't invested at all - you as a GM are challenged to get them invested in what you're running and they agreed to play. Otherwise what are you really doing other than wasting your time and everyone elses.


I'm a bit "weirded" out at people that dismiss the "personal horror" aspect of the game. I've never had a problem getting people in my WoD to feel horror. There are certain basic things that humans are horrified by, that usually revolves around their own lack of self-awareness that even if you go by the "boohoo I illed a bunch of people OH WELL!" attitude, simply making them consistently face the natural consequences of those actions will clearly paint them as the monster they are in-game. I have players who are exactly like this - total power players. They used to play Vampire for the sole purpose of diablerizing their way to POWER(tm) only to find themselves isolated and hunted down for the monster they are in Vampire society.

It only took a few examples of this to break them of the habit - and stick to the social order lest they become a threat to it.

Now you might ask "how is that personal horror?" Well that's where you as the GM take some narrative liberty to tell your sub-3 Humanity player the difference between what they think they feel and what their PC is urged to do. Leverage the in-game mechanics to force the player to fight against what they're becoming. Trust me - it will sink in. Loss of control is a motherfucker to Power-Players - especially when they realize it is jeopardizing their ability to function within normal parameters of the game. If you don't leverage those in-game mechanics such as Humanity loss and Virtue loss - Penalized rolls for lack of humanity etc. the conceits of the game will already relegate those characters to living like scary predatory animals on the edges of Vampire and human society.

The "personal horror" *will* sink in. If you think that's too much effort for such players, then the whole concept probably isn't something you really interested in. And that's fine too. But I think you're missing out.

Of course if you want to play Supers-with-Fangs - that's not really an issue either. I do both contextually in the same game. If you think about it - people trying to avoid "Personal Horror" in a game where you're a blood-addicted monster trying to retain their humanity makes being a Super-with-Fangs a natural pursuit. If for nothing more than to cultivate the veneer of humanity.

As for the Clans... I liken them to Mafia families. It's fun to play in a secret fraternity of crazy proportions doing socially transgressive things with super-powers. Clans are the perfect sub-division of a political party to do that kinda stuff in. It's Gangbanging-with-Fangs.

Hey, I'm a huge fan of V5 and it works awesomely for me and my group.
I should point out that people who have a problem with V5 tend to be the same people who ignore that vampires have ALWAYS had Hunger frenzies. The fact they don't seem to understand that you were always supposed to be hungry for blood and never satisfied was them ignoring fluff. Except, now, for whatever reason they are taking the metaphorical statement of "if you kill someone feeding you're not hungry anymore" as literal--and honestly, that makes you LESS likely to Hunger Frezny as in V20 and earlier editions.

Personal horror is also something I love but there's a simple fact: most players have no idea what it means and the STs aren't much better.

"So, what does personal horror mean?" A friend of mine asked.

After thinking about it, I said, "It's Dragon Age and Mass Effect roleplaying."

"Excuse me?"

"Personal horror gaming is where you're confronted with two incredibly bad choices and you have to make a choice between them. Like in Dragon Age where you have the noble Knights Templar who lock up mages to keep them from frying humans or being demon-possessed but the mages are abused there and treated as slaves. You can side with one or the other but not both."

"I don't understand. What does that have to do with vampires?"

"Let me use another example. You are Dave the 13th Generation Neonate. I am the Storyteller. I introduce your mortal years girfriend to you. She's smoking hot and really devoted to you."

"Yeah?"

"She's dying now. Cancer from a Pentex plant in her area. She wants to just live well before she dies an dthat involves being your girlfriend. You can make her a ghoul and fuck up her mind, embrace her and risk the Prince's wrath, or let her die."

"Okay, a bit clearer. Isn't it better to do the latter and make her happy?"

"Maybe, except she figures out you're a vampire and demands you save her life. Now you have a problem you have to deal with, especially as she's a bit hysterical about the whole thing and possibly dangerous."

"I'm getting you a bit better now."

"But that's a bit too situational. A better example, you're dancing at the Succubus Club and you find a guy roofies a woman there. Do you intervene?"

"Fuck yes!"

"Awesome. Here's the thing, the dude is a regular and will just do it again. The vamps in the club don't care if he does it. The kid is the son of a Senator."

"So, what I should kill him?"

"MAYBE! Maybe you do and find out he still has parents and she's going to drag the cops down here to investigate it. You may have to pay a fine or do a favor for body disposal or get rid of it yourself. You could also scare the shit out of him by making it clear you're a vampire or, hey, Dave has Dominate. Tell him to turn himself into the police or reveal it on social media that he's a rapist."

"That last one sounds good."

"You're getting the point now. I see vampire personal horror as trying to navigate the various moral choices that will always have some sort of downside but may be one your character can live with. Say you frenzy and kill that guy. Maybe the girl sees it and is traumatized for life--but one of his other victims loves you now and wants to become your servant. Then there's my favorite way of doing personal horror."

"Which is?"

"Where I don't do it to you but you do it yourself."

"Huh?"

"I give you permission right now to describe something truly horrifying happening to your character either now or in the past. I want you to be the one to torture your character and roleplay their bloody revenge or survival. You were locked in a cellar with a little girl for a week by the Sheriff, the Prince has enslaved your sister and is keeping her as his sex slave, you killed your parents during your first frenzy but Dominated it out, and you actually aren't who you think you are are all good. I want you to feel like it's less something the ST does to your character than an opportunity for you to make your character more dramatic."

(These are all things players have come up with before)

"Okay, this sounds good."

"Welcome to 5E."

So, how do you handle personal horror.

One does not need to like a Rpg to properly review it. One does need to actually read it. Don't get me started on all the bullshit and garbage reviews on 4E and other rpgs where it's obvious the author of said review did not read the review and is going on second or third hand information. While I respect a person years in the hobby none of that means you don't read a rpg before reviewing. Though I do tend to actually not listen to those reviews who dislike a rpg as more often than not the reviewer cannot separate personal bias from trying to be objective.

As for V5 I don't know I hated all versions before the new World of Darkness. As I absolutely despised the end of World metaplot. Talk about writing oneself into a corner by the devs. Myself and my gaming group were and still are not fans of fighting a losing battle no matter what we did the world ends. It's the same reason we might play Rifts again we will not play Rifts Chaos Earth. Thankfully they dropped that in the new world of Darkness. That and the whole no one trusts anyone vibe throughout all the world of Darkness core books was damn annoying. Vampires do not trust and hate Werewolves and Mages. Werewolves and Mages the same with the other three. Which I could live with. It's when the respective clans etc did not trust each other which was weird. So the Werewolves need to stop Pentax yet they are at each out throats. Yeah your going to stop the Wyrm from taking over.  If the GM still wants to play with the world ending he can it's not baked into the system. If V5 has that as a element I'm not interested.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1056637I loved the first and second editions of Vampire. V20 was decent too.

Revised and V5 suck balls though.

Why?

Quote from: Lurtch;1063669Why?

First edition Vampire had an awesome setting and style, while Revised and V5 were ruined by an overbearing metaplot and shitty setting changes.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1063680First edition Vampire had an awesome setting and style, while Revised and V5 were ruined by an overbearing metaplot and shitty setting changes.

So the systems are fine you just dont like the meta plot?

Quote from: CTPhipps;1063616Hey, I'm a huge fan of V5 and it works awesomely for me and my group.
I should point out that people who have a problem with V5 tend to be the same people who ignore that vampires have ALWAYS had Hunger frenzies. The fact they don't seem to understand that you were always supposed to be hungry for blood and never satisfied was them ignoring fluff. Except, now, for whatever reason they are taking the metaphorical statement of "if you kill someone feeding you're not hungry anymore" as literal--and honestly, that makes you LESS likely to Hunger Frezny as in V20 and earlier editions.

Personal horror is also something I love but there's a simple fact: most players have no idea what it means and the STs aren't much better.

"So, what does personal horror mean?" A friend of mine asked.

After thinking about it, I said, "It's Dragon Age and Mass Effect roleplaying."

"Excuse me?"

"Personal horror gaming is where you're confronted with two incredibly bad choices and you have to make a choice between them. Like in Dragon Age where you have the noble Knights Templar who lock up mages to keep them from frying humans or being demon-possessed but the mages are abused there and treated as slaves. You can side with one or the other but not both."

"I don't understand. What does that have to do with vampires?"

"Let me use another example. You are Dave the 13th Generation Neonate. I am the Storyteller. I introduce your mortal years girfriend to you. She's smoking hot and really devoted to you."

"Yeah?"

"She's dying now. Cancer from a Pentex plant in her area. She wants to just live well before she dies an dthat involves being your girlfriend. You can make her a ghoul and fuck up her mind, embrace her and risk the Prince's wrath, or let her die."

"Okay, a bit clearer. Isn't it better to do the latter and make her happy?"

"Maybe, except she figures out you're a vampire and demands you save her life. Now you have a problem you have to deal with, especially as she's a bit hysterical about the whole thing and possibly dangerous."

"I'm getting you a bit better now."

"But that's a bit too situational. A better example, you're dancing at the Succubus Club and you find a guy roofies a woman there. Do you intervene?"

"Fuck yes!"

"Awesome. Here's the thing, the dude is a regular and will just do it again. The vamps in the club don't care if he does it. The kid is the son of a Senator."

"So, what I should kill him?"

"MAYBE! Maybe you do and find out he still has parents and she's going to drag the cops down here to investigate it. You may have to pay a fine or do a favor for body disposal or get rid of it yourself. You could also scare the shit out of him by making it clear you're a vampire or, hey, Dave has Dominate. Tell him to turn himself into the police or reveal it on social media that he's a rapist."

"That last one sounds good."

"You're getting the point now. I see vampire personal horror as trying to navigate the various moral choices that will always have some sort of downside but may be one your character can live with. Say you frenzy and kill that guy. Maybe the girl sees it and is traumatized for life--but one of his other victims loves you now and wants to become your servant. Then there's my favorite way of doing personal horror."

"Which is?"

"Where I don't do it to you but you do it yourself."

"Huh?"

"I give you permission right now to describe something truly horrifying happening to your character either now or in the past. I want you to be the one to torture your character and roleplay their bloody revenge or survival. You were locked in a cellar with a little girl for a week by the Sheriff, the Prince has enslaved your sister and is keeping her as his sex slave, you killed your parents during your first frenzy but Dominated it out, and you actually aren't who you think you are are all good. I want you to feel like it's less something the ST does to your character than an opportunity for you to make your character more dramatic."

(These are all things players have come up with before)

"Okay, this sounds good."

"Welcome to 5E."

So, how do you handle personal horror.

You just described narrativist play as per the Forge definition: moral/human dilemmas -driven play. Which, ironically, was created as a response to the original Vampire the Masquerade.

Does V5 achieves that better than previous editions in your experience? I'm tempted to get a copy myself.

I really do not understand why anybody is still married to World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness. They are not really that good.

You want to know what I find annoying? I wanted to play a game equivalent of Being Human, but I cannot do that in either World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness because of their terrible baggage.

In World of Darkness the vampires and werewolves are mortal enemies and almost nobody can interact with ghosts. In Chronicles of Darkness the vampires and werewolves have their absurd political systems and spiritual maladies, plus ghosts are not a playable option.

Indie games like Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts actually provide that, so they win by default.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1063680First edition Vampire had an awesome setting and style, while Revised and V5 were ruined by an overbearing metaplot and shitty setting changes.

V5 basically exists to roll everything back to 1st Edition.

Quote from: Itachi;1063709You just described narrativist play as per the Forge definition: moral/human dilemmas -driven play. Which, ironically, was created as a response to the original Vampire the Masquerade.

Does V5 achieves that better than previous editions in your experience? I'm tempted to get a copy myself.

Basically, the first book V5 tries VERY hard to give vampires systems to allow new players to ease into these kind of narrativist events. They really love the idea knowing how your character feeds is a central part of their character and incentivize it a bit by giving bonuses depending on how you do it. So, yeah, I would say they really did a big job talking more about what it feels to be a vampire night to night and making it both stylish as well as scary.

It won't be to everyone's tastes (like drinking from politicians) but it worked for me.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1063711I really do not understand why anybody is still married to World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness. They are not really that good.

You want to know what I find annoying? I wanted to play a game equivalent of Being Human, but I cannot do that in either World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness because of their terrible baggage.

In World of Darkness the vampires and werewolves are mortal enemies and almost nobody can interact with ghosts. In Chronicles of Darkness the vampires and werewolves have their absurd political systems and spiritual maladies, plus ghosts are not a playable option.

Indie games like Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts actually provide that, so they win by default.

Oddly, I did an adventure of Being Human with a Ventrue living with a Ronin werewolf and a ghost.

One of the reasons Requiem failed and believe me, it failed. I recommend if you on and Xbox and/or Playstation to download Fangdango and buy the World of Darkness documentary. It's hilarious how much they rip into Requiem--was the fact Requiem didn't have a setting per say. They sometimes did but they were enamored of trying to give the players as much of a toolkit when they really wanted a strong and consistant setting.

The thing being, "Fans don't want fucking toolkits. They don't want to assemble the chair themselves. They want the damn chair pre-assembled so they can just sit in it. That's why we buy books."

I would disagree that VTR failed imo. Considering how many sourcebooks they released for it I doubt it was a failure. Either it did well enough to justify publishing those books. Or the publisher had money to throw away. I'm a firm believer of my first theory.  

It's us funny that the tear into VTR for not having a setting. Yet they mention nothing on how the metaplot painted WW into a corner.

Sure one could ignore it except towards the later years almost every new book was tied into the metaplot.

VTR and similar core books did not have a settings. The company was smart enough to release sourcebooks such as World of Darkness Chicago where one could pick and choose what they wanted to use.

Saying no one wanted a toolkit is both bullshit and being ignorant. Maybe not all but some wanted to build their own worlds ro game in. Without the end times garbage and overall hopeless of the original overall setting.

I prefer World of Darkness because I can pick and choose what I can include and disallow.

Notably, THE WORLD OF DARKNESS DOCUMENTARY (available only on Fandango and U.K and Canadian Amazon Prime--WTF) talks about how Requiem's sales continually got worse and worse while the publishers kept throwing money their way in hopes of recapturing lightning.

Then they were told by Paradox Entertainment, "Can we never mention Requiem again?"

Justin Achilli, who was the prime mover and shaker behind it, said, "Yeah, I kind of like Masquerade more too but everyone else was SOOO excited in the office."

There's a great moment when they announced the MMO was going to be Masquerade vs. Requiem and the crowd cheered.

Then it cuts to Justin and like, "Yeah....we could read the writing on the wall."

Man I wish I had that money to throw like that. Too bad about VTR it's still my favored edition as is NWOD.

Quote from: sureshot;1063796Man I wish I had that money to throw like that. Too bad about VTR it's still my favored edition as is NWOD.

It helps to remember that they sold a million copies of White Wolf books and they were published out of two offices by like 30 guys. There was a surprisingly large amount of money made by the original guys who took good advantage of their small press. Requiem was "doing it for the art" and they had a lot of money leftover from its original sales to continue with.

I admit, I basically steal heavily from it.

5E is also doing the same, making a kind of "World of Darkness with Requiem rules" hybrid that is my jam.

Other fans hate it, though.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1063747Notably, THE WORLD OF DARKNESS DOCUMENTARY (available only on Fandango and U.K and Canadian Amazon Prime--WTF) talks about how Requiem's sales continually got worse and worse while the publishers kept throwing money their way in hopes of recapturing lightning.

Then they were told by Paradox Entertainment, "Can we never mention Requiem again?"

Justin Achilli, who was the prime mover and shaker behind it, said, "Yeah, I kind of like Masquerade more too but everyone else was SOOO excited in the office."

There's a great moment when they announced the MMO was going to be Masquerade vs. Requiem and the crowd cheered.

Then it cuts to Justin and like, "Yeah....we could read the writing on the wall."

I weep tears of joy. :D Vindication, from their own lips!, at last. Oh, and for Doc Sammy, fuck you Justin Achilli... ("or maybe not," a la Justin's aggravating writing style)

Yeah, Justin Achilli is a untalented hack.

I recommend people check out his interview on UTILITY MUFFIN LABS.

The reviewers gush over Requiem, which he had total control over for awhile and he's like, "Yeah, sorry, Masquerade was better."

https://utilitymuffinlabs.com/25-years-of-vampire-the-masquerade/2018/10/23/vtm25-x-justin-achilli

Quote from: CTPhipps;1063855I recommend people check out his interview on UTILITY MUFFIN LABS.

The reviewers gush over Requiem, which he had total control over for awhile and he's like, "Yeah, sorry, Masquerade was better."

https://utilitymuffinlabs.com/25-years-of-vampire-the-masquerade/2018/10/23/vtm25-x-justin-achilli

Honestly, I actually liked Requiem and Achilli did better with Requiem than he did with Masquerade.

Seriously, he ruined Masquerade in my opinion, with his metaplot changes and insistence on pushing supernatural wangst as the "One True Way" to play Vampire.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1063867Honestly, I actually liked Requiem and Achilli did better with Requiem than he did with Masquerade.

Seriously, he ruined Masquerade in my opinion, with his metaplot changes and insistence on pushing supernatural wangst as the "One True Way" to play Vampire.

I hate some of the metaplot.

But it was always a source of fresh new ideas when you were running out of adventure hooks.

I say that as someone who still uses Chicago by Night 1st Edition.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1063876I hate some of the metaplot.

But it was always a source of fresh new ideas when you were running out of adventure hooks.

I say that as someone who still uses Chicago by Night 1st Edition.

Eh, well to each their own.

I haven't really found anything of use in it in terms of story hooks, aside from a modified variant of the Second Inquisition.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1063853Yeah, Justin Achilli is a untalented hack.

Yes, he is.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1063747Notably, THE WORLD OF DARKNESS DOCUMENTARY (available only on Fandango and U.K and Canadian Amazon Prime--WTF) talks about how Requiem's sales continually got worse and worse while the publishers kept throwing money their way in hopes of recapturing lightning.

Then they were told by Paradox Entertainment, "Can we never mention Requiem again?"

Justin Achilli, who was the prime mover and shaker behind it, said, "Yeah, I kind of like Masquerade more too but everyone else was SOOO excited in the office."

There's a great moment when they announced the MMO was going to be Masquerade vs. Requiem and the crowd cheered.

Then it cuts to Justin and like, "Yeah....we could read the writing on the wall."

Years ago there was another interview or interviews, which is no longer available so I can't cite it, which stated that World of Darkness was revised and later rebooted because of the tabletop market crunch in the late 90s and 2000s. At the time the marketing department did not know about the crunch, so they assumed their flagging sales were because of the way the books at the time were written. So they introduced the metaplot. When that didn't increase sales, they decided to reboot the franchise and officially ended World of Darkness with the Time of Judgment. Requiem didn't increase sales either, but that wouldn't have changed if Masquerade never ended.

The interviews are full of crap. World/Chronicles of Darkness have consistently experienced falling sales since the late 90s and are only trudging along due to the good will of their longtime fans, who steadily shrinking due to attrition. The games are not attracting new audiences, at least not nearly enough to reach the peak of the 90s. I did some comparisons on google trends, and it seems that World of Darkness is pretty obscure. The Bloodlines game is probably more widely known than the tabletop, and it is still an extremely obscure title. Indie video games like Amnesia have eclipsed the tabletop in popularity and sales if google trends are anything to go by. Search results related to World of Darkness have consistently declined since 2004 when Google started keeping track.

So the "Masquerade is better than Requiem" argument is crap. They are equally poor-selling and some psychotic manchildren with sticks up their asses make a big deal about the edition wars.

Whenever there's a world of darkness charity sale on humblebundle or whatever, I use that as an opportunity to screw them by donating all the proceeds to charity and getting books that I will never use. I'm so petty that I donate to charity to get copies of books I will never read. I'm a terrible person.

Anyway, I think World of Darkness is overrated and prefer indie titles with rules that actually support their themes. World of Darkness is just a giant mess.

Vampire 5E is selling as much as they sold in the Golden Age of the 90s.

And it was a massive success, so I don't know what you mean.

I mean, they had a (shitty) television show made out of in Fox.

Vampire and the WoD biggest problem is that they are so far up their own ass when it comes to their online community that they dont try to explain or show new folks how or why to play their game.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064394Vampire 5E is selling as much as they sold in the Golden Age of the 90s.

And it was a massive success, so I don't know what you mean.

I mean, they had a (shitty) television show made out of in Fox.

Do you have hard numbers or are you just making that up based on what you think might be true?

Vampire isn't even in the top twenty according to every reputable source of market research I could find.

TV execs will turn anything into a show.

Quote from: Lurtch;1064398Vampire and the WoD biggest problem is that they are so far up their own ass when it comes to their online community that they dont try to explain or show new folks how or why to play their game.

The game isn't even worth playing if that wasn't the case. It isn't a generic vampire roleplaying game, it is somebody's anal-retentive sandbox about world-spanning ninja clans and stealing candybars causing schizophrenia and dudes hitting people in the face with fish.

There is twenty years of absurd lore that involves such ridiculous things as the Christian God actually being an evil spirit called The Patriarch (because feminism; not human sacrifice, or slavery, or any of the other atrocities committed by the Abrahamic religions matter in comparison), the patriarchy arising because a cosmic worm told men how babies were made, the fairytale witch Baba Yaga placing a magical iron curtain around Russia to keep other monsters out, the closest thing to an afterlife being a nightmarish hellscape where a bazillion recently deceased souls are turned into shoes every day, and a block of cement in the ocean being toxic to mermaids because it is literally too boring to let them exist. And did I mention the rampant bestiality and anti-intellectualism?

I cannot take anyone seriously who isn't the least bit perturbed by all this. World of Darkness is absolute shit. The only reason people give it a pass at all is because of highly selective nostalgia that pretty much ignores the majority of the actual games.

5E hasn't learned a thing from this. For heaven's sake, they used the recent persecution of homosexuals in Eastern Europe as conspiracy fodder. With predictably negative backlash online. https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/13/18089574/vampire-the-masquerade-white-wolf-lgbtq-chechnya-apology

Paradox is not handling this well at all. I'd find it hilarious if I really cared enough about their decline. The best I can muster is cheap potshots.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064410Do you have hard numbers or are you just making that up based on what you think might be true?

Vampire isn't even in the top twenty according to every reputable source of market research I could find.

TV execs will turn anything into a show.

It's from Kenneth Hite so I assume he knows what he's doing but the issue is that the sales are being done in physical market form.

QuoteThe game isn't even worth playing if that wasn't the case. It isn't a generic vampire roleplaying game, it is somebody's anal-retentive sandbox about world-spanning ninja clans and stealing candybars causing schizophrenia and dudes hitting people in the face with fish.

There is twenty years of absurd lore that involves such ridiculous things as the Christian God actually being an evil spirit called The Patriarch (because feminism; not human sacrifice, or slavery, or any of the other atrocities committed by the Abrahamic religions matter in comparison), the patriarchy arising because a cosmic worm told men how babies were made, the fairytale witch Baba Yaga placing a magical iron curtain around Russia to keep other monsters out, the closest thing to an afterlife being a nightmarish hellscape where a bazillion recently deceased souls are turned into shoes every day, and a block of cement in the ocean being toxic to mermaids because it is literally too boring to let them exist. And did I mention the rampant bestiality and anti-intellectualism?

The Black Furies Tribe Book and Rage Across Russia are your best issues?

And also, it's not much of a HORROR game if you can go to Heaven isn't it? The Underworld is a fairly good depiction of the Jewish Hell and C.S. Lewis' version of it. It's meant to be a place for ghosts who have unfinished businessed to be trapped in and the point is to transcend it by resolving your issues. There actually are Heavens and Hells located in the Underworld as well, though the line wasn't popular enough to get them detailed.

QuoteI cannot take anyone seriously who isn't the least bit perturbed by all this. World of Darkness is absolute shit. The only reason people give it a pass at all is because of highly selective nostalgia that pretty much ignores the majority of the actual games.

Basically, it requires you to actually know what you're talking about.

The Patriarch isn't the Christian God because Demon: The Fallen makes it clear that spirits are nothing more than after effects from angel works. God is a trillion times greater than Gaia and the Patriarch is a minor Weaver totem. The gamelines don't fit together and werewolf is an animist pagan Mother Goddess world while Vampire and Demon are Judeo-Christian.

Changeling and Mage? They make HUMANS gods who created the gods with their mind.

The games are at their best a urban fantasy kitchen sink for making your characters look badass with trenchcoats and katanas.

Also, Baba Yaga was an awesome villain.

:)

In my World of Darkness headcanon, Demon: The Fallen and Kindred of the East are not canon.

Meanwhile, Senshi: The Merchandising and Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game are canon.

The metaplot never happened, the Gangrel are still in the Camarilla, the Ravnos are still a full clan, there was no Avatar Storm and no Beckoning.

And all the Goths and Punks who insist on being utter metaplot shills and acting as if supernatural wangst (or as they call it, "personal horror") is the One True Way of playing WoD can go fuck themselves.

I say bring on the trenchcoats and katanas!

Is Vampire 5E a sandbox? Because if so, that's awesome.

Docsammy,

Why does the meta plot bother you so much? Can't you ignore it? That's what I do with Rifts.

Quote from: Lurtch;1064439Is Vampire 5E a sandbox? Because if so, that's awesome.

Docsammy,

Why does the meta plot bother you so much? Can't you ignore it? That's what I do with Rifts.

I do ignore it, and then the purists at Onyx Path Forums give me shit because of it.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1064440I do ignore it, and then the purists at Onyx Path Forums give me shit because of it.

I think the key is to ignore the OPP folks. They really are freaking out because 5E was written by an evil nazi Republican.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064394Vampire 5E is selling as much as they sold in the Golden Age of the 90s.

And it was a massive success, so I don't know what you mean.

I mean, they had a (shitty) television show made out of in Fox.

Actually the TV show was fairly well done and was slated for a second season had not the main actor died in an accident.

Quote from: Omega;1064450Actually the TV show was fairly well done and was slated for a second season had not the main actor died in an accident.

I think the show was getting much better and the show runners seemed to figure out Frankel (Julian Luna) was the stand out star of the show with the most relationship versus C. Thomas Howard (The cop). The fact Showtime wanted to program and was a canle network at the time could have resulted in them actually, you know, acting like vampires. It's a "what if" as to what would have happened if they managed to get going and it's a shame it happened.

I requested SF Debris (and paid for it) to do a retrospective of the series' eight episodes.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064426It's from Kenneth Hite so I assume he knows what he's doing but the issue is that the sales are being done in physical market form.

Considering how inconsistent the interviews have been over the years, especially regarding the financial issues White Wolf faced long before Time of Judgment, I am not inclined to believe those statements are accurate or objective.

When the public relations people are actively taking part in the edition wars and taking cheap potshots at whole brands which took a lot of work for their own peers to make, I feel nothing but contempt and scorn for them. They are acting like children angry their toys were taken away for bad behavior.

Effing a*holes the lot of them.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064426The Black Furies Tribe Book and Rage Across Russia are your best issues?

And also, it's not much of a HORROR game if you can go to Heaven isn't it? The Underworld is a fairly good depiction of the Jewish Hell and C.S. Lewis' version of it. It's meant to be a place for ghosts who have unfinished businessed to be trapped in and the point is to transcend it by resolving your issues. There actually are Heavens and Hells located in the Underworld as well, though the line wasn't popular enough to get them detailed.

To be honest those were only the things I could remember off the the top of my head. If I had more time I could probably come up with a lot more.

In any event, Wraith was way darker than it really needs to be and that was probably a big part of why it was cancelled and succeeded by Orpheus. We already have the whole being dead thing and the shadow mechanics, but the absurdly dystopian society tacked onto that was a deal breaker for me. It is edgelord screed obscuring an otherwise decent concept I thought.

Back in 2004/5 when Chronicles of Darkness was still trying to find its footing, a fan of Wraith decided to make a re-imagining in the vein of Requiem at the time. It explicitly took its inspiration from Wraith, Orpheus and Exalted's Abyssals, but excised certain elements it felt were distracting from the premise. Namely, the dystopian society which turned people into shoes because edgelords. Otherwise, most of the structures from Wraith were still around in a recognizable form. The focus, of course, was largely on the ghost's anchors(/fetters/mementos/whatever the terminology is at the time) and three major factions represented this in different ways. The "Order" and "Freewraiths" were introduced as essentially rival gangs waging an elaborate conflict over haunted territory poetic titled "The Game of Houses." They did this because their whole ghost economy was powered by emotion and haunts produced said emotion. The "Believers", by contrast, focused on therapy to help ghosts resolve their anchors and transcend. In Oblivion, transcending was supposedly impossible or whatever. In the fan's re-imagining, it was a black comedy where the primary barrier to transcendence was the characters' own stubbornness while an entire faction consisted of ghosts who had personally witnessed at least one successful transcendence since joining.

I liked the attempt, back when I still liked anything shat out by White Wolf.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064426Basically, it requires you to actually know what you're talking about.

The Patriarch isn't the Christian God because Demon: The Fallen makes it clear that spirits are nothing more than after effects from angel works. God is a trillion times greater than Gaia and the Patriarch is a minor Weaver totem. The gamelines don't fit together and werewolf is an animist pagan Mother Goddess world while Vampire and Demon are Judeo-Christian.

Changeling and Mage? They make HUMANS gods who created the gods with their mind.

The games are at their best a urban fantasy kitchen sink for making your characters look badass with trenchcoats and katanas.

Also, Baba Yaga was an awesome villain.

:)

I am aware of the incompatible cosmology stuff and I don't care for it either. The games are pretentious, poorly written, poorly designed and generally terrible.

The staff and community are toxic in the extreme. The edition wars are just one of many examples. Did you know that when Mage Revised was released, hundreds of insane fans sent the lead developer death threats by email? He was terrified of opening his inbox for a long time afterward.

More times than I can count I have seen instances of the games being treated like the inerrant holy texts of a religion. A really anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive religion.

The rules lawyering makes the days of 3.x D&D look positively sane by comparison. I remember reading an online discussion in which the posters actually argued about how to represent the individual articles of clothing worn by ghosts. This despite the fact that ghosts are not physical beings, but exist as a result of force of will and as such are not bound by the restrictions of conventional space-time. The games operate on the basis that all ghosts are just humans transplanted into the ethereal plane (or whatever it is called depending on the edition) and give them an arbitrarily limited SFX budget. This despite the fact that real world hauntings are extremely diverse and actual parapsychologists (who are quacks, btw) have a bazillion different classifications of hauntings to explain their inconsistent behaviors, and ghost movies are wild and wacky and and inconsistent and otherwise full of weird unexplained things, and the games are supposedly taking inspiration from this.

That is just one of many, many anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive behaviors I have personally witnessed. The discussions regarding morality or really anything to do with the actual setting are much, much worse. Any suggestions to do anything remotely new or original are decried as filthy evil heresy. (I speak from experience here.) I am convinced that most of the people attracted to these games are mentally ill in some fashion. I stopped paying much attention to those asinine forums years ago, so there's probably much more that I don't know about.

---

[/HR]

So I take any positive claims regarding White Wolf and their community with a grain of salt. There has been way too much drama and scandal over the years for me to ever give them the benefit of the doubt. Plus the actual rules of their games are terrible even without their stupid lore on top of that.

QuoteIn any event, Wraith was way darker than it really needs to be and that was probably a big part of why it was cancelled and succeeded by Orpheus. We already have the whole being dead thing and the shadow mechanics, but the absurdly dystopian society tacked onto that was a deal breaker for me. It is edgelord screed obscuring an otherwise decent concept I thought.

Edgelord is being misused her, a bit like Mary Sue. You can say it's badly written but Edgelord means that something is trying to be shocking and edgy for the sake of being shocking and edgy. In this case, the Heirarchy of Wrath is like the Camarilla or Pentex.

They're the VILLAINS of the setting.

It's like saying a game set in the Galactic Empire or a resistance in Mordor is edgelord.

The whole reason there's a society of slavers and soul-forgers is because it's meant to give the PCs something to oppose. You might be right it was too depressing for the setting but I'm just saying that wasn't the goal.

QuoteThe staff and community are toxic in the extreme. The edition wars are just one of many examples. Did you know that when Mage Revised was released, hundreds of insane fans sent the lead developer death threats by email? He was terrified of opening his inbox for a long time afterward.

That's unfortunately just the internet.

But yes, there's some horribly toxic people out there. I spent two hours talking to Mark Rein Hagen about how fans have been harassing the poor guy because he's a pacifist who supports peaceful resistance to Neo-Nazis--and he's being harrassed by the anti-Nazis.

But every fandom on the internet has some real shitty people. I can't think of any that doesn't and it's the job of the community to police them as free speech should end when it involves actively threatening and ruining lives.

I hate the fans can't communicate with the actors of Star Wars anymore because, well, they're afraid of being doxxed.

Is it wrong that I now want to write a Vampire: The Masquerade/Kingdom Hearts crossover fan fiction?

Specifically, it'd be an AU where Sora, Riku, and the other KH characters are Kindred in the 1E VTM setting, most likely Chicago By Night with all the classic characters from that setting (and by extension, Gary and Milwaukee by Night)

Or better yet, a deliberately gonzo "Story Within A Story" where Sora and his friends are roleplayers playing a Vampire game using the old First Edition rules and 1E setting fluff, along with some homebrew stuff thrown in as well.

And on that note, I have a new character to add to my Chicago By Night games as one of the more prominent Anarch NPC's in Chicago.

If we can have Al Capone, Granny O'Leary, and Helen of Troy as Kindred in the Chi-Town, then why not the most famous martial artist to ever come out of that area?

That's right, I'm talking about the Deadliest Man Alive himself, the one and only Count Dante.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dante

He would be either be a Toreador or a Malkavian with Brawl 5, Melee 5, and high levels of Celerity, Potence, Fortitude, and Auspex.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064524Edgelord is being misused her, a bit like Mary Sue. You can say it's badly written but Edgelord means that something is trying to be shocking and edgy for the sake of being shocking and edgy. In this case, the Heirarchy of Wrath is like the Camarilla or Pentex.

They're the VILLAINS of the setting.

It's like saying a game set in the Galactic Empire or a resistance in Mordor is edgelord.

The whole reason there's a society of slavers and soul-forgers is because it's meant to give the PCs something to oppose. You might be right it was too depressing for the setting but I'm just saying that wasn't the goal.

It's completely unnecessary. Every WoD game had a formula like that and it was never necessary.

PCs are already dead and their Jungian shadow is now sentient. They don't need anything more to deal with. How many games actually involved the Hierarchy anyway?

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064524That's unfortunately just the internet.

But yes, there's some horribly toxic people out there. I spent two hours talking to Mark Rein Hagen about how fans have been harassing the poor guy because he's a pacifist who supports peaceful resistance to Neo-Nazis--and he's being harrassed by the anti-Nazis.

But every fandom on the internet has some real shitty people. I can't think of any that doesn't and it's the job of the community to police them as free speech should end when it involves actively threatening and ruining lives.

I hate the fans can't communicate with the actors of Star Wars anymore because, well, they're afraid of being doxxed.

World of Darkness isn't like every fandom. The people hired to write the books participate in the edition wars. That behavior is disgusting and promotes an extremely toxic environment that drove me away in the first place. Freelancer Malcolm Sheppard once wrote a (now deleted, sorry!) blog post in which he complained about the toxic environment of tabletop gaming, and stated that his friends in video game design specifically designed their products to drive those sorts of people away.

I don't give a flying sex act about the edition wars or the twenty years of imaginary goth nerd history. I'm just interesting in playing a game about emulating vampire fiction and I can't do that because of all the baggage attached. The company is toxic, its fans are toxic, the rules are garbage, the setting is garbage. Everything about it is terrible.

Communities for indie games like Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows actively promote creativity. World of Darkness actively denigrates that sort of thing. Unless you are playing the way the publisher or community intended then you are criticized for having badwrongfun if you are stupid enough to post on the forums.

That's the entire reason I focus all my RPG imagining efforts in D&D now. The D&D community has a "do anything" attitude that promotes massive amounts of homebrew generation. Sometimes I get frustrated with the community and especially with the world building, but nowhere near to the same degree as I did when dealing with the WoD community all those years ago. Unlike WoD, the D&D community gives me free reign to homebrew away everything I dislike.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064549It's completely unnecessary. Every WoD game had a formula like that and it was never necessary.

PCs are already dead and their Jungian shadow is now sentient. They don't need anything more to deal with. How many games actually involved the Hierarchy anyway?

It's one of those things where everyone plays it differently but I almost never used my shadow save as a Devil on the shoulder. The games I ran and played in were all about running an Underground Railroad of slaves from the Heirarchy's control and trying fight against them.

QuoteWorld of Darkness isn't like every fandom. The people hired to write the books participate in the edition wars. That behavior is disgusting and promotes an extremely toxic environment that drove me away in the first place. Freelancer Malcolm Sheppard once wrote a (now deleted, sorry!) blog post in which he complained about the toxic environment of tabletop gaming, and stated that his friends in video game design specifically designed their products to drive those sorts of people away.

Bluntly, I've seen plenty of toxicity in general in the RPG world. Fandom does stand for fanatic after all.

QuoteI don't give a flying sex act about the edition wars or the twenty years of imaginary goth nerd history. I'm just interesting in playing a game about emulating vampire fiction and I can't do that because of all the baggage attached. The company is toxic, its fans are toxic, the rules are garbage, the setting is garbage. Everything about it is terrible.

The company has done immense good in the real world and is one of the few ones which can be measured as a net positive in history. The kind of stories I've heard constantly of how much the games meant to them in dealing with their sexuality, coming to terms with trans status, finding a community outside their conservative home environment, or even becoming a better more tolerant person number in the dozens and that's just me alone.

I know for me that I left an extremely homophobic church and became a liberal Christian because of World of Darkness' influence.

QuoteThat's the entire reason I focus all my RPG imagining efforts in D&D now. The D&D community has a "do anything" attitude that promotes massive amounts of homebrew generation. Sometimes I get frustrated with the community and especially with the world building, but nowhere near to the same degree as I did when dealing with the WoD community all those years ago. Unlike WoD, the D&D community gives me free reign to homebrew away everything I dislike.

Fundamentally, the World of Darkness community has ever been a home for me and many of my closest friends. It's saved lives.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1064530Is it wrong that I now want to write a Vampire: The Masquerade/Kingdom Hearts crossover fan fiction?

Specifically, it'd be an AU where Sora, Riku, and the other KH characters are Kindred in the 1E VTM setting, most likely Chicago By Night with all the classic characters from that setting (and by extension, Gary and Milwaukee by Night)

Or better yet, a deliberately gonzo "Story Within A Story" where Sora and his friends are roleplayers playing a Vampire game using the old First Edition rules and 1E setting fluff, along with some homebrew stuff thrown in as well.

And on that note, I have a new character to add to my Chicago By Night games as one of the more prominent Anarch NPC's in Chicago.

If we can have Al Capone, Granny O'Leary, and Helen of Troy as Kindred in the Chi-Town, then why not the most famous martial artist to ever come out of that area?

That's right, I'm talking about the Deadliest Man Alive himself, the one and only Count Dante.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dante

He would be either be a Toreador or a Malkavian with Brawl 5, Melee 5, and high levels of Celerity, Potence, Fortitude, and Auspex.

I would play that game.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064553It's one of those things where everyone plays it differently but I almost never used my shadow save as a Devil on the shoulder. The games I ran and played in were all about running an Underground Railroad of slaves from the Heirarchy's control and trying fight against them.

This is exactly one of the key problems I have with World of Darkness. It advertises itself as one thing but delivers something completely different (in addition to trying to do too many things at once and losing sight its own themes). If you are playing a fantastical version of the Underground Railroad, why would you pick a game about ghosts to do that?

This is one of the many reasons why I dislike World of Darkness and its toxic writers and community. They deliberately foster certain modes of play, ones completely at odds with societal expectations and popular culture as a whole, and cry "heresy!" whenever anyone doesn't swallow the kool-aid.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064553Bluntly, I've seen plenty of toxicity in general in the RPG world. Fandom does stand for fanatic after all.



The company has done immense good in the real world and is one of the few ones which can be measured as a net positive in history. The kind of stories I've heard constantly of how much the games meant to them in dealing with their sexuality, coming to terms with trans status, finding a community outside their conservative home environment, or even becoming a better more tolerant person number in the dozens and that's just me alone.

I know for me that I left an extremely homophobic church and became a liberal Christian because of World of Darkness' influence.



Fundamentally, the World of Darkness community has ever been a home for me and many of my closest friends. It's saved lives.

That fits with my observation that Google trends indicates that searches for the games are most popular in the American Midwest, aka "the Bible Belt." I didn't grow up there, so my life experience is completely different from yours and as such I am not charitable towards World of Darkness and those associated with it. I grew up in an environment which was already critical of organized religion and which fostered individuality, critical thought, creativity and such. I only ever saw the ugly public side of the games, their writers and community.

The community as a whole is full of zealots, and most of them seem to be drawn from the Bible Belt. Normally I am highly suspicious of coincidences, but that seems like a connection. I would think that the conformist attitudes indoctrinated by such an environment translated directly into the hostile environment I discovered during my own forays.

Yet another reason for me to dislike the game and its community.

---

[/HR]

I can't even google "diablerie", a cognate of diabolic meaning "devil worship" and "mischievous conduct", without being inundated by vampire-related results. The game has actually ruined a real dictionary word which existed for centuries before it was published. But I digress...

At this point I am still astounded anybody still plays. I could write many lists of problems with the rules and setting alone (and I have in past posts), but probably the easiest to articulate at this moment is that you can never ever become a vampire unknowingly and immediately start levitating like in The Lost Boys. That's an iconic vampire movie and a game named "vampire" cannot emulate it at all. You can't even emulate Anne freaking Rice without house rules. (http://vampirerpg.free.fr/Rules/Anne-Rice.html) What gives?

Generally, I've found religious people much more likely to do charity and work better for their fellow man. Right now, in Kentucky, there's 60,000 children who go hungry every week if not for the work by the people in the Bible Belt picking up the slack because of the corrupt and disgusting state government. I also tend to find the most closed minded, dismissive, and impolite fol online to be born in secular areas.

And both of these are bullshit stereotypes.

:)

(I'm teasing you is what I'm saying--I do think you're being a bit generalizing)

But you're not ENTIRELY wrong here that there's something you're missing in the fact that White Wolf was born literally in the counter-culture section of Atlanta, Georgia. It's where the two creators and Mark Rein Hagen lived, surrounded by Goths who grew up in very conservative environments and were doing their best to establish individual identities  Being gay in the late 80s and 90s in the Bible Belt was a seriously painful experience for a lot of people.

White Wolf's community was initially marketed at the Goths of the South, sold well among the Goths of the South, and holds a legacy from their values.

A very special one for a lot of people.

But I'm going to forward an AMAZING IDEA that maybe the assholes on the internet aren't the best people to judge a fandom's community by. STAR WARS, WHITE WOLF, or THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

The representatives online are the loudest, not the largest body of a group.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064563This is exactly one of the key problems I have with World of Darkness. It advertises itself as one thing but delivers something completely different (in addition to trying to do too many things at once and losing sight its own themes). ...
At this point I am still astounded anybody still plays. I could write many lists of problems with the rules and setting alone (and I have in past posts), but probably the easiest to articulate at this moment is that you can never ever become a vampire unknowingly and immediately start levitating like in The Lost Boys. That's an iconic vampire movie and a game named "vampire" cannot emulate it at all. You can't even emulate Anne freaking Rice without house rules. (http://vampirerpg.free.fr/Rules/Anne-Rice.html) What gives?

  These same complaints could be made about Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe it's that mélange of 'a bunch of familiar stuff mixed together and infused with its own bizarre, distinctive flavor' that makes for success in the field?

  (Being a non-fan of WoD, and alienated from much of D&D at this point, I'm not sure I could say.)

Actually, you have Movement of the Mind which most people use for Lost Boys levitation and flight.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064410The game isn't even worth playing if that wasn't the case. It isn't a generic vampire roleplaying game, it is somebody's anal-retentive sandbox about world-spanning ninja clans and stealing candybars causing schizophrenia and dudes hitting people in the face with fish.
.

Well, that I'd actually play.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;1064603Well, that I'd actually play.

JG

Sounds pretty cool to me too.

QuoteThe game isn't even worth playing if that wasn't the case. It isn't a generic vampire roleplaying game, it is somebody's anal-retentive sandbox about world-spanning ninja clans and stealing candybars causing schizophrenia and dudes hitting people in the face with fish.

Quote from: James Gillen;1064603Well, that I'd actually play.

JG

Quote from: Lurtch;1064609Sounds pretty cool to me too.

It's why I love Changeling the Dreaming. So yeah, me three! :D

I have no doubt that the 5e game is doing well. I totally doubt that it's doing anywhere near its 1990s peak.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064577Generally, I've found religious people much more likely to do charity and work better for their fellow man. Right now, in Kentucky, there's 60,000 children who go hungry every week if not for the work by the people in the Bible Belt picking up the slack because of the corrupt and disgusting state government. I also tend to find the most closed minded, dismissive, and impolite fol online to be born in secular areas.

And both of these are bullshit stereotypes.

:)

(I'm teasing you is what I'm saying--I do think you're being a bit generalizing)

But you're not ENTIRELY wrong here that there's something you're missing in the fact that White Wolf was born literally in the counter-culture section of Atlanta, Georgia. It's where the two creators and Mark Rein Hagen lived, surrounded by Goths who grew up in very conservative environments and were doing their best to establish individual identities  Being gay in the late 80s and 90s in the Bible Belt was a seriously painful experience for a lot of people.

White Wolf's community was initially marketed at the Goths of the South, sold well among the Goths of the South, and holds a legacy from their values.

A very special one for a lot of people.

But I'm going to forward an AMAZING IDEA that maybe the assholes on the internet aren't the best people to judge a fandom's community by. STAR WARS, WHITE WOLF, or THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

The representatives online are the loudest, not the largest body of a group.

Market research is always going to be a challenge for this industry.

In any case, World of Darkness captured that extremely specific cultural zeitgeist and doesn't really work outside of that. Chronicles of Darkness was an attempt to market the same basic ideas to a broader audience.

The problem here is that there wasn't much of a broader audience. Regardless of the iteration, the of Darkness games have a lot of baggage and bad design choices which make them unpopular compared to games in the top twenty like Dungeons & Dragons (including retroclones), Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars, Warhammer, etc. That's why those other games have many more multimedia adaptations, including novels, video games, movies, television, etc.

The of Darkness games have had two (maybe three) video games, one short-lived television show (and a few dozen self-published fiction books, card games, board games, and other merchandise). I don't see that as an indicator of popularity relative to the competition.

Despite that, Chronicles of Darkness tried new things for the first time in the IP's history. I could certainly argue about how well it achieved its goals and how well I received it over time, but it tried. In fact, it tried to recapture the feel of the first editions by adding more mystery and opportunity for surprises, which you couldn't get in World of Darkness because of the highly systematized world building. The second editions pretty much steamrolled over all that effort in favor of trying to emulate World of Darkness' convoluted continuity while vainly trying to pretend to be different.

The best products White Wolf ever released were towards the end of first edition Chronicles, when they started dismantling the rules and exploring alternatives and translations guides and such. I felt it was too little too late, and really should have been done at the start, but I give them kudos for trying.

The edition wars are asinine in the extreme and the company makes itself look like manchildren by joining in.

World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness are not fundamentally different. They recycle the same ideas over and over. What would have made more sense would have been to provide an actual toolkit, which would have allowed fans to both continue their World of Darkness adventures as well as explore new territory by dismantling the limitations of the rules and setting.

All of the games may be boiled down to some basic themes, plus high school cliques tacked on because zeitgeist.

• Vampire is fundamentally about the struggle between humanity and vampirism and the need to feed. The number and nature of the various bloodlines and sects is window dressing.
  
• Werewolf is fundamentally about being torn between two worlds and trying to maintain a balance between them. Which is honestly the same as Vampire, but framed in an external context using the spirit world. Whether the antagonists are cosmic evils or just reality being inherently hostile is cosmetic from a greater critical analysis standpoint.
  
• Mage is fundamentally about freedom versus control. Each iteration explored different sides of that, whether it be rebelling against tyranny or resisting the urge to abuse your phenomenal cosmic power.
  
• Wraith is fundamentally about getting over your own psychological issues and enjoying your life. (It lost its way by making the Hierarchy an external manifestation of that when the fetters/anchors and shadow mechanics were already sufficient. The grimdarkness is an oft-criticized element.)
  
• Changeling is fundamentally about... pretty much the same as Wraith, actually, but framed completely different. You could be coming to terms with being LGBTQ+ and accepting the new creative experiences that offers in the face of persecution... or you could be overcoming traumatic experiences like living in a war zone or being abused or experimented on and taking back your power from whatever hurt you.
  

And that's my extremely brief and simplistic analysis of the big five. I'm not going to touch the rest because their themes are either all over the place or can be summed up with a single trope (e.g. Hunter is "he who fights monsters" writ large).

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1064578These same complaints could be made about Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe it's that mélange of 'a bunch of familiar stuff mixed together and infused with its own bizarre, distinctive flavor' that makes for success in the field?

  (Being a non-fan of WoD, and alienated from much of D&D at this point, I'm not sure I could say.)

That's a false equivalency.

Dungeons & Dragons lets you do pretty much anything if you are creative enough and your DM is permissive, since it is deliberately trying to be as generic as possible for the most part (in a genre it pioneered nonetheless). Especially in 5e, which acknowledges the years and years of history in the core rulebooks. Some people have criticized it for not supporting certain play styles, like anything depicted in the artwork, but that's just a matter of rules lawyering.

World of Darkness never tries to be as remotely expansive. The only time I ever saw it given room for arbitrarily large growth was in a fan's generic point buy rules (https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/white-wolf/). If one fan designed the single best implementation of the rules so far, then the company has no excuse for failing to achieve the same.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064580Actually, you have Movement of the Mind which most people use for Lost Boys levitation and flight.

That's a magic ritual known only by the tremere, who are the designated magicians before third edition and beyond added a bazillion new kinds of magic and obscure magician bloodlines. It isn't possible to replicate Dracula scaling walls, Carmilla passing through locked doors, or the lost boys flying without resorting to obscure magic rituals and learning a bunch of filler powers in order to get a relevant power.

You missed the point of my argument. Vampire isn't designed to emulate any existing vampire fiction, besides its own idiosyncratic setting. Not unless you invoke house rules, and at that point you might as well pick a new system because the rules are not very good for that. The fundamental problem with the disciplines, combination disciplines, variant powers, devotions, rituals, threnodies, blah blah blah is that they are exception-based. Rather than learning a generic skill defined syntactically (like mage's arcana/spheres), you have to learn a grab bag of tricks before getting something you need specifically. Second edition Requiem highlights how poorly designed the disciplines are when it attempts to circumvent their limitations and ends up making things worse. The new powers they added are obvious filler that in many cases make the grab bag of tricks problem even worse than it was before (although not quite as bad as the heyday of second edition Masquerade, when Mytherceria's purview included pulling pranks and making tunnels; of course, Requiem makes up for that with even worse bloodline bloat).

That's the entire reason I was interested in Feed. The author wrote it as a direct response to Vampire's limitations, and it shows. The ideas for vampire strains only ever mentioned in passing are vastly more creative than the loads of bloodlines White Wolf churned out. Even though the basic rules assume a humanity mechanic, the sample campaign settings are wildly diverse and don't automatically assume the characters are suffering (one of the scenarios is explicitly emulating b-movie vampires that like being monsters). The rules for vampire traits, rather than being exception based, use the sort of indie free-form description that White Wolf seemingly always wanted to do (what with claiming they were about roleplaying not rollplaying) but never did even when second edition Chronicles haphazardly copied FATE mechanics and bolted them into an ST system chassis.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1064638It's why I love Changeling the Dreaming. So yeah, me three! :D

Perhaps I might have liked the games if they weren't so pretentious. The arguments between the supporters of the traditions and the technocracy are morally repulsive most of the same.

If the rules weren't so abysmal I might have been willing to overlook the problems with the setting, but the rules are really bad as I just ranted about.

Well, chalk another up for the censors.

https://www.white-wolf.com/newsblog/a-message-from-white-wolf

QuoteA Message From White Wolf
Hello everyone,
 
My name is Shams Jorjani, VP of Business Development at Paradox Interactive and interim manager at White Wolf Publishing. I wanted to inform you of some changes that will be implemented at White Wolf, starting immediately.
 
Sales and printing of the V5 Camarilla and Anarch books will be temporarily suspended. The section on Chechnya will be removed in both the print and PDF versions of the Camarilla book. We anticipate that this will require about three weeks. This means shipping will be delayed; if you have pre-ordered a copy of Camarilla or Anarchs, further information will follow via e-mail.
 
In practical terms, White Wolf will no longer function as a separate entity. The White Wolf team will be restructured and integrated directly into Paradox Interactive, and I will be temporarily managing things during this process. We are recruiting new leadership to guide White Wolf both creatively and commercially into the future, a process that has been ongoing since September.
 
Going forward, White Wolf will focus on brand management. This means White Wolf will develop the guiding principles for its vision of the World of Darkness, and give licensees the tools they need to create new, excellent products in this story world. White Wolf will no longer develop and publish these products internally. This has always been the intended goal for White Wolf as a company, and it is now time to enact it.
 
The World of Darkness has always been about horror, and horror is about exploring the darkest parts of our society, our culture, and ourselves. Horror should not be afraid to explore difficult or sensitive topics, but it should never do so without understanding who those topics are about and what it means to them. Real evil does exist in the world, and we can't ever excuse its real perpetrators or cheapen the suffering of its real victims.
 
In the Chechnya chapter of the V5 Camarilla book, we lost sight of this. The result was a chapter that dealt with a real-world, ongoing tragedy in a crude and disrespectful way. We should have identified this either during the creative process or in editing. This did not happen, and for this we apologize.
 
We ask for your patience while we implement these changes. In the meantime, let's keep talking. I'm available for any and all thoughts, comments and feedback, on shams.jorjani@paradoxinteractive.com.

Mind you, they had a good reason beyond this.

The Chechnyan government, I shit you not, were using it to claim the West were using propaganda to frame the country for atrocities.

And the White Wolf distributors in Russia were threatened with jail time.

Not to mention a certain author lives in Russia.

This is a safety issue as well.....for not just WW staff but the people who would have their struggle discredited.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064879the people who would have their struggle discredited.

Yes, we have to make sure that the real world people that might otherwise help these suffering folks are not led astray into believing that vampires are the cause of it all. I don't know how many times I've let others suffer IRL when I figured vampires must be behind it and just blew it off...

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064879Mind you, they had a good reason beyond this.

The Chechnyan government, I shit you not, were using it to claim the West were using propaganda to frame the country for atrocities.

And this matters to us how? Most anti-Western nations say tons of horrible stuff about "the West" to justify their own authoritarian prerogatives as they crackdown on their own people.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064879And the White Wolf distributors in Russia were threatened with jail time.

Then perhaps they should not market their products in a nation that, you know, perpetrates these kinds of things?

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064879Not to mention a certain author lives in Russia.

Mark isn't stupid. He knew the effects of the Super-sauce before he drank it. And for accuracy - he's in Georgia. Which has it's issues, yep.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064879This is a safety issue as well.....for not just WW staff but the people who would have their struggle discredited.

Well... look... at *what* point does one promise to create a fantasy-pretend-game based on real-world issues and not come to realize that years into the process you might irritate some people? Wasn't that the entire point of the endeavor? SOMEONE is going to be the bad-guy. Unless you're a moral-relativist, this is an objective fact that horrifying shit is going on around the world. It's certainly not a crime to give any of that game-relevance - if indeed that was the intent. If you succumb to this level of outrage you're now implying *any* form of modern history that produces dark results ought to be subject to censorship.

Who gets to make that call precisely in the name of good taste? What *isn't* objectionable?

Edit: I'm not attacking you or anything CT. I'm just talkin.

I just am concerned for the people there.

The article did bring a lot of attention to the struggle, though.

But I worry for people I actually know there (specifcally Mark).

And it's disgusting how many fans are like, "YES! WHITE WOLF'S EDGELORDS ARE DONE WITH! ONYX PATH WILL BE THE NEW DEVELOPERS!"

Which...yes, they will be but PERSPECTIVE people.

The end result of this will be the stake in the heart of the IP.


It may not kill Vampire (stakes just paralyze), but paralysis may as well be market-death.

Quote from: tenbones;1064891The end result of this will be the stake in the heart of the IP.


It may not kill Vampire (stakes just paralyze), but paralysis may as well be market-death.

I'm doubting that.

1. Tabletop games aren't the point. The Vampire: The Masquerade TV series in development with Showtime and the planned trilogy of video games is.

2. They've more or less said they're just going to let Onyx Path do whatever the hell they want. So they're celebrating there like in the Producers.

Chicago by Night will probably be a soft reboot of 5E.

I've already read most of that book and they tone down or ignore most of the metaplot.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064893I'm doubting that.

1. Tabletop games aren't the point. The Vampire: The Masquerade TV series in development with Showtime and the planned trilogy of video games is.

2. They've more or less said they're just going to let Onyx Path do whatever the hell they want. So they're celebrating there like in the Producers.

Chicago by Night will probably be a soft reboot of 5E.

I've already read most of that book and they tone down or ignore most of the metaplot.

1) I do not count on this. Hollywood is notoriously fickle- and given the PC issues on this alone concerning the IP... I could *easily* see this getting dropped or put in development hell. In fact, I'm willing to bet on it (any takers? A nice gentleperson's bet of a set of dice?)

2) Onyx Path have not been good for the WoD IP imo. I say that as someone that owns most of the entire OP catalog up to Demon. Letting them do "whatever the Hell they want" makes me chuckle at the possibilities that doesn't bode well for the future of my purchases for WoD stuff. In fact, it pretty much renders the possibility next to nil, for various reasons, not the least of which has to do with their design.

But more power to them and those that love their stuff.

I'm asking for a refund of my pre order of the elder set.  OPP has been very open that they dont want me as their customer.

Changeling is not Mage, by the way. :) Mage is about Traditions and the Technocracy. Changenling is about Kiths and the coming of Endless Winter banality. Changeling actually 'wuvs da science'. In fact, the Moon Landing was a massive Dreaming event that briefly allowed Arcadia to open up to Earth and pour out the modern Sidhe kith. Basically mankind was so enamored and awed it broke down Banality walls and poured forth some Moon Elves.

And yes, the cards from 1e do work, too. :) You just have a kitchen sink worth of factional frictions to play out and must be choosy in running your table.

Quote from: tenbones;1064891The end result of this will be the stake in the heart of the IP.


It may not kill Vampire (stakes just paralyze), but paralysis may as well be market-death.

Well the VtES CCG keeps bouncing in and out of torpor, so why not the RPG? :D Who wants to attempt diablerie? The fans may have Eyes of the Dead in hand (a really niche anti-diablerie shitty card), who wants to risk it?

I hope the dude that got this all started is happy that he pretty much killed the refresh of WoD.

Eh, the Glorious Moral Revolution hasn't arrived to confiscate my WW 1e books, so I ain't bothered. :D

But maybe there might be self reflection among the Storyteller community that there is gangrene among their "super-fandom" number. ... bwa ha ha ha ha! :p Oh lord, I just don't have that good of a poker face! :p

Quote from: Lurtch;1064930I hope the dude that got this all started is happy that he pretty much killed the refresh of WoD.

If you mean me:

1. Apparently, the dude that did this was some dude in Russia as it wasn't me that caused the shitstorm. I think my petition got 100 signatures total before I pulled it.

2. It's being "killed" by being given to Onyx Path. They're correcting the shitty typos and errors in the books and re-releasing them anyway. The Camarilla will just be out in February, not December.

3. The Sabbat book is cancelled but it will probably be done by someone else now instead of WW. It was the last book they planned to publish anyway.

4. The author (who is not hard to figure out the identity of) fucking hated the edit of it, which ruined the intent of his story to bring attention to the atrocity.

The Chechnyan response and Russian were HUGE as well because I think someone forgot that Vampire: The Masquerade in Russia is like Starcraft in Korea. A major reason why the "Golden Age of White Wolf" sales have been being consistently reached.

Here's a Crimean newspaper talking about it.

https://en.crimerussia.com/gromkie-dela/chechens-hate-vampire-the-masquerade-game-for-sultan-ramzan-character/?fbclid=IwAR2ibGrSgZHEnX8u8ZbyX__h1a-3_bWMB3BT0BNlfzSlC5A9Qk54yrTWMBM

OPP taking over the line means the line us going to stall and never get out if the mud. The OPP crew are toxic gatekeepers that will damage the ability to broaden the players for the game.

Quote from: Lurtch;1064941OPP taking over the line means the line us going to stall and never get out if the mud. The OPP crew are toxic gatekeepers that will damage the ability to broaden the players for the game.

Dude, you realize the people White Wolf hired to write the books they released....were the exact same people, right?

Plus Old Guard WW.

I'm sorry this entire controversy happened and am irritated everyone is dancing on the grave of White Wolf when it was a source of such joy for our hobby's enthusiasts.

Edit:

"Ironically, the LGBT community, representatives of which are being persecuted in Chechnya, are also outraged by the game about Chechen vampires. The fact is that the persecution of gays is represented as a "smart media manipulation" to divert attention from bloodsuckers. Homosexuals consider this derision immoral. Science fiction writer Charles Phipps, as well as former White Wolf collaborator, game designer Joseph Carriker, agree with them."
- I confess, today, I did not expect to be caught up in an international controversy over the depiction of gays, vampires, and state sponsored torture in roleplaying games.

https://en.crimerussia.com/gromkie-dela/chechens-hate-vampire-the-masquerade-game-for-sultan-ramzan-character/?fbclid=IwAR2ibGrSgZHEnX8u8ZbyX__h1a-3_bWMB3BT0BNlfzSlC5A9Qk54yrTWMBM

Guess who is back?

Oh man after reading this fail train to its eventual crash is entertaining.  Nice to see another company utterly fail and give Onyx Path the wreckage as if it was gold.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1064950Guess who is back?

Oh man after reading this fail train to its eventual crash is entertaining.  Nice to see another company utterly fail and give Onyx Path the wreckage as if it was gold.

Its the second times its happened.

The first time was after Requiem.

Your forgetting the CCP MMO scam.  Now what what was the lie during that time?

White Wolf: "We are partners."

Me: "Really?  So you can make decisions that would effect CCP as a whole?"

White Wolf: "Well no..."

Me: "Can you make decisions over your MMO project?"

White Wolf: "No..."

Me: "Can you make any decisions at all?"

White Wolf: "We are partners."

Quote from: Snowman0147;1064955Your forgetting the CCP MMO scam.  Now what what was the lie during that time?

White Wolf: "We are partners."

Me: "Really?  So you can make decisions that would effect CCP as a whole?"

White Wolf: "Well no..."

Me: "Can you make decisions over your MMO project?"

White Wolf: "No..."

Me: "Can you make any decisions at all?"

White Wolf: "We are partners."

I think White Wolf's merger with Paradox means the company, as is, is now a letterhead. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064939The Chechnyan response and Russian were HUGE as well because I think someone forgot that Vampire: The Masquerade in Russia is like Starcraft in Korea. A major reason why the "Golden Age of White Wolf" sales have been being consistently reached.

So Vampire is huge in Russia.
Somehow this does not surprise me.
JG

Quote from: James Gillen;1065016So Vampire is huge in Russia.
Somehow this does not surprise me.
JG

Vampire is huge everywhere except the US. An irony there.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065026Vampire is huge everywhere except the US. An irony there.

Probably because WW ruined it after about 2e's end. 3 editions of anywhere from "meh" to "suck" later and is it any wonder its nearly a (un)dead IP?

Apparently the LARP is still chugging away. No clue what edition that uses. I know one of the local groups was not so thrilled to go from 1 to 2, or was it 2 to 3? Been a decade and a half. They wanted me to play an NPC.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065026Vampire is huge everywhere except the US. An irony there.

Sort of like both Goth and Punk.

jg

Quote from: Omega;1065180Probably because WW ruined it after about 2e's end. 3 editions of anywhere from "meh" to "suck" later and is it any wonder its nearly a (un)dead IP?

Apparently the LARP is still chugging away. No clue what edition that uses. I know one of the local groups was not so thrilled to go from 1 to 2, or was it 2 to 3? Been a decade and a half. They wanted me to play an NPC.

I thought LARP (One World By Night?) pitched a fit over being forced to convert to Requiem that people just refused en masse until WW capitulated or something. Never was that into the LARP drama, so I just overheard and went back onto the dancefloor to "This Corrosion" by Sisters of Mercy.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064939The Chechnyan response and Russian were HUGE as well because I think someone forgot that Vampire: The Masquerade in Russia is like Starcraft in Korea. A major reason why the "Golden Age of White Wolf" sales have been being consistently reached.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064952Its the second times its happened.

The first time was after Requiem.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065026Vampire is huge everywhere except the US. An irony there.

I've done research myself that doesn't confirm any of what you are saying. This sounds like simple propaganda. Requiem didn't ruin White Wolf. Even if they hadn't published it, their fate would have been the same. Interest in World of Darkness has been steadily declining ever since Google starting collecting data on trends. The video game Vampire: Bloodlines is more well known than the tabletop ever was.

Quite honestly, I am surprised that World of Darkness doesn't have any significant competition in the urban fantasy market (not counting Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu). Every single competitor has eventually petered out. At least, if you are counting tabletop games. Online role-play is uncountable, and none of it relies on World of Darkness.

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[/HR]

My complaining about the idiosyncrasies of the rules isn’t going to achieve much. White Wolf clearly isn’t going to improve them and there are already point buy rules and indie games which neatly solve those issues.

So what I would like to analyze are the bloodlines aka clans, which are probably the most popular part of the fluff. The bloodlines have multiple writing flaws, as a collective. Sometimes the writers have recognized this and attempted to refine the writing, but their attempts have always been clumsy since they are unwilling to make the deeper changes that are necessary.

There has been constant bloodline bloat over the years. Initially you had to pick one at character creation, but later the option was added to join certain bloodlines after creation (e.g. Baali, Kiasyd, Ahrimanes). Some editions made this possible for all bloodlines, subject to certain restrictions. In some editions you could learn any discipline, even bloodline disciplines, subject to certain restrictions.

The bloodlines are limited to three or four discipline specialties each, which eventually broke down due to the problem of discipline bloat. There were eventually bazillion disciplines and similar mechanics (combination disciplines/devotions, paths, rituals, mysticism/threnodies, merits, etc), most of which were only situationally useful at best and cost a huge amount of XP that could have been spent on other things. The disciplines themselves are arbitrarily limited, and many are bags of tricks.

The bloodline weaknesses are all over the place in terms of complexity, applicability, balance, etc. They change across editions too. Some of them force players to think creatively, such as the “hideous monster” weakness, while others are barely noticeable (extra damage from sunlight or fire) or only come into play in highly specific circumstances (must sleep on a bed of your sacred soil). Some simply impede play and can be more frustrating than interesting (paralyzed by the sight of “beauty”).

While a large number of bloodlines meant that eventually their concepts will get niche and bizarre, this doesn’t excuse those that are supposedly the most prevalent. Their concepts may easily be very niche or outright silly, even offensive. Pretty much all the clans introduced after the 1e rulebook, which introduced the original seven, fell into this trap. Later attempts to make them more palatable only addressed the symptoms, not the underlying issues.

The bloodlines, particular the most prevalent “clans”, often have bizarre names. These include bruja (Spanish “witch”), toreador (Spanish “bullfighter”), la sombra (Spanish “the shadow”), tremere (Latin “to tremble”), and malkavian (unclear; either a writer’s Ars Magica character, Hebrew malakh “angel”, Latin mala cavalla “bad mockery”, or the Slavic surname Malkov originally from Hebrew malka “queen”). Attempts to rationalize this have generally been torturous and silly. It is more than bit silly on its face that they have the same names worldwide, as opposed to varying by language.

There has never been a clear distinction between sects and bloodlines. Bloodlines supposedly determine your political beliefs and personality and whatever, but many of them make more sense as sects that members of any bloodline could join, or as sects with bloodlines typically associated with them, etc.

In future posts I will analyze the fifteen clans individually.

It is pretty interesting that Vampire has not real competition in this genre!

I think (i.e. I have absolutely no evidence to back this up) that it might have to do with the metaplot. It was fine in the beginning - then it became so overwrought that in the end it closed the loop. I know I found the apocalyptic End Times as a concept interesting - but never did I *ever* intend for it to be anything in my game but some element that a few conspiracy-theorist Vampires believed in. Some of which to the point they'd be fanatical and want to kill you over it (Sabbat).

The horizontal development of Vampire also got *waaaaaay* overdone. For the superfans, there is no such thing as too much. But lets face it... at the end it was a contradictory conceptual mess. ESPECIALLY with the endless cosmological references to their other WoD splats liberally sprinkled in, that themselves implied gigantic contradictions far beyond the ignorance of the most knowledgeable Vampire.

This becomes an opaque turnoff for people. Hard to dive into. Hard to GM without a very clear understanding of what you as a GM want and can conceive of the mess. Hell, Palladium Rifts was more conceptually rigorous than Vampire. White Wolf devs would blow shit out of their ass and keep telling us: It's meant to be this way.

Yes... Tzimisce are infected with a space-virus. True Brujah can control Time. Kue-jin are a wtf mess. On top of the all the crazy shit in Chicago... Big Trouble in Little China pretty much renders most of the shit in Chicago moot - is happening right under their noses and no one knows! etc. etc.

Sure it's meant to be this way.

In some fashion, it's like Comicbook lore-logic. Most of it is total garbage, but each GM has to cultivate their own narrative about what is "real" and what isn't within the game. Personally I like doing that. It's *why* I liked Requiem and NWOD's system. It unified the system (that was a big deal for me). But it cleared the board of the metastory. Ironically this pissed a lot of people off, including my players. And I always wondered why? I'd get into these big discussions with them and said "I can recreate *every* aspect of OWoD in NWoD without all the baggage, while using this unified system.

Something happened. I know personally in my group the "attitudes" of Onyx Path became a very big issue. Especially those at RPG.net that worked for Onyx Path... and that association became poisonous for some of my players. I'm not sure if that impacts people here - but it did in my extended group.

Then there was the quality of that material OP was producing. It was a downhill slide into shit.

This tells me either the genre is unsustainable - which I don't believe. Or that the WoD is so closely associated with good ideas mired in shit and shepherded by a bunch of ideologues that has driven off what otherwise might be a sustainable audience that has become gunshy to invest in other options - which I think is likely.

Or both...

Quote from: tenbones;1065280It is pretty interesting that Vampire has not real competition in this genre!

I think (i.e. I have absolutely no evidence to back this up) that it might have to do with the metaplot. It was fine in the beginning - then it became so overwrought that in the end it closed the loop. I know I found the apocalyptic End Times as a concept interesting - but never did I *ever* intend for it to be anything in my game but some element that a few conspiracy-theorist Vampires believed in. Some of which to the point they'd be fanatical and want to kill you over it (Sabbat).

The horizontal development of Vampire also got *waaaaaay* overdone. For the superfans, there is no such thing as too much. But lets face it... at the end it was a contradictory conceptual mess. ESPECIALLY with the endless cosmological references to their other WoD splats liberally sprinkled in, that themselves implied gigantic contradictions far beyond the ignorance of the most knowledgeable Vampire.

This becomes an opaque turnoff for people. Hard to dive into. Hard to GM without a very clear understanding of what you as a GM want and can conceive of the mess. Hell, Palladium Rifts was more conceptually rigorous than Vampire. White Wolf devs would blow shit out of their ass and keep telling us: It's meant to be this way.

Yes... Tzimisce are infected with a space-virus. True Brujah can control Time. Kue-jin are a wtf mess. On top of the all the crazy shit in Chicago... Big Trouble in Little China pretty much renders most of the shit in Chicago moot - is happening right under their noses and no one knows! etc. etc.

Sure it's meant to be this way.

In some fashion, it's like Comicbook lore-logic. Most of it is total garbage, but each GM has to cultivate their own narrative about what is "real" and what isn't within the game. Personally I like doing that. It's *why* I liked Requiem and NWOD's system. It unified the system (that was a big deal for me). But it cleared the board of the metastory. Ironically this pissed a lot of people off, including my players. And I always wondered why? I'd get into these big discussions with them and said "I can recreate *every* aspect of OWoD in NWoD without all the baggage, while using this unified system.

Something happened. I know personally in my group the "attitudes" of Onyx Path became a very big issue. Especially those at RPG.net that worked for Onyx Path... and that association became poisonous for some of my players. I'm not sure if that impacts people here - but it did in my extended group.

Then there was the quality of that material OP was producing. It was a downhill slide into shit.

This tells me either the genre is unsustainable - which I don't believe. Or that the WoD is so closely associated with good ideas mired in shit and shepherded by a bunch of ideologues that has driven off what otherwise might be a sustainable audience that has become gunshy to invest in other options - which I think is likely.

Or both...

I'm glad to see some people still give Chronicles of Darkness the benefit of the doubt. White Wolf was always incompetent, but Chronicles marked one of the few times they tried to pull their shit together (even if they still failed as usual). That is why I find it so frustrating that the edition wars have obscured the hard work they did put in, even if it was immensely flawed. None of the World of Darkness zealots even read the Chronicles books, so they keep parroting the same stupid and false talking points that completely ignore the actual problems with Chronicles (http://garglinggoblin.blogspot.com/2013/01/problems-with-world-of-darkness-rpg.html).

As far as edition wars go, White Wolf made a mistake by wiping the slate clean. What they should have done would have been to maintain sample settings, including World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness or whatever weird multiverse was in place. Don't just give people a toolkit (and I mean a real toolkit, not a fake), give them example campaign settings to learn from. Do some more of the self-analysis on alternate settings that was done in the third edition ST guides and handbooks.

Actually unify the rules too, don't keep everything running on a different subsystem. The point buy rules I mentioned are a great guide in this regard.

Where was I? Ah yes, I was analyzing the bloodlines...

---

[/HR]

Analysis of the fifteen clans

This analysis will be taking into account all of the different editions of Vampire (Masquerade, Dark Ages, Requiem, etc)

Camarilla clans

Brujah, Bruja, Brouhaha, etc
The Bruja are seemingly based on an extremely superficial reading of The Lost Boys and other 80s vampire flicks, and accumulated a bunch of counterculture baggage over the editions. The games introduced several other sects with the same idea to steal their thunder, including the anarchs, furores, prometheans, and carthians. This makes their place uncertain, even unnecessary, since they really do make more sense as a sect than a bloodline.

Their name is nonsensical, being Spanish for "witch" or "warlock" depending on the inflection. One of the books tries to claim that the word originally meant "wise woman" (which is demonstrably wrong (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bruja)). I think the writers were trying to go for "sage", referring to the supposed philosopher-king roots of the bloodline, but it's still tortured. But that's really a small issue compared to the rest.

Gangrel
The Gangrel (name is Scottish slang for vagabond) are seemingly based on a mix of Dracula and 80s vampire flicks in general, being bestial vampires with shapeshifting powers. They have remained largely unchanged across the editions, since their shtick is archetypal. Probably the biggest change is in their weakness, which has changed to reflect different aspects of their archetype. In some editions they steadily transformed into hideous beasts, whereas other editions have them deeply in touch with their animal instincts.

All in all, I can't say much bad about them. Maybe one could call them bland for being archetypal, but that's not a good critique in my opinion.

Malkavian, Malkovian, etc
The Malkavian are one of those bloodlines I deeply dislike. Not because of the inherent concept, but because writers and fans alike couldn't resist making fun of mental illness through them. Of course the inherent concept is a very strange one to associate with vampires and I have been told multiple times they are based on the movie Vampire's Kiss staring Nicholas Cage. After their initial appearance, they accumulated lots of baggage, such as the mad oracle and connections to fairies.

I don't think they make sense as a major bloodline, and possibly not even as a bloodline at all. In some editions, they became a sub-bloodline or supernatural disease that other vampires could contract. That's creative, and it's unfortunate that depiction didn't prove very popular because of the bullshit edition wars.

As with the rules in general, their signature power of "dementation" is arbitrarily limited. It came in a few different versions in the official rules and I've seen a few homebrew versions too. All in all, the discipline ladder does the concept a huge disservice.

Their name has no obvious etymology. I've seen several etymologies proposed: the name of a writer's Ars Magica character, the Slavic surname Malkov derived from Hebrew Malka "queen", the Latin mala cavalla "bad mockery," and the Hebrew malakh "angel, messenger."

Nosferatu
Like the Gangrel the Nosferatu represent an archetype of the vampire, here as obvious monster. They were originally based on Nosferatu the movie, but oddly dropped certain aspects of that portrayal (e.g. nobility, plague, aging) and added baggage over editions.

What I would criticize about their portrayals is that most editions didn't really do that much with them. For reasons that elude me they were typically depicted an information gatherers, using animal empathy and clouding minds to achieve that as well as mundane computer hacking skills. Other editions emphasized the monster part by giving them (poorly-designed) powers over fear and nightmares and such.

Their weakness has varied pretty dramatically while remaining essentially the same: they look wrong. In some editions they looked like Count Orlock, in others their appearance wasn't fixed and could range from obvious deformity to an invisible feeling of wrongness to being inhumanly beautiful and thus uncanny. Many editions introduced a physical mutation mechanic similar to that of the Gangrel.

Like the Gangrel I think the basic idea is archetypal, but the implementation has always been lacking in my opinion. Requiem probably did the best job, which I why I am frustrated that it receives undeserved mudslinging. (Not that I think Requiem is good, since this is White Wolf.)

Toreadors, Matadors, etc
The Toreadors (name is Spanish for "bullfighter", which doesn't relate to their shtick) are supposedly based on Anne Rice, but if so then a very superficial reading of her work. The Toreadors are characterized as upper class art critics and degenerates and the like, and their weakness is that they are paralyzed at the sight of beautiful things.

I find them extremely bland and their weakness is an obvious missed opportunity. Rather than being paralyzed, they could have been driven to collect beautiful things and that would provide interesting roleplaying opportunities.

Tremere
The Tremere (name is Latin "to tremble") were originally immigrants from another White Wolf game, Ars Magica. They were a House from the Order of Hermes who embraced vampirism to survive the decline of magic. They originally had a monopoly on magic, but later editions introduced a bazillion other varieties of vampire magic unrelated to them. Their culture was a pyramid scheme in which all Tremere were made loyal to the inner circle of the clan. They were given rivalries with the Gangrel, Nosferatu and Tzimisce because they stole vampirism from them and used their members to create homunculus gargoyles. At some point they were somehow able to convince other vampires to kill an established bloodline the Salubri, who had healing powers, which never made much sense.

Requiem introduced a variation on the idea named "Architects of the Monolith," which took the pyramid analogy to the extreme by specializing in geomancy. They didn't get much detail, but I saw bits of homebrew extending the idea.

Overall, I think the main problem was that their shtick of magicians became increasingly irrelevant when loads of other magician bloodlines were added. They could just as easily be a sect rather than a bloodline.

Ventrue
The Ventrue (from French ventru "pot-bellied") are upper class vampires loosely based on Dracula, specifically his supposedly mind control powers. Their weakness is a selective palate. They were fairly bland even as the baggage accumulated.

Requiem added more features like animal empathy (to continue to mind control theme) and a Caligula complex that made them more aloof and deranged as time went on (with the selective palate becoming a possible manifestation); although I think this could have been implemented a bit better. This edition dropped the specific upper class aspect in favor of focusing on an archetype of "lords", not merely lords of society but lords of anything: animals, professions, whatever. Of course this progress was ignored due to the stupid edition wars, which again frustrates me.

I can't really be sure, but I suspect that original seven clans were meant to be something like archetypes. This became increasingly muddled as the editions continued. Requiem tried to return to that, but provoked the asinine edition wars that obscured what good it did.


Sabbat clans
The two Sabbat clans of Lasombra and Tzimisce were essentially variations on the "lord" archetype originally filled by the Ventrue (and emphasized in Requiem), to the point of being the latter's direct competitors. The translation guide and similar homebrew convert them into Ventrue sub-bloodlines.

Lasombra
Their name is the first strike: La sombra is "the shadow" in Spanish. While an accurate, it is more than bit silly as a name since the phrase is more popularly known as an epithet of Sauron. Something like El sombres ("the shadow-men", a wordplay) would make more sense.

They received a lot of baggage over the years, such as connections to the Catholic Church, piracy and the ocean, abyss mysticism, Satanism, path of night, etc. In fact, their portrayal seemed to have heavily informed the development of the Lancea+Sanctum in Requiem. They only received a token passage in the translation guide, but one of the White Wolf freelancers had written a more detailed biography that was posted online after it was decided not to publish it.
I will give them credit for being creative.

Their no reflection weakness is thematic but has received complaints about being overpowered because they can get past security cameras. I don't really understand this for multiple reasons: how often does that come up compared to them not showing up in reflective surfaces that are everywhere? Even so, I think it is a bit weak and that maybe a more interesting extension would be for them to be violently hateful of reflective surfaces.

Tzimisce
The Tzimisce take their name from the Byzantine Emperor Johannes Tzimiskes for some reason, or possibly a Yiddish word for stirring stew. Anyway, they are directly based on the Wamphyri from the Necroscope novels, although there was something lost in translation, and possibly the 1989 body horror flick Society. The Wamphyri could dissect corpses in order to acquire their knowledge and they had a complicated science of alchemy which they used to transformed infected victims into hideous monsters like living plumbing, Tyranid- or Zerg-esque warrior creatures, and such. The Tzimisce are really censored in comparison, even to the point of replacing the Wamphyri's brutal alchemy with simpler touch-based biokinesis (which oddly enough predicted the capabilities of the Shing't from the 2006 Necroscope novel The Touch, who with one touch could turn people inside-out).

Their weakness is that they must sleep on a bed of sacred soil, which had been extensively criticized over the years for whatever reason. It is extremely situational and they lack the suite of other classic vampire weakness to go along with it.

The Tzimisce suffer the common White Wolf problem of taking foreign dictionary words and applying completely different meanings. For example, Slavic words for "nobility" and "lord" were used for warrior creatures, rather than the Tzimisce leaders. (One of the homebrew actually does this by naming the Tzimisce leaders "Council of Szlachta", which still runs into the problem that they aren't specifically Polish).

Brian Lumley did something right when he invented the Wamphyri, because the Tzimisce have received probably the most homebrew attempts at translation guides before the guides even came out.


The only problem with the Lasombra and the Tzimisce is that their presence merely highlights problems with the Vampire game. They are competitors with the Ventrue but vastly more interesting in every way. They don't really make much sense to follow the quasi-Ricean mold and would probably be better served by a different set of vampire metaphysics, such as Tzimisce which feed by fusing with their victim's flesh or something.

Independent clans
The independent clans are probably the worst off, since they feel like obvious filler since the well-known vampire archetypes were already taken by the Camarilla clans. They are extremely niche, too niche to be sensible global conspiracies, and were really offensive when first introduced and later attempts to make them less so didn't address the underlying problem.

Assamites
The Assamites are a globe-spanning Arab ninja clan. The idea of a conspiracy that descends from the Hashashin isn't inherently silly, but I do think they make more sense as a sect. Their name is wholly nonsensical, since Assam is a state in India that was never associated with the Assassins.

Followers of Set, Setites, Sethites, etc
The Setites aren't based on Egyptian myth, but on Conan the Barbarian. It makes more sense for them to be the Followers of Apep. They never received a conversion to Requiem until the translation guide, but Requiem did have different bloodlines tied to snakes and the Egyptian god Set prior to that. Requiem introduced a more Egyptologically-accurate conception of Setites aka Sethites as a cult which claims to protect the world from demons or whatever by using constructive chaos in service to ma'at, as well as a bloodline of shadow-kinesis users "Khaibit" supposedly descended from Set himself (since he was a god of darkness and storms and such).

Giovanni, Giovani, Sangiovanni, di San Giovanni, etc
The Giovanni are just plain silly.

Their name is Italian for "John" and does make that much sense as a surname. Some like di Giovanni or "Johnson" would make more sense.

They are a family of incestuous mobsters who practice necrophilia and necromancy. Seriously? These are supposed to be the vampire underworld's representatives for Italy?

Similar to how the Tremere were originally introduced with a monopoly over magic, the Giovanni were introduced with a monopoly over necromancy. Inevitably a bunch of other bloodlines were introduced with their own necromancy.

Their weakness has often been criticized as not much of a weakness for whatever reason. Essentially their kiss is really painful, and the rules for this have varied across editions. The translation guide didn't include a conversion, but the writer latter stated on TBP that their weakness was that their kiss left ugly painful black marks that took a while to heal.

Another conversion was officially published for Requiem previously, which was largely identical aside from playing up the necrophilia aspects (gross!) and tweaking the name to San Giovanni or "St. John" to highlight Church connections instead of mafia connections.

Ravnos
The Ravnos were originally introduced as awful Romani stereotypes, having illusion powers and a compulsion to commit crime. Later editions tried to downplay this, without actually changing it, while introducing supposed connections to Hindu mythology and demons and the veil of Maya and such.

They never received a Requiem conversion until the translation guide, but there were a few bloodlines with powers tied to sensory manipulation, crime or the Romani. The Duchagne could selectively deprive the senses of others, the Bohagande were nomads who could manipulate luck and chance, and the Daeva had a weakness which pressured them to indulge in excesses of behavior.

Requiem would also briefly introduce a family of Romani who were rescued from the Nazis by vampire scientists who were impressed by their survival rate. They were rewarded with supernatural powers gifted by the vampire scientists (formally the Ordo Dracul, founded by Dracula). Their backstory mocked the idea that Romani had supernatural powers (referencing that time that White Wolf tried to make Romani into a character class).

Requiem clans
Requiem introduced two clans of Daeva and Mekhet. Their names were specifically chosen to indicate a vague connection to Middle Eastern cultures.

Daeva
The Daeva were written to represent the vampire archetype of sex god. They share aspects of previous clans, such as the Bruja's hot-headedness, the Toreador's degeneracy, the Ravnos' compulsion, the Setite's sinfulness, etc. All of those clans were suggested as possible Daeva bloodlines in the translation guide. Their weakness is that they are prone to decadent excesses of behavior, although the rules for this have varied.

Honestly, I think reducing the bloodline bloat was a great idea. Unfortunately, Onyx Path can't keep them straight. Between editions their nickname has changed from "incubus/succubus" to "serpent" for no reason (other than maybe to suggest the Setite connection?) and their weakness changed from being generally decadent to specifically becoming addicted to anyone they bite more than once. I think that's a stupid change to make as a whole, rather than try to actually work at making their previous weakness more interesting if that was the intention.

Chronicles of Darkness 2e is pretty much a textbook case of the writers trying to fix problems that didn't exist, while ignoring actual problems. Most of the changes, in my opinion, centered on making Requiem more like Masquerade rather than trying to make it distinct. Which highlights the stupidity of maintaining two competing games with the same shtick rather than trying to synergize their strengths, but I digress...

Mekhet
The Mekhet have been described (reductionist, I might add) as "psychic ninjas." Their shtick is being mysterious and occult and such, which I didn't know was ever a vampire archetype but I guess we need to put those ideas somewhere. Like the Daeva, they share aspects of other clans like the Nosferatu's information gathering (the Mekhet are better at it because of auspex), the Tremere's and Giovanni's occultism, the Assamite's ninja skills, the Lasombra's inner darkness, etc.

The main problem with these guys is that White Wolf didn't do enough to make them interesting, at least not until very late in the first edition; not that it really mattered given the edition wars obscuring them completely. One book suggested that they were potentially obsessed with solving mysteries, but this never panned out even though that's a perfect plot hook for an occult conspiracy game.


Conclusion
All in all, no incarnation of the clans have ever been particularly good. The Masquerade clans were often silly, but several could have worked with better direction. Requiem tried to be archetypal and cut down on bloat but only really hit their goal near the end of first edition and then blasted away all their previous work and good will in the second edition, creating a second edition war while the first had never ended.

In my opinion, people are better off playing a different system such as Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows or Feed, then cherry-picking whatever they liked about the White Wolf games. The edition wars are stupid and the people who keep fighting them are psychotic manchildren. I say this as someone who previously fought the WoD/CoD edition war many years ago then only later realized everything White Wolf was always mediocre.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065271I've done research myself that doesn't confirm any of what you are saying. This sounds like simple propaganda. Requiem didn't ruin White Wolf. Even if they hadn't published it, their fate would have been the same. Interest in World of Darkness has been steadily declining ever since Google starting collecting data on trends. The video game Vampire: Bloodlines is more well known than the tabletop ever was.

Don't take this the wrong way but the information about Requiem is from here.

[video=youtube;1UMf8SgSH5A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UMf8SgSH5A[/youtube]

It's available on Fandango and is awesome.

It also says Requiem ruined Masquerade.

Which is bullshit because Requiem is awesome but that's the official documentary.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065271Quite honestly, I am surprised that World of Darkness doesn't have any significant competition in the urban fantasy market (not counting Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu). Every single competitor has eventually petered out. At least, if you are counting tabletop games. Online role-play is uncountable, and none of it relies on World of Darkness.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the actual market for urban fantasy just doesn't overlap very much with the TTRPG market.

My experience has been that a LOT of urban fantasy is just romance novels (teen or adult) with supernatural trappings and those who read them regularly are more likely to devote their creative energies to either fanfic (the ones who care about those particular fictional characters) or amateur writing (those with genuine creative drive). This becomes particularly apparent when you go look at the various fandom forums for the properties and find them to be 90+% female and the longest threads are about the particular shipping pairs rather than the actual plots of the episodes.

The World of Darkness got in ahead of the pack and pretty much sucked up the entire market share such that any competitor is basically going up against the D&D of that market (only its a MUCH smaller market than general heroic fantasy).

I think they hit that Anne Rice nail right on the head. 1e Vampire was Anne Rice with only a couple of numbers filed off. Usage of a lot of her terminology, the link to music and underground rock (Hello Lestat), and the allusion to a deeper darker history with scant details was complete riffage off of Anne Rice's then-trilogy.

Then all the movies hit - and then the recapitulation factor: when creators inspired from White Wolf clearly started trying to spin their own version - Underworld, I'd even say elements of Blade, Dresden Files etc.

There's definite crossover with fantasy gaming and that material - but the fantasy nobs don't really delve into the world of Goth clubs etc. which the game suddenly gave them some kind of license to co-opt the affectation without the actual experience.

Quote from: Chris24601;1065305If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the actual market for urban fantasy just doesn't overlap very much with the TTRPG market.

My experience has been that a LOT of urban fantasy is just romance novels (teen or adult) with supernatural trappings and those who read them regularly are more likely to devote their creative energies to either fanfic (the ones who care about those particular fictional characters) or amateur writing (those with genuine creative drive). This becomes particularly apparent when you go look at the various fandom forums for the properties and find them to be 90+% female and the longest threads are about the particular shipping pairs rather than the actual plots of the episodes.

The World of Darkness got in ahead of the pack and pretty much sucked up the entire market share such that any competitor is basically going up against the D&D of that market (only its a MUCH smaller market than general heroic fantasy).

Correction from an urban fantasy writer.

* Paranormal Romance is fucking weredeer and vampires

* Urban Fantasy is wizards blowing up shit and vampires killing people.

Quote from: tenbones;1065280Hell, Palladium Rifts was more conceptually rigorous than Vampire.

"Let that sink in."

Personally, I loved early Requiem 1e and Masquerade 1e. Both were awesome games that were ruined by later editions.

I want to run a 1E Requiem or 1E Masquerade game so badly to show that White Wolf can still be awesome when you divorce it from everything that happened from Revised Edition onward (or Requiem For Rome onward, in the case of Requiem)

BoxCrayonTales, your main complaint seems to be that many of the clans/bloodlines would be better represented as sects than as bloodlines.  If that is your point, then I agree. In D&D terms, it would be as if we were back in the days when Elf and Halfling were mechanically classes as much as races, whereas even in 5th Edition D&D there is room for multiclassing.

JG

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065296Don't take this the wrong way but the information about Requiem is from here.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065296It's available on Fandango and is awesome.

It also says Requiem ruined Masquerade.

Which is bullshit because Requiem is awesome but that's the official documentary.

Like I said, propaganda. Vampire is an extremely niche product.

Masquerade and Requiem are essentially the same game. A bunch of psychotic manchildren got upset about window dressing. They're equally terrible because it's White Wolf.

Quote from: Chris24601;1065305If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the actual market for urban fantasy just doesn't overlap very much with the TTRPG market.

My experience has been that a LOT of urban fantasy is just romance novels (teen or adult) with supernatural trappings and those who read them regularly are more likely to devote their creative energies to either fanfic (the ones who care about those particular fictional characters) or amateur writing (those with genuine creative drive). This becomes particularly apparent when you go look at the various fandom forums for the properties and find them to be 90+% female and the longest threads are about the particular shipping pairs rather than the actual plots of the episodes.

The World of Darkness got in ahead of the pack and pretty much sucked up the entire market share such that any competitor is basically going up against the D&D of that market (only its a MUCH smaller market than general heroic fantasy).

It doesn't sound like a growing market either. Given that the edition wars are still being fought over, including by the writers, I get the impression that most of the fans have been there a long time.

The fact that White Wolf's last set of writers thought the Chechnya passage was acceptable suggests a very deep rift between the game's intended audience and the modern market. It's completely in keeping with the way the books were written in the 90s, which should suggest something about the longevity of the game's appeal.

My analysis of the clans essentially being a grab bag of weirdness should have already made that clear. I don't see how the latest edition of the game is attractive to today's teens and young adults. There are a bazillion vampire-themed browser and mobile games that are better at getting their attention.

Quote from: tenbones;1065313I think they hit that Anne Rice nail right on the head. 1e Vampire was Anne Rice with only a couple of numbers filed off. Usage of a lot of her terminology, the link to music and underground rock (Hello Lestat), and the allusion to a deeper darker history with scant details was complete riffage off of Anne Rice's then-trilogy.

Then all the movies hit - and then the recapitulation factor: when creators inspired from White Wolf clearly started trying to spin their own version - Underworld, I'd even say elements of Blade, Dresden Files etc.

There's definite crossover with fantasy gaming and that material - but the fantasy nobs don't really delve into the world of Goth clubs etc. which the game suddenly gave them some kind of license to co-opt the affectation without the actual experience.

I don't think anybody took inspiration from White Wolf beyond the most superficial aspects, and even then none of the ideas that were recycled were unique or original to White Wolf. The concept of clans still remains unexplored territory, with only a few tabletop and video games ever exploring it, despite being pretty much the only thing that sets the White Wolf games apart from vampire fiction at large.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1065330Personally, I loved early Requiem 1e and Masquerade 1e. Both were awesome games that were ruined by later editions.

I want to run a 1E Requiem or 1E Masquerade game so badly to show that White Wolf can still be awesome when you divorce it from everything that happened from Revised Edition onward (or Requiem For Rome onward, in the case of Requiem)

I'm surprised to hear that. I was under the impression you hated Requiem.

I don't think the later editions strictly ruined things. They tried to fix perceived problems... while ignoring actual problems. While in some cases they did fix actual problems, in other cases the changes were unnecessary or not far enough. The real problem was that the writers sucked at designing crunch and fluff. The rules and setting didn't actually support the gameplay they wanted.

That's why I switched to different systems, ones written from the ground up to support particular gameplay like Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows or Feed, and cherry-picked what I liked from the White Wolf games.

Quote from: James Gillen;1065331BoxCrayonTales, your main complaint seems to be that many of the clans/bloodlines would be better represented as sects than as bloodlines.  If that is your point, then I agree. In D&D terms, it would be as if we were back in the days when Elf and Halfling were mechanically classes as much as races, whereas even in 5th Edition D&D there is room for multiclassing.

JG

Yep.

One of the things that Requiem tried to stress at some point, although it's difficult to tell because the writers never seem to know what they were doing, was that your bloodline was your adopted vampire family but not synonymous with your political affiliation, personality, beliefs, etc. You were a human being before you became a vampire and the bloodline chose to adopt you for whatever reason, but your bloodline doesn't define you.

The problem was that White Wolf has pretty much no understanding of actual politics so their political parties function like high school cliques instead. High school cliques function absolutely nothing like real political parties. They're vapid and lack any coherent ideology. Although that probably explains a lot about the game design as I've seen it, such as the lack of any political flowchart mechanics like you see in other games that focus on politics.

So, again, I switched to another system.

Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on, "It's propaganda because I can't imagine one person preferring one game over another because they both suck."

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065351Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on, "It's propaganda because I can't imagine one person preferring one game over another because they both suck."

That isn't what I said. I said that the statements "Masquerade is now selling as well as it did in the 90s peak" and "Requiem ruined Masquerade" are clearly propaganda. Even if the former statement is true (although I'm guessing it's using a highly flawed metric), then that means the 90s peak didn't actually sell all that much. What's more telling is that this is hearsay and the company doesn't release hard numbers.

I found no indication that Masquerade is more popular now than it was before the release of 4e or 5e. It's extremely niche and that hasn't changed. The Bloodlines video game is more well known and generated more interest during its initial release period.

Requiem might very well have made less money according to some (almost certainly biased) metric, or is generally less popular, but that's unrelated to its relative quality. The market at the time was already well into a huge decline and Requiem suffered simply because there wasn't much market for it and because of the asinine edition wars.

Let's think about this rationally. I see a lot of people parroting that White Wolf ended World of Darkness the first time because they had always promised to end with the apocalypse, but that's obviously nonsense. It was a marketing decision, the same as 3e, as revealed by a number of obscure interviews that have since been lost due to neglect or censorship. After the peak in the 90s, sales entered an inevitable decline and the marketing department didn't know the full extent so they decided to try reinventing the games twice to make up for flagging sales. Obviously this didn't work.

Chronicles of Darkness was created specifically to attract new audiences (assuming they existed, which is probably not much). The problem was that it alienated the existing audience. When the market is already as small and insular and toxic as it is, this isn't a good idea.

World of Darkness isn't geared for new audiences and isn't attractive to them because of the midwest 90s zeitgeist baked into it, as seen by the bazillion vampire online roleplay chats that don't use it at all and controversy it recently courted with its fictional conspiracy theories. It is being written for an insular, toxic, aging and shrinking community. The setting is quite stagnant aside from metaplot developments that don't really impact the status quo, as 4e and 5e have been little more than recapitulations of previous editions with minor rules revisions and in some cases have undone genuinely good rules revisions such as the 3e Ahrimanes replacing their spirit discipline with magic paths.

EDIT: The writers claiming that Requiem ruined Masquerade is extremely ironic, hypocritical and schizophrenic considering that V5 took massive cues from it. The metaplot has outright destroyed modern lines of communication between vampires and turned the cities into isolated enclaves, which is pretty much the same setup as Requiem. Blood potency has replaced generation, too. I could easily argue that V5 is essentially Requiem if Requiem tried to be a direct continuation of Masquerade.

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EDIT: I didn't want to double post, but I had this new passage to post.

I haven't talked about V5's rules and setting in particular, and that's because until recently I didn't actually bother to read it. I still haven't bought a copy to do a detailed analysis, but the online reviews have done a fair job of showing how much has changed. Which... isn't a lot, relatively speaking, but I'm sure it would be mind-blowing for those who still fight the edition wars.

Long story short, the new White Wolf took the 1e Chronicles of Darkness rules and made a few tweaks to it. Almost none of the mechanics are original: the systems for convictions, tenets, touchstones and humanity may easily be traced back to (IIRC) Requiem Chronicler's Guide and Blood & Smoke. There are a few ill-thought reversions and missteps, such as the mess of backgrounds, merits and flaws that had previously been cleaned up in CoD. (Mercifully, they ignored the ill-thought attempt to bolt FATE mechanics on in 2e CoD. I didn't like that, not because I'm a grognard but because CoD should have been rebuilt for it rather than the frankenstein mess we got.)

The wholly original innovation I have found so far is that they finally got rid of the absurd hierarchy structure of disciplines and now every level has multiple different powers you can select from. It took them effing long enough! While I doubt this will reduce the bloat of disciplines in general (that's the fault of exception-based systems), it should at least make them easier to organize and track. The alternate powers, combinations/devotions, discipline merits, rituals/threnodies, etc. in previous editions were pretty much a nightmare to keep track of.

What I found pretty ironic and hilarious is that V5 takes such huge cues from Requiem. Not just in terms of the rules, but also the setting. I found this ironic and hilarious because the writers and community have been constantly reigniting the edition wars and denigrating Requiem as ruining Masquerade and other nonsense, despite V5 using Requiem as its chassis. V5 severs the fast lines of communication between cities and turns them into largely isolated bastions similarly as Requiem did, except this is part of the metaplot. The alpha playtests even had more rules from Requiem that were tweaked and renamed in drafts, such as the Virtue/Vice mechanic for refreshing willpower. One could easily argue that V5 is essentially Requiem if it had tried to be a direction continuation of Masquerade; the premise sounds virtually identical to an old fanbook titled "Gehenna Age Vampire" which did exactly that.

For all intents and purposes, V5 is a new edition of both Requiem and Masquerade. What surprises me is that White Wolf hasn't forced Onyx Path to convert all their subsequent books to that system, even if Vampire is the prime money maker. Requiem and Masquerade are both perfectly serviceable as campaign settings to serve different tastes, and the same goes for the other games. I am genuinely curious to see whether White Wolf will do the same remixing with new editions of the other games like Werewolf, Mage, and the rest. That might be less likely since the rules divergences are generally more extreme compared to Requiem/Masquerade, but the discipline system revision makes it clear the writers have at least some idea of what they're doing. According to the promotional interviews from a while back they said they were planning to give all the splats unified rules and setting or something along those lines, although they never explained what that entailed.

Of course they might very well self-destruct if the recent controversy is any indication. Not that I'm particularly invested in their well-being. I'd be happier to see the already limited market open up after their destruction leaves a gaping power vacuum.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065349One of the things that Requiem tried to stress at some point, although it's difficult to tell because the writers never seem to know what they were doing, was that your bloodline was your adopted vampire family but not synonymous with your political affiliation, personality, beliefs, etc. You were a human being before you became a vampire and the bloodline chose to adopt you for whatever reason, but your bloodline doesn't define you.

The problem was that White Wolf has pretty much no understanding of actual politics so their political parties function like high school cliques instead. High school cliques function absolutely nothing like real political parties. They're vapid and lack any coherent ideology. Although that probably explains a lot about the game design as I've seen it, such as the lack of any political flowchart mechanics like you see in other games that focus on politics.

So, again, I switched to another system.

Their setup resembles real politics insofar as real politicians don't have much grasp of either ideology or the real world either.

(What games are you referring to that use flowcharts for political arrangements?)

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;1065508Their setup resembles real politics insofar as real politicians don't have much grasp of either ideology or the real world either.

(What games are you referring to that use flowcharts for political arrangements?)

JG

Any game with actual rules for politics, rather than leaving it up to vaguely-defined "roleplaying", inevitably requires flowcharts at some point because tracking politics gets difficult fast. Those I can name off the top of my head include Reign and Game of Thrones. I'm not an expert on this by any means.

EDIT: In other news, I remembered why I left the fandom years ago. Any kind of discussion in which someone tries to argue in favor of common sense gets dog-piled by autistic fanboys who irrationally hate change unless it is officially given approval by the company they support.

No joke. If you had argued for something like V5 before it came out, the fanboys would have burned you at the stake. The moment that White Wolf published it, their views turn 180 degrees.

I hate hypocritical zealots.

I dislike the current V20 iteration of the Giovanni. I found them much more interesting in 1st Ed, when it was implied in a few places that they were basically just a secret off-shoot of the Tremere, created to just be a money-making operation to support the clan. The effort to force each new clan into the Antedeluvian mix just made things way more broad and overdone than they needed to be.

Quote from: The Black Ferret;1065514I dislike the current V20 iteration of the Giovanni. I found them much more interesting in 1st Ed, when it was implied in a few places that they were basically just a secret off-shoot of the Tremere, created to just be a money-making operation to support the clan. The effort to force each new clan into the Antedeluvian mix just made things way more broad and overdone than they needed to be.

Don't forget that Gehenna revealed there were actually 23 clans or so.

I think Vampire went wrong when they decided there was a set number of clans. Or really, deciding all vampires were the same species except for those weird kuejin.

Doesn't help that the fanboys irrationally hate change most of the time, or hypocritically accept changes imposed by White Wolf due to perceived authority. Being forced into such an awful community due a lack of competition destroyed my interest in urban fantasy.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065509EDIT: In other news, I remembered why I left the fandom years ago. Any kind of discussion in which someone tries to argue in favor of common sense gets dog-piled by autistic fanboys who irrationally hate change unless it is officially given approval by the company they support.

Try convincing Exalted players to play Godbound.  They will fight you to the bitter end due to White Wolf/Onyx Path brainwashing.  Then act all amazed when they play Godbound because for the first time ever the rules were made to be understood by everyone who can read.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1065521Try convincing Exalted players to play Godbound.  They will fight you to the bitter end due to White Wolf/Onyx Path brainwashing.  Then act all amazed when they play Godbound because for the first time ever the rules were made to be understood by everyone who can read.

Preach my brother.

I inspired after watching Castlevania on Netflix to tweak the Tzimisce to "devil forgemasters" who use physical tools (anything from blacksmith tools to a box of crayons) to make their wamphyri warrior monsters. Good luck getting fanboys not to hate it.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065465Of course they might very well self-destruct if the recent controversy is any indication. Not that I'm particularly invested in their well-being. I'd be happier to see the already limited market open up after their destruction leaves a gaping power vacuum.

Yes I agree a power vacuum needs to happen.  Then a game that is free from and vigilant against the toxic community that brought down World of Darkness.  These assholes need to be replaced.

I was thinking more on my dislikes with the setting and I realized something rather simple.

Requiem reduced the clans in order to give more attention to each one. They tried give each clan unique sets of cool powers. You could criticize the execution, but that's definitely something lacking from Masquerade. Few of the seven Camarilla clans have unique discipline aptitudes, whereas all the other six do. Even the Bloodlines game gave each clan a unique advantage to set them apart more.

I'm frustrated with the arbitrary limitations that date back to Rein•Hagen. All clans are the same basic species, all have exactly three discipline aptitudes, all disciplines work the same, etc.

And the community hates any thought of trying to fix this, better organizing things, simplifying needlessly complicated rules, condensing the WoD and CoD brands, being creative at all, or really anything that sounds like common sense for any other game business.

It shouldn't be a surprise that I like D&D way more.

Here's the TV tropes page for 5th Edition I made.

If any of you guys like TV tropes.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/VampireTheMasqueradeFifthEdition

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065546Requiem reduced the clans in order to give more attention to each one. They tried give each clan unique sets of cool powers. You could criticize the execution, but that's definitely something lacking from Masquerade. Few of the seven Camarilla clans have unique discipline aptitudes, whereas all the other six do. Even the Bloodlines game gave each clan a unique advantage to set them apart more.

Not to mention their own weaknesses which Requiem 2.0 made better (shocking I know).  I really like that Ventrue's are just more detached from people instead of being insane as a example.  Not to mention each clan book brought more unique assets to each clan.  My favorite was the Nosferatu undercity builder with Mehket's mystery cults being second.  Requiem tried to make each clan unique.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1065568Not to mention their own weaknesses which Requiem 2.0 made better (shocking I know).  I really like that Ventrue's are just more detached from people instead of being insane as a example.  Not to mention each clan book brought more unique assets to each clan.  My favorite was the Nosferatu undercity builder with Mehket's mystery cults being second.  Requiem tried to make each clan unique.

I have loads to say about constructive criticism, but I have to disagree with you about the weaknesses.

Yes, some of the Requiem weaknesses were bland or poorly contextualized. That didn't justify changing all of them completely.

The new Daeva weakness is outright inferior because it forces extremely specific gameplay for what is supposed to be a vampire archetype.

The new Ventrue weakness completely ignores that the Humanity meter already measures the same thing. The original weakness was supposed to make them into Caligula but this was lost on most people due to the writers lacking a clear direction at the time.

A bigger problem was the whole derangement system in the first place, since it never made any sense even in Masquerade. In reality, people go insane for numerous reasons such as stress, genetics, disease and remorse. Yes, remorse causes mental illness, not the lack of it.

EDIT: This article outlines an alternative perspective on the weakness (https://www.robjustice.net/games/mechanics/vampire-the-requiem-alternate-clan-weaknesses/) that I feel is superior to Onyx Path's interpretation overall. Of course, that is a very low bar to be sure.

---

[/HR]

EDIT: I didn't get a chance to put this in my last post since I was typing on a phone with little time, but I wanted to go more into what I said about derangements being stupid. The Humanity mechanic is still fundamentally broken.

Masquerade developed Paths entirely to get around the inherent problems with the Humanity mechanic, namely that it punishes players for playing. 2e did the exact same thing by introducing touchstones (IIRC) that existed specifically to let you get away with violating Humanity tenets.

Requiem's actual toolkit books came up with a few different flavors on Humanity, such as atrocity dice which provided benefits for gaining them. 2e introduced the idea that you could lose Humanity by acting less human: using supernatural powers, joining monster conspiracies, etc. That is a very transhumanist way of thinking (and I saw the same idea presented on B.J. Zanzibar's archive from years before Chronicles of Darkness 1e was first published). (BTW, I vaguely remember reading homebrew which combined atrocity dice and humanity, having the traits act in opposition.)

Feed implemented the best Humanity mechanic that incorporates all this functionality without the arbitrary punishment of derangements. The basic assumption is that characters are struggling between humanity and vampirism, so all their traits fall into either human or vampire traits. There are a fixed number of traits on your sheet, so as you degenerate you replace human traits with vampire traits.

Putting that into Vampire would require rewriting the darn thing from the ground up because the fundamental assumptions, much less the basic task resolution mechanics, are so different. Short of that, the best I can think of on such short notice is to rewrite derangements to something other than arbitrary punishments. As I already said, the rule about not feeling remorse causing derangement is completely opposite to how human psychology works in reality. Perhaps characters could instead accumulate discipline derangements (introduced in Dark Ages: Vampire) to represent how their thought patterns are becoming less human and more vampire. Given that players are already conditioned to play their characters as monsters, since typical tabletop game characters are murderous hobos anyway, this would probably be a lot easier to roleplay too.

Do we honestly need derangements?

Quote from: Snowman0147;1065647Do we honestly need derangements?

I never thought so, but without them Humanity would have little effect except limiting social rolls with mortals IIRC.

To be quite honest I never saw the point of Humanity. It isn't really integrated with the rest of the rules. I could level the same complaint at all the similar mechanics in Chronicles of Darkness. I always felt that a light/dark side mechanic would have made more sense.

You could try retrofitting Feed's degeneration system onto the various dual sanity meters from Chronicles of Darkness but I can't predict whether they would be improved or not. Feed's system is built on the fundamental assumption that the characters struggle between two natures (in this case vampire and human) and that they MUST FEED, which may not necessarily translate well if other natures are applied instead. In fact, any human/monster dichotomy isn't functionally different from the basic human/vampire dichotomy and may be treated the same as seen in the 1989 Nightlife game in which loads of different monsters used the same humanity and feeding mechanics.

Where was I? Ah yes, attempting to retrofit the sanity meters... I'll be using the 2e versions since they started emphasizing duality in that edition which is easier to retrofit.

Werewolf: The Forsaken's harmony system seems to fit pretty well as a flesh/spirit dichotomy. The only difficulty is defining flesh and spirit traits as well as drawbacks of imbalance. In comparison to Feed, this is essentially like struggling between two different vampire natures rather than human and vampire natures. Not sure how you would apply it to Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

Mage: The Awakening's wisdom system is a scale between controlled and uncontrolled magic. On one side your use of magic is barely distinguishable from chance, whereas on the other side you are a Cthulhu mythos monster. Changeling: The Lost's clarity system is similar, except fairy themed.

At this point I think that Feed's degeneration system doesn't translate well. Each of these games would be better served by being rebuilt from the ground up to support their intended themes as Feed did for vampires, rather than forcing them to use the ST chassis to give the illusion of them being playable together or whatever silly reason is being used to justify using the inferior ST rules.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065603Requiem's actual toolkit books came up with a few different flavors on Humanity, such as atrocity dice which provided benefits for gaining them. 2e introduced the idea that you could lose Humanity by acting less human: using supernatural powers, joining monster conspiracies, etc. That is a very transhumanist way of thinking (and I saw the same idea presented on B.J. Zanzibar's archive from years before Chronicles of Darkness 1e was first published). (BTW, I vaguely remember reading homebrew which combined atrocity dice and humanity, having the traits act in opposition.)

There was already a Monster game that gave benefits for being "human" and reduced those benefits the more you used your powers.  It was called NightLife.

JG

Quote from: Snowman0147;1065524Yes I agree a power vacuum needs to happen.  Then a game that is free from and vigilant against the toxic community that brought down World of Darkness.  These assholes need to be replaced.

I think the best thing for this IP would be to be developed by a completely different company. To be fair these WoD games never had good writing style with stuff that is actually of practical use to me and they never had decent mechanics. They were only succesful because of the Zeitgeist and the incredible cool art style of Tim Bradstreet.

White Wolf Entertainment was brought down by the Chechen government.

Let's not pretend that this was the work of disgruntled fanboys complaining about idiocy like Alt-Right code and the use of the word "triggered."

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065659To be quite honest I never saw the point of Humanity. It isn't really integrated with the rest of the rules. I could level the same complaint at all the similar mechanics in Chronicles of Darkness. I always felt that a light/dark side mechanic would have made more sense.

To measure your level of control over the Beast before you go completely insane.

It's the SAN mechanic of Call of Cthulhu.

Except being a good person.

You're supposed to inevitably lose it but the journey is what matters.

Edit:

I did a TV tropes page for V5. So far it's gotten good response for explaining the difference between editions.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/VampireTheMasqueradeFifthEdition

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064410and a block of cement in the ocean being toxic to mermaids because it is literally too boring to let them exist.

That's hilarious.

Eat your heart out Hipster Ariel.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064410https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/13/18089574/vampire-the-masquerade-white-wolf-lgbtq-chechnya-apology

A Polygon link? Shame on you ;)

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064524Edgelord is being misused her, a bit like Mary Sue. You can say it's badly written but Edgelord means that something is trying to be shocking and edgy for the sake of being shocking and edgy. In this case, the Heirarchy of Wrath is like the Camarilla or Pentex.

They're the VILLAINS of the setting.

It's like saying a game set in the Galactic Empire or a resistance in Mordor is edgelord.

The whole reason there's a society of slavers and soul-forgers is because it's meant to give the PCs something to oppose. You might be right it was too depressing for the setting but I'm just saying that wasn't the goal.

It's apparent at this point that many of the most obnoxious fans don't get this concept at all, or need it to be spelled out to be sure they're not contributing economically to the wrong people.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064524I spent two hours talking to Mark Rein Hagen about how fans have been harassing the poor guy because he's a pacifist who supports peaceful resistance to Neo-Nazis--and he's being harrassed by the anti-Nazis.

And people are still calling him a Nazi outright on #Reddit.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064524But every fandom on the internet has some real shitty people. I can't think of any that doesn't and it's the job of the community to police them as free speech should end when it involves actively threatening and ruining lives.

Problem is it's the toxic people who are doing the policing.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064577Generally, I've found religious people much more likely to do charity and work better for their fellow man.

Almost as if religion wasn't a universal good or evil.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064524But I'm going to forward an AMAZING IDEA that maybe the assholes on the internet aren't the best people to judge a fandom's community by. STAR WARS, WHITE WOLF, or THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

The representatives online are the loudest, not the largest body of a group.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064580Actually, you have Movement of the Mind which most people use for Lost Boys levitation and flight.

Not anymore.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064859In any case, World of Darkness captured that extremely specific cultural zeitgeist and doesn't really work outside of that. Chronicles of Darkness was an attempt to market the same basic ideas to a broader audience.

The problem here is that there wasn't much of a broader audience.

Well there might have been, but WW had no way of reaching them.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064859The of Darkness games have had two (maybe three) video games, one short-lived television show (and a few dozen self-published fiction books, card games, board games, and other merchandise). I don't see that as an indicator of popularity relative to the competition.

To be fair, the Vampire series was actually pretty good, and only died because one of the principle actors did. And Bloodlines is immensely popular, and perhaps second only to Planescape Torment in that regard.

The problem isn't the license, it's the management.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064859The edition wars are asinine in the extreme and the company makes itself look like manchildren by joining in.

Agreed.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064859World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness are not fundamentally different.

The former focuses on setting while the latter on themes.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064859Vampire isn't designed to emulate any existing vampire fiction, besides its own idiosyncratic setting.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1064859That's the entire reason I was interested in Feed. The author wrote it as a direct response to Vampire's limitations, and it shows.

Ron Edwards wrote Sorcerer for exactly the same reasons.

Quote from: rgalex;1064873Well, chalk another up for the censors.

https://www.white-wolf.com/newsblog/a-message-from-white-wolf

To be fair this did cause an honest to god international incident.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1064879The Chechnyan government, I shit you not, were using it to claim the West were using propaganda to frame the country for atrocities.

And the White Wolf distributors in Russia were threatened with jail time.

Not to mention a certain author lives in Russia.

It's funny how WW managed to offend both the oppressed and their oppressors at the same time.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065296It also says Requiem ruined Masquerade.

Which is bullshit because Requiem is awesome but that's the official documentary.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065465The writers claiming that Requiem ruined Masquerade is extremely ironic, hypocritical and schizophrenic considering that V5 took massive cues from it. The metaplot has outright destroyed modern lines of communication between vampires and turned the cities into isolated enclaves, which is pretty much the same setup as Requiem. Blood potency has replaced generation, too. I could easily argue that V5 is essentially Requiem if Requiem tried to be a direct continuation of Masquerade.

I love how much WW respects their own developers by trashing their work and then building off it.

Seriously, who would work for these assholes?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065349The problem was that White Wolf has pretty much no understanding of actual politics so their political parties function like high school cliques instead.

That's also a feature, not a bug.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1065349High school cliques function absolutely nothing like real political parties. They're vapid and lack any coherent ideology.

I how I wish this were true.

I am a crazy Leftist but yes, there's some genuine goddamn stupid in tone policing.

I believe you can write shitty game supplements and stuff that's offensive to real people. I believe in the Century RuleTM that if you're going to make a real life event into a supernatural one, you should wait until everyone involved is dead.

HOWEVER, I point out its goddamn ironic that VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE which has had REAL LIFE FANS imprisoned by the local rednecks and shitty urban suburban police out of suspicion they're Satanists or killers is suddenly a group complaining about tone.

And again, calling Mark Rein Hagen a Nazi.

Again, pro-gay pacifist in a country where either can get you jail time.

I know real Nazis, they're shitty people who kill gays and beat you to death if you try to confront them. They're not people you bully on a hyperbole argument on the internet. Fuck both of those guys (albeit the Nazis more).

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065834Again, pro-gay pacifist in a country where either can get you jail time.

.

Ok, I need a reality check here. How exactly does a country work where it just up and jails random pacifists for the crime of... being a pacifist?  

"I'm sorry, Mr Rein-hagen, but you see, we had a report yesterday that you refused to fight your neighbor Bob, who was drunk, over a parking spot. We simply cannot have that sort of lack of misbehavior here!"

Why do I suspect 'definition creep'?

Quote from: Spike;1065852Ok, I need a reality check here. How exactly does a country work where it just up and jails random pacifists for the crime of... being a pacifist?  

"I'm sorry, Mr Rein-hagen, but you see, we had a report yesterday that you refused to fight your neighbor Bob, who was drunk, over a parking spot. We simply cannot have that sort of lack of misbehavior here!"

Why do I suspect 'definition creep'?

Political sedition, accusations of being a foreign agent, and so on.

Given Russia invaded the country in 2008, saying that it's wrong to fight people is an unpopular stance.

[Mark Rein hagen lives in Georgia, not the United States and was evacuated as a refugee briefly during the 2008 invasion]

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065888Political sedition, accusations of being a foreign agent, and so on.

Given Russia invaded the country in 2008, saying that it's wrong to fight people is an unpopular stance.

[Mark Rein hagen lives in Georgia, not the United States and was evacuated as a refugee briefly during the 2008 invasion]

Absolutely none of that has anything at all to do with persecution of people for Pacifism, which is what you said was one cause of his persecution.  Its a damn loopy thing to say, which is why I called it out.

While any number of self-proclaimed pacifists have been persecuted through history, I'll be damned if I can think of a single one who was persecuted FOR their pacifism, possibly excepting conscientious objectors in time of war...

Quote from: Spike;1065892Absolutely none of that has anything at all to do with persecution of people for Pacifism, which is what you said was one cause of his persecution.  Its a damn loopy thing to say, which is why I called it out.

While any number of self-proclaimed pacifists have been persecuted through history, I'll be damned if I can think of a single one who was persecuted FOR their pacifism, possibly excepting conscientious objectors in time of war...

It has nothing to do with persecution for pacifism except for possibly being arrested because of the actions taken because of his pacifism.

Gotcha.

I'm not disagreeing with you but it seems like a distinction without difference.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065894It has nothing to do with persecution for pacifism except for possibly being arrested because of the actions taken because of his pacifism.

Gotcha.

I'm not disagreeing with you but it seems like a distinction without difference.

Not at all.  Ghandi was a pacifist, but only an idiot would claim he was persecuted for his pacifism and not his agitation for an independent India.  Dr Martin Luther King was a pacifist and only an idiot would claim he was persecuted for his pacifism and not his agitation for civil rights for blacks.

If Rein-Hagen was persecuted for in Georgia it almost certainly wasn't BECAUSE he is a pacifist.  Claiming he was is most likely due to sloppy thinking, or perhaps a bit of misdirection... let me go back to your first sentence here.

Assume that R-H is being persecuted because he, an immigrant or (more likely) a foreign national (expat?) decided to protest Russian military actions in Georgia.  Never mind the damned arrogance of a guest or recent immigrant telling the hosts how to run their country (treat it like an informal version of your century rule. Yes, Russia shouldn't invade Georgia, but we're talking principles not pragmatism. I don't tell the Scottish people if they should vote independence from England, and while I support Brexit (as an example), I don't DO (not even on the internet) anything because its not my circus, not my monkey.)

He still isn't, in this case, being persecuted for his pacifism. He's being persecuted for agitation against the occupying forces. Pacifism is a side show... unless he moved to Georgia TO protest the violence there, moving around the globe to various 'hot spots' to protest violence, waving placards and chanting nursery rhymes against violence at UFC matches and Football games. THEN I might expect to claim his pacifism was the primary cause of persecution.   Strangely, not a single one of the many millions of self-proclaimed pacifists in the world seems to be doing that...

Okay.

:thumbs up:

Edit:

That's not sarcasm by the way.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065940Okay.

:thumbs up:

Dismissive attitude to anything that contradicts his statement.  Yeah, about what to expect.  You keep shuffling those goalposts, we'll be here wondering what the hubbub about a near 30 year old game with almost no audience as people are mostly over Vampires now.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1065962with almost no audience as people are mostly over Vampires now.

That just means the Masquerade is getting stronger!:p

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1065962Dismissive attitude to anything that contradicts his statement.  Yeah, about what to expect.  You keep shuffling those goalposts, we'll be here wondering what the hubbub about a near 30 year old game with almost no audience as people are mostly over Vampires now.

Your post would be a lot more biting if it didn't rely on the premise that I'm not being 100% sincere.

Dude made his case.

The people involved are not being arrested for their pacifism but actions related to it.

He is correct.

So, what are we discussing about Vampire: The Masquerade?

Quote from: CTPhipps;1065940Okay.

:thumbs up:

Edit:

That's not sarcasm by the way.

Accepted, with my apology for coming on strong. I prefer a certain precision in language AND I find that pacifism is often bandied about far to casually as evidence of inherent goodness, to which I would quote Mills but frankly I'm past my bedtime and I've derailed enough.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1065795That's a feature, not a bug.

There's a reason why D&D is so much more popular, beyond starting off with a simple formula of "adventure!". It throws a bazillion things from across fantasy fiction into a blender and in some editions includes rules for becoming a feudal lord and even a deity. Magic-users can do everything that fictional magic-users can do and more besides. It encourages creativity, most of the time.

Vampire, despite the name, ignores the majority of vampire fiction. You aren't allowed to learn all the cool things you see fictional vampires doing, not without jumping through hoops and accumulating filler powers if at all. You can't play an emotional vampire, a vampire who isn't photosensitive, a vampire who feeds using a disgusting mosquito-like siphon, etc. without homebrew.

All of the creative elements are stolen from other vampire fiction like Necroscope and 3x3 Eyes. But everything past 1991 is ignored, even though vampire fiction has come a long way (even before then). There's a tvtropes page for the diversity of vampires in fiction (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurVampiresAreDifferent).

Vampire is arbitrarily limited. That's frustrating and can easily turn away people who are familiar with vampire fiction, or simply read that tvtropes page, because it doesn't try to meet their basic expectations of how diverse vampires can be.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066085There's a reason why D&D is so much more popular, beyond starting off with a simple formula of "adventure!". It throws a bazillion things from across fantasy fiction into a blender and in some editions includes rules for becoming a feudal lord and even a deity. Magic-users can do everything that fictional magic-users can do and more besides. It encourages creativity, most of the time.

Vampire, despite the name, ignores the majority of vampire fiction. You aren't allowed to learn all the cool things you see fictional vampires doing, not without jumping through hoops and accumulating filler powers if at all. You can't play an emotional vampire, a vampire who isn't photosensitive, a vampire who feeds using a disgusting mosquito-like siphon, etc. without homebrew.

All of the creative elements are stolen from other vampire fiction like Necroscope and 3x3 Eyes. But everything past 1991 is ignored, even though vampire fiction has come a long way (even before then). There's a tvtropes page for the diversity of vampires in fiction (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurVampiresAreDifferent).

Vampire is arbitrarily limited. That's frustrating and can easily turn away people who are familiar with vampire fiction, or simply read that tvtropes page, because it doesn't try to meet their basic expectations of how diverse vampires can be.

You keep saying this but Vampire: The Masquerade is by far the second most popular tabletop game of all time with a huge cultural influence and massive present-day following.

So, I don't get what you're trying to say here.

"A ridiculously famous, well loved, and incredibly popular game that influenced movies, video games, and fashion isn't quite as popular as it could be if it was more generic?"

I mean, its less popular than D&D but more popular than any D&D setting ever was.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1066229You keep saying this but Vampire: The Masquerade is by far the second most popular tabletop game of all time with a huge cultural influence and massive present-day following.

Citation needed.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1066238Citation needed.

You have no idea do you how much people love Vampire: The Masquerade, do you?

* Arcane Magazine ranked it the 6th most popular RPG of all time, which I call bullshit on. It's more popular than Traveller but is at least above Shadow Run and Star Wars.
https://www.listchallenges.com/arcane-magazine-best-50-role-playing-games
* The fact Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines sold a 1.5 million copies AFTER its initial failure and is considered now to be one of the all time best games ever made.
* They hired Tim Bradstreet to do the look of Blade and redesigned the chaarcters' backstory as well as society around V:TM for the three movies.
* The Underworld movies.
* The writers of True Blood have explained they were huge V:TM fans and incorporated elements in later seasons.
* It was inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame in 2007
* The fact it was a mainstream show on Fox and almost got a Showtime deal. We haven't see that for D&D.
* The Mind's Eye Sociey is one of numerous global branches still carrying on.
* It produced 130 novels across multiple game lines, some of which were best sellers.

I mean, seriously, what are you talking about like Vampire isn't huge and has always been huge?

FYI -

If you ever wanted to get into V5E then now's the time because you can buy a copy of the main book or its PDF and have it count toward the Chicago by Night Kickstarter now.

So the rules and a setting in one order.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/chicago-by-night-for-vampire-the-masquerade-5th-ed/description

Quote from: CTPhipps;1066243You have no idea do you how much people love Vampire: The Masquerade, do you?

* Arcane Magazine ranked it the 6th most popular RPG of all time, which I call bullshit on.

I call bullshit on using 20 year-old sources from a single non-random sampling and calling it meaningful: "In 1996, Arcane magazine polled it's readers to find what they considered the 50 best RPGs ever. This list replicates them in rank order." Note that there is nothing given about response return rates or any demographics other than "readers" which tells us almost nothing. I played the hell out of RPGs in the 1990s and I never even heard of Arcane magazine, so it's hardly a great sample.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1066245I call bullshit on using 20 year-old sources from a single non-random sampling and calling it meaningful: "In 1996, Arcane magazine polled it's readers to find what they considered the 50 best RPGs ever. This list replicates them in rank order." Note that there is nothing given about response return rates or any demographics other than "readers" which tells us almost nothing. I played the hell out of RPGs in the 1990s and I never even heard of Arcane magazine, so it's hardly a great sample.

Agreed. I'm trying to find new data to show how much more popular the game is now. However, the argument is weird that V:TM was NEVER popular and that's fucking bizarre.

Frankly, it's long since surpassed that period and gone to much greater heights.

However, my internet search fu is not as strong as it could be. I'd love some help with more recent polling data to show how much of a gargatuan success this game is.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1066247Agreed. I'm trying to find new data to show how much more popular the game is now. However, the argument is weird that V:TM was NEVER popular and that's fucking bizarre.

I can anecdotally agree that it was very popular in my locale during the mid-late 90s. I can also say it's been an almost total non-entity in the area for the last 10 years. I can't speak beyond that.

On the other hand, their big Chicago by Night Kickstarter looks to be peaking at about 20% of what the recent Savage Worlds Adventure Edition pulled in.

Apples and oranges? Probably. But I can't help but think that the old enthusiasm has dwindled.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1066247Agreed. I'm trying to find new data to show how much more popular the game is now. However, the argument is weird that V:TM was NEVER popular and that's fucking bizarre.

Frankly, it's long since surpassed that period and gone to much greater heights.

However, my internet search fu is not as strong as it could be. I'd love some help with more recent polling data to show how much of a gargatuan success this game is.

All my research indicates that it is niche. I checked google trends, market reports, and app user statistics. You are clearly cherry-picking and ignoring historical context.

The Bloodlines game got a ride from Valve and the dev team behind Planescape Torment. The setting has nothing to do with its success. Starcraft has a great setting but the story is crap.

Rifts has sold more than 2 million copies of its core rulebook. GURPS 4E sold more than a million.

Vampire is not the second most popular RPG.

It was very popular in the mid 90's but it hasn't been that way 20 years. Vampire today has no market power, like Rifts.

OPP is like Palladium. Pathfinder is the second most popular rpg and it's a D&D hack.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1066243You have no idea do you how much people love Vampire: The Masquerade, do you?

I mean, seriously, what are you talking about like Vampire isn't huge and has always been huge?

Not presently.  In fact, they've been stripped down to two people in an office says a lot of it's current popularity.  You were speaking of it's popularity in present tense, and that's demonstratively false, given that most of your information is almost 20 years old, it's heyday.

I don't know if the game was popular, but I know that LARPing was, especially among the creepers.

From my personal experience with the Vampire RPGs (and its various spin offs).
It was HUGE in the 90s (at least as popular as DnD) but died off a LOT by the 2000s

It was my goto game in the 90s... Most people who I knew into RPGs at the time either played it and/or or Werewolf, Mage and the various flavors of the Vampire RPGs. Often, they played all of them.

Now, I don't know anyone who plays it anymore or any of those White Wolf games.

I don't see any of the Vampire stuff in RPG stores and rarely even 2nd hand in any prominent place either.

Quote from: CTPhipps;1066229"A ridiculously famous, well loved, and incredibly popular game that influenced movies, video games, and fashion isn't quite as popular as it could be if it was more generic?"

I mean, its less popular than D&D but more popular than any D&D setting ever was.

Except none of that statement is true.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE influenced movies, video games and fashion.  Vampire just ripped it off.

That is certainly more accurate imo.

There are other big modern "vampire mythos" writers out there - Brian Lumley looms pretty big for me in this regard. But Interview (and the next two books) really set the bar. Honestly... if I wanted to *really* argue it... I might say 'The Vampire Lestat' was really where the ideas of Interview took off. Either way - the cart doesn't come before the horse.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1066738Except none of that statement is true.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE influenced movies, video games and fashion.  Vampire just ripped it off.

Preach.

jg

Quote from: tenbones;1066775That is certainly more accurate imo.

There are other big modern "vampire mythos" writers out there - Brian Lumley looms pretty big for me in this regard. But Interview (and the next two books) really set the bar. Honestly... if I wanted to *really* argue it... I might say 'The Vampire Lestat' was really where the ideas of Interview took off. Either way - the cart doesn't come before the horse.

Necroscope is extremely obscure.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1066738Except none of that statement is true.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE influenced movies, video games and fashion.  Vampire just ripped it off.

There are at least 3 Vampire the Masquerade videogames (one of them extremelly well regarded by critics) and no Interview with the Vampire ones. So let's not exaggerate here.

I guess the good, the bad, and the ugly didnt influence westerns as much as Wild Arms, theres like a whole series of wild arms video games.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1066738Except none of that statement is true.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE influenced movies, video games and fashion.  Vampire just ripped it off.

It added conspiracies to the mix. I always saw Vampire as one part Anne Rice and another part dark superhero comic. The right game at the right time with the popularity of the  Vampire Diaries, Interview with the Vampire, Spawn, the Punisher, Highlander, but also music videos by Nine Inch Nails and Tool for example. Dark was cool in movies, comics and on MTV and it remained cool through the 90's with Blade, the Crow, Marilyn Manson etc. Vampire hit the Zeitgeist on the head with a Ricean game with art from Tim Bradstreet. It never was a very good system nor was it written in a concise and clear manner. But I love it anyway, because I am a 90's kid and I still love all the dark, gritty stuff I liked back then.

Quote from: Itachi;1067299There are at least 3 Vampire the Masquerade videogames (one of them extremelly well regarded by critics) and no Interview with the Vampire ones. So let's not exaggerate here.

That has nothing to do with the fact that V:TM was a lackluster ripoff.  The fact that it was easier to license than Anne Rice's products doesn't change his statement.

And given that Lestat is still the modern benchmark everyone uses for Vampires, puts your statement to a lie.

Quote from: Slambo;1067322I guess the good, the bad, and the ugly didnt influence westerns as much as Wild Arms, theres like a whole series of wild arms video games.

I laughed! :D Know at least one person got it. :p

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1067406It added conspiracies to the mix. I always saw Vampire as one part Anne Rice and another part dark superhero comic. The right game at the right time with the popularity of the  Vampire Diaries, Interview with the Vampire, Spawn, the Punisher, Highlander, but also music videos by Nine Inch Nails and Tool for example. Dark was cool in movies, comics and on MTV and it remained cool through the 90's with Blade, the Crow, Marilyn Manson etc. Vampire hit the Zeitgeist on the head with a Ricean game with art from Tim Bradstreet. It never was a very good system nor was it written in a concise and clear manner. But I love it anyway, because I am a 90's kid and I still love all the dark, gritty stuff I liked back then.

Technically, Anne Rice's books had implications of conspiracies even if they weren't the main focus. For example, when Lestat slips vampire secrets into his songs, the secret vampire conspiracies send assassins after him.

The Arcanum is obviously a rip-off of the Talamasca.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1067437That has nothing to do with the fact that V:TM was a lackluster ripoff.  The fact that it was easier to license than Anne Rice's products doesn't change his statement.

And given that Lestat is still the modern benchmark everyone uses for Vampires, puts your statement to a lie.

That's putting it mildly. Dracula and to a lesser degree Lestat are the benchmark. VTM is a ripoff of every preceding vampire fiction you could care to name, which is exemplified by each clan ripping off particular vampire stories: brujas are The Lost Boys, gangrels are 80s b-movie vampires, toreadors are lestat, ventrus are Dracula, nosferatus are Nosferatu, malkavians are Nicholas Cage in Vampire's Kiss, tremere are immigrants from Ars Magica, tzimisce are Necroscope's wamphyri, and... well, the remaining clans are basically just weird random ideas with vampires tacked on. The la sombra are shadow puppet SFX, the assamites are the historical assassins, giovanni is a mess of Italian caricatures and weird incest and necrophilia stuff tacked on, the setites are based on "Set" from the Conan the Barbarian stories, and the ravnos are offensive Romani caricatures.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1067443I laughed! :D Know at least one person got it. :p

Im glad someone did.

Quote from: Christopher BradyThat has nothing to do with the fact that V:TM was a lackluster ripoff. The fact that it was easier to license than Anne Rice's products doesn't change his statement.

Don't forget one of the biggest things in VtM is the ideology-based character splats, and that has nothing to do with the movie. It was such a success that even spilled back in D&D (see Planescape). So it's safe to say that it had it's share of merits.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1067406It added conspiracies to the mix. I always saw Vampire as one part Anne Rice and another part dark superhero comic. The right game at the right time with the popularity of the  Vampire Diaries, Interview with the Vampire, Spawn, the Punisher, Highlander, but also music videos by Nine Inch Nails and Tool for example. Dark was cool in movies, comics and on MTV and it remained cool through the 90's with Blade, the Crow, Marilyn Manson etc. Vampire hit the Zeitgeist on the head with a Ricean game with art from Tim Bradstreet. It never was a very good system nor was it written in a concise and clear manner. But I love it anyway, because I am a 90's kid and I still love all the dark, gritty stuff I liked back then.

This. :)

Quote from: Itachi;1067513Don't forget one of the biggest things in VtM is the ideology-based character splats, and that has nothing to do with the movie. It was such a success that even spilled back in D&D (see Planescape). So it's safe to say that it had it's share of merits.


This. :)

Interview with a vampire is a novel, the movie was an adaptation.

Oh cool, I didn't know that.

Quote from: Itachi;1067513Don't forget one of the biggest things in VtM is the ideology-based character splats, and that has nothing to do with the movie. It was such a success that even spilled back in D&D (see Planescape). So it's safe to say that it had it's share of merits.


This. :)

Planescape ultimately failed commercially and Wizards never brought it back except as part of the implied setting used by the books that were not explicitly Forgotten Realms or Eberron. FR is the only setting that receives much attention in the present. Everything else is consigned to the DM's Guild.

So having a dozen high school cliques is by no means a recipe for success. Also, most of those cliques are based on specific vampire movies as I stated earlier. Those not based on existing vampire movies were generally caricatures.

Well, I didn't say ideological splats were guaranteed success. Just that it worked so well for Vampire (and WoD in general) that even D&D tried to copy it.

Quote from: Itachi;1067614Well, I didn't say ideological splats were guaranteed success. Just that it worked so well for Vampire (and WoD in general) that even D&D tried to copy it.

Most recently in Ravnica. I was getting attracted to the setting for a short while (about a week or two) before I realized that the various guilds are like WW splats and that PC groups with multiple guilds are bound to make the same kind of crap situations that I disliked from WW.

Quote from: Itachi;1067513Don't forget one of the biggest things in VtM is the ideology-based character splats, and that has nothing to do with the movie. It was such a success that even spilled back in D&D (see Planescape). So it's safe to say that it had it's share of merits.

This. :)

The splats are cool and have attitude. The were something new and different at the time. The game has style. You hardly ever see an RPG with art that oozes so much atmosphere as the old WoD and has such a unique style. I can only think of Shadows of Esteren or Streets of Bedlam in terms of mood and style.

As much as I love the style of the games I really don't like the practical use of it. Bad crossover (even in the new WoD), all the rules are spread out over a ridiculous amount of books, badly organised, not that easy to hack and change it to your taste, throwing buckets of dice, a bit handwavy sometimes. And that is just the system. The writing style is horrendous for non-native speakers, the pretention goes through the roof, a lot (and I mean a lot) of padding, the stacking of metaphor, not providing a lot of practical advice that you actually use, the worst gamemaster advice ever about how to run a campaign or quest with it's focus writing a theme, mood and story-arc in advance.

In short I love the style, but I dislike the substance. For me a near perfect game is something like Covert Ops or Silent Legions.

The only place where ideology-based groups worked for me was Gamma World.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1068681The only place where ideology-based groups worked for me was Gamma World.

And why is that?

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1068761And why is that?

Probably because it was all done with a strong dose of the absurd.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri remains the best game for me where players choose between ideology-based factions.

Quote from: Itachi;1069413Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri remains the best game for me where players choose between ideology-based factions.

I've heard it's good, but I'm not a computer gamer.