Thanks for that list.

So I wrapped up my Heroic RPG testing with my group (good rules, it's great, buy it) and my group and I were batting around ideas of what to play or pick up on an old campaign.

One of the ideas was a Savage Worlds World of Darkness game. And literally *all* the arguments everyone has made here was condensed into a five-hour booze-rant between myself and my crew. The issue is Savage Worlds could easily handle doing WoD with a cleaner set of mechanics... but with all that work required, my contention is that if I'm going to spend all that time translating WoD to Savage Worlds (which would be great for Savage Worlds fans) I'd simply rather design my own game and publish it, using all those elements.

I've done a few templates of WoD Vampires and Werewolves, and did some mockups of Mages, and it passed our sniff tests (but do require some playtesting). So I'm absolutely sure it would work after some testing and tweaking. The real question is: why use WoD at all and not just make an entirely new setting and mythos? Yes, obviously that's a higher bar, but y'know, as we've established in this thread, WoD is a circlejerk of epic proportions.

Alas, we settled on playing Rifts (which I'm going to make a thread on), but the Savage WoD concept is haunting us.

I think Everlasting had the right idea by making the default PCs Immortals who actually lived through history. Thus, the various events of the secret history would actually be personally relevant to them, a la Nick Knight or MacLeod.

The problem is that establishing a PC's secret history is very time consuming, especially if you do it at character creation. It would be very intimidating to beginner players.

I think one way to handle it is to allow PCs to recall their past lives during play, rather than establishing them at character creation. This could be represented as the PC being an amnesiac who gradually remembers their lives, or it could be framed as that information not being relevant until later in the campaign.

The Mythos *IS* what one of the primary driving forces of WoD is... Whether it's Classic World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness.... Chronicles was much more open ended with it's Mythos, but it still (especially by 2nd edition) had a Mythos.

It's enough as to why 5th edition sells poorer than 4th/20th edition does. Paradox rewrote large portions of the mythos in the name of DEI....

That's really the main thing here... There are lots of games you can play Monsters in. Every Superhero game by default can easily be reskinned towards it...

But that's the thing.... All Vampires being descended from Caine is fucking cool and evocative.
Werewolves being the immune system of the Earth is also cool.

Chronicles of Darkness made Vampires origins more mukry but it still had very The Clans and the Covenants which were what gave players something to sink their teeth into.

People didn't love WoD just because they got to play a Vampire or a Werewolf, they loved it because they were a VENTRUE Vampire or a Get of Fenris Werewolf.

I remember Nightlife was a contemporary of WoD's but never took off as much partially because it's system was ten times more obtuse, but partially because it was a Monster Mash as well... It had a ton of different Monster types but not a lot of Lore inherent to those individual Monsters.

Onyx Path's new game is a "Monster Mash" but even then they're still making the Lineages and Families distinct with their own lore and origins and mysteries to dive into.

That's a blind spot I'm seeing in this discussion. Making up your own Monster Mythos is going to be the hardest part of a WoD alternative, not the system.

Quote from: Orphan81 on June 28, 2024, 12:34:36 PMThe Mythos *IS* what one of the primary driving forces of WoD is... Whether it's Classic World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness.... Chronicles was much more open ended with it's Mythos, but it still (especially by 2nd edition) had a Mythos.

It's enough as to why 5th edition sells poorer than 4th/20th edition does. Paradox rewrote large portions of the mythos in the name of DEI....

That's really the main thing here... There are lots of games you can play Monsters in. Every Superhero game by default can easily be reskinned towards it...

But that's the thing.... All Vampires being descended from Caine is fucking cool and evocative.
Werewolves being the immune system of the Earth is also cool.

Chronicles of Darkness made Vampires origins more mukry but it still had very The Clans and the Covenants which were what gave players something to sink their teeth into.

People didn't love WoD just because they got to play a Vampire or a Werewolf, they loved it because they were a VENTRUE Vampire or a Get of Fenris Werewolf.

I remember Nightlife was a contemporary of WoD's but never took off as much partially because it's system was ten times more obtuse, but partially because it was a Monster Mash as well... It had a ton of different Monster types but not a lot of Lore inherent to those individual Monsters.

Onyx Path's new game is a "Monster Mash" but even then they're still making the Lineages and Families distinct with their own lore and origins and mysteries to dive into.

That's a blind spot I'm seeing in this discussion. Making up your own Monster Mythos is going to be the hardest part of a WoD alternative, not the system.

I do buy all that. You want to have something like that. But the level of Lore in WoD games drives me insane and makes it hard to GM. Player's who are into it have tons of "knowledge" (often contradictory) so nearly anything I try to do in the game is constrained by all this.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on June 28, 2024, 02:17:17 PMI do buy all that. You want to have something like that. But the level of Lore in WoD games drives me insane and makes it hard to GM. Player's who are into it have tons of "knowledge" (often contradictory) so nearly anything I try to do in the game is constrained by all this.

So, I'm not trying to convert you or convince you to use WoD here. If you don't like the system or the lore, than obviously you should use something else.

All that being said though.... It's important to remember the Whitewolf "Golden Rule" and that's... the Storyteller is always right... throw out what you don't like and use what you do. The lore should be a tool, not a straight jacket.

It's supposed to be YOUR World of Darkness in the end... so for example if you decide the Ventrue as a Clan have been completely wiped out... You've decided it, that's how it is.

I don't know if you have any of the 20th Anniversary Books, but if you *ARE* interested in the World of Darkness and you don't... Those are the books to use. They present pretty much every highlight of The Metaplot and how to include it or ignore parts of it in every core book.

They're *very* new player/storyteller friendly in that aspect without getting lost in the reeds.

But at the end of the day, like I said, I don't want it to seem like I'm trying to tell you your wrong or how you should play.

I obviously very much like World of Darkness. I like it's system and the 20th anniversary books are my go to... I ignore everything 5th edition.

The mythos was never a driving force outside of the lore nerds and the terminally online who never actually played the game. WoD wouldn't have struggled against D&D if people played it for the lore.

Making up your own mythos for an urban fantasy game set on Earth is easy. You have the entirety of myth, folklore and literature to draw from. It's just the fantasy genre, except set on Earth.

But I don't want a mythos. I want a game that lets you make your own setting. That is designed to do so specifically. Premade modular elements to set examples, but not constrain. Something actually made to be played by gamers, not read off a wiki by terminally online nerds.

"You can ignore the lore!" That's a bullshit thought-ending non-reply. I want a game that caters to original world building, not one that you can force to use something else despite itself. You can do that with any game.

I didn't like how CoD turned into a lore masturbation fest when it entered 2e. Curseborn seems to be doubling down on that writer egotism. I'm not gonna buy it. I'm a gamer, not a sycophant.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 28, 2024, 03:05:29 PMThe mythos was never a driving force outside of the lore nerds and the terminally online who never actually played the game. WoD wouldn't have struggled against D&D if people played it for the lore.

*Insert Jay Jonah Jamesion Laughing gif*
Wait you're serious?

Box Crayon you have continued to make the most blatantly wrong and fradulent claims about Whitewolf, the World of Darkness and it's history I can only assume you lived in an entirely different dimension than I did.

The world of Darkness was literally the second most popular roleplaying game in the world through the 90s and up until the release of Chronicles. Full stop, it was nipping at D&D's heels.

You have a personal grudge against it for some... Bizarre reason. Full past "It's not for me" to actively hating it, like Wod took you behind the garage and bad touched you. I don't get it.

Me being a fan of World of Darkness doesn't make me a Sycophant either. I'm clearly aware of it's flaws, and it's something I enjoy *despite* those Flaws.

But you're not willing to have a real discussion, you just want to shit on it and tell lies that suit your narrative of the World of Darkness never being successful, it's Lore never being something people were really into, and the concept of playing Supernatural creatures being the only thing going for it..

Despite there having been multiple games released under a variety of systems that let you play Supernatural creatures that never reached the height, success or cultural impact that World of Darkness did.

Quote from: Orphan81 on June 28, 2024, 02:36:47 PMAll that being said though.... It's important to remember the Whitewolf "Golden Rule" and that's... the Storyteller is always right... throw out what you don't like and use what you do. The lore should be a tool, not a straight jacket.

It's supposed to be YOUR World of Darkness in the end... so for example if you decide the Ventrue as a Clan have been completely wiped out... You've decided it, that's how it is.

I don't know if you have any of the 20th Anniversary Books, but if you *ARE* interested in the World of Darkness and you don't... Those are the books to use. They present pretty much every highlight of The Metaplot and how to include it or ignore parts of it in every core book.

I have the 20th anniversary books and they're uniformly great (and heavy). However, from my own experience

1. I don't recall most of the WW stuff presenting it as "this is a toolkit take what you want". The only book I can recall doing that was Beckett's Jyhad diary, that explicitly presented each thing with "here's a bunch of options you can choose from for each event presented."

2. It's been my uniform experience that every person I've played with (I've even run vampire LARPs) that's into Vampire pre-v5 treats their detailed knowledge of the setting canon as if it was part of the game, so when I violate that as a GM I'm not doing my own thing, I'm literally not running the game, like if I was running Savage Worlds and got rid of the wild die. I've only ever seen this with WW Vampire. Those same player's I'm talking about wouldn't ever push back with any whacky idea I had about any other setting. Other than me, and maybe you now, I don't know anyone who is like 'just hack this how you want and that's great, if you want to merge the Sabbat and
Anarchs into one thing go for it'.

Quote from: Orphan81 on June 28, 2024, 03:23:34 PM*Insert Jay Jonah Jamesion Laughing gif*
Wait you're serious?

I never called you a sycophant and I never said the game wasn't successful. I said the lore didn't help it compete with D&D once WotC pulled things together.

You still haven't given any hard numbers to support your assertions that WoD was going strong until CoD and Paradox arbitrarily ruined it. The impression I've gotten is that WoD peaked in the 90s and never recovered. Its success was due to a combination of TSR's poor business decisions, the popularity of the goth scene at the time, first mover advantage, and the network effect. But then things changed: video games got better, WotC released D&D 3e and d20 boom happened, the goth scene declined, the popularity of LotR made elfgames look cool and mainstream, etc.

Despite what folks like Frank Trollman might claim, CoD was clearly financially successful before the 2008 recession hit and CCP axed the company. So I don't think the gamers who were buying several hundred thousand books per year were all that concerned with lore. They weren't concerned when WoD was published, and they weren't concerned when CoD replaced it on shelves.

No other games were able to survive in that niche? That's pretty normal for ttrpgs. It's not a growth sector and never has been. It has insane first mover advantage due to the huge initial investment costs. Every genre is dominated by a single game that pushes out competitors. Aside from Pathfinder, can you name any medieval fantasy game that reached the same level of success as D&D? Any horror game that matched Call of Cthulhu? Any cyberpunk game that matched Cyberpunk 2020? Of course not! So calling out WoD for having no competition is a silly statement. It's not special in that respect.

I think your online echo chamber has given you an inflated sense of WoD's importance. Outside of heartbreaker ttrpgs, its cultural impact has been nil. "It influenced Blade and Underworld!" you claim. The tropes used in those movies can be traced to works that predate WoD, such as Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, or to Dracula, or to Captain Kronos, etc. It clearly hasn't meaningfully influenced popular vampire shows like True Blood or Vampire Diaries.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder? Well, I've said multiple times that I was cyberbullied by terminally online WoD lore nerds in the 2000s for briefly liking CoD. The fandom was a dumpster fire then, and it's still one now. It's hard not to be disgusted by that.

Could I be misinformed? Sure, but so could you. But I suppose none of that matters now because the IP is very obviously on life support and never coming back. Once Bloodlines 2 bombs as predicted, Paradox is gonna dump the IP like a hot potato or let it languish in limbo. There's been so much damage done to the brand name now, it's so out of touch with modern tastes, and there's so much mainstream distrust of any corpos reviving old IPs, that even if someone else bought it then they'd most likely be unable to make it successful outside of the shrinking number of diehard brand loyalists.

Like, Bloodlines by itself seems to be largely responsible for the lingering interest in the IP. White Wolf sold themselves to CCP because they were banking on video games maintaining their flagging sales. Didn't work out for them, since ttrpgs are drops in the bucket compared to video games. The peaks in Google Trends seem traceable to Bloodlines and Bloodlines 2, but it's pretty obviously been a continuous downward trend for the IP since Google started collecting data.

I think it's only a matter of time before somebody makes a new urban fantasy ttrpg that takes over the genre, like how Pathfinder has increasingly taken market share from D&D. Or maybe we won't see a single game dominating the genre, but a split among a bunch of smaller games. I suppose it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on June 28, 2024, 04:59:56 PMHowever, from my own experience

Correct.

WoD is not a toolkit and never has been. The lore nerds are anal retentive about it. If you don't use the lore exactly as they imagine it, then they think you're running the game wrong. It's very obnoxious.

CoD isn't a toolkit either, but it has several toolkit books and the community is usually more open-minded about that sort of thing. It's not frowned upon for GMs to just make things up. Or at least it wasn't back in the 2000s. I noped out around when 2e was released because the rules got much clunkier and the lore nerds took over.

However, if you did treat v20 as a toolkit, with maybe some different optional rules for how you could make vampires work, you could make a pretty nifty home brew.

I do strongly prefer single splat games, and really WoD/CoD that's been their meat and drink. Cross monster games are much less interesting to me.

I would love to see a core system for building your own monsters (like Unisystem Angel but much fancier) so you could make your own single splat game.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on June 28, 2024, 05:35:42 PMHowever, if you did treat v20 as a toolkit, with maybe some different optional rules for how you could make vampires work, you could make a pretty nifty home brew.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on June 28, 2024, 05:36:55 PMI do strongly prefer single splat games, and really WoD/CoD that's been their meat and drink. Cross monster games are much less interesting to me.

Quote from: PencilBoy99 on June 28, 2024, 05:37:34 PMI would love to see a core system for building your own monsters (like Unisystem Angel but much fancier) so you could make your own single splat game.

I have some recs. Check out Feed or Vampire City for vamps, Bite Marks for werewolves. Sigil & Shadow has a build your own monster section.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 28, 2024, 05:42:30 PMI have some recs. Check out Feed or Vampire City for vamps, Bite Marks for werewolves. Sigil & Shadow has a build your own monster section.

Those are very cool.

What about Requiem 2e? I've heard it has much better mechanics than VtM and you're not bogged down by tons of metaplot.