Regardless of pronoun usage, Martin Ericsson is still a douchebag and he will not get any money from me.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;962185Regardless of pronoun usage, Martin Ericsson is still a douchebag and he will not get any money from me.

You could buy the whole line or hijack a shipment to prevent people from buying it, Martin Ericsson gets paid either way, it's not like he gets a percentage or something.

So basically you're boycotting a company because of the opinions of someone in the company.  How...SJW of you.

Quote from: CRKrueger;962197You could buy the whole line or hijack a shipment to prevent people from buying it, Martin Ericsson gets paid either way, it's not like he gets a percentage or something.

So basically you're boycotting a company because of the opinions of someone in the company.  How...SJW of you.

Actually, it's because Martin Ericsson is making the decision to continue the Revised Edition metaplot. That's the main reason why I am boycotting his work.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;962117I have not yet found that forum.  If somebody knows of it, and doesn't think I'll shit it up too much, I'd love to know if it's out there.  I mean, holy shit, does the constant identity politics get fucking old.

True that.  

At least here you won't get banned for being on the wrong side of the identity politics divide.

We will see. No reason to celebrate nor panic.

In the meantime, I need to run some Nightbane. That's my fav game for Katanas & Monsters.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;962163Because Ken and Zak are pals.

the FIEND!  How dare Ken be friends with someone who fought back when TBP targeted his group, and used TBP's own tactics against them?  Doesn't he know any better?

Quote from: Baulderstone;962106The anniversary books certainly seem unfriendly to newcomers, and as someone the was only interested in the game during its very early stages, I have absolutely interest in Vampire with all the toppings included.



I get what you are saying. The early supplements were about playing vampires in the real world. Characters in Chicago by Night were largely defined by the real world ideologies of the characters and the background of their human lives. As the line wore on, everything became defined by the insular terms of vampire society. "I'm playing an Antitribu Tzimisce Primogen." The real world began to fade out of the game and it became all about the Sabbat and Camarilla fighting each other.

Adding the Sabbat really did drain the focus of the game as well. It was more interesting when players were introduced into Camarilla society, with its delicate balance between the establishment and anarchs. It was a society on the brink of a revolution, and the players would have to pick a side and hope their side one once it broke out. It was a bleak setting, but it felt like the players were in a position to play a pivotal role. With the Sabbat added, suddenly you were playing in a game where the revolution happened 500 years ago, and was still happening. It was ongoing slog that made it easy to have your combat monster get into fights, but nothing felt consequential.

It also shifted the game from a local focus to a global one. When I ran Vampire for the first time 1991, I set the game in the place I was living. Early Vampire gave he sense that every city was a world unto itself. Having a single city, and one the players all knew, as the focus made the game seem more real, and it made the players matter a lot more. Once the game shifted to a world war between the Camarilla and the Sabbat, city politics became small potatoes.

You have a good point about the constant addition of new clans diluting the game. The original clans were all clear archetypes. The later ones were often flavorful, but didn't have a clear place in the game.

As I said earlier, I don't know if I am really interested in getting into vampire again anyway. I ran a very successful game of it in 1991-92 and it was all diminishing returns for me. It's possible though that having Hite back can renew my interest. Hite is fascinated by real world history and applying it to his games. He has a general lack of interest in games taking place in completely imaginary worlds. Personally, I like both, but the appeal of oWoD for me lay in having the fantastical going on in the real world. A WoD with Hite in charge seems unlikely to drift completely out of the real world and into its own imaginary conflicts. He seems like the right guy to deliver the WoD that I wanted 25 years ago. It's just a question of whether it is something I still want.



Why does he need to square it away? The fact that vampires preying humans was horrific was a central conceit of the game at the start. You need to feed on humans to sate your bloodlust so you don't get hungry, lose control and do even more horrific things. It was all spelled out pretty clearly.



I agree the Humanity track/Frenzy mechanic never worked well, but I think it was just poorly calibrated, not a bad idea.

The idea behind it is just good, old-fashioned resource management. You build up your blood pool, and can choose to expend it to do cool things. If you expend it too far, you risk bad stuff happening. Players generally get into frenzy territory because they put themselves there. On the whole, it's not really much different than using a magic system where magical mishaps occur if the players get greedy. There is certainly more player control than in Call of Cthulhu where Sanity checks come at you out of nowhere.

I don't think the numbers and probabilities ever worked well to deliver the game they wanted, but I think it was a cool idea. It's just playing Stormbringer, with every player having their own Stormbringer. If you want its cool powers, you better keep that thing fed.

I agree. As more books came out the setting became increasingly detached from the real world. The humanity mechanic, while good in concept, was badly executed. This is why I prefer Feed. The editing suffers from having a low budget but I think the internal conflict of humanity versus vampirism is well executed. It uses lots of different sided dice but we have die roller apps if that isn't your thing.

There were so many character traits in Vampire: attributes, abilities, skills, talents, knowledges, backgrounds, merits, flaws, disciplines, combination disciplines, devotions, derangements, discipline derangements, discipline merits, threnodies, touchstones, etc. Feed condenses all of that to a few trait categories and uses it as the basis of degeneration from humanity into vampirism. Where Vampire punished you with arbitrary derangements for being a jerk (discipline derangements were the only ones I thought were sensible) and a penalty to interactions with humans, and later introduced paths and touchstones so that you could act like a jerk without being punished, Feed takes a different approach. Feed replaces your human ties with vampire ties if you fail to maintain them (this is personalized for each trait, there isn't any sin ladder), rewarding you with supernatural powers and connections in exchange for becoming worse at mundane skills and connections.

The author doesn't insult you for having badwrongfun: the core rulebook offers angsty, devil pact, horrors of war and b-movie shlock flavors in its sample campaign settings. The rules are genuinely toolbox (not the fake toolbox in Chronicles of Darkness) so it's easy to convert a Vampire campaign over to it. I've spent a lot of time writing new vampire types based on Vampire, Nightlife, etc. The simplicity of the rules makes it so much fun to work with that I have trouble deciding what to settle on.

Quote from: Snowman0147;962149Don't think that is gonna happen.  I think all the zirs and Exalted put a end to that.

They are taking their sweet time with C:tD20, but the pdf is out to backers so at least there is something to show.  Now, how long it takes to get to print from here, that's a different story.

@BoxCrayonTales, thanks for linking to my review of Feed.

To be honest Feed is an interesting RPG, pushing the idea of a vampire's humanity and links that with game mechanics. Without linking the mechanics the way that it has, it might have fallen to the pure "story-teller," type RPG.

Considering the glorious melt down on the big purple... Color me interested. Get it? Get the pun???

Quote from: CRKrueger;962184Jesus Wept.

In an RPG book there is only three reasons to use a pronoun.
1. Referring to an NPC in the world, in which case you use the appropriate gender pronoun of that NPC, whatever that is (oldsters might remember in WFRP1 the Slaaneshi pronoun "shem").
2. Referring to the players in an example.
3. Referring to the characters in an example.

Using all he or all she when referring to players or characters is just stupid.  Neither one reflects reality, so you mix them, like B/X and AD&D did.

Is that what Ken did? I'm not a Gumshoe fan. Non-specific use of she in place of he in reference to no particular entity doesn't bother me; it's a reflection of how language changes over time. But using "she" to refer to a male specific character would drive me nuts.

Quote from: Voros;962165And you're basing that on what exactly?

The flowchart. The documentary. The blog posts. The interviews. The setting changes. The themes they're focusing on.

So nothing empirical yet, but man if my gut isn't churning something awful.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;962167Martin Ericsson is on my shit-list of "Goths I will never give money to"

Are there any goths who are not on this list?

Quote from: camazotz;962442using "she" to refer to a male specific character would drive me nuts.

Now you know how people who want you to use their preferred pronouns feel.

Mind you there are limits, and I'm damn close to calling everyone #Groot at this point, but the fact is this issue is the epitome of #FirstWorldProblems.

Quote from: camazotz;962442Is that what Ken did?

Night's Black Agents relies almost entirely on second person. When third person is called for, such as in examples, there is a mix of male and female examples, but the genders remain consistent and clear. You'd need to have a learning disability of some kind to have trouble reading the book.

Aaaaaaand...this...

https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?803533-So-let-s-talk-about-the-moral-implications-of-supporting-NuWW-and-harassers-generally

Have any of these fucktards ever experienced true hardship? It must be hell (or kinda cool) being able to spawn monsters out of your ass like a rectal Pokéball.

Quote from: Baulderstone;962450Night's Black Agents relies almost entirely on second person. When third person is called for, such as in examples, there is a mix of male and female examples, but the genders remain consistent and clear. You'd need to have a learning disability of some kind to have trouble reading the book.

Creepy post count, sir! More importantly, how good is NBA? It looks hyper-focused but damn cool.