Any good alternatives to Vampire the Masquerade?

Rob Necronomicon · June 28, 2024, 10:19:53 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 28, 2024, 05:42:30 PM
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.

Sigil and Shadow is excellent!

BoxCrayonTales · June 29, 2024, 11:06:39 AM

Quote from: Monero on June 28, 2024, 08:10:28 PMWhat about Requiem 2e? I've heard it has much better mechanics than VtM and you're not bogged down by tons of metaplot.

2e added a ton of clunky new mechanics, like conditions that you collect like Pokemon, so it doesn't have that advantage anymore.

If you want vampires who struggle with their inner conflict, but with simple rules that don't constantly get in your way, then the best option I've found so far has been Feed. It tells you to invent your own setting, so you can cherrypick whatever you like from other settings.

yosemitemike · June 30, 2024, 01:24:38 AM

CoD carried on the old White Wolf tradition of having a bunch of clunky, disjointed subsystems that bogged everything down and were ignored by most people.

BoxCrayonTales · July 01, 2024, 12:00:50 PM

I'm skimming through Elegy. It's extremely derivative of WW and even mentions the WW games as its sole source of inspiration. It has 1:1 equivalents to sects and covenants, while the clan equivalents or "lineage" are each equivalent to multiple clans. The only thing that's particularly original is that it offers three different kinds of werewolves, with one of them being the tree-hugging vampire-hating "varou". It's disappointing that it's a ripoff, but that seems to be the case for most of these new games.

It's really strange. 90s urban fantasy games like Everlasting and WitchCraft were written directly in response to WoD, but they weren't ripoffs. The bloodlines in Everlasting were not 1:1 ripoffs and the vampires in WitchCraft fed on emotions rather than blood.

BoxCrayonTales · July 07, 2024, 10:07:26 AM

If you want an alternative to the God Machine, then there's an indie game called Midnight World that touches on similar ground but with superior implementation. The basic premise is that various dread gods from failed-yet-somehow-extant universes are trying to invade Earth and each has its own aesthetics and goals to distinguish it from the others. The writer doesn't try to fake an incomprehensible mystery by hemming and hawing, but outright tells you how to design dread gods with several examples.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/407806/The-Midnight-World

Orphan81 · July 07, 2024, 11:12:10 AM

Sad to say Curseborn's system is a real turn off.

As much as I like the idea of the original Whitewolf staff developing another Urban Horror game, they seem to be leaning into more and more fiddly mechanics that try to blend traditional tabletop gaming with 'story game' mechanics.

Overly complicated dice mechanics borrowed from V:TM 5th, combined with their superhero system implemented in the new versions of Trinity and Scion...

With all the 'conditions' of Nwod 2e.

Chris24601 · July 07, 2024, 12:26:15 PM

Honestly, with how dice pools with static TNs work, it's almost worth looking at using Fudge dice to replace the variance... for difficulty 6 on a d10, half the dice pool + 4dF is close enough to the results that the reduction in number of dice needed is worth the slight loss of fidelity on the edges (i.e. yes, 10 dice at difficulty 6 could, in theory, botch... but 4dF+5 counted as successes will get all but the most extreme outlier results within a couple of percentage points for rolls in the normal range of attributes and abilities).

Basically, one place to go looking for alternatives with similar mechanical weighting to WoD might be to look at what people have built out of FUDGE and Fate.

I think if I were to ever rebuild my "White Book Mage" engine for a setting of entirely my own design, I'd probably drop the dice pool system (a modified OWoD that replaced difficulties less than 4 with bonus dice and difficulties above 8 with subtracting dice... working magic allowed both building up ridiculous numbers of dice and extreme difficulties that kept the final pool size manageable) for something akin to Fudge dice just because it would likely speed up play a lot.

"Hunters of the Damned" is probably next on my list once I finally get my current game product done.

Batjon · July 07, 2024, 02:24:18 PM

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.

All vampires descending from Caine is the main reason I DON'T play VtM. I'm not a fan of it.

Batjon · July 07, 2024, 02:32:39 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 29, 2024, 11:06:39 AM
Quote from: Monero on June 28, 2024, 08:10:28 PMWhat about Requiem 2e? I've heard it has much better mechanics than VtM and you're not bogged down by tons of metaplot.
2e added a ton of clunky new mechanics, like conditions that you collect like Pokemon, so it doesn't have that advantage anymore.

If you want vampires who struggle with their inner conflict, but with simple rules that don't constantly get in your way, then the best option I've found so far has been Feed. It tells you to invent your own setting, so you can cherrypick whatever you like from other settings.

I guess I don't get the love affair for Feed. I bought it and wanted to like it, but it just seemed like a vampire creation toolkit more-so than an actual game.

Batjon · July 07, 2024, 02:36:03 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on July 01, 2024, 12:00:50 PMI'm skimming through Elegy. It's extremely derivative of WW and even mentions the WW games as its sole source of inspiration. It has 1:1 equivalents to sects and covenants, while the clan equivalents or "lineage" are each equivalent to multiple clans. The only thing that's particularly original is that it offers three different kinds of werewolves, with one of them being the tree-hugging vampire-hating "varou". It's disappointing that it's a ripoff, but that seems to be the case for most of these new games.

It's really strange. 90s urban fantasy games like Everlasting and WitchCraft were written directly in response to WoD, but they weren't ripoffs. The bloodlines in Everlasting were not 1:1 ripoffs and the vampires in WitchCraft fed on emotions rather than blood.

I'm looking for Elegy to research it and found this: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/456053/elegy
Is this it? If so, this is a solo game.

Batjon · July 07, 2024, 02:37:32 PM

Where can I find Everlasting?

Batjon · July 07, 2024, 02:41:53 PM

Shiver could work well and you can overlay a hunger mechanic easily.

BoxCrayonTales · July 07, 2024, 03:39:43 PM

Quote from: Batjon on July 07, 2024, 02:32:39 PM
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 29, 2024, 11:06:39 AM
Quote from: Monero on June 28, 2024, 08:10:28 PMWhat about Requiem 2e? I've heard it has much better mechanics than VtM and you're not bogged down by tons of metaplot.
2e added a ton of clunky new mechanics, like conditions that you collect like Pokemon, so it doesn't have that advantage anymore.

If you want vampires who struggle with their inner conflict, but with simple rules that don't constantly get in your way, then the best option I've found so far has been Feed. It tells you to invent your own setting, so you can cherrypick whatever you like from other settings.

I guess I don't get the love affair for Feed. I bought it and wanted to like it, but it just seemed like a vampire creation toolkit more-so than an actual game.

How so? What do you think it is lacking?

The creator did want to make more supplements, but couldn't raise enough money on kickstarter.

It's released under creative commons, so anyone can make and sell repackages and supplements. If you think it doesn't have enough game, then anyone can write supplements adding more game to it.

Perhaps Vampire City would be more to your taste?

Quote from: Batjon on July 07, 2024, 02:37:32 PMWhere can I find Everlasting?

It's on the list, but doesn't have Everlasting in the name:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/2945/book-of-the-unliving-revised

Batjon · July 07, 2024, 05:30:16 PM

I did enjoy Vampire City the time I read it, before its new update. I haven't gotten to read the new updated version yet.

I remember Feed being almost completely concentrated on designing vampires with very little barebones actual game mechanics behind it. Perhaps I didn't read it thoroughly enough and/or am misremembering a bit. I do want to like it. A customer vampire designer is one of the things I want, but I also need solid game mechanics to make the gameplay fun and compelling.

I just pulled it off my shelf to re-read.

Thondor · July 07, 2024, 09:28:33 PM

Quote from: Batjon on July 07, 2024, 02:41:53 PMShiver could work well and you can overlay a hunger mechanic easily.

Shiver does have an immortal archetype in the Shiver Gothic supplement. Vampypre being one of the two. There's simple resist hunger check in one of the optional backgrounds (essentially GM can require you to make a check to resist feeding.)

Lot's of neat archetypes in that one (mad scientists, constructs, undead, etc).
https://composedreamgames.com/marketplace/shiver-gothic-spireholm

The book is mostly dedicated to a gothic city and adventure.