Quote from: LibraryLass;786062I'm kinda with Hite, personally. Fuck playing the "good" vampire, just play the vampire. If I may paraphrase the recent Fright Night remake (which they totally shot in my hometown!) you're a monster and you're not brooding, or lovesick, or noble. You're the fuckin' shark from Jaws. You kill, you feed, and you don't stop until everybody around you is dead.

Yeah, I love the bit in that movie where it shows how the vampire gets around not being invited into the house (Solution? Burn the fucker down!)
I understand the draw of The Anne Rice, the desire to know the secrets of such creatures... to hang out with them for a bit. The draw of the enigmatic and dangerous stranger. Temptation to join the secret club...
Except that secret club is all about being an undead parasite. A serial murderer with a natty wardrobe.
Hard to play that character for very long and keep it up... for me at least.
I'd much rather play a human who rubs shoulders with the monsters on occasion... hunting them, tentative alliances on occasion. More like Supernatural or Grimm or Buffy... where there are monsters and then there are MONSTERS.

Nephilim got a 2nd and 3rd edition in France. The 2nd edition made a number of rule changes and the 3rd edition used a new ruleset entirely. Then the French RPG industry crashed around 2003/4, and Nephilim was cancelled with it. Edge Entertainment recently released a 20th anniversary edition which again used an entirely new system. Last I checked all reference to Nephilim has vanished from their redesigned website. So I'm pretty sure the game is not still supported.

Witchcraft sounds like it might be great, but the free PDF is crap quality with missing fonts and stuff. It's never received a new book since 2004 despite promises and the official website with bonus content was taken down years ago (I could only find it with the wayback machine).

Most of the games competing for the dark urban fantasy niche are OOP, have badly aged rules, bad writing, or heavily reference future books that were never produced. It's frustrating for someone who wants a more or less complete experience.

I like my vampires like this:

Ken Hite is an excellent author and his horror stuff is amongst his best.

He just recently came out with a new Gurps Horror PDF book called "The Madness Dossier".

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/madnessdossier/

Blurb from the website below.

   Can You Handle The Truth?

History is a lie. The truth is that the godlike Anunnakku enslaved mankind, co-opted language to program us, and established the superhuman šedu as our overseers. And that would have been The End if reality-warping disaster hadn't overturned everything in 535 A.D., leaving the true past forgotten but not gone, shoved from human memory by a collective delusion. Now the irruptors – servants of the Anunnakku, dimly remembered as monsters of myth – gnaw at the edges of our world, seeking to return their masters to power and history to the way it was.

Most humans are clueless about all this. Worse, those who discover snippets of the truth tend to worship the Anunnakku or irruptors as gods, or turn the power of language and symbols to misguided ends, making the situation worse. Fortunately, a stalwart few are moved to defend our reality from forces that would rewrite it. Welcome to Project SANDMAN!

Quote from: Will;786071I like my vampires like this

Yeah, those were some brutal vampires... and not very chatty.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;786069Most of the games competing for the dark urban fantasy niche are OOP, have badly aged rules, bad writing, or heavily reference future books that were never produced.

'Badly aged'? Because rules are like old cheese?
'Badly aged rules' translates to 'Rules that are not currently in fashion'... and if that's a concern have fun chasing down that trendy rabbit hole.

Quote from: LibraryLass;786062I'm kinda with Hite, personally. Fuck playing the "good" vampire, just play the vampire. If I may paraphrase the recent Fright Night remake (which they totally shot in my hometown!) you're a monster and you're not brooding, or lovesick, or noble. You're the fuckin' shark from Jaws. You kill, you feed, and you don't stop until everybody around you is dead.

Which is my preferred stance on vampires in general, not just for PC vampires. More Christopher Lee-Dracula and Nosferatu, less Lester and Edward.

Badly aged rules seemed fresh and innovative at the time, before time and experience showed all the wrinkles and flaws, or better ways to handle things have come around.

Some rule systems are just good. Torg, for example, could stand a few tweaks, but DAMN the core of that game is just awesome.

Some... not so much.

(I mean, heck, my arc with D&D 3e is loving it initially, and then it ... aged. I started seeing all the flaws, seeing other games handle what I liked better, etc)

Quote from: Simlasa;786075Yeah, those were some brutal vampires... and not very chatty.

'Badly aged'? Because rules are like old cheese?
'Badly aged rules' translates to 'Rules that are not currently in fashion'... and if that's a concern have fun chasing down that trendy rabbit hole.

Eh, sometimes you can improve on rules after you've seen them at the table and understand what they're like in actual play. If the new set produces the sort of games you want better than the old set, then the new rules are better (Obviously, it's possible to make them worse, as well).

Rules shouldn't be put on a pedestal just because of what decade they were written in, there are good old games, bad old games, good new games, bad new games, and everything in between.

I think in new vampire you are really supposed to play a bad vampire. I mean at least three out of five factions are very evil and the other two can be evil.

The evil vampire church who burns heretics at the stake, the evil cultists who sacrifice mortal on a bloody altar, the unethical scientists who experiment on other vampires to achieve becoming übervampire, the draconian powermongerers and the revolutionaries who blow up your haven if you disagree with them.

Especially the three mystical ones (and mostly the Lancea et Sanctum) are evil. But you have to play them. I think an evil relegion makes a great baddie and if I want to play something mystical it will be the stereotypical occult detective like Harry Dresden or Constantine.

So yeah, Hite may be right.

Quote from: Will;786080(I mean, heck, my arc with D&D 3e is loving it initially, and then it ... aged. I started seeing all the flaws, seeing other games handle what I liked better, etc)

But the rules did not 'age'... they didn't change at all. If you suddenly decide the rules suck it's not because they suddenly went bad... they were always bad and you didn't realize it or maybe it's just that your tastes have changed... but the rules didn't 'age', you did.

Quote from: Ladybird;786086Rules shouldn't be put on a pedestal just because of what decade they were written in, there are good old games, bad old games, good new games, bad new games, and everything in between.

Totally agree... newer or older shouldn't carry any points in how a game is judged... which is kind of how I feel about art and layout (though not organization) as well, because those things fade out once we're playing at the table. I love the look of classic Traveller's clean white pages... but that doesn't bear on the way the game plays at all.
I like some old games and some new ones. I don't have any interest in old editions of D&D except what they've inspired in 'new' games like LotFP and DCC.

Quote from: Simlasa;786097But the rules did not 'age'... they didn't change at all. If you suddenly decide the rules suck it's not because they suddenly went bad... they were always bad and you didn't realize it or maybe it's just that your tastes have changed... but the rules didn't 'age', you did.

I think your usage of the term 'age' is overly narrow, and is contradicted by a lot of media-related discussion.

When people say a movie didn't age well, they don't usually mean that the film stock has degraded (and if they DO mean that, they generally don't say 'this movie has aged poorly.')

Quote from: Will;786104When people say a movie didn't age well, they don't usually mean that the film stock has degraded (and if they DO mean that, they generally don't say 'this movie has aged poorly.')

Yeah, I'd argue with that usage of 'aged' as well. It's too much a matter of taste and has everything to do with the viewer's perspective. Like guys I know who just can not stand anything in black and white... and go on about the 'bad acting'... not recognizing that styles change... but the acting isn't 'bad'... just not the current fashion.

Aaah. Everyone is using it wrong but you.

Ok then.

(To be a bit more positive, I've found myself arguing that everyone's usage of a word is wrong. At which point I embrace it and elect to either make up a new word or keep it to myself, because, well, words are 'what people mean'. If most people MEAN it that 'wrong' way, well. That's the word)

Quote from: Will;786106Aaah. Everyone is using it wrong but you.

I'd argue that not 'everyone' uses it that way. To my ears it sounds better and more accurate when they say 'it's a product of its era'... or somesuch expression that doesn't imply the thing itself has changed.

Quote from: Will;785985I only read Kult once, and it was a mind-blowing experience.

It's gnostic on speed. The idea of Cities as the natural state of existence, and all this nature as something other?

Man.

A roleplaying game where the physical universe is a product of your collective imagination.
What a concept.

JG