Quote from: Dropbear on September 20, 2024, 09:12:15 PMI think a few great replacements for WoD are Sigil & Shadow, Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars, and After the Vampire Wars.

A big shout-out for Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars for anyone who likes old school D&D style games. It's a pretty simple system, has a good writing style, and generally is a fun game to play.

Quote from: KingCheops on September 20, 2024, 11:03:16 PM

Quote from: Dropbear on September 20, 2024, 09:12:15 PMWW always had to introduce some "twist" into their metaplot rather than let a GM do it themselves. Part of the reason I grew less and less fond of their games as the piles of splatbooks grew ever-higher.

Could be faulty memory but I recall this being one of the complaints about nWoD.  That they didn't have the metaplot.

nWoD deliberately eschewed metaplot in favor of giving more creative control to GMs. It still has tons of lore scattered across the books, but it's disconnected and you're not expected to memorize all of it to understand basic concepts. This has drawbacks, since it means that interesting concepts are never developed further, but it also resulted in a lot of really creative book concepts that aren't permitted by the stifling oWoD lore.

In second edition they added a metaplot involving an alien "god machine" trying to invade Earth so humans will mine more uranium. Yes, they literally wrote that. I thought it was awful, but the fanboys chased out the naysayers. In general I found second edition to be overall bland and soulless compared to the first edition, but that may very well have been my inner grognard talking. Looking back on all iterations of WoD as an adult, the writing is pretentious emogoth bullshit in every edition.

V5 also killed metaplot and got hate for it too. Metaplot is dead.

Quote from: Dropbear on September 20, 2024, 09:12:15 PMThe only thing about folks griping about how Trinity killed Aberrant by turning the heroes into villains?

Trinity (1997) preceded Aberrant (1999). It wasn't released after Aberrant. So if you read Trinity first, you knew the Aberrants were not going to end well.

Maybe you had your hopes up - OH KEWL A WW SUPERHEROES GAME! - if you hadn't read Trinity yet. In which case, oops.

I was never a big fan of superhero games anyway, so I was pretty cool with the Novas becoming disgusting and perverted mutations of humanity instead of evolutions of Humanity as the Psions were supposedly. But then they weren't. Oh well.

WW always had to introduce some "twist" into their metaplot rather than let a GM do it themselves. Part of the reason I grew less and less fond of their games as the piles of splatbooks grew ever-higher.

I think a few great replacements for WoD are Sigil & Shadow, Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars, and After the Vampire Wars.

I never liked metaplot either. This is supposed to be a game you play, not a serialized comic book you read. Hence why I preferred nWoD/CoD until it got taken over by metaplot in second edition.

Quote from: finarvyn on September 21, 2024, 06:31:42 AM

Quote from: Dropbear on September 20, 2024, 09:12:15 PMI think a few great replacements for WoD are Sigil & Shadow, Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars, and After the Vampire Wars.

A big shout-out for Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars for anyone who likes old school D&D style games. It's a pretty simple system, has a good writing style, and generally is a fun game to play.

I second Night Shift. Unlike prior games, it actually has support for multiple campaigns settings in the rulebook, called "Nightworlds". They're entirely separate universes, like 3pp D&D settings, or GURPS. This is really how I think WoD should've been in 1991, and it probably wouldn't have imploded so spectacularly had WW gone that route.

Unfortunately Night Shift doesn't have much support or community. The author does have more books planned, but the schedule is like one book every few years if that.

It uses a d20 class and level system, so if you prefer skill-based or whatever then you'll have to make up rules yourself.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 20, 2024, 12:54:41 PM

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on September 20, 2024, 12:38:04 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 19, 2024, 03:27:14 PM

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on September 19, 2024, 02:38:36 PMI'd play old Vampire, if the people were right. But not any of that new 5e shit.

Why play that IP at all? It has so much idiosyncratic baggage and unplayable rules. Is this a Gen X nostalgia thing?

Eh? We made VtM our game. We played it our way (and always as Sabbat). We ignored most of the splat books. And after playing it for so long, we'd smoothed out the kinks in the rules.

So assuming that I could get players with a similar attitude, why wouldn't I play it? That's like saying why would I bother to play WFRP 1e? Because we had classic games, it's really that simple.

Sure, nostalgia comes into it. But I don't know anyone that doesn't have nostalgic feelings from a certain point in their RPGing careers, if you will.

As far as I can tell, even in that substantial list of games you've made. I still have-not seen anything that can match VtM in terms of style and substance (not talking about the V 5e wank of course).

Your second point about making an urban fantasy game. I have been, and now that I've finished Terminus and had it published, I can get back to it. I thought V5 was so bad, it actually inspired me to write my own game. I wanted to make vampires horrific and with a Lovecraftian origin. It will contain no angst stuff or politically correct krud like 5e tried to implement.

I think WitchCraft and Everlasting have style and substance, more than any other I found, but they've been dead for decades unfortunately. The owner of Everlasting died years ago and the owner of WitchCraft has health problems. Unfortunately, nothing written since the Great Recession has been any good. No idea why.

If you're ignoring most of the rules and setting anyway, then you might as well use a system that's actually designed to be played. I would recommend Vampire City or Feed. They're sparse on setting (you're expected to convert your own), but they're the most flexible I found and would save you time writing your own rules. Feed in particular has a humanity mechanic that doesn't suck: rather than punishing you with schizophrenia for stealing candy bars, it's a lightside/darkside mechanic that gives actual temptation to lose humanity and gain vampirism. Everyone I chatted with, who actually played it, says they love the mechanic.

Good luck with your original game. God knows we need more new IPs these days. I've heard a few people tried making their own games in response to V5, but I'll yet to hear of anyone getting published thus far. Hope you can break the barrier

Witchcraft was (is) a great game. I've never played Everlasting - So I'll def check it out!

Don't get me wrong, VtM certainly had its flaws. But at the time it was pretty cutting-edge and shook up the RPG world by trying to do things that we'd not seen before.

Sadly, it suffered from a terrible meta-plot that sunk its tentacles into every corner of the game and really made it unplayable (towards the end). It also suffered from lots of useless bloat. Mostly Made by people who were creatively barren (who came in after the original crew).

As I said, we pretty much went back to basics only using only the Core book, a few of the clan books, players' guide, and the Sabbat books. Everything else was meh...

Regarding my own game(s). Don't worry... I'm under no illusions. NO ONE will play them bar a scant few. In all honesty, I'm not trying to crack the mainstream, and I certainly would never compromise my vision to suit any of those 'modern' gamer-types. And I'm terrible at social media and self-promotion.

Regarding the system, I don't think I will be going to a recognizable dice pool (as they can be a bit wonky) and while I like OSR mechanics; I don't think they feel right for vampires (YMMV of course). I'm currently looking at the WaRP system or a variant of it. I've got all the lore written, but I'm just a bit stuck on the mechanics.

But I'll also look at Feed and Vampire City. Thanks for the heads-up!

I think it makes more sense to try targeting the general fantasy audience than trying to target WoD fans. WoD fans are a tiny market who are into the WoD IP, not urban fantasy. Whereas general fantasy is a huge market where you'll find at least some people who are interested in trying new things.

This is why my own efforts try to emphasize the common fantasy aspect, like having elves and dwarves and slayers. Like WotC's old Urban Arcana.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 19, 2024, 09:59:24 AMThe nWoD/CoD books were successful. Forsaken, Awakening, and Lost were, AFAIK, more popular than their predecessors. Lost especially was surprisingly successful, to the point where it was promoted from a limited release (only 6 books were planned, then nothing) to an ongoing release schedule. Yeah, grognards hated it, but zillennials loved it. It was an example of attracting a new audience actually working. I remember it being hugely popular in the 2000s and saw new releases on the shelves of bookstores. It was successful enough that the original writing team still wanted to make stuff for it before Paradox pulled the license.

This generally tracks with my experience. VtR was met with lukewarm reactions. Promethean and Forsaken went nowhere. Mage was originally met with derision due to the "Atlantis" issue, but gained a solid following. Hunter was excellent, but I don't know if it caught on. But Lost was the apex of NWoD.

Quote from: Aglondir on September 21, 2024, 04:20:48 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 19, 2024, 09:59:24 AMThe nWoD/CoD books were successful. Forsaken, Awakening, and Lost were, AFAIK, more popular than their predecessors. Lost especially was surprisingly successful, to the point where it was promoted from a limited release (only 6 books were planned, then nothing) to an ongoing release schedule. Yeah, grognards hated it, but zillennials loved it. It was an example of attracting a new audience actually working. I remember it being hugely popular in the 2000s and saw new releases on the shelves of bookstores. It was successful enough that the original writing team still wanted to make stuff for it before Paradox pulled the license.

This generally tracks with my experience. VtR was met with lukewarm reactions. Promethean and Forsaken went nowhere. Mage was originally met with derision due to the "Atlantis" issue, but gained a solid following. Hunter was excellent, but I don't know if it caught on. But Lost was the apex of NWoD.

Vigil and Lost seemed to be most beloved. They were also the most customizable of the bunch and their splats were the most sensical (if that makes sense) of any WW game ever made.

WW games have always had this problem with their splats being pulled out of the writers' asses and being ascribed bullshit cosmological significance while simultaneously acting like straitjacketed high school clique stereotypes, but Lost and Vigil bucked that trend entirely.

Vigil didn't have any fixed splats. The various organizations were actual organizations with any number of reasons for existing and a variety of power sources. Evil corporations that cut up magical creatures for parts, secret wings of the vatican, online message boards, etc. It made so much sense and was readily customizable and inspiring. It didn't have much foundation in myth or folklore, but it felt like an organic extrapolation of the human experience that anyone could've come up with.

Lost took cues from fairy tale archetypes. Rather than specific splats for leprechauns or barghests, the splats were literal archetypes that could be customized to support a wide variety of character concepts. Because it drew directly on world fairy tales, it was easy to get into and had an obvious sense of familiarity for players of all backgrounds. The premise of playing escaped abductees living in fear of returning to fairyland was dark and there were complaints about it, but most players didn't seem to mind. The cosmology was also open-ended and writers were more or less free to make up whatever without worrying about continuity.

I really think these open-ended approaches would've hugely helped the other games. I felt they suffered as a result of trying too hard to adhere to a cosmic conflict or to idiosyncratic baggage that didn't resonate with a broad audience.

Promethean in particular made a huge mistake to focus on a nomadic pilgrimage when the audience up to that point had been trained to expect local politics as the default playstyle. I do think it was very creative, particularly the more diverse selection of powers (WoD/CoD has always struggled with this) and the various monsters like pandorans, qashmalim and assorted weirdo mutants, but it was aimed at the wrong audience.

In general, I think an optimized for monster mash approach is better than splitting the player base. See WitchCraft and Everlasting for examples. You can still have single splat focuses, but splats get more exposure if they play well together.

Promethean and Mummy and Geist and so on really have no business existing. No matter how creative the premise might be, they're so weird that they'll always be niche. The writers pulling stuff out of their asses is always gonna be inferior to drawing upon millennia of world folklore and logical extrapolations of the human experience.

Let's face it. Requiem is just a cleaned up version of Masquerade, and Masquerade is weird af. It succeeded in the 90s due to a confluence of factors that don't exist now and never will. Its fans are into it because they were trained on it, and not because they like vampires or urban fantasy in general (because in all likelihood they don't). If it wasn't for Bloodlines, then the IP would have already died in obscurity. Bloodlines bombed on release, and it only peaked in the early 2010s because of Troika's quirky writing.

Aside from the Gen Xers who got hooked on it back in the day, there's really no audience for anything like World of Darkness anymore. If there was, then you'd expect to see more clones with more successes, but stuff like WitchCraft and Everlasting never achieved success. The urban fantasy genre as a whole hasn't taken any cues from World of Darkness. There are no other series about, say, multiple different races of vampires competing for influence.

You need something like Troika's quirky writing to attract an audience now. You can't rely on exposition dumps about splats.

Or maybe I'm wrong and it's just for lack of trying because no publisher wants to spend money on competing with the sad pathetic remnants of WW.

I don't know

Sorry for the rambling

A personal thing here. I really disliked the whole amalgamation of all the WoD games that had been thrown into a melting pot in order to spit out this gargantuan monstrosity of a whole 'dark' world.

It felt so crammed full of bizarre concepts, while all trying to be shoehorned together with one generic system which couldn't really handle it.

Not to mention that the world felt ridiculous. Half the time I expected to run into a demon or mummy who ran the local newspaper kiosk or some shit.

It makes the monster elements seem so banal because they are so ubiquitous and shoved down your throat at every opportunity. All those creatures should be as rare as a three breasted nun. To keep the air of mystery and horror.

I think each of these games is at its best when they concentrate on one specific setting and the other elements are on the periphery, or not even included at all. When we played vampire, it was all just about vamps. Sure, there were werewolves and the odd demon. But they felt very alien and dangerous because of their rarity and lack of player knowledge regarding these foes.

YMMV of course.

Exactly Rob, I've been saying for ages the splats don't play well together, yet everyone had a hard on for a WWF/WWE Battle Royale or Wrestlemania cage matches. Had to spend years pointing out all this character generation theory crafting is its own separate private minigame, as is white room arena match-ups. All that nerd measuring stick contests is an orthogonal game to role playing.

One of the reasons I try to keep reminding people why the ethics matter in these games is because humans *are* the point. They are the ones who populate most thoroughly the world, they have to be more than walking resource refreshment packs. Humans have to bring forth monster feelings of fear, comfort, nostalgia, rejection, love, hate, etc. It's *their* world, your monster (and their monster society) is just living in it.

But it becomes a GM crutch to presume all powerful conspiracies hold it all together and humans are afterthoughts. It can't. And if it does, the game loses a lot of its point of "monster amidst mortals" and devolves into typical murderhobo powering up in new trappings.

The secret cool kids club means nothing if it is nothing but secret cool kids clubs all the way down. That surface layer of dreary high school doldrums and angst has to remain. And one of the better ways to make it meaningful, to bother having a club in the first place beyond survival, is to make it a liminal place to find meaning from being apart from a system you cannot join. Humans *are* the point!

Quote from: Opaopajr on September 21, 2024, 10:31:18 PMThe secret cool kids club means nothing if it is nothing but secret cool kids clubs all the way down. That surface layer of dreary high school doldrums and angst has to remain. And one of the better ways to make it meaningful, to bother having a club in the first place beyond survival, is to make it a liminal place to find meaning from being apart from a system you cannot join. Humans *are* the point!

This is it man! All the weird stuff became so normal the game itself became banal despite having some cool ideas. That why it's back to basics for me!

I have some nostalgia for oWoD because I ran it quite a bit back in the 90s.  As a game to actually run, I prefer nWoD in about every way.  A lot of oWoD books, especially the later ones, were more books to admire than books to actually use during play.  They seemed to be aimed mainly at people who read the books but didn't play.  I remember a lot of WoD fans on places like TBP who bought all the stuff but hadn't played in months or years.  The nWoD stuff seemed designed a lot more with people who play the games in mind.  nWoD had an increasingly intrusive and stupid metaplot with later books written assuming you were following it.  nWoD is much more of a toolbook with suggestions and ideas rather than a metaplot.  The way splats are structured in Requiem makes them much more flexible and usable in actual play in my opinion.  The CoD came out and they brought in a stupid metaplot and overcomplicated the hell out of everything.  They also added really niche and messed up stuff like Beast and Deviant.  They just lost me entirely.         

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on September 22, 2024, 06:42:45 AM

Quote from: Opaopajr on September 21, 2024, 10:31:18 PMThe secret cool kids club means nothing if it is nothing but secret cool kids clubs all the way down. That surface layer of dreary high school doldrums and angst has to remain. And one of the better ways to make it meaningful, to bother having a club in the first place beyond survival, is to make it a liminal place to find meaning from being apart from a system you cannot join. Humans *are* the point!

This is it man! All the weird stuff became so normal the game itself became banal despite having some cool ideas. That why it's back to basics for me!

I totally agree with you guys on this. The population dynamics are completely implausible and always were. IIRC a recent book spent itself on expositing the hundreds of Jewish vampire sects, despite there only being 1-200 Jewish vampires worldwide, half of which are NPC only. You can check the gaming den critiques for more.

That's actually one of the reasons I preferred nWoD/CoD. Yeah, a lot of the descriptions of secret societies implied implausible population numbers because these writers cannot do math. But the decentralized disconnected nature of the setting meant that you could just treat these secret societies as clubhouses with no more than a dozen members and not worry about implausible logistics.

Also, yeah, the splats don't play well together. But then they were never meant to be. Everlasting and WitchCraft make mashups work because they were designed to from the start. Everlasting's Codex of Immortals provides unified guidelines for creating superpowers that are shared across splats. WitchCraft uses point buy to balance characters. It's totally feasible to do monster mashes if you write the rules and setting from the ground up to support it.

This is one of the reasons I grew to dislike nwod. It advertised itself as crossover friendly, made a few crossover scenarios even, but lied about it. The mechanics were an unbalanced mess. Everlasting and WitchCraft did it first and did it better just a few years earlier. I don't understand how these writers didn't get the memo.

Quote from: yosemitemike on September 22, 2024, 09:08:10 AMI have some nostalgia for oWoD because I ran it quite a bit back in the 90s.  As a game to actually run, I prefer nWoD in about every way.  A lot of oWoD books, especially the later ones, were more books to admire than books to actually use during play.  They seemed to be aimed mainly at people who read the books but didn't play.  I remember a lot of WoD fans on places like TBP who bought all the stuff but hadn't played in months or years.  The nWoD stuff seemed designed a lot more with people who play the games in mind.  nWoD had an increasingly intrusive and stupid metaplot with later books written assuming you were following it.  nWoD is much more of a toolbook with suggestions and ideas rather than a metaplot.  The way splats are structured in Requiem makes them much more flexible and usable in actual play in my opinion.  The CoD came out and they brought in a stupid metaplot and overcomplicated the hell out of everything.  They also added really niche and messed up stuff like Beast and Deviant.  They just lost me entirely.         

Yup. That was my experience too. They fell apart for the same reasons that WoD did in the 90s.

As I said, we have games like WitchCraft and Everlasting as examples of how to do it well. Take something like that, mix in the creativity of the more toolbox nWoD supplements like Mythologies and Mirrors and Reliquary and Lost and Hunter, then you'll have something really fun.

That's why I'm not looking forward to Curseborn. Aside from the Storypath and condition rules being horribly convoluted compared to the superior simplicity of Fate or PbtA, the setting looks like it's gonna repeat the same problems that plagued later CoD books. Discarding the toolkit in favor of bizarre metaplots, social justice weirdness, and the writers' barely concealed sexual fetishes.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 22, 2024, 09:26:21 AMAlso, yeah, the splats don't play well together. But then they were never meant to be.

At the time, it seemed obvious to me that the different game lines were not really meant to cross over like that.  Changeling and wraith took place partly or almost completely in a world that the other splats couldn't see or interact with without some special condition.  Most of the main game lines had one or more special stats that had no equivalent in the other lines.  I spent years running these crossover game and it was always a janky mess.  Players were fascinated with it though and there was always at least one player who insisted on playing a splat from another game line. 

WitchCraft doesn't have any special stats. Everyone works basically the same except with point buy to handle powers and drawbacks.

Everlasting is where things get weird. It has all the splats operate on more or less the same general template. Powers are created using universal guidelines in the immortal codex. The magic system is the same for all splats, freeform with a variety of "magical paths" to cover different styles in the magician's handbook (unfortunately there's no legal PDF and the paperback can read absurd prices on the used book market). All splats have a "torment" statistic, the exact nature of which varies by splat: vampires have damnation, questers have ennui, etc. But there's occasionally outliers: the vampires have a "blood-potency" stat (it's actually called that, in 1997) that limits their trait maximum and adjusts their magic point pool, and which can be stolen by other vampires a la Anne Rice rules.

Unfortunately, the Everlasting rules are a straight heartbreaker of the ST rules. Slightly better designed (e.g. skills modify the number of pips you need to roll instead of the number of dice you roll), but still a heartbreaker. But it's actually designed for mixed play.

According to the wayback machine of the official site, they had plans for multiple other books like a book on historical eras. I get the impression that they wanted to emulate highlander and make PCs ancient immortals with detailed pasts. It sounds really fun, so I'm bummed it died. There's no games on the market that let you play ancient immortals with detailed backstories, and WoD certainly never supported it.

There must be so many cool game concepts I've seen that died without ever developing a following. It's so stupid. Ttrpgs have infinite potential, but it feels like very few people actually want to explore that potential.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 22, 2024, 08:40:32 PMThere must be so many cool game concepts I've seen that died without ever developing a following. It's so stupid. Ttrpgs have infinite potential, but it feels like very few people actually want to explore that potential.

I think that's probably on of the biggest problems in TTRPGs. That is to say, that many people won't actually ever leave their comfort zone. I always feel that looking at lots of different material will give you a new perspective on gaming, even if you don't like the game per se.

Even bad games can still ignite some original creativity that you many not have seen without looking beyond the mirror so-to-speak.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 22, 2024, 08:40:32 PMunfortunately there's no legal PDF

There is now.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/46/visionary-entertainment-studio