Quote from: Snowman0147;1095029Currently trying to make my own system as we speak.  It is similar to D&D hacks that simplify D&D.  Basically think Black Hack for something similar to nWoD, but leans more on the adventuring with barely any personal horror bullshit.  There is also a generic pool of powers that all supernaturals to use so that I don't need to reinvent the wheel unless I REALLY have to.

What would be great would be a revision of Opening the Dark that takes into account the innovations made by CoD, V5, Exalted, etc. Right now it hews fairly closely to the Revised Storyteller System.

For example:

• Persona/Being: There's a bazillion ways this could be changed up, but I like how it combines the Nature/Demeanor and Virtue/Vice concepts that people endlessly argued over. It could even be discarded entirely or merged into Emotional Traits.
  
• Emotional Traits: Scion lets you select from a suite of virtues. Exalted 3e switched it to free-form intimacies. V5 and CoD 2e introduced touchstones and whatnot. The Everlasting did something similar.
  
• Ethos: Need to ensure this doesn't punish players for playing as murderous hobos and doesn't introduce ways around itself. Maybe it could be changed to a light/dark side mechanic, with both sides providing benefits and drawbacks. Or discard it entirely.
  
• Will: As in V5, this could be tweaked to a mental hit point trait. Or does the Madness trait already cover that?
  
• Attributes: The way that CoD and V5 divide attributes along two axes of Mental/Physical/Social by Power/Finesse/Resistance. Epic/Mega Attributes* from Trinity and Scion (as an alternative to scaling attributes beyond 5 ranks).
  
• Background Traits: This could definitely stand to be expanded to account for all the negative backgrounds (a la Mage: The Ascension), background enhancements* (a la Trinity), merits and flaws, conditions, yadda yadda introduced over the years.
  
• Power Paths: Universal powers are a must, so great that it's the default. Take into account all the ways that powers have been represented in the many ST games. V5 has multiple powers to select from at each rank of a power path (including upgrades and amalgam powers), and explicitly tags power paths as mental/social or physical. Trinity, Scion and Exalted rely on Attributes and Skills instead of dedicated Power Paths. Exalted has a very detailed tagging system. Power Paths could have separate effect and target traits a la CtD or GtSE. Etc.
  
• Essence: Change this to a universal "power stat" a la Trinity, Scion and Exalted. But not CoD's dozen different traits with different limits.
  
• Task Resolution: used the simplified task resolution mechanics from CoD 1e or Qwixalted. Don't use more rolls than you need to. Conditions are helpful in theory since it makes sense to condense various advantage/disadvantage rules, but the execution needs to be streamlined a lot.
  

---

[/HR]

I'm going to focus on Conditions for a sec since those are one of the most maligned aspects of CoD2. Although you can criticize them for clearly ripping off FATE, it make sense to condense the various backgrounds, merits, flaws, experience gain, yadda yadda into a single system for various advantages and disadvantages. CoD2's implementation is very clunky, however.

The rules for spirits are a commonly cited example. In order for, say, a ghost to manifest, it first needs to roll dice to create an Open Condition. What would make more sense is not to need this step at all, as in CoD1. Cleaning up the list of manifestations is good, but in the process it lost the flavor from CoD1. The "twilight image" manifestation is nowhere near as interesting as the highly variable precursors in CoD1. The limitations on temporal parameters, manifested appearance, and sight based attributes was really interesting and I'm sad that it was discarded in CoD1 (along with most of the numina). (I could go on about how it isn't thematic for spirits to limited by spatial coordinates when they aren't manifesting as a target, but that's another tangent.) IIRC, over on the Onyx Path forums somebody made a list of new manifestations to account for things like demon whisperers or whatever. I definitely think the list of manifestations could stand to be expanded, since a lot of nuance depicted in the fluff is absent. For example, there's no manifestation for a spirit to be attached to a host without possessing them: in the Immortals book the chapter opening fiction for a purified character depicts wasp spirits literally riding on the backs of hosts, but this isn't actually allowed by the rules. And the whole multiple levels of twilight rule is just pointlessly confusing; I didn't like the penumbra (nor the umbra) in WoD and I don't like it in CoD either.

Another clunky example would be the super powers. I haven't read the rules in a while, so excuse any errors. Some powers require inflicting a condition before they can be used, but much of the time this isn't abstracted into a single roll. While it makes sense that modifying someone's memories in detail first requires placing them into a hypnotic trance so that you can do a Q&A to determine what they do remember and what you want them to remember instead, placing them into a trance and starting the editing should be abstracted as part of the same roll as they were in CoD1 unless the nuance is dramatically important in a particular situation. In any case, ease of play should trump other concerns.

One of the first rules of the ST system has always been some variation of "only make rolls when dramatically appropriate." There are way too many instances when this is broken for the sake of some bizarre need to simulate everything in as much detail as possible or whatever the rationale is.

To sum, I prefer simplicity and flexibility.

---

[/HR]

As far as splats go, I find WoD/CoD to be needlessly restrictive. Everlasting, WitchCraft, Nightlife, and other games had plenty of original ideas that were never reflected by WoD/CoD. Everlasting in particular is just crazy. It has analogues for almost all of the WoD/CoD splats, as well as Scion/Exalted, and more. It wouldn't be feasible right now to try listing every idea I had for splats, so I'm going to restrict myself to the "big five" of vampire, werewolf, mage, ghost and fairy. My design philosophy takes heavy inspiration from Changeling: The Lost and Hunter: The Vigil, since those are the most creative and free-form splats.

• Vampire: I'd dispense with the fixed number of clans nonsense. There's an arbitrary number of bloodlines, since a new one comes into existence whenever a "progenitor" appears, so you can play whatever concept you want. Sects/covenants would be free-form and you could have membership in multiple circles if it makes sense, like how cliques work in real life.
  
• Werewolf: I'd dispense with the enforced ecoterrorism and spirit cops monomyth. While you could certainly play as ecoterrorists or spirit slayers, werewolves don't have a monopoly on that. For that matter, I wouldn't limit your animal aspect to a wolf or even a single animal. You wanna play lunars? These guys are basically lunars. You could even have plant or mineral aspects like Everlasting's manitou. There's no single way to become a werewolf, either. You could be hereditary, or you could be infected, or you could have made a pact with a totem, whatever. This would place a larger emphasis on the tribes, since they'd not only serve as high school cliques they'd also give you your mission in life.
  
• Mage: OtD provides a magic system that anyone can use, so Mages don't have a monopoly on flexible magic. I'm taking some inspiration from Everlasting's osirians for the next part: what they do have potential to access is a meta-magic that isn't limited by paradigm/magical tradition/whatever (what OtD represents as arts and praxes). However, they do suffer from the equivalent of "paradox" (or "magical bursts" a la Ewen Cluney's Magical Fury RPG) which prevents them from using their power wantonly. Mages don't have a universal monomyth, but several that inform many different secret societies.
  
• Ghost: This includes ghosts, revenants, mediums, astral projectors, reapers a la Dead Like Me, deja-vus a la Tru Calling, and so forth. There's no slavery, pseudo-underworld, underworld politics or any of those weird WoD/CoDisms to distract from the real world. You could play ghosts haunting their former lives, ghosts trying to relieve their karma and move on, ghost gangs fighting over haunted territory, ghost hunters hunting for ghosts, grim reapers reaping souls, etc.
  
• Fairy: This includes both fairies and half-fairies like changelings. These aren't your friendly kithain, but Dresden Files style Fair Folk. Deal with them at your own peril. Changelings are pretty much their DAF or CoD version, living between human and fairy but being terrified of the dangers of Fairyland. Fairies are closely related to spirits (the distinction is fuzzy since they don't coexist in any real religion so there's no theological underpinning), so they're the closest you get to a playable spirit character.
  

There are any number of other splats that you could devise, like angels, demons, ghouls, zombies, mummies, golems, gargoyles, grail questers, etc but I'm not going to try that right now. Well, maybe I'll say a few worlds on zombies.

• Zombie: The ancient fan-splat Zombie: The Coil deals a lot with zombies, combining both Haitian folklore and Romero's horror movies for a bizarre whole. The obvious downside is that you're expected to play highly prolific serial killers who literally eat people alive (and the zombies who only eat dead bodies are portrayed as the villains), but that's hardly a stretch from the standard murderhobos. I prefer something more like All Flesh Must Be Eaten, where there are a bunch of very different zombie varieties depending on their origin and the constraints of the deadworld (campaign setting) in question. On the other hand, flesh-eating monsters heavily overlaps with Vampire's shtick. For that matter, folkloric vampires overlap with ghosts.
  

Worldbuilding is a lot to think about.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1095104What would be great would be a revision of Opening the Dark that takes into account the innovations made by CoD, V5, Exalted, etc. Right now it hews fairly closely to the Revised Storyteller System.

For example:

• Persona/Being: There's a bazillion ways this could be changed up, but I like how it combines the Nature/Demeanor and Virtue/Vice concepts that people endlessly argued over. It could even be discarded entirely or merged into Emotional Traits.
  
• Emotional Traits: Scion lets you select from a suite of virtues. Exalted 3e switched it to free-form intimacies. V5 and CoD 2e introduced touchstones and whatnot. The Everlasting did something similar.
  
• Ethos: Need to ensure this doesn't punish players for playing as murderous hobos and doesn't introduce ways around itself. Maybe it could be changed to a light/dark side mechanic, with both sides providing benefits and drawbacks. Or discard it entirely.
  
• Will: As in V5, this could be tweaked to a mental hit point trait. Or does the Madness trait already cover that?
  
• Attributes: The way that CoD and V5 divide attributes along two axes of Mental/Physical/Social by Power/Finesse/Resistance. Epic/Mega Attributes* from Trinity and Scion (as an alternative to scaling attributes beyond 5 ranks).
  
• Background Traits: This could definitely stand to be expanded to account for all the negative backgrounds (a la Mage: The Ascension), background enhancements* (a la Trinity), merits and flaws, conditions, yadda yadda introduced over the years.
  
• Power Paths: Universal powers are a must, so great that it's the default. Take into account all the ways that powers have been represented in the many ST games. V5 has multiple powers to select from at each rank of a power path (including upgrades and amalgam powers), and explicitly tags power paths as mental/social or physical. Trinity, Scion and Exalted rely on Attributes and Skills instead of dedicated Power Paths. Exalted has a very detailed tagging system. Power Paths could have separate effect and target traits a la CtD or GtSE. Etc.
  
• Essence: Change this to a universal "power stat" a la Trinity, Scion and Exalted. But not CoD's dozen different traits with different limits.
  
• Task Resolution: used the simplified task resolution mechanics from CoD 1e or Qwixalted. Don't use more rolls than you need to. Conditions are helpful in theory since it makes sense to condense various advantage/disadvantage rules, but the execution needs to be streamlined a lot.
  

---

[/HR]

I'm going to focus on Conditions for a sec since those are one of the most maligned aspects of CoD2. Although you can criticize them for clearly ripping off FATE, it make sense to condense the various backgrounds, merits, flaws, experience gain, yadda yadda into a single system for various advantages and disadvantages. CoD2's implementation is very clunky, however.

The rules for spirits are a commonly cited example. In order for, say, a ghost to manifest, it first needs to roll dice to create an Open Condition. What would make more sense is not to need this step at all, as in CoD1. Cleaning up the list of manifestations is good, but in the process it lost the flavor from CoD1. The "twilight image" manifestation is nowhere near as interesting as the highly variable precursors in CoD1. The limitations on temporal parameters, manifested appearance, and sight based attributes was really interesting and I'm sad that it was discarded in CoD1 (along with most of the numina). (I could go on about how it isn't thematic for spirits to limited by spatial coordinates when they aren't manifesting as a target, but that's another tangent.) IIRC, over on the Onyx Path forums somebody made a list of new manifestations to account for things like demon whisperers or whatever. I definitely think the list of manifestations could stand to be expanded, since a lot of nuance depicted in the fluff is absent. For example, there's no manifestation for a spirit to be attached to a host without possessing them: in the Immortals book the chapter opening fiction for a purified character depicts wasp spirits literally riding on the backs of hosts, but this isn't actually allowed by the rules. And the whole multiple levels of twilight rule is just pointlessly confusing; I didn't like the penumbra (nor the umbra) in WoD and I don't like it in CoD either.

Another clunky example would be the super powers. I haven't read the rules in a while, so excuse any errors. Some powers require inflicting a condition before they can be used, but much of the time this isn't abstracted into a single roll. While it makes sense that modifying someone's memories in detail first requires placing them into a hypnotic trance so that you can do a Q&A to determine what they do remember and what you want them to remember instead, placing them into a trance and starting the editing should be abstracted as part of the same roll as they were in CoD1 unless the nuance is dramatically important in a particular situation. In any case, ease of play should trump other concerns.

One of the first rules of the ST system has always been some variation of "only make rolls when dramatically appropriate." There are way too many instances when this is broken for the sake of some bizarre need to simulate everything in as much detail as possible or whatever the rationale is.

To sum, I prefer simplicity and flexibility.

---

[/HR]

As far as splats go, I find WoD/CoD to be needlessly restrictive. Everlasting, WitchCraft, Nightlife, and other games had plenty of original ideas that were never reflected by WoD/CoD. Everlasting in particular is just crazy. It has analogues for almost all of the WoD/CoD splats, as well as Scion/Exalted, and more. It wouldn't be feasible right now to try listing every idea I had for splats, so I'm going to restrict myself to the "big five" of vampire, werewolf, mage, ghost and fairy. My design philosophy takes heavy inspiration from Changeling: The Lost and Hunter: The Vigil, since those are the most creative and free-form splats.

• Vampire: I'd dispense with the fixed number of clans nonsense. There's an arbitrary number of bloodlines, since a new one comes into existence whenever a "progenitor" appears, so you can play whatever concept you want. Sects/covenants would be free-form and you could have membership in multiple circles if it makes sense, like how cliques work in real life.
  
• Werewolf: I'd dispense with the enforced ecoterrorism and spirit cops monomyth. While you could certainly play as ecoterrorists or spirit slayers, werewolves don't have a monopoly on that. For that matter, I wouldn't limit your animal aspect to a wolf or even a single animal. You wanna play lunars? These guys are basically lunars. You could even have plant or mineral aspects like Everlasting's manitou. There's no single way to become a werewolf, either. You could be hereditary, or you could be infected, or you could have made a pact with a totem, whatever. This would place a larger emphasis on the tribes, since they'd not only serve as high school cliques they'd also give you your mission in life.
  
• Mage: OtD provides a magic system that anyone can use, so Mages don't have a monopoly on flexible magic. I'm taking some inspiration from Everlasting's osirians for the next part: what they do have potential to access is a meta-magic that isn't limited by paradigm/magical tradition/whatever (what OtD represents as arts and praxes). However, they do suffer from the equivalent of "paradox" (or "magical bursts" a la Ewen Cluney's Magical Fury RPG) which prevents them from using their power wantonly. Mages don't have a universal monomyth, but several that inform many different secret societies.
  
• Ghost: This includes ghosts, revenants, mediums, astral projectors, reapers a la Dead Like Me, deja-vus a la Tru Calling, and so forth. There's no slavery, pseudo-underworld, underworld politics or any of those weird WoD/CoDisms to distract from the real world. You could play ghosts haunting their former lives, ghosts trying to relieve their karma and move on, ghost gangs fighting over haunted territory, ghost hunters hunting for ghosts, grim reapers reaping souls, etc.
  
• Fairy: This includes both fairies and half-fairies like changelings. These aren't your friendly kithain, but Dresden Files style Fair Folk. Deal with them at your own peril. Changelings are pretty much their DAF or CoD version, living between human and fairy but being terrified of the dangers of Fairyland. Fairies are closely related to spirits (the distinction is fuzzy since they don't coexist in any real religion so there's no theological underpinning), so they're the closest you get to a playable spirit character.
  

There are any number of other splats that you could devise, like angels, demons, ghouls, zombies, mummies, golems, gargoyles, grail questers, etc but I'm not going to try that right now. Well, maybe I'll say a few worlds on zombies.

• Zombie: The ancient fan-splat Zombie: The Coil deals a lot with zombies, combining both Haitian folklore and Romero's horror movies for a bizarre whole. The obvious downside is that you're expected to play highly prolific serial killers who literally eat people alive (and the zombies who only eat dead bodies are portrayed as the villains), but that's hardly a stretch from the standard murderhobos. I prefer something more like All Flesh Must Be Eaten, where there are a bunch of very different zombie varieties depending on their origin and the constraints of the deadworld (campaign setting) in question. On the other hand, flesh-eating monsters heavily overlaps with Vampire's shtick. For that matter, folkloric vampires overlap with ghosts.
  

Worldbuilding is a lot to think about.

Really cool. I havent read it all yet, but for some reason i haven't gotten updates on the threads im subscribed to.

Once you finish you should sell it as a PDF on the storytellers vault that Onyx Path and White Wolf opened for third party developers.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1095104What would be great would be a revision of Opening the Dark that takes into account the innovations made by CoD, V5, Exalted, etc. Right now it hews fairly closely to the Revised Storyteller System.

For example:

• Persona/Being: There's a bazillion ways this could be changed up, but I like how it combines the Nature/Demeanor and Virtue/Vice concepts that people endlessly argued over. It could even be discarded entirely or merged into Emotional Traits.
  
• Emotional Traits: Scion lets you select from a suite of virtues. Exalted 3e switched it to free-form intimacies. V5 and CoD 2e introduced touchstones and whatnot. The Everlasting did something similar.
  
• Ethos: Need to ensure this doesn't punish players for playing as murderous hobos and doesn't introduce ways around itself. Maybe it could be changed to a light/dark side mechanic, with both sides providing benefits and drawbacks. Or discard it entirely.
  
• Will: As in V5, this could be tweaked to a mental hit point trait. Or does the Madness trait already cover that?
  
• Attributes: The way that CoD and V5 divide attributes along two axes of Mental/Physical/Social by Power/Finesse/Resistance. Epic/Mega Attributes* from Trinity and Scion (as an alternative to scaling attributes beyond 5 ranks).
  
• Background Traits: This could definitely stand to be expanded to account for all the negative backgrounds (a la Mage: The Ascension), background enhancements* (a la Trinity), merits and flaws, conditions, yadda yadda introduced over the years.
  
• Power Paths: Universal powers are a must, so great that it's the default. Take into account all the ways that powers have been represented in the many ST games. V5 has multiple powers to select from at each rank of a power path (including upgrades and amalgam powers), and explicitly tags power paths as mental/social or physical. Trinity, Scion and Exalted rely on Attributes and Skills instead of dedicated Power Paths. Exalted has a very detailed tagging system. Power Paths could have separate effect and target traits a la CtD or GtSE. Etc.
  
• Essence: Change this to a universal "power stat" a la Trinity, Scion and Exalted. But not CoD's dozen different traits with different limits.
  
• Task Resolution: used the simplified task resolution mechanics from CoD 1e or Qwixalted. Don't use more rolls than you need to. Conditions are helpful in theory since it makes sense to condense various advantage/disadvantage rules, but the execution needs to be streamlined a lot.
  

---

[/HR]

I'm going to focus on Conditions for a sec since those are one of the most maligned aspects of CoD2. Although you can criticize them for clearly ripping off FATE, it make sense to condense the various backgrounds, merits, flaws, experience gain, yadda yadda into a single system for various advantages and disadvantages. CoD2's implementation is very clunky, however.

The rules for spirits are a commonly cited example. In order for, say, a ghost to manifest, it first needs to roll dice to create an Open Condition. What would make more sense is not to need this step at all, as in CoD1. Cleaning up the list of manifestations is good, but in the process it lost the flavor from CoD1. The "twilight image" manifestation is nowhere near as interesting as the highly variable precursors in CoD1. The limitations on temporal parameters, manifested appearance, and sight based attributes was really interesting and I'm sad that it was discarded in CoD1 (along with most of the numina). (I could go on about how it isn't thematic for spirits to limited by spatial coordinates when they aren't manifesting as a target, but that's another tangent.) IIRC, over on the Onyx Path forums somebody made a list of new manifestations to account for things like demon whisperers or whatever. I definitely think the list of manifestations could stand to be expanded, since a lot of nuance depicted in the fluff is absent. For example, there's no manifestation for a spirit to be attached to a host without possessing them: in the Immortals book the chapter opening fiction for a purified character depicts wasp spirits literally riding on the backs of hosts, but this isn't actually allowed by the rules. And the whole multiple levels of twilight rule is just pointlessly confusing; I didn't like the penumbra (nor the umbra) in WoD and I don't like it in CoD either.

Another clunky example would be the super powers. I haven't read the rules in a while, so excuse any errors. Some powers require inflicting a condition before they can be used, but much of the time this isn't abstracted into a single roll. While it makes sense that modifying someone's memories in detail first requires placing them into a hypnotic trance so that you can do a Q&A to determine what they do remember and what you want them to remember instead, placing them into a trance and starting the editing should be abstracted as part of the same roll as they were in CoD1 unless the nuance is dramatically important in a particular situation. In any case, ease of play should trump other concerns.

One of the first rules of the ST system has always been some variation of "only make rolls when dramatically appropriate." There are way too many instances when this is broken for the sake of some bizarre need to simulate everything in as much detail as possible or whatever the rationale is.

To sum, I prefer simplicity and flexibility.

---

[/HR]

As far as splats go, I find WoD/CoD to be needlessly restrictive. Everlasting, WitchCraft, Nightlife, and other games had plenty of original ideas that were never reflected by WoD/CoD. Everlasting in particular is just crazy. It has analogues for almost all of the WoD/CoD splats, as well as Scion/Exalted, and more. It wouldn't be feasible right now to try listing every idea I had for splats, so I'm going to restrict myself to the "big five" of vampire, werewolf, mage, ghost and fairy. My design philosophy takes heavy inspiration from Changeling: The Lost and Hunter: The Vigil, since those are the most creative and free-form splats.

• Vampire: I'd dispense with the fixed number of clans nonsense. There's an arbitrary number of bloodlines, since a new one comes into existence whenever a "progenitor" appears, so you can play whatever concept you want. Sects/covenants would be free-form and you could have membership in multiple circles if it makes sense, like how cliques work in real life.
  
• Werewolf: I'd dispense with the enforced ecoterrorism and spirit cops monomyth. While you could certainly play as ecoterrorists or spirit slayers, werewolves don't have a monopoly on that. For that matter, I wouldn't limit your animal aspect to a wolf or even a single animal. You wanna play lunars? These guys are basically lunars. You could even have plant or mineral aspects like Everlasting's manitou. There's no single way to become a werewolf, either. You could be hereditary, or you could be infected, or you could have made a pact with a totem, whatever. This would place a larger emphasis on the tribes, since they'd not only serve as high school cliques they'd also give you your mission in life.
  
• Mage: OtD provides a magic system that anyone can use, so Mages don't have a monopoly on flexible magic. I'm taking some inspiration from Everlasting's osirians for the next part: what they do have potential to access is a meta-magic that isn't limited by paradigm/magical tradition/whatever (what OtD represents as arts and praxes). However, they do suffer from the equivalent of "paradox" (or "magical bursts" a la Ewen Cluney's Magical Fury RPG) which prevents them from using their power wantonly. Mages don't have a universal monomyth, but several that inform many different secret societies.
  
• Ghost: This includes ghosts, revenants, mediums, astral projectors, reapers a la Dead Like Me, deja-vus a la Tru Calling, and so forth. There's no slavery, pseudo-underworld, underworld politics or any of those weird WoD/CoDisms to distract from the real world. You could play ghosts haunting their former lives, ghosts trying to relieve their karma and move on, ghost gangs fighting over haunted territory, ghost hunters hunting for ghosts, grim reapers reaping souls, etc.
  
• Fairy: This includes both fairies and half-fairies like changelings. These aren't your friendly kithain, but Dresden Files style Fair Folk. Deal with them at your own peril. Changelings are pretty much their DAF or CoD version, living between human and fairy but being terrified of the dangers of Fairyland. Fairies are closely related to spirits (the distinction is fuzzy since they don't coexist in any real religion so there's no theological underpinning), so they're the closest you get to a playable spirit character.
  

There are any number of other splats that you could devise, like angels, demons, ghouls, zombies, mummies, golems, gargoyles, grail questers, etc but I'm not going to try that right now. Well, maybe I'll say a few worlds on zombies.

• Zombie: The ancient fan-splat Zombie: The Coil deals a lot with zombies, combining both Haitian folklore and Romero's horror movies for a bizarre whole. The obvious downside is that you're expected to play highly prolific serial killers who literally eat people alive (and the zombies who only eat dead bodies are portrayed as the villains), but that's hardly a stretch from the standard murderhobos. I prefer something more like All Flesh Must Be Eaten, where there are a bunch of very different zombie varieties depending on their origin and the constraints of the deadworld (campaign setting) in question. On the other hand, flesh-eating monsters heavily overlaps with Vampire's shtick. For that matter, folkloric vampires overlap with ghosts.
  

Worldbuilding is a lot to think about.

Hmm, maybe you could do a "Magical Girl" splat as a shout-out to the fan games "Senshi: The Merchandising" (for the Old WoD) and "Princess: The Hopeful" (for the New WoD) since that's the only splat to have a fan game in both main iterations of the World of Darkness?

At the very least, it could be a sub-group within the Mages or Fairies.

Quote from: K9ine;1095266Really cool. I havent read it all yet, but for some reason i haven't gotten updates on the threads im subscribed to.

Once you finish you should sell it as a PDF on the storytellers vault that Onyx Path and White Wolf opened for third party developers.

I'm not selling anything on storyteller vault. I chose the OGL precisely to avoid shackling myself to the deranged World of Darkness IP.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1095295Hmm, maybe you could do a "Magical Girl" splat as a shout-out to the fan games "Senshi: The Merchandising" (for the Old WoD) and "Princess: The Hopeful" (for the New WoD) since that's the only splat to have a fan game in both main iterations of the World of Darkness?

At the very least, it could be a sub-group within the Mages or Fairies.

I'm not married to a specific fatsplat setup. What I liked about Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts was that they let you makeup your own skins/archetypes.

Quote from: K9ine;1094895I always play with the same group so I'm sure that has a lot to do with it but CofD is the best RPG system Ive gotten to play so far. Ive played 5e, Dresden Files, Fate Core, BESM, and GURPS.

This game had some mechanical depth, without being any more complex than nessesary. Lots of character customization, and the games make it easy to come up with a realistic character. The rules naturally guide you to role playing without any narrative game BS, and playing mortals is really fun if you like horror.

Besides the core rules you have vampire, werewolf, mage (my favorite and I was pretty resistant to the concept) promethean (basically frankenstien), Beast (build your own monster), Sin Eater (A revenant like the crow), and others.

I figured since RPG Pundit is an OSR guy most people here will not like these games since their more rule heavy, but I was wondering if anyone else here does?

I purchased and adore the entire changling: the lost line. I also ran two very well-received games of werewolf: the forsaken and mage: the awakening.

Big fan. Found some minor issues in the blue book and some major ones in the lines themselves, but the system is robust enough that a little design duct tape fixed them pretty handily.

I'm relatively fond of the 1e of the New World of Darkness, to a limited degree. Requiem was pretty interesting (Ventrue and Nosferatu are my jam), and the nWoD version of Werewolf (Forsaken) kicked the old version of Werewolf's (Apocalypse) in the ass; it was much better. Just chiming in to say I'm a fan to a limited degree, provided you're including 1e with the thread's premise/question. Oh, and Changeling: the Lost was cool. I'm ambivalent on the other game lines (except Beast, which was a dumpster fire), though there were some interesting supplements I thought were neat.

Tried to play some stuff after the God Machine update; couldn't quite get into things after those changes (added too many mechanics in places there did not need to be mechanics and modified too much of existing stuff I liked), but I liked the 1e stuff pre-God Machine.

Beast is solely a God Machine project and has no connections with 1E at all.  Which I am fine with that dumpster fire being a second edition thing.  I am just sad that Demon was God Machine too because it has some pretty good ideas and people generally like that game a lot.  It was a good start for the God Machine line.  No the truly last 1E nWoD game was Mummy which I never played so I cannot really comment on it.  Not to mention I am a fan of the lesser games such as mortal, promethean, changeling, and hunter.  I tried geist once, but couldn't get a good understanding of it.  Big fan of second sight, skinchangers, and of course mirrors.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1095986Beast is solely a God Machine project and has no connections with 1E at all.  Which I am fine with that dumpster fire being a second edition thing.  I am just sad that Demon was God Machine too because it has some pretty good ideas and people generally like that game a lot.  It was a good start for the God Machine line.  No the truly last 1E nWoD game was Mummy which I never played so I cannot really comment on it.  Not to mention I am a fan of the lesser games such as mortal, promethean, changeling, and hunter.  I tried geist once, but couldn't get a good understanding of it.  Big fan of second sight, skinchangers, and of course mirrors.

I never got the appeal of Demon: The Descent. Then again, I never particularly liked the "evil omnipotent moron" thing they had going with the god-machine. What were the good ideas? If I knew that, then it might help me if I wanted to try writing guidelines for angel and demon splats of my own.

Quote from: Azraele;1095920I purchased and adore the entire changling: the lost line. I also ran two very well-received games of werewolf: the forsaken and mage: the awakening.

Big fan. Found some minor issues in the blue book and some major ones in the lines themselves, but the system is robust enough that a little design duct tape fixed them pretty handily.

This mirrors my own experience - but I had a *lot* of success with the Hunter line and my own version of Requiem. I stopped my considerable purchasing of the various lines around the time Demon dropped. Not interested in the direction OPP has gone, yes some of it has to do with their public behavior, which I can ignore, but it immediately had an impact on the quality of their work for the obvious reasons.

Changeling and Hunter by *far* are my favorites. Vampire, Werewolf and Mage - I largely approach with a toolkit view and don't play them with their in-game cosmology.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1096043I never got the appeal of Demon: The Descent. Then again, I never particularly liked the "evil omnipotent moron" thing they had going with the god-machine. What were the good ideas? If I knew that, then it might help me if I wanted to try writing guidelines for angel and demon splats of my own.

It was a game of proper espionage and laying low from the God Machine while blending in with the surrounding mortals.  The biggest thing that I like was the Cover/Pact subsystems.  Cover is basically integrity, but not really.  It is how well the demon can maintain his disguise till he is discovered by angels.  Basically you mimic as mortal and have to larp as that exact mortal.  If cover drops to zero the cover is lost forever and the demon is on the lam.  Which he has to find a new cover, or get caught by the angel police.  Pacts are means to produce new covers by either patchworks, or tricking mortals into selling their souls whole sale.

Quote from: tenbones;1096048Changeling and Hunter by *far* are my favorites. Vampire, Werewolf and Mage - I largely approach with a toolkit view and don't play them with their in-game cosmology.

I share this view too. Hence why I'm motivated to build entirely new settings to apply the toolkit formula to everything.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1096051It was a game of proper espionage and laying low from the God Machine while blending in with the surrounding mortals.  The biggest thing that I like was the Cover/Pact subsystems.  Cover is basically integrity, but not really.  It is how well the demon can maintain his disguise till he is discovered by angels.  Basically you mimic as mortal and have to larp as that exact mortal.  If cover drops to zero the cover is lost forever and the demon is on the lam.  Which he has to find a new cover, or get caught by the angel police.  Pacts are means to produce new covers by either patchworks, or tricking mortals into selling their souls whole sale.

While I'm not a fan of "angel police" (long story short: cosmology is a bitch), I think similar mechanics could work in any espionage context. It could be renamed "the masquerade" and applied to all splats, serving as a clear way to track whether the authorities and witch-hunters are on your trail.

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On another note, here's another short dissertation on world building analysis. This time: animism.

OtD's section on spirits reflects the WoD view, but this is utterly divorced from animism in real world belief. Although many religions have an otherworld, nature spirits don't dwell in an otherworld. They exist in OUR world. Spirits aren't some abstract concept separate from material reality; they are literally the souls of everything. When you anthropomorphize animals, inanimate objects and the weather, you are ascribing them agency and spirit. That is the basis of animism.

Warhammer 40,000's Adeptus Mechanicus is an example of realistically practiced animism. They believe that machines have souls they call "machine spirits." These aren't incorporeal entities that attach themselves to machines, but souls no different than those ascribed to humans.

Animism is the foundation of most religions that exist today, since it is an extension of our psychological inclination to anthropomorphize things. It is very clearly present in our records of the Ancient Greek religion, which had a plurality of primordials, nymphs, demons and so forth.

A related concept is "magical thinking," or the belief that there is a causal relationship between things that cannot be verified by science. In other words, the belief that thoughts can affect reality. This is intimately tied with animism too, being another psychological predisposition of human beings.

Not much is known about most pre-Christian belief systems due to a lack of records. Fairies are the result of pre-Christian European beliefs being filtered through a Christian lens. They aren't a separate concept from spirits in general.

World building based on real world animism would require making a very different set of assumptions. The most visibly obvious of which is that spirits wouldn't exist separately from their material counterparts, if any. It would be closer to Exalted's Creation setting or WitchCraft's setting, I suppose.

The important questions would be: why are spirits important? how do they help/hinder characters? how do they drive plots? how do characters interact with them? etc

I'll try to answer those next post but feel free to chime in.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1096043I never got the appeal of Demon: The Descent.

Someone on The Pub described it, and I thought "Holy Crap, so that's what Demon is about. That is actually awesome."

I will see if I can find the post.

Quote from: K9ine;1094895I figured since RPG Pundit is an OSR guy most people here will not like these games since their more rule heavy, but I was wondering if anyone else here does?

I think you'll find there are plenty here who don't ascribe to Pundit's preferences (and he'd be among the first to tell you so).

To your question: not a fan of the setting genre/conceits, so I've never bothered with the system outside a very brief read of the rules (I like looking at different mechanics and systems). Had some players in my old D&D campaign 20-something years ago who really loved that system. But then, they loved the genre, as well.

Never played the oWod so I can't comment on that. I played the nWoD 1st edition for a few years. The system is quite ok even though it's a dice pool and I never really liked the combat in it. It was a bit boring. I always struggled with their GM advice, the narrow focus of the games and mostly with the pretentious flowerly language the books were written in. They want to beat you over the head with the same themes and this always caused me to get some sort of tunnel vision when reading the books instead of opening up a lot of different possibilities.

Then came the second edition, which didn't seem to fix any of these problems I had with it and instead made the system go from rules-medium to rules-heavy with all the extra bookkeeping. Beats, tilts, conditions etc. I didn't get it and I moved away from it. I like games that let the players make the game and let the GM react to it (aka sandbox), being rules-light or rules-medium, written in simple practical language, offers flexibility to adapt my own setting with the rules provided and opening up many possibilities what the GM cand do building the setting and what the players could do playing the game. So I like tables.

I use Unisystem's rules (Witchcraft) nowadays and for setting inspiration I often skim through Silent Legions and Dark Streets and Darker Secrets. Both offer many tables to make the setting my own and provide ideas for quests. I never look into the WoD nowadays. It's a shame really, because unlike the Pundit here I don't view D&D as the golden standard of rpg's. I really like that WoD moved away from the murder hobo style of playing rpg's and made different playstyle viable. It's no longer a sequence of combat encounters. But the books didn't work for me. If I read them the possibilities seem to be getting smaller instead of bigger.

Why Witchcraft and not a cinematic unsystem? What books / house rules do you use?

I love the nWoD / Chronicles stuff but it's very crunchy.