As a point of discussion, I don't see Wraith as being a 'grim dark' setting at all. Gothic and existential, yes, but any setting that depicts any form of transcendence after death is a positive, hopeful outlook in my book. As they say in the tagline, it's not about Death but what comes after. Moreover, I find the whole experience to be both cathartic and more allegorical towards making the most out of life before you pass away to Oblivion.

Quote from: TrippyHippy;911709As a point of discussion, I don't see Wraith as being a 'grim dark' setting at all. Gothic and existential, yes, but any setting that depicts any form of transcendence after death is a positive, hopeful outlook in my book. As they say in the tagline, it's not about Death but what comes after. Moreover, I find the whole experience to be both cathartic and more allegorical towards making the most out of life before you pass away to Oblivion.

ok, this forces me into a short story.  (sorry)
So, I was the only one in the group that had a copy of the Shadow Player's Guide, a book full of fun advice on how to drive the primary aspect of another player into madness and depression.  (fun subject, right?)
One of the suggestions was for the Shadow to offer assistance on various tasks, simple little things, "need to get past a guard?  here have an extra die for your stealth check" "Trying to convince the head of your guild to teach you a new ability?  have 2 dice."  Get the player used to getting those bonus dice.  And then when he REALLY needs them, don't help.  "being attacked by Specters?  Sucks to be you."

I didn't do that.  I took it one step further.  the Shadow I ran had this philosophy, "Look no one we know has ever come back from either Oblivion OR Transcendence, so for all I know they are the same thing, and either way we return to nothingness.  So we can do this the easy way, where I help you get over all your baggage, or the hard way where I fight you tooth and nail. I'm lazy, so I'm going to help you."
and I did.  All the time.  I'd talk to Specters and tell them to pester someone else, I'd offer assistance, I would talk to other Shadows to get information for my primary, help him see to it his love ones got closure, all that stuff.
The primary, however, never saw it that way.  He _knew_ that he had a dark half.  Everyone does, and that dark half is ALWAYS trying to kill you or get you to do evil things.  So obviously whatever his Shadow was trying to get him to do was what he shouldn't do.
Which is how I drove him into Harrowing himself half way into the second session.

Quote from: Orphan81;911685The thing about Wraith is, it's one of the coolest "fantasy" settings. The Underworld is huge, and full of interesting and awesome stuff. Most of my campaigns were "DoomSlayer" based ones. Where the characters were Doomslayers, members of the Legions who went into the Labyrinth to fight Spectres and keep local citadels and haunts safe.

Pseudoephedrine used to run an OD&D/S&W game set in an afterlife called Necrocarcerus whichwas a lot like Wraith's setting, plus gonzo D&D stuff e.g. oozes possessed varying degrees of sentience and more or less played the role of Spectres.

Quote from: Snowman0147I ran promethean on a chat site for a year and a half. Most of the time it was a struggle to get anyone to play. I also got my first bitter taste of ST, Admin, and site owner bullshit that plagues World of Darkness sites. As you can see I am slowly recovering in skype and with better games with better fan bases.

Since promethean is not getting as much discussion here, mind if I ask you what worked and didn't work about the game (not the fan base)?

Quote from: remial;911737I didn't do that.  I took it one step further.  the Shadow I ran had this philosophy, "Look no one we know has ever come back from either Oblivion OR Transcendence, so for all I know they are the same thing, and either way we return to nothingness.  So we can do this the easy way, where I help you get over all your baggage, or the hard way where I fight you tooth and nail. I'm lazy, so I'm going to help you."
and I did.  All the time.  I'd talk to Specters and tell them to pester someone else, I'd offer assistance, I would talk to other Shadows to get information for my primary, help him see to it his love ones got closure, all that stuff.
The primary, however, never saw it that way.  He _knew_ that he had a dark half.  Everyone does, and that dark half is ALWAYS trying to kill you or get you to do evil things.  So obviously whatever his Shadow was trying to get him to do was what he shouldn't do.
Which is how I drove him into Harrowing himself half way into the second session.

Perfect.

There are some great supplements for Wraith, but the core book did a terrible job of explaining the setting, what you were supposed to do and what kinds of characters to make. My group attempted to play it right after it came out, but never quite got through character generation. There were just too many questions. Were the players newly dead? Where they are risk of being grabbed by the Legion? How did Guilds work?

By the time some of the cool supplements came along and made the game coherent, everyone had moved on. I saw the game's potential, but didn't feel like trying to coax people back to it when there were plenty of other games that weren't already damaged goods in their eyes.

Wraith was still better than the unfocused bag of crap that Changeling was. That's a contender for worst game ever put out by a major publisher.

If you do it on chat with multiple people you need to house rule disquiet.  The site owner refuses to let me and it made the chat suffer.  Mainly anyone who isn't a promethean got shit tons of penalties.  It really sucked for werewolves as the disquiet made death rage more likely to happen and wasteland fucks up their territory.  

Hunter the Vigil core book had the best solution.  Non promethean rolls willpower - promethean's azoth.  Success means the non promethean acts normal.  Failure means the promethean gets treated like shit by the non promethean.  That way disquiet stays in theme and yet the non promethean isn't fuck over with so many penalties that the character is crippled.

I would keep wasteland smaller.  Mile radius at worst in fact.  That way you don't get a dozen werewolf packs wanting to kill you.  You want tension, but not a full scale war.  Less headaches down the road.  Last allow mobile homes, or houses by the junkyard.

What's Disquiet?

Quote from: Nexus;911921What's Disquiet?

Prometheans inspire murderous torch-and-pitchfork rage mobs merely by dint of being around people, because they're unnatural or something.

Quote from: The Butcher;911941Prometheans inspire murderous torch-and-pitchfork rage mobs merely by dint of being around people, because they're unnatural or something.

Yeah thats the main problem with that game. I always thought it was unplayable for a group and could only be solo played unless house-ruled. Thats also the reason way it isnt played much.

Quote from: Snowman0147;911643I ran promethean on a chat site for a year and a half.  Most of the time it was a struggle to get anyone to play.  I also got my first bitter taste of ST, Admin, and site owner bullshit that plagues World of Darkness sites.  As you can see I am slowly recovering in skype and with better games with better fan bases.

Awwh, you poor bastard. You may be grouchy but at least you're passionate about WOD. That's one of the things I hate most about the online WOD community, so many fucking human trainwrecks. Honestly wish I could have you 'round to the club so you can play with guys and gals who aren't going to leave you soured on the series.

Quote from: Necrozius;911632I ran Wraith back in college (~15 years ago). The campaign lasted about 2 sessions because it got really dreary, depressing and boring. My group went back to our more light-hearted WFRP 1e campaign. Yeah, you read that right.

Coldly aborting babies because of chaos taint and then burning the mother on a pyre as a witch. Fuck yeah, that's Warhammer bitch. Jesus weeps for us all...

Quote from: Azraele;911645I ran a solid 2 sessions of Promethean as a sort of "The Odyssey by way of hobos" with a liberal dosage of Silent Hill. Based on my experience, I can't imagine running a campaign to completion.

I campeted one!

Swearz.

Two, actually. First one died in hellfire. The second had the PCs fighting off a flock of Pandorans in a speeding car down a country road and somehow not dying. They met up with a Tier Two faction and found out the reason the region hadn't turned into a crater was because the big guy had some even bigger poor bastard with Azoth 6 chained in the basement of the faction's bunker who was essentially absorbing all the disquiet into him and "breathing" it out slowly so it could be reasonably countered.

It was pretty fucked.

Quote from: Orphan81;911649I ran both, my groups had fun with both games. Wraith is probably my favorite of the Cwod games.

Fucking A.

Quote from: remial;911670I was in a short lived Wraith game. We found that the game was one that you had to have JUST the right group for, as you need to be able to trust your fellow players to push the right buttons and not push the wrong buttons.
But that wasn't the problem we ran into.  The problem we ran into was that the GM was a hemophiliac, and we were playing in the ICU while he was in for treatment. Any time Specters showed up, there was a code blue called down the hall.  That was the only time code blues were called. Correlation or causation, it was too creepy an occurrence for us, so we stopped playing, and never quite started back up.

Sounds legit.

Quote from: yosemitemike;911681I ran a very brief Wraith game.  It took two sessions to fall apart.  The Shadow mechanic pretty much doomed it from the start.  The super grimdark tone didn't help.

Wraith isn't even grimdark. Its just genuinely dark. Like nihilism and existentialism and all that gud' shit.

Makes it all the more an impressive feat.

But I'll stick with Geist. Much more empowering and brutal and adventure-y.

Quote from: TrippyHippy;911709As a point of discussion, I don't see Wraith as being a 'grim dark' setting at all. Gothic and existential, yes, but any setting that depicts any form of transcendence after death is a positive, hopeful outlook in my book. As they say in the tagline, it's not about Death but what comes after. Moreover, I find the whole experience to be both cathartic and more allegorical towards making the most out of life before you pass away to Oblivion.

Beautiful.

Quote from: Snowman0147;911919If you do it on chat with multiple people you need to house rule disquiet.  The site owner refuses to let me and it made the chat suffer.  Mainly anyone who isn't a promethean got shit tons of penalties.  It really sucked for werewolves as the disquiet made death rage more likely to happen and wasteland fucks up their territory.  

Hunter the Vigil core book had the best solution.  Non promethean rolls willpower - promethean's azoth.  Success means the non promethean acts normal.  Failure means the promethean gets treated like shit by the non promethean.  That way disquiet stays in theme and yet the non promethean isn't fuck over with so many penalties that the character is crippled.

I would keep wasteland smaller.  Mile radius at worst in fact.  That way you don't get a dozen werewolf packs wanting to kill you.  You want tension, but not a full scale war.  Less headaches down the road.  Last allow mobile homes, or houses by the junkyard.

What a shithead.

I totally wouldn't houserule it though. Just do what I did above and essentially nullify it within a certain zone but through very inhumane means.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;911949Yeah thats the main problem with that game. I always thought it was unplayable for a group and could only be solo played unless house-ruled. Thats also the reason way it isnt played much.

I GM'd it for 11 at the same time. It worked. Never went any lower than 7, avg 9 during its run.

But then that's how I roll. Hah hah.

Quote from: remial;911670I was in a short lived Wraith game. We found that the game was one that you had to have JUST the right group for, as you need to be able to trust your fellow players to push the right buttons and not push the wrong buttons.
But that wasn't the problem we ran into.  The problem we ran into was that the GM was a hemophiliac, and we were playing in the ICU while he was in for treatment. Any time Specters showed up, there was a code blue called down the hall.  That was the only time code blues were called. Correlation or causation, it was too creepy an occurrence for us, so we stopped playing, and never quite started back up.

Holy crap, I might just stop gaming after that! Creepy!

Quote from: Snowman0147;911919If you do it on chat with multiple people you need to house rule disquiet.  The site owner refuses to let me and it made the chat suffer.  Mainly anyone who isn't a promethean got shit tons of penalties.  It really sucked for werewolves as the disquiet made death rage more likely to happen and wasteland fucks up their territory.  

Hunter the Vigil core book had the best solution.  Non promethean rolls willpower - promethean's azoth.  Success means the non promethean acts normal.  Failure means the promethean gets treated like shit by the non promethean.  That way disquiet stays in theme and yet the non promethean isn't fuck over with so many penalties that the character is crippled.

I would keep wasteland smaller.  Mile radius at worst in fact.  That way you don't get a dozen werewolf packs wanting to kill you.  You want tension, but not a full scale war.  Less headaches down the road.  Last allow mobile homes, or houses by the junkyard.

Isn't, like, the first unofficial rule of running WoD to never, ever run mixed supernatural campaigns?

Quote from: PrometheanVigilTwo, actually. First one died in hellfire. The second had the PCs fighting off a flock of Pandorans in a speeding car down a country road and somehow not dying. They met up with a Tier Two faction and found out the reason the region hadn't turned into a crater was because the big guy had some even bigger poor bastard with Azoth 6 chained in the basement of the faction's bunker who was essentially absorbing all the disquiet into him and "breathing" it out slowly so it could be reasonably countered.

I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on how the game works in actual play. Is it better than it sounds on paper?

A group I was with spent one session making Wraith characters... And then the next session our problem player bombed the game for us and we never played it again.

Promethean is in New World of Darkness which is now called Chronicles of Darkness.  The major improvement is that you can mix other monster types.  Just mind the power gaps in Mage and Geist.

Quote from: Snowman0147;912034The major improvement is that you can mix other monster types.

From what I've read of nWoD, I still think mixing monsters hampers and dilutes more than it adds or enhances.