Quote from: Opaopajr;945633I don't see the point using the system without the fugliness of "personal horror." Those pathos meters as an alternate lose condition to HP (or virtues for simply losing control), akin to CoC sanity, (e.g. humanity, banality, etc.) is the big reason I find to bother playing those games. The sliding-down-into-the-antlion's-jaws is the big selling point in casting Supers! widget powers in a new genre light.

Otherwise it's a pain in the ass rules light system with too many stats that loosely cross-combine -- until some janknard wants to fart out some bullshit exception-based squee power.

There's better rules light systems to run Supers! with way less overhead. And well, I also just don't get Supers!, too.

This may just be me, but I don't find that the meters in WoD really push the personal horror aspect. Neither did I find that Limit and The Great Curse pushed the idea that Exalts can be really over-the-top horrible people in Exalted. Every time that kind of 'pathos'  has come up in a game I've played it's in spite of the mechanics, rather than because of it.

Maybe it's execution, because I don't have a problem with Sanity in CoC. Though it does play more like an alternate health resource than Humanity does in VtM, IMO.

Quote from: remial;945588Together they went on surreal adventures that made the events of the Tick cartoon, and Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol look sane.

I request, nay, demand you provide more details and access to your back issues on subscription to your newsletter.

Quote from: Tristram Evans;945590Why has no one made a Highlander TV Series RPG?

Because there can be only one.

Quote from: kobayashi;945645I wrote Dreadful & Obscure

Huh, never heard of it.

Quote from: rgrove0172;945584Sorry, what's "personal horror"? Dealing with mental illness, depression and other "demons"?

It's horror at yourself, what you've done or become.
I like it in horror movies and books... not sure I've seen it portrayed convincingly very often in RPGs. Everyone seems so focused on stats, such things are just pluses or minuses.
Like, we were playing Mazes and Minotaurs the other day. My character failed some checks and got a couple of 'blessings'... which changed her physically as well as giving her powers. I took it as a horrific shock, suddenly becoming a monster, and played it accordingly... to the point that she panicked and passed out. Meanwhile, everyone else in the group saw it as 'Free Powers' and ran over to do the same thing my PC had done that sent her mental. Because mechanically, those mutations buffed us up... with no mechanical down-side (AFAIK).

Quote from: Michael Gray;945647This may just be me, but I don't find that the meters in WoD really push the personal horror aspect. Neither did I find that Limit and The Great Curse pushed the idea that Exalts can be really over-the-top horrible people in Exalted. Every time that kind of 'pathos'  has come up in a game I've played it's in spite of the mechanics, rather than because of it.

Maybe it's execution, because I don't have a problem with Sanity in CoC. Though it does play more like an alternate health resource than Humanity does in VtM, IMO.

Well, after GMing WoD it's noticeable that there's so much flying Attribute+Ability combinations and exception-based powers it's easy to forget these meters. Also Sanity is more in your face, suffers more immediate attrition (because being larger than 10 can suffer quite a bit of damage), and is more structured / less vague than WoD Frenzy & Humanity(Path) Loss. Also more CoC modules tack encounters with quantifiable SAN loss and defined tripwires, whereas WoD adventure/campaign material is just as loosey-goosey with encounters as it is with seemingly everything else.

I'd be comfortable saying Chaosium does a better job presenting how to use CoC versus WW for its splats -- and BRPs/CoC is a simpler, receding, more robust chassis than Storyteller.

(I speak nothing about Exalted. Like Mage I find nothing interesting about those lines and thus don't follow them.)

Quote from: Tristram Evans;945590Why has no one made a Highlander TV Series RPG?

actually, the group that did the CCG also did an RPG.  Sorta.  I got to play a pre-release version of it at the first con I went to. (where I also played the CCG)
for those of you fortunate enough to have missed out on the CCG, your persona, or character or whatever had a 3x3 grid that you put defense cards in, then each round you would play attack cards that would strike 3 adjacent locations.  High attacks would hit the top 3 (and cut off your head, winning the game), there were also low attacks, left, right, diagonal, and center attacks.  If you were playing as one of the characters from the shows or movies, you could get special attacks that were specific to those characters.
Why am I bringing up the mechanics for a bad CCG, well that is because guess what the default combat system for the RPG was?
I don't really remember the CCG well, I played it once with a borrowed deck (the local game store refused to stock the game it was so bad).  there was a reason you couldn't just spam head attacks, but I'll be damned if I remember why.
Anyway, the CCG tanked very badly, and ended up costing the company everything they had sunk into the RPG (which also had an optional dice based combat system, but they wanted you to ignore that).

I hate to be 'that guy' but I have to ask this honestly, with no snark, but what made it great in the first place?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;945743I hate to be 'that guy' but I have to ask this honestly, with no snark, but what made it great in the first place?

Wait, are we talking about #America, or #TheWorldOfDarkness? I get confused here sometimes.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;945743I hate to be 'that guy' but I have to ask this honestly, with no snark, but what made it great in the first place?

It's easy to grok intro to chargen AND feel all warm, fuzzy special from the onset. That and d10s give false assurances that "the maths" are so simple, everyone can do it!

That's pretty much it.

It's a bean bag of a chassis. Which also implies it gets dated and outgrown just as fast as tastes mature, too. Expecting more from it seems unfair to me. Just enjoy the moment in time that it is for what it is, I say.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;945743I hate to be 'that guy' but I have to ask this honestly, with no snark, but what made it great in the first place?

It was a good conversation starter with hot goth chicks in the 90s.

Quote from: Tristram Evans;945762It was a good conversation starter with hot goth chicks in the 90s.

As much as I hate the Goth subculture, I can see why people liked this aspect of the game.

Don't write the factions as a parody of high school cliques, real ethnic groups, the radical left or as fads writ large? Don't write the conflict as humanities majors versus science majors?

Werewolf is a contrived setting where ecoterrorism and genocide are morally good. The tribes include manhating lesbian feminist parodies, neonazis, drunken irishmen, technophiles, and all the non-white people below the poverty line in America.

Mage has wicca, kungfu, virtual reality and drugs among others. The villains are literally the Renaissance and Enlightenment schools of thought.

I could go on but I am tired of hearing about these games and their fans who sent death threats for publishing Mage Revised. The writers aren't much better: at one point in M20 a sidebar complains that social media is too alienating and the updated for millennium traditions are literally lunatic SJWs, and the V20 companion makes vampires who use social media look like morons (e.g. The bruhaha broadcast the location of their flashmobs so the ventru can send police to arrest them, and the nosferatu try to bury videos of supernatural phenomena using troll comments on youtube rather than fabricating makeup and SFX tutorials to discredit whistle blowers.)

It was never great. If you want to make it great, play Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows or Monster of the Week instead. If you prefer personal horror done right, play Feed.

I like the Chronicles of Darkness's stuff.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;945811I like the Chronicles of Darkness's stuff.

I like New World of Darkness First Edition. Don't care for the 2E Chronicles stuff though.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;945573But enough about my setting hacks, what are YOUR homebrews and changes you make to World of Darkness (both Classic and New)?

Caveat 1: Me and my group do Mage: The Ascension and ONLY Mage: The Ascension and specifically with a 2nd Edition ethos so every other story element and thing else in the World of Darkness only exists to the extent that it services that setting.

Caveat 2: The campaign world I run has been ongoing for nearly a quarter century now (not with the same players and we've ended the stories of particular sets of PC's and started new ones, but the world has been persistent and ongoing) and upwards of 90% of the NPCs are actually old PC's from previous games. This colors a LOT of things.

So, the first and most important thing is that Gehenna/Apocalypse/Armageddon/End of the World was played out in the campaign about ten year ago and the PC's at the time kicked its ass. It was basically the worst version of every possible event with the Antidiluvians as the original Nephandi Lords (who commanded all the forces of the Wyrm) and the Nameless leading them all. But the PC's at the time were heavily Hermetic and hit upon an idea so universally cool it couldn't not work. See, per the story the Nameless had literally sacrificed its True Name to the Outer Darkness, which supposedly made it untouchable since you could not affect something without a name.

So the PC's did the opposite.

They cooked up the mother of all Correspondence, Mind and Spirit rituals using the shard of the World Tree to do one simple thing... to reach out to and share a simple thought with every last soul and spirit for just one moment; Everything that exists has a name, so if something has no name it doesn't actually exist. And the collective beliefs of creation agreed and so all that the Nameless had ever done and been was undone as if it had never been because something that didn't exist couldn't do anything. The last vision the PC's had of the Nameless was of him striking futilely at them before he faded away and even the PC's forgot he had ever existed. That particular story for those PC's ended with the group happily around a dinner table making plans for their futures.

Long story short: The World hit the bottom of the Wheel of Ages and, thanks to one group of PC's is now on the slow upswing. I refer to the setting for new players as "The Dark Fantastic." The world is dark and dangerous, but also wondrous and full of possibilities for those willing to grab them. Hope, while still not assured, is no longer in vain and "Earn Your Happy Ending" is the name of the game.

In the years since, various PC's have played instrumental roles in the restoration of many of the old 2nd Edition Mage elements while holding onto a few of the more interesting 3e/Revised elements (most notably the more humanized Technocracy). The Avatar Storm ended, Horizon was re-established, the Technocracy had a civil war that ended with a schism between the "Rebel Technocracy" (the Protect the Masses moderates who had been getting by on Earth who think harassing Tradition Mages who keep their heads down is a waste of resources and have even joined forces with the Traditions at the local level to stop Nephandi and other dark powers from harming innocents) and the "True Technocracy" (The 1e pogram-loving diehards who spent the previous decade sequestered in the Umbra who view the "Rebels" as just as much an obstacle to their Time Table as the Traditions).

There have been a few NWoD-ish elements that worked their way into the story. Most notably is that the Tremere stopped being vampires. After reading the signs of the End of Days, discerned that, just as they transformed themselves from mages to vampires to escape the dying magic, that they must again transform themselves to survive the rise of the Antediluvians. While the rest of the supernatural community (save a few PCs) believes the Tremere destroyed themselves in some mass ritual gone wrong, they actually became magic-wielding wraiths who use ritually prepared mortals as vessels. They've been the players behind a number of schemes over the years.

Finally, while we'd always been reasonably house-ruled, about five years ago now we went did a deep rewrite of the entire game engine that also incorporated a few NWoD elements along with things picked up from other systems. You can find it HERE if you want to check it out.

Hunter is an interesting take but I've never played it.