TheRPGSite

What?

https://www.modiphius.net/collections/vampire-the-masquerade

I got this in my email and had no clue it was happening. It appears to be some sort of distribution collaboration.

My humblest apologies if someone already posted something about this.

Quote from: Jason Coplen;1036444What?

https://www.modiphius.net/collections/vampire-the-masquerade

I got this in my email and had no clue it was happening. It appears to be some sort of distribution collaboration.

My humblest apologies if someone already posted something about this.

I got it too. It's a pre-order thing...as much as I'm sure the new White Wolf folks are serious, I will wait for the pictures to be more than photos hop mockups.

Over $500 for the limited edition? I am going to buy it just to flip it in a few years.

The Modiphius Borg cube I purchased is way better and cost less.

More 2D20 nonsense? I hope not.  Who keeps feeding Modiphius? Let it die on the vine.

If it's just a new printing, we already have our coffee table books.

V5 is definitely going to suck and it will sink like the Lusitania.

Not even the awesomeness of Mark Rein-Hagen can save this trainwreck, Justin Achilli saw to that.

Well, actually Martin Ericsson did because he decided to continue with Achilli's worst decisions.

If V5 is actually enjoyable and not a metaplot-ridden wangsty Goth trainwreck, I will eat my hat!

Nope, it's not a reprint and from what I've gathered it's ruleset has about as much in common with the previous editions as Vampire the Requiem did and a lot of the focus is on the rules taking over your actions and that only drinking someone to death actually sates their hunger (which makes the whole Masquerade thing rather nonsensical as the playtest rules had the PCs murdering a dozen people in a night because they dropped the blood pool for hunger dice that you roll with every action thereafter that have a chance of turning your PC into a GM controlled NPC until they indiscriminately feed and the only way to be sure of not losing control is to regularly drink someone to death).

This is what happens when your game gets purchased by a Swedish video game company who wants their primary market to be Eurotrash LARPers.

Personally I'm hoping it crashes and burns before they can get around to ruining Mage with their "One World of Darkness" nonsense... or least delays things enough to get all the key Mage20 books out before NuWW takes over that part of the line.

Quote from: Chris24601;1036488Nope, it's not a reprint and from what I've gathered it's ruleset has about as much in common with the previous editions as Vampire the Requiem did and a lot of the focus is on the rules taking over your actions and that only drinking someone to death actually sates their hunger (which makes the whole Masquerade thing rather nonsensical as the playtest rules had the PCs murdering a dozen people in a night because they dropped the blood pool for hunger dice that you roll with every action thereafter that have a chance of turning your PC into a GM controlled NPC until they indiscriminately feed and the only way to be sure of not losing control is to regularly drink someone to death).

This is what happens when your game gets purchased by a Swedish video game company who wants their primary market to be Eurotrash LARPers.

Personally I'm hoping it crashes and burns before they can get around to ruining Mage with their "One World of Darkness" nonsense... or least delays things enough to get all the key Mage20 books out before NuWW takes over that part of the line.

See, I told you that V5 was going to suck.

We could've avoided all this bullshit had WW never hired Justin Achilli in the first place. The metaplot would have not gotten out of hand, we wouldn't have Gehenna, which means we wouldn't have Vampire: The Requiem and the failure of New World of Darkness which led to the CCP merger that gutted White Wolf completely and caused them to get bought out by Paradox Interactive in the end.

TL;DR Justin Achilli is a talentless hack who ruined World of Darkness.

Just to clear up a couple misconceptions (not that I have ANY connection to the new Vampire)...
Modiphius is just doing the distribution, as White Wolf / Onyx Path don't really DO general releases anymore having switched mostly to a PoD model of business.
The system is still going to be a pool of d10s, not 2d20, but there are also Hunger Dice that are added to the pool (no idea what that means)
Ken Hite is primary developer of the game, and has, in the past at least, been very vocal about how he can't see vampires as 'heroic'. (as an example, when the playtest file went out a year ago, if a vampire ate a baby they would temporarily be able to pass as human, with the flush of life skin tone. (as you can imagine this made the outrage brigade of TBP take notice and express some displeasure)

Quote from: Chris24601;1036488Nope, it's not a reprint and from what I've gathered it's ruleset has about as much in common with the previous editions as Vampire the Requiem did and a lot of the focus is on the rules taking over your actions and that only drinking someone to death actually sates their hunger (which makes the whole Masquerade thing rather nonsensical as the playtest rules had the PCs murdering a dozen people in a night because they dropped the blood pool for hunger dice that you roll with every action thereafter that have a chance of turning your PC into a GM controlled NPC until they indiscriminately feed and the only way to be sure of not losing control is to regularly drink someone to death).

This is what happens when your game gets purchased by a Swedish video game company who wants their primary market to be Eurotrash LARPers.

Personally I'm hoping it crashes and burns before they can get around to ruining Mage with their "One World of Darkness" nonsense... or least delays things enough to get all the key Mage20 books out before NuWW takes over that part of the line.

Hate to break it to you, it's crashed long before that point.  It died back in the early 2000's.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1036492Hate to break it to you, it's crashed long before that point.  It died back in the early 2000's.

And you can thank that Goth piece of shit Justin Achilli for that.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1036481More 2D20 nonsense? I hope not.  Who keeps feeding Modiphius? Let it die on the vine.

If it's just a new printing, we already have our coffee table books.

No, but the dice are proprietary.

https://twitter.com/Modiphius/status/990246997012762624

I don't know what to say about these covers. If they wanted to make the books not look at all like RPG books... they succeeded. Not really a bad goal -- the original Vampire was like that when it first came out. However...  it was still IN GENRE. You got that it was a Vampire thing. It was horror, fantasy. It could be the cover of a novel. This new cover looks like... a fashion thing? And than we have this sample of a page spread:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2437[/ATTACH]

I... don't get it.

Maybe they will finally turn Vampire into something that is "indistinguishable from club culture" like they preached in the trailer for the WOD documentary. :D

I thought it already was indistinguishable from the culture.  And I'm saying this with complete seriousness.

OMFG.

It gets worse.

https://icv2.com/gallery/38269/3

https://icv2.com/gallery/38269/2

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1036492Hate to break it to you, it's crashed long before that point.  It died back in the early 2000's.

Onyx Path has been doing a pretty good job with the 20th Anniversary Edition material and they brought back a bunch of the original creators for the projects (which was a very good thing for Mage) and the mechanics are more a cleaned up 2e (call it 2.5e) than some of the questionable updates from Revised/3e.

The gist has been "reports of the world's end have been greatly exaggerated." In Mage20 they presented options that ranged  from "The Revised Metaplot Never Happened" to "The Metaplot Happened but it was just another millennial scare (at worst it happened in a parallel universe an Etherite or two had visited) and things are mostly back to normal (no more Avatar Storm and paradox levels are back to what they were in 2e)" to "Metaplot is still looming (and here are the mechanics for that)" and then leave it to the GM to decide what they prefer.

They also consolidated everything and cleaned up/clarified the rules (particularly for sphere magic). M20 core is nearly 700 pages (and they still needed to cut so much that they made three books out of the overflow). V20 core included every clan bloodline and discipline all in the core book.

If you were a fan of the pre-metaplot WoD then the 20th Anniversary editions are definitely up your alley.

Which is why the nuWW V5 is even worse than it's poor mechanics.

I officially fail to care:). Will see what it looks like when it turns out, but I'm unlikely to play it before Aquelarre and Vital Hearts.
And I'm not running either of these right now;).

Quote from: RF Victor;1036504OMFG.

It gets worse.

https://icv2.com/gallery/38269/3

https://icv2.com/gallery/38269/2

HAHAHA


What you want your friends to think you do
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vs

What you actually do
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2439[/ATTACH]

Quote from: Rod's Duo Narcotics;1036569HAHAHA

What you want your friends to think you do
vs

What you actually do

You're just making fun of a different kind of nerd, but fact is, we're all nerds. The whole goddamned industry is ridiculous if you're not into its kind of fun. We're playing pretend. It's fine.

Quote from: Rod's Duo Narcotics;1036569HAHAHA


What you want your friends to think you do
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2438[/ATTACH]

vs

What you actually do
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2439[/ATTACH]

HAAHAHHAHAHA well said!

Quote from: NeonAce ;1036569You're just making fun of a different kind of nerd, but fact is, we're all nerds. The whole goddamned industry is ridiculous if you're not into its kind of fun. We're playing pretend. It's fine.

White Wolf is the one who started, and that's why I have no reserves about making fun of them. Did you see the trailer for the WOD documentary? "Everything before Vampire was dorky fantasy" is their argument. Have a look!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UMf8SgSH5A

And then they release... A game so MATURE it has cheap softcore SEXAY pictures of vampire chicks making out instead of some decent art? HAAHAHHAHAAHHA :D

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2442[/ATTACH]

Looks awful.

The Star Trek Borg cube was awesome sauce and the best money I've ever spent.

White Wolf went to shit when Mark Rein-Hagen and Andrew Greenburg left and Justin Achilli took over.

Even with Achilli gone, Ericsson wants to continue Achilli's legacy.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1036668White Wolf went to shit when Mark Rein-Hagen and Andrew Greenburg left and Justin Achilli took over.

Even with Achilli gone, Ericsson wants to continue Achilli's legacy.

OK, we get it, you hate Justin Achilli.  Unfortunately, you're also wrong.  Rein-Hagen was the reason it's not that good a game system.  Ignoring his rather obvious pretentiousness, he saddled a Vampire game based on conflict without answering the most basic of conflict systems.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1036685OK, we get it, you hate Justin Achilli.  Unfortunately, you're also wrong.  Rein-Hagen was the reason it's not that good a game system.  Ignoring his rather obvious pretentiousness, he saddled a Vampire game based on conflict without answering the most basic of conflict systems.

Mark Rein-Hagen had his flaws, but a lot of the pretentiousness of VTM can be laid at Justin Achilli's feet with his One True Way attitude that was all over Revised Edition.

Quote from: RF Victor;1036504OMFG.

It gets worse.

https://icv2.com/gallery/38269/3

https://icv2.com/gallery/38269/2

Oh, dear.

I mean...I do a  lot of work with PhotoShop. It's a great tool.

But this...this looks like a PS enthusiast with no particular skill with the program was given a variety of photos and told, "Make 'em look cool! And creepy. But mostly kewl!"

Quote from: DMK;1036707Oh, dear.

I mean...I do a  lot of work with PhotoShop. It's a great tool.

But this...this looks like a PS enthusiast with no particular skill with the program was given a variety of photos and told, "Make 'em look cool! And creepy. But mostly kewl!"

I know, right?

I thought Revised Edition was the worst version of Vampire: The Masquerade, but it looks like V5 is going to take the cake.

Of Vampire system variants, either Masquerade or Requiem, I already have sufficient. I am not on the market for a new rehash of old hash. I like the oldest hash well enough. I just want more modules (small plug n play content) for my old favorites.

Yeah, I've got such a well established campaign setting for Mage that even adventure type options aren't even needed by me. Honestly, I suspect I won't care one way or another about Mage5 so long as "Gods, Monsters & Familar Strangers" for Mage20 (the last overflow book with material they had to cut from the core book for space) gets released before nuWW gets around to telling them to stop like they did with the V20 supplements.

Best case would be V5 tanks so badly they never get around to killing the rest of the OP run lines. A World of Darkness without vampires as the centerpiece might even be something interesting to explore and see some of the other parts get some more attention.

Vampire was always garbage.

Seconding that Vampire was never good.

The modern heartbreakers like Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows and Feed are vastly superior.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037261The modern heartbreakers like Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows and Feed are vastly superior.

Monsterhearts?

QuoteIn Monsterhearts any PC may roll to turn any other character on, and all the characters have a sex move (as indicated above). This is explicitly because as a teenager you don't get to choose what turns you on, and because "Monsterhearts is a game about the confusion that arises when your body and your social world start changing without your permission."[5] It also, because of this, has a double page dedicated to using Monsterhearts to explore queer content.

This approach to sexuality has drawn comment, with Bitch Magazine commenting, "Indeed, nearly every rule related to sex and sexuality in Monsterhearts is a game manifestation of real-life sexual dynamics, good and bad, healthy and unhealthy. Instead of the rote, heterosexist portrayals of sex and sexuality you might find in other games, Monsterhearts gleefully encourages people of all identities to explore sexuality in every permutation, often with great self-examination and as uncomfortably as possible. But for a game with such a depth of emotional/sexual content, it's remarkably free of sexism. It also doesn't slut-shame, or enforce traditional gendered tropes of judgment about sexual behavior."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsterhearts#Sexuality_and_queer_content

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Quote from: Christopher Brady;1036685OK, we get it, you hate Justin Achilli.  Unfortunately, you're also wrong.  Rein-Hagen was the reason it's not that good a game system.  Ignoring his rather obvious pretentiousness, he saddled a Vampire game based on conflict without answering the most basic of conflict systems.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1036702Mark Rein-Hagen had his flaws, but a lot of the pretentiousness of VTM can be laid at Justin Achilli's feet with his One True Way attitude that was all over Revised Edition.

Anyway, Doc Sammy is completely wrong about pretty much everything. I have listened to statements by past White Wolf staff on old dead forums long enough to get the truth.

In the 90s, the RPG market saw a slump. White Wolf saw their sales declining and so the marketing department decided that a revised/third edition was needed to bring up sales. Justin Achilli was hired and we got the metaplot advancing more than it ever had before (contrary to popular belief, it did exist since the games' inception). This did not stop the decline nor did it make it worse. Memorably, the lead developer of Mage Revised received a huge amount of death threats in his email and became terrified of checking his inbox.

Marketing department did not understand that the slump could not be fixed because it affected the entire RPG market. So they assumed it might have been because WoD lore was too unwieldy for new audiences, so they decided to pull an Ultimate Marvel. WoD metaplot was officially ended with the Time of Judgment series. CoD, then (n)WoD, was released with the intent to attract new audiences. Problem was, as I said before, there were not enough new (nor old) audiences to sustain it at the same level as the RPG boom in the early 90s. Continuing WoD, now cWoD or oWoD, would not have done any better because the old audiences were moving away too.

White Wolf was bought out by CCP, the staff liquidated because CCP fell on hard times, licensed to an indie publisher, and finally sold again to Paradox. This all would have happened regardless of whether WoD or CoD was the flagship product at the time. Both CCP and Paradox were only interested in CoD anyway.

I could saw a lot about the rules, but I will limit myself. WoD seems to have been originally inspired by Nightlife, another monster mash RPG that came out in 1989. Nightlife was basically Vampire, except that werewolves, ghosts, fairies, demons, etc all played by the same rules and many of them even fed on human blood/emotions/etc. WoD inspired a few notable competitors (now failed), such as WitchCraft, Everlasting, and the Chaosium adaptation of the French RPG Nephilim, which were actually worked on by some of the same writers. When CoD was developed, it burrowed a lot of ideas originally introduced in the competitors, such as a loosely unified mechanic for power points (from Everlasting and Witchcraft), Atlantis as a mage's utopia (from Nephilim), and variably-themed sanity meters (from Everlasting).

WoD, in any iteration, has always had crappy rules. The most notable is probably Vampire's humanity meter. It is supposed to promote a theme of personal horror, but all it does is punish characters with schizophrenia for stealing candy bars or whatever. In many iterations it is easier to get away with cruelty and slaughter if your conscience is rated higher. A good humanity mechanic would not do that.

You can see an example of a good humanity mechanic in, say, Whistlepunk Games' Feed RPG. Character traits all follow the same mechanic and are described in free form. As vampire characters lose their humanity, this is represented by replacing human traits with vampire traits. The implications of this are flexible and covers the path/road mechanics from WoD. For example: in a Stoker style setting the PCs would become unplayable after a certain point, in a B-movie style setting the PCs would exalt in vampirism, etc. If the players are invested in the concept of humanity loss and personal horror, this mechanic supports that theme a lot better than an arbitrary sanity meter. Of all the humanity systems I have seen in various vampire-themed RPGs, this is by far the best one.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037484Anyway, Doc Sammy is completely wrong about pretty much everything. I have listened to statements by past White Wolf staff on old dead forums long enough to get the truth.

In the 90s, the RPG market saw a slump. White Wolf saw their sales declining and so the marketing department decided that a revised/third edition was needed to bring up sales. Justin Achilli was hired and we got the metaplot advancing more than it ever had before (contrary to popular belief, it did exist since the games' inception). This did not stop the decline nor did it make it worse. Memorably, the lead developer of Mage Revised received a huge amount of death threats in his email and became terrified of checking his inbox.

Marketing department did not understand that the slump could not be fixed because it affected the entire RPG market. So they assumed it might have been because WoD lore was too unwieldy for new audiences, so they decided to pull an Ultimate Marvel. WoD metaplot was officially ended with the Time of Judgment series. CoD, then (n)WoD, was released with the intent to attract new audiences. Problem was, as I said before, there were not enough new (nor old) audiences to sustain it at the same level as the RPG boom in the early 90s. Continuing WoD, now cWoD or oWoD, would not have done any better because the old audiences were moving away too.

White Wolf was bought out by CCP, the staff liquidated because CCP fell on hard times, licensed to an indie publisher, and finally sold again to Paradox. This all would have happened regardless of whether WoD or CoD was the flagship product at the time. Both CCP and Paradox were only interested in CoD anyway.

I could saw a lot about the rules, but I will limit myself. WoD seems to have been originally inspired by Nightlife, another monster mash RPG that came out in 1989. Nightlife was basically Vampire, except that werewolves, ghosts, fairies, demons, etc all played by the same rules and many of them even fed on human blood/emotions/etc. WoD inspired a few notable competitors (now failed), such as WitchCraft, Everlasting, and the Chaosium adaptation of the French RPG Nephilim, which were actually worked on by some of the same writers. When CoD was developed, it burrowed a lot of ideas originally introduced in the competitors, such as a loosely unified mechanic for power points (from Everlasting and Witchcraft), Atlantis as a mage's utopia (from Nephilim), and variably-themed sanity meters (from Everlasting).

WoD, in any iteration, has always had crappy rules. The most notable is probably Vampire's humanity meter. It is supposed to promote a theme of personal horror, but all it does is punish characters with schizophrenia for stealing candy bars or whatever. In many iterations it is easier to get away with cruelty and slaughter if your conscience is rated higher. A good humanity mechanic would not do that.

You can see an example of a good humanity mechanic in, say, Whistlepunk Games' Feed RPG. Character traits all follow the same mechanic and are described in free form. As vampire characters lose their humanity, this is represented by replacing human traits with vampire traits. The implications of this are flexible and covers the path/road mechanics from WoD. For example: in a Stoker style setting the PCs would become unplayable after a certain point, in a B-movie style setting the PCs would exalt in vampirism, etc. If the players are invested in the concept of humanity loss and personal horror, this mechanic supports that theme a lot better than an arbitrary sanity meter. Of all the humanity systems I have seen in various vampire-themed RPGs, this is by far the best one.

Monsterhearts sucks, and Achilli's amped up metaplot ruined WoD and hastened its inevitable demise. Andrew Greenburg may have started the metaplot in 2e, but it was Achilli's metaplot in Revised that sucked donkey balls, and combined with a declining RPG market, killed the franchise.

Admit it, you know I am right and you are wrong. Pride and a love of the awful Revised metaplot are fucking with you. Get Justin Achilli's dick out of your mouth.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037484WoD, in any iteration, has always had crappy rules. The most notable is probably Vampire's humanity meter. It is supposed to promote a theme of personal horror, but all it does is punish characters with schizophrenia for stealing candy bars or whatever. In many iterations it is easier to get away with cruelty and slaughter if your conscience is rated higher. A good humanity mechanic would not do that.

I always felt the rules for Mage were much more solid (and honestly the only part of the WoD I had any interest in... though vamps, wolves, ghosts, fairies, etc. make great antagonists... along with dragons, liches and all the other things mankind has ever believed in).

Mage also didn't have a humanity meter or virtues or any of that; just Arete (basically your spellcasting stat) and Willpower (which is mostly a difficulty threshold for certain mental/emotional magic effects and points you can burn to gain successes in a system where a foundation of the setting is that willpower shapes reality... so it fits the world's metaphysics far better there than it does for the other WoD types). Mage20 and especially the overflow book "How DO You Do That?" (which is basically 100% nuts and bolts mechanics for magical effects) did a LOT to clean up the magic system for it.

The only house rule I recommend for WoD that cleans up a lot of the weird probability quirks is to floor difficulties at 4 and cap them at 8 and instead add a die for every point of difficulty below 4 or subtract a die for every point of difficulty above 8 (so difficulty 2 would be difficulty 4+2 dice, difficulty 10 would be difficulty 8 -2 dice) and treat all 10's (not just those with specializations) as 2 successes (if you want to use the specializations, just have them reduce the difficulty by 2).

Given what I've read of their updated mechanics I have a hard time seeing how Mage's magic system would transfer well into the new mechanics (it really was designed to leverage the variable difficulties on a d10 dice pool and Awakening's magic always suffered from the static difficulties CoD imposed in my opinion). Given their whole "Post-Gehenna" continuing the Revised Metaplot I don't even know how exactly they'd be able to continue Mage given where its metaplot ended up (i.e. universal Ascension, demon apocalypse or all magic dies being the primary options presented in the Time of Judgement books).

Honestly, Mage should have been set in its own game universe from the World of Darkness anyway... its whole philosophy is so contrary to it that they basically had to butcher the setting in Revised just to try and make it fit the rest of the Revised line (including adding a brand new to Revised end-times scenario that had never even been mentioned before; Armageddon; to coincide with Gehenna and the Apocalypse).

So that's my completely selfish reason for wanting V5 to crash and burn like a vampire suffering orbital re-entry... into the sun. They need to stop trying to ruin the mad genius of Mage by forcing it to be part of the malaise that is the rest of the WoD.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037514So that's my completely selfish reason for wanting V5 to crash and burn like a vampire suffering orbital re-entry... into the sun. They need to stop trying to ruin the mad genius of Mage by forcing it to be part of the malaise that is the rest of the WoD.

Great post.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037514Mage also didn't have a humanity meter or virtues or any of that; just Arete (basically your spellcasting stat) and Willpower (which is mostly a difficulty threshold for certain mental/emotional magic effects and points you can burn to gain successes in a system where a foundation of the setting is that willpower shapes reality... so it fits the world's metaphysics far better there than it does for the other WoD types). Mage20 and especially the overflow book "How DO You Do That?" (which is basically 100% nuts and bolts mechanics for magical effects) did a LOT to clean up the magic system for it.

I thought Awakening's arcana made somewhat more sense than the spheres did, and did not require a second book explaining how to use it. And I say that as someone who read over the custom spheres on B.J. Zanzibar's site and old usenet posts. Splitting entropy and correspondence into fate, death and space are much easier to grok than other concepts I saw suggested.

I prefer Ars Magica though, since it is Mage's granddaddy and the techniques make so much more sense than the idiosyncratic practices (or whatever the terminology is) in Mage. I would prefer any other game that uses a syntactic magic system (http://pseudoboo.blogspot.com/2016/02/mechanics-syntactic-magic.html). The politics in Ascension are absurd and repulsive, especially in the 20th anniversary book where the metaplot expansion explains that the nine traditions became even more insane than they already were. The politics in Awakening (and CoD in general) are not so repulsive, but they still make no sense as political parties that human beings would actually create.

Which is the best version of Mage to buy?

Quote from: Ashakyre;1037571Which is the best version of Mage to buy?

Get a copy of Second Edition off of either eBay or Amazon.

Avoid Revised and M20 like the plague.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1037572Get a copy of Second Edition off of either eBay or Amazon.

Avoid Revised and M20 like the plague.

Ascension or Awakening?

Quote from: Ashakyre;1037581Ascension or Awakening?

Ascension.

Quote from: Ashakyre;1037571Which is the best version of Mage to buy?

For mechanics, definitely Mage20. The rules for Focus (Paradigm/Practice/Props) and Mythic Threads/Hypernarratives blows the earlier versions of their foci system out of the water and if you're playing Mage, the main reason to do so over a generic urban fantasy setting is their magic system. It was good enough to get me to drop my 60 page* house ruled "White Book" Mage system (vs. Purple or Blue book) I'd been using for the eight years previously for my latest campaign.

Mage20 is also the only version to ever include playable Technocracy and minor factions in the core book so that's a plus too.

For setting, either playing 2e with no Revised elements or the "Revised happened but was just another millennial scare and is in the rearview and fading fast" depending on your focus. The former is good for an upbeat rebels against the evil Technocracy game, the latter for one where the Traditions, Technocray and Independents are all flawed heroes with competing goals (primarily the classic security vs. freedom with both sides representing the pros and cons of each).

Avoid Revised like the plague that it was.

* it was that long because I included all the rules for character creation and playing the game, including full rules for all skills, merits/flaws, equipment, spirits, animals, etc. since this was back in the days before the pdf explosion and I wanted the players to have everything needed to play without having to track down out of print books.

So the notebook is only $13.99, and the 'Luxury' Rulebook $676.99. What a [STRIKE]steal[/STRIKE] ripoff.

Good grief this is a train wreck. They're obviously trying to bank on brand recognition, yet they're doing everything they can to destroy it.

Quote from: NeonAce;1036583You're just making fun of a different kind of nerd, but fact is, we're all nerds. The whole goddamned industry is ridiculous if you're not into its kind of fun. We're playing pretend. It's fine.

No it's not, because White Wolf wants a particular image for this property, and 'ugly awkward nerds' aren't it.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1037823So the notebook is only $13.99, and the 'Luxury' Rulebook $676.99. What a [STRIKE]steal[/STRIKE] ripoff.

Good grief this is a train wreck. They're obviously trying to bank on brand recognition, yet they're doing everything they can to destroy it.

The fact of the matter is that the people behind V5 aren't even making it with Americans as a audience in mind. Their stated goal has been to break away from American-centric settings and elements and instead market it primarily to rich European Eurotrash LARPers.

They're going to deserve every bit of "Fail" that's headed their way.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037838The fact of the matter is that the people behind V5 aren't even making it with Americans as a audience in mind. Their stated goal has been to break away from American-centric settings and elements and instead market it primarily to rich European Eurotrash LARPers.

They're going to deserve every bit of "Fail" that's headed their way.

Agreed.

Instead of undoing Justin Achilli's fuck-ups that killed the game in the first place, they are continuing them to an exponential degree.

Keep the Gangrel in the Camarilla and bring back the Ravnos, goddammit!

V5 is going to be a bigger flop than D&D 4E. If it isn't, I will eat my hat.

The Ravnos are offensive stereotypes of Romani and both the Traditions and the Technocracy hate social media.

Why should anyone deal with that when there are already many other superior options to choose from like Ars Magica or Unknown Armies?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037911The Ravnos are offensive stereotypes of Romani and both the Traditions and the Technocracy hate social media.

Why should anyone deal with that when there are already many other superior options to choose from like Ars Magica or Unknown Armies?

Are you Romani?

Quote from: CRKrueger;1037916Are you Romani?

Why should my ethnic background have any bearing on this discussion? What Sammy was saying is equivalent to asking for D&D to add "blackface minstrel" as a bard kit. The Ravnos are thieving Romani, the Assamites are Arab ninjas, blah blah. I am not personally offended but I do find them lame and uninspired. The vampire clans are based on high school cliques, ethnic stereotypes, and other bizarre niche ideas. Rein*Hagen played with identity politics before they became fashionable.

Not only that, but the rules for vampirism itself is just a generic vaguely Ricean template and the superpowers are arbitrarily restrictive. For example, the game divides various forms of mental manipulation into domination, dementia, obfuscation, etc. These are ladders with various filler. When you watch vampire tv shows, that sort of distinction does not exist. The vampires on TV just have a generic hypnosis that lets them make suggestions, alter memories and even manipulate perception to some degree.

I got sick of it years ago, so I left and never looked back. There are many other, better games to choose from.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037911The Ravnos are offensive stereotypes of Romani and both the Traditions and the Technocracy hate social media.

Why should anyone deal with that when there are already many other superior options to choose from like Ars Magica or Unknown Armies?

The Ravnos are fine, particularly with the update of the clan weakness from 'habitually engages in one particular vice' to 'obsessive about one particular thing' which even fits with vampire lore like having to count every every last grain of something you spill and with variant clan discipline options they've got a lot of flexibility to be a more generic near-eastern vampire.

ETA: and the Assamites are actually based on the original Assassins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassins) (a term derived from al-Ḥashāshīn). The ninja didn't hold a monopoly on being stealthy spies and murderers (indeed the original order from which all later assassins got their name was extinct for centuries before the concept of a Ninja even existed).

Ars Magica isn't set in the modern world and is limited to only a single paradigm of magic (like Mage the Awakening, its like playing a game of Mage the Ascension with only one Tradition allowed).

Unknown Armies sucks, particularly its multi-track madness meters that replace roleplaying with dice mechanics. Frankly, it reads like exactly the sort of Eurotrash garbage V5 is looking to be (avatars of mystic hermaphrodites and magic fueled by indulging your obsessions).

Mage the Ascension doesn't have sanity loss or mind-destroying horror as a theme to it's magic. It's more about belief and giving a damn about trying to change the world for the better (as defined by you... other mages have different definitions of better and that's the primary source of conflict). It's the antithesis of Unknown Armies in practically every sense.

Mage is a kung-fu movie star (or more accurately a character they'd play in a movie), a kabbalist rabbi, a shaman, a mad scientist and a guy who hacks the source code of reality with a custom laptop fighting a Nephandi riding a mile-long undead dragon (and the undead parasites feasting on the corpse) from their space zeppelin as they rocket through Etherspace while Void Engineers in powered armor with plasma cannons and rail guns land on the opposite wing from their starship that just happened upon them both during their routine sweep for tachyon particles. Then a Marauder who thinks he's Ghengis Khan comes trodding down a spirit path on the back of his Triceratops followed by an undead Mongol Horde and starts attacking everyone who refuses to bow to his rule.

Unknown Armies PCs would be gibbering wrecks just encountering that... for Mage it's a Tuesday.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037925The Ravnos are fine, particularly with the update of the clan weakness from 'habitually engages in one particular vice' to 'obsessive about one particular thing' which even fits with vampire lore like having to count every every last grain of something you spill and with variant clan discipline options they've got a lot of flexibility to be a more generic near-eastern vampire.

It's been a while since I read V20 so my memory may be a bit rusty, but that is beside the point. Ravnos have nothing in common with Middle East or Indian vampire myths like the foot-licker, the ghoul or the vetala. They follow pseudo-Ricean logic with some D&D illusionist thrown in. They have no flexibility at all if I wanted to do something different that does not fit that tiny little box... like remove the sunlight weakness, change their feeding method to using a siphon or eating dreams, make them vulnerable to roses instead of fire, add levitation, or whatever.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037925ETA: and the Assamites are actually based on the original Assassins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassins) (a term derived from ). The ninja didn't hold a monopoly on being stealthy spies and murderers (indeed the original order from which all later assassins got their name was extinct for centuries before the concept of a Ninja even existed).

That is beside the point. "Arabic assassins for hire" is still bizarrely specific and niche. It might work in D&D as a monster of the session but I don't see the sense of adding it to a supernatural soap opera or whatever WoD is supposed to be now.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037925Ars Magica isn't set in the modern world and is limited to only a single paradigm of magic (like Mage the Awakening, its like playing a game of Mage the Ascension with only one Tradition allowed).

I just complained that Vampire did the same thing.

MtA included rules for paradigms in the Chroniclers Guide that came out years ago around the time I stopped following the releases. Ars Magica is really old and probably has rules for modern days and paradigms and whatever somewhere. If not it is probably easy to homebrew with Fudge 4x5 magic or something.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037925Mage the Ascension doesn't have sanity loss or mind-destroying horror as a theme to it's magic. It's more about belief and giving a damn about trying to change the world for the better (as defined by you... other mages have different definitions of better and that's the primary source of conflict). It's the antithesis of Unknown Armies in practically every sense.

So Ascension is about playing an SJW? I think I will pass on that, thanks. Even Awakening sounds more interesting with its theme of "power corrupts" or whatever (but I still think it terrible in every other way, just like its predecessor).

Quote from: Chris24601;1037925Mage is a kung-fu movie star (or more accurately a character they'd play in a movie), a kabbalist rabbi, a shaman, a mad scientist and a guy who hacks the source code of reality with a custom laptop fighting a Nephandi riding a mile-long undead dragon (and the undead parasites feasting on the corpse) from their space zeppelin as they rocket through Etherspace while Void Engineers in powered armor with plasma cannons and rail guns land on the opposite wing from their starship that just happened upon them both during their routine sweep for tachyon particles. Then a Marauder who thinks he's Ghengis Khan comes trodding down a spirit path on the back of his Triceratops followed by an undead Mongol Horde and starts attacking everyone who refuses to bow to his rule.

Sounds like Rifts, Shadowrun, the more wacky D&D settings, or the imagination of a small child... only way more pretentious because it takes itself seriously (despite that scene being about as surreal as a Bosch painting) and throws in delusional SJW politics. At that point I might as well take acid.

In any case there are dozens of urban fantasy RPGs on the market. Suzerain, Dresden Files, homebrew... I will never give Mage a chance in hell, except maybe the Risus conversion and then only as a comedy campaign which mocks the absurdity and pretension.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037944I just complained that Vampire did the same thing.

No, you complained about the opposite... that they were hyperspecific niche things. What I'm saying is that all of Awakening and Ars Magica is about like saying "Ventrue are the only type of vampires in existence" when compared to the options in Mage the Ascension.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037944MtA included rules for paradigms in the Chroniclers Guide that came out years ago around the time I stopped following the releases.

I lasted about six months before I went back to running Ascension. I did read their rules for paradigms when they came out. They boiled down to "This paradigm calls Atlantis this, and this is their name for X Supernal Realm." The entire system was rooted in an objective truth. It was the antithesis of Ascension and its mechanics were horrible.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037944Ars Magica is really old and probably has rules for modern days and paradigms and whatever somewhere.

And you'd be wrong. Its only ever had rules for the Medieval rules and all magicians are members of the Order of Hermes.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037944So Ascension is about playing an SJW?

Or a Tea Party member or an honest cop or a vampire hunter or an inventor or an entrepreneur or anyone who takes a look at the world as it is now and says "I want to make it better."

SJW's don't have a monopoly on wanting a better tomorrow.

One could argue that the 2016 election was the result of a whole bunch of non-SJWs coming out to vote because they wanted what they believed would be a better tomorrow.

Play what you want, its all good. People like different things. I've tried the alternatives you mentioned over the years and none of them have ever delivered for me what Mage the Ascension did. They all felt hollow by comparison.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037944It's been a while since I read V20 so my memory may be a bit rusty, but that is beside the point. Ravnos have nothing in common with Middle East or Indian vampire myths like the foot-licker, the ghoul or the vetala. They follow pseudo-Ricean logic with some D&D illusionist thrown in. They have no flexibility at all if I wanted to do something different that does not fit that tiny little box... like remove the sunlight weakness, change their feeding method to using a siphon or eating dreams, make them vulnerable to roses instead of fire, add levitation, or whatever.

  At this point, I think most of the people looking for the cWoD are looking for the World of Darkness itself in all its rococo weirdness and specificity, rather than flexibility or fidelity to folklore. It's kind of like D&D in that regard. :)

  But I say this as an outsider--as a longtime fan of Stoker, Universal, Castlevania and Ravenloft, I am of the opinion that, with a few rare exceptions, vampires are for staking. :D

I've stated my piece before with BoxCrayonTales' recommended alternatives, such as Feed et alia. I don't think they're very good, evocative, nor as immersive as I want (basically too fiddly like Euro Board Games). And I put Storyteller on a pretty low bar mechanically; it just gets bonus points for 'apparent simplicity' (approachability).

So Armchair Gamer is right, I want oWoD and that's that. This new crew can bastardize V5 and the rest of the splat lines as they like, creating whole factories of cogs and gears to elaborately power widgets a la Eurotrash Board Games, and I won't care. I got my Splat 20 line put out for eventual collection completion, (Changeling the Dreaming 20, fuck yeah!). So they can fap to their heart's content with the belief that dividing their customer base into popularity -- again! -- is a viable business strategy. Not my concern... :)

I just can't wait to point and laugh when V5 inevitably fails and then I will tell all those Eurotrash Goths and Punks at NuWW "See, I told you so!"

Not even the great likes of Mark Rein-Hagen and The Gentleman Gamer can save this trainwreck, and those two are really talented. But it seems Martin Ericsson and his ilk are dedicated to destroying World of Darkness once and for all by finishing what Justin Achilli started.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1037954At this point, I think most of the people looking for the cWoD are looking for the World of Darkness itself in all its rococo weirdness and specificity, rather than flexibility or fidelity to folklore. It's kind of like D&D in that regard. :)

  But I say this as an outsider--as a longtime fan of Stoker, Universal, Castlevania and Ravenloft, I am of the opinion that, with a few rare exceptions, vampires are for staking. :D

Hasn't D&D always encouraged creativity in those who wanted something different? There are dozens of unique campaign settings with wildly different world views, and that is just the IP owned by WotC. There are hundreds of third party campaign settings to buy, much less homebrew.

WoD or CoD does not seem to encourage that same amount of creativity AFAIK, at least not since the heyday of B.J. Zanzibar's archive.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1037986I've stated my piece before with BoxCrayonTales' recommended alternatives, such as Feed et alia. I don't think they're very good, evocative, nor as immersive as I want (basically too fiddly like Euro Board Games). And I put Storyteller on a pretty low bar mechanically; it just gets bonus points for 'apparent simplicity' (approachability).

Would you care to quantify that statement? For example, why specifically is Feed less good/evocative/immersive compared to Vampire? I found it easy to convert between and to give new spins on things, like malk@vs that feed on sanity or gangrels with Buffy-style game faces.

Nah, we already did this song and dance on a previous topic. People can search if they're interested. I deleted Feed off of my old device afterwards, dunno if I have another copy lingering on any storage devices. I simply don't care enough to tread on old ground again. :)

But I'd gladly play another game of oWoD with some solid houserules and a decent sandbox. :D

Quote from: Opaopajr;1038042Nah, we already did this song and dance on a previous topic. People can search if they're interested. I deleted Feed off of my old device afterwards, dunno if I have another copy lingering on any storage devices. I simply don't care enough to tread on old ground again. :)

But I'd gladly play another game of oWoD with some solid houserules and a decent sandbox. :D

Your critique (https://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?33724-Which-do-you-feel-is-played-more-cWoD-or-nWoD/page8&p=873279#post873279) was extremely shallow. You criticized the mechanics for being non-traditional and you criticized a toolkit for being a toolkit. It is fine if you personally dislike the mechanics, but it is disingenuous to say the game is not good/evocative/immersive compared to some imaginary ideal without any qualifiers.

I think Feed is superior to WoD because it better fits the moniker of "storytelling system" by using free-form skills/attributes (the concept of which predates FATE by decades), the humanity mechanic actually depicts a gradual loss of humanity instead of arbitrarily punishing characters with schizophrenia for stealing a candybar, and it has none of the arbitrary restrictions that WoD does. I have yet to see any credible challenge to that assertion, despite my past queries.

Feed's a highly narrative system, so by definition less immersive, unless of course you're going to play games with 'immersing into what,etc'.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1038051Feed's a highly narrative system, so by definition less immersive, unless of course you're going to play games with 'immersing into what,etc'.

If I understand you correctly, you are criticizing narrative systems as less immersive because they represent the outcome of "role playing" (i.e. internal conflict) with dice rolls instead of the players deciding everything? Traditional RPGs are not designed to represent characters losing control of themselves and engaging in crimes of passion as a result of psychological trauma, and it is highly unlikely that most players would "role play" their character suffering a psychotic break because that is contrary to the typical RPG goal of accumulating power and wealth. Feed is designed around the characters struggling with their hunger, and dice rolls are used because the outcome of struggle is supposed to be unpredictable. Allowing players to arbitrarily decide whether their characters are hungry or not and how they react defeats the entire point.

But that is beside the point. WoD is advertised as a narrative-focused game and includes narrative mechanics like psychotic breaks. Feed is no less immersive than WoD in general, since mechanics like anchoring and compulsion have precedents there. It is disingenuous to claim Feed is less good/evocative/immersive compared to a game it was deliberately written in response to without qualifiers or explanation. That is what I take issue with.

Claiming that narrative games are less immersive just stinks of one true wayism to me. Non-narrative/simulationist/whatever-the-jargon-is games have numerous breaks from reality that can make them less immersive. Off the top of my head, most RPGs discourage angrily shooting at the corner an enemy already escaped around because it increases the chances of a critical failure, despite this being common in fiction involving gunfights. The only RPG I know of that does not suffer this problem is Risus, which explicitly rebuts this. It includes the example of action heroes: they cannot fail to outrun the fireball, so the outcome of the roll only determines whether they land in a swimming pool or a stinky garbage dumpster.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1038038Hasn't D&D always encouraged creativity in those who wanted something different? There are dozens of unique campaign settings with wildly different world views, and that is just the IP owned by WotC. There are hundreds of third party campaign settings to buy, much less homebrew.

  True. There have always been two strains in the D&D audience and design--"D&D for D&D's sake", or favoring a specific playstyle and mélange of influences, or "D&D as fantasy toolkit." Most of the settings came out in the 2E era, which pushed heavily into the latter, or under the OGL, which allows anyone to use the familiar skeleton. But there's also been a heavy push towards the former, especially from WotC. And this is further complicated by the fact that D&D is the 8000-lb. gorilla of the hobby, so a lot of people will just try to hack D&D into something even if there are better tools out there, simply from familiarity, accessibility, popularity, etc.

 

QuoteWoD or CoD does not seem to encourage that same amount of creativity AFAIK, at least not since the heyday of B.J. Zanzibar's archive.

  If memory serves, that archive dates back to the days when WoD had a similar level of presence in the market. Nowadays, though, people who are doing that sort of thing seem to have moved on to other tools, such as FATE, CoD, or other systems. Which brings me back to my original point--I think most of the people still interested in the oWoD nowadays are interested in it for the specific kind of flavor you get from the WoD, just as a lot of people stick with 1E AD&D because they want that specific style and flavor of D&D gaming.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1038051Feed's a highly narrative system, so by definition less immersive, unless of course you're going to play games with 'immersing into what,etc'.

What does "narrative" even mean in this context? I have seen several different definitions so I cannot tell what you are saying unless you explain what definition you are using.

If you mean "narrative" as the opposite of "immersive," that is a narrative games makes you ask "what makes for a better story" and immersive asks "what would my character do," which is one of several possible meanings... well, I certainly never got that impression.

Furthermore, Feed was being compared unfavorably to WoD without qualifier, not non-narrative RPGs in general. WoD is typically advertised as a "storytelling" game. Saying "Feed is less good/evocative/immersive than WoD" needs actual support before I can take that statement as anything other than thoughtless nonsense.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1038058If memory serves, that archive dates back to the days when WoD had a similar level of presence in the market. Nowadays, though, people who are doing that sort of thing seem to have moved on to other tools, such as FATE, CoD, or other systems. Which brings me back to my original point--I think most of the people still interested in the oWoD nowadays are interested in it for the specific kind of flavor you get from the WoD, just as a lot of people stick with 1E AD&D because they want that specific style and flavor of D&D gaming.

CoD is not a toolkit, just the equivalent of Marvel's Ultimate Universe for WoD. The same may be said of it. Anal retentive edition wars aside, CoD and WoD have more similarities than differences.

Nah, my critique was complex as it hit at the core of why Feed is needlessly complicated to interact with, how it disassociates, and offering unevocative pablum as a setting. But you like it, and hate WW, so yeah, you'll be on topics like these to push your darling. I get it, too old to care in the same way nowadays, but once upon a time I did. :) Have fun chasing the dream!

Quote from: Opaopajr;1038082Nah, my critique was complex as it hit at the core of why Feed is needlessly complicated to interact with, how it disassociates, and offering unevocative pablum as a setting. But you like it, and hate WW, so yeah, you'll be on topics like these to push your darling. I get it, too old to care in the same way nowadays, but once upon a time I did. :) Have fun chasing the dream!

I still have no idea what you meant because you failed to provide much context, analysis, examples of play or comparison to WoD. It is easy to assemble lists of flaws in the Storytelling System (http://garglinggoblin.blogspot.com/2013/01/problems-with-world-of-darkness-rpg.html). I am genuinely interested in seeing the same effort put toward analyzing Feed.

I mean, sure, Feed certainly has its flaws as the only review I could find (http://withinthedungeon.blogspot.com/2017/01/rpg-review-feed.html) pointed out (and what RPG doesn't?), but it is vastly superior to WoD in terms of flexibility and adjudicating humanity loss. The organization could use some revision and the tone is weird since much of the book makes a big deal about characters not wanting to be monsters only to include B-movie monster vampires as a sample premise.

Let me try an example of my own... If I understand you correctly, you criticized the anchoring/hunger/etc as being dissociative. The mechanic is not very different from the loads of similar mechanics in WoD like the beast or the shadow. So I don't understand your point as it being more dissociative than WoD. It is not possible to depict internal conflicts in RPGs without being dissociative since traditional RPGs train players to treat that sort of thing as "role playing" and somehow fundamentally different from normal task resolution.

If you think the rules are needlessly complicated, do you have suggestions for simplification? Off the top of my head, the different types of dice can be replaced with a single die type and simple division. This complaint is something that makes perfect sense to me, since figuring out a simple task resolution is probably the bane of RPGs as a genre.

As for "unevocative pablum as a setting"... it is supposed to be a toolkit, it was a kickstarter project written by one guy that never got continuations due to lack of funds, and it is being given out for free. We were lucky to get what little we did and it is a huge breath of fresh air compared to WoD. It works as a toolkit, way better than WoD ever did, and if we want a setting there are loads of existing settings to take inspiration from as well as our own imaginations.

I love critique and would like to see more. But your criticisms boil down largely to the game being non-traditional, which is sort of the entire appeal and probably the only reason the game works. The humanity mechanic, for example, cannot work under traditional attribute/skill mechanics... or at least not as well, I have yet to try.

What is with the Mage hate in this thread?

Holy christ on a crapstick, you'd think Mage was like a dragon giving itself a reacharound -- which, that said, is an ouroboros but err...

Mage is one of my least favorite of the games in the4 NWOD and OWOD. I gave Awakening a shot, GM'd  it, was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be pretty solid. You have to get rid of that abysmal Atlantean plot hook and stuff but get past all that surface crap and its a great game to host. Its pretty good at punishing stupidity and player bullshit so that's defo in its favor.

I'd say if you're "never gonna give it a try": fuck your feelings, go GM it.

If you don't like one, you won't like the other and Awakening is handsdown the better system and setting to test that out. Ascension is just a mess: it's very limited in that its premise ostensibly is about belief but it's really about the belief of your chosen faction as a collective which then melds in with the other collectives which then leads to a watered-down and flowery interpretation of chaos magick (yeah, with a fucking "k") where belief doesn't actually mean shit in the end, especially for your character personally. Completely defeating the point. Mechanics are OWOD so that tells you all you need to know.

Awakening keeps it simple: world's a gnostic prison and you're trying to escape it (and hopefully get yours while trying). Much more compelling take on the human condition -- and at the core, that's what all WOD games are about. Everyone's got their take on how to escape, that's part of why the Orders exist but it's all because Mages are humans and like to be with people who think like them. Keeps it simple. You're a still a regular human being to start with: it's that process of becoming enmeshed in the darkly myopic and increasingly brutal magical world that's great to experience (at least, that's how I ran it). Oh, and ignore the Imperial Mysteries sourcebook -- that was utter shite. Completely defeated the point of Mage by turning it "cosmic".

So yeah, save your hate for Mummy and Demon and Changeling and... urrrgh, that Beast one written by the SJW "alleged" child molester.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1038092What is with the Mage hate in this thread?

Holy christ on a crapstick, you'd think Mage was like a dragon giving itself a reacharound -- which, that said, is an ouroboros but err...

Mage is one of my least favorite of the games in the4 NWOD and OWOD. I gave Awakening a shot, GM'd  it, was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be pretty solid. You have to get rid of that abysmal Atlantean plot hook and stuff but get past all that surface crap and its a great game to host. Its pretty good at punishing stupidity and player bullshit so that's defo in its favor.

I'd say if you're "never gonna give it a try": fuck your feelings, go GM it.

If you don't like one, you won't like the other and Awakening is handsdown the better system and setting to test that out. Ascension is just a mess: it's very limited in that its premise ostensibly is about belief but it's really about the belief of your chosen faction as a collective which then melds in with the other collectives which then leads to a watered-down and flowery interpretation of chaos magick (yeah, with a fucking "k") where belief doesn't actually mean shit in the end, especially for your character personally. Completely defeating the point. Mechanics are OWOD so that tells you all you need to know.

Awakening keeps it simple: world's a gnostic prison and you're trying to escape it (and hopefully get yours while trying). Much more compelling take on the human condition -- and at the core, that's what all WOD games are about. Everyone's got their take on how to escape, that's part of why the Orders exist but it's all because Mages are humans and like to be with people who think like them. Keeps it simple. You're a still a regular human being to start with: it's that process of becoming enmeshed in the darkly myopic and increasingly brutal magical world that's great to experience (at least, that's how I ran it). Oh, and ignore the Imperial Mysteries sourcebook -- that was utter shite. Completely defeated the point of Mage by turning it "cosmic".

So yeah, save your hate for Mummy and Demon and Changeling and... urrrgh, that Beast one written by the SJW "alleged" child molester.

I don't share the irrational hatred for Atlantis (or the propensity for sending the lead developer death threats) infesting the fandom like a plague. I find it about as relevant as claiming Troy or Carthage or Sumer were magocracies, academic trivia at best, but I don't find it a turn off. Oh no, the sheer irrelevance and idiosyncrasies of everything else is what turns me away.

Whenever I think magic, I think of The Dresden Files, Harry Potter, Charmed, The Magicians and a bazillion other urban fantasy novels. The Mage game doesn't capture any of what made those interesting and the politics are just plain unbelievable, which isn't surprising considering it was written by humanities majors and SJWs.

Changeling the lost is probably one of the best WW titles, if only because it was the single most creative product to ever come out of WW without turning into the surreal silliness of Mage the Ascension. The disturbing and surreal descriptions of fairyland were quite evocative.

Yeah, Mage sucked too.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1038335Yeah, Mage sucked too.

Hey, Mage: The Ascension 1e and 2e were fucking awesome!

Pundit, your justifications for your hate-on for White Wolf only applies to them in the Revised Era onward. In the early 1990's, White Wolf was based as fuck.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037919What Sammy was saying is equivalent to asking for D&D to add "blackface minstrel" as a bard kit.

Holy shit that's hilarious.

Quote from: Chris24601;1037925Unknown Armies sucks,

I will knife fight you...

Quote from: Chris24601;1037925avatars of mystic hermaphrodites

Fun fact: This was removed in the latest edition. Because it was offensive.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1037944So Ascension is about playing an SJW?

Yes.

Got banned at the big purple for pointing that out too :D

Quote from: Chris24601;1037953One could argue that the 2016 election was the result of a whole bunch of non-SJWs coming out to vote because they wanted what they believed would be a better tomorrow.

One could also argue that it was 4Chan and meme magic.

#PraiseKek

Mage the Ascension was a mixed bag, IMHO.

The concept of vulgar and coincidental magic was really amazing and required, check this, player skill.

The Technocracy was great as an antagonist and the first scenario Loom of Fate was a GM friendly scenario that showed you how a MtA game could be run.

Then came the drek and bloat culminating in rip-offs like The Book of Mirrors which was all preachy and absolutely no utility.

Shame.

If they had kept the Traditions more an alliance of philosophy/ideology, like the Conventions of the Technocracy were, rather than having the "Ethnicity of the Month" "crafts" it might have been really cool.

Plus the more they published "rotes" the less comprehensible the Spheres became.

A simple list of "classic spell effects" to Sphere(s) Required would have sufficed.

Other faults with the 1e

Mawkishness (tho nowhere near as bad as later stuff)
Crappy artwork (ditto)
Fanfic
Not enough stats for antagonists
No beginning scenario (Loom of fate should have been part of the core book)

So anyway I went ahead and made a list of effects that are frequently called upon either by the PCs or the NPCs. The GM could keep this from his players or let the player in on a few that the PC is capable of. Then it can be updated, extended and revised as required.

Armour:   Energy 3, Matter 2 or Life 3
Banish:   Spirit 4
Barrier:   Prime 2 + Energy 3 or (Prime 2 + Matter 2 )or Correspondence 4
Beast Friend or Charm Person:   Mind 2
Bolt of Electricity:   Forces 2 (from ambient current)
Blast of Energy:   Prime 2 + Forces 3
Blind Person:   Mind: 3 or Life 3 or Entropy 4
Boost Body:   Life 3 (self) Life 4 (other)
Boost Mind:   Mind 1 (self) Mind 4 (other)
Confusion:    Mind 2 or Entropy5
Control Weathe:   Forces 4 (+ Correspondence 2 for widespread effects). The GM might rule that (Prime 2+Matter 2). Moreover Entropy 4 dissipates weather
Create Simple Matter (i.e. water, iron, dead wood):   Prime 2 + Matter 2
Create Simple Life (i.e. mold, grass, living wood):   Prime 2+ Life 3
Change spatial dimensions:   Correspondence 4
Cure Disease:   Life 2 (to reverse damage caused Life 4 or 3 for self)
Darksight:   Life 3 or Forces 1 or Matter 1 or Correspondence 1
Deflection:   Entropy 3 or Forces 3 or Matter 3,
Detect Magick:   Prime 1
Disguise:   Life 3 (self) 4 (other) or Mind 3 (illusion)
Dispel Magic:   Prime 4 or the same spheres as the effect in place
Divination of Past & Future:   Time 2
Earthquake:   Forces 5 + Prime 2
Environment Protection:   Life 3 (self) Life 4 (other) or (Forces 3 or 4)
Explosion:   Forces 4 + Prime 2 + Matter 2
Farsight:   Correspondence 2
Fear/Calm: Mind 2
Fly/Levitate:   (Prime 2 + Forces 4)
Forget:   Mind 4 or Entropy 5
Growth/Shrink:   Life 4
Harm:   Life 4 or Entropy 4
Heal:   Life 3 (self) Life 4 (other) simple lifeforms Life 2
Hold the Door:   (Forces 4 + Prime 2) or Matter 3
Illusion:   (Prime2 + Forces) for holograms or Mind 3 for hallucinations
Intangibility:   Spirit 3 or (Life 5 + Matter3) or Correspondence 4
Invisibility:   Forces 2 or Mind 3 (illusion) or Correspondence 4
Light: Forces 2 or in pitch black (Forces 3 + Prime 3)
Locate:    Correspondence 2 + Life/Matter/Mind/Spirit 1 depending on quarry
Luck/Jinx:   Entropy 2
Obscure (i.e. darken):   Forces 2 or Entropy3
Paralyse:   Mind 4 or Life 4 or Time 4 or Entropy 4 or Forces 4 (gravity)
Passwall:   Matter 4 or Correspondence 4
Plane Shift:   Spirit 3 or 5 depending on the destination.
Protection from Heat:   Forces 2 or Entropy 3
Protection from Cold :   Prime 2+Forces 3
Protection from Wind:   Entropy 3 or Forces 4
Protection from Electricity:   Entropy 3 or Forces 2
Puppet:   Mind 4
Quickness:   Life 3 (self) 4 (other) or Time 3
Read Minds:   Mind 3
Remove Poison:   (Life 1+Matter 3) or (Life 1+Matter 1+Correspondence 4)
Resist Elements:   Life 3 (self) or Life 4 (others) but Life 5 may be required
Shape Change:   Life 5
Shatter/Break machine:   Matter 3 or Entropy 3
Shapechange object:   Matter 3
Short Circuit:   Forces 2 or Entropy 3
Silence:   Forces 2 or Entropy 3
See invisible: Any Sphere at 1
See Spirits:   Spirit 1
Slow   Time: 3 or Life 4 or Entropy 4 or Forces 4 (gravity)
Sleep or Stun:    Mind 2 or Life 4 simple lifeforms Life 2
Speak/Read Languages:   Mind 1
Seak to the Dead:   Spirit 1
Send Dreams and Nightmares:   (Mind 3+Correspondence 4) adding Time 2 for prophetic dreams or Spirit 1 for dreams of the spirit world.
Summoning/Gate:   Spirit 4 and/or Correspondence 4 possibly Spirit 5 and/or Correspondence 5 depending on what is being summoned.
Summon Spirit:   Spirit 2
Touch from distance:   Correspondence 4
Touch the Spirit: Spirit 2
Telekinesis:   (Prime 2 + Forces 4)
Teleport:   Correspondence 3 (self) 4(others)
Time Stop:   Time 5
Transmute substance:   Matter 4
Tune into Signals:   Forces 1 Mind 1 (Correspondence 2 for distant signals)
Wall Walking:   Forces 4 or Life 5
Zombie:   Spirit 2 (willing) or Spirit 4 (unwilling) the rest being done by the spirit.
Water Breathing:   Matter 4 or Life 4
Water Walking:   Forces 4

I am aware of the M20 but this is just going from the first Mage MtA 1e

That looks a lot like the list they included in Mage 20 Core (which did clarify a number of things, like not needing prime for telekinesis or flight and both of those only needing rank 2 to move a couple hundred pounds or so... rank 4 is in the moving a plane territory).

Personally, I like how elegant the magic system actually is (and the M20 switch from individual foci to a unified focus (consisting of paradigm, practice and props was a huge improvement... as was mythic threads/hypernarrative replacing the role of specialty foci on the difficulty chart). I condensed the whole thing down onto a single sheet as one of my GM and Player references and it works fantastically.

I get that its not everyone's bag of chips, but I've been able to GM (not Storyteller, GM) the same setting virtually non-stop for nearly a quarter century now and have never had a shortage of players so what I'm doing with it must have some appeal.

Quote from: Chris24601;1038381That looks a lot like the list they included in Mage 20 Core (which did clarify a number of things, like not needing prime for telekinesis or flight and both of those only needing rank 2 to move a couple hundred pounds or so... rank 4 is in the moving a plane territory).

It may well do, at least without all my spelling mistakes and failue to alphabetise correctly.:o I couldn't say because I didn't buy M20 because it was too expensive for an update of a game I already have two editions of.

I just whipped that up this morning from a Savage Worlds power list and a browse on old B/X spell lists.:p

I worked with the 1e of the game because I can't bear the look of the later versions of the game.:eek:

Oh good! Yet another version/edition/branding/etc... of vampire!

It's not like the product line isn't a confusing clusterfuck as it is.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1038340Hey, Mage: The Ascension 1e and 2e were fucking awesome!

Pundit, your justifications for your hate-on for White Wolf only applies to them in the Revised Era onward. In the early 1990's, White Wolf was based as fuck.

No, it was shit. Mage was especially shit with it's ultra-elitist views (something that in some sense every WW game had, but mage literally presented science and technology as the bad guys; along with all of modern civilization, basically).

Quote from: RPGPundit;1038667No, it was shit. Mage was especially shit with it's ultra-elitist views (something that in some sense every WW game had, but mage literally presented science and technology as the bad guys; along with all of modern civilization, basically).

The Virtual Adepts would prove your argument bullshit.

The enemy wasn't technology or science... it was a faceless non-governmental organization that had tendrils in every level of government and had been subverting society in their effort to turn everyone into cogs in a One-World Government machine for the last hundred years. Their factions literally included one called the New World Order whose methods included domestic spying, abduction and brainwashing the masses with propaganda. Others had the express goals of controlling the masses through drugs and healthcare and eugenics, or through the economy and forcing a switch to an entirely plastic-based economy so they could track every transaction you make and open borders for cheap labor.

How is that enemy NOT a fictionalized version the Leftists you so loathe and despise?

Quote from: RPGPundit;1038667No, it was shit. Mage was especially shit with it's ultra-elitist views (something that in some sense every WW game had, but mage literally presented science and technology as the bad guys; along with all of modern civilization, basically).

It could be (and probably was) played that way by people with such a mindset but I doubt that was the authors' intent (The Intentional Fallacy notwithstanding). Personally, I believe that the Technocracy was originally intended to represent an Orwellian Dystopia  that was a road to Hell paved with the best of intentions (the Englightenment).

In the original scenario, Loom of Fate, neither the Technocracy nor the Traditions can be said to be the "good guys".  In fact the conflict is more based on the Moorcockian themes of Law and Chaos

The orientation of Mage was largely that the world is evil because you don't get to have the special-power elites doing whatever the fuck they want while everyone else lives like worthless peasants.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1039102The orientation of Mage was largely that the world is evil because you don't get to have the special-power elites doing whatever the fuck they want while everyone else lives like worthless peasants.

Uh, no.  The player side wanted to make ALL the peasants to be Mages too!  But each Faction had their own way of getting people to 'Awaken'.

Which is a whole problem that no one addresses at any point.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1039116Which is a whole problem that no one addresses at any point.

In the context of an RPG that was an almost impossible task, in my opinion.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1038814In the original scenario, Loom of Fate, neither the Technocracy nor the Traditions can be said to be the "good guys".  In fact the conflict is more based on the Moorcockian themes of Law and Chaos

Or from a Garou's perspective, The Weaver and The Wyld.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1039121In the context of an RPG that was an almost impossible task, in my opinion.

That's one of the problems.

Another is when you have people who don't want to change the world (and they're NOT either faction) and suddenly given this power.  Then there's others with actual mental conditions and suddenly have this power...  And they all go at it with each other.  What do you think will happen?  Because I can't mentally handle that.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1039124Or from a Garou's perspective, The Weaver and The Wyld.

Yep, and Mage and Changeling seemed to follow that Moorcockian dichotomy after WtA set it up in the WoD.

I suppose the Wyrm would be Stormbringer/The Black Jewel
.

QuoteIn the book The Quest for Tanelorn, a man claims that the demon in the sword is named Shaitan – a variant of 'Satan'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormbringer#Description

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1039125That's one of the problems.

Another is when you have people who don't want to change the world (and they're NOT either faction) and suddenly given this power.  Then there's others with actual mental conditions and suddenly have this power...  And they all go at it with each other.  What do you think will happen?  Because I can't mentally handle that.

Agreed. I think the setting as an idea for a series of graphic novels is interesting. As a background for a RPG, not so feasible unfortunately. I am reminded of an article in an old White Dwarf article by David Langford on how literature and film would be different if the main protagonists were PCs.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1039126Yep, and Mage and Changeling seemed to follow that Moorcockian dichotomy after WtA set it up in the WoD.

Mage actually went a step further in that it had mage factions representing Weaver (early Technology; wants the universe to run like a well-oiled machine with no deviation... by mid-to-late 2e they'd evolved into the Men-In-Black movies, trying to keep the world spinning another day as all these crazy reality deviants keep pulling their crap), the Wyld (Marauders; whose personal paradigm warps reality around them without their even trying), the Wyrm (Nephandi, mages who embrace Descent instead of Ascension) and Balance (The Traditions; again by mid-to-late 2e this was more that they had examples of all three other types of philosophy among their members than that they actually embodied balance... but ostensibly they existed to protect Sleepers from the excesses of the other factions and to try and get the Sleepers to awaken).

As someone who's been running a continuous Mage campaign for 20 years now, the general trend over the years has been that the Tradition PCs have moderated over the years and have been able to work with moderates in the Technocracy by finding some degree of common ground (usually in the vein of "keep the world safe from the things that go bump in the night") where they can co-exist. The other has been the notion of the PCs having to be act as moderating forces on the extremes of their respective factions. Tradition politics as a big bad of sorts really took a center stage about five years ago and has never really let go... The Technocracy as Well-Intentioned Extremists started about three years before that (including a civil war the Tradition PCs helped determine the winner of)... the two combined have led to some wonderful moments where Tradition PCs have questioned if they're even on the right side of things in a given situation.

I have a Conspiracy Flowchart these days to keep track of it all the Tradition and Technocracy (and other faction) politics as different sets of PCs have actually helped advance the interests of different factions over the years... sometimes without even realizing they did so).

That campaign sounds great. BTW my wife is from Fort Wayne. We got married there and it's kinda "home" when I am in the US (I'm British):cool:

I enjoy it a lot. I think my favorite part from a setting standpoint is that while it based in the modern world, the players can choose to visit places that fall under just about any genre. I've got two groups running currently and one is trying to shut down a Pentex-organized drug ring in Chicago while another is exploring the lost civilizations of the Hollow Earth. Past groups have visited everything from the Fallen Tower on the edge of Oblivion to exploring strange worlds aboard a Void Engineer science cruiser. The stakes at various end games have ranged from the fate of the cosmos to the fate of a single soul with resolutions ranging from massed armies of mages doing battle to asking a single question.

It can be as alien or as down to earth as the players wish to explore. My job as the GM is just to keep track of what's going on in the world and inform the players of what's going on around them so they can decide what to do. If we're just starting a new set of characters (sometimes the whole group feels their characters have reached a satisfying endpoint so they all make brand new ones) I'll throw an inciting incident into the mix from my conspiracy flowchart if the group doesn't have any particular goals they want to pursue on their own, but even that's probably just a loose end or unintended consequence of their old PCs actions.

Honestly, the setting practically runs itself at this point.

All the classic WW RPGs can be characterized as "super special people being ignored or persecuted by people not as special as they are".

There is a lot of inbuilt self-pity and narcissism in the WoD but that holds true for a lot of games.

You Are Special so Persecuted by By Big Bad Society

WoD
Unknown Armies
Exalted
Playing Dow/Dragonborn etc in D&D
Some Super heroes (X-men) type games
Ars Magica


You are ordinary people in extraordinary situations

DCC at low level
CoC
most OSR D&D clones at low level
Traveller

Quote from: RPGPundit;1039534All the classic WW RPGs can be characterized as "super special people being ignored or persecuted by people not as special as they are".

This of course ignores the fact that rules establish PCs as low men on the totem poles in their respective settings.

Vampires are neonates; less than 50 years old at the bottom of the social pecking order and with minimal physical power compared to their elders (3-5 dots in disciplines versus 10-15 for even a modest elder) and can't be higher than 8th generation when the power ramp up (vastly larger blood pools, the ability to spend more than one point per turn and to buy superhuman stats) comes at 7th generation and up. Half the point of forming a coeterie (PC party) is that pooling your resources you can survive the political games of the elders (and eventually become elders themselves).

The same goes for werewolves (newly turned, you are only rank one and so can only gain rank one gifts in a system that runs up to rank 6).

Likewise for Mages, you start as an acolyte (Arete of 3 or less out of 10, spheres of magic can't be bought higher than Arete) on a path that includes adepts, masters, archmages and oracles above you. You're the grunts in the Ascension War or Independents trying to survive in the margins between superpowers. You need mentors to learn any sphere you don't know and if you improved nothing else but Arete and one sphere with XP you might reach adept status in that single sphere after 15 game sessions (which is about the level of a lot of the NPC opponents in the books) and another 20 sessions to master that one sphere.

All of the settings also include horrors well beyond the PCs (antideluvians/methuselahs, malfeans, nephandi lords) that put into perspective how tiny even the elders, tribal leaders and masters are.

So, yeah, you're "special"... in the same way a first-level fighter, wizard or cleric is special in D&D. You're a cut above the masses, but you're a long way from the top... the journey to get there (or failing in the attempt) is the whole point of playing the game.

Sure, you start on the bottom rung of the super-special people.

In D&D, it's presumed your 1st level character is a "veteran", that they got there through study or effort. In WW games they're almost always the super-special people because they are just inherently better than the hoi polloi.

True in D&D pre 3.5 you start off as a journeyman at 1st level but more recent WotC versions of the brand seem to start PCs off at a much more "super" initial position. i think it was said best (don't recall by whom) that Old School D&D feels like everyday people doing extraordinary things while 3.5 feels like etraordinary people doing everyday things.

Having said that, having a character class puts you in a very small demographic. In fact this is often forgotten in the sort of modules I dislike in which the local blacksmith is a 3rd level fighter, the local priest an 8th level cleric and the lord is a 12th level Paladin.

IIRC a Balrog type creature in AD&D would have had 13HD so just about everybody in LOTR is below that apart from maybe Gandalf the White, Elrond, Galadriel and Sauron himself (and Tom Bombadil ofc).

So being a 5th level anything is something we play as a BIG DEAL.

So while not on the level of WoD archetypes or playing a Supers RPG, even just having a character class means you ain't everyday people.

Unless you're playing DCC and survive the funnel. :p

Quote from: RPGPundit;1040012Sure, you start on the bottom rung of the super-special people.

In D&D, it's presumed your 1st level character is a "veteran", that they got there through study or effort. In WW games they're almost always the super-special people because they are just inherently better than the hoi polloi.

Mage presumes that a starting character has been awakened for 3-6 years learning the basics of magic from a mentor before starting play. They actually have separate rules for if you want to start as a just awakened individual; Arete is 1, You get 1 dot (i.e. detect "sphere" effects only) in two spheres and have lower attributes, abilities and willpower than a typical starting mage. They even have guidelines for how long it took to learn your starting spheres; six-months for a rank one, one year for rank two, three years for rank three. Each. So a starting PC with two spheres at rank three is presumed to have been studying under a mentor for six years already to have the power that they do. They're inherently 'better' than the hoi polloi in the same way a PhD in physics is 'better' than a bachelor's degree in science... because they worked for it.

Vampire presumes that a starting PC has spent FIFTY YEARS under the wing of their sire, learning the ropes and a few dots in vampiric disciplines, and is only now being allowed to fly solo so to speak. They presume it took the vampire literal decades to master the ability to shift shape or dominate minds. The presumption is that any vampire that hasn't actually learned the basics of his clan's disciplines after 50 years has probably already met Final Death by this point (lack of motivation makes you expendable in undead politics).

Werewolf presumes that a starting PC has gone through training and then the Rite of Passage, a task that requires a cub to accomplish a goal specific to its tribe using what it has learned (examples include "A Wendigo rite often takes the form of a vision quest, while the Get of Fenris commonly send their cubs into combat with Wyrm-spawn.") before the game begins.

In other words, you're just wrong. Again. All the different PC types in the World of Darkness are presumed to have gone through study and experience to get where they are at the start of the game. They're as much "veterans" as a level 1 fighter, cleric or magic-user is.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1037235Vampire was always garbage.

Yes.  Maybe I should keep my opinions to myself but: garbage in, garbage out.  Modiphius attempting to polish a turd.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1040012Sure, you start on the bottom rung of the super-special people.

In D&D, it's presumed your 1st level character is a "veteran", that they got there through study or effort. In WW games they're almost always the super-special people because they are just inherently better than the hoi polloi.

"My make-believe character that I just generated became a badass through years of make-believe effort, while your make-believe character that you just generated didn't properly earn his make-believe powers. That makes me part of a special class of superior gamer, and not an elitist like you."

Quote from: Baulderstone;1040101"My make-believe character that I just generated became a badass through years of make-believe effort, while your make-believe character that you just generated didn't properly earn his make-believe powers. That makes me part of a special class of superior gamer, and not an elitist like you."

Okay, props right there.

Quote from: Baulderstone;1040101"My make-believe character that I just generated became a badass through years of make-believe effort, while your make-believe character that you just generated didn't properly earn his make-believe powers. That makes me part of a special class of superior gamer, and not an elitist like you."

I like this! Can I have it embroidered upon my crusader tabard? :) I have un-earned elitist smiting to do.

Quote from: Chris24601;1040079Mage presumes that a starting character has been awakened for 3-6 years learning the basics of magic from a mentor before starting play. They actually have separate rules for if you want to start as a just awakened individual; Arete is 1, You get 1 dot (i.e. detect "sphere" effects only) in two spheres and have lower attributes, abilities and willpower than a typical starting mage. They even have guidelines for how long it took to learn your starting spheres; six-months for a rank one, one year for rank two, three years for rank three. Each. So a starting PC with two spheres at rank three is presumed to have been studying under a mentor for six years already to have the power that they do. They're inherently 'better' than the hoi polloi in the same way a PhD in physics is 'better' than a bachelor's degree in science... because they worked for it.

Vampire presumes that a starting PC has spent FIFTY YEARS under the wing of their sire, learning the ropes and a few dots in vampiric disciplines, and is only now being allowed to fly solo so to speak. They presume it took the vampire literal decades to master the ability to shift shape or dominate minds. The presumption is that any vampire that hasn't actually learned the basics of his clan's disciplines after 50 years has probably already met Final Death by this point (lack of motivation makes you expendable in undead politics).

Werewolf presumes that a starting PC has gone through training and then the Rite of Passage, a task that requires a cub to accomplish a goal specific to its tribe using what it has learned (examples include "A Wendigo rite often takes the form of a vision quest, while the Get of Fenris commonly send their cubs into combat with Wyrm-spawn.") before the game begins.

In other words, you're just wrong. Again. All the different PC types in the World of Darkness are presumed to have gone through study and experience to get where they are at the start of the game. They're as much "veterans" as a level 1 fighter, cleric or magic-user is.

Godamm, that's a long time to have been a pre-PC!

See, I never got that. Same way with WW properties I never got the absurdly low population numbers, especially given that the majority of the supernatural factions have multiple ranks in their organization structures and are implicitly (or explicitly in a number of cases) hosting hundreds to thousands of members just in their org alone. That just can't work, particularly in the case of, say, more disparate factions like the Carthians or institutions like the Invictus. There's over seven-and-a-half billion Mortals on the planet (and we can assume it's even larger in WOD due to various darker socio-cultural/economic factors): you're telling me there's only 70,000+ vamps GLOBALLY when the metropolitan area of a city like LA is home to 17mil+? Come on son, don't tell me lies...

Specifically on the point of the length of service before a PC is "live", in our current VTR chron the PC has been a vampire for no more than one or two years. And in our previous Mage chron before that, it was no more than a couple months. And then BEFORE that one when we did Hunter, the PCs became Hunters pretty much the first time the classic GM phrase "what do you do?" was uttered. To be a vamp for FIFTY YEARS already puts you at Ancillae level and by that point, a Kindred would be by all reasonable accounts WELL-ESTABLISHED in their Domain and should be highly independent if they've survived that long (barring exceptions such as incredibly long gestations periods under a particularly severe Ventrue Bloodline or the like). It shouldn't take you years just to realise you're particularly good at casting fireballs or Mage would be hella low-powered than it is.

Well if you read the original Chicago By Night, 50 years is about right, but I agree it jars a bit. Mage would have been better toning down the power level a bit and starting with characters with less tutelage.

Meh, there was just simply too much to put right and sort out after a while. Pit cos there was a gem of a game in there somewhere back when urban fantasy didn't make me feel so jaded.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1040251Godamm, that's a long time to have been a pre-PC!

2-6 years for a mage isn't too bad, not much different than the 1d6 difference in starting age between a human fighter (15+1d6 years) and a human wizard (15+2d6 years) in D&D truthfully. I should make the caveat though that my frame of reference for the WoD is almost entirely through the lens of Mage the Ascension. While there have been many vampire, werewolf, wraith and changeling NPCs over the years, my games are 100% Mage focused... that likely colors my perspective a bit from people who are coming at it from Vampire or Werewolf first.

QuoteSee, I never got that. Same way with WW properties I never got the absurdly low population numbers, especially given that the majority of the supernatural factions have multiple ranks in their organization structures and are implicitly (or explicitly in a number of cases) hosting hundreds to thousands of members just in their org alone. That just can't work, particularly in the case of, say, more disparate factions like the Carthians or institutions like the Invictus. There's over seven-and-a-half billion Mortals on the planet (and we can assume it's even larger in WOD due to various darker socio-cultural/economic factors): you're telling me there's only 70,000+ vamps GLOBALLY when the metropolitan area of a city like LA is home to 17mil+? Come on son, don't tell me lies...

17 million people would be a base average of 170 vampires in the city (1/100,000 is the official number) and a baseline of 17 true mages (1 in a million is canonical, though there'd be another 70 or so Sorcerers/linear magicians baseline as well).

But here's the thing that the rules point out; those numbers are global averages and Vampires have disproportionate representation in cities (because population density makes it easier to hunt and feed) while the 5 or so vampires the population numbers say should be living in Wyoming just aren't there, they're living in a bigger city where missing persons when they botch a feed are less likely to be noticed. Chicago by Night explicitly stated that the population of vampires in Chicago was 2-3 times higher than the average would suggest (depending on whether it was before or after the war with the Lupines).

There is also canonical material that sets the Clans at much smaller than you'd think. Per the fluff, the size of the Tremere is precisely 400 vampires for mystical reasons... Tremere, his 7 advisers who each have 7 vampires in the next rank down (49 total) who in turn have seven vampires under them (343 total)... basically 7 x 7 x 7 = mystical perfection. The GM is just expected to replace members in that number with PCs if the player makes a Tremere.

Likewise, the Order of Hermes in Mage had the membership of each House listed in one of its books, ranging from Bonisagus officially having just FOUR members (but ranked as a great house out of respect for their founder also being the founder of the Order of Hermes as a whole) to Ex Miscellanea having around 200 (though any individual minor house is probably only a dozen or so at most) and total numbers of about 550 or so True Mages in their ranks. They are also stated to be the absolute largest of the Traditions. The smallest, if I recall, is the Euthanatos at just over 200 True Mages.

If I recall the official numbers back in 2000 (so only 6 billion people) were 2000 Traditions, 2500 Technocracy and 1500 "Other" (disparates, crafts, orphans, nephandi and marauders). The Technocracy also got a lot of mileage out of Linear Practitioners (i.e. Sorcerers and guys who could use technocratic items) which are about four times more numerous than True Mages, constructs (MIBs, HIT Marks and such grown/built as needed) and unenlightened dupes (you don't need to know how the gun works... just that it works really really well). The only ones who came close were the Order of Hermes whose entire program was designed to get as close to "Awakening by Rote" as possible and included Linear Practitioners as part of the ranks of initiates and apprentices leading up to Awakening and True Magic.

QuoteIt shouldn't take you years just to realise you're particularly good at casting fireballs or Mage would be hella low-powered than it is.

The thing is, magic is pretty low powered, at least on the margins the PCs start in. The guys who can theoretically lift a mountain with their magic are depicted as literally centuries old (life extended through magic). Rank 2 Forces (takes about a year) actually has the bulk of what a creative Mage is likely to need Forces for. Invisibility, flight, telekinesis (up to 300 lb.), controlling the flow of electricity, moving fire with your mind... all of that is rank two and takes about a year of study per the rules to get good at.

Rank 3 lets you transform one force into another force (so light into electricity or fire into sound) and ups the scale affected to about 2 tons (basically a car instead of a man) and that takes two years of additional study (while you still get to live your daily life... so grad school, not secluded in a monastery). Two years to be able to go from moving energy around with your mind to completely transforming any form of energy into any other form of energy AT WILL does not feel excessive to me.

ETA: Fireball itself would just a be a Rote, a set of magical actions you've practiced enough to pull off on the fly. Once you have the understanding of Forces 3 needed to channel the energies, learning the Fireball "spell" would take you a couple of hours.

To put it another way, you can't design an F-15 from the ground up (a specific spell) without years of study in aeronautical engineering first. If all you want to do is fly around in an F-15, just have another mage make you a wonder (ex. a ring of fireballs) and use that, but the spheres represent a whole body of knowledge well beyond just that one single application.

Forces 3 is magic missile, light, mage hand, ghost sound, every illusion spell in the book, levitate, fly, fireball, lightning bolt, telekinesis, reverse gravity, invisibility, shield, mage armor, wall of force, darkness, shocking grasp, darkvision, animate objects and a ton more. /ETA

Fireballs also aren't generally part of many real world magical paradigms. A Celestial Chorus might be able to pull off a pillar of holy fire, an Etherite could certainly whip up a Tesla gun, but a Verbena don't really have the concept of fireballs in their paradigm... they'll curse you to die in a freak accident (perhaps being struck by lightning), but they don't throw fireballs. That's not how they believe magic works so that's not how it works for them.

Magic in Mage isn't D&D magic at all (except for that one Orphan for whom it was... and they 'memorized' their spells using a 1e D&D Player's Handbook every morning... Paradox flaws for him often took the form of temporary amnesia to varying degrees... the downside of a paradigm that says spells are erased from your brain when cast).

Quote17 million people would be a base average of 170 vampires in the city (1/100,000 is the official number) and a baseline of 17 true mages (1 in a million is canonical, though there'd be another 70 or so Sorcerers/linear magicians baseline as well).

There is also canonical material that sets the Clans at much smaller than you'd think. Per the fluff, the size of the Tremere is precisely 400 vampires for mystical reasons... Tremere, his 7 advisers who each have 7 vampires in the next rank down (49 total) who in turn have seven vampires under them (343 total)... basically 7 x 7 x 7 = mystical perfection. The GM is just expected to replace members in that number with PCs if the player makes a Tremere.

I implemented VII as having the same structure. Total coincidence. This is using my adjusted pop.# for VTR. Otherwise, I'd quarter that number because there is no fucking way in hell that number of vampire mages would exist and not be chopped right down by their peers (and the supernatural world at large) -- it's not even sustainable as an organisation with that few vampires globally. We can't just handwave this kind of stuff away and this is where my real problem with WW's setting math lies: they're full of crap. Seventeen Mages in LA alone? Nah, not buying it. And I read Destiny's Price, too, so double no.

Speaking of VII though, it's a shame they didn't actually do a proper write-up for them but, on the other hand, it was a good writing exercise. I kept the mystery around them simple: simple is best. It's really easy to go full gonzo with pages worth of detail (almost as if there were an entire series of urban horror books with bulk made up of just that!) and I've had to tell my apprentice GMs in the past to avoid that. Otherwise, you end up with Scientology (there's a reason their "truths" are kept cryptic and obscure from lower level members). Ultimately, I made VII be seven Elders who were coterie of Neonates during the first decades of the 1st millennium who banded together for safety against the really fucked-up Elders who existed in their time . The Seven, now spread across the globe, ended up siring seven childer (or recruited younger vamps) who in turn did the same -- no vampires younger than Ancillae are allowed and roughly 343 are maintained at any time. None of The Seven are yet Ancients but a couple of them are very close by the time the game starts.

QuoteThe thing is, magic is pretty low powered, at least on the margins the PCs start in. The guys who can theoretically lift a mountain with their magic are depicted as literally centuries old (life extended through magic). Rank 2 Forces (takes about a year) actually has the bulk of what a creative Mage is likely to need Forces for. Invisibility, flight, telekinesis (up to 300 lb.), controlling the flow of electricity, moving fire with your mind... all of that is rank two and takes about a year of study per the rules to get good at.

Yeah, oMAGE was totally different in power scale from nMage. You don't get telekinesis until 3rd dot, true invisibility at 5th dot and flight you don't get until 5th dot as well. You just about get flamebolts at 3rd dot but true fireballs aren't until 4th dot. Based on oMage guidelines... christ... mastery is a fucking virtue in and of itself!

QuoteRank 3 lets you transform one force into another force (so light into electricity or fire into sound) and ups the scale affected to about 2 tons (basically a car instead of a man) and that takes two years of additional study (while you still get to live your daily life... so grad school, not secluded in a monastery). Two years to be able to go from moving energy around with your mind to completely transforming any form of energy into any other form of energy AT WILL does not feel excessive to me.

You don't get to do that until 5th dot for most of the Arcana in nMage. There's piecemeal stuff starting from 3rd dot but it's fairly specific (no lead into gold type stuff 'til at least 4th).

QuoteTo put it another way, you can't design an F-15 from the ground up (a specific spell) without years of study in aeronautical engineering first. If all you want to do is fly around in an F-15, just have another mage make you a wonder (ex. a ring of fireballs) and use that, but the spheres represent a whole body of knowledge well beyond just that one single application.

Mate, I've GM'd Mage twice, both for a whole year and for a table comprising very different thresholds of EXP per character. I'm WELL AWARE of how the learning process should be represented. My whole thing is oMage was insane and I-just-don't-know-what-the-fuck-they-were-thinking back then...

QuoteFireballs also aren't generally part of many real world magical paradigms. A Celestial Chorus might be able to pull off a pillar of holy fire, an Etherite could certainly whip up a Tesla gun, but a Verbena don't really have the concept of fireballs in their paradigm... they'll curse you to die in a freak accident (perhaps being struck by lightning), but they don't throw fireballs. That's not how they believe magic works so that's not how it works for them.

Yeah, I'm not into that whole idea of "belief" had going. I totally get the switch to the gnostic style of sorcery they went for -- very much needed. Magic as a power should be objective in and of itself: just because you believe magic should be a certain way stylistically doesn't mean you can't throw a fireball if wish to will it into existence. That said, that's getting into territory very different from what we're discussing which is the insanity in power scale of oMage compared to nMage.

QuoteMagic in Mage isn't D&D magic at all (except for that one Orphan for whom it was... and they 'memorized' their spells using a 1e D&D Player's Handbook every morning... Paradox flaws for him often took the form of temporary amnesia to varying degrees... the downside of a paradigm that says spells are erased from your brain when cast).

nMage allows for D&D style magic to a large extent. Rotes take on that form, it's just not strictly Vancian in implementation (you need to "write them in your spellbook" but they're always available from then on) and unlike Improvised spells, there's no Mana cost (disclaimer: I altered the spellcasting system to make it so that Improvised always cost Mana and Rotes never did unless you augmented them). A significant minority of my players during both chrons actually specialized in Rotes and shied away from Improvised, preferring the consistent, bigger dice pools to the on-demand freedom of effects.

Paradox is also super-fucking harsh in nMage. I actually initially did Paradox wrong... by being way easier on the players than the book was! My players used to do a lot of stupid shit in-game: once I started using Paradox and Mitigation rules as written, the cries of "fuuuuu-" were near-deafening...

See, I found Mage the Awakening downright hollow after having run Ascension nonstop for nearly eight years by then (my Mage campaign has been going on for more than 20 years now); like you could fit the entirety of the Awakening setting into a single Tradition (it doesn't help that gnosticism was basically the Scientology of its day; give us your worldly possessions and we'll share with the secrets of transcending the material world).

Ascension's power scale wasn't insane either, owing mainly to the fact that your dice pool was only your Arete, not Gnosis + Sphere + Skill and you needed to spend those few successes on the spell's actual effects. 3 dice at difficulty 6 when you need one success just to affect a target other than yourself and another success to actually do anything to them and the idea that a starting Mage is snapping their fingers and hurling fireballs is just silly.

Awakening had to cap the effects by sphere rank because to fit with the more universal mechanics of the other supernatural splats (and keep them balanced against each other) they had to use more dice and reducing the difficulty meant adding even more dice. Ascension didn't have that problem because even if you dropped the difficulty from 8 (base difficulty for a vulgar rank 3 effect with witnesses) all the way down to 3 (minimum difficulty for a magical effect) you're still only rolling three dice for successes to spend on the end result (and no doubling of 10's until you've gotten a sphere to rank 4, while 1's subtract right from the start).

For a basic fireball you'd need Forces 3, Prime 2 (to create something from nothing), you'd have three dice at difficulty 7-8 (depending on witnesses). Forces gives you one free success when using it for damage so that covers affecting one target at range. Each success you score on the dice then does 2 health levels (so 0-6 depending on your luck, if you hit, which takes a roll and can be dodged) to one target. You’d have to spend one or more of those successes for area (1 success spent for area would get you a blast about 10 feet across, 2 about 15’, etc.). You also pick up a point of paradox for each one you cast (3-4 if you botch; at 5+ accumulated your GM starts rolling for paradox backlashes).

By comparison a 9mm pistol does 4+successes dice of damage and has no risk of paradox. Forces 2-3 is better for subtle effects than overt battle magic.

Generally speaking you need Arete 5 and Forces 5 before fireballs become really effective (not least of which because rank 4-5 forces is where areas of effect start costing much fewer successes to create). Rank 3 forces can get you a crude fireball (not very hot, not very big and needs more time to cast), but that's not what it's best at.

Long story short; Ascension and Awakening balance the potency of their effects in different ways, but they are both still quite limited in their own ways for starting PCs.

I find it impossible to believe the monsters can stay secret with population numbers that high, barring some kind of global weirdness censor. The more members of a conspiracy there are, the more difficult it is to keep secret.

Either the monsters are eventually discovered a la True Blood, or a global censor keeps the population at large from noticing a la Urban Arcana. You cannot have it both ways.

Well, at least when it was the 5 original series, each of them did have an explanation - Vampires had a global conspiracy which controlled the media and halls of government, etc., Werewolf had pretty much exactly a weirdness censor, Mages couldn't use their powers other than to be improbably lucky without paradox blowing them up, Changelings also had a weirdness censor, and Wraith who messed too obviously in mortal affairs got caught by Stygia and squished into paperweights or whatever.

Now, all of those are what you might call lip-service excuses -- woefully insufficient measures which at best might be inoculum to the accusation that they didn't think of it. OTOH, it's no worse than the 'scientific justifications' most four-color superhero characters' powers get (Iceman draws ambient moisture from the air, nevermind that  he's just made a ton of it in an enclosed room or the like). The numbers don't work, the measures are insufficient (ex. sure a vampire won't survive outing his kind to the world, but some 'set the truth free' fanatic would still do it), but they did put in explanations.

Mage also has the literal New World Order controlling the media and education with agents in key law enforcement and espionage organizations acting to keep existence of the Supernatural (including vampires, werewolves and even weirder stuff) from the masses. They even have Men in Black with memory erasers (when they're being nice) when necessary.

They were masters of fake news before fake news was even a thing.

ETA: I find it rather amusing that the primary opponent in Mage is literally the Deep State + Main Stream Media + Big Education + Globalist Bankers + One World Government types + Google/Amazon. The Technocracy is the culmination of the Progressives wet dreams and the core conflict is opposing them.

Quote from: Chris24601;1040366Mage also has the literal New World Order controlling the media and education with agents in key law enforcement and espionage organizations acting to keep existence of the Supernatural (including vampires, werewolves and even weirder stuff) from the masses. They even have Men in Black with memory erasers (when they're being nice) when necessary.

They were masters of fake news before fake news was even a thing.

ETA: I find it rather amusing that the primary opponent in Mage is literally the Deep State + Main Stream Media + Big Education + Globalist Bankers + One World Government types + Google/Amazon. The Technocracy is the culmination of the Progressives wet dreams and the core conflict is opposing them.

You just erased every objection I've ever had to Mage - and I never liked Mage at all.

Quote from: RandyB;1040370You just erased every objection I've ever had to Mage - and I never liked Mage at all.

With the way everything fell into place for him, in Mage, Donald Trump is either some Orphan Master who somehow flew under the radar until he made his move against the Technocracy -or- Project Invictus (a secret cabal within the Technocracy determined to purge the corruption in the organization and get it back to its original mission of protecting and empowering the common man) was Trump's idea and they're finally enacting their plan to clean house.

If it ever comes up in my campaign I'd lean towards the latter option as a Syndicate "insider" who grew disgusted with the status quo corruption and spent decades prepping for the right moment feels closer to the truth while still holding to Mage's setting. Plus a Technocrat civil war has a lot more opportunities for PCs of every stripe to get involved than one Mage in Washington causing problems for the Technocracy.

Even if Trump is just a supremely talented non-Mage (it wouldn't be the first time), Control and the Inner Circle have to be pulling their hair out at Trump's utter disruption of the Time Table (the Inner Circle's plan to transform the world into a One World Government/Paperless Economy where everyone serves as cogs in their machine). The TPP, NAFTA, Paris Climate Accord and Open Borders are the exact sort of initiatives the Technocracy favors.

I'd still lean towards "he's a Mage" though because of their utter inability to derail him with their own Procedures (ie. Technocrat spells). His tweets and linguistic kill shots (Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Lyin' Ted, Crooked Hillary) are definitely his focus for altering reality in his favor.

* * * *

Which actually is another point in regard to the number of Mages in the setting. Mages aren't all guys in robes chanting in Enochian.

That 17 Mages in LA doesn't seem so outrageous when the seven or so that are part of the Traditions could be a Hollywood mogul who weaves magic into his movies to make them extra popular (Son of Ether), a software developer whose apps perform well beyond expectations (Virtual Adept), a Wiccan medical student studying applications of holistic medicine (Verbena), a yoga instructor (Cult of Ecstasy), a stuntman who pulls off insane stunts (Akashic Brotherhood), a Kabbalist rabbi (Order of Hermes) and a street preacher (Celestial Chorus).

Throw in another eight from the Technocrats... an Hollywood investor and a talent scout (both Syndicate), a Tech CEO (Iteration-X), the head researcher at a bio-tech firm (Progenitor), a pair in law enforcement and a professor at UCLA (all New World Order) and a military aerospace contractor (Void Engineer).

Then throw in an Orphan of some type (probably a struggling actor whose paradigm amounts to "sometimes weird shit happens") and a Nephandi in charge of MS-13 members in LA and you're at 17 mages pretty easily and none of them especially obvious as a Mage to the public.

You have perfectly illustrated why I don't like White Wolf games. The politics are based on high school cliques and special snowflakes, rather than anything remotely realistic.

In real life, specifically the USA, you have the GOP and the Democrats. They have these things called "goals" and they are very impatient about pursuing them. The GOP wants to steal from the poor and control women's uteri, while the Democrats want to kill all white people and convert everyone to LGBT. Ultimately, both parties are motivated by profit and use these things called "ideals" to conceal that and attract new victims.

In WoD, the political party system doesn't work. The conspiracies of witches and monsters have to keep themselves secret because they are more often than not serial killers and their goals are generally to turn the planet into a nightmarish hellscape where humanity is either cattle or living nightmares themselves.

That the monsters organize themselves into high school cliques based on things like jocks, Asian jocks, popular girls, computer lab nerds, druggies, Jesus freaks, 1950s B-movie fans, Harry Potter LARPers and so forth is ridiculous.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1040584You have perfectly illustrated why I don't like White Wolf games. The politics are based on high school cliques and special snowflakes, rather than anything remotely realistic.

Sounds like a fun thought experiment! Let's do it!

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1040584In real life, specifically the USA, you have the GOP and the Democrats. They have these things called "goals" and they are very impatient about pursuing them. The GOP wants to steal from the poor and control women's uteri, while the Democrats want to kill all white people and convert everyone to LGBT. Ultimately, both parties are motivated by profit and use these things called "ideals" to conceal that and attract new victims.

So this assumes a few things - that establishment politics of America encompass the totality of the understanding of creatures that have lived for centuries, formed their own habits based on those centuries, including a ridiculous amount of bias. Plus the supernatural power to enforce those biases on others.

I'm not saying you don't have a valid point. I'm saying that point would be more pertinent for modern vampires than elder ones. By "elder" I mean those born to eras of monarchical rule or even older means. Such beings, imo, would look at things like the GOP and Democrat party as useful tools for the herd, or as childish playthings aping their view of some bygone era of the original Republic or some romantic thing like that. But those power-structures do exist, but I'm saying insofar as vampires are concerned those structures exist to provide currency for survival. Which ultimately is blood and territory upon which they can allow their herd to graze.

I've always dismissed the high-school clique idea because while that certainly can exist, I find such comparisons in themselves juvenile and missing some real possibilities. If you take Vampire for what it is - it's monsters cannibalizing humans for *survival* while trying not become a monster, right? We're both perfectly reasonable enough to understand once you have powers like Dominate, Presence, alone - much less the more fantastically flashy abilities - these things concerning mortal politics only matter insofar as they give you a food-supply and temporal power to secure your lifestyle.

The "high-school" politics thing never really floated with me. Unless you're a bottom-feeder. For me it was more like Narcos. Competing criminal cartels. Modern human politics is merely a bell to gather your food.

That said - younger vampires involved in political stuff (especially today) I could totally see what you're saying as being relevant. The problem here is they would relegate themselves to merely being tools for these more established Vampires with *far* more firepower brought against them. Hence this is acknowledged in the game with the Anarchs.

What I'm saying here is that there is a metric shit-ton of nuance you can (and should) bring to the game in order to not devolve it into high-school hijinks. And as I've run the game I don't dismiss those things - it's certainly there. But it's something I include in a much larger whole.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1040584In WoD, the political party system doesn't work. The conspiracies of witches and monsters have to keep themselves secret because they are more often than not serial killers and their goals are generally to turn the planet into a nightmarish hellscape where humanity is either cattle or living nightmares themselves.

I tell everyone this deep secret... I'm going to let it out only here in this post. Ready? Okay here goes.... "There are precisely the *exact* number of supernatural creatures in the WoD to make this exactly what you need to be realistic for your setting." Easy peasy.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1040584That the monsters organize themselves into high school cliques based on things like jocks, Asian jocks, popular girls, computer lab nerds, druggies, Jesus freaks, 1950s B-movie fans, Harry Potter LARPers and so forth is ridiculous.

Agreed. Unless they are in fact, those things when they are turned into monsters... and then you *force* them to deal with the reality of the world that you, as the GM, have created *outside* of those conceits. That's where the game is.

Near Dark - jock turned into a vampire. Still just wants to be a jock. Too bad the conceits are he's part of a roving Sabbat Pack led by an ex-Confederate soldier. Conflict. Game. Profit. Once that scenario is over - the setting expands. The conceits expand. How long does the "jock" thing even matter?

How about even shorter:

In many ways High School never ends... and all the non-assholes of the world are desperately trying to not get sucked back into a perpetual High School that these assholes in power keep rebuilding. Thus all monsters with their Path meters, quiet desperation, and sectarian hypocrisy. 'High School' is merely a metaphor for the hell of being a social being amid monsters, and humans are quite good at being monstrous, therefore build our own prisons.

/sniffs flower tragically

Quote from: Opaopajr;1040679How about even shorter:

In many ways High School never ends... and all the non-assholes of the world are desperately trying to not get sucked back into a perpetual High School that these assholes in power keep rebuilding. Thus all monsters with their Path meters, quiet desperation, and sectarian hypocrisy. 'High School' is merely a metaphor for the hell of being a social being amid monsters, and humans are quite good at being monstrous, therefore build our own prisons.

/sniffs flower tragically

Actually, you're more onto something than you think.  See, the interests most people have in High School, who is sleeping with who, what the popular kids are doing, so on and so forth, doesn't end.  If you have ever been a supermarket and seen the magazine rack, full of lurid stories detailing the lives of those same types of people, except now we call them 'stars' or 'celebrities', but in the end it's same gossip filled stage of social acceptance and denial, just on a bigger field now.  Don't fool yourselves, we never left high school.

Yes, it's the game of social status amid a social predator species (humans derivation is of a predatory animal). The metaphor works because life is still all about those games to the majority among us who want to fill those basic needs. Maslow's Hierarchy and all that... We strive to contain our monstrousness in our pursuit for these needs for the sake of survival; all competing against all eventually weakens all, primed to succumb to the elements. Thus we create systems to contain and channel the primal darkness within: Cooperation.

But cooperation also has a cost. And in humans it is elaborate. So why not in sapient monsters, too?

White Wolf oWoD is merely playing with that struggle through metaphor. And some take a game too seriously and try to overcomplicate it. Hence why I am not that curious about V5, or its heartbreakers. I already have a game that does it, relatively loosely and with warts, but easy enough to jump right in.

When I ran WW games, I specifically invoked high school. The petty egos, the forced obedience to often clueless masters, the seeking freedom while needing resources from above, the prom, the clubs, the need to develop skills faster than your peers, and all the various nonsense. Also, it works for players because....we all went to high school and many never left, or deal with those who never left.

To extend the metaphor: For me D&D is all about leaving High School and the Small Town in which it sits. As George Bailey puts it "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world." So is Traveller for that matter.

It's quite hard to represent "adult life" properly. I find simple things like having players handle "lifestyle" stuff like making enough bread to pay their rent and shit like that helps. Also, actually punishing stupid shit in game like blatant use of disciplines in public with heavy taxes (often espoused, rarely practised). When the costs start getting high, my players start getting pissed off with those who keep fucking around. It's funny how quickly everyone turns "professional", even if in real-life they're not there yet. Something I've found is that, as a rule, people are as mature as when they left education (and the intensity of and drive for that that education also plays a large factor). It's why when I do characters like vampires, the older they were sired, the more likely they will actually survive and even thrive (to a certain point, it's a balancing act -- mid 20's-early 30's 'tis the sweet spot) because though intellectually they may grow, they'll always stay emotionally where they were when they were made.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1041057To extend the metaphor: For me D&D is all about leaving High School and the Small Town in which it sits. As George Bailey puts it "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world." So is Traveller for that matter.

Sounds like a Werewolf game to me. Or Sabbat.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1041047When I ran WW games, I specifically invoked high school. The petty egos, the forced obedience to often clueless masters, the seeking freedom while needing resources from above, the prom, the clubs, the need to develop skills faster than your peers, and all the various nonsense. Also, it works for players because....we all went to high school and many never left, or deal with those who never left.

I look at it like high-school politics with fangs within a huge house of cards. For me, a big thing to keep players in the spirit of the game is simple: existential threat. I would say high-school is relevant as a metaphor if by high-school you mean Battle Royale. Vampires in WoD for me, are on an island. I populate that island with knobs and levers that keep the status-quo at a certain level for reasons to be discovered by the noobs.

And every single one of those reasons ends with "Existential Threat". It's always a house of cards waiting to topple. That's half the fun. Most games are a game of Jenga where the high-school politics, almost without fail, cause the house to come tumbling down. The question is "Have the PC's put themselves in a position to support the House of Cards or Benefit from its fall?". That is the game. I think a lot of GM's for WoD don't think enough about external threats to the perceived sandbox for their players.

If your city is the perceived sandbox. Then the next big city over is the cross-town rivals. Nothing stokes new shifts in alliances like external threats to the normal order. Werewolves are also quite useful for this. One of my favorite double-takes on this is threatening werewolves on the city - which after a couple of encounters I had the players crapping in their pants... only to find out wasn't normal werewolves, but Black Spirals.... and the players had the balls to work with a local pack of garou to help deal with them. (Of course this led to other political issues).

That's what I like about WoD. If you like gang-related drama, everything is a never-ending loop of issues.

So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer wouldn't have been the cultural touchstone it was if there wasn't some truth to the idea of "High School is Hell."

Truthfully, it's more the point in developing from child to adult happening to coincide with High School than High School itself, but the stereotype persists.

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

I deeply suspect that there's nothing specific about US High Schools. Being a teenager (/being a parent or teacher of teenagers) is rough. We take a lot of the basic restrictions of childhood off of them, and expect them to take the social guidelines they're just now mastering and use them consistently. They screw up. Their peers take the brunt of it. My brother started coaching for high schoolers and his response when we asked how it was going was, "I had forgotten how absolutely awful we all were to each other... often with literally no reason."

I think the US just has a well-established narrative  about how that plays out--jocks/cheerleaders on top, 'nerds'/band geeks/ AV club guys on the bottom, drama club/heavy metal guys/skateboarders/other stereotypes in the messy middle. Not sure anyone's actual HS experience mapped to it that well, but the narrative continues.

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

Yes. :) The movies are 100% real. (Well, OK, perhaps only 90% of it ;) :p)

Yeah... WoD doesn't do it for me.

What I would be interested in is some combination of Warhammer's vampire counts, Shadowbane's nightborn, Legacy of Kain's vampires, and Rift's vampire kingdoms.

Here's the rundown of their emblematic characteristics:

• Shadowbane: vampires are created by black magic, with no memory of their former lives, and their intended purpose is to enforce the cycling of souls into the void
  
• Warhammer: vampires have awesome Eastern European-themed armies of undead
  
• Legacy of Kain: all vampire clans have characteristic mutations which grow more pronounced over time
  
• Rifts: vampires may be divided into head/master, bride/groom/servant, and feral/wild types
  

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1041261I deeply suspect that there's nothing specific about US High Schools. Being a teenager (/being a parent or teacher of teenagers) is rough. We take a lot of the basic restrictions of childhood off of them, and expect them to take the social guidelines they're just now mastering and use them consistently. They screw up. Their peers take the brunt of it. My brother started coaching for high schoolers and his response when we asked how it was going was, "I had forgotten how absolutely awful we all were to each other... often with literally no reason."

I think the US just has a well-established narrative  about how that plays out--jocks/cheerleaders on top, 'nerds'/band geeks/ AV club guys on the bottom, drama club/heavy metal guys/skateboarders/other stereotypes in the messy middle. Not sure anyone's actual HS experience mapped to it that well, but the narrative continues.

The O.C captured the dichotomy pretty well, I think. There's a lot more socially mixed groups of friends than the movies portray (because, of course, you have to have an easily digestible number of cliques). It only gets more mixed as you get older -- groups break up, they get back together, new people show up, old people leave etc... Here in the UK, it kind of retains into post-16/further education and is all but completely eliminated once you hit undergrad. It doesn't last longer than freshers week -- beyond that, cliques form based on courses taken, the programme you're on and then your study groups and just who's plain good at coursework (it's actually quite utilitarian when you think about it).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041312Yeah... WoD doesn't do it for me.

What I would be interested in is some combination of Warhammer's vampire counts, Shadowbane's nightborn, Legacy of Kain's vampires, and Rift's vampire kingdoms.

Here's the rundown of their emblematic characteristics:

• Shadowbane: vampires are created by black magic, with no memory of their former lives, and their intended purpose is to enforce the cycling of souls into the void
  
• Warhammer: vampires have awesome Eastern European-themed armies of undead
  
• Legacy of Kain: all vampire clans have characteristic mutations which grow more pronounced over time
  
• Rifts: vampires may be divided into head/master, bride/groom/servant, and feral/wild types
  

Warhammer vampires are shit. And this is coming from someone who enjoyed the Vampire Wars trilogy (Genevieve was... ok. And Witch Hunter was sick) There's only a handful of vampires that exist in proportion to WOD. And they took the bloodlines thing from WOD 'cause shit like Strigoi, Lahmaian and Necran (forgot the name of the sorcerer vampires -- been awhile) doesn't make sense in the Warhammer-verse given the homongenuity of everything for each faction. The Vampire Counts faction is just that: a few vampire commanders, the rest are zombies, skeletons, ghouls etc...

LOK is also shite in comparison. Dude, I liked Soul Reaver too, classic PS gaming, but no no and no.

Now, this said, the only interpretation I can think of that'd be legit would be the way vampires were handled in Morrowind. It fit the system, the setting and they didn't try to ingratiate themselves within mortal society but yet maintained a surprisingly large population, particularly the Quarra. The Aundae clan were the weakest and most disparate but were just a bunch of Ireancuses essentially. Quarra were warriors, were actually a huge threat to Vvardenfell after the Blight. Berne was weakest but most organised and actually had some serious influence in mortal affairs. Mix was roughly 60/40 clan vamps and "feral" vamps, worked well.

Vampires just don't make sense as one single, small bloodline. And they need to have a strong central feeling, they can't just be random grabs from other vampire fiction and lore. There has to be an actual reason they'd be split up into different groups and/or have different strengths and weaknesses. Had White Wolf done Clan + Bloodline from the start, OWOD would have siiicckk. All that metaplot without it being retro'd all the bloody time or stuff written in out of nowhere because the line designers were shit at getting the writers to communicate...

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

In my school system, that was middle school (6th through 8th grade). That was when cliquish pettiness and immaturity was at its height. Middle schools are on the smaller side, and you are stuck with the same people all day long, so there is plenty of room for bad relationships to fester.

My high school was significantly larger with 3000 students, and I rarely had the same people from one class to another unless we coordinated. It still had lots of cliques, but there was so much space between them that there really wasn't much friction.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1041323Warhammer vampires are shit. And this is coming from someone who enjoyed the Vampire Wars trilogy (Genevieve was... ok. And Witch Hunter was sick) There's only a handful of vampires that exist in proportion to WOD. And they took the bloodlines thing from WOD 'cause shit like Strigoi, Lahmaian and Necran (forgot the name of the sorcerer vampires -- been awhile) doesn't make sense in the Warhammer-verse given the homongenuity of everything for each faction. The Vampire Counts faction is just that: a few vampire commanders, the rest are zombies, skeletons, ghouls etc...

LOK is also shite in comparison. Dude, I liked Soul Reaver too, classic PS gaming, but no no and no.

Now, this said, the only interpretation I can think of that'd be legit would be the way vampires were handled in Morrowind. It fit the system, the setting and they didn't try to ingratiate themselves within mortal society but yet maintained a surprisingly large population, particularly the Quarra. The Aundae clan were the weakest and most disparate but were just a bunch of Ireancuses essentially. Quarra were warriors, were actually a huge threat to Vvardenfell after the Blight. Berne was weakest but most organised and actually had some serious influence in mortal affairs. Mix was roughly 60/40 clan vamps and "feral" vamps, worked well.

Vampires just don't make sense as one single, small bloodline. And they need to have a strong central feeling, they can't just be random grabs from other vampire fiction and lore. There has to be an actual reason they'd be split up into different groups and/or have different strengths and weaknesses. Had White Wolf done Clan + Bloodline from the start, OWOD would have siiicckk. All that metaplot without it being retro'd all the bloody time or stuff written in out of nowhere because the line designers were shit at getting the writers to communicate...

What is your malfunction? I was just cherry-picking elements I liked for my own world building. Can you go even one second without shitting on every vampire story for not being WoD or whatever? God, this insane elitism over fictional characters is half the reason I quit WoD all those years ago. (The other half was WoD being shit.)

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041327Here's the rundown of their emblematic characteristics:
*Shadowbane: vampires are created by black magic, with no memory of their former lives, and their intended purpose is to enforce the cycling of souls into the void
*Warhammer: vampires have awesome Eastern European-themed armies of undead
*Legacy of Kain: all vampire clans have characteristic mutations which grow more pronounced over time
*Rifts: vampires may be divided into head/master, bride/groom/servant, and feral/wild types

....God, this insane elitism over fictional characters is half the reason I quit WoD all those years ago. (The other half was WoD being shit.)

I know you're not talking to me (or if you are, I'm not trying to bomb on you). But since you listed elements that you like about Vampires in general...


Shadowbane - I think it's workable, but it would assume that whomever created vampires are "overseeing" them? Needs more context, but it's a start.

Warhammer - No comment. I'm still a Warhammer noob.

Legacy of Kain - this IS an element of WoD vampires. In fact, when I first played LoK I thought - "nice they lifted this idea from WoD and did their own spin."

Rifts - Structurally this element is massively part of WoD too. Clan elders are monstrous creatures that have this exact relationship. Maybe it's a setting thing for you?

The gist of what makes WoD vampires in particular popular is it gave a fairly solid context that originally was very flexible to play a vampire within the modern context. It had a taxonomy of social structure, an "origin" that was potentially very expansive (or if you wanted an outright lie). As a narrative construct it even works brilliantly in other games. I've ported the whole concept into my Marvel game where Dracula, a longtime Marvel character of considerable power, was one of the most powerful overlords of this secret conspiracy called the Sabbat. And of course there was the counter conspiracy of the Camarilla. My players loved it! Especially the player whose PC had Light and Radiation control and could blast vampires into ashes... but proved to be wonderfully susceptible to mind-control (Kindred love nothing more than having a thrall they can unleash on their own foes!)

So I think all these premises are fine. I just want all of it. Not a few pieces of it.

QuoteVampires just don't make sense as one single, small bloodline. And they need to have a strong central feeling, they can't just be random grabs from other vampire fiction and lore. There has to be an actual reason they'd be split up into different groups and/or have different strengths and weaknesses. Had White Wolf done Clan + Bloodline from the start, OWOD would have siiicckk. All that metaplot without it being retro'd all the bloody time or stuff written in out of nowhere because the line designers were shit at getting the writers to communicate...

Presuming you mean Clan + Bloodline in the sense of "Social Organization + Common Sire Line" then WoD did actually have that. The Clans are the "common sire line" part while Camarilla/Sabbat/Anarch/Inconnu/Tal'Maha'Re/Minor Factions/Independents are the "social organization part." (Ex. There are members of Clan Bruhah among the Camerilla, the Sabbat, the Anarchs, etc.).

I think they also did a pretty good job linking vampirism to a strong central element via the Caine mythology... vampires as the children of the First Murderer cursed by the Biblical God. Throw in their superhuman abilities as blood magic learned from Lilith after Caine fled and you've got a pretty solid foundation for why vampires exist. Let the SJW types whine about the fact that the setting makes the Biblical God into a real force within it, but every time they've tried to muddy the waters about vampiric origins the less compelling and coherent the setting gets (which is why the ONLY scenario in the Gehenna book that made a lick of sense was Wormwood).

Quote from: tenbones;1041338Shadowbane - I think it's workable, but it would assume that whomever created vampires are "overseeing" them? Needs more context, but it's a start.

Shadowbane is a dark fantasy setting where the PCs are morally ambiguous at best. The vampires serve the Null, who are described as hive minds for the undead. Unlike in typical D&D, the undead are an effect of interruptions in the cycle of souls rather than a cause. Although vampires can join guilds with other races unless the guild's charter is racist.

Quote from: tenbones;1041338Legacy of Kain - this IS an element of WoD vampires. In fact, when I first played LoK I thought - "nice they lifted this idea from WoD and did their own spin."

I thought the progressive distinctive mutation (which provided functional benefits like armor or sonar) was a much more interesting way to distinguish the clans than "hit really bad by the ugly stick" or "paralyzed by images of [strike]Judy Garland[/strike] beauty." I could say a lot about how the WoD weaknesses are more silly than evocative.

Take the Toreador weakness, in either Masquerade or Requiem (I don't care about edition differences). They are paralyzed by images of [strike]Judy Garland[/strike] beauty, like a parody of the typical repulsion from crosses. What would be more evocative would be if they were obsessed with acquiring pretty things (art, cars, lovers, etc), then immediately lose interest in their newest possession to seek out another. If you're willing to abandon preconceptions, this could replace the traditional hunger for blood.

Quote from: tenbones;1041338Rifts - Structurally this element is massively part of WoD too. Clan elders are monstrous creatures that have this exact relationship. Maybe it's a setting thing for you?

The distinction in Rifts is one of taxonomy, and I believe similar distinctions are present in a number of other vampire fiction like D&D 3rd edition (and beyond), Stephen King's work and Syfy's Van Helsing show. Master/head vampires were created by pacts with a demon lord or vampire god (or is itself some kind of demon), brides/grooms/servants by infection, and feral/wild by flawed infection or starvation. The concept is obviously based on Dracula and his brides.

In fact, the concept of vampires turning feral/wild through starvation shows up fairly often. In many cases starvation causes mental (and less commonly physical) deterioration that may or may not be restored by receiving sustenance. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires can't die of starvation but if they starve too long they will suffer permanent brain damage. In Syfy's Van Helsing vampires need blood to survive, but they need human blood to retain their sanity; animal blood causes them to turn feral (and stop caring about their hygiene). In Warhammer Fantasy vampires that starve (or give into their hunger completely) turn into bat-like monsters with far greater physical prowess at the cost of their sanity.

Quote from: tenbones;1041338The gist of what makes WoD vampires in particular popular is it gave a fairly solid context that originally was very flexible to play a vampire within the modern context. It had a taxonomy of social structure, an "origin" that was potentially very expansive (or if you wanted an outright lie). As a narrative construct it even works brilliantly in other games. I've ported the whole concept into my Marvel game where Dracula, a longtime Marvel character of considerable power, was one of the most powerful overlords of this secret conspiracy called the Sabbat. And of course there was the counter conspiracy of the Camarilla. My players loved it! Especially the player whose PC had Light and Radiation control and could blast vampires into ashes... but proved to be wonderfully susceptible to mind-control (Kindred love nothing more than having a thrall they can unleash on their own foes!)

Forgive me, but I understand the meaning of sabbat (holy day, Sunday, etc) so I find a society of vampire supremacists calling themselves that silly. I can say the same about lots of the bizarre names in WoD. Bruja is Spanish for "witch", la sombra is Spanish for "the shadow," Tzimiskes was a Byzantine emperor, toreador is Spanish for "bullfighter," gangrel and ragabash are British/Scottish English for "vagabond," tremere is Latin for "to tremble" (the present infinitive of a verb, and thus nonsensical as a name), etc.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041444Forgive me, but I understand the meaning of sabbat (holy day, Sunday, etc) so I find a society of vampire supremacists calling themselves that silly. I can say the same about lots of the bizarre names in WoD. Bruja is Spanish for "witch", la sombra is Spanish for "the shadow," Tzimiskes was a Byzantine emperor, toreador is Spanish for "bullfighter," gangrel and ragabash are British/Scottish English for "vagabond," tremere is Latin for "to tremble" (the present infinitive of a verb, and thus nonsensical as a name), etc.

Forgive what? White Wolf, if it's fans and detractors can agree on nothing else, is pretty widely understood to have been trying to name-drop its' designers' vocabulary throughout the game creation process. Forget names of clans, the powers and abilities were always 'Celerity,' or 'Vicissitude,' or 'Legerdemain,' or 'Chicanery.' You're either on board for the wacky (sagacious- or pretentious pseudo-intellectual-, depending on your interpretation) funhouse ride, or you're not.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041444Shadowbane is a dark fantasy setting where the PCs are morally ambiguous at best. The vampires serve the Null, who are described as hive minds for the undead. Unlike in typical D&D, the undead are an effect of interruptions in the cycle of souls rather than a cause. Although vampires can join guilds with other races unless the guild's charter is racist.

Yeah that sounds do-able.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041444I thought the progressive distinctive mutation (which provided functional benefits like armor or sonar) was a much more interesting way to distinguish the clans than "hit really bad by the ugly stick" or "paralyzed by images of [strike]Judy Garland[/strike] beauty." I could say a lot about how the WoD weaknesses are more silly than evocative.

Take the Toreador weakness, in either Masquerade or Requiem (I don't care about edition differences). They are paralyzed by images of [strike]Judy Garland[/strike] beauty, like a parody of the typical repulsion from crosses. What would be more evocative would be if they were obsessed with acquiring pretty things (art, cars, lovers, etc), then immediately lose interest in their newest possession to seek out another. If you're willing to abandon preconceptions, this could replace the traditional hunger for blood.

It's all in the gameplay. I emphasize heavy roleplaying in my WoD games (as well as brutal combat). I also try to give a lot of nuance to these weaknesses. What is "beautiful" to one character is not necessarily the same to others. These are details I try to establish at chargen very organically. I'm flexible too on how to play these weaknesses as well and see no fundamental problem with doing what you're suggesting as long as I put some in-game rationales for it.

The distinction in Rifts is one of taxonomy, and I believe similar distinctions are present in a number of other vampire fiction like D&D 3rd edition (and beyond), Stephen King's work and Syfy's Van Helsing show. Master/head vampires were created by pacts with a demon lord or vampire god (or is itself some kind of demon), brides/grooms/servants by infection, and feral/wild by flawed infection or starvation. The concept is obviously based on Dracula and his brides.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041444In fact, the concept of vampires turning feral/wild through starvation shows up fairly often. In many cases starvation causes mental (and less commonly physical) deterioration that may or may not be restored by receiving sustenance. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires can't die of starvation but if they starve too long they will suffer permanent brain damage. In Syfy's Van Helsing vampires need blood to survive, but they need human blood to retain their sanity; animal blood causes them to turn feral (and stop caring about their hygiene). In Warhammer Fantasy vampires that starve (or give into their hunger completely) turn into bat-like monsters with far greater physical prowess at the cost of their sanity.

Good point. I actually think this is a good concept that could be introduced into WoD's Vampire. Essentially this is the Gangrel clan weakness but done better.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041444Forgive me, but I understand the meaning of sabbat (holy day, Sunday, etc) so I find a society of vampire supremacists calling themselves that silly. I can say the same about lots of the bizarre names in WoD. Bruja is Spanish for "witch", la sombra is Spanish for "the shadow," Tzimiskes was a Byzantine emperor, toreador is Spanish for "bullfighter," gangrel and ragabash are British/Scottish English for "vagabond," tremere is Latin for "to tremble" (the present infinitive of a verb, and thus nonsensical as a name), etc.

Yeah stipulated. I'm pretty sure this is a nod to Anne Rice and later rationalized through the practices of the Lasombra whose clan structure is closely tied to Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchical titles (which is why the organization of the Sabbat is structured like the Catholic Church with a few positions moved around). That aside the Sabbat are not just "vampire supremacists" - which is silly, that is an element of their cult which if taken a little too literally gets stupid very quickly - because it's pretty trivial to destroy the Masquerade when one assumes this AND the GM doesn't put the actual controls implied by the game into effect. That being - Humanity *will* purge the world of Vampires. This is directly why I say the GM has the responsibility to enforce those population controls as they see fit and that means putting those controls into place with ruthless precision. The PC's *need* to understand that.

The other aspect of the Sabbat is that they see themselves crusaders against the minions of the Antediluvians which happens to be the dolts of the Camarilla. Heh they're the alt-right of the Vampire world.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041444Forgive me, but I understand the meaning of sabbat (holy day, Sunday, etc) so I find a society of vampire supremacists calling themselves that silly. I can say the same about lots of the bizarre names in WoD. Bruja is Spanish for "witch", la sombra is Spanish for "the shadow," Tzimiskes was a Byzantine emperor, toreador is Spanish for "bullfighter," gangrel and ragabash are British/Scottish English for "vagabond," tremere is Latin for "to tremble" (the present infinitive of a verb, and thus nonsensical as a name), etc.

A) They're not vampire supremacists; that's the stereotype lumped on them by the Camarilla. Their stated goal is to destroy their ancestors; the Antedeluvians and all their puppets (i.e. the Camarilla, whose official policy is that if the Antedeluvians ever existed they're long dead... so of course the group trying to destroy the non-existent beings are fanatical nutjobs to them). Most notably, the two main clans who lead the Sabbat are known to have explicitly murdered their founders (kind of... its hard to make it truly stick with 10,000+ year old vampire gods... but whatever is left of them isn't exactly a vampire anymore either).

B) The Sabbat leadership makes a mockery of the Catholic Church as part and parcel of membership. They have twisted versions of Baptism and Communion and mock the Catholic Church with their names just as the Satanists refer to their rites as "Black Masses" and similar.

C) The Clans weren't always called by their current names. There's a reason most texts refer to the founders as [Brujah] or [Malkov]; its because no one knows what the hell they were originally called 10,000+ years ago. Most vampires outside of a rare few are just a few hundred years old at most. The presumption is that each of the clans has been called many things throughout history... their current names are just that, current. The Brujah probably picked up their current name during the Spanish Inquisition (which a pretty big deal in VtM Lore... called The Burning Times... and the point where both the Sabbat and Camarilla were formed (ETA: and the concept of the Masquerade established). Likewise the Lasombra (whose primary discipline is manipulation of shadows) and Toreadors probably picked up their current clan names at about that point.

The Old Clan Tzimisci ruled the area that once the northern reaches of the Byzantine Empire for millennia (Vlad the Impaler is of their clan)... almost like they were emperors of their respective lands or something. Gangrel and Ragabash probably picked up their clan/tribe names the same way many outcast ethnic groups do... they were named for what their neighbors called them. Tremere was the name of one of the Houses of the Order of Hermes and one of the core precepts of their paradigm was that True Names have power and thus all true Hermetic practitioners hid their true names with a Craft Name... Tremere is just that... the craft name of House Tremere's founder.

In other words, most of the stuff you claim is silly and nonsensical is actually just stuff you are judging from a position of complete ignorance.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1041447Forgive what? White Wolf, if it's fans and detractors can agree on nothing else, is pretty widely understood to have been trying to name-drop its' designers' vocabulary throughout the game creation process. Forget names of clans, the powers and abilities were always 'Celerity,' or 'Vicissitude,' or 'Legerdemain,' or 'Chicanery.' You're either on board for the wacky (sagacious- or pretentious pseudo-intellectual-, depending on your interpretation) funhouse ride, or you're not.

Don't forget the made up names either, like chimerstry (chimerical chemistry) or mytherceria (mither (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mither) ceria (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cerium#Latin), "irritating ulcer"). The etymology can be pretty weird.

There has only been one good vampire RPG (https://www.amazon.com/NightLife-Role-Playing-Game-Urban-Horror/dp/B000ONA774).

Early Vampire was awesome, but everything WW did after Revised Edition sucked and V5 is going to sink like the Lusitania.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1041554Early Vampire was awesome, but everything WW did after Revised Edition sucked and V5 is going to sink like the Lusitania.

This sounds familiar. Quick look back...

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1037990I just can't wait to point and laugh when V5 inevitably fails and then I will tell all those Eurotrash Goths and Punks at NuWW "See, I told you so!"

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1037861V5 is going to be a bigger flop than D&D 4E. If it isn't, I will eat my hat.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1037496killed the franchise.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1036709I thought Revised Edition was the worst version of Vampire: The Masquerade, but it looks like V5 is going to take the cake.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1036489See, I told you that V5 was going to suck.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1036486V5 is definitely going to suck and it will sink like the Lusitania.

If V5 is actually enjoyable and not a metaplot-ridden wangsty Goth trainwreck, I will eat my hat!

Doc, I genuinely don't care, but I also can set myself a google calendar note. If V5 hits the market and sinks like the Lusitania*, and you start crowing about how you 'called it,' we can come back and validate your claim. We believe you-you knew ahead of time that it was going to fail. You don't have to come back and repeat the assertion every 5-10 days. We'll remember.
*note to self: go check whether Lusitania actually sunk in a spectacular way, or simply had far-reaching repercussions.

VtM 1st edition, Chicago By Night and other 1991 publications.

MtA 1ste edition, loom of Fate and an old adventure about London Underground in a magazine I can't recall

er that's it for me and WW

The Lusitania was just a straightforward torpedo attack.  He really should have gone with the Titanic because I don't think any external forces will sink V5 -- it'll be internal fuck ups.

I've been following this as the WW games are ones I've always loved in concept.  In application the games are almost always terrible.  The system is always too clunky.

Dice pools are not for me.

Most things in WW are rated 1-10 IIRC.

So a quick roll under or roll plus meeting DC will be the way I go, if I ever play again.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1041563Dice pools are not for me.

Most things in WW are rated 1-10 IIRC.

So a quick roll under or roll plus meeting DC will be the way I go, if I ever play again.

Eh I'm a long time Shadowrun GM/player so dice pools are right in my wheel house.  The problem is that both WW and the Shadowrun team don't really seem to understand how math works and how to properly design game components to work with the basic game mechanics.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041327What is your malfunction? I was just cherry-picking elements I liked for my own world building. Can you go even one second without shitting on every vampire story for not being WoD or whatever? God, this insane elitism over fictional characters is half the reason I quit WoD all those years ago. (The other half was WoD being shit.)

Hah hah hah hah, I'll let you live. I'm not telling you how to do you, I'm just saying what fits on a macro scale rather than a micro. I believe tenbones explored this in his post after yours.

Quote from: Chris24601;1041370Presuming you mean Clan + Bloodline in the sense of "Social Organization + Common Sire Line" then WoD did actually have that. The Clans are the "common sire line" part while Camarilla/Sabbat/Anarch/Inconnu/Tal'Maha'Re/Minor Factions/Independents are the "social organization part." (Ex. There are members of Clan Bruhah among the Camerilla, the Sabbat, the Anarchs, etc.).

No, nVamp segregated political identity from "genetic"/familial identity. In oVamp, only two factions really mattered as they held overwhelming dominance over the Earth. You usually didn't get a choice which one you were a part of: you lucked out and were sired Camarilla or you somehow survived being canon fodder -- i.e.  a "shovelhead" -- for the Sabbat.

nVamp used Bloodline + Clan + Covenant. oVamp did Sect + Clan.

In nVamp, importance placed on each element was roughly 40/30/30, in favor of Bloodline. This meant that there was a reason finally to have sire/childer relationships that didn't feel like sterile vetting periods because every Kindred now had a fairly good chance of being part of a particular lineage (in many cases, that was actually traceable). What this didn't mean is that Bloodlines overshadowed Clans or Covenants because you still were part of one archetype of vampires and you still were or were not a member of one of the policultural factions present in the city.

In oVamp, Clan just meant that you are part of

• army --  "ALL VENTRUE ATTACK TZIMISCE" blah blah -- which was the entire premise of Dark Ages: Vampire and that was very much driven home in both PC games as well. Your Sect, for the most part, didn't really matter. It might occasionally affect things in, say, the metaplot but by and large, each city was thoroughly dominated by one of the two major Sects. And if you weren't part of the dominating Sect, you were forcefully converted, exiled or -- most likely --  killed. Hell, in the Redemption game, one of your companions (Samuel) is almost killed by a local Pack because he won't join the Sabbat who are in complete control of NYC. All Toreador are Setites are Tremere -- your individual character or your character's lineage didn't matter.
  
  nVamp made it so that every vampire came under an archetype -- i.e. Clan -- but kept it flexible and loose enough that you could have genuine variety within that. You could substantially differentiate, say, one Daeva from another and the same for Ventrue and the system would encourage and support that. Your character could then inherit, adopt or found a Bloodline which are offshoots of one of the Clans. This meant you could explore a stereotype within the archetype. This meant there could be inumerable Bloodlines and this solved the problem of having to write new Clans just because one of the designers wanted a mafia-style lineage or a voodoo lineage (Giovanni and Samedi respectively) and also stupid shit like Blood Brothers. You could very easily write up a mafia-based Bloodline, insert it under a Clan for flavor and voila! You've got mafia vampires without any system or narrative baggage! In fact, I've done this myself several times for our current VTR game at the club: the Giacconis and the Zagratv-Kem are both Ventrue Bloodlines but one is mafia and the other are smugglers -- both are criminal lineages but they focus on a different stereotype.
  
  What oVamp did was use stereotypes in place of archetypes and then act like they were the same thing -- they weren't, the setting (and the system) severely punished you for acting outside your stereotype. This is one of the top complaints I hear from oVamp players about the game, especially from those who've joined us at the club and especially once they've played a couple seshes it just sounds night and day from them.
  
  

  Quote from: Chris24601;1041464In other words, most of the stuff you claim is silly and nonsensical is actually just stuff you are judging from a position of complete ignorance.

  
  Well said.
  
  Wasn't Tremere started by Goatrix or something? I think it was Troile who was Brujah and Zilla who was Toreador or something like that...

Quote from: KingCheops;1041564Eh I'm a long time Shadowrun GM/player so dice pools are right in my wheel house.  The problem is that both WW and the Shadowrun team don't really seem to understand how math works and how to properly design game components to work with the basic game mechanics.

Yeah, oddly I remember vaguely that Shadowrun 2nd edition didn't seem to have the same clunkiness.

I always found WW from the first game to be rather pretentious and having a fondness for taking random words and changing them into something else.  And they clearly were never game designers as their system was kludgy from the word GO!

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1041569Yeah, oddly I remember vaguely that Shadowrun 2nd edition didn't seem to have the same clunkiness.

I didn't start until 3rd.  3rd was where things started to slide off the rails but 4th explicitly went full nWoD and blew up.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;1041548There has only been one good vampire RPG (https://www.amazon.com/NightLife-Role-Playing-Game-Urban-Horror/dp/B000ONA774).

That was a great game.  Imagine an alternate universe where NightLife exploded in popularity instead of Vampire.

Also, I don't think even US high schools are like that anymore. There was a generational shift.

Is it sad that I like Vampire: The Requiem 1E un-ironically?

Like, I even like it better than Masquerade at times, even if my take on Requiem is less "woe is me" and more badass katanas.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1042631Is it sad that I like Vampire: The Requiem 1E un-ironically?

Like, I even like it better than Masquerade at times, even if my take on Requiem is less "woe is me" and more badass katanas.

So you are just lifting the mechanics and basic premise of 'vampires with a wide array of supernatural abilities' out of the system and playing a general vaguely superhero-ish game (where the superheroes/villains all have a similar backstory and set of vulnerabilities)? I don't think anyone considers superhero games sad. I've never understood why you would actively choose to lift the mechanics out with the premise, since I've never really been impressed with the base mechanics of either oWoD or nWoD, but hey if you have it and it doesn't bother you, why not? What about VtR is better at that than VtM?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1042734So you are just lifting the mechanics and basic premise of 'vampires with a wide array of supernatural abilities' out of the system and playing a general vaguely superhero-ish game (where the superheroes/villains all have a similar backstory and set of vulnerabilities)? I don't think anyone considers superhero games sad. I've never understood why you would actively choose to lift the mechanics out with the premise, since I've never really been impressed with the base mechanics of either oWoD or nWoD, but hey if you have it and it doesn't bother you, why not? What about VtR is better at that than VtM?

VtR is better in the sense that it has no metaplot and the mechanics are slightly better than VtM. Slightly.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1042628That was a great game.  Imagine an alternate universe where NightLife exploded in popularity instead of Vampire.

You're making me sad, Pundit :(

I mean, mechanically NightLife might not have been the greatest thing since sliced bread but holy cow did it really capture the chaos and madness of having a "race" of Vampires.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1041047When I ran WW games, I specifically invoked high school. The petty egos, the forced obedience to often clueless masters, the seeking freedom while needing resources from above, the prom, the clubs, the need to develop skills faster than your peers, and all the various nonsense. Also, it works for players because....we all went to high school and many never left, or deal with those who never left.

The other thing is, you get obsessed with the petty stuff because you think you're going to be this age forever.  Well, in Vampire, you ARE.

JG

Quote from: RPGPundit;1042628That was a great game.  Imagine an alternate universe where NightLife exploded in popularity instead of Vampire.

It was certainly a lot more punk.  Or at least metal.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;1042806The other thing is, you get obsessed with the petty stuff because you think you're going to be this age forever.  Well, in Vampire, you ARE.

JG

One of the things that Vampire failed to really explore was the psychological consequences of people being stuck at the same level of emotional maturity forever. One edition tried to explain this in the text itself, badly, and fans ended up hating it because they misunderstood it to mean vampires did not feel emotions.

Here is a better example I heard from someone else: becoming undead (and not dead dead like a ghost) stunts not only your physical growth but also your mental growth and ability to change. If you are a teenager, you will be a raging ball of hormones forever even if your husk of a body does not actually produce hormones (although that last part varies if you're playing another game where vampires have varying degrees of deadness). If you, say, never felt romantic love then in situations where a living person would develop romance you would get emotionally confused and in a worst case scenario might feel the wrong emotion like anger or something. Your personality would be stuck in a loop and your worldview would stay the same, even while the living become unrecognizable as the years pass.

In Warhammer Fantasy, which is very loosely based on Rein*Hagen's work, this goes a step further because the vampire's existing personality traits become exaggerated almost to the point of parody to compensate (which I think is more entertaining).

Quote from: James Gillen;1042807It was certainly a lot more punk.  Or at least metal.

JG

Yeah. But I guess it didn't fit the times as well. VtM was like shooting fish in a barrel for goths.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1042986In Warhammer Fantasy, which is very loosely based on Rein*Hagen's work, this goes a step further because the vampire's existing personality traits become exaggerated almost to the point of parody to compensate (which I think is more entertaining).

How is Warhammer based on Rein Hagen's work?

Quote from: CRKrueger;1043331How is Warhammer based on Rein Hagen's work?

Yeah, I don't think that makes any sense either.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1043331How is Warhammer based on Rein Hagen's work?

I was under the impression that it was the other way around...

Quote from: CRKrueger;1043331How is Warhammer based on Rein Hagen's work?

Quote from: RPGPundit;1043860Yeah, I don't think that makes any sense either.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1043871I was under the impression that it was the other way around...

As far as I was able to tell, Rein•Hagen popularized the concept of vampire clans with distinct supernatural features. Vampires were added to Warhammer after the popularity of Rein•Hagen's game took off, but Games Workshop put their own spin on the concept like Soul Reaver did.

On another note, Nightlife and its derivatives like WoD, Everlasting and WitchCraft seem to be the only works of fiction written in the last two centuries where werewolves are portrayed with a wide variety of superpowers. What gives?! Why does all other fiction depict werewolves with physical augmentation and changing shape at most, but vampires often get hypnosis and flight and pyrokinesis and stuff?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1043903On another note, Nightlife and its derivatives like WoD, Everlasting and WitchCraft seem to be the only works of fiction written in the last two centuries where werewolves are portrayed with a wide variety of superpowers. What gives?! Why does all other fiction depict werewolves with physical augmentation and changing shape at most, but vampires often get hypnosis and flight and pyrokinesis and stuff?

Because folklore and fiction are not competitions with two camps that are supposed to have some kind of parity. Why does Godzilla get some form of atomic breath weapon, while King Kong is just a giant ape? Naturally, once you do make a game where you get to 'play as' one of two options, you tend to care to balance the two choices (and to keep the analogy parallel, you get movies like King Kong vs. Godzilla where they have to give Kong a previously unmentioned ability to absorb energy from electricity so that the two can fight on the same level).

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1043920Because folklore and fiction are not competitions with two camps that are supposed to have some kind of parity. Why does Godzilla get some form of atomic breath weapon, while King Kong is just a giant ape? Naturally, once you do make a game where you get to 'play as' one of two options, you tend to care to balance the two choices (and to keep the analogy parallel, you get movies like King Kong vs. Godzilla where they have to give Kong a previously unmentioned ability to absorb energy from electricity so that the two can fight on the same level).

That does not answer my question. If you look at the historical vampire panics involving Arnold Paole, Peter Plogojowitz and Mercy Brown, the vampires do not display any supernatural powers aside from rising from the dead in physical or spectral form to suck the life force out of people. In you look at the inquisition's accounts of werewolf trials, like Peter Stubbe, Ossory or the "hounds of God", werewolves were attributed abilities like astral projection (with physical projections) and descending into hell to fight demons and witches. That last part is really vague, since demons and witches are so diverse you would need a laundry list of superpowers to fight them effectively. If you look through folklore long enough you will notice they are ascribed whatever superpowers make them sufficiently scary.

I suspect that this is because of Universal's Dracula and Wolfman. They became so popular in movies that they overshadowed anything else in the public consciousness. Dracula was depicted with a variety of superpowers, so now vampires typically have all the same powers. The Wolfman had barely anything, so now werewolves typically have only changing shape and usually as a curse.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1043933I suspect that this is because of Universal's Dracula and Wolfman. They became so popular in movies that they overshadowed anything else in the public consciousness. Dracula was depicted with a variety of superpowers, so now vampires typically have all the same powers. The Wolfman had barely anything, so now werewolves typically have only changing shape and usually as a curse.

This doesn't explain why Abbott and Costello are not in The World of Darkness.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;1044200This doesn't explain why Abbott and Costello are not in The World of Darkness.

JG

I am now tempted to run that. :eek: (But I'll have to give the comedians a pretentious Path meter; I'll call it The Path of Mirth-itas, one's Funny meter. Drop below zero and your movie contract is not renewed.)

Quote from: James Gillen;1044200This doesn't explain why Abbott and Costello are not in The World of Darkness.

JG

That would be hilarious just to see the Goths' reactions.

Apparently, this is the most anticipated RPG of 2018... Hmm.

VtM was definitely one of my favorite games back in the day. I played it to death on and off for years. But I only ever enjoyed playing the Sabbat. It was lots of fun kicking the shit out of all those Gothy Ventrue masqueraders. Sending in ghouls armed with flamethrowers.

But I digress... You'd think that I'd be rather excited that 5e is coming out given my love affair with the original game. But I'm not at all for the following reasons.

1) The game is so old now, that we've ironed out all the 'kinks' and tailored it to how we want to play - So it's fine as far as I'm concerned.
2) The morbidly obese metaplot continues in 5th edition I believe. C'mon, everyone knows it was an utter mess and it pretty much destroyed the original Vampire line as we know it.
3) With some of the original creators gone, the game took on some very strange directions that were obviously shunted out from the creators own gaming tables. So we nuked those krud ideas but I suspect that they will be returning in 5th and its whole new line of books.
4) The new artwork... Ugh! :( The old B&W artwork was very evocative.
5) It's a product of it's time. I still run it in the nineties with the threat of Gehenna around the corner. Incidentally, I'd never use their version of Gehenna that was presented in that splatbook it was atrocious imo.
6) We already have the 5th edition in the form of V20 (some of it's good and some of it is just okay).
7) How politically correct with 5th be? I mean, are they dropping the term Jihad like the did for nWOD? Will all the clans be hemoginised in some way as to avoid 'offense'? Boo! if so...
8) I know I'm stating the obvious with this one. It's a blatant cash grab from the commercial juggernaut that WW is. The 'killed off' VtM then brought it back to life wholly on the success of V20 $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
9) One good point is that Mark R H is back with the project. However, how much say he will have is yet to be seen. Fingers crossed!

Anyway, 'that's it for now.

I have been to many conventions over the decades, and I can't even remember the last time I saw anyone running a pen-and-paper VtM game, or WoD. maybe GenCon like 10 years ago ... I've never seen anyone run Mage or Wraith, etc.

The Midwinter Gaming Convention in Milwaukee does the Vampire Larps, but that has stagnated in recent years, and no one runs the official pen-and-paper stuff. The events amount to people in costume posturing and not engaging in gameplay. Very boring.

I'm not sure why anyone would resurrect this game, or even think it has a future.