Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1081097Right now the IP is a mess and Paradox has no idea how to manage it besides pilfering it for their video games. The fans cannot agree on anything, yet simultaneously they can decry other fans for heresy. This sort of mind-numbing stupidity is precisely why I left the fandom and never looked back.

Which is why I am busy making my own rpg similar to nWoD, but not a copy.  It will have a united core system with no editions to fuck it up.  I already got different timelines in my equipment section so if you want dark ages, or grim dark future you can.  So getting close to nWoD: Mirrors supplement that I am aiming for.  Tool kits to create your own content.

Last my first template isn't vampire, but something special...

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3274[/ATTACH]

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1081097None of this is particularly consistent with the V5 setting, either. Paradox doesn't seem to care about maintaining continuity at all, so it is impossible to predict where they are taking the IP. Although the fact that they are willing to change it so easily makes me cautious optimistic as to its future.

So CCP all over again?  For that matter what happened to the Apocalypse game that was promise?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1081097The game might still be able to stand on its own merit, though. The reason why Bloodlines 1 is a cult classic is because of Troika's writing, not because it used the World of Darkness IP. It could have used Requiem or an original IP and still been considered a cult classic.

That should be stated more often.  It was the game engine and ridiculous schedule that made the game glitchy.  It was Troika's story telling and design that made it great.  It still would had been just as good if it was cyberpunk, or even just noir.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1081121Which is why I am busy making my own rpg similar to nWoD, but not a copy.  It will have a united core system with no editions to fuck it up.  I already got different timelines in my equipment section so if you want dark ages, or grim dark future you can.  So getting close to nWoD: Mirrors supplement that I am aiming for.  Tool kits to create your own content.

That's setting off my heartbreaker alert. What sets your attempt apart from all the other heartbreakers like The Everlasting, C.J. Carella's WitchCraft or Opening the Dark? Why makes it a better choice over Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows or Feed?

I'm not opposed to a better implementation of the same idea, like how Godbound is a direct response to Exalted and Scion, but I'm leery due to the many failures that came before.

Most of the reason why people like the Worlds of Darkness is because of the lore/metaplot, which is the only reason they tolerate the highly questionable rules. In fact, a lot of people are only interested in the lore/metaplot rather than actually playing. This got to the point where the Chronicles of Darkness was taken over by a lore/metaplot fixation during its development: Requiem was lore agnostic, but Werewolf and Mage put a weird monomyth front and center; by 2nd edition the god-machine metaplot took over as the main antagonist.

Most of the heartbreakers never reached the same breadth and depth of lore, if they ever tried (The Everlasting and WitchCraft certainly did their best). The more recent indie games focused more on gameplay rather than lore.

Unifying the rules isn't even that big a hurdle. The Everlasting and WitchCraft did that long before Chronicles tried and failed to devise a shared framework for magic points and karma meters.

Although Chronicles tried to devise compatible rules (and failed due to a lack of balance), the different monsters aren't compatible in terms of their themes and were always intended to stand alone. Vampires are supposed to be personal horror, Mages about power corrupts or SJWs fighting the Man, Werewolf is about being a corrupt cop or ecoterrorist who abuses their family, Changelings are either LGBTQ+ or human trafficking survivors, Wraiths refuse to get over their last breakup, etc. Although the lore/metaplot/politics/whatever generally obscures that.

Monsterhearts managed to solve this thematic conflict by makings it monsters ("skins") into explicitly fantastical metaphors for the struggles of humanity. Their shared nature as metaphors allowed them to play together without the tonal imbalance of the Worlds of Darkness.

Introducing new splats? Nightlife introduced wights, succubi, and more long before. The Everlasting introduced dragons, gods, elves, sin-eating gargoyles, grail questers (no relation to Fate/stay night), and more! Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows include guidelines for making your own, which resulted in fans releasing lots of their own splats on the social media pages.

The karma meters are probably the biggest thing that could go wrong, depending on whether they work by stick or by carrot. Chronicles has its bizarre "morality" meters that vary dramatically between editions. The Everlasting called these sorts of mechanics "torments" and they worked very differently between splats. Urban Shadows has a "corruption" mechanic but it doesn't work like a recognizable karma meter. Nightlife had a truly insane amount of book keeping in its humanity mechanic due to how rapidly it could fluctuate.

All these considerations are the reason why I gave up on making such a game myself a long time ago. What exactly sets your attempt apart from the many others?

Mostly focusing on gameplay and yes there is core setting for all that metaplot.  Mostly though this will cater to cross play.  As in the templates you play as have reasons why they would work together.  Secondly while there is in game politics most of the time your going to have adventures.  This is classical D&D, but in modern 2019 AD world.

Think Stranger Things and the Cat Lady as examples.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1081128Mostly focusing on gameplay and yes there is core setting for all that metaplot.  Mostly though this will cater to cross play.  As in the templates you play as have reasons why they would work together.  Secondly while there is in game politics most of the time your going to have adventures.  This is classical D&D, but in modern 2019 AD world.

Think Stranger Things and the Cat Lady as examples.

I forgot to mention Frank Trollman's "after sunset" heartbreaker. I don't know if it's any good, but it does have a huge list of splats including bug people, zombies, and Cthulhu deep ones.

EDIT: do you guys mind if I wax poetic about designing urban fantasy heartbreakers?

Go ahead, but I don't think I am making a heartbreaker.  I am just making a urban fantasy that focus on doing stuff instead of being angst, or talking about how much of a progressive you are.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1081135Go ahead, but I don't think I am making a heartbreaker.  I am just making a urban fantasy that focus on doing stuff instead of being angst, or talking about how much of a progressive you are.

That's not what heartbreaker means. I honestly don't remember the exact definition off hand.

Anyway, I don't really have the time right now to do a full spiel so I'll save it for later. And it's getting a bit too off-topic.

What I will say about Bloodlines 2 is that I am impressed they actually took my critique about the arbitrary discipline mechanics to heart. Or they ripped off Bloodlust: Shadowhunter.

EDIT:

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[/HR]

Okay, so I found the time to do a part of my spiel. This part is just going to be about splats, the concept and design of them.

World of Darkness divided its splats pretty cleanly into vampires, werewolves, mages, ghosts, fairies, whatever. These distinctions are essentially arbitrary. Each splat consists of a list of superpowers (which may easily overlap), usually some weakness (e.g. blood dependency, silver allergy, etc), and some lore baggage. All of them have some access to things like spellcasting, shapeshifting, whatever. If you dig into pre-modern folklore (or listen to Maven of the Eventide), then you'll notice that there was little to no distinction between, say, vampires, witches, werewolves, and ghosts. These were descriptors rather than mutually exclusive categories.

The television show Lost Girl exemplifies this: it has a bazillion varieties of essentially vampires that prey on humanity, but these are all called "fae." Nightlife, the forgotten precursor to World of Darkness, had a bunch of different monsters called "the kin" and most of them preyed on humanity in some way.

(World of Darkness had a bazillion different mechanics for superpowers for each splat. I think that's absurd, so for the purpose of discussion I'm going to assume a universal superpowers mechanic.)

Anyway, unless you have a very clear goal in mind, it is very easy for splats to overlap to the point of redundancy or become variations on essentially the same concept. Or to become so weird (or niche) that you wonder why they exist. Vampire: The Masquerade suffers a problem with bloodlines stretching the idea of what it means to be a vampire by, for example, including time travel as a superpower. Something like Geist: The Sin-Eaters suffers from being essentially an over-expansion of the "death mage" concept already seen in other games. The majority of fansplats (genie, zombie, doll, dragon, skeleton, magical girl, leviathan, genius, pathogen, blah blah blah) suggested over the years have suffered from some variation of this problem. Avoiding that problem was precisely why Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts structured their splats the way they did especially considering they don't have a fixed number.

Nephilim side-stepped the whole splat proliferation by using an elemental system as the basis for its splats. There was air, earth, fire, water, moon, black moon... The game is French and largely obscure, another casualty of the tabletop market crunch of the late 90s and early 2000s.

Immortal: The Invisible War was just bizarre and reads more like a satire of every single urban fantasy game ever, even though it's independent of White Wolf's influence.

---

[/HR]

If you aren't allowing free-form splat creation, then the big five of vampire, werewolf, mage, ghost and fairy seem like a fairly sufficient base to build off of.

Vampires have always been the most popular splat. They have what one critic called "teh sexy" that other splats somehow don't. Since the advent of Anne Rice, pretty much only two things have defined them for the most part: they eat people, and they struggle to maintain a connection with humanity in the face of their inhuman nature. This doesn't necessarily mean vampires that do the latter are good: Jerry Dandridge still killed prostitutes at the same time he tried to live a normal life in the suburbs, and Louis whined so much precisely because he physically could not stop himself from eating people but was too scared to commit suicide. This is a pretty solid base to work with. They've been pretty similar across their portrayals in Nightlife, World of Darkness, The Everlasting and WitchCraft.

Werewolves (and shapeshifters in general) have a significantly less solid base. In folklore, lycanthropy was generally treated as either a curse or an aspect of witchcraft in general. There's never really been an equivalent of Dracula or Interview with the Vampire dealing with werewolves, and thus their depiction in popular culture has been pretty stagnant compared to vampires. This is probably most obvious in the trend that vampires may display a variety of superpowers like mind control, levitation, telepathy, etc (mostly because Dracula and Interview did it first) whereas werewolves generally do not. White Wolf's werewolf games are notable for the simple fact that they give werewolves a wide variety of superpowers. The spirituality aspect is unique to White Wolf, but it was copied by The Everlasting and WitchCraft. In The Everlasting, the werewolf concept is split between "manitou" (people who bind themselves to spirits to become magical warriors) and "wer" (stereotypical pathogenic werewolves). In WitchCraft, "ferals" are the result of a spiritual curse/possession that mimics the pathogenic stereotype to a degree while allowing for the development of spiritual powers. To my knowledge, there hasn't been much else done with the concept besides Exalted's Lunars condensing shapeshifters in general into one splat.

Mages have no solid basis. Every fiction featuring spellcasters has done them in its own way. The only thing that White Wolf brought to the table was the syntactic magic system first presented in Ars Magica, and some really disturbing baggage about technocrats and Atlantis. Mage tries to make players think about the morality of their actions, with varying degrees of success. The conflict between the diamond orders and the seers of the throne is ambiguous as hell, and I still can't determine which side is right, what the really important difference between them is, or if their intended goals can even be accomplished. The conflict between the traditions and the technocracy is... heavily politicized and commonly leads to flame wars. When Mage Revised was released in 2000, hundreds of mentally ill fans sent the developer death threats by email.

Ghost stories are ubiquitous across human cultures worldwide and throughout history. So it is very odd that White Wolf executed their take on it so poorly. Yes, a game about playing ghosts is going to be bleak by virtue of the fact that you are dead and haunting the remnants of your life. However, that wasn't enough for White Wolf and they decided to pile on extraneous bleakness in the form of Oblivion, Stygia, and the shadow mechanic. I don't really mind the shadow mechanic: ghost stories by nature tend to be short (or at least nobody has really tried to write long-running fiction about being a ghost in the same vein as the Vampire Chronicles), so a long-running story about ghosts needs something like the shadow to keep the story fresh (and it better explains why, especially in Asian cultures, ghosts can become so viciously inhuman). Oblivion and Stygia were absolutely not necessary and distracted from the core conflict of a ghost dealing with the remnants of their former life. The lore pressured you to abandon the very thing that defined ghosts in the first place in favor of fighting hordes of the damned, running underground railroads to free slaves from bondage, and other things that have absolutely nothing to do with being a ghost. Perhaps because of this oppressive atmosphere, Wraith: The Oblivion was officially cancelled in 1998. Orpheus was interesting in that it tried to tackle the concept of ghost busters (many years before Ghost Hunters was a thing) and provided a more nuanced metaphysical biology for ghosts, but unfortunately it was hamstrung by the reliance on metaplot. The depictions in heartbreakers don't really do much to improve on this: most are pretty bare bones, but The Everlasting more or less copied the same oppressive cosmology as Wraith: The Oblivion. The wraith project fansite, before it ceased publication in the early/mid-2000s, tried to reimagine the game for Chronicles of Darkness (this was before the stifling underworld cosmology was codified) by refocusing on what it meant to be a ghost rather than distractions like the underground railroads. Rather than trying something like that, White Wolf/Onyx Path never tried hard to make ghosts playable in Chronicles of Darkness; the closest we got was Geist: The Sin-Eaters, which was pretty much made up wholesale by the writers and feels very lackluster in comparison.

Fairies have varied immensely. Changeling: The Dreaming had a bunch of mixed metaphors, like gay awakenings, artsy fartsy protest, etc. Like Wraith, it was cancelled due to low sales. World of Darkness suggested that fairies were related to bygones in some way, since both were harmed by disbelief, but they operated by completely different rules. Changeling: The Lost changed the player characters to people who were taken to fairyland and irreversibly transformed physically and mentally by the experience. For whatever reason it eclipsed its predecessor in popularity: originally it was intended to run for only a limited number of books, but due to demand this was increased. Of all the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness settings, it has what is probably the single best execution I have ever seen. I would attribute this to the fact that, unlike all the other splats, it has the greatest resonance with human mythology, folklore and religion; as opposed to the writers having to make these things up themselves without a degree in anthropology, literary criticism, et al. It's splats are literally anthropological archetypes for supernatural creatures: beasts, fairest, darklings, ogres, elementals, and wizened. It's politics are based on ancient symbols of the natural world like seasons, day and night, and compass directions. The fairy creatures easily encompass every single thing you've heard of in stories. Furthermore, this is one of the few duplicated brands where there wasn't an edition war: pretty much everyone agrees that it is superior to its predecessor. Lost's formula is a lightning strike and I'm really surprised it was never duplicated for any of the other settings; then again, I'm not sure how you would do that.

---

[/HR]

Actually, Lost's success illustrates a fundamental problem with White Wolf's products in general. The whole splat thing is constantly overreaching. The vampire clans, werewolf tribes, mage traditions, etc are arbitrary and lack appeal outside of White Wolf's indoctrinated community. That's probably why the indie games never tried to approach the same breadth and depth.

Okay, so I found the time to do a part of my spiel. This part is just going to be about splats, the concept and design of them.

World of Darkness divided its splats pretty cleanly into vampires, werewolves, mages, ghosts, fairies, whatever. These distinctions are essentially arbitrary. Each splat consists of a list of superpowers (which may easily overlap), usually some weakness (e.g. blood dependency, silver allergy, etc), and some lore baggage. All of them have some access to things like spellcasting, shapeshifting, whatever. If you dig into pre-modern folklore (or listen to Maven of the Eventide), then you'll notice that there was little to no distinction between, say, vampires, witches, werewolves, and ghosts. These were descriptors rather than mutually exclusive categories.

The television show Lost Girl exemplifies this: it has a bazillion varieties of essentially vampires that prey on humanity, but these are all called "fae." Nightlife, the forgotten precursor to World of Darkness, had a bunch of different monsters called "the kin" and most of them preyed on humanity in some way.

(World of Darkness had a bazillion different mechanics for superpowers for each splat. I think that's absurd, so for the purpose of discussion I'm going to assume a universal superpowers mechanic.)

Anyway, unless you have a very clear goal in mind, it is very easy for splats to overlap to the point of redundancy or become variations on essentially the same concept. Or to become so weird (or niche) that you wonder why they exist. Vampire: The Masquerade suffers a problem with bloodlines stretching the idea of what it means to be a vampire by, for example, including time travel as a superpower. Something like Geist: The Sin-Eaters suffers from being essentially an over-expansion of the "death mage" concept already seen in other games. The majority of fansplats (genie, zombie, doll, dragon, skeleton, magical girl, leviathan, genius, pathogen, blah blah blah) suggested over the years have suffered from some variation of this problem. Avoiding that problem was precisely why Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts structured their splats the way they did especially considering they don't have a fixed number.

Nephilim side-stepped the whole splat proliferation by using an elemental system as the basis for its splats. There was air, earth, fire, water, moon, black moon... The game is French and largely obscure, another casualty of the tabletop market crunch of the late 90s and early 2000s.

Immortal: The Invisible War was just bizarre and reads more like a satire of every single urban fantasy game ever, even though it's independent of White Wolf's influence.

---

[/HR]

If you aren't allowing free-form splat creation, then the big five of vampire, werewolf, mage, ghost and fairy seem like a fairly sufficient base to build off of.

Vampires have always been the most popular splat. They have what one critic called "teh sexy" that other splats somehow don't. Since the advent of Anne Rice, pretty much only two things have defined them for the most part: they eat people, and they struggle to maintain a connection with humanity in the face of their inhuman nature. This doesn't necessarily mean vampires that do the latter are good: Jerry Dandridge still killed prostitutes at the same time he tried to live a normal life in the suburbs, and Louis whined so much precisely because he physically could not stop himself from eating people but was too scared to commit suicide. This is a pretty solid base to work with. They've been pretty similar across their portrayals in Nightlife, World of Darkness, The Everlasting and WitchCraft.

Werewolves (and shapeshifters in general) have a significantly less solid base. In folklore, lycanthropy was generally treated as either a curse or an aspect of witchcraft in general. There's never really been an equivalent of Dracula or Interview with the Vampire dealing with werewolves, and thus their depiction in popular culture has been pretty stagnant compared to vampires. This is probably most obvious in the trend that vampires may display a variety of superpowers like mind control, levitation, telepathy, etc (mostly because Dracula and Interview did it first) whereas werewolves generally do not. White Wolf's werewolf games are notable for the simple fact that they give werewolves a wide variety of superpowers. The spirituality aspect is unique to White Wolf, but it was copied by The Everlasting and WitchCraft. In The Everlasting, the werewolf concept is split between "manitou" (people who bind themselves to spirits to become magical warriors) and "wer" (stereotypical pathogenic werewolves). In WitchCraft, "ferals" are the result of a spiritual curse/possession that mimics the pathogenic stereotype to a degree while allowing for the development of spiritual powers. To my knowledge, there hasn't been much else done with the concept besides Exalted's Lunars condensing shapeshifters in general into one splat.

Mages have no solid basis. Every fiction featuring spellcasters has done them in its own way. The only thing that White Wolf brought to the table was the syntactic magic system first presented in Ars Magica, and some really disturbing baggage about technocrats and Atlantis. Mage tries to make players think about the morality of their actions, with varying degrees of success. The conflict between the diamond orders and the seers of the throne is ambiguous as hell, and I still can't determine which side is right, what the really important difference between them is, or if their intended goals can even be accomplished. The conflict between the traditions and the technocracy is... heavily politicized and commonly leads to flame wars. When Mage Revised was released in 2000, hundreds of mentally ill fans sent the developer death threats by email.

Ghost stories are ubiquitous across human cultures worldwide and throughout history. So it is very odd that White Wolf executed their take on it so poorly. Yes, a game about playing ghosts is going to be bleak by virtue of the fact that you are dead and haunting the remnants of your life. However, that wasn't enough for White Wolf and they decided to pile on extraneous bleakness in the form of Oblivion, Stygia, and the shadow mechanic. I don't really mind the shadow mechanic: ghost stories by nature tend to be short (or at least nobody has really tried to write long-running fiction about being a ghost in the same vein as the Vampire Chronicles), so a long-running story about ghosts needs something like the shadow to keep the story fresh (and it better explains why, especially in Asian cultures, ghosts can become so viciously inhuman). Oblivion and Stygia were absolutely not necessary and distracted from the core conflict of a ghost dealing with the remnants of their former life. The lore pressured you to abandon the very thing that defined ghosts in the first place in favor of fighting hordes of the damned, running underground railroads to free slaves from bondage, and other things that have absolutely nothing to do with being a ghost. Perhaps because of this oppressive atmosphere, Wraith: The Oblivion was officially cancelled in 1998. Orpheus was interesting in that it tried to tackle the concept of ghost busters (many years before Ghost Hunters was a thing) and provided a more nuanced metaphysical biology for ghosts, but unfortunately it was hamstrung by the reliance on metaplot. The depictions in heartbreakers don't really do much to improve on this: most are pretty bare bones, but The Everlasting more or less copied the same oppressive cosmology as Wraith: The Oblivion. The wraith project fansite, before it ceased publication in the early/mid-2000s, tried to reimagine the game for Chronicles of Darkness (this was before the stifling underworld cosmology was codified) by refocusing on what it meant to be a ghost rather than distractions like the underground railroads. Rather than trying something like that, White Wolf/Onyx Path never tried hard to make ghosts playable in Chronicles of Darkness; the closest we got was Geist: The Sin-Eaters, which was pretty much made up wholesale by the writers and feels very lackluster in comparison.

Fairies have varied immensely. Changeling: The Dreaming had a bunch of mixed metaphors, like gay awakenings, artsy fartsy protest, etc. Like Wraith, it was cancelled due to low sales. World of Darkness suggested that fairies were related to bygones in some way, since both were harmed by disbelief, but they operated by completely different rules. Changeling: The Lost changed the player characters to people who were taken to fairyland and irreversibly transformed physically and mentally by the experience. For whatever reason it eclipsed its predecessor in popularity: originally it was intended to run for only a limited number of books, but due to demand this was increased. Of all the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness settings, it has what is probably the single best execution I have ever seen. I would attribute this to the fact that, unlike all the other splats, it has the greatest resonance with human mythology, folklore and religion; as opposed to the writers having to make these things up themselves without a degree in anthropology, literary criticism, et al. It's splats are literally anthropological archetypes for supernatural creatures: beasts, fairest, darklings, ogres, elementals, and wizened. It's politics are based on ancient symbols of the natural world like seasons, day and night, and compass directions. The fairy creatures easily encompass every single thing you've heard of in stories. Furthermore, this is one of the few duplicated brands where there wasn't an edition war: pretty much everyone agrees that it is superior to its predecessor. Lost's formula is a lightning strike and I'm really surprised it was never duplicated for any of the other settings; then again, I'm not sure how you would do that.

---

[/HR]

Actually, Lost's success illustrates a fundamental problem with White Wolf's products in general. The whole splat thing is constantly overreaching. The vampire clans, werewolf tribes, mage traditions, etc are arbitrary and lack appeal outside of White Wolf's indoctrinated community. That's probably why the indie games never tried to approach the same breadth and depth.

Quote from: WARDUKE;1080576This Rageaholic video sums up why I am skeptical.

[video=youtube;BnEhruDrBfA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnEhruDrBfA[/youtube]

Updated with another video from The Quartering:

[video=youtube;Bm-_WM0Jy84]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm-_WM0Jy84[/youtube]

The irony here is that the tabletop writers starting back in the 90s were SJWs before it was fashionable. And produced a lot of bizarrely racist/sexist/whatever splats like the Ravnos, Akashics and Stargazers.

Quoteincline

The Codex is leaking? 'Sup.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1081267The irony here is that the tabletop writers starting back in the 90s were SJWs before it was fashionable. And produced a lot of bizarrely racist/sexist/whatever splats like the Ravnos, Akashics and Stargazers.

Yeah, 1990s Vampire was all about the fashionable lefty causes and fashions of the day, and it was not even subtext - Vampire was openly and outspokenly political when few other games were. It is ultimately a game about youth rebellion against a corrupt adult world that Doesn't Understand You. Most of the Tim Bradstreet art was "urban hipsters with fangs", and the game was quickly picked up by urban hipsters without fangs. Well, real fangs, at any rate.

It got more subdued in the 2000s, but progressive and countercultural themes were part of the game from day zero.

The mention about new powers just reminds me how poorly designed the tabletop's disciplines are.

When I heard that V5 changed disciplines to have multiple powers at each level, I was initially impressed because I mistakenly assumed this meant characters would be able to learn more powers. Unfortunately, this was just a codification of the alternate powers that appeared sporadically in previous editions and characters were still arbitrarily limited to one power per level.

The amalgam powers mechanic seems like it was based on the combination disciplines, but it is actually worse since it takes up a discipline level slot and many of the prerequisites are nonsensical. Those odd prerequisites seem designed to indirectly restrict access to certain clans, rather than specifying the actual clan.

Rituals are still a mess in any edition. In some cases it's unclear what the distinction between a ritual and a standard power even is. Some standard powers are performed very similarly to rituals, particularly anything that involves anointing your blood on something to cause an effect.

The writers never seem to be able to decide what powers belong where. DA20 moved some powers to different disciplines. V5 merges whole disciplines together. Requiem 2e makes some powers available to multiple disciplines. Every edition has made changes to the power lists for whatever reason.

The whole mechanic is absurd. I'd just simplify things by allowing characters to buy multiple powers per level (selecting from all powers from all editions), and allowing some powers to be available to multiple disciplines. If needed, amalgam/combination powers can have prerequisites like a minimum rank in multiple disciplines or already knowing specific powers. Maybe scale the experience cost of a discipline based on its sphere of influence. That's only a patch though, and honestly the mechanic needs to be redesigned from the ground up.

Godbound's powers system is a much better implementation of the same concept.

I agree vampire clans should have discipline specialties and not exclusive powers.  Like a xp discount, or some other advantage.  I also agree that there should be a universal discipline where we get all the common powers.  Last I am way ahead of you in stealing the Godbound power system.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1081318I agree vampire clans should have discipline specialties and not exclusive powers.  Like a xp discount, or some other advantage.  I also agree that there should be a universal discipline where we get all the common powers.  Last I am way ahead of you in stealing the Godbound power system.

I don't understand you. The clan discount is already part of Vampire. Every clan has three disciplines it gets a cost break for. I was criticizing amalgam powers, a V5 exclusive mechanic, for NOT being clan specific. The example I remember offhand is that one amalgam power for animalism (animal empathy/control) allows you to control swarms of animals, but requires obfuscate (clouding minds). This doesn't make sense except as a way to make it harder to learn for anyone who isn't nosferatu, who receive both animalism and obfuscate.

I don't have a problem with clan-exclusive powers and I think that would be a good idea actually. Some clans have had exclusive powers since forever, like the nosferatu and gangrel deformities/mutations merits that appeared in some books. I think it's weird that multiple different subsystems are used to represent these capabilities. This complexity is typical for the ST rules: it has always had arbitrary distinctions between attributes abilities/skills, backgrounds/merits/flaws, and disciplines/gifts/etc. It wants to be a story game (by some estimation anyway, the definition of a story game varies by who you talk to) but it refuses to use mechanics like free form traits that would cut down on needless complexity.

Or are you refering to the idea that clans should have specialties organized by keyword (e.g. darkness, animals, mentalism, etc), within a unified system for creating powers for all types of splats, like what is done in The Everlasting's Codex of the Immortals book? (Everlasting isn't the best example though, since like World of Darkness it still has an advantage/disadvantage system that provides some powers separate the standard powers rules. Offhand I remember "two hearts" being an example, since that helps against staking.)

What do you mean by "universal discipline"? Are you talking about something like Requiem 2e giving every vampire darkvision and blood-based senses?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1081323I don't understand you. The clan discount is already part of Vampire. Every clan has three disciplines it gets a cost break for. I was criticizing amalgam powers, a V5 exclusive mechanic, for NOT being clan specific. The example I remember offhand is that one amalgam power for animalism (animal empathy/control) allows you to control swarms of animals, but requires obfuscate (clouding minds). This doesn't make sense except as a way to make it harder to learn for anyone who isn't nosferatu, who receive both animalism and obfuscate.

I don't have a problem with clan-exclusive powers and I think that would be a good idea actually. Some clans have had exclusive powers since forever, like the nosferatu and gangrel deformities/mutations merits that appeared in some books. I think it's weird that multiple different subsystems are used to represent these capabilities. This complexity is typical for the ST rules: it has always had arbitrary distinctions between attributes abilities/skills, backgrounds/merits/flaws, and disciplines/gifts/etc. It wants to be a story game (by some estimation anyway, the definition of a story game varies by who you talk to) but it refuses to use mechanics like free form traits that would cut down on needless complexity.

Or are you refering to the idea that clans should have specialties organized by keyword (e.g. darkness, animals, mentalism, etc), within a unified system for creating powers for all types of splats, like what is done in The Everlasting's Codex of the Immortals book? (Everlasting isn't the best example though, since like World of Darkness it still has an advantage/disadvantage system that provides some powers separate the standard powers rules. Offhand I remember "two hearts" being an example, since that helps against staking.)

Admittedly you were confusing me some what.  Look I don't like exclusive powers unless it makes some sort of sense.  I see bloodlines in VtR that offer nothing, but devotions which anyone should be able to learn provided you meet the discipline requirements.  Some devotions are so mind numbingly simple that I am surprised it was not in the core book.  If I have to ask the question, "What prevents me from figuring that out?", your in trouble in terms of powers.

There is a example devotion made by Egyptian vampires back in the days of ancient Egypt.  They could walk in sunlight.  How?  Auspex 5 and some majesty to create a illusion of yourself as if your really there in the flesh.  You think a useful devotion like that would be used by most elders throughout the world.  They have ghouls and thralls to command after all.  Any power that lets you do work 24/7 is too good to miss out.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1081323What do you mean by "universal discipline"? Are you talking about something like Requiem 2e giving every vampire darkvision and blood-based senses?

Yeah.  Pretty much.  Think minor powers in comparison to the specialty powers.

The discipline mechanic is fundamentally flawed.

A recurring problem is that disciplines generally range anywhere from increasingly powerful instances of the same effect to a grab bag of powers that are tangentially related at best. There's no guidelines for the limitations at each level like Mage uses for its arcana/spheres so determining the level of a power is guesswork at best. The lineup of disciplines is essentially arbitrary and the distinction between disciplines can easily blur, particularly for the mental disciplines. The writers cannot agree on what the powers should be, so they vary dramatically between editions.

Take obfuscate, collectively across all editions. It is a form of mental trickery that essentially consists of two distinct but related effects: concealing things and disguising things. Those "things" being people, places, things, objects, auras, psychic impressions, etc subject to level-based limitations like size, scope, numbers, activity, etc. In terms of syntax-based magic systems it can be broken down into the effect, the target, and the various modifications for the circumstances.

This can easily lend itself to creative applications. You could disguise a person in any number of ways for different levels: generic identity (police man, soccer mom, etc), specific individual (real or fictitious), whoever the viewer was expecting (reporter, friend, pet turtle, etc), an authority figure (viewers will think you have authority over something and not question your behavior regarding it), etc.

Not all disciplines can necessarily be broken down that way. Obfuscate is easy to analyze because the idea behind it is simplistic and versatile. Tailor made for a syntactic magic system.

How exactly would you sort that into powers at each level? linearly or non-linear? Would you treat it like a skill without distinct powers? What do you think would be the best implementation?

There's so many ways it could be implemented. Maybe concealment and disguise are divided into separate paths. Maybe the target is measured by a separate trait, similar to a two-fold syntactic magic system like Ars Magica.

Remember when I said mental disciplines can easily blur? That's most of the reason why I think it should be possible for powers to be available to multiple disciplines. All mental disciplines are ways of manipulating the mind, so naturally due to the nebulous nature of the mind itself there could easily be overlap.

Of course, if a power is available to multiple disciplines, wouldn't it be redundant? In a way, yes. But you could mitigate this in any number of ways, like only needing to buy it once (mandatory!), perhaps making each discipline's use of that power subject to different limitations.

For example, obfuscate might be limited to illusions that closely meet your physical dimensions, whereas dementation might not (but lack versatility in other areas).

This means questioning the fundamental assumptions made by past editions, whatever those may even be. The World of Darkness writers seem utterly unwilling to do so even if it would make for better rules.

EDIT: V5 does take this sort of criticism into account, although I don't know if I would call it perfect. It's certainly an improvement in most ways.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1081132EDIT: do you guys mind if I wax poetic about designing urban fantasy heartbreakers?

Not at all. In fact, you should seriously consider making your game; you have some good ideas.