Quote from: Doc Sammy;918245I like my WoD to be metaplot-free and done in a style often derided as "Superheroes With Fangs". And my playstyle is no less valid than their "Personal Horror" playstyle.

While that's true, your consistent immature "All Goths suck! Amirite? Amirite?" posturing is not doing wonders for your reputation.

There's more than a few people here who could point out the irony of an undiscriminating anime fan deriding the silliness of the Goth-Punk subculture.

Quote from: daniel_ream;918220The best fix for oWOD, IMHO, is to ignore the Player's Guides and cap Disciplines at 5 like the back of the book said.  Keeps dice pools and Elders at sane levels.

Oh I don't have these problems. I've just seen them happen. I rather like the Players Guide. Getting their Disciplines above 5 is a real goal if it's even possible. I usually make players have to find someone to train them to get their disciplines that high or if they have a means of even knowing about it, self train but over a loooooong time.

Quote from: daniel_ream;918220I suspect this is based on a misunderstanding of the rules.  You can't spend more blood than you have capacity for (10-14), you can't drop below 3 without triggering a Hunger frenzy check, and most Blood Pool expenditures that would help in combat only last a single scene.  It should be obvious that you're in a new scene once the combat starts, unless you can manipulate your enemies into attacking you on your boat.

The rule works very well for that iconic scene where the wounded vampire grabs a random dude, drains him dead, and then resurges into the fight on the power of blood, but I can't see how the scenario you're describing works under RAW.

Well I don't own a 1st edition copy. AS I RECALL (i.e. I could be wrong) you could spend to your hearts content as long as you had the blood available, but such increases only lasted for the scene. So... like any idiot-power-player would try and do, they'd go abduct a couple of dozen homeless people, bind them, then in preparation for the fight drain-and-spend until they were blood-soaked behemoths. Rules-lawyering that if they spent to 4-blood points they don't have to frenzy-check. Right? riiiight. In 1st Ed there was no ceiling as I recall on stats when you pump.

After a jackass tried this with me - I simply told him that when he was done spending all the time drinking and spending - that by itself was a scene. All your pumped up stats? Gone. Now start rolling for that humanity loss. Next! They fixed that in Revised by capping stats as I recall.

Eh, he's self admittedly young. Like a jaded methuselah savoring a neonate's unconscious breathing & blinking, I miss the halcyon days of easy laughter, passionate defenses, and the higher contrast of everday life. I have no need to beat that back down to the oatmeal grey pablum of overwhelmed indifference; life'll do that soon enough...

("Oh, the light grows dim from my aging eyes!" Suck on that personal horror, Doc Sammy! )

Quote from: Doc Sammy;918245Fair point. I guess I should really just move on. It's just that type of attitude persists on Onyx Path Forums and complaining about that attitude got me banned from RPG.net (Turns out Darren MacLerran is one of those Goth edgelords)

I like my WoD to be metaplot-free and done in a style often derided as "Superheroes With Fangs". And my playstyle is no less valid than their "Personal Horror" playstyle.

See? Now we're having a perfectly fine set of parameters to have this discussion. Like you - Onyx Path's employees turned me off to their entire product line. I own what I own, and nary shall they get a cent more from me. (there's obviously more to it than just that.)

But that doesn't make me hate Vampire. Anymore than I'd look at Darren MacLerran as some representative of "Goth" by *any* stretch of the imagination. But I'm cool with him and his friends at the TPB believing whatever they want.

I'm not comfortable with calling my Vampire "style" anything. There certainly is a lot of horror. And I try to make it personal to the characters, how the Players take it is on them (I had some very interesting reactions). But "Superheros with fangs" is kinda relative. If by that you mean you're leaning towards PC's being Vampires with little consequence to their condition? Got you. I find it kind of funny that people deride the existence of that "style" of play since I would probably be on the far other end of the spectrum. But the irony is - isn't that what *ALL* vampires and monsters in the WoD should be trying to vie for? A (un)life without consequences?

Where you set the marker is what makes one of the core conceits of your game. Regardless of metaplot and setting.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;918223This may be a silly question, but what was playing Vampire like in the early days of Vampire: The Requiem?

I know it seems silly because 2004 is more recent than 1991 (For example, I was alive in 2004, but I was born after 1991), but remember that I came into the WoD scene in late 2009-early 2010, after Geist had came out and the "classic" First Edition era of nWoD/CofD had more or less completed its run. This was the time when CCP had more or less left White Wolf to die as they worked on a now nonexistent MMO and then in 2011 came the huge surprise of V20 and the revival of oWoD and the birth of Onyx Path.

... and like that the shadow of age mocks me.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;918223I want to know what people thought of Requiem when it first came out and how it was played by people back then. I know the majority of WoD fans were butthurt and stuck to Masquerade (I happened to have the misfortune of LARP'ing with some of these butthurt oWoD fans), but I missed out on the closest thing that nWoD had to a heyday when oWoD wasn't supported and White Wolf hadn't been completely gutted by CCP or hijacked by Paradox Interactive.

Before the arrival of Demon: The Descent and the shitty God-Machine pseudo-metaplot, before the abominable Beast: The Primordial, before the Strix became the seemingly sole focus of Requiem. I want to know what New World of Darkness was like before it became Chronicles of Darkness, back when it was still supported by White Wolf.

Should that warrant another thread?

I'll be honest, I've run so much WoD - that when NWoD happened, I just absorbed the mechanics, and rolled right into doing the same exact style that I'd "perfected" for myself without missing a beat. There was no "wow this is cool and new" - it was simple "Hey! I like these unified mechanics more. Let's start fiddling with shit and do what we do."

The fluff of the game was somewhat interesting, I find some appeal in the structure of the politics. I like the coherence between the different splats. But ultimately it's my kinda system since I like toolbox-mechanics. I create Tenbones World of Motherfucking Daaaarkkknesssss!!!! And yeah - it worked. It lets me use whatever metaplot I see fit - but I kinda do that anyhow.

One of my favorite bits was to tease my players with elements from the Old World of Darkness - and slowly over the campaign they began to find out that the reason why things were the way they were was because in the OWoD when the Ravnos Antediluvian awoke and was blasted by the Technocracy and the Kuei-Jin - he invoked his Rank 10 power and changed reality. In my NWoD it was simple - he made everyone believe Caine never was. So the entire mythology among the Kindred fractured into the squabbling political groups you see in NWoD plus whatever I felt remained plausible from OWoD. For me, in NWoD - the Seven were essentially powerful Methusaleh that were not affected for various arcane reasons. They knew the truth.

It was a very interesting and scary game. It kept the players jumping all the time because I was literally hinging on the metagaming mentality of their knowledge of the OWoD, even making passing references to our old campaign. Good times.

TL/DR - NWoD just gave me more mechanical control to do more gonzo stuff within my own sandbox playstyle.

I played in one game of the NWoD Vampire when it came out. It was honestly just more of the same old, same old. The books might be visually different, the mechanics tweaked a bit, there might be no metaplot (something I never actually paid attention to in oWoD), and the clans renamed and mixed up a bit, but the game really wasn't discernably any different of an experience.

nWoD Changeling, on the other hand, was a completely new game. Or rather, it was a modern day incarnation of Dark Ages:Fae more than a redo of Changeling: The Dreaming. I liked what I rea, but by that point in time I ha my own system I used for everything and there was nothing appealing enough about any version of White Wolf's system to cause me to switch. Unlike some RPGs, while I havea lot of nostalgia for certain oWoD settings,I have none for the system (except the 1st edition Changeling Magic system, which apparently I was the only person on Earth who liked....or actually read it seems, because everyone thought it was about buying those ccg-style random packs of cards).

I always wanted to read/play that White Wolf clone game "The Everlasting" (or something like that).It seeme fun, an much more "urbanhorror-gonzo", almost giving a 'World of Synnibar-if-it-was-set-in-the-oWoD' vibe.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;918223This may be a silly question, but what was playing Vampire like in the early days of Vampire: The Requiem?

It was pretty crazy.  No one in my group really knew what to do with it.  I ran a kitchen sink mess of a Werewolf game.  One ran a game set in the TOS Star Trek era with supernatural types being open members of society and serving on starships.  They had artificial blood for vampires and the like.  One ran a Changeling game set in San Francisco because he loved that city and it was mostly about the city itself.  There was a war for the literal soul of the city between developer types and underground transgressive types.  It was all very crazy and all over the place.  Metaplot didn't matter even a little.  Playstyles were all over the place and personal horror wasn't really a big factor at all.  I tried to do some of it on my game but no one gave a crap so I dropped it.  We even time traveled to the Wild West in the Star Trek one because the ST had seen a Western she really liked a couple of days before.

We all looked like Edgar Winter, and the blood was REAL. (I have no idea--the game sorta spooked me)

I know a lot of people make a big thing about the 'play style' of personal horror, but you know it was just a descriptor on the back page. I have never read in any Vampire book ever, where they have claimed the game is strictly about playing in a set way to create personal horror. Indeed, it's always plainly said just to play the game in your own way. For me, the "personal horror" idea is simply a reference the point that the PCs are playing the monsters, rather than them being an exclusively external factor as in most other horror games. That's all. If you want a game that is more directed in it's play towards a theme of personalised horror, then that would be Wraith: The Oblivion with it's Shadowplay.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;917937Buckets of dice, too many rolls for attack/damage/defense/shenanigans, confusing initiative, botches, unbalanced multiple-action rules, unbalanced combat maneuver options, and hispo being generally better than the so-called "war form" crinos for combat.

If those are your problems, no - they didn't rewrite the entire system. I'm also going to politely disagree about the crinos:hipso comparison, but not going to chase that conversation in this thread.

The botch rules as the bit I can't believe, after all these years, they didn't just fix. i mean, jesus, they're awful. Just awful. There's the usual newer "oh, if you rolled successes it isn't a full botch, etc." but still, each "1" rolled killing a success is just brutal. With all the house rules over the years about botch mechanics, surely someone in that office must have read one and went "wow, that's better than the crap we printed".

My endorsement of the 20th editions is that you get a whole lot of the game line in one book. For Vampire, all the clans in one book. For Mage, all the Traditions and Crafts in one book. It's made Vampire back into a one book game, which is what I prefer.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;918223This may be a silly question, but what was playing Vampire like in the early days of Vampire: The Requiem?

The old game died. The company replaced their game with a newer, shinier version of their system and world, with altered themes and mechanics. We tried it out. Some of the changes were for the better (WtF, CtL), but it didn't take long for us to begin to yearn for the older games. I know after running Mage: The Awakening for 2 years, I wanted to revert to Mage: The Ascension, and really never looked back. I generally prefer the newer dice engine, but it's too much hassle to cherry picks the parts of the system I like between old and new.

I will say there was a bold sense that White Wolf was trying to really push their lines, and to compete with the other games on the market. But making nothing but expensive hardcovers for their splats, and taking so long to revise the core rules was a mistake.

It had a raw mystery and isolation about it that was lost in the latter editions. Back then the world just felt... bigger and lonelier. And while the LARPs in Florida earned their notoriety, I somehow never encountered any of those problems. Thinking back I actually kinda miss it.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;916753I don't think the metaphors work because vampires are predators who rape, eat and infect people.

Vampires are predisposed to such behaviors, but they still have a choice.

Keeping destructive urges like those in check has been a core theme in almost every vampire example I can think of, and losing sight of that is the thing most responsible for the T&K style of play Masquerade resulted in most of the time. But that representation is potentially offensive too because it implies you can accidentally 'rape' someone if you lose control.

I often wonder why this genre appeals to so many women.

#EqualOpportunity

Quote from: IskandarKebab;916896True Blood used Vampirism as a metaphor for being gay only in the context of living with secrets and the struggle to be open about who you are.

Metaphors don't have to be precise. In fact I'm pretty sure that's the point.

Quote from: IskandarKebab;916896It did NOT link the predatory nature of Vampirism (which was the fucking point of Box's post, if you bothered to spend more than a second on it) to its LGBT context, in the classic Vampires=homosexuals dynamic of "Vampires preying on impressionable youth and turning them gay." In fact, all of the classic vampire metaphors you mentioned (sex/HIV/gay) were about societal out-groups (HIV positive horny gay people) preying on vulnerable populations and infecting them with their life-style or disease. Which, shockingly, is kind of an outrageously offensive dynamic and one that True Blood (and Being Human, another major modern show about vampirism) deliberately avoided and were actually responding to.

And yet cultural infection is such a fundamental theme I don't think it can be avoided. No matter what you do, one group is going to end up the predator, and one group the prey.

Quote from: Frey;917788I started playing the game in 93 or 94, I think. And always remember that the first published modules were dungeon crawls where the reward was an increase in "blood level"!

Yep.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;916674Those are silly and offensive metaphors.

Sex: are we talking a pathological sex addiction? Pedophile priests? Domestic rape? Because vampirism as metaphor for women's sexual freedom is offensive.

HIV: people with HIV don't eat people. Also offensive.

Gay: ditto.

Quote from: Omega;917889Next year...

Vampirisim is a metaphor for misguided liberalism!

A few years after that it will be...

Vampirisim is a metaphor for rabid SJWs!

Here's the thing about metaphors: Vampirisim represents all those things at once. That's how metaphors work. How they're interpreted depends on the cultural context and personal experience of the viewer however, which does change with time and lead to certain interpretations being offensive.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;918145My main issue with the Goth and Punk subcultures is that both subcultures are by their very nature full of mopey, whiny, pretentious malcontents who have really shitty music.

Oh man, you went there.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;918191One of the best things I ever did was stop worrying about musical tribes and just accept good music wherever it happens to come from.

Now I'm thinking musical genres as vampire clans.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;918740[...]it implies you can accidentally 'rape' someone if you lose control.

I often wonder why this genre appeals to so many women.

You just answered your own question.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;918740Vampires are predisposed to such behaviors, but they still have a choice.

To some extent.  Sometimes you had to spend willpower which was not an unlimited resource.  You can't always control the beast.

So, can't we all agree that 1e was so much better than Revised? At least thematically.