Taking the whole game line into account, Vampire hardly seems to know what Vampire's themes are.

Quote from: yosemitemike;919972Taking the whole game line into account, Vampire hardly seems to know what Vampire's themes are.

Thats the same with any RPG where you get different writers for different material. Or when the game doesnt really have a theme.

The impression I got from my read-through of 1st ed was that the setting was focused on social and political intrigues both inside and between each faction. Combat seemed like almost an afterthought there. Or something to use mostly on the mundanes. That and to me the mild tone of gradual corruption of ideals as the darkness tempts.

I got no impression of horror, goth or trenchcoats and katanas at all. More like the first Ann Rice novel despite how many times the writers denied it.

Werewolf came across as all these factions at eachothers throats because they are all totally raging idiots more concerned with making things worse than fighting the horrors. Grudges grudges and more stupid grudges. Werewolf the Grudge.

Mage had the least theme to me. You are magic users screwing with other magic users... because! Oh and maybee pausing to annoy these technomage jerks or zap some thingy from beyond before resuming fucking with other magic users... because.

Wraith was the most interesting to me. You are dead. The afterlife sucks. Literally. You can try to hang on to what you have left of yourself and try and help others in and out of the afterlife while resisting the darkness within and without. The one campaign I saw took place totally inside the afterlife dealing with all the problems there.

An overarching theme in all the books was that no one seems to really know what happened in the past. Wraith had that the least.

Aberrant had the most straightforward theme. Superheroes and Conspiracies. And depending on your interest and/or bad luck. More of one or the other. Also the theme of what would happen if you gave normal people superpowers.

Changeling is the one I know the least of. What little I've seen seems to be courtly intrigue, maybee fantasy questing, and annoying the other races.

Changeling was the most disjointed of the gamelines in regards to themes. It basically took a handful of themes and threw them at a fan, trying to see which ones stuck to the walls after being shredded. There was the "stranger in a strange land" concept of being aliens "trapped in a world they didn't create", there was the class war aspect of commoners vs nobles, there was the "Peter Pan" theme of the death of childhood dreams as one got older, there was the "butterfly in a storm" theme of hope in a world of darkness. And that was just the corebook.

It's my favourite of the owod games, but it had no idea what it wanted to be, and each new author with each new splat compounded this further and further.

Quote from: Omega;920015Thats the same with any RPG where you get different writers for different material. Or when the game doesnt really have a theme.

The impression I got from my read-through of 1st ed was that the setting was focused on social and political intrigues both inside and between each faction. Combat seemed like almost an afterthought there. Or something to use mostly on the mundanes. That and to me the mild tone of gradual corruption of ideals as the darkness tempts.

If you gave someone who didn't know anything about the game, told them to read a random part and then asked them what it was about you might get

politics and intrigue
Inter-generational struggle
Feudalism vs modernity
Fight the powaz street revolution
Redemption
Corruption
The unbearable ennui of being an immortal artiste

Among other thing depending on where they opened the book.

Quote from: TristramEvans;920039Changeling was the most disjointed of the gamelines in regards to themes. It basically took a handful of themes and threw them at a fan, trying to see which ones stuck to the walls after being shredded. There was the "stranger in a strange land" concept of being aliens "trapped in a world they didn't create", there was the class war aspect of commoners vs nobles, there was the "Peter Pan" theme of the death of childhood dreams as one got older, there was the "butterfly in a storm" theme of hope in a world of darkness. And that was just the corebook.

It's my favourite of the owod games, but it had no idea what it wanted to be, and each new author with each new splat compounded this further and further.

C20 will supposedly have 110 kiths! Woohoo! That's up from, what?, 80+ already? I call dibs on being first yunwi amai'yine'hi!

It is the most fragile of sugar sculpture flowers within an art nouveau greenhouse, during a hurricane. It's dark because it's tragic. Something so pretty, so fleeting, so imperiled... so cray-cray.

Quote from: yosemitemike;920104If you gave someone who didn't know anything about the game, told them to read a random part and then asked them what it was about you might get

politics and intrigue
Inter-generational struggle
Feudalism vs modernity
Fight the powaz street revolution
Redemption
Corruption
The unbearable ennui of being an immortal artiste

Among other thing depending on where they opened the book.

That was me and my impression reading the whole book after knowing nothing of the game. You know... Im not even sure how I came by the book. Think I picked it up out of curiosity or a sale.

Quote from: Opaopajr;920112C20 will supposedly have 110 kiths! Woohoo! That's up from, what?, 80+ already? I call dibs on being first yunwi amai'yine'hi!

I backed the kickstarter for C20 initially, then dropped out once I found out what they had done to the Mage 20th Anniversary.

Quote from: TristramEvans;920165I backed the kickstarter for C20 initially, then dropped out once I found out what they had done to the Mage 20th Anniversary.

Oh god no! Don't tell me. [Something something]  "check your privilege" [something something] genital policing nightmares [something something] "fuck you, you'll have half-assed Poser art and you'll like it!"

*sigh* Better finish my collection before the speculator prices occur. Thank goodness I gave zero shits about Mage, given how M20 was supposedly inc(l/r)ucified.

Quote from: GameDaddy;919968There might be a couple other folks that remember the Late Punk-Early Goth era in SoCal here.

http://weirdotronix.tripod.com/wotxgig1.htm

http://www.corndogs.org/minutemen%2011-15-85.html

The Golden Bear
http://www.latimes.com/local/orangecounty/la-me-1206-hbclub-20141206-story.html

Other clubs that were hot that I heard about

Circle City and 321

.

GameDaddy - I'll bet you and I probably ran across one another at some point. Though it sounds like you were with the OC crowd (South Bay here).

3-2-1 was Ehhhhh... but super popular with the trendies, plus it had the under-18 crowd (which was why it was so popular since it was the only place you could get into with knowing someone, or not having a fake ID).

I spent most of my time when I wasn't going to rock dives on the Strip with my girlfriend that worked for Westwood One (so yeah, I frequently ended up doing the KNAC trifecta: Gazzari's-Whiskey-Troubadour thing) or I'd end up doing every bar between Melrose and the Strip. But every Friday it was Helter Skelter at Club Probe, which was pretty much as Goth as it got without going full-blown deviant (for that: Club Fuck). Many good (and bad) times.

My crowd rarely ventured into OC territory. Had a penchant for not feeling very welcome there. "Locals only bro!!!" and all that shit.

Yeah you definitely brought up a lot of old memories. And all of it informed my WoD play. Not in terms of implicit "Goth IS WoD" - it was, is, always will be to me - "Goth subculture makes for an awfully nice place to hunt for food." Those early Goth clubs in the late-80's and 90's really just painted all the trappings that filtered into WoD as a motif. I think that people that never trucked into those circles, gamers, just glommed onto the surface of it all and defined their games by it out of novelty.

Quote from: Omega;920015The impression I got from my read-through of 1st ed was that the setting was focused on social and political intrigues both inside and between each faction. Combat seemed like almost an afterthought there. Or something to use mostly on the mundanes. That and to me the mild tone of gradual corruption of ideals as the darkness tempts.

I got no impression of horror, goth or trenchcoats and katanas at all. More like the first Ann Rice novel despite how many times the writers denied it.

This was my general experience as well. Although I can't see how *anyone* at WW could deny it was a direct lift from Ann Rice? I actually don't know anyone there that denied it. I know Mark Rein-Hagen never denied it. Hell, the "World of Darkness" is a direct line from her novels. Maybe this was a later thing? I know no one in my circle of friends that played ever thought that WoD wasn't just Anne Rice on roids.

The horror part for me, was kinda there because I identified with the themes of vampires being essentially addicts of the worst sort. And I had a lot of friends in that cycle that let me home in on a lot of the human-horror elements with the dial turned up to 11 due to the condition. It made for good horror. But I can totally see a lot of people not leveraging that. Of course there's also all the supernatural shit.

Quote from: Omega;920015Werewolf came across as all these factions at eachothers throats because they are all totally raging idiots more concerned with making things worse than fighting the horrors. Grudges grudges and more stupid grudges. Werewolf the Grudge.

Yeah it did come across that way. Still does. It took me a few years to get a good handhold on Werewolf before I could run it without the players crusading themselves horrifically into a TPK. My WW games were really short affairs until I started making some tweaks to the whole Apocalypse thing to render it less... "grudgy".

Quote from: Omega;920015Mage had the least theme to me. You are magic users screwing with other magic users... because! Oh and maybee pausing to annoy these technomage jerks or zap some thingy from beyond before resuming fucking with other magic users... because.

I thought it was cool as fuck... at first. Then I started feeling it was more "grudgy" and ultimately more of a dead-end conceptually than Werewolf, but for different reasons.

Quote from: Omega;920015Wraith was the most interesting to me. You are dead. The afterlife sucks. Literally. You can try to hang on to what you have left of yourself and try and help others in and out of the afterlife while resisting the darkness within and without. The one campaign I saw took place totally inside the afterlife dealing with all the problems there.

An overarching theme in all the books was that no one seems to really know what happened in the past. Wraith had that the least.

Spot on. I do think Geist in the NWoD did a good job of re-framing the Wraith conceits into something far more playable. I have yet to run it... just like Wraith.

Quote from: Omega;920015Changeling is the one I know the least of. What little I've seen seems to be courtly intrigue, maybee fantasy questing, and annoying the other races.

I owned the books. Never caught on. Love the concepts. But I could never run it in a way I thought my players would find "fun". Changeling the Lost? My players love it. I love it. But I keep looking at the Dreaming feeling I missed out on something. But I don't know what it is.

Quote from: tenbones;920458This was my general experience as well. Although I can't see how *anyone* at WW could deny it was a direct lift from Ann Rice? I actually don't know anyone there that denied it. I know Mark Rein-Hagen never denied it. Hell, the "World of Darkness" is a direct line from her novels. Maybe this was a later thing? I know no one in my circle of friends that played ever thought that WoD wasn't just Anne Rice on roids.
.

I was surprised to see fans of WoD say Anne Rice was either not an influence or not a big one. Personally, when I first saw Vampire, it looked like someone had read Interview with a Vampire and made a game based on the experience (which was cool and fine by me). People saying there isn't a connection, is only something I've encountered online and I really don't understand it when I've seen it.

Quote from: tenbones;920458I know no one in my circle of friends that played ever thought that WoD wasn't just Anne Rice on roids.

QuoteYeah it did come across that way. Still does. It took me a few years to get a good handhold on Werewolf before I could run it without the players crusading themselves horrifically into a TPK.

QuoteBut I keep looking at the Dreaming feeling I missed out on something. But I don't know what it is.

Here's the thing about early WW games: they're supernatural/horror kitchen sinks the same way D&D is a fantasy kitchen sink and Shadowrun is a cyberpunk kitchen sink.  VtM isn't "Anne Rice on 'roids", it's Anne Rice and Bram Stoker and le Fanu and Lost Boys and Near Dark and Brian Lumley all in a blender, and then the serial numbers and copyright notices filed off.

This broadly worked for VtM because vampire media was popular enough that people coming in would recognize at least some of the influences.  While not all those vampire sources are entirely reconcilable, you can largely ignore the parts you don't like/recognize and still play.  Later WW games suffered from using sources that were both obscure and even more irreconcilable, leading to the whole "WTF do I do with this" problem. The games don't give you enough of a view of a Day In The Life Of to hang a character on, and you're not likely to have read (or even heard of) the source material that might, and even if you have it's been mashed up with some totally incompatible notion of werewolves/wizards/ghosts/faeries that you can't just drop because it's baked into the mechanics.

Quote from: daniel_ream;920482Here's the thing about early WW games: they're supernatural/horror kitchen sinks the same way D&D is a fantasy kitchen sink and Shadowrun is a cyberpunk kitchen sink.  VtM isn't "Anne Rice on 'roids", it's Anne Rice and Bram Stoker and le Fanu and Lost Boys and Near Dark and Brian Lumley all in a blender, and then the serial numbers and copyright notices filed off.

I was hugely into Dracula and Le Fanu when I first encountered Masquerade, and have to say I really didn't see either one at all in it. What made Vampire different was the fact that you played the Vampire and there was some kind of vampire culture in the background, like secret societies. That stuff is all very Anne Rice to me. I wasn't terribly familiar with Brian Lumely so maybe there is something there that I am missing. And certainly Near Dark and Lost Boys fit too. But the Masquerade screamed Interview with the Vampire very loudly.

Quote from: daniel_ream;920482VtM isn't "Anne Rice on 'roids", it's Anne Rice and Bram Stoker and le Fanu and Lost Boys and Near Dark and Brian Lumley all in a blender, and then the serial numbers and copyright notices filed off.

This is true, though for me, I didn't realize it until much later. MOST everyone I knew, had read Anne Rice. I think I was the only one that had read Stoker, and Lumley and Le Fanu. But 'Near Dark' and less so, 'The Lost Boys' were there and very much a part of my digestion process of Vampire. Rice loomed tallest among them. But even then, I never ran the game as if it were expressly a Rice-style game. Hell I'd say "Kiss of the Vampire" with Nick Cage had as much influence in my game as anything else. But yeah, after running the game for a long time, especially as the splats started to mount up, all those influences including a lot of non-vampire genre influences could definitely be seen.

Quote from: daniel_ream;920482This broadly worked for VtM because vampire media was popular enough that people coming in would recognize at least some of the influences.  While not all those vampire sources are entirely reconcilable, you can largely ignore the parts you don't like/recognize and still play.  Later WW games suffered from using sources that were both obscure and even more irreconcilable, leading to the whole "WTF do I do with this" problem. The games don't give you enough of a view of a Day In The Life Of to hang a character on, and you're not likely to have read (or even heard of) the source material that might, and even if you have it's been mashed up with some totally incompatible notion of werewolves/wizards/ghosts/faeries that you can't just drop because it's baked into the mechanics.

Yep. This is why everyone ends up making their own mythos about what this all is about. And of course your outcomes will vary.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;920494I was hugely into Dracula and Le Fanu when I first encountered Masquerade, and have to say I really didn't see either one at all in it.

Gangrel.  I don't remember off the top of my head what the direct le Fanu reference was, I'd have to re-read it.

QuoteI wasn't terribly familiar with Brian Lumely so maybe there is something there that I am missing.

Tszimisce and Vicissitude.

And the Salubri are from the anime 3x3 Eyes, etc., etc.