Reading this thread I'm feeling a bit alone here.

I picked up Vampire at OrcCon the year it released. My group was pretty diverse in terms of what sub-cultures we were from. Seven in total, a couple of die-hard nerds both Mexican, a couple of ex-gangbangers (black), a couple of Asians - one into cars, the other into "weird shit". And one goth-punk white guy. We'd have Westside Connection playing as much as Skinny Puppy or some old-school Black Flag, or Circle Jerks. Depended greatly on who was playing what and the location within the game.

When Vampire landed and we played, our characters didn't do the trenchcoat-katana thing, it never even *dawned* on us until we saw in nerd-circles talking about it in relation to Highlander. We played it, and I ran it with as much personal exploration of the setting as it would allow. What's funny is that my players ended up doing a LOT of things to protect themselves in-game that would later become standard operating procedure for the Sabbat (which wouldn't even see print for years).

I dunno, we played what we knew: people trying to live their unlives suddenly discovering this new social order. Sure some indulged in their powers, but as a GM I was always making their condition be part of the experience. Alienation from what was to what is. We explored the nature of power - controlling gangs, people, whatever - and fighting to maintain it. It was never about the angst of "forever"... /swoooooon - sure there are NPC's pulling that shit, but in my groups they were always a means to the end. The "end" which was always the amorphous and nebulous position of "freedom". Which of course is the illusion.

The years of play have worn that thin. I've run a Vampire Chronicle that lasted for well over 6-years. Had great times. But it's gotten stale for me.

I'm more interested in Werewolf or Changeling the Lost. As for NWoD - like most people, love the system, dislike most of everything else. I own all the 20th Anniversary stuff, nice-ish cleanup of the rules. Have yet to actually use them. May never happen.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;917304What the fuck is the god machine anyway and why did they feel the need to add what appears to be a meta-plot back into games that benefited enormously from the removal of meta-plot?

The God-Machine is an all-knowing cosmic deity cum machine-god cum anything and everything of the "Darkness" part of World of Darkness cum "digital" god-architect. I shit you not they turned World of Darkness into a Matrix simulation.

Here's how I explain it to players when they ask me about it:

"GMC is what you get when a handful of writers/designers, who are really into their particular style of game and who wanted to make WOD for their clique, the reins to a major license with no hierarchy to oversee and curb them. So what happened was that White Wolf was taken over by CCP.hf -- who made EVE Online, an MMORPG game like World of Warcraft -- who essentially wanted nothing to do with the tabletop side of things but wanted to get a slice of the market. They were going to make a WOD MMORPG but their priority obviously was their big cahoona EVE so that was never going to happen -- didn't stop em' from hyping it up (but business-minded gamers like me saw it for what it was).

So they licensed it out to that same clique I said before who turned into an outfit called Onyx Path. Essentially, Onyx was given free reign to do whatever they wanted and so it literally just turned into whatever it was that THEY were interested in and THEY played in their WOD games. No big publisher to rein them in and make sure they were designing for a broader audience like it was when White Wolf was around. Their whole thing was storygames and so they turned into more of storygame with a fair amount of the system still there for legacy (and legal reasons) but it was now redesigned to take a backseat, so more traditional (actual gamey bits) stuff got suppressed and now GM's had a lot less control and sway over the actual mechanical reality of the game (something called Tilts and Conditions which means to you that there are now very specific things a GM can say happen to you, say due to tripping or being shot or getting bad news. It was so bad that combat was heavily muffled and made ridiculously lethal so that players would just go with their new rule which handwaved the combat down to essentially a simple contested die roll (and that's ALL combat). Social stuff got put to the forefront but in a negative way and it wasn't empowering just essentially a switcheroo from proper meaty combat to proper meaty... social combat. And Morality was switched for "Integrity" which ultimately allows a player to say "hey, murder doesn't bother me!" -- Derangements were seperated from losing Morality for god knows what reason because the gothic nature of the game means people go nuts from doing more violent things and dark stuff like happens in real-life (I should know... I'm a... hothead).

 From there on loads of awful design decisions followed, including MTC starting characters off with max potency stat (if you know VTM, think Generation, if VTR then Blood Potency) and it dwindling down over a matter of in-game weeks instead of something actually sane as normal progression from weak to powerful. There's a lot more but we can talk about it later if you want -- hey, any of you assholes have Q&A? Yeah? Dex, see I'm trying to buy Firearms and this Merit here, see..."

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;917305Oh, and what do you think of the 20th Anniversary rulesets for oWoD?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;917428The rules have always had problems going right back to VTM 1e. So I switched to another system. Apocalypse World has three games for monster mashes.

Same guy who despises MTC also has that. I'm not really a fan of the system it uses or its general concept the way he explained it. He said it's really not that good a system if you wanna do proper RPG games.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;917304What the fuck is the god machine anyway and why did they feel the need to add what appears to be a meta-plot back into games that benefited enormously from the removal of meta-plot?

It's main purpose is to tie the cosmologies together.  It's not really a metaplot.  There is no specific plot tied to it unless it's in some book I don't have.  It's more of a plot seed or plot device for the GM to use or ignore.

The God-Machine is a World of Darkness thing, not necessarily a Vampire, or Werewolf or Prometheus or whatever thing.  Instead of being the real secret behind EVERYTHING, it's just yet another optional "secret history of the world", one that you can use by itself, or that sets up the new Demon: The Descent.  There are a couple references to something behind the scenes in a couple supplements of the various lines, but in keeping with the nWoD method of not really stating the "Truth of the Setting" whether any of this stuff all comes under the God-Machine Umbrella or not is up to the GM.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;917305Oh, and what do you think of the 20th Anniversary rulesets for oWoD?

Each one is an improvement on the previous one, so far, but they are all distinctly very large books. Not for the uninitiated therefore. The 20th Mage I like especially, though, as all the previous editions had some editing and technical issues, which are finally tidied up and they've managed to include a load of good material that really brings out the diversity of the full setting. In short I like and get what I'm reading about, but if I wasn't already a fan, I can see how it is quite intimidating.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;916603And I feel as if Martin Ericsson and his "One World of Darkness" is only going to make things worse.

Being way out of the loop on anything to do with White Wolf since circa '99, who is Ericsson and what is his "One World of Darkness"?

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.

Are you joking? Please say you're joking.

Vampires and vampirism are metaphors for lots of things, some of them uncomfortable issues. If you labour under the weight of misguided literalism you may be prone to taking offence.

When the nWoD rules came out, I was initially enthused about them. A tighter mechanical structure, one roll resolving more of combat, all of it sounded like some interesting and useful evolutions of the Storyteller dice engine. I really liked the Blood Potency mechanic. But then, in play, it was a mess. I ran a 2 year MtA game and by about year one, we were beginning to see the serious gaps in the system. More importantly, the actual setting didn't engage us the way the cWoD setting did. After a while we all agreed on the same word to describe this new WoD setting - Sterilized. Cultural references? Gone. All structures purely social and essentially fantastic? Check. Nothing offensive, nothing to ever link these creatures back to the real world. When the 2.0 rules came out (GMC) I picked them up to read through, and while they seemed like a good update to the base rules, my group has switched back to the cWoD rules and mechanics when we do run Storyteller games.

The 20th Anniversary Editions are, thus far, excellent purchases. They nicely mesh most of the 2nd and Revised edition rules, back the metaplot off the setting (but include how to use it, rules changes, etc) and acknowledge the different edition play styles and choices. If I have criticisms, they would be a) both are gigantic, and really could have used a lot less fluffy descriptions here and there to keep the page count down b) the gender pronoun business doesn't irk me personally, but I'm not certain that our language has accepted neutral descriptions yet, so I don't like to see them in serious print.

I don't have any particular gripe against the nWoD games - now CoD, of course - but it wasn't a mechanical issue for me. It was just that they made a deliberate attempt to make the games more generic in use, and as such removed a lot of the cultural and thematic references in the premises and back-stories of each that made the original games so interesting to me.

Quote from: Coffee Zombie;917678The 20th Anniversary Editions are, thus far, excellent purchases. They nicely mesh most of the 2nd and Revised edition rules, back the metaplot off the setting (but include how to use it, rules changes, etc) and acknowledge the different edition play styles and choices. If I have criticisms, they would be a) both are gigantic, and really could have used a lot less fluffy descriptions here and there to keep the page count down b) the gender pronoun business doesn't irk me personally, but I'm not certain that our language has accepted neutral descriptions yet, so I don't like to see them in serious print.

Do the anniversary editions fix the combat problems?
Do they fix the other issues?
I heard the designers didn't want to alienate old fans and were very conservative, so I'm not sure if there were enough fixes to be worthwhile.

Quote from: tenbones;917470Reading this thread I'm feeling a bit alone here.

I picked up Vampire at OrcCon the year it released. My group was pretty diverse in terms of what sub-cultures we were from. Seven in total, a couple of die-hard nerds both Mexican, a couple of ex-gangbangers (black), a couple of Asians - one into cars, the other into "weird shit". And one goth-punk white guy. We'd have Westside Connection playing as much as Skinny Puppy or some old-school Black Flag, or Circle Jerks. Depended greatly on who was playing what and the location within the game.

When Vampire landed and we played, our characters didn't do the trenchcoat-katana thing, it never even *dawned* on us until we saw in nerd-circles talking about it in relation to Highlander. We played it, and I ran it with as much personal exploration of the setting as it would allow. What's funny is that my players ended up doing a LOT of things to protect themselves in-game that would later become standard operating procedure for the Sabbat (which wouldn't even see print for years).

I dunno, we played what we knew: people trying to live their unlives suddenly discovering this new social order. Sure some indulged in their powers, but as a GM I was always making their condition be part of the experience. Alienation from what was to what is. We explored the nature of power - controlling gangs, people, whatever - and fighting to maintain it. It was never about the angst of "forever"... /swoooooon - sure there are NPC's pulling that shit, but in my groups they were always a means to the end. The "end" which was always the amorphous and nebulous position of "freedom". Which of course is the illusion.

The years of play have worn that thin. I've run a Vampire Chronicle that lasted for well over 6-years. Had great times. But it's gotten stale for me.

I'm more interested in Werewolf or Changeling the Lost. As for NWoD - like most people, love the system, dislike most of everything else. I own all the 20th Anniversary stuff, nice-ish cleanup of the rules. Have yet to actually use them. May never happen.

RISE ABOVE! RISE ABOVE, WE'RE GONNA RISE ABOVE!

Fucking legend.

Agent Orange isn't bad too. Awwh man, Johnny Thunder, Richard Hell, The Weirdos, Husker Du, hell even New York Dolls (man I went all East Coast here... jesus...).

See, I really didn't get the hate for Punk. Like, it's been incredibly influential on more mainstream rock from the period. Even the big alternative bands took their cues from em'...

The games you had sound very in the zone -- totally nailing the general WOD vibe, agnostic of the particular generation/series of the system itself. Good stuff.

Quote from: CRKrueger;917498The God-Machine is a World of Darkness thing, not necessarily a Vampire, or Werewolf or Prometheus or whatever thing.  Instead of being the real secret behind EVERYTHING, it's just yet another optional "secret history of the world", one that you can use by itself, or that sets up the new Demon: The Descent.  There are a couple references to something behind the scenes in a couple supplements of the various lines, but in keeping with the nWoD method of not really stating the "Truth of the Setting" whether any of this stuff all comes under the God-Machine Umbrella or not is up to the GM.

That's totally bogus. They've designed everything post-GMC to fit what's within it. Hell, the Strix can be argued to be organic manifestation of thing. Come on man, don't undersell how strong they played into it throughout the newer books. The very fact that you mentioned Demon, I mean, it's literally designed to encompass it all and that a whole game used it as DEFAULT setting is more damming. Same thing with the design ethos, as mentioned. Proof in the pudding, you know and all that.

Quote from: TristramEvans;917639Being way out of the loop on anything to do with White Wolf since circa '99, who is Ericsson and what is his "One World of Darkness"?

This guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlA6LKUNDWs

I 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"!

Quote from: Doc Sammy;917087When it comes to White Wolf, I never do things "by the book". Ever.

In my nWoD, Vampires are NOT emotionally or creatively dead and some are actually heroic. Also, the Strix and the God-Machine do NOT exist in my games. My games are anime-influenced and extremely anti-Gothic and anti-Punk. And that's how they're always going to be.

To each their own.

"To each their own" but anime > "DC and Marvel that suck," vintage rock > "punk/goth that suck," yada yada. Why are you even here? People are talking about Vampire 1st Edition. You insist everything that made that game a success "ruined" it, and you play nWod with Sailor Moon and anti-goth ponies or something. What else do you play? Anti-medieval CCR Ars Magica? :rolleyes:

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;917769This guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlA6LKUNDWs

I got about 15 minutes in, even skipping ahead. Videos suck, humans talk too slowly and have a hard time getting to the point. All I've surmised is he's a White Wolf fanboy that now owns the company.