Quote from: two_fishes;493733What he means is that the new World of Darkness line is 7 years old, now. Seriously, WTF?
Is starting a thread asking a question that has been hashed and rehashed by everyone who pays the least bit of attention really that much harder than a wikipedia search?. I don't want to sound like condescending dick, but man, r u srs?

If you haven't heard a story, then it's not old.

Quote from: JDCorley;493801Nobody gives a shit about the internal decisionmaking of a small business 7 years after the fact.

Obviously I do, or else I wouldn't have asked the question, Enlightened Master.

Since I don't keep up with the current pulse of the RPG world, as some here do, I thought there would be many experts who could answer my question. Pseudoephedrine and Imperator gave pretty good answers, I thought.

And the there's folks like you who apparently are just here to let the world know they had an 'accident' and require a clean diaper.

Quote from: TristramEvans;493884
Changeling: The Lost, btw, was a masterpiece.

I agree.

Quote from: CRKrueger;493802There's only so many years you can carry on a metaplot about being right on the edge of Gehenna/Apocalypse/Armageddon/The Gathering/Ragnarok/whatever  before you have to pull the trigger.  Especially when your main marketing technique is to advance the metaplot closer to it with every novel and splatbook, of which there seemed like a hundred.

That makes a lot of sense. Rifts has done that (but keeps reinventing itself) with several of its supplements. For example, the Rifts Africa contains info for a battle between the heros of Earth and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The thing difference as I see it is that Rift's event is not neccessary for the continuation of the game universe, whereas it seems that WoD's V:TM was continingent on Ghenna happening. Once it happened, there was nowhere to go.

Quote from: Blazing Donkey;493720Then, about a year ago, I was in a RPG store and ran into Vampire: The Requiem.  It had changed a lot of the clans, added new ones, changed the magic, but had kept much of the premise of the original 'Masquerade' books.

Out of the nWoD lines with direct roots in the oWoD, Vampire: The Requiem arguably remained the closest to its predecessor. At the time of the release there was a fair amount of complaining on various forums by people who had anticipated more dramatic setting changes and were disappointed that the game still featured relatively familiar Clans, Disciplines, the Masquerade, and so on. By contrast, for instance Changeling: The Lost has little more in common with its older counterpart than the subject of the fae and a handful of mostly redefined leftover terminology.

In keeping with the toolbox approach taken by the new WoD in general, one major change in Requiem is the lack of metaplot and unified origin myth. (No Caine, no Generation.) Despite various alternative beliefs and theories, the published material offers no solid canonical explanation for how vampires came into existence, and the books hint that the five clans may actually have begun as separate "species" grown to resemble each other through a kind of parallel evolution. And speaking of the clans, there are now precisely five of those as broad archetypes, while bloodlines constitute "subclans" within them instead of acting as minor lineages in their own right.

One thing that confused me and made me feel uninterested, like Blazing Donkey, was the way Requiem seems to be in the middle somewhere between reinterpreting clans and creating new ones. Gangrel didn't change much but Nosferatu and Ventrue had the "new coke" symptom. And why did the Toreador get a new name (Daeva) and not the others? I admit it's a cosmetic issue in a way but it added up with other stuff to make me feel "meh" about Requiem. Fortunately Benoist is showing me how awesome the game is in his Paris By Night PbP campaign.

The main thing about the "Clans" of Requiem is to understand they don't actually represent the same type of concepts as they did in Masquerade. As GrimGent said very well, clans are much broader in Requiem in nature, while Bloodlines act more as the equivalent of "Masquerade clans".

The Gangrel archetype is already itself very broad, the primal hunter aspect of the vampire, and all you needed to do was to take the animal features away for the archetype to be declined in many more ways.

Same thing about the Nosferatu : the concept behind the Requiem Nosfe is about Fear, without AND within, not "ugliness" or "I'm wearing my monster badge on my FACE" - so you still can play your ugly motherfucker if you want to, but you're not trapped into that schtick and may instead opt for more psychological expressions of the monster that inspires fear in others.

The Ventrue are still about kingship, or rather ruler-ship, but they are also very much about decadence and "power corrupts, inevitably" in nature. They're about madness, diseases born from their blood, and much more besides.

The Mékhet act as a much broader clan than the old Lasombra. Actually, the Lasombra would make a perfect bloodline for them (or a Ventrue bloodline if you prefer the "power behind the throne" aspect of the Lasombra, or even a Nosferatu bloodline if you prefer to emphasize the creepy aspect of Obtenebration in your WoD setting). They're the stalkers, the lovers of darkness, the vampires disappearing in the blink of an eye, damn complex besides, with tons of little tidbits about them that remind you of the Setites, the Nosferatu information network and spying schtick, and yes, a lot more stuff besides.

The Daeva are not the Toreador. The Daeva are succubi and incubi. They are agents of a warped, dangerous, deadly sensuality expressed through the vampire. They're the representation of the this duality of Sex and Death that mixed to give us the very archetype of the vampire, and his Blood.

So yeah. The Clan archetypes are just that: very, very broad archetypes, much broader than Masquerade clans. The Lasombra could be an Mékhet bloodline in Requiem. The Tzimisce would be Ventrue infected by a strange disease of the East, if you were to keep Vicissitude as it is in Masquerade. And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem. And so on, so forth.

Again, Ben's nailed it. Requiem's Clans are broad and archetypal, rather than tribal gatherings of vampires bound both by descent and social convention/tradition (i.e. actual clans), as they were in Masquerade. They are more like Werewolf's (old and new) Auspices, where Masquerade's Clans were more like Tribes. They're no longer as crucial in determining where one stands in vampire politics.

Quote from: Benoist;493921The Mékhet act as a much broader clan than the old Lasombra. Actually, the Lasombra would make a perfect bloodline for them.

Actually, the Khaibit (from Bloodlines: The Hidden) are an amalgam of Setites (minus the silly parts, e.g. the snake imagery) and Lasombra; a bloodline of Egyptian Mekhet who serve the Circle of the Crone and master a Discipline called, you guessed it, Obtenebration. Much better than drug-peddling snake lovers, or "darker and edgier" Ventrue clones IMHO.

Quote from: Benoist;493921So yeah. The Clan archetypes are just that: very, very broad archetypes, much broader than Masquerade clans. The Lasombra could be an Mékhet bloodline in Requiem. The Tzimisce would be Ventrue infected by a strange disease of the East, if you were to keep Vicissitude as it is in Masquerade. And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem. And so on, so forth.

I like the idea of Assamites as a bloodline. Mekhet would be a natural parent clan, judging from the Discipline array, and from their love of sneaking around. The Akhud from VII, and the Azerkatil from Ordo Dracul, also feel fairly Assamite-y to me.

Still on the subject of recycling oWoD stuff: I loved the Bruja from the core book (it was nice to read, back in 2004, that the folks at WW finally learned to laugh at themselves). The Malkovians and Toreador felt half-hearted. Burakumin were okay, nothing to shout about.

From the supplements, I loved the Architects of the Monolith, from Bloodlines: The Hidden, which to me are pretty clearly a Clan Tremere stand-in (a tightly-knit cabal of Ventrue sorcerers obsessed with power, hierarchy and vaguely Masonic occult imagery); and the Osites, from the Lancea Sanctum book, also a stand-in for the Cappadocians (and much, much better than the half-assed Sangiovanni from Bloodlines: The Legendary).

Of course, since the official take on the Sangiovanni sucked, I made my own. Therein lies the beauty of Requiem; stuff like this is easy to ignore, or switch. You try announcing to your Masquerade-savvy players "in my Masquerade game, the Tremere don't exist and the Salubri are still around", sit back and watch the fireworks.

I'm a big fan of recycling oWoD stuff into the nWoD. My group as a whole is fairly familiar with oWoD lore, and appropriating names and concepts allows me both to play on this familiarity, and to surprise them; the way I see it, it's a win-win situation. And Requiem's bloodlines and covenants make it really, really easy to reconstruct the stuff you like, while leaving out the stuff you don't like.

The one thing I dislike about the bloodline system is its prestige-class-like approach. It does make sense from a game-mechanical point of view, but I'm not sure it holds up as an in-setting thing ("waking the power of the Blood"). Like the tiered Merits, I blame it on d20 design principles seeping into everything.

Sorry if this feels kind of rambling and disjointed. I find Requiem and exciting and somewhat underrated game, that preserves a lot of great stuff from Masquerade, while fixing most of what I perceived to be bugs (namely, the calcification of vampiric hierarchy). And it's not everyday we get a nice WoD (old or new) thread going around here.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Actually, the Khaibit (from Bloodlines: The Hidden) are an amalgam of Setites (minus the silly parts, e.g. the snake imagery) and Lasombra; a bloodline of Egyptian Mekhet who serve the Circle of the Crone and master a Discipline called, you guessed it, Obtenebration. Much better than drug-peddling snake lovers, or "darker and edgier" Ventrue clones IMHO.

Correct. There's also the Followers of Seth in Mekhet: Shadows in the Dark (NB: all the Clan books in Requiem are really awesome to read, and recommended, contrarily to [most of] their Masquerade equivalents), but that's precisely it: you have several adaptations if you will of concepts of Masquerade deformed, rebooted in different ways in Requiem, several of them mirroring different aspects of the same old clans or bloodlines, plus the Conversion Guide to really make conversions on your own if you want something that really matches your own expectations.

That's the "giant RPG buffet" thing I was talking about earlier. You can build your own WoD from scratch much more easily and creatively with NWoD. So you have basically OWoD to play with all the background and threads and NPCs one might like, and NWoD to take it in a different direction and go "OK, that OWoD thing is great, but now I want to create my own version of the whole thing."

Quote from: GrimGent;493908In keeping with the toolbox approach taken by the new WoD in general, one major change in Requiem is the lack of metaplot and unified origin myth. (No Caine, no Generation.) Despite various alternative beliefs and theories, the published material offers no solid canonical explanation for how vampires came into existence, and the books hint that the five clans may actually have begun as separate "species" grown to resemble each other through a kind of parallel evolution. And speaking of the clans, there are now precisely five of those as broad archetypes, while bloodlines constitute "subclans" within them instead of acting as minor lineages in their own right.

Thank you for a very authoritative and well-spoken explanation; I greatly appreciate it.

Quote from: Benoist;493921...So yeah. The Clan archetypes are just that: very, very broad archetypes, much broader than Masquerade clans. The Lasombra could be an Mékhet bloodline in Requiem. The Tzimisce would be Ventrue infected by a strange disease of the East, if you were to keep Vicissitude as it is in Masquerade. And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem. And so on, so forth.

Excellently written and very informative & intuitive. Thanks for explaining this. It makes a lot more sense now.

You're welcome.

Quote from: Benoist;493921And there are those clans in Masquerade which would work best as something else in Requiem: the Assamites, for instance, would work great as a Covenant in Requiem.

That actually brings up another detail about the new splat arrangements...

As with many other aspects of the major templates (such as their power stats, fuel stats and Morality equivalents), White Wolf has to a significant extent standardized those across the various game lines, along what in forum discussions have been called the x (innate/personal), y (chosen/social) and z (advanced specialization) axes. The clans form that x-axis for vampires, while it's the y-axis, the covenants, which represents membership in ideological, political, or religious factions. That leaves the bloodlines as the z-axis, the "prestige class" as The Butcher said, which typically may be joined later in the game because of the required power level.

For werewolves, the three options corresponding to that Clan/Covenant/Bloodline set-up are Auspice, Tribe, and Lodge; for mages, Path, Order, and Legacy. (Seeming, Court, and Entitlement would be the changeling version.)

Which is like one of the greatest boons and the greatest curses the game brings to the table.

It's potentially one of its best aspects because it allows you to understand a particular WoD game instinctively from the way its organized, it allows you to also come up with your own WoD "game" or supernatural beings if you follow that pattern and so on, to add game elements that work with the whole without much issues, to make cross-overs happen without having to brainstorm endlessly about the way the rules will relate from one game to the next, because the frame is basically all there ready to be used.

It's potentially one of its worst aspects because it can make the games feel kind of same-y on a rules level, past the first brush with varying disciplines/gifts/spheres/transmutations/contracts/etc. power structures. It's one of those elements which can create a burn-out on the WoD as a whole because it's basically always the same frame, but with a different dressing with each game.

I guess it depends what you like about the game, how many of the different games you use at the same time within the same campaign frame, how you keep things fresh in the game itself, how "present" the rules are at the game table while you play, and so on, so forth.

I say, if you have the books, keep playing OWOD. I never cared for any of the NWOD books, myself.