Quote from: Benoist;494016It'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.

It didn't help that the Big Three (Requiem, Forsaken, Awakening) all conformed to a 5x5 pattern for the PC splats, with five clans and five covenants for vampires, and so on. But the later lines broke away from that, and even Requiem's since then gained additional covenants in the supplements. The so-called z-axis has varied considerably between the lines from the start: for instance bloodlines and entitlements function quite differently.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Still 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.

Ch'in Tsao, one of the most prominent NPCs so far in the Paris Alchymique (among some ... 75 plus named characters met so far), the Sire of Boulet's PC actually, is a Burakumin. I love that bloodline in play. The mix of Japanese class plus cadaver business plus mummy-like appearance is something I really like.

Regarding the Malkovians, just ditch the bloodline and check out the Clan Book Ventrue: Lords over the Damned. I won't say more for fear of spoilers, but chances are, you are going to like this.

The Toreador are super-über specialized in their history and schtick and so on. There are some in Paris, but with a specific background attached to them.

I don't care for the Bruja.

And the Morbus are totally awesome, IMO.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Of 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.

Agreed. Why do you think the Sangiovanni sucked? Is that because they clash/are completely different than the Giovanni of Masquerade, or is there something more to it you didn't say, like the Necrophile aspect of the bloodline, maybe?

Quote from: The Butcher;493946I'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.

Very same thing here.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946The 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.

It does IMO from a game play point of view as well. I haven't had any issues with it so far.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Sorry 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.

That's right. We might as well keep this going for a while.

Quote from: GrimGent;494062It didn't help that the Big Three (Requiem, Forsaken, Awakening) all conformed to a 5x5 pattern for the PC splats, with five clans and five covenants for vampires, and so on. But the later lines broke away from that, and even Requiem's since then gained additional covenants in the supplements. The so-called z-axis has varied considerably between the lines from the start: for instance bloodlines and entitlements function quite differently.

Agreed as well. It's nice to see the way they gradually (try to) overcome that format to do different things with it. I must say that I personally haven't felt the burn-out I was talking about in one of my last posts here, but I would understand if some gamers felt that way.

It's strange, because after enjoying NWoD, looking at the OWoD games again, I feel like I like them even more for their quirks and differences (like each game being its own thing, apart from one another, like the way lupines work in Masquerade being different from what the Garou basically are in Apocalypse, and so on), you know, like you are looking at familiar games with a new set of eyes and seeing stuff you weren't quite getting before, and it kind of renews my interest in the whole thing, actually.

Quote from: Benoist;494156And the Morbus are totally awesome, IMO.

You're right, I forgot about them. Great bloodline, though I'm more partial to the Morotrophians (even though "Institutionalize" is a crap name for a Discipline).

Quote from: Benoist;494156Why do you think the Sangiovanni sucked? Is that because they clash/are completely different than the Giovanni of Masquerade, or is there something more to it you didn't say, like the Necrophile aspect of the bloodline, maybe?

I'm a big fan of Masquerade's Giovanni (Justin Achilli's original clanbook really gave this weird, insular clan a lot of character) and my version is a lot closer to it. My beef with the official take on the Sangiovanni is that they're neither here nor there; their entry isn't much more informative than "extended family of Italian necromancers". I'd be thrilled to see new ideas clashing with the oWoD mold in an intriguing way (which is at least half the fun of recycling oWoD concepts into the nWoD), or just a mechanically well-executed port of the old Clan Giovanni into the Requiem milieu (which would be kind of lazy, but I'd still be happy). I felt I got neither.

Quote from: The Butcher;493946Sorry 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.

I find this all extremely interesting. Vampire (Requiem or Masquerade) never was a big thing with me but reading all this makes me want to take a second look. What were your (Ben, anyone games like ?

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Benoist;494157I must say that I personally haven't felt the burn-out I was talking about in one of my last posts here, but I would understand if some gamers felt that way.

Well, Changeling's really the one and only nWoD line that I'm interested in using, so crossover comparisons were never an actual concern for me. Personally, I explain nearly everything supernatural in the setting with the fae, except for "dead things" and an occasional unverified anomaly just to keep everyone a little more uncertain about what's out there. So while there could well be all sorts of vampires, werewolves, and mages skulking in the shadows, those aren't the Kindred, the Uratha, and the Awakened as described in their own books. (Of course, the Kindred aren't necessarily the only vampires even in Requiem.)

A note to the OP, in case this is new information: unlike Masquerade and the other oWoD titles, Requiem and the rest of the nWoD lines aren't standalone games but rather expansion sets for the core RPG, The World of Darkness, which covers the basic rules and character creation procedures for mortal PCs, by default ordinary people who somehow find themselves up against sinister supernatural phenomena, with ghosts as the featured sample antagonists. Each expansion then revolves around a specific major template which can be applied to that base either before or during play, converting the character into, say, a vampire. All of the major templates share certain traits which for the most part are treated almost identically by the system, rendering crossovers easier: a power stat which measures the character's mystical might (for vampires, that would be Blood Potency, replacing the old Generation), a fuel stat which can be spent for a variety of effects (for vampires, Vitae, or blood points), and a modified Morality equivalent which determines the circumstances for degeneration checks (for vampires, Humanity).

Quote from: David R;494192I find this all extremely interesting. Vampire (Requiem or Masquerade) never was a big thing with me but reading all this makes me want to take a second look. What were your (Ben, anyone games like ?

Regards,
David R

It's a hard question to answer without having you precise what type of aspect you are after. Do you mean from a set up point of view, the way the game unfolds, the background, ... ?

I'll answer a little bit of these and you'll tell me if you want more detail on any or all aspects, okay ?

Concerning Paris by Night (PbN) V1 and V2 (or Paris Alchymique), the set up is basically the same. We could call that "the sandbox before the term was coined." I basically have an environment, a city, Paris, with a society of the Damned (and other supernatural and mundane beings), various factions, coteries, power and influence structures, conspiracies, secrets, and so on.

The players create the characters they like. We work out the details of the background together. Usually that means inserting specific goals to start with, like "my Sire abandoned me and I really want to find out why", or "This vampire killed my entire family, I'm going to find him, and destroy him" or "I'm the infant of X and I'm a mole trying to achieve goal Y for him", and so on, so forth. From there, the PCs basically show up in town and present themselves to the powers-that-be (in Masquerade's PbN this meant originally François Villon, but he came to disappear pretty early on in the campaign, and then this became a huge clusterfuck of musical chairs, if you see what I mean, which was part of the point in Villon's disappearance, to eliminate further opposition to his rule, but that completely backfired for him over the years, particularly when Ontaï/Montano got involved and claimed part of the rulership in the name of his Sire, Lasombra himself).

From there, the PCs basically do what they want. They can investigate some mysteries, act on their goals, determine new ones as the game evolves, create a domain, develop their contacts and influence, go to war against this or that faction they want to destroy, ... whatever the case may be. I've had all sorts of PCs going through Paris over the years. I made a count recently and must have had more than 50 distinct players. Probably around 70+ individual player characters. I've had all clans, all sects, all types of goals and personalities... each of them acting like pebbles thrown into a lake, and/or rolling down a hill, creating their own avalanches which then clash with each other and basically trigger all sorts of events left and right in a sort of domino effect that never stops in years and years of gaming.

Some examples : a PC was playing the Justicar Tremere who in fact was acting as a mole for the Sabbat, a Ravnos living in a gypsy cart who got enslaved by ghouls with submachine guns reconverted to fire hypodermic needles filled with another PC's blood in his own lair, a Malkavian with an obsession for gambling who managed to overturn the ban on gambling in Paris to create the sole Casino in town, which in time became a hot spot and pretty important domain of the city, a Ventrue who got completely manipulated by the Giovanni to become "le Roi des Morts", a conduit for the dead to reach the world of the living through the Sangréal flowing in the vampire's veins, a mage and a garou brothers dressing as bozo the clown and his sidekick to hunt and kill all the vampires of Paris (including a number of PCs before they were taken down by another PC, an Assamite Antitribu part of the Sabbat himself), a mummy who thought himself to be Anubis and who acted accordingly, a Toreador Antitribu prostitute from England who came to Paris to reenact the murders of Jack the Ripper who she both admired and hated at the same time, ... an entire pack of Sabbat PCs called les Cinq Lames (the Five Blades) who ended up blowing up the Cathedral of Notre Dame after a HUGE magical backlash (players were super proud of it, and that was remembered for quite a while after in the campaign)... alright. Lots of PCs.

One thing that to me is most jarring about the nWoD is that the vampires have no sense of history.  The continual forced cycles of Torpor means that "the new guy" next to you could have been a peer of Homer, but has no memory of it.  It's hard to get into a character that has no real sense of self.  It seems like the "ennui of the immortal" would be overwhelming.

Quote from: CRKrueger;494257One thing that to me is most jarring about the nWoD is that the vampires have no sense of history.  The continual forced cycles of Torpor means that "the new guy" next to you could have been a peer of Homer, but has no memory of it.  It's hard to get into a character that has no real sense of self.  It seems like the "ennui of the immortal" would be overwhelming.

The Mists can affect a vampire's mind in any number of fashions. Some vampires will see their memory mostly erased, but they are far from being the majority. In fact, the dreams populating your torpor screw with your mind. So you might come to believe things about your previous periods of activity that never were, or you switched two people you knew in your mind, or you remember almost nothing but the most emotional time you went through.

The Mists shouldn't stop you from playing what you want : they should allow you to come up with all sorts of wacky backgrounds instead, where your character himself might not realize what is fantasy and what isn't, what really happened, and what didn't. It's a license to be creative, instead of sticking to rigid timelines and metaplot that wouldn't allow you to come up with your "angel of death persuaded he was the one who visited Sodom with his buddy back in the day, except the day wasn't prior to Christ's birth, but after his death, and the town wasn't called Sodom, it was Florence".

Did anyone ever play Hunter: The Reckoning? It's the only WW game I myself bought (but played in Vampire quite a bit) and I fell in love and ended up buying tons of the splats, but never really ran it for... some reason I can't put my finger on. I think maybe I was concerned (or my players were) that going against the Vampires they were used to playing as PCs would be a lost cause.

Any opinions on the game? Maybe it's time to take it off the shelf for another look-see.

Reckoning is one of the games of OWoD I know the least. I never bought it, never read it. I do own Hunter: the Vigil, however, for NWoD, and it's a damn fine game. It's about compacts and conspiracies, humans trying to uncover truths in the WoD, for the sake of an agenda, or protecting others, or whatever the background of the groups they're part of is about. It has tiers of play, from isolated groups trying to uncover what's going on on their own, X Files style, to big conspiracies with their own supernatural powers and so on.

Not at all the game centered on the lunatics with True Faith burning witches one might expect.

Quote from: Benoist;494253It's a hard question to answer without having you precise what type of aspect you are after. Do you mean from a set up point of view, the way the game unfolds, the background, ... ?

How about the first two. What you wrote was good but I'd like to see how it all come about. Also, were there any limitations on what kind of characters your players could create ? What aspects of the official setting info did you abandon ? Stuff like that. And off course how it played out during the course of the campaign And I am really interested here. Like I said, I was never never really interested in running a Vampire game, until you and The Butcher started going on about it. Then it's like, how did I miss this stuff ?

As for Hunter 1E, yeah I liked it a lot. I ran a very well recieved campaign (The Righteuos Kind) heavily inspired by the early works of John Carpenter set in a bizarre 70's era-like America.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Benoist;494284I do own Hunter: the Vigil, however, for NWoD, and it's a damn fine game. It's about compacts and conspiracies, humans trying to uncover truths in the WoD, for the sake of an agenda, or protecting others, or whatever the background of the groups they're part of is about.

And the nWoD hunters really are human, more competent and motivated than most people but still without actual powers of their own below the conspiracy tier. Mechanically they don't constitute a separate template in the same sense as, for instance, vampires. But then, Vigil doesn't expect familiarity with the existing templates, either: instead, it presents its own versions of the various supernatural beings, simplified and toned down to turn them into more suitable antagonists for mortal PCs, often based on assumptions which have the side effect of making it perhaps the least crossover-friendly line of the lot.

Quote from: David R;494330How about the first two.

OK I will in a moment. Do you want me to talk about the first OWoD Paris by Night, the NWoD Paris Alchymique, or both? The answers might vary, given the specificities of each games, how they relate to stuff like metaplot and so on.

Quote from: Benoist;494337OK I will in a moment. Do you want me to talk about the first OWoD Paris by Night, the NWoD Paris Alchymique, or both? The answers might vary, given the specificities of each games, how they relate to stuff like metaplot and so on.

Why not both. It's been years (and never here ) since I read a good WoD thread.

Regards,
David R