With that negative post out of the way I go on with some things I like.

I like how weapons and armor are handled.  Weapons just do extra damage instead of providing dice to the attack pool.  Armor just soaks up damage instead of reducing attack dice pool.  A 2L weapon means if you successfully hit the target you do amount of successes plus two more lethal damage.  Armor with a 4/2 rating means that when struck the first four damage never happens as they got soak up into the armor.  The two converts any remaining damage into bashing damage if that damage is lethal.  I think unless the armor is supernatural aggravated damage can still ignore armor as always.  Though this time aggravated damage might be rarer.

Finally I like the fact that ghosts now are treated as spirits with their own ranks.  Mere echos are rank 1 and earthly ghosts with a will of their own are rank 2.  More powerful ghosts come from the underworld and I would hate to be any stupid mage that tries out summoning the dead.  Necromancers will now have to be careful as shamens and not treat ghosts as empty vessals.  No wise necromancers should treat these powerful ghosts as the lords of metal that they are.

Quote from: The Butcher;821885Vigil's Hunters are people who survived at least one brush with the supernatural, and while the top-tier (Conspiracy) Hunters may have minor cool toys to play with (Aegis Kai Doru has artifacts, Chiron Group has biotech gleaned from vivisection of supernaturals, Lucifuge has infernal bloodlines, Malleus has prayers, etc.), the middle (compact) and low (Cell) tiers of play rely on grit, wit and tactics alone.

Thanks - well yes, I do think Vigil sounds much better!

Of the nWoD games, probably Vigil and Promethean are my favorites - though I think Promethean would necessarily require a very small group of PCs.

Quote from: Piestrio;821893Would anyone be willing to explain to me exactly how nnWoD works?

Like what product is there? What do you need? What's the overall plan?

There is also the first edition. The core book gives the rules and it focuses on the mortals in the world. There is an entire mortal line with books like Mysterious Places, Urban Legends and Midnight Roads. These books are grabbags with a lot of different ideas usually of the mystery sort. What if you wake up and the entire third floor of your appartment building is gone no one seems to notice this? That kind of stuff.

There are also some monster setting books like Requiem, Forsaken, Awakening, Vigil etc. These books give you a setting for playing a particular monster. New WoD doesn't only give you subraces like the old WoD, but it also gives you different factions you can join.

Oh, wait, I see a lot of this stuff is out of print.

Quote from: Lynn;821903Thanks - well yes, I do think Vigil sounds much better!

Of the nWoD games, probably Vigil and Promethean are my favorites - though I think Promethean would necessarily require a very small group of PCs.

I like Promethean, it's the most optimistic World of Darkness game ever published. I like the idea that even in the World of Darkness there is a happy ending. It's nightmare to play though.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;822078Oh, wait, I see a lot of this stuff is out of print.

Everything should be in print on demand on drivethru.

As to Dark Eras, some of the stretch goals were expansions, so yeah - the Egyptian mages in To The Strongest will be changing from a sidebar to a proper writeup. The whole chapter's going to be about half the length again bigger.

And we're doing Neolithic mages, which I'm looking forward to.

Quote from: DaveB;822208Everything should be in print on demand on drivethru.

Yes it is. For some reason it didn't come up yesterday when I searched it on rpgnow. This is the blue book line for example.


I think Dark Eras presents it setting material (just like all nwod) in a way like: "Here you go. There it is.". There is not plot in it. You can't pitch it that easily to a group of players.

In Deadlands for example shamans succesfully closed the door to the Hunting Grounds and everything went tits up when the shaman Raven opened the doors again in 1863. Letting magic and monsters back into the world.

New WoD would never do something like that. There is no "And this is what happened before." moment.


Edit:
For the record I like some plot in the history part of a setting, because it's easy to get campaign ideas from that. You could do a Deadlands campaign where the main goal of the party is to kill Raven or to close the door again in the Hunting Grounds or maybe to win the Rail Wars for a certain company they decide to help.

It's much harder to do with settings with an opaque history.

Are God Machine and Demon complete games or sourcebooks?

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;822324Are God Machine and Demon complete games or sourcebooks?

Yes they are complete games.  In fact they are second edition mortal book and demon is its own venue splat.  Like nWoD you need to get the core mortal book (aka God Machine) and then get demon.

Quote from: Snowman0147;822345Yes they are complete games.  In fact they are second edition mortal book and demon is its own venue splat.  Like nWoD you need to get the core mortal book (aka God Machine) and then get demon.

Actually, they're sourcebooks.

We wanted to do a second edition of the nWoD. CCP still thought they'd be doing the WoDMMO and preferred we put the rules updates we wanted to do in supplements instead, and the compromise was that each game would get a giant-sized "Chronicle" sourcebook containing all of its rules updates.

"God-Machine Chronicle" was the one for the corebook. "Strix Chronicle" was the one for Vampire.

God-Machine Chronicle isn't actually a complete game, and most of the book is setting and adventure advice. The Storytelling System Update is an Appendix inside it, which is available seperately for free.

Demon, the first game produced after it, used the rules updates, so it has the same Appendix (literally the same text) in it. They both still require the WoD corebook.

The rules changes were so comprehensive, though, that it was only very basic stuff left untouched, and we noted that you could run the game perfectly well with one of the old freerpg day quickstarts and the system update. We updated the old Vampire quickstart as an experiment, it proved successful, and by the a htime Strix Chronicle came out, it now contained a cut-down version of the core rules merged in with the update. Unlike Demon, it does *not* need the corebook, though rules for some things like car crashes aren't in it.

Then the WoDMMO got cancelled, and CCP no longer had a problem with second editions. Strix Chronicle has had a new cover put on it as Vampire second edition, and the in-progress Idigam, Fallen World, Firestorm, and Huntsmen chronicles got their names changed. All of them will, like Vampire, have enough of the core rules to play them.

We are now writing a proper second edition WoD corebook.

TLDR - God Machine isn't the second ed corebook. It's a chronicle advice book that has a rules patch in it. Demon has the exact same rules patch in it, both require the original corebook or enough knowledge of the Stirytelling System to wing it. Everything after that is second edition proper.

Yeah, I learned that the awkward way at the first session of my Vampire:TR game this week. One of the characters said "I want an SUV, what's the deal with those" and I spent five minutes on a wild goose chase until I looked in the 1st edition WoD book.

Suffice to say, I am really looking forward to a 2nd edition WoD book. My group has been very impressed with the 2nd edition so far. Release schedule wonkiness aside.

Quote from: JonWake;822451Yeah, I learned that the awkward way at the first session of my Vampire:TR game this week. One of the characters said "I want an SUV, what's the deal with those" and I spent five minutes on a wild goose chase until I looked in the 1st edition WoD book.

Suffice to say, I am really looking forward to a 2nd edition WoD book. My group has been very impressed with the 2nd edition so far. Release schedule wonkiness aside.

Do you like the rules? Isn't it too much micromanagement with all those beats and conditions to keep track off?

Quote from: jan paparazzi;822902Do you like the rules? Isn't it too much micromanagement with all those beats and conditions to keep track off?

They're okay and not really.

I mean, it's the Storyteller system, innit? You roll a pile of dice and count successes. They fixed some of the dumb things from 1e NWoD: weapons not doing actual damage and just adding to dice pools, and explosions or impacts have a fixed damage that's easier to remember.  Disciplines are better, but a lot more subtle than you might be used to from Masquerade. For example, Obfuscate is strictly a psychic effect. People just ignore you and can't quite remember what you looked like. You don't freak out when you see another Vamp, but you do notice them immediately and can initiate an vampire pissing match where you are hissing and whatnot at each other.

I really like the changes to Humanity now. It's not morality anymore, its the literal tension between the demonic force inside you and your sense of human identity. You can lose humanity from simple isolation or surviving wounds that would kill a normal human. It's less about being a big stinky jerk face and more about forgetting what it's like to be a person.

The only downside is the extensive list of conditions, so many that there are cards for the individual conditions. Most of them boil down to +/- 2 to some actions though, so they're pretty easy to wing (except for Discipline dependent conditions). With two plays, it was pretty manageable, because I was spending most of the time RPing with the characters and only made a roll maybe once per scene.

Likewise, the beats were manageable with 2 players, provided I wrote down the character's Aspirations  beforehand. It was a matter of keeping them in mind when I introduced a scene. If someone had an aspiration of "Make everyone like me", then I knew that I could put the character in a group of enemies and watch her shuck and jive to get everyone to like her. If she didn't, no worries, but if she did it was pretty easy to say 'take a beat' without things slowing down too much.  

I do have concerns with larger groups. My usual group is 5 players. A lot of systems break down with larger groups of players, but we'll see.

Quote from: DaveB;822406Actually, they're sourcebooks.
...
TLDR - God Machine isn't the second ed corebook. It's a chronicle advice book that has a rules patch in it. Demon has the exact same rules patch in it, both require the original corebook or enough knowledge of the Stirytelling System to wing it. Everything after that is second edition proper.

I don't mean to raz on you much but you guys picked some horrible names and release strategy.

I'm not an expert and certainly don't mean to do the whole "fan who knows better than the creators" thing. But I AM an experianced consumer and I can tell your u when I'M confused about a product line.

I'm sure folks who follow you closely get it but to everyone else it just feels like a confusing mess.

Quote from: Piestrio;823152I don't mean to raz on you much but you guys picked some horrible names and release strategy.

I'm not an expert and certainly don't mean to do the whole "fan who knows better than the creators" thing. But I AM an experianced consumer and I can tell your u when I'M confused about a product line.

I'm sure folks who follow you closely get it but to everyone else it just feels like a confusing mess.

Yup. But that's the thing. It still sells very well. The folks who follow it closely buy all the wod games and only those rpg's. While people outside of the wod community usually hate on the owod metaplot and generally don't care for the nwod and never played it. So only the hardcore fans buy all of the gamelines and there is very few overlap with other games. At least D&D players also play Shadowrun, Numenera or Mutants and Masterminds. I think it's always good to play a number of different games from different companies.

Eh, we did release the rules patch for free simultaneously with God-Machine Chronicle, because we didn't want to increase the buy-in needed for an nWoD game to three books.

It's still up on drivethru:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114078/World-of-Darkness-GodMachine-Rules-Update