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I would absolutely not recommend oWoD for first-timers, it is mechanically terrible and horribly unintuitive. However! Vampire: The Requiem is a great game, and if you pick up its second edition you should be able to have fun with that. It's still Vampire, if not with the same clans and quite the same tricks as you saw in Bloodlines. You're going to want ten-sided dice, and a good amount of them. You can get the PDF of Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition for 20 dollars, or 40 for a softcover printing. Dice, well, that'll depend on what retailers you have available, but that shouldn't run too high. If you absolutely must have oWoD, you want Vampire: 20th Anniversary. That'll run you 30 for a PDF, 45 for a softcover.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:47
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Xinlum posted:So me and my buddies want to try a tabletop game and I really really like V:TM Bloodlines. I know they changed up the plot/setting a lot but I'm cool with that. I called up a local store and they sell nothing, saying that after some Gehena event 8 years ago nobody plays it anymore. Do you mean would we recommend V:tM for total newbies? No, and I would recommend the new game lines instead of the Old World of Darkness, which is what Masquerade is part of. I think most people prefer the cleaner rules of the New World of Darkness, which also has a different setting. Also if you guys are totally new to RPGs you should start with something like Hunter: The Vigil if you think supernatural power rules will be too complicated for your group. You can get the PDFs from DriveThruRPG. e: for any nwod game you need the Core World of Darkness rulebook and the core sourcebook of the game you want to run (Vampire: The Requiem, Hunter: The Vigil, Mage: The Awakening, etc) tatankatonk fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 21:49
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The 2nd edition stuff, at least as of Blood and Smoke/Vampire 2nd ed is supposed to work standalone.
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Nov 9, 2014 21:55
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Yeah I meant NWOD. What else do I need? Whiteboards?Minifigs?
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Nov 9, 2014 21:56
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Xinlum posted:Yeah I meant NWOD. What else do I need? Whiteboards?Minifigs? Character sheets, a rulebook somewhere, a bunch of 10-sided dice or a dice-rolling program everyone can use on somebody's laptop, paper for notes or whatever, and ~your imagination~
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Nov 9, 2014 22:00
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You should just go buy the Horror Recognition Guide right now no matter what you end up playing.
tatankatonk fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 22:06
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tatankatonk posted:e: for any nwod game you need the Core World of Darkness rulebook and the core sourcebook of the game you want to run (Vampire: The Requiem, Hunter: The Vigil, Mage: The Awakening, etc) You don't really need the HtV book for a cell level hunter game.
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Nov 9, 2014 22:21
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Xinlum posted:Yeah I meant NWOD. What else do I need? Whiteboards?Minifigs? I've theoretically heard of people using a map and figures to play a World of Darkness game, but have never done it myself and never found that it's necessary. Combat in WoD is kinda abstracted and it runs well in the ~Theatre Of The Mind~ WoD isn't the most newbie friendly game out there but it's far, far from the worst. Making a character is easy (although making a good character requires some knowhow) actually playing the game is just adding two or three numbers, rolling that many dice and counting the number of 8s, 9s and 10s. GMing is pretty much a cinch if you don't mind improv and bullshitting. Just roll 3 dice per success you want the NPC to get and away you go.
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Nov 10, 2014 12:23
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tatankatonk posted:You should just go buy the Horror Recognition Guide right now no matter what you end up playing. This is true. The HRG is the perfect book to show what the NWoD is like.
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Nov 10, 2014 12:55
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Mors Rattus posted:I would absolutely not recommend oWoD for first-timers, it is mechanically terrible and horribly unintuitive. While I don't disagree with the spirit of this knee jerk goon idiocy, as a 13 year old it worked pretty well. Especially compared to pretty much anything else around historically. 1 to 5 ratings, dicepools, and easy to hang onto concepts aren't bad and the Revised edition of the games while not perfect aren't bad. But hey there's always Pathfinder that's very good. Mexcillent fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 03:14
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It's not the 90s any more, though.
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Nov 11, 2014 03:41
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tatankatonk posted:e: for any nwod game you need the Core World of Darkness rulebook and the core sourcebook of the game you want to run (Vampire: The Requiem, Hunter: The Vigil, Mage: The Awakening, etc) Also note that this is what holds for Demon: the Descent and the first edition gamebooks. The second edition cores, which are just beginning to roll out but which Vampire already has one of, as linked above, do not require the World of Darkness Rulebook. So what I would do is find a set of ten-sided dice (you can find sets of ten fairly easily on Amazon — World of Darkness games of any stripe tend to use a bunch, so ten to twenty dice should probably handle the entire group if you share their use), buy a PDF & print-on-demand version of Blood & Smoke (because the PDF version comes with a separate PDF of the character sheet for you to print copies of and give to your players), and for the second edition nWoD rules I would also recommend having a set of index cards on hand. That'll cover you. I will come back in a bit with a set of advice for both coming to the World of Darkness new and specifically for the second edition rules. The setting for Requiem won't quite line up to the Camarilla/Sabbat divide of Bloodlines, but the general atmosphere plays extremely well to keeping the tone and general vibe of Bloodlines. If anything, the five-covenants setup of Blood & Smoke may actually let you play factions against each other more effectively than having three major sects at war with one another.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:02
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From a conceptual point of view, I'd say oWoD is easier to grasp than nWoD. nWoD games extensively use multiple "race" and factions to define a character, and it's easier to jump in with oWoD's broader strokes. This makes nWoD a lot more nuanced, but oWoD is a lot more accessible; oWoD concepts fit into an elevator pitch - nWoD takes a lot more baseline setting knowledge. For example, to play a nWoD Carthian Mekhet you need to understand what a Carthian is, what a Mekhet is - to play an oWoD Brujah you need to have seen Lost Boys. But neither is ideal as a first-timer RPG.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:15
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I'm the biggest oWoD fan in this thread (disagree? I have over a thousand pages of obsessive nerdery to prove it.) and even I wouldn't recommend it as a first-timer's RPG.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:17
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Loomer is right, and I'd like to reiterate this:moths posted:But neither is ideal as a first-timer RPG. There are a bunch of great first-time games to start off with, which could eventually lead to WoD if that's where your group wants to go. Plus the subject matter (both new and old) is littered with gross, weird crap. It's stuff that could potentially put someone off RPGs if it's their first impression of the hobby. I'd try asking in the GM advice thread, or maybe the November general chat one.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:29
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I would absolutely disagree that NWoD requires more setting knowledge than CWoD. You can make a genre pastiche character in either and do fine (it's what I do anyway, even with experience). But for a variety of reasons - some of which relate to metaplot, others to basic genre definitions, and some to baked-in system facts that all add up to make new world of darkness games much more approachable for beginner players -and - characters.
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Nov 11, 2014 04:49
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Loomer posted:I'm the biggest oWoD fan in this thread (disagree? I have over a thousand pages of obsessive nerdery to prove it.) and even I wouldn't recommend it as a first-timer's RPG. How is The Project going anyway?
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Nov 11, 2014 05:04
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moths posted:For example, to play a nWoD Carthian Mekhet you need to understand what a Carthian is, Vampire revolutionaries. They hate the draculas. moths posted:what a Mekhet is A "sneaky vampire", as opposed to an "aristocratic vampire", "decadent vampire", "bestial vampire", or "Nosferatu. Dir. Friedrich W. Murnau. Perf. Max Schreck and Greta Schröder. Film Arts Guild, 1922. Film." Sure, these definitions leave out nuance, but for a first-timer you're better off describing in broad strokes and nWOD works just fine for that.
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Nov 11, 2014 05:19
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The complexity comes from the two things that primarily define your character interacting with other PC and NPCs' two big things. Yeah, if you know the setting it's no big deal - but five clans and five covenants can be a lot to juggle for a new V:tR GM, and I wouldn't wish that on a first-time-ever GM.
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Nov 11, 2014 05:47
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Masquerade clans are loaded with way more baggage, is the thing, as is the setting they exist in. "Lost Boys" is not actually an accurate description of the Brujah, for instance. More amusingly, "Nosferatu" is not an accurate description of the Nosferatu.
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Nov 11, 2014 05:55
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moths posted:The complexity comes from the two things that primarily define your character interacting with other PC and NPCs' two big things. Yeah, if you know the setting it's no big deal - but five clans and five covenants can be a lot to juggle for a new V:tR GM, and I wouldn't wish that on a first-time-ever GM. I would definitely disagree that those two things make a character more complex, and here's why: your family and your role in society are separable. So while in theory, yeah there's 25 combinations (although if you start getting into antitribu etc. then wouldn't Masquerade still have more complexity than Requiem?) it's easy to explain to someone than your Clan is mandatory and is basically your extended family and blood; meanwhile Covenant is your place in society. And if you don't know what Covenant you'd want to be in thats ok because you don't have to be in a Covenant at all and in fact choosing a Covenant is a perfect storyline for new players to establish their characters and the setting simultaneously. e. To put it another way, you lose something of the Tremere if you don't ever actually hear the story of Tremere and Saulot and the Hermetics or whatever (not asking for a clarification either). But you don't really miss out on what the Ordo Dracul really is all about if you don't bother learning about the Three Brides of Dracula or whatever. The reason for that is that in Masquerade the camera is sort of pointing towards the Elders as a result of the setting-defining Jyhad and the game mechanic of Generation. On the other hand, your opinion of Anoushka is only important insofar as whether or not you're dedicated to following her Ladder -- it's otherwise a historical quirk without relevance on the modern night. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 06:17
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The elevator pitch where you try to explain the Ravnos is the elevator pitch where you get fired for racism
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Nov 11, 2014 06:18
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moths posted:The complexity comes from the two things that primarily define your character interacting with other PC and NPCs' two big things. Yeah, if you know the setting it's no big deal - but five clans and five covenants can be a lot to juggle for a new V:tR GM, and I wouldn't wish that on a first-time-ever GM. Obviously the way to simplify this is to have like thirty clans. It should also be noted that clan is not really a meaningful social distinction in most of nWoD - being Ordo Dracul is a lot more meaningful to your allegiances than being Mekhet or Ventrue.
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Nov 11, 2014 06:44
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tatankatonk posted:The elevator pitch where you try to explain the Ravnos is the elevator pitch where you get fired for racism "Wait wait come back I haven't even gotten to the part where the purer the Gypsy blood is, the more magical Gypsy powers they get!"
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Nov 11, 2014 06:57
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citybeatnik posted:How is The Project going anyway? Halfway through 2001, not counting the novels, so about 2/3rds of the way done in its initial data gathering. Seeing a few interesting threads to trace back later. The timeline is getting fairly interesting as well, though I wish I'd done proper citations for it earlier than I started. Compiling the most interesting events in the one place lets you see just how intense a year can be - 1999 was a big one, as we all know, but you don't realize how big until you see it all side by side. Another one, for vampires at least, was 1848. Not only was there the Paris Revolution, but the Inner Council of the Camarilla met, and under cunning leadership, the Sabbat launched massive assaults on the cities of Paris and London, which can really be said to be two of the Camarilla's strongest power bases. What remains is to read the rest, figure out how to deal with V:tES, revisit some older content and specially flagged content, and then input it all into a database. Once that's done I can trim duplicates more easily and proceed from there. The real problem is that I sometimes miss details so the initial version will still be incomplete (But like, 95% complete), and like gently caress am I rereading the entire oWoD again. Long term plan is still to finish it up, polish it, and see if White Wolf would be interested in buying it for a pretty cheap rate given the manhours involved. If not, up on a blog it goes to be used for free by whoever. After that, the odd bit of corrections and the odd book revisit just for kicks, but the version for the nWoD will start and benefit, just like the setting itself did, from having had the methodology and approach hammered out through painstaking effort on the oWoD.
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Nov 11, 2014 07:10
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citybeatnik posted:"Wait wait come back I haven't even gotten to the part where the purer the Gypsy blood is, the more magical Gypsy powers they get!" "How about my werewolf tribes? We have the brave and honorable Aryan Norse Get of Fenris and the cowardly and scheming Slavic Shadowlords. Wait, oh God, why does this keep happening!?"
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Nov 11, 2014 07:40
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:"How about my werewolf tribes? We have the brave and honorable Aryan Norse Get of Fenris and the cowardly and scheming Slavic Shadowlords. Wait, oh God, why does this keep happening!?"
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Nov 11, 2014 07:47
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:"Also the Wendigo---no they aren't cannibals! They're noble. Yet...savage..." "There's also the Black Furies, they're basically straw femini-AMAZONS! There's the Fianna, who are not at all a slapped-together collection of Celtic stereotypes that wouldn't be out of place on a Lucky Charms box! Oh, and we also have the lost tribes, only one of which doesn't reek of noble savage bullshit!"
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Nov 11, 2014 07:51
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:I would definitely disagree that those two things make a character more complex, and here's why: your family and your role in society are separable. So while in theory, yeah there's 25 combinations (although if you start getting into antitribu etc. then wouldn't Masquerade still have more complexity than Requiem?) it's easy to explain to someone than your Clan is mandatory and is basically your extended family and blood; meanwhile Covenant is your place in society. And if you don't know what Covenant you'd want to be in thats ok because you don't have to be in a Covenant at all and in fact choosing a Covenant is a perfect storyline for new players to establish their characters and the setting simultaneously. To add to this, most of what makes nWoD is graspable from other media. A Clan defines your abilities, and is extremely roughly comparable to character class. "Here's what you want to do" defines Covenant, and "Here is how you do it" defines Clan. It could not possibly be any simpler. I played both a lot and don't misapprehend, I loved the poo poo out of CWoD. But it took me a long time to grasp that Clan was both character archetype, and social ideology, and political faction rolled into one, with my character agreeing or disagreeing with each one of those things along separate axes. I found the immediate conflicts represented by the Covenants (Pagans vs Christians, Revolutionaries vs. Hardliners, Science vs. Religion) extremely easy to grasp. It's not more complex in any way.
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Nov 11, 2014 08:06
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:"How about my werewolf tribes? We have the brave and honorable Aryan Norse Get of Fenris and the cowardly and scheming Slavic Shadowlords. Wait, oh God, why does this keep happening!?" "Over here we have the dirty, smelly, sexually promiscuous Hobo Tribe. And their friends, the elitist cyberpunk businessmen! Wait! Come back!"
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Nov 11, 2014 08:32
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moths posted:From a conceptual point of view, I'd say oWoD is easier to grasp than nWoD. nWoD games extensively use multiple "race" and factions to define a character, and it's easier to jump in with oWoD's broader strokes. This makes nWoD a lot more nuanced, but oWoD is a lot more accessible; oWoD concepts fit into an elevator pitch - nWoD takes a lot more baseline setting knowledge. I would never wish oWoD on anyone for their first RPG. nWoD at least has some attempt at consistency through it.
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Nov 11, 2014 17:23
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Yawgmoth posted:VtM on the other hand requires kind of a lot of setting info to know (for example) what actually separates the ventrue from the lasombra because they're both "lordly vamps with Dominate". One of them are evil black-eyed murder ninjas with shadow tentacles. Like, I see your point that in general oWoD Clans come with a lot more metaplot baggage and subfactions and so on, but by and large they were all written to be easily summed up in like one sentence. Obviously you're missing out on a lot of the detail, like saying Brujah are "hot headed revolutionary types" misses out on all the backstory that they're supposed to be warrior-philosophers and the whole firebrand thing is relatively new. That's pretty true in nWoD as well though, just to a lesser extent. How many people who haven't read the Mekhet clanbook know that the Mekhet are supposed to all be craaaaaaazy after a couple centuries and know that Daeva have a massive tendency to be suicidal if they haven't read Danse Macabre?
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Nov 11, 2014 18:53
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I feel like when you have t say 'well, these are the arrogant nobleman vampires, and these are the arrogant nobleman vampires who are ninjas with shadow tentacles, and these are the arrogant nobleman vampires who also mutate flesh into horrible abominations' you may not be well-served by your number of clans. I mean, as you get more of them their niches get really specific. Whereas with just the core five you get 'here are the sexy vampires, the arrogant vampires, the sneaky vampires, the bestial vampires and the creepy vampires' and leave the weirdly specific stupid bullshit to bloodlines, which are entirely optional.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:12
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Part of why I love Requiem so dang much is how archetypal the clans feel, it adds a sort of narrative richness to the world in a way that the weight of metaplot and piles of "history" don't do much for me. The Clanbooks follow along that line in just being narratives on the themes that each Clan represents. The Covenants are a bit more tricky because while I like the premise whenever I ran Vampire I had trouble sometimes with a few players trying to figure them out, but while some of the fluff changes I was apprehensive about for
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Nov 11, 2014 19:28
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Doodmons posted:One of them are evil black-eyed murder ninjas with shadow tentacles. Like, I see your point that in general oWoD Clans come with a lot more metaplot baggage and subfactions and so on, but by and large they were all written to be easily summed up in like one sentence. Obviously you're missing out on a lot of the detail, like saying Brujah are "hot headed revolutionary types" misses out on all the backstory that they're supposed to be warrior-philosophers and the whole firebrand thing is relatively new. That's pretty true in nWoD as well though, just to a lesser extent. How many people who haven't read the Mekhet clanbook know that the Mekhet are supposed to all be craaaaaaazy after a couple centuries and know that Daeva have a massive tendency to be suicidal if they haven't read Danse Macabre?  ]" versus "what's Blood Potency?" "It's how beefy of a vampire you are."The problem isn't so much that there's X clans vs. Y, it's there's a much, much higher initial buy-in with oWoD as far as how much poo poo you need to know, and it's all so interconnected that nothing really makes sense until you're close to finishing. This is a pain in the rear end, especially to newbies.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:11
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Yawgmoth posted:Part of the problem is that the metaplot baggage is really hard-wired into the clans. As Mors noted, there's 3 different arrogant noble clans with dominate and you can't really explain why they exist without digging into the metaplot pretty hard. A lot of the mechanics are like that too - "what's Generation?" "it's how far removed you are from Caine, the first vampire. [3 years of True facts. I've always felt that oWoD is run best as a "you've literally just today been embraced" game unless your players are really up on the metaplot. That way they can learn poo poo at the same time as the characters and you can pace it out a bit rather than just going all infodump on them. Requiem works a lot better for established characters even if the players have poor setting knowledge. Easiest example I can come up with is that I literally knew nothing about Requiem when I first started playing in my weekly Ordo Dracul game. Upon being told that they're vampire scientists who are trying to occult their way into removing all their vampire weaknesses and that the only way you advance in their organisation is by buying their special superpowers, that was pretty much everything I needed to know to start playing. The closest oWoD analogue is the Tremere and I've played Bloodlines, skimread Masquerade and had a lot of conversations with people who play oWoD and I still don't know what the Tremere actually do apart from occasionally cast magic and spend their time being shady and dickish to other people. All the important details are overly specific nuanced metaplot poo poo like, I don't know, it being mentioned in a splatbook that London Tremere have a big project to cast a ritual to let vampires go in St Paul's Cathedral and Dickhead McWizard is feuding with Ventrue McDickhead and this colours the chantry politics and blah blah blah blah. In nWoD you get nice generalisations that let you actually play.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:19
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Mors Rattus posted:I feel like when you have t say 'well, these are the arrogant nobleman vampires, and these are the arrogant nobleman vampires who are ninjas with shadow tentacles, and these are the arrogant nobleman vampires who also mutate flesh into horrible abominations' you may not be well-served by your number of clans. I mean, as you get more of them their niches get really specific. Don't forget that the last of the three has another off-shoot that's all about being arrogant nobleman vampires who poke Chernobog in order to gain power over the land itself. I like the oWoD. But I'll be good god damned if there's not a lot of clan creep in there.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:22
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Doodmons posted:The closest oWoD analogue is the Tremere and I've played Bloodlines, skimread Masquerade and had a lot of conversations with people who play oWoD and I still don't know what the Tremere actually do apart from occasionally cast magic and spend their time being shady and dickish to other people. To be honest that's almost exactly it for the Tremere, and that's why they would rock if not for the bloated Thaumaturgy creep. So instead it's all about the Setities who occasionally deal drugs and spend their time being shady and dickish to other people and are also another offensive ethnic stereotype... OK scratch that.
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Nov 12, 2014 00:37
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Juvenalian.Satyr posted:To be honest that's almost exactly it for the Tremere, and that's why they would rock if not for the bloated Thaumaturgy creep. So instead it's all about the Setities who occasionally deal drugs and spend their time being shady and dickish to other people and are also another offensive ethnic stereotype... OK scratch that. To be fair, Ravnos also fill the role of being shady and dickish to other people while being an offensive ethnic stereotype. If there's one thing that the oWoD has covered, it's offensive ethnic stereotypes.
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Nov 12, 2014 01:49
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We haven't even got started on the Assamites.
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Nov 12, 2014 02:15
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