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Tollymain posted:was there ever a point to having lower-generation characters in owod or was it just the most obvious character generation trap in theory, if you're going after other vampires specifically for the purpose of lowering your generation via diablerie, a 13th gen vampire isn't even in your sights but of course a vampire who's already set on murdering their kindred is going to find some other excuse to kill your character if it'd be expedient for them to do so so in practice, yes, it's 100% a newbie/roleplayer trap
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Apr 29, 2018 23:47
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Didn't one of the Gehenna sourcebooks have rules for unique Caitiff disciplines? I think 14th & 15th gens also got some perks for being nearly human? I think they were somehow involved with fighting off the Antedilluvians. Something about a pregnant vampire, The game definitely written from the presumption that you're a pitiful weakling in a city of eternal nightmares, but if you give gamers a direct ladder to power they're gonna gently caress the pizza on the roof. that's just how gamers do. if there's a pizza, they're gonna gently caress it, and you can't stop them from fuckin' it.
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Apr 30, 2018 00:18
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Neither Requiem nor Masquerade ever should have had a way to convert starting character resources directly into their power stat. The ST should just decide where people start or how much variance they want and let players spend their resources on things that actually help characterize them. "I'm a vampire but like, more" is dull as dirt and mechanically alluring.
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Apr 30, 2018 00:32
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:The game definitely written from the presumption that you're a pitiful weakling in a city of eternal nightmares, but if you give gamers a direct ladder to power they're gonna gently caress the pizza on the roof.
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Apr 30, 2018 00:44
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I've only recently realized that the betrayal of Cappadocious was called the Conspiracy of Isaac because they were stealing his birthright.PHIZ KALIFA posted:Didn't one of the Gehenna sourcebooks have rules for unique Caitiff disciplines? I think 14th & 15th gens also got some perks for being nearly human? I think they were somehow involved with fighting off the Antedilluvians. Something about a pregnant vampire, That's Time of Thin Blood. quote:that's just how gamers do. if there's a pizza, they're gonna gently caress it, and you can't stop them from fuckin' it. And that's just truth.
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Apr 30, 2018 00:45
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Didn't one of the Gehenna sourcebooks have rules for unique Caitiff disciplines? I think 14th & 15th gens also got some perks for being nearly human? I think they were somehow involved with fighting off the Antedilluvians. Something about a pregnant vampire,  factor that they could remain slightly alive. I think 14th and 15th generations could both innovate new disciplines, which, while weak, could also be taught to older vampires, who could in turn refine them. Similarly, the blood of a 15th-generation vampire still counted for the dark hunger of a 7th generation elder who couldn't get any "juice" out of humans any more. The 15th generation were also weak enough that sunlight was "only" lethal damage for them, not aggravated, and I think they could conceive children, who as a practical matter were like the Sabbat revenants. The connection to Gehenna was ultimately that what rouses the Antediluvians isn't the resolute urgency of now or the presence of round numbers on the calendar, but vampires dying in large numbers. Unfortunately, the Thin-blooded counted just as much as anyone.
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Apr 30, 2018 01:39
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Didn't one of the Gehenna sourcebooks have rules for unique Caitiff disciplines? I think 14th & 15th gens also got some perks for being nearly human? getting to make up a unique discipline (provided that the storyteller allows it) doesn't make up for the fact that thin-bloods, especially at 15th gen, are barely more powerful than ghouls
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Apr 30, 2018 01:39
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I think the ST system is more flexible than a 1-20 level based game because strong and weak can vary by chronicle, I think it'd be pretty sweet to run a short game of thinbloods trying to protect their still-human family while The End Times Come. You're not going to be ashing elders, but if you want to play that kind of game, there's always Dark Ages. Pope Guilty posted:I've only recently realized that the betrayal of Cappadocious was called the Conspiracy of Isaac because they were stealing his birthright. All those years of Catechism finally paid off!
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Apr 30, 2018 02:11
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The MET V20 LARP edition, I feel, strikes an ideal balance with generation--every playable category of generation offers fairly unique benefits and drawbacks, and naturally inclining towards certain builds. It's also written by long-term LARPers so it cuts weird jank like generation-based Dominate or the aforementioned Flesh of Fiery touch. Judging by this thread's stories and similar accounts of friends, I'm not sure I'd play VtM in any other system without some serious houseruling.
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Apr 30, 2018 11:46
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It's said about every tabletop, but VtM is probably one of the more "it is what you make of it" games out there. I think by nature of it being written as a stand alone game, it embodies a wider variety of tropes than you'd see in CofD games, which generally isolate themes and mechanics better. The powers cover social, combat, investigation, and Deep Weird poo poo all fairly thoroughly, and each clan generally has enough offshoots and specialities that every clan can do everything if spec'd correctly. Heavy house ruling isn't much of an issue needed if the players and ST are all on the same level as to the nature of the game, and what their characters will need to do.
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Apr 30, 2018 14:15
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Nessus posted:And I think they could conceive children, who as a practical matter were like the Sabbat revenants. Yeah, they're called Dhampir, and functionally could generate their own Vitae.
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Apr 30, 2018 14:52
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, they're called Dhampir, and functionally could generate their own Vitae. They even got their own book, although it was under the Kindred of the East line since it's easier for the Made-Up Asian Word vampires to get themselves knocked up.
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Apr 30, 2018 15:02
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Is it possible control KotE Jiangshi by slapping one of those spell talismans on their forehead, like in the Mr. Vampire movies? IIRC aren't jiangshi just kuei-jin in frenzy or something?
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Apr 30, 2018 15:15
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Is it possible control KotE Jiangshi by slapping one of those spell talismans on their forehead, like in the Mr. Vampire movies? IIRC aren't jiangshi just kuei-jin in frenzy or something? If I remember right, that's the phase every kuei-jin goes through when they first come back to life. I know the older vampires have teams of handlers to get them under control and it's quite possible that's how they do it.
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Apr 30, 2018 16:14
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Is it possible control KotE Jiangshi by slapping one of those spell talismans on their forehead, like in the Mr. Vampire movies? IIRC aren't jiangshi just kuei-jin in frenzy or something? Wrong incorrectly used Hong Kong Movie word. Jiangshi were the Yin-imbalanced Kuei-jin whose sunlight burns rotted their flesh permanently so they looked like zombies. Chih-mei were the 0 dharma Kuei-jin stuck in frenzy, though unlike Kindred Wassail they could be brought out of it by magic rites and taught a dharma (probably by slapping a spell talisman on their forehead like in movies), or could just spontaneously chill out and be on Humanity, or just spontaneously chill out and make up their own Dharma based on a virtue, in which case you're called Kanbujian, which White Wolf said meant "unable to see" when it actually means "invisible".
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Apr 30, 2018 18:10
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Now I need to justify having an Illegal Triad Street Race with Chimei-drawn carriages, like some kind of horror-comedy Fast & Furious film. edit- ha ha ha whoops, toootally different gangs.
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Apr 30, 2018 19:40
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Crasical posted:Why do Jiangshi have Animalism instead of Vigor? Vigor even lets you make Mad Ups super-leaps and that's totally a hopping corpse thing. By the way, still mad about this Requiem thing a year later
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Apr 30, 2018 21:26
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I just want y'all to know that Rivers of London is an nWoD as hell book, and I hope the rest of the series can keep that up. It is about the British police force, its semi-secret wizard division, and the occult lore of Isaac Newton. Also, the war between the gods of the Thames, and a serial killer.
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Apr 30, 2018 23:34
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:That being said, blood potency is just hands-down a better system on every aspect. In my thaumaturgy game, all of my new players just took one look at Generation and didn't bother buying any other background. The games I used to have back in college, everyone instead maxed Contacts and Influence instead, hoarding plot hooks like fuckin' dragons. Yeah, Blood Potency is so much nicer a mechanic. Also gives the elders/neonate dance a nice extra edge on the elder side. Sure, the Generation system elders had to wonder if the neonates would devour them for their power, but the new one keeps that fear but adds in the factor that just by surviving, this century's feeble weaklings will be next century's rivals, especially since the elder has to go down in power via torpor at some point too. Means no vampire can ever dismiss or ignore any other vampire because if they aren't equals/superiors now they will be sooner or later. The elders can't ever just rest on their laurels, they have to fight as hard as the young vampires because sooner or later the wheel WILL turn on them. Tying feeding requirements directly to it and making your power level directly proportional to how much you're willing/able to feed off your own kind in the end adds even more fun power/age dynamics, since you either stay up until you're a threat to all the other vampires just by existing or you have to nap with the obvious consequences to your power (both worldly and supernaturally) to stay at an easier to manage level of feeding.
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May 1, 2018 02:41
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Mors Rattus posted:I just want y'all to know that Rivers of London is an nWoD as hell book, and I hope the rest of the series can keep that up. It is about the British police force, its semi-secret wizard division, and the occult lore of Isaac Newton. The audiobook, if you like that kinda thing, is excellent. The narrator nails it.
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May 1, 2018 03:05
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I like that sort of thing (audiobooks) so thank you for mentioning that 
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May 1, 2018 04:11
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Blood potency mechanically and to a degree thematically works better, but I really like the basic concept of generation, especially the decay of the curse and the horror that in itself creates. It's bad enough being remade into a nocturnal predator - but not only are you now a very small fish, you will always be a very small fish unless you do unthinkable things, and the bigger fish are true monsters on a level you pray you will never be even if becoming one is the key to survival. The degree of powerlessness there is astonishing, and while that makes for bad game design in many respects, I still think it's a neat concept.
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May 1, 2018 08:32
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Loomer posted:Blood potency mechanically and to a degree thematically works better, but I really like the basic concept of generation, especially the decay of the curse and the horror that in itself creates. It's bad enough being remade into a nocturnal predator - but not only are you now a very small fish, you will always be a very small fish unless you do unthinkable things, and the bigger fish are true monsters on a level you pray you will never be even if becoming one is the key to survival. The degree of powerlessness there is astonishing, and while that makes for bad game design in many respects, I still think it's a neat concept. If I had a critique about how Generation worked, it's that it's such a steep curve between 8th and 7th and between 13th and 14th.
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May 1, 2018 10:48
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Mister Olympus posted:The MET V20 LARP edition, I feel, strikes an ideal balance with generation--every playable category of generation offers fairly unique benefits and drawbacks, and naturally inclining towards certain builds. It is in most respects a huge improvement over Laws of the Night, but Generation still has problems (the big one being that taking two dots of Generation is a trap option) and the Influences rework is very, very bad.
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May 1, 2018 13:46
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Nessus posted:You could even combine the two. Blood Potency represents your vampire power level, Generation maybe gives a little bonus on top but is really important for... Dominate. I actually did just that when I was drafting a Requiem/Masquerade game, but got sidetrack with running a different game. Completely untested and not given even an editor's pass. 
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May 1, 2018 15:05
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Whenever I am tempted to run V:tM, I'm tempted to do it with the V:tR rules (and the translation guide) and just say that Blood Potency is, in fact, how it works, and the whole Generation thing is a big fat lie the Camarilla tell to keep people in line - the theory being that by the time someone's lived long enough to realise it's bullshit, they're benefitting from the big lie as much as those who originally lied to them in the first place. That takes a big fat dump on the whole Antediluvian thing, but I'm vanishingly unlikely to want to include such stuff in my campaigns anyway. If, on the off-chance, it felt really important to include some really high-Generation-type elders who were more functional than high Blood Potency implies, that's where you handwave at various means they discovered over their extremely long lives to mitigate the effects of high Potency.
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May 1, 2018 15:56
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Yeah, the other big Generation trap is it both sets a hard limit for when the blood curse, just, can't propagate anymore, and it heeeeaaaaavily leans on the Antedilluvian metaplot. I don't know how the game works with both "Gehenna happened!" and "there's still plenty of vampires" cause those should be mutually exclusive? If anything, I like Generation as an entirely social system, similar to influence, and just as liable to mistakes and obfuscation as anything else in vampiric society. It explains the Camarilla's need to maintain population control, in order to make sure their lineages are accurate, and it's totally the sort of pecking order thing they'd fixate on. If you wanted to let high BP vampires sire slightly less high BP childer, that would straddle both systems fairly well I think.
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May 1, 2018 16:02
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Yeah, the other big Generation trap is it both sets a hard limit for when the blood curse, just, can't propagate anymore, and it heeeeaaaaavily leans on the Antedilluvian metaplot. I don't know how the game works with both "Gehenna happened!" and "there's still plenty of vampires" cause those should be mutually exclusive? If a proper Gehenna happened, yeah, it's either 'all/nearly all vampires die', with the difference largely being whether everyone else dies, just most of everyone else, or basically no one else.
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May 1, 2018 16:08
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Based on what NuWW have said so far and reading between the lines I think the idea is that at Gehenna, yeah, sure, the Antediluvians wake up and kill a bunch of vampires, but what people didn't realise is that they also spawn a bunch of vampires at the same time, effectively injecting a heap of high-Generation blood into the ecosystem. (The hints about the Grave War also suggest that the survivors of each Gehenna cycle end up becoming the Antediluvians of the next one, gaining extreme power and founding new clans before they go into their long slumber.) So what you'd expect from that is a population crash among vampires too young/inexperienced/weak to hide, and then a swathe of new 4th Generation kids whose sires are too sleepy to supervise them rushing about spawning 5th Genners everywhere until they suss out why the Traditions are a thing.
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May 1, 2018 16:14
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Yeah, I need to find this Grave War PDF y'all keep mentioning, but something about the idea of a cyclical Gehenna just, doesn't seem to fit theme? Wasn't 1e all about the ancient brooding formidable evils? Like, a newly spawned 4th gen has horrifying potential, but isn't immediately a force to be reckoned with. Yeah they got a lot of blood and high stat limits, but you're still mostly a human, with human morals and connections. What made low gens scary in past games is the knowledge that they're dangerous enough to survive the hundreds of years between then and now, a newly spawned 4th gen was just in the wrong place in the right time. It seems like a cool setting, but at the same time, a major departure from what they claim they're making?
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May 1, 2018 16:47
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If you want to see where the metaplot is going, V20 Beckett's Jyhad Diary is the place to look.
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May 1, 2018 16:52
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Yeah, I need to find this Grave War PDF y'all keep mentioning, but something about the idea of a cyclical Gehenna just, doesn't seem to fit theme? Wasn't 1e all about the ancient brooding formidable evils? Like, a newly spawned 4th gen has horrifying potential, but isn't immediately a force to be reckoned with. Yeah they got a lot of blood and high stat limits, but you're still mostly a human, with human morals and connections. What made low gens scary in past games is the knowledge that they're dangerous enough to survive the hundreds of years between then and now, a newly spawned 4th gen was just in the wrong place in the right time. In fairness, the very very first version of the game did present Gehenna as less of a total armageddon and more of a whole 'big scary bad time that happens now and then', but that got dropped by like, the second book of first edition. This is the same core book that's running interstitial fiction let you come back to life if you killed the vampire that turned you.
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May 1, 2018 17:14
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Given that they have trumpeted a big return to the original vision and made Anarchs vs. Camarilla the main conflict rather than Camarilla vs. Sabbat, this isn't entirely surprising. (Though my feeling from the interstitial fiction in question is that the cure didn't quite take...)
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May 1, 2018 17:44
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Gotta be hard to be a Camarillan, who officially denies the existence of both Gehenna, the Antes, and the Jyhad itself, in the nights immediately following the rise of the Antedilluvians and the completion of Gehenna. I kind of imagine it's like the opposite of Harold Camping's church, two Toreadore hanging in a bombed out nightclub, neither acknowledging feeling incredibly slighted that they weren't drawn into the all-consuming maw of their great great great great great great great great great great great great grandsire.
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May 1, 2018 18:44
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:Gotta be hard to be a Camarillan, who officially denies the existence of both Gehenna, the Antes, and the Jyhad itself, in the nights immediately following the rise of the Antedilluvians and the completion of Gehenna.
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May 1, 2018 19:03
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(This does, of course, end up reducing much of the metaplot of the first four editions of the games to "As the Millennium approaches Gehenna cults expecting the end of the world - most prominently the Sabbat - go into overdrive, momentarily overshadowing the Establishment-vs.-Anarch struggle that's been going on for some 600 years, then it sort of fizzles out a few years into the 2000s and the old struggle returns to prominence." In other words, the whole Sabbat-vs.-Camarilla plot arc from 1st edition to the end of Revised was just one big goofy mistake.)
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May 1, 2018 19:05
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I'm kind of curious as to how they're going to "Whoops NM Lol" the apocalypse the way they're apparently doing to gehenna.
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May 1, 2018 19:28
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Kurieg posted:I'm kind of curious as to how they're going to "Whoops NM Lol" the apocalypse the way they're apparently doing to gehenna. An easy way would be 'it was all a nightmare,' but for some reason I think they'll just act like the last books of Masquerade never happened, and instead continue from some point before Gehenna was on the table.
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May 1, 2018 20:20
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Uhh...Kurieg posted:I'm kind of curious as to how they're going to "Whoops NM Lol" the apocalypse the way they're apparently doing to gehenna.
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May 1, 2018 20:31
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It's interesting to me that the Cams are always portrayed as the hidebound, unable-to-adapt conservative faction but the major difference I saw with them and the Anarchs was just that the Anarchs didn't want to kowtow to literal bronze age regents and didn't like being blood bound slaves. The Anarch movement might be comparatively young against the long night of Vampire civilization but a vampire from the twelfth century is still going to have very different values and outlook from a modern reader (or 13th gen) Was that element of conflict ever explored? I know the Sabbat was supposed to have gone all crazy because they discovered the antediluvian plot or whatever plus something something vicissitude magic virus but really "warlord who is just willing to straight up murder his enemies because that's how they rolled back home" is pretty close to the basic way Sabbat vamps were portrayed. Except of course that the Camarilla were the ones with the supposedly medieval outlook.
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May 1, 2018 20:51
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