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Digital Osmosis posted:I talked to him a bit about how tabletop RPG game design evolves and builds off each other, how since the 1990s game design got a lot more thoughtful about asking like, how the rules they have encourage a particular style of play, and how new ideas filter into the mainstream through more experimental games. He thought that loving ruled. You know what? It totally does. I mean, that's how it's supposed to work but then D&D5 and VtM5 show up drunk and yelling about tradition.
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Dec 22, 2018 13:04
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moths posted:I mean, that's how it's supposed to work but then D&D5 and VtM5 show up drunk and yelling about tradition. To extend my metaphor, you can't really stop people from driving a Model T if they really want to.
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Dec 22, 2018 13:08
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It's more an issue with the CEO of Ford insisting that Model T was the apex of design and everything afterward is SJW communist snowflake participation trophy gaming for safe space babies.
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Dec 22, 2018 13:33
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moths posted:It's more an issue with the CEO of Ford insisting that Model T was the apex of design and everything afterward is SJW communist snowflake participation trophy gaming for safe space babies.
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Dec 22, 2018 13:45
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Pope Guilty posted:To extend my metaphor, you can't really stop people from driving a Model T if they really want to. 5E's more like the sort of thing with a retro aesthetic but actually when you look under the hood there's a number of novel technological things that make the ride a bit smoother (like the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, short rests allowing for use of hit dice to replenish hit points, etc.), though fundamentally those can only go so far and still fit into the vintage chassis they're using for it.
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Dec 22, 2018 13:51
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It never really came up, but 4e let you spend surges during short rests too. It's just that 4e's short rests were five minutes as opposed to an hour.
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Dec 22, 2018 14:11
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Kurieg posted:It never really came up, but 4e let you spend surges during short rests too. It's just that 4e's short rests were five minutes as opposed to an hour. That's kind of my point - 5E snuck in more 4E innovations in here and there than people commonly assume, it just clothed them in a way which made them more palatable to traditionalists. 5 minutes vs. an hour is obviously a big difference, but even so my experience is that the hit dice mechanic actually does appreciably help for the purpose of extending the "adventuring day" in the same way surges were meant to do.
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Dec 22, 2018 14:16
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5e is Harley Davidson going back to the old motor because "it sounds more like a harley." E: This isn't the thread for it, but there are plenty of examples of intentionally bad design choices being made (against the flow of iterative improvements) due to brand identity or management nostalgia. NuWW and D&D5 are two big examples. moths fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 14:20
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Nessus posted:I think Henry Ford would not have wasted our time and would have gone straight for blaming the Jews. Henry Ford is OSR I guess?
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Dec 22, 2018 14:40
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If I had a Model T I would use it to drive this thread back to World of Darkness chat.
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Dec 22, 2018 14:42
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Okay, here's a World of Darkness thought I had recently after pondering on Blood Treachery: Blood Treachery has been poorly-regarded for a number of reasons, including the scene at the end where Tremere appears in front of the most senior Hermetics. A lot of people view this scene as giving the ancient vampire the "moral high ground," but after some consideration, I think this isn't quite right. The issue is that Mage, as a gameline, is willing to judge mages, both in-character and out-of-character, when they don't behave the way the writers think they should. It shows up in-character as bits of the gameline exploding because somebody didn't approve of them, or being told that you should be running a soup kitchen or something to be a responsible magus. It shows up out-of-character when you get lectured about how... you know what, I don't want to go into M20. Anyway, Vampire, conversely, doesn't really judge vampires, and when it does, it usually does it in a fun way. Vampires are supposed to go crazy and become terrible, terrible people. That's the game working as intended. It doesn't really spend a lot of time thinking about what a nasty jerk Tremere or Ennoia are, because seriously, what else did you expect? The result of this is that when a mage and an elder vampire appear in the same scene, the gameline's perspective goes completely insane because it doesn't really recognize that Tremere could be construed as a moral actor.
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Dec 22, 2018 14:56
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Ettin posted:If I had a Model T I would use it to drive this thread back to World of Darkness chat. We can split the difference, Monte Cook's World of Darkness?  
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Dec 22, 2018 15:00
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hangedman1984 posted:We can split the difference, Monte Cook's World of Darkness? Hey, I love this book... I just would never play a demon or Vampire because their mechanics break down too quickly. And Mages have.... Issues.
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Dec 22, 2018 15:04
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But the 4e thing is actually a great example - surges weren't meant to extend the adventuring day. The opposite is true. Surges were designed to be the hard limit on an adventuring day so HP could be assumed to be full. Misunderstanding and misinterpreting the prior editions intent is how you end up with vampire 5e imho.
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Dec 22, 2018 15:04
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Kurieg posted:Hey, I love this book... I just would never play a demon or Vampire because their mechanics break down too quickly. Really? I skimmed through it back when it first came out and it seemed...not for me.
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Dec 22, 2018 15:06
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hangedman1984 posted:Really? I skimmed through it back when it first came out and it seemed...not for me. The more powerful a demon becomes, the less time they're able to spend in human form and the more time they need to spend out of human form before they can put up a disguise again. There's a splat of demons explicitly designed to seduce and sex up humans. Vampires get d8+con per level in hp. And a single blood point still only heals 1d6 regardless of how high level you are. At level 20 you need to kill a small village every day just to heal up. The mage spell system functions just fine if all you're doing is slinging instant damage spells. But anything with a radius or duration has a very large component cost. Such that a mage spell replicating control weather from 3.5 has a high enough component cost to knock out or kill even a high level mage.
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Dec 22, 2018 15:16
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Rand Brittain posted:Blood Treachery has been poorly-regarded for a number of reasons My favorite being that it is an adventure presented in the format of a play, which opens with a dramatis personae assigning major arcana of the tarot to characters instead of actors to portray them. Included in the dramatis personae is an item representing the role of each of the nine Spheres as characters in something like a Greek chorus. Not included in the dramatis personae is an item representing the player characters. The notion of how to fit players into this playable adventure receives less space than an article on mages who are ghouls and how doomed they are.
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Dec 22, 2018 16:18
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I Am Just a Box posted:Not included in the dramatis personae is an item representing the player characters. The notion of how to fit players into this playable adventure receives less space than an article on mages who are ghouls and how doomed they are. Oh, yeah, people always say "it's structured as a loving play" and forget to mention "it's structured like a play with a clear beginning, middle, and end, which resolves itself on its own without any player characters becoming involved." Other bullshit things about it:
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Dec 22, 2018 16:30
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Ettin posted:If I had a Model T I would use it to drive this thread back to World of Darkness chat. Utterly unrelated to that will shall not be uttered in this thread, Monte Cook's understanding of the World of Darkness as evinced in the book at hand seems familiar somehow: cherry picks the aesthetics of a better game and pays lip service to a few small name-recognition bits here and there, welds them to a chassis of SRD-available 3e, and whenever there's a conflict between the two (like the aforementioned "mages are wizards but expensive"), err on the side of doing older and worse.
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Dec 22, 2018 17:33
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Yeah, the nostalgia-revival movement in tabletop games was briefly brought up but my buddy isn't as into the minutia as I am. I only skimmed D&D 5e and haven't read any of nuVampire, but my understanding was that both of these had some smart advances in game design buried under their poor decision to basically be the old versions again. I know people like 5e's advantage/disadvantage system, and I seem to remember a few people here thinking of how to rip out some of the stuff (hunger... dice?) they liked from nuVampire. Like, the strategy of going old school again is dumb and wedded the games to some bad old mechanics, but there's still some thought and improvements thanks to general better ways of doing and thinking about design in them.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:00
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Digital Osmosis posted:I only skimmed D&D 5e and haven't read any of nuVampire, Digital Osmosis posted:but there's still some thought and improvements thanks to general better ways of doing and thinking about design in them. Now that I see why you think this, I can assure you that a closer look will change your opinion.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:12
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I Am Just a Box posted:Not included in the dramatis personae is an item representing the player characters. The notion of how to fit players into this playable adventure receives less space than an article on mages who are ghouls and how doomed they are.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:29
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Warthur posted:Scenario writers completely spacing on the fact that player characters are a thing seems to be a recurring thing with early White Wolf; there's several adventures in Succubus Club where there's whole scenes of NPCs just doing stuff at each other and no consideration of what might happen if the PCs try to intervene, and they keep falling back on the "elders are having a feud" trope so hard that there's multiple adventures in the book where none of the action will make a lick of sense to the PCs, because it's all part of a big game the elders are playing against each other and aren't going to explain to the PCs. Blood Treachery is from like 2000, which isn't what I think of as "early" White Wolf.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:43
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Warthur posted:Scenario writers completely spacing on the fact that player characters are a thing seems to be a recurring thing with early White Wolf; there's several adventures in Succubus Club where there's whole scenes of NPCs just doing stuff at each other and no consideration of what might happen if the PCs try to intervene, and they keep falling back on the "elders are having a feud" trope so hard that there's multiple adventures in the book where none of the action will make a lick of sense to the PCs, because it's all part of a big game the elders are playing against each other and aren't going to explain to the PCs.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:44
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I know this happens in other systems, but I feel like it happens way more in Vampire than really anything else, WoD or otherwise (other than the whole "any adventure Sam Haight's in, the PCs get WoW-style cutscene stunlocked as he escapes to appear Next Time(tm)" situation across Werewolf). Maybe because the implicit social/internal-politicking focus of Vampire lends itself to casting PCs as the extras in someone else's movie, while largely Werewolf/Mage/others have way more "ok go do the thing at the place to Antagonist Faction" threads? I feel like WW really, really god drat loved their metaplot and NPCS, which is why stuff like that happened. Especially with Vampire because it has that baked in element of "The elders are playing chess with everyone else for reasons" that at least in 1st ed is really prevalent.
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Dec 22, 2018 20:08
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That Old Tree posted:Blood Treachery is from like 2000, which isn't what I think of as "early" White Wolf. Yeah. Also around this same time is the adventure wherein a the PCs essentially go globe-trotting and basically the point of the whole deal is so they can watch Baba Yaga get eaten by an even older and more powerful Nosferatu so they can appropriately cower in awe.
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Dec 22, 2018 20:13
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah. Also around this same time is the adventure wherein a the PCs essentially go globe-trotting and basically the point of the whole deal is so they can watch Baba Yaga get eaten by an even older and more powerful Nosferatu so they can appropriately cower in awe. And, of course, 2000ish is the era of Aberrant.
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Dec 22, 2018 20:55
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Warthur posted:Scenario writers completely spacing on the fact that player characters are a thing seems to be a recurring thing with early White Wolf
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Dec 22, 2018 21:31
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The werewolf scenarios had a degree of inevitability to them. But there were parts where the players intervened. And I think they explicitly recommended keeping the players away from Albrecht and Zyrzzhch because of how integral they were to the scenario. Sort of a "Here's what the players see if they happen to be here. But please don't do that." Last battlefield has the player characters as the generals of the war more or less. A Tribe Falls was more of a framework than an actual storyline (because it was thirteen frameworks). Weaver Ascendant had the PCs as the ones organizing Full Disclosure and suggested that they be at the waking of the Wyrm. Ragnarok is a nuclear winter end times scenario. The actual player involvement is "survive".
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Dec 22, 2018 21:42
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Blockhouse posted:have y'all seen gangrel lately From a few pages back but I saw Gangrel wrestle like six months ago and he's still totally fine. Did dives to the floor and everything.
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Dec 22, 2018 21:52
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Draxion posted:From a few pages back but I saw Gangrel wrestle like six months ago and he's still totally fine. Did dives to the floor and everything. Yeah I follow him on instagram and he frequently posts shots of him at wrestling shows. Dude seems legit really cool, despite the goofy rear end fangs that I think are permanent because lol wrestling.
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Dec 22, 2018 22:39
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The Wormwood scenario is the only one worth a drat from Gehenna. It’s quiet, personal, the last few vampires left in a church coming to terms with their sins before they too inevitably die.
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Dec 22, 2018 22:42
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Dawgstar posted:Yeah. Also around this same time is the adventure wherein a the PCs essentially go globe-trotting and basically the point of the whole deal is so they can watch Baba Yaga get eaten by an even older and more powerful Nosferatu so they can appropriately cower in awe.
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Dec 22, 2018 22:45
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Meinberg posted:The Wormwood scenario is the only one worth a drat from Gehenna. It’s quiet, personal, the last few vampires left in a church coming to terms with their sins before they too inevitably die. "Goth Superheros don't save the world, maybe save their souls" is the only ending of Vampire that anyone should ever even consider.
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Dec 23, 2018 00:21
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Yea there's no world in which the proper apocalypse level emotional cap to a VtM campaign is anything but 'we're going to sit here and reflect on all we've done as the world ends, and hope that we can find some manner of peace after all this'.
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Dec 23, 2018 00:24
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'I repent my sin of being turned me into a monster by some dickhead because he was thirsty. Truly, I should have commit suicide the moment it happened like all people do when they become what people consider immoral.'
nofather fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 01:40
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Nessus posted:How could you tell? Wouldn't they both have super-Obfuscate? It's been ages, but I think that Baba Yaga is gloating to the players or something and then Vasilisa shows up and roflstomps the Hag and the PCs can be all 'gasp Gehenna is coming!'
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Dec 23, 2018 01:47
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Is Blacula in WOD
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Dec 23, 2018 02:20
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The movie exists.
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Dec 23, 2018 02:24
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nofather posted:'I repent my sin of being turned me into a monster by some dickhead because he was thirsty. Truly, I should have commit suicide the moment it happened like all people do when they become what people consider immoral.' I mean...yes? That's kinda the point of the beast mechanic and all, even the most moral vampire has to compromise their humanity and 'maybe we'd be better off dead for real' vs 'gently caress that I've got vamp power now and that's a step up from humanity' is one of the biggest themes of the game? It's real weird the most iconic end of the world version throws that all away for what amount to vampire kaiju theater. It's like the writers themselves were victims of the gundam meme but with vampires. 
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Dec 23, 2018 02:32
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