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Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer
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Hillary 2024
Nov 13, 2016

by vyelkin

Kurieg posted:

the 20th anniversary editions are basically huge collections of all the 3rd edition media brought into one book with the storyline roughly brought up to the current day (While also pushing back the end times as necessary) It uses the same rules as Revised with limited changes, and they have relatively complete compendiums of disciplines, bloodlines, and merits. It's the "Final" Version of what you played in college, more or less.

V5 basically ignores that the 20th anniversary books came out, Gehenna happened but it wasn't the world changing apocalypse that people feared it would be. The mechanics are completely different though they still use d10s.

Yeah the impression I'd gotten was that the 20th books are compendiums vs V5 which is a setting reset and rules update. There's also a move in V5 back towards the horror feel with humanity and the hunger mechanic, and an emphasis on feeding styles as part of your character. You're more aware of your character being a parasitic corpse with a veneer of humanity over a monstrous core.

Hillary 2024 fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jun 16, 2020

Wiccan Wasteland
Oct 15, 2012
The Gentleman Gamer is currently live on the WoD twitch channel talking about Werewolf V5.

https://www.twitch.tv/worldofdarkness

Oberst
May 24, 2010

Fertilizing threads since 2010

Kurieg posted:

Somone coming to the game from Revised edition will definitely have an easier time running V20 than V5. V5 is a completely different mechanically even though it tries to emulate the "Design feel" of the mid 90s.

Gonna have to disagree bigly. I've run both after coming from Revised and V5 is leagues easier than V20. Theres just less demand on the ST to keep track of dumb stuff like how much blood can X gen vampire use in a turn, 3 damage types, soaking, OP celerity / potence, etc

V5 is just easier to run for a ST - anyone who has played it will understand. I like V20 but its extremely 90s and the book is a tome. Also things like 1s taking away from your successes is extremely lame

Oberst
May 24, 2010

Fertilizing threads since 2010

Lurks With Wolves posted:

I will admit that this thread does have a bias against V5. A bias that mostly exists because it started with Martin Ericsson making a bunch of edgy promises about how it's going to tackle modern issues and then hired noted harasser/pants-shitter Zak S to make a promotional game and handled ISIS refugees in a hamhanded way in a preview adventure and caused a literal international incident when the second book called an actual organized effort to kill gay people a vampiric smokescreen.

Is V5 still that bad? I hope not, since it's been two years and Ericsson left. Is it fair that bringing up V5 causes an instinctive bristling in this thread because the way it started was that bad? Not really, it's at least an interesting take on the concept mechanically and it's been out long enough that people could have started playing it well after the aforementioned abysmal introduction. I'm still going to side-eye people who jump in to recommend V5, but that isn't actually that fair.

(But also, the thread can be kind of aggressive about V5 while still having a good point about it's mechanical flaws so let's just be chill.)

Thats fair, but I got into the game due to LA by night well after the swedracula and other pieces of poo poo were fired. As far as im concerned the faces of V5 are Erika ishii and the gentleman gamer. I cant go back in time to unfuck the games start, but I'm also not going to commit seppuku because the game i enjoy is fun even if the creator was a piece of poo poo :shrug:

It improved on V20 and Requiem just as new editions are supposed to do and i like it. New editions will always cause wars - hell I'm sure the goth kids in 2004 were pissed about Requiem

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
Again, Oberst. It's very disingenuous to state that V5 is a new edition of Requiem.
It's not.

Requiem is a completely different system by a completely different game developer, that is still active and still getting books. The 4th edition of Vampire was the 20th anniversary editions, it is no longer getting any books (partly because executive meddling from Paradox meant putting out additional 20th anniversary books was no longer desirable).

And yes, there was some pushback to the nwod games when they came out, primarily against werewolf and mage, mostly because the themes in those games were profoundly different compared to their oWoD Counterparts and seemed actively vindictive towards the owod playerbase in some ways. the 2nd edition books are almost universally seen as better.


Also: For a group of people familiar with oWoD Revised, V20 would be very easy for them to pick up because it's literally the same mechanical system, the only thing that's changed is some merits and disciplines/gifts/spheres/chocolate sprinkles/etc. It should be very easy for their playgroup to pick up V20 and know exactly what to do.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
Forsaken being actively hostile to Apocalypse is good, actually. :v:

Mage is, well, it's less hostility and more like cleaning up someone else's mess out of pity.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Forsaken being actively hostile to Apocalypse is good, actually. :v:

Mage is, well, it's less hostility and more like cleaning up someone else's mess out of pity.
I'm not sure what in Forsaken is specifically hostile to Apocalypse -- Requiem seemed to be taking an axe to the entire thing of having potent, cogent ancient vampires and a fixed cosmic millenial metaplot, of course, but it largely did this by revising the rules of vampire poo poo and going from there.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
I mean, making the weird furry sex thing into even more of a Taboo made it even kinkier for the people who got off on that. On top of it turning into some really bizarre slut shaming for the woman in the equation, and making it really uncomfortable for everyone who wasn't getting off on the weird furry sex thing.

The right way to get rid of it is to not make it special at all. Which is what 2nd edition did.

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Nessus posted:

I'm not sure what in Forsaken is specifically hostile to Apocalypse -- Requiem seemed to be taking an axe to the entire thing of having potent, cogent ancient vampires and a fixed cosmic millenial metaplot, of course, but it largely did this by revising the rules of vampire poo poo and going from there.

The Pure are pretty much the Garou Nation repurposed as antagonists.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
I mean, yes, that's a good thing. The fascist bits of the garou nation deserve to have their dirty laundry hung out to dry. But the Forsaken tribes being oddly antagonistic to each other and there being a lot of inter-pack conflict for some reason just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Dave Brookshaw
Jun 27, 2012

No Regrets

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Forsaken being actively hostile to Apocalypse is good, actually. :v:

Mage is, well, it's less hostility and more like cleaning up someone else's mess out of pity.

Depends on how recently I’ve encountered Ascension fans.

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Oberst posted:

Gonna have to disagree bigly. I've run both after coming from Revised and V5 is leagues easier than V20. Theres just less demand on the ST to keep track of dumb stuff like how much blood can X gen vampire use in a turn, 3 damage types, soaking, OP celerity / potence, etc

V5 is just easier to run for a ST - anyone who has played it will understand. I like V20 but its extremely 90s and the book is a tome. Also things like 1s taking away from your successes is extremely lame

This is a very strange post, because while V5 definitely improves on V20 in certain areas you've mostly mentioned V5's weaknesses rather than strengths. Let's move down the list:

* V5 actually makes you roll to see how many blood points your powers cost each time you use them, instead of just marking down a set number of points. Superior Generation, instead of just letting you spend more at a time, requires you to roll multiple times per power use, except it only applies to certain levels of powers as cross-referenced by the Blood Potency you've managed to unlock within that Generation. Way more of a fiddly time waster.

* V5 actually has four damage types, two for health and two for willpower, and they're healed from in different ways.

* Actually, the lack of soak rolls and multiple-rolls-per-attack resolution is a clear win for V5 and this is a reason I would recommend the system.

* Celerity and Potence are actually substantially weaker in V20, although of course oWoD combat balance kind of blah in general. Meanwhile, does anyone actually know how the V5 Celerity power "Lightning Speed" works yet?

* Instead of taking away successes, 1s (and 10s!!!) threaten to take away your agency all together, such that you have to use a much fiddlier and more dice-tricky willpower system to sometimes massage both the failures and successes of your rolls in order to avoid straight up losing social merits and other trickle down consequences of bestial failures/messy criticals. On top of that, as mentioned previously, using WP effectively constitutes marking damage on one of your health tracks rather than just spending a resource. Super punishing and time consuming!

Aside from simplified combat, I would note that V5 has (mostly) balanced chargen with the exception of broken incentives in Predator Types, reduces Thaumaturgy to just being two disciplines rather than twenty or thirty, and allows for more differentiation between members of clans that share Disciplines thanks to its innovative choose-a-power-for-each-dot system. On the other hand, this means that someone looking to indulge in oWoD nostalgia should probably avoid V5 because they'll find a lot of options they used to have substantially constrained.

citybeatnik
Mar 1, 2013

You Are All
WEIRDOS




Oberst posted:

Also things like 1s taking away from your successes is extremely lame

It's not a true WoD game unless you roll 16 dice to hit and still somehow do zero damage on the roll due to 1s.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Kurieg posted:

I mean, making the weird furry sex thing into even more of a Taboo made it even kinkier for the people who got off on that. On top of it turning into some really bizarre slut shaming for the woman in the equation, and making it really uncomfortable for everyone who wasn't getting off on the weird furry sex thing.

The right way to get rid of it is to not make it special at all. Which is what 2nd edition did.

It always felt like a sever over-correction on getting rid of the Metis (which is a good idea), but they still wanted 'woof on woof sex is bad.'

I'm really curious to see what they do with Metis in W5.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Dawgstar posted:

It always felt like a sever over-correction on getting rid of the Metis (which is a good idea), but they still wanted 'woof on woof sex is bad.'

I'm really curious to see what they do with Metis in W5.

*Long extended scream*

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Kurieg posted:

*Long extended scream*

Well, I hoped the implication was 'I'm hoping they're gone for good and they do something else' but it didn't read like that, sorry.

I Am Just a Box
Jul 20, 2011
I belong here. I contain only inanimate objects. Nothing is amiss.

Dawgstar posted:

It always felt like a sever over-correction on getting rid of the Metis (which is a good idea), but they still wanted 'woof on woof sex is bad.'

The treatment of werewolf reproduction in general smacks not only of a kneejerk reaction to Apocalypse but also to a failure to separate completely from Apocalypse's mindset. Weird hate-ghost children (or anything else specific) wouldn't have been necessary to remove the metis at all if they had just realized that the struggle to conserve the werewolf population is born of Apocalypse's environmental themes, and it was never necessary or even relevant for Forsaken to address sex at all. If they had made that mental jump in first edition they could have made a better game by removing the Wolf-Blooded families and the implication of coercive, codependent relationships they spread through Uratha society, because if conserving the werewolf population isn't going to be a relevant struggle or theme, there was no need to keep werewolves a hereditary phenomenon.

Second edition does a lot to recover from this by both giving the Wolf-Blooded their Tells, which both make them more interesting and somewhat narrow the power gap of their asymmetric relationship with werewolves, and establishing non-hereditary Wolf-Blooded. I would have liked to see even more emphasis on the latter. Families as breeding stock is a gross and out of place element in Forsaken, except maybe as a particular element of why the Ivory Claws are one of the extra bad, extra maladjusted tribes.

nofather
Aug 15, 2014
It seemed more like a doubling down of the original intent. Werewolf and werewolf sex was supposed to be not done in Apocalypse, this was reinforced by social taboo, and the creation of metis, who were supposed to be horrible, but ended up with a lot of people wanting to play them (whether there was a mechanical advantage, or just for sheer uniqueness factor I have no idea). For whatever reason they, again, decided "No sex" in Werewolf the Forsaken, and in addition to social taboos, you had a thing that would outright kill you.

It was weird in both lines from the start, especially since White Wolf wasn't exactly shying away from sexuality. But they didn't want sex in werewolfs. Other games seemed to play it up. Vampire, obviously. Mage seemed pretty sexless (from the viewpoint of a person who never paid much attention to it, though there was this one story in an anthology) but more due to a shift of focus. The whole thing across werewolf seemed a very hamhanded way of someone trying to ban something they didn't like.

Glad they got rid of attempts at a sex ban in Forsaken second edition, where cleave to the herd just means to stay among them. Don't care about what they're doing in Apocalypse.

nofather fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jun 20, 2020

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



nofather posted:

It seemed more like a doubling down of the original intent. Werewolf and werewolf sex was supposed to be not done in Apocalypse, this was reinforced by social taboo, and the creation of metis, who were supposed to be horrible, but ended up with a lot of people wanting to play them (whether there was a mechanical advantage, or just for sheer uniqueness factor I have no idea). For whatever reason they, again, decided "No sex" in Werewolf the Forsaken, and in addition to social taboos, you had a thing that would outright kill you.
Metis were popular I think because you got most of the up sides of being a Homid and you got a tragic flaw. Plus two free points of permanent Gnosis and resting Crinos. The problem with forbidding horny is that you only increase the pressure under which the horny exists.

Angry Lobster
May 16, 2011

Served with honor
and some clarified butter.
Freaking furries are a very important group in the kink market, they are going to pander to them in one way or another.

TheKingslayer
Sep 3, 2008

Ferrinus posted:

* Celerity and Potence are actually substantially weaker in V20, although of course oWoD combat balance kind of blah in general. Meanwhile, does anyone actually know how the V5 Celerity power "Lightning Speed" works yet?

On the other hand, this means that someone looking to indulge in oWoD nostalgia should probably avoid V5 because they'll find a lot of options they used to have substantially constrained.

I agree completely on the first point. Celerity seems like such a bigger deal in V5. I'd rather have all the utility it gives me than just extra actions. On the Lightning Speed thing do you mean, "Lightning Strike"? It seems pretty simple to me unless there's something I'm overlooking.

On the second sentence, for me personally I enjoyed the somewhat similar world to play in but having completely different options and as of right now not a complete bloat of them to choose from. Merits and flaws in oWoD were getting out of hand along with Thaumaturgy.

ElNarez
Nov 4, 2009

Ferrinus posted:

This is a very strange post, because while V5 definitely improves on V20 in certain areas you've mostly mentioned V5's weaknesses rather than strengths. Let's move down the list:

* V5 actually makes you roll to see how many blood points your powers cost each time you use them, instead of just marking down a set number of points. Superior Generation, instead of just letting you spend more at a time, requires you to roll multiple times per power use, except it only applies to certain levels of powers as cross-referenced by the Blood Potency you've managed to unlock within that Generation. Way more of a fiddly time waster.

I feel like we've had the argument on whether V5 Hunger is in any way equivalent to V20 Blood Points already, so I'm gonna leave that aside for now. At most, you only ever roll twice when activating a power that requires a Rouse check. Once for the initial check, and one other time if you have enough Blood Potency for a reroll on checks for that level of Discipline. (The maximum available Blood Potency for player characters at the highest available Generation during character creation is 4, giving you rerolls on checks for Disciplines at level 2 and below)

Either way, that stuff is set at creation or between sessions and it doesn't move during play. One additional roll of one die is hardly what I would call "a fiddly time waster".

ZearothK
Aug 25, 2008

I've lost twice, I've failed twice and I've gotten two dishonorable mentions within 7 weeks. But I keep coming back. I am The Trooper!

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2021


The best new mechanic in V5 is the Lore sheets, which are cool merits that create bonds between the players and the setting, taking advantage of Masquerade's metaplot for the benefit of the game instead of its detriment.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

Nessus posted:

Metis were popular I think because you got most of the up sides of being a Homid and you got a tragic flaw. Plus two free points of permanent Gnosis and resting Crinos. The problem with forbidding horny is that you only increase the pressure under which the horny exists.

And it wasn't hard to poke for a flaw that didn't hamper you too much. Albino and True Reflection (which meant you always appeared as a Crinos in a mirror) were popular, as was Silver Sensitivity which was just dumb in that silver did damage if you just touched it. You already die to silver and just don't carry a klaive, so who cares?

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

ElNarez posted:

I feel like we've had the argument on whether V5 Hunger is in any way equivalent to V20 Blood Points already, so I'm gonna leave that aside for now. At most, you only ever roll twice when activating a power that requires a Rouse check. Once for the initial check, and one other time if you have enough Blood Potency for a reroll on checks for that level of Discipline. (The maximum available Blood Potency for player characters at the highest available Generation during character creation is 4, giving you rerolls on checks for Disciplines at level 2 and below)

Either way, that stuff is set at creation or between sessions and it doesn't move during play. One additional roll of one die is hardly what I would call "a fiddly time waster".

Actually you might roll up to four times*, since some powers cost 2d2-2 blood points rather than 1d2-1. And the fiddly thing is that high BP doesn’t just give you D&D-style Advantage on rouse checks generally, but a specific subset of rouse checks based on dot level, so you have to keep track of whether you’re (risking) spending blood on a level 2 Discipline or a level 3 Discipline.

I appreciate that having a Hunger number that goes up is useful for expressing some other mechanics in a non-wordy way (where V20 might have to say something like “subtract current from max BP and divide by two” but this actual implementation is really clunky, putting aside the strategic and balance concerns of all mana costs being randomized for the moment.

* Okay I’m being a bit cheeky here, since in practice you’d roll a pair of dice twice in a row, or maybe two white dice and two red dice.

Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jun 20, 2020

Oberst
May 24, 2010

Fertilizing threads since 2010

Clever Moniker posted:

I'd like to thank everyone for the V5 replies! Seriously. I checked out Reddit and the Onyx Path forums for game advice, and it was more even more contentious over there. I only recently found out about V5, so I was not around for the serious issues that it had. I considered VtR and V20 as well, but I'm most interested in the new mechanics of V5. I had a feeling they were a little more finicky than they first appeared, and I see that is indeed the case. Thank you again for the articles and advice!

Fantastic choice - every edition is fun in its own ways, but you'll find V5 very story teller and player friendly compared to its older, predecessor editions like requiem and V20

Do consider rereading this post for good starter advice (ex. please god don't use beastial failures as presented in V5 core):


Oberst posted:

:siren: Big V5 mechanical thing to consider: don't use Bestial Failures as the core V5 book presents them. Seriously. Only hand out a bestial failures if there's no successes in regular and hunger dice and atleast 1 hunger dice is a 1 :siren:

Remember to have your players build their characters appropriately:

- Make sure they pick the SPECIALIST skill array in character creation as it returns the most XP bang for their buck (they don't want to pick generalist or whatever the other array is)

- Make sure they throughly consider their predator type and where they're placing the predator type discipline dot. Ideally they should place it in their best in clan discipline (brujah taking celerity from 2 to 3) or place in an out of clan discipline that they can then level normally (Nosferatu with Dominate that they can level themselves)

- Don't follow the V5 core of you must taste X type of blood to raise X related discipline. Just let your players raise disciplines with XP when they have it

Oberst
May 24, 2010

Fertilizing threads since 2010

Hillary 2020 posted:

Yeah the impression I'd gotten was that the 20th books are compendiums vs V5 which is a setting reset and rules update. There's also a move in V5 back towards the horror feel with humanity and the hunger mechanic, and an emphasis on feeding styles as part of your character. You're more aware of your character being a parasitic corpse with a veneer of humanity over a monstrous core.

Yep this is all very true - V20 is superheroes with mana pools and fangs; V5 is about being parasitic, blood powered corpses that could snap at any moment

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

I Am Just a Box posted:

The treatment of werewolf reproduction in general smacks not only of a kneejerk reaction to Apocalypse but also to a failure to separate completely from Apocalypse's mindset. Weird hate-ghost children (or anything else specific) wouldn't have been necessary to remove the metis at all if they had just realized that the struggle to conserve the werewolf population is born of Apocalypse's environmental themes, and it was never necessary or even relevant for Forsaken to address sex at all.

It's not about the Metis, it's about players who played the game by spending every second in wolf-form, having lots of sex with other werewolves, and creeping out other players at the table. Making sex between werewolves have practical consequences was a reaction to that and an attempt to put a stop to it.

Angry Lobster
May 16, 2011

Served with honor
and some clarified butter.

LatwPIAT posted:

It's not about the Metis, it's about players who played the game by spending every second in wolf-form, having lots of sex with other werewolves, and creeping out other players at the table. Making sex between werewolves have practical consequences was a reaction to that and an attempt to put a stop to it.

Good thing that my entire playgroup got castrated after a few vicious fights and some unlucky rolls on the battle scar table.

citybeatnik
Mar 1, 2013

You Are All
WEIRDOS




LatwPIAT posted:

It's not about the Metis, it's about players who played the game by spending every second in wolf-form, having lots of sex with other werewolves, and creeping out other players at the table. Making sex between werewolves have practical consequences was a reaction to that and an attempt to put a stop to it.

Don't forget what Metis would be expectes do when they got too many successes on a rage roll.

ElNarez
Nov 4, 2009

Ferrinus posted:

Actually you might roll up to four times*, since some powers cost 2d2-2 blood points rather than 1d2-1. And the fiddly thing is that high BP doesn’t just give you D&D-style Advantage on rouse checks generally, but a specific subset of rouse checks based on dot level, so you have to keep track of whether you’re (risking) spending blood on a level 2 Discipline or a level 3 Discipline.

I appreciate that having a Hunger number that goes up is useful for expressing some other mechanics in a non-wordy way (where V20 might have to day something like “subtract current from max BP and divide by two” but this actual implementation is really clunky, putting aside the strategic and balance concerns of all mana costs being randomized for the moment.

* Okay I’m being a bit cheeky here, since in practice you’d roll a pair of dice twice in a row, or maybe two white dice and two red dice.

I guess my other problem with your argument is that you mark down everything having to do with Blood Potency on the character sheet, including the Rouse reroll; so it's just one cross-reference when using a power. It's hardly as complicated as you make it sound.

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Oberst posted:

Fantastic choice - every edition is fun in its own ways, but you'll find V5 very story teller and player friendly compared to its older, predecessor editions like requiem and V20

Do consider rereading this post for good starter advice (ex. please god don't use beastial failures as presented in V5 core):

This is flat-out wrong and bad advice; there's no reason to pick the specialist array as opposed to the generalist array, because all arrays of skills and stats are worth the same XP. Conversely, it's a huge mistake to use predator type to get a dot in an out-of-clan discipline; you should always pick a predator type that raises your highest discipline higher still.

ElNarez posted:

I guess my other problem with your argument is that you mark down everything having to do with Blood Potency on the character sheet, including the Rouse reroll; so it's just one cross-reference when using a power. It's hardly as complicated as you make it sound.

There's more to mark down, and you might end up having to cross reference things on your own character sheet. If I'm playing V20 or Requiem I can just write something like this:

Dominate 1: Free
Dominate 2: 1 Vitae
Dominate 3: 1 Vitae

But if I'm playing V5 I either have to note this:

Dominate 1: Free
Dominate 2: Rouse Check
Dominate 3: Rouse Check

BP: 3 All Rouse checks for Disciplines level 2 and below have advantage (I didn't look up if this number is right so don't feel the need to correct me if it's not)

or I have to go through every Discipline list and add a parenthetical to the ones of level 2 or below reminding me that I have Advantage on those rouse checks specifically. And, of course, we're talking about a situation where you have to roll to see how much mana you lose every time you spend any, which means actually activating and resolving powers takes that much more time.

DantetheK9
Feb 2, 2020

Just...so fucking tired.



Kurieg posted:

I mean, making the weird furry sex thing into even more of a Taboo made it even kinkier for the people who got off on that. On top of it turning into some really bizarre slut shaming for the woman in the equation, and making it really uncomfortable for everyone who wasn't getting off on the weird furry sex thing.

The right way to get rid of it is to not make it special at all. Which is what 2nd edition did.

Everyone seems to have a "furry sex thing" WtA story and it still mystifies me. I've been running WtA for 20 years, am a furry and I've...never encountered this in the wild.

Angry Lobster
May 16, 2011

Served with honor
and some clarified butter.

DantetheK9 posted:

Everyone seems to have a "furry sex thing" WtA story and it still mystifies me. I've been running WtA for 20 years, am a furry and I've...never encountered this in the wild.

Your creep mileage may vary. My WtA experience was similar to yours, very tame, but everytime I wanted to play Vampire it was a loving non stop creepshow.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

DantetheK9 posted:

Everyone seems to have a "furry sex thing" WtA story and it still mystifies me. I've been running WtA for 20 years, am a furry and I've...never encountered this in the wild.

I'm pretty sure that open furries have better ways to get their furry sex thing on than 'bring it to the gaming table.' This poo poo always seems to come out in groups of people who have no reason to expect it.

Joe Slowboat
Nov 9, 2016

Higgledy-Piggledy Whale Statements



Oberst posted:

Yep this is all very true - V20 is superheroes with mana pools and fangs; V5 is about being parasitic, blood powered corpses that could snap at any moment

So, what do you consider Requiem about?

Since you keep calling it a 'predecessor' edition to V5, rather than an ongoing system and setting that diverged from the Masquerade design a while back and is still trucking.

What do you think Requiem does, compared to the other two?

Omnicrom
Aug 3, 2007
Snorlax Afficionado


Ferrinus posted:

This is flat-out wrong and bad advice; there's no reason to pick the specialist array as opposed to the generalist array, because all arrays of skills and stats are worth the same XP. Conversely, it's a huge mistake to use predator type to get a dot in an out-of-clan discipline; you should always pick a predator type that raises your highest discipline higher still.

Relatedly, are there any WoD/nWoD/CoD games of any stripe that deal with this particular wonk of progression? The idea that going Super specialized is mathematically better for long-term progression than being a more generalist character?

Ferrinus
Jun 19, 2003

i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

Joe Slowboat posted:

So, what do you consider Requiem about?

Since you keep calling it a 'predecessor' edition to V5, rather than an ongoing system and setting that diverged from the Masquerade design a while back and is still trucking.

What do you think Requiem does, compared to the other two?

Though I assume Oberst doesn't realize it, there actually is an ideological throughline leading from VtM to both V5 and VtR... but specifically VtR 1E.

I think Requiem 2E might be the only edition of Vampire I remember that didn't bill itself as trying to get away from "superheroes with fangs" and moving towards a mythic past of "personal horror". You could see it in VtR 1.0 in many places, like the way Blood Potency was super unrewarding to raise, the way the game's default mechanics were very stingy with character advancement points, and the way that many Discipline powers, particularly physical Discipline powers, were very low-key in effect. V5 has this stuff in spades - its XP drip vs. XP costs are very punishing, and also its physical disciplines suck rear end. Like, if you buy V5 Potence or Celerity with the impression that they are going to help you win fights against non-chumps you are going to get a very rude awakening. Frankly, I think V5 is actually worse about this than Requiem is - if you make a Daeva or Nosferatu and just give them Vigor 3 on top of a decent base Strength score, you do end up terrifyingly strong and able to completely shut people down in grapples or deal ridiculous damage with a heavy weapon, while a Potence 3 V5 character ends up with bare hands that are as dangerous as but not more dangerous than, like, a fire axe.

(V5 has one thing in common with VtR 2: they both do the supremely lame cop-out of making Protean claws deal regular damage but not get halved)

I have my issues with Requiem 2E, but one thing I'll always admire it for is not being quietly ashamed of thinking vampires are cool and letting vampires be powerful. Meanwhile V5 is as self-conscious about VtM Revised as VtM Revised was about VtM 2E and - I'd bet money on this - as 2E was about 1E. Just stuck in a constant flight from the "superheroes with fangs" that haunt their nightmares.

And the funny thing is, if you actually read Oberst/Metapod/whoever else's gameplay reports it's clear that they'll never escape because the poison is inside them. They're still concerned with punishing players for minute-to-minute tactical errors like going home without feeding or failing to check for traps before opening a treasure chest or whatever.

Omnicrom posted:

Relatedly, are there any WoD/nWoD/CoD games of any stripe that deal with this particular wonk of progression? The idea that going Super specialized is mathematically better for long-term progression than being a more generalist character?

For 1E, my group has just used XP-based chargen for forever; you might be able to find it in the OP of this WoD thread or a past one.

In the 2E nWoD this is no longer a concern because all advancement costs are flat rather than scaling, and any Merits lost to narrative mishap don't cost XP (but do cost in-game effort or luck) to replace, so there no longer exists any concern about buying up traits in the right order so as to not miss out on XP.

Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Jun 20, 2020

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Relevant Tangent
Nov 18, 2016

Tangentially Relevant

Metis's parents were probably dead (childbirth and Harano respectively (they really shouldn't have made Harano a thing)) so you didn't have to worry about the ST kidnapping them and they're substantially better mechanically than the other two options. Smart play would have been to just make it so if Garou gently caress nothing happens.

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