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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


citybeatnik posted:

Or as another player in the group put it, Wolverine v Gambit.

That is a really clever way to descripe their core archetypes (I remember the Revised Ravnos clan art felt like a tracing of Gambit), but you don't really need to fit your character into those roles.

Also Gangrel are not forced into nomadism by their Curse, it is not unusual for them to lay claim to a territory and become the apex predator within it or integrate with a pack. Ravnos in V5 do have to be nomads or at least maintain rotating/mobile havens. Or just have a lot of reliable friends that they can sleep on when their bane demand it or a deathstyle that fits that (ever-touring band, carny, bounty hunter, courier, travelling merchant/smuggler, etc).

Another way is focusing on their disciplines, both share Animalism in V5 (and used to share Fortitude in past editions). V5 Ravnos have Obfuscate and Presence with almagam disciplines giving them illusion powers while the Gangrel have Fortitude and Protean. Those are very different power sets that will result in extremely distinct approaches to solve problems for characters that focused their development into disciplines.

It is funny that the Gangrel disciplines are objetively better for a nomadic playstyle (can just sleep anywhere there's ground), but Caine was also kind of an rear end in a top hat when handing out curses.

ZearothK fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Jun 11, 2022

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worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?

Rand Brittain posted:

My impression is that it's because nearly all OPP books these days have a lot of writers, who do a lot of different sections that then have to be stitched together by the developer into a single book...

It's not really that anybody involved is particularly incompetent; it's that they're trying to do a full-time employee's job with part-time employees.

Having worked in editing/proofreading, I can tell you that it's probably half this and half technical incompetence on the part of the lead.

At my last job we had two different house styles. The technical people all used one and the public facing side used the other. We'd get documents where 4 or 5 people from both sides had written different chunks of copy with completely different fonts and spacing and my boss (the lead) lacked the technical competence to properly fix these errors. She'd use Word's format paste tool (do not do this ever) to "fix" everything and leave every document with dozens of hard to spot errors.

These documents would get saved and their hosed up copy would be reused to Frankenstein other documents together, so the errors would become ossified. Even if I fixed the current document by redoing it all by hand, she'd insist on pulling copy from older ones for the next one, so the errors would always creep back in.

She had 30 years of experience on me so I couldn't really convince her that her entire workflow was wrong. Our clients just kept getting documents where the kerning would randomly be a few thousandths of an em off in places or the margins would slightly shift between headers. Sometimes I had to print poo poo out and spot errors by looking for places where the text just felt uncanny somehow.

This was at a full time office job where almost everyone involved was making good money and physically present in the building. I cannot imagine the stress of trying to get eight or ten remote freelancers to Exquisite Corpse a PDF together under deadline without a full-time proofreader on board.

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund

citybeatnik posted:

Any advice on differentiating between the niches that V5 Gangrel and Ravnos fill? Was chatting with the ST of my game and there's twenty years of baggage he's trying to get over. He likes what I'm doing with the character but not the clan.

He has a point. Both are nomadic. The best I've got is that if a Gangrel rolls into town with rival crime families they'd be that grizzled loner that lashes out when someone does something to them. While a Ravnos would Yojimbo their way through them all. Reactive v proactive.

Or as another player in the group put it, Wolverine v Gambit.

Sons of Anarchy vs Lucifer (as in the show character)

Daryl from Walking Dead vs dude from White Collar





The actual point is honestly that there's HUGE overlap with any idea in V5. Board Room CEO Ventrue? Of course, naturally. But a Brujah or Lasombra or even a Thinblood? Works just as well. Ultimately there's just a vibe to each of the clans, but the books straight contradict that vibe in themselves regularly, just to exemplify that stereotyping based on a clan is much less a thing. It's why in Night Road they specifically made the Banu Haqim guy be a scrawny nerdy androgynous Malaysian computer hacker guy instead of the stereotypical Arab warrior type. I actually had a chat with Justin Achilli about this on the official Discord, and they've been super aggressively trying to stomp out the white supremacist and out and out racist undertones to the community, which they fully acknowledge are the old Edditions' own drat fault by reinforcing stereotypes or straight up channeling racist ideas like Yellow Peril. (the convo was about KotE and my current work on a fan splat)

Fuzz fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jun 11, 2022

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


worm girl posted:

Having worked in editing/proofreading, I can tell you that it's probably half this and half technical incompetence on the part of the lead.

At my last job we had two different house styles. The technical people all used one and the public facing side used the other. We'd get documents where 4 or 5 people from both sides had written different chunks of copy with completely different fonts and spacing and my boss (the lead) lacked the technical competence to properly fix these errors. She'd use Word's format paste tool (do not do this ever) to "fix" everything and leave every document with dozens of hard to spot errors.

These documents would get saved and their hosed up copy would be reused to Frankenstein other documents together, so the errors would become ossified. Even if I fixed the current document by redoing it all by hand, she'd insist on pulling copy from older ones for the next one, so the errors would always creep back in.

She had 30 years of experience on me so I couldn't really convince her that her entire workflow was wrong. Our clients just kept getting documents where the kerning would randomly be a few thousandths of an em off in places or the margins would slightly shift between headers. Sometimes I had to print poo poo out and spot errors by looking for places where the text just felt uncanny somehow.

This was at a full time office job where almost everyone involved was making good money and physically present in the building. I cannot imagine the stress of trying to get eight or ten remote freelancers to Exquisite Corpse a PDF together under deadline without a full-time proofreader on board.

I'm so mad

I'm like a fairly amateur editor and this is so loving bad

Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

Anonymous Zebra posted:

This was the printed hardcover book. I hate reading from pdfs so went and bought the book.

gently caress this was the package that ups said was delivered but never was last week.

citybeatnik posted:

Any advice on differentiating between the niches that V5 Gangrel and Ravnos fill? Was chatting with the ST of my game and there's twenty years of baggage he's trying to get over. He likes what I'm doing with the character but not the clan.

He has a point. Both are nomadic. The best I've got is that if a Gangrel rolls into town with rival crime families they'd be that grizzled loner that lashes out when someone does something to them. While a Ravnos would Yojimbo their way through them all. Reactive v proactive.

Or as another player in the group put it, Wolverine v Gambit.

Not that this is particularly helpful, so I apologize, but this is why V:tR condensed the clans which was NOT a design choice I was happy with when it first dropped.

Soonmot fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Jun 11, 2022

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

Soonmot posted:

Not that this is particularly helpful, so I apologize, but this is why V:tR condensed the clans which was NOT a design choice I was happy with when it first dropped.

It's always funny to see every single element of VtM that distinguishes it from VtR come up as a problem, often repeatedly, and to see V5's own solutions always trend in the direction of making the game more VtRlike.

Well Played Mauer
Jun 1, 2003

We'll always have Cabo

I Am Just a Box posted:

I honestly just think Hunter 2e is a poor book for reasons that have nothing to do with word count or editing. Hunter 1e was excellent at maintaining a grounded focus on the experience of relatable people in the Vigil, and in remaining hazy and flexible. Hunter 2e feels too categorized and quantified, and too divorced from that immediate human experience. It tries to capture the shape without grasping the feel.

Thank you for putting this so succinctly. I read 2e right when the PDF dropped and haven’t been able to put why I didn’t like it into words. It’s a bummer, too, since Vigil 1e is my favorite game from either line by a big margin.

e:
I also think I’m not a big CoD 2e fan in general, though. I’ll also admit I haven’t read as much of 2e. I read the new Blue Book a while back and while I like touchstones, the changes to experience combined with conditions and tilts just seemed like too much to manage and way too focused on creating a system to reward role playing in a certain way.

What I liked about CoD was the 1e books read like a reset of an old system that was way too convoluted, and did its best to streamline its new rules and provide a lot of tools to build something as a GM. The books read like advice for how you might actually play a world of darkness game. I remember reading Requiem and thinking, “Oh poo poo, they actually expect you to play this with other people and are telling you how to do that. That’s new for White Wolf.”

2e seems more like it was trying to be more explicit about each game line’s place in a specific universe which came at the expense of that pragmatic toolboxy approach that I liked. Now it’s 150 pages on factions I probably won’t use with 50 pages on a system that’s more complex than before and very little advice on how to connect the two.

That’s all to say that I’m more excited about H5 than I thought I’d be. The concept of small groups doing street level poo poo was my jam from Vigil 1e so a whole book about that it promising, but it’d be cool to know if H5 improves upon Vigil or just takes Reckoning in a Vigil-ish direction.

Well Played Mauer fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Jun 13, 2022

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.
Vigil 1e is 95% certain to be better than H5. Just keep using that, the system's still alright.

TheCenturion
May 3, 2013
HI I LIKE TO GIVE ADVICE ON RELATIONSHIPS
That’s the feeling I got with Promethean. 1e was a fantastic setting for mood and feeling. It really communicated the idea behind the setting.

2e read like a video game strategy guide. They even explicitly laid out a predefined path for the new dawn.

worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?

Well Played Mauer posted:

Thank you for putting this so succinctly. I read 2e right when the PDF dropped and haven’t been able to put why I didn’t like it into words. It’s a bummer, too, since Vigil 1e is my favorite game from either line by a big margin.

e:
I also think I’m not a big CoD 2e fan in general, though. I’ll also admit I haven’t read as much of 2e. I read the new Blue Book a while back and while I like touchstones, the changes to experience combined with conditions and tilts just seemed like too much to manage and way too focused on creating a system to reward role playing in a certain way.

What I liked about CoD was the 1e books read like a reset of an old system that was way too convoluted, and did its best to streamline its new rules and provide a lot of tools to build something as a GM. The books read like advice for how you might actually play a world of darkness game. I remember reading Requiem and thinking, “Oh poo poo, they actually expect you to play this with other people and are telling you how to do that. That’s new for White Wolf.”

2e seems more like it was trying to be more explicit about each game line’s place in a specific universe which came at the expense of that pragmatic toolboxy approach that I liked. Now it’s 150 pages on factions I probably won’t use with 50 pages on a system that’s more complex than before and very little advice on how to connect the two.

That’s all to say that I’m more excited about H5 than I thought I’d be. The concept of small groups doing street level poo poo was my jam from Vigil 1e so a whole book about that it promising, but it’d be cool to know if H5 improves upon Vigil or just takes Reckoning in a Vigil-ish direction.

A fun exercise is to pretend that you've never even heard of vampires and crack open Requiem 2e. I love that game, but the book loving sucks if you don't go into it already familiar with the other Vampire games. It's like they decided to save time and effort by assuming everyone had played 1e, there's very little written about why being a vampire is not as good as it sounds, what vampires do night-to-night, how the inter-covenant politics play out, what players should expect their characters to be getting up to, or how survival and territory work. I can almost forgive the 2e players I've met who think that a Kindred is a good guy whose job is to protect the world from the Strix.

Lurks With Wolves
Jan 14, 2013

At least I don't dance with them, right?

TheCenturion posted:

That’s the feeling I got with Promethean. 1e was a fantastic setting for mood and feeling. It really communicated the idea behind the setting.

2e read like a video game strategy guide. They even explicitly laid out a predefined path for the new dawn.

I agree about Promethean 2e being way too video game-y with its systems, but I wouldn't necessarily call having a more defined system for the New Dawn a bad thing. The execution could have been better, but in 1e it felt like the game just shrugged and said "just do it when it feels like you've done enough and it's emotionally satisfying" and that just isn't enough to work with.

If you want to talk about 2e feeling video game-y, look at how Alembics work. The whole system feels like it could only feel good if you could open a panel on your status screen and see a bunch of bars filling.

Dave Brookshaw
Jun 27, 2012

No Regrets

worm girl posted:

A fun exercise is to pretend that you've never even heard of vampires and crack open Requiem 2e. I love that game, but the book loving sucks if you don't go into it already familiar with the other Vampire games. It's like they decided to save time and effort by assuming everyone had played 1e

We did, in fact write it thinking it was going to be a 1e sourcebook, and it got turned into a corebook long after the writers had done with it.

Really, the 2e nWoD is full of questionable decisions that make sense when you realise they were meant to be Arcana Unearthed or Players Options. Shame there'll almost certainly never be a 3e

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."

Dave Brookshaw posted:

Really, the 2e nWoD is full of questionable decisions that make sense when you realise they were meant to be Arcana Unearthed or Players Options. Shame there'll almost certainly never be a 3e

The other problem is that so many of those decisions were carried forward for no reason a sane person can understand, so that every nWoD 2e book puts the detailed splat descriptions long before you have the context to understand what they mean.

TheCenturion
May 3, 2013
HI I LIKE TO GIVE ADVICE ON RELATIONSHIPS

Lurks With Wolves posted:

I agree about Promethean 2e being way too video game-y with its systems, but I wouldn't necessarily call having a more defined system for the New Dawn a bad thing. The execution could have been better, but in 1e it felt like the game just shrugged and said "just do it when it feels like you've done enough and it's emotionally satisfying" and that just isn't enough to work with.

I mean, that's the whole point of 1e, to my mind. "When are you human? When you think you are. When you believe you are. When you finally understand that, honestly, you always were; you had to deal with your trauma and angst and finally accept that, no, there's nothing wrong with you." Honestly, Promethean always struck me as 'Awkward Teenager: The Pubescent.' "Nobody loves me, nobody wants me around, everyone hates me, nobody understands me, I didn't ask to be born, there are bullies literally lying in wait for me, there's something wrong with me, the world isn't made for people like me, but I can find other outcasts just like me to bond with, and we can all be outcasts together." And eventually, you realize there's nothing wrong with you, and you grow up.

2e? "Complete these 15 quests, and you win! Yay!"

Chernobyl Peace Prize
May 7, 2007

Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

This is probably because it's the hole that was made for me, but it's a real shame that Deviant came so late in the product/production entity's life cycle for CoD, because having a more-or-less standardized system of How To Build And Do A Power is the kind of deal that WW/OP rpgs regardless of era or staff have been screaming out for, forever. CtL 2e makes the most half-hearted attempt possible at it (for both titles and tokens), and it's clear by the time people were building Storypath/Scion that they had come around to the idea of "just put in a table, with numbers" but man. It would be really nice to just have those in mind right out of the gate for everybody.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


TheCenturion posted:

I mean, that's the whole point of 1e, to my mind. "When are you human? When you think you are. When you believe you are. When you finally understand that, honestly, you always were; you had to deal with your trauma and angst and finally accept that, no, there's nothing wrong with you." Honestly, Promethean always struck me as 'Awkward Teenager: The Pubescent.' "Nobody loves me, nobody wants me around, everyone hates me, nobody understands me, I didn't ask to be born, there are bullies literally lying in wait for me, there's something wrong with me, the world isn't made for people like me, but I can find other outcasts just like me to bond with, and we can all be outcasts together." And eventually, you realize there's nothing wrong with you, and you grow up.

2e? "Complete these 15 quests, and you win! Yay!"

Man this is exactly the opposite of my experience. 1e just kind of felt like a flat "time to mope," 2e feels like a really meaty, meaningful game about deliberate change and self-exploration.

Well Played Mauer
Jun 1, 2003

We'll always have Cabo

Dave Brookshaw posted:

Really, the 2e nWoD is full of questionable decisions that make sense when you realise they were meant to be Arcana Unearthed or Players Options. Shame there'll almost certainly never be a 3e

Does Mage 2e fall in that camp? I picked it up recently and was really excited about it but the first few chapters all read like I was already supposed to know a lot about what was going on, and the last time I touched Mage was WoD Revised in like 2003. I can go back and get 1e if it has more explanation about what the game is, and 2e just expands/elaborates on those concepts. Or maybe I'm just too dumb for Mage.

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund

Well Played Mauer posted:

Does Mage 2e fall in that camp? I picked it up recently and was really excited about it but the first few chapters all read like I was already supposed to know a lot about what was going on, and the last time I touched Mage was WoD Revised in like 2003. I can go back and get 1e if it has more explanation about what the game is, and 2e just expands/elaborates on those concepts. Or maybe I'm just too dumb for Mage.

No, 2E just assumed it wasn't getting any new fans and was straight catering to the existing nWoD crowd.


Awakening summary:

Atlantis was real and full of dicks who were mages, who are all dicks.

They built a ladder to ascend to a higher plane of awesomeness, them they kicked out the ladder so no one could follow them, because they're dicks.

All of humanity including you are stuck in the fallen left behind world, which sucks and is made worse because of warring mage factions, who are dicks.

Most importantly: Mages are dicks.

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

Well Played Mauer posted:

Does Mage 2e fall in that camp? I picked it up recently and was really excited about it but the first few chapters all read like I was already supposed to know a lot about what was going on, and the last time I touched Mage was WoD Revised in like 2003. I can go back and get 1e if it has more explanation about what the game is, and 2e just expands/elaborates on those concepts. Or maybe I'm just too dumb for Mage.

It doesn't completely hurt to read 1e books for Awakening 2e, but the book is one of the better 2e offerings. It still has problems with having to commit page count to the WoD squishy rules, and overall order of chapters is not super helpful either. Signs of Sorcery is good for the magic part of things, but the book that's supposed to be in depth about the overall society stuff is still not published. For that you might find Sanctum & Sigil* in 1e helpful as a background source for mage society. It's not a direct translation, but it's close enough that I'd still use it. It does an okay job with world and general how might this play, but I've never had a single WW/OPP book that does a great job of actually showing you how a session might really play. It's always spread out over a handful of books and they don't typically come out in the same year. It does end up in the same place as most of the other 2e books in where it assumes some basic knowledge because page counts are restrictive.

The spellcasting system in 2e is a lot easier to use and where it really shines, but it's still fairly crunchy to get it doing what you want it to do. They're just really great at giving you the tools to do it. In 1e you needed another book entirely to make good sense out of it.

Fuzz posted:

Most importantly: Mages are dicks.

This is pretty much what every new mage learns quickly, or maybe they don't last very long.

Jhet fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Jun 13, 2022

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011
I think you maybe mean Sorcery & Sigil as the 1e book to read about mage society since Tome of the Pentacle isn’t out yet.

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
Mage 2e absolutely does the thing where it does a long, in-depth explanation of what a Thyrsus is before you know nearly enough about what a mage is and does to understand the explanation.

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

Arivia posted:

I think you maybe mean Sorcery & Sigil as the 1e book to read about mage society since Tome of the Pentacle isn’t out yet.

Yeah, that's a derp. It's Sanctum and Sigil (1e). Tome of the Pentacle (2e) is the one that I was hoping would release before Awakening game finished. Tome of the Mysteries (1e) was basically the second core book.

Lurks With Wolves
Jan 14, 2013

At least I don't dance with them, right?
To add to what everyone else said, don't go back to the 1e core book if you want a better explanation. It's a bad book for actually selling you on what's cool about Mage. Instead just do what everyone else said and read the good 1e books. A lot of their takes were incorporated into the 2e core book, but if you read them first you can at least appreciate that Mage 2e has a lot of good takes on Mage despite being laid out in a really weird/backwards way.

Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund

Lurks With Wolves posted:

despite being laid out in a really weird/backwards way.

OnyxPathBook.txt

Well Played Mauer
Jun 1, 2003

We'll always have Cabo
So just to summarize, to understand Mage 2e:

Read Sanctum & Sigil 1e
Read Signs of Sorcery 1e
Read Mage 2e, probably in order of system -> character creation ->Tradition fluff?

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
Awakening 1E is actually very good, and like many 1E books better about introducing you to setting information in a logical order before dumping you into mechanics. Pretty much everything it says is still true, so I don't recommend skipping it if you're new to the line.

It was kind of the victim of a miniature D&D 4E release tempest-in-a-teapot because a lot of people got really mad about Atlantis, but here's the thing. Atlantis is cool. Dragons kick rear end.

EDIT: Oh, but the 1e Path writeups are really bad. You pretty much have to reconstruct what the Paths are actually about from their Ruling and Inferior Arcana + the Attribute they get +1 to.

Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jun 14, 2022

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

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

Ferrinus posted:

It was kind of the victim of a miniature D&D 4E release tempest-in-a-teapot because a lot of people got really mad about Atlantis, but here's the thing. Atlantis is cool. Dragons kick rear end.

Dave Brookshaw
Jun 27, 2012

No Regrets

Well Played Mauer posted:

So just to summarize, to understand Mage 2e:

Read Sanctum & Sigil 1e
Read Signs of Sorcery 1e
Read Mage 2e, probably in order of system -> character creation ->Tradition fluff?

I would actually start with Mage 2e, but read it in the following chapter order -

fiction (it's spread out in multiple parts as chapter openings, but it's one story. Well, it's a story with a story within it. Read it all in one go).
Introduction
chapter two (the setting)
chapter one (the splats)
chapter six (the world, but skip the rules bits and come back later)
appendix 2 (what is this Atlantis thing anyway)

That's all Mage's setting information. Then the rules

chapter 5 for the core rules
chapter 3 for the Mage specific rules
chapter 4 for the magic system

And if you're running it

chapter 8 for storytelling
appendix 1 for non mage characters
chapter 7 for some example settings
the rulesy half of chapter six

And in play
Appendix 3 for the using-magic summary


As Rand notes, this is all matter of strange. In theory, having the books go splats - setting - character rules - specific rules - storytelling - example settings makes them easier to use as reference in play if you already know the game, but they're awfully hard work as a newcomer. And Mage is so much worse as its magic rules take up about half the book, right in the middle because while they let me split it into two chapters, they had to obey the 2e book format.

I would not recommend Sanctum and Sigil as your first exposure to Mage's setting. It was the first ever sourcebook for 1e so is a bit wonky setting-wise, and well... Okay, so I am probably the biggest Awakening superfan in the world, right? To the point that I started freelancing to work on it, fought my way to being in charge of it by annoying OPP's owner until he let me, designed the new edition, etc. I love Awakening. It is my very favourite game. Sanctum & Sigil sends me to sleep..

2e corebook, in machete order. Then Signs of Sorcery, then whichever Order books you're interested in. We were supposed to get a book about the various otherworlds of the nWoD after the upcoming one on Mage society, but god knows if that'll ever happen, so Astral Realms and Book of Spirits for 1e are your go-to-guides for the Astral and Shadow.

Lurks With Wolves
Jan 14, 2013

At least I don't dance with them, right?

Well Played Mauer posted:

So just to summarize, to understand Mage 2e:

Read Sanctum & Sigil 1e
Read Signs of Sorcery 1e
Read Mage 2e, probably in order of system -> character creation ->Tradition fluff?

For Mage 2e's core book, I'd probably go Chapter 2 -> Chapter 1 -> the actual mechanical stuff, just because the third 1e book that was really essential for getting across what Mage should look like (Tome of the Watchtowers) was pretty firmly incorporated into the first two chapters, and I just find CofD mechanics kind of dry without reading a critical mass of fluff first. The problem with 2e isn't that it puts the fluff before the crunch, imo. It's that it presents the fluff in a really weird order.

(Also, because Ferrinus mentioned it, the flaws of Awakening 1e's core book are ultimately that it font/ink choice is really bad and it doesn't make Atlantis and being a mage sound very cool. I wouldn't read it just so you can read MtAw 2e with more context, because 2e covers all of the same content with better text but in a weirder order, and even for nerds like us who enjoy reading a giant pile of RPG books that feels excessive.)

EDIT: And listen to people with more experience than me about which order to read assorted splatbooks in, it's actually been a while since I read them.

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011
If I pull my copy of Awakening 1e off the shelf (first print run) I'm pretty sure a bunch of pages are smeary just from the bad ink. It's very pretty but also yeah kind of awkward. Also the gold headers are extremely hard to read in a lot of lighting situations - the weird thing is, it's NOT the gold ink that smears I think, it's the black ink.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Ferrinus posted:

It was kind of the victim of a miniature D&D 4E release tempest-in-a-teapot because a lot of people got really mad about Atlantis, but here's the thing. Atlantis is cool. Dragons kick rear end.

Ferrinus is right again and it's about Mage, this calls for a celebration

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

Dave Brookshaw posted:

I love Awakening. It is my very favourite game. Sanctum & Sigil sends me to sleep..

This makes me smile because it really illustrates the breadth of that game. S&S is one that I used a lot in 1e games and still used it frequently in 2e.

Astral Realms and the book on Archmastery also came up regularly for me. The book of mage fiction isn’t bad to get you in the mood either. But it was never going to win awards. Fast read.

Well Played Mauer
Jun 1, 2003

We'll always have Cabo
This has been very helpful. Thanks to y’all for explaining the desired order. I’m looking forward to making GBS threads up magechat in the near future!

FirstAidKite
Nov 8, 2009
Is "you're an always on-call worker at a temp agency and you have so little money you'll take any job offered to you sight unseen and training be damned" a good way to describe Mummy to someone

Bogart
Apr 12, 2010

by VideoGames
And you’re unstuck from time and attempting to progress yourself in the company will get you explicitly struck down by unknowable bosses.

Anonymous Zebra
Oct 21, 2005
Blending in like it ain't no thang
I'm at a bit of a loss on how to proceed with introducing Hunter to my group. Previously I mentioned my disappointment with the 2e book, so I tracked down a "like new" copy of the original HtV splat (this was surprising easy and literally cheaper than buying the goddamn lovely print-on-demand 2e book), and I've now read the majority of it. I was going to do a long-form review of the two books, but that's too much work for a tiny sub-forum of a dying comedy website, so TLDR the original HtV book is better written and blends the feeling of Hunter with detailed rule descriptions in a manner that makes the game very easy to understand while still giving plenty of fluff for both players and the GM to work with.

So here is the problem, I actually really like the rule set of CoD 2e. I like beats, I like conditions/tilts, I like that combat merits have been obviously re-balanced so that there aren't obvious overpowered fighting styles. But I like the detailed tactics descriptions, equipment lists, etc of the 1e book. 2e, in general, seems like a much more refined tool-set, but the goddamn writing in Hunter 2e is so bad (relative to 1e) that I still can't imagine handing this book to my players. So what do I do? Send them the 1e HtV pdf (and NWoD blue book pdf), have them read that, and then say, "Ok, so half those rules are moot, here's all my new house rules."?

I feel like this is already a hard sell for a group of D&D players, and making the poo poo super complicated is not going to help, so I'm not sure how to approach it.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



Anonymous Zebra posted:

Send them the 1e HtV pdf (and NWoD blue book pdf), have them read that, and then say, "Ok, so half those rules are moot, here's all my new house rules."?
This is the traditional method. Have you spoken to your table about running Hunter in general?

Anonymous Zebra
Oct 21, 2005
Blending in like it ain't no thang

Nessus posted:

This is the traditional method. Have you spoken to your table about running Hunter in general?

Only a little bit at this point. I mentioned I was starting to dig the system back up, and that I was going to read the 2e book and get back to them. There is very little gaming experience outside of D&D for most of them, so I'm basically trying to introduce them to a completely new system on top of a completely new way to play a table-top game. I'm basically trying to make sure I make a good impression on introducing the game, or risk them just going, "Bah, that's too complicated." and missing my chance.

EDIT: I'm probably overthinking this. Just have them read the first book, then show them the second book and say, "These are the real rules, enjoy."

Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Jun 19, 2022

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


I've done the "this is the edition for lore" and "this is the edition for rules" dance several times and honestly it works well enough.

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Fuzz
Jun 2, 2003

Avatar brought to you by the TG Sanity fund

Anonymous Zebra posted:

Only a little bit at this point. I mentioned I was starting to dig the system back up, and that I was going to read the 2e book and get back to them. There is very little gaming experience outside of D&D for most of them, so I'm basically trying to introduce them to a completely new system on top of a completely new way to play a table-top game. I'm basically trying to make sure I make a good impression on introducing the game, or risk them just going, "Bah, that's too complicated." and missing my chance.

EDIT: I'm probably overthinking this. Just have them read the first book, then show them the second book and say, "These are the real rules, enjoy."

Have you checked out H5? It has a different system, but maybe it's good? I've heard that the overall vibe is very much like Vigil 1.0.

Another option is to just used the same setting info but a better system, since really the system matters way less in Hunter. Could use ICON or the Free League system if you still want something that uses some dice and has actual combat instead of weird abstractions like PbtA, which might be too biga jump for your D&D people.

You could also just use the Blades in the Dark system for Hunter, it would work great for that.

Fuzz fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jun 19, 2022

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