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Rutibex posted:I like the way Mage20 handles things. All lore is optional So are the rules, because Brucato thinks magic is real.
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Aug 14, 2022 23:57
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Rutibex posted:I like the way Mage20 handles things. All lore is optional That's literally how every game works.
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Aug 15, 2022 00:13
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Fuzz posted:That's literally how every game works. What no how dare you! Malkavians are mandatory you can't limit my creative freedom like that  
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Aug 15, 2022 00:31
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Fuzz posted:That's literally how every game works. It's pretty funny how Rule 0 just gets ignored in favor of bitching and moaning. A rule that has existed since 1st ed WoD none the less.
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Aug 15, 2022 01:47
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MonsieurChoc posted:I feel liek the best choice would be a complete reboot, keeping the MAsquerade name but officially jettisoning the continuity (not the weird half-assed way they're doing now) and importing stuff from both gamelines as needed. Want Count loving Dracula and the Chevalier de Thélème in the same setting as Malkav and Lucita? Sure go for it. I carry The Count with me always.
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Aug 15, 2022 01:51
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Cause it makes it impossible to discuss a game online, really. Unless there's a subset of universally understood rule zeros you can discuss around. If someone's talking about how Malkavians as depicted in the text belittle and deminish the struggles of people with real life mental disorders, and asking for ways in which it might be made better, responding with "Well in my game Malkavians don't exist" Doesn't really add much to the discussion.
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Aug 15, 2022 01:53
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Kurieg posted:Cause it makes it impossible to discuss a game online, really. Unless there's a subset of universally understood rule zeros you can discuss around. If someone's talking about how Malkavians as depicted in the text belittle and deminish the struggles of people with real life mental disorders, and asking for ways in which it might be made better, responding with "Well in my game Malkavians don't exist" Doesn't really add much to the discussion. And people acting like a great wrong has been done because OP doesn't have the license anymore and screaming about how awful the new edition is sucks and is tedious and boring.
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Aug 15, 2022 01:56
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Kurieg posted:Cause it makes it impossible to discuss a game online, really. Unless there's a subset of universally understood rule zeros you can discuss around. If someone's talking about how Malkavians as depicted in the text belittle and deminish the struggles of people with real life mental disorders, and asking for ways in which it might be made better, responding with "Well in my game Malkavians don't exist" Doesn't really add much to the discussion. I think it would be useful to make all of the lore in a new WoD "modular". So you can have vampire clan X Y and Z but not a lot is written about how they interact with each other, just self contained lore about each particular clan. That was you can drop pieces of lore into your games optionally, without having to include everything.
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Aug 15, 2022 01:59
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joylessdivision posted:And people acting like a great wrong has been done because OP doesn't have the license anymore and screaming about how awful the new edition is sucks and is tedious and boring. I don't think that's what we were doing.
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Aug 15, 2022 02:34
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MonsieurChoc posted:I feel liek the best choice would be a complete reboot, keeping the MAsquerade name but officially jettisoning the continuity (not the weird half-assed way they're doing now) and importing stuff from both gamelines as needed. Want Count loving Dracula and the Chevalier de Thélème in the same setting as Malkav and Lucita? Sure go for it. That's where I'm at. V5 and the others should have been a hard reboot, sweeping away everything save for the very essence of the WoD games and what separates them from CofD so they can both serve as active brands. Exactly what that difference is is a matter of fierce debate, but if I were to take a crack at it, I'd say the specific essence of WoD is an intense emotional landscape, dedicated political structures from the micro to macro level, and a focus on eschatology. That still might be a bit too much overlap with CofD, but that's something to start with. From there you can do whatever you want depending on whether or not you need to keep the copyrights on certain faction names. The only problem with a hard reboot, and I figure the reason why it didn't happen aside from Ericsson really wanting to "continue the legacy" or whatever, is that people really like talking about WoD lore and speculating about it in and of itself. It's not a deal breaker since I'd say CofD's managed to achieve that same kind of dedication to its setting a decade on, but it potentially hurts buy in and could set you up for some very lean early years. I think that's a risk worth taking. V5 and its descendants were always going to be seen as a kind of "third WoD," so they really should have embraced it. For what it's worth, I'm having a lot of fun playing around in the setting space V5 creates. Its not only a fun thought exercise to figure out the full implications of how the setting got from Revised-era to 5 with each new thing we learn, it keeps me on my toes as the absolute fool who decided he was going to keep his campaign as close to the published setting as possible, no matter how much it changes over the course of it. Its done absolutely nothing to the player side of the table (thank God) but its certainly caused me to do some seriously re-scribbling in my notes in terms of antagonists. I think I wrote about this before, but so far that's just been cutting a possible story with the Imbued in one case and holding back on Werewolves as antagonists in the other. I originally designed my city with a significant population of Get and had a few of them show up as incidental characters, but now I want to wait and see exactly how they've fallen to the Wyrm, fallen into whatever "Haglust" is supposed to be, or if those are supposed to be the same thing.
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Aug 15, 2022 07:43
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They should lean into a Multiverse of Darkness. Infinite worlds made by the god machiene for some unfathomable purpose. Each world has a slightly different lore. Then they can do a Timelord: The Timeining splatbook and now VtR and VtM and V5 are all in the same setting. Bing Bong, done!
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Aug 15, 2022 11:46
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Rutibex posted:They should lean into a Multiverse of Darkness. Infinite worlds made by the god machiene for some unfathomable purpose. Each world has a slightly different lore. Then they can do a Timelord: The Timeining splatbook and now VtR and VtM and V5 are all in the same setting. Bing Bong, done! ...what do you think the Malkavian Madness Network is, chummer?
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Aug 15, 2022 13:22
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I wan my first ever game of Vampire last night. Dunno how many people will care but I had a good time and I feel like writing up a report. I finally decided to go for V5 because I love the hunger mechanics and the players preferred the setting for various reasons. I plan to eventually run VtR (probably set in ancient Rome) but that's a long ways away. Two of the three players were brand new to the game and setting and fairly new to TTRPGs so I decided to have them play humans that were invited to a new year's party where they were served great food and drinks. Unfortunately for them, the main course was the mortals at the party. Fortunately for them, two vampires had taken interest in them: A Brujah (an SPC, but controlled by the third player) was inspired by the passionate anti-gun activism of one of the characters, even if he didn't necessarily agree, and a Gangrel saw a lot of potential in the other character due to their already deep connection to nature and animals. While the rest of the mortals at the party were being drained dry, both of the players were separately taken aside by their sires-to-be and, unbeknownst to the other Kindred at the party, embraced. I spent a good few minutes describing in great detail the sensations the characters went through as they were being drained: A mixture of intense pleasure and symptoms of rapid blood loss, their consciousness fading and them breathing out one last time and dying. I didn't say anything for like 20 seconds and it was just dead silent. Then I told them how a brand new sensation, a salty and metallic taste on their tongue, violently pulled their consciousness back from the abyss and they instinctively start drinking, this time being completely overwhelmed by warmness and pleasure. Then they lost consciousness and woke up in a trash dumpster where they were left for dead. The rest of the session was about them coming to learn and understand their condition. Going home to get cleaned up, throwing up everything in their stomachs (I wasn't gonna bring it up at all but they independently decided to evacuate all human waste by going to the bathroom which was smart), noticing things such as the cold not really bothering them so much, and most importantly, rapidly getting more hungry. One character cooked up some pasta and was dismayed that it tasted horrible because it's her favorite dish. Eventually they ordered a rare steak at a restaurant which wasn't gross, but completely unsatisfying and got into an argument with the waitress over it. Their final attempt was to get some Doritos and energy bars at a local gas station, where I described how they could hear the attendant's heart beat, clearly see a vein in his neck pulsing and even smell the blood in his veins. They actually passed a frenzy roll, so I had the attendant clumsily knock over a glass bottle and cut his hand picking up the shards. This finally did the trick and they both frenzied, jumped over the counter and drained him dry, experiencing both the pleasures of feeding and the guilt of killing an innocent. Since it was a prelude I did not give them the opportunity to use willpower or anything, as I wanted to use this as a teachable moment, which the players later told me they enjoyed greatly. The Gangrel broke down in tears upon seeing what she had done, which the Brujah was shocked to see were tears of blood, which in turn freaked out the Gangrel again. As the Gangrel stood up from behind the counter, she saw a guy in the doorway with his phone out, who had clearly filmed the whole thing. The guy made a run for it and the Gangrel and the Brujah gave chase. This is where the Brujah learned she had Celerity and ran really fast. I decided that they won't be able to use their powers until the first time they instinctively use them or the Beast gives them an urge to use. This allowed me to gradually introduce their powers and uses to them and makes for an interesting event. Just as the Brujah was about to catch the guy, the guy ran out into the street and was hit by a truck, instantly killing him. Inside the truck was the third PC. This PC, a Ravnos, immediately recognized the other two as vampires due to the Brujah running really fast and the Gangrel having wolfish ears after frenzying. They did some cleaning up after themselves, making the scene look like a robbery and destroying evidence, and the prelude and session ended once they left the gas station. The session involved a fair bit of railroading in order to get the characters all together and the backstory set up, but next session it's completely up to them what they want to do: there are plenty of hooks there already and they have yet to fully come to terms with their vampirism. I told the Ravnos player about a few Kindred his character would know of in the city that might be able to take the fledglings off their hands (they won't, but the Ravnos doesn't know this): Either The Prince or Sheriff, or one of two Anarch "leaders". I'm curious to see what he'll choose. Overall it was a great success and a really good time. I was especially pleased with the impact the Embrace scene had. One player told me that she had trouble sleeping because she kept thinking about the game, which is very flattering to hear especially since I'm a novice GM/Storyteller myself.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:17
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a7m2 posted:I wan my first ever game of Vampire last night. Dunno how many people will care but I had a good time and I feel like writing up a report. Well done, having fun is the important part. 
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Aug 15, 2022 16:09
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a7m2 posted:I wan my first ever game of Vampire last night. Dunno how many people will care but I had a good time and I feel like writing up a report. This sounds awesome and the way you slowly introed the players to the setting and unlife is great. Keep it up, sounds drat fun, and keep posting!
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Aug 15, 2022 16:32
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Fun Game Reports make this a better thread.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:01
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Having fresh characters learn their powers as situations arise where the specific power would be useful is a great technique. I did something similar in my Aberrant game where one of the pcs wanted to do random power generation.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:57
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Soonmot posted:Having fresh characters learn their powers as situations arise where the specific power would be useful is a great technique. I did something similar in my Aberrant game where one of the pcs wanted to do random power generation. More rpgs should steal the SaGa series's sparking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X6SQBNjymo
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Aug 15, 2022 20:41
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Tulip posted:Yeah consensus AFAICT is that V5 is fine. The real nightmare of *OD gaming is that "which is the good edition" varies by line and as much as I'm the COD2e partisan, there are 5 and 20th versions of some lines that are more highly regarded. I mean, that's just what the folks at SA like. If you go to the Onyx Path forums the VTM forum has 137.3k posts, Mage has 51k and WTA has 36.7k Charlz Guybon fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Aug 16, 2022 |
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Aug 16, 2022 01:55
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yeah never assume SA represents a majority opinion of anything
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Aug 16, 2022 02:05
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Yeah vampires and vampire politics is cool I guess. But I read all the Anne Rice novels like 20 years ago and watched every episode of Buffy and it just feels like I'm done with vampires. But all these other kinds of monsters? They are all so interesting! I'll have to admit my white wolf/onyx path print on demand shelf is getting a bit overfilled. But every time I read one of these CoD off-brand monsters I just have to grab it. I had no idea Changeling the Lost was so much cooler than Changeling the Dreaming. WoD Mummies is basically Quantum Leap which is hilarious. Demons are Agents from the matrix wtf that's weird but I love it. I don't know if I like the new or the old Wrath concept better, I haven't read those books yet. Mage: The Ascention is the superior version of Mage though. It is metaphysically much more compelling, also wtf Atlantis? Come on. Promethians and Deviants seem similar to me thematically, but I'll have to get into the books. They both feel really interesting to run.
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Aug 16, 2022 02:24
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And just like that magechat has been summoned again.
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Aug 16, 2022 02:28
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Tulip posted:I never really see that for Vampire, and I'd be interested to see if I'm wrong and someone has really engaged thoughts about Vampire and its philosophy. From what I have seen about what drives Vampire is the inverse of what you are looking for - Vampire is straight up about its philosophy and themes, with almost every story teller and player's guide type chapter reemphasizing the whole 'Beast I am, least beast I become' bit - the juice is in the absolute clusterfuck resulting from hundreds of vampire committing to that mindset over thousands of years. When you discuss vampire the conversation is more 'how did your survival attempt go' rather than 'what is the truth of the vampire condition'.
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Aug 16, 2022 02:29
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Charlz Guybon posted:I mean, that's just what the folks at SA like. If you go to the Onyx Path forums the VTM forum has 137.3k posts, Mage has 51k and WTA has 36.7k I mean, I was talking about SA specific consensus, but I think that misses the larger question of why you would assume that quantity of posts on a game correlates to quality of the play experience of the game? This thread's bedrock is people who think Awakening is a better game but Ascension is more worth posting about. Like, people post a lot about Star Citizen. It's not largely endorsements of it being a polished, fun to play game.
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Aug 16, 2022 04:48
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Sorry if I opened a can of worms with my first question, I missed reading WoD books and was trying to figure out what I've missed the last 15ish years. So if I am correct, Onyx Path is not involved with 5th edition at all correct? They are still producing CoD stuff and that's it?
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Aug 16, 2022 04:56
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Drinking With Nixon posted:Sorry if I opened a can of worms with my first question, I missed reading WoD books and was trying to figure out what I've missed the last 15ish years. So if I am correct, Onyx Path is not involved with 5th edition at all correct? They are still producing CoD stuff and that's it? in as much as cod content is still being produced, yes
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Aug 16, 2022 04:57
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Mister Olympus posted:in as much as cod content is still being produced, yes Thats good, I've read a few of the CoD 2ed books and loved them. I started out with OWoD stuff but really bought into the NWoD reboot. I'm a bit grumpy with 5e WoD being made but I am trying to keep and open mind about it. I honestly don't know how you could possibly make a new WtA game after WtF. Lore wise just a superior game in every respect imo and the Pure are such a through deconstruction of the Garou. I'm just glad stuff for this franchise is still being made and people besides me care.
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Aug 16, 2022 05:09
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Pakxos posted:From what I have seen about what drives Vampire is the inverse of what you are looking for - Vampire is straight up about its philosophy and themes, with almost every story teller and player's guide type chapter reemphasizing the whole 'Beast I am, least beast I become' bit - the juice is in the absolute clusterfuck resulting from hundreds of vampire committing to that mindset over thousands of years. When you discuss vampire the conversation is more 'how did your survival attempt go' rather than 'what is the truth of the vampire condition'. The books are straight up about those themes, and the majority of the player base over the years have rejected those themes while still loving the setting, so lots of discussion comes out of that dichotomy. Tulip posted:I mean, I was talking about SA specific consensus, but I think that misses the larger question of why you would assume that quantity of posts on a game correlates to quality of the play experience of the game? This thread's bedrock is people who think Awakening is a better game but Ascension is more worth posting about. Unlike Star Citizen, tons of people have actually played VTM and enjoyed it, so I don't see the two as comparable.
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Aug 16, 2022 05:09
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Charlz Guybon posted:Unlike Star Citizen, tons of people have actually played VTM and enjoyed it, so I don't see the two as comparable. You proposed a test whereby quantity of posts in a forum correlates to quality of gameplay experience. I applied that test to other games that produce lots of forums posts and demonstrated that you can post a lot about games that do not even realistically exist. Meaning your test produces absurd results if taken as you argued and should not be used. Drinking With Nixon posted:Thats good, I've read a few of the CoD 2ed books and loved them. I started out with OWoD stuff but really bought into the NWoD reboot. I'm a bit grumpy with 5e WoD being made but I am trying to keep and open mind about it. I honestly don't know how you could possibly make a new WtA game after WtF. Lore wise just a superior game in every respect imo and the Pure are such a through deconstruction of the Garou. I'm just glad stuff for this franchise is still being made and people besides me care. CoD is functionally, depending on your perspective, either dead or complete. I tend to like completed works so I'm not particularly upset, Promethean is by far and away the best *OD game I've actually dealt with and frankly at current rates it'll take me a couple of decades to exhaust COD as it currently exists, so when my limiting factor is more "life expectancy of American males" than "COD publications" I don't worry too much about the publishing schedule. But anyway yeah this is largely a COD positivity zone. They're good. I sure as hell have my complaints about them but Demons are cool, Requiem Vampires are cool, Awakening is a lot less to post about but a lot better to play than ascension, and so on.
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Aug 16, 2022 05:34
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Dawgstar posted:Attempts at population numbers were a mistake and thrown out the window by the first Chicago by Night. A good rule of thumb for VtM is to just double the numbers. 1 in 50k for Camarilla cities, 1 in 25k for Sabbat. Gives mid size cities like Pittsburgh or St. Louis 50-60 vampires, which is enough to have a court with primogen and a Prince.
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Aug 16, 2022 05:39
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Tulip posted:
This is such a healthy and mature way to look at it. I was a bit sad to see the COD stuff go just as I felt I had rediscovered it. But you are completely right, I haven't even read a fraction of the COD books anyways. There is a ton of content, and it is complete. Thanks a lot for typing that out.
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Aug 16, 2022 06:28
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For all that it was nice to feel like there was more of the line to look forward to, I absolutely do not miss the 90s/2000s-era supplement treadmill or having to keep abreast of 2-3,000 pages of #content to have a sense of what might be cool for my table vs. what just shipped totally undercooked.
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Aug 16, 2022 06:34
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the expectation that games need to constantly have new content coming out or they're "dead" and not worth bothering with is insane and 100% a product of marketing. balance, gameplay cohesion, sticking to a clear standard of jargon and templating, etc. all get harder as you add more variables, not easier
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Aug 16, 2022 15:32
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Honestly, the only problem with CofD dying is that they aren't actually saying the line's done. It would be business suicide to announce that kind of thing early, but until they do we're stuck in a quantum state between "no more books" and "more kickstarters for books that are worse than what came before" and it's impossible to get any closure. (Yeah, nWoD 1e was in a similar state at the end, but the books they were slowly putting out at that point were actually interesting.)
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Aug 16, 2022 16:33
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Out of cofd games I mostly followed VtR and as far as core experience I enjoyed 2ed way more than 1st but on the other hand writing quality in supplements is night and day
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Aug 16, 2022 16:44
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:the expectation that games need to constantly have new content coming out or they're "dead" and not worth bothering with is insane and 100% a product of marketing. balance, gameplay cohesion, sticking to a clear standard of jargon and templating, etc. all get harder as you add more variables, not easier It feels like a huge cultural divide between different types of games. I definitely have my own biases toward preferring my works to be "complete" - I tend to not watch TV shows until they're done, I think of writing as "published books" rather than "ongoing serials," and in RPGs I'm very biased toward weird indie games. I'm fine acknowledging that this is a bias and probably has more to do with my cultural background & SES than anything else, but it does definitely mean that when an RPG line is no longer supported I think of that as it having reached maturity rather than death. Or to put it more harshly - the expectation of a continuous splat treadmill to me reads less like "this is a healthy, vibrant game" and more like "the developers don't trust themselves to publish stuff worth using." Lurks With Wolves posted:Honestly, the only problem with CofD dying is that they aren't actually saying the line's done. It would be business suicide to announce that kind of thing early, but until they do we're stuck in a quantum state between "no more books" and "more kickstarters for books that are worse than what came before" and it's impossible to get any closure. That's fair. To some extent my own group has kind of threaded this needle by just declaring that we're only working with certain books, fairly frequently just literally the core books for supernaturals in the current game (for example, our current game is Mage, so it's just Mage 2e and Vampire 2e, and that second one is because there are vampires in the game and they've got some unique conditions that are relevant). For Demon and Promethean we use a couple of the more interesting splats but ultimately we try to reduce the number of pages you need to read in order to play an RPG.
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Aug 16, 2022 16:46
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Rutibex posted:Mage: The Ascention is the superior version of Mage though. It is metaphysically much more compelling, also wtf Atlantis? I really think it's the opposite. Ascension does more to immediately grab you with pop culture references (the men in black are controlling you by putting fluoride in the water!) but when it comes to actual magic and metaphysics Awakening is wayyyy better, both on the setting and game mechanics fronts. In Ascension, the actual magic itself is extremely simplistic and you just get better at it through practice and ideological absorption. In Awakening you're legitimately trying to discover secrets and piece together grand theories and you have an entire integrated-across-multiple-gamelines setting cosmology to grapple with if you want to.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:25
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Ascension also has the problem that somebody probably should've discovered the Purple Paradigm centuries ago. Although "we actually on some level know how reality works but we're all studiously ignoring it and sticking with our limited practices" is extremely funny.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:52
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I try to be generous to Ascension, so I assume that the metaphysical bones of the setting ("magic" is human will exerted across the fulcrum of the avatar, avatars come in four essences, there are three broad types of resonance that flavor all that is, there is a spirit world and an underworld, etc) are in fact known to the Traditionalists and perhaps even to most Technocrats, and all existing mages layer their paradigms on top of those fundamental truths in basically defensible ways. Unfortunately, that still doesn't leave much for you to get excited about finding where magic itself is concerned. An Obrimos summoning an angel in Awakening is in for a much more interesting and potentially surprising experience than a Chorister summoning an "angel" in Ascension.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:00
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I think there’s a nice middleground between single-book indie games and endless splat treadmill. Maybe I’ll read Tome of the Pentacle when it finally comes out in 20 years and decide it’s bad enough that I’m glad they’re done, but I think there’s still some space to explore or update concepts from 1E if nothing else. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more “official” examples of legacies or Mysteries, and the 2e stuff for Awakening so far has been top notch.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:18
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