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MonsieurChoc posted:oWoD was very 90s OVA anime, with gratuitous gore and violence. So that would merely be a change of genre. You know I was thinking more jujutsu kaisen or chainsaw man then 90s ova when writing the post, but yeah totally appropriate.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:15
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joylessdivision posted:I had the exact opposite take from my brief reading so far. Yeah, shits really hosed, so get mad and fix it (with claws and teeth). It is the point of playing Apocalypse, murdering Captialism and it's agents. More power to you, but there’s only so long I can keep up the HOO RAH to do something about it as I’m being given a bullet point list of everything wrong and beat over the head with how useless the Garou’s efforts are.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:21
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Free Gratis posted:More power to you, but there’s only so long I can keep up the HOO RAH to do something about it as I’m being given a bullet point list of everything wrong and beat over the head with how useless the Garou’s efforts are.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:23
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Wow. Somehow they managed to take an unsinkable badass concept of being a ten-foot-tall murder machine fighting animated toxic waste and turn it into being a useless emo gently caress whose entire life's ambition is to kick Tucker Carlson in the nuts. Fighting the cosmic force of destruction that's been corrupted into a being of ultimate horror? gently caress no, we need to rip Uncle Ron's head off after he made Thanksgiving weird by talking poo poo about Biden through the second course.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:23
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 A Samuel Haight reference? In 5th edition 
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Aug 3, 2023 00:24
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All the "back to its roots" bullshit was bullshit from the start. Vampire 1e, the very first book, tells you to go have adventures with wizards and mummies. One of the earliest scenario lines of the entire franchise was about World of Darkness All Star Samuel Haight, gallivanting across multiple game lines collecting power-ups and then exploding when he fought Vampire Satan wrong. It's always been loving dumb as hell and that's part of what made it great fun for a bunch of tasteless 90s teenagers. And I'm not sure if any of the recent/current creators except maybe Karim are even on that train anyway. (I do not closely follow 5th edition stuff.) It's not a call back to an imagined past, it's just a regular brand new unsatisfying. But they're still trapped regardless by the initial weird halfway idea that these games are a direct continuation of the older books even when they completely upend huge chunks of foundational parts of the legacy franchise due to all the racism etc. It's good to get rid of all that poo poo but you can't legitimately then try to say "it's all the same, just modernized!"
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Aug 3, 2023 00:41
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Ghost Armor 1337 posted:You know I was thinking more jujutsu kaisen or chainsaw man then 90s ova when writing the post, but yeah totally appropriate. If you don't think Yoshiaki Kawajiri would have made a banger but highly problematic World of Darkness OVA... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZT94_yTOls
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Aug 3, 2023 00:46
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MonsieurChoc posted:If you don't think Yoshiaki Kawajiri would have made a banger but highly problematic World of Darkness OVA... Suddenly I've never wanted anything more in my entire life. WoD OVA, Kawajiri, 15'd dub by Manga Video...we were denied a better timeline.
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Aug 3, 2023 00:52
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Nessus posted:At a certain point the solution becomes “to play the previous edition of the game “. Honestly I would probably do that. Change the name of You Know Who to Winter's Teeth and maybe Ghost Council is okay for Uktena, change the name of the Metis, figure out what to do with Pure Breed and some other stuff.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:09
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Nessus posted:At a certain point the solution becomes “to play the previous edition of the game “. Or run a werewolf themed refluff of Mahralika because if you get down to it a werewolf is a furry mecha  : https://youtu.be/g1nY2bnjfqE I'm not completely joking either since Mahralika has a similar sanity system, (although instead of getting crippling mad or sad like in w5 it's closer to "the God bound to your mecha is taking you over because you're a bit too disconnected from humanity"). Hell from what I've seen the social system of Mahralika is much more robust than w 5, a game based primarily around mecha combat having a more well thought out system for social interaction and sainity than a story game doesn't say good things about it. Also writers are proudly Filipino and it shows in the setting. Ghost Armor 1337 fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 01:19
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Dawgstar posted:Honestly I would probably do that. Change the name of You Know Who to Winter's Teeth and maybe Ghost Council is okay for Uktena, change the name of the Metis, figure out what to do with Pure Breed and some other stuff. Except combat would still suck poo poo and require 3+ rolls for every attack.
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Aug 3, 2023 01:21
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This WoD5 poo poo just seems more like CoD 3rd edition. Even the diminishing quality lines up. Old WoD worked because it was a concept that resonated with 800+ years of folklore and then was twisted into the zeitgeist of the 90s: hippy environmentalist revenge fantasy, somewhat problematic if ultimately kinda silly conspiracy theory come to life, Gen X’s nascent angst as they entered adult life. It worked because it was 100% of its time. These game lines were about loving up ~~dad~~ the bad guys in power. The main issue I see with these revivals is they’re trying to recapture a moment in time that while nostalgic as hell was ultimately correct in most of its predictions: the planet is boiling and/or on fire; the world is run by 12 ghouls/conglomerates; and technology has become the new, boring, accessible magic. They’re trying to thread a lovely needle: forcing an irrelevant metaplot into a redesign that tries to ignore it in favor of street level games. I really wish Bloodlines used V:TR so they’d put money into the game line they made to solve these problems 20 years ago. Well Played Mauer fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 01:28
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Fuzz posted:Except combat would still suck poo poo and require 3+ rolls for every attack. Ehh, X5 already wants 2 rolls per attack, and X20s generally initiative system so you don't have to go around polling everyone to see what they'll do before you know how many reflexive dodge rolls need to be made. It's nice not to have any extra actions to worry about, but, then, on the other hand, at least there's no ambiguity in what Celerity actually does. And the thing is, you know what needs an annoying, superfluous roll in an X5 game? Nearly every power activation! Hell, every use of liquid resources all together, because you need to flip a coin to see if you can heal a wound without spending a rage point. Also, in the 5th editions, just trying to recall a fact or pick a lock could result in a scene-derailing fiasco or broken merit or whatever, so each roll that does get made commands extra attention as you audit your fluctuating sub-pool of bad dice. So, as much as I'm usually given to criticize the cruft and inelegance of oWoD task resolution systems, I can't in good conscience advise someone who wants to specifically play Masquerade or Apocalypse that the dice mechanics of the new editions are going to be less annoying.
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Aug 3, 2023 02:03
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Dawgstar posted:Honestly I would probably do that. Change the name of You Know Who to Winter's Teeth and maybe Ghost Council is okay for Uktena, change the name of the Metis, figure out what to do with Pure Breed and some other stuff.
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Aug 3, 2023 03:13
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oWolf resonated with literally none kinds of folklore, no line of Werewolf has ever had anything to do with folkloric werewolves except tangentially.
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Aug 3, 2023 03:13
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That Old Tree posted:All the "back to its roots" bullshit was bullshit from the start. Vampire 1e, the very first book, tells you to go have adventures with wizards and mummies. One of the earliest scenario lines of the entire franchise was about World of Darkness All Star Samuel Haight, gallivanting across multiple game lines collecting power-ups and then exploding when he fought Vampire Satan wrong. It's always been loving dumb as hell and that's part of what made it great fun for a bunch of tasteless 90s teenagers. "Back to its roots" is just marketing for the potential nostalgia buyers, I don't think they themselves actually buy into it all. What seems more at play is a level of self-consciousness, of not wanting to be seen as cringe and embarrassing like the old White Wolf/World of Darkness was. And while that's certainly a fine instinct as far as excising the racist and other repugnant content goes, they're overly focused on making the 5th edition reboots truly the "storytelling games of personal horror" that the originals were marketed as but criticized for failing to deliver on. What they're ignoring and in many cases working to remove are the aspects of the games were that the people who played and followed it actually liked and gravitated to, because that stuff is yeah, kind of childish, the edgy superpowers, the grand cosmic battles, honest to god thinking that the concept of "Gothic Punk" was hard as gently caress, and the "gently caress YOU dad" aspects of it, that is indeed cringe, it's all very, deeply, inexorably cringe, but that's fine. That's part of what makes it fun and it's why people liked it and continue to like it. You gotta dare to be cringe.
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Aug 3, 2023 03:29
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"gently caress you, vampire dad!" I shout as I backflip off the 72-story skyscraper and pull the rip cord on my parachute, then hit the detonator.
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Aug 3, 2023 03:47
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Loomer posted:"gently caress you, vampire dad!" I shout as I backflip off the 72-story skyscraper and pull the rip cord on my parachute, then hit the detonator.
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Aug 3, 2023 03:52
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Loomer posted:"gently caress you, vampire dad!" I shout as I backflip off the 72-story skyscraper and pull the rip cord on my parachute, then hit the detonator. You don't need a parachute, just have Weight of the Feather! Nessus posted:You have rolled 3 of the bad dice numbers on the detonator. You are now ravenously hungry. No no, he Messy Crits, so he suffers a Gangrel compulsion and can only communicate in grunts until he hits the ground. (It's such a stupid compulsion)
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Aug 3, 2023 04:02
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"Going back to its roots" just seems self-defeating because can't people just play older editions if they want it to be like the old days?
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Aug 3, 2023 04:05
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NikkolasKing posted:"Going back to its roots" just seems self-defeating because can't people just play older editions if they want it to be like the old days?
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Aug 3, 2023 04:07
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Nessus posted:On the one hand the combat engine is more efficient, and on the other hand it seems that if you suffer a handful of substantial setbacks your character succumbs to Werewolf Depression. An easy solution is to backport the combat engine to a previous edition then.
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Aug 3, 2023 04:16
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Run all WoD combat in a system with good combat, like Strike! or Lancer.
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Aug 3, 2023 04:50
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You can always find used copies of GURPS WoD.
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Aug 3, 2023 05:08
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Storytellering combat's always sat in a weird place for me where it's too shallow for fun action or tactical stuff but too involved for it not to bog down a session when it appears. Never really tried an edition that didn't have this problem. Combat still produces fun moments - mostly off the back of stupendously dramatic successes or failures - but they're the exception and not the norm.
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Aug 3, 2023 05:19
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ZearothK posted:Run all WoD combat in a system with good combat, like Strike! or Lancer. Why that just proves my point that werewolf are furry mecha 
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Aug 3, 2023 05:28
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Nessus posted:On the one hand the combat engine is more efficient, and on the other hand it seems that if you suffer a handful of substantial setbacks your character succumbs to Werewolf Depression. Now now. You might also succumb to... uh... Werewolf Zealotry and bounce off to became a ST character in the Cult of Fenris.
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Aug 3, 2023 13:41
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Ferrinus posted:Surprise! W5 is actually Glitch. God, if only. One of my "if I had infinite free time" someday-projects I'd like to do is a Glitch hack of Demon: The Descent, which seems like the best match to me, but it could work for a lot of splats as long as there's a slow but inevitable end your characters are facing down.
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Aug 3, 2023 13:59
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For those of you reading W5, how does it handle combat? One of the things I recall sticking with me when I read H5 was the insistence that the game was not really meant for combat and that the rules really didn't want to spend a lot of time covering combat. That kind of makes sense in something like Vampire, but I thought it was odd for Hunter and definitely can't picture them taking the same stance in Werewolf too.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:25
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Yeah, the three and out or narrative rules for combat in V5 are actually good for its genre (if we ignore the storied experience of people wanting to run Blade, Buffy and Underworld with it), but I was really disappointed that H5 didn't have something more robust for it. I was also disappointed by the lack of Imbued and it just being Hunters Hunted. Overall a huge disappointment.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:29
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Attorney at Funk posted:Storytellering combat's always sat in a weird place for me where it's too shallow for fun action or tactical stuff but too involved for it not to bog down a session when it appears. Never really tried an edition that didn't have this problem. Combat still produces fun moments - mostly off the back of stupendously dramatic successes or failures - but they're the exception and not the norm. Eh, I think CoD2 (until you got bogged down by Conditions) and current V5 have hit a decent place. The focus is still extremely narrative, but the heavily reduced dice and roll burden means you're resolving the mechanical crap in under 30 seconds, the bulk of the turn really is just describing what you're doing, which can be boring RPG poo poo like, "I punch the enemy vampire and did 3 Superficial damage," if your table is loving lame vs "We smash headlong into each other, unable to land a blow on each other as each hit is deftly blocked. The scrum tumbles through the bar, sending tables and chairs toppling. I finally catch him off guard when he stumbles backward on a fallen stool and I plant a side kick firmly in his gut, staggering him." The vast majority of players are boring and suck and treat it like D&D though. Fuzz fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Aug 3, 2023 |
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Aug 3, 2023 14:35
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"Punch the enemy vampire for 3" is a lot more justifiable when there are thirty vampires in the fangbanger bar of course.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:38
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When players actively engage with conditions and tilts, it really makes combat interesting. My players were able to ambush the big bad of our first chapter and instead of going for damage, since they remembered how tough it was, they used called shots to blind and hamstring it, which made it much easier to fight and stopped it from fleeing as it had done previously. Three rounds of combat and it was over.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:54
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ZearothK posted:Run all WoD combat in a system with good combat, like Strike! or Lancer. As wonderful as Lancer is, I would never consider playing it again unless there is a strick turn timer or a pretty small group of players. I think Lancer combat is great if you want to do a campaign around tactical combat battles, but I want that well away from any more roleplaying focused rpg. The quick combat stuff in the new WoD stuff is great at keeping things moving. Also another thought I had about people complaining about how dice rolls can make your character freak out and lose control. Don't call for rolls for stuff that doesn't matter! If the roll doesn't have interesting consequences, just let the PCs do the drat thing.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:10
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*wod stuff is in an awkward place in that the combat system absolutely sucks rear end and always has but if you simply ignore it then a lot of levers PCs use to describe and embody their characters get lost with them. especially for splats like werewolves, demons, or hunters where a huge chunk of character creation and the game's narrative is about how you, specifically engage in violence
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Aug 3, 2023 15:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:God, if only. One of my "if I had infinite free time" someday-projects I'd like to do is a Glitch hack of Demon: The Descent, which seems like the best match to me, but it could work for a lot of splats as long as there's a slow but inevitable end your characters are facing down. I could see that, demon the fallen might work too. If you tweak the rate costs build up at it could be a decent humanity sort of thing - you passively will fall apart, you need to make an effort to keep yourself human, and you'll probably still lose in the end.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:44
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Also another thought I had about people complaining about how dice rolls can make your character freak out and lose control. Don't call for rolls for stuff that doesn't matter! If the roll doesn't have interesting consequences, just let the PCs do the drat thing. This. The V5 Player's Guide has an entire thing about the take half rule and how you should only call for rolls when things going sideways or there being a complication would actually make the narrative more interesting or if there's actually a stake in failure. They even specifically call out the classic "if failure just means someone else tries or you try again, there's no point in rolling dice."
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Aug 3, 2023 15:45
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This is why the best combat system was just the 1e nWoD's "add up the things feeding in to your attack and roll them" with no further tactical considerations (assuming you just ignored the fighting styles, and why wouldn't you?). There were still a few warts to polish and accidental incidents of (mostly fake) tactical depth to buff out but it mostly let strong people win fights and weak people lose them while making sure that having a fight, at all, made a difference to your available liquid resources in later scenes. 2E is a lot worse for this stuff, but you could probably get it somewhere decent by making the Defense formula not stupid, more strictly controlling available weapon and armor values (including those available through powers), and maybe straight-up removing the successes-to-wounds carrythrough and just make attacks either succeed or exceptionally succeed just like any other roll in the general system.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:47
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something like LANCER (tactical but also the players are unstoppable engines of destruction) might actually work pretty well for Werewolf -- woofs are supposed to be nigh-unstoppable, and the combination of their incredible regenerative powers + witnesses forgetting what they saw and rationalizing it (in Forsaken, at least) means you don't have to worry quite as much about how to interpret the narrative consequences of combat compared to other splats but it'd be completely inappropriate for Hunter for PC power level reasons, a bad match for Mage because Mage fights should be closer to a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure-style battle of wits than an exercise in DPS prioritization, bad for Demon because Demon combat is mostly just "Demon wins: but at what cost in unwanted visibility?" and so on
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Aug 3, 2023 15:51
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Also another thought I had about people complaining about how dice rolls can make your character freak out and lose control. Don't call for rolls for stuff that doesn't matter! If the roll doesn't have interesting consequences, just let the PCs do the drat thing. There's a wide gulf between not rolling for complete trivialities and instituting some rigorous indie game regime for when you're allowed/forced to pick up the dice at all, which is the actual correct setup for a game in which any roll made for any reason has the potential to gently caress you over. Chuubo's (which has no dice, so it's not a great example, but bear with me) has a thing where each character can basically do one significant thing per scene before fading into the background to let everyone else have their turn in the spotlight; V5 could've laid out that each player gets, but also MUST make, exactly one roll per scene or something. The problem is that Storyteller and its derivatives has always been a basic, in-character task resolution system chiefly concerned with an individual character's capabilities vs. a definite obstacle. There's a huge range of rolls which are useful for adding detail to a scene, aren't trivially successful, and change the plot whether they succeed or fail ("have you heard of this guy before", for instance, or "do you know the rules of etiquette for this meeting") but which you'd be a real rear end in a top hat to call for in V5 (less so in W5, which is content to just let rolls fail without then looking for a way to punish you for even trying). That kind of an overhead really gets in the way of what's normally a pretty breezy and improv-friendly system.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:23
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