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I realise that it's a real-life world but I still think "krewe" is the worst find-and-replace substitution for "coterie" in any WoD or CoD game.
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Nov 1, 2017 15:45
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Kibner posted:Maybe it's because I grew up in South Louisiana but seeing the word "krewe" made me smile and go "neat!".
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Nov 1, 2017 17:22
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GimpInBlack posted:That's pretty much how it's used in 2e--it's a catch-all term for "Sin-Eater led mystery cult" (and there's an in-setting reason for that), but if you asked most celebrants they'd describe themselves as members of a church, temple, or what have you. It's sort of like how "mafia" has come to be a catch-all term for organized crime syndicates, even those that don't really bear much similarity to the original Sicilian group and a member of, say, the Yakuza probably doesn't describe himself as a mafioso.
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Nov 1, 2017 17:23
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Night10194 posted:But is the setting really lacking for 'I prey on people and lie to myself about it' characters without them? Before Beast was announced, nobody was clamouring for a game where you kind of play a dragon/kraken/giant/whatever but not really and also there's weird dream stuff and you spend your time abusing people. It's just not a concept that needed to be filled out at all. The drive to turn absolutely any monster type people can think of into a Chronicles game seriously needs revising, particularly since it's got to the point where you have redundant takes on the same concept. (Take Deviant, a game where you play the product of a Frankenstein-esque hideous experiment, and Promethean, a game where you also play the product of a Frankenstein-esque tampering in God's domain. Had Promethean really nailed its central "This is our take on Franknenstein and similar myths" brief, Deviant would be wholly redundant.) It kind of feels like most of the Chronicles games outside of the Big Three have the problem of being based on such a personal vision it ends up tossing out most of the stuff people would want to do with that particular niche in favour of one specific thing. Changeling dispenses with most of what people would want to do with the whole dark faeryland thing in favour of the "fugitive abuse survivor" concept. Geist is whatever the gently caress Geist is, and I won't deny that it's an original concept but I will deny that it's a concept anyone was specifically crying out for in the "you play spoops" game. Promethean feels more like a philosophical exercise than a game you actually play a campaign of. Mummy is just sort of there. Demon I have a lot of affection for, but it works much better if you don't think of it as playing actual demons (which it has absolutely the wrong aesthetic for) and instead think of it as Matrix: the Agenting. One wonders whether their sales woes and depleted cultural cachet aren't at least partially due to the fact that they've kind of disappeared up their own rear end and taken to delivering games with concepts better suited to niche indie releases rather than something for a broad audience. LatwPIAT posted:Long before the Beast draft was released, it never really seemed like a very good idea for a game. It doesn't have the strong connections to easily identifiable mythical creatures and doesn't draw on a body of existing pop culture works, and the one-line pitch is that you're playing monsters - which is already what the World of Darkness as a whole is about. Paring Beast down to its bare bones leaves you with a less thematically coherent or interesting Vampire.
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Nov 15, 2017 12:08
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Archonex posted:Changeling is literally an abuse metaphor writ large and in supernatural terms and with a far lighter metaplot than what WoD usually offers. When you get past the window dressing that makes up the setting there's a pretty empowering message there. Also, it handles the whole abuse issue right unlike Beast. Also, also, it does it from the role of the victim instead of the abuser. Also in my post I admittedly was mostly thinking about Changeling: the Dreaming, where you pretty much are playing the faeries but because you already had magical shapeshifters who cavort with spirits in a hazy otherworld in the form of oWoD woofles they kind of ended up being conceptually redundant.
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Nov 15, 2017 15:37
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I Am Just a Box posted:I mean, it's not falsely advertised. It's called Changeling, not Faerie, and it delivers people being stolen and coming back wrong. On the other hand, I guess there's Dreaming for the former, and people's talk here about how the abuse metaphor isn't pushed as much as I'd heard elsewhere it was has got me curious again, so maybe I'll dip my toe in that water.
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Nov 15, 2017 17:29
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Yawgmoth posted:Because some of us like the setting and system and broad strokes/elevator pitch of a game but don't really enjoy getting all "deep" or "philosophical" with games because oddly enough that poo poo is really not fun to think about when you want to unwind. For my money, the non-RPG thing which captures what I want out of World of Darkness the most is the Underworld movie series. It's campy ridiculous action in a world where stepping out of line will get the powers that be coming after you like a ton of bricks, stuffed with ancient conspiracies and constant mashups of occult nonsense with techno-thriller garbage. It's light entertainment at its finest.
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Nov 16, 2017 00:08
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ProfessorCirno posted:I legitimately appreciate that every other game has it's reasons and need to exist, and vampires continue to just be a big fat leech that could be completely excised with no overall loss. Even better, delete the actual Beast game line.
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Nov 28, 2017 02:05
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Kurieg posted:A reminder that the game constantly implies that something bad will happen if Beasts weren't around, but don't actually elaborate. The antagonists supllement introduces the Insatiables, which are basically Beasts but Worse in every concievable way, except they're INEXPLICABLY undetectable by Heroes. Heroes can detect something loving up the local Dream, but can't actually find the Insatiables. And are thus quick to blame the nearest Beast they can find, also Insatiables can do... something.. to beasts (it's not actually mechanically complete) which allows them to steal bits of their lair or just take them over like cordyceps.
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Nov 28, 2017 02:27
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DigitalRaven posted:Exactly. Everything mentioned already in this thread is something I've had in mind, but that would have caused backlash if it'd gone into the book as being "too over the top". Werewolf already gets dinged as "furry Captain Planet", if we'd included the Nestle-water-thing as an example of Pentex' malfeasance people would claim we were leaning into that rather than just including poo poo that happens in the real world. I was super glad they did the Black Hand book for V20 so those who wanted to add the Vampions wackiness back into the game absolutely could if they wanted to, and kind of wish Werewolf had a similar supplement.
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Jan 25, 2018 16:22
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Mr. Maltose posted:Nah, that's exceedingly Attitude Era. Which is a pretty good description of the nuWW approach in general.
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Feb 2, 2018 13:08
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Loomer posted:Unfortunately V5 will likely sell quite well. We are a relative minority of the fanbase - a great many more belong to the LARP world these days. That said, I don't do Isles of Darkness/Camarilla UK/whatever. I might be missing something. On the other hand, I suspect that people doing WW-derived LARPs are the minority in the LARP community these days, since the community's largely moved on to newer pastures. I suspect the LARP sales will be nowhere near what they are hoping it'll be. If I had to guess why they're gambling so much on it, I suspect that Ericsson is making the classic mistake of assuming that the wider LARP community broadly has the tastes of his own little bubble. (Admittedly, I might be making that mistake too... but I am aware that I am in a bubble. I don't know that he's aware that he is in one.)
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Feb 2, 2018 17:54
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All these badass nicknames make me hope for a reprint of the pro wrestling-themed Aberrant supplement for the new edition.
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Feb 6, 2018 17:53
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Twibbit posted:Perhaps distancing self from nuWW
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Feb 6, 2018 18:30
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Kurieg posted:Not really anymore. It's true that NuWolf had no hand in the first parts of V20, since that was produced before Paradox bought the White Wolf imprint, NuWolf has made changes on several current 20th anniversary releases to bring them more in line with their ideas for the 5th edition lines. 
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Feb 7, 2018 12:41
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MonsieurChoc posted:CAN we get a class action lawsuit going? Because we paid for a OPP product, not a NuWW one? I partly blame OPP for this, mind. They really should have given Rich Dansky a bit more support rather than leaving him to write the entire tome by himself and also juggling an increased day job workload he hadn't expected to deal with at the time of the Kickstarter. If the book had been finished faster, it would have received the CCP oversight treatment ("It's written in words on a page? Eh, good enough...") and be safe from NuWW's meddling. RichT on one of the recent Monday Meeting Notes made some vague noises about how maybe OPP's allowed developers to work unsupported by their ownsome a bit too much and they're working on changing that, which is good. (Being less reliant on "game designer as auteur" as a cornerstone of the PR would also be helpful - Wraith20 was always promoted as effectively being RICH DANSKY'S Wraith, Mage20 was very much presented as PHIL BRUCATO'S Mage and so on, with the involvement of those designers being a major selling point on the Kickstarters in question. That's fine in theory, but if the designer in question suddenly becomes unable to focus their efforts on the project that leads you to what's happened with Wraith. Plus the less a game line is intimately associated with one particular individual, the less damaged it gets when you get a BHM situation.) Warthur fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Feb 7, 2018 |
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Feb 7, 2018 13:16
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Terrorforge posted:Despite how it can look, especially with projects like the OPP ones, donating to a kickstarter is not the same as purchasing a product. You're donating to something you believe in, not entering a binding financial contract. There's potential for repercussions in cases of outright scams, but it's kind of critical to the whole crowdfunding concept that backers can't just demand their money back or fling around lawsuits when the product doesn't turn out quite how they envisioned it, or even when the project outright tanks. That said, given that it was always going to be the case that the project would be subject to an approvals process from the licensors, I don't think the change in the identity in the licensors would be considered enough to be a breach of the original contract. But if someone fails to deliver on a Kickstarter that'd be breach of contract.
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Feb 7, 2018 13:41
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Rand Brittain posted:Also, it looks as though Wraith20 can be safely filed under “unreservedly good” based on my current progress and what people are saying, so the 20th Anniversary line is now at 3.75/5 for quality.
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Feb 13, 2018 14:43
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Lightning Lord posted:Probably Vampire being a bit of a dry run and I'm gonna guess that most people in this thread don't like Changeling to begin with anyway (For that purpose I'd junk the rule that says that you get all your permanent Banality back when you exit the Dreaming, and adapt the quests that currently exist to let you reduce your personal Banality and make them ways to actively counteract Banality and/or make a new foothold of the Dreaming in the mundane world, so that stuff would still be relevant but managing personal Banality would be substantially easier. It'd mean that Changelings can be way, way nastier, but that's fine because I like my fae folk to have a nasty edge to them.)
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Feb 13, 2018 14:55
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Yawgmoth posted:Banality has always been and will always be a stupid loving concept both in form and function because it is inherently poisoned by writers' biases against things they personally do not find interesting.
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Feb 13, 2018 15:22
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What's that bad about Mage? I know it's got a lot of Phil on it and the Disparates didn't need to become Council of Traditions 2.0, but it generally seemed to hit the right feel for me. (Then again, I tend to regard Mage as the game where you all get around the table and have a debate about how it works, because it's the "Bargaining" spot on the oWoD Five Stages of Grief theme.)
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Feb 13, 2018 16:50
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Rand Brittain posted:1) The book really shits on the Traditions, which is the opposite of what needed to happen, because people have developed a serious hate-on for them as a result of everything that's happening in the world right now (waves hand vaguely at the universe), but they got a blackwashing instead of a whitewashing so now it's canon that wizards hate light bulbs instead of insane fanon. 1) and 3) I don't mind because I mentally put M:tAs in the same category as W:tA - the "I can only appreciate this game as an absurdly cynical parody where everyone is a different flavour of total rear end in a top hat" category, to be specific. So it doesn't particularly matter to me that the Traditions are shitbirds because I think any single one of them (or any particular Disparate Craft, for that matter) has the seeds of a new tyranny embedded in them anyway, and that the Marauders are the only faction who can truly be said to be "correct" in the sense that they're the only ones who actually take the whole consensus reality thing to its logical conclusion. Likewise, it doesn't matter to me that the book says that doing poo poo is badwrong violence because I don't put a high premium on PCs being nice role models. I think the reason the amount of Phil in M20 doesn't bug me more is that at least he very brazenly wears his biases on his sleeves and you can correct for that. (He also, I seem to recall, usefully says "Oh, by the way, you mustn't do X, Y and Z when it comes to interpreting what your spheres can do because it means the PCs end up with too much power", so I can make sure to do X, Y and Z because I prefer my Mage to be a cartoon shitshow where absurdity rules all the time.) Kavak posted:Didn't Brucato leave out information on Paradigms from 2nd Edition because he was afraid people would cast actual magic in their games? (Which makes you wonder what happens to the GM, who has to NPC all the Nephandi at once...)
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Feb 13, 2018 18:48
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Slimnoid posted:What would be the other four stages as game lines? Werewolf = Anger. It's right there in the tagline and everything. Mage = Bargaining, as mentioned, 'cuz every time you use magic it's basically a little negotiation between you and the Storyteller. Wraith = Depression. The way the Shadow works, in particular. Changeling = Acceptance. In the case of the oWoD, acceptance of the fact that life is magykal and story is magnificent and adulthood is poopy - it's the acceptance of the wonder-child within. The last is based on my belief that Rein-Hagen's early plan for the five-game arc (he refers to the whole thing as the "Storyteller saga" in writings from the time) was that in the end it was the Changelings who were going to have the right of it and be the catalysts for the victory of colour and goodness over the grey drabness of modernity. My main point of evidence for this is that Changelings are all about tossing aside soulless mass media in favour of personal storytelling and oral traditions and the like, which is exactly what White Wolf had told us the whole Storyteller thing was about ever since V:tM 1E.
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Feb 14, 2018 00:39
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Problem I always had with the Traditions is that several of them seem to have originated in 1st edition as a means of letting you play someone who isn't really a wizard, at least aesthetically speaking - you have your VR hackers, your old-timey mad scientists, you even have the original illustration for the Akashic Brotherhood depicting a martial arts dude. Vampire you don't get to opt out of being a vampire; werewolf you don't get to opt out of being a woofle. Mage you weirdly do get to opt out of being a wizard, or at least get the option to claim what you do isn't magic but forbidden super-science. In general, letting people get away with not really buying into the basic concept of the game is a poor move - which is why I much prefer Mage: the Awakening for the purposes of playing a game which actually focuses on mages.
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Feb 15, 2018 01:00
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Nessus posted:MTA in general had the problem of the core book more or less openly telling you that all of this was bullshit and your character was deluded, held back by her paradigm and so on. I remember one example of "A Verbena may just have no way to actually cast a Life effect without vulgar magick, in which case, welp, eat poo poo witch boy." I don't think any other splat pulled that particular rug out.
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Feb 15, 2018 08:32
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Mendrian posted:If I recall there is a particular Arete level where you just get to transcend Paradigm anyway. It's been years but I seem to remember that. Really this is one of the very long list of reasons why Unknown Armies did the whole postmodern magic/subjective reality/everyone's take on magic is a little different thing way better than Ascension.
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Feb 15, 2018 21:35
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Rand Brittain posted:There isn't actually a purple paradigm in-setting, but it is true that the closer your paradigm is to the theoretical purple paradigm, the better it is. The Sons of Ether and Void Engineers very nearly run on it, and have a much easier time justifying any given effect.
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Feb 15, 2018 22:26
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Terrorforge posted:That's not very different from their relationship with any other supernaturals, though. Vinnie the vampire can shrug off a lead pipe to the face just by virute of a corpse having chewed on his neck, but hunters aren't exactly jealous of him. If anything it's the very fact that a mage doesn't have to work for their abilities (in any way the average mortal understands as "work") that marks them as a monster. For one thing, "person who happens to be able to do poo poo I cannot do", as disconcerting as it may be, is orders of magnitude easier to cope with than "person who literally needs to drink blood/abuse people to keep living". Fundamentally, "I'll never be able to do the thing that person can do" is already an ordinary part of human experience - people can deal with it. For another, "fellow human being who happens to have superpowers" is the sort of backup that Hunters absolutely dream of having. OOC there's balancing issues to do to keep everyone feeling relevant, but IC Hunters really don't mind the Angel Summoner vs. BMX Bandit problem - if they can solve poo poo by convincing a friendly mage to do stuff, and doing so lets them keep their powder dry and their people safe, it's a no-brainer. I think the main reason Hunters would not get on with Mages would be the stances of the different factions. I can see lots of Hunters buying into the Free Council's rhetoric, for instance, whereas I can equally see how Hunters would take one look at the Seers of the Throne and say "OK, that's some Illuminati poo poo right there, I can completely believe those are the evil guys". (On the other hand, if the Seers were smart enough to run propaganda like OWoD's Technocracy - "We're the people who make sure that the laws of physics stay consistent enough to allow people to have an ordinary, calm life" - that might persuade some Hunters to side with them.) The other reason I see for Hunters to turn on Mages is if the Mages' mystery-sniffing seemed about to go into a dangerous area. Say the local Hunter cell has already worked out that something horribly dangerous and well beyond their ability to flat-out kill is slumbering at the bottom of the Old Copperbottom Mine, and they arranged for an "accidental" rockfall to seal off the mine to keep the horror trapped. They're going to get pissed if Mages show up wanting to get inside and talk to the gribbly to find out its secrets.
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Feb 23, 2018 12:32
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Terrorforge posted:I tend to think the average hunter doesn't have nearly enough understanding of the internal structure of gribbly politics to even know there are multiple factions, let alone have an informed opinion on any specific one. They're not going to see the difference between the Seers' unnatural, manipulative, self-serving machinations and the Pentacle's unnatural, manipulative, self-serving machinations, especially since a lot of the conflict centers around things that only matter to wizards. To the Union soccer mom who just wants to drain her local swamp, the fact that a friendly Pentacle mage is willing to kill in order to "prevent the Seers from strengthening the influence of the Exarchs and reinforcing the Lie" marks him as a dangerous lunatic, not a hero. I mean, ultimately, if it can be neatly summarised in the setting chapter of the rulebook to an extent that we who are not Mages can understand and play in the Mage setting, it stands to reason that it can be explained to a similar extent in-character.
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Feb 23, 2018 17:01
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Mors Rattus posted:The other thing is that, thanks to the Lie, magic hurts people. Mages can try to tell you what they're doing, but they can't ever show you, because it will literally make your mind start tearing itself apart. They can tell you it's the Lie, they can tell you they can't help it, but they can never be honest with you, you can never trust they're doing what they say, because they can't show you their magic. Basically, you want them thinking you're Deep Throat, or if you want a less Seer-ish guise one of the Lone Gunmen from the X-Files. You're the fixer who can arrange for circumstances to be juuuust right for their next raid. Sure, it's harder to get their trust that way - that's why you start with the information broker angle, if you hand them some secrets they can go corroborate for themselves on their own time you aren't asking for much. Then eventually, once you've established your credentials with them, you can do more for them, until eventually they won't know how they got along without you.
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Feb 23, 2018 17:06
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The more I think about it, the more the "Lone Gunman" cover works beautifully for a Mage. Then all your weird obsessions and the red-string conspiracy boards that clutter the walls of your house are all just part of the cover. "Bob's a crackpot conspiracy theorist, sure," think the Hunters. "He's a little odd that way. But hell, look at us. We spend our evenings hunting vampires and wolf people and we've stumbled across more ancient cults and weird secret societies than your average Dan Brown novel - people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. And every single time Bob's encouraged us to go check out a location, it's turned out to have had some weird poo poo going down there, so his research methods can't be that off-base."
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Feb 23, 2018 17:12
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Anyone seen Messiah of Evil? That kind of feels like the iconic "elder vampire who hangs out in the ocean until it's time to rise" movie.
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Mar 5, 2018 01:12
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Kavak posted:I'm pretty sure there is. This book was mandated by the Kickstarter, right? In terms of popularity of Demon vs. Beast, I'm with nofather - judging it solely on number of forum posts is misleading because Beast has been vastly, vastly more controversial than Demon ever was. That and a lot of Beast's concepts are just plain weird - and not weird in an interesting way like the strangest parts of Demon so much as weird in a "Is the description of this concept even written in English, or is it just a completely different language where all the words happen to resemble English words with different meanings?" sort of a way. (I'm still not seeing what the point of Heroes is when they occupy the exact same conceptual space as Hunters - or, for the matter, why Beasts aren't just utterly redundant in the structure of NWoD altogether.)
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Mar 9, 2018 14:05
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Kurieg posted:"4chan likes beast" is a fairly damning endorsement. EDIT: In fact, I found the thread with the poster doing the Planescape/Ravenloft comparison and in context it looks like it's just one person who has a really odd take on Beast (like they seem to think it's way more about exploring the multiverse of CofD than any other discussion of Beast I've seen has made it out to be). Warthur fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 18:59
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How much WoD/Chronicles play actually takes place in the (bewildering, frankly kind of redundant) number of otherworlds the games present us with? I always figured that in your typical campaign most play would unfold in the regular world and otherworld trips would be a clear minority of play time. After all, the underlying meta-theme of each WoD/Chronicles game seems to be "It's the everyday world we are familiar with (or a gothic-pubk pqrody of it), except creature type X exists in the shadows." Major exception would be Wraith; I've only read 1E but it seems like most of the action in that is focused on underworld shadows of our world rather than the world of the living.
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Mar 12, 2018 12:21
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@Dave Brookshaw: Makes sense, the ideological basis of the Seers is "Eh, the Lie's better than any of the alternatives" and I'm not seeing how a collapse of the Lie could occur without cosmology-redefining consequences.
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Mar 13, 2018 20:03
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Joe Slowboat posted:Mhm. Mhm. Ok, let's just consider this: What version of history are you aware of where nothing has changed in thousands of years, and also where the US government has 'objectively done more net good than a random group of humanists' ? In my personal take on Unknown Armies the Invisible Clergy hits the magic 333 number every time someone ascends to them -- and in that instant, the paradigm of the world is rewritten, the weakest archetype in the toybox gets excised, and the number goes back to 332. It is the "end of the world" each and every time it happens in the sense that the zeitgeist shifts and can never return to what it formerly was. It has been happening more and more regularly over time, but it keeps happening. For M:tAw purposes I'd be tempted to go a similar route: every time someone Ascends successfully to the Supernal and takes up a place in it, they become an Exarch - not because of some sort of heel turn, but because once you stop being one of the dorks stuck in the cave watching the shapes making their shadows on the wall and become one of the shapes, by your very nature you will cast a shadow. The nature of the Lie, the sheer oppressive thickness of it, the ease with which it can be penetrated, the particular ways it grinds people down - that's changed bit by bit over the years as Mages have slipped through the cracks. Bit by bit the shadow play becomes more and more complex as more and more Exarchs cast their shadows; eventually, perhaps, it will become so convoluted that it can no longer hold people's attention and the Lie will collapse. That will be great for everyone who has been able to prepare themselves for Supernal existence and pretty drat fatal for everyone else.
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Mar 13, 2018 22:49
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Zereth posted:Just take the elevator pitch of "You're ancient monsters hiding in plain sight" and make something that actually matches that elevator pitch with it. The big problem you have in cooking up new CoD games is that more or less all the really iconic monsters with wide enough cultural cachet to hang a game line on are taken, either by actual WoD/CoD games or knockoffs. Dragons are a major gap, but then Fireborn exists and the comparisons to that may be undesirable. Likewise, UFO aliens are a gap, but don't really fit the more supernatural than science fiction underpinnings of the setting. Deviant might be the closest that you get to that, though Deviant has its own issues in that it's a slightly different take on the Frankenstein thing than Promethean. (The only difference between a Deviant and the original Frankenstein's monster, so far as I can make out, is that whoever's brain it is in the Deviant remembers their old life whereas Frankie woke up a blank slate - though that's probably a big enough difference to hang a splat on.) Beast seemed to want to be an "miscellaneous/all of the above" splat, but was anyone really, genuinely, honestly crying out for the chance to play, oh, I don't loving know, a hydra or a centaur or a minotaur or whatever in a CoD/WoD-like game? Even if someone was, were there enough people crying out for the same thing that it made any goddamn commercial sense to actually make a game for them? And doesn't having a splat which can glom onto other splats and joyride on their schtick just undermine all the other splats' USPs? It feels like Beasts either end up being lovely versions of concepts better dealt with by other splats, or failing that end up being weird take on monsters which, on balance, don't really belong in your modern day urban occult horror game because there isn't a good hook for doing a modern-day update of them. Beast being a trainwreck due to its handling of abuse themes was deplorable, but there's a reason all Beast discussions turn into discussions of the abuse stuff - if you take it away there's nothing conceptually vivid there beyond vague huffing and puffing about a dark mother and creepy otherworld lairs. Compare that to the striking conceptual clarity of, well, pretty much any other splat. There isn't enough "there" there to make a game out of, or at least not one which sits nicely in the same ecosystem as the other CoD splats. Some of those "ancient monster" concepts would work way, way better in Scion than elsewhere (all the Greek myth ones, for instance, make far more sense in a cosmology where the Greek pantheon exists and has an active role in the world), others could make decent splats in their own right except their lunch already got eaten by a sufficiently conceptually-close splat that making a CoD game out of them would struggle to find its own identity. Warthur fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 11:57
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:This is a really solid point. It's also one of the reasons I dig the new Demon/GMC flavor is it feels like a step away from Dante's vision of hell and demons, which has become fairly stale. The move towards more abstract and gnostic themes do open up potential for basing games on more philosophical, deconstructed ideas of monsters. I'm not sure how often you can do the "we're going to take the central idea and do a radical reimagination of it" thing though. If someone buys Splat: the Splattening, odds are it's because they want to play something which closely resembles a Splat, and if what's presented doesn't feel like a "real" Splat to them then that's a burden. Your new thing sounds interesting. Do you intend to present it as a standalone game? Because as with Beast (and to a certain extent Demon, come to think of it) I'm not sure what having the other CofD splats present in that setting really adds. That Old Tree posted:While there's always a sort of limited "cultural bandwidth" for franchises and parts of franchises, I think it's a mistake to just sort of shrug your shoulders and assume that the various WoD's are done because, like, Frankensteins and Vampires and Wizards and Werewolfs and, hell, I guess that's it. Demon sure got some of the same "Meh, but what's the incredibly simplistic hook of a broad cultural touchstone?", even after it demonstrated you could totally open up new spaces in the of Darknesses. The big stumbling block isn't that "the good ones are taken", it's that creating a new, engaging IP is just plain hard. The fact that it's very hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing - but equally, the fact that it's very hard intrinsically means that the odds of success are slim. Coming up with a new splat that benefits from being part of the CofD rather than just its own thing in its own standalone game is difficult enough that, whilst I don't think Onyx Path's designers should stop brainstorming, I'm not anticipating that many new games in the CofD happening. And if they do come, they'll come at an extremely slow pace, unless older lines get outright shuttered for the sake of making way for concepts that do what they did better.
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Apr 23, 2018 19:31
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:. . . More Gehenna plot? Really? The gently caress is there even left to say about that. Come on. The Gehenna and Second Inquisition stuff seems to be less interactable plot and more a heavy-handed justification for setting up the new Camarilla-vs.-Anarch status quo - the Sabbat and the Elders have hosed off over the horizon, vampires are largely restricted to single cities, and the slapfight between Camarilla institutional power and the Anarchs which 1st edition and very early 2nd edition focused on is back on. I can see the appeal of that style of game, but trying to reconcile it to the old canon rather than brushing it all aside and starting over inevitably leads to clumsiness like what we've seen.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:10
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