The State of the Chronicles of Darkness
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@tragedyjones
Oh, derp, you're right. My bad. -
NP. I know I ran the B&S demo and still probably have a few around somewhere.
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@tragedyjones said:
It kills me inside when I am reminded that people still prefer the oWoD versions of Werewolf or Vampire. Mage was ok.
And @Bobotron, the Blood and Smoke was FreeRPG Day 2013. 2014 was an M20 thing.
I much prefer the old theme of both these spheres. I prefer the new mechanics though, as flawed as they are (or well, at least as flawed as 1st Edition is, I'm not versed enough in the 2nd Edition to have an opinion about it yet).
Did that hurt? Are you more dead now than 30 seconds ago?
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The 2e stuff feels like a happy medium between nWoD and cWoD. At least in reading Vampire and some of the changes it reminded me of oWoD in some of the powers and the FEEL of it. I think they are making a good move forward.
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From the Monday update:
Werewolf: the Forsaken fans…keep your heightened senses peeled! We hear an Advance PDF for Werewolf: the Forsaken 2nd Edition featuring the Idigam Chronicle has been sighted! It might be as close by as Wednesday
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At least in reading Vampire and some of the changes it reminded me of oWoD in some of the powers and the FEEL of it. I think they are making a good move forward.
It's not really about the powers, but as for the feel... oWoD vampire was more or less about being a fish feeding on other smaller fish while avoiding being eaten by the much larger fish who swim upstream from you, who were themselves in turn terrified of even larger fish. I've never really gotten that sense from nVampire at all.
The Camarilla and Sabbat provided organization and a standard framework for creatures who actively lied for centuries or more, not this Choose Your Own Adventure bullshit where nobody outside of your borders gives a fuck or even recognizes whatever is within them. The Elders presented a clear and present danger, especially because there was always someone older and more powerful than you, because of the way Generation worked. I still thought it was a pretty shit game, but at least I could see what it was about, more or less. nVampire seems about as pointless as it's possible to make a game and still call it a game, really. If that's changing in 2.0, hallelujah.
@tragedyjones,
oWoD Werewolf was about a dying breed of spiritual warriors fighting a cosmic evil in a hopeless series of battles trying to stave off the end of everything. Sure, a bunch of ecowarrior stuff was thrown in, but there was at least still an overarching point to it all. It got replaced by nWerewolf where as far as I can tell you basically play a bunch of burnt out spirit cops, who if they were a character on a show would be the stubborn sheriff who's always half drunk and can't be bothered to care anymore, because it's all just a bland miasma of Same Shit Different Day with maybe some procedural stuff thrown in.nWerewolf is like a slice of life anime. No real point, just following some dudes in their day to day lives, except they're also werewolves, but who cares? Meh.
oWerewolf was incredibly stupid, but also encouraged a balls to the wall action hero plus D&D sort of fun that I could get behind. It was Armies of Darkness over nWerewolf's Law & Order: Spirit Cops.
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@HelloRaptor said:
oWoD Werewolf was about a dying breed of spiritual warriors fighting a cosmic evil in a hopeless series of battles trying to stave off the end of everything.
So the werewolves were just Eldar the whole time?
That actually makes me appreciate them a bit more.
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What I miss of owod Werewolf and Vampire is Pentex and Sabbat. God do I miss those. In nwod, God help you if you want to play a 'bad' vampire. You will be staked. Then burned on a bigger one.
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@Admiral said:
@HelloRaptor said:
oWoD Werewolf was about a dying breed of spiritual warriors fighting a cosmic evil in a hopeless series of battles trying to stave off the end of everything.
So the werewolves were just Eldar the whole time?
That actually makes me appreciate them a bit more.
...hah. I hadn't thought of that. Nice catch.
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@Miss-Demeanor said:
What I miss of owod Werewolf and Vampire is Pentex and Sabbat. God do I miss those. In nwod, God help you if you want to play a 'bad' vampire. You will be staked. Then burned on a bigger one.
I was willing to deal with the folks who played BSD fetishists just to have some built in antagonism.
nWoD lacks teeth. But I've posted on that several times. And people railed against it and went on and on about how much conflict nWoD has and how much better it is than oWoD.
I still disagree. Firmly.
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@Admiral said:
nWoD lacks teeth. But I've posted on that several times. And people railed against it and went on and on about how much conflict nWoD has and how much better it is than oWoD.
NWoD lacks direction. That was intentional. Most of the people I know that prefer running oWoD games have creative minds that rival rocks. Chances are, you're one of them.
That said, oWoD is heads-and-tails better, especially for Vampire and Werewolf, because the people that like those lines, by and large, have creative minds that rival rocks. As a GM, that's not a bad thing because it makes your life a lot easier.
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Disparaging my person is beneath you, Ganymede. Or at least I'd hoped so.
Pardon me if I'd rather run things that my players can already relate to rather than pulling crap out of the aether and expecting them to be engaged. oWoD is very plug and play. nWoD requires a lot more from its players.
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@HelloRaptor said:
At least in reading Vampire and some of the changes it reminded me of oWoD in some of the powers and the FEEL of it. I think they are making a good move forward.
It's not really about the powers, but as for the feel... oWoD vampire was more or less about being a fish feeding on other smaller fish while avoiding being eaten by the much larger fish who swim upstream from you, who were themselves in turn terrified of even larger fish. I've never really gotten that sense from nVampire at all.
Years ago when I first heard about Vampire the Masquerade it wasn't hype that got me. I knew no one who played it on table-top at the time and it'd be a long time before I'd be on a MU* at all, let alone a WoD one. So I wasn't drawn in by anyone else.
But damn if it didn't make sense. I just loved the entire metaplot, every bit of it. The Elders manipulated by Methuselahs and they themselves played by Antideluvians, the slow revelations leading up to ancient truths, the idea of raising your power through diablerie, the constant hypocrisy of Camarilla's rules (which the higher-ups did fuckall to obey) and the Sabat's freedoms (which its higher-ups did fuckall to respect), all of that crap. The theme was amazing, and the nWoD never quite managed to capture that for me.
Maybe it's nostalgia? I don't know. I doubt it though, when I played on an oWoD MUSH briefly a few months ago I had a lot of fun. It was stagnant and tiny though, full of feature chars played by staff alts, and that was the only reason I left.
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@Miss-Demeanor What about the LS in VtR?
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@Miss-Demeanor said:
What I miss of owod Werewolf and Vampire is Pentex and Sabbat. God do I miss those. In nwod, God help you if you want to play a 'bad' vampire. You will be staked. Then burned on a bigger one.
Sounds more like a MU* issue than a game one. Requiem is filled with 'bad' vampires (Also, all Vampires are fucking horrible parasites), it's just with the exception of the Brood and VII it doesn't come with a big WE'RE THE BAD GUYS sticker. It's more about individuals. I rather like that.
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Except that's essentially the problem. Recognizable bad guys are a good thing to have, they're a shared foil for disparate groups who are all supposed to be part of the same examination. Sure you're X and this other guy is Y, and Y is totally fucking trash who are total losers, but at least they're not Z. You can both agree that Z is goddamn terrible and on some level you're going to have to temper your rivalry with an awareness of the threat Z presents.
I don't really agree with being able to play Z, whatever it is, because insert every argument about PC antagonist factions, but what all of owod shared was that they all had Z. And it wasn't generally some half-assed phantom threat which very rarely materialized in any concrete fashion (Seers of the Throne) or was so nebulous it might as well be meaningless (like whoever the fuck the pseudo-antagonists in Vampire are now). Werewolf comes close with The Pure, but even that is really pretty lackluster since they're basically just angry assholes and bullies.
Honestly, bullies sums up most of the nwod 'antagonists'. Just petty assholes who like to kick sand in your face because fuck you they can if they want.
As @Admiral mentioned, you can come up with antagonists for any given group if you want, but it lacks setting integration and the weight of meaning. It's the same with D&D, you can spin a story for your players about a race of <whatever custom shit you cooked up> who live in terrible places and bring terrible things with them when they encroach upon the world, but it's never going to have quite the same impact as Mind Flayers, Drow, etc, because those things have weight that's been baked into most of the settings in a way your custom shit just isn't.
@Ganymede can call it a lack of creativity all she wants, but that's like saying that people who prefer RPGs with rules to freeform shared storytelling exercises lack imagination, a vast oversimplification at best and just trolling nonsense at worst.
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@Admiral said:
@Miss-Demeanor said:
What I miss of owod Werewolf and Vampire is Pentex and Sabbat. God do I miss those. In nwod, God help you if you want to play a 'bad' vampire. You will be staked. Then burned on a bigger one.
I was willing to deal with the folks who played BSD fetishists just to have some built in antagonism.
nWoD lacks teeth. But I've posted on that several times. And people railed against it and went on and on about how much conflict nWoD has and how much better it is than oWoD.
I still disagree. Firmly.
NWoD only has conflict if people are willing to USE the conflicts that are detailed in the various fluff, the things that are in various Covenant and Clan notes, backstories and writeups that lend to that antagonism. Which is heavy on the ST to set that up and design how the city functions.
Do the Crone and Ordo hate each other here, or are they at a relative 'I won't piss in your Cheerios if you don't piss in mine'? Are the Carthians trying to smash apart the stuffy Invictus socially, or are they more militant factions who are trying to smash them apart by destroying them directly? Do the Invictus have an alliance with the Sanctified, or does the Invictus Primus here have Crone leanings due to being raised in a time of pagan religions and acceptance? Does everyone fuck with the Dragons in some way because most everyone has some type of hate-on for the dragons (especially if someone knows the legends that Drac stole secrets from Cruac and Theban)? And are the dragons fucking around with the (hopefully NPC) other supernaturals because of Mystick Science!? Do you have any type of Brood presence, present or past; if so, which faction(s) and how many coveys? Do you have any VII presence, present or past? Which version of VII? It's a lot of work on the STs.
Doesn't mean NWoD doesn't have teeth or conflict. Simply that people aren't really putting that energy into the setup, or if they are, not enforcing it from the outset (if it evolves in play, that's fine, but if we have militant crazy Carthians in a turf war with the Invictus and all Carthian appers app for people who'd rather poetry slam and try out Carthian Democracy than the setting set down by the STs, that's another problem entirely).
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Conflict between factions within the same larger organization isn't a substitute for conflict with other organizations.
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@HelloRaptor said:
@Ganymede can call it a lack of creativity all she wants, but that's like saying that people who prefer RPGs with rules to freeform shared storytelling exercises lack imagination, a vast oversimplification at best and just trolling nonsense at worst.
It is a lack of creativity, but so what? What hours of true, imaginative creativity I have I spend elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with admitting that one prefers something systematic, yet pleasurable. And once many of us admit to this, the allure of nWoD will lose its luster.
I don't go into gaming because I want to be creative; I get involved because I enjoy it, and there's nothing high-minded about my appreciation for simple pleasures. It's the same reason I like hockey and pro-wrestling.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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