Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info
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@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
The situatation seems to be the Sabbat dabbled in the Middle East, playing all sides, and that this meddling kicked off the 2nd Inquisition, which in turn led to a night in Berlin in which careless Berlin Anarchs had messages intercepted by this Inquisition, leading to the catastrophic events of last Friday night here and the eventual expulsion of Anarchs from the Camarilla and its setup as a "closed room", a secret society you have to be invited into.
This sounds really lame, right from the start.
“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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@Ganymede
I'm sure it'll be equal parts dumb Sabbat and dumb Anarchs, but most of the stuff posited by the developers talked about how various government agencies started getting clued into vampires through a variety of means. So it's probably one facet of the whole thing.We'll see. I like the concept of moving back to street level but I fucking hate the Anarchs as a baseline. A fractured Camarilla with neonates and ancillae in over their heads is more appealing to me.
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@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
We'll see. I like the concept of moving back to street level but I fucking hate the Anarchs as a baseline. A fractured Camarilla with neonates and ancillae in over their heads is more appealing to me.
If anything I'm just happy they are doing something with the IP other than recompile what they wrote 20+ years ago. I hope they can preserve whatever magic I loved back when I first encountered V:tM.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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I have little interest in the government being like the God Machine. There is game where you plan and work to not leave evidence of your activities. It's called Killshot. It builds that right into the game, making evidence linked to your activities, lack of evidence based on your skill and planning, and emergency moves harder to clean up. Builds it right into the tension of a situation.
I doubt Vampire 5E plans to build it right in. So we are back to the technocracy as supers police. Yay.
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@Arkandel
Yeah. If nothing else, I can steal what mechanical changes I like (Hunger being one of them) and go from there, since I never really use the default setting anyway.@Misadventure
You sniped me on answering my question. I'm hopeful they'll do something like that with the Complications. I'm hoping that we'll see some of that when we get the beta in a couple weeks. -
I just mean it as a sort of deus ex machina oh noes the world has noticed you sort of thing.
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@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
@Arkandel
Yeah. If nothing else, I can steal what mechanical changes I like (Hunger being one of them) and go from there, since I never really use the default setting anyway.Since it's highly unlikely I'll ever play Vampire again on table-top it's still a big change for MU*; tracking down a resource like the vitae pool never quite meshed very well - it was usually just a command you used to replenish it with nearly no chance of failure or consequences - and Hunger could make it way more relevant.
I am curious to see how they plan for it to affect theme though in terms of ghouls, domain, etc.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel
Yeah, Hunger could be really fun on a MU*. Apparently some things in Compulsions are going to be based on consequences, like a Ventrue got 'baby tastes good' (I'm paraphrasing) during one of her Compulsions.EDIT: Here's the relevant section.
Well.
The table I ran had a player death. Turns out a frenzy-struck vampire versus a team of GSG9 with assault rifles on FA is pretty detrimental to anyone.I was a Storyteller, and I really enjoyed to see my player's cringe when the Ventrue realized that a baby was an amazing meal to get her hands on. I loved the fact that the writers decided to give each of them names, and focus on the visceral side of the hunt.
As far as I gathered, the Success with Consequence is an option, not a requirement, and only available when the ST deems that it can actually happen. It shouldn't draw attention away from the game.
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@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
- Demon: "We'd love to bring it forward. Bring your pitches." Some other lines, like Wraith and Changeling, may come out in different formats first.
Plz make Lores not just all over the fucking place. In the fiction (especially the Greg Stolze trilogy) it seemed like they were supposed to work more like Spheres, which would be cool.
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I will say, my one REAL criticism of the new direction is the art direction. The actual art they showed is HORRIBLE. Like, 'ventrue with a bowl cut has a nosebleed into a wine glass' or 'two ventrue with lines on the face look like a new wave band' or 'Brujah are torn-jeans and beanie hipsters' or 'Nosferatu are normalish looking but have Giger-esque outfits'. The plan to do actual art mixed with real photography is iffy to me.
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What I'd love to see is a conscious effort to make all the major splats integrate into a greater whole. They don't need to be quite balanced in terms of their overall power (although it'd be nice if the gap between them isn't huge) and I'd definitely not want all books to be required to play the game fully, but just being able to treat them as reasonable thematic additions instead of completely separate islands you need to figure out htf to bridge would be nice.
(Then maybe we'll stop seeing the foolishness on multisphere MU* where people are going out of their way to keep their specific sphere from interacting with the rest of the entire game because reasons)
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
I will say, my one REAL criticism of the new direction is the art direction.
Their art has never been exceptional.
To me, the biggest problem is what they've revealed about the metaplot. Looks and smells like orientalist bullshit to me.
Much as I love White Wolf, they have really driven their franchise and brand into the ground.
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@Arkandel
From the discussion of 'one core' with things for each game line being in their books (like a Hunger-alike thing for Werewolf), this is probably going to happen, without balance mattering.@Ganymede
I'm not sure how 'Vampires go to the Middle East' (which lines up with all kinds of canon from many OWoD books about the First City and ancient cultures and such) and 'The Sabbat used the Middle East conflicts to fuck with everyone' is orientalist? But okay. Nothing that's been said paints the Middle East in any light other than 'there's fighting and shit going on here'. I'm genuinely curious what paints that picture to you. -
@Bobotron, @Misadventure is to blame for everything but maybe not for @Ganymede.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel
Oops, fixed. The joys of medication! -
@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
But okay. Nothing that's been said paints the Middle East in any light other than 'there's fighting and shit going on here'. I'm genuinely curious what paints that picture to you.
"There's fighting and shit" occurs all over the world. In China, there is the government-driven oppression of Uygurs. In Myanmar, there is the oppression of the Rohingyas. In the Central African Republican, there is the oppression of the Fulas. And this is just the violent oppression of Muslims.
What about the Russian crackdown on homosexuals? What about the structural violence in India against the poor and underprivileged?
But when it comes to "fighting and shit," White Wolf goes and picks the low-hanging fruit. Because the ongoing media sub-text is: all the violence in the world occurs in or stems from what happens in the Middle East.
The World of Darkness' prior take -- that the United States is the breeding ground for Sabbat dissidence -- is a far-livelier and interesting take on the eternal struggle.
So, yeah. Orientalism. Right there: alive, well, and uninspiring.
“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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@Ganymede
OK, I see where you're coming from. Thank you for articulating that. Personally, I don't read it that way, but I'm also looking at it from the lens of Masquerade's lore and where a lot of the 'ancient vampire conflict' happens/happened. But I can see where you're coming from with it. -
@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
OK, I see where you're coming from. Thank you for articulating that. Personally, I don't read it that way, but I'm also looking at it from the lens of Masquerade's lore and where a lot of the 'ancient vampire conflict' happens/happened. But I can see where you're coming from with it.
I hope you don't think I'm being personally critical of you; I'm not. I'm just lamenting what I see as very lazy game design.
Most of us were probably exposed to V:tM around our teen years. We are now getting on in age, and are generally more aware of the world as a whole. So, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that V:tM's storyline will similarly mature. And this does not seem to be the case.
One of the things that the New World of Darkness did well is unshackle the Vampire Myth. Whereas V:tM clung to Mesopotamian roots for vampires, V:tR did not. V:tR embraced (sorry, pun) the idea of vampires just emerging, with different characteristics and powers based on their areas and without tortured explanations as to "how did Euro-Asian vampires end up in that part of the world?".
There are many cultures that arose in ancient times. Couldn't they have used some of those? Of course not. Why bother drawing upon the proliferation of information the Internet Age has brought us? Nah, let's go back to clinging to old, outdated, interminably-overwrought origin stories.
“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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@Ganymede
No, I don't think you're being personally critical of me at all. I hope you're not thinking I'm being personally critical of you either. I genuinely was curious as to what you were seeing. It's good we can have a dialogue without shit exploding. I have some internet acquaintances (and some RL friends) who would scream bloody murder at me if I didn't agree with every little thing they said or thought.I will say, looking at it from my end, this isn't a new vampire game; it's building on top of Masquerade's foundations, so they have to use that backdrop. We'll have to see how well they treat the evolution from there, since all we have is little tidbits.
EDIT: Because I re-read it and felt like I was explaining versus popping my reading/opinion of it.
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@Bobotron said in Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info:
I will say, looking at it from my end, this isn't a new vampire game; it's building on top of Masquerade's foundations, so they have to use that backdrop. We'll have to see how well they treat the evolution from there, since all we have is little tidbits.
True, that may be intent. If so, then I'm disappointed because I've outgrown that genre.
