Posts made by Bobotron

@Thenomain
He was there hanging out, participating in a LARP and showing off a new card/board game for Masquerade he developed for WW called Conclave, from what I saw third-hand.

@Arkandel
Kenneth Hite is a good writer; he used to write stuff for WW in the day (Cainite Heresy) and he wrote the excellent Night's Black Agents game.

The OTHER name in the controversy, Zak Smith, is a very controversial figure who has been accused of harassment in various forms, evidence both for and against (and evidence of him being counter-harassed), and is kind of a troll. He is also apparently a good writer, having a few things published and a D&D thing he wrote won multiple ENnies (I haven't read his stuff, so I can't verify this). There's a lot of controversy with the guy and, while I don't like his writing style (I find it to be edgy for the sake of edgy), I don't believe he's working on V5 in any capacity though. A writer in OPP's stable, David Hill, quit because WW hired him to write the vampire mobile game (Hill has a history of beef with Zak S. and has accused his 'followers' of taking pictures of his kids' school and issuing threats that as far as I can tell, never got presented to the police, before Hill expated to Japan).

So make of that what you want. A lot of people are screaming to boycott WW because of Zak S. and stating that they are 'condoning harassment'.

I feel like I'll be bitched off the forum for saying this, but I have no opinion on that aspect of it. Until I know that Zak S. is definitively involved in the development of V5, I'm going to continue with cautious optimism, 'cause I like what Ken has written and like what has been revealed so far.

@Thenomain
Its okay, Theno. I was putting it up here 'cause I know there are people who like WW, and there's a lot there to go through even with it being pre-alpha.

I like the mechanical stuff that's going on. I'm ambivalent about the setting changes until I know more. The rest I am going to refrain from commenting on. I like Ken Hite's stuff and him being involved is enough for me to watch with cautious optimism.

@Thenomain
LOL. I get you. They stated that they want them all to work out mechanically together, even if they aren't balanced, so likely they'll all run on the same 'base' mechanic with better integration than regular OWoD has. I'm cautiously optimistic at the moment. A lot of the concerns I had about 'you are what you eat' and such things have been alleviated.

(Also, I like Ascension more than I like Awakening. There, I said it, I'm a pariah in the community now.)

@Thenomain
They said Ascension is third in the list. Someone elsewhere mentioned something about how the core mechanic is similar to Paradox dice and quintessence?

@ThatGuyThere
This is very true. It requires a buy-in from staff to adjudicate it. Which is why I feel like it'd be better for a single-sphere game than a multi-sphere game.

@ThatGuyThere
I think the big thing with Hunger on a MU* is, it's less HOW you refill (though there's detail on it, especially with having to KILL someone to get to 0 Hunger), and how Hunger interacts with everything else.

If I gain a Hunger die during play and that puts me at 2 Hunger Die, that's 2 chances to flip out and have to deal with a Compulsion. It gives a different feel to the scene where you might be concerned about blood; instead, you' re now concerned about not only flipping out due to Frenzy triggers if they come up but also the raw compulsions like 'get ranty about your control of the situation' and such things. It's like the damn Snickers commercial almost, to an extent.

Plus with the 'passive bonus' from who you feed on, that's impetus for a rejiggered gaining blood command. I could see it opening a job, doing all the 'you get blood' work, and then staff adjudicating any 'after the fact' things. Like if you purposely killed a dude. You have only three or four options for feeding, so it's not like you're going 'I take 3 points safely.' It's 'I drink from and not kill a human, remove 3 Hunger, and gain a +1 to my Seduction pool 'cause I ate a hooker'

Perhaps a bit more minutiae for a many-sphere game, but I find it could be a good flavor thing on a one-sphere game.

@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.

@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.

@Arkandel
Oops, fixed. The joys of medication!

@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.

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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

And one more bit from the dude who played the thing in Berlin.

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.

@Thenomain
One thing that was stated by Karim, the mechanical designer, is that they wanted to do some narrative ties to the mechanics. So we'll see, I guess.

Trailer for the X-Men TV show Gifted. They actually name-drop the X-Men and Brotherhood! No news if it's tied to the movie franchises, but they directly have cast Polaris, Thunderbird and Blink in the series. Lots of mutants with telekinesis/magnetism/non-flashy powers in the preview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTzW9rMcbzk

And more...

The "big thing" that it seemed like this was a testbed for is the Hunger system as a replacement for Blood Points. The basic idea is that rather than decreasing the amount of blood you have you increase the amount of hunger you have. Rather than spending Blood Points you instead "Rouse the Blood" to accomplish a variety of things (basically all the same things you spend blood for under the current rules). A few subtle but important inclusions are that you must Rouse the Blood to awaken each night, any vampire must Rouse in order to not appear dead, and all uses of Disciplines require Rousing. You keep track of how many times you Rouse the Blood in a scene and at the end of that scene you roll that many dice. Any dice that don't roll a success add to your Hunger (a scale of 1-5). Any time you make a skill roll or skill-based Discipline roll you have a number of dice in your pool replaced by "Hunger dice," equal to your Hunger rating. These dice function like normal dice and can contribute successes, but if any of them roll a 1 you gain a temporary Compulsion from your Beast (note that 1s do not subtract from successes in these rules so you aren't getting double-whammied or anything). Compulsions are tics of your predatory vampiric nature that can vary in severity depending on the number of Hunger dice that rolled a 1. In the game I ran a Toreador was overwhelmed with strong emotion for someone in the scene, a Ventrue felt compelled to assert his dominance and leadership over the group, and another Ventrue felt incredible anxiety at the lack of order and structure they had without guidance from their superiors. These were all pretty minor Compulsions and we didn't have anyone fail badly enough to pull one of the nastier ones (though one character was walking around with 4 Hunger for a bit).
Hunger is reduced by feeding, shock of all shocks. There was a scale that told you how much Hunger was removed by feeding on what. IIRC animals removed 2 and feeding on a human without killing them removed 3. Feeding on a human and killing them in the process removes 4 and is also the only way to reduce your Hunger below 1 (temporarily), otherwise all vampires are assumed to always have at least 1 Hunger.
Honestly, it worked pretty well and everyone I talked to seemed to feel likewise. It needs refinement, something even Karim said in a couple conversations I had with him, but the core concept and system is actually surprisingly thematic and functional.

In this set of rules the extent of "you are what you eat" was getting small, temporary bonuses from feeding on certain people. They said this is something they want to continue with but are still developing a proper system for. At this point though assuming the final system for that has broadly similar outcomes to the listed effects in the playtest it doesn't seem like that addition to the system is going to be as huge and game-changing as some people were thinking.

The other addition that was generally a hit (with exceptions I'll talk about) was "Success With Consequences," wherein if the number of successes you rolled fell exactly one short of the number you needed you could choose to succeed but have the ST add in some complication or consequence. It only happened a couple times at my table and worked well both times. Other people I talked to reported similarly with the exception of one table where it apparently happened so often it became cumbersome to the flow. Seems like something that depends a great deal on the fall of the dice and the kinds of things the ST decides to throw in.

@WTFE
WHY DID YOU KILL MOCCHI!?!?!?!?!?! Now he can't fight Mu any more! GENKI WILL BE SO SAD! (+1000000 upvotes to the person who gets this).

@Arkandel
No word that I have found until this morning.

@Ganymede
If they use some aspects of C20 it might fix some things, like childlings not actually having to be physically a child. I was a little disturbed by the sheer amount of 'yes, we are addressing the pedophilia aspect' discussion came out of the MET Changeling announcement though.

Anyway, here's the newest layout of info from someone who did the playtest.

ALL OF THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE IN THE FINAL PRODUCT

Only 3 Attributes - Physical, Social and Mental, 1-5 dots
Specialities for these Attributes like Strength, Charisma etc (the old atts) and others that were not old Atts add one die
Skills pretty much unchanged 1-5 dots
TN nearly always 6
Difficulty is now number of succs. needed
Disciplines are activated by "Rousing the Blood"
This means you add all your (red) Hunger die to the pool (they replace ordinary die). We started with 1 die.
Hunger die only added to skill based pools (including pools that use skills for disciplines) but not others like willpower.
Hunger die track 1-5
Hunger increased during play, but it happened to me only once and I cant recall the mechanical cause
Hunger went to zero when someone fed
Victims sometimes gave a small bonus to trait rolls (eg. the homeless guy gave a die for the next stealth roll I think). This was even when partially drained.
Each 1 on Hunger die triggers a Compulsion
Compulsions are clan based and the consequences situation based and were randomly generated. Our hungry Toreador walked into a burned out haven and became entranced by the beauty of the destruction. Police then crept up on him.
Compulsions could be overcome with Composure, but this left you with less Compusure to counter with should a Frenzy occur later.
Frenzy occurred when more 1s came up together (I think)
Willpower was 1-5 and could be spent to reroll all the failed dice, so long as there was at least one success
Humanity was in there at 1-10, but was not tested or afaik used in the beta, the focus was on other mechanics
Characters also had advantages like backgounds and merits, but these too were not a focus of play
The focus was really on how the mechanics and storytelling aspects of play integrated with one another
Im not going to give my views as I want that to brew for a while and to submit it to the offical feedback place first
The story was very dense - I dont think any table completed it in the 4 hours of play - and was a direct follow up to the events of the Enlightenment in Blood LARP which concluded the night before. The story became the first event of the new VtM metaplot.
It was set in Berlin in the current nights during an Anarch uprising that saw the final death of Breidenstein and numerous other vampires as well as follow up trouble coming from the Inquisition. We were all Camarilla neonates trying to find the vampire who had blood bonded us all. It was a clusterfuck. There were several classic moments in the story where the Hunger mechanics produced a genuine 'Vampire' moment.

I made one reporting error in my earlier post, the Anarchs are being forced out of the Camarilla, of course. But its a changed Camarilla, almost broken. The Anarchs are basically turning on a tyrannical, despotic organisation. The events in Berlin were the catalyst for a global change, as the Anarchs pulled the Camarilla to its knees here last week.
Generation was still in development but the idea talked about was that it would be less discernable and more difficult to know which generation your character or anothers actually was. Line of descent may be growing murky to the characters.
Gehenna (the actual events of any ToJ metaplot) was not revealed but my sense is that V5 will feature a selection of elements from ToJ blended togther into a new version of Gehenna which for now we only know as the Gehenna Wars.
The two looks for vampire I mentioned are cosmetic looks, nothing more. Vampires in Elysium dress (and act) differently. This I feel is a nod to the LARPers, who like to really go to town on a look that would often shred the Masquerade on the streets. Elysium is now a place where they can let their monsters show and relax.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!
on combat - oh yeah! mostly between the characters as the situation was really intensive and desperate.
You could rouse the blood to increase any Attribute not just Physical. Also to heal.
Damage was really interesting, it came as either Superficial or Aggravated. Anything that could conceivably kill you was Aggravated for you. Aggravated damage was also very slow to heal.
You didnt take any penalty or injury until a certain level was reached (5 I think) then you took a nasty consequence that was dependent on the type of damage used.
The fighting was between the coterie members, the coterie and the German armed forces, the coterie and some very well equipped dudes who were likely New Inquisitors, and the coterie and some Anarchs. It worked well and was entertaining.
By the way, a little bird sitting in the middle of the nest told me that EDOM from Nights Black Agents were being ported or adapted into WoD...check out The Dracula Dossier for more on that little insight...and you'll realise this could easily be and probably will be part or even the heart of the New Inquisition.

Of note:

• The attributes/specialties is directly lifted from MET VtM.
• Superficial/Aggravated Damage is lifted directly from MET VtM's Normal/Aggravated damage (though I like the term superficial).
• Fixed TN is okay.
• Hunger mechanic seems much less fiddly than I was expecting. I kinda like it.
• I like WP rerolling all failed dice.
• Hunting bonuses seem extremely fiddly.
• I don't like almost-broken Camarilla, but it makes sense in terms of the Anarch morons in the setting. The shitty phone game was our hint that this was the case.