@bobotron Overall, there is a LOT of system stuff that cannot be really feasibly done on a MU*. Even the feeding mechanics would essentially need to be ST run scenes, thanks to Resonance and Dyscrasia. Loresheets are another example. It would take a lot of work to really make this game MU* compatible, and I'm not certain how well it would wind up in the translation.
@thenomain Yeah. I've been saying to everyone that I talk to about this that... if you were into the Underworld vibe of Revised, this isn't really the game for you. This is a game for those people who were into VtM 1st edition, and early in the lifespan of 2nd Edition. It's a game that tries to focus more on the personal horror of the slide into inhumanity and the struggles of trying to live a life when you've become a monster. It's about the dissolution of personal relationships, the intrigues of being low man on the totem pole, pushed and pulled by people who are far more inhuman than you, and how far you're willing to compromise of yourself to find a balance between power and humanity.
@ominous said in Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition (VtM 5E):
Couldn't it be interpretted that even getting one stain is so damning for a 9 Humanity Vampire that they don't get a chance to resist? Whereas the 3 Humanity vampire is obviously so inhumane that a few stains are all in a day's work. They don't even register, until they really go all out.
I fully believe that this is what it should mean. However, since you're rolling to succeed, and success means your character actually FEELS REMORSE, it means that ICly, your 3 Humanity vampire gets a stain for doing something bad and he beats himself up over it, while her Humanity 9 vampire kills a puppy, fails the roll and says, "Oh, well, you know... it really shouldn't have shit on my floor."
Rather than thread necro'ing: Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition Info I figured we should open up a new one, now that the full PDF has finally hit.
Anyone else have this, yet?
So... I got the PDF when it first released. It's got a nice, easy to look out layout... but for fuck's sake, the Bookmarks are a god damned mess and a half. They're seriously not tied to chapter headings properly, link to strange places on pages, and even their organization is like what you'd see on some scanned copy of an obscure RPG book you downloaded off of Limewire in 2003. It's garbage. It's really not very professional looking. I can't believe that a product went out like this. I will be spending time with my PDF editor to completely redo them and that's balls.
Now, with that major gripe out of the way...
We open to 30 pages of memos, clippings, correspondences, etc. to help prime us for what the book is and what it is about. This strikes me as very CoD. I would have expected a more short story form introduction. This isn't a critique of that choice, it just struck me as notable. The only thing I will say is that 30 pages of it seems excessive in the long run. That page count could have gone to other meat in the book itself.
I'm not going to try to do like a full review like Theno's doing with Changeling. I probably won't read every bit of the book all at once, but rather the interesting tidbits. We've already covered most of the new lore info, in regards to the Beckoning, the state of the Sabbat and Camarilla, etc. Nothing really seems to stand out as new in that, from what I've read so far.
Disciplines are nifty. Having multiple powers at some levels is a cool addition, but I was only skimming, and don't know yet if or how one has access to multiple powers of a level of a discipline. Or how one might purchase the Amalgam powers, for that matter.
Humanity seems... I'm torn on it. Overall, it seems good and it seems to do the trick nicely of conveying everything that they want it to be. I do have a hangup though, in the mechanics versus fluff aspect of it. Basically it works like this. You have a track of ten. Your humanity fills up from the left side. You get stains for violations of Humanity, that fill in from the right. At the end of the session, however many spaces on the track are left empty is how many dice you roll to check for degeneration. So, if you have 6 humanity... you take 2 Stains, at the end of the session, you roll 2 dice (for the two empty spots) to see if you lose a dot of humanity.
The problem is that you're rolling to feel remorse. This leads to... Well, let's say I have 9 humanity. I get a stain. I have NO unchecked humanity on the tracker. I have no dice to resist degeneration. Even if I have a chance die (I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think you always get the chance die), this leads to one inherent problem in the fluff of it. It means that Humanity 9 mother fuckers are god damned sociopaths who are almost completely incapable of actually feeling remorse. I understand exactly why the mechanics are the way they are. It should be easier to degenerate at Humanity 9 than it is at Humanity 3. But this also means that the Humanity 3 character has a lot more opportunity to feel remorse for his actions. In a way, this translates to lower Humanity = More empathy in a weird way.
Character creation is nice. Not having to divvy up points, but rather just assign them makes it easier and prevents min maxing. That said, I still hate that they have stuck with a multiplier XP system, instead of learning how CoD/2E does things. With as much else as they've learned (physical disciplines that have varying abilities and aren't stupidly OP. Blood potency, etc), I wish that they'd have learned to get away from multipliers before all of that.
Also, after seeing all the disciplines and stuff that causes Rouse checks, I almost think that the Hunger mechanics, while sexy af, might wind up being a bit too restrictive in play. You're going to be looking at a bare minimum of 2 Rouse checks to function like a normal person every night (one to wake and one to Blush so you can check your phone), so this will likely set you at a 2 or even 3 Hunger dice right at the get go at the start of each night. Also, heaven forbid you take agg damage. You get to wake up to all the Rouse checks, all the time, and it seems entirely too possible to wind up going into torpor over as little as 2 or 3 agg damage due to exceeding 5 hunger dice at awakening. I'm waiting to get a chance to play to make the final judgment on that, though.
Feeding is fucking rad. It's very abstract in the immediate, but the whole thing with getting emotional resonance from the blood while feeding, and how that fuels and enhances your disciplines... genius. I love it.
What I absolutely don't love? We're back to books dictating when and how vampires can have sex. At pretty much anything under Humanity 9, the book says that you can't even actually have sex with the Blush activated, but you can "fake it" with like a charisma check. This shit is completely unnecessary and inherently repressed and is going to be the first rule that just sits completely ignored. I don't understand why they might have thought that this... well, that it was worth even officially addressing. But whatevs.
Anyway, if anyone else has it, I'd like to hear your take, or maybe you can start a full on review.
What kind of extras are you allowing within the spheres that you offer? Like will you be allowing for custom Bloodlines with Vampires? Are you using all the options and character traits from splatbooks for Demon and Beast (ie Heirs to Hell)?
ETA: If I ever make my planned Victorian pseudo-London Vampire game, it's going to have a weather system that just emits various intensities of rain at all times.
Please do this.
I was thinking of just having STs to run it, but honestly, the buddy-ST system (Which I've seen, albeit rarely used, in FC for Possessed characters) would be a great way to handle it, I think. It would likely only be good for a smaller, Vamp only game, most likely, but I do think it would be fun way to handle it, for sure.
@misadventure Replicate may be a bit much, as I think it would be impossible to do, really. It is a system that is uniquely based on scripted NPCs in a limited environment.
Simulate is a better word, I think. The idea being to create a mechanical system where, essentially, you get more for A) interacting with your food (through playing feeding scenes), and B) establishing relationships with said food, so that your character actually has to consider the fact that they are snuffing out a real life, and that there are real consequences for that. To make the player feel remorse for what is normally just a thoughtless dice roll mechanic.
@magee101 Yeah. It's something easy to do at a table. I'd like to find a way to simulate it for a MU*, though.
@magee101 Yeah. I wish I could think of a way to really simulate that experience, mechanically. I mentioned in another post somewhere about my previous attempt at something similar, with a sliding scale Humanity versus Blood Potency mechanic, but that still doesn't make players directly have to personally invest in their victims in any way. Which is, I think, the core of what makes it work so well.
So, there's a new game out where you play a doctor in Victorian London, returning from World War I, who is promptly turned into a freshly minted vampire. He gets embroiled in supernatural skullduggery, and has to establish connections with his neighbors and such during the course of the game. It has a really very unique mechanic that pits gameplay directly against story in an antagonistic relationship. Essentially, in order to gain "XP" type stuff, you'll need to feed on your fellow Londoners, thus killing them. This allows you to get points to purchase skills and grow stronger. You can avoid doing this altogether, and play the game, but you will progressively find it harder and harder to advance because you're just woefully underpowered.
The other side of this is that the characters are all very human. They have dreams and hopes and foibles and nuances. They all have their own lives and issues and essentially sidequests for you that allows you to discover who they are, and through that, make London better, and try to stave off the chaos and the plague that's sweeping the city. The trick is that... the more you progress with a character, the more XP you get for killing them, basically. But this also cuts their storyline short.
So you have to choose. Do you end a storyline short for quick burst of XP? And if so, then... deviously, the game has been designed in such a way that you have to humanize your meal to get the most out of it. It truly brings to the forefront the dichotomy of the Man versus The Beast struggle that is supposed to be at the forefront of themes in regards to WoD/coD vamp.
I highly recommend this.
You can read a much more literate review here: Vampyr Review: The Story in Blood
I ran a tabletop game of VtR like this, in another sort of way. I made Humanity and Blood Potency a sliding scale with a maximum of 11 points spread between the two, with normal starting stats of 7 Humanity and 1 BP. The basic idea was to play up the conflict between being a human being, and confronting the monstrous nature of being a vampire. If you wanted to truly grow in power as a vampire, you'd have to sacrifice your Humanity. And when you'd realize that you had become this horrible thing, and try to seek redemption, your vampiric might would ebb, as you were denying and neutering your own Beast.
It was really a lot of fun, and certainly turned the game theme towards the aspect of personal horror storytelling that has always been the real draw for me about Vampire. I was never all that into the political angle.
@prototart You're a bad person and you should feel bad. 
@carex They also never get the real chance to ninja that they deserve, either, because mostly, there's just no use for that in a space where PVP is treated like the ultimate taboo.
Full Disclaimer: I'm not a PVP/PK hound by any stretch of the meaning. I prefer cooperative storytelling in all things. I do like antagonism and conflict, though, but only maintained by a friendly OOC atmosphere of cooperation, transparency and trust.
@auspice Fair enough. I've never played on an oWoD game. Funny story... when I first "discovered" MU*s, I was first trying to join an oWoD game set in Miami. I logged on as a guest... looked over the wanted concepts board... Staff had set a few wanted concepts. So, I created a character that fulfilled all but one of those concepts, and melded them together into a seamless whole that would have actually been a really very interesting and useful character in terms of narrative function. I got denied immediately over something that was so minor and petty that I literally can't even remember what it was now. I noped right off of that place without looking back.
At the time, it was the only place I knew about/could find. I didn't have really any knowledge or resources to dig any deeper than I had just to find "Oh... these MU things exist and people RP there." So, I wound up finding the next best thing for me... An nWoD game. And thus, I started my MU life on The Reach as Dorian. All because those assholes running that Miami place were assholes.
Yeah... that... staff decision is gross. Letting that happen to a character was a really, really bad decision, and I'm curious as to what thought process was behind that. I wonder if the Mage was a staffer pet or something to that effect. I can't imagine any scenario where even the worst staff I've seen would just let that fly at random.
@golgoth It's not that fun being a ninja on a WoD game. Trust me. I've done it.
I've had the whole "Wants nothing but TS thing" happen to me a number of times, too. It... definitely causes a burn out. For sure. I've also stopped logging in to characters because of it. I've full on freezered a character about it, too.
The thing is... OOC conversations haven't worked for me. I've had the OOC conversation of "Hey, I'd like to do something other than fuck", and the other person invariably responds with "Oh, sure! We can do something else. I have some ideas. Let's scene!" ... and then those ideas never manifest. Literally it's just placating me OOCly to keep trying to draw scenes straight into sex.
I think that the IC method of having a conversation between the characters might be a better solution.
Edit: I also tried making a completely non-sexual character. That wound up causing a lot of problems ICly for its own sake, and being more trouble than it was worth. YMMV
Let me know if Possessed become app'able. That's kind of the only sphere I have much interest in left these days.