Vampire: 20th Anniversary Edition

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Thu Sep 29, 2011 9:51 pm

First of all, when I was playing Masquerade I had a great group of players. But even then we stuck with vampire over the other games because the other games drove us deeper into the rule system which was clearly FAIL.

However some of the minor spinoffs were interesting in their own right. Wild West for Werewolf was interesting because it made sense with raw power and might makes right anarachy. Dark Ages also seemed interesting mostly because Constantinople by night was full of flavor.

But that was about it. I wouldn't touch exaulted with a ten goot pole.

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Thu Sep 29, 2011 10:41 pm

The only impression I'm getting is that nWoD is for creative people, while oWoD is for uncreative people. Otherwise I don't really see much of a difference between them: Vampire is still about screwing each other over, Werewolf is still about fighting demons, and Mage is still about eastern mysticism.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Sep 29, 2011 11:37 pm

Specifically, the probability of getting a botch in Exalted as published for n dice is ((.6^n) - ((5/6)^n))

For the system as Josh described it, the chance of a botch is much more complicated: for n dice and m successes required, P(botch)=
{1 - (.9^n) n<=m
(sum from k=0 to (m-1) of (n!/(k!*(n-k)!))*(.4^k)*(.6^(n-k)))-(5/6)^n n>m }

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Sep 29, 2011 11:39 pm

Don Strudel wrote:The only impression I'm getting is that nWoD is for creative people, while oWoD is for uncreative people. Otherwise I don't really see much of a difference between them: Vampire is still about screwing each other over, Werewolf is still about fighting demons, and Mage is still about eastern mysticism.

How is OWoD for uncreative people? Because it has a meta-plot? Oh, yes, I'm sure the writers of franchise movies and television shows certainly agree that you can't do anything creative if there's a metaplot...

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 3:17 am

Prak_Anima wrote:How is OWoD for uncreative people? Because it has a meta-plot?

A lot depends on when you started OWoD. I really started around 1.0.0 when there really wasn't a major metaplot and then flat ignored all the stupid ones. If you start out from day one and just assume that everything is a POV, the situation can get really interesting.

souran · Post by **souran** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 3:32 am

Don Strudel wrote:The only impression I'm getting is that nWoD is for creative people, while oWoD is for uncreative people. Otherwise I don't really see much of a difference between them: Vampire is still about screwing each other over, Werewolf is still about fighting demons, and Mage is still about eastern mysticism.

Its not that OWOD is for uncreative people because it has a metaplot and NWOD is for creative people because it has loose structure.

Its that vampire hit a nerve with 90's teen and 20 somethings audiances (and so did all the other games to some lesser degree). They were so DIFFERENT from D&D and they had a story that you could follow along with. But the whole thing was a fucking sham from day 1.

I never met any group that actually played with all the rules. The game designers made it clear that they didn't really understand their own rules. And in the 90s, in the effort to escape the mounds of Gygaxian shit that normally dominated every kind of RPG people thought it was amazing.

Fast forward 5-8 years and the meta plot is more of an obsticle than an advantage to each game. The rules holes have gone from being things that only "munchkins" exploit to ways that everybody who is not a newb plays. And all the Gygaxian bullshit that dominated D&D/Gurps/Rifts/Runequest has been left on the trash heap of history by 3.X D&D that said you could have a functional ruleset and a strong play experience too!

So White Wolf did what their fan base had been DEMANDING they do for about 3 years and they did a MAJOR system revision/overhaul. Only they went even further than the fan base thought they would. Now, lots of Fans were saying "the meta plot must fucking go or the players are fucking pointless" but when they got rid of the meta plot they also got rid of focus that drove each gameline.

Similarly people said that they wanted an end to the old gamelines, something that resolved the ongoing plot. White wolf gave them that and people LOVED the end times books.

They had been told that the rules sucked so they really tried to figure out game design but they just suck at that and so they managed to go from unplayable to boring. Which is an upgrade but doesn't impress anybody know that 3.X and the internet has made it google easy to find ways to break an rpg system and given people a collective space to say "execuse me but your rpg rules suck because of this list of shit we found while playing"

NWOD is a superior GAME to OWOD. OWOD is a superior Setting to NWOD. That shit is crystal clear. The problem is that NWOD was so boring that people forgot how much bullshit they put up with to play vampire to get into girls pants.

V:TM20 sucking is NO SURPRISE. V:TM SUCKED. It sucked 20 years ago. It sucked every time I read the rulebook. However, people want a game that lets them play cool vampires and urban horror and they quickly forget why they wanted something different.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 4:53 am

souran wrote:NWOD is a superior GAME to OWOD.

What.

K · Post by K » Fri Sep 30, 2011 5:30 am

I don't know about anyone else, but the groups I played with never took any WoD plot or metaplot as fact. We always assumed that the info in any one book was mostly lies and misinformation.

Then we took some as true and ran with those as stories. The only thing we cared about was lots of options to spark ideas.

By that metric, oWoD is superior for storytelling because it had the most weird little plots that could be used or disregarded and those didn't hinder at all your ability to come up with more little plots since none were set in stone. I mean, most people I knew thought the Tzimisce subplot about being infected with aliens was stupid, so it's not like anyone actually was using it, but it worked great as boogeyman story that players didn't know was true or not since there were rules for it in the book.

If nWoD had been given ten more years, it too would have filled up with bullshit plots, but it never had the chance. The fact that as a system it was slightly better didn't overcome that wiping the blackboard on the backstory was not a service to storytellers who liked having a large amount of options and material to read over to inspire new ideas.

Oddly, this didn't lead to people using nWod mechanics with oWoD backstory, and I think it's because deviation from the core written material is just really hard for people to wrap their minds around.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 5:50 am

The worst part is that while nWoD is simpler, the actual system is probably even worse. OWoD is full of trap options and the difficulties do funky things at the high end and so on and so on. But nWoD is like 90% trap options. The game system is "you roll some dice and succeed with a margin of 1-3 successes" for basically every action. If you have a power that hands out penalties or does damage or something, that is a waste of your fucking time, because the enemy actions are going to succeed anyway. If you don't have a Save or Lose, you lose. If you do have a Save or Lose, you win. Because no one ever saves vs. Save or Lose.

In oWoD you can carve people up with super speed or have enough toughness to bounce small arms off your chest or hit so hard with an ax that you drop people in one hit or give people penalties so big that their tricks don't work and so on and so on. There are a fuck tonne of trap options and not all paths of sorcery are even in the same ballpark, let alone the same. But there are multiple paths to success. You can get enough damage out of a magic fire blast to matter. You can accomplish things on multiple axes.

NWoD has the worst combat system of any game made in the last 15 years. It's absurd.

-Username17

DeadlyReed · Post by **DeadlyReed** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 6:13 am

If I wanted to ever play OWOD again, I would just use the setting with After Sundown rules.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 9:28 am

I'm working on a house ruled fix to owod, since I agree that the system is terrible, and like AWoD/After Sunset, the problem is that people I've known are much more likely to try out some codified houserules than some homebrew from the internet.

It's kind of slow going, but I think I've identified the core issues, and basic themes of each game line.

souran · Post by **souran** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 12:56 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The worst part is that while nWoD is simpler, the actual system is probably even worse. OWoD is full of trap options and the difficulties do funky things at the high end and so on and so on. But nWoD is like 90% trap options. The game system is "you roll some dice and succeed with a margin of 1-3 successes" for basically every action. If you have a power that hands out penalties or does damage or something, that is a waste of your fucking time, because the enemy actions are going to succeed anyway. If you don't have a Save or Lose, you lose. If you do have a Save or Lose, you win. Because no one ever saves vs. Save or Lose.

In oWoD you can carve people up with super speed or have enough toughness to bounce small arms off your chest or hit so hard with an ax that you drop people in one hit or give people penalties so big that their tricks don't work and so on and so on. There are a fuck tonne of trap options and not all paths of sorcery are even in the same ballpark, let alone the same. But there are multiple paths to success. You can get enough damage out of a magic fire blast to matter. You can accomplish things on multiple axes.

NWoD has the worst combat system of any game made in the last 15 years. It's absurd.

-Username17

I still think that this gives OWOD way to much credit.

At the vampire (easily the weakest super type in OWOD) you really couldn't actually carve people up or hit them so hard that you one shot them. You could only do that to bullshit stuff that was not a real operator. Anybody who was also a super had some defense that made it so that you traded 1 -2 boxes of damage until you could seriously pile on.

At the exalted end this reached its pinicle where because of perfect defense and the absurd dice polls people rolled it was lterally people developing 20+ dice attacks and them having those get auto countered until some ran out of invicibility juice and got curb stommped. That was literally the games limit tactical complexity.

OWOD/storyteller as a table rpg (I have never LARPed for this game) is and was putrid.

NWOD combat is only worse than OWOD combat because you know the result before aybody throws dice. Seriously, everything in NWOD is like frank says a small margin of success. So you can pretty much see clearly who is going to trounce who just by looking at their character sheets. The whole game suffers from the "monopoly" problem and is therefore so fucking boring that even a broken ass system that can't be used to coherently play a game sounds better.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 1:41 pm

In OWoD, vampires do not have to compare themselves to Mages or Werewolves, because they do not play the same game. In nWoD, the fact that Vampires are in the middle, mages are at the top, and werewolves are on the bottom actually matters. But in oWoD, it does not make any difference because they are separate games. The fact that the games don't play together is a problem, but the fact that the different monsters are on different power levels is not - because the games do not play together.

Anyway, no. Other vampires don't have super defenses. You have a magic ax, and they don't get to soak that. If they have Fortitude, they get to bounce some of it, but if you have super strength and a magic weapon (which you do if you are going the super strength route), then people don't normally get to soak the damage. Like, at all. You just hand out 7 aggravated wounds and that is that.

OWOD/storyteller as a table rpg (I have never LARPed for this game) is and was putrid.

Yes. I am not disputing that. However, amongst all the trap options, there were still several viable options. It is like the card game. You're never going to make a Ravnos deck work because they suck. But you can make a deck around Potence combat or a deck around Dominate bleeding or a deck around Presence voting or a fuck tonne of other options. There are several viable concepts that play differently.

NWOD combat is only worse than OWOD combat because you know the result before aybody throws dice.

Yes. That is the only reason that nWoD is a worse system than oWoD. Well, that and the fact that not only is the game deterministic, but the range of things that deterministically win is incredibly narrow. I mean, we aren't even at the level of RPS determinism. The things that win always win and are an incredibly narrow and repetitive list.

OWoD is bad, but it is salvageable. I don't even know where to start with nWoD. It's bad and boring and shallow. There is nothing to save.

-Username17

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 2:15 pm

Don Strudel wrote:The only impression I'm getting is that nWoD is for creative people, while oWoD is for uncreative people. Otherwise I don't really see much of a difference between them: Vampire is still about screwing each other over, Werewolf is still about fighting demons, and Mage is still about eastern mysticism.

Mage is about eastern religion in the same way Da Vinci Code is about Catholicism. Although that comparison is probably unfair to Dan Brown if you're talking about nWoD Mage; I actually can't figure out what the hell nWoD Mage is supposed to be about. I know what they say it's about, it seems to be about being a really imaginative child with a rich fantasy life. Which is fine with me, because the game that filled that role in oWoD (Changeling) has been replaced with a game about being an escapee from Auschwitz.

souran · Post by **souran** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 2:40 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:In OWoD, vampires do not have to compare themselves to Mages or Werewolves, because they do not play the same game. In nWoD, the fact that Vampires are in the middle, mages are at the top, and werewolves are on the bottom actually matters. But in oWoD, it does not make any difference because they are separate games. The fact that the games don't play together is a problem, but the fact that the different monsters are on different power levels is not - because the games do not play together.

While it is true that the games don't mix well that doesn't mean that it was not done...and done often. However, the larger problem I ran into were people who assumed that you could use the vampire rules to make good foes for werewolf and that you could use the werewolf rules to make good foes for vampires. Sadly it doesn't and even though vamps are weaker it usually resulted in tpk eitherway.

Anyway, no. Other vampires don't have super defenses. You have a magic ax, and they don't get to soak that. If they have Fortitude, they get to bounce some of it, but if you have super strength and a magic weapon (which you do if you are going the super strength route), then people don't normally get to soak the damage. Like, at all. You just hand out 7 aggravated wounds and that is that.

The only agrivated wounds vampires ever took that I saw where from fire and holy water. Nobody had a magic sword in vampire. Even the guy who would play a character that was a pure blade ripoff didn't get a magic sword.

This meant that combat was about either save or suck (dominate type) enslavements or it was peopel using potence/celerity/fortitude to try and inflict wound boxes on each other and resist said wounds. What I remember as the common tactic was the celerity action cheating.

Yes. I am not disputing that. However, amongst all the trap options, there were still several viable options. It is like the card game. You're never going to make a Ravnos deck work because they suck. But you can make a deck around Potence combat or a deck around Dominate bleeding or a deck around Presence voting or a fuck tonne of other options. There are several viable concepts that play differently.

The "viable" concepts are the ones that make use of some of the most broken parts of the system and its possible to create a single character who can do most of them at once.

OWOD really only has options that are traps and options that break the system and don't really work. The thing was when we were teenagers we we all acted like it was somehow cool to take pointless shit or that if we just pretended like a certain concept was not obviously better than others it somehow wouldn't be. That lasts exactly until you get the one person who won't play cool for cools sake.

Yes. That is the only reason that nWoD is a worse system than oWoD. Well, that and the fact that not only is the game deterministic, but the range of things that deterministically win is incredibly narrow. I mean, we aren't even at the level of RPS determinism. The things that win always win and are an incredibly narrow and repetitive list.

OWoD is bad, but it is salvageable. I don't even know where to start with nWoD. It's bad and boring and shallow. There is nothing to save.

-Username17

And I am not saying that NWOD is a better game than OWOD because it has fewer trap options. NWOD is filled with traps too.

I am saying that OWOD mechanically is made of fail. It dicing mechanics do not generate a range of results they generate arguments about results. There are tasks in OWOD where follwoing the RAW would certainly result in failure every time and others were it becomes pointless to even roll the dice. The OWOD storyteller system might as well be Magic Teaparty ONLY because the mechanics do not actually let you get a randomized range of results.

So to say that OWOD is more salvagable than NWOD to me seems really crazy. For NWOD you can make changes to the system and see if you get something that actually is fun. Obviously the whole setting and fluff has to go but mechanics wise there is at least something to work with.

OWOD you hvae to start from a postion of "what the fuck is the purpsoe of hte dice in this game?" and develop everything from there. Its no surprise to me why NWOD is boring. Its not like its a new system developed in a vacuum. NWOD is what happens when you try and put OWOD on a mechanicaly coherent foundation.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 2:44 pm

The trick I figured out, playing as the Sabbat elder in our citywide game, was to have a shit-ton of Potence and Shadow Step. Pop in, grapple, pop out next to the nearest crucible of molten steel, let go, pop out. Easy mode!

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 3:15 pm

As best as I recall, holy water didn't even do agg damage. The thing is the rituals to enchant a blade to do agg damage to specific creature types were not hard to get if you were a sorcerer. And someone on the team was a sorcerer because it was one of the better routes to real ultimate power.

So if you had blade masters running around doing non-agg damage to other vampires, I genuinely don't know what they were doing with their life.

-Username17

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 3:17 pm

I can't remember what that agg-damage rune was, but our solution was to put one for each creature type on the blades of an industrial food processor...

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 3:18 pm

JigokuBosatsu wrote:I can't remember what that agg-damage rune was, but our solution was to put one for each creature type on the blades of an industrial food processor...

Ward Against Kindred. Yeah, those things went on the blades of everything that anyone intended to actually kill people with.

-Username17

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 5:36 pm

souran wrote:The OWOD storyteller system might as well be Magic Teaparty ONLY because the mechanics do not actually let you get a randomized range of results.

More or less ... spot on. We didn't really care at the time, however.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 6:45 pm

souran wrote: The only agrivated wounds vampires ever took that I saw where from fire and holy water. Nobody had a magic sword in vampire. Even the guy who would play a character that was a pure blade ripoff didn't get a magic sword.

Off the top of my head, you have Ward against Kindred from Tremere which is a lower level ability, you have feral claws from the Gangrel (who either the city or normal gangrel have potence on top of that. Yay!), the book specifically mentions chainsaws as dealing aggravated damage, your *fangs* did aggravated damage, white phosphorous rounds did aggravated damage, and I could keep going on.

Aggravated damage was easy to come by. If you have potence on top of that you're officially, easily in the realm of one-shotting a vampire, since I'm assuming you have been buffing your strength up to 5, you probably have a combat skill, and your weapon does extra damage too. At the very least even with a sword you can torpor someone pretty quickly, which is effectively dead.

nWOD was worse though in combat. A starting character with a pump action shotgun could drop vampires in one hit with a couple rounds of aiming. Blow a willpower after aiming for 2-3 rounds on a dice pool of 6-7 or so and you're looking at around 13 dice. Shotguns don't have 10-again, they have 9-again, so 2/3 of your successes explode on average. My starting character was throwing 10-12 levels of damage around like it was nothing on decent dice rolls.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Mon Nov 07, 2011 7:32 pm

Sorry for Resurrection of a dead thread, but I didn't feel like throwing out a new thread for something minor.

I just got the dead tree V20 book that I pre-ordered ages ago. I must say that with all the fuckups that White Wolf/CCP has gotten into lately, they did this book handsome. The only limited editions that I've seen that were done better were the Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader/Deathwatch books, which cost like 400 bucks and were crazy to begin with.

This LE is black faux leather (sad, but what book *is* bound in leather these days), the edge of the cover is stitched in black, and the cover simply has a nice embossed ankh on it. The spine has Vampire The Masquerade embossed on it and a color V20 medallion on it (which kind of spoils the aesthetic but probably was needed for ease of selection in a bookcase). The pages are silver-edged, and recessed about 1/2 an inch from the edge of the cover. There is the now-standard bookmark (two of them actually) and the book is all color now, although most core books are all color these days so no bonus points for that.

Overall, the aesthetic reminds me of a bible. Which is cool, and probably intentional. It's subdued, but looks like a quality book. The only thing that would have been even cooler would have been to include a latch/clasp to lock the thing up.

Time and use will tell how the binding is. White Wolf books are infamous for having shitting spines. Hopefully this book is different.

Overall, compared to the Shadowrun 20th Anniversary LE, this LE blows it out of the water, even if the content is wonky. If anyone is interested I'll see if I can post some pictures of it, though I don't know how much detail I can get with my camera.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Tue Nov 08, 2011 2:15 am

talozin wrote:
Don Strudel wrote:The only impression I'm getting is that nWoD is for creative people, while oWoD is for uncreative people. Otherwise I don't really see much of a difference between them: Vampire is still about screwing each other over, Werewolf is still about fighting demons, and Mage is still about eastern mysticism.
Mage is about eastern religion in the same way Da Vinci Code is about Catholicism. Although that comparison is probably unfair to Dan Brown if you're talking about nWoD Mage; I actually can't figure out what the hell nWoD Mage is supposed to be about. I know what they say it's about, it seems to be about being a really imaginative child with a rich fantasy life. Which is fine with me, because the game that filled that role in oWoD (Changeling) has been replaced with a game about being an escapee from Auschwitz.

nMage is armchair Gnosticism.