OSSR: Promethean: The Created

[Username17]

It its core, the nWoD system seemed like a good idea. Create one unified res set so that you can mix and match your splats without having to waste time with stupid house rules and balance them better so that a werewolf, a vampire, and a mage in the same party doesn't default to the mage declaring that he wins everything forever.

Create a unified system so that there won't be any incompatibilities between the different splats and you can play Monster Squad without an insane kludge of house rules, an admirable goal that is.

At yet, it seems that somewhere down the line they just completely lost the point.

Yeah, at first it looked like they were making a super friends game, where the different splats could be mixed and matched and people could play whatever types together (assuming they had purchased the relevant books). Certainly the fact that there was a core rulebook, and everyone used the same rules for punching and there were unified rules for gaining experience, and core conversion rules for how power stats protected you from magic from whatever splats, all seemed to point in that direction. Seemed like something of a money grab, but one that I was completely OK with them taking my money for.

Obviously, you don't have to sell four hardcover books to allow people to play Being Human (Vampire, Werewolf, and Ghost live in a flat together and have adventures). You could have all the basic supernaturals in a single book. But as money grabs go, it seemed less offensive than most. If there was value added in terms of extra stories and setting information and shit in each splat, I wasn't prepared to grumble that much.

But then the "no metaplot or consideration of what happens in other splats" editorial decisions came into effect, and all that went into the crapper. Everyone uses the same character generation rules, but a single dot of Vampire Discipline does a lot less than a single dot of Mage Arcana. And none of the world information is even vaguely compatible. Not only is a super friends game horribly unbalanced, but the things the different characters are supposed to care about don't even overlap.

-Username17

[Rawbeard]

I don't even know what vampires are supposed to care about. Werewolf looks solid in the "this is your care stuff" department and Mage is or isn't but whatever anyway.

The hell did happen? Did they not want to postpone random ends of the world plots for decades so they can sell the same game for a couple of centuries?

I assume nobody actually cared over the sound of paycheck.

[Username17]

I don't even know what vampires are supposed to care about. Werewolf looks solid in the "this is your care stuff" department and Mage is or isn't but whatever anyway.

nWerewolf has a bunch of problems and needs to have a whole thread devoted to it at some point. The initial pitch sounds pretty good: you're "the forsaken", a group of werewolves who play spirit cop while fighting other werewolves who are called "the pure". The problem of course came in the moment you asked "why not leave?"

See, you're a damn werewolf, and the game handles this by having you unable to hold or job or keep mortals close to you. Your rage drives everyone away from you, or at least forces you to stay away from people lest you randomly eat them. As such, there is nothing for you in any particular patch of dirt. You can fight Spirits or The Pure for one city block or another, but you're just going to have to leave in a month anyway if you want to reset your "is your life destroyed by werewolf tantrums" counter.

So while it's set up as this big losing battle to hold territory, it's a losing battle, and the territory doesn't do anything. You could just go somewhere else and then immediately all of the supernatural conflicts just sort of trail off like a fart joke when your grandmother comes over.

There's no "tribe" or "feng shui sites" or anything that is actually important for you to protect. It's just you and whatever patch of land you happen to have peed on most recently. But you could just drink a bunch of coffee and piss somewhere else, none of this tower defense shit actually accomplishes anything.

The hell did happen? Did they not want to postpone random ends of the world plots for decades so they can sell the same game for a couple of centuries?

I assume nobody actually cared over the sound of paycheck.

My assumption is that they interpreted all the fan feedback that the metaplot was too complicated as something they could solve by wholly removing the metaplot. People said "I can't keep track of what the fuck is going on" and their reply for nWoD was "Now you don't have to! Because nothing matters and no events meaningfully progress!"

Of course, what people actually wanted was to be able to keep track of what was going on. Not for the books to say "Here's a couple things that might have happened... or make something else up, you know... whatever. None of this shit matters anyway, so don't worry about it. We sure don't." In short, I think Justin Achilli thought he was a fucking genius for definitively solving the metaplot problem, but in reality he was an idiot who turned all the problems people had with the oWoD metaplot up to infinity.

-Username17

[Sashi]

The initial pitch sounds pretty good: you're "the forsaken", a group of werewolves who play spirit cop while fighting other werewolves who are called "the pure". The problem of course came in the moment you asked "why not leave?"

Ok, I know that's probably actually the names of those two groups, because White Wolf, but seriously? Way to goth it up: "the forsaken are the good guys! durr"

[talozin]

This book maintains a hallowed tradition of stuff from White Wolf of shitting out amazingly bad Latin. This goes all the way back to before White Wolf even existed and the company was called Lion Rampant and made Ars Magica. In any case, mini sections are called shit like “Attaining the Lapis Philosophorum” and “Mysterium Conjunctionis”. Those are not jokes, those are the actual names of headings of mini sections.

"Mysterium Coniunctionis" is the actual name of a book by Jung, of all people, about the alchemical metaphor in psychological development or something like that. Because this is Jung, it's approximately the same size and weight as a cinder block and only marginally easier to read, so I have not read it, and I kind of doubt that anyone involved in the design process for this game has, either. It's sort of like slipping sly references to "A Brief History of Time" into a game but with more obscure alchemy references.

Of course, since one of the secret clubs in nWoD Mage is actually called "The Mysterium", it's probably going to confuse the shit out of people who only know Jung as that guy who inspired Sting to write "Every Breath You Take" and/or couldn't possibly give any less of a fuck about alchemy, which is almost everyone who's going to actually see the reference. So ... well played, I guess.

[hyzmarca]

The initial pitch sounds pretty good: you're "the forsaken", a group of werewolves who play spirit cop while fighting other werewolves who are called "the pure". The problem of course came in the moment you asked "why not leave?"

Ok, I know that's probably actually the names of those two groups, because White Wolf, but seriously? Way to goth it up: "the forsaken are the good guys! durr"

Well, the original forsaken did some horrible murderous shit that fucked up the balance of the universe and were rightfully shunned for it. The Pure, who didn't murder anyone but were still punished for it anyway because they mom was an abusive bitch, were rightfully pisses off at their murderous siblings and decided to kill them all.

But, you know, that was a long time ago and all of the originals on both sides are long dead.

So you've got some really terrible original sin thing going where all of the PC werewolves are trying to atone for something that their great to the nth power grandparents a million ears ago while in a blood feud with NPC werewolves who want to murder them for what their great to the nth power grandparents did a million years ago.

The whole there is supremely stupid because there is no actual reason for the two sides to fight each other because every member of every tribe was born and raised as a normal human who just suddenly because a werewolf sometime after puberty and doesn't really have any personal stake in the conflict.

So the Forsaken are basically Catholics who try to redeem themselves with good deeds while the Pure are Protestants who believe in justification through faith alone. And both sides are always trying to murder each other, to take the religious analogy a bit further.

[TheFlatline]

I don't even know what vampires are supposed to care about. Werewolf looks solid in the "this is your care stuff" department and Mage is or isn't but whatever anyway.

nWerewolf has a bunch of problems and needs to have a whole thread devoted to it at some point. The initial pitch sounds pretty good: you're "the forsaken", a group of werewolves who play spirit cop while fighting other werewolves who are called "the pure". The problem of course came in the moment you asked "why not leave?"

See, you're a damn werewolf, and the game handles this by having you unable to hold or job or keep mortals close to you. Your rage drives everyone away from you, or at least forces you to stay away from people lest you randomly eat them. As such, there is nothing for you in any particular patch of dirt. You can fight Spirits or The Pure for one city block or another, but you're just going to have to leave in a month anyway if you want to reset your "is your life destroyed by werewolf tantrums" counter.

So while it's set up as this big losing battle to hold territory, it's a losing battle, and the territory doesn't do anything. You could just go somewhere else and then immediately all of the supernatural conflicts just sort of trail off like a fart joke when your grandmother comes over.

There's no "tribe" or "feng shui sites" or anything that is actually important for you to protect. It's just you and whatever patch of land you happen to have peed on most recently. But you could just drink a bunch of coffee and piss somewhere else, none of this tower defense shit actually accomplishes anything.

The hell did happen? Did they not want to postpone random ends of the world plots for decades so they can sell the same game for a couple of centuries?

I assume nobody actually cared over the sound of paycheck.

My assumption is that they interpreted all the fan feedback that the metaplot was too complicated as something they could solve by wholly removing the metaplot. People said "I can't keep track of what the fuck is going on" and their reply for nWoD was "Now you don't have to! Because nothing matters and no events meaningfully progress!"

Of course, what people actually wanted was to be able to keep track of what was going on. Not for the books to say "Here's a couple things that might have happened... or make something else up, you know... whatever. None of this shit matters anyway, so don't worry about it. We sure don't." In short, I think Justin Achilli thought he was a fucking genius for definitively solving the metaplot problem, but in reality he was an idiot who turned all the problems people had with the oWoD metaplot up to infinity.

-Username17

Don't forget the mechanics nerfing either. Even in WTF (how appropriate that nWerewolf's initials are WTF) the werewolves are pitched to be combat monsters that flip out and kill entire buildings full of people and are the ultimate predators, but are "balanced" against starting vampires. This was back when WW was officially saying that they wanted the games to be crossover-capable (which they abandoned with Mage more or less so only WTF got the shaft), which was NewSpeak for "Vampire fanboys hated the idea that a werewolf could beat them in combat so we totally *changed* that for Vampire fans because fuck Werewolf fans."

So what changed? Well, the big "buff" was that you didn't have to make concentration rolls in combat to regenerate. The down sides? Regeneration was more or less nerfed so that blood healing was more efficient, werewolves in their war hulk smash form could only stay there for maybe 4-6 rounds *total* now (a round per dot of stamina) because reasons (in reality, vampire fans would constantly bitch in the werewolf forum that it was unfair that werewolves, literally whose concept is "combat monster" could stay in combat form longer than a vampire's celerity could last. Seriously, that was the big complaint), the stat boosts for going into war form hulk smash mode were more or less halved, your gifts were completely nerfed and made marginally useful, and most importantly, in your war form, you no longer did aggravated damage (because vampires don't soak aggravated), now werewolves did lethal, so you're in this weird situation where a shotgun is preferable to being the ultimate predator earth has ever known.

When nWerewolf came out pretty much 90% of the oWoD WW fans freaked the fuck out. A lot of them left.

So basically WW fucked over one of their product lines to appease the fanboys of another product line that were never going to play Werewolf.

[Username17]

So basically WW fucked over one of their product lines to appease the fanboys of another product line that were never going to play Werewolf.

I could see this as being a story that Werewolf fans told each other, but it's pretty obviously bullshit on every level. The truth is that it was not Vampire players that they were trying to throw a bone to by nerfing Werewolf players, it was the "Rollplayer vs. Roleplayer" fuckers that they were trying to appease by nerfing everything that made you good at physical combat. If they were trying to make Vampires win in physical combat, they would not have nerfed Celerity so hard that it was literally worse than not having it outside of some bizarre niche situations. And yet, they did.

White Wolf has always had a vocal contingent of the fanbase who loudly insist that anyone making a character even passably good at physical combat is a munchkin, and demand horrible consequences for those people. Now, I always thought (and am now certain) that those people were extremely disingenuous, and given half a chance would make their own Vampire superheroes stacked out with super strength and super speed. But for over a decade before the release of nWoD they loudly and repeatedly condemned the "munchkinness" of anything and everything that would allow a player character to win a knife or gun fight.

nWoD delivered what those people claimed to want - physical super powers were so terrible that they were not only worse than spending your XPs on Strength, in many cases they were literally worse than not turning them on even if you had them. And the better something was in oWoD at beating up security guards, the harder it was nerfed going into nWoD. The Requiem version of Celerity has no offensive applications at all, and outside of niche scenarios actually protects you from less damage than you could negate by simply not spending the blood to activate the fucking thing. In an unmodified one on one shootout, a Vampire with Celerity 3 spends one blood on Celerity to take on average one less Bashing wound, but if they simply didn't activate the worthless piece of shit they could spend the same blood point to negate 2 Bashing wounds. It's seriously that bad.

nWerewolf was hardest hit by this practice of course. The entire splat is about beating people up in combat with your claws, so an across the board nerf on every single ability that helps with that sort of thing in any way is basically going to render the entire splat a dead ender. And so it was. But there's no fucking way it was about making Vampire players feel better about themselves. It was supposed to satisfy the vocal part of the fanbase that constantly pretended that they would be happier if characters couldn't win fights. Which of course was always bullshit posturing, meaning that actually delivering what those assholes claimed to want just pissed everyone off.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

I can roll with that, but I specifically remember the devs coming out on the forums and saying they brought the furries down in physical power so that you could have "parity" between vampires and werewolves at any given XP level. Much teeth-gnashing ensued. So in a way you're totally right. By destroying any real power your supernatural creature has, you're sort of on the same power level with everyone else. AKA you can be beaten to death by a pack of 3rd graders with sticks.

Early on in nWOD, cross-game compatibility was a big talking point. It's one of the three main reasons given why there was even a core blue book. First was amusingly enough "to save cost on the core books", second was "a unified ruleset", third was "crossover compatibility!"

Out of those three goals, WW achieved zero of them. But the official WW line at the time of WTF's run-up to release and shortly after it's release was "Werewolves were overpowered physically, now they're on par with Vampires for crossover purposes."

Except that as a starting vampire I can pop unsokable aggravated damage claws as a player option (a shitty option in nWOD, but it's still an option). As a furry, that's my raison d'etre (popping claws and murdering things) but I don't have the option to do unsoakable aggravated damage for quite some time, and even then, I'm only able to pop them for like 5 turns.

[TheFlatline]

Then again, considering the "consistency" that WW is *cough* known for, anything they say is probably not a valid argument and is useless for anything other than historical trivia.

[Whipstitch]

My takeaway was that it was an unholy coalition of sorts and then people used whichever argument seemed less asinine as their excuse when pressured by critics. You know, classic denial-in-depth.

[Username17]

My takeaway was that it was an unholy coalition of sorts and then people used whichever argument seemed less asinine as their excuse when pressured by critics. You know, classic denial-in-depth.

Yeah, pretty much this. Although it really looked like they were trying to make all the games play nice with each other there for a while. Even after Mage came out, they didn't straight up admit that Mages were just so much more powerful than the other splats that it didn't even make sense to try to get them in the same game. For at least a solid year after Mage came out, they tried to tell us that the splats were balanced in that Vampires were the best Socially, Werewolves the best Physically, and Mages the best Magically.

I mean, that wasn't remotely true, right? And even if it was, it's small comfort if your Nosferatu Bruiser could have been the best in social scenarios if hypothetically they had taken a completely different character concept, clan, and allotment of skills and magic powers within their splat. Because your Nosferatu bruiser is still worthless in social situations and a fairly shitty combatant with the character options he actually has.

But I think the "denial in depth" thing is probably the best explanation.

The weirdest part is that the design team was kind of obsessive about "balance". But it's weird, cargo cult idea of what balance is, there's no math or playtesting behind any of it. They run around nerfing physical abilities of any kind and making dice pools conform in the name of "balance". But what good is making the dice pools exactly the same size, if getting a hit on a Nightmare 5 test does a single box of damage and getting a single hit on Dominate 2 makes someone your bitch for an entire scene?

And don't forget this gem:

A COMBATANT’S DREAM

You’re right, of course. The Moroi are designed to be good at combat. They get two of the three physical Disciplines, plus most of the Moroi have some knowledge of Protean or Nightmare and can get easy access to the other.
What are we thinking?

Take another look. They’re good at combat — and very little else. They suffer from both the Gangrel and the Nosferatu clan weaknesses, both of which are pretty debilitating if you want to do something simple, like have a normal conversation. The Ordo Dracul views them as attack dogs at best, and relics of the covenant’s brutal past at worst.

This isn’t to say that the Moroi are nonviable or “unbalanced” as characters. They provide interesting roleplaying challenges, to be sure. A character who joins the Moroi bloodline and tries to maintain her Humanity has quite a task ahead of her, as she is in her element only when hunting and killing. The primary instance in which a Moroi character “unbalances” a chronicle is if the chronicle is focused solely (or at least largely) around combat. Chronicles that focus on the larger themes of Vampire: The Requiem, or even on the themes of the Ordo Dracul in general, don’t inordinately favor the Moroi. If anything, these Kindred must struggle to keep up with the subtle espionage and intriguing schemes of their contemporaries.

This ran completely unironically on the Moroi bloodline, which if you didn't fully grasp from their description of it in their apology box text, are completely terrible. Seriously, these guys are among the weakest bloodlines in nWoD, and that's from an edition where there is a bloodline of vampires who can't leave their house and a bloodline of vampires who have the signature power to make perfume. They are weak as hell, completely crippled in almost all circumstances as they have a penalty on every single die rolled in a test involving Intelligence, Wits, Manipulation, or Presence. Meaning that not only do they suck at mental and social challenges, but they will always suck at those challenges, because buying up skills and stats is simply worth less for them.

And what they get for this... is some extremely terrible combat disciplines. Resilience is so bad that all it does is protect you from damage, and unless your enemies have flame throwers you will literally end the combat with less damage on you if you don't turn it on than if you do. That is not a joke. And yet, end that power is something that the authors think needs to be looked at again and again and nerfed here, there, and everywhere just in case someone might somehow some way stack that into winning a fight. Because having player characters win a fight is considered the one and only benchmark of "broken balance".

Bypassing a combat with the persuedotron is still totally fine though.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

And of course we can't rule out our favorite dead horse entirely. White Wolf easily had enough staffers that it is quite possible that in a stunning feat of parallel evolution they had people simultaneously shitting on melee for different reasons and not bothering to share notes.