Did anybody ever play OWOD by RAW?

[souran]

Title is the question. Did anybody ever play OWOD by the rules as written.

I tried to DM several OWOD games by RAW and they all fell apart because of how shitty the rules were.

Everybody I have ever met played OWOD in a way that really had little to do with the rules as written. Many of these people felt that WOD was the best roleplaying game they ever had, often becuase they were doing little more than MTP plus occsionally throwing huge handfuls of dice on the table and then having the DM tell them some result pulled out of thin air.

I want to know becuase i have a new theory on why NWOD has lost so much fanbase.

Basically, if Nobody gives 2 shits about your rules then why would they care about a rules heavy game update?

[Korwin]

What was RAW in OWOD anyway...?
There is no point in RAW if they support both sides off an argument.

[souran]

What was RAW in OWOD anyway...?
There is no point in RAW if they support both sides off an argument.

For this discussion we will say as written the the major hardback book that describes the supernatural type you are.

Because you have a really good point, there were lots of little revisions and plenty of conflict. However, I thinkt that would lend support to the "nobody ever cared how WOD was supposed to be played they just did stuff" aspect of the theory.

[sabs]

Well, I mean those ARE the OWOD rules.
You throw some dice, and the gm makes shit up.
It's a pretty straight forward system.
you roll anywhere from 1 to 10 d10, and the most successes you have the cooler you are.

But OWOD was universally about the setting, and not so much about the incredibly shitty rules. I mean, the OWoD rules are only a 1/2 step over your average LARP rules.

[tzor]

Title is the question. Did anybody ever play OWOD by the rules as written.

Yes. Well at least the original Vampire: the Masquerade. We mostly played at what you would consider "low levels" and tried not to push the system to where we knew it was broken. Heavy Role Play but definitely not MTP. Mind you that was over ten years ago, and I've forgotten a lot about it. I played a Maklavian, by the way.

[talozin]

Every online game of Vampire I've ever seen (and I've seen quite a few) has slavishly followed the pen-and-paper rules for whatever version was current at the time it started. This includes games that routinely had hundreds of people logging in at once to play.

As an aside, I think this is evidence of breathtaking hardheadedness -- playing online is essentially a text-based LARP, with the concomitant problems of minimal MC oversight and unpredictability. You're playing in a setting that has actual published rules intended for exactly the situation you're dealing with -- why are you not just using the damned Vampire LARP rules? It's not as if they're good, but it's not like the tabletop Vampire rules are any good, either, and it's a hell of a lot less work.

[Orca]

Every game of that generation I played in had house rules. It was, and in some places is expected that the GM would have house rules, or if it was the first time anyone in the group had played that particular game that some would be added during play.

[MGuy]

I thought NWOD didn't really change its rules just brought them all kind of together.

[Blasted]

Well, I mean those ARE the OWOD rules.
You throw some dice, and the gm makes shit up.
It's a pretty straight forward system.
you roll anywhere from 1 to 10 d10, and the most successes you have the cooler you are.

But OWOD was universally about the setting, and not so much about the incredibly shitty rules. I mean, the OWoD rules are only a 1/2 step over your average LARP rules.

Yes. Well at least the original Vampire: the Masquerade. We mostly played at what you would consider "low levels" and tried not to push the system to where we knew it was broken. Heavy Role Play but definitely not MTP. Mind you that was over ten years ago, and I've forgotten a lot about it. I played a Maklavian, by the way.

In between these two. The group was happy to play at power levels, but it was always RP heavy and our GM constantly overrode rules to make them work.

[TheFlatline]

We generally played RAW. What would end up happening is that someone would run the game who last played in 1st or 2nd edition, and so little... err... artifacts would remain. Like your initiative actually being a dice pool and some of the combat would be relics from earlier editions under those storytellers.

I generally ran RAW, or more specifically RAW when I could be bothered to look up the rules. Most of the supernatural rolls we had in a player reference, and beyond that, I'd roll with ability plus skill, difficulty whatever was appropriate. The farther you stretched the skill to be appropriate, the higher the difficulty.

LARP was another creature though. It was generally RAW because people came and went out of the game frequently enough that having a lot of houserules was prohibitive to the game running smoothly. Sometimes we'd rip powers from the tabletop and use them in LARP just because they felt like they worked better. For example, Presence 1 in LARP allowed a free social retest or something limp like that. Houseruling Presence 1 to basically be the book version was easy. Someone would call Presence 1 in a loud (not yelling) voice twice, and everyone who heard this announcement must turn and give the user 5 seconds of attention. Whether everyone continued to pay attention after the time was up was their prerogative.

[JigokuBosatsu]

We always played RAW- though it was more like RATLAHA. (Rules as taken literally and horribly abused). It seems like the most entertaining parts of our games were the ginormous botch-fests that were always occurring.