Right, so I know O/NWod is bad but...

[Prak]

are there degrees? are any of the lines less bad than others? What about Hunter?

I've got an idea for a game that I think Hunter is a decent match for, thematically and all that, and can't really match any other system to what I want to do.

Campaign idea inspired by listening to a Creature Feature cd, it would involve various b horror movie type plots popping up and letting the pcs run around kicking ass, until culminating in a zombie outbreak.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I have another question about O/NWod--

What's up with all of the uber-badasses who instantly wreck any and all PCs and aren't even granted stats? What's the purpose of these characters other than for the setting designers to wave their micropenises at the fans?

[FatR]

Mechanic-wise they all just different brands of suck. Unless you like one of their settings, there is no reason to use any Storytelling/Storyteller incarnation. They are tailored to these settings anyway.

oWoD system (any of them) is more suited for an action-horror game. nWoD combat is full of padded sumo and empty of options.

[FatR]

I have another question about O/NWod--

What's up with all of the uber-badasses who instantly wreck any and all PCs and aren't even granted stats? What's the purpose of these characters other than for the setting designers to wave their micropenises at the fans?

Honestly, I suppose they serve the same purpose as Khelbens and Asmodeuses of DnD: making sure that Status Quo Is God. Practically all setting authors seem to secretly hate the idea that someone else's characters can be protagonists in their beloved settings or, Heavens forbid, introduce changes they disapprove of, and therefore they create NPC cockblockers.

[TheFlatline]

I have another question about O/NWod--

What's up with all of the uber-badasses who instantly wreck any and all PCs and aren't even granted stats? What's the purpose of these characters other than for the setting designers to wave their micropenises at the fans?

Officially, their answer was "if you stat it, the PCs will kill it." Which is generally true. If you have an ongoing metaplot that requires certain characters to survive to certain points, giving them stats is essentially a death sentence.

The problem only really exists in Vampire. Werewolf had the Wyrm itself and Gaia and the ilk, but giving stats to the earth incarnate or a philosophical archetype of "decay & destruction" is silly.

And as to the original poster, Hunters Hunted or another mortal book would work, Hunter: The Reckoning would work, and the core nWOD book (blue book) would work.

I might look at something like Call of Cthulhu though depending on how squishy you want the players to be.

[Lokathor]

nWoD combat is full of padded sumo and empty of options.

New Mage is super rocket tag.

[Prak]

And as to the original poster, Hunters Hunted or another mortal book would work, Hunter: The Reckoning would work, and the core nWOD book (blue book) would work.

I might look at something like Call of Cthulhu though depending on how squishy you want the players to be.

I actually kind of don't want them to be particularly squishy. I want the game to be fun, and more about just kicking things asses. Hence why I considered using d20, but d20 modern seems worse than OWoD...

[Lago PARANOIA]

d20 modern is full of hate and agony. The game works at its 'best' at low levels and people are ridiculously fragile in that system. As in you're in a shootout with a gang consisting of 1st and 2nd-level mooks with holdout pistols and you're at a high risk of suffering a TPK. You have less toughness than a D&D character but the first-level weapons are more lethal.

This levels off later in the game, but unfortunately the gap between minmaxxed characters and 'regular' characters is freaking immense. Like in 3rd Edition D&D, the point where a bupkiss class like a fighter or bard eats up more resources than they save is somewhere around level 10 or 12. In d20 Modern the point where you would rather send one of these characters to pasture is around level 6.

I don't know much about nWoD or oWoD, but it can't be worse than d20 modern. Even Exalted, as long as you have a team of min-maxxers, can make low-level adventuring bearable. In d20 modern a team of Fast Heroes is at serious risk of an unplanned TPK against average opposition until around level 5 or so.

[Username17]

All nWoD combat involving weapons of any kind is a grueling and painful padded sumo match. Taking out a random pedestrian in a combat round requires you to be rolling 23 dice or double-attacking with 13. That's right, if you come in with a Strength of 5, a Melee of 5, a Sword and a high cost merit that allows you to attack twice, then you are an "uber munchkin" and yet you are just barely capable of dropping a pedestrian in a round. If you roll low, or they are wearing some armor, or spend any of their Willpower, or Indra help you they are in any way tougher than normal (up to and including being in any way supernatural), then that won't even do it.

On the other hand, even a modest investment in any contested power will generate all-or-nothing effects, many of which will end combat instantly, and which pretty much always work. 9 dice is pretty much the absolute minimum on a magic attack for a starting character, the average pedestrian rolls 2 dice, and even a DM penis-extension NPC only rolls 9. Contested rolls in nWoD don't actually have the loser's hits subtracted from the winner's hits - whoever gets more gets to count their entire roll. So if you're a real Dominate specialist, you can probably stunlock the Prince of the City. Indefinitely.

Anyway, the relative "power" of any splat therefore has much to do with the degree to which their powers are more like all-or-nothing spells or more like stabbing someone with a knife. Mages will cut you in half as soon as they get a turn, because they have spells that will fucking end you. And like everything else that is essentially all or nothing, they pretty much always work. On the flip side, Werewolves have the "power" to fly into a great rage where they have to fight using the shitty accumulating hits to kill people rules, which is basically worse than not having that power.

Splats that are more "magical" are more powerful: Mages and Geists are very very powerful. Splats that are more "fighting" are less powerful: Werewolves and Hunters don't get as much power from their splat as provided by the Combat Marksman Training merit. Seriously. Splats that in between can be made decently powerful if they focus on the magic aspect or pretty much worthless if they focus on the physical prowess aspect: Vampires and Changelings fall into this category.

However, that's all secondary. The real story is that no one gives two shits about the World of Darkness except in reference to vampires. Everything else is a distraction.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Contested rolls in nWoD don't actually have the loser's hits subtracted from the winner's hits - whoever gets more gets to count their entire roll.

Bullshit. What a load of fucking bullshit. How did they fuck this up so bad?

[TheFlatline]

Contested rolls in nWoD don't actually have the loser's hits subtracted from the winner's hits - whoever gets more gets to count their entire roll.

Bullshit. What a load of fucking bullshit. How did they fuck this up so bad?

They had to justify scrap-heaping an entire mechanics system *and* a setting and start over from new, fresh themes.

Plus, the people who had originally developed WOD had largely moved on if memory serves. The people who took over and eventually rewrote WOD disagreed with many fundamental concepts of the old games.

Sort of like D&D 4th.

Which is sad, because White Wolf used to be one of my favorite game publishers. They scammed me for something like 100+ dollars selling me the blue core book, the Vampire book, and then the Werewolf core book. Reading Werewolf, I realized that WW had a different philosophy approaching their games now and stopped giving the company money.

[FatR]

New Mage is super rocket tag.

I stopped caring by that point. In nVampire and nWerewolf there are some I Win powers that are lightyears better than anything else (in nWerewolf you'll need to comb through supplements to find Gifts that accidentally are these, because nWerewolf is marketed to the people who hated the old line, and therefore werewolves must suffer and suck) and can make the game into a rocket tag, but physical combat is still padded sumo. Your words confirm things I heard about nMage being massively overpowered, compared to other nWoD gamelines.

But OP wanted human characters, so I don't think that save-or-lose powers of vampires and whatever are relevant.

[FatR]

I actually kind of don't want them to be particularly squishy. I want the game to be fun, and more about just kicking things asses. Hence why I considered using d20, but d20 modern seems worse than OWoD...

In oWoD characters are squishy, unless you give all PCs the Merit: Bad-Ass Action Hero, that adds ability to soak lethal/some Health Levels. Using extras rule for mooks also helps. nWoD is harder to modify accordingly, because padded sumo and inabilty to gun down opponents fast is hardcoded into combat resolution.

[TheFlatline]

New Mage is super rocket tag.

I stopped caring by that point. In nVampire and nWerewolf there are some I Win powers that are lightyears better than anything else (in nWerewolf you'll need to comb through supplements to find Gifts that accidentally are these, because nWerewolf is marketed to the people who hated the old line, and therefore werewolves must suffer and suck)

You quit at the same point that I quit.

I will say about the nerfing of Werewolves that I FUCKING HATED IT.

Okay, I get that nWOD is super-crossover-friendly (sort of). But in oWOD you had a triad. Vamps were social creatures, Garou were walking food processors, and the mages were the "intellectuals".

I used to be really active in White Wolf's forum through most of Revised and clear up into the beginnings of nWOD. Every. Fucking. Week. some bitch-ass whiny vampire player would complain that his neonate vampire couldn't go toe-to-toe with a newly generated werewolf.

The Werewolf fans said "You want to defeat a Werewolf? Go read a book for 30 years. Most werewolves will die horribly within that period of time doing something other than killing you". But the flame wars continued constantly for years that vampires *should* be able to mop the floor up with Werewolves. Why? Generally the argument came down to "because Vampire is more popular than Werewolf."

So nWOD came out and they smoothed out the uneven playing field into a paved parking lot. Jerked around regen rules (which sort of are a moderate improvement in some ways on WTA), no aggrivated damage in war form until later in progression than Vampires (who can start with the ability to deal agg in Protean 2), war form only being usable for a few turns (WTF is up with that?), reduced ability to soak damage, and so on and so forth.

They did it in the name of "crossover potential", but in reality I suspect a lot of it was because of whining vampire players. The Werewolf core book was the last white wolf book I bought new. I've picked up some oWOD books on the cheap, used, but WW will never see a penny of that. They completely disappointed me.

[TheFlatline]

And as to the original poster, Hunters Hunted or another mortal book would work, Hunter: The Reckoning would work, and the core nWOD book (blue book) would work.

I might look at something like Call of Cthulhu though depending on how squishy you want the players to be.

I actually kind of don't want them to be particularly squishy. I want the game to be fun, and more about just kicking things asses. Hence why I considered using d20, but d20 modern seems worse than OWoD...

Check out Spycraft 2.0

It's probably the best, most comprehensive modern D20 system I've seen. You're going to have James Bond superspies either as a private merc group or a part of a government agency determined to police supernatural baddies, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is even a version of the spycraft ruleset specifically geared towards a supernatural horror game.

I love Spycraft. In fact, I tossed out an idea to use a modified version of the chase system over at Dumpshock as an alternative hacking system that gained some traction with a few people. Who would have thought car chases would be *fun* in a roleplaying game?

If you want to kick bad guy ass, Hunter is your game in WOD. If you're willing to go Gaslight and not modern day, there's a Savage Worlds engine game called RipperJack where you play Victorian monster slayers who rip the bits and pieces of the baddies out to splice into your own body for an edge. Looked interesting but we never got into it.

If you REALLY want to go over the top, find an old school copy of Hong Kong Action Theater (I hate 2nd ed, it's a Tri-stat system, 1st ed is way more goofy and fun) and run a hong kong ghost story ala Big Trouble in Little China.

[Username17]

It's worth noting that the padded sumo makes players really not survivable instead of the other way around. Every time people attack, they inflict a couple of health levels, and everyone has between 6 and 8 health levels. This means that if anyone gets focus fired upon by an opposing team, they drop, and it also means that neither side can wipe the other in any conflict in a round. In pretty much any engagement, a couple of players will drop even against vastly inferior opposition. There's just no way around it. nWoD is a bad system if you want to enjoy combat, win combat, or have combat be dramatically meaningful.

Plus, the people who had originally developed WOD had largely moved on if memory serves. The people who took over and eventually rewrote WOD disagreed with many fundamental concepts of the old games.

Rein*Hagen went on to write anti-Russian propaganda for the nation of Georgia and lives in Tblisi. The Shadowrun authors he worked with for the original game mechanics have all long since departed.

Justin Achilli hates the oWoD. He hates the entire "vibe" of blood powered superheroes, and thinks it should wallow in more "personal horror" and Christian imagery. He made damn sure that vampires suck at combat and that the game world did not reward people for rising high in political structures. The game is small and depressing by design. Nothing you do or don't do is supposed to matter on the global scale, and nothing you can achieve will take you outside the realm of things that a couple of dudes with baseball bats could plausibly fight.

And yeah, FatR is right. It wasn't just made by someone who hated the World of Darkness, it was marketed to people who hated the World of Darkness. And it shows. And it has done incredibly poorly. And in 2009, the Camarilla society voted to support Old World of Darkness again, even though it had been unsupported for six fucking years. Seriously, nWoD is so unpopular that the remnant fans that oWoD still has after being told to go fuck themselves in 2003 are a major challenge to it. This would be like 2nd edition AD&D players getting their game listed in the RPGA.

But remember: OWOD is no mechanics prize either. It's basically a shallow knock off of Shadowrun with d10s instead of d6s, where the authors went out of their way to prove that they didn't care about balance. And they did so by making a game full of puzzlingly unique mechanics where the fact that one power is better than another is so blindingly obvious that you want to strangle the writers. We can start with Thaumaturgy. It's a discipline that gives you one or more magic powers from a list longer than all other magic powers lists combined, that is almost completely dumpster divable for the "good" powers and which is substantially less expensive than any other power set for no damn reason. Then we get to the fact that there are four or more discipline powers that are "shoot a fire bolt at a target" and all have completely different costs, chances to succeed, and damage outputs - to the point of some being worth less than hitting someone with a chair and others being on par with having military ordnance that weighs nothing and is invisible.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Rein*Hagen went on to write anti-Russian propaganda for the nation of Georgia and lives in Tblisi. The Shadowrun authors he worked with for the original game mechanics have all long since departed.

Justin Achilli hates the oWoD. He hates the entire "vibe" of blood powered superheroes, and thinks it should wallow in more "personal horror" and Christian imagery. He made damn sure that vampires suck at combat and that the game world did not reward people for rising high in political structures. The game is small and depressing by design. Nothing you do or don't do is supposed to matter on the global scale, and nothing you can achieve will take you outside the realm of things that a couple of dudes with baseball bats could plausibly fight.

And yeah, FatR is right. It wasn't just made by someone who hated the World of Darkness, it was marketed to people who hated the World of Darkness. And it shows. And it has done incredibly poorly. And in 2009, the Camarilla society voted to support Old World of Darkness again, even though it had been unsupported for six fucking years. Seriously, nWoD is so unpopular that the remnant fans that oWoD still has after being told to go fuck themselves in 2003 are a major challenge to it. This would be like 2nd edition AD&D players getting their game listed in the RPGA.

But remember: OWOD is no mechanics prize either. It's basically a shallow knock off of Shadowrun with d10s instead of d6s, where the authors went out of their way to prove that they didn't care about balance. And they did so by making a game full of puzzlingly unique mechanics where the fact that one power is better than another is so blindingly obvious that you want to strangle the writers. We can start with Thaumaturgy. It's a discipline that gives you one or more magic powers from a list longer than all other magic powers lists combined, that is almost completely dumpster divable for the "good" powers and which is substantially less expensive than any other power set for no damn reason. Then we get to the fact that there are four or more discipline powers that are "shoot a fire bolt at a target" and all have completely different costs, chances to succeed, and damage outputs - to the point of some being worth less than hitting someone with a chair and others being on par with having military ordnance that weighs nothing and is invisible.

-Username17

OWOD is kind of my guilty pleasure. Our group at the time enjoyed the game specifically because equally experienced characters could differ wildly in power level and in how bad they were fucked over. Which is strange, because it's like saying "I enjoy hitting myself with a hammer because it feels so good when the pain stops". In some ways it pushed me to be a better roleplayer, so I guess maybe that's why I remember it fondly.

And yeah, I admit I'm one of the oWOD "threats" to nWOD. I wonder if the Cam fan club officially supporting the old Mind's Eye Theater system is going to lead to possibly a reprint or a print on demand situation. Common sense would say to milk old material, every copy would be gravy in a PoD situation, but if nWOD is really that "threatened", I don't see it ever happening.

And I think you hit the nail on the head with Achilli being obsessed with the Judeo/Christian symbology. Demon the Fallen came out to a large "WTF?" at the time. It seemed silly, and at that point WOD had kind of caved into the idea that everything needed to be crossover-capable, and Demon kind of took a big cosmological shit in the middle of it . A lot of players were less than enthused with it, and I suggested In Nomine to them.

I also see the crowbarring insertion of a limited, helpless scope into the new Vampire setting with the "every city is an island" approach that they rammed down our throats.

Now, in real life, I live an hour outside of Los Angeles. I can get to Las Vegas in about 5 or 6 hours of driving. Hell I can hop on a plane in Burbank and be there in 45 minutes. I can take a train and be there in a few hours. In 3 hours on a plane I can be halfway across the country. And yet, according to VtR it would be almost unheard of to have vampires travel between Los Angeles and my town. Too risky.

What.
The.
Fuck.

And thanks to blood potency and the sleep of dreams, you can get a blank slate from your past and be able to adapt to the modern world relatively assuredly, so even relying on "I'm from 300 years ago and these horseless carriages scare me" doesn't have the same weight that it had in the old system for a vampire wanting to settle in and live like a proper 17th century Gentleman.

Interesting to hear about Rein*Hagen though. Unexpected, but really, not surprising from what I had heard about him back when I was kind of a WW fanatic.

[A Man In Black]

I actually kind of don't want them to be particularly squishy. I want the game to be fun, and more about just kicking things asses. Hence why I considered using d20, but d20 modern seems worse than OWoD...

Superpowered D20 with relatively non-lethal combat? Mutants and Masterminds seems like it'd be obvious.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What's all this crap about Christian imagery getting shoehorned in?

Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot of cool stuff in Christian fandom that can be plundered for a Monster Mash game. The temptation to have a Corrupt Church and/or a Van Helsing Secret Society (or both, or even combined) is just too awful to resist.

But really, demons? Why not have some fucking greys come in and abduct some vampires, too?

I know it seems really nitpicky and fanboyish, but it seems like demons and shit just doesn't fit the kind of 'vibe' that WoD seems to be going for. I mean, it worked for Angel but it seems to me that one of the selling points of WoD is the whole 'No, John, you are the demons' vibe--the appeal of the setting is the dark undertone that you, too, could become one of the stalkers lurking the night.

But demons? I dunno.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm not really a fan of the WoD setting, but like I said it just feels weird to have creatures in the setting who have an 'elite' status that humans can never attain to.

Changelings? Sure. Vampires? Hell yes. Werewolves? Of course. Mages? Why not? Geists? Yup. Mummies? Eh, that's stretching it a bit. The Invisible Man? But of course.

Deep ones? Demons? Prometheans? I dunno. I'm just not feeling those.

[Prak]

I actually rather liked Demon, and once figured out how to fit all the different games together, still including demon. Course Achilli would probably have a fucking heart attack if he saw the WoD game I'm used to..

[Username17]

I used to be really active in White Wolf's forum through most of Revised and clear up into the beginnings of nWOD. Every. Fucking. Week. some bitch-ass whiny vampire player would complain that his neonate vampire couldn't go toe-to-toe with a newly generated werewolf.

The Werewolf fans said "You want to defeat a Werewolf? Go read a book for 30 years. Most werewolves will die horribly within that period of time doing something other than killing you". But the flame wars continued constantly for years that vampires *should* be able to mop the floor up with Werewolves. Why? Generally the argument came down to "because Vampire is more popular than Werewolf."

To an extent they are right. If you make $A_CHARACTER and invest heavily or completely in $AN_ACTION and doing it well, than it's sort of definitional that someone else making a different $A_CHARACTER and investing comparably in the same $An_ACTION should be pretty comparable with you in that action.

It was a huge problem that if you made a Brujah and put all your starting powers into Celerity and Potence that a starting Werewolf born under the new fucking moon to human parents who specialized in VCR repair could still transform into a giant fucking wolf monster and rip you in half. That was bullshit. Not because it's wrong for Werewolves to beat the shit out of Vampires, but because it's wrong for anyone to invest all of their power in combat askickery and still get their ass kicked by another player for whom kicking ass was a secondary or tertiary concern. Vampires could make themselves useful with Presence, Dominate, or Animalism, but the whole crossover concept was fucked by the fact that a Brujah can't beat the shit out of a Garou Ragabash.

Balanced Choices include:

• Every Vampire has substantial social powers, even the combat oriented ones.
• A Vampire who goes whole hog into ass kickery kicks as much ass as a Werewolf.

But there is no third option where you can make a wholly focused Vampire Combat Monster and still have your as handed to you by a Werewolf socialite. That's just several layers of not-OK. This is why I ended up making aWoD the way that I did.

But really, demons? Why not have some fucking greys come in and abduct some vampires, too?

Uh... they kind of did that. Mysterious Places offers alien abduction as an alternate plot twist three times. Midnight Roads offers that advice four times.

But the Demons / Christian crap is just all over the nWoD stuff. It's actually most glaring in Requiem For Rome. It's pre-Christianization of the Empire, right? And yet, you still are tempted by Christian sins and have to support yourself with Christian virtues. It's pretty fucked up and horribly out of place.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

But really, demons? Why not have some fucking greys come in and abduct some vampires, too?

Totally doable. In Mage the Technocracy had the Void Engineers, who ventured out past Mars in space ships and had space marines who did battle with eldrich creatures. Greys probably are statted out somewhere. My guess is 2nd edition.

What's all this crap about Christian imagery getting shoehorned in?

Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot of cool stuff in Christian fandom that can be plundered for a Monster Mash game. The temptation to have a Corrupt Church and/or a Van Helsing Secret Society (or both, or even combined) is just too awful to resist.

...(edited)...

I know it seems really nitpicky and fanboyish, but it seems like demons and shit just doesn't fit the kind of 'vibe' that WoD seems to be going for. I mean, it worked for Angel but it seems to me that one of the selling points of WoD is the whole 'No, John, you are the demons' vibe--the appeal of the setting is the dark undertone that you, too, could become one of the stalkers lurking the night.

But demons? I dunno.

They lay it on thick in VtR. Apparently the first real vampire is the Roman soldier who stabbed Jesus on the cross with a spear. God cursed him, and he became a bloodsucker. Everyone descends from that supposedly.

Except for the descendants of Dracula (dead serious). He became a vampire "some other way" and started his own lineage.

I could live with it okay enough in oWOD because it was generally a myth cycle based on early Judaism. It didn't really matter. I think the highest True Faith rating in WOD was some homeless nut who worshipped a trash can, but had true faith in it. It didn't matter what the faith was, just that it was immense, immovable, and relentless. It fit within the Mage cosmology, where willpower shaped reality.

Vampire was always the judeo-christian theme setting. Werewolf had it's yin-yang gone askew wyrm, weaver, and wyld triad, Mage had consensual reality, Wraith was based more in psychology than in mythology, and Changeling was... well fucking out there. Hunter started the creep with The Messengers I think they were called, but were kind of retconned into being super-powerful spirits and not angels. Kindred of the East uses a completely different cosmology than normal Vampire (then again, KoE aren't vampires per se), I don't remember much about Mummy, and Demon just pukes all over the cosmology of the different games. If memory serves, Lucifer is a named character in the game, and while he's not "active", there are demons that remember him. Which thanks to crossover-mania, kind of sets up a lot of paradox in the WOD cosmology. What fucking sucks is that this paradox was intentional, and I wondered if it was to help hasten the demise of oWOD.

And then they tied Exalted into Mage and things went completely batshit insane.

[TheFlatline]

To an extent they are right. If you make $A_CHARACTER and invest heavily or completely in $AN_ACTION and doing it well, than it's sort of definitional that someone else making a different $A_CHARACTER and investing comparably in the same $An_ACTION should be pretty comparable with you in that action.

It was a huge problem that if you made a Brujah and put all your starting powers into Celerity and Potence that a starting Werewolf born under the new fucking moon to human parents who specialized in VCR repair could still transform into a giant fucking wolf monster and rip you in half. That was bullshit. Not because it's wrong for Werewolves to beat the shit out of Vampires, but because it's wrong for anyone to invest all of their power in combat askickery and still get their ass kicked by another player for whom kicking ass was a secondary or tertiary concern. Vampires could make themselves useful with Presence, Dominate, or Animalism, but the whole crossover concept was fucked by the fact that a Brujah can't beat the shit out of a Garou Ragabash.

Balanced Choices include:

• Every Vampire has substantial social powers, even the combat oriented ones.
• A Vampire who goes whole hog into ass kickery kicks as much ass as a Werewolf.

But there is no third option where you can make a wholly focused Vampire Combat Monster and still have your as handed to you by a Werewolf socialite. That's just several layers of not-OK. This is why I ended up making aWoD the way that I did.

Yeah, aWoD is designed with crossovers in mind. No, you know what? That's not fair. It was designed with versatility in mind. That's a better way of putting it.

I hate crossovers. I've never had a fun WOD crossover game. It degenerates into a dick-waving contest over who has the greatest monster. It's like participating in the special olympics. Whoever wins that fight is still retarded.

But the games to beg for crossover. I guess I can see your point. The mechanics were horribly imbalanced cross-game, and were imbalanced even in-game. I just tended to avoid it.

[FatR]

What's going on with this thread? Anyway, by hating the fans of the old games I didn't even mean subordination other supernaturals in power or themes (because, really, werewolf and mage PCs were more powerful than vampire PCs in oWoD mostly because Vampire reguarly tried to put on horror mask, and horror to WW stuff, particularly late WW stuff, apparently means powerlessness, while Werewolf and Mage were modern fantasy, Mage didn't even pretend otherwise). Judging by things people say of nMages, they are far more powerful than nVamps. I meant that the old Werewolf mostly ran on the idea of Cuchulainn, King Arthur, Siegfried, Ilya Muromets and Enkidu (who all just so happen to be werecreatures) teaming up to win Ragnarok, while having Bleach-like gonzo adventures in the magic realms and beating shit out of Global Evil Inc. on the way. Sure there were terrifying enemies and the game made it really clear, that none of the above are nice people, and it was perfectly possible to have low-key games that had no consequences on the main conflict, but the main conflict demanded something like the above. Just like the old Mage was, in its main plotline, mostly about Merlin, Dr. Tesla, Neo and Zhuge Liang teaming up to reshape the world to their liking, while battling Secret World Order, in turn controlled by the upper Party from 1984.

And nWoD authors just decided to take a big shit on all that. They flat-out said in the books and on the net, that they hate gonzo stuff, that "detracted from personal horror" and shit. Big news, assholes, looks like most people played your games other than Vampire to take out cyborg Men In Black by truckloads, slay dragons, chat with antropomorphic personifications of the planets, generally screw with reality and otherwise engage in the very gonzo stuff you hated.

For that matter, Vampire wasn't untouched too. In my experience, the three biggest ways of playing Vampire were soap operas of the undead, dark superheroics and jokeying for power in the vampire society. Only the third wasn't expicitly stomped upon by nVampire. But Werewolf (and Changeling) went farther than that. They completely rejected - and condemned - the core ideas of old games (or, just as commonly, the standard perception of these ideas among the Internet detractors), so the only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that they were marketed to people who hated the old games. I can remember very few people on the net who said they liked both versions of either.

No wonder, that nWoD just about killed the company.