What would it take to make VTM 5e not garbage?

[Username17]

Beast is certainly worth an OSSR here.

Not really, no. FATAL or RaHoWa isn't worth an OSSR either. It's essentially a fan publication where the fan in question is apparently a guy who pointedly didn't deny molesting a teenage girl. So... that's terrible. You similarly wouldn't do an OSSR of Myfarog, since the only reason anyone ever knew or cared about that particular heartbreaker is that it's written by a racist murderer.

Bad games that have basically nothing to offer and are only famous because the people who made them turn out to be IRL criminals should not be given the OSSR treatment. If they were famous because they had an actual rabid following (Unknown Armies) or were backed by a "real" company with money and advertising (Scion), then they might be important enough to talk about even if they are total trainwrecks.

But Beast has no redeeming features and also only "existed" as a bizarre confidence scam to cause a couple thousand remaining nWoD fans to pledge support to "keep the game alive" despite the fact that by any possible sane measure the game in question had already been dead for years.

But anyway, I remembered the thing that really set me off about that Beast review:

My only request is that you do not blame Onyx Path Publishing for what you are about to read. The blame rests solely with Matt McFarland.

What the shit? Onyx path is like one dude. He chooses what he promotes and what he doesn't promote. People are perfectly able to go do their own kickstarters without having him put his "Onyx Path" label on them. In essence the only thing that Onyx Path really does is evaluate submissions and either positively endorse them or not. Onyx Path positively endorsed Beast. The label was put on not by Matt McFarland, but by Richard Thomas. It is absolutely fair to blame Onyx Path for choosing to associate itself with that kind of edgelord abuse-justifying bullshit. That's like Richard Thomas' whole thing.

Remember how Onyx Path decided to put their name on an edition of Exalted? Remember how Exalted was cannibalism justifying edgelord bullshit from the beginning? Yeah, that's because Onyx Path Publishing is just that kind of outfit. Of course you should blame Richard Thomas for the fact that he puts his logo on things that are not only bad games but actually exist as justifications for bad behavior by bad people. Richard Thomas is obviously a bad person and he has repeatedly demonstrated that by helping to publish screeds of badness. Not once, but over and over again.

To remain a fan of Richard Thomas before Beast came out requires a ridiculous level of naiveté. To stay a fan after is just fucking sick.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Pugmire is actually pretty good.

[Fucks]

There's even a new release for B:tP; the Player's Guide. I'm wondering is this because of contract obligations or KS obligations or if the game is selling so well.

[Mord]

I would have linked to a better review than FATAL & Friends, but Beast is such a stupendously low-selling product that no other reviews exist at any level of depth. Go ahead and Google it; I'll wait. Let's remember the words that introduced Anatomy of Failed Design: nWoD:

First off, as part of this series on failed design we are going to talk about nWoD. Which pretty much means that we are talking about Vampire, because any and all discussions of nWoD Werewolf or Mage pretty much boil down to doing Cat Duck Reviews. Seriously those games are the Matrix 2 of WoD: none of the conflicts matter or solve anything so you're better off just leaving rather than interacting with the plot on any level.

We have been making hay about what a failure D&D 5 is for the last three years because Hasbro is only moving something like 50,000 books a month. In comparison, the Beast Kickstarter had 1,623 backers; Beast will not achieve total sales of 50,000 copies if it lives to be a million. The Player's Guide is not part of the Kickstarter obligations, which means it's probably made of leftover scraps from the core book and produced at something close to zero cost.

WtF and MtAw had audiences two orders of magnitude greater than BtP and we still correctly identified them as clown shit back in 2009. If we want to properly describe just how few fucks there are to give about Beast, we will have to use scientific notation and an electron microscope.

Everything of value to say regarding Beast's social and historical context has already been said: it is rape apologia written by an accused rapist published under a knock-off brand name by a parasitic vanity press whose business model is affinity fraud. The only original things about Beast are morally reprehensible and the only good things about Beast are tired and derivative. For fuck's sake, its tagline is "A Storytelling Game of Endless Appetite." Vampire is already a thing McFarland, you kiddy-diddling clod!

[Username17]

WtF and MtAw had audiences two orders of magnitude greater than BtP and we still correctly identified them as clown shit back in 2009. If we want to properly describe just how few fucks there are to give about Beast, we will have to use scientific notation and an electron microscope.

Everything of value to say regarding Beast's social and historical context has already been said: it is rape apologia written by an accused rapist published under a knock-off brand name by a parasitic vanity press whose business model is affinity fraud. The only original things about Beast are morally reprehensible and the only good things about Beast are tired and derivative.

Pretty much this. Of course, given the original World of Darkness pitch as an expanded universe for Vampire: the Masquerade, "Beast: the Whatever" has been something being bandied about since the early nineties. The "classic monsters" list isn't actually very long, and after you hit the big ones of Dracula and Wolfman, the list people made early films about includes:

• Beast (1903)
• Frankenstein's Monster (1910)
• Mr. Hyde (1908)
• The Golem (1915)
• The Hunchback (1923)
• Phantom of the Opera (1925)
• Dr. Moreau (1932)
• The Mummy (1932)

So obviously Mr. Hyde has fucking staying power, in that they made multiple movies about him for decades, spanning the entire era of silent and talky movies. But Beast has fucking pedigree, the first Beauty and the Beast film is made nineteen years before Nosferatu.

A problem the World of Darkness had was that they never actually articulated what the expanded universe was supposed to look like, and thus never had a map of what creatures to include or what their space should be in the theme or narrative. And so you end up with some seriously weird shit like Orpheus or Promethean where the entire game is only supposed to present a single story despite nattering on about it for three hundred thousand words. And you end up with some seriously weird holes, like how the fuck did we get all the way through oWoD and nWoD without ever getting a decent Evil Scientist or Mr. Hyde splat?

But fundamentally it was weird that we didn't get Beast before 1996. If we were going to get Beast, it's fucking inexcusable to get something that isn't recognizably monstrous people who can get it on with Belle or Liza. And having it be "Basically Nightmare on Elm Street. Including the child abuse subtext" is absolutely incomprehensible. But if you're going to have the splat model of horror monsters, Beast has the kind of pedigree that it's hard to deny, alongside Frankenstein's Monster and Wolfman.


We got Mage instead of this because the early White Wolf people actually weren't very well read about the Gothic genre they were supposedly emulating.

-Username17

[PrometheanVigil]

Time for my epic reply post to this entire thread...

IMO, they need to reboot Vampire (again). Let VTM and VTR rest in peace, let the oWoD and nWoD go.

Yet another set of vamps that are obstensibly different from one another but ultimately are the same bloody thing? They can fuck right off.

Might as well stick with Requiem's take. Bloodlines have provided a near-perfect solution to the "my vamp has sharper fangs" syndrome.

Masquerade players pretty much universally acknowledged that there needed to be a reboot of the franchise back in 2003.indeed the addition of 10 years of semi-canon Onyx Path shit has just made everything even more confusing.

Similarly, nWoD was a pile of shit that was on fire.

On the setting side, I need to hear a cogent explanation of why there are coteries of different
-Username17

Masquerade, from what I can tell, never worked as PnP setting. Great for computer games and tv shows and novels but shit for everything else. I've clocked both Bloodlines and Redemption but man, the idea of Gen as implemented and enumerated on never sat right with me.

Requiem (and NWOD in general) was pretty fucking dope. The recent Onyx Path era has been... unfortunate. But otherwise, the shit works even now in the upcoming 20's (even with the nu-metal, neo-gothic and bleakcore themes and style laced through everything). Gotta lotta VTM to VTR and MTAs to MTAw converts in my neck of the woods because OWOD ain't shit, system AND setting-wise.

Adventurers meeting haphazardly in an inn is not a valid reason for a game (and any and all variants). This kills a signifcant portion of the games out there right now. NWOD is one of the few games that said "hey, actually, there's no reason your guys are together -- clash of destinies works as good as anything else, yeah go do that".

That's literally how. every. single. PC. in my games come together. Case in-point: last session at my club, two new Ghoul PCs met because A was sick of his mundane office job life and badly high on vitae and decided to follow B out a diner because B was obviously sketchy but different and in order to intervene before a corrupt cop got his hands on him -- end of session, they passed out drunk in A's well-to-do studio apartment after being fixed up by B's vet Ally having been shot by the cop while doing a getaway.

And that is honestly a shitty example compared to some of the others over time. But it still fucking owns the vast majority of shit I've read in the gamebooks and from other people online.

I mean, while I hink it would be interesting to play around with stereotypes and say that all Ventrue are black just because I like the idea of suave black aristocrats playing against sterotype, that's not going to fly in a game where white people might like to play a Venture, you know. It's going to be seen as racist now matter what you do, if Vampire clans are tied to real world ethnic features.

Vamps are assumed to be White in both NWOD and OWOD, unless explicitly specified. Same shit today, regardless of whatever neo-liberal crap has wedged itself into the collective gamer psyche.

Your point's moot is what I'm getting at here.

But hey, Black aristocrats are fucking awesome. I have a Bloodline in my current NYC-based VTR chron which are essentially African-American royalty straight outta Harlem, originating from the South. They've got some numbers outside NYC though and have in the last couple decades finally got a handful out there on the west coast to represent the blood.

Anyway, other than your vozhd-sounding nick, it's all about authenticity. And the current writing staff and just culture... lack that. I swear, Lucien Soulban was one of the only writers they ever had that got the fucking setting. He wrote both Blood In, Blood Out and Constantinople By Night's storyline and fuck me, those are both pretty fucking good, highly recommended.

Doesn't really matter. The entire concept is The Masquerade. Every Vampire has to be able to pass for a normal human. It's completely non-negotiable. So if you want to distinguish types of vampires visually, your only choice is what kind of humans you want them to be disguised as.

The "vampire types should be visually distinct" concept is completely incompatible with Masquerade as a concept. It literally cannot end well, and "your product is uncomfortably racist" is probably an inevitable end result from pursuing that line of thought.

-Username17

Yes, agreed. The HU-man must be a thing. Or the whole godamm game falls apart.

Nah, racist tropes originate from inauthenticity. If you're not in or have thorough grounding in the culture, don't fucking write about Black people and Black issues. If you're from some inbred county shire in the midlands, then fucking write about that. If you're the son of Korean immigrants who owned a "Dae-Ho's Liquor" in Koreatown that got exorted out the ass and used as a front for a counterfitting operation, fucking write about that. Or, again, at least have some fucking grounding in it.

In other words, hire writers and designers who didn't listen to My Chemical Romance growing up and then Joy Division when they wanted to be grown up.

The big thing is they need to not be a bunch of transgressive edgelords

Ah hah, ah hah, ah hah...

[url=https://career.paradoxplaza.com/people/ ... n-ericsson]I don't think so.[]

Like, if we're keeping the VtM clans (and I'm not saying we should, just spitballing)-

What the shit made you think these were good ideas?

The tattoo idea alone is gonna swish all up down some Torrie/Daeva chick's face like the hung balls of her co-star.

So make it magical. And honestly, most people who play the game aren't going to think about that.

...

...

...

You obviously don't know gamers.

If your vampire setting doesn't have the coroner doing a necropsy on a dead vampire at very least muttering "this person... this person has been dead for HOW LONG?" in disbelief, then it's a bad vampire setting and I don't care about it.

And I'll posit that this is good for the setting because the clean up is the kind of urgent mission that the Prince can assign to the PCs: "Get in that morgue and clear the situation for us. Do not fail."

Agreed.

WoD approach where you can't play as a mix of those is deeply unsatisfactory. It creates dead splats and badly suffers from prestige class problem, where big books are full of content that will be used by 1% of the tables. If you want to play, for example, Geist, or Promethean, your best option is to go fuck yourself.

Go fuck yourself.

(Kidding, obvs. This made me laugh. Thank you for actually puttin' some real-talk out there, compared to some of this shit I'm reading)

Actually, to note, we did almost get Geist voted in for last year's chron at the club but it narrowly missed out 'cause Mage beat it. Would've been a historical game, golden age piracy, several players really liked the idea, I think it suit the game pretty well. Henry Morgan would have been a Hunter and founder of a Compact and ultimately Panama City would have been a diversion for him and his fellow Hunters to access the Underworld through a faulty Avernian Gate deep in the jungle. Anyway, 'nuff said.

• Whatever groups there are, they have to be able to play nicely together.
• None of the groups can be embarrassingly racist. I can't believes it's 2018 and I still have to say that, but obviously I do. If you roll out your groups and one of them is "Vampires, but Romany Vampires who have deception powers" or "Werewolves who are Native Americans and are deeply spiritual" or some shit, I am putting the book down. That shit was bad in the 90s, and in the last quarter century you have to at least have learned that that shit isn't OK.
• None of the groups can explode the setting in zero time. If one of the groups wants to destroy the Masquerade, obviously they are just going to hold a press conference tonight where they reveal that Vampires exist and then the Masquerade is over. Shit like that (see: Sabbat, Mage Traditions) is completely unacceptable.

-Username17

No, they just need a good reason not to kill each other on sight. They're not fucking humans, they're monsters from a darkness deep.

I agree on the representation point.

Are you fucking serious on the third point? That really happened? What in the actual dickjizz...

To clarify my point about visual differences:

Obviously all the vampires types should have ways of maintaining the Masquerade, since that's a core conceit of the WoD (old, new, rebooted, whatever). The Nosferatu are all disfigured and deformed,

Edit: A kinda good example of what I'm talking about with visual communication would be the Jedi-Sith visual design.

They tried to do this with the base Nossies in VTR. Didn't work. At least, too many fuckwits IME used it as an excuse to be sex pests and blood fetishests while claiming "I'M NOT OBVIOUSLY CREEPY!"

Also, if you have to start doing Blue vs Red, you've failed.

"Supernatural Teenage Drama" is a mainstream TV genre that started roughly with Supernatural (not really), and continues with things like Teen Wolf, Shadowhunters, Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Van Helsing and Penny Dreadful. And arguably even superhero TV shows fall under the same umbrella. Penny Dreadful is probably the best out of those and is not the worst series to emulate.

Penny Dreadful's pretty legit. I need to get back on it.

(1) You need a full reboot, as was already mentioned in this thread.

(3) You need to choose whether your system would be rules-lite and fast to run or complex and tactical, and stick with your choice. Also, in the latter case mechanical interaction should be actually interesting.

No, you don't. You just need people who aren't OPP working on it. That and that and an actual fucking publishing company with deadlines, vision, editorial oversight and shit. The kinda place you'd get fired in a heartbeat for the crap that's been put out in the last half-a-decade.

Tactical over rules-lite every time. People like choice and they like granularity. The people who will actually buy 'yo shit are those same people. No-one's saying it needs to be HERO but it must be at least EOTE.

When Masquerade went live, vampires were going mainstream. They had signed A-list talent to be in Interview. Today, vampires have already gone mainstream. Twilight was such a big property that they could take randos who couldn't act and turn them (at least temporarily) into A-listers. Breaking Dawn made over eight hundred million dollars at the box office despite being a shit movie with 25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

So your target is no longer college age women who are discovering that there's a goth genre that had been chugging along without their knowledge for ten to fifteen years. Now your target is college age women who read Twilight books when they were in their teens and are now ready for more adult fare.

So all the dumb questions about whether and how much adult content vampire should have are irrelevant. A reboot of Vampire would absolutely need to have romance and death and shit because your target audience watched True Blood while they were children.

-Username17

I want to say you're full of shit but I think there is a kernal truth in there (hey, fair is fair yo).

Again, Requiem got it right in the base setting (minus the stupid fucking clueless "fog of war domain segregation" shit). It's not one fuck-off massive vampiric conspiracy but, say, several major ones across the world that all play off each other in ways both direct (inter-Covenant conflict, torpor vendettas), and indirect (migration trends in the kine, firearm proliferation, modern tech, other supers).

No one wants to play a game where John Wayne Gacy is the hero.

You say that... but you shoulda seen how a few of the PCs from our Third Crusade-era Hunter chron a couple years back developed/were developing. That game got dark towards the end...

But in general, it's probably a bad idea to have any distinct supernatural type have a mad hate on for any other distinct supernatural type.

Agreed.

It's ok for Vampires and werewolves to have a tense relationship like old warhammer elves and dwarves.

It's also good for the game to have some antagonist factions that the players can feel fine about using their powers on without holding anything back.

The whole thing with vampires in Warhammer Fantasy only works because it's just that: fantasy. And it's pretty fucking high fantasy in that regard. In any other setting, they'd have burned them out long ago, they'd be in hiding or it'd be WOD-style conspiracy (it actually is for Lahmians). There's a lot of stupid shit in both WHFN and WH40K so I wouldn't use it is an example of your point.

Also, WH40K has a nazi fetish undertone which pisses me off. I stripped that shit right out when I hosted Only War back in the day.

Vampires don't have to strictly be, or fall under, any of those categories. The more compelling vampire, IMO is the one who's story is a tragedy.

and more of "What Shadow Government?

"Every supernatural group is covering for themselves and also every other supernatural group."

You couldn't just embrace a person with a particular skillset unless they were completely on board with the Masquerade, and you would need constant implicit and explicit threats to keep them inline. Also, I think the core conceit of the Masquerade virtually rules out having an entire group of playable characters who's main trait is 'hot-headed', 'loose cannon', 'rebel for the sake of rebelling' aka the Brujah. They would've been persecuted relentlessly by their kin until 'natural selection' ruled out embracing anyone with those traits, (or if those traits were a property of the Brujah blood, the entire clan would've likely been genocided.)

Soon as I saw Elric Melnibone, I was like "Vampire Wars". You motherfucker, hah hah! That was honestly one of the more honest portrayals of the vampiric condition I've ever. I actually felt real bad for him, I was happy he was able to overcome the worst callings of his vampirism to bring down his fucked-up kin. And that ending! Screw that (admittedly, self-imposed) fate...

Nah, fuck shadow government. This is urban horror, not an espionage flick.

Yes, you can "just" embrace someone. This is totally a thing at my club. That's a Masquerade artifact because, as Frank pointed out in his VTM thread, the numbers were utterly, utterly fucked in VTM and WW knew it. In VTR they gave it a wide caveat by essentially knocking it down to "on your head be it if they fuck up". Much better. Self-policing over contrived bullshit any night. Any Prince that gets touchy about breeding better have juice to back a restriction that severe.

All too often, the Masquerade was the Ventrue overseeing the local government and police force and that was it.

This shit is why Masquerade did. not. work.

The vampire 1% are old money. Some of them made a killing in grain futures when a guy named Joe gave them a hot tip. None of them need to commit crimes, because they have diversified investment portfolios.

Vampire organized crime are the new money. Guys who don't have the connections and investments to do everything above board.

Legit.

Although I'd still put my stock with the Werewolves. Vampire are good an' all but they freak out when it turns out Florida ain't gonna deliver oranges anywhere near what was projected 'cause its "what they know". Uratha keep it movin'... they literally have a Tribe with this as one of its core focuses.

He's also a really bad writer and the fact that he keeps getting work is proof for me that he knows real magic.

BRUH!

Definitely not. I mean, I'm sure he's a nutter, but he also never fucking mattered. Phil Brucato got his start at White Wolf writing under the Black Dog imprint in 1995. Destiny's Price, Freak Legion, crap like that. He wasn't the B-team. He wasn't even the C-Team. Phil Brucato was one of the pervy fanboys that wrote commissioned works that the main teams were explicitly ashamed to have their names associated with. It's only much later that he's allowed to contribute material to Mage's Second Edition or obscure expansion books like the Cult of Ecstasy splatbook. He's not a main author on Mage: The Awakening either. In fact, he was never allowed to be a main author on any main game line. He didn't become "important" in Mage until the entire company stopped actually existing.

...

I liked Destiny's Price.

(Although, it was seriously white boy at times, the general atmosphere was legit)

Remember listening to this in particular (among other tracks) while reading it one rainy night in London back in the day... https://open.spotify.com/track/1fT3tLqL ... aDW8ohgdNw

I mean, that instrumental, that's Mage

(I've never been one for the writers' or other fans' music choices at the start of the books. They don't really evoke the settings for me... at all. Tends to be neo-folk, IDM or metal wank...)

Phil Brucato was the lead developer of Mage Second Edition, as well as a current lead developer of Mage 20th Anniversary Edition. He absolutely mattered for Mage development and matters even more right now. It's notable that Mage Revised edition's big changes were rolling back all of Brucato's craziness and making it more "street level". Which Brucato has now "fixed".

What in the fuck... what'd he change? Any particular horrors?

Mage 20th Anniversary isn't a real thing. It never was. The entire company actually factually went out of business in 2006. It was bailed out by Icelandic videogame nerds, but went out of business again in 2012. And then it just sort of stayed out of business. Eventually the rights got sold to Swedish videogame nerds who are picking their ass making vaporware. But the bottom line is that anything done after November 2006 is only arguably White Wolf, and anything after 2012 just flat isn't White Wolf at all.

Mage 20th Anniversary was made in 2013, one year after White Wolf studios fucking closed forever. It's a fan project. No one fucking cares. It is exactly as much a new edition of Mage as Princess or Witch is. Jesus Fucking Christ.

-Username17

Who gives a shit if White Wolf studios closed? Mage20 is being sold as a Mage the Ascension product. What does the identity of the producing company have to do with anything? You might as well claim that D&D 3 was not a real D&D product because TSR closed. Paradox lets Onyx Path make and sell oWoD products. Princess and Witch are not being sold as oWoD products. Yeah, Phil Brucato is a fanboy turned writer, but that doesn't make the product illegitimate.

CCP was the one that licensed oWoD and nWoD to Onyx Path. That's because CCP didn't care about the tabletop market and just wanted the IP so that they could make a huge, epic, oWoD MMORPG.

Their reach exceeded their grasp on that one.


When Paradox bought the IP, they pulled Onyx Path's oWoD license as fast as the existing contracts would let them, and just left Onyx Path with the nWoD, which they renamed to Chronicles of Darkness.

This of because Paradox thinks that the nWoD is flamming garbage and just wants to develop the oWoD IP. They are right.

And while they are treating oWoD20 as a fourth edition, as shown by their naming scheme, they're basically dropping all of oWoD20's metaplot in favor of actually moving the setting forward into 2018.

They're also rewriting the rules from the ground up. Because they know that the old rules sucked, but also that no one buys Vampire for the rules.

That's really the smart thing. They know that the tabletop game is important, but it's not the money maker. It's the foundation for the rest. The real money comes from licensing and merchandising. From multimedia. From toys. From movies, television shows, from Lego playsets. Vampire at one time had that. It had television shows. It had video games. It had movie deals. And White Wolf squandered all of that. And CCP ignored all of that in favor of its vaporware. Paradox isn't setting out to make a better game, or to even appeal to fans. They're setting out to build a multimedia empire on the back of a really, really good IP that has been grossly mismanaged.

And to do that, they need to exercise control. And they do.
The only reason Mage20 exists is that paradox couldn't stop it from going to print. But Onyx path isn't going to be allowed to make more oWoD20 products beyond what they've already licensed. Instead, they're left with the shit-stick that is Chronicles, and can screw that up as much as they want because it isn't worth anything.

You're full of shit on the NWOD point.

Everything else in this post is legit, accurate and fucking solid. I was right there back in the day calling all this shit out and and there were a few other wise gamers calling it out before me. But the tragedy still struck...

NWOD was great but that mismanagement and lack of tight stewardship is what fucked it over, not the actual IP itself as it used to be in the WW era.

That the setting attracted writers who really believe in Chaos Magick or whatever is not a surprise, but this is not dispositive for responsibility in making the setting ill-conceived in the first place.

Ahhh, so that's where it comes from? And here was me thinking WW's designers actually came up with something groundbreaking in terms of game systems for magic... how little I truly knew.

So, basically, "Objectivists are shitty at writing propaganda for their own contradictory bullshit philosophy?"

News at 11.

In other news, Ken Levine wants his Atlas Shrugged copy back... so he can burn it.

So I was playing the new-ish Vampire game We Eat Blood & All Our Friends Are Dead and it occurred to me that the setup of the game is the protagonist (you) being a super-brand-new Neonate basically being left to flounder about and wander around on your own for a bit, which is a ridiculous premise. Under no circumstances would a Childe be left alone in such a manner to figure things out for themselves. The entire Creation Rites of vampires would definitely need to be looked at in any Reboot of Vampire or new edition of VTM. VTM at least had the rule that you need the Prince's "O-K" before you could sire a Childe, and it was understood that your Sire had the go-ahead before they made you, but that probably isn't enough by a long shot since maintaining the Masquerade is something that concerns ALL Kindred, the creation of any new vampire concerns ALL Kindred, and that Childe would essentially have the eyes of the (vampire) world watching them at all times.

And VTM Bloodlines (the video game) also does this as well. You're created, your Sire is destroyed, and the rest of the Vampire world, who is present at the time of the local Prince deciding NOT to execute you on the spot (since you were illegally created), collectively shrug and say, "Not my problem," and "Good luck out there, kiddo!" except for Smiling Jack and Nines Rodriguez, two Anarchs. It's absurd to think that the Camarilla would not be responsibly teaching such neonates, and almost as absurd that they would put all the responsibility on the Sire. And while it works because the video-game needs to give the player freedom and whatnot, it would just NOT be a thing within the setting. A Childe would probably have been assigned to a coterie of older vampires for the explicit purpose of learning all the rules. And no-one in the vampire world would be ignorant of who you are or your station. It's likely that they would eventually get around to trying to use you in their own schemes, but only after they've made sure you're not going to fuck up the Masquerade.

What? That doesn't happen in Bloodlines.

- LaCroix actively fucking sets you up with a Haven. Initially, he sent you on stuff with the intent of getting you killed but once he realised you were a self-started/self-sufficient (which the majority of real-world players of that game aren't, I'm not sorry to say...) he actually entertained you as a valued agent (since no-one else would take him seriously, especially among the Primogen). This is especially true if you were also Ventrue (I was first-time!) Only when his Megalomania started cracking through in the late stage of the game did he go back to trying to kill you again. Swings-and-roundabouts

- Strauss actually does try to look out for you from the start. He feels bad in his own way that you've been fucked over by the city's tense politics. And if you're Tremere, he absolutely tries to bring you into the fold (haven in the chantry, yo). Through your convos with him, he schools you in the subtler side of your new unlife and tries to impart some wisdom, not unlike Beckett.

- Beckett looks out for you too and actually grows fond of you as the game's main storyline progresses. He could be said to recognise some of himself in you, a pariah among his kind, the guy everyone calls when they need shit done or something answered but who no-one truly tries to claim. And while Beckett might like it that way because he truly pitties his fellow Kindred, the wider society and does not actively pursue all the politics, that's not necessarily the same for you. The fact he fucking goes out of his way to warn you, you of all kindred, I think, really shows this.

- Gary and Issac are arguably much more pragmatic but if you're a Nosferatu or Toreador respectively, they does actually want to bring you into their folds.

- VV does a bit of a lookout for you. She's more powerful than she let's on (possibly more so than Issac, honestly) and she gives you free reign of her club for feeding once you've helped her out.

- Andrei actually does try to school you, even while he's trying to destroy you. Had he (or one of his bishops') gotten to you first, he'd quite likely have taken you under his wing, since he infers your Gen is actually lower than it should be as a neonate in the modern nights (but not lower than his, otherwise he'd probably diablarize you on the spot)

- Mercurio even does a lookout for you. In fact, he's arguably the most helpful of all, since he sets you up with the good shit weapons-wise and is entirely loyal pretty much from the start.

Beasts are people who sold their souls to an alien dreamspace horror and got fancy powers from that. In return, Beasts have to feed said horror by inflicting pain and suffering on people. This can range from keying someone's car to feed your hunger for destruction, to stealing shit to feed your hunger for the hoard, to being an obstructive bureaucrat to feed your hunger for power. Feeding generally involves the target suffering an Integrity break, but high level feeding requires murder.

Beasts have an in-universe rationalization for feeding that they are "teaching lessons" to people by scaring the shit out of them, but you explicitly don't have to teach shit, and lessons can be completely arbitrary. One of the Beasts in the book hunts bad tippers. The example of feeding is a character poisoning a frat boy and choking him in his own vomit for the evil crime of stealing halloween candy. Another example is a pair of beasts tag teaming - one keeps a treasure hidden in a cave and spreads rumors to attract people and feed on their greed, another murders them for the crime of trying to take that treasure and thus feeds his hunger for punishment. It may sound like entrapment, because it literally is.

But what's really damning is that the writer of Beast, Matt McFarland, got called out as a child molester. It's a book about abusers written by an abuser and couched in justifications for abuse.

Beast is such a shit template. And they did a new one which was, like, mad scientist leftovers or some shit? Forgetting the name here for a moment...

Didn't know McFarland was the lead on Beast. Now that makes some fucking sense. Oh my God, did you see the fucking turnaround on that whole debacle? The mods on RPG.net like to hold themselves as the guardians of a safe community and shit and align themselves with the kind of people that accuse people of seriously heinous shit but then, when one of their own is actually the real deal... man, they took their sweetass time before they got rid of him, yes they did.

Frank, Chronicles of Darkness haven't killed anything because CoD was released long after White Wolf died. Chronicles of Darkness is the second edition of nWoD, and it has some genuine improvements, like linear xp costs post chargen. It's still fundamentally nWoD but slightly less shit.

They didn't improve anything. Exponential EXP costs were better -- shit actually cost. The whole beats thing is crap. They fucked the system when it was already pretty sweet. We actually have players at the club who outright refuse to play with the rules and any of template from Mummy onwards because of how utterly they jacked they system. One in particular fucking rages any time that particular game is mentioned because of his high hopes for it.

Beast is certainly worth an OSSR here.

Not really, no. FATAL or RaHoWa isn't worth an OSSR either. It's essentially a fan publication where the fan in question is apparently a guy who pointedly didn't deny molesting a teenage girl. So... that's terrible. You similarly wouldn't do an OSSR of Myfarog, since the only reason anyone ever knew or cared about that particular heartbreaker is that it's written by a racist murderer.

Bad games that have basically nothing to offer and are only famous because the people who made them turn out to be IRL criminals should not be given the OSSR treatment. If they were famous because they had an actual rabid following (Unknown Armies) or were backed by a "real" company with money and advertising (Scion), then they might be important enough to talk about even if they are total trainwrecks.

But Beast has no redeeming features and also only "existed" as a bizarre confidence scam to cause a couple thousand remaining nWoD fans to pledge support to "keep the game alive" despite the fact that by any possible sane measure the game in question had already been dead for years.

But anyway, I remembered the thing that really set me off about that Beast review:

My only request is that you do not blame Onyx Path Publishing for what you are about to read. The blame rests solely with Matt McFarland.

What the shit? Onyx path is like one dude. He chooses what he promotes and what he doesn't promote. People are perfectly able to go do their own kickstarters without having him put his "Onyx Path" label on them. In essence the only thing that Onyx Path really does is evaluate submissions and either positively endorse them or not. Onyx Path positively endorsed Beast. The label was put on not by Matt McFarland, but by Richard Thomas. It is absolutely fair to blame Onyx Path for choosing to associate itself with that kind of edgelord abuse-justifying bullshit. That's like Richard Thomas' whole thing.

Remember how Onyx Path decided to put their name on an edition of Exalted? Remember how Exalted was cannibalism justifying edgelord bullshit from the beginning? Yeah, that's because Onyx Path Publishing is just that kind of outfit. Of course you should blame Richard Thomas for the fact that he puts his logo on things that are not only bad games but actually exist as justifications for bad behavior by bad people. Richard Thomas is obviously a bad person and he has repeatedly demonstrated that by helping to publish screeds of badness. Not once, but over and over again.

To remain a fan of Richard Thomas before Beast came out requires a ridiculous level of naiveté. To stay a fan after is just fucking sick.

-Username17

He also doesn't pay his writers, allegedly. Hasn't for years.

[Username17]

That was way too long.

Requiem (and NWOD in general) was pretty fucking dope.

No. It wasn't.

Sure, there are people in the world that liked it, but they are in the minority. nWoD had its chance to win everyone over when it was the flagship project of what was then the second largest RPG company backed by a full marketing blitz and an established fanbase that had bought-in to the idea that a reboot was required. It failed. It failed so hard that the company went bankrupt. Then the IP was bought out and brought back by an Icelandic Videogame company flush with internet dollars and willing to pump cash into it just to keep the IP in the public eye. And it failed again.

NWoD failed twice despite getting two bites at the apple that were each better than anything that wasn't an edition of Dungeons & Dragons or a licensed Star Wars game has ever gotten in the history of the world. If nWoD couldn't succeed in those incredibly generous circumstances, it is absolutely fair to say that nWoD was simply bad. The public has spoken: people do not like nWoD.

Which is not to say that all the ideas floated in nWoD are bad. Blood Potency is better than Generations, the Bloodline system is better in Requiem than the lack-of-system from Masquerade. But the overall pitch of Requiem is one in which nothing fucking matters, characters are powerless fuckups, and there's not even a reason for player characters to meet in person.

NWOD is one of the few games that said "hey, actually, there's no reason your guys are together -- clash of destinies works as good as anything else, yeah go do that".

See, that's just a complete failure of writing. If you haven't written in a reason for the player characters to go do missions together, you fucking failed. Getting people to start playing the game is task number one. Shrugging your fucking shoulders and saying you can't think of a real reason means you need a complete rewrite until you can.

The reason why almost every other RPG puts more effort into coming up with a pitch by which the characters in the ensemble cast might want to be in the same room together at the start of the adventure is because that is the first fucking sentence in the first game. If you don't have something to say there it is fucking obviously that you have failed at the most basic tasks of game design.

Vampire needed a reboot. It still needs a reboot because Requiem was not the reboot it needed. The people have spoken on this issue. People bet tens of millions of dollars on proving me wrong here, and they lost that bet.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

First off, I really can't tell how the example of doing things better than a bar plot was different from a bar plot. I mean, your players bump into the corrupt watch captain cop at a diner instead of a pub but otherwise you can port the same plot to D&D or a friggin' western just fine.

Anyway, very little good has ever come about from game designers saying "Well, the PCs are going to build their own motivations and ignore the metaplot anyway, so why should I write anything?" That's because in many ways it's the NPCs who define settings and franchises because they're a controllable variable and players are not. Metaplot, locations and NPCs are valuable because they give shape to things by responding to what the players do according to their characterization and goals. That's what creates a recognizable franchise about which strangers can have coherent conversations about what the game world does and does not feature. E.g., D&D is a kitchen sink clusterfuck that gets by on the weight of its history more than anything but at the end of the day its fans can still make jokes about Strahd and have more than the 4 other people who were at the table get the punchline. That's actually hugely valuable for social games that survive on good word of mouth.

So when nWoD came out with a shittier and smaller metaplot right out of the gate that was a big ass problem. As a game designer a huge part of your job really does involve producing a lot of content that could plausibly work as a writing prompt because that shit inspires NPCs even if it doesn't inspire players. D&D sounds like a shit game by that metric but gets by in large part on the strength of its huge bestiary and Vampire doesn't have that. Asking what the day in the life of a Pit Field is like sounds really dumb and shallow but it's actually a pretty good prompt when your game doesn't aspire to anything greater than a dungeon crawl. If you want a more freeform game like WoD to work you can and should set your sights higher.

[ArmorClassZero]

[deleted]

[Whipstitch]

ACZ, at this point I genuinely don't know what you're advocating for anymore. At various points I have thought you were advocating for the following:

1. Some vampire types that can turn into things so physically different from normal humans that mortals believe they're other monster types like wolfmen and shit. I would rather just have multiple different monster types, but whatever, it's not an unworkable setup.

2. All vampire types have unearthly attributes that are distinctive enough for audiences to quickly and consistently recognize but somehow don't arise undue mortal suspicion because reasons. I don't know how this works with the Masquerade without copious amounts of mindcaulk being involved. Also, one of the reasons some people are attracted to playing a vampire is due to the fact that they're a monster that doesn't require a big costuming budget. Like, yours truly often plays Ventrue precisely because their most distinctive feature is a tendency to wear no less than a sport coat on Casual Friday instead of being sticky, hairy or achingly beautiful.

3. Vampire types that are indistinguishable from each other in-world but are styled differently in the books for marketing purposes. That is basically the status quo and I'm fine with it. If you could score the budget to have Rebecca Guay do Toreador art while Timothy Bradstreet handles the Brujah cover I'm sure there would be much rejoicing.

Plus, datedness aside I think aesthetics is the last thing I'd complain about with VTM. Yes, it was edgy for edgy's sake, but between the production values, early adoption of new layout software and having distinctive clans at all I think you can actually make a fair argument that no RPG owes more to sheer aesthetics and faction branding than Vampire.

[ArmorClassZero]

@Whipstitch:

1. Yes.

2. Yes. This does not exclude no.1. It's already established that vampires can disappear from sight, mind-wipe people, shapeshift, and use magic. I'm a big believer in the 'Game Face' trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GameFace. Also, talking about cosplaying vamps from VTM reminds me of when that guy cosplayed as Scruffy the Janitor and no one even realized he was cosplaying Scruffy the Janitor: http://i.imgur.com/iUH37Mf.jpg ... Masquerade secured? XD

3. Yes, now we're talking. Maybe DiTerlizzi too, for the Toreador.

[Whipstitch]

Just making sure because there were times where I felt like you defended 2 by saying you mostly meant 3 and that was confusing as hell.

[PrometheanVigil]

That was way too long.

Thank you, I try.

X

Eh? White Wolf didn't go bankrupt 'cause of NWOD. They were taking on too many series, book sales had been in a decline since the mid 90's, they were being increasingly mismanaged not to mention that FUCKING D&D 3RD had been out for a few years by that point. That's... rather inaccurate. You're completely demented about the CCP years mate: they left the IP to fucking languish in the sun (as Icelanders are wont to do, kinda poetic too) when they realised "oh hey, our lights are kept on by spaceship spreadsheet sims".

Nothing fucking matters in VTM. It really doesn't. To the point where that game is actively hated for that very reason (among several others). You perpetually play guys and girls on the bottom rung of vampire society who've gotta take everything like a bitch. That gets tired so quickly Celerity would be considered moving at the speed of paste dripping down a wall.

Who bet tens of millions of dollars proving you wrong? Mate, you. are. a. fuck-ing. lunatic. Your loaf's gone stale. You're a few peas short of a pod.

Honestly though, what I'm most pissed about what went on with NWOD is WHO got access to it post-WW. For all NWOD's faults, its legacy was -- par for the course -- actually alright. Then it took industrial-strength bleach to the face and neck in the form of OPP and now it has to breath through a second mouth. Fuck's sake...

(The fact that a child molestor (*cough*alledged*cough*) worked -- shit, was the lead! -- on the latest iteration of the rebranded series... I mean godamm RPG gods, what did it do! What did it do to deserve that fate!)

X

Spying in a diner/bar/resturant/etc... and then pursuing is not the equiv of specifically meeting in a tavern as a ragtag group to take on a quest. That's beyond reaching and you know it.

As an extension to the above, I've done flash-forwards where the PCs are escaping from burning building and the players make up shit on the fly as to why they're in that predicament. I've done deep drops when they're literally about to enter a cave of bandits. I've dropped them right into combat or stealth moments. None of these are necessarily NWOD but the variety is far more strongly encouraged by the game than most any other game out there which usually have a proscribed style of start or situation (e.g. tavern for D&D, some drop/attack/retreat in Only War, travelling to weird horror site a la The Void).

Did you really just make an argument based on "weight of history"? Really? Really [EDITED]... Is this how we do?

Vampire is simple: "You're a Vampire. Hunt, fuck, feed, kill. And survive however you can until the next night to do it all over again". This is literally the baseline of the modern vampire interpretation and expectation -- everything follows from there.

X

Dude, you don't need turbans to differentiate characters. More than anything else, it's the portrayal of a character that people pick up on in a show or movie or even computer game. Do you really think you remember {x} crew member of BSG by their uniform? Or say SOA, do those patches on their sleeves and jackets really make you remember who they are?

Specifically on the racism point, OWOD wasn't racist because of the clothing. It was racist because the writers and artists were lazy. You can perfectly say the Roma are full of scum and thieves and shit but you have to actually fucking explore their culture and history and how they've been treated. And as we all know, if you add a "but" to anything, it immediately invalidates everything you said before it. So that leads to "OH HEY, SHIT, FUCK, THEY'RE NOT ALL JUST THIEVES, THERE IS ACTUALLY MORE TO THEM THAN THAT!" automatically. Do I really need say more?

Fuck me, not only are Frank and Trip full of shit, so are you. Use your loaf, Armor.

[Li£ Dex]

Who bet tens of millions of dollars proving you wrong? Mate, you. are. a. fuck-ing. lunatic. Your loaf's gone stale. You're a few peas short of a pod.

At least he can quote posts correctly.

[Thaluikhain]

Nothing fucking matters in VTM. It really doesn't. To the point where that game is actively hated for that very reason (among several others). You perpetually play guys and girls on the bottom rung of vampire society who've gotta take everything like a bitch.

Why? I mean, do you have to? Surely a group that's gotten tired of this can use the same materials to run a higher level game (or whatever the term should be), without having so significantly homebrew stuff more than you'd normally do?

You can perfectly say the Roma are full of scum and thieves and shit but you have to actually fucking explore their culture and history and how they've been treated. And as we all know, if you add a "but" to anything, it immediately invalidates everything you said before it. So that leads to "OH HEY, SHIT, FUCK, THEY'RE NOT ALL JUST THIEVES, THERE IS ACTUALLY MORE TO THEM THAN THAT!" automatically. Do I really need say more?

Flippantly, I'd say you might need to say how that stops it being racist. Cause saying Roma are full of thieves and scum isn't a great way to start not being racist, even if you put a "but" in there.

[Username17]

You can't lay the blame for White Wolf's collapse on taking on too many projects. They had the option to scale back on projects, and indeed killed various projects that weren't making money. Like oWoD Wraith, or nWoD Mage. Those projects ended because they did not have the fanbase.

So sure, Exalted sucks and never succeded at being the DnD killer it was supposed to be. And yeah, it was embarrassing when they tried their 'DnD is old and uncool' marketing blitz into the spearhead of 3rd edition. But so fucking what? White Wolf still had operating capital. They weren't unable to make dozens of nWoD books. They did make dozens of nWoD books. And the lines failed. They all fucking failed. Even Vampire failed.

NWoD was given dozens of books totalling tens of millions of words. Achili's vision of sad sack personal horror with no meta plot was given more of a chance than any other RPG. The idea that it languished without support is counterfactual but also laughably absurd. No game has ever had as many words printed for it in a single edition as nWoD. If I was involved with a game and it got one tenth as much support as nWoD did, I would consider that sufficient and excellent.

The fact that nWoD is a dead letter is not because it wasn't supported. It's not because it wasn't given a chance. It's because people fucking hated it. That's simply the facts.

Now you may like nWoD. But claiming that it was good overall makes you a laughingstock. People thought it was shit overall. White Wolf used to semi regularly announce how many million books they had ever sold - which inadvertently proved that sales of all books flatlined shortly after nWoD hit. Word of mouth was bad for that edition. Provably and provedly bad.

-Username17

[souran]

So, NWOD failed hard core, that is basically indisputable. However, lets compare to a couple of other well known failures.

You have indicated that NWOD had to many products in development and that sank the company. The problem is that is not what the NWOD failure looks like. TSR went under for literally the reason you suggest. They developed to many projects, many of them pointless and had no idea how to price them. Even as they were dying they were dumping product on the shelves every month. They didn't kill any lines until they got bought out. Not only that, but the "too much product" as the reason for financial failure means that the brand had a lot of value. WOTC picked up the brand and immediately set about recovering their investment by running the company better. There was fanbase there and better managment was all it took to make a better brand.


4E D&D split the fanbase and didn't have the sales of its predecessor but it fucking made money in fact, even this website can't argue that during its run it was at worst the second most profitable rpg on the market. If you look at WOTC financials 4E probably made more money than Paizo over the same period even with the smaller fanbase because they sold subscription services and other ancillary products.

So even though 4e was a failure to meet its targets it goals it was didn't sink the company or even the brand. The owners of the IP were able to again reboot and make money. Hell they even kept the 4E brand mangers in place. 5E has its own problems but again, its a product that makes money.


By comparison to NWOD both 2e D&D and 4E D&D are roaring successes.

NWOD destroyed its fanbase, neither people who wanted a good table top RPG or people who wanted a meta plot heavy LARP liked it at all. Sales were so bad that the company was kept alive by selling 3E shovelware.

Personally, I think that the issue was that people who were invested in the meta plot had no desire to learn another one from scratch while people who had wanted WOD to have better rules discovered that if you actually took out all the confusion and obfusactory bullshit in the OWOD rules that the system actually sucked as game.

NWOD was a god damn disaster. There is no other way to describe it. I was at origins right after mage was released. There was a lot of excitement for it...and then everybody ended up playing 3e and WOTC doesn't give a shit about that convention.

[Longes]

Frank, you've gone mad. nWoD Mage had 25 books vs 32 books of nWoD Vampire, but the books for it kept being made until 2012, when the second edition of nWoD came out, and then with a pause of four years nWoD Mage second edition came out in 2016. There has never been a point where White Wolf or Onyx Path decided to cancel nWoD Mage and kill the line. There was a nWoD Mage book or multiple books every year between 2005 and 2012, with the exception of 2011.

Exalted 2e was officially over in 2012 and Exalted 3e was out in 2016, and both of those dates are placed long after White Wolf merged with CCP. The second one is placed a year after White Wolf got bought by Paradox. Exalted 3e is an Onyx Path product through and through, not a White Wolf product.

[Mask_De_H]

So the line died for four years between Awakening 1st and 2nd. As the horrible shovelware machines of D&D 3.X and Pathfinder have shown, you can still continue making product for a line about to be switched over to a new edition up to about a year before launch.

Awakening 2nd got four. And was an Onyx Path joint. If the line wasn't dead, it was in a damn coma.

[Whipstitch]

Did you really just make an argument based on "weight of history"? Really? Really [EDITED]... Is this how we do?

Yeah, I used hyperbole, big deal. I stand by my point, which is that deserved or not D&D gets by in large part on inertia and institutional advantages. There's so much old content that you can demonstrably put out only 3 or 4 books a year and many fans will simply shrug their shoulders and feel unaffected because they're already playing their own home brew adaption of some bullshit Ed Greenwood wrote in the '80s. That's not an advantage most rpgs can claim.

[Username17]

Frank, you've gone mad. nWoD Mage had 25 books vs 32 books of nWoD Vampire, but the books for it kept being made until 2012, when the second edition of nWoD came out, and then with a pause of four years nWoD Mage second edition came out in 2016. There has never been a point where White Wolf or Onyx Path decided to cancel nWoD Mage and kill the line. There was a nWoD Mage book or multiple books every year between 2005 and 2012, with the exception of 2011.

Exalted 2e was officially over in 2012 and Exalted 3e was out in 2016, and both of those dates are placed long after White Wolf merged with CCP. The second one is placed a year after White Wolf got bought by Paradox. Exalted 3e is an Onyx Path product through and through, not a White Wolf product.

Mage: The Awakening: Chronicler's Guide was the last Mage: the Awakening book. We know this because it includes an essay about how it is the last book. The line ends, officially, in July 2010. A few dribs and drabs come out after that, but only at the point where they completely stop giving a fuck and start releasing unfinished drafts on Drivethru. Even then, Mage Noir is literally the only book "published" (for certain values of "published") in the entirety of 2011. No books come out in 2014 by even the most generous definitions of such things.

While Onyx Path and DriveThru print on demand bullshit cobbled together some crap no one cares about, none of that shit "exists" in a way that anyone who isn't very deep into the asshole of Onyx Path would acknowledge. Nothing printed after July, 2010 even has an entry on Amazon, for example. Because none of that garbage was ever actually printed at all. It's horseshit pdfs being sold by Richard Thomas.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

PrometheanVigil, is this your first day on the internet? Have you not been here before? I ask because your exaggerated outrage to actual information ratio is like 3:1, you spend so much time talking about how amazed you are that your opponent believes a thing that I get bored and stop reading your posts waiting for you to get to the point. You clearly think you can sell your argument on the weight of how witty you are when you're being all shocked that people disagree with you, but you're really bad at it. And this "witty outrage" approach is really common on the internet, so I don't know how you could fail to understand you're really bad at it unless you are so new to the internet that you don't yet have a solid grasp of the form. I regularly read 5,000+ word analytical articles about subjects I don't even care about because I just like reading about things, and yet I can't make it more than about 400 words into any of your posts because the information density is low and you spend so much time on interminably dull exaggerated outrage. And, like, in addition to the 5,000+ word analytical articles I also binge read chapter-by-chapter reviews of terrible books - I am exclusively familiar with Maze Runner via this format - so it's definitely not that I dislike the thing you're going for. It's just that you're atrocious at it, and more than that, you apparently have quite a bit of misguided confidence that you are very good at it, so good that you think you can hang your entire post on it without boring your readers into sliding over your post to read the responses instead. But, like, you're not. I read the first two paragraphs of your post, got bored, and read Thaluikhain and Frank responding to you instead.

[Kaelik]

I also got bored of his post and skipped it, but I was also too bored to put in the effort to understand why. Having read your explanation, I think that's it.

[Username17]

Personally, I think that the issue was that people who were invested in the meta plot had no desire to learn another one from scratch while people who had wanted WOD to have better rules discovered that if you actually took out all the confusion and obfusactory bullshit in the OWOD rules that the system actually sucked as game.

The part about the rules to nWoD being hot garbage are very true. It's not just that the rules don't work, which they don't, but even on their own terms the rules don't support most power fantasies - they deliberately removed the ability to be "good at fighting" from all the possible Vampire powers. People can put up with some pretty shit clunkiness from the rules as long as at the end of all the micromanaged bullshit and extra die rolls and shit their character gets to do something awesome. nWoD Celerity is so useless that people shake with rage and flip the fucking table over.

But the thing about learning a new metaplot is backwards. Vampire fans went into 2003 with the broad acknowledgement that the World of Darkness metaplot was bloated and full of stupid shit. Everyone was ready for a reboot. Well, I'm sure you had some number of sadsacks who refused to consider a reboot on principle, but that was not the majority position. The attitude among Vampire players in the runup to nWoD was "About fucking time!" People wanted to quietly pretend Avatar Storms and Technocratic Space Lasers and shit never happened and get some fucking sanity and theme back into the game line.

The metaplot lovers of Vampire didn't reject Requiem because they didn't want a new metaplot. They wanted a new metaplot. Loudly and almost universally they wanted a new metaplot. They rejected Requiem because Requiem did not give them a new metaplot. Nothing fucking happens in Requiem. Getting promoted in the Invictus just lets you use the company car (that should be an exaggeration, but that's literally what it says). Fighting for territory in W:tF doesn't get you anything at all. The towers that you're supposed to be fighting over in Mage are literally unreachable and might not even exist. Promethean has a full story mapped out, and the conclusion is just that your character stops being a Promethean and you stop playing the game.

Vampire society in Requiem provides brutally harsh reasons why you wouldn't want to interact with it (Predator's Taint makes putting 5 vampires in a room together basically impossible), but no reasons why you would want to try. You might as well just work a night job and buy shit online. The pitch for why you'd want to tell any stories or interact in any way with any of the people or organizations described in nWoD was sorely lacking.

Gamers and storytellers rejected nWoD because the gameline rejected them. Not because they weren't willing to tough it out, or unwilling to read a new set of books or whatever. Just because the new edition literally could not tell them a single reason why they should want to play games and tell stories in the world it described.

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

@PrometheanVigil: I wasn't even talking about individual characters, Christ.