World of Darkness and Folly

[dbb]

Wait, Lago -- so being into Dungeons and Dragons isn't enough to make you a target of ceaseless mockery, but liking Anime is beyond the pale?

[bitnine]

1166658650[/unixtime]]WW was never a system that you could play with RAW only. It was effectively a list of basic guidelines that a good storyteller used as a rough base and it could be a lot of fun in the right hands.

Yeah, that's about how I'd describe it. It was somewhere between one step above a freeform game with loose descriptions and a half-finished system with a lot of fascinating concepts. The setting and the ideas, for Mage in particular,

Back in the day, I was fairly big into MtA and frequented the boards thereof. I can tell you that most STs who ran Mage treated it almost like a labor of love and more or less finished the game themselves. The most basic elements, from magickal rolls to paradox accumulation could vary wildly from game to game because of ill-defined and plain contradictory bits in the sourcebooks.

But the setting and premise was so shiny and the play of the Ascension War entralling enough that people made it work. Defining something like a Reality Hacker paradigm alone was a wonderful creative excersize. I think the quality of the game relies very heavily on the ST. I wouldn't recommend playing it unless you could basically trust that ST to run something half-freeform, or if they've put in an incredible amount of work to build the missing half of the system. However, that setting and the thematic and creative elements that mage oWoD MtA so appealing to me are gone now. 'Tis a pity.

(Sidetrack: Ah, those boards. They did contain my favorite topic name ever: "Why I want to curb stomp Justin Achilli and then make him eat glass until he dies!" Especially when that particular developer showed up in the thread to flame the OP. Wow, I've got more than a few threads saved on my computer, including apparently a few from Tony Vargas.)

[Lago_AM3P]

Wait, Lago -- so being into Dungeons and Dragons isn't enough to make you a target of ceaseless mockery, but liking Anime is beyond the pale?

I don't need both, dammit. I already have my One Weird Thing, which is roleplaying games, and it's bad enough as it is.


EDIT: And now, I gracefully bow out of this thread. I don't have anything to add, I never had anything to add, and I don't know a goddamn thing about oWoD/nWoD. And yet I made the majority of these posts. Bye bye.

[Sir Neil]

The setup is that there's a mage girl, a werewolf, a vampire, and a robot girl. They all live together in a treehouse and have angsty adventures.

Holy crap, I've got to find an episode of that.

Seriously. If one of you guys called me up and said "Hey Arioch, we have Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu over here. They're in the mood to play World of Darkness and then they said something about having an orgy with a goofy looking former jock with a beer gut, if only they could find one", I'd tell you to sodomize yourself.

Naw, OWOD was fun. It wasn't any good, but it was fun. Kind of like Uwe Boll movies.

[Modesitt]

Arch Mastery where the book flat out says that eve the authors don't know what you can do.

They're trying to avoid screwing the pooch like they did with Archmastery the first time around. Tome of the Mysteries has significant information on how an ST can run Archmaster NPCs, but the long and short of it is they don't deal with mage society at large. The line developer has hinted at a dedicated Archmaster book somewhere far, far away, probably not before '08 at the earliest. Until then, they're pure Plot Device.

It's unplayable in the literal sense: upon reading the rulebook you are not empowered with the knowledge of how the game works.

I disagree. I played it fine for a year or so. If you're still having problems, I would strongly suggest giving Tome of the Mysteries a read through. It clears up a great deal of the WTF in the game. There's also a Skip-style errata available here. Also, read Appendix 1 in Werewolf: the Forsaken to clear up spirits - the core mage book is quite unhelpful and the Spirit book is a long way off.

---

Promethean: The fact that Prometheans can't adventure with other supernaturals is just the tip of the ice berg. I just don't think it's a good game. Here's to hoping that their next game, Changeling, is no longer subtitled Pedophile: the Fantasy.

---
Werewolf: It does a couple things right.

First, harmony. Harmony is how Wisdom should have been done. It's a completely new set of moral rules.

Second, it promotes cooperative play like none of the other lines. Vampire encourages rampant backstabbing, Mage in no way disincentives it, and Prometheans form circlejerks so they can better understand their inner child. If you want to avoid inter-party killing/betrayel, Werewolf's the game to go for.

Third, it has the best crunch. Check out the rules for making Fetishes or Totems. They actually use a POINT SYSTEM to build both. That's way better than the other lines.

Fourth, its PrCs(Lodges in this case) are the most flexible. Unlike Vampires and Mages, whose PrCs are immutable once chosen, Werewolves can switch them up as their mood changes or even be a member of multiple PrCs

But finally, if you really want to play Old Werewolf but with the new system, pick up the splatbook The Pure. The Pure are fleshed out and in many ways humanized. They're very close to Old Werewolf in many ways. They're friendly with spirits, the mere touch of silver hurts them, and they're driven by raw hate. In many ways, they're the Sabbat of old.
---

I have yet to actually meet anyone who plays nWoD, everyone I've talked to has said it more or less sucks ass and was nothing more than a desperate moneymaking stunt by White Wolf.

The system and setting work better now.

The system is a static target number with a varying number of dice. That base mechanic is a significant improvement over the statistical madness that characterized earlier editions.

The setting needed a reset. There was too much crap in the old one. We're talking about 10+ years of material, and much of the new material referenced or required earlier material. I never ran the canon Mage End of the World Scenario because it was completely incomprehensible to me. It wasn't because it was poorly written, it was because it required I know so much backstory.

Everything before the nWoD was AD&D. White Wolf learned their lessons and created the New World of Darkness.

[RandomCasualty]

1166663925[/unixtime]]
The system and setting work better now.

The system is a static target number with a varying number of dice. That base mechanic is a significant improvement over the statistical madness that characterized earlier editions.

It's a simpler system for sure, but I don't think it's a better system. I mean, the system can't even tell the difference between a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher. You can shoot a baby in the face with a shotgun and with all likelihood it will still be alive.

About the only thing good about the system is that it's relatively easy to port over to Shadowrun's system. Which is very similar to nWoD, only it doesn't suck ass.

The setting needed a reset. There was too much crap in the old one. We're talking about 10+ years of material, and much of the new material referenced or required earlier material. I never ran the canon Mage End of the World Scenario because it was completely incomprehensible to me. It wasn't because it was poorly written, it was because it required I know so much backstory.

A reset might have been fine. But this wasn't about saying "toss out all the stuff that happened". This was effectively a setting rebuild to something vaguely familiar but much more bland and mainstream. It just screamed generic to me.

The old mage game had a lot of underlying philosophical concepts to it. The new mage totally lost that.

As far as actually running a mage game, you didn't need that much background information. White wolf games were similar to running Forgotten Realms, where there is tons and tons of information about it and nobody really knows all the information. Eventually you just made up stuff to fill in the setting details that you didn't know.

There were really only a few major events that people had to know about. The awakening of Ravnos and the Avatar Storm are really the only two that come to mind immediately. Besides that, there were a bunch of minor events that you may or may not care about.

[PhoneLobster]

I already have my One Weird Thing, which is roleplaying games, and it's bad enough as it is.

Waaait... I thought Anime was mainstream now.

Oh crap.

[Immortius]

Next you'll be telling me Manga isn't mainstream yet...

Oh snap.

[Modesitt]

I mean, the system can't even tell the difference between a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher.

Yes, it can.

Stats for the RSA "Dragunov" SVD: Damage: 4(9 again), 250/500/1000 range, 10+1 cap, 2 str, 3 size, cost ****.

Stats for the disposable light HEAT(Think LAW rocket launcher): Damage: -3(L)+8, 3 blast area, force 3, 125/250/500, 3 str, 2/N size, knockdown, AP 14

You can shoot a baby in the face with a shotgun and with all likelihood it will still be alive.

No. A human infant has a Size of 1 and a Stamina of 0, MAYBE 1. Joe Blow with dex 2, 0 firearms, and a 12-gauge shotgun(4 dice+9 again) has a dice pool of 5 dice. He will usually kill a baby in one shot, or at least mortally wound it.

This was effectively a setting rebuild to something vaguely familiar but much more bland and mainstream.

And a HELL YES to that!

I've been trying to recruit someone into my ongoing Mage game. This particular someone has played D&D and Shadowrun 4E, but he's still pretty green. I've so far been unsuccessful because New Mage intimidates him. This is the second time I've had this problem. You get that? The system has been 'mainstreamed' and it's STILL extremely intimidating to newbies. Do you have any idea how hard it was to recruit players to Old Mage? Or to even explain what the hell it was all about to someone who was new to the genre? If you did, you would realize that White Wolf killed the game to save it. Did we 'lose' underlying philosophical concepts and the like? Sure. I consider the fact that I can explain Mage's setting in under 10 minutes to be worth it.

As far as actually running a mage game, you didn't need that much background information.

No, you didn't, but that wasn't my point. Let me explain.

Towards the end of TSR, more and more of their books would be unusable unless you also had books A and B. This meant that if you didn't own books A and B, you had no reason to purchase Book C. This was OK if you had a lot of disposable income and a willingness to cross-reference books. This wasn't OK if you were a casual player who didn't buy every book that came out. This meant that if you were interested in buying one book, you COULDN'T buy it and completely use it unless you had also bought earlier books that you weren't interested in.

In this regard, White Wolf was a repeat offender. I distinctly remember buying a vampire book and being very confused by all these references to 14th and 15th generation vampries. What were they TALKING about? It wasn't until someone pointed me to the book Time of Thin Blood that it made any sense at all.

---

I happen to still have my copy of the mage End Times book. I'm going to list off every single book that I'm supposed to refer to for details. I'm going to limit myself to just the first chapter.

Werewolf Book: Rage Across the Heavens
Hunter: Core book
Vampire book: Nights of Prophecy
Mage: Manifesto: Transmissions from the Rogue Council(A Mage scenario book, you have to have run the scenarios to run the 'canon' ending)
Mage: The Infinite Tapestry
Mage: Storyteller's Handbook

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I have friends who swear by the new World of Darkness because, as they put it, "They took out all the excuses", as if having the Wyrm, Technocracy, the Sabbat and so forth excused any bad things you did.

Really, I find the nWoD to be terribly bland over all. There's a few things I like about it (I love the idea that Vlad Tepes is such a egomaniac that he set up his own worship cult. If you're gonna stoop to using Dracula, that's a good way to do it IMO. Also, I like how they severed the Vampire origin from Gnostic Christianity) but there seems to be no real inborn reason for characters to do anyrthing. This is not so bad for Vampires, who in White Wolf terms have always been for power for powers sake and really don't give a flying fuck about anyone else in the World of Darkness, but for the other power groups that's a problem.

Sure, anyone can come up with an interesting plot for any setting, but when your main draw is all the glorious, involved fluff you have, looking at a setting and going "So what?" is a problem.

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

1166703666[/unixtime]]
Stats for the RSA "Dragunov" SVD: Damage: 4(9 again), 250/500/1000 range, 10+1 cap, 2 str, 3 size, cost ****.

Stats for the disposable light HEAT(Think LAW rocket launcher): Damage: -3(L)+8, 3 blast area, force 3, 125/250/500, 3 str, 2/N size, knockdown, AP 14

I see they've apparnetly added a lot of new mechanics then. Since I'm not familiar with most of the stuff on the rocket launcher. What exactly is all that stuff anyway? Damage -3(L) +8, force 3, AP 12? I assume AP is armor peircing, but the others, I realy have no clue.

No. A human infant has a Size of 1 and a Stamina of 0, MAYBE 1. Joe Blow with dex 2, 0 firearms, and a 12-gauge shotgun(4 dice+9 again) has a dice pool of 5 dice. He will usually kill a baby in one shot, or at least mortally wound it.

Ok, well maybe not a baby. But any adolescent child. The fact is that your dice pool is only going to land a success 1/3rd of the time for each dice. So if you want to reliably do 3 damage, you need 9 dice (which is a pretty big pool). And 3 damage isn't even a lot in that system.

I've been trying to recruit someone into my ongoing Mage game. This particular someone has played D&D and Shadowrun 4E, but he's still pretty green. I've so far been unsuccessful because New Mage intimidates him. This is the second time I've had this problem. You get that? The system has been 'mainstreamed' and it's STILL extremely intimidating to newbies. Do you have any idea how hard it was to recruit players to Old Mage? Or to even explain what the hell it was all about to someone who was new to the genre? If you did, you would realize that White Wolf killed the game to save it. Did we 'lose' underlying philosophical concepts and the like? Sure. I consider the fact that I can explain Mage's setting in under 10 minutes to be worth it.

But explaining it in 10 minutes lost everything that actually made mage good. There are no more underlying concepts to the game, nor any bigger picture. To me, the game isn't even worth playing anymore. It's like stripping the entire conspiracy element from Evangelion and just having it entirely about big robots versus angels with no backstory at all. In the end, the setting was castrated. It just isn't interesting anymore, at least to me.

Yeah, all the stuff they removed is really important. I wouldn't have even minded if they decided to toss some of the traditions and mainstream that a bit, but getting rid of the fundamental concept of reality=belief was a big mistake. Paradox doesn't even make sense anymore.

They took something great and ruined it. The setting is dumbed down to the point of being lame and generic.

In this regard, White Wolf was a repeat offender. I distinctly
remember buying a vampire book and being very confused by all these references to 14th and 15th generation vampries. What were they TALKING about? It wasn't until someone pointed me to the book Time of Thin Blood that it made any sense at all.

Yeah, white wolf was great for cross referencing. It was a pain in the ass at times, but I never had that much of a problem with it. You generally just looked up whatever it was you were curious about on the internet and you'd find basic information. Often times, you could simply ignore whatever it was they were talking about because it wasn't especially central to the plot. Mage was actually the easiest in that regard because Mage didn't have a heck of a lot of added mechanics. Mage stuck mostly with core only as far as how the system itself worked and that made it somewhat playable.

Vampire was the big offender I think for cross referencing, as you had NPCs in adventures with new disciplines that were from other books, and you seriously had no clue what they even did. They needed to at some point make a big compendium of disciplines and rules and stuff.

With mage you were missing parts of the storyline (which was kind of a pain if you were running prepackaged adventures) but it didn't matter if you ran your own campaign.

[Lago_AM3P]

But explaining it in 10 minutes lost everything that actually made mage good. There are no more underlying concepts to the game, nor any bigger picture. To me, the game isn't even worth playing anymore. It's like stripping the entire conspiracy element from Evangelion and just having it entirely about big robots versus angels with no backstory at all. In the end, the setting was castrated. It just isn't interesting anymore, at least to me.

I don't know WoD, but I agree with RandomCasualty here. The only setting I know that can not only be summed up in two or three sentences but also has no further depth than that (and still consistently attracts players) is Mutants and Masterminds.

And the reason why Mutants and Masterminds can get away with it is because the superhero genre iwell established in modern American culture. Even people who never engage in nerd hobbies but maybe watched Spiderman, Superman, and Batman when they were in the theaters can visualize the settings.

So what do you do for, say, Mage I take it when you don't have such a rich body of out-of-game work to help people immerse themselves into the setting? I imagine that it'd have to work in the same way WoD did to originally attract people: find a genre construct that people like, tell people that the game expounds on this and if they show interest introduce more setting elements to the players.

You don't have to throw everything at players to get them started. I mean, to enjoy Star Wars you didn't have to watch a single sci-fi movie before it. But if you loved Star Wars with all of your hate, there's extra stuff out there for you to enjoy it more. And what do you know, they mad a fan into a fanatic and made more money while not alienating the new people.

But:

Vampire was the big offender I think for cross referencing, as you had NPCs in adventures with new disciplines that were from other books, and you seriously had no clue what they even did. They needed to at some point make a big compendium of disciplines and rules and stuff.

This is an example of overcomplicating that you can't overcome.

It's one thing to print flavor text for your modern horror campaign that says, 'every summer night in this isolated Chilean village, zombies emerge from the ancient Mayan battlefield in an attempt to feast on the brains of mortals. For some unknown reason the police or army, while well within their power to stop the rampage, never show up. Many brains are eaten. Here are the zombies' stats in case the heroes want to fight the zombie hordes.'

This is workable. You don't necessarily have to have the game describe a reason why the police don't show up (though a reason is necessary). The Storyteller for this game decides that it's because they think the zombie horde is a virus and want to minimize exposure. In fact, they have the area under constant surveillance and are intentionally using the village as bait while they think of a countermeasure.

BUT THEN LATER an expansion book states that Pinochet intentionally doesn't interfere because he needs an outlet for his sadism. He has hidden cameras around the village that record the slaughter.

Did this detail destroy the underlying premise? It might have, depending on what the Storyteller assumed. Does it break the game? No.

What WILL break the game is if the zombies and villagers don't have stats on the good chance the characters want to fight them.

[bitnine]

1166703666[/unixtime]]Do you have any idea how hard it was to recruit players to Old Mage? Or to even explain what the hell it was all about to someone who was new to the genre? If you did, you would realize that White Wolf killed the game to save it. Did we 'lose' underlying philosophical concepts and the like? Sure.

Yeah, they had been moving towards stripping elements away to make room for greater accessibility for some time. Rev showed a great trend towards this, downplaying the Ascension War, locking away the other worlds, largely nixing the masters and more fantastic elements (wasn't that right after the release of Masters of the Art?), blowing up the digital web and reformatting it and all that.

Honestly, though, I never had all that hard of a time finding players. The system was indeed sort of intimidating, but you could sketch out the concepts and big names in 20 minutes or so and introduce a new player pre-Awakening. Picking up specific rules and how things works as a player flows fairly naturally when one theme and focus of a low level game was an exploration of the nature of reality and introduction and transition to the hidden supernatural world.

Then again, I was a philosophy minor at a tech school, so other's mileage may vary. The folk that I did introduce it to found it fascinating and enjoyable for its most unique aspects, those selfsame things which were later excised. Seriously, I never found the premise, setting, or underlying philosophical elements to be the problematic part for me or my players. Loosely defined rules seemed like more of an issue.

I happen to still have my copy of the mage End Times book.

Your point stands about the heavy referencing that WW did in general, but the end times book was supposed to bring all of the existing elements together and help you have an idea of bringing them to a close. Mage was the best of the oWoD games to run off of the core book as well as pick books up. A good part of this is that you knew the spheres, organizations, and hopefully had the setting books for the settings you wanted to utilize.

It was also much less impacted by the progression of the metaplot than other games, as a simple sidebar would say "the metaplot curb stomps you if you try to go into the umbra or incorporate fantastic elements" instead of more disruptive things like "WTF 15th gen? When did all Ravnos asplode?!" Now, I don't want to say that the metaplot and avatar storm were lame and most people ignored it for the better - Wait, actually, yeah, yeah I do.

Things having to do with the metaplot, modules in particular, was riddled with cross-references. So certainly, running the module with the metaplot's conclusion (fisticuffs against Voormas, was it?) referenced all the books that were peppered with mentions thereof. Other parts of the system? Not so much.

Vampire was the big offender I think for cross referencing, as you had NPCs in adventures with new disciplines that were from other books, and you seriously had no clue what they even did.

Yeah, given that new spheres weren't likely to be introduced and Rotes were self-contained enough to simply explain parenthetically, you might run an effect differently than outlined in a particular supplement, but you still could using the general rules.

Actually, a couple of Rotes did go against the rules, like that Euthanatos Matter 2/Prime 2 animate-the-dead deal, and that probably wasn't too good. WW had a proud tradition of handing out kewl things that run afoul of their own rules, and no game line was exempt.

So what do you do for, say, Mage I take it when you don't have such a rich body of out-of-game work to help people immerse themselves into the setting?

You show them Dark City (and assume they've seen the Matrix) and ask if they have any background in philosophy? It was actually fairly handy that Mages started mortal in a fairly everyday world - players can certainly grasp that. Learning about their powers and the true nature of the world is something that happened to the character, so I'd certainly recommend starting most any new player before their Awakening.

Oh, and for the genre, Mage could be played to a number of different genres or styles. Many fans of the other games complained that this was a reason that MtA didn't fit the WoD, and fans of some of these expressions didn't care for the emofication of Rev flavor (the Ascension war is lost, the masters are gone, the fantastic elements are a thing of the past, now it's time to try to survive and cry about it). In fact, there were going to be a series of genre-books dedicated to talking about how to run different styles of games with the system. I own Tales of Magick: Dark Adventure, and found it to be an interesting read. Hell, you could have a group of Sons of Ether players emulating Doc Savage and fighting dinosaur-riding Nazi Technomystics under the light of the sun within our hollow planet.

[Username17]

Do you have any idea how hard it was to recruit players to Old Mage?

Yes. Old Mage sucked ass and I refuseds to play it. The setting was unstable to the point where there's no reason it wouldn't already have destroyed itself by the time the PCs walked into it. The power level was off the hook to the point where it not only couldn't be played with other setting books it couldn't even really be played within its own context.

But the worst offense of it all wasn't even the fact that the entire game was "Suicide Bomber: The Recconning" - where your goal was to get into the biggest pile of humans you could find and make a magical detonation that would probably kill you and a lot of them - no the worst problem was the fact that the PCs were the fvcking Taliban.

I mean sure, you're the bad guys in Vampire too. You drink human blood and whatever. But holy shit! In Mage your actual goal is to eliminate technology and regress humanity to the stone age so that people like you can boss people around by interpreting the word of God. Fvck that!

Not only was the game completely unplayable, but even attempting to do so is morally reprobate. The game was actually evil, and attempted to portray the worst of humanity as its saviors.

Since I'm not familiar with most of the stuff on the rocket launcher.

The key here is that in addition to having a clumsy system, nWoD also has a bunch of extra rules for no reason. Weapons which are explosive or electrical have a completely different mechanic that functions in all ways differently than anything else in the game.

So while you are correct that an AV rocket launcher is the same as a Sniper Rifle, a High Explosive Rocket Launcher has a completely different mechanic. Instead of having an arbitrary number of damage dice where it causes some small but significant number of wounds each turn regardless of who's using it or who it's being used against - explosives have a scatter roll and a targetting roll, and then they cause automatic damage levels to everyone in the area.

Vampires should generally drop explosives at their feet because this incapacitates everyone in the room regardless of die rolls or skill - and vampires can jolly well repair themselves and other creatures usually can't.

It's the worst of both worlds: a lack of granularity makes combat uninteresting and pointless, while unique mechanics make combat unplayable and confusing.

---

Now modern Mage lacks the underlying and hideously evil conceit that the world would be better if ordinary people couldn't control light and heat while they were lorded over by religious zealots who could fly. But it also doesn't have anything cool. The game isn't as overpowered or confusing, but you still can't play it next to Vampires so there's no point.

The nWoD groups aren't locked in a death struggle, which means that playing mixed groups is possible at all - which is a huge improvement. Clan and organizational allegiance has taken a back seat to coterie, and that's great for the game.

oWoD had a secret organization inside a secret organization that controlled a secret organization of vampires and was itself controlled by a secret bloodline of vampires who were themselves secretly the puppets of a secret vampire god. Did you follow that? It's all laid out in Sabbat, Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, and the Brujah clan book! That was too fvcking much. People could not seriously run with that, it had to be cleaned up.

But a lot of the things that nWoD does aren't any cleaner. They promised a world with less crap in it, but Bloodline Bloat has already taken over and gone native. nWoD needed to happen, but the way they did it was an insult.

-Username17

[Username17]

No. A human infant has a Size of 1 and a Stamina of 0, MAYBE 1. Joe Blow with dex 2, 0 firearms, and a 12-gauge shotgun(4 dice+9 again) has a dice pool of 5 dice. He will usually kill a baby in one shot, or at least mortally wound it.

A human baby has a Stamina of 1 according to the rules I'm looking at.

A five die pool generates zero successes 16.8% of the time and 1 success 32.4% of the time. The babie is not dropped 49.22% of the time.

So you're right, you can usually drop a baby with a shotgun in just one attack. A whole 50.78% of the time - that's more than half the time!

---

But basically, nWoD combat blows beyond reason or comprehension. There's a pile of dice and they do damage. If you're fight 2 opponents, you go 50/50 with them if your dice pool is three times he size of their dice pools. If you are fighting 3 opponents, you go fifty-fifty if your dice pool is six times the size of any of theirs. If you are fighting four opponents, you break even if your dice pool is an order of magnitude larger than any of theirs.

With White Wolf stat caps, that's not even possible.

-Username17

[Eela6]

Mage (and by extension, White Wolf) happen to be absolutely stupid. Let's face it - White Wolf was only saved by the fact that it's rules don't work. Much like L5R, it latched on to a certain self-hating aspect of the market and created a new section of RPG gamers [in L5R, self-hating Japanophiles, in White Wolf, self-hating Goth-Vampire-Emo-Furries.]

It happened to accumulate a tradition of "Awesome Roleplaying" - some of which did exist, because the cool people who played it realized the rules didn't work [especially the combat ones] and tried to get around it by coming up with complicated ways to avoid combat. It even came up with a couple cool things - let's face it, everyone wants to beat the shit out of people in a game like Exalted occasionally.

Of course, Exalted has a bunch of it's own problems, including the fact it's hard as hell to beat the shit out of someone because there's no gorram combat rules that work. In any case, nWOD attempted to fix this. It succeeded at one cruical thing - it knocked the furries the hell out of Werewolf, which makes the entire setting much more playable. Unfortunately, it somehow made the rules worse , and that's an (un)holy accomplishment.

Add to that the fact that a couple cool things (namely, the less-complicated, less-emo vampire stuff) are gone, and you have a recipe for nothing worthwhile. Even the promise of being within ten feet of a hot gamer chick (tm) isn't worth the internal bleeding.

My best advice is to join a group with as many Hot Gamer Chick (tm)s as possible and have them delve as deep into the rules as they can. If they're not complete idiots, they'll quickly realize that nWOD is shit. If they are, leave now.

From there, you can pull out your sneakily prepared modified version of d20 or Fate or Fudge or something like that and go - "Hey, we can run an emo-trash Vampire game in this rules system!" Since they aren't complete idiots, they'll look it over and realize you're right.

From there you can wean them on to D+D or your game of choice. As long as said game isn't, say, FATAL, it has to be better. Good luck.

[RandomCasualty]

Not only was the game completely unplayable, but even attempting to do so is morally reprobate. The game was actually evil, and attempted to portray the worst of humanity as its saviors.

I don't think I'd go that far. The traditions weren't exactly that evil. Some of them were even technomancers. Most of them disliked the technocracy because it wanted to eliminate all other magic aside from technology. So like if you were a Verbena witch or whatever, the technocracy was actively trying to stamp you out because it didn't like you.

I didn't get the idea that the traditions were anti-technological, hell, even some of the order of Hermes used technology. The traditions werent out to stamp out technology like the werewolves were, they just wanted to allow for the possibility of magic as well as technology. They weren't opposed to the technocracy introducing science so much as them 'disproving' the existence of magic, which caused all kinds of crazy paradox for tradition members and made their lives a bit more hellish.

Now, their ways had disadvantages and advantages. If you bought into their whole magic theories you coudl have sick people spontaneously cured by spells and prayers, on the other hand you could also get vengeful minotaurs and spirits rampaging the countryside. As the traditions saw it, the technocracy was trying to create a stale rigidly defined world lacking imagination and wonder. And basically preventing them from doing good deeds, like spontaneously curing the sick or raising the dead.

I wouldnt' call their philosophies evil per se, though it might have been a bit selfish, because they had the most to gain through their perfect world. It wasn't inherently destructive though.

I've always looked at it similar to D&D mechanics versus White wolf. D&D relies on codified, complex rules to manage reality, while white wolf is much more loose and storyteller controlled. The technocracy was D&D, supporting codified mechanics because they supposedly protect the average person, and the traditions felt that looser rules on reality were beneficial because they weren't as stifling to creativity, and the world would be better if people did their own thing without some universal authority telling them what is and isn't possible.

One of the interesting aspects of mage was that you could actually see both the traditions side and the technocracy's side. The technocracy was actually misleading and brainwashing the people and taking away magic from them that they never knew they had (or could have). It was a hell of an oppressive organization, because its goal was to sterilize elements that didn't fit with its paradigm. On the other hand, the work that it did seemed to benefit humanity on many levels.

If anything was true of mage, is that much of the conflict, tradition versus technocracy wasn't about white hats versus black hats, but rather two philosophical factions with good and bad points and theories to them. Yeah, eventually you came to agree with one side or the other, but you could see each side's points.

It's natural to side with the technocracy because that's actually the world we live in now and it's hard to imagine a world of flexible reality limitations because we're so used to rigid restrictions, where everything happens because of specific rules. So if magic suddenly came into being and all of a sudden people could fly, and giants walked down main street, well we'd be a little bit scared. Of course, when bad things happen in life, we all wish there was a little magic we could turn to to fix things.

Then we get to the new mage...

The new mage is just black hat tyrannical wizards who want to control all of reality versus everyone else. And that's pretty lame. There really is no agenda or underlying story besides "there are these evil guys and they want to kill us. Lets take them down first."

*Yawn*

The nWoD groups aren't locked in a death struggle, which means that playing mixed groups is possible at all - which is a huge improvement. Clan and organizational allegiance has taken a back seat to coterie, and that's great for the game.

Well, I enver really thought mixed groups were all that great an idea to start with. I mean, the games themselves tend to be so political that it's rather difficult to try to include the social structures and factions from all the games at once. Alternately you can have one character who is the fish out of water, but that's often not all that fun to play, not to mention rather tough to play.

Mages tended to suck ass early on, but when they started getting good they blew past everything in terms of power. And there just wasn't any good way for any of the other factions to counteract a correspondence mage. He could pretty much scry on you and teleport to you whenever, wherever you were and there wasn't anything you could actively do about it. Mages really had to fight mages, because at high power levels they could chew through anything else. Most of the time though, it didn't matter because mages didn't especailly care.

1166727093[/unixtime]]
oWoD had a secret organization inside a secret organization that controlled a secret organization of vampires and was itself controlled by a secret bloodline of vampires who were themselves secretly the puppets of a secret vampire god. Did you follow that? It's all laid out in Sabbat, Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, and the Brujah clan book! That was too fvcking much. People could not seriously run with that, it had to be cleaned up.

Well I always viewed that stuff as being totally optional anyway. The characters don't know any of that stuff anyway, so whether that conspiracy really exists or not is entirely up to the Storyteller, and he can add or subtract as many conspiracy layers as he sees fit to his own game.

The main thing with vampire was that while it was exceedingly complex, there was so much crap that was behind the curtain that the PC's never found out about that it didn't matter whether the storyteller used it or not. Most vampire campaigns didn't even delve into the deep background of the multilayered secret organizations and focused more on the PCs and their more mundane struggles and that's what vampire tended to be best at anyway. People were more interested that two of the cities primogen were trying to plot an overthrow of the prince as opposed to hearing about some millenia old vampire god is trying to take over the world.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

1166727093[/unixtime]]
I mean sure, you're the bad guys in Vampire too. You drink human blood and whatever. But holy shit! In Mage your actual goal is to eliminate technology and regress humanity to the stone age so that people like you can boss people around by interpreting the word of God. Fvck that!

So all this time the Republican party have been mages?

[Lago_AM3P]

But the worst offense of it all wasn't even the fact that the entire game was "Suicide Bomber: The Recconning" - where your goal was to get into the biggest pile of humans you could find and make a magical detonation that would probably kill you and a lot of them - no the worst problem was the fact that the PCs were the fvcking Taliban.

I mean sure, you're the bad guys in Vampire too. You drink human blood and whatever. But holy shit! In Mage your actual goal is to eliminate technology and regress humanity to the stone age so that people like you can boss people around by interpreting the word of God. Fvck that!

Not only was the game completely unplayable, but even attempting to do so is morally reprobate. The game was actually evil, and attempted to portray the worst of humanity as its saviors.

Then what was the deal with the Technocrats? Were they the good guys, relatively speaking?

Also, this seems like the best time to bring it up, so: the extradimensional mage-only world in Harry Potter. What do you think of it?

[bitnine]

1166732215[/unixtime]]I don't think I'd go that far. The traditions weren't exactly that evil. Some of them were even technomancers. Most of them disliked the technocracy because it wanted to eliminate all other magic aside from technology. So like if you were a Verbena witch or whatever, the technocracy was actively trying to stamp you out because it didn't like you.

No, I'd say that because of one of the fun parts of the WoD, he's right on the money. Sort of. All factions in the oWoD ate babies to keep it edgy. But it was more than that.

The technocracy tortured babies to death for experimentation, labotomized children, and enslaved people so that their souls could power machinery that would eventually assimilate the human race. Simultaneously, they wanted the world to be safe and empowering for the benefit of normal people and sacrificed endlessly to pave the way to a better future.

Traddies were relics from a past time who wanted to blow up office buildings so that they could tear down the empowerment of humanity and turn into animals in the middle of a town square and terrorize and rule over the masses. At the same time they were just trying to keep their way of life alive and wanted people to be free from the subversive control, experimentations, and abuse from the other supernatural forces.

I seriously think they wanted to keep things ambiguous by publishing contradictory pieces. That way your storyteller could decide who the good and bad guys were and have a large amount of support purely based on the pieces of text he wanted to emphasize. Either that or they were just horribly inconsistant and let and number of wildly conflicting takes in now and again.

Now, many storytellers painted a picture similar to the one that you mentioned, but some didn't. Some ran technocratic games where mankind needed protection from these primal throwbacks and dangerous hackers. Others ran tradition-based games where the traditions were the last thing standing before a literal enslavement of the minds of mankind. Still others ran orphan based games where both sides had ideologies that had been long corrupted by a lust for power and control and mere survival was tantamount.

I can dig through my books and cite examples for all of these, even when taken together their coexistance simply doesn't work. It runs beyond different factions that could conceivably work within a single organization. It might work better if you take the descriptions, even those not explicitly in character, to be heavily colored, but this applies even to particulars statted out. No amount of cloak and dagger or 'secret corruption' should result in the two technocrats above sharing an office.

However, what almost all games had in common was that mages were imminently human, and an exploration of that condition when exposed to power and control over reality itself. The game doesn't dictate goals on a personal level; it largely serves as a storytelling vehicle.

And I have to say that Werewolf still wins in my book. Nothing like an IC post from a 'savior' who spouts off about racial purity, slaughters, and how he keeps human women around for breeding stock, then tears them apart and eats the remains.

[Lago_AM3P]

I know I've repeatedly broken my promise not to post in this thread anymore, but bitnine's last post sort of made me ill.

I mean, I was complaining about Shadowrun and D&D because the subtext is that you're playing a group of psychopaths who steal and murder in the name of a greater good (or sometimes personal greed).

The way you guys are describing WoD makes the protagonists sound downright twisted, even if they do their best to emphasize the 'good' aspects of whatever the fuck they're fighting for. What gives, gentle reader?

[RandomCasualty]

1166736297[/unixtime]]
Then what was the deal with the Technocrats? Were they the good guys, relatively speaking?

Sort of. The basic concept of mage is that reality = mass belief. So if society believes in demons and evil spirits, then they really exist and can hurt you. If the general population disbelieves in them, then they don't exist anymore. Science and the laws of science are nothing more than another form of magic. In mage, guns fire because people believe they work that way. Medicine cures people because people believe it does. The whole scientific principles behind that is effectively a bunch of crap to amke it more believable, which in turn makes it work.

Mages were people who could break those rules, sort of. A mage can bend reality and make all sorts of effects happen, though he is still affected by reality's influence in the form of paradox. If you perform effects which go agaisnt people's perceptions of reality, especially in front of observers, then you generate paradox and a lot of it. Of course you can still do small stuff. Theoretically almost anyone could be awakened and become a mage.

Basically the technocracy was a propaganda campaign trying to push the idea that science was the one truth to the universe. And as people started to believe that and disbelieve magical things, science takes over.

Now, part of the technocratic paradigm is also that people need to be protected. So the best way to protect them from weird space aliens or magical spirits is to claim they don't exist and get people to believe that lie. It also means the technocracy wants to actively eliminate anything that doesn't fit their paradigm, which generally leads to the "my way or the highway" philosophy, where the highway happens to be a quick death or imprisonment.

Whether you view the technocracy as good or evil as a whole is really a matter of your point of view. The technocracy is securing a limited safety for humanity at the cost of a rigid reality following thier rules, which requires that it eliminate or convert anyone who disagrees with their point of view. So yeah, they go about brainwashing, assassination and otherwise covering up the truth. In fact, they even pissed off some other technomages who joined with the traditions becuase their theories didn't fit in with the mainstream technocracy.

As with any organization, they've got some asses who do inhuman experiments on people and such. The technocracy is also interested more in the big picture, and that makes them rather inhuman. The technocracy thinks it's okay to sacrifce lots of people to further their goals as long as it leads society in the right direction. The value of the individual really doesn't fit firmly in their paradigm.

And because the technocracy applies such rigid standards to reality, it limits the potential of humanity in many ways.

I honestly can't say whether I think they're the good guys or the bad guys. They certainly have valid points, I'll give them that. But I wouldn't go so far as to call them white hats.

Nobody can say really how each factions plan for reality will work out. The technocracy's plan could become Star Trek or it could be 1984. The traditions may create some magical utopia where everyone is a mage and the world is a paradise or the world might become like Shadowrun, where you've just got all kinds of crazy magic/techno shit running around.

The way you guys are describing WoD makes the protagonists sound downright twisted, even if they do their best to emphasize the 'good' aspects of whatever the fvck they're fighting for. What gives, gentle reader?

Well, remember that organizations on WoD don't have any internal morality, so it's real easy to get a twisted SoB in your ranks who gives your whole faction a bad name. And that applies to the traditions, the technocracy, the Camarilla and the werewolves. Sometimes the guy may just be a zealot who takes his cause too far, other times he's not fully into the organization's cause and more about advancing his own power. Factions aren't like D&D temples where everyone is a loyal follower of one all knowing ubergod.

Really though as far as werewolves go, I have to agree with bitnine. Those guys were real twisted. I never fully understood the werewolves morality. Aside from them fighting something potentially more evil than they were, they didn't seem like good guys by any means. To me they were more like the sociopathic cousins of Captain Planet.

[Sir Neil]

I was complaining about Shadowrun and D&D because the subtext is that you're playing a group of psychopaths who steal and murder in the name of a greater good (or sometimes personal greed).

You haven't seen psychopathy until you've played Werewolf the Apocalypse.

The good guys are homicidal druids who try to preserve the planet's environment by killing anyone who disrespects it.

The bad guys are demons trying to poison the planet until it's indistinguishable from the lower planes.

In Changling the Dreaming, the players are psychic vampires feeding on creativity.

I haven't played Wraith.

[Username17]

The concept of the world of darkness setting is that the world is horrible and trying to make you do horrible things, and you have to constantly struggle to retain your moral center as you slowly descend into madness and evil. In short: Lovecraft influenced gothic horror.

oWoD attempted this and failed. Miserably. In a three part process:

1. You have a "Humanity" score. Doing bad shit makes that score fall, you suffer penalties, you have to make Willpower checks to avoid doing bad shit, and eventually you turn into a flaming chainsaw weilding NPC if your humanity runs out.
   
2. Villains need to be able to do bad things without that making them run around with a flaming chainsaw, so they introduce "paths" - which are simply alternate moral codes that you can adhere to in order to keep that from happening.
   
3. You now have eliminated humanity as a concern entirely since people can just cherry-pick a moral system that happens to correspond to whatever the fvck their character wanted to do in the first place.

And well shucks, the raw advanatages of evil are still totally there and the game mechanical incentives that tried to force you to be eil are there too. Only now being evil doesn't actually do shit to you so your character just turns into a horrible person that does depraved things and nothing bad ever happens because of it. D'oh!

So nWoD steps in. Paths are gone. Now you have to worry about your humanity again. That's a step in the right direction, right?

Hells no! They introduced a bunch of non-sensical Christian bullshit at the same time. You get penalized more for stealing a car from the factory at Mitsubishi than you do for stealing a homeless man's sandwhich. You have to choose a vice and a virtue that are pulled right from the Sunday School crap. Seriously, there are seven virtues and one of them is Faith, and none of them is triggered by bettering the plight of man.

There are seven vices now, and one of them is gluttony. I'm not even kidding.

The current nWoD morality scale is fvcked like seven ways. Being Robin Hood causes your humanity to go down because you're stealing.

-Username17

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Is there a path that lets you run around with a flaming chainsaw? Because I wouldn't mind playing a character that runs around with a flaming chainsaw.