Vampire: 20th Anniversary Edition

[TheFlatline]

So the PDF just came out and I'm browsing through it. Having caught the fight over Celerity and how much BS it could ensue, I made it one of the first stops in my flipthrough. It sounds like they've toned it down, but still given it some very useful abilities.

Celerity now gives you an extra die to any dex pool. Period. Then, for every dot in celerity, you can now spend a blood point to gain an extra action. So Celerity 4 requires 4 blood to get all 4 actions. This can burn past your generational limit of burning blood. Also, each extra action you buy, you lose 1 of those bonus dex dice.

So now Celerity is useful in a whole bunch of other stuff but more expensive to curb-stomp with. I'm okay with this.

Flower of Death (Celerity 7) now costs 4 blood, adds your celerity rating in dice to all attacks (not just dex attacks), and actions bought for Celerity don't penalize this bonus. Not bad at all.

Fortitude seems unchanged. It would have been interesting to have Fort take the same system that Potence below has.

Potence now adds strength dice flat out instead of successes. To upgrade to successes, you have to spend a point of blood. A bit of a nerf, but not too bad.

More as I review this thing. It's 500+ pages, and a lot of it is been there done that, but there's still a lot of material to cover.

[TheFlatline]

If memory serves it looks like the generational blood pools/blood per turn limits have been tweaked at lower levels.

8th gen has 15 blood points and can spend 3 a turn
9th: 14/2
10th: 13/1

Anything higher than 10th just loses one point of blood pool per generation.

[Username17]

As before, failing to spend all of your starting background points on Generation is just you hammering a nail into your dick. The various backgrounds are all fucking insane, with the amount you get for various things totally unbalanced. Taking a point of Camarilla status gets you literally nothing, while taking a point of Sabbat status makes you a Pack Priest. Resources are in generally basically the same thing as Influence except that they is not as good.

The Backgrounds are even less fleshed out than they were in nWoD, which is amazing. There are basically no coherent examples. Resources, for example, tells us that "You receive a basic allowance each month based on your rating" but it does not tell you what these allowances are. Higher levels of Resources allow you to maintain lower levels of resources without doing anything, but the lowest levels don't actually require you to do anything to maintain. So Resources one tells us "You can maintain a typical residence in the style of the working class with stability" (amphasis mine), while the 2-dot version tells us "A fraction of your resources are available in cash, readily portable property (like jewelry or furniture), and other valuables (such as a car or modest home) that let you maintain a standard of living at the one-dot level wherever you happen to be, for up to six months."

So... one-dot is stable, but 2-dots is only worth one-dot for six months. That doesn't even sound very stable.

Oh... and Fortitude is completely worthless. Potence is bonus Strength dice that you can upgrade to automatic hits at the rate of one blood per round (that's one blood for however much Potence you have, not one blood per automagic hit).

But the bottom line is: they brought back the variable Target Number and 1s are negative hits again. The game is essentially unplayable, making the entire nearly 600 pages of material an astonishing waste of time.

-Username17

[Ferret]

Is that the '1's remove existing hits and so larger dice pools lead to LESS chance of success past 8 dice?' thing again?

[Username17]

Is that the '1's remove existing hits and so larger dice pools lead to LESS chance of success past 8 dice?' thing again?

The chance of success still goes up at difficulty 10, but if you have a higher dice pool, your chance of catastrophic failure also increases as you go up in dice pool. Also, for any high difficulties, you can buy an automatic success with things like Potence: and when you do that your chance of failure does indeed increase as your dice pool increases.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Also, for any high difficulties, you can buy an automatic success with things like Potence: and when you do that your chance of failure does indeed increase as your dice pool increases.

Wait, what? Buying automatic successes can increase your chance of failure?

[Username17]

Also, for any high difficulties, you can buy an automatic success with things like Potence: and when you do that your chance of failure does indeed increase as your dice pool increases.

Wait, what? Buying automatic successes can increase your chance of failure?

No. After you bought successes, you succeed unless you generate enough botches on your actual dice to cancel that out. In short: your chance of failure goes up when you have more skill and a larger dice pool.

-Username17

[Koumei]

Oh right, now I understand.

[TheFlatline]

Also, for any high difficulties, you can buy an automatic success with things like Potence: and when you do that your chance of failure does indeed increase as your dice pool increases.

Wait, what? Buying automatic successes can increase your chance of failure?

No. After you bought successes, you succeed unless you generate enough botches on your actual dice to cancel that out. In short: your chance of failure goes up when you have more skill and a larger dice pool.

-Username17

Actually, according to this version of the rules, if you roll even one success, you can roll 9 1's and still just fail. It's not a botch.

But yeah, it's still generally the same game as before. However, I imagine the hardcover book will be worth something in a year or so. These limited editions usually are. Dark Heresy runs for 500 bucks now, Deathwatch I've seen go for 400, etc...

[JigokuBosatsu]

So are 1s taking away successes acceptable, or is the problem with the concept of the 'botch'?

[souran]

But the bottom line is: they brought back the variable Target Number and 1s are negative hits again. The game is essentially unplayable, making the entire nearly 600 pages of material an astonishing waste of time.

-Username17

What? What? A re-released version of OWOD is NOT PLAYABLE! I am SHOCKED, SHOCKED I tell you! This could obviously not have been forseen by anyone. I mean, every previous version of OWOD was renowned for its playability and the tightness and elegance of its ruleset.

And look, every one of your complaints is so new and raw. Its not like these compliants were not exactly the ones that lead to the design decisions made for NWOD! No, they can't be, that would be like discovering that the grass is not actually greener on the other side, or that the memory of a thing can be better than the thing itself.

The shock of these developments is to great, I cannot believe how badly we have been fooled, decieved even, into the the belief that a game that was basically shit 20 years ago could be republished with minimal changes to save a company and a genre.

Oh the humanity.

[fectin]

Frank and Flatline are disagreeing on the facts, for a rather important point. Who is correct?

[Username17]

We're currently talking about them unfixing things that were fixed in the Revised Edition of OWOD Vampire. That's... bizarre.

So are 1s taking away successes acceptable, or is the problem with the concept of the 'botch'?

1s taking away successes is generally a bad idea, because it means that adding dice can in some instances be bad. Having 1s take away successes is a completely horrendous idea if you also have ways anywhere in the system to buy automatic successes, which this system does in fact have.

By the way: this book is incredibly badly laid out. I mean: wow. The combat rules reiterate the attack system at least half a dozen times over ten pages, and I can't actually see explicit confirmation anywhere as to what the actual damage calculation is. You shoot a fool with a pistol, and you roll Dex+Firearms, if you roll any successes and your target isn't dodging, you hit and now go to the damage roll. But let's say you rolled two successes, is your damage roll 4 dice (the gun) + 2 dice (the successes on the to-hit roll) for a total of 6? Or does the first success not count and you only roll 5 dice? I can't fucking tell because the writing is so bad.

-Username17

[Username17]

Frank and Flatline are disagreeing on the facts, for a rather important point. Who is correct?

Flatline is correct and I am wrong.

The key is that you botch if you have botches and no successes. And botches cancel with successes and remove the dice completely. So if you have net botches you by definition have zero successes, and they stress that the successes have been completely removed. But nevertheless, there is a caveat that if any successes were there and were removed, it doesn't count as a botch, which appears to be a last minute change since the rest of the entry is written as if you specifically don't have any successes in that instance.

-Username17

[souran]

By the way: this book is incredibly badly laid out. I mean: wow. The combat rules reiterate the attack system at least half a dozen times over ten pages, and I can't actually see explicit confirmation anywhere as to what the actual damage calculation is. You shoot a fool with a pistol, and you roll Dex+Firearms, if you roll any successes and your target isn't dodging, you hit and now go to the damage roll. But let's say you rolled two successes, is your damage roll 4 dice (the gun) + 2 dice (the successes on the to-hit roll) for a total of 6? Or does the first success not count and you only roll 5 dice? I can't fucking tell because the writing is so bad.

-Username17

You must stop, my poor heart cannot take it anymore.

Now you are telling me that the rules are written in a confusing style and that the layout is bad? These things, which have only been true of every white wolf book I have ever read of any kind ever, are unbelieveable and cut me to the core!

[TheFlatline]

By the way: this book is incredibly badly laid out. I mean: wow. The combat rules reiterate the attack system at least half a dozen times over ten pages, and I can't actually see explicit confirmation anywhere as to what the actual damage calculation is. You shoot a fool with a pistol, and you roll Dex+Firearms, if you roll any successes and your target isn't dodging, you hit and now go to the damage roll. But let's say you rolled two successes, is your damage roll 4 dice (the gun) + 2 dice (the successes on the to-hit roll) for a total of 6? Or does the first success not count and you only roll 5 dice? I can't fucking tell because the writing is so bad.

-Username17

I'm flipping between my Vampire Revised rulebook and the V20 book. I'm pretty sure part of the bad layout has to do with them cutting & pasting the original documents from years ago into a big-ass document and then mucking with spot rules here and there. It wasn't re-written, it was cribbed. So what narrative voice flow there was originally has been cut & pasted and spot changed here and there.

Also, we always played in the above example 6 dice. Otherwise it gets to be way too screwball when you throw dodging in.

And I specifically checked the botching rules. They've changed multiple times throughout just revised edition games. The botch rules in V20 are the same essentially as in Mage IIRC.

Edit: Thus far what I am seeing that they cribbed from nWOD is that for 530 pages, there's not a lot of setting fluff... There's some, but for a "comprehensive" book, it's strangely light on setting. Granted, you're not going to fit the entire mechanics of the game plus significant fluff into one book, not when they had years of verbal diarrhea making up "canon", but to me leaving out a lot of setting is hardly "comprehensive".

[Josh_Kablack]

Somebody want to tackle the one and only question here:

Will it still help angsty teen gamer boys hook up with nerdy goth girls?

[TheFlatline]

Somebody want to tackle the one and only question here:

Will it still help angsty teen gamer boys hook up with nerdy goth girls?

No. It's not edgy enough any more to appeal to teens, and the PDF alone costs 30 bucks. Will it help emo angsty 30-somethings hook up with nerdy goth girls of varying ages?

Yes, yes it will.

[Guyr Adamantine]

Err, hurray?

[CatharzGodfoot]

You must stop, my poor heart cannot take it anymore.

Now you are telling me that the rules are written in a confusing style and that the layout is bad? These things, which have only been true of every white wolf book I have ever read of any kind ever, are unbelieveable and cut me to the core!

If only there was some well thought out, well-written alternative. An 'alternate World of Darkness', if you will.

Not that it would matter to me, seeing as I managed to marry a nerdy goth girl with no help from V:tM at all.

[Don Strudel]

They ditched the metaplot for good, just like Alderac. People are already complaining.

[Prak]

Somebody want to tackle the one and only question here:

Will it still help angsty teen gamer boys hook up with nerdy goth girls?

No. It's not edgy enough any more to appeal to teens, and the PDF alone costs 30 bucks. Will it help emo angsty 30-somethings hook up with nerdy goth girls of varying ages?

Yes, yes it will.

I really, really need to find a VtM game...

[souran]

They ditched the metaplot for good, just like Alderac. People are already complaining.

The problem with metaplots is that they make the PCs feel small in the pants because anything important is done by metaplot characters.

What often pisses them off even more is that usually said characters when stated out are push overs or cheat to the point of being game breakingly spectaurlar.

eitherway, it sucks.

The problem with not having a metaplot in a WOD type game is that you end up with the "what the fuck are we supposed to do?" feeling that nwod has.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

More for you. I chatted with a goth girl one time. It was so annoying I wanted to punch myself for listening to her drivel.

[Koumei]

So basically, we had this:
oWoD: people were interested in the fluff/world setting, even if it had plenty of stupid (that they could choose to ignore), and a system slightly more painful than running your genitals over a sanding belt.

nWoD: it made the system slightly more bearable, so that it's only as bad as trimming your nails with a shark, but the setting became boring boring boring crap.

Now: they took the lesson of "Aha! People wanted the awful rules, and the existence of the old clans and stuff, but want us to flush all of the actual fluff and setting!"

Am I close to the mark here?