WoD Relaunch

[n8sumsion]

Being a new poster to the site, I really hope this thread isn't something you've all talked to death. But I was wondering if anyone has looked at or played the new Vampire: The Requiem from White Wolf. Any thoughts or comments on it?

I haven't picked up a copy yet, and I'm wondering if I want to part with any of my money to do so. I'm a big fan of the original World of Darkness setting, I ran a Vampire campaign for around 10 years or so. And I have to say, I'm not really thrilled about having to go out and buy a whole slew of new books. I have about 2 shelves full of old WoD books for all 6 or so settings in WoD, which is a considerable investment of money (not to mention all the moves I've done in the past couple of years, and me having to haul them around the world every time).

It looks like they're trying to change things up a bit, make vampires more mysterious and powerful rather than undead goth superheroes. But I'm not sure it's enough of a change to warrant an entirely new setting. It would have to be a fairly significant departure from the old setting and world in my mind to warrant a relaunch.

The way it stands right now, unless I read very compelling comments to the contrary, I'm just going to stick to the tried-and-true goth angst setting I know and love.

[Mr_Pleasington]

Storyteller 2.0 is a better system, in my opinion.  Streamlined, sleaker, and plays much faster.  It's worth it.  A good friend converted his Orpheus campaign to this.

Vampire: The Requiem is okay.  It's a beautiful book and a well-designed setting, but if you already like V:tM you may find what they kept and what they took out to be a little odd.  I think its okay and definitely clears some of the problems that always crept up in V:tM.  Some friends of mine, who are much bigger fans of the old WoD, decided it was 'meh' at best.

There's lots of reviews out there.  RPG.net has a ton for both, I know.  Should give you enough info to tell if you like it or not.

[EUOL]

You know, the funny thing is, I never played WoD.  We owned a lot of the books--they were really interesting to read, and the character creation system was awesome.  However, we couldn't ever really figure out how to play the game.

From what I hear, Exalted fixed a lot of these problems, so I'd be tempted to get Vampire 2.0.  Though, to be honest, I've heard such good things about Exalted that I'd probably be more likely to play it than go to WoD.

(By the way, welcome, Nate.  It's been a LONG time since I last saw you.  Of course, it's been a long time since I saw anyone from Nebraska.)

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

still a lot of the crunchy clan-ness is gone... part of the fun was making your Vamp and loading him down with the weight of intrigues of the ages.

[n8sumsion]

The beauty of the World of Darkness setting was that it was so HUGE, I never worried about backing myself into a corner. Any time one of my players called me one of my rulings (over 10 years my campaign became riddled with contradictions), I could always find something to bail me out. ("Ah, yes, you're right, being that vampire is a Tzimisce, he should be infected by the Viccissitude bug... but wait! He's really OLD CLAN Tzimisce. Ta-da!" and many other examples). Since everything was so mysterious, and there was always someone more powerful than the last, the intrigues and conspiracies were going crazy.

(Of course, by the time the Gehenna book came out, they'd pretty much run out of powerhouses. "Your guy is 9th generation? Well this guy is 7th. Then this guy is 4th. That guy's a Methuselah? Bah, here's a bonafide Antidiluvean." By Gehenna, they'd already introduced Caine, who was the most powerful of all. In Gehenna they finally introduced God himself to rain on the characters' parade. At least they didn't give him stats.)

I had finally gotten everything kind of sorted out in my head, and now they want me to re-learn everything in kind of a Bizarro-World-of-Darkness? Eh... maybe, maybe not. I suppose I could just get the WoD sourcebook and stick with the old setting.

Oh, and totally off-topic, but big congrats on the book, Brandon. I'm looking forward to reading it.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

we tended to let our characters burn out in a blaze of glory when things got that crazy. Still our best games were when we played the psychopathic Sabbat. Playing visciously evil somehow clicked and everyone really tried to be more and more evil. Our resident Malkavian player, she ... she usually won. Still we were one huge disaster waiting to happen,.. and when someone stepped out of line, no one minded when they became lunch,... like the Tremere that figured out how to break the Valdarie. He made a nice snack. The best part is that no matter how alien and evil we got, there was always just a hint of humanity to carry us through. It didnt hurt that we started before the becoming, and ourselves were hunted and then buried alive only to come out kicking, and screaming and HUNGRY. Man that was a blast. Anarch games were equally fun, because you were taking on the status quo, but I wasnt a huge fan of Camarilla games, they just got too much like a hardy boys book, if the Hardy boys had fangs and were sent out to solve x mystery by an undead prince.

[Entsuropi]

Well...

I have no real interest tbh. I'll probably never get to play Vampire, and Mage is not terribly likely unless I run it myself. And I like vampire the way it was. While i'm sure the new book is shiny and cool, i've not got so much money that i'll buy it because it's new WoD.

Though if I can borrow it, I will.

[Mr_Pleasington]

The new V:tR still has a lot of mystical, unexplained stuff, as I'm sure you would expect.  Really the best part about it is now the vampire society is really dynamic.  No more thousand year old uber-beasts which are impossible to remove from power.  See, generation has been replaced by Blood Potency.  Once a vampire gets to powerful he must go into Torpor to thin the blood, lest he go into a long frenzy.  

While the blood is thinning, the vampire has vivid dreams and loses some of his memories to the haze.  So while recent history may still be clear, long ago is a mix of memory and dream that the vampire can't trust to tell apart.  

So every couple of hundred years your big bads are going to have to hibernate and they'll be quite a bit less powerful when they awaken.

I like it.  Mixes things up a bit.  A lot of people don't.

[Spriggan]

Many of you here know what I think of Storyteller, that it's one of the worst game systems conceived my mankind, but I thought I'd share my first experence with it since all the players are on the board now.

About 11-12 years ago Moredew got Wearwolf, so me, Rican and Nyciadamius decided to play it, along with the RHBS and a boy named Castro.  Well after makeing cool characters, as kids our age allwayse managed to do  , we sat down and started playing.  About 15-20 minutes into the game we got into a fight, the characters not us as players, and as we started to fight came the eneveitable words from Moredew, who was Gming, of "Uhhh...huh..I don't realy know how to run the combat yet".  Yes he talked like that, he aslo wore and AC/DC shirt and hated Winger.

So we gathered together to try and decipher the rules, and after about 30 minutes are so Moredew decided to call his brother, N8sumpsion, who was in utah at the time to ask him.  After a while Moredew hung up, said something along the lines of "this game sucks" and we pulled out the RIFTS books.

The revamped rules are better, but I think they're still overly complicated.  Especialy since they're trying to make a simple system (according to Exalted) .  Though there are so many dumb rules involveing the DC's, how many dice you roll and how many sucesses you need.  Honestly, just use WEG's D6 rules.  The whole you have to get X number of successes to do something is just a bad concept.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

WEG actually has a # of successes based rulesset too. They used it for DC Universe.

[Spriggan]

ya, but it's not their D6 ruleset that I mentioned, well I guess it's D6 Classic or something like that now.  I realy hate # of sucess DCs over just roll X die to beat a number DCs.

[MoreDew]

Oh man, Sprig, I had totally forgotten about that.  Leave it to you to remember those things.  Yeah, I never was too impressed with the WoD games.  I loved the concept of Werewolf and Vampire, but when we tried playing, the combat system was so alien to me.  When my bro. explained it to me, I realized what I had gotten us into.  I figured just to stick with what I was good at at the time: Rifts.

By the way, it wasn't an AC/DC shirt, it was a Nine Inch Nails shirt...and yes I did hate Winger too.  huh..huh, huh....huh

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Werewolf was definitely WW's worst organized, written and designed game so I dont disagree it didnt make sense. Its famous for the whole page XX thing.

[MoreDew]

I basically gave up trying to understand the WW games.  I loved the ideas behind them--Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, Mage--but never really cared to learn more about them.  I never really had the chance to play them as well.  I remember when I was 12 or somewhere around there, I played Werewolf with my brother's gaming group and I thought that the game was cool.  When I tried to run a game, it was a complete disaster.

[EUOL]

Sprig, you sure that was Werewolf?  For some reason I remember that exact experience at MoreDew's house, but remember it being Vampire.