Timewaster's Guide Archive
Games => Role-Playing Games => Topic started by: n8sumsion on December 06, 2004, 05:16:50 PM
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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WEG actually has a # of successes based rulesset too. They used it for DC Universe.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Sprig, you sure that was Werewolf? For some reason I remember that exact experience at MoreDew's house, but remember it being Vampire.
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Ya, it was werewolf. Vampire is for goths and people with no friends :)
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Whereas Rifts is for people who dedicate themselves to the fine art of cheese.
*grin*
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I stand by my original stament, it;s been proven in the court of popularity and sterotypes.
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It was Werewolf EUOL. I remember it vividly...unfortunately. ;D
I, too, found the concept intriguing, but at this point I think I would rather do a D20 Modern or D&D with the vampiric or lycanthropic templates. I enjoy the system, it is realtively easy to run, and is adaptable enough to include everything one might desire. Not to mention I am not opposed to using things from other games to add a little spice into my campaigns.
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Ya, it was werewolf. Vampire is for goths and people with no friends :)
So wait, I'm confused. You did, or did not, play this game?
yes, for the confused, that was certainly a jab.
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WOD's system was never a huge detractor in our games,... they were more social than anything else, and it was very east for newbies to learn, Werewolf had problems for lots of reasons. It was WW's eco-terrorist game, as Werewolves raged against corperations destroying the natural world. It was poorly organized with rules everywhere but the chapter for rules and it was unbalanced with Werewolves more than a match for anything n combat than any other WOD character.
Vampire 2e was a lot of fun
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I have to say I really like the WoD rule system. Of course, maybe I had to learn to like it running a Vampire campaign for so long. I tend to prefer rules-lite systems, where you can role-play, move things along, and throw in the occasional dice-role to give the players an opportunity for disaster. I liked the ease of the system, where basically anything you wanted to do, you take an attribute paired with an ability and it gives you a die-roll.
And I like systems where it's easy for the GM/Storyteller/DM to fudge things for or against the players. "6 successes? Wow, that's a good roll... unfortunately, it's not good enough." The problem I have running D&D campaigns is the rules-lawyers in my group calling me on any critical decision, because they know the level of the monster they're fighting because they know the levels of all monsters in the game, they have the tables memorized and know what rolls they need to make to hit. Very frustrating.
The D&D campaign I ran in Salt Lake really was right out of KODT. I had the Brian character (the guy who studied all the tables, knew all the min-max race class combos, and memorized the books. He would tell me what pages tables were on so I could look things up), I had the Stevil character (who was pissed off at the world), and the Bob and Dave characters.
<back from tangent> I haven't looked at the new edition of the WoD system yet, but I was very happy with the 2e.
And, in my opinion, the Vampire setting was always the strongest. Werewolf was the weakest, even though I really wanted to like it. And Changeling was surprisingly good even though I just couldn't imagine running a campaign out of it. Hunter was good too.
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see, the thing about rules memorization and monsters is this: describe the beasts instead of naming it. Or name the monster something other than is in the MM but give it hte same stats. Or just give the thing a level or two of some other class. You can do lots of things without even cheating to get around rules lawyers.
And if all else fails, cheat. It's your prerogative as GM.
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Sure, you can do that... but you have to realize, the group I gamed with at work = video game programmers and designers. These guys were smart. If they're fighting a new group of monsters, they kill one off... "Ah... we did 20 points of damage to kill it, that means it must be a 3HD monster, therefore these spells will work on it." And they'd pull out battle strategies I hadn't prepared for, taking advantage of Attacks of Opportunity and I don't even remember what else.
It's the GM's perogative to cheat, absolutely, but it's more fun when the players aren't sure you're cheating.
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One of the problems with D&D is it's popularity. Rarely have I played a game where everyone who's played it once (ie a campaign) know all the rules, stats, and the like. For some reason people enjoy knowing all those rules with D&D while in other games they're content with only knowing the basics and relying on the GM for the rest.
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incidentally, the review of Frostburn that I had planned for today has been derailed for a deeper discussion of some of my thoughts on this. Expect an article in a couple hours.
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I think the overall popularity of WODs system says volumes about what a good 1/3 of the gaming community wants. And how much they liked the rules. The spin offs from VTM are legion, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, Changling, Mummy, Hunter, Aeon/Trinity, Aberrant, Exalted and so on. A lot of people had to like the rules and setting to allow this to happen. Have there been changes and revisions, of course there have. Im prolly one of the only people here to have played the first first edition of VTM (bought by a friends boyfriend from Mark Rein Hagan at a con) bound in a 3 ring binder. I saw lots of changes between that and its revised and 2nd edition versions. Its not just about setting either, WOD was terrifically easy to convince inexperienced players to play, because the rules system didnt require huge amounts of memorization, or more than one book for the whole group in many cases. In fact we played vampire for a year with just the GM owning a main book. At the time that compared very favorably to the 3 book D&D system or the one book and two supplements (ie 3 books) for GURPS.
Like any game though WOD requires a good GM to maximize the game,...
VTM was also the first game I played that had lots of girls who wanted to play, and the chick magnet draw at the time (age 15 -19) was too much to pass up. Who knew girls liked vampires so much. On a side note, who knew they would be such vicious evil players...
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I would agree that the GM is the one that makes the game fun in the WW settings. That's why I had so much fun playing Werewolf when I was 13 because the GM really knew what he was doing. When I tried to run a campaign, it sucked because I didn't really know the system.
the WW games are fun if you have a great GM.
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Bit off topic but the only really good experience I had with role-playing was in the shadow-run universe. It was an absolute blast because the GM (Darpino, former movie reviewer onTWG) really knew what he was doing.
The GM makes or breaks just about any system if you ask me.
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I think Storyteller is one of the smoothest systems out there. The only problem I ever had with it was slow combats, which the new version has virtually fixed. It's easy to grasp, intuitive to use, and crunchy without being overly so. Also, very easy to plug stuff into.
While its certainly not my favorite system, its none too shabby in my book.
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I've gotta agree with Pleasington. The only place Storyteller ever fell down for us was extended combat.
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That reminds me of one of my favorite aspects of the system... extended actions. I don't think many other systems can claim such a good mechanic for the outcome of actions that require more than a round or two. It's an elegant method and is fully integrated.
Just a random thought.
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So thanks to this thread, I picked up the new revised WOD and Vampire the Requiem the other day. Maybe it was because of pangs for the good times I used to have, maybe because Im not sure I can wait till march for the Iron Kingdoms World Guide. Whatever the reasons I have to say WOD is a pretty cool revision. First of all having the core rules in one book and the setting extras in another cut down on reprinted material greatly which is good for WW secondly it allows players to play normal guys without owning Vampire or Hunter.
My ideas are already flowing, but I see two possabilities one a Buffy the Vampire slayer style game and the other Vampire like I used to play in High School. In Vampire the characters are very underpowerd compared to the old system and like Mr. P said, the blood potency thing really works better than the Generation thing in VTM.
Vampire impressed me, but I think I was just whelmed, not over or underwhelmed, just whelmed. Mage promises to be really cool though, because I can already see how everything works. I forsee a lot of the traditions changing, and a few new ones in the works. The cool part about this new style of game from WW is that characters can be made unique at least as far as special attributes go.
So far there are only plans to produce Werewolf and Mage as seperate WOD campaigns, which is dissapointing because WW's coolest games (IMHO) Wraith and Changling wont be done.
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From what I know, in the backstory the changlings all died during the reckoning. They either fled to Arcadia (where the bridges finally fell down) or they went feral. Many of the critters that hunters fight were supposed to be feral changlings. :)
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Yeah according to the old rules, but the new WOD is a completely different WOD with a different backstory and such. It does not happen after the events that WOD just did. Basically its 3E.
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My friend Shawn (doors and windows guy) updated Orpheus to NWOD without any trouble at all. I just played it last night and had a hoot. The campaign has been going on a while, but this was the first night I could make it.
Good, ghostly fun, and much more accessible than Wraith was.
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I think wraith was creepier than Orpheus is though... way creepier. I never liked the government organization looking for ghosts and goblins angle. Plus the whole alive and dead angle is strange.... still Im sure a lot of people love it.