Timewaster's Guide Archive
Games => Role-Playing Games => Topic started by: Entsuropi on March 11, 2003, 09:54:10 AM
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A question for the peeps here : what is hunter like? someone i talked to said it was crap, with more twink that Kindred of the East. whats it like in relation to the other WoD games?
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I wouldn't call Hunter a twink game. It's different, but certainly not munchkiny if played right. The basic premise is that you're playing an ordianary joe who has been given a wee bit of power by an unknown force and the ability to see all the beasties roaming around in the WoD.
It's easy to play as a "go fight the monster" game, but the rulebook really emphasizes just how much this affects the character's lives. Most hunters either die or go mad and that's after losing their friends, family, and social standing because everyone thinks that they're nuts. It's a game of tragic heroes.
I think it would be hard to run well, but it could be done. The video game based on it is not really representative of the game.
On a tangent, I picked up Demon the other day and was blown away. WW managed to combine the major themes from their other games into one, super game. I recommend giving it a look if you're not easily offended by strange takes on religion.
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i think ill pass on demon. im still expanding my Mage book collection (at least, when WW get around to making the Void engineers con book, and the Sons of Ether trad book ^_^). then i need to start expanding my Werewolf set. the silent strider book is out, thats on the hitlist. i spend way too much on RPG books :( besides, i only play at World of Darkness New York City (http://www.wodnyc.net). demon is not a allowed game there.
and heh, i can hardly be offended by a strange take on religion, when im not religious ;)
Im tempted to get hunter simply for a look at how normal humans (well, more normal than most supernaturals) regard all the beasties. hunters are getting more and more mention in the other WoD lines.
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World of Darkness is rumored to be getting a reboot once Exalted runs its course. Other than finishing off whatever collections you are working on, I would check into that before dumping more money into it.
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Not so much a rumor anymore. WOD 2.0 was confirmed at Gen Con in August along with the Time of Judgement, which is now underway.
As for Exalted, I don't think it will be running itscourse anytime soon as it is doing amazingly well. On top of the rpg there will a CCG, a miniature game, and a video game based on the setting all due out in the future.
I'm on the CCG playtest list, but it didn'tseem like my type of game,so I haven't really participated.
Man, I love Exalted though. Hate the system, love the setting. I've got a conversion to WUSHU, but it loses some of the flavor.
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Hmm, interesting. I'll have to check out Exalted, since I like WoD. Although I used to really like White Wolf, and not so much anymore. I have a lot of White Wolf books, both RPG and novels. I'm not totally sure what turned me off, probably their business more than their products.
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Exalted completely changed my opinion of White Wolf.
Over the top, epic fantasy.
So good.
Too bad the dreadful Storyteller system is a complete mismatch for it. So cumbersome, so slow.
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not really, I mena the main rule is ignore the rules if they get in the way... whats slow about that? ;D
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(Not that I've ever played it, but...) If the main feature of a game is that it allows you to ignore the rules, what are you left with? A game with no rules? That would either be slow (while you try to come up with something to fill in) or arbitrary (while you make stuff up in the absence of guidelines). Of course, with a really good GM, arbitrary can occasionally turn out well.
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In a lot of the Vampire games I played it it worked fine, sure it was a little arbitrary, but EVERY gm Ive ever known fudges rolls. The idea is if the rules slow the game down, ignore em, yeah you could roll to see if you kill the security guard, or you could just kill him.
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I think I have to agree with Fell on this. there's no point to having a system if you're not going to use a system. A good system would not be one that includes a statement that you ignore any rule that doesn't work for you: any system that DOESN'T include that isn't worth looking at (it's part of what annoyed me about hackmaster, yes yes, go ahead, I know what you're going to say about "spoof" and "satire" but I don't think they pulled it off well enough). An ideal system is one where you don't HAVE to ignore the rules on a constant basis just to make the game playable. I think that's what Fell and Mr. P are saying. that yeah, you can play in just a setting, but it'd be nice if you didn't have to ignore the system packaged with it.
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Storyteller system is practically built on the idea of rule 0 and ad hoc adjustments. They look more like guidelines then rules next to a system like d20. I heard the new WoD is supposed to use d20 rules. If it does, that would probably add a lot to the game. I think it will lend itself to WoD style of how each game is part of the same world.
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you can play in just a setting, but it'd be nice if you didn't have to ignore the system packaged with it.
Less ignoring it, more of just not a rule to handle it. In some ways, that puts more pressure on a DM, because they have to decide how to handle that situation. And if they are a good DM, they will know once you use it, its going to be assumed that is how you will handle the same situation every time. Not a huge deal if you've been playing WoD with the same players for a long time... you've already filled in all the rule gaps and everyone knows what they are. Even a seasoned WoD player can walk into a new game and get confused with how certain things are handled. It also means at some point you have to make up any and all additional rules you need. Even if you borrow them from another system, its going to be a lot more work then it would have taken to just read them out of the rulebook.
WoD really needs to upgade the Storyteller system or drop it for d20 (I wouldn't recommend trying to do both like Chaosium has).
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yeah, see... to me, that says not a good system. You need something that ports over quickly, and any changes or house rules should be explanable in just a few minutes, with everyone ready to go.
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Rule 0 works fine if you don't want to follow canon or want to house rule a few quirky things about the system, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that ST is a terrible system for Exalted. Rolling 20-30 dice for actions is extremely slow and makes combat take forever. Even slower than D&D. This is a game about over the top high speed action and the system doesn't reflect that. A simpler sytem like WUSHU or BESM would fit much better, which is why conversions to both of those are abundant. The problem with that is that despite such a terrible mismatch of setting and system WW managed to tie the two together in really interesting ways that let the mechanics evoke the setting. Switching systems removes some of this flavor, but its worth it.
And WOD 2.0 will not be d20. Rumors were abound about this and fans were in a tizzy all over the net to think their favorite system had sold out to consumerism. The rumors are false. WOD 2.0 will not be d20.
However, they are re-releasing the Aeon Contiunuum...Adventure!, Trinity, and Aberrant... in d20 format, which is an interesting choice. While I'm not a huge fan of d20 (after 3E burnout) I always liked those games and think they deserve a second shot.
Oh, and btw, welcome to the boards, Eagle. :)
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Thanks. One question, why such a huge dice pool?
A little disappointed to hear they won't be going with d20, altough if Chaosium is any indication they probably would have done a horrible job with it. So it might be better that they're going with their own system (hopefully updated with better rules). Just please don't do both, like I mentioned above. I think that's really screwed up a lot of Chaosium books like the new Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer stuff.
I agree with you Saint Ehlers, definatily a sign of a poor system. Some of the rules are pretty good, but they seem only half finished.
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A starting Exalted character can use his Charms, which are magical abilities, to pump up his dice pool. It's possible for such a character to have a dice pool above thirty. More often though, its in the high teens, which is still a lot of dice.
The books have so many good ideas. I need to pick up The Abyssals and Siderals to complete my fatsplat collection...
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Are the high dicepools to reflect how much more powerful they are than werewolves and vampires, or is there things they actually need to get multiple DC 10 successes on?
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Well, there are no werewolves or vampires in Exalted since it's not WOD (though there are Lunars and Abyssals...long story).
Gaining such power is supposed to reflect how superior the Solar Exalted are above both mortals and other Exalted.
At times they would need such high dice pools...like when fighting other Exalted, taking on an army single handed, or trying to slay a god. All of which are things likely to be seen in a typical game of Exalted.
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argh. Stop talking up Exalted. I don't want to have to buy it.
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I wish I could stop talking, Saint. It's one of those games I love so much but know I will never get to play. So many good ideas, such a great setting...mmmmmmmmmm....Exalted....
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It was a neat setting, kind of anime meets the Illiad.
But I felt it was to like WW Streetfighter for my taste.
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I wish I could stop talking, Saint. It's one of those games I love so much but know I will never get to play. So many good ideas, such a great setting...mmmmmmmmmm....Exalted....
That was like Wraith: The Oblivion for me. I got all the stuff, but only ever got to play it a couple times.
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I have a few things to say about WoD, since I'm currently running a Werewolf campaign and playing in my husband's Orpheus campaign. (we alternate)
The 'fudging rolls' thing is not quite what you guys are thinking about. It's not that you fudge rolls to say that you succeeded or not usually, but it's up to the Storyteller's discrecion to find out how WELL you succeeded. If your target number is 7, and you get two successes of 7 on a search, you won't find as much as if you rolled three 9's and an 8. So you can decide how well the players did on what they were trying to do.
As for Exalted, if you have the books, I know my husband would LOVE to play it sometime, esp. since he's been a big WoD fan for a while. Don't assume that you'll never get to play it, just coerce a group of friends into doing it.
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I'd just like to add I agree completly with Mr.P on exalted. Awsome setting, crappy system (storyteller is one of my most disliked systems ever). The rule books are awsome, I've only got The main one and Abysmals. I read them just for the sake of reading them, they're almost as cool as Palladium for that. The difference between and Exalted book and a Palladium book is that Exalted does a great job setting up the different races and history, while Palladium gives you better world info. WW's world only info books are pretty sad, no maps or stats of monsters in that area. We've got several reviews for exalted books in the RPG section under WW (http://www.timewastersguide.com/RPG/sortarticles.php?sortby=score&filter=WhiteWolf&type=1). I was going to write an abysmals and Scavenger sons reviews, but my take on them isn't that much different then Kid's.
One word of waning though, don't buy the caste books! They;re supposed to be a class suppot books but they are the WORST books for any rpg I've ever seen. I'd give them a 1 clock ot of 6. these $20, 100 page books have about 10 pages of new charms and equipment and the other 90 odd pages are nothing but crap. All they use that space for is to tell stories about several differenet exalted in that caste, ie how/when they became exalted and how they live now. Really worthless stuff.
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oh and Mr.P Exalted is sorta WOD, it just takes place thousand of years before the world exisits as we know it in WOD. Abysmals become Vampires, lunars become Werewolfs etc. The Exalted Storytells guide explaines this.
Also the Exalted books are some of the most typo ridden books I've ever scene. Not just spelling but letters being replaced by symbols, force justafying makeing whole paragraphs have no spaceing among the offenders. I doubt the editor even looked at them.
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Abysmals become Vampires, lunars become Werewolfs etc. The Exalted Storytells guide explaines this.
Woooeeee, man that would piss off all the vampires and werewolves, that's for sure. I'm not going to be the one to tell them. Where did all the Gaia and Caine creationa legends come from if they're really descended from the Exalted world??
Perhaps I'll look at the ST guide just for that purpose- I'm very curious about how it ties into the WoD.
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because Gaia and the worm a prevelent figures in exalted. And Gaia created the lunars. Oh and the ST guide dosen't say it they way I did. They say something like, all the events and people in exalted will lead to the events that created the WoD. Then in anther place they say that they wont say wither or not lunars become WWs but that at the end of the Exalted story run you'll know. But Lunars are set up just like Werewolfs and Abysmals are vampires in the game.
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Its Abyssals not Abysmals!
Actually The assertion that Exalted is somehow the prequel to the WOD is one that is and had been catagorically denied by the White Wolf staff.
And I have to disagree with you on palladium having a better world setup.... I think the history and racial information is more important than solid maps, and creature info (even though there is a book on both gods and mystical creatures out for exalted) because it takes place in an ever changing mythical world. Scavenger Sons is a better book than just about anything ever made by Palladium and provides a huge amount of world info without giving concrete distances and tons of stats.
As for the system some people love it and some hate it, I personally think its fun and easier than almost any other game. I have never had a problem teaching the game to new players or ever had a horrible time playing a storyteller game which isnt something I can say about D20, Rifts, or Gurps. True Exalted has huge fricking dicepools but somethings satisfying about handfulls of dice anyway.
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Actually The assertion that Exalted is somehow the prequel to the WOD is one that is and had been catagorically denied by the White Wolf staff.
I wonder if anyone else finds it hypocritically ironic that they're denying it when there are more similarities than in the movie they're trying to win the lawsuit against.
*innocent look*
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woh Jeffe WW says in the Stroy Tellers companion that it is. Of course they day, oh well it may not turn out that way depending on how you play. And that those who don't want to use Exalted as a prehisotry of the WoD can ignore Exalted.
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The idea was to take what they did best and combine them into an Anime influenced mythological RPG that took elements from their successful games and created a new and seperate idea from it. Remember there is no equivelent of the Solar Exalted or the Dragon blooderd at all in the WOD.
Its as real to the WOD as Gilgamesh, Odyssey, Troy and the Illiad are to us ie. not very.
Abyssals for instance arn't vampires or wraiths, they are corrupted Solar Exalted who are in service to the Deathlords.
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I remember it saying that it was one possibility where the weaver went crazy but I also remember it say that it was not specifically the WOD. The theme in Exalted is one of hope, not one of bleak darkness. WW execs have been quoted on a few sites as saying that the Exalted world will not end up as the WOD.
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Just because there's no equilivant to all the Exalted in WoD dosn't mean anything Jeffe. For all we know they all get killed off by something else, or loose their powers a the change to a new age of man. Also I remeber reading in one of their other books about Exalted being the prehisotry of WoD, if I find it I'll post that book too.
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Ok, and I'll find the quotes from the guys at the company where they say it isnt the prehistory and then we'll be at an impass again.
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I just take WW's squimining at the topic a way to try and not make the WoD fans mad, supposedly a lot of people were mad a WW with Exalted hinting at (in the first book) that it was the WoD's prehistory. They shouldn't have printed missleading things if they didn't want people to think that, nor should they have used WoD mythos in Exalted.
So basicly this leaves us at two places:
1) Exalted is the prehistory of WoD, and WW is trying to calm upset fanboys.
2) They didn't think Exalted would sell, so they added info to make it linked to WoD in some way so fans of WoD would buy it.
I don't buy the whole "Exalted could or couldn't be the world that lead up to WoD. It's your choice." Exalted is too well of a designed setting to not have WW decide one way or the other at the time of it's design.
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I don't know why you can't buy it, in fact I think its pretty shrewd.
Either way it doesn't matter much, does it. If it is the WOD prequal what does it matter, there are no exalted anymore, things happened so long ago that you miught get a raised eyebrow from a diehard fan but thats it, the rules between the two set of games are different enough to make it pretty difficult or at least painstaking for the storyteller to change things around.
If its not the prehistory then again no one really cares, it doesn't affect what you plan to do in the story.
Again the prehistory is as relevent to the WOD as Gilgamesh is to us.
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Oh and about Scavenger Sons, I would go about talking how great that book is. It's very disapointing on every subject. When you make a book about a certain reagion don't go about trying to cover every other place in the world before you get to that region. The povided information is so lacking in deatails that it's practicaly impossible to use the book for anything but a brief desciption on Nexus. Check that, make it a VERY brief description of Nexus. When someone buys a region info book you want details on that region, not a half page summery on each of the areas. You want maps (don't give descriptions of areas not on any map out for the game), poltics, economy, stats (don't talk about all the monsters in an area then not give stats for them).
Scavenger Sons is a clear example of WW trying to push out second rate material quiclky to make a quick buck.
I don't care wich way it was intended to be (I don't care for WoD games, infact I'm proud that I don't play them or own any of the books), but I do think WW is being cynical not shrude. Can't have it both ways.
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I personally think you just want to hate ww stuff, and just love palladium stuff. Thats ok by the way. I hate palladium stuff and like WW stuff for pretty much the same reasons. Is storyteller for everyone, no, of course it isn't. You'd have to threaten me at gunpoint to play any Palladium game again (even robotech). The truth is White Wolf has almost never done what you want in any of their worldbooks. Never done a map of New York, or San Franciso, or the Warrens under the Space Needle. Its never been their style to ruin a game by making it that concrete and I woudn't expect them to start changing that formula now. Knowing how they work, I was very happy with the product. I didn't want any of the standard maps and monster writeups to be baggage for my exalted game. Maybe I just got tired of players sneaking a peak at the product and knowing that Hari's swordmart is next to the inn they need to break into to steal the precious emerald of Sera. When I do a game I want to do all of the mapping (if im doing it at all) and plot work on my of. I just wanted to know why,... say Gem was different from Nexus what the feel of the place is. I wanted a world summery with a few paragraphs about one place so I can do more with it. The book was designed to do just that, and did it very well describing it in a storyteller kind of way and not a hard stat kind of way. Playing a game of Exalted isn't like playing D&D where every passage is mapped out and every trap is set down on paper. A trip in a maze is handled with roleplaying and built into the plot so its not a random execise in hitpoint re-allocation. Its about the story that you make not a set of rules more like a play or a movie than an exercise in dice rolling. Thats where storyteller gets fun, and I've found where its more social than other games. Its why fudging roles works and why the golden rule of Storyteller is change it if you don't like it.
Its why I still own Vampire, and Wraith and Changling, Exalted, Trinity and Mage, long after I have stopped playing them, and why tomorrow I could over to Game Parlor, put up a card and have 20-50 players call me to game. Its a good game, and thousands of people wouldn't play it if they didn't think it was good.
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No need to get angry, Jeffe, Sprig is making some valid points.
I own quite a bit of Exalted material and the designers have stated for the record that it can or can't be the pre-WOD. They put more emphasis on the negative there. However, I still have books that have the teasers in them that read "Before the World of Darkness..." and such. Before the game was released it was pimped out as the pre-WOD. So you're both right.
I like Scavenger Sons. It's the equivalent of a D&D gazeteer...lots of broad info on different areas so the GM can get a feel for things. I'm kind of glad its not more detailed as it leaves more room for GMs to put in their own stuff.
So far, all the hardbacks and the majority of softbacks are good. That statement excludes the splatbooks though which are, and always will be, crap.
I just wish it had a better system...
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Im not angry. Just trying to explain my position. Did I sound angry?
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I wonder if anyone else finds it hypocritically ironic that they're denying it when there are more similarities than in the movie they're trying to win the lawsuit against.
*innocent look*
lol
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I just want to point out that any game that gives me maps and stats is going to be easier for me to integrate, and I'm not going to feel pined to it. A lot of people feel pinned by games that do this, but frankly, that's hardly a problem with the system: it's their own perceptions. If I have maps I have more to choose to use or ignore, and a launching point for alterations: all of which mean more options and less time I have to use to prepare.
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The system isn't designed around maps though, a lot of games you play like D20 are effectively miniature games with skills, Storyteller isn't like that, all their main books prime their players and GM to play a different way than traditional RPG's. Locations in storyteller are set pieces, and not concrete, so instead of giving you a map of club such and such they tell you about people there, the mysterious back room and let you go from there. They also teach you how to describe it so mapping isn't important. Monsters and opponents in WOD and other WW games are so easy to make that you just do it. Not that the games are designed to be battles against monsters. Social interaction and the story is more important. Its a different style of game.
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People are still gonna ask where things are. It's nice to know that. Yes, it's one thing to make it all up on the fly, it's another to not have to because a lot of it is planned. If you have those plans, you can still ignore them, but you have the OPTION of using them. More options = better.
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I don't hate WW stuff, I just hate the Storyteller system. I think WW's stuff is well done in setting up the mythos of the different creatures with common beleifs and new things. Vampire was a fun book to read, I just don't own them beacue before Fell started TWG I had never met anyone who played WW that wasn't mentaly unstable.
And is it wrong to demand quality work from a game company? Scavenger Sons dosen't live up to my standards of what I want from a world book. Ya you don't need a map of NYC becasue its a real city, so are most of the WoD settings. I don't see how maps of locals is a hinderence to GM's. Don't use the provided ones if you don't want too. But the most people want them.
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most people who play WOD and use storyteller are used to them not being there, since they were the main target, most of them didn't mind.
But we're going to disagree. I do have to ask though just how much experience do you have actually playing storyteller?
I played palladium games for 5 years. 3 years of robotech, 2 of rifts/ hero's unlimited and Ninja's and superspies.