New World of Darkness

[Locky McKenzie]

As in like Exalted Charms, or Heroic Knacks?

I can't see the issue with it - there are many ways to the same goal, after all. That said, I'd have slight issues if baselines could gain Mega-Attribute Enhancements like that (I suspect that you would have added "+ being a nova" to the prerequisites...)

[Neurosis]

I used to play V:tM a lot. Pretty much the only RPG that I've really liked. Obviously, it wasn't a perfect system, everything outside of the core book/player's guides were a waste of time except for getting inspiration, and things had been rehashed, updated, fixed and broken again that it was a little hard to wrap your head around it. But I still liked it.

I don't like Requiem though. I don't know if it's because I'm unfamiliar with it or what, but the whole emphasis on elaborate political structures/religious institutions makes it somewhat burdensome and a little more, well, boring. In Masq the set-up was little simpler, but you could still have lots of intrigue as well as combat if you so desired. Also, the diversity was nice, having lots of clans. Having fewer clans kind of narrows things a bit, although I suppose there is a trade-off with allowing clans to have more diverse members than just stereotypical types.

Maybe I'm just bitter that I bought a bunch of books for a series that got canceled.

[metaphysician]

I don't see conversion being very easy/useful, at least for Aberrant. The big problem for me is the totally different damage/defense system. In WoD2.0, armor either reduces the dice pool of the attack, or reduces damage levels taken, depending on the exact armor and the nature of the attack, in manners that are a bit counterintuitive. For example, body armor actually provides more protection against explosives than against bullets.

Normally, the reduced dice pool works fine, because at the scale the game normally works at, attacks are strictly dice pool increases too. OTOH, for any kind of serious ( nova level/military grade ) firepower, you need damage adds. Then, if you apply armor as attack dice pool reduction, you get all-or-nothing results where an attack either bounces or splatters. If you apply it to damage levels, than it very rapidly overwhelms the benefits of high or low accuracy. And either way, I haven't the foggiest how to manage the old ping rules.

Would it be possible to do Aberrant2.0? Yeah. However, it'd require essentially rebuilding the game entirely from the ground up, and alot of very careful effort to avoid the Aberrant d20 problems ( "How come my character who could smash mountains now can get killed by a single cop with a shotgun?" ).

[Ptesan-Wi]

OK, here's what I posted a couple months ago on another forum regarding the New World of Darkness:

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When I first heard about the New World of Darkness, my thoughts on the topic could pretty much be summed up as follows: "It's going to stink on ice."

I'd been playing in the Old World of Darkness since '93. I liked Tremere and Caitiffs and Malks (oh my); I liked the detailed Garou cosmology and the other Changing Breeds; I liked Mummies and Wraiths and the like. Most of all, I liked the idea of not having the 4+ feet of shelfspace that was dedicated to my World of Darkness books go obsolete overnight. Mind you, there were some aspects that I was never keen about - that damned looming end-of-the-world metaplot; the difficulty of actually doing anything with Mage without PhDs in Philosophy, Physics and Paranormal Phenomenon; the eternal plague of "Fish-Malks". But by and large, the Old World of Darkness was a comfortable role-playing home, a favorite sweater, and I was anything but happy to see it tossed on the bonfire... and was dead-certain that this thing that they were replacing it with would be a wretched abomination.

My first glimpses of the new core system did little to assuage my disgust. Attack and damage in a single roll/pull? Madness. Madness, I tell you! No freebee points? Ye gods, no! Purchasing new traits as a multiplier of the new dot, rather than the current? How on earth would anyone ever get anywhere with that?!?

Then I saw the pre-release information on Vampire, and my mood, if anything, darkened. Warmed over Ventrue that don't have a feeding restriction - what could they be thinking? Nosferatu that could no longer reach into their Animalism grab-bag whilst cackling out a loud, "Come to me, my feral minions!" - humbug and bah! Gangrel that didn't gradually wind up with feral eyes and tufts of fur - no, no, a thousand times, no! And these "new" clans... did anyone really think that Daevas were anything other than a renamed Toreador? And Mekhets seemed to be, for lack of a better term, Lasombra stripped of their shadow powers... sad, just sad. And all these covenants? What the heck is the deal with those, and who would need them when you have clans, fer crying out loud? Mind you, this "Blood Potency" thing looks interesting, and a damned sight better than Generation - perhaps it could be retrofitted into OWoD somehow - but the rest? Feh.

And so, I gave the New World of Darkness a pass, and continued to play in my cherished OWoD (ignoring, as best I could, the End of Days products). Right up until this past March, when my partner-in-life-and-crime asked me (in what I found out later was meant to be a joke) if I would be interested in joining the local Vampire: the Requiem LARP with her. In a fit of boredom and much to her surprise and perhaps regret, I said, "Sure, what the heck. It's LARP; hopefully I can just dive into the role-playing and ignore as much as possible of the new stuff."

So it was that I sat down and re-imagined one of my cherished OWoD characters - that unfortunate creature that you have come to know and love/dread/pity as Sarah O'Neally - within the confines of the New World of Darkness. It helped somewhat that she was to be Gangrel (once I could finagle an Embrace for her), which appeared to be the least changed of the clans. And it would be interested to see what could have happened to her had things gone different in her life, though with the same core original aspects (growing up in a family with werewolf connections before being embraced as a vampire).

I showed up to that first game with no small trepidation with my little mortal and unbound character... and find myself in one of those rare joint Requiem-Forsaken venues. The role-playing was a hoot - these utterly insane people playing characters named Dallas and Belle and Regina that, I later learned to my dismay, were merely visiting Columbia ensured it and were an absolute riot. And surprisingly enough, the core system seemed to actually work... and work relatively quickly.

A session later, Sarah was undead. And by that point, I was hooked. Remarkably enough, these new versions of old clans worked quite well. And the covenants, rather than being an extra burden and a pain in the patoot, turned out to offer freedom from the old clan stereotypes; an Invictus Mekhet and Invictus Gangrel were likely to have more in common than, say, an Invictus Mekhet and an Ordo Mekhet. For the first time, vampires could more or less choose their associations (without the rather forced "antitribu" rationale).

Within a few months, I came to a conclusion that made me almost ill: Requiem was better than Masquerade, and was so by a long shot. From what I had seen, Awakening had Ascendancy beat all to hell and back, too. I'm still not exactly thrilled with Forsaken - too much of it seems to be changing names for the sake of changing names, and elements of it just don't quite seem to work - but you can't win them all.

So now (with the exception of Forsaken), I'm thorougly in favor of the New World of Darkness... and while it might be interesting to use the Masquerade setting with the new engine for sort of a nostalgia game once in a while, I'll take my vampires Requiem-style now, thank you very much.

[Catalyst]

They made things too simple. THat is about as simple as I cna put it and as detailed as I can go itno it without offending nayone.

[Mr Fox]

Granted I didn't read very much of the new Vampire, but from what I did read, I didn't like the flavor. They made it sound like once you were embraced, you were locked into some shadowy pale existence that could never surpass what you might have achieved if you had lived. Blah!!! Who want's an eternal life as a shadow of your former potential?

[Percivald]

Originally Posted By: Mr Fox

Granted I didn't read very much of the new Vampire, but from what I did read, I didn't like the flavor. They made it sound like once you were embraced, you were locked into some shadowy pale existence that could never surpass what you might have achieved if you had lived. Blah!!! Who want's an eternal life as a shadow of your former potential?

Dude, old Vampire was even worse. It's an emo-goth game that runs mainly on existential angst and self-pity, with extra servings of undead-ity seasoned with suppsoedly stylish black clothes. You're not going to find much happy-happy in the books.

[metaphysician]

My own thoughts:

Vampire: Similar themes, but got a major debugging. For one thing, no more crippling clan weaknesses ( Nosferatu and Gangrel, I'm looking at you ). Blood Potency helps explain why its not elders uber alles. The covenants provide more interesting political/religious affiliations than the prior camarilla/sabbat divide.

Werewolf: Haven't read, from what I've heard its just more of the same stupidity as old Werewolf, except with less munchkin twinkiness. I suppose thats a good thing. . . except CDAU is supposed to be policy for the new WoD.

Mage: While I'm a big fan of the Technocracy, and there was good stuff in Mage 1.0, the new Mage is a much better game for mystic feel. Magic system is alot better described, cosmology is more coherent.

[Blue Thunder]

Personally...I don't really like the Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc. lines. I never have. I just like straight-up World of Darkness, where the players are normal humans in a dark setting.

IMO, the best thing White Wolf did with the nWoD was have the main book *not* include vampires, werewolves, or any of the other "supernatural" type PCs. I don't mind throwing in a vampire or werewolf every now and then, but like I said, I prefer having human characters running into the supernatural, X-Files style. It gave a lot more freedom, I think.