Requiem For Rome Review

[Username17]

Vampire: The Requiem: The Highschool Years: In Rome: The Review

If you are at any time tempted to play nWoD Vampire, it is highly suggested that you play it with the Requiem For Rome rather than the standard Requiem rules/setting. This is because Requiem For Rome is far and away the highest quality nWoD product made. Now, you may be familiar enough with my opinions on the matter that you may be under the distinct impression that I do not regard this as being much of a set of praise. And you'd be totally right. The nWoD is a crappy world that tells crappy stories and is married to bad game mechanics. And so being better than the rest of the sea of dung merely makes it an island of shit which is scarcely solid enough to support your weight while you're examining it. But hey, that means that you actually can stand on it and examine it in detail without drowning in feces. That's fucking key if you want to mine it for ideas. And you do, because there are a lot of diamonds in here.

What the Fuck? Welcome back Camarilla!

So first off, to get a grasp on really anything that is going on in this book, you need to be a WoD fanwaker to an amazing degree. The book is an alternate history that details the divergence point between oWoD and nWoD Vampire in ancient Rome. So you have your whole ancient Roman Vampire Civilization and it's running around calling itself the Camarilla in order to vainly attempt to get oWoD vampire fans back on board.

The entire book is a prequel to nWoD, which means that all the crap from Requiem is “going to happen” - this is supposed to give everything a feeling of impending doom and collapse. And since the nWoD storyline is a bunch of boring crap that we don't give a fuck about, this is actually a remarkably effective technique. Normally I am against throwing up the players with an “inevitable” future, but if you really want to grind in the angst and despair it's not a bad method of doing just that. For once, the nWoD hits the right note and actually achieves the emotional impact it's going for: their Rome is pretty cool, and the thought that it's all going to fall apart and be replaced with a bunch of boring Christians who scarcely talk to each other and have nothing any sane person would even care about is a thing to darkly brood over.

What you get is frankly the usual assortment of page-filling meanderings for much of the book. If you've read anything from White Wolf in the last five years, you'll know the drill: TL;DR first person rants in illegible “hand scrawled” fonts, weird philosophical tirades and asides, jumbled mechanics that don't match the descriptions even on cursory examination, and so on. But it finds traction in many unexpected places. Firstly, someone has gone through all the trouble of data mining the actual Roman Histories for all the fucked up shit like the various recorded rains of blood and ambulatory cadavers. Secondly, some people have actually gone through Roman philosophy with a more complicated eye than just hand waving about how it's “awesome” or “barbaric” and really gone into some genuine Roman thought patterns and morality. In short, it got exactly what it needed to not be a waste of space: someone with a genuine Classics education and too much time on their hands to rant all over it.

Aaah! nWoD mechanics!

Now unfortunately, this stuff all gets overlain onto the nWoD core mechanics, and those are terrible. And that's a fact that comes up to painfully annoy again and again. The “roll lots of dice until I tell you to stop” combat system is really the centerpiece here. In nWoD, combat is a boring, tacticsless afterthought. And melee combat is a boring afterthought tacked onto that. This is brutally damaging when the players are supposed to be Romans with swords. Even 4e D&D has a more interesting melee system, fuck, Tunnels & Trolls has more interesting melee combat.

But it's not just in melee combat that the game system sucks. Remember that these are Requiem rules, so you're required to take a Christian Virtue and Vice even though you're not a fucking Christian society. Seriously, the Christians get to have Christian virtues, but the Aristoteleans still have to take Christian virtues for no damn reason. There's all this cool introspection going on about how the non-Christians seriously don't believe in Sin and Redemption, but there's no mechanical backup for that. You're still stuck with the rules made to back up tired Christian apologetics. And let's be honest here: Christian apologetics make as much sense to an impartial observer as Time Cube. So now that the standard character is assumed to be an impartial observer, these rules seem even shittier and out of place than they normally do.

And yeah, you get the same predator's taint crap that makes the game not work. And the book just sort of glosses over how totally fucked that system is. I mean, you're seriously supposed to do Roman-era philosophical dance-offs in front of crowds of fifty vampire strangers, and we know how fucked up that would be under Predator's Taint fappery.

Some of these things just Don't Belong

There are a lot of times that you will find yourself stopping short and pondering what the fucking hell when you read a mechanic. I mean, literally the fifth dot of one of the Debate trees (yes, there are two debate trees, more on that later) does nothing at all. It seriously allows you to pay a Willpower for +3 to a roll instead of the normal rule where you can spend a Willpower for +3 to that roll. It's 120 words long and it has no effect whatsoever. It's really puzzling.

But the there's the usual crap like how the game goes off at great length about what great combatants the Gangrel are despite not having any special combat ability at all. Seriously a frickin Nosferatu will hand a Gangrel his entire ass, and Nosferatu suck at life.

The most intriguing of the game's innovations is its extra Dance Fighting mechanic. It's the thing where you get to stand up in front of your opponent and rant at each other while an audience determines which of you is the winner and which is the loser. It's based on nWoD combat mechanics, which means that the core mechanic is that you both figure out how many dice you roll and then you roll them over and over again until someone on one side or the other accumulates a sufficient pile of hits. It's actually slightly better than that sounds because there are a couple of actual choices you can make during the danceoff. But yeah, the core really is that you do some math to determine whether you'd be better acting like a sexless Vulcan or Groucho Marx and then making the same “insult mother” appeal over and over again until you win or don't. Still, the fact that the rules encourage you to figure out when the battle is almost over and then spam a bunch of mudslinging is kind of neat. There are a number of pieces of that which could be adapted to other uses.

Perhaps the most puzzling choice is that they replaced the Ventrue with... wait for it... the Ventrue. They have a different name and a different origin story but they are exactly the same. There is no reason – at all – for them to be claimed as a different clan.

But the real key is that the entire setup with the different wings and factions of the Camarilla and the interweaving of historical details and genuine crises with real decision points means that there is stuff to do and reasons to interact wth the stuff and the people in the setting. That's key. And that, by itself, makes this hands down the best nWoD product ever made.

-Username17

[souran]

Frank,

Did you like OWOD at all or is White Wolf simply never written a coherent ruleset in your eyes?

I admit that nwod makes me so frustrated when I play it that I am to the point where I just don't, even when offered.

However, owod was quite simply just mechanically worse.

[Username17]

Did you like OWOD at all or is White Wolf simply never written a coherent ruleset in your eyes?

That better be an nclusive or.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

I believe Franks point has always been:

oWoD rules sucked. And were more work to implement. But it had good fluff and plot and stuff that was at least worth playing.

nWoD rules suck, and are less work to figure out and implement, but result in an actually worse game than someone who has figured out oWoD. Also, the fluff sucks too. No reason to play.