Paradox Buys White Wolf from CCP

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Mask_De_H
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Voss wrote:It had a prime time tv show on fox in the aftermath of Buffy* that failed miserably, being too confusing for the general audience and too hand wavy for the True Fans.

*with a number of cast members that were monsters of the week or short arc adversaries on Buffy.

The IP isn't good for a general audience, because it's just now+weird ass terminology that means nothing or something real that is entirely different (see Antediluvian, Brujah and Jyhad). It can work for computer games, because a larger chunk of the audience there is looking for clan names, wacky power terms, and lexicon terms to nerd out to. With the TV show (and possible future TV shows and films), people hear a litany of gibberish nonsense and tune out- even though they toned it down quite a lot for the show. If you strip all that out, you just have a fairly terrible generic vampire show.
Dude, what? Now+bullshit terminology is every urban fantasy thing on TV. You honestly thing the market is less accepting of that after True Blood, The Magicians, various superhero serials and Game of Thrones?

With some focus and a competent hack at the helm, a nuVamp TV series could at least settle into comfortable mediocrity on SyFy or something.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
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Post by Mechalich »

Look, The Vampire Diaries, which is soap-ified version of what VtM (and to an extent the entire oWoD, it has werewolves and mages too) always wanted to be has gone 8 fucking seasons with no signs of stopping and managed to spawn The Originals as a multi-season spin-off. Both series have drunk deep from the Teen Choice Awards. The interest is there.

Both shows have all sorts of absurdly arcane terminology and tons of bullshit effects and it doesn't seem to bother the audience.

Attempting to replicate the feel of those shows, across various media, is probably what needs to be done with Vampire now. For TV I'd go across to Europe since the game seems to still be very popular there, and Vampire Diaries is firmly nestled in the US. A teen VtM soap set in London or Paris with a suitably hot cast (this is depressingly important to the primarily female audience that follows this stuff religiously) and maybe a single recognizable lead - pick a decently famous British person from Game of Thrones for some nerd cred - could absolutely work.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

It's not that those shows don't mean anything, it's that they demonstrably didn't need the V:TM intellectual property to succeed. At the end of the day vampires are public domain whether you want to make The Strain, True Blood, Twilight or fucking Blacula. In this world of Comicon panels and internet promotion I'm not sure actually owning the WW IP and being indebted to the hardcore fans is that much more valuable than making the appropriate noises of deference and promising edginess for some and miniature American flags for others. It's certainly possible, but it's a math problem I don't know enough about to answer.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sun Mar 19, 2017 1:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich »

Whipstitch wrote:It's not that those shows don't mean anything, it's that they demonstrably didn't need the V:TM intellectual property to succeed. At the end of the day vampires are public domain whether you want to make The Strain, True Blood, Twilight or fucking Blacula. In this world of Comicon panels and internet promotion I'm not sure actually owning the WW IP and being indebted to the hardcore fans is that much more valuable than making the appropriate noises of deference and promising edginess for some and miniature American flags for others. It's certainly possible, but it's a math problem I don't know enough about to answer.
That's a fair point. I suppose it is an open question whether or not the WW IP brings a benefit or a cost to making an all-myths-are-true modern monster soap.

I think there are benefits, if, if, you manage it correctly. Correctly being a Camarilla city with the core clans doing the kind of gothy-politics stuff that the various LARPs got up to is useful and the idea of vampire clans - as stupid as many of the VtM clans are - is useful in a large-cast drama like TV or a video game. However, those benefits may be marginal and not worth the baggage.

Part of the question is also one of age. VtM is old and has been dead - for Onyx Path values of dead - for over a decade. Modern supernatural soaps are generally pitched younger - mostly at teenage and college girls. In the mid-nineties that would have had a huge overlap with the VtM player base, now, probably not so much.
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Post by Username17 »

But True Blood and Vampire Diaries were based on books. True Blood is based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries and The Vampire Diaries is based on a book series that is also called The Vampire Diaries.

The World of Darkness has more setting elements to use than most such book series, but way less plot. So converting it to a series would be a bit harder. But the overall value would be about the same, and you would never run into the problem of needing another season when the next book isn't done because so long as you ignore the Final Nights garbage, everthing is open ended and there's no real plot to diverge from.

Remember that the underlying quality of the writing of the book series has very little to do with the quality of the adapted TV show. I think we can all agree that Dresden Files is a much better book series than most of the other Urban Fantasy shlock, but when they made a TV series out of it they made a half season Syfy abortion. Making a V:tM TV series would have precisely the same chance at being a big hit or a flop as any other Urban Fantasy adaptation. Vampire Academy is insanely popular in this genre and the movie they made out of it was kind of a mess and flopped at the box office.

Now the thing to remember here is that there's no particular reason to want to make a World of Darkness TV show rather than adapt the Mercy Thompson Mooncalled books or the Jane Yellowrock Skinwalker books. And the fact that V:tM already made a TV show that failed makes going after Anita Blake or Georgina Kincaid. It would be entirely reasonable to make a new TV show about Ventrue, but it would be just as reasonable to make a show from the Night Huntress or Already Dead series.

For V:tM to be turned into a new series, they pretty much have to randomly find some producer in Hollywood or Vancouver who happens to be a big fan and wants to make a show about Malkavians who are also Private Eyes or some fucking thing like the really cool campaign they ran while they were in college. If they can't find that, there's no show. Because no random producer is going to want to finance a show based on an interchangeable property that already failed on TV once in the nineties back when it was at its most popular as a book series.

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Post by Voss »

@Mask and Mecha- I don't watch TV, so other than Game of Thrones I had no idea any of that existed (and that only because people won't fucking shut up about it).

But given that they DO exist... the idea that there would be a demand for a new version of a failed TV show based on a tabletop game... how would that be justified?

There aren't any meaningful or memorable characters or actual plot elements to transition to TV, and the only thing converting it to a mediocre SciFi channel or CW (does that network even still exist anymore?) show would do is clean it up and take some of the creepy-as-fuck shit out, which would do little but enrage the tiny surviving fanbase.

That isn't much incentive for a studio to do it, rather than, say, serialize Ann Rice or any of the really literally dozens of actually popular vampire or werewolf teen shit series running around. There has been a long string of vampire shows including buffy, forever knight and all the way back to dark shadows. Plus whatever modern shit is running around, and also-rans like whatever that 'new amsterdam' thing was a few years back. 'But a nostalgic look at a dead TTRPG' isn't a quality that any studio is going to look for.
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Post by K »

Mechalich wrote:Look, The Vampire Diaries, which is soap-ified version of what VtM (and to an extent the entire oWoD, it has werewolves and mages too) always wanted to be has gone 8 fucking seasons with no signs of stopping ...

The Vampire Diaries literally aired their series finale on March 20.
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Post by Aspirinsmurf »

Voss wrote:It had a prime time tv show on fox in the aftermath of Buffy* that failed miserably, being too confusing for the general audience and too hand wavy for the True Fans.
Actually, Kindred: the Embraced first aired a year before Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Mask_De_H
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Post by Mask_De_H »

So apparently WW's new Swedish overlords hired Ken Hite to help design VtM 5e (with V20 being the 4th). He talks about it on his podcast.

There's also hearsay that Shitmuffin's involved, but it's low veracity even for TTRPG hearsay.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Mask_De_H wrote:So apparently WW's new Swedish overlords hired Ken Hite to help design VtM 5e (with V20 being the 4th). He talks about it on his podcast.

There's also hearsay that Shitmuffin's involved, but it's low veracity even for TTRPG hearsay.
Considering that he partially wrote the choose your own adventure that someone had the balls to sell on the open market, I am not surprised.
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Post by Longes »

FatR
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Post by FatR »

It seems they are still laboring under delusion that struggle against vampiric hunger was the main, or at least one of the key parts of the game.

If my experience with VtM is in any way indicative, actual players try to get the problem of feeding and general logistics of their vampire life out of the way at the stage of character generation, at least past their first character.
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Post by Parthenon »

Two things that jump out at me:

Firstly, what is with the weird opening quotation marks below the text? Is that a German thing or is it the writer being up their own arse?

Secondly, it doesn't say about any effect of rolling a 10, so at the moment it looks like a flat 50% chance per die. At that point is there any point in using d10s rather than coins other than nostalgia?
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Post by Schleiermacher »

Yes; flipping that many coins is annoying. Now, there's no reason not to start using d6s with TN 4+ rather than d10s. D6 are more useful for other games, roll better and more people have then long around.
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Post by Teylen »

@Parthenon:
I am the writer and I just noticed, thanks to you, that it is a German thing. Thanks :)
In German quotes work like „...“ opposed to "..." in the US. Somehow some lower ones slipped into the English translation. I corrected it.

For most rolls, save for the hunger die, any dice with an even number or a coin would indeed do. When talking about it with friends they did compare it to Ubiquity.
Last edited by Teylen on Tue Jun 06, 2017 1:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Parthenon »

Teylen wrote:@Parthenon:
I am the writer and I just noticed, thanks to you, that it is a German thing. Thanks :)
In German quotes work like „...“ opposed to "..." in the US. Somehow some lower ones slipped into the English translation. I corrected it.

For most rolls, save for the hunger die, any dice with an even number or a coin would indeed do. When talking about it with friends they did compare it to Ubiquity.
Thanks for the clarification. I guessed that it was a German thing, but White Wolf has been known in the past to have people who insist on a very eccentric way of doing things for the sake of being different or to pretend they didn't make a mistake, so I was curious.

Since d6s are used more by lots of other games, do you think that the hunger rolls could be altered to use d6s instead of d10s as an alternate method? Just thinking that it would be easier for people to start playing if they don't have to buy and store another type of dice.
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Post by Teylen »

No problem, I understand :)

Hm, I have to admit that I haven't really thought about replacing the d10.
In regards of the hunger mechanic it is basically percentile. Thus if just taking d6 each die would have a 16% chance being a hunger dice 1.

Maybe it could be done with a set of cards?

Select 10 cards of spades and 10 of hearts. Shuffle them and draw one.
If it comes up red, it is a success. If not it isn't.
If the card drawn is an Ace it equals a 1.
This process would have to be repeated for each roll. To keep the statistics the same.

Though you might switch the whole system to cards.
Instead of a dice pool you would take a card pool.
Instead of picking up 3 days, you would choose 3 red cards and 3 black cards (of Ace to 10).
For each dot in hunger you replace 2 cards of each color with jacks, queens, kings or jokers.
You shuffle and draw as many cards are in your pool. Red ones are successes, black ones ain't. Check how many came up as "a face card". They are hunger cards 1s. Disadvantage: Its quite a bit of sorting.

That's only my train of thought. I am not a developer and am not a White Wolf associate, just a normal fan.
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Post by hyzmarca »

FatR wrote:It seems they are still laboring under delusion that struggle against vampiric hunger was the main, or at least one of the key parts of the game.

If my experience with VtM is in any way indicative, actual players try to get the problem of feeding and general logistics of their vampire life out of the way at the stage of character generation, at least past their first character.
Replacing the blood pool with hunger does have some mechanical advantages.

1) It lets you spam Disciplines all day and all night. Previously, a hungry vampire was a less dangerous vampire, because some of the most lethal disciplines had a blood point cost. Now, you don't have that limitation. A hungry vampire can murderize you just as well as a full one can, perhaps better.

2)It gives the characters a good reason to murder people. Killing was never really a useful solution in the blood point system. You were always better off taking regular sips. This basically means that vampires who did murder people, including the entire Sabbat, made no sense. Now, vampires who regularly murder people have a substantial advantage.
This means that instead of constantly frenzying Lost Boys rejects, your opposition is going to be the calm and collected guy in the three-piece suit, while your moral PCs are always a little on edge, like a heroin addict who needs a fix.

3) We no longer have to worry about how many blood points are in a pint.
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Post by Username17 »

Blood Pool didn't work the way we wanted it to. Turns out that murdering hobos for a few pints of blood was bullshit when a more rational approach could give you gallons of the stuff with no trail of bodies at all. This hunger thing should work better than that, although it's pretty fiddly.

Also, the Hunger is still amenable to a rational approach. Expect to hear the words "heparinized beer helmet" fairly frequently if anyone still cares about Vampire at this point.

A bigger problem of course is that Vampire had its big chance at a reformation in the early 2000s, and it failed. The use of a single Physical attribute indicates that V5 combat is likely to be just as terrible as nWoD combat, and we've already established that was unacceptable.

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Post by Smirnoffico »

Pre-alpha rule set here, if anyone wants:
https://blog.white-wolf.com/2017/06/15/ ... ain-rises/
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Post by Mask_De_H »

There are a lot more save or die/die no save situations in the module than I would have expected. The Anarchs specifically will dust the entire party on a hair trigger. You also don't really have the ability to circumvent some of the challenges thrown your way, so it seems to be designed for you to lose. There's a lot of "do we not deserve this?" on Bad Ends.
The shotacon Ventrue that's one of the pregens can get DNSed as soon as she walks through the door. Granted, that's because she's been rounding up and feeding on refugee children and one of the Anarchs you have to suck up to is Ashirra
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

I am really impressed that after 26 years and 5 editions there are still no rules for Presence 1. That's kind of amazing.
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Post by Username17 »

Why are we still using the word "succeed" to mean one die rolling over the target number and getting enough total dice to beat the difficulty? I mean, Shadowrun fixed that nomenclature with "hits" and "success" twelve years ago. People who were in fucking kindergarten when this problem was solved can now vote and buy porn. What the fuck!

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Post by Username17 »

I genuinely don't understand why the core mechanics are so clunky at this point. A "Hard" task is something that someone with a maximum dicepool fails at 62.3% of the time. That is ridiculous failure rate for someone who has maximum stat and maximum skill.

Skipping the die roll gives you the exact same average result as rolling, so there's no incentive to roll.

It uses d10s, but no fact about d10s is used in the core mechanics and it would just be easier to use d6s with TN 4.

They went to a single stat system where you only have a single "mental" stat.

Ugh. It's just so bad. It looks like a Vampire ruleslite from the Fuzion era circa 1996.

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Post by hyzmarca »

FrankTrollman wrote: It uses d10s, but no fact about d10s is used in the core mechanics and it would just be easier to use d6s with TN 4.
The hunger dice kick in on a 1, do hunger effects would be much more common on a d6.
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