World of Darkness and Folly

[Desdan_Mervolam]

1169710077[/unixtime]]The whole Sabbat thing never made much sense to me. What is the point of the Masquerade if you have an entire faction that doesn't play by those rules? And if they can get away with not playing by those rules, why do they exist at all (since there is no reason to think the rest of the vampires couldn't as well)?

The sad thing was, the Sabbat DID play by those rules. The only real difference between the Sabbat and the Camarilla was the window dressing. Both of them expect you to suck the cock of anyone above you on the totem pole at a moments notice and call it candy, and both assume you're planning to kill and drink everyone above you at the first sign of weakness. The Sabbat is just more open about it. Both will kill you just as quickly for running around letting people know you're a vampire, The Camarilla will just point to the Inquisition as an example of when humans know too much, and the Sabbat will call it "Being sloppy". The Camarilla has big decadent parties to convince themselves that they're still human, the Sabbat has big decadent parties to convince themselves that they're not. And most importantly, they're both run by secret circles of really old, really powerful fucks who are interested in maintaining their power first and reducing the power of everyone who has ever pissed them off.

Most of the stuff about the Sabbat flagrantly violating the traditions was written back when it was assumed that the Sabbat were going to be nothing but 2 dimensional villians and their thugs. When White Wolf realized that there were people who actually wanted to PLAY Sabbat, like for reals, they realized that the game breaks down REAL FAST like that. So they decided to rope the Sabbat in and play the previous impressions off as Camarilla propaganda. (Unfortunatly, their hamfisted handling of the Sabbat didn't stop there, or ever. For example, see the aforementioned Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, a book so bad both in general and for the game that they decided it would be a better idea to drop the ghost of an atomic bomb on the subplots introduced in it than allow that bullshit to continue)

-Desdan

[bitnine]

I've got a nice collection of old Werewolf material.

Yeah, if the Garou were supposed to be the tragic dying breed and the others gone or fragments from the war, all these books beg the question of how the frig many of these critters were there before the war?

But werewolf was just dumb... There's just no reason that werewolves wouldn't be common knowledge. Vampires supposedly control the media, and they want werewolves out of the picture. So why not acknowledge the existence of werewolves and set the human populations on their destruction. They lose effectively nothing and have something to occupy the monster hunters of the world.

I dunno, the threat of humanity overwhelming with numbers was sometimes presented as a theme, but I really never saw it pan out as an actualized element. Instead, you'd have Immensely Powerful Supernatural RetCon Police who did the real work of keeping the WoD in line with ours in regards to appearances. Why the Immensely Powerful Supernatural RetCon Police went ahead and did their job as they did varied a bit, and sometimes didn't quite make sense. I've seen more than one ST of various games just rely on the threat of Technocratic orbital vaporization and subsequent populace neuralization in order to keep the flow. (Okay, usually not quite so flashy scifi as orbital vaporization, but have you seen the plot devicerific stats on oWoD Black Helicopters?)

Personally, I rather liked pre-rev Mage for pretty much the reasons bitnine talks about: you could have characters who got to do really cool things without also being expected to get all angsty and tormented about it. It's not that I don't enjoy getting angsty and tormented about my characters as much as anyone (and probably more than most), but I prefer not to have that kind of thing applied with a sledgehammer by the game itself.

Well, that certainly was the source of a lot of complaints against mage Rev, and why a substantive number of active players ported rules from Rev into the setting of pre-Rev. (On the plus? side, resonance was a glass hammer that was annoying yet fairly ineffective.)

Really, if there was a drawback, it was usually played as seeing the world beneath the world even in trying to live an everyday life, and not being able to be help being drawn in. But that's not necessarily terribly emo, and it is a very 'soft' plot element to be fairly arbitrarily implemented by the ST. That and the broader range of themes didn't really fit with the rest of the WoD. Aside from the delightful "OMG CYBORGS WITH LASERZ IS NOT GOTHIC OR WOD" spam that you'd see.

Most of the stuff about the Sabbat flagrantly violating the traditions was written back when it was assumed that the Sabbat were going to be nothing but 2 dimensional villians and their thugs.

Yeah, especially near the beginning, WoD designers seemed to suffer from a great lack of anticipation and planning in making things actually playable. They had a narrowish view on what players were supposed to play, and were real loose in going nuts with the things that were ST 'props'. Consequently, someone would run a Sabbat or even early Technocratic game and find out that a lot of things didn't work. They sort of wised up a bit as things went on and tried to patch up these elements and release player's guides, but various artifacts can certainly be seen.

[RandomCasualty]

1169747530[/unixtime]] Well, that certainly was the source of a lot of complaints against mage Rev, and why a substantive number of active players ported rules from Rev into the setting of pre-Rev. (On the plus? side, resonance was a glass hammer that was annoying yet fairly ineffective.)

I never saw the big difference between Rev and pre-rev aside from flavor text. In both versions, the technocracy was pretty much in control and winning the ascension war, only before the mages sorta thought they had a shot at winning back and the rev mages were a bit more realistic about the fact that they were pwned.

But really, aside from the avatar storm and the destruction of that one famous chantry, not much happened with the rev storyline wise, aside from them being more direct about telling us how awesome the technocracy was. I guess the backstory had a bit more of an angsty tone to it, but otherwise I didn't feel the game was all that worse storywise.

[Modesitt]

Yeah, if the Garou were supposed to be the tragic dying breed and the others gone or fragments from the war, all these books beg the question of how the frig many of these critters were there before the war?

Do you really want to know? I can, unfortunately, vouch for the accuracy of that article. We were one supplement away from manbearpig.