Paradox Buys White Wolf from CCP

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Schleiermacher
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Post by Schleiermacher »

Lots of really poorly thought out stuff there, as expected (You are what you eat, for example, is a trash fire) -but some unexpected good stuff too. The Hunger system and even the sketchy blood potency rules seem a lot more usable than the old Blood Point rules. They make elders who can go a lot longer without growing hungry, but need lots of blood and crash hard when they do, which seems appropriate. And when Elders can't flatten you with bottomless blood reserves and sky-high spending caps anymore, it makes their overwhelming power a notch less overwhelming, too.

(The Compulsions table for the effects of hunger is pretty hopeless though. You'd need to rewrite it thoroughly.)
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Post by Chamomile »

Reading White Wolf rules makes me vomit blood. Anyone want to summarize the new blood mechanics for me?
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Post by hyzmarca »

Chamomile wrote:Reading White Wolf rules makes me vomit blood. Anyone want to summarize the new blood mechanics for me?
Instead of spending blood points, you add 1 die to a pool that gets rolled at the end of scene, or when it reaches 5, whichever comes first. When you roll this pool, every success adds to your Hunger, rated 0-5. If your Hunger pool is already full, you make a frenzy roll at a penalty equal to the extra successes.

Hunger dice replace notmal dice in your pool, and are colored red. If a Hunger die rolls a 1, you suffer from a hunger related compulsion, which you can resist by spending Composure, which is a new pool that works like Willpower.

Feeding removes a number of hunger dice depending on what you're eating. Humans remove 3, unless you kill them, then they remove 5. Blood packs are only worth 1 die. Killing a human is the only way to drop the hunger pool to 0.

Lower generations have a blood potency stat. Their blood potency is subtracted from their end of scene blood rolls, so they become hungry much more slowly. However, it makes their hunger compulsions stronger and more extreme, and reduces hunger loss from feeding.


Feeding is tracked per act, rather than per point. It doesn't matter how much you consume, only what the source is, and if you kill. Killing a premature newborn is going to be more satisfying than drinking an adult to the edge of death, even though the adult has more blood. It's the act that matters, not the volume of fluid.

Incidentally, this is taken advantage of in the backstory of one of the pregens.

There's also a new "you are what you eat" mechanic to help encourage in-scene feeding. Basically, when you feed off of someone, you get a small bonus that varies from victim to victim. Drink a junkie high of meth, your next use of Celery is free. Drink a chairming yourg woman, get a +1 on your next Presence test. Drink from a stout, though, guy, next use of Fortitude is free. Drink from a baby, get a free Blush of Life for the rest of the scene.

This requires the DM to make up small bonuses pretty much on the spot whenever you feed, or to only let you feed on pregened characters.


Actions that add to the roll to see if you're hungry are refereed to Rousing the Blood, and the term can be used in character, which is an advantage over blood points.

These include most things that would have cost blood in previous editions. Waking up, activating powers, adding a +1 bonus to any stat, or healing, or using Blush of Life.


Also, I think that they 're a bit too enamored with the fact that t's 2017 and saying "fuck" in an RPG book is no longer transgressive. The playtest scenario has multiple pregened child and infant NPCs that you can feed on for that free blush of life bonus.


It also explicitly states that one of the pregened PCs is a pedophile. Not in a Ventrue Clan Flaw and oblique feeding as rape metaphors sort of way. Nope. The description of one of three characters that you're required to play explicitly says that she likes to fuck children.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Fri Jun 16, 2017 12:03 am, edited 6 times in total.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

It also explicitly states that one of the pregened PCs is a pedophile. Not in a Ventrue Clan Flaw and oblique feeding as rape metaphors sort of way. Nope. The description of one of three characters that you're required to play explicitly says that she likes to fuck children.
Nah, she's a pedophile and her Ventrue Clan flaw is can only eat kids. She's the shotacon in my spoiler.
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 FatR »

hyzmarca wrote: Replacing the blood pool with hunger does have some mechanical advantages.
Maybe, but - let bigger buffs of urban fantasy correct me if I'm wrong - it was decades since anything with vampires as protagonists made a big deal out of feeding. Even Tokyo Ghoul pretty much never returned to logistics of procuring human corpses once the main character got past the initial adapting to his new life, and the actual plot with superpower battles and fifteen layers of conspiracies kicked in. (You know, pretty much like in actual VtM games.)

But seems nobody on the dev team got the note that the vast majority of people who may be interested in a game about vampires today haven't read Ann Rice. And probably don't associate vampires with a Shadowrun-style game premise, where recent vampires get dusted so easily, that Embrace actually lowers your life expectancy
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Post by Username17 »

The raw mechanics of feeding are pretty central to iZombie, where the titular zombie heroine gets visions and skills from brain eating and the show features a new brain getting eaten every single episode.

But more broadly I would agree. Blood gets thrown around every episode of True Blood, but it's rarely particularly important where it comes from. Even in books and shows where it's a thing that is used as a leitmotif it's still only a leitmotif. It's not the plot or the goal, it's the fucking spinach song from Popeye or the transformation sequence from Sailor Moon. You show the blood drinking to show that shit is about to get real. It's not the resolution of fucking anything.

Having the hunger mechanics be front and center like this is just missing the entire fucking point. Urban Fantasy isn't a genre about wondering where your next meal is coming from, it's a genre about looking good in black and having superheroes with magic themed powers duke it out with horror themed monsters. Drinking blood is a power source and an excuse to be dark and edgy and morose, but it's not actually interesting enough to have that carry the narrative by itself.

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Post by Dogbert »

Would it make me a bad playtester to test the rules with a scenario different from the vomitive MC wankfest provided? I'd make sure of using situations involving compulsions and combat avoidance (which is what the mechanical parts of the scenario seemed to be about), but penis-extension NPCs give me cancer.
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Post by Voss »

Dogbert wrote:Would it make me a bad playtester to test the rules with a scenario different from the vomitive MC wankfest provided? I'd make sure of using situations involving compulsions and combat avoidance (which is what the mechanical parts of the scenario seemed to be about), but penis-extension NPCs give me cancer.
Apparently, yes. According to the blogpost that accompanies the rules/scenario, not only is not using the scenario badwrongfun, it also renders the rules non-functional (somehow, well aside from the obvious that they don't function very well with the scenario).

I'm honestly amazing at what stands out as the worst features of this whole deal:
1) they're trying to launch the game on the memory of actual humans deaths

2) the railroad nature of everything (including blood bonds, which now apparently telepathically geas you to the plot, even if you have zero way of knowing about the situation.)

or 3) the shit-tastic rules, in general, be it the stats or the incoherently complex feed/hunger mechanics (which are simply avoided by never rolling dice?).

4) or the truly bloody awful writing, with references to so many things of no relevance to anyone playing a playtest scenario. But hey, feel guilty about the things these characters did off screen. Except any time they murder-fucked children, of course. In fact, why don't we kick off the player actions with that? Sounds like a great basis for a playtest.

5) the scenario is basically Vampions in reverse, not only the do the characters suck, the fifty billion enemies wandering the streets of Berlin all seem to be on some sort of anti-vampire task force for no apparent reason.

6) Huzzah for living up to the worst standards of old WW and their rape train. Not only do we get the murderous pedophile rapist, but the thing she feels guilty for is actually legally executing someone according to the laws of the camarilla, the society she's been a part of for 80 years.
Next up is her 'loyal' virtue childe that wants to murder her.


Ugh, nothing about this good, and the amount DM powertripping is absolutely abominable, as is wallowing in real life tragedies.

Honestly, embarrassingly bad for all involved, even if they are just going to use it as a computer game license.
Last edited by Voss on Fri Jun 23, 2017 4:28 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

I don't actually care about their intro playtest scenario. I mean, it's a dumpster fire and if I had this sprung on me at a convention I would have noped the fuck out. But honestly it doesn't matter. The vast majority of prepack adventures are garbage, but most people don't play prepack adventures so who cares?

The big issue seems to be that the new people don't seem to know why Vampire was cool, let alone how to go about making it cool again two decades later. Vampire would need to do some real deep introspection about what worked, what didn't work, and what parts of the rules and setting were just being mind caulked away in actual play.

The new crew doesn't seem to get any of this. They don't seem to have the slightest idea of what made Vampire popular or how to reach out to people who would like to play Vampire again. The time was you could get all the goths and nerds to take notice and start a test game up just by saying "New Edition of Vampire." That time was fifteen years ago. Those people have grown up and gotten jobs and many of them have kids of their own now.

To do a new edition of Vampire and have people care, you really need to tell us what you're doing to revitalize the franchise. This... isn't that. It's not even close.

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Post by hyzmarca »

Voss wrote:
Dogbert wrote:Would it make me a bad playtester to test the rules with a scenario different from the vomitive MC wankfest provided? I'd make sure of using situations involving compulsions and combat avoidance (which is what the mechanical parts of the scenario seemed to be about), but penis-extension NPCs give me cancer.
Apparently, yes. According to the blogpost that accompanies the rules/scenario, not only is not using the scenario badwrongfun, it also renders the rules non-functional (somehow, well aside from the obvious that they don't function very well with the scenario).
The rules as written are incomplete. They're just enough to run this highly railroaded playtest scenario and that's it. And they're barely enough for that. Anytrhing that allowed the PCs to act on their own initive would immediately leap completely outside of the rules they have and into a giant white space full of question marks.

This is pre-Alpha not ready for any time, much less prime time.
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Post by Username17 »

hyzmarca wrote:The rules as written are incomplete. They're just enough to run this highly railroaded playtest scenario and that's it. And they're barely enough for that. Anytrhing that allowed the PCs to act on their own initive would immediately leap completely outside of the rules they have and into a giant white space full of question marks.

This is pre-Alpha not ready for any time, much less prime time.
At this point we can't critique the hacking system or the balance of spells or whatever the fuck, because subsystems don't really exist. All they've got is their ideas on how they are going to run the core action resolution and... I'm not impressed. Shadowrun and Vampire have been on fixed target numbers for a long time. Shadowrun 4 came out in 2005. NWoD came out in 2004. It's been more than a decade, the problems with the core resolution mechanics are well known and I do not feel that they have really addressed many of these.

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Post by Longes »

https://blog.white-wolf.com/2017/06/28/ ... al-horror/

A new blog post is up, saying some odd things.
Make no mistake, the player characters in the V5 pre-alpha playtest are monsters and villains. Through them, we intend for our players to view the Camarilla sect from the Anarch perspective, as a perverse and privileged class of old-school vampires and who adhere to an antiquated code of morality and obsessed by the realpolitik of staying in power at any price. The player characters are written as dictators and collaborators who deserve to fall hard, perhaps even deserve to die, as they are torn from power.
Personally, I don't know why they decided to show in their opening hand the kind of vampires who are decidedly not the PCs produced by normal chargen. Say what you will about Z-person's visual novel, but at least you played a neonate in that one.
The nature of the Curse makes each sin vampires might inflict upon the world erode their souls. Yet vampires must live off the blood of humans. The longer they exist, the longer they visit their own evil upon the world, they become ever-more distant and alien to the world around them. Their actions have terrible consequences for themselves and others; some of them can be considered truly evil. This internal conflict has been been at the core of VTM stories since the game’s creation. That is the very essence of the Curse of Caine, and it makes the best vampire a struggling anti-hero and the worst a hypocritical monster like Amelina.
I must have missed all the anti-heroic personal horror over the sound of big penis NPCs slapping me around.
Contemporary, real-world horrors and atrocities are an important part of the setting and by extension – its characters.
I'm looking forward to Assamites backing ISIS and Ventrue healthcare problem.
As we release future previews, you’ll see that V5 will include many relevant, timely story elements like the global migrant and refugee crises, drug abuse, human trafficking, urban decay, homelessness, government corruption, ecological crises and political instability.
So no Assamite ISIS?
We’ll give you the means to focus your V5 chronicles on any aspect of Vampire: The Masquerade that you’ve ever enjoyed, from terrifyingly intimate scenes of very personal horror to the repulsive global power plays of the Camarilla Kindred.
I don't think I've ever actually seen Camarilla being portrayed as a global conspiracy. It's called that, but it's all very much pirates who do nothing.
Q: Why is Amelina a pedophile?
A: She’s not. She has an obsession with young (recently embraced) Kindred and a feeding restriction that forces her to feed from children and young teens.
But clearly many people thought she is a pedophile.
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Post by Mord »

Smells like damage control.
Our oversight, for which we apologize, was not providing this context so that our players could see why and how we made these decisions. We needed to clearly state again that the material was intended for mature audiences, and to label it that way. We should have stated again that our vision for V5 brings Vampire back to its roots as a morality tale about evil, set in the darkest places of our own world.
... and playing in any other way is badwrongfun. :nonono:
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Post by tussock »

I thought Vampire was about using rocket launchers to kill older Vampires so the storyteller would stop waving them in your face, and that describing how you fed was about as important to all that as a D&D Wizard explaining where they took a shit was to getting spells back.

I mean, it's an RPG, you go places where people don't like you, kill them, and take their stuff.
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Post by Voss »

hyzmarca wrote: The rules as written are incomplete. They're just enough to run this highly railroaded playtest scenario and that's it. And they're barely enough for that. Anytrhing that allowed the PCs to act on their own initive would immediately leap completely outside of the rules they have and into a giant white space full of question marks.

This is pre-Alpha not ready for any time, much less prime time.
This is a bullshit stance to take. Even 'pre-alpha' rules should be able to take the sample characters (especially the blank mobs, like 'gangrel anarch') as written and shake'n'bake them in different combat and social situations, just to see what the fail points are. (or what gets handled passably). Folks did this a lot with the various test iterations of the D&D rules, which is how everyone knew bog-standard 5e hobgoblins were made of pure bullshit and one of the most notable low-level threats.


@Mord- mostly badwrongfun.

It says a lot about how clueless and out of touch they are. If you want to show bad-touching Camarilla folks from the Anarch perspective... you get the players to play anarchs dealing with horrible examples of the Camarilla. Instead they did the opposite, and normalized pedobears as the kind of average everyday characters the new WW encourages.

But theme wise, it's Crips and Bloods having meaningless slap fights against a random French Revolution themed backdrop while the German army hunts them with full loads of anti-vampire ammo for no explicable reason, and they're forced to go out and get murdered because magic.

If there is a morality tale or good vs evil hiding somewhere in this railroady bullshit, I've no idea where it is. There isn't any personal horror here- just managing damaging boxes as waves of mooks try to kill you and irritation with shitty rules or bullshit scenarios that just strip away control of your character. And yeah, penis-extension NPCs. Nope, can't lie to the anarchs, because the child Not-a-Gypsy won't leave the room.

Take the sample willpower check- the Nossie is built for intimidate, and so the very likely failure just forces the player to leave.


Anyway, for the 'dark tone' they're talking about- it certainly isn't in the game mechanics. Feeding and Hunger is a muddled mess, but killing isn't particularly necessary or useful. Just make common dice pools high enough that you can auto-pass without rolling, and raise large dogs. Your blight on the world amounts to largely nothing.

Q: Why is Amelina a pedophile?
A: She’s not. She has an obsession with young (recently embraced) Kindred and a feeding restriction that forces her to feed from children and young teens.
But clearly many people thought she is a pedophile.
Well, yeah. The dungeon crawl clearly states (on page 30), that she has herd of underage refugees and she's murdered at least five of them. Her introduction is also ambiguous enough that the feeding restriction and 'loving the young' can easily be taken to mean not just vampires.
Last edited by Voss on Thu Jun 29, 2017 9:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Longes wrote:
Q: Why is Amelina a pedophile?
A: She’s not. She has an obsession with young (recently embraced) Kindred and a feeding restriction that forces her to feed from children and young teens.
But clearly many people thought she is a pedophile.
Amelina works better as a pedophile. If she is a pedophile, then she's a tragic monster with a genuine psychological problem that compels her to do something that's pretty terrible and enough superpowers that she can get away with acting on those impulses.

If she isn't a pedophile, then she has literally done nothing wrong, from a vampire perspective, and the whole morality tale where she clearly deserves to die is utter bullshit and the Anarchs are just massive hypocrites. They're just massive hypocrites, anyway, of course, but that just makes it all the more stark.
Voss wrote:
hyzmarca wrote: The rules as written are incomplete. They're just enough to run this highly railroaded playtest scenario and that's it. And they're barely enough for that. Anytrhing that allowed the PCs to act on their own initive would immediately leap completely outside of the rules they have and into a giant white space full of question marks.

This is pre-Alpha not ready for any time, much less prime time.
This is a bullshit stance to take. Even 'pre-alpha' rules should be able to take the sample characters (especially the blank mobs, like 'gangrel anarch') as written and shake'n'bake them in different combat and social situations, just to see what the fail points are. (or what gets handled passably). Folks did this a lot with the various test iterations of the D&D rules, which is how everyone knew bog-standard 5e hobgoblins were made of pure bullshit and one of the most notable low-level threats.
Oh, I wasn't defending them. These rules leave you less able to run a Vampire game than you were before reading them. They're clearly too incomplete.

Voss wrote: Nope, can't lie to the anarchs, because the child Not-a-Gypsy won't leave the room.
You should be able to lie to the Anarchs, if you do so with deceptive truths and half-truths. The Not-a-Gypsy can only detect lies, for some reason, so if you never say anything that isn't technically true, you should be in the clear, unless your DM is a dick.

My preference for dealing with the situation is to parley with the Get of Fenris you meet outside the city and agree to lead his Pack to the Anarch leaders, thus allowing them to cut the taint of the Wyrm out of the heart of Berlin, and attain great renown and glory. The Anarchs probably aren't going to ask you outright if you're being followed by a pack of werewolves.

My second preference is to make a deal with the Inquisitor and lead her to the Anarchs. While Jan is likely to ask about tracking devices and take your cell phones, you can probably bullshit around that by swallowing a tracker and just not mentioning it.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Fri Jun 30, 2017 1:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Mord wrote:Smells like damage control.
Our oversight, for which we apologize, was not providing this context so that our players could see why and how we made these decisions. We needed to clearly state again that the material was intended for mature audiences, and to label it that way. We should have stated again that our vision for V5 brings Vampire back to its roots as a morality tale about evil, set in the darkest places of our own world.
This is always weird to me because I thought the game was only a morality tale in the sense that you're a bunch of jaded, pretentious monsters who aren't allowed to create anything of lasting value by older jaded monsters who are already so rich that they'd rather keep you poor and bored rather than risk exposing their predilections to the light of day. So like a Mafia movie, but weirder.
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