gamegrene.com

Hmmm, new World of Darkness, eh? I'm just rather tired of the whole game. My group plays VTM occasionally, but i loathe the whole court system. When we play, and especially when i GM, we remove the court and the prince and play the vampires like the world-beating ass-slammers that they can be. And of course, there is much death to be had. Oh well. I guess I'll give it a shot. If it sucks, oh well. If not ... well, then it's still a distant third to Palladium and DnD.

Excelsior!
Oni

I like what I've heard so far and have not played WoD for some time. If they can bring back the feeling of the early days which was much more "PERSONAL horror" than powergaming than I am all for it.

Now if I can just find some people to game with - I have a cuhrazy schedule. :)

It means I work 8:30am-10pm two days a week and am looking to increase that to four days a week. Plus I have office hours on Friday (I'm a teacher). Since I have errands/family stuff to do on the weekend and am mostly exhausted kind of hard to fit in any gaming in beyond online.

They are making daily updates on the WOD site which have been going over changes to the rules this week.

Ooo OOoo OOoo, Can't wait!!

NOT!

VtM brought out the worst kind of "elitism" I'd ever seen among gamers.
I remember even WW had an article in it's magazine where the author described those who played VtM as being more mature and "cooler", because they played VtM!
I think this contrived piece of self-important garbage they call the WoD should stay....ENDED!

Eh, what? What rumours and gossip I had previously heard about the launch of a "post-apocalyptic" world setting by WW in autumn of this year had pointed towards a setting radically different from the previous WoD. And there was much rejoincing on my part since I thought finally we could dispense with all the pretentious and annoying gothic and postmodernist crap.

This is just... lame. Unless it's an elaborate joke.

Call me stupid but didn't the Ascension rulebook for Mage explicitely state that by the time the Avatar Storm culminated there were no other supernaturals[1] to speak of left in the WoD save for the awakened, and that in the end all the surviving "sleepers" awakened?? So save for those who died, ascended or left for other spheres, mankind now comprises solely of awakened humans, hopefully without the stupid, forced antagonism between "cool new age wizards" (yech) and "evil technocrats".

Seeing how Ascension was set after the events of the endings for the other gamelines.... and spelled out vast global consequences that could not be ignored by the inhabitants of the WoD? In contrast to the Vampire rulebook which offered several scenarios for the end times to pick and choose, Ascension only had one main plot, so I thought it was the "official" metaplot?[2]

As far as I am informed, most "final nights" scenarios for Vampire assumed that a few vampires might survive, unless God killed them all off or the few worthy ones regained mortality. Or something. But unless I missed something, the werewolves, changelings, dark fae etc. all got wiped out, died off or left for other planes.

So while of course there might be a few stray survivors left[3], the source info Pareidolic gives us sounds like a reset button cop-out to simply recycle the whole damn thing. There will still be vampire clans? Whole clans? WTF? (If the Ventrue remain in play while the Tremere do not, I will be seriously vexed. Oh well. Who cares.)

I was an idiot. I had hoped there would be something truly new. Not just a WoD 2.0 with all the base splats warmed up again, and the mortals still being completely oblivious to the "hidden basement" where supernatural things go bump in the night. But it sounds like exactly that will be the case. Of course at this point WW might still surprise me... [insert manical laughter] Just kidding.

I know why I stopped reading and posting in alt.games.whitewolf ages ago. If the wanted to revive Changeling, for example, why didn't they give the gameline more support when it ran? Take it somewhere different. Release Changeling: the Age of Steam, instead of rules for vampires in victorian top hats.

If you really start from scratch, the WoD 2.0 would not look anything alike the old WoD. If I merely wanted a WoD with a slightly different background to try out alternate ideas, I can invent one myself, thanks.

Fortunately for me and my money, I stopped playing the modern times part of the WoD long ago (although I still vainly try to find players for a Technocracy chronicle). I can keep myself sufficiently amused with Mage: Sorcerer's Crusade, Dark Age: Vampire and Dark Ages: Inquisitor.

--
[1] Or none that mattered in the war for reality that unfolded, anyway. Unless WW simply pretends that all the various gamelines and their end times all happened in parallel universes, like they were so fond of doing in the past. But I thought that nonsense had ended with the advent of the Big Fat WoD Metaplot and brilliant crossover supplements like Times of Thin Blood and Blood Treachery.

[2] Not that I would complain if the whole scenario for Mage were invalidated, since IMO the book was so fucking stupid it was not worth the ink it was printed with. Boringly written, badly paced, resetting Mage to the Bad Old Days of 1st Edition, rewriting the Avatar Storm's effects yet again, blablabla Rogue Council blablabla, turning all technocrats into mindless drones, the authors apparently confusing avatars with fae souls, gratuitous insertion of cliches like the "omniscient clone child" and "Orwellian prison camps", fetch-it quests and PCs having to watch as NPCs do great things and deliver lots of exposition. Uninspiring, as a module utter trash from a playability point of view. I'm not sure I can ever bring myself to write a more detailed review (instead of this rant) because that would mean I'd have to read the damn rulebook again, and I don't think I can stand that without succumbing to raving madness or mindnumbing boredom. :twitches:

[3] And WW had proven before how they can inflate the numbers of a few surviving Ravnos of weak generation into enough vampires to warrant their continued existance as a bloodline, plus suddenly and conveniently have all these mysteriously surviving elder Ravnos come from no-where. Didn't they.
--

P.S. Oh and as to "elitism" among WW authors and WoD players, I must agree with SilentG. I have witnessed it not once, but several times; less from players in actual table-top groups, but there was a lot of snobbishness floating around on WoD newsgroups and similar. Wrinkling their noses at "that other game" (read: D&D), even after the WoD itself had turned into a splat fest with PCs and NPCs slinging around superpowers of anime proportion. The worst examples of powergaming, hack-n-slay and rules lawyering I've ever seen happened in World of Darkness groups. Sorry.

Actually my impression is they are going back to the "personal horror" roots of the game(s) but we will see come August.

I absolutely agree with your "golden rule" definition, in fact, I often like to run games with just the base rulebook(s) and nothing else.

However, we don't know the inner workings of White Wolf so we don't know if it is Achilli or "the powers that be" making the decisions affecting the direction of the game.

Just like we don't know the actual degree of "influence and skill" MRH brought to the original games...

Or maybe some of us do.

I like a lot of the rules changes and other material. Just sad that the focus of the game changed over time, though I still had fun with it. Haven't checked out Orpheus, need to do that from what I'm hearing...