Andkat
Educated
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2010
- Messages
- 68
The new Onyx Path books are terrible so I really hope we don't wind up with them drawing on the upcoming Vampire "4e" that's set after a Gehenna that somehow doesn't end the world (What is event the point?). They're mostly just milking clumsily recycled content. I mean, V20 is overwhelming word-for-word Vampire Revised; they didn't do anything to incorporate the incredibly useful mechanical revisions, expansions, and clarifications in the Vampire Dark Ages Revised material, often coupled to a few new totally inane bits like Vampire facebook ensorcelled so that browsing mortals can't see the Masquerade-violating bits.
The whole "X20" stuff feels largely like milking already published content*- Mage 20 and Werewolf 20 are also prominently home to additional shoveling of sentimentalist far left nonsense (i.e. Cultural Appropriation and "Trendy Hat" 'chivalry' as literal manifestations of cosmic evil, gender identity crises as facilitating Awakening) beyond the already somewhat irritating level that Mage and Werewolf were characterized by (I mean Werewolf is basically a darker, grittier Captain Planet, and Mage had its whole anti-science thing with the Technocracy as the perennial villain for a large part of its lifetime, and it "every idiotic or obsolete cultural milieu is valid" schtick at its core).
*The point was to be a compilation of Revised into one book...then they just didn't stop publishing additional books....
WoD is a setting that badly needed a real reboot, one that cut out all the godawful nonsense (such as throwing out the arbitrarily "Ethnic" clans that lock off large parts of the world from normal play for no apparent reason, etc. ) while keeping the core setting/themes/style/aesthetic (i.e. not Vampire: The Requiem- the nWoD settings were just depowered and blanderized). Instead of simply retconning White Wolf would just come up with increasingly contrived and bizarre explanations for why some stupid idea they had earlier is mostly no longer relevant anymore (I.e. the True Black Hand getting blown up by a ghost of a nuclear bomb in their ghost copy of Enoch in the underworld....).
I see a lot of concerns about Bethesda/Bioware/etc. getting licenses. The fact is that White Wolf's authors routinely descended to levels of idiocy and pandering equaling or exceeding those of the key offenders at both companies; you had plenty of clever and fun ideas, but there were an awful lot of total hacks. You often had totally bipolar presentations of the same content within or between books- it often felt like you had one author with an actual reasonable or clever idea for how a setting element ought to work battling with someone just banging out rote absurdities (i.e. presentation of how Clans actually work,). Bloodlines is miraculous for somehow pulling out a solid narrative and a fantastic atmosphere out of the incredibly uneven mess that is the setting as a whole.
I keep seeing this and I have no idea where people are getting it. Fallen from Demon the Fallen are literally the weakest of the Revised splats (insofar as Wraith and Changeling didn't get Revised editions), mechanically. They're basically Vampires, but worse (except they can walk around during daytime). If you play a Malefactor and abuse artifact-crafting you can get somewhere scary, but otherwise they're pretty underpowered for what they're supposed to be.
Now, Demons from the Dark Ages Devil's Due supplement can get super broken pretty quickly due to their huge flexible frontloaded power point buy system and stronger base features, although by dint of a minor technicality they're not quite the same as the Fallen.
The super-flexible Sphere/Domain systems of Mage and Dark Ages Fae seem like the real challenge in terms of simulating in a video game or GMing for a group (so many possible things every PC can do, not to mention every NPC you have to think through).
Wraith the Oblivion could make for a fantastic, PST-esque experience in a video game, I feel like, but you'd need either a predefined protagonist or an incredibly robust way of setting your character history/motivations/personality so that you handle the Shadow/Harrowings properly.
The whole "X20" stuff feels largely like milking already published content*- Mage 20 and Werewolf 20 are also prominently home to additional shoveling of sentimentalist far left nonsense (i.e. Cultural Appropriation and "Trendy Hat" 'chivalry' as literal manifestations of cosmic evil, gender identity crises as facilitating Awakening) beyond the already somewhat irritating level that Mage and Werewolf were characterized by (I mean Werewolf is basically a darker, grittier Captain Planet, and Mage had its whole anti-science thing with the Technocracy as the perennial villain for a large part of its lifetime, and it "every idiotic or obsolete cultural milieu is valid" schtick at its core).
*The point was to be a compilation of Revised into one book...then they just didn't stop publishing additional books....
WoD is a setting that badly needed a real reboot, one that cut out all the godawful nonsense (such as throwing out the arbitrarily "Ethnic" clans that lock off large parts of the world from normal play for no apparent reason, etc. ) while keeping the core setting/themes/style/aesthetic (i.e. not Vampire: The Requiem- the nWoD settings were just depowered and blanderized). Instead of simply retconning White Wolf would just come up with increasingly contrived and bizarre explanations for why some stupid idea they had earlier is mostly no longer relevant anymore (I.e. the True Black Hand getting blown up by a ghost of a nuclear bomb in their ghost copy of Enoch in the underworld....).
I see a lot of concerns about Bethesda/Bioware/etc. getting licenses. The fact is that White Wolf's authors routinely descended to levels of idiocy and pandering equaling or exceeding those of the key offenders at both companies; you had plenty of clever and fun ideas, but there were an awful lot of total hacks. You often had totally bipolar presentations of the same content within or between books- it often felt like you had one author with an actual reasonable or clever idea for how a setting element ought to work battling with someone just banging out rote absurdities (i.e. presentation of how Clans actually work,). Bloodlines is miraculous for somehow pulling out a solid narrative and a fantastic atmosphere out of the incredibly uneven mess that is the setting as a whole.
I keep seeing this and I have no idea where people are getting it. Fallen from Demon the Fallen are literally the weakest of the Revised splats (insofar as Wraith and Changeling didn't get Revised editions), mechanically. They're basically Vampires, but worse (except they can walk around during daytime). If you play a Malefactor and abuse artifact-crafting you can get somewhere scary, but otherwise they're pretty underpowered for what they're supposed to be.
Now, Demons from the Dark Ages Devil's Due supplement can get super broken pretty quickly due to their huge flexible frontloaded power point buy system and stronger base features, although by dint of a minor technicality they're not quite the same as the Fallen.
The super-flexible Sphere/Domain systems of Mage and Dark Ages Fae seem like the real challenge in terms of simulating in a video game or GMing for a group (so many possible things every PC can do, not to mention every NPC you have to think through).
Wraith the Oblivion could make for a fantastic, PST-esque experience in a video game, I feel like, but you'd need either a predefined protagonist or an incredibly robust way of setting your character history/motivations/personality so that you handle the Shadow/Harrowings properly.
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