D.T. Pints
Instigator
JACKERCON 2018: WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY June 22-July 1st
Posts: 2,857
Currently Playing: D&D 5e, Pathfinder, DUNGEONWORLD, Star Wars Edge of the Empire
Currently Running: DUNGEONWORLD, PATHFINDER
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Post by D.T. Pints on May 15, 2017 6:23:06 GMT -8
Stu Venable going to GenCon...all I can say is he better buy one of these hats. Cuz' my motherland is the inside of the dogs mouth in August. Kenneth Hite is developing Fifth ?? I'm very fucking in!
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sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on May 15, 2017 6:35:20 GMT -8
Probie Tim - That was before White Wolf was sold to Paradox Interactive. Paradox considers 20th Anniversary Edition to be the 4th Edition.
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sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on May 15, 2017 6:36:36 GMT -8
Someone did a big compilation of everything they'd picked up from Berlin:
"ALL OF THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE IN THE FINAL PRODUCT
Only 3 Attributes - Physical, Social and Mental, 1-5 dots Specialities for these Attributes like Strength, Charisma etc (the old atts) and others that were not old Atts add one die Skills pretty much unchanged 1-5 dots TN nearly always 6 Difficulty is now number of succs. needed Disciplines are activated by "Rousing the Blood" This means you add all your (red) Hunger die to the pool (they replace ordinary die). We started with 1 die. Hunger die only added to skill based pools (including pools that use skills for disciplines) but not others like willpower. Hunger die track 1-5 Hunger increased during play, but it happened to me only once and I cant recall the mechanical cause Hunger went to zero when someone fed Victims sometimes gave a small bonus to trait rolls (eg. the homeless guy gave a die for the next stealth roll I think). This was even when partially drained. Each 1 on Hunger die triggers a Compulsion Compulsions are clan based and the consequences situation based and were randomly generated. Our hungry Toreador walked into a burned out haven and became entranced by the beauty of the destruction. Police then crept up on him. Compulsions could be overcome with Composure, but this left you with less Compusure to counter with should a Frenzy occur later. Frenzy occurred when more 1s came up together (I think) Willpower was 1-5 and could be spent to reroll all the failed dice, so long as there was at least one success Humanity was in there at 1-10, but was not tested or afaik used in the beta, the focus was on other mechanics Characters also had advantages like backgounds and merits, but these too were not a focus of play The focus was really on how the mechanics and storytelling aspects of play integrated with one another Im not going to give my views as I want that to brew for a while and to submit it to the offical feedback place first The story was very dense - I dont think any table completed it in the 4 hours of play - and was a direct follow up to the events of the Enlightenment in Blood LARP which concluded the night before. The story became the first event of the new VtM metaplot. It was set in Berlin in the current nights during an Anarch uprising that saw the final death of Breidenstein and numerous other vampires as well as follow up trouble coming from the Inquisition. We were all Camarilla neonates trying to find the vampire who had blood bonded us all. It was a clusterfuck. There were several classic moments in the story where the Hunger mechanics produced a genuine 'Vampire' moment.
I made one reporting error in my earlier post, the Anarchs are being forced out of the Camarilla, of course. But its a changed Camarilla, almost broken. The Anarchs are basically turning on a tyrannical, despotic organisation. The events in Berlin were the catalyst for a global change, as the Anarchs pulled the Camarilla to its knees here last week. Generation was still in development but the idea talked about was that it would be less discernable and more difficult to know which generation your character or anothers actually was. Line of descent may be growing murky to the characters. Gehenna (the actual events of any ToJ metaplot) was not revealed but my sense is that V5 will feature a selection of elements from ToJ blended togther into a new version of Gehenna which for now we only know as the Gehenna Wars. The two looks for vampire I mentioned are cosmetic looks, nothing more. Vampires in Elysium dress (and act) differently. This I feel is a nod to the LARPers, who like to really go to town on a look that would often shred the Masquerade on the streets. Elysium is now a place where they can let their monsters show and relax.
on combat - oh yeah! mostly between the characters as the situation was really intensive and desperate. You could rouse the blood to increase any Attribute not just Physical. Also to heal. Damage was really interesting, it came as either Superficial or Aggravated. Anything that could conceivably kill you was Aggravated for you. Aggravated damage was also very slow to heal. You didnt take any penalty or injury until a certain level was reached (5 I think) then you took a nasty consequence that was dependent on the type of damage used. The fighting was between the coterie members, the coterie and the German armed forces, the coterie and some very well equipped dudes who were likely New Inquisitors, and the coterie and some Anarchs. It worked well and was entertaining. By the way, a little bird sitting in the middle of the nest told me that EDOM from Nights Black Agents were being ported or adapted into WoD...check out The Dracula Dossier for more on that little insight...and you'll realise this could easily be and probably will be part or even the heart of the New Inquisition.
The "big thing" that it seemed like this was a testbed for is the Hunger system as a replacement for Blood Points. The basic idea is that rather than decreasing the amount of blood you have you increase the amount of hunger you have. Rather than spending Blood Points you instead "Rouse the Blood" to accomplish a variety of things (basically all the same things you spend blood for under the current rules). A few subtle but important inclusions are that you must Rouse the Blood to awaken each night, any vampire must Rouse in order to not appear dead, and all uses of Disciplines require Rousing. You keep track of how many times you Rouse the Blood in a scene and at the end of that scene you roll that many dice. Any dice that don't roll a success add to your Hunger (a scale of 1-5). Any time you make a skill roll or skill-based Discipline roll you have a number of dice in your pool replaced by "Hunger dice," equal to your Hunger rating. These dice function like normal dice and can contribute successes, but if any of them roll a 1 you gain a temporary Compulsion from your Beast (note that 1s do not subtract from successes in these rules so you aren't getting double-whammied or anything). Compulsions are tics of your predatory vampiric nature that can vary in severity depending on the number of Hunger dice that rolled a 1. In the game I ran a Toreador was overwhelmed with strong emotion for someone in the scene, a Ventrue felt compelled to assert his dominance and leadership over the group, and another Ventrue felt incredible anxiety at the lack of order and structure they had without guidance from their superiors. These were all pretty minor Compulsions and we didn't have anyone fail badly enough to pull one of the nastier ones (though one character was walking around with 4 Hunger for a bit). Hunger is reduced by feeding, shock of all shocks. There was a scale that told you how much Hunger was removed by feeding on what. IIRC animals removed 2 and feeding on a human without killing them removed 3. Feeding on a human and killing them in the process removes 4 and is also the only way to reduce your Hunger below 1 (temporarily), otherwise all vampires are assumed to always have at least 1 Hunger. Honestly, it worked pretty well and everyone I talked to seemed to feel likewise. It needs refinement, something even Karim said in a couple conversations I had with him, but the core concept and system is actually surprisingly thematic and functional.
In this set of rules the extent of "you are what you eat" was getting small, temporary bonuses from feeding on certain people. They said this is something they want to continue with but are still developing a proper system for. At this point though assuming the final system for that has broadly similar outcomes to the listed effects in the playtest it doesn't seem like that addition to the system is going to be as huge and game-changing as some people were thinking.
The other addition that was generally a hit (with exceptions I'll talk about) was "Success With Consequences," wherein if the number of successes you rolled fell exactly one short of the number you needed you could choose to succeed but have the ST add in some complication or consequence. It only happened a couple times at my table and worked well both times. Other people I talked to reported similarly with the exception of one table where it apparently happened so often it became cumbersome to the flow. Seems like something that depends a great deal on the fall of the dice and the kinds of things the ST decides to throw in.
Of note The attributes/specialties is directly lifted from MET VtM. Superficial/Aggravated Damage is lifted directly from MET VtM's Normal/Aggravated damage (though I like the term superficial)."
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Post by Probie Tim on May 15, 2017 6:45:53 GMT -8
Probie Tim - That was before White Wolf was sold to Paradox Interactive. Paradox considers 20th Anniversary Edition to be the 4th Edition. So is the Onyx Path 4th edition now kaput?
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sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on May 15, 2017 6:47:34 GMT -8
Yeah. For cWoD, the word seems to be that Onyx Path will be allowed to finish its Kickstarter obligations, and then they don't get to play with those toys anymore.
But apparently they'll still be allowed to do the Chronicles of Darkness stuff.
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Post by Probie Tim on May 15, 2017 6:53:38 GMT -8
they don't get to play with those toys anymore. That's a bummer.
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Post by sovereigncitizenkane on May 15, 2017 14:06:36 GMT -8
they don't get to play with those toys anymore. That's a bummer. Your new profile pic threw me off. It's definitely not ideal so far. The new White Wolf has been making some interesting decisions for their products.
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sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on May 15, 2017 14:51:37 GMT -8
Yeah. Looks like someone there has a hard-on for 1E Vampire and wants to return to that status quo - Anarchs vs Camarilla. No Sabbat. Cellphones? Looks like they're making use of modern tech anathema via the Second Inquisition.
I mean, really, why not just set the game in the nineties and be done with it?
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otherdoc
Supporter
Jim - Yes, THAT Jim
Posts: 84
Preferred Game Systems: AMBER Diceless, Savage Worlds, D&D/Pathfinder, Fiasco, Apocalypse Engine
Currently Playing: N/A (on a hopefully temporary hiatus as a player)
Currently Running: N/A (only con games, at the moment)
Favorite Species of Monkey: Squirrel Monkey (Peru, Ucayali Region)
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Post by otherdoc on May 26, 2017 15:51:32 GMT -8
Just wanted folks to know White Wolf just released a bunch of videos on their YouTube channel, including a couple of the main presentations from Berlin, the Vampire 5th Edition talk and their Keynote from the event. After watching these, Martin strikes me as an unusually loud Swede. I like some of this, some of it less so. I believe elsewhere I've said I'm going to be "cautiously pessimistic" about the new edition, at least until it's further along and I can reevaluate things. I *do* like Ken Hite's work, so I'm still willing to see where this goes.
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sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on May 26, 2017 16:24:10 GMT -8
I'm concerned about the plans for unifying the various gamelines, if I'm interpreting some of the rumours I'm seeing. Intentionally putting Vampires and Mages and Garou together means either (a) the Mages are gonna get a big nerf, and the Garou a lesser one, to bring them in line with Kindred power levels, or (b) Kindred are just gonna be outclassed in a bunch of cases.
I mean, yeah, crossovers in specific, ST-sanctioned cases? Sure. Crossovers as a matter of fact? Not so much.
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Post by sovereigncitizenkane on May 26, 2017 18:02:50 GMT -8
I'm guessing nerfing if it's anything like we've seen so far
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Post by sovereigncitizenkane on Jun 6, 2017 18:07:58 GMT -8
I'm also wondering how the new Hunger mechanic is going to affect things like pumping stats, healing, or Disciplines that are focused on the use of blood like Thaumaturgy or Quietus.
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sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on Jun 7, 2017 3:47:42 GMT -8
Any use of the blood pumps hunger one die, up to five. You hit five, you make a check to see if it affects you (frenzy, etc).
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Post by sovereigncitizenkane on Jun 8, 2017 12:29:18 GMT -8
Not sure how I feel about that. Is that how it works with all Disciplines that required blood expenditure. My god they'd need to feed a lot.
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sbloyd
Supporter
WHAT! A human in a Precursor service vehicle?!
Posts: 2,762
Preferred Game Systems: Storyteller; Dresden; Mage
Favorite Species of Monkey: Goddamnit, Curious George is a CHIMP not a monkey! Stop teaching my daughter improper classification!
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Post by sbloyd on Jun 8, 2017 13:40:18 GMT -8
Feeding from a human sets you to Hunger 1, as I understand. Feeding from a human and killing 'em, Hunger 0. I forget animal feeding, or stored blood feeding. It's not a straight 1:1 blood point to hunger die relationship.
At the end of a scene, you check against your Hunger level for complications; if you hit 5 during a scene, you check immediately. I think that's how it works... and remember, this is all still early development stuff.
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