Honestly I'm a bit confused on that stance in a post George Floyd world and the recent protests in Iran. It more inline with what the conservatives desires than any leftests ideals that the Devs seems to champion.
White Wolf's World of Darkness
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So it's turning into a worse Werewolf: the forsaken?
Yes making it impossible for you to do long term change is bad and not something you want in a game About encouraging action.
I hate how they try to "simplify" things for 5E the COfD is the gameline where you can play without learning a shit ton of lore and weird mechanics. No making disaplines less unique or shit like that .
The fact that some Garou were born as wolves was so cool to me. With imagining how a wolf would react to human like intelligence. Now it's gone alongside playing games that take place at a epic scale.
Which is why people played Werewolf: the Apocalypse. It has Apocalypse in its name it's about epic stories.
The COfD has a tier system of games with tier one being a local affair like a city area or small town.
Tier two being a U.S. State area level of impact to country wide.
With Tier three being epic World shaking adventures.
The books give you advice on playing any tier level.
While NUWW only wants you to play tier one personal games. Instead of making you able to play any level.
They are making worse Chronicles of Darkness games. Making both fanbases mad.
Lots of W:TA was cringy but they are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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What does a Humanity rating of 5 mean for a 407 year old Toreador Elder Vampire?
What about 7 for a Toreador Ancillae Couple who are still happily married in their entire times as vampires?
What about 7 for a Toreador Ancillae Couple who are still happily married in their entire times as vampires?
Didn't say you couldn't, I said it was downplayed (EDIT: Okay, I see it now--I'm sorry, I exaggerated when I said "all Garou," I will change that). My information is, I'll admit, second hand, but it's from Achilli's twitter and the W5 Q&A that Achilli did a while back; as it's really long I've relied upon other people's quotes and summaries (such as the one linked here). People on RPG.net have also talked about how he called lupus a "legacy option" on his Twitter. I've seen similar conversations on the Onyx Path Forums, but they are currently down for the move. While a legacy option isn't something you eliminate entirely, it's certainly not something you feature prominently. This will be all the more true if the Red Talons now have homid members.
To support my other statements, quoting from the transcription:
I don't think the devs are actually leftists (left-liberals will say they support a lot of the stuff we on the left do, they just have very different ideas on what is required to get there and what tactics are acceptable), but I suspect a large part of this is simply due to Achilli's roleplaying preferences. See, the daily struggle to survive would be a great theme to have as a focus... if you were playing Vampire.
It's possible I'm being too pessimistic and this is simply an attempt to explore what tactics are and aren't acceptable without saying any radical, decisive action is bad, but given statements like this I refuse to extend very much charity. In conjunction with the focus being on surviving just a few more weeks and the Get seeming largely defined by demanding radical action to save the world now it's hard to interpret any other way.
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A more mysterious and dangerous sprit world and a focus on survival are what's Forsaken is about.
Stop trying to turn Apocalypse into Diet Forsaken when we already have Werewolf: the forsaken.
That's about surviving day by day and claiming your territory in hopes you would make it past age 30.
I want an epic battle to save the world to the realm and mystic umbral locations with lots of lore.
It's like how they turned Masquerade into diet Requiem.
When people could just play Requiem.
Why are they trying to turn WOD into diet COfD without any of the mechanics and themes that make COfD work?
Why are they forcing tier one play on everyone?
The complex lore and world spanning events makes WOD WOD.
It's like when H5 got rid of the imbued and made a worse Virgil.
But Virgil lets players play part of world spanning conspiracies because that's cool to be the MIB or part of an amoral mega corp. as well as scrappy Hunters in their own.
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Also, that works for Werewolf: the Forsaken because the world isn't actually under existential threat. Again, playing spirit cop is not my preference (though some of what I've seen of 2e makes me think that I could enjoy it; spirits seem less monomaniacal and egoistic), but concerning yourself with only your own turf is a luxury you only have if you're not up against world-spanning threats.
Furthermore, in these conversations there seems to be a weird focus on globe-trotting as a thing that happens in Werewolf, and I'm not convinced it actually happens much in play. My games have all been almost entirely regional. You're part of a larger organization (the Ahadi, the Garou Nation, whatever) that coordinates to fight a global threat but what you personally are doing is usually within a few day's travel. Even with stuff like the Amazon War, I don't think the expectation is that PCs from North America will travel to the Amazon, spend a story there, and then go off into Australia or whatever.
In the server I'm currently in, almost all the play is in Seattle. There's been occasional trips to other areas, but they're generally short side-adventures involving the PCs' personal histories.
Furthermore, in these conversations there seems to be a weird focus on globe-trotting as a thing that happens in Werewolf, and I'm not convinced it actually happens much in play. My games have all been almost entirely regional. You're part of a larger organization (the Ahadi, the Garou Nation, whatever) that coordinates to fight a global threat but what you personally are doing is usually within a few day's travel. Even with stuff like the Amazon War, I don't think the expectation is that PCs from North America will travel to the Amazon, spend a story there, and then go off into Australia or whatever.
In the server I'm currently in, almost all the play is in Seattle. There's been occasional trips to other areas, but they're generally short side-adventures involving the PCs' personal histories.
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Anyone gonna help?
@Konradleijon Honestly I suspect the recent trend of Paradox/While wolf of turning OWD into N:WOD is that they fundamentally don't know what to do with the WOD property so they look at the nearest competitor (NWO in this case).
Hell if another competing property filling the same niche (Like say a clanbook collectively written by /tg/ that tuns the surviving Get into Matt Ward era Utramarines) ever comes and garners enough attention then I won't doubt that PX/WW will gladly copy it no matter how stupid the idea is.
Hell if another competing property filling the same niche (Like say a clanbook collectively written by /tg/ that tuns the surviving Get into Matt Ward era Utramarines) ever comes and garners enough attention then I won't doubt that PX/WW will gladly copy it no matter how stupid the idea is.
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These are your characters and your story. You tell us.
No, seriously. You tell us. How do these characters behave? How do they treat mortals? How do they feel about the demands of their existence, about drinking blood or not seeing the sun?
The humanity score doesn't decide these things. Their behavior and mentality dictates their humanity score.
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They are not competitors but owned by the same company.
But yeah they don't seem what to do with the IP as Bloodlines is the only thing with some mass appeal.
Really? I Was under the impression the Onix Parth is a separate studio that broke off from white wolf and operates independently from Paradox.
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Paradox owns Chronicles of Darkness and licenses the trademark to Onyx Path, who write the actual books.
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Yes they are not competitors but separate brand mangaged by the same company.
It really seems like they are trying to merge WOD and COfD.
I don't understand why they are getting rid of what makes Apocalypse fun in my opinion like Pentex subsidies and umbral realms.
What do you think M5, or C5 real be like? Because I shudder to think what will happen to the Technocratcy. Considering WW5E tact in handling sensitive issues.
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Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
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I'm going to be brutally honest with you here: the questions you are asking are things that you should know yourself and should be able to figure out yourself, or you will not be able to write characters, let alone a narrative. Stop leaning on numbers, because they do not mean anything outside the very narrow context of the tabletop game.
So. Pause. Take a step back. Look at the ideas you have for your story and consider what characters you need for the story. Consider what would make interesting interactions. Since you've said you're writing smut, consider what you find hot, who you find hot, and how to make those things combine. Push the numbers out of the way. No-one - least of all you - will care if the vampire has Humanity 4 or Resources 5. They'll care that he is cruel and sadistic and never lets the main character catch a break. They care that he deliberately destroys her progress because he cannot bear to see anyone do better than he did, that he sends goons over to burn down her art because it does not match his specifications and he cannot allow anything he doesn't like to stand, that he callously murders people because they inconvenience him or because he's hungry. They'll care that he's as beautiful as a marble statue and just as cold and unfeeling. They'll care that he hasn't talked to a normal human for seven centuries and that he requires all of his subordinates to learn the specific dialect of his era and will not allow anyone to speak anything else where he can hear it.
But we cannot write your story for you, which is what you are asking us to do. Look up writing advice. Craft actual characters, not a pile of numbers. Plot out your story in advance.
(Here's some starting points from SV itself for you.)
Some people have predicted that the Technocracy will be Pure Evil and totally bad guys. I actually predict the exact opposite--if they include the Technocracy, they will make it appear to be the lighter shade of gray. Of course, I think that's a bad thing. I hate the Technocracy. As someone whose field is in the sciences, I view them as everything about our history that has sucked, with additional totalitarian overtones--but their evils happens to mesh with liberalism, so you get people saying that the genocide was acceptable because the Technocracy invented vaccines.
My guess for any hypothetical M5 game will be that players will be forbidden from being part of the major factions, with only Orphans.
To elaborate on my last point:
The Technocracy is a fundamentally evil institution. It is a human-supremacist organization that was spread on the backs of colonialism and helped provide the intellectual backing behind the Third Reich. It's fundamentally incapable of existing alongside other paradigms. But not unlike the most pernicious forms of modern liberalism, the Technocracy wants to be egalitarian while not fundamentally changing anything.
So you get backwards justifications about how the Technocracy made things so much better despite M:tAs being a setting where homeopathy works if enough people believe it does. All of the folk cures we disregard IOTL work perfectly well in the game, or at least they did until the Technocracy deliberately took cures away from people. This is also the same logic as the people who say colonialism was justified because a railway got built.
We also see people talk about how the Technocracy accepts people of all races, sexual orientations, genders, et cetera, at least now. But they haven't actually changed their approach. The institutional approach of the Technocracy is the same one that made colonialism and then neocolonialism. It's still an organization that's fundamentally about enforcing a single view of the world onto the entire planet.
What would systematic change look like in the Technocracy? Well, it would look like admitting they were fundamentally wrong and that the Traditions were right. Saying racism was bad but now they've Progressed (capitalization deliberate) beyond it isn't enough. They would need to start allowing the Traditions' paradigms into the Consensus; they would need to start working Bygones into the Consensus; they would need to treat with the other species they already share the planet with as equals with legitimate concerns rather than as subordinates or species-enemies (I am particularly thinking about their response to Fera there).
But they won't do that, and the average Technocracy fan thinks they ought not to. And I blame Real Life Politics for that, because in reality there's this sort of... rationalization or modernist politics, I suppose; as I'm not a political scientist I'm not sure of precisely the right terms to use. And it's really a profoundly authoritarian and oppressive ideology that denies it's even an ideology.
If you're going have a protagonist faction which does terrible things, they either need to be called out in character as mistakes that have made things more difficult and that they're trying to move past (Werewolf: the Apocalypse actually does this fairly well, which is probably why you don't really seem to see anyone arguing the Wars of Rage were justified), or they need to bear no resemblance to anything that would ever have mass appeal (like Paranoia, because even the weirdest authoritarians wouldn't want to work for Friend Computer).
The Technocracy is a fundamentally evil institution. It is a human-supremacist organization that was spread on the backs of colonialism and helped provide the intellectual backing behind the Third Reich. It's fundamentally incapable of existing alongside other paradigms. But not unlike the most pernicious forms of modern liberalism, the Technocracy wants to be egalitarian while not fundamentally changing anything.
So you get backwards justifications about how the Technocracy made things so much better despite M:tAs being a setting where homeopathy works if enough people believe it does. All of the folk cures we disregard IOTL work perfectly well in the game, or at least they did until the Technocracy deliberately took cures away from people. This is also the same logic as the people who say colonialism was justified because a railway got built.
We also see people talk about how the Technocracy accepts people of all races, sexual orientations, genders, et cetera, at least now. But they haven't actually changed their approach. The institutional approach of the Technocracy is the same one that made colonialism and then neocolonialism. It's still an organization that's fundamentally about enforcing a single view of the world onto the entire planet.
What would systematic change look like in the Technocracy? Well, it would look like admitting they were fundamentally wrong and that the Traditions were right. Saying racism was bad but now they've Progressed (capitalization deliberate) beyond it isn't enough. They would need to start allowing the Traditions' paradigms into the Consensus; they would need to start working Bygones into the Consensus; they would need to treat with the other species they already share the planet with as equals with legitimate concerns rather than as subordinates or species-enemies (I am particularly thinking about their response to Fera there).
But they won't do that, and the average Technocracy fan thinks they ought not to. And I blame Real Life Politics for that, because in reality there's this sort of... rationalization or modernist politics, I suppose; as I'm not a political scientist I'm not sure of precisely the right terms to use. And it's really a profoundly authoritarian and oppressive ideology that denies it's even an ideology.
If you're going have a protagonist faction which does terrible things, they either need to be called out in character as mistakes that have made things more difficult and that they're trying to move past (Werewolf: the Apocalypse actually does this fairly well, which is probably why you don't really seem to see anyone arguing the Wars of Rage were justified), or they need to bear no resemblance to anything that would ever have mass appeal (like Paranoia, because even the weirdest authoritarians wouldn't want to work for Friend Computer).
Im surprising people complaing about removing some of the aspect nearly general consensus see was apocalypse touchy issues:
Like.
For what I this is because lupus werewolf were kinda hard to play mostly because....well, roleplaying a wolf that also become a werewolf isnt exactly the most easy prospect for most people since most of then didnt care for the human world aside on how much it affect then, which it only reinforce other problems later in the line.
I think this is mostly because Gaoru are mostly killing machine that obey the whim of a near dying goddess against sociaty can come across as.....well, really bad. There are momets in some books were Gaoru are kinda trying to said humanity is to blame for now siding with Gaia and do what the Gaoru wants to do, I mean you have the shadow lords who are backstabber and authoritarians, the ultraviolent get of fenris and utterly classist silver fang.
For me a least it simply they are clashing with many of the stuff they drop away in forsaken for the exact reason many complain about Apocalyse: the whole "hack and slash" vibe, the whole "everyone except me and pals are corrupt" and this sort of gritty superhero feeling you have at times was one of the many thing people complain about the game.
Like.
For what I this is because lupus werewolf were kinda hard to play mostly because....well, roleplaying a wolf that also become a werewolf isnt exactly the most easy prospect for most people since most of then didnt care for the human world aside on how much it affect then, which it only reinforce other problems later in the line.
I think this is mostly because Gaoru are mostly killing machine that obey the whim of a near dying goddess against sociaty can come across as.....well, really bad. There are momets in some books were Gaoru are kinda trying to said humanity is to blame for now siding with Gaia and do what the Gaoru wants to do, I mean you have the shadow lords who are backstabber and authoritarians, the ultraviolent get of fenris and utterly classist silver fang.
For me a least it simply they are clashing with many of the stuff they drop away in forsaken for the exact reason many complain about Apocalyse: the whole "hack and slash" vibe, the whole "everyone except me and pals are corrupt" and this sort of gritty superhero feeling you have at times was one of the many thing people complain about the game.
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I think the main theme of Apocalypse was environmental destruction is bad and so is mindless hyper violet toxic masculinity and tribalism.
How often did you have these conversations with people who actually play Werewolf: the Apocalypse?
They are not that hard to play, especially if you do a modicum of basic research (which could be easily summarized in under 10 pages of book material). Most of my PCs have been animal born. The server I'm in is about 25% animal born and most of the players manage just fine. Yes, it's somewhat more difficult than just playing Joe Everyman, but a homid Garou isn't Joe Everyman either and animal born are something you need to have in the game. Part of the point of Werewolf: the Apocalypse is that the human world isn't the only thing that matters. The fact that people are having trouble understanding this is, if anything, a sign that the game should've emphasized animal born more.
I'd suggest that you try and place yourself in the mind of a wolf and think about their perspective. Their perspective is a valid one, and the fact that Werewolf: the Apocalypse decentered the human perspective was one of the things that gave the game teeth and made it mean something.
What you are neatly eliding in this paragraph is that the "near dying goddess" is the biosphere, and "what the Garou want to do" is 'not kill her' (sure, some of them also have other shit they want, but that's their most basic uniting goal). Society has, in real life--no Wyrm or Weaver required--decided to treat the planet as a whole, and other species in general, as raw material and collateral damage. Yes, yes, #NotAllHumans, but everyone reading this is fucking complicit at minimum; I include myself in that. The rich and powerful might drive it, but we participate in those systems of ecocide (and, incidentally, oppression as a whole) for those ends, even when it's not life or death.
To go back to talking specifically about animal born Fera, in 2021 one division of the American federal government slaughtered 64,131 coyotes, 3,014 foxes, 324 wolves, and 200 mountain lions. In most states it is legal to run contests over who can slaughter the most wildlife (be warned that the video link shows a lot of dead wildlife, and people killing wildlife). Habitat destruction and persecution is driving many of their species extinct. If you want to prove that the characters are wrong to judge the human species like they do, help deal with that shit and prove it through deeds.
Yes. They're dicks. We know they're dicks--but the elements of human society they're fighting against are still evil. The Garou are assholes who are still fighting the good fight.
Also, part of the metaplot's development from 1e to Revised has involved them dealing with their internal issues and becoming slightly less dickish, which has some very obvious political parallels both for society as a whole and for anti-capitalists specifically. I'd actually have been quite pleased if what we got for W5 was a Garou Nation that--like the left--had improved internally even if they still had work to do. After all, for the past few decades PCs, who tend to be the newer generation, have generally been more progressive.
But we didn't get that.
I've seen several people talk about how they got into political activism because of Werewolf: the Apocalypse.
I've not seen anyone talk about how they got into political activism because of Werewolf: the Forsaken--or any other roleplaying game, actually.
I don't hate Forsaken. But I can't help but notice how a lot of the complaints--actually, I'll go ahead and call it whining--about Apocalypse revolve around it having the gall to have politics. People complain that society is shown as corrupt, people complain about the environmentalism, people complain about the PCs using violence as an answer to social ills. These complaints just happen to be about things that align with environmentalist strains of revolutionary leftism.
There's plenty to complain about in Apocalypse; I've talked with other fans of the game and there's broad consensus that the Native American tribes badly need a rewrite by someone who can do them justice, that metis need a different name, et cetera. I've proposed radical changes and gotten positive feedback. But that preserves the themes and politics of the game, and if anything strengthens them. It doesn't declare them 'problematic.'
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Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
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Pulled this bit out because it's very funny, as W:tF is literally all about being a direct-action community organiser and activist as opposed to the more fantastical kind of environmental activist/ecoterrorist you get in W:tA.
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i admit as someone who started gaming in NWOD i have heard a lot of wild takes from OWOD fans over the years and grown cynical but "WtA is a serious take about leftist praxis, which is why unlike WtF or any other roleplaying game it turns people into activists" is really incredible, i think it is the purest one yet
might be some selection bias here in who you've talked to about activism and games, just maybe?
might be some selection bias here in who you've talked to about activism and games, just maybe?
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I mean, WTA, if nothing else, is rather direct about its theme, which is "Oil Execs possessed by evil spirits want to destroy the planet, you should probably kill them." R-Rated Captain Planet, as many have said.
WtF might have a more grounded and nuanced community organization and activism theme. Still, IMO it's more shrouded by the abstractions of werewolf society and the Hunt and the balance of the flesh and shadow and such.
I'm not trying to say that either is better, just that Apocalypse is more straightforward than Forsaken concerning these ideas.
WtF might have a more grounded and nuanced community organization and activism theme. Still, IMO it's more shrouded by the abstractions of werewolf society and the Hunt and the balance of the flesh and shadow and such.
I'm not trying to say that either is better, just that Apocalypse is more straightforward than Forsaken concerning these ideas.
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I heard many people saying that Captain Planet Villains are pretty realistic nowz