/CofD/ & /wodg/ Chronicles of Darkness and World of Darkness General::

Why talk about the actual faults of the playtest when you can rant about gamers you don't like (who totally don't play, you guys, really) and the Bad Playstyles?

The follow-up blog makes it pretty clear, the playtest characters are supposed to be the worst aspects of the Camarilla manifest, presumably so that you won't feel too bad if they die in your playtest (there is a lot of potential ways for them to die in this thing). It was a bad choice made worse by the fact that they weren't up front with it, and the premade characters kind of suck fluff wise, no pun intended.

Is there any good 2nd edition conversion for the Mage:The Awakening Archmages/ Imperial Mysteries?

Not yet, but I imagine using the material would be pretty simple despite the fact there isn't example spells

Just use Imperial Mysteries, add reach options where it makes sense to, and have some high powered fun

I really wish I could get a Forsaken game going. Recently reread through the Gifts/Facets and there are some really fucking neat things in there. Like the Wisdom Facet for Dominance, which makes people temporarily a part of your pack, and then afterwords make them want to be a permanent member

Forsaken is such a cool game that is sadly tainted by the cringefest that was Apocalypse. People only see "Hippy ecoterrorist yiff fantasy" and not "Men in Black but with Shamanism"

I see it more as gang wars you can't kill people in without going crazy

Also, Harmony is just such a good mechanic in 2e, if you take the example sins and use them as a basis and amp up how many sins towards each side people are gonna face in a game

Also, I liked Apocalypse, but god damn if I don't need to rewrite like half the lore

He did discuss the flaws. Left wing/anarchist circle jerk politics being forced into core material, which is worse than the usual sidebar garbage or even the SJW stuff in Beast or the worst sidebar garbage of a Phil Brucato book.

And a bad, in your face, feeding mechanic, which redefines what the game has been about for 20+ years.

He failed to alight upon other stuff, like the major granularity issues and the ridiculous shallowness of the three stat set up, but hey, how about you answer the question instead of trying to show us just how much of a swededracula fanboy you are.

So these actual faults - can you bring yourself to talk about them, or are you just going to keep bumping the thread forward to its end?

See, none of my W:tF games ever had the Pure Tribes in any major role. It was mostly operators operating operationaly against Hosts and other spirits.
They'd rarely show up as the token "Russian Spec Ops team" like any good Clancy novel but that was it.

I wasn't talking about Pure vs Forsaken. Forsaken vs Forsaken happens enough with territory disputes

How hard would it be to use the 2nd edition (Chronicles of Darkness) Storyteller system to run a fantasy game where the player characters have recently undergone apotheosis into "living-gods"?

I just ignore the fluff and focus on the mechanics, it makes the mystery element more interesting.

... just play Exalted man

I think there's also a weird aspect that really caters to the worst part of the fanbase, the kind that gets way too overstimulated by things like secret special languages, and overly specific/archaic nomenclature that is itself a labor to learn, really turns off a lot of people.

The vast majority of people don't play fantasy roleplaying games to learn Noldor and Sindarin, and just flooding RPG mechanics and core aspects with that needless jargon, while absolutely addiction inducing and validating to a certain often unfortunately pathologically abnormal fringe of the populartion, is like fucking kryptonite to normal, sane people. There's no need for this Uratha this, Hishu, Dalu, Urshul, blah blah blah) and then just exploding outward with it, it's just cringey as fuck.

I always get the picture that they are trying to set up the image of some wizened First Nation elder teaching some stupid white kid newbie to the pack, in that faux old First Nations accent you hear in movies, using this garbage jargon, as being the intention of the authors and it just makes me cringe so fucking hard it hurts, and I still can deal with it.

My players see it, and they don't see anything beyond it, which sucks, becuase if you strip it away, yeah, it is a fucking awesome game. I do like that description, a great deal. Men in Black, but with Shamanism, and a dose of Lovecraft too, because the spirit world is alien as fuck at times.

What is even the point of the Pure? It just seems a needless distinction, and almost a way of setting things up as the kewl, good, native tribes fighting against the eeebil white man tribes. It seems like you could just well, entirely forget the whole story of a schism of packs. Asume there are just different tribes of wolves. Each pack is an island unto its own. Assume the wilderness between pack controlled and managed areas much more open and dangerous, sort of like the rural are to vampires as opposed to cities. Packs are still competition and rivals etc... The pure just don't seem to serve much purpose besides some weird identity politic angle, unless I'm missing something.

The whole First Tongue thing never really bothered me. They went overboard with every spirit having to have its own gibberish name but the core stuff was fine.
Might be because my first experiences with the line were reading MrShopping's actual plays and that dude made the foreign aspect of it work.

Isn't that sort of what mage is? If you want them more adept at base without magic, just consider higher stats at start

Can I play a mythological style physical god (like Thor or Apollo) in this or is it just limited to demi-gods?

I'll have to look those up, maybe those will sell them, if I could get their elderly asses to use the internet outside of facebook and twitter. (I grew up wrong for my generation).

The Pure are meant to be an antagonist playing off the theme of "This job fucking sucks". They are more numerous because it feels good to be a fucking top dog predator king ruling over The Shadow and fucking anyone you want.

Its less about Native vs Euro, more about the people actively working for selfish ends with little moral restriction vs people who are doing a tiring, thankless job where your only reward is pain and maybe very rarely you get a bonus in the form of Renown.

You want Scion then. It's a mechanical clusterfuck but it does exactly what you're looking for.

Exalted is all about playing Gods and Demigods. Technically by fluff the players are supposed to be demigods of a sort (The Exalted), but they can be more powerful than gods.

There's also the aspect of the Pure viewing the Forsaken as the assholes that ruined everything. It's their fault Pangaea is gone, it's their fault Luna hates them, it's their fault the Shadow is a mess.

Detroit Rock City was his best one, Scars of Russia (I think) was pretty good too. He did a 3rd really good one I can't recall the name of but he used V:tM vamps as the antagonists and that just killed it for me.
You'll have to brave Cancer.net to get to them though, no one's taken the initiative to PDF them like DaveB's stuff.

And of course the ever present theme of Werewolf: No one actually knowing the fucking truth about what happened

You know how in Geist 2ED, the Geister have a special Manifestation responsible for the Bargain that is different from Claiming?

You could play as "Sin-Eaters" who made a "Bargain", but with a special Goetia instead of a special Ghost. This Goetia embodies a certain god. Your "Psyche" represents how powerful your legend in the collective mind of humanity is, and your "Synergy" represents how well you balance your human and divine desires. The Underworld is replaced by the Astral, and your powers are more like the Atavisms and Nightmares of Beasts (i.e. they do not cost anything to use, but may be improved by spending your Fuel Stat). For example, if you're Poseidon, your "Atavisms" manifest as a mystic trident and weather control, and your "Nightmares" manifest as psychic assaults that feel like drowning. Your "Plasm" is generated by acts of faith, devotion, sacrifice and rivalry from mortals and other gods. You can have special Safe Places in the Astral like Olympus or Asgard.

Antagonists include rival gods, primordial abominations from the Astral, mortals who take your word too far, rebellious demigods, mysterious godslayers and sometimes Fate itself

Which is fuckery coming and going: the oldheads who liked being the Camarilla play a shotacon and weaksauce blood slaves to some punk ass clubrat and the new recruits end up playing monsters that aren't even cool (also a shotacon). Both sides are likely to get dusted by the Anarchs/Inquisition/the random Get of Fenris werewolf in the forest like it was the Tomb of fucking Horrors. There's even a random encounter table!

Presence 1 still doesn't do shit, the cutting down to Physical/Mental/Social for stats makes combat a joke and opposed rolls deterministic as fuck. The fact you can buy hits equal to the exact number of hits your pool would need makes rolling dice pointless. There's no reason to use d10s other than nostalgia, but hunger die ding on 1s so you can't just switch to d6es without modifying the chance of getting Frenzy/Compulsion. You have to spend Composure before your compulsion roll, so it's more likely to have to do dumb shit on a Compulsion. Also, the Hunger mechanic is too far forward, even for a playtest where it is the main mechanic. The power ups you get for eating specific people feels like an arcade game joke and require either pre-seeding for each scene by the Storyteller or a random seeding table that the game does not have.

It's the worst excesses of nWoD and oWoD combined.

Who would you guys say is the most well known character of each splat type of CofD?

Are there stats for Rank 1 or 2 abyssal entities? I can't seem to find them in the Awakening 2e core.

Summoners and Intruders has them I believe.

Good to know. Do abyssal entities have a resistance or immunity to magic?

Gulmoths are made as Spirits.
Acamoths, as Goetia.

There are examples for them in the books says, however those don't necessarily follow those rules.
It's worth nothing however that if at any point you want to deviate from formula, do so. These are entities of untruth, if anything gets to break the rules, they do.

The 2e does not have any such entities. You may check out the supplement called Intruders: Encounters With The Abyss and the following thread for inspiration, however:

forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-new-world-of-darkness/mage-the-awakening/925972-2e-abyssal-aspects-and-numina

Are they affected by Spirit and Mind?

It's just that... the stupid fucking charm system is so fucking Japanese CRPG meets collectible card game that it doesn't feel like anything else. It doesn't feel like playing gods, it doesn't feel like a RPG, the goddamn mechanics are just front and center bullshit.

Unless 2e switched it up, got it backwards. Gulmoths attack your astral spaces and are effected by Mind, Acamoths attack baseline reality and are effected by Spirit.
Abyssal entities are made as either Spirits or just as narrative encounters. You can't really put a Finesse stat to something possessing the idea of 7am on Thursdays.

>, but hunger die ding on 1s so you can't just switch to d6es without modifying the chance of getting Frenzy/Compulsion.
>I don't care for V5 but for math's sake, 1 in 6 chances is NOT THE SAME as 1 in 10 chances.

Interesting idea, though I was going to instead start with an Archmage and modify the rules from there since this is a completely different setting than normal.

Oh boy, thanks for the heads up. Already met a girl in a yarn store who used to be a big regular on rpg.net. She quit like 5 years ago because of the crazy, but still carried it with her, in spite of being pretty cool. She was married to complete loser though, refused to split with him, even though cheating on him was the only time she said she ever felt like she wasn't being his mother.

Just for clarity
*Second line was accidental greentext*

I didn't know this. Jesus, please, I never prayed for anything, but let Geist 2.0 happen before the end of days, k?

Also, kill all the muzzies.

Requiem would be Dracula at least.

Celerity is back to being an absolute must have, and like 5 dots at that. Obfuscate's first dot is absolutely worthless. That fucking ding on 1's.. man I was actually hoping to be able to dump D10's til I read that, if the system was going to be completely trashed, but then I realized that this was all shit angled at people who just hate dice in general, so fuck LARPers, fuck you swede cunt faggots. If you don't like the core game, fuck you, there have always been separate LARP rules.

The question is then, who did like the playtest? Clearly someone does and their opinion must count for a lot to drown out the howls of rage all across the land.

Alternatively, does V5 and by extension One WoD as a whole have a future if this rate of alienation continues?

My assessment of V5 so far:

Terrible. Worse, they are ignoring all but the most sycophantic feedback, which they are latching onto and absolutely fawning over and cultivating, which bodes horribly for what quality developers they are going to be.

They are turning the core vampire game in every way into the worst of the LARP, with the depth of Indie Darling For A Month type RPGs too.

But hey, at least we can expect yet more fiction about gay couples. And maybe the token heterosexual case of incest or rape or worse.

Please tell me how wrong I am?

They statted out fucking Dracula in Requiem? Seriously? He's like right up there with Caine in the Mythos.

whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Dracula_(VTM)#Character_Sheet
He didn't get statted out in Requiem as far as I can tell.

Paradoxical Puppetry (Abyssal Numen)

The Abyssal may blur the lines between its own will and that of its target. The target must be within line of sight, and the entity must spend 3 Essence and roll Power + Rank vs Resolve + Supernatural Tolerance. If the entity succeeds, it and the target share senses and thoughts for the remainder of the scene. During this, either one may spend 1 Willpower point to make the other take an instant action. At the end of the scene, the target must roll Resolve + Composure with a penalty equal to the entity's Rank. If they fail, they gain a Resistant Delusional Condition (The Abyssal And I Are One). Whenever the target acts on this Delusion, the Abyssal gains 1 Essence. The Abyssal may have this Numen affecting a numer of individuals up to its Rank.

docs.google.com/document/d/1kIDr9_-oBGLEPwmfmtTyTefnSh9d5D62LdY1fCa7UHI/edit

The possibility must be at least raised that we are, in fact, the screeching minority.

What's the equivalent to sorcery in Awakening/CofD?

Is the focus on feeding as annoying as it seems in the preview?

It feels like you'll be spending most of your time looking for blood and I know that will get tedious after a couple sessions.

So Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary edition has a lot of the Tradition mystics embracing new technology as compatible with their paradigm, as opposed to most of their predecessors who historically rejected any modern technology from the time. House Verditius and Thig from the Order of Hermes embrace information technology, techno-shamans becoming more common among Dreamspeakers, the Euthantos Lakshmists commonly use computers to perform advanced probability calculations, etc.

What do you think about this change? Do you use it in your games?

Personally I think it makes sense in the setting, especially since all the old masters and archmages were wiped out by the Avatar Storm and we have people growing up with the internet. It can also lead to some interesting friction within the Traditions as a whole and withing individual Traditions.

Supernatural Merits of all sorts, Warding/Binding/Summoning/Abjuring, Hidden Moves (Hurt Locker), Relics, Mystery Cult Initiation and Rites (Second Sight)

My most realistic hopes are a book on the Tribes, a Werewolf version of TYoN, maybe a new Auspice book, and a new Night Horrors book with 2e Bale Hounds in it.

In our playtest, yeah. It was very intrusive. The mechanic started out seeming cool, but during our beer break, there was no argument that it was already starting to get tedious, obnoxious. That night, as I reread the PDF, I really saw it for what it was, a really gimmicky thing, with just tons and tons of flavor text trying incredibly desperately to sell it.

It the stuff of a one of those * heartbreaker RPGs - you know, the ones someone makes because they have a chip on their shoulder about D&D, which is basically a veneer of D&D centering around their one goofy super special, this changes everything mechanic? Only in this case, instead of D&D it's Vampire, and that super special, this changes everything mechanic is Hunger. And like all heartbreakers, it is just a soulless pastiche piece of garbage, which pleases no one but the maker, in the end.

As a neuro-atypical, I feel my opinions are especially poignant, and I do believe these are excellent changes for the setting. But please use the proper names for these Traditions. Dreamspeaker, Euthanatos - it's really crass and you know it. It's time to stop being insensitive, okay? We all have feelings and deserve to be actualized and empowered.

In my setting Avatar Storm never happened and magitek is an occasional tool used by certain Traditions.

Sons of Ether of course use super-science
Virtual Adepts hack reality
House Thig uses outright magitek

And all factions tend to use magic to enhance technology [making your truck fly, shooting blessed rounds, etc], but overall no I don't like mixing the occultic fluff with technology unless it fits that specific Tradition.

M20 fucked up a ton of Paradigms in the way they handled it, resulting in yoga-using Virtual Adepts, every other Hermetic using super science, and [unpardonable sin] the TAFTANI using high tech in their magick.

Fuck all over that noise. Keep the fluffs of the various Traditions at least nominally distinct.

Gotcha, that makes sense. It certainly doesn't fit for some (especially Taftani and Verbena), but having some folks in the mystic Traditions use it works fine.

Out of curiosity, why do you undo the Avatar Storm?

Yeah, and it's all probably because Satirical Phil was given a tablet by someone (you know he'd never buy one, the lot of his chosen writers grift off their friends and fans constantly), and found he could order crystals off of ebay.

WE EAT BUTT

>As a neuro-atypical, I feel my opinions are especially poignant, and I do believe these are excellent changes for the setting. But please use the proper names for these Traditions. Dreamspeaker, Euthanatos - it's really crass and you know it. It's time to stop being insensitive, okay? We all have feelings and deserve to be actualized and empowered.

Is this a Tumblr parody?

Is the user who does all the 2e legacy conversions lurking?

Don't knock it till you try it.

>M20 fucked up a ton of Paradigms
>Satirical Phil

There is virtually nothing that SatyrDouche did not screw-up or try to ruin in M20, with the supplements arguably even worse than the core.

Of course, RichT also deserves some "credit", as he chose to give Phil free reign, and then Rich totally abdicated his job as owner, final editing authority, and most importantly, "creative director," of OPP.

>I still don't understand why every conceivable minority craft was included or referenced in M20, but the Lions of Zion were so controversial they needed to be excised as Zionists might trigger Phil or soe SJW readers.
>diversity is mandatory, except for mainstream Jews (and anything conceivably white, Western or to the political right of Lenin).

100% agree. I'm strongly to the left, but so much of their shit makes me roll my eyes. Honestly, if they wanted to include their politics in the game (which is likely to happen, given the nature of Mage) they could have done it low key and that would have been fine.

"our clan weakness is that we're TOO LOYAL to our clan!"
"Fire? Yeah, I can call up a roiling inferno on zero notice, no issues."
"Sunlight? A problem FOR PUSSIES."
"What can stop me? NOTHING BUT AN AUTHOR INSERT."

Fucking Tremere. At least Strauss was a sharply dressed gigolo.

There is much importance in this observation. In fact... you know...

COMING IN 2018!!!

BUTT-EATERS RPG!!!

(It's V5, in every way, but instead of Vampires, the characters are just people who are addicted to tonguing anuses, and the core mechanic is Butt-Hunger. Humanity stays the same, only the Beast is just their primal desire to just grab the fattest ass they see, depants/skirt it, and start mmmlalalalalllamlalalalla tounging the shit out of it ravenously).

>WW / OPP ever being low key with their politics.
If only, user, if only.

Yeah - totally. Veeky Forums is just an echo chamber of like minded individuals. RPG.net too, where it's also hated. And RPG.net and Veeky Forums agree so frequently too.

We are just completely off and it is just hunky dory, and all the flaws cited are just pure hysteria.

Fuck off, you sycophantic piece of garbage.

You talking 2e? 3e came out recently and tried its best to move away from that.

Similar note. I once had an Etherite that was obsessed with the Taftani and replicating their magic via Ethertech. Ended up making a cannon that shot their fire tornado rote.
Good times.

No, more like a M20 specific garbage Parody. It's Tumblresque all right, but every aspect of it comes directly from shit Phil put in M20 core.

I think the charm criticisms apply to 1e and 2e equally strongly, and 3e hasn't exactly abandoned it, it just tried to fit the other exalts into the book more, likely opening up the charms for future supplements.

It's especially weird because the Lions are virtually the only craft that gives a fuck about Sleepers, which should be a good plot point to have for PCs, and that the Arabs get TWO crafts. One for Muslims and one for pre-Muslim pantheists.

What Lions..

>tfw based Jews only really exist in Dark Ages Mage

...

You know, I was reading Exalted the other day. It sounded interesting so I bought a copy. But when I actually read the rules to it, it seemed... pretty underpowered compared to WoD, honestly. Haven't played it though so I don't know if that holds up in practice.

Last thread, someone mentioned Luna had been given actual stats beyond the "rank 8" of Imperial Mysteries. Anyone got a page and book reference for me?

Sounds like something a mage-poster would say.

Mage is starting to feel like a game of Crusader Kings 2.

I thought Werewolf had all the weird incest shit.

I wonder if I'm the only one who likes the idea of hunger being the main focus of Vampire (I mean, you're a fucking *vampire*. All the politics and shadow playing is *supposed* to be a thin veneer of window dressing over the central fact that you are an undead corpse that drinks blood), and just takes issue with how it's implemented in V5?

Hunger just isn't a fun part of the game. If it is, it's easy for the group to run with that. But there are only so many feeding scenes you can run before you want to top yourself.

Weren't the Lions deleted from M20, because well, that horrible Abrahamic Religion don't like our queer lifestyles and shit? Also, zion is a BAD WORD.

>Part I

To many of the far left, mainstream Jews are unacceptable traitors.

When Jews were nearly annihilated in the Holocaust (although violence against them was historically routine and continues today), and when the creation and early political environment of Israel most concerned leftist politics (e.g., Kibbutizm) with wide worldwide Jewish support while under constant threat, Jews were lauded minorities. However, Jews committed certain cardinal sins against the rigid identity politics of the left. Rather than wallow or demand other accomodate them, the vast majority of Jews assimilated into western cultures, and far worse, had the audacity to immensely succeed and prosper, almost always without government handouts or benefits or even protective legislation (although they, like everyone else, are protected today under general civil rights laws). If that wasn't bad enough, while the vast majority of Jews are still socially liberal, most have adopted strong capitalist ideals and traditional notions of family, hierarchy, law, personal responsibility, etc. In Israel, Jews went from fears for survival to a democratic first world nuclear power with close ties to the USA, err... Great Satan, while all the "brown" nations were culturally, politically and scientifically regressing.

Simply, in miraculous few generations since the Shoah, Jews not only somehow turned into "whites," but the worst kind of whites. [This same phenomena in now seen with many Asian groups in the USA today].

>Part 2

Don't expect strong and proud Jewish groups to be positively portrayed in WW books any time soon, no less with someone like SwedeDracule in charge of the IP. At best, you'll see SJW-approved individual trans / gay / disabled / "neurotypical" /etc. npcs that have a seemingly Jewish last name so some authors can claim either they or their brethren aren't really antisemitic (only "anti-Zionist", with no explanation of why Jews uniquely are no longer entitled to national self-determination or why they implicitly support the bigoted and decidedly illiberal cultures surrounding Israel and/or proudly hate Jews worldwide).

>end of angry rant

>Weren't the Lions deleted from M20, because well, that horrible Abrahamic Religion don't like our queer lifestyles and shit? Also, zion is a BAD WORD.

Yeah, between coverage of all those pride parades, you never stop hearing about Jews throwing all those gays and trans off buildings, unlike the enlightened, accepting, diverse. liberal and multicultural Muslim cultures who hate not only Israel, but openly despise Jews...

>Jews are too white, Western, capitalist and pro-American... stop the "pinkwashing"
>But what about Arab and Muslims... they don't count because they're "brown"... they must be included in WW games for "diversity" and reasons... and shut up

>Lions deleted from M20,
> can't have horrible Abrahamic Religion

>Multiple Muslim crafts and lauding of non-Jewish Middle Eastern cultures in M20

>Abrahamic religion also maid source of Celestial Chorus AND basis for ENTIRE Masquerade gameline

>Still effectively need trigger warning for presence of open Jews or excise any proud Jewish groups from WOD books

Tremeres weakness is that every member of that clan is powerful, meaning climbing up the ranks requires intense amounts of backstabbery and paranoia. Thus, everyone there should be an easily corruptible wretch.
Tremere is the only clan that cannot trust themselves at all, THAT is why they are all blood bound to someone.