What went wrong?

I think Mage actually got the worst change. Ascension has Traditions based on real-world ones and some really cool "villains", Awakening just had some shit about dragons and Atlantis. I don't know much about Werewolf: The Foresaken but The Apocalypse was Edgy Captain Planet Plus The Planeteers Fuck Dogs and it seems like anything would be better than that.

CCP fucked everything, but also was the only company that could pull a WoD MMO with proper player politics but they fucked that too

WW was never good. They just had a knack for lore that was edgy and unusual enough to not have a lot of competition, but still basic enough to not go full art piece.

Once that wore out, they had nothing else really left. That's why most of their products are just throwing another self-contained game into their main setting- they want to build up the setting/brand, but they don't really have a way to do that other than copy+pasting the main draw of "look, you play as X!" for a new partition.

It's probably also why they went all SJW, and did whatever the fuck they did with Beast. Writing weird/off stuff is all they ever had, so it shouldn't be surprising they eventually started grasping at shitty politics or weirder than normal revenge fantasies.

Ascension had way too many problems that Awakening circumvented though. Sure, Awakenings Mind magic is still basically required, but Ascension made it so you HAD to go down that tree heavily or you were basically a joke with magic.

To spite the fact Ascension has the better setting; it's rules and power-level are just so hard to get to working consistently that it doesn't lead to a fun game to run. Awakening is simple, kinda silly and not as flashy; but it gets you to work and back.

This is actually the most plausible reason here.

Goths loved the escape. Goth culture has since died, and whats left of it has become something the game completely does not resonate with.

First edition nWoD was not bad, just different. Second ed though... that's SJW-city.

Forsaken is pretty good, it's basically "Werewolf: Spirit Police" with a combat focus

>W-what seems to be the problem, Uratha?
>Turn around, slow movements... Yes, that's what I thought, possession of a mortal without a permit, you're going to have to come with us Spirit

But instead of arresting you claw them up. That's basically Forsaken.

This makes too much sense not to be true.

Years of neglect, instead of reinvention.

>Ascension has Traditions based on real-world ones
PFFFFFFTTTTTT

>Christians except without any theology and they're weird ultra-Unitarians
>dude, drugs, man
>hippies
>token "primitive" group
>token "Asian" group

You could chop out most of the Traditions and make things so much better. Or give them ACTUAL FUCKING HISTORICAL FLUFF AND NOT MAKE HALF OF THEM "OH WOW LOOK AT THESE FOREIGNERS SO MYSTERIOUS"

the technocratic union did nothing wrong

>the technocratic union did nothing wrong

That's the point, Mages are the Villain Protagonists.

As with every other industry that failed: trying to diversify and chosing the absolute worst avaliable audience to pander to.

Yup. They should have been releasing video games this whole time.

What they need to do release this 'vtm 5th edition' as 'World of Darkness 5th Edition' and get some unifying design to make the books extremely clearly linked- no more 'wait what do i need is it awakening or ascension or revised or 2nd ed what'

Release a solid, easily readable book that instructs people on how to make mortal characters with all the weapons and merits/flaws etc and just the basic fluff you need to get going. Then you release the supplemental books- Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Mage the Ascension, Hunter the Whicheveroneisright, etc. Every book clearly belongs to the same system and setting. Every book is compatible. The rules work together, they're all on the same page, And you don't need them all to play. Just what you want. Then we get a big fluff setting book- a thick one, clearly for the fans of the old stuff and people who are really invested.

Most importantly, you fucking stock these books in flgs's. You advertise them. You also release a new VTM video game to remind people of how great bloodlines was. It's a spiritual successor (they don't have the rights to the actual Bloodlines stuff) and gets people hyped. You have sensible PR and a fucking subreddit that doesn't allow 'chronicles of darkness' shit on it- that goes elsewhere.

Then WoD can compete with Shadowrun for D&D and Pathfinder's scraps, maybe even surpass it.

What about Geist?

Geist != Wraith

Geist is probably the best original idea in Chronicles.

Thinking that their online java chat game was the standard for their audience. Putting so much focus on lore that "didn't matter" to your game. Saying over and over how players shouldn't have access to rare bloodlines or super low gen, then printing tons of information on them

Quads of Truth!

yea, shit like that would make a great book a few years in when the people are getting boring. "RARE AS FUCK STUF! epic levels you can go above level 20 omg fight the gods!!'

The player base is more autistic than average.

I learned to screen my players before games and cast a wide net thanks to Mage.

Requiem is much more personal than Masquerade and conductive to more creative stories. It gave up on lore to add more game which may make it better or worse depending on what you want out of Vampire.

But nothing is stopping me from telling a personal story in Masquerade. Also; the reduction of clans and the focus on covenants made it hard to really flesh out why this group was even hanging out together.

>But nothing is stopping me from telling a personal story in Masquerade.
The nagging feeling of squandered potential kinda does.
What is your pitiful 13th gen unlife worth when Gahenna is right around the corner?

They were a bunch of mid-20s humanities majors and when their audience went to college themselves they realize how facile and awful the lore was and moved the fuck on.

The industry has a weird "Silver Age" where everyone simply went out and wrote their own mechanics and settings for their groups' games and that happened to coincidence with nWoD.

You could argue we're still in it but I think we're in the Bronze Age of RPGs where the edgiest ideas are currently worming their way up to the mainstream gaming communities. Before, you know, the bottom falls out from the market and the IPs are sold to movie studios for "ideas."

Yeah but that's never going to happen. The folks who bought the license literally only cared about one thing: Mind's Eye Theater. It's still up and running, license renewed in a sweetheart deal.

They hired a bunch of middling writers to produce a new RPG because they hate Onyx Path's shitty SJW "we're vampires who hug" stuff, but I doubt they really intend to publish a large product line.

Wait, isn't this exactly what they did?

>What is your pitiful 13th gen unlife worth when Gahenna is right around the corner?

Wow, that's actually a great question to base a campaign off of. Rebellion against a stacked deck, the value of one's self and so many other philosophical plot points can come from this.

Thanks!

kys dumb grognard

owod and vtm is fucking stupid

Honestly; I'm distantly excited for M5 because of this. Ascension always suffered from how the original team viewed Paradox, the power-level of mages and how mages should grow and act.

My hope is that M5 is just Mage: The Shitposting. You already lost the war for reality, so on your way out via Ascension, fuck some shit up, have a good lark and get the fuck outta Dodge laughing the whole time.

What is this SJW stuff everyone's talking about? I haven't been paying much attention to WoD in a while and it's news to me.

I've honestly never met a single person who likes VtR.

Tell me how VII was a good villain when they literally had to have mental plot armor to keep their secret from leaking.

youtube.com/watch?v=PUmOPgp0SeA

youtube.com/watch?v=ATUesFQyA8U

Abandon all hope all ye who enter.

>But nothing is stopping me from telling a personal story in Masquerade.
Sure there is, it's the fact that you can tell other kinds of story with it. Who would want a story about trying to be president of the anime club when you could be doing something interesting?

What did Kek mean by this?!

Haven't most people who worked with opp and ww have been revealed to be antisemites and sexual predators?

99% of SJW-pushing "personalities" in all media are being found out to be racists, sexual deviants and predators.
It's unsurprising to me, you must be very intimate with that sort of behavior to be so ridiculously paranoid about the right wanting to sodomize you just because a christian bakery refused to make a dick-shaped cake or something.

opp people are all a bunch of weirdo losers who can't market their shit. Mostly they're just editing old shit together into slightly more passable books while adding some legitimately sjw shit (this comes from a liberal female- it's seriously sjw garbage these people are touting) and then they didn't even get the books sold in flgs because, surprise surprise, nobody wants to spend close to a hundred dollars on a massive confusing tome that's really only 1/5 of the game.

I'm hoping paradox/whitewolf get vtm together and actually fix world of darkness. It'll never be D&D but for god's sake, Paizo was literally nobody ten years ago and they're one of the biggest booths at Gencon these days. If they can make a business out of 'basically 3.5' I think a major game company should be able to fix this mess.

They decided being obnoxious cunts about their leftie beliefs was more important than making a decent game.

>It'll never be D&D
Sad thing is, there was a time in the 90s when White Wolf was bigger than D&D.

Yeah, a lot of the Planescape setting was inspired by VtM.

I never understood the nostalgia for OWoD to be frank(or 3.5 for that matter). I was too young during their heyday but when I first started to get into pen & paper and was able to check on some sourcebooks in the bargain bin at my lgs. It was like trying to understand something written on Mars.

It was all they had at the time.

Justin Achilli

>Or give them ACTUAL FUCKING HISTORICAL FLUFF AND NOT MAKE HALF OF THEM "OH WOW LOOK AT THESE FOREIGNERS SO MYSTERIOUS"
"Guys, you all need to get sociology degrees prior to playing a game just so I won't get the problematic cultural appropriation trembles."

>pushing SJW shit really hard and in a really cringy way

oWoD's material was the 90's version of your much-hated "SJW shit," only actually way more overt and heavy-handed.

Anyone bitching about SJW material in nWoD doesn't really get that oWoD did the same shit.

This is why it needs to be rewritten from the ground up. The rules can stay basically the same but right now they are batshit. It's impossible to understand.

They could at least put in the minimal amount of effort on how things work. Maybe if they didn't have some compulsive urge to NOT GIVE ANY FUCKING EXAMPLE PARADIGMS SERIOUSLY HOW THE FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PLAY THIS WITHOUT DOING A FUCKTON OF RESEARCH.

Like seriously all it takes is maybe a half a page per Tradition giving a bunch of "I am an X that does Y through Z."examples.

>Forces 3 Corr X "Kill the fuck out of someone far away"
>I am a TRAINED MEMBER OF THE ORDER OF HERMES that can BURN THE FUCK OUT OF PEOPLE by INVOKING THE NAMES OF ANGELS IN ENOCHIAN
>I am a SHAMAN, LIKE MY FATHER BEFORE ME, who CAN KILL PEOPLE WITH LIGHTNING by CALLING UPON THE THUNDERBIRD THROUGH THIS RITUAL
>I am a MEMBER OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER who can MURDER PEOPLE WITH A DRONE STRIKE through CALLING IN A HIT USING THE OMNIPRESENT AMERICAN DRONE NETWORK

oWoD wasn't originally like like, didn't really go batshit until the 2nd edition of werewolf. I guess they lost writers and the ones left and new ones went in a different direction.
oWoD was less political and just fucking dark. I still wish Rage would have taken off, if only so Ron Spencer still did art, instead we are left with his less talented sister.

oWoD wasn't radically bipartisan despite Vampire literally having two main factions at each other's throat.

oWoD is very much a product of its time. It's based heavily on 90's counter-culture with a very big "fuck the man" mentality threaded throughout most of the game lines, with a big splash of "you're a misunderstood cast-out from society but as it turns out, you've got wolf-blood/magic/vampire/actually a fucking fairy" thrown in for good measure. And a layer of goth too, for style points.

As much as oWoD tries to paint itself as this horror-based game, it's really more akin to X-Men and other 90's comics. Including a large, overarching meta-plot that doesn't make a lot of sense unless you follow every splat and sourcebook to piece together the story that WW was trying to (poorly) tell.

This isn't to say that oWoD isn't fun in its own way. It totally is! But a lot of fondness for it comes through in the same way that D&D for a lot of people does: because it's what they played when they were 12. And a lot of those same people haven't gone back and given their favored series a critical look because they don't want to ruin their fun memories of it.

>oWoD was less political and just fucking dark.

It absolutely was political. oWoD was pretty counter-culture for its time, what with the gothic punk aesthetic going on and the strong vein of "governments and corporations are out to get you and are poisoning the earth in the process." Their idea of inclusivity was...misguided, to say the least (I'm looking at YOU, Gypsy), but it was very much a political series. Anyone saying otherwise either didn't read the material in-depth or are full-on revisionists.

THIS guy should write the book!

get started.

Uh they've made it clear they're just retconning everything after VtM away. If you need continuity you're allowed to suckle the SJW teet that is Chronicles of Darkness.

From what they've said they consider the MET metaplot the correct starting point.

>not understanding what bathroom bills are
>not understanding what transgender is
>transgender

Well that's a pretty bad starting point.

There's no such thing as "90's version of SJW". SJW is SJW, it's only been around for a little over 5 years. There was no 90's version of SJW, because SJWism is a very modern cancerous offshoot of mainstream liberal PC culture taken to its extremes.

OWoD was stridently liberal, but that's not the 90's version of SJW. It's the 90's version of stridently liberal.

90s OWOD had shit like the Gypsies book. What are you talking about?

In the 90's, having super stereotypical token ethnic representatives that would be considered hilariously simple and offensive today was how you showed how inclusive and liberal you were.

Are you guys all twelve or something? Or were you asleep during the 90's?

oWoD was the 90s FUCK THE MAN counterculture. It doesn't work out so well today, because the counterculture has returned to the system because FUCK THE MAN didn't do shit and is trying to reform it. The FUCK THE MAN types tend to be right-wing nowadays, anyways, which goes against the left-wing bent of WW.

In other words, the target audience has grown out of being Virtual Adepts and turned into liberal NWO. THE HORROR.

This. Liberal and sjw aren't interchangeable. Being inclusive isn't being an sjw.

Sjw is when you shout about how inclusive you are while actually being shitty and only wanting the brownie points. It's when you have a narrow idea of what is right and anyone who thinks different is a FUCKING NAZI

What you call stridently liberal was the equivalent of the SJW movement today, specifically how conservative right-wing elements absolutely loathe both. The amount of shit that people advocating for LGBT rights, eco-friendly material, and restrictions on corporation spending and business practices got in the 90's is mirrored pretty well with the crap we're seeing for online discourse today.

The differences are there, of course, and there's particulars that differentiate the two, but the culture war of the 90's hasn't really left. It just moved from talk radio to twitter, with the extremist right-wing trading in Rush Limbaugh for Steve Bannon. Same shit, different day, basically.

Gypsies was some hot accidentally-racist garbase. Whatever good intentions they may've had initially (and I'm sure they had them, somewhere) was ruined by the utterly awful execution of it.

I live in Chile and trust me when I tell you that in when I was in high school, around 2004-2008 VtM and other oWoD games were popular as fuck. More popular than DnD is ever going to be here. Even some Jocks were into it.

SJWs aren't "FUCK THE MAN", they literally want the government to incarcerate people for wrongthink. They sincerelly believe Trump was gonna hunt them down because that's what they expected Clinton would do to /pol/.

If anything goth/punk were right-wing liberalism by virtue of wanting individualism and for every authority to fuck off out of their business.

That's kinda the point? oWoD is FUCK THE MAN. That was the 90s left. The modern left is not, in fact they are trying very hard to be THE MAN.

Imagine honestly believing what this guy is saying.

Monte Cook plz go

all I want is to play WoD with cute goths why won't this ever happen in my life

The same reason that Brave New World never took off. Because the number of people who actually want to play a game about being an even more politically charged version of the X-Men are few and far between.
Also the rules were different from D&D, which didn't help.
Turns out being edgy doesn't always increase your playerbase.

Pretty much. Kids who wanted to rebel/stand out used to become goths. Now they just dye their hair and tell everyone they are polyrhythmic genderkin or whatever the fuck. A real shame, since goths made some neat stuff.

>punk were right-wing liberalism
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
No. The punk scene is left-anarchist my dude. I dunno about goths, but most punks are anarcho-communists or some variation thereupon.

Well as far as Chronicles of Darkness goes;
-There isn't a snowballs chance in hell for meaningful crossover.

Power levels range from slightly stronger then mortal to kills gods with cock. The only way to know the power level is to have a good understanding of the rules for each book. Which means memorizing each of these damn books.

-The late game in every line is vague if mentioned at all.

1000 years of night fills me with rage. "Do vampires tun into monsters(ala soul reaver, see image) or get some passive ability for being really old monsters?"

>No, they just get more ways to run out of vitae faster and their weaknesses become stronger.

-Players level really fast. Like dear god fast if their doing it right. Peoples first instinct is to throw every EXP they get into their powers. This becomes a problem when its final boss time and hes gotta face some motherfuckers who don't have the skills needed to drive a car in the rain but can wield that car as a +11 weapon.

Its bad in vampire(I blame Vigor and Resilience, they spoil people), Worse in Mage(lets make a system were you don't need stats to use 99% of the spells! People will still get strength!) Present everywhere.

-Most people don't get meaningful choices in combat.
>Attack and see if its a chance die
>Use an ability. If your a mage congratulations on the victory.
>Spend a willpower to see if you can roll regular dice
>All out attack if you have shit defense/good armor

Also defense against firearms seams amazing until you remember you loose 1 defense for each attack applied to it that turn. Now you know why the guy with the grenade launcher is waiting to the last minute to attack.

Don't get me wrong I still like them, I just spend a shit load of time on homebrew.

Punk is anarchism period, and goth is apolitical.
They were born during the cold war and were demonized hard for being against both America and Russia.

I did!
But... it's the only edition I played. And I took a lot of inspiration from VtM: Bloodlines. And incorporated some pseudo-Gehenna stuff, with an older Vampire leading a group of not!Sabbat as the far off threat set against the day-to-day intrigues of the city.

>tfw know a cute punk chick
>already wanted to join in on our DnD group a while back
Fuck, I could probably get her in our VtM game if I asked. I think the goth/punk aspect of it would be right up her alley.

>inb4 fuck her
Nah, she's a qt3.14 for sure and fun enough to hang around with (when she isn't stoned off her ass) but she has some annoying habits that are a deal-breaker for me in terms of gf material and I'm not into casual sex (even though she is).

>There isn't a snowballs chance in hell for meaningful crossover

I mean, crossovers always end bad in WoD games on account of power disparity and lack of strong connectivity rules-wise. nWoD/CoD does this a little bit better than oWoD on account of everyone being made with the same human stat block, but none of the lines are really meant to interact in any meaningful way.

>all I want is be the cute goth people want to play WoD with why won't this ever happen in my life

Do a meetup gaming group, and make the game world approachable. Avoid bullshit politics and identity issues. Start off in a comic or game shop so they feel safe. See where it goes from there.

I was one of those 90's gamers. This is not untrue. The most liberally "forward" the WoD ever got was using "she" as the default pronoun throughout the game books. All of the preachy bullshit started in the 2000's, just like in comics.

I say left-anarchism to distinguish from anarcho-capitalism, which punk certainly is not.
Captcha: Roads. Seems as though the almighty Captcha gods agree with me.

But there's also a lot of reasons for some of these guys to cross over. In Chronicles; The WOOP WOOP WEREWOLF POLICE and Mages are basically on the same side, so why not team-up?

New poster here. I'm not well read on the nWoD but I know that mixing genres can steal a little something from both things you're mixing, so you wind up diluting the game. Still, it has the potential for fun.

You shouldn't really need to distinguish it desu. Ancap is so radically different from every other kind of anarchism that I don't think it's the first thing to pop into anybody's head when anarchism as a whole is brought up. Wanting corporations to rail your asshole is the least punk thing there is.

Yeah, there is a lot of areas where two groups could thematically run into each other.

Off the top of my head, because depending on what power level they meet either the werewolves got this shit handled better than the magi, or the magi delete the threat faster than you can blink.

Power disparity is pretty bad in WoD no matter which version you play, though at least villain crossing over splats works a hell of a lot better in nWoD. So, there's that, I guess.

>If anything goth/punk were right-wing liberalism by virtue of wanting individualism and for every authority to fuck off out of their business.

This is essentially true, though. Both movements arose after any conception of Revolution completely died in the West. And both were hyper-focused on individualist branding. Goth never produced much beyond its aesthetic and some alright music, and Punk was so fundamentally vacuous that it could comfortably serve as a feeder for both Leftist and Far-Right movements.

Ego

>you mean the default
Steven if it didn't work the third time it's time to move on your shitty dominatrix character is never going to amount to anything than suck old man dick to get past the back door. figuratively and literally
kys unimaginative fuck

>I'm hoping paradox/whitewolf get vtm together and actually fix world of darkness
I mean if you like trans women sucking sjw powerVag while stabbing your local god emperor supporter

so nwod? stabyourself filthy causal. if you can't read that's your own fault

But enough about Zak Smith's terrible prose.

Who's Steven?

You're gonna need a time machine because the people who would've been goths 20 years ago are rainbow whales now.