Vampire the Requiem and the other books that came out for the NWoD a few years ago.

Does anyone have any experiences, critiques, opinions, statements, rants, praises, etc?

Here is what I know and have heard from local gamers in North Jersey.

1.) The New World of Darkness makes crossing over between Mage, Werewolf, Vampire, Changeling and the other games much easier. Instead of all the games being seperate the New World of Darkness is one complete game which seems like a nice feature.

2.) When NWoD first came out, there was a lot of resistance to it. People were saying that it is not as good as OWoD (Which was a great world IMO).

3.) Recently, I have been hearing a lot of praises and seeing more games pop up with NWoD. Albeit a younger generations seems to be playing it.

White Wolf has always been light on the mechanics and heavy on story and roleplaying. Never tried out NWoD. One of my players mentioned playing NwOd as an alternative to Shadowrun paper and pencil.

Any comments would be good to hear.

Thanks
-Agape.

I can answer to the resistance part of your question, but not much about the rest.

WW literally blew up the world people had been playing in for 10 years, and replaced it. So not only do you have the annoyance of having to buy new books, but you also have the pain of having your 8th Gen True Brujah with Master level blahblahblah getting blown up too. And with the NWoD, many characters were impossible to recreate...

And, if you have played OWoD, then you know how attached some people can get to their characters in that game.

So that's the source of the backlash, really. The pain of buying new books, destroying the canon that they spent these past 10 years memorizing, and destroying these characters that they have also spent 10 years moulding.

I have also heard good things aobut NWoD, but have yet to play it or purchase the books due to lack of interst by anyone else I game with to play it.

Agreed with what you have to saw Nighty.

OWoD was argubely one of the best RP games to come out during the 90s. Some of the writing from many of the clan sourcebooks was very innovatative for its time.

The old city sourcebooks for Masquerade such as Chicago by Night, DC by Night, New Orleanns by Night, etc were great campaign settings and I think Shadowrun should follow the same mold when creating source books. Provide a back story and have written up statistics for important NPCs in the books etc. A lot like Ghost Cartels.

I agree with Nightfalke.

While the story may have been fun (I didn't bother reading any of the Apocalypse stories), I just wasn't going to shell out hundreds of dollars for new books...that do the same thing! Sure...they tweaked the rules to keep the adult munchins in check...but any Storyteller can do that for free.

But if SR4 starts doing that...then you fall into the same traps as WoD:

1) If it has stats, we can kill it.

2) The backstory for WoD, specifically Vampire, got soooo convoluted and frustrating by the end, all they could do was blow up the world and start over. And you had to buy every book in order to keep up with it, which sucked. Honestly, I couldn't care less about *insert City X that my game is not set in*, but I had to be familiar with it enough to know about the meta plot...because my players would surely use it against me if I didn't.

I'm not a fan of the World of Darkness, but I loved most of the Mage stuff.

If you like the WoD rules, look up the original Aeon/Trinity rules - scifi, psychic powers, hacking, power armour, bioware, hardware, conspracies...
...Not quite as cyberpunk as SR, but can be modded that way with just a few tweaks [especially as the SR v4 rules are almost the same].

I have played two short campaings with mage and one with hunter. I like the setting and the fact that after learning basic rules I can play any nWoD with only few extra considerations.

The magic system of mage is the most flexible I have ever played with, but because of this it is difficult for beginner.
OK, you can do much, but sometimes you really have to thing hard and/or outside the box to come up with something useful.
And some arcanas(Prime, Life, Forces) seemed way more useful compared to others(Spirit, I'm looking at you).
Maybe after some playing, reading books & forums etc. I could have more better at it.

We houseruled quite a few things in the game to suit it for our needs and it worked pretty well. We changed few things to make the game grittier, few things to make more sense and few things to suit it for our view of the world. Took inspiration from shadowrun and oWoD, since GM had played it and disliked some changes between versions.

Maybe it was just me, but after shadowrun the dice pools seem so small. No matter how hard I keep bashing my inner munchkin, it was always screaming for more.
It felt that because of smaller dice pools the result varied lot more than with shadowrun.

The character generation seemed a bit too restrictive sometimes. You have to put exactly this amount of points to that and if it doesnt fit your character, well, too bad.
Of course GM can allow changes if the reason is good, but still...

Advancing your character, especially magical aptitude, requires lots and lots of experience. By the book reward is quite small, so in our short campaings the character didnt really change. GMs should in my opinion consider the lenght of campaing carefully when rewarding exp.
The recommended amount of exp is less than in pre-attribute cost change shadowrun and cost for improving is higher.

From a mechanical standpoint the core human rules are some of the best medium-light rules I have seen from an RPG (I have a whole 1 house rule). The supernatuals games have cleared most of the baggage of the old storyteller system as well but there are a few bumps with the subsystems. From a world stand point the early stuff is terrible, each line has improved over time but still I don't find it as interesting as the Dark Ages line.

When looking at nWOD I would first pick up the core book along with some of the line you find interesting (Armory [Not Armory Reloaded], Antagonists, Midnight Roads, and Second Sight I all recommend). Play it just as a mortal horror game for awhile to get the rules down. You'll notice some similarities between it and SR4 (enough that there was a running gag for awhile of Shadow: The Running) Next I would look at Changling: The Lost. Really it is nWOD at its finest. Vampire, Mage, & Werewolf all have problems of wanting to wipe the slate clean but wanting to keep the old there as well without really doing what was best for the line and more trying to make it so your old Order of Hermes, Bone Gnawer, and Malkavian can all work togeather. This I feel made each line loose the appeal, but like I said the new stuff for all the lines is much improved. You also may want to take a look at Innocents rather than the WOD core. Its set up for playing kids but it contains a variation on the core rules that some people like better and its a complete core rules book.

My favorite thing about NWOD over OWOD is that it is so much easier to run any horror with just the basic book. No themes, back story, different takes on the critters running the show. Hellraiser? No problem. Sixth Sense? Piece of cake. Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw; all can be done with the basic book.

I have played the new World of Darkness in a game that used Forsaken, Requiem, & Awakening all together (we had, initially, 2 mages, 2 wolves, & 1 vampire).

While the cross system is nice, & the setting is great (I have no experience with the old version, so I cannot compare), there is no concept of balance in the game. At all. And this is not limited to crossing the games. So bad it's borderline "Why are there rules at all?", and because of this, I cannot play it any more.


It would be relatively simple to create a conversion to the Shadowrun system, & in the process rebalance the game, but it would be a lot of work. I know how to do it for most aspects of the game, but have not had any drive to do so yet.

i wonder if the lack of rules are an effect of the "faithfuls" apparent willingness to act things out...

You're in luck.

The lack of rules and lack of balance are design choices to enforce the inherent unfairness and bleakness of the world.

I've played oWoD and NWoD extensively.

I agree with the sentiment that WoD, and nWoD in particular, is rules-lite and definitively not concerned with balance across the whole WoD After years of play, Vampire (at least out of the core - don't get me started on bloodlines or the other supplements) is surprisingly well balanced internally. That goes out the window, of course, the moment you introduce almost any other book in the line, but then again, people rarely play nWoD for its tight game balance.

I never really felt any of the bitterness others felt about the end of the oWoD. I enjoyed it, and even continued playing it for a few years after the end, but I never really felt like White Wolf had done me some sort of wrong by starting over. They didn't really "blow up the world" so much as they released books that detailed the various end-times they have been trumpeting since the lines started. One of the comments the designers came out with was that, it's hard to talk about Gehenna (vampire apocalypse) for 10 years and never actually do it. Every book brought us incrementally closer to the end of the world; they had to "put up or shut up."

nWoD is worth exactly as much as you put into it. oWoD was sort of like keeping up with a game system and a comic book at the same time; many players are at least as interested in the movement of the metaplot as they were about the game itself. nWoD says, "That was fun, but let's try it without all the baggage." There is no metaplot any longer. For instance, when you played oWoD vampire, you could make many sweeping assumptions about the world you were, right down to specific individuals in charge of specific aspects of the world; this can also be done in SR. Damien Knight is Damien Knight in my game, in your game, and in that guy's game, although how that expresses itself tends to change once the game starts rolling (or until another book comes out.) By contrast, the nWoD is a toolkit. If you play a Requiem game, you can make a handful of assumptions; that these five vampire Clans exist, that vampires work in this way, and that some or all of these five social groups (called Covenants, equivalent to localized versions of Masquerade's Sects) may exist. Nothing else is set in stone.

nWoD is localized, as well. Games rarely are about broad, global politics or conspiracies (though the game is certainly capable of it, and the books encourage you to do your own thing; again, it's a toolkit). A good Storyteller can craft a world every bit as interesting as Masuquerade, and it will be unique to that ST; however, the inverse is also true, that a bad ST can make the game seem bland and boring. nWoD focuses a lot more on mystery, and on personal horror, rather than on huge social issues or broad, powerful factions. Even the power level reflects this; Vampires are substantially more powerful than humans, for instance, but no longer can any given vampire, no matter how you build him, expect to chuckle his way through a crowd of ordinary people. One on one, average on average, the vampire always wins. Mix up the numbers a little though, and things aren't so sure any longer.

I love nWoD. I like what you can do with the Covenants. The Covenants are these really broad, adaptable concept, conforming to really resonant archetypes. You have your Invictus (the "noble vampires"), your Carthians (your "modern/revolutionary" vampire), your Lancea Santcum (your "Christian" vampires), your Circle of the Crone (your "pagan" vampires) and the Ordo Dracul (your "scholars.") Between that and the various and sundry Disciplines available in the suppliments, you can create any sort of social dynamic you want; a holy war in New York between the two religious Covenants and no other ideologies are present; a race to uncover vampiric history with the Ordo Dracul; a typical political game involving all five. The sky is the limit. But you have to be willing to put together a good cast of characteries and play it like the soap opera it is. The cool factor is deeply in the hands of the ST now, and it is woefully easy for him to screw it up, leaving many new players with a dry feeling.

There is balance there but you have to know enough before diving in. Werewolves for example are your fighter types, the healing rate, ability to move through the spirit real etc are the strengths. Mages get their strength by planing ahead. They have potentiality the power to do everything but they need time and preparation. Vampires are social creatures able to win over the masses and have armies fight for them.

so basically, fighter, caster, socializer?

explains why i always had a hard time with vampire, while mage was just my thing

Yes, though I would say physical, mental, social

So where do Changelings fit in the new schema?

psychopaths...

The secondary lines developed a trend along the other dimension. Prometheans were Resistance, Changelings were Finesse, and Hunters were presumably Power.

Nah, It's Giests that bring power to the table.

The funny thing is that they gave themselves an out that they never bothered to take in the form of Concensus Reality. If reality is determined entirely by the collective beliefs of humanity, then all the convoluted and contradictory backstory can be explained as bullshit that only happened because enough people believe it happened, that the past rewirtes itself according to the whims of the people just as the laws of physics do.

that, in theory, only applied in the mage game...