Is WoD the new D&D for bashing purposes?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tantric

By the weird double standard of political correctness, as I understand it, I, as an actual homosexual, can call a thing "gay" and not be homophobic. So, officially, I'm calling it. Vampire is gay :-P

Oh, hell yeah!

Originally Posted by tantric

If I want to be sexy, I'll be a half-orc with pecs, scars and a serious manly smell, not a tick with delusions of grandeur.

Ick, ick and double ick.

What is it with you people*? ;)

*That is, gay men and women.
How can you ever find men attractive? Yes, we're sweaty, muscular and smelly. How is that a plus? It's like liking exrement for smelling gross.
Still, more power to you. ;)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

*That is, gay men and women.
How can you ever find men attractive?

Surely you mean "gay and bi men and straight and bi women"? I'm pretty confident that lesbians don't find men attractive as a rule.

Bill Stoddard

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Surely you mean "gay and bi men and straight and bi women"? I'm pretty confident that lesbians don't find men attractive as a rule.

Bill Stoddard

True.

But, then again, all the less reason for me to ask them this question. All the lesbians I've known have been very sensible and found men as unattractive as I do. ;)

[pyratejohn]

Originally Posted by xeniac

WoC killed them in D&D4 and so it sucks big time for old Hardcore Gamers.

Wow. Just about every old Hardcore gamer I've gamed with loves D&D4. I'm an old hardcore gamer who started with the white box, and I love it.

But I digress...

Game bashing? Been there. Done that. Before WoD even existed. A couple decades later, game bashing seems plain odd to this old timer. It makes about as much sense to me as bashing checkers, or chess, or pinochle. To each his own.

[Mailanka]

WoD is in my top three games. It works well as a generic, simple game. I tend to run it for those who dislike the nitty-gritty detail of GURPS.

Originally Posted by Running Wolf

All I can say for the whole Emo thing is ick!

Just because Vampire superficially resembles Twilight doesn't mean it needs to be infected with the same angst. WoD tends to be introspective, but that's not the same as "emo."

Originally Posted by Icelander

How can you ever find men attractive? Yes, we're sweaty, muscular and smelly. How is that a plus? It's like liking exrement for smelling gross.

It takes practice, but us straight guys can start to pick up on wants yummy in a man too.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by The Final Door

I don't really find the V:tM system that offensive.

Not offensive, but poorly thought out. The die pool system had 4 variables (number of dice, number of successes, target number, and then whatever you actually rolled). This made it very hard to predict probabilities, especially in any intuitive way. Additionally there were quite a few specific rules that seemed poorly balanced; for example the rapid fire rules made all weapons of the same caliber have the same effects in combat regardless of rate of fire. One of my players in a werewolf game insisted on carrying a M-131 minigun in his Krinos (giant wolf-man battle form) form. If I had used the RAW it would have been exactly the same as a M240 but just massively heavier.

[Qoltar]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Surely you mean "gay and bi men and straight and bi women"? I'm pretty confident that lesbians don't find men attractive as a rule.

Bill Stoddard

As a rule, true - but I know one who thought some men were attractive. She just didn't want to get in bed with them.

In response to an earlier post - I find a LOT of women like GURPS as their preferred RPG once they've played it a few times.


- Ed Charlton

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Not offensive, but poorly thought out. The die pool system had 4 variables (number of dice, number of successes, target number, and then whatever you actually rolled). This made it very hard to predict probabilities, especially in any intuitive way.

I found predicting expected results trivial. You are rolling 7 dice against a difficulty rating of 8; you succeed on an 8, 9, or 10 (30% of the time), but a 1 is a botch that takes away one success (10% of the time), so your net number of expected successes is 20% x 7 = 1.4. I found that sufficient for planning scenarios. The big quirky thing was whether you rolled excess botches, but the chance of that was always small.

And that's only three variables: the number of dice you rolled, the difficulty level, and the number of successes you needed. I found that pretty cool: the first reflected your inherent ability, the second the environmental situation, and the third the quality of outcome you aimed at. Being able to adjust those independently gave me a stronger sense of control of the narrative flow. I didn't like it when later versions took away varying task difficulty levels.

On the other hand, I have a history of falling in love with quirky mechanics that most players are glad to get rid of. I loved Strike Ranks in RuneQuest II, for example. It's a wonder that I'm not bemoaning the abandonment of PD in GURPS!

Bill Stoddard

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I've played several WoD/WW games. I've got nothing against the premise of many of these games.

But the mechanics! Every single experiment with these games has led to the gaming group in question abandoning the game in frustration due to arcane, inconsistent and annoying game mechanics that modelled neither the stated genre nor reality with any accuracy.

For me, WoD/WW stands as an example of a large publisher with editing, playtesting and designing standards so low as to make their games unplayable. That failure, in my books.

I agree with you on both counts.

The game supplements that I own have a great deal of setting information, plots, plot lines, societies, institutions, and interesting characters.
Making them work in the provided system is really disheartening because of how inconsistent the game mechanics are. We realized just how bad when the group's Galliard (Bard-type) took apart the group's Ahroun (Warrior type) during a practice to learn game mechanics. We acknowledge the importance of *luck* and low-probability events that can swing things in favor of even a less-combat oriented character, still, in this case, it just gave us a sense that the probability system favored unlikely events over what *should* probably happen.

I know that patches were made for the system, but even that suggests that the system wasn't developed to be robust enough to handle the premise of the game, which is generally a big red flag for me.

Our fix has been to play GURPS Vampire (I have a 3rd Ed copy of VTM and VTM:Companion) on occasion. Has worked well for our group. Better than using the WoD ruleset.

-P.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Qoltar

In response to an earlier post - I find a LOT of women like GURPS as their preferred RPG once they've plated it a few times.

Huh. My women players (I have six currently) mostly like GURPS, true, but then they mostly like whatever system I choose to run. The main thing most of them want is a narratively open system where there's game mechanics for whatever story they tell about their characters.

Bill Stoddard