Is WoD the new D&D for bashing purposes?

[Anders]

I don't like the endless conspiracies and inconsistencies. How many groups are there behind the scenes ruling the world? Camarilla, Sabbath, Wyrm Corporations (or whatever they are called these days), Technocracy, and so on and so forth. Too much!

[GrimGent]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

I don't like the endless conspiracies and inconsistencies. How many groups are there behind the scenes ruling the world? Camarilla, Sabbath, Wyrm Corporations (or whatever they are called these days), Technocracy, and so on and so forth. Too much!

None of those even exist in the nWoD, though. Just as WW discarded the built-in metaplot and the notion of all the diverse apocalypses looming on the horizon, they mostly got rid of global shadow governments and world-dominating archvillains, generally focusing on a far more local scale, even if Mage still has its Seers of the Throne and Hunter its third-tier Conspiracies.

Oh, and it's also worth noting that the new game was deliberately designed to be used as a tool kit instead of any sort of a unified setting in which all published material co-exists uneasily. None of the supplements assume that you've read any of the others, so that a stat block in Book A won't include an exotic power from Book B and Book B won't expect familiarity with some obscure bit of lore from Book A. They simply build on the core books of their respective lines. You are supposed to pick and choose whatever best fits into your campaign.

(Vampire isn't playable on its own these days, either: it's more of an optional expansion set for the core game, The World of Darkness, which by itself is a generic horror RPG about ordinary people stumbling across supernatural phenomena, with common mortals as the default PC type.)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

I don't like the endless conspiracies and inconsistencies. How many groups are there behind the scenes ruling the world? Camarilla, Sabbath, Wyrm Corporations (or whatever they are called these days), Technocracy, and so on and so forth. Too much!

But the original games were each presented in such a way that they could be run as standalone. Nothing in any of them forced anyone to assume the validity of the others. You were free, in a Mage campaign, to assume that vampires, werewolves, fae, wraiths, mummies, and the like were all peripheral entities existing in odd corners of the world, without real power, and that the struggles and conspiracies that obsessed them had no real importance, any more than, say, the conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese mattered to the death cage match between America and the Soviet Union. When I ran a Mage campaign, I simply wrote all the nonhuman races out of the continuity entirely and had no trouble in adapting the published material to my use. Of course, a lot of people went the other way and assumed that all of the world-bestriding conspiracies existed at once (and, by implication, that the average town was packed with supernaturals of all kinds to the point where you'd have to search to find a normal), but that wasn't inherent in the games; it was more their direction of entropic failure at the hands of players who wanted an infinite supply of power-ups. You could just as well complain about GURPS's long list of advantages, instead of remembering that nothing in GURPS requires the GM to allow all the advantages to be available. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[GrimGent]

Originally Posted by whswhs

When I ran a Mage campaign, I simply wrote all the nonhuman races out of the continuity entirely and had no trouble in adapting the published material to my use.

And when I run Changeling: The Lost (the one nWoD line which interests me), everything supernatural is somehow associated with Faerie. While the likes of vampires, werewolves and mages exist in the setting, those might be blood-sucking fae, beasts from the Hedge and mortals who have bargained for unnatural powers at the Goblin Markets, respectively, rather than the official major templates.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by GrimGent

And when I run Changeling: The Lost (the one nWoD line which interests me), everything supernatural is somehow associated with Faerie. While the likes of vampires, werewolves and mages exist in the setting, those might be blood-sucking fae, beasts from the Hedge and mortals who have bargained for unnatural powers at the Goblin Markets, respectively, rather than the official major templates.

Sure, that works too. It was an option in the old line as well as the new.

Bill Stoddard

[zorg]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

I don't like the endless conspiracies and inconsistencies. How many groups are there behind the scenes ruling the world? Camarilla, Sabbath, Wyrm Corporations (or whatever they are called these days), Technocracy, and so on and so forth. Too much!

I found this quite charming, actually. It meant that none of the Splat Books was entirely right, or maybe that all of them were.

The setting was deliberately contradictory - a good example would be Rasputin, who gets claimed by several different Vampire clans, a Wraith faction, and, I believe, some sort of Mage. Obviously, they can't all be right. Therefore, the players couldn't be certain either (even if they knew all the books), and the GM was free to come up with something he prefered.

Depending on your taste, you could see, frex, the Technocracy as a dupe of the Wyrm, the Sabbath as behind every bloodthirsty conspiracy, or all of the above as clueless Nephandi fronts.

[GrimGent]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Sure, that works too. It was an option in the old line as well as the new.

Yup. As I recall, in CtD changelings tended to believe that the other supernaturals were simply "Prodigals," fae cousins who had lost their way and forgotten what they really were.

[knarf]

Originally Posted by GrimGent

Yup. As I recall, in CtD changelings tended to believe that the other supernaturals were simply "Prodigals," fae cousins who had lost their way and forgotten what they really were.

And one of the cool things about the nWoD is that there's no obstacle to setting things up so that this is indeed the case.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I found predicting expected results trivial.

It is, but estimating P(at least X successes) was hard. I used a spreadsheet, and found thy results ugle.

When I played I found that everyone always succeeded, pretty much. No-one seemed to care.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Brett

It is, but estimating P(at least X successes) was hard. I used a spreadsheet, and found thy results ugle.

Isn't it pretty much the binomial distribution?