All Things World of Darkness

While I have long stopped being a primary audience for VtM, here are some things from others' second-hand accounts that made me shake my head about V5:

• Effective removal of the Sabbat, especially as PCs (I'm not sure if that change got walked back).
• Seems like a lot of the old lore that made the setting so full of elder intrigue got removed, sometimes with stealth retcons.
• Hunters get Technocracy-grade super-surveillance as NPCs, but also people say that when the hunters are the PCs their lore competence in such matters is much lower, which makes both sides of the coin look bad.
• I heard bad thigns were done to iconic disciplines/clans like Vicissitude.

Not a lore element, but a thing that made me wary of V5: the use of red dice makes the game sound much more roll-centric, which seems misplaced for a narrative-leaning game like WoD; plus, the nature of probability means that a lot depends on whether stuff is resolved as one roll, many rolls, or a non-roll - this can distort narrative outcomes depending on game-design/roll-design decisions.

There is an entire Sabbat book (including Disciplines etc), but it is entirely geared towards them being an Antagonist group-exclusively. No character creation guidance.

That said, I've seen people say it's not too hard to homebrew that.
I would add that all splats got powered down in 5th edition. Vampires Werewolves and Hunters all feel more "street level" starting out

And the Inquisition isn't necessarily the same thing as Hunters. Inquisitors got powered up. Hunters got powered down.
This is subjective.

Disciplines as a whole got overhauled. Most signature Discipline are now "Amalgams" requiring combinations of basic Disciplines.

It achieved a lot of things from a narrative and game design perspective, such as making signatures more a product of progression, and decreasing the number of Disciplines out there reducing crunch in that way.

Ofc the oWoD purists are upset about it tho. I didn't like Amalgams at first, but eventually could see what they achieved with it (in addition to what was lost).

Was it a net gain or loss is subjective (often directly related to how much of a grognard you are).
They traded resource management-based mechanics (Blood Pool) for emergent narrative drive by dice (Rouse)... that is actually what they did.

Is resource management more narrative-leaning than emergent narrative driven by dice?

I'd say no.

With resource management you're inextricably tied to the resource and those mechanics. Managing your resource can push you toward narratives. But in Vampire at least you can "engineer away" much of the need for narrative to manage your resource with mechanics, and most people do.

Where's emergency narrative driven by dice... you cannot escape the narrative. You have less control over exactly what that is, yes.

But it pretty inarguably creates more narrative, more interaction and roleplay with the world through narrative.

That’s interesting to hear! I’d be interested in checking out your V5 game whenever you feel ready to announce it.

What aspects of V5 lore do you like?

Few V5 Sabbat player guides from ST Vault: Sword of Caine, Black Hand.

I guess they can do that, but 'you can fix it' is not the same as 'it is not an issue'.
Lowercase-h hunters in the sense of being mortals who hunt vampires and other splats. It still gives a strong taste of 'antagonist off-screen phlebotinum', in the sense that the creators hyped up the mortals as a threat to vampires, then released a mortal-side book, everyone says the mortals do not get to play the cool stuff that was in the hype.
Sure, it is subjective, but it is a direct answer to what one may dislike about V5 lore. For me, there's a big appeal of Vicissitude as being a thing that is fundamental to being Tzimisce, not an add-on that is built later through some crossover with another Discipline.
I would say that resource tracking that meaningfully ties to in-setting resources is more narrative than the diced gamist/abstracted alternatives. Perhaps my example will be a bit on the extreme side for the sake of contrast, but consider these two comments:

"After losing the starboard cargo hold, our ship now only has 120 rations left."
"After losing the starboard cargo hold, our ship is lower on rations. OOC: we will be rolling 1d10 and when it comes up 1, you run out of rations."

The former allows the characters to make meaningful conclusion and make informed and meaningful in-character choices. The latter is a gamist abstraction that forces OOC-only thinking, obfuscate the in-setting situation from the players through mechanics, and forces vaguifying the narrative.

You may point towards subjectiveness of these views, but it is a view the explanation of which will hopefully let Morphling have some understanding of why some people dislike V5.

This is like complaining about how CR10 NPCs exist in D&D as "Monsters" but you can't play them instantly as characters.

Kind of a weird and pointless thing to point out.
Yes, we've already established that since you've become used to one thing linking fiction to mechanics in a certain way, that it is unacceptable to you for the game designers to choose to link those same mechanics to fiction in a different way. But...

That's a you thing. And it's a thing closer to a tantrum over the thing not being just how you've come to like it rather than a reasoned argument based on merits.
Yea, so what I think the game designers are telling you through their game design choices is that vampires aren't that in-control of the Beast. That's a part of the horror.

Blood Pool doesn't lead to storytelling and it doesn't lead to horror. Blood Pool actually does what you say is a bad thing - it drives OOC only thinking, it leads to people engineering the inconvenience away through mechanics. It makes it an ooc math game, not a story.

I could probably count on one hand the number of times, across decades of play and dozens of different players and STs, that the Beast ever actually became an issue under pre-V5 systems. It's a joke. It's vampires-as-superheroes. It's a power fantasy game like D&D. The only horror was what we decided to create, the system did not support emergent horror and it didn't drive you towards storyrelling that centered on that horror. Lack of control is horror.

There's no abstraction, and no obfuscation, with Hunger and Rouse checks in V5. Your character knows that the Beast lurks behind every use of Vitae. There's just less control. There IS the Beast. Unavoidably.

Reading between the lines?

You like control. You like the power fantasy.

That's fine! That's valid! Lots of ppl like that! I like that, when that's what I want out of the game experience!

But if I want horror? If I want mechanics that drive me towards narratives that actually strike at emotions? A system geared toward power fantasy isn't going to give that.

V5 does that.

V5 totally creates a different feel of the whole VtM experience, than what came before. If you really like what it was before? Ofc you may not like the new feel. That's a tale old as time.

It's not invalid. But let's be honest what's going on here with your issues.

Just as you're giving a "direct answer"?

I am giving the direct counterpoint.

Monsters are more about individual power. But the threat of mortals in V5 seems to be hyped up in terms of collective / organisational power, but it seems that when the shoe's on the other foot that hype wasn't lived up to. Contrast how in earlier editions, mundane mortal hunters were not hyped up as much - they were considered a threat not to be dismissed but not this ubiquitous and almost infallible Damocles' sword. (Meanwhile, the Technocracy was presented as powerful both from an outside and inside view, at least about as powerful as mages individually plus some of the institutional benefits.)
Shrug. There are changes that change things I'm used to, but I'm indifferent to the changes themselves (e.g. the necromantic clans' unification). But Vicissitude as an iconic, essential Discipline for the Tzimisce, both Revenant and Cainite, is something I genuinely like and not merely defending because of sheer inertia.
I don't see it as OOC. Rationing the blood pool in a game to me seems to me very similar to rationing drinking water IRL. I'm not switching to 'OOC thinking' when I ration water IRL, so why would it be OOC thinking when I do the same with vitae in a campaign? Especially if it is known that a BP is approximately a half-litre of blood in the narrative, so it's not like it's some purely gamist unit divorced from the game world.

Not making everything diced makes for more meaningful cause-and-effect within the narrative. (On a side note, while I'm not the target audience for it, I appreciate a VtM-esque PbtA game Undying for not using dice at all. That I consider an interesting innovation that breaks with tradition. But V5 went in the opposite direction and wants to be more rolly.)
While I think you're spot-on about liking control (which is why, despite 'simulationist' roots, I learned to embrace narrative games with direct narrative mechanics), and I do appreciate the monsters being more powerful than mortals overall, the superheroes part off the mark - superheroes are something I never felt kinship with (probably because my familiarity with superheroes comes almost exclusively for a handful of films, and not the source material), so the implication that that is what I'm after does not look to me as 'being honest about my issues'.

Now, it's fine that the two of us have different likes. But are we each trying to defend our preferences, or are we trying to describe and enumerate things that people dis/like about V5?

Honestly, I haven't delved too deep into it yet, but I like the Second Inquisition and the idea of Sabbat as a bunch of undercover special ops vampire teams.

So you think a vampire has a liquid level meter that tells him exactly how much vitae is contained in his gut? Or a counter in his brain that ticks down with exacting precision the very ephemeral concept of willpower??? That's... weird. And not accurate. You're not describing narrative or storytelling. You're describing mechanics and crunchy bean-counting mechanics at that.

Yes, those mechanics have a narrative description, but that doesn't mean it ever really translates into created-narrative or roleplay at the table. Describing stats on a character sheet with in-world terms is not storytelling.

And instead of engaging with BP and it's management as a narrative element, people just buy ranks in Herd, or an Ally, or Resources, or just dots in their favorite attribute+skill that they use to get blood and hunt, and they offload any narrative or storytelling onto those mechanics - and, critically if we're conceiving of VtM as a game of storytelling based around personal horror, they very rarely, almost never, have to worry about the Beast for that reason.

Only in a heated combat or if there's A LOT of fire around is the Beast ever really knocking at the door in pre-V5 VtM. And even then both of which can, again, be engineered to be a minimal threat through mechanics/stats and math-rocks.

If you want horror out of the Blood Pool, you HAVE to choose and seek that out really intentionally by zooming in on feeding. Otherwise it's just: "Ok make Hunt check. Moving on!!"

And... people always say that's the kind of game they want, "gritty, street-level" vampirism, but then when they get in game? They stack 5 dots in Resources and are Gen 10 and own a huge music club... and VtM absolutely usually plays out like a power fantasy.

Just because you're a Neonate trying to keep your head down under the whims of an eccentric Prince does not mean it's not a power fantasy. Just like in D&D, just because you're level 1 and there's a BBEG, doesn't mean that's not a power fantasy. There's always a bigger fish. If there's not? The power fantasy frankly doesn't work! You have to have someone more powerful to punch up at (and succeed against) to be powerful yourself!

You can be all about the power fantasy without playing specifically vampires-as-superheroes, but vampires without real threat of the Beast are ultimately just vampires-as-superheroes, and certainly a power fantasy.
I think you need to go re-read my initial response to your assertions. Because I think you will find that I largely was 1. confirming much of what you said, and 2. adding context that was actually independent of Edition Wars entirely. My responses were about game design and how we can think about what kind of game VtM says it is versus what it actually is and does with mechanics.

If I'm defending anything, it's the principle that system and game design matters with regards to what the players can easily achieve at the table.

No I don't. Do you seriously think I think that? But I think just as mortals IRL count rations, calories, and water bottles, so vampires can approach their own physiologies through reason and make decisions based on their observations ('a mortal needs an average of three rations per day, a cainite needs an average of 3½ litres per week not accounting for forms of mystical exertion').

The connection is much much fuzzier with willpower, but with blood there is actually a narrative description of what these things mean in-setting, and I don't think vampires should be less capable of making logistic decisions based on observation and reasoning than real-life mortals who deal with non-vampire logistics or nutrition.

Meanwhile, divorcing the mechanics and the in-setting details often risks bringing forth a curse a certain subset of writers is infamous for: a lack of sense of scale.

Again, this isn't to say that all game phenomena have precise mapping onto the in-setting/narrative phenomena, but how much feeding a vampire requires was actually a reasonably solid and accessible-to-knowledge match.

As for the other stuff, I admit I may be not the target audience for the Beast theme. I think protagonists get enough temptations to lose Humanity without actions-caused-by-Frenzies, though Frenzies did happen with sufficient requency when I GMed decades ago. (I also find BlueAndOrangeMoralities of Paths more interesting than the spiral into mere beasthood.)

So . . . yeah, I do find the powers interesting, and I am not the target audience for complete underdog stories (which BTW is why I appreciate Exalted as breaking that stereotype), but I tend to see VtM vampires more as blue-and-orange-morality master conspirators with fangs, not big blue boyscout superheroes with fangs.

---

But hey, I drifted away from VtM a long time ago, and my engagement with it nowadays is a peripheral curiosity with a pinch of nostalgia, so my opinions are probably not of much importance.

I'm not gonna engage with the rest of this current discussion because the argument is getting personal on multiple sides, and I don't think that's productive. I'm just here for discussing the 20th and 5th systems as someone interested and trying both.
I like the Second Inquisition as well, I feel like moving into the modern nights calls for modern threats. And the concerns around surveillance by government powers is pertinent. I'm not as familiar with the Sabbat lore in V5.

As I've said, I've been playing Hunter for the past few months, starting out I worried it wouldn't be able to handle grey morality and it would lean into superhero-humans but it's since won me over. It feels very noir and underdog. I also like that governmental hunter orgs are antagonists to the capital-H Hunters as well. They're fun to read about in the H5 splat.

In other news, I'm preparing to announce my WtA 5th game soon! I pitched it months back. It's set in South Florida, and can be considered a sister game to @DragonDweller62's Boca Raton by Night chronicle--we've talked a lot about the setting together, we have lots of thoughts on it. The games' themes will be along similar lines but have distinct focuses.

Will probably take a few days till the announcement thread is up. I'm excited to run it.

Thanks valentine_teddies for noticing that some of the last few posts have some tone that veers towards personal argument. Let's be mindful about that to take it down a notch, appreciate that from everyone please.

I wanna chime in too on this topic since I play/run both, and will remind us that the debate is about V5 vs older edition mechanics (eg blood pool vs rouse check) and what that difference implies about the kind of game we are imagining or experiencing, and why we might prefer one or the other.

Thanks.

I’m almost done with respec-ing my first VtM PC. I’m probably gonna do some solo RP and test out Rouse checks properly.

Mortals don't have to deal with nutrition in WoD ofc, but they do in D&D however. So is your assertion that D&D is the more narrative game? Because they have to track rations and arrows and spell slots and things? That seems to be where your assertion goes.

Beyond that, sure, let's engage that line of thought on it's own merits... Again.

And again... logistics is not usually creating narrative. "Managing their physiology" (Blood Pool) is done largely by mechanics and dice-rolls. It creates rolling. It creates roll-play. And it keeps the Beast solidly beyond arms length. Heck, even in V5 you can largely handle it through mechanics, but they did add Resonance to TRY to make it more narrative (tho admittedly I have not seen it used much in actual play), and the Hunger system makes it very hard to fully escape the threat of the Beast. Which definitely creates narrative.

So again, for BP to create narrative, the group must intentionally seek that out, otherwise it's just mechanics, just logistics, just bean counting. Not narrative.

BP is pretty inarguably the less-narrative(ist?) mechanic.
There is no divorce. The player and characters know how this works just as surely as they knew how BP worked.

You seem to be only framing it as a divorce, because that understanding that the characters must now have is different than what it used to be. But what it used to be is not horrorific. You were in control of the Beast 95% of the time.

But the game designers have shown us that's not their vision of vampires any more.

Their vision is that the Beast is a threat to vampires when they have any level of hunger. And the more hungry they are, the bigger the threat. The Beast is largely beyond the vampire's control, and the more hungry you are, the further beyond your control that it is.

Under that vision, you're only in control of it about 10% of the time.

That sounds much more like horror to me.

So... it is both the more narrative mechanic and the more horror-oriented mechanic.
So again here, the view is one of logistical resource management. Humanity tho, this time. Frenzy as a means of effecting Humanity.

I view it as about making vampires seem monstrous in the world. And about making it seem horrific to BE a vampire (if you're a vampire that wishes to hold onto their humanity (little-h)). And about the system supporting narrative that brings out those elements.

So again we see that this is not about narrative or horror thru this lens, but control and resource management.

Here is a question unrelated to the editions - how do you make a city come alive? I realise now, looking back, that I didn't manage to make the two cities in which my game was taking place (Chicago and then Detroit) really pop. They stayed as these decrepit, decadent, generic metropoli - no soul, no substance behind the descriptions, just gray buildings and concrete. So how do you make the cities in which your games take place characters in their own right? Do you stick to places you know personally? Do you not care? If you do care - what sort of prep work do you do?

I've been agonizing over this--currently running Hunter 5th set in Metro Manila, Philippines. The problem was, I've never really been to Metro Manila. I'm also running Los Angeles by Night and I'm agonizing over that too. Particularly over accuracy. My LAbN players say it's alright if I just make stuff up, but I still feel huge imposter syndrome.

But in my last Hunter session, I feel like I hit the sweet spot. I think it felt alive because I filled it with people. The struggling stay-at-home wife of a jeepney driver, anxiously sitting at his bedside while he recovered at the hospital. A student reporter for the university press sharing gossip and ghost stories. A no-nonsense, trans woman Hunter juggling single motherhood and knowledge of the Manila Camarilla. A contact who survived Duterte's drug war.

Being Filipino and visiting the Philippines helped with some of this, but I think creating NPCs with their own lives, perspectives, goals outside of the WoD helps a ton in making a city feel alive. I also think researching the city's history and important locations helps, because it helps ground NPCs (who would know where to hang out, where to find what, etc.) But yeah, NPCs and their snapshots of daily life helps make the city feel alive.

Mortals do deal with it in WoD (e.g. page 435 of the M20 book, Starvation and Thirst) when the situation calls for it. It's just that WoD tends to be set in cities with food being least of concerns, while D&D traditionally runs the kinds of adventures where the number of rations you carry is more limited. Meanwhile, D&D has its share of divorced-from-in-setting-facts stuff, like the very abstract Healing Surges.

Speaking of D&D, the replacement of BP tied to meaningful in-setting phenomena with rolling hunger reminds me of how D20 Modern handled wealth by more dice-rolling. Thankfully, Storyteller knows a more elegant and setting-connected approach to handling resources: either by using meaningful amounts of money (e.g. assigning disposable incomes to Resource levels), or by making individual purchases below the granularity of the system and assigning broad description of what a given level of Resources can and cannot afford without trouble (with each next step bigger than the previous), depending on edition.

Blood Points lean towards the equivalent of option 1; I imagine in some alternative possible world authors might've handled them in a manner closer to option 2 (but did not in the actual world). Or they could've (in another possible world) gone in other directions, like using Compels like some variations of Dresden Files and other Fate games (essentially bypassing the hunger levels and focusing more on the direct narrative of actions/choices), or gone the way of Undying with no dice rolling at all and the narrative instead being emergent from actions. But out of all the options, V5 went for dice, and I think that's the worst of the options, both from a system-mapping-of-the-game-world PoV and the narrative games PoV.
I'm not sure where logistical resource management comes into this. Certainly back then my players did not treat Humanity as a resource even when taking actions to lose it - they tended to focus on the temptations and resulting actions, most often with an ensuing descent.

E.g.: A 'sireless' Caitiff kidnapped a Tremere Ghoul for a lengthy and brutal interrogation, without needing to be prodded by a supernatural mind-control mind-passenger, or being brainwashed by the Camarilla, but merely because of the temptation of the long shot of maybe getting to learn some low-level secrets of a faction he wanted to oppose. Enough cause to be a monster and forsake Humanity through one's own choices, without the need for heavy-handedness of blood-coated dice on everything.

I don't think that's a superhero with fangs, it's not even a supervillain with fangs. That's a monster made through one's own actions, and the fangs are merely enablers.

Oof, this is an incredibly intellectually disingenuous response. BP/Hunger is ofc the single most absolutely central mechanic to vampires. Whereas in over two decades of playing WoD, as ST and Player across sizes of tables, I've never seen Hunger or Thirst come up

One can't compare (or listen to a comparison of) the two with a straight face.

And even so, you're pointing to a 20th ed game. For you to disprove my point (which is that: V20 is much more like D&D - a VERY traditional RPG - than it is any modern narrative system, which is what V5 shares more DNA with), you would have to point to 5th's crunchy bean counting mechanics.
So you do seem to support an assertion that D&D is a more narrative system than V5?? Wild. I'll let the Internet settle that one.
Both V20 and V5 have this mechanic.

Not a valid point of comparison.
My friend ... BP is the equivalent of tracking and counting gold pieces. Like, again, how traditional D&D does.

Period.

Resources is one of vtm's consistently narrative mechanics, but Hunger is like Resources. It is a "ranked" mechanic (like Resources), and rolled mechanic (like Resources sometimes), and which narrative emerges from (like Resources - you don't know if you can afford the thing until you reference the mechanic, just like how with Hunger you don't know of the Beast emerges until the mechanic tells you).

You are just wrong here.

Objectively. By any common understanding of game design and mechanics.

So yet again we see that BP is the traditional way of doing it.

Hunger is the narrative way of doing it.
You're grounding your defense of BP in mechanics.

I'm grounding my defense of Hunger in the narrative it creates.

And we're talking about which is the "more narrative".

Your original assertion was that BP is the more narrative mechanic.

It demonstrably is not. (see: all of my points above which you have either conceded and agreed on, or failed to refute).
You don't seem to fully understand the metaphor.

Vampire as "superheroes with fangs" does not so much reference whether the characters are "good" or "bad".

It's about power. And whether the story is a power fantasy, or personal horror (like Storyteller says it is).

The games that I've been a part of that most brought a city to life were, 1. vampire games, and 2. ones where the Coterie were spread across the city, each with their more localized involvement in whatever their Domain was.

The Ventrue was down town with the business power brokers, the Nos was down asking the river with derelict people, the Giovanni was off in the rich suburb puppeteering the police, so on...

In short, the City was brought to life by the players/characters.