uuuuuuugh you had me until ‘oWoD fluff’

Vamps would have it hard, yes, hunting would be extremely hard. They would need to subsist on mandragora gardens, animals, and closely guarded herds imported for that purpose. The relative isolation does mean far less oversight, though, so it’s way easier to hide your underground dungeon full of blood dolls.

@Hobbie Minot, North Dakota. Ground Squirrels of Darkness!

@somasatori I’d play the fuck out of WoD fantasy isekai.

See this is what makes pre modern games attractive in terms of ism handling. The world was so different that many of the categories of bigotry today just didn’t exist yet. The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.

It’s unavoidable in all human history that people have used bigotry to justify harming perceived political and social enemies. It’s not the only way to go after your enemies, either, and those other ways are a lot less retraumatizing for people who have experienced it. Few people have been traumatized by weaponized lightning bolts, disintegration rays, or medieval weaponry applied to them. Nor have they been hurt by people orchestrating a palace coup against them and running them off their throne. But the modern ism stuff? Why drive off players like that? If the beef is between like, Hittites and Myceneans, who cares? Go ham.

Oh and first WOD was one NOLA game, Bourbon and Blood. I tried it because Katrina just hit and I was fifteen. It was humiliating to be fifteen on a WOD game.

@MisterBoring ahahaha I did the Dystopia Rising Texas game in it’s first couple years. some truly heinous behavior over time. I learned to hate nerds

ElendorMUSH when the LotR movies came out. I was twelve and a revolving door of orcs, then a Beorning named Atli, who was a child of a chieftain in the Amduin Valley.

CofD aka 2E nWoD is miles better than oWoD. Here are my crusty and garrulous opinions.

1. No more dated 90s tropes and politics. It was timely in the moment, but like all references to contemporary politics they go sour and smelly fast. This is especially true for Werewolf the Apocalypse, which aged like fashy doo doo in summer heat. Furry ecofascists are a grim and absurd reality in the 2020s, no longer relegated to a darker future, but to the present. The same goes for Mage the Ascension to a large extent, as I’d consider the Virtual Adepts to have gone crawling back to the Technocracy by now.

2. The mechanics of 2E are more of a side-grade in comparison to 1E, but they’re still better balanced than oWoD. No more variable target numbers for dice rolls, no more botch rules that make combat between two powerhouses into pathetic slapfights. Running oWoD combat made me want to cry, even in 20th where much of the jank is edited out. There are so many stages and moving parts to the mechanics of oWoD that the alternative in nWoD 2E and even 5E oWoD are superior, flat-out.

3. No glut of metaplot. The meta of oWoD is treated all too often like some sort of canon bible, which privileges having downloaded and read a bunch of PDFs of the old books to glean all the little details. This is a leftover from the era when RPGs published and printed supplement books to fill shelf space in bookstores. It’s one of the reasons why they rebooted the setting into nWoD to begin with. The mistake in 1E was to try and chase old fans while making something new, and succeeded at neither very well.

This is only the beginning. I ask no quarter and give none. To battle!

@Jennkryst Can I be a Mekhet vamp mummy cultist whose bloodline serves your tomb?

@catzilla That’s utterly pathetic on their part. As is that game for allowing this to go off at all.

And as an aside, I’ll always prefer Forsaken for putting the Pure Breed nonsense where it belongs, firmly in the realm of antagonists. Ivory Claws are Pure Breed personified, and it’s as bad as it sounds. Just like how Fire-Touched are Children of Gaia if they’re being honest with themselves and others, and how Predator Kings are what the Red Talons really are in practice.

If someone sets up a WoD edition wars thread, I will offer my most garrulous, crusty opinions there.

@somasatori I would leave out the bigot or intolerant flaws entirely, they seem poised for bad faith nonsense on a MU* environment. It’s one thing if it’s your own table, but then you can play FATAL for all I care if it’s in your personal space.

Yeah all that Garou stuff is why I picked a Pumonca, and why I never bothered with PB. Solo cat needs no pack drama!

@Popes Yuck. I wish the whole Apoc line didn’t have so much fash in its DNA, but despite the proper and nuanced readings it winds up landing in so many minds as fashy. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen doing Werewolf LARP who play it straight, like ‘what if we were just all on board with the genocidal ecofascism’?

@Popes Poor Stan. He really made Garou shine. Convinced my Bastet interacting with them was worthwhile after all!

I’ve always thought Pure Breed was a creepy, eugenicist concept if left untreated tbh, but there are versions where it’s not tied to ‘blood purity’.

There was also the whole thing with the Rokea Homid Kinfolk PC. They didn’t need to run her off, but I think she was involved with the City of Hope drama that was aforementioned.

@somasatori I got big chunks of Renown for doing that, but I had to come up with tiny reasons to eke out any more. Never even got another Perm Renown.

I tried to make my Pumonca work, but the place just kept losing players and losing steam with it. It’s a shame, I’d love a place to play a cougar-man long term.

At risk of outing myself, I do faction PVP on Silent Heaven frequently, and am the only combat character on my side so my PC often loses fights and gets beaten up as a result. It works because I know I can come back from the fight without losing anything massively inconveniencing, and dying isn’t possible in the course of day to day play. Antagonists check with me OOC to make sure I am cool with it as a player first, as is best practices when initiating a fight.

It is very much possible to have this without it devolving into OOC bad feelings and drama.