A thread for the discussion of games: board, LARP, MMORPG, video, tabletop RPG, game theory etc. etc. and all attendant news, developments and ancillary subjects thereof, as well as coordinating/scheduling games either online or IRL. All are welcome to chime in, talk about their favorite games or learn about gaming of any sort.
PLEASE TO WHITEFONT SPOILERS for video games, RPG modules or anything for which foreknowledge of events might lessen one's enjoyment of whatever gaming experience.
Posting my answer to a "what would you do?" question about Vampire the Masquerade because doing so on the official forum might get me banned:
I'd burn my character sheet. The storyteller having NPCs throw middle school hissyfits over who pays too much attention to whom sounds like a strong indication of a dreadful game, whether said NPC is actually a millennia-old puppet master or merely a garden variety supernatural predator that someone is telling bold-faced lies about. She faces a nightly battle to control the beast within and drink only what she needs from her prey rather than leaving a trail of bodies, but her big concern is if Charity thinks Belladonna Horowitz is cool and wants to hang out with her? Pass.
Ha!
Man, I haven't played anything WoD in ages. I think they've released several different rulesets since the last time I played (It was Revised edition, I think?)
Vampire is two editions past that now, I think most everything else is at the 20th Anniversary edition stage (4th for the main three lines, 3rd for the others).
I pretty much jumped ship when they blew up the old WoD and introduced new games with new systems and metaplot. I remember them deciding all Mages were from Atlantis or some craziness like that and never bothered buying any of the books after that.
One of these days I'll get around to running the 1999-set Mage chronicle where the villain is trying to use all the End of the Millennium hysteria to try to usher in the actual Apocalypse.
I'd stopped playing due to gaming group diaspora by the time Revised rolled out, but I kept following the books until that New World of Darkness revamp. No bueno.
The most recent version of V:tM is a trash fire in terms of mechanics AND content. They leaned heavy into the edgelord aspects.
Oof. I remember it being edgelordy enough, back in the day. It seemed like there were 9 Sabbat players for every Camarilla.
I also remember the few people who did play Camarilla were always Toreadors or Malkavians (who were always cartoon crazy).
It's like the dev team for V5 looked at the original books and said "It's not dark enough! Hold my blood bag!"
Weren't the creators of the core big into the Scandinavian LARP scene, and basically writing for that crowd's playing style even though tabletop gamers were the actual customers they were trying to sell it to?
Dark themes aren't necessarily a dealbreaker for me (hey, I've played Call of Chthulhu and KULT!), but nothing I heard about the new version sounded like it would be any actual fun to play. I've yet to spend a penny on it.
Can I just take a moment to say "Thank God for VTTs?" We've got a potentially nasty winter weather system hitting us this weekend and the fact that I can just tell my players "Hey, let's play online tomorrow night so everyone can stay warm and safe at home" is huge.
