Hello, Giant Bomb!
So, I was in a tabletop thread, and I posted a picture of the World of Darkness stuff I had on hand at that moment, and it got me to thinking!
Do we have many World of Darkness players on the Giant Bomb forums? If so, do you prefer oWoD or nWoD? Have a favorite gameline? How do you feel about that upcoming MMO from CCP? Any highlight moments from a game you played? I'll share some of the campaigns I've run if you share some you've run/played. I want to hear from you!
Also, if anyone would be interested in a VoIP game, World of Darkness seems to work well with that, assuming players can be honest and not terrible. Let me know!
I'm interested in hearing back from folks.
World of Darkness
Concept »
World of Darkness is White Wolf's horror/fantasy universe in which all of their games take place. After a long hibernation, White Wolf (now owned by Paradox Interactive) are making a strong push to making more World of Darkness games.
World of Darkness
The only experience I've had of WoD is both Vampire: The Masquerade games. I would love to play the table top game though.
The only experience I've had of WoD is both Vampire: The Masquerade games. I would love to play the table top game though.it's easier than you might think. Unlike modern D&D (4e especially, but 3.5 as well), World of Darkness is less about being rigid battlechess, and more about storytelling and interaction. World of Darkness natively uses no figurines (although D&D 4e only uses tokens now, I believe), only one size dice, and is super accessible and easy to learn.
I associate table top with board games and that sort, but pen and papir might be considered included in the category as well :)
Don't believe I have the main eight. I haven't got the one with people playing as ghosts, but I have WoD, Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling (magicians right?), armory (complementary to WoD), chicago and 2-3 story specific books (cant remember their names). But the WoD system seems really interesting to me.
I've played other tabletop games (D&D, Shadowrun, etc.), but never a World of Darkness campaign. I'm intrigued by it, but the people I usually play with that used to play WoD claim that they've pretty much grown out of it. Vampire the Masquerade is, to them, a game for teenage goths and the people that hang out with them.
Though, there was for a long stretch of years a crazy-huge VTM LARP that was held on my university's campus every Saturday night. However, they were banned from holding it there a few years ago after some people made complaints to the university. To be fair though, those guys were a weird bunch.
The WoD system is pretty great, I love it.
Thanks for the clearup. I have Mage. Read a bit of changeling (don't own the book) but didn't know about Geist. Haven't really read any of the books for some years. because I haven't had anyone to play with. But the setting og WoD is very interesting, the system is very easy and streamlined to use and I think the gameplay method of having "scenes" is a great method of keeping the storytelling going, the party joined up and people from being more descriptive and participate in storytelling to a larger degree
High fantasy is great for maintaining mysticism. Crazy stuff can go down and the GM can pretty much do as he want to, without having to explain anyhing (magic right!?) and it doesn't break immersion (when done right). But other then that I also prefer either cyberpunk, contemporary or Cthulu setting.
What sort of programs do you use for online sessions? Skype or other voicechat is a given, but do you have any dice roll software? Anything for sharing pictures or drawings of terrain and buildings etc?
As for your points about High fantasy embracing mysticism, you aren't wrong, but I feel like WoD does the same thing, it just takes a different route. There are so very many aspects to the WoD (and any Storyteller worth their salt will be able to homebrew almost anything, too!), that you can easily bring about some real, real fantastic stuff. Hell, the Fae along are so varied and complex that you could set a hundred campaigns around them and still keep the mystery alive, likely!
My gaming group actually just started playing WoD (used to play D&D, then played D&D and L5R alternating, then dropped D&D for nWoD, as none of us have the old books, but one of my friends and myself had both a nWoD core book and Vampire Requiem book). Unfortunately we've only played one session so far, but this Sunday is supposed to be the second WoD session. So far I rather enjoy it. Kind of wish I was running it instead of the L5R game, but, being a player is fun as well, so, I'm not complaining.
The only thing I don't like about WoD a whole lot so far though is that it seems really easy for someone to unknowingly make a character that is almost completely useless in combat. Not that combat is guaranteed to show up all the time or anything in WoD, especially compared to something like D&D, but our group has somewhat accidentally ended up with only one character that can do anything in a fight and three characters that are reduced to one die or a chance roll (depending on if they're using an actual weapon or not). I know that this probably could have been a bit better avoided by some sort of checking system between players/storyteller, but, I think the fact that it's going to take so long for any of the three non-combat characters to get to a point where they could be proficient bothers me a bit more than the fact that we got in the situation in the first place. I mean, by all means, we're going to make it work, but, there's certainly a lot of pressure on my character at the moment being the only one that even remotely stands a chance of putting an opponent down in a fight.
I could give a brief run down of our first session too I suppose, but, I won't clog up the post even more with that unless it's requested or whatever.
Sadly our group that's supposed to meet weekly can barely manage that most of the time, so I have no idea what kind of real progress we'll make in getting to play WoD even on a remotely regular basis.
I'll also add that playing nWoD, and having play Vampire Redemption and Bloodlines, kind of makes me want to check out what the oWoD books/game was like, but, since we can barely pull together for the two games we already have running, I doubt that will happen with my group any time in the near future.
OH GOD GIANT POST I LOVE YOU, etc.My gaming group actually just started playing WoD (used to play D&D, then played D&D and L5R alternating, then dropped D&D for nWoD, as none of us have the old books, but one of my friends and myself had both a nWoD core book and Vampire Requiem book). Unfortunately we've only played one session so far, but this Sunday is supposed to be the second WoD session. So far I rather enjoy it. Kind of wish I was running it instead of the L5R game, but, being a player is fun as well, so, I'm not complaining.
The only thing I don't like about WoD a whole lot so far though is that it seems really easy for someone to unknowingly make a character that is almost completely useless in combat. Not that combat is guaranteed to show up all the time or anything in WoD, especially compared to something like D&D, but our group has somewhat accidentally ended up with only one character that can do anything in a fight and three characters that are reduced to one die or a chance roll (depending on if they're using an actual weapon or not). I know that this probably could have been a bit better avoided by some sort of checking system between players/storyteller, but, I think the fact that it's going to take so long for any of the three non-combat characters to get to a point where they could be proficient bothers me a bit more than the fact that we got in the situation in the first place. I mean, by all means, we're going to make it work, but, there's certainly a lot of pressure on my character at the moment being the only one that even remotely stands a chance of putting an opponent down in a fight.
I could give a brief run down of our first session too I suppose, but, I won't clog up the post even more with that unless it's requested or whatever.
Sadly our group that's supposed to meet weekly can barely manage that most of the time, so I have no idea what kind of real progress we'll make in getting to play WoD even on a remotely regular basis.
I'll also add that playing nWoD, and having play Vampire Redemption and Bloodlines, kind of makes me want to check out what the oWoD books/game was like, but, since we can barely pull together for the two games we already have running, I doubt that will happen with my group any time in the near future.
It seems a lot of folks end up starting with D&D and moving onward (not that many don't stick with D&D, or that it's not worth doing so or anything), and the World of Darkness seems to be a pretty popular next step, so you're in fine company. I did the exact same, even. I went from 3.5, to 4e, to d20 modern, to d20 Cthulhu, and then to World of Darkness.
In regards to characters created and being incapable of combat, this is more a failure on your Storyteller's part (no offense to your friend meant, of course). Combat can be, and in some games (and especially certain gamelines!) often is, secondary to most everything else. Your ST should have reviewed characters beforehand, and noticed this. At that point, he'd need to acknowledge 3/4ths of his players weren't looking for such a combat heavy focus. At that point, he (or she, of course!) would need to either embrace this, center the story around this (think the ordinary man in the extraordinary situation), or otherwise ask at least one or two of you to perhaps tweak or even flatout change their concept. There's a lot of options, here. Maybe have a sitdown with your Storyteller, express how you feel about things, and make possible alternatives.
Not being able to meet regularly has always been an issue, for as long as tabletop/P&P games have existed. Personally, my friends and I all just play over Skype and use a couple third-party programs I shared earlier in the thread to make everything jive. Of course, this means you need to trust your fellow players not to lie, but this is easier with friends than it is with strangers.
As for oWoD vs. nWoD, it varies from gameline to gameline. Some are massively different, mechanically (Mage!), some are pretty similar (Ah... Mortal? Changeling, to an extent). Where they REALLY differ, though, are theme and concept. A game of Mage: the Ascension is so thematically different from Mage: the Awakening, it's almost night and day, and they are clearly different games. Some of this is for the better (I much prefer nWoD Hunter to oWoD Hunter), some for the worse (a vast majority I have met prefer Masquerade to Requiem, although I do not agree), but it's worth it to get books for everything, when you can find them on the cheaps. At the very worst, you have a lot more lore hooks, and the oWoD books are especially full of little snippets of possible lore and stuff.
And, I'd love to hear about your sessions. If you are interested, the main concepts I have run in the last year are:
- Dresden Files setting. Not much to say here.
- Grim Tales: My players entered the original "Mother Goose" story book, and had to correct corrupted, twisted fairy tales before they affected modern morality.
- Recent Hunter game that took a very, very strange route. The players met modern Dr. Frankenstein (as envisioned in Dean Koontz's adaptation).
- 1930's Mortals in a world of manipulative Vampires. Didn't go far, mostly liked the aesthetic.
- More-Human-than-Human campaign, where the PC's where manipulated by the Fae into fighting their war as proxies.
- Pseudo-Geist campaign that opened with the players being killed.
I mostly stick to Masquerade, the nWoD doesn't really click too well for me apart from Changeling The Lost (which I want to play so badly).Changeling is pretty fantastic in this iteration. Have you checked out Hunter or Mage? I'm a pretty big fan of the direction they both took (as long as we are ignoring the Atlantis... stuff).
I actually have no experience with WoD. It sounds pretty interesting, at least in so much that none of my DnD buds really like games like Call of Cthulhu. I've only ever really played, like, three sessions of this type of game but it's always been plenty more interesting than ADnD.
I'm inclined to go do some research about the systems, but what is the game really like? I get the storytelling/characterization > mass battles and lootquesting, but is it a White Wolf game or what?
The player is then told to make a roll. "Roll me Dexterity plus Stealth, with any modifers". He has three dots of Dexterity, two dots of Stealth, and a specialization in moving silently. The player rolls six dice. He gets a 7, an 8, a 3, a 9, another 9, and a 10. This is four successes (8, 9, 9, 10), and a 10 is a reroll. He rerolls that die. He gets another 9. Five successes. As a baseline, five successes is a critical success.
The player creeps along the rooftop as if he is no more than just another aspect of the night. He reaches the skylight and lifts it quietly, dropping onto a towering palette of crates.
Alternatively, it could go much differently.
The player rolls, and gets no successes. Half way across the rooftop, there is a loud creaking as he steps into a rusted, weak point. It gives way slightly, the player only just barely lifting his foot before it fell inward. Suddenly anxious voices are heard from below.
Even more alternately, it could go even worse.
The play has only one dot of dexterity, and nothing in stealth. Since being untrained in a physical skill means you get -1 dice for that roll, it would seem he has 0 dice to roll. This is not the case. In WoD, 0 dice becomes one die, a chance die (or, in my group, a luck die). Only a 10 is a success, and a 1 is a critical failure.
He rolls a one.
The player creeps along the top of the rooftop, making his way across it. Step gingerly, he treads across a tarp lain over a portion of the roof. Unbeknownst to him, this tarp was placed because the skylight was recently broken, and he takes a dive through it. As he tries to grab an edge of anything, he finds himself entangled in the mass of canvas and rope, and plummets to the floor below, taking two bashing damage and alerting the entire complex to his presence. He is also still going to need to disentangle himself.
I'm short on tabletop time, but I might do some research and see if I can push this into some of the games. I'm not well versed in White Wolf either, though, so we'll see how well I can set up a scenario for newbies to enjoy.
And here I was hoping for a The Darkness MMORPG sequel... *sigh*
@Mmmslash: Originally I was going to make some post talking about how I'm not too worried about the combat and while most of us couldn't fight our way out of a paper bag, we'd find ways to make it work and how I also take some responsibility for the combat situation since I don't think the less experienced players in the group entirely understands how combat works and that having 2 points in Strength and 1 point in Brawl means that you'll still be rolling 1 die, or maybe even a chance roll, just about any time you want to try and take a swing at someone (despite the fact that since starting I have expressed that multiple times and we all made back-up characters this week and their characters are still built almost the same, if not worse, for combat.) And I was going to say how, well, we may not be designed for combat, but, combat doesn't seem to be coming up a whole lot and I'm sure we'll get by fine, if not a bit shaky.
Then, after this week, I've just about thrown my hands up in the air. Part of me is tempted to make this something of a blog post, or maybe I'll start up a regular blog or something detailing our tabletop adventures as a whole, but, I'm still frustrated enough at the moment that the blog would probably have just turned out pretty poorly. We'll see though if I can come up with a good way to try and give a still rather objective view of much of what's gone on in the story up to this point, and then detail grievances afterwords.
So, the story so far, and a MASSIVE POST INCOMING:
There are four players, all of the characters are college students in a small town outside of Chicago (which, our Storyteller has said that it's 3 hours away from Chicago by car, which seems like it's considerably farther away than 'outside of Chicago', but, whatevs.) So, there's Blaze (don't ask me why that's his name, I have no idea), who is the son of a rather rich family that is notorious (has the notorious flaw) for their sketchy practices (whether perceived or real), and is kind of what you might expect from a rich college boy, flaunts his money, has the personality/social skills to get away with a good bit, likes to party, and is kind of a lech. Then there's Leon, a sophomore at the school, studying to become a veterinarian, and is (in his own words), a bit 'unremarkable'. There's Brooke, who is studying journalism and mass communications, is the only girl in the group, and at times needs a bit of encouragement to pursue things (goals, mysteries, stories, what have you.) Then you have Leslie who is a professional wrestler that suffers from a bout of amnesia that spanned about 4 years of his life and resulted in him finding himself in Japan at a pro-wrestling school, and found his way to the States looking to advance and expand his pro-wrestling career, with college being a bit of a cover for his parents. He's a bit flamboyant and eccentric, has a big curly handlebar mustache, dresses with a bowler hat, tends to carry around a cane, (his wrestling persona is Vincent "Lord British" Warrington) but is a good hearted guy that tries to help others out often.
So, events start on Friday night at a party being hosted by the college at a nearby community center. A student comes running in shouting about how a girl was being attacked outside, so everyone rushes outside to find a girl bleeding to death from a neck wound. Leslie, Brooke, and Leon try to stop the bleeding and stabilize her while getting at least another student to call 911. Leon and Brooke notice bloody footprints leading from the body down the alleyway, presumably from the attacker. Leslie and Leon take off following the footprints while Brooke stays with the girl (with Blaze deciding this was a good time to try and seduce Brooke.)
The footprints lead Leslie and Leon to a warehouse where they get attacked by a crazy guy (who looks to be a hobo; nicknaming him the Barefoot Killer Hobo, an important distinction from the Barefoot Hobo Killer, as the latter suggests he kills hobos while the former implies that he is a hobo that kills. We had a very lengthy discussion on this matter) who ends up growing claws and causing some severe wounds to Leslie and Leon. Brooke and Blaze (who hired a random student from the crowd; Dude Gayheart to be his bodyguard) show up around this time and attempt to help. Combat is pretty clumsy, but Leslie and Leon do manage to lay a bit of a beatdown on the hobo despite his seemingly supernatural powers (we figured he was hopped up on some kind of drug or something, at least in character.) Eventually the hobo makes a break for it and runs back out of the warehouse with us chasing after only to get stopped by the police who fail to apprehend the hobo and take the rest of us in for questioning (well, Brooke, Blaze, and Dude; Leslie and Leon are taken to the hospital to have their wounds treated.)
At the police station, Blaze is able to pull his connections to get him out of jail in under an hour, while Brooke gets questioned by an "FBI Agent, Detective Haggardy" and spends the rest of the night in a cell. Leslie and Leon have their wound tended to and spend the night in the hospital with "Detective Haggardy" questioning Leon early the next day before both of them released.
Back on campus Brooke starts to investigate the attack from last night and finds out that the Barefoot Killer Hobo has been at large in town for a while now, and (after much prodding from the storyteller) does some minor research on vampire lore/myths/etc but effectively writes it off after the fact. Leon goes to work at the Vet Clinic, Blaze figures now is also a good time to make several more passes at Brooke and then spends the rest of the day mostly just hanging out. Leslie spends much of his day wandering around campus trying to obtain information about the Killer Hobo from other students and the like and discovers that all of the other victims so far have been found dead except for one man (with the exception of the girl from the previous night who is still in a coma.) So, having absolutely no computer skills at all and being somewhat unintelligent, remembers that Brooke is studying to be a journalist, and she may be able to help him figure out who this one surviving man is. Leslie finds Brooke having lunch in the school's cafeteria with her roommate and begins to ask her about the attack last night while telling her that he thinks they should go talk to the surviving man and see if he has any more details or information that might be able to help them piece together what happened. Brooke, for her part, tries to write Leslie off completely and doesn't see what this survivor would be able to do to tell them that he didn't already tell the police and that he should leave her alone. After a bit more pleading, and her roommate running off to get campus security, Leslie convinces Brooke that if she just goes with him to find out the information he'll leave her alone (since originally he tried getting her contact information and she shut him down and told him she'd just find him later after she had the info, but, he wasn't really buying it.) So, they head back to her building where Leslie waits outside and Brooke goes and gets the files she printed off from her earlier research. Outside Leslie runs into Blaze (who was there to further his attempts to try and hook up with Brooke) and they chat for a while before Brooke returns and gives Leslie the info about the man, one Paul Donnelly. Leslie says that they should go and talk to the man tonight and after a LOT of talking and pleading convinces them to go and pay the man a visit (and if it looks like he isn't home or is already sleeping, they'd just come back the next day.) Before leaving they run into Leon and tell him the situation and he makes a quick stop at his room for supplies before they head off.
At Donnelly's house they find one light on inside the house, so they make their way up to the front door and knock and call out for Paul only to get no response. At this point Leon tries the front door and finds out that the door is open and we make our way inside. The house looked as if there was a struggle, furniture knocked over, stuff broken, etc. Leslie and Blaze head towards the kitchen where they find the back door was destroyed going outside to the back yard. Leslie heads out into the back yard to look for an attacker and Blaze settles down and raids the man's fridge, makes himself a sandwich and gets a glass of milk. Brooke and Leon go upstairs to find the hallway a bloody mess; blood on the floor, on the walls, leading down to the main bedroom (the blood already dry.) Inside the room they find a man dead, on the bed, body mutilated, covered in slashes and the like, with his chest ripped open. Leon discovered that the man's heart was missing by slapping some latex gloves on he had in his bag and poking around the chest cavity. Around this time "Detective Haggardy" shows up and takes Brooke, Leon, and Blaze outside at gun point (Leslie went unnoticed hiding in the backyard.) Outside Haggardy was the victim of a driveby shooting from some men in a black van who then grabbed Haggardy, loaded him up into the van, and drove off. It was after this that they found that Haggardy had an array of fake I.D.'s in the glove compartment of his car (and several dead animals in the trunk.) Leslie made his way back inside the house and down to the basement to find that part of the concrete floor had been broken up down to the dirt underneath. Leslie didn't have time to investigate it further however as he needed to get out of the house before the police showed up. Blaze took off with his personal driver and all of the fake I.D.'s of Haggardy's, and the other three stayed behind (Brooke picking up Haggardy's gun which he had dropped in the attack) and gave their reports to the police before leaving.
Back at campus, still Saturday night, they discover another body, viciously attacked, looking as if he had been mauled by a bear or something, pinned to a building wall with some writing in blood above him, saying "Beware Pale-" Unfortunately that was all the Storyteller would let us see. Brooke went off to get a camera and came back to take some pictures of the scene to try and get a better view of the writing. Leslie and Leon went back to their rooms and Brooke went off to upload the photos. Blaze, meanwhile, back at his room, was greeted by a mysterious man who told him that he needed Blaze to get Brooke out of her room at 6pm tomorrow, but to make sure that her roommate was still in the room at the same time. So Blaze called Brooke up in yet another attempt to suck up to her and try to woo her and to try and set up a situation to get her out of her room at 6. During the conversation someone hacked Brooke's computer and altered the uploaded images of the crime scene to remove the writing in the blood, at which point Blaze said he might be able to help since he has contacts that might be able to help retrieve the original images and set a time for 6 the next day.
So, Sunday rolls around and Leslie wakes up to find a note in his room with two names on it; Everette Stevens and Cassandra Wallace. Leslie has a hunch of who these people might be and heads off to Brooke's room. Leslie finds Brooke in her room alone and asks her what her roommates name is, to which he needs to explain that he had a note with two names on it in his room this morning, and he confirms that Brooke's roommate's name is, in fact, Cassandra Wallace. He then explains to Brooke that he has a bad feeling about this and thinks that Cassandra might be in danger and pleads with her to find her roommate and make sure that she's not in any danger or trouble while also asking for help with finding out what room the other person, Everette Stevens, lives in. Leslie struggles considerably trying to convince Brooke that Cassandra might be in danger and that she should be on guard and on watch, with Brooke giving him a very cold shoulder the entire time and pretty much treating him as if he's crazy. Afterwords Leslie heads down to the Vet Clinic looking for Leon to ask him if he's right about his hunch that Everette is his roommate and tell him the same thing he told Brooke.
Leon is considerably more understanding about the situation and does what he can to try and help Leslie find out where Everette might be. In the mean time, Brooke reluctantly heads down to Cassandra's work and finds her and tells her that "the really creepy guy from the other day had a note with her name on it and he thinks it means something." They spend most of the conversation bad talking Leslie and how he might be a stalker or something. Leslie starts looking around the bars for information, as Leon informed him that Everette liked to spend a lot of time down at the bars, and he hadn't seen him for the past day or so. The bars is a dead end for Leslie (as he failed a streetwise check, so, this left him wasting a lot of time down there) and Leon heads back to the campus apartments after he gets off work to check his room for Everette and to head off to Brooke and Cassandra's room. Leon and Leslie had come up with something of an idea of thinking they could get Brooke, Cassandra, Leon, and potentially Everette if they could find him, out of the town and off to Chicago to go to a wrestling show that Leslie was supposed to perform in that night. Being unable to find Everette, however, and Leon not finding Brooke and Cassandra at their room, Leslie canceled the idea as it would be cutting things far too close considering the three hour drive just to get to Chicago. Leslie tells Leon that Brooke and Cassandra are probably still down at the dinner where Cassandra works, or on their way back, and he might check that way for them.
Leslie spends some more time at the bars hoping to find Everette, while Leon heads to the dinner. Leon has no luck and immediately heads back to the apartments. Brooke, in the meantime, has been getting played by Blaze who has been fighting tooth and nail (and not always very convincingly, and most of the time in an incredibly pushing, somewhat suspicious manner) to get Brooke to leave Cassandra alone. Leon shows up at the apartment just as Brooke is down on the street talking to Blaze about the photos and his contact and I'm skipping over a good number of minor details in their conversation here, but, the short version is there should have been a lot of red flags going off for how Blaze was acting and changing his story about things he said previously. Leon got to the apartment only to find several men in black suits heading into the apartment - taking only a moment to call and tell Leslie this before trying to break the door down to get inside to try and help Cassandra. Brooke, in the mean time, is still being delayed outside by a combination of Blaze and then some random guy he hired to delay her for as long as possible by hitting on her/getting in her way/etc. As Brooke finally heads for a different entrance to the building Blaze calls campus security on Brooke saying he saw someone with a gun enter that apartment building before driving off with the memory chip that contained the photos.
Leon fails to break into the room in time, and breaks in only to see no one inside the room, and to find the entire room ablaze. He quickly calls out for Cassandra and makes a quick scan for anyone inside before running before the room explodes. Leslie shows up far too late and simply heads back to his room in self-defeat and anger. Brooke gets taken down to the police station under possible suspicion of being involved in the whole thing, and Leon went off back to his room to hide Brooke's gun. In the mean time Blaze meets with his contact, finds out that he's supposed to go find Everette next, and helps rid themselves of the pictures that Brooke had taken that might have been of some use to the rest of the group.
Monday passes pretty much uneventfully, with some of the characters talking to one another, Blaze hitting on Brooke some more, lying to her even more, and trying to see if any of our characters know anything about Everette or where to find him or anything.
And that is finally where things stop for the time being. Which ended up being a lot more writing than I intended. I really wish I had some pictures or something to try and break that up some, but, I don't think I feel like scrounging around for pictures that might have only some semblance of relevancy right now.
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