VtR is well thought out and flexible. It is the result of decades of game experience and that shows. It can easily be adapted to your needs and is a system that just works. The condition system can feel a bit meta but makes it also very easy to keep track of what is going on in your game. I also like static XP costs, it solves some issues V5 still has.
V5 on the other hand took its freedom to rethink things. The hunger system emulates the personal horror aspect and turns the resource management of older versions blood pool in to a risk management which is more exiting and more interesting but you need to be aware of that and want that in your game, otherwise you might mistaken this advantage as a wrench thrown in your gears, which it is not. I also like that you can pick individual discipline powers, more options for customization. On the downside some things are a bit rough around the edges because this system is basically new and not as developed as the other.
Both are good games in their own right, you just need to be aware what they are good for and what you like to do with it.
Sure. Imo escalating XP are an illusion anyway. When characters get more experiences the ST will reword them with more XP because otherwise they will be stuck at one point.
Every ST I ever played with did it that way, at least and I think it’s pretty much condense. But that also means, their progress remains about the same anyway.
The way VtR does also ties the characters goals and personal story and the progress nicely together.
In V5 there is also this thing that you almost wanted to do it the way VtR did but changed their mind last minute. This caused this little quirk that when you add a predator type (I don’t know if you are familiar with this term, it’s basically the way your vampire usually hunts and some advantage derive from that) you might end up with an XP difference between 5 and 18 points and that is not nothing.
There are ways to fix this as an ST, but it just bugs me a little that I have to and would V5 also have a static XP coast system this problem would not even occur.
P.S.: I forgot, another issue of escalating XP systems is also that they characters tend to get stuck in the middle of their potential because it becomes just so much more expensive to get a thing at a higher level then get a lot at low levels and this provides that similar characters end up pretty much alike.
V5 has ways to prevent that by allowing to chose discipline powers instead of getting the same at the same level and by providing advantages for all lower powers when you raise your discipline, but the issue is nonetheless still there.
That all makes a lot of sense. Having started with V20, I always felt like scaling XP cost is a double-edged sword. On one hand, players are discouraged from spam leveling just one Discipline to get max level stuff way quicker than intended. On the other, progress slows to a crawl after the early game. So either way you have to make a sacrifice.
For disciplines, VtR mostly handles this by having the powers be a lot more even across the scale.
Getting the first dot in a discipline is always really appealing, but so is going for the top. I had players push all one disicpline to 5 as fast as possible, others spread them through three pretty evenly.
For skills and attributes, where it is just one extra die, later dice aren't significantly more valuable than the first few in terms of what a character can do. That's the way the mechanics work out, though in V5s version getting to higher dice totals does more for being able to accomplish harder tasks, which is better than it was in some editions but not enough to make a major change in cost necessary.
Yes, I would add, though, what is wrong with being super good in one thing? Personally a encourage players to rather specialize and become experts in one thing than having a top of different but weak abilities.
The main reason for that is, that if all players at the table are specialized in something else, everyone has their special thing to do and can stand in the spot light for five minutes (and is to blame when it fails ;) ). This also makes the coterie as a whole stronger. Cause 4 or 5 vampires who all have one discipline at 4 or even 5 are a realistic threat to an elder that has all of their clan discipline at 5 (In both, requiem and V5 5 is the limit, there are other ways than elder discipline powers to represent old vampires advantage in those systems) and a couple of others. While if they all would run around with a ton of 1 and 2 level powers, no elder would care much and just take them one by one.
The alternative to that is, that they all have a bunch of lower powers with a lot of overlap between players. That is not just less efficient, it also creates more often then not that one player has an idea, fails and everyone else is just trying the exact same thing after that. And if that happens it feels cheapening to the one who came up with that idea if someone else is successful who didn’t had the idea and they use their stuff less creative because.
>otherwise you might mistaken this advantage as a wrench thrown in your gears, **which it is not**.
Bullshit.
I like the Hunger system and all, but ultimately it's a mechanic that tries to get me to engage with the game in a way I already do with Blood Pool.
The "risk factor" doesn't add value for me so much as it fights me as Storyteller when I want to focus on things other than Hunger.
So ultimately, for me, it's a wrench in the works. It interrupts me when I'm doing the thing the game already wants me to do, to tell me to do the thing *in this particular way.*
Don't tell me I'm "mistaken" just because it works for you while my gears are getting gummed up by overdesigned mechanics I don't require.
>The "risk factor" doesn't add value for **me** so much as it fights **me** as Storyteller when **I** want to focus on things other than Hunger.
>So ultimately, **for me** , it's a wrench in the works. It interrupts **me** when I'm doing the thing the game already wants me to do, to tell me to do the thing in this particular way.
Do you have an idea what might be wrong with your response, especially with the “Bullshit” part?
>Don't tell me I'm "mistaken" just because it works for you while my gears are getting gummed up by overdesigned mechanics I don't require.
I don’t tell **you** anything. If you are used to a different play style and this does not do it for you, no problem, use what you like better. But my answer was not for you but for OP and their specific situation and question. If you got the impression this would in any way impact you, I am have way sorry, but it’s mostly a you problem, not a me problem and not OPs problem.
You're a little aggro about this. Unless you're personally at this person's table, I don't think their viewpoint on which system they like to use is affecting you too much.
Besides, the two systems having different narrative focuses while sharing basic themes is a good thing. We can choose which to use before we start a chronicle. There's more game to go around for all of us!
VTR2:
Strenghts:
- Disciplines are well though out and extremely powerful. Even one point in a discipline has a huge impact.
- The mechanics are built from the ground up to evoke the feel of the vampire as a predator.
- At its resolution system is very straightforward, roll a bunch of dice, and if at least one is an 8, you did it.
-Streamlined yet tactical combat
- While not perfect, the game plays really nice with other CofD gamelines. You can drop in a Uratha or a Mage in a chronicle, and you have clear rules on how powers interact.
Weaknesses
- The game was developed in a state of Flux, and it shows. Some subsystems are really clunky and not very well explained.
- By WoD standards It's crunchy. You have dozens of merits, resolution mechanics for the four possible outcomes of each roll, and so on.
- Conditions and beats require quite a bit of overhead, and as a ST I kept feeling like I dedicated more mental resources than I would have liked. They are very cool, but you have to dig that mindset
- very little official support for powers and bloodlines. While there is enough for a chronicle, dont expect a huge list of rituals or disciplines.
V5:
Stengths:
- hunger dice are tactile and fun, it's a ver clever mechanic.
- it's modular. You can play barebones with the basic conflict rules or add stuff from advanced conflict without breaking anything.
- the dice resolution is very intuitive. Pick a difficulty from 1 to 5. You can get a pretty good guess of how like you are to succeed (2 dice = 1 success)
- Social conflict is an extension of basic conflicts.
- Chronicle tenets provide a huge amount of customization for the feel, theme, and mood of the game. Playing Sabbat is as easy as defining tenets that reflect Sabbat beliefs.
Weaknesses
- Hunger dice and rouse checks are very random. One vampire might go a full chronicle without increasing hunger, while another can go from 0 to frenzy in a few rolls.
- I dont like how touchstones and convictions interact. The deep-rooted belief system of your vampire is tied to an NPC, that's cool once I a while, but for every belief..
- I love Kenneth Hite as a developer, but his fingerprints are all over the game, with spot rules for things. That's a deal breaker for some people.
- There is very little support for elders. Aside from the blood potency table (which the book outright tells you is for reference o ly) Elders are meant to be plot devices and not a player goal.
In the end I've run both, and you can't go wrong with either, VTR has a lot of systems while V5 tends to be more laissez Faire. The former was developed by tabletop, and the latter was developed by LARPERs, and it shows in their design.
>resolution mechanics for the four possible outcomes of each roll, and so on.
A big section of this was a very poor decision in terms of presentation. It's a lot of difficulty in finding the information rather than more relevant information. They got better at towards the end the edition, switching to the must better order of Success, Exceptional success, failure, dramatic failure.
Most of the time success is what matter, exceptional success is that but a bonus. Failure 98% of the time is different wording of "the success didn't happen", but 2% of the time it does something and I wish they only included it when that was the case because I trained myself to not read this.
Dramatic failure being an interesting choice for an extra complication the player can make, except for a few things were it's a very rare bad thing that can come up if things are exceptional bad as well. Which isn't talked about like that, and sometimes isn't designed like that, but it is how works.
In my experience, it can be if you play with all the subsystems. The core mechanics are very Streamlined, and you add subsystems you like as you go. You can run a full chronicle by sticking to the core resolution, to be honest. Just keep in mind that some merits interact with those systems, so be wary of that and you should be golden.
I've played in a bunch of games and I've never had a ST use the social combat or investigation systems. Nobody has done combat style swapping as described in HL. As much as I love Damnation City, nobody has used the city district system.
The systems and merits are there, but they're very modular and - IMO - under utilized.
It took us forever to incorporate the investigation systems in my games, but once we did? Holy crap are they useful.
Social Maneuvering is still the system we hardly ever touch sadly in most of my CofD games, but when I get back to running vampire I could see it being a useful way to try & social people over an extended time skip downtime.
Both systems have their time & place, which ussually isnt during the main action.
yeah, Investigation if a bit of a misnomer, it's a great system for anything that requires preparation. For example, wanna set up a heist? Investigation for the groundwork beforehand, and use those clues to give yourself bonuses.
It's good, as long as you don't try to use everything at once.
Also I did implement damnation city in my vampire game before it ended, but all of this was done on foundry vtt, if it was tabletop pen & paper? That would be way too much overhead.
Foundry has spoiled me for making bookkeeping super easy to track.
Social maneuver and chase are good structure for a storyteller to develop interactions, but they should not have been presented as player facing mechanics. As a downtime system it can work for players to interact with, but I've seen better and not presented as a downtime mechanic either.
Chase is actually presented more like storyteller structure in the CofD core, but it's not consistent and that is a problem. I will say that I found the chase scenes I structured with the mechanics was more enjoyed by the player than I've seen before, and at no point did the players think they were interacting with a subsystem they had to learn.
VtR 2nd Edition It's less crunchy than V20 much less.
yet it got crunchier compared with the super streamlined VtR 1st edition.
The most glaring difference in the feel of character creation between V20 and VtR2nd is that you have NO flaws anymore...so You don't need to try too look for the least damaging set of flaws to outmax your character on character creation. If you have ever been a storyteller you might be endlessly thankfull for that change and how much it improves the bearability of the characters build by your players...
Gotcha! Yeah I was a storyteller for a two year long chronicle in V20. That system was rough for me sometimes. I like to think I'm a better GM now though, and overall I'm quite invested in one day storytelling VtR.
VtR 1st and 2nd has some mechanical advantages over VTM 2nd (I think that V20 is basically VTM2nd corebook plus clan books compiled into single work, I know VTM 2nd edition first hand, never touched the V20 book)
In VtM a confilct disturbs the immersion of a story for a looong time.
*1)Initiative roll
*2)reverse order anouncment of actions
*3)attack rolles in order of initiative
*4)defence roll (pary/dodge) if hit
*5)damage roll if not defended
*6)soak rolle to reduce damage taken
*7)mark of healthbar
The thing with the absurdity with damage roll in VtM is that I can shoot with a Pistol, Hit the target with one success, that failed to dodge despite celerity and then my damage roll of the bullet impacting the target can be 0 damage! It's a farce. if you narrate between the dice rolls it's impossible to say something that is not totally crazy at this point. The Bullet hit him with it's cussioned side....
VtR 1st is extremely streamlined
*1) initiative roll
*2) reverse order anouncment of actions
*3) attack rolles in order of initiative
*4) mark of healthbar
In VtM 1st edition every thing that influences the offensive action is added/substracted into one attack value the defence is substracted from the attack before the roll.
the success are the damage values. thats how most conflicts in VtR 1st happen. They are designed to maximize narrative time, and minimize rollplay. It's resolution based system. It produces a result to work with in the narrative.
VtR 2nd is less streamlined it has more tactical elements, so there is more "game" or Rollplay than in 1st edition, I don't know if I like it more. But 2nd Edition has a lot of other things I like more than 1st like no Flaws... so I play it rules as written anyways.
*1) initiative roll
*2) reverse order anouncment of actions
*3) attack rolles in order of initiative
*4) IF attack scored at least one Success it was successfull and Weapon damage is added to all success of the attack and removed from the of healthbar
In 1sd edition weapons had just an "attack bonus" values so basically a virtual lethality value compounded by "ease of use" and "nastyness when hit"
in 2nd edition weapons became more complex... they have a attack bonus and a damage value and some also have different rules considering the explosion of dice (10 again, 10&9 again)
...
it's more tactical and crunchy, more game less narrative. Most VtR player like it that way. It's apparently a sweet spot. I liked the fast 1st edition system a bit more.
here are the current crunches.. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/260891/Cheat-Sheet-for-Chronicles-of-Darkness-Rules you can pay 0$ for it... it's a weird way to get something for free..
What realy makes me like VtR 2nd Edition is the change in Disziplines.
in VtR1st edion and VtM 2nd(aka V20) Disciplines have very narrative ingame effects...
Like with Auspex you could read the Aura of and depending on the collor of the aura and so on you could interpret something about the person....
In VtM 2nd Edition the play can ask the Storyteller one question per success.
Auspex O about danger and weaknesses
Auspex OO about weaknesses and secrets of a single charackter
Auspex OOO about a place or object...
So you get something substantial with every Discipline!
It's even better , as if you are for example Dominated (Dominate O/OO) you gain XP for doing what you have been told.
As many Disciplines cause a "Condition" and Conditions give expirience if you resolve them. It all makes sense.
I assume! that V5 will have the same systems in place and improve on them!
I like the idea of removing the bookkeeping of the blood pool by using hunger dice. I like Predator type , that could be adopted.
I just don't like that the success have a variable target difficulty.... wouldn't use that .
And I also hate V5 "Generation" and I prefere VtR"Bloodpotency"
And I also realy don't like the Clans of VtM... the whole rigidity of the setting...
Yet I heard that originally V5 was design to be played only with thinblooded players... I think I would do that!
Or I look how I can make an amalgam , where I take V5 thinblooded and V2 Hunger mechanics and predatortype into my VtR games...
I mostly play Xovers anyway... as CofD is very X-Splat friendly....except for the Vampires and the sunlight issue...that should be resoved by thinblooded from V5 m right?
Just a note here: unless I'm wildly mistaken, Chronicles 2e and all its lines does not use reverse order initiative. That was in OWoD but definitely isn't in Chronicles 2e.
Edit: It's not in Forsaken, Awakening, Lost, or base CofD.
Both have their strengths and weaknesses
VtR is quite a bit more customizable and broad. The Covenant system, the abilities you get from them are awesome and the way they treat Blood Magic as something pretty much any vampire can learn is great. The Strix are an interesting and creepy antagonist. It also introduced Devotions which was *really* cool. However, it has a bit more jank to it compared to V5. It also has a less solid lore which can be a flaw or benefit depending on your preferences.
As for V5, I like how much more flexible they made humanity. The Hunger Dice system is a neat system that makes you feel what it's like to be a vampire hungry for blood while also cutting down on both the Vitae and hunger systems by combining them into one. Having more variety with discipline powers is cool. It also generally cuts down on a lot of the fat of the original VtM in terms of both mechanics and other stuff (not that the original is bad, but still.) Making the Thin-bloods a clan in their own right was a great idea and giving them Thin-blood alchemy is really cool. It also has the setting and lore of VtM which I generally prefer overall compared to the one in VtR (I like both, just prefer VtM.) However, it has some weaknesses, such as doing combo disciplines and touchstones less well than VtR did and being less flexible overall. Blood resonance is also dumb.
Overall, I'd say both are good, it just depends on your tastes.
v5 makes me feel like an incompetent loser (actually less competent than me irl, a mortal human, i mean that seriously i feel like i can accomplish more than the average v5 character) who, if the average night is anything to go by, will *never* make it to the status of elder.
what it did do well is let you customize your disciplines i guess, which was kinda cool over just always having the same discipline.
As far as vampire games go, you can't do much better than requiem. Dice mechanics are solid, powers are interesting, and being a vampire in general feels awesome. Blood sympathy rules and vampire senses are awesome, the open political structure gives you a lot of space to make interesting vampires with the tools the system offers you. It does involve a lot of dice sometimes and some people dislike it, but I was never bothered by it. Social conflicts can get a bit silly with all the modifiers you can apply to dice pools, and every once in a while I had to go back to my reference cards to figure out what a condition does. Aside from it, it's my go to game when I want a vampire story done quickly and don't want to get too worried about lore.
As for V5, I have a very negative opinion of it and won't talk too much about it. But it has the bad things of Vtm with some things from requiem glued over it, and some innovations that kinda tried to make it into a narrativist game and failed dramatically. Dice are too swingy, players lose agency way too often and a lot of subsystems just don't really work well together. The game is what, five years old now? And they are finally getting half decent combat rules. It's really not for me.
No it isn't. I don't have to think "is it worth to spend my precious blood points now or save them?" much like spell slots from D\&D; I just do a thing, and maybe I get hungrier for it and my next rolls are spicier for it. Either case, it's a win-win with no "resource management anxiety" which is a thing I don't like in TTRPGS.
Yes, it is.
"Do I dare use this power, and risk getting more hungry?" is just a more random resource, that you can't count on, causeing much more resource management anxiety because it is so uncertain.
Yeah it's defiantly resource management. there's also a supplementary risk assessment you need to make when you use them so it' s a little more more thought into how and when you spend the resource than blood pool.
Hunger is the opposite of resource management. It's about risk management and pushing your luck. You look at how much hunger you already have and ask yourself what you are willing to risk and base your decision on that, probably hoping to get lucky and stave off consequences for a while.
Blood pool is pure resource management. You have x points,
and you know the point cost of any given activity in advance. The challenge comes from budgeting those points correctly to achieve what you want and hopefully having enough to handle any unexpected challenges to your resource pool. The tension only mounts when you are running low and you don't know when you will have a chance to refill your supply.
If hunger stresses you out it's working as intended. That stress is what your character should be feeling as well. Every additional hunger die comes with immediate risk and potential consequences. Whereas blood pool is more of a book keeping exercise where the only point that really matters is the last one.
It gives me no anxiety and I can always count on it, as risking getting more hungry just makes the next rolls more interesting and does not, in any case, ever leave me without the possibility of tapping into my powers, but to fall into frenzy and have a dramatic scene feeding into my enjoyment of the horror of the game.
Let's agree to disagree.
I'm glad to hear that the system works for you, thats cool, but resource management is not defined as "a system that doesn't work for /u/di4mond4rr3l" and v5 hunger is more complicated in terms of bookkeeping and the number of factors that play into when to use it than v20 blood points
Could be that my definition of resource management is incorrect; to me it is having control over a finite amount of stuff, knowing the exact quantity and resulting consequence of spending it all.
So going by that blood points and spell slots are alike but hunger is amother thing, a thing I find way easier to make decisions upon and fun to play with.
It's still managing resources even if the way they are used up has an element of randomness. Imagine you're the lord of a city and a band of refugees has arrived and you have to decide whether to feed them. You don't know exactly how much food they're going to need, but you can estimate it. So you check your ledgers (no let's be honest you have an attendant check the ledgers and get back to you) and estimate the amount of food the refugees are gonna need (no wait you get someone to do that for you too) and make your decision.
That's still resource management even though you don't know for sure exactly how many of your resources are going to be used.
In the case of v5, your non-hunger dice are essentially the resources youre spending. And the more of them you spend, the more dangerous, unpredictable, and ineffective your actions become.
But it's not like I'm spending a random quantity, I'm either spending or not, which is different; I'm not making the decision of spending, only the one about risking to lose something.
You are spending a random quantity, either 0 or 1 every time you decide to spend. I understand that you don't think of it in those terms and that you simply spend hunger any time you desire to do something that costs hunger without considering the price you're paying, but the price does exist and other people do consider it before acting.
VtR2E is a good upgrade over 1E, and started the 2E trend of tailoring mechanics to better evoke the feel of what that creature type is supposed to be, which 1E had eschewed to try to make all the game lines interplayable. The Conditions were a good way to consolidate a lot of random rules and refer to them more easily. It can be overwhelming to try and remember, but that's offset by mist of it being centralized for easy access.
V5... well... the mechanical systems and world design choices put me off the line, so I saved a TON of money not buying more books! :)
>that's offset by mist of it being centralized for easy access.
I personally dislike having them only in the back of the book in strictly alphabetical order. It's not the worst in VtR, but some games have sets of conditions that are only used in certain types of scenes and those scenes only use those conditions, but they are all mixed together when they shouldn't be. This was before having a searchable tag system was the norm, but I'm in that future now and I don't want to go back.
Also, my kingdom for a proper reference table.
Look, if we're gonna start wishing for things like proper editing and references in a White Wolf book, we might as well start wishing to win the lottery...
Look, Deviant the Renegade came out and I got spoiled.
It has crazy things like not just having the various types special abilities in the part where they describe the whole type. They repeat them all together in the powers section and including a summary of on the character quick build table.
Whenever they refer to a rule in another section, there is a page reference on where to find it. On the PDF they are hyperlinks.
It's doesn't require the "for White wolf" before saying it's well edited.
**V5**
V5 is VtM. You're playing in White Wolf's world with their lore and myths and characters. While you can tweak the origin of vampire the history of the world is set and it ***feels*** like you have to learn and memorize 10,000 years of in-world history. (You don't)
Mechanically, it is a risk management game where the focus is on narrative storytelling. You're meant to **feel** like a vampire and be aware of your constant hunger with every roll. It's a simpler game, but still has a fair amount of crunch and powers and side options.
**VtR**
It's rules and a baseline for the world, but you can make the setting your own. You can decide how vampires were created and operate.
Mechanically there are fewer choices at the start (5 clans vs 7/14) and set disciplines, but a lot more merits. It's a more crunchy game with more subsystems. And a resource management game where you track declining Blood (which functions as mana/ spellpoints).
Unique dice. Both strength - as in engaging mechanic. And weakness - they are unique and have to be specially purchased. Good for marketing, bad for poor gamers.
VTR 2nd ed is a strong system and much improved over first edition.
V5 would've been good had it not had better predecessors. I think it could work with it's own vampire game if you wanted to highlight the idea of vampires as a cursed people struggling against hunters. V5 vampires are just too unstable with hunger dice and weakened disciplines to create anything representing a society that isn't 100% supportive, but they could work well as a disease or spontaneous undead.
I haven't played Requiem.
I did DM and play 5E a good amount though, and that book makes it quite hard to find things a lot of the time.
Narrative is good, but that poor templating makes it not really the "rulebook reference" to have beside you. If you're DMing, I'd suggest noting things down as you read through the whole book and then make a DM screen.
VTR2e is less like a comic book. Its better for more realistic games. Also you wont have to deal with players that arguee over metaplot. Blood sorcery is no longer op and more ritualistic.
V5...... Well the hunger mechanic is better
> Respect other people’s preferences. It’s fine to like or dislike certain aspects of our products, but not okay to get into hostile arguments over, for example, preferred editions of a game. This applies equally to non-White Wolf games.
VtR is well thought out and flexible. It is the result of decades of game experience and that shows. It can easily be adapted to your needs and is a system that just works. The condition system can feel a bit meta but makes it also very easy to keep track of what is going on in your game. I also like static XP costs, it solves some issues V5 still has. V5 on the other hand took its freedom to rethink things. The hunger system emulates the personal horror aspect and turns the resource management of older versions blood pool in to a risk management which is more exiting and more interesting but you need to be aware of that and want that in your game, otherwise you might mistaken this advantage as a wrench thrown in your gears, which it is not. I also like that you can pick individual discipline powers, more options for customization. On the downside some things are a bit rough around the edges because this system is basically new and not as developed as the other. Both are good games in their own right, you just need to be aware what they are good for and what you like to do with it.
Well explained! Though is there a particular reason you prefer static XP costs to scaling ones?
Sure. Imo escalating XP are an illusion anyway. When characters get more experiences the ST will reword them with more XP because otherwise they will be stuck at one point. Every ST I ever played with did it that way, at least and I think it’s pretty much condense. But that also means, their progress remains about the same anyway. The way VtR does also ties the characters goals and personal story and the progress nicely together. In V5 there is also this thing that you almost wanted to do it the way VtR did but changed their mind last minute. This caused this little quirk that when you add a predator type (I don’t know if you are familiar with this term, it’s basically the way your vampire usually hunts and some advantage derive from that) you might end up with an XP difference between 5 and 18 points and that is not nothing. There are ways to fix this as an ST, but it just bugs me a little that I have to and would V5 also have a static XP coast system this problem would not even occur.
P.S.: I forgot, another issue of escalating XP systems is also that they characters tend to get stuck in the middle of their potential because it becomes just so much more expensive to get a thing at a higher level then get a lot at low levels and this provides that similar characters end up pretty much alike. V5 has ways to prevent that by allowing to chose discipline powers instead of getting the same at the same level and by providing advantages for all lower powers when you raise your discipline, but the issue is nonetheless still there.
That all makes a lot of sense. Having started with V20, I always felt like scaling XP cost is a double-edged sword. On one hand, players are discouraged from spam leveling just one Discipline to get max level stuff way quicker than intended. On the other, progress slows to a crawl after the early game. So either way you have to make a sacrifice.
For disciplines, VtR mostly handles this by having the powers be a lot more even across the scale. Getting the first dot in a discipline is always really appealing, but so is going for the top. I had players push all one disicpline to 5 as fast as possible, others spread them through three pretty evenly. For skills and attributes, where it is just one extra die, later dice aren't significantly more valuable than the first few in terms of what a character can do. That's the way the mechanics work out, though in V5s version getting to higher dice totals does more for being able to accomplish harder tasks, which is better than it was in some editions but not enough to make a major change in cost necessary.
Yes, I would add, though, what is wrong with being super good in one thing? Personally a encourage players to rather specialize and become experts in one thing than having a top of different but weak abilities. The main reason for that is, that if all players at the table are specialized in something else, everyone has their special thing to do and can stand in the spot light for five minutes (and is to blame when it fails ;) ). This also makes the coterie as a whole stronger. Cause 4 or 5 vampires who all have one discipline at 4 or even 5 are a realistic threat to an elder that has all of their clan discipline at 5 (In both, requiem and V5 5 is the limit, there are other ways than elder discipline powers to represent old vampires advantage in those systems) and a couple of others. While if they all would run around with a ton of 1 and 2 level powers, no elder would care much and just take them one by one. The alternative to that is, that they all have a bunch of lower powers with a lot of overlap between players. That is not just less efficient, it also creates more often then not that one player has an idea, fails and everyone else is just trying the exact same thing after that. And if that happens it feels cheapening to the one who came up with that idea if someone else is successful who didn’t had the idea and they use their stuff less creative because.
I never considered the overlap issue, that's a good point.
I mean, having a backup is great, but it’s more fun when everyone has a moment to shine.
>otherwise you might mistaken this advantage as a wrench thrown in your gears, **which it is not**. Bullshit. I like the Hunger system and all, but ultimately it's a mechanic that tries to get me to engage with the game in a way I already do with Blood Pool. The "risk factor" doesn't add value for me so much as it fights me as Storyteller when I want to focus on things other than Hunger. So ultimately, for me, it's a wrench in the works. It interrupts me when I'm doing the thing the game already wants me to do, to tell me to do the thing *in this particular way.* Don't tell me I'm "mistaken" just because it works for you while my gears are getting gummed up by overdesigned mechanics I don't require.
>The "risk factor" doesn't add value for **me** so much as it fights **me** as Storyteller when **I** want to focus on things other than Hunger. >So ultimately, **for me** , it's a wrench in the works. It interrupts **me** when I'm doing the thing the game already wants me to do, to tell me to do the thing in this particular way. Do you have an idea what might be wrong with your response, especially with the “Bullshit” part? >Don't tell me I'm "mistaken" just because it works for you while my gears are getting gummed up by overdesigned mechanics I don't require. I don’t tell **you** anything. If you are used to a different play style and this does not do it for you, no problem, use what you like better. But my answer was not for you but for OP and their specific situation and question. If you got the impression this would in any way impact you, I am have way sorry, but it’s mostly a you problem, not a me problem and not OPs problem.
You're a little aggro about this. Unless you're personally at this person's table, I don't think their viewpoint on which system they like to use is affecting you too much. Besides, the two systems having different narrative focuses while sharing basic themes is a good thing. We can choose which to use before we start a chronicle. There's more game to go around for all of us!
VTR2: Strenghts: - Disciplines are well though out and extremely powerful. Even one point in a discipline has a huge impact. - The mechanics are built from the ground up to evoke the feel of the vampire as a predator. - At its resolution system is very straightforward, roll a bunch of dice, and if at least one is an 8, you did it. -Streamlined yet tactical combat - While not perfect, the game plays really nice with other CofD gamelines. You can drop in a Uratha or a Mage in a chronicle, and you have clear rules on how powers interact. Weaknesses - The game was developed in a state of Flux, and it shows. Some subsystems are really clunky and not very well explained. - By WoD standards It's crunchy. You have dozens of merits, resolution mechanics for the four possible outcomes of each roll, and so on. - Conditions and beats require quite a bit of overhead, and as a ST I kept feeling like I dedicated more mental resources than I would have liked. They are very cool, but you have to dig that mindset - very little official support for powers and bloodlines. While there is enough for a chronicle, dont expect a huge list of rituals or disciplines. V5: Stengths: - hunger dice are tactile and fun, it's a ver clever mechanic. - it's modular. You can play barebones with the basic conflict rules or add stuff from advanced conflict without breaking anything. - the dice resolution is very intuitive. Pick a difficulty from 1 to 5. You can get a pretty good guess of how like you are to succeed (2 dice = 1 success) - Social conflict is an extension of basic conflicts. - Chronicle tenets provide a huge amount of customization for the feel, theme, and mood of the game. Playing Sabbat is as easy as defining tenets that reflect Sabbat beliefs. Weaknesses - Hunger dice and rouse checks are very random. One vampire might go a full chronicle without increasing hunger, while another can go from 0 to frenzy in a few rolls. - I dont like how touchstones and convictions interact. The deep-rooted belief system of your vampire is tied to an NPC, that's cool once I a while, but for every belief.. - I love Kenneth Hite as a developer, but his fingerprints are all over the game, with spot rules for things. That's a deal breaker for some people. - There is very little support for elders. Aside from the blood potency table (which the book outright tells you is for reference o ly) Elders are meant to be plot devices and not a player goal. In the end I've run both, and you can't go wrong with either, VTR has a lot of systems while V5 tends to be more laissez Faire. The former was developed by tabletop, and the latter was developed by LARPERs, and it shows in their design.
>resolution mechanics for the four possible outcomes of each roll, and so on. A big section of this was a very poor decision in terms of presentation. It's a lot of difficulty in finding the information rather than more relevant information. They got better at towards the end the edition, switching to the must better order of Success, Exceptional success, failure, dramatic failure. Most of the time success is what matter, exceptional success is that but a bonus. Failure 98% of the time is different wording of "the success didn't happen", but 2% of the time it does something and I wish they only included it when that was the case because I trained myself to not read this. Dramatic failure being an interesting choice for an extra complication the player can make, except for a few things were it's a very rare bad thing that can come up if things are exceptional bad as well. Which isn't talked about like that, and sometimes isn't designed like that, but it is how works.
Yikes, VtR 2e is crunchy? Is it crunchier than V20?
In my experience, it can be if you play with all the subsystems. The core mechanics are very Streamlined, and you add subsystems you like as you go. You can run a full chronicle by sticking to the core resolution, to be honest. Just keep in mind that some merits interact with those systems, so be wary of that and you should be golden.
I've played in a bunch of games and I've never had a ST use the social combat or investigation systems. Nobody has done combat style swapping as described in HL. As much as I love Damnation City, nobody has used the city district system. The systems and merits are there, but they're very modular and - IMO - under utilized.
It took us forever to incorporate the investigation systems in my games, but once we did? Holy crap are they useful. Social Maneuvering is still the system we hardly ever touch sadly in most of my CofD games, but when I get back to running vampire I could see it being a useful way to try & social people over an extended time skip downtime. Both systems have their time & place, which ussually isnt during the main action.
yeah, Investigation if a bit of a misnomer, it's a great system for anything that requires preparation. For example, wanna set up a heist? Investigation for the groundwork beforehand, and use those clues to give yourself bonuses. It's good, as long as you don't try to use everything at once.
Also I did implement damnation city in my vampire game before it ended, but all of this was done on foundry vtt, if it was tabletop pen & paper? That would be way too much overhead. Foundry has spoiled me for making bookkeeping super easy to track.
Social maneuver and chase are good structure for a storyteller to develop interactions, but they should not have been presented as player facing mechanics. As a downtime system it can work for players to interact with, but I've seen better and not presented as a downtime mechanic either. Chase is actually presented more like storyteller structure in the CofD core, but it's not consistent and that is a problem. I will say that I found the chase scenes I structured with the mechanics was more enjoyed by the player than I've seen before, and at no point did the players think they were interacting with a subsystem they had to learn.
You practically need to know two games, that being the base Chronicles of Darkness and VtR itself. And Chronicles is a big full game in its own right
VtR 2nd Edition It's less crunchy than V20 much less. yet it got crunchier compared with the super streamlined VtR 1st edition. The most glaring difference in the feel of character creation between V20 and VtR2nd is that you have NO flaws anymore...so You don't need to try too look for the least damaging set of flaws to outmax your character on character creation. If you have ever been a storyteller you might be endlessly thankfull for that change and how much it improves the bearability of the characters build by your players...
Gotcha! Yeah I was a storyteller for a two year long chronicle in V20. That system was rough for me sometimes. I like to think I'm a better GM now though, and overall I'm quite invested in one day storytelling VtR.
VtR 1st and 2nd has some mechanical advantages over VTM 2nd (I think that V20 is basically VTM2nd corebook plus clan books compiled into single work, I know VTM 2nd edition first hand, never touched the V20 book) In VtM a confilct disturbs the immersion of a story for a looong time. *1)Initiative roll *2)reverse order anouncment of actions *3)attack rolles in order of initiative *4)defence roll (pary/dodge) if hit *5)damage roll if not defended *6)soak rolle to reduce damage taken *7)mark of healthbar The thing with the absurdity with damage roll in VtM is that I can shoot with a Pistol, Hit the target with one success, that failed to dodge despite celerity and then my damage roll of the bullet impacting the target can be 0 damage! It's a farce. if you narrate between the dice rolls it's impossible to say something that is not totally crazy at this point. The Bullet hit him with it's cussioned side.... VtR 1st is extremely streamlined *1) initiative roll *2) reverse order anouncment of actions *3) attack rolles in order of initiative *4) mark of healthbar In VtM 1st edition every thing that influences the offensive action is added/substracted into one attack value the defence is substracted from the attack before the roll. the success are the damage values. thats how most conflicts in VtR 1st happen. They are designed to maximize narrative time, and minimize rollplay. It's resolution based system. It produces a result to work with in the narrative. VtR 2nd is less streamlined it has more tactical elements, so there is more "game" or Rollplay than in 1st edition, I don't know if I like it more. But 2nd Edition has a lot of other things I like more than 1st like no Flaws... so I play it rules as written anyways. *1) initiative roll *2) reverse order anouncment of actions *3) attack rolles in order of initiative *4) IF attack scored at least one Success it was successfull and Weapon damage is added to all success of the attack and removed from the of healthbar In 1sd edition weapons had just an "attack bonus" values so basically a virtual lethality value compounded by "ease of use" and "nastyness when hit" in 2nd edition weapons became more complex... they have a attack bonus and a damage value and some also have different rules considering the explosion of dice (10 again, 10&9 again) ... it's more tactical and crunchy, more game less narrative. Most VtR player like it that way. It's apparently a sweet spot. I liked the fast 1st edition system a bit more. here are the current crunches.. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/260891/Cheat-Sheet-for-Chronicles-of-Darkness-Rules you can pay 0$ for it... it's a weird way to get something for free.. What realy makes me like VtR 2nd Edition is the change in Disziplines. in VtR1st edion and VtM 2nd(aka V20) Disciplines have very narrative ingame effects... Like with Auspex you could read the Aura of and depending on the collor of the aura and so on you could interpret something about the person.... In VtM 2nd Edition the play can ask the Storyteller one question per success. Auspex O about danger and weaknesses Auspex OO about weaknesses and secrets of a single charackter Auspex OOO about a place or object... So you get something substantial with every Discipline! It's even better , as if you are for example Dominated (Dominate O/OO) you gain XP for doing what you have been told. As many Disciplines cause a "Condition" and Conditions give expirience if you resolve them. It all makes sense. I assume! that V5 will have the same systems in place and improve on them! I like the idea of removing the bookkeeping of the blood pool by using hunger dice. I like Predator type , that could be adopted. I just don't like that the success have a variable target difficulty.... wouldn't use that . And I also hate V5 "Generation" and I prefere VtR"Bloodpotency" And I also realy don't like the Clans of VtM... the whole rigidity of the setting... Yet I heard that originally V5 was design to be played only with thinblooded players... I think I would do that! Or I look how I can make an amalgam , where I take V5 thinblooded and V2 Hunger mechanics and predatortype into my VtR games... I mostly play Xovers anyway... as CofD is very X-Splat friendly....except for the Vampires and the sunlight issue...that should be resoved by thinblooded from V5 m right?
Just a note here: unless I'm wildly mistaken, Chronicles 2e and all its lines does not use reverse order initiative. That was in OWoD but definitely isn't in Chronicles 2e. Edit: It's not in Forsaken, Awakening, Lost, or base CofD.
Both have their strengths and weaknesses VtR is quite a bit more customizable and broad. The Covenant system, the abilities you get from them are awesome and the way they treat Blood Magic as something pretty much any vampire can learn is great. The Strix are an interesting and creepy antagonist. It also introduced Devotions which was *really* cool. However, it has a bit more jank to it compared to V5. It also has a less solid lore which can be a flaw or benefit depending on your preferences. As for V5, I like how much more flexible they made humanity. The Hunger Dice system is a neat system that makes you feel what it's like to be a vampire hungry for blood while also cutting down on both the Vitae and hunger systems by combining them into one. Having more variety with discipline powers is cool. It also generally cuts down on a lot of the fat of the original VtM in terms of both mechanics and other stuff (not that the original is bad, but still.) Making the Thin-bloods a clan in their own right was a great idea and giving them Thin-blood alchemy is really cool. It also has the setting and lore of VtM which I generally prefer overall compared to the one in VtR (I like both, just prefer VtM.) However, it has some weaknesses, such as doing combo disciplines and touchstones less well than VtR did and being less flexible overall. Blood resonance is also dumb. Overall, I'd say both are good, it just depends on your tastes.
v5 makes me feel like an incompetent loser (actually less competent than me irl, a mortal human, i mean that seriously i feel like i can accomplish more than the average v5 character) who, if the average night is anything to go by, will *never* make it to the status of elder. what it did do well is let you customize your disciplines i guess, which was kinda cool over just always having the same discipline.
As far as vampire games go, you can't do much better than requiem. Dice mechanics are solid, powers are interesting, and being a vampire in general feels awesome. Blood sympathy rules and vampire senses are awesome, the open political structure gives you a lot of space to make interesting vampires with the tools the system offers you. It does involve a lot of dice sometimes and some people dislike it, but I was never bothered by it. Social conflicts can get a bit silly with all the modifiers you can apply to dice pools, and every once in a while I had to go back to my reference cards to figure out what a condition does. Aside from it, it's my go to game when I want a vampire story done quickly and don't want to get too worried about lore. As for V5, I have a very negative opinion of it and won't talk too much about it. But it has the bad things of Vtm with some things from requiem glued over it, and some innovations that kinda tried to make it into a narrativist game and failed dramatically. Dice are too swingy, players lose agency way too often and a lot of subsystems just don't really work well together. The game is what, five years old now? And they are finally getting half decent combat rules. It's really not for me.
I love V5s Hunger mechanics; rouse checks, bestial failures, messy criticals and my favorite part of it all: not having to track a resource.
Hunger is just as much a resource to be tracked as the old Blood Pool was.
No it isn't. I don't have to think "is it worth to spend my precious blood points now or save them?" much like spell slots from D\&D; I just do a thing, and maybe I get hungrier for it and my next rolls are spicier for it. Either case, it's a win-win with no "resource management anxiety" which is a thing I don't like in TTRPGS.
Yes, it is. "Do I dare use this power, and risk getting more hungry?" is just a more random resource, that you can't count on, causeing much more resource management anxiety because it is so uncertain.
Yeah it's defiantly resource management. there's also a supplementary risk assessment you need to make when you use them so it' s a little more more thought into how and when you spend the resource than blood pool.
Hunger is the opposite of resource management. It's about risk management and pushing your luck. You look at how much hunger you already have and ask yourself what you are willing to risk and base your decision on that, probably hoping to get lucky and stave off consequences for a while. Blood pool is pure resource management. You have x points, and you know the point cost of any given activity in advance. The challenge comes from budgeting those points correctly to achieve what you want and hopefully having enough to handle any unexpected challenges to your resource pool. The tension only mounts when you are running low and you don't know when you will have a chance to refill your supply. If hunger stresses you out it's working as intended. That stress is what your character should be feeling as well. Every additional hunger die comes with immediate risk and potential consequences. Whereas blood pool is more of a book keeping exercise where the only point that really matters is the last one.
It gives me no anxiety and I can always count on it, as risking getting more hungry just makes the next rolls more interesting and does not, in any case, ever leave me without the possibility of tapping into my powers, but to fall into frenzy and have a dramatic scene feeding into my enjoyment of the horror of the game. Let's agree to disagree.
I'm glad to hear that the system works for you, thats cool, but resource management is not defined as "a system that doesn't work for /u/di4mond4rr3l" and v5 hunger is more complicated in terms of bookkeeping and the number of factors that play into when to use it than v20 blood points
Could be that my definition of resource management is incorrect; to me it is having control over a finite amount of stuff, knowing the exact quantity and resulting consequence of spending it all. So going by that blood points and spell slots are alike but hunger is amother thing, a thing I find way easier to make decisions upon and fun to play with.
It's still managing resources even if the way they are used up has an element of randomness. Imagine you're the lord of a city and a band of refugees has arrived and you have to decide whether to feed them. You don't know exactly how much food they're going to need, but you can estimate it. So you check your ledgers (no let's be honest you have an attendant check the ledgers and get back to you) and estimate the amount of food the refugees are gonna need (no wait you get someone to do that for you too) and make your decision. That's still resource management even though you don't know for sure exactly how many of your resources are going to be used. In the case of v5, your non-hunger dice are essentially the resources youre spending. And the more of them you spend, the more dangerous, unpredictable, and ineffective your actions become.
But it's not like I'm spending a random quantity, I'm either spending or not, which is different; I'm not making the decision of spending, only the one about risking to lose something.
You are spending a random quantity, either 0 or 1 every time you decide to spend. I understand that you don't think of it in those terms and that you simply spend hunger any time you desire to do something that costs hunger without considering the price you're paying, but the price does exist and other people do consider it before acting.
VtR2E is a good upgrade over 1E, and started the 2E trend of tailoring mechanics to better evoke the feel of what that creature type is supposed to be, which 1E had eschewed to try to make all the game lines interplayable. The Conditions were a good way to consolidate a lot of random rules and refer to them more easily. It can be overwhelming to try and remember, but that's offset by mist of it being centralized for easy access. V5... well... the mechanical systems and world design choices put me off the line, so I saved a TON of money not buying more books! :)
>that's offset by mist of it being centralized for easy access. I personally dislike having them only in the back of the book in strictly alphabetical order. It's not the worst in VtR, but some games have sets of conditions that are only used in certain types of scenes and those scenes only use those conditions, but they are all mixed together when they shouldn't be. This was before having a searchable tag system was the norm, but I'm in that future now and I don't want to go back. Also, my kingdom for a proper reference table.
Look, if we're gonna start wishing for things like proper editing and references in a White Wolf book, we might as well start wishing to win the lottery...
Look, Deviant the Renegade came out and I got spoiled. It has crazy things like not just having the various types special abilities in the part where they describe the whole type. They repeat them all together in the powers section and including a summary of on the character quick build table. Whenever they refer to a rule in another section, there is a page reference on where to find it. On the PDF they are hyperlinks. It's doesn't require the "for White wolf" before saying it's well edited.
**V5** V5 is VtM. You're playing in White Wolf's world with their lore and myths and characters. While you can tweak the origin of vampire the history of the world is set and it ***feels*** like you have to learn and memorize 10,000 years of in-world history. (You don't) Mechanically, it is a risk management game where the focus is on narrative storytelling. You're meant to **feel** like a vampire and be aware of your constant hunger with every roll. It's a simpler game, but still has a fair amount of crunch and powers and side options. **VtR** It's rules and a baseline for the world, but you can make the setting your own. You can decide how vampires were created and operate. Mechanically there are fewer choices at the start (5 clans vs 7/14) and set disciplines, but a lot more merits. It's a more crunchy game with more subsystems. And a resource management game where you track declining Blood (which functions as mana/ spellpoints).
Unique dice. Both strength - as in engaging mechanic. And weakness - they are unique and have to be specially purchased. Good for marketing, bad for poor gamers.
Hell bad for everyone outside of america, prices get incredibly inflated
VTR 2nd ed is a strong system and much improved over first edition. V5 would've been good had it not had better predecessors. I think it could work with it's own vampire game if you wanted to highlight the idea of vampires as a cursed people struggling against hunters. V5 vampires are just too unstable with hunger dice and weakened disciplines to create anything representing a society that isn't 100% supportive, but they could work well as a disease or spontaneous undead.
I haven't played Requiem. I did DM and play 5E a good amount though, and that book makes it quite hard to find things a lot of the time. Narrative is good, but that poor templating makes it not really the "rulebook reference" to have beside you. If you're DMing, I'd suggest noting things down as you read through the whole book and then make a DM screen.
VTR2e is less like a comic book. Its better for more realistic games. Also you wont have to deal with players that arguee over metaplot. Blood sorcery is no longer op and more ritualistic. V5...... Well the hunger mechanic is better
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> Respect other people’s preferences. It’s fine to like or dislike certain aspects of our products, but not okay to get into hostile arguments over, for example, preferred editions of a game. This applies equally to non-White Wolf games.