What do you think about The World of Darkness

[AK81]

What do you think about the world of darkness? Which version do you like the best and why?

 

[Rogerd1]

I prefer Hunter the Vigil over everything else, plus you can add on God Machine, Inferno and a few others to get a coherent game.

 

[Ulfgeir]

Haven't played that many of their games.

There some things they did right in Vampire: the Masquerade 5e vs earlier editions imo (I have played 1e as well), and that is that they managed to make it a vit more scary- But on the other hand the rules system is fiddly as hell, and the way the rules are written, well I doubt the masquerade would last 1 month in gametime.. 1e suffered from the rules not matching the setting-text at all.

I have also played a character from Changeling : the Dreaming 2e, but the magic system did not fit the game at all.

Then played Mage: the Awakening 2e. That one I do like. The best of the WoD-games imo.

Not sure if Scion 2e: should be counted in here as well, but if so, then very nice game, though the rules are not that well written. Heard that they rewrote them halfway through, and that they are more clear in Trinity?().

 

[James Gasik]

I encountered the World of Darkness after 2nd edition AD&D stopped being fun in the 90's. It was this deep, rich setting full of lore and mysteries, and I found it tragically cool.

The rules were utter garbage, of course, and I've never encountered a more frustrating, poorly written game in my life (I could debate Fantasy Craft, but that game's problem had more to do with terrible formatting than the rules themselves being arcane- for the most part).

The different Clans of vampires were cool, even if some of their concepts were...built on shaky ground ("We're the vampires from Bram Stoker's Dracula!" "We're the vampires from Nosferatu!" "We're Set-worshippers from the Hyborian Age!" "We're a bad take on Muslims/Romani!" "We're werewolves in every way but werewolves are also a thing!" "We're vampires that like art!" "We're vampires that like money!" "We're vampires that are CRAZY!").

The core Clans mostly share powers, which is neat, but hit the splatbooks, and everyone has a unique power that you can't have unless you belong to that group.

Despite using the same rules as a base, crossovers were a bloody mess (pun intended), when a starting vampire has three weak powers and a starting werewolf can turn into a wolf man and double their strength and deal unsoakable damage to anything that moves!

Then of course, even though everyone is supernatural, they create "magicians" who have every conceivable magic spell and can break the game in half.

Then, suddenly, they turned around and said "all that lore? Forget it! All those mysteries? Here's the answers! Oh and the world is ending!"

All to sell us a new game, suspiciously like the old game, but different for reasons. I'm sure that sounds familiar!

If you want to try it, I'd seek out the 20th Anniversary editions. The rules are still a bit...obscure...but it really captures the best parts of the original setting.

The 5th edition tries to insist that vampires are actually weak, have to worry about cops and drug dealers, find that using their powers suddenly makes them unable to use their powers, but still has ancient vampires running everything behind the scenes.

I mean, if you're playing a game about vampires, you should at least feel like you're more powerful than the Scooby Doo gang, but that's just my opinion.

 

[Gnosistika]

I started playing WoD with Mage the Ascension 1e, but I vastly prefer Chronicles of Darkness gamelines over classic World of Darkness. Ascension will always be the game that changed my life, but I have little to no interest in the 90's esthetics, angst and edge.

Awakening 2e, Vigil 2e and Lost 2e are my favourite gamelines by far. I never liked Masquerade at all, Requiem on the other hand is a thoroughly engaging game, along with Geist, Forsaken and Descent.

*Adding: The CofD system is far better than the classic WoD system.

 

[Yora]

World of Darkness is a setting that started out with a complelling premise, but might be one of the prime examples of campaign settings getting suffocated by an avalanche of lore and hype.
I'm mostly familiar with Vampire, but that game went so far overboard with more and more lore for increasing numbers of clans and bloodlines that its original concept got just completely burried by it. Vampire was supposed to be a game about alienation and hanging on to your humanity, knowing that all you can look forward to is losing all that mattered to you and eventually turning into a monster that will destroy what is still left. But then it became this world where there's hundreds of vampires, all involved in clan politics, instead of dealing with isolation and the only people who can understand you being horrible bastards that you despise. And the horrors of eternity won't matter, because everyone will be killed in a year or two anyway.

I think just nine clans, with Gehenna being a doomsday cult that few take serious, is the way to go. And only vampires, with werewolves being the very rare and rarely seen boogymen of the vampire world.

 

[AK81]

I prefer Hunter the Vigil over everything else, plus you can add on God Machine, Inferno and a few others to get a coherent game.

Can you tell me a bit more about Hunter the Vigil? I really like the idea of normal humans hunting down the monsters of the night.

 

[aramis erak]

What do you think about the world of darkness? Which version do you like the best and why?

mechanically, VTM 1E. Mechanics suck for VTM itself, but the Diff 10 "issue" isn't really an issue; once you hit specialization, in spec, 10's open end, so 1's are slightly less frequent,
Setting wise? definitely 1E of oWoD... mostly because I never got into later eds... I did buy VDA, and tried to run it, but player minimal interest killed that.

 

[AK81]

I encountered the World of Darkness after 2nd edition AD&D stopped being fun in the 90's. It was this deep, rich setting full of lore and mysteries, and I found it tragically cool.

The rules were utter garbage, of course, and I've never encountered a more frustrating, poorly written game in my life (I could debate Fantasy Craft, but that game's problem had more to do with terrible formatting than the rules themselves being arcane- for the most part).

The different Clans of vampires were cool, even if some of their concepts were...built on shaky ground ("We're the vampires from Bram Stoker's Dracula!" "We're the vampires from Nosferatu!" "We're Set-worshippers from the Hyborian Age!" "We're a bad take on Muslims/Romani!" "We're werewolves in every way but werewolves are also a thing!" "We're vampires that like art!" "We're vampires that like money!" "We're vampires that are CRAZY!").

The core Clans mostly share powers, which is neat, but hit the splatbooks, and everyone has a unique power that you can't have unless you belong to that group.

Despite using the same rules as a base, crossovers were a bloody mess (pun intended), when a starting vampire has three weak powers and a starting werewolf can turn into a wolf man and double their strength and deal unsoakable damage to anything that moves!

Then of course, even though everyone is supernatural, they create "magicians" who have every conceivable magic spell and can break the game in half.

Then, suddenly, they turned around and said "all that lore? Forget it! All those mysteries? Here's the answers! Oh and the world is ending!"

All to sell us a new game, suspiciously like the old game, but different for reasons. I'm sure that sounds familiar!

If you want to try it, I'd seek out the 20th Anniversary editions. The rules are still a bit...obscure...but it really captures the best parts of the original setting.

The 5th edition tries to insist that vampires are actually weak, have to worry about cops and drug dealers, find that using their powers suddenly makes them unable to use their powers, but still has ancient vampires running everything behind the scenes.

I mean, if you're playing a game about vampires, you should at least feel like you're more powerful than the Scooby Doo gang, but that's just my opinion.

I really like the lore too, that's what draws me to the world of darkness. But I'm unsure of which game system is best. I can fit the game lore into any of the "3" systems, V20, V5 or CoD. I just need to find out which system is the best made.

 

[jdrakeh]

What do you think about the world of darkness? Which version do you like the best and why?

That's a complicated question. Lore-wise, I liked the OWoD better, with Vampire: The Dark Ages (1996), Werewolf: The Wild West (1997), and Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade (1998) being standout favorites. Mechanically, I felt that the NWoD was an improvement in almost every conceivable way.

[Edit: I forgot to mention Orpheus because, despite it officially being a OWoD game, it's sooooo different than anything else in the OWoD. It's a standalone campaign, really, meant to be played from start to finish as a singular epic story. And it rocks.]