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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ondath" data-source="post: 8657149" data-attributes="member: 7031770">My brush with WoD is fairly limited, but I'd consider myself a fan of the setting. I played a few games in a friend's Vampire the Masquerade 20th Annivesary Edition game (that never went beyond 3-4 games, despite two different groups but alas), I tried STing a Mage the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition game (that game also didn't go anywhere after 2-3 games) and I read a few sourcebooks from earlier oWoD editions and Changeling: the Dreaming. I find the writing to be counterproductive to what the games are trying to do, it's too much purple prose and really unclear (especially Mage's rules). Unlike the poster above, what dragged me to oWoD first (and what I still like) was the high-concept, postmodernist "clashing metanarratives define the world" aspect of Mage 20. I like any game of "philosophers with clubs" where people try to enforce their ideology of the world to each other (also why I love Planescape), and I think all of the Traditions (and most of the Technocracy) presented their own worldview in really interesting ways (the Disparate Crafts are... a different story. Then again, WoD never did cultural representation of different ethnicities well). I think there is a lot of potential for interesting stories, from small-scale tales of living in a world where magic is dying to large-scale metaplots that can be thinly-veiled metaphors for the monolithic ideology we currently live in devouring everything else.The system itself, on the other hand, is a mess. The freeform magic system is pretty good, and I still wish there were more systems that adopted a similar system of spheres and dots for increasing difficulty. The rest of the system, from its combat rules to needlessly complicated casting difficulty adjustments to the completely inane layout of the books (I still don't know where the weapons and armour are in the M20 book), as well as the min-max encouragement Quirks and Flaws inadvertantly provide, make it really difficult to run a game well. The setting would definitely be better suited with a modern narrativist system such as Cortex Prime or Powered by the Apocalypse (which isn't surprising since narrativist games were spurned by discussions on why WoD failed to deliver its premise).As for the edition to recommend, I'd say the 20th anniversary editions are the gold standard if you want the pure WoD experience. Vampire's 20th anniversary edition is especially well edited, and even if you were running other splats (such as Mage), I'd recommend referring to Vampire's rules for common things like basic action resolution, combat and weapons, since Mage is just terrible in where it places things (Satyros Brucato having a needlessly verbose style in how he writes and edits probably doesn't help). Otherwise, I've seen famous streamers in my country run pretty succesful Vampire games on FATE, and like I said, making a PbtA or Cortex Prime conversion shouldn't be too difficult.</blockquote>

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