Werewolf and WoD

[thexar]

I have never been able to figure out how to run a WoD game. We tried Hunter. Once. Not knowing what werewolves were like, I flipped through the antagonists section, and threw one down on a party of 5 PCs. I think it was a TPK in 3 turns. While I was staring at the book trying to figure out if I cheated - the group shredded their characters, and pulled D&D back out. "No more of that." The Hunter video games, while fun, don't help, except to reinforce the idea that you don't fight werewolves (you use a rocket launcher to knock it back while guiding it to the vampire, because you can't kill that thing either). While loads of fun as a video game, that's not going to be interesting at the table top.

Exalted wasn't difficult to figure out for a D&D group. You start with a basic D&D like quest line, and we soon begin to get the feel of how to escalate things to an Exalted level of play.

So what does a party of 4 to 6 werewolves ... do?

 

[Nagol]

Inter-pack rivalries mostly though they also deal with other forms of supernatural threat. Not vampires typically, because a typical werewolf shreds a typical vampire (there are a few exceptions based on specific powers) in a couple of rounds. oWoD games aren't particularly well balanced against one another.

 

[PMárk]

Mostly agree with the article, especially with the part about the rules. I think nowadays, with all the super rules-light narrative games on the palette some people, who prefer those (or NWod/CofD) tend to oversell how crunchy WoD is. It really isn't, it's medium-crunch at best.

Also, while I like the WtA background, I'd want a "traditional" werewolf game too. however, I understand why they did it this way, it would had too much similarity in themes with Vampire if licanthropy would been an affliction.

I might add it's a bit funny how you wrote about your preferences changing, due to the fiction you read and shows watched, because the whole urban fantasy genre was based on WoD in a big way. As far as I'm know WoD was the first modern horror/fantasy setting where a lot of different kind of supernaturals were running around, doing things, politicking, etc. Also, a lot of the writers were played it back in the day and "integrated" fairly obvious parts into their writing.

Anyway, I believe those games are still relevant today, the 20ths are quite good (although not my favorite edition visually) and we shall see how the new editions will turn out, I hope for the best!

 

[Tony Vargas]

I have never been able to figure out how to run a WoD game.

Ironically, not all that differently than you might run an early D&D game: just make stuff up. The rules are borked so just use rolling those hand-fulls of dice as a placebo to keep the players engaged and describe what happens.
It really was almost literally 'Storytelling.'

So what does a party of 4 to 6 werewolves ... do?

Hunt nexus crawlers (seriously, there are critters in W:tA that can not only challenge, but annihilate a pack of werewolves).

Actually, when I ran WoD it was a Werewolf/Mage crossover, so it got pretty weird. Between 'sense wyrm' and all the extrasensory perceptions mages got with even 1 dot in a sphere, plot hooks were dead easy. Someone just notices something. That building is black and creepy in the umbra. The person you're talking to is actually a ghost. The police officers that drove past you reek of the wyrm. The patients leaving that clinic have much less life-energy than they did going in. That character on the TV screen is a co-located nephandic spirit... (At one point they raided a technocracy construct called Network 6 and killed Barney. The Network sent color-coded fomori 'rangers' after them to exact vengeance. They fled to Pangea where they recruited dinosaur-spirits to help them fight their pursuers. That was probably peak campiness for that campaign.)

There were entwined story arcs, Destinies, umbral quests, True Love, technocracy plots, Pentex plots (not always that easy to tell 'em apart), Evil Twins, Malpheans, Nephandi, Black Spiral Dancers, Marauders, but I stopped short of actual time travel (though a botched umbral jaunt dropped them into a re-play of the fall of the White Howlers).

Anyway, it went for years, concluding with the Apocalypse. (And there was a little mini-campaign coda set 20 years in the future... ...said future, depressingly, is only 3 years away, now.)