Okay, so let’s go back through some of the feedback, both here and in the White Wolf forums.
Fangs glow in the dark? +3 dice to Academics pools. You can read books better with glowing fangs. Okay, maybe this is an absurd example.
With the return of Vampire in the V20 format, we’ve noticed some distinct patterns. You guys like your Masquerade setting. That’s awesome.
When I originally assembled the V20 Companion outline, I did it with an eye toward “cleaning up systems” without revising them so that they didn’t resemble the originals. Part of this included merging the setting material with the systems material. And, in draft one of the titles chapter, that’s what I presented.
But your feedback suggests that you want less emphasis on the system and more emphasis on the setting. Specifically, many of you have called out the systems as incongruous, detrimental to immersion in their function, and an intrusion upon the Kindred social structures that were previously dealt with in terms of vampire-to-vampire interaction. Here’s some of the indicative commentary:
DRAKE NOBLE: I absolutely love the idea of quantifying what it is that you get as a result of your title with mechanics… but the mechanics being anything other than purely social/political seems very odd to me.
KYOROU: What he said, plus V20 doesn’t need to become like D&D or Dark Heresy, where your character suddenly becomes able to perform physical feats he couldn’t before just because he got a promotion.
GREGOR S.: Some titles don’t seem to fit into the table you have for making their effects. For ones like Prince, that’s fine. For ones like Mystic, it’s rather confusing and not a good comparison for what baseline effect a title should have.
So we’ve taken this feedback to heart and here’s the proposal Eddy, Rich, and I hashed out this morning. First off, I’m going to devote more word count to a wider selection of titles as well as some additional info on the sects, the better to give context to the title descriptions. I’m going to rework some of the anomalous non-social systems from the titles and reconstruct them to be purely social functions. For example, Mystic provided a very abstract benefit that seemed to function arbitrarily — the mechanics of the game changed when enough people thought you were a Mystic, as opposed to reflecting how other vampires’ reactions to you would have changed. While that sort of consensual reality might have a place in Mage, it really stood out as inappropriate to Vampire.
As well, I’m going to add some of the opened-up word count to the locations chapter, because we’ve received so many suggestions for additional places that are just as iconic or more so than the ones already in the locations chapter. Finally, I’m going to move the variant Disciplines chapter to a later book, to free up that much more word count. (I thought about moving the systems info to an “optional” section with variants, too, but that seems like it will cause more controversy. Since it would be in print, some players would claim a right to it, but since it’s optional, not all Storytellers will want it, so I’d rather not provoke those arguments.)
You have spoken. We have listened. I understand that not everyone will agree with this decision, but it does seem to be the predominant trend among cWoD feedback, particularly as we’ve shared the content from this book. Your impressions?
My personal impression? That all of you, developers listen, and respect, the opinions of the devoted fans of VTM. And this is quite awesome, mostly because I´m sure it mus be hard to work with and manage all this feedback in open development.
Yes, I believe VTM fans have a special crush on the setting. So I agree with all the changes: more depictions of the sects and locations will be more welcomed, at least for me, than disciplines and extra rules.
I think V20 Companion needs more burritos.
Yes, the Disciplines go well with the guack-a-mole.
I like it. I do hope that most of the focus of the sects is not on the Camarilla, Sabbat and/or Anarch we’ve had tons of this information in the past. I’d really like to see more information on the subsects of these, or the small sects not associated with any of these.
Like with Cam/Sabbat, Archons and Tempars was a good book, but it still left a lot of things unclear about the Justicars (and up), same for Archbishops (and up) for the Sabbat. It would also be nice to get a little more information on the Warlord of the Camarilla, how did Karsh get that title? Is there only one? What’s the deal with his underlings, do they have a special title and role in the Camarilla?
With the non-Camarilla/Sabbat, I said this in the Titles doc, but I’d really like to see more information on the Tal’mahe’Ra, since both of the books that talked about it were clearly aimed at the Sabbat Black Hand, and so the Tal’mahe’Ra just seemed to have gotten an honorable mention. Like, “Oh yeah, the Sabbat Black Hand takes it’s name for this group that nobody really knows anything about… but THEY’RE SCARY!!” then went on to talk more about the Sabbat Hand. Caine’s Chosen was much worse about this than Dirty Secrets; the main problem with Dirty Secrets is you just didn’t know if the book was reffering to the “True Hand” or the “False Hand,” it seemed at times that they were the exact same group.
I’d also like to see more information on the Inconnu. We have a rather robust list of members in Children of the Night, with at least one being mentioned in most of the City by Night books, and then Lair of the Hidden. But none of these sorces give us any indication of what the inconnu is, how is it organized (is it organized?), how does one join, anything. At this point all we know about the group is that they’re spread all around the world, they are mostly very old and powerful, most seek Golconda. But that’s it…
The only sect (or subsect, or whatever you might call them) that has intrigued me more than the Inconnu has been the Tal’mahe’Ra, so I’ve been sorely disappointed in the past by a total lack of information on the Inconnu and the lackluster information we’ve gotten on the Tal’mahe’Ra (though we’ve gotten awesome information on the “False Hand”).
OK…yeah….that turned out to be more rambly than I wanted, but those are my initial thoughts on this idea.
Thank You!
VTM is all about the setting.
That all sounds good. I’m not saying that systems aren’t important, but I doubt that they’re the reason you sell books. They certainly aren’t the reason you sell books to me personally.
If you want enough bells and whistles to give a Cray supercomputer a migraine, D20 is the way to go. But for help in actually roleplaying a character with a given title, the “induction lecture” given by Navarrese in Archons and Templars is a far more useful model. That section of the book was a minor masterpiece – it was a well-written and enjoyable short fiction piece, but it was stuffed to the gills with usable setting information.
There was nothing actually _wrong_ with the crunchy mechanics for the various titles, but most players and storytellers could improvise those for themselves, using basic traits like Charisma, Manipulation, Status or whatever. Navarrese’ lecture was about what it actually _means_ to be a Templar – what does the job involve, what are the challenges, what are the pitfalls? Obviously you can’t go into that level of detail for all the titles in the Companion, but I hope you to go in that direction.
“I’m going to move the variant Disciplines chapter to a later book”?? Presumably as part of the “Onyx Path” you’ve been hinting at? Is that going to be purely modern-day, or is there any chance that the DA lines might see a revival?
I think that’s a good choice, this game is almost 70% setting, the rules are made to be adapted…
by the way, for the “Status” background I use a 2-line-10-dots-each system, with the first line relevant to the interaction and the second like a sort of “temp status” (10 dot on the 2nd line = 1 dot on the 1st line), this way I can give some Status for prestigious actions of my player (like surviving a Sabbat Siege as a War Coterie) without having to raise ‘em necessarily to Ancillae or Elders-level status
I really like the set of titles that appeared, but I think that making them more firmly placed into the setting will help a lot. The V20 book is lovely, but it feels a little heavier on rules (for clans, sects, Disciplines and systems, so not all ‘crunchy’ stuff) than it is on setting.
Also, I do hope that there will be some discussion of titles for the Independent Clans. I’m not asking for a whole lot of info (as I stated in the chapter thread), but something about how titles work among the Setites, the Giovanni, the Assamites and the Ravnos would be a really excellent addition.
I very much like the idea of Titles having a system effect. So much I’m thinking of porting this idea directly into my Requiem campaign. How the bonuses will look and function I’m not sure of right now but that will work itself out.
For me (<– NB!) it does not break system of disbelief one bit that some of them actually have a physical effect on your character, but I'm rather game-y in my approach to RPGs and game systems. The bulk of them, as it should be, are social in nature but I guess there's only so many situational bonus dice or lowering of difficulty you can think of really?
Some ideas to get crunch but perhaps not get the same physical effects is to make some Backgrounds cheaper to purchase, they bestow some Merit upon the character with the Title, cost break on skills (or whatever the general name is, say Occult of Mystic) and so on.
Good work with the Titels Justin! I like them a lot!
Cog.
This is actually notable. We’ve seen that, on the whole, Requiem players are much more interested in the systems integrity and balance, while the Masquerade players are much more interested in the setting material. It’s something we saw firsthand at Grand Masquerade this year, and since it became a sort of defining characteristic, we’ve watched it and seen it corroborated in other places (like this
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Thanks for the feedback — it will certainly inform how we continue to develop the books, and it may open another, supplemental avenue of book content, such as translation guides between the two games for the new material.
Masquerade _has_ more setting material. It has two complete clan novel series, two game lines (DA, Victorian Age) to give it historic context, “bridging” chronicles (Giovanni, Transylvania, Ventrue) to link between them, and a large amount of additional published fiction going back to the early 90s. Ancient Mysteries/Bloodlines were superb, but they couldn’t make up that “context deficit” by themselves. I suspect that if you hired people like Greg Stolze, Myranda Kalis, Sarah Roark, and Janet Trautvetter to do more pure fiction and setting background, you’d see that difference between the player groups disappear. Sad fanboys with no lives, who enjoy debating whether Saulot or Ashur sired the Baali, just find more to sink our… er, their… teeth into in Masquerade.
2 things:
I was just at the white-wolf.com site and there’s still a big link there to the open development page for the V20 sourcebook at vampirethemasquerade.com. I had heard there were technical issues with that site. Whatever. Since you want fans to have input into this open development shouldn’t the white-wolf.com page be changed so that there’s a link to whitewolfblogs.com/v20companion?
Second, thumbs up to the switch to settings first. Good!
Great news. Thanks for not only allowing us input on the micro-level, but even have a voice on the structure of the book! I’m very impressed with the willingness of WW to listen to us this closely. Thanks!
As for opening up space for the locations, I’m heading over the open dev page for that section right now to add some ideas I had that I didn’t mention due to Justin’s statement that new locations were not an option.
I’m glad to hear you guys are adding more locations!
I hope to see the Black Monastery and perhaps a greater write-up on the Weeping Stone as well.
I am a huge fan of the Black Monastery, as well. I just wanted to point that out…
Lots of feedback suggests that people are into the Black Monastery. I’ve added it to the living draft work.
Woot!
What I found most odd was the references to Enoch and the Underworld locale of the Tal’Mahe’Ra in the titles chapter.
Monitor was fine – the Inconnu never had a definitive writeup, besides the sect as a whole being interested in Golconda and staying out of the Jyhad – as a title without a great deal of description. The True Black Hand had a rather infamous book accorded to them, and a few paragraphs in V20; while you could glean a bit of their structure from the titles, it was harder to get a sense of the goals, power and aims of the sect. It felt like detailed information for a structure barely glimpsed, like jigsaw pieces put together when you don’t know where the corners of the puzzle are.
As for a new site (crossposted from the locations article):
Have you seen this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuchin_catacombs_of_Palermo
Since 1599 the monks use this as a burial ground for mummies. The catacombs serve to mummify the bodies. It’s in Italy. And called Capuchin catacombs. Something for the Giovanni, the Cappadocians. Maybe even the Capuchin from the Giovanni Chronicles.
Yo soy Chileno, crecí con Vampire the Masquerade, esto me hiso como soy, tengo tatuado el logo de Vampire: the Requiem, ya soy parte de la oscuridad del mundo que crearon y soy feliz, espero que no paren, y por ultimo, prefiero las cosas como eran antes con Vampire the Masquerade.
I love that fucking world
Put the personal back into personal horror! Let this be the ruling metaplot and develop the rules from this starting point.
Turn the characters’ character – not their beliefs (as in a Mage game), but their fears and hunger – into the compass of the game.
Nature and Demeanor RULES!
P.S. You could call some crazy batshit like Greg (and myself) to grapple the mechanics of this.