Explain Old World of Darkness to Me

[hiryuu]

Throwing a stake half a mile through a concrete wall isn't a thing that happens either.

You're right. It's much more likely that you'll turn off all a vampire's disciplines no matter how old it is for hours (Oh, Rank 3 Judgement, you so crazy).

[Morty]

Well, not all disciplines. Only those that require it to spend Vitae. But yes, the power level of Hunter Edges is all over the place. Some are so weak you might as well not bother and others are crazily powerful.

[awa]

wow world of darkness not being balanced i mean how could that happen.

[SiderealDreams]

I identify as a fan of the New World of Darkness line. I love Changeling: the Lost with a rabid passion, and have a soft spot for the other games as well.

Recently, I picked up a few books from the Old World of Darkness line. They are kind of thick and intimidating, and before diving in, I would like to know a bit about what to expect. What is the Old World of Darkness like? How is it different from its successor?

To try to tack to a more neutral tone than some stuff posted I'll toss in my 2 bits.

A lot of the New World of Darkness, beyond being set with a strong emphasis on returning to classic gothic narrative tone is defined by both the post millenial era and less as a world that is darker, more run down,terrible,etc than the real world and more a world of "The supernatural is real!" Then running to all the crazy places the collective mythology of humanity has to offer.

In contrast the Old World of Darkness declared itself built on two basic pillars in theme. The one it shares with the NWoD is the Gothic overtones. Due to a lot of factors those Gothic overtones played a bit more gonzo than it tends to in NWoD but it was there never the less. The other that the NWoD doesn't share is Punk. Particularly all that the real world 70's, 80's and part of the 90's defined and surrounded that term with. OWoD had all the same occult realities like NWoD and every other game that shares that genre has but also infused it with the idea that the world was a dirtier, more run down, terrible place all heading towards some sort of reckoning. Whether it be Eternal Winter, Gehenna, an animistic Ragnarok, universal Ascension or Descent,etc. Like the NWoD the game lines played in their own world but had a shared base in the "World of Darkness." The CWoD lines however trended ultimately to being more far afield from each other than NWoD does. Mechanically each shared the Storyteller system of the time but diverged widely after that. No such thing as Power Stats among major splats, all having morality traits,etc. Metaphysically they differed widely as well. To put it the way one writer put it and I paraphrase here. "You could add werewolves to a Vampire:the Masquerade game. You could have those werewolves call themselves Garou, have them be in tribes and have one call themselves the Silent Striders. But it still wouldn't be the same thing as them being the Silent Striders from Werewolf:the Apocalypse."

As others have said you could for the purpose of internal consistency in your games work out a cosmology for a crossover game with some work but by default they tended to work with each other only so much and were designed with independence in mind. As mention power levels were generally higher than NWoD, aggravated damage sources were plentiful and the scope of the game world as a whole tended to default on a wider scale than NWoD's more intimate tone.

As for the metaplot. Well a little yes and a little no. It was around the game table easy to ignore as much as any companies "official story" is. Which is pretty easy. The issues came in well the whole idea of supplements themselves. A supplement for an rpg is basically...well you COULD homebrew this stuff and do the historical research if applicable yourself, but we'll do the work for you. So if you weren't inclined to homebrew or lots of research,etc and dove headfirst into supplements. You had to live with the mechanical and setting realities of a book reflecting a metaplot change.

[LibraryOgre]

wow world of darkness not being balanced i mean how could that happen.

It's not just "not balanced"... there's always going to be better and worse options. It's just that some of the powers are so crazily insanely overpowered compared to the investment, or were so poorly worded as to be unusable or insane, depending on your ST.

The thing is, OWOD had some great ideas, and I've played some great games in it. It just wasn't well-designed, and they decided to go with a "science is bad, m'kay?" theme EVERYWHERE.

[Cirrylius]

Vampire in particular, as the first product following the reboot, had some issues. Since Masqerade shifted from personal horror to over-the-top (verging on camp) action horror, a lot of the re-alignment of NWoD was awfully heavy-handed in the other direction. Attributes, skills, and Disciplines got nerfed to more realistic, easily handled levels. Combat, even for supernaturals, became significantly more lethal in order to encourage more problem-solving and team-playing. Humanity loss mechanics were made more draconian to give you a reason to HAVE to play nice. Strength comes with age, rather than exclusively from diablerie, and a negative feedback loop was included to keep blood potency down. Frenzy mechanics were installed for meeting new vampires, to keep travel minimal and stories more local and intimate (and removing the monolithic controlling organizations of Masqerade as a result). Only the outlines of vampire history and organization are given, to allow more sandboxing and to prevent railroad Overplots from forming.

I can see why a lot of players were pissed with the results, although I don't necessarily agree with their points. The overall effect kind of comes off as the developers waving their arms and going "Guuuuuys! This is a storytelling exercise about personal horror! Stop having FUUUN!!". The rules are smoother, though, and the game lends itself better to deep character involvement and setting customization.

IOW, YMMV.

[Sith_Happens]

But you know, that's what PCs do. Shout "screw the rules, I'm going to wear this smaller mecha as a hat on my bigger mecha."

So has or has not someone created Gurren: The Laganning?

Mage: You are Indiana Jones and you run on Spiral Power and the Antispirals are trying to track you down.

Huh, I guess I'll take that as yes.

[Alejandro]

Ironically, in the Mage game I tried, I made an Indiana Jones-inspired character. He was a professor at a university and an archaeologist, traveling around the world to find magical artifacts before The Bad Guys did (Technocracy, etc.)

It was fun at first, but I rapidly learned that all the effort I had put into being good with my Webley pistol, my fists, and my inherent knowledge on various academic topics was all worthless compared to the player in the group who knew how to take just the right flaws/bonuses/whatever and the right magical powers, and was able to solve/defeat all our encounters whether or not I did anything. I lost interest after that.

[The Glyphstone]

Vampire in particular, as the first product following the reboot, had some issues. Since Masqerade shifted from personal horror to over-the-top (verging on camp) action horror, a lot of the re-alignment of NWoD was awfully heavy-handed in the other direction. Attributes, skills, and Disciplines got nerfed to more realistic, easily handled levels. Combat, even for supernaturals, became significantly more lethal in order to encourage more problem-solving and team-playing. Humanity loss mechanics were made more draconian to give you a reason to HAVE to play nice. Strength comes with age, rather than exclusively from diablerie, and a negative feedback loop was included to keep blood potency down. Frenzy mechanics were installed for meeting new vampires, to keep travel minimal and stories more local and intimate (and removing the monolithic controlling organizations of Masqerade as a result). Only the outlines of vampire history and organization are given, to allow more sandboxing and to prevent railroad Overplots from forming.

I can see why a lot of players were pissed with the results, although I don't necessarily agree with their points. The overall effect kind of comes off as the developers waving their arms and going "Guuuuuys! This is a storytelling exercise about personal horror! Stop having FUUUN!!". The rules are smoother, though, and the game lends itself better to deep character involvement and setting customization.

IOW, YMMV.

They made up for it with Dudes of Legend, though.

[Friv]

Ironically, in the Mage game I tried, I made an Indiana Jones-inspired character. He was a professor at a university and an archaeologist, traveling around the world to find magical artifacts before The Bad Guys did (Technocracy, etc.)

It was fun at first, but I rapidly learned that all the effort I had put into being good with my Webley pistol, my fists, and my inherent knowledge on various academic topics was all worthless compared to the player in the group who knew how to take just the right flaws/bonuses/whatever and the right magical powers, and was able to solve/defeat all our encounters whether or not I did anything. I lost interest after that.

Well yes, if you play a mage who doesn't use magic you're going to have a lot of trouble down the road compared to players who do use magic. This is a fact in most WoD games; the magical traits are a better return on your XP as far as problem-solving goes than non-magical ones. Mages are the ones for whom that's most true.

You could make some serious use out of a mixture of Entropy 3 and various Spheres at 1 and make a great Indiana Jones, though, who can solve problems with his gun, his knowledge, and his amazing knack for things going right at just the right moment (and vice versa). Entropy 3, Matter 1, Prime 1 and Spirit 1 seems like a good Mage-style version.

[Darth Stabber]

I have evidently been playing/storytelling OWoD wrong (and intend to continue). Infact I have gone back and reread some materials, and my version is significantly askew. Combine that with a complete and total disregard for metaplot, and it leads to a very different experience, and only once has someone complained (some crap about prince albrecht).

The next chronicle I am working on is a big crossover zombie apocalypse affair with pcs as mages, werewolves, or hedge wizards, with no regards for anything written in any of the end of the world stories. I spoilered it due to length, but if anyone has any thoughts or criticisms feel free, especially if you have thoughts about what to do with the giovanni vampires, deamons, and changelings.

Spoiler

Show

Pentax has a project to develop fomori capable of reproducing, combining the talents of one bsd theurge and one giovanni necromancer. The fomori's bite transfers a disease that summons a specially bred breed of bane that animates the corpse as the body dies. Before they can work out a means of controlling them, there is a raid on the lab by a pack of werewolves, which accidently releases them. The contagion is starting grow, and pentax says f it and purposefull starts spreading the disease, as part of a plan to bring the rest of the world's population under their control.

Before they can move to the next step of their plan, the technocracy figures out who caused this massive reality deviation, and starts attacking pentax. Pentax ends up calling in every favor owed them, bringing a massive force of black spirals and more than few nephandi to shore up their weakened force.

In the ensuing chaos, the camarilla is caught in a massive wave of sabbat attacks, bringing massive numbers of casualties to both sides. And even those that survive are afflicted by the loss of herds to the zombie hordes.

The silver fangs hold a giant tribal moot in one of their mountain strongholds in eastern europe, where they are discussing the call of the next imperial moot to call for a rededication of garou nation to the silverfangs and to plan how to move forward in the new world of death and terror. However the massive world wide death of kindred and kine awakened the sleeping tzimitse antediluvian. In a titanic battle the silverfangs go the way of the croatan, ending the threat at the cost of many of leaders of the garou nation.

In the power vacuum, the shadow lords move to take power, and are thoroughly rebuffed by the nation at great loss of life on both sides. Realizing that new leadership is needed, an unlikely alliance between the children of gaia and the get of fenris quickly silences the massive werewolf civil war. The need for unity and strength in the face of the possibility of black spiral retribution caused all but one of the remaining tribes to join the proclamation of a new garou nation. The red talons, seeing what might be their only chance to renew the impurgium, break away from their brothers, promising no aggression, so long as they were left to their own devices.

The traditions seeing their greatest foe entangled with an outside force were temporarily joyous, especially since the force of paradox weakened, but with that weakening came a significant increase in marauder activity. Without the technocracy to bear the brunt of the marauder hunting, the traditions quickly became bogged down, trying to keep reality from unraveling under the strain. Realizing that their magic, while less inhibited by paradox, both sped up the unraveling, also brought the attention of marauders, which unraveled things more. A great knot of freyed leylines broke in california, causing massive magical turmoil across the american southwest and northern mexico. The forces of paradox became closer to normal around the rest of the world (though still less than before), while the southwest/mexico became areas seperated from any and all thoughts of causality, things impossible even by mage standards became the norm.

As the favors ran out pentax started to fall apart internally. The blackspirals and nephandi realizing that it was losing battle for them, and left the corporates to their fate, and started creating their own domains in various places. Pentax crumbles to the technocrats assault.

Having won their battle the technocrats suddenly realize that they have been losing the war. Finding certain strange quirks in their machinery, they slowly start to realize just how much of what they were doing was Magick. They begin to rebuild in hopes of recreating the static reality that existed before the war, and have made their first great task to clean up the southwest, and reverse the stream of magickal wierdness.

The players start in a small hedgewizard school for children of gaia kinfolk in southern canada, as a small cabal of mages, and about 30 werewolves realize that the generations of magical work in the area has caused it to become a node/caern, and prepared to take up residence, and work togother on a solution to the vast array of threats before them.

[Craft (Cheese)]

I'm not sure if it's just me, but a lot of oWoD seems to be built around the theme that civilization everything is bad and horrible and crushes human spirit.

Fixed that for you

[Alejandro]

Well yes, if you play a mage who doesn't use magic you're going to have a lot of trouble down the road compared to players who do use magic. This is a fact in most WoD games; the magical traits are a better return on your XP as far as problem-solving goes than non-magical ones. Mages are the ones for whom that's most true.

You could make some serious use out of a mixture of Entropy 3 and various Spheres at 1 and make a great Indiana Jones, though, who can solve problems with his gun, his knowledge, and his amazing knack for things going right at just the right moment (and vice versa). Entropy 3, Matter 1, Prime 1 and Spirit 1 seems like a good Mage-style version.

Very true. And I was shown those ideas, but as I explained, we had a player that was capable of solving/defeating everything in the game for us, and it stopped being interesting.

[Arbane]

Darth Stabber's post reminded me: One of my (many) problems with Werewolf was that its bad-guys were essentially the villains from s hypothetical NC-17 remake of Captain Planet.

[Sylvos330]

I'm currently running a Werewolf Dark Ages game and ignoring a great deal of the rules and meta plot. I find the game is a lot more fun when you don't throw the fact that they are fighting a losing battle in their face.

Also my girlfriend and I are starting up a LARP for VTM and kicking the metaplot in the face by desolving all three major factions (Sabbat, Cam, and Anarchs) and making the players come up with a brand new social structure. We pretty much wrote our own metaplot for this game and only hinted at the core structures. We even took it as far as to write the Tremere out and create a subclan that works with the new society (mainly due to the fact that every game we play anyone who plays a tremere is not trusted and shunned).

[Opperhapsen]

They made up for it with Dudes of Legend, though.

Dudes of legend just seemed like a giant middle finger to people who complained about their game.

[Emperor Tippy]

I find Requiem to suck. V:tM had it's problems (it pushed humanity and redemption and the one true god and faith way to hard and a lot of the mechanics needed to be streamlined) but at a basic level it was interesting, it was organic, it was fun, and it worked. It was certainly a tragic game and a tragic story but it was also a human story.

At the end of the day becoming a vamp was nothing more than being a human given immortality, super powers, and told that to maintain both you had to feed on the blood of others. Everything after that was a logical progression and watching how most people fell to internal conflict as their morals and ideals are weighed and tested against their desire to survive.

You got to see the conflict between basic human desires and the reality of vampire life. Caine created the second generation because he wanted companionship that could understand him. Vampires, like humans, are social creatures and so you get the Sabbat packs and Camarilla and yet the life of a vampire is fairly inherently antithetical to working together. All of the desires, conflicting realities, and challenges of life come together to make a great, believable, organic, setting that you can run nigh any kind of story in.

Requiem, you can't do that. Requiem vamps are basically animals with a veneer of humanity over them. They aren't organic and they don't work.

That all being said, you need a decent storyteller and group for V:tM. It's a setting where the Storyteller should not be remotely fair, where the players are likely utterly screwed, where they are operating in a death world, and where they are playing against entities so far beyond them that they may as well be gods. With supreme cunning, skill, and luck the players can rise to the top and conquer existence; but they will probably die quickly, alone, and unlamented as they simply got in the way of the plan of someone more powerful.

[RPGuru1331]

It just wasn't well-designed, and they decided to go with a "science is bad, m'kay?" theme EVERYWHERE.

I remember looking back on some CtD books a year ago, after having gone to university, and especially after watching actual scientists give lectures, and giggling myself hoarse over the idea that scientists themselves added Banality to the world with rationalism. You can more or less replicate the effect by watching Bill Nye the SCience Guy or Neil DeGrasse Tyson talk. But I do still love CtD deeply.

One thing I'll say about the oWoD, for better or worse (the latter, in my personal experience), the metaplot is a lot stronger. There was, and likely still is, a much stronger feeling among the playerbase that whatever the books say happened, did in fact actually happen, and that all the developments were to remain intact. In the extreme, every little change warranted a 'houserule'. This got obnoxious with dozens of books per main splat. They also had more of a habit of making Asia super mysterious and untouched by the basic lines. Still extant now, but less so.

Still, I always enjoyed both. nWoD, on balance, moreso, but oWoD did more solidly let you point to Mummies when some jerk is whining about "how dare you not like horror, its ruining my pretensions", because Mummy was about the most ridiculous over-the-top heroes I've seen presented outside of out n' out pulp.

Edit: Oh, bother, it appears that irritation at how oChangeling treated science is totally normal. Well, don't I feel less special. It's a WoD thread so I should probably act to maintain those pretensions, but.... lazy :D

[Electrohydra]

"science is bad, m'kay?" theme EVERYWHERE.

I don't know much about it yet, but isn't science the ONLY advantage neonates have over the older generations in VtM? It seemed to me it was a good thing in that line.

[Opperhapsen]

I don't know much about it yet, but isn't science the ONLY advantage neonates have over the older generations in VtM? It seemed to me it was a good thing in that line.

Science, in oWoD, literally and provably made the world worse.
It's killing off creativity, giving the world over to an insane godlike entity that'll stagnate the world to oblivion, and in Mage the enemy is pretty much "The scientific method".

[The Glyphstone]

Dudes of legend just seemed like a giant middle finger to people who complained about their game.

I'm not sure you see that. It was more like a Take That aimed at themselves, satirizing the perception of the people who played Vampires like they were superheroes with fangs, a disturbingly common phenomenon back in the days of original Masquerade. If you took DoL as serious commentary on anything, you're definitely doing something wrong.

[Opperhapsen]

I'm not sure you see that. It was more like a Take That aimed at themselves, satirizing the perception of the people who played Vampires like they were superheroes with fangs, a disturbingly common phenomenon back in the days of original Masquerade. If you took DoL as serious commentary on anything, you're definitely doing something wrong.

Exactly, it was a screed on people playing their game wrong. Meanwhile portraying these people in an entirely negative light.

I wouldn't approve if Wizards of the Coast came out with a book making fun of people playing intrigue based games (Or asking for rules to facilitate the same) with the D&D ruleset either.
It also came out right about the time WW fired of most of their employees and became primarily a license holder if I remember correctly, so there's just that extra hint of bitterness.

[The Glyphstone]

This wouldn't be like WotC publishing a satirical book to make fun of people who played a D&D intrigue game, this would be more like WotC publishing said book to make fun of people who used D&D rules to play commoners working their fields and tending their herds, and insisted on a specialized Complete Mundane Drudgery sourcebook.

Which they kind of did, with their own April Fool's line of Commoner Flaws - Were-Sheep, Chicken Infested, Pig Bond, Corpse, Delicious...

[Opperhapsen]

This wouldn't be like WotC publishing a satirical book to make fun of people who played a D&D intrigue game, this would be more like WotC publishing said book to make fun of people who used D&D rules to play commoners working their fields and tending their herds, and insisted on a specialized Complete Mundane Drudgery sourcebook.

Which they kind of did, with their own April Fool's line of Commoner Flaws - Were-Sheep, Chicken Infested, Pig Bond, Corpse, Delicious...

'cept no one ever actually wanted to play a farmer and do farming things.
They're not making fun of an actual demographic, and even had they been it's much less mean spirited.

Although I should point out that I enjoyed quite a few of the jokes in the book.

[GammaPaladin]

I think a lot of the complaints about the age-linked seemings in CtD come from the misconception that glamour and banality are about creativity. They're not, they're about belief and credulity. They actually describe it pretty well in a couple of places, but in typical old WW style, they do it obliquely.

Certainly if you see it as a statement that we lose our creativity with age, it can seem insulting, but it has nothing to do with creativity. At one point in the core book they make the analogy that adults can enjoy sci-fi and fantasy stories, comics, movies, etc just as much as children, but unlike small children we don't actually believe that those movies are real. We know at least the basic outlines of how the special effects are produced, and that the shot of the fleet of space ships is actually a bunch of plastic models, or a 3D rendering.

A small child watching that same movie has no idea how it's done, and in the moment they're watching it, they believe it utterly. I mean, you can tell a kid that it's all make-believe and explain how it's done even, and they can even understand that, and acknowledge it after the movie ends, but in the immediate moment that the movie is playing and they're absorbed in it, that thought is completely out of their minds. We adults suspend our disbelief, but we never forget that it's not real the way a child does. They don't have to suspend disbelief, they simply believe.

The game is about loss of innocence and naivete, not loss of imagination. As we grow older we take on more responsibilities, and have to spend more of our time thinking about reality. We start to learn what isn't possible.

Grumps aren't people with no dreams. They're people who don't believe their dreams can come true anymore.

If you ask very small children what they want to be when they grow up, you'll hear a lot of "fireman" and "policeman" and all the stereotypical answers you expect to hear, but you'll also hear answers that are utterly crazy and impossible. A small child will tell you with complete sincerity that he wants to be superman when he grows up, and until someone explains to him that that isn't possible, or he learns it by extrapolation from other things he learns, he honestly believes that he can grow up to lift cars and shoot lasers out of his eyes and fly.

The process of growing up is an utter mystery to him, he has no idea how it works, so anything is possible.

If you give very young children a little playhouse and explain the game of "playing house" to them, give them the idea of roleplaying mommy and daddy, it's interesting that you generally won't see much of a link between sex and role chosen. They don't have a clue that boys become daddies and girls become mommies, but of course eventually either an adult or an older child will come along and say "No, you have to be the mommy because you're a girl!" and a possibility is killed in their minds.

Growing up is about learning what is and is not possible. What works and what doesn't, how things can and cannot be done, which things go together and which do not.

A writer may be a very creative person, but he channels that creativity into a very focused and driven process in order to create a work which is coherent, that has internal consistency, that works. He's creative, but he's also constrained by what he knows is impossible, what he knows is inconsistent.

If you ask a child to tell you a story it will generally involve all of their favorite things with very little rhyme or reason involved in their selection. Look at "Axe Cop" for an example. An adult would never write that because it's a bunch of things that don't go together. It doesn't make sense.

It's the same way the mists operate. A changeling could ride a flying carpet above a crowded park, and the adults would all dismiss it as having been a bird or a plane or a kite or something, because they know that flying carpets can't happen. The children would remember and accept it because they don't know that it can't happen.

Kids don't have to work to believe in magic. They just do.

Grumps have learned too much of what is and isn't possible. Their ability to believe in nonsensical things is impaired. To age to 25 or 30 means that he's spent a significant amount of time in mundane reality, which means he has had to devote a significant amount of mental effort to keeping up with the necessities of adult responsibility in mundane reality.

To say that adults no longer have dreams would be false. To say that our dreams become more modest, or at least less different from our current situations as we grow older, on the other hand, is almost indisputable.

Even in changeling society the grump comes to understand what the realities of their social order are, so even there he's come to know what doesn't make sense, what can't be done. The breadth of things he can simply believe in becomes narrower and narrower, until he can no longer truly believe in faerie.

And then the door is shut.

Honestly though, I never actually got to play it because I never had reason to read the books until years after the nWoD release, but in theme I'd say it's the only WoD (Old or new) that I'd really have much interest in.

I played some Mage in college, and it was fun in its own way, but honestly I detest the "futile struggle" concept, period, so even Mage isn't something I can really get into.

Exalted was the one WW game I loved, but mainly because if you ignored supplements it didn't really have that element of futility. You can save the world and right injustice and live happily ever after, and it's that way by design.

Changeling appeals to me because of its theme of innocence and wonder. Admittedly you also have the problem of losing that over time, but there's nothing in the rules that necessarily force that on you. If you start the campaign by creating a childling, there's nothing really to stop you from turning 13 with 6 glamour and still only 1 banality. There's nothing to stop you from making it to 90 without picking up any permanent banality even.

It'd be difficult, but there's definitely nothing in the crunch that precludes it.

And that's assuming you even grow up at all, since you could spend 100 years of game time and only age a few years without much trouble. There's bedlam, sure, but there are also a lot of ways to avoid it.

I honestly love the setting (And absolutely loathe the setting of CtL), but sadly it's unlikely I'll ever play it because I simply cannot deal with the oWoD storyteller system's mechanics. And rewriting the entire core book to adapt it to the Exalted/Aeon rules would be a ton of work that I'll never get around to.

[hiryuu]

I think a lot of the complaints about the age-linked seemings in CtD come from the misconception that glamour and banality are about creativity. They're not, they're about belief and credulity.

This misconception comes from the place where it says that banality is about creativity right there on page 66 of the core book. And that trying to understand how the universe around you works is dumb and boring.

But yeah. Not a big fan of the anti-science slant of the whole thing when scientists are, you know. Awesome, creative people who would jump for joy at the idea of fairies.

Hmm.

You know. Demon Hunter X, Mokolé, Bygone Bestiary, and Sorcerer: Revised were my favorite oWoD books and to this day I refuse to get rid of them.

[Lapak]

Science, in oWoD, literally and provably made the world worse.
It's killing off creativity, giving the world over to an insane godlike entity that'll stagnate the world to oblivion, and in Mage the enemy is pretty much "The scientific method".

As with most things in Mage, that's a bit of an oversimplification. The [largest group of the] enemy happens to be science-focused, but so are the Sons of Ether and the Virtual Adepts. It's not science-as-paradigm that's the problem, but a flawed execution of that paradigm that overemphasizes Order. Actually, in Mage it's known that the scientific paradigm drastically improved the lot of the average non-Mage, which is how the Technocracy got started in the first place: to tamp down on how much raw chaos and random reality-shifting was going on. Science literally and provably and historically made the world better. The enemy in OWoD Mage is Order, not Science, and only an over-emphasis on Order to boot. A little is good; most of the traditions have rules and structures. Too much is stifling. Just as a little disorder is good, but too much causes everything to fall apart.

The SoE would be very pleased with the Uncertainty Principle, the possibility of universes forming something-from-nothing and spontaneous matter/energy arising from sub-quantum unreal structures, and all kinds of similar modern scientific theories. Anything that introduces a little Chaos/Change/Creation into the mix.

[Lord_Gareth]

You know, I've noticed a trend with oWoD for storytellers to marry themselves to the fluff far above and beyond what happens in nWoD; in no other system have I heard (so very often) things like, "This character could never be a Tzimice," or "Gangrel just aren't like that," or, my personal favorite, having a Mage concept shot down because "he would have died, no way he got away with that." And before you think this is just a case of sour grapes, the behavior that goes with this is that these storytellers are then utterly unwilling to work with me to make the concept more appropriate.

Maybe I'm just cursed with a string of bad storytellers, but in no other system have I encountered such hostility and inflexibility from those running the game.

[Alejandro]

You know, I've noticed a trend with oWoD for storytellers to marry themselves to the fluff far above and beyond what happens in nWoD; in no other system have I heard (so very often) things like, "This character could never be a Tzimice," or "Gangrel just aren't like that," or, my personal favorite, having a Mage concept shot down because "he would have died, no way he got away with that." And before you think this is just a case of sour grapes, the behavior that goes with this is that these storytellers are then utterly unwilling to work with me to make the concept more appropriate.

Maybe I'm just cursed with a string of bad storytellers, but in no other system have I encountered such hostility and inflexibility from those running the game.

I had a similar experience with a WoD devotee. I think it stems from the futility concept of the game, where you aren't supposed to win or save the day, so why bother breaking any molds?

[hiryuu]

Maybe I'm just cursed with a string of bad storytellers, but in no other system have I encountered such hostility and inflexibility from those running the game.

I have encountered this, too. I think it stems partly from the fact that A) the setting sits around and tells you, in terrible stereotype format, how that faction is, no buts, and B) oWoD players tend to submit characters like "I have a Son of Ether with an iron man suit who is also kinfolk to the last of the White Howlers and his best friends is a tszimisce vampire named Screamin' Ted" and STs slowly build up a sort of rage, and C) The Cam was super strict about what it allowed but was hopelessly corrupt and took bribes and would "kill" groups one or two cities away because of the actions of another. So much so that a lot of the STs just up and quit and made their own "official" group, with blackjack and hookers.

For the record, the only time I've ever said "no" was when it blatantly contradicted anything on the list I was given, which, admittedly, had some weird things on it. Like "no female Sons of Ether," "no Camarilla Uktena," "no Verbena Kuei-jin," and "no Mokolé." (But again, I just like Mokolé; I ended up running a side-group just for them for a little while until one of the other STs noticed and approved and muscled it through, citing "the game is set in a small town in a Florida swamp.")

AH! That's D) WoD games can have upwards to 6 to 7 STs in the same area. They all have to vote on your character and they all have different tastes. It's like trying to get oWoD Mages agree on what they think reality is.

This is one of many reasons I moved to nWoD, a lot of those metaplot-PCs can't really be there anymore. And I'm the only ST, so I can approve Iron Man mages who punk around with Vampires all day. >_>