WoD/Bloodlines Vampire Video Games Megathread: We all suck blood down here

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > WoD/Bloodlines Vampire Video Games Megathread: We all suck blood down here

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

In 5e thin bloods get crazy rear end home brewed alchemy using their own body or that of a mortal as the cauldron. It involves mixing their own blood with mortal blood of the proper resonance and only thin bloods can do it.

Like think �garage napalm� more than any kind of organized science.

Dross fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Oct 15, 2019

# ¿ Oct 15, 2019 06:53

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:06

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

The Cheshire Cat posted:

And yeah the thing to bear in mind ... is that a lot of the clans don't like each other very much in general so the neutral default of vampire relationships is antipathy.

This is true even intra-clan in almost all clans and is a critical component of the game setting�s atmosphere. Basically unless someone is fully blood bonded to you there�s no assuming they are honestly working with your interests in mind.

Though some individual clans do present a more cohesive united front against the rest of the world (Tremere, Nosferatu, Giovanni, Setites).

# ¿ Nov 4, 2019 14:29

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Vavrek posted:

Not even that. There are considerably fewer talents/skills/knowledges in Bloodlines than in tabletop. Each category has four in Bloodlines, compared to ten in tabletop. You don't make Crafts or Empathy or Law rolls in Bloodlines. Any points you might spend on Athletics or Etiquette can instead be spent on Brawl and Dodge.

Makes me idly curious about playing a tabletop character who was restricted to the dozen abilities you get in Bloodlines. "What do you know of the occult?" "Nothing, but I punch very well."

Those tabletop characters are called Brujah.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2019 01:49

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Apologies if I�ve missed this in previous discussion but do we know the mechanism by which the PC gains a clan after being a clanless thin-blood? Because as far as I know changing clans (or even just gaining a clan adherence if clanless) is impossible in tabletop rules/lore.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2019 16:32

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Sure, and I�m not coming at it from a �must be rolling D10s or game bad� kind of perspective, I was just wondering if there was a significant piece of setting I was missing.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2019 17:18

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Not all Malks ramble or have some kind of prophetic schizophrenia. Some just have OCD or a mood disorder or ASPD or fugue or even synesthesia.

Those are the kind I always preferred to play with, the �disturbed� versus the wacky detached from reality.

Dross fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Nov 10, 2019

# ¿ Nov 10, 2019 04:14

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

I have always suspected that when Tzimisce were first envisioned, they were (like many other bloodlines, such as Baali) intended to be exclusively NPCs. Their personalities and motives are extremely alien, Vicissitude is probably one of the most powerful Disciplines, and most of the early player material seemed to be from a Camarilla perspective.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2019 20:26

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Is there a good completionist LP of the first Bloodlines where the host has a good knowledge of the lore but doesn�t talk over in game dialogue?

# ¿ Dec 5, 2019 02:04

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Brendan Rodgers posted:

e: Yeah you get powers based on clan but Brujah, Ventrue, Toreador being the options means there's a bit of overlap there.

I�m gonna pick the one with Presence, that seems like it would be a useful ability in a dialogue heavy game.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2019 02:49

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

I'm more surprised that there was / will be no Hunter 20.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2019 00:43

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

It�s easy to imagine a large number of members of different endlessly conspiring factions when you�re playing with a large number of members of different endlessly conspiring factions.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2019 18:47

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Further on the LARP popularity among Vampire players, the WoD has always been about how your character fits into a grand ensemble of characters reaching back millennia, doing things you can�t fathom, as opposed to tabletop games where more often than not your party are the protagonists of the story and the only things that happen are things you do or things that give you a reason to do something. A LARP, like the WoD, is bigger than you, and the players will drive the plot with their machinations just as much as the STs create existential threats.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2019 20:14

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

HoboTech posted:

And to touch on the LARP thing, there's a podcast that reviews every book from the VtM line, and while the reviews themselves are fine, boy do LARPers seem to have absolutely no respect for people who play non-WW tabletop games. I've never head the words "beer and pretzel" used so derisively.

I figure you�re talking about 25 Years of Vampire: the Masquerade and fwiw they run other games on their discord for Patreon supporters and they�re about to start Shadowrun. I think it�s specifically D&D they�re not fans of because it tends to contain little atmosphere beyond the world revolving around the players� actions and thus lends itself to murderhobo gameplay, whereas WoD game lines are about fitting your character into a persistent world where you aren�t in control.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2019 20:26

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Wasn't it Valve who forced Troika to delay the release of VTMB until the release of HL2 because they didn't want the buggy prerelease Source engine they gave the Troika devs to be the first public impression of Source?

# ¿ Aug 11, 2020 18:17

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Wholesale copy and paste from the D&D books was the basis of a little game called Final Fantasy

# ¿ Aug 19, 2020 20:54

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Perhaps it is cancelled in the Twitter sense

# ¿ Oct 12, 2020 20:40

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

I am glad I resisted the impulse to preorder this game.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2021 11:14

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

ZearothK posted:

Reform Troika and let them finish the game.

But they didn�t finish the first one!

# ¿ Feb 23, 2021 18:51

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Peaceful Anarchy posted:

Here's Descent retailing for $29.99 in 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/19961220010550/http://www.interplay.com/descent/descent.html

Descent was a semi budget title with a development cost estimated at under 500K, whereas a contemporary AAA flagship game like FF7 was closer to 40 million. A modern AAA game can crack 250 million. And the top names on the cartridge based consoles were upwards of $80 due to cost of production. Optical media were a godsend and dropped game prices by like $20-30, and then they kinda never rose again.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2021 23:19

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Zaphod42 posted:

I've never understood paying so much money for Gloomhaven when you can just play D&D instead.

I forget sometimes that other people can just enjoy a game without owning every bit of related material. Gloomhaven�s price tag didn�t seem like much compared to what I�ve spent on DND and WoD/CoD.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2021 09:56

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

That �turning people into still living blobs as torture� thing is straight from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2021 21:09

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Archonex posted:

It was mentioned already but the "not a total loving tortureporn obsessed flesh crafting monster" thing actually existed in prior editions. There were multiple branches of the Tzimisce line. One is the old school pre-flesh crafting Tzimisce, and the other is the ones that may or may not have made a deal with Kupala (IE: A literal demon that wants to cause the apocalypse.) to get their flesh crafting powers depending on which book you're reading.

The ones featured in V5 seem to be more in line with the old school Tzimisce that were basically feudal lords (And by many accounts in the books seemed to usually take their obligations pretty damned seriously.) that tended to think the new age turbo-monster Tzimisce were awful fuckers that were infected with their Antediluvian* and should be purged at all costs if they show up in their areas of control. However, they're mostly an eastern european thing.

Since the Sabbat is quietly shoved off screen during most of the V5 books, the only way they were going to add the Tzimisce in is if they were willing to reintroduce the Sabbat or use the old world variant of the Tzimisce. The turbo monster variant of Tzimisce is almost certainly still around barring some swerve in the metaplot.

*It's implied a few times in earlier editions that one part of the reason the Sabbat went so bad (going from the original Anarch revolution that had groups like the Prometheans in their ranks to a supremacist cabal of dickhead monsters that embraced acting like as much of a suicidal bastard as possible.) is that the thing that let them break the blood bonds --- the Vaulderie --- was in fact a trick. In one legend this thing called the Sacred Fire-Flower was supposedly used to create the Vaulderie...Except in that story the place they got it from was the Cathedral of Flesh. IE: Literally one of the vessels of the Tzimisce Antediluvian.

Keep in mind that some other lore (especially the Gehenna book) suggests that anyone that ingests Tzimisce blood is essentially a vessel for the Antediluvian that can be flesh crafted or ghouled at will. Meaning that the Vaulderie is really just rewriting the blood bond to the Antediluvian that is and inspires chronic monstrosity in their behavior instead. Meaning it's possible the entire Sabbat is being puppeteered by the Antediluvian they thought they killed (Who instead really just killed the guy that is given credit for it, and fleshcrafted himself into that person before going out to take a leading position in the Sabbat.) in one way or another.

As a result of all of that, anyone that hears that story and manages to put two and two together between the past and current Sabbat are likely to come to the conclusion that the Sabbat is basically a Manchurian agent spreading the virus that is Tzimisce. And that the flesh crafting turbo monster type Tzimisce are literally the primary carriers spreading the "disease" everywhere.

Suffice to say that though they didn't really feature much in any of the fiction the old world Tzimisce do not get along with the Sabbat type Tzimisce.

I�ve always felt like the existence of Aura Perception and other low level Auspex powers makes these infinitely long deceptions implausible. Tzimisce even have Auspex.

Dross fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Mar 14, 2021

# ¿ Mar 14, 2021 21:57

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

I kinda feel like a Mage visual novel could not possibly capture the essence of playing a mage because the game�s system is so incredibly open ended. Figuring out how to use the spheres you have to create the effect you want and make it coincidental is like the majority of the mechanical fun of the game.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2021 10:49

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Post-abortem

# ¿ Aug 24, 2021 09:31

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Mr Scumbag posted:

I really wish they made more of the "X of New York" games. For what those games were, they were incredibly good at evoking a great VTMB feeling with their music and art, and the writing wasn't too bad ither from what I remember. Playing through those in the dark with the music up was a great time, even though both games had their flaws.

They were released in 2019 and 2020 respectively, so unless there�s something I don�t know I�d say it�s a little early to call the series dead

# ¿ Mar 31, 2022 16:34

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

CainFortea posted:

Tell him to just reprint oWoD books.

That seems unlikely given how much they had to scramble to save face with the new ones. The old ones are worse.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2022 05:00

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

MonsieurChoc posted:

They vary a lot, from worse to much better.

I mean in terms of things like the "real life genocide as cover for VAMPIRES" that rolled heads a few years ago. The 90s material gets pretty seriously WTF from a 2020s cultural perspective.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2022 06:59

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

CainFortea posted:

I just want the setting stuff and all the base books for the 90s nostalgia and setting info and the rules and all that. I can just not use the lovely parts.

I'm not indicting you personally, I'm just saying there's a strong disincentive for them to publish that stuff again, in terms of PR backlash.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2022 11:27

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

A word to anyone planning on PODing hardcover books from DTRPG: spring for the expensive glossy paper. I didn't when I was buying the set of 6 20th edition splats, and I deeply regret it because on top of the art color looking a bit dull, the pages are regular thin paper and I feel like I have to handle these books with extreme caution lest I stain or tear a page. So there's practical considerations as well as aesthetic.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2022 18:28

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Some little offshoot team should add controller support to Bloodlines 1 and release it for modern consoles for $20.

# ¿ May 1, 2022 03:04

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

This is basically the one-stop bloodsucker video game with sometimes bonus random white wolf / onyx path lore discussion thread at this point

# ¿ May 20, 2022 05:03

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Good grief, the facial animation in Swansong is distractingly bad, especially the mouths.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2022 18:15

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Fuzz posted:

Glad you enjoyed my college era modding skills! I did the website, readme, and a lot of VtM poo poo, plus the map pack. I apologize retroactively for how lovely Shroud of Night worked for anyone on the receiving end, sorry if people reset their computers thinking their monitor died since the only lovely solution I could think of was to just cut video output entirely if it hit you. Yith had all the talent and he made all the Mage and Changeling poo poo.

This was incredible and I can't believe I'm interacting with the person who did that. Well done.

As janky as the combat was, and as cut and dry as Redemption's story was for the time I still wish there would be another VtM Diablo-like.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2022 19:43

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

As opposed to

we are monsters

# ¿ Aug 30, 2022 23:58

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

joylessdivision posted:

He's such a weasely turd. Probably #2 on my "People involved in White Wolf who suck/annoy me" list.

Whose #1?

Brucato. Always and forever Brucato.

He is a friend of a friend on Facebook. I'm curious what are his biggest sins, I'm not super familiar with the 90s stuff.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2023 11:44

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

joylessdivision posted:

I was under the impression MRH wrote that considering how much he hemmed and hawed about it on facebook after it blew up. If it was Swedracula who wrote it, then toss it on the pile of Swedracula's sins.

To clarify, Brucato was who I was asking about.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2023 00:50

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:06

Dross: Sep 26, 2006; Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

Why did they bother telling us to wait 3 more months for real news?

# ¿ Jun 11, 2023 23:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > WoD/Bloodlines Vampire Video Games Megathread: We all suck blood down here