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jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





wiegieman posted:

Aren't oWoD hunters magically immune to stuff like the werewolf fear aura?

To the fear aura? Yes. To the entirely rational thought "holy gently caress, that thing can shred me into vampire-bits in three seconds flat" not so much.

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jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Played Vampire first, but played Werewolf for a lot longer. Our pack got caught up in a Indiana Jones style archaeology race for various artifacts around the world, with our opponents being a coterie of Vamps. They had minions and money and could access mundane information sources a lot easier, we has the muscle and claws and a better spiritual connection to the loot. We got most of the artifacts, and the final battle was a lot like last night's GoT with an army of undead storming a Fianna castle defended by a half dozen Werewolves and a dozen kinfolk.

Good times.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





SuperKlaus posted:

I will certainly grant you that my experience was colored by a Storyteller who was cool and kept us doing cool things like killing Pentex scientists for testing mutagens on people instead of killing humans for existing or raging against modern sanitation or something.

RPGs are like that a lot. You don't realize how bad they are in concept or execution because your cool GM writes good stories and glosses over bad mechanics.

They're ALL like that. There's no lovely RPG that can't be redeemed by a good GM and players. There's no quality RPG that can't be ruined by bad ones.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Bust Rodd posted:

Hey so what was the actual gameplay loop of V:tM? I can't watch LPs, I dont have the patience, so i don't know how the game actually worked. Did every clan have a different starting area? How are disciplines handled?

Everybody has the same starting situation. You've just been embraced, and your sire gets whacked by the Prince of LA for embracing without permission. You're compelled to do jobs for the guy to "prove your worth" lest you share your sire's fate. This mostly involves running around various parts of the city and doing quests, often involving violence. You can play in first or third person, go melee or firearms. You have a blood pool on screen which gets decreased whenever you activate a discipline, which usually lasts somewhere from 10-30 seconds depending on the discipline and your rank in it. Stealth and stealth kills can get you pretty far but eventually you'll run into boss battles you have to fight, and I hope you've got the stats, skills, and gear to handle it when they show up.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





HoboTech posted:

Also the ending sequence/fight for the library segment was... something. I'm not even entirely sure what happens before you fight the (I assume) Lasombra.

You come into the room from above, and look down onto the ritual. There's the local vamp who's the assistant and the Lasombra. You, in cut scene, sneak up behind the local dude and dust him, recovering the broadsword. Then a fight commences with the Lasombra. As it happens, I died the first time I did the Lasombra fight, so I figured it out when I saw it a second time. Dunno why I didn't stealth kill the Lasombra, though, which I'd definitely have tried for if they hadn't cut scene'd my control away. :shrug:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





NikkolasKing posted:

Grout was too smart for Sigmund Freud and kept to the good old ways like phrenology.

Grout is a big reason I'm not even convinced the Camarilla is more ethical than the Sabbat. His house of horrors was only marginally better than Andrei's.

They aren't. All vampires are horrible monsters with an insatiable hunger where their soul used to be. The only difference between the Camarilla and the Sabbat is that the former wear the thinnest veneer of humanity to disguise themselves from their prey, and the latter don't bother.

Of course, choosing not to bother once the prey upgraded to high enough tech to be truly dangerous is why there are a lot less Sabbat around these days... :commissar:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





eonwe posted:

the la by night series owns

It seriously does. My thanks to whomever it was who first mentioned it on this thread, because I hadn't heard about it until that post.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





hostess with the Moltres posted:

I keep trying to stealth the sabbat mansion, get found, try to kill everyone and die. What am I doing wrong?

The mansion full of the lil flesh demon things? Yeah, don't bother with stealth because there are too many of them to stealth past. I used a Toreador with Auspex and an Ingram and an Uzi and just machine gunned the lil fuckers. For a more melee build with Potence or Fortitude a sword should work okay with Blood Buff.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Phobophilia posted:

My concern regarding VtMB2 is that it seems to be going for a number of innovative and unconventional mechanics, like the disposable weapon combat, or the blood resonance. The former means that there is no item progression system, you're starting from scratch every time. The latter reads to me like a variation on an item progression system, which would be a pain in the rear end if every single time you wanted to refill your mana tank you had to play a complicated stealth minigame.

There's no doubt that this game has alot of very talented writers with great pedigrees, but what I'm worried about is Hardsuit doesn't have the design chops to pull it off. They sold a great design pitch to Paradox, but can they back it up? I dunno.

At the same time, the game seems much less ambitious than the other highly anticipated 1st person CRPG coming out soon. I'm also worried about Cyberpunk 2077, which feels like the mission design scope could be way too much to handle.

The thing is, I expect that Resonance is supposed to make you care a lot more about hunting and feeding than you did in Bloodlines 1. That game really was "fill up your blood pool at the nearest convenient prostitute" and while it was a decent enough mechanic in what was mostly an action game, it also trivialized what's supposed to be the core of a vampire's existence, that is the hunger and the need to feed.

I have to assume they want the experience to be more impactful then "Press F to Feed" and a few seconds of a "try not to kill them lest you lose Humanity mini-game". Strip away the clan politics, the Masquerade, and the superpowers and what's really at the core of being a vampire is having to drink someone's blood to survive, and trying to make that a more important part of the game seems like a great idea.

I just hope it's implemented with enough care and variety that it doesn't become tedious busywork, and instead feels important each time.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Basic Chunnel posted:

Blood powers your cool magic poo poo. If they make hunting anything less than an afterthought, expect it to be as well-received as the Deus Ex sequels’ battery system

Depends on the ratio of powers to blood. Bloodlines 1 was incredibly punishing where you could only use four or five powers for less than a minute each per full blood bar before you had to fill up again. But it doesn't have to be like that. VtM5e doesn't use blood points at all, for instance, just "rouse checks" whenever you use a power that may or may not increase your hunger,. Even if you keep the blood point mechanic, if you either increase the duration of powers (most Vampire powers are supposed to be "per scene" not just 16 seconds or whatever) or decrease the cost/increase the blood pool you can make it a finite resource that one can handle with a single feeding per night, with maybe a second or third if poo poo's gone really sideways and you need to heal or something. Wake up at sundown, have a significant hunt, spend the rest of the night going about your business, coffin up before dawn, wash, rinse, repeat. You only need "juice box" humans in a game where powers barely last any time and cost a huge percentage of your available blood. Also mitigated, for that matter, by how often blood packs are available, how much they restore, how much they cost, and if they work at all.

Which is what I mean about them implementing the system with care, particularly towards the player gameplay loop and how much time hunting takes vs how often you need to do it.

jng2058 fucked around with this message at 18:15 on May 25, 2019

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Crabtree posted:

Bloodlines 2 success will generate a strategy game spin off where you realpolitik, murder and invade your way to having a world under your unseen vampire reign. You have to also occasionally kill your friends and subordinates for backstabbing you, loving up horribly or just as pawns for a particularly nasty event with possible benefits you can't ignore on top of fighting off other sects, clans, rivals and elders. You can have it take place in historical scenarios like Ventrue's Rome (Kingdom, Republic and Empire)to modern city environments.

I'd buy it.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Zaphod42 posted:

Is there not a mod for CK2 that does that? :cheeky:

I believe there is but I also understand its not very good. Besides, I want the modern day scenario. :colbert:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Lucinice posted:

I want a grand strategy not just based on VTM but including other game lines too.

I've always wanted a 4X space strategy game based on the Battletech universe, with the focus on ground combat rather than space combat as in most space 4Xs. With HBS being bought out by Paradox this seems like the best chance for this game existing yet, but there's nothing so far. But I live in hope. :pray:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





A Bug posted:

I could see werewolves as a sort of environmental hazard if not a full faction. A sort of 'dont move your stuff through this forest or they take heavy losses' thing maybe

I'd make it that plus a building threat. Like certain things you do like clearing forests, expanding into wilderness generally, and the like increase your threat and if you get too high a werewolf pack comes rushing at you and then you have to try and mitigate the damage.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





The whole Buffy/Angel-verse is screwed up by VtM standards because things don't follow from sire to childe. The Master, who's pretty clearly a Nosferatu, made Darla who's, what, maybe a Ventrue(?), who made Angelus who's probably a Toreador, who made Drusilla who's a textbook Malkavian, who made Spike who's a Brujah. :shrug:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





DankRhymer posted:

That being said, put me in the camp that thought the 5th clan was going to be Nosferatu as well.

Malkavians need a huge writing pass, sure, but there isn't much change in the physical assets they need to create, where-as Nosferatu need a whole sewer and tunnel network to be able to get around in. It makes more sense to have them in an expansion, presumably "Underworld" or some such, that not only adds the Nos and the underground, but also reasons for everyone else to go down there, just like they'll probably add Gangrel, wilderness, and enemy werewolves in some kind of "The Wild" DLC.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Zaphod42 posted:

Its true, although scions can be stupid powerful too and both become completely restricted by the drawbacks of their own godhood as they ascend.

I did once have a campaign where we all played 5-dot archmages that was incredibly fun. But its not an easy thing to manage.

How long did you get to play before someone destroyed the world?

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Zaphod42 posted:

E: Another big reason I like WOD over like D&D, is you seem more pushed to create flawed characters. Which are more interesting and fun to roleplay. Every character, from Mortals to Vampires to Werewolves to Mages, has systems like Morality, Humanity, Wisdom, etc. which measure your character's mental state. Its more degrees than simple "chaotic evil" or "lawful good", and allows you to kinda fall into a dark phase, develop some kind of derangement (maybe you gain a phobia, and roleplay that for awhile) and then ultimately redeem yourself and grow out of your derangement.

D&D seems all about being a heroic badass, not everybody plays it that way but it seems more catering to that. WoD is more about being a tragic anti-hero.

All depends on the group playing the game. I've seen a ton of WoD games where it never gets any deeper than "We're loving vampires, let's tear poo poo up!" and some D&D games that get into some GoT level politics and character drama (before, you know, the show itself threw out the politics and character drama to do a heroic badass story, ironically enough). But you're right in that the mechanics of WoD encourage that kind of depth where-as D&D's pretty much doesn't.

The problem, of course, is that if that kind of thing is mechanical it's also subject to abuse and power gaming, but again, that depends on the group you're playing with.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Lucinice posted:

I think people are just getting impatient for gameplay and are kind of picking apart the info we have.

Heh, that's nothing. Over in the Infinity Engine thread, we've got people freaking out and declaring they won't buy Baldur's Gate III....which hasn't actually been officially announced yet. It's the reaction to the drip-feed hype machines that companies use these days. By rationing the information that people need to decide if they actually want a game so tightly, it leaves a lot of room for people to either build their ideal game in their heads, which you will inevitably fail to live up to, or to assume that everything they hear that is even slightly annoying is a game-breaking debacle, and reason not to buy it.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





QuarkJets posted:

if we could harness the energy from all of the hand-wringing in pre-release threads like this one then we'd be rich

But not as much as you'd think. These things pop up, have a huge number of posts for a few weeks, then die away as something else new and shiny grabs our attention. Compare how many posts the Baldur's Gate III thread is getting compared to this one, because that's the newer hotness.

Essentially, we're all just ADD kittens batting at new pieces of string as each new announcement happens.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





communism bitch posted:

Fun thing I saw mentioned elsewhere: your character has the ability to turn into mist but apparently can only use this skill to travel through very specific air vents.
So there are railings and fences and poo poo everywhere but your mist apparently can't pass through those lol.

Why not just ditch the mist and put regular loving video game air vents in? At least that's a consistent mechanic that adheres to its own internal logic.

That annoyed me in the gameplay vids they released. So lemme get this straight, I can turn to mist through that tiny vent but not through the huge gaps in the gate that Slug closed behind him? :doh:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





PantsOptional posted:

So, the Anarchs then?

Almost certainly.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





frajaq posted:

now I'm really curious what the last 2 factions are going to be...

Well, based on the demo footage they floated around earlier, it seems the Nosferatu are a separate faction from the Camarilla itself. The Cammy lady tells you to go to them for info, and when you do the Nossy gives you a side quest to work for them. Whether that's a reflection of the Nosferatu being a wholly separate faction, or them being a subset of some other one we don't know, of course, but perhaps some kind of "Underground" or "Sewer Folk" or some such?

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





TheCenturion posted:

V:tM still wasn't as bad as Mage: The Ascension for not ever managing to figure out what it was actually about.

Hell, the main issue I have with all the games from that era was that sourcebooks had to introduce new and cool things in order to be worth buying, but that introduced power creep and too much cruft. Shadowrun was bad for that; the base 2E game was amazing. By the end of the 2e line, when you'd introduced concepts like security and other variant riggers, cyberzombies, whatever the hell the psychic deckers were called, let alone ridiculously over-specialized deckers thanks to Virtual Realities 2.0, adepts and metamagic, bioware, hell, grafting on an entirely new points-based character build system…..

Back in the day, we called it Uncle Al's Syndrome, named for the Uncle Al's Catalogs for CarWars, each of which added new toys and vehicles that made everything that came before it, including the older Uncle Al's books, obsolete.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Tetrabor posted:

It's a good thing Bloodlines 2 has been delayed, Half-Life: Alyx is being released in March2020 when BL2 was first scheduled, and the last thing we would have needed is a repeat of the first release.

Alyx appears to be VR only. I doubt it'll really impact any other game's release that much, since I don't think VR headsets have that much market penetration.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





NikkolasKing posted:

So I would imagine Bloodlines 2 chose the fan favorite Clans: Brujah, Toreador, Tremere, Malkavian and Ventrue.

I don't like Brujah or Malkavian and I can give or leave Ventrue. But I really think they should have at least included one unconventional choice instead of picking all the greatest hits.

Maybe Giovanni or Followers of Set. I'd take them over Malkavians. Brujah and Ventrue need to be there because Cammies and Annies but Malks? Meh.

This IS still a sequel to Bloodlines. They have the "2" and everything. The Malkavian playthrough was one of the most interesting ways to play the original Bloodlines, and for them to leave it out would have pissed a lot of people off. Besides, if they're really fans of Bloodlines the way they claim then they want Malks in for the same reason the rest of us do....because the Bloodline Malks were fun.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





NikkolasKing posted:

I guess that makes sense.

I suppose if Bloodlines 2 does well they could hypothetically make a totally new vampire game and include other Clans then.

Or DLC them into this game. That's already the plan for the Nosferatu (along with a traversable sewer system) and Gangrel (with wilderness and maybe werewolves) as I understand it. Given that the Lasombra fleeing the Sabbat to join the Cam is a big plotline in V5, I'd imagine that playable Lasombra would be the logical third DLC Clan.

e: drat :ninja:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





System Metternich posted:

Jeanette claims that her last sunrise was "over two lifetimes ago" which would put her embrace being sometime in the mid-19th century, I guess? Their father's attire on the painting seems more like early 20th century to me, but who knows.

Sure, but she could be referring to her's and Therese's simultaneous lifetimes which would make early 20th century about right.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





SuperKlaus posted:

I'm a Werewolf booster because I experienced it as superheroes with fangs AND claws, which is objectively one "claws" better than superheroes with fangs.

I experienced Werewolf as a globe trotting Indiana Jones style adventure with our pack racing around the world trying to beat a Black Spiral Dancer and her Tzimisce cohort and his army of ghouls to the artifacts needed to open Ayer's Rock and free the last living Bunyip from a magical hibernation.

To say that elements of personal horror were downplayed is putting it mildly. :shrug:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





It's going to be flawed in several aggravating ways, buggy as hell, but ultimately evolve into a decent game with a small but fanatical following after years of modding.

Just like the first one.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Basic Chunnel posted:

Depends on what Paradox is willing to pay for. More Battletech seems like a good bet

Alas, it seems not. Word is that HBS is working on their own IP rather than playing in ex-FASA playgrounds.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Tetrabor posted:

Trailers can be good, but they don't represent anything about the final product.

Dead Island's trailer was a work of art, but it definitely didn't represent anything but aesthetics in the final product.

Dead Island has to be the greatest gap between high quality trailer and boring, uninspired game that I've ever seen.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





MonsieurChoc posted:

We almost got an Ars Magica videogame by the Kings of Dragon Pass devs.

What? We did? drat, now I'm sad? :sigh:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Vince MechMahon posted:

If Cyberpunk worked it would be great.

Lucky for me that it does work on my laptop just fine, then!

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Kavak posted:

Yes. Real world politics MUST carry over to the tabletop exactly. For example, nobody can be a good person against police brutality if they like Delta Green.

Likewise any version of fantasy roleplay from D&D on down is a tacit endorsement of colonialism. :rolleyes:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Popete posted:

Please let the new developer be Cloud Imperium Games.

Well, why not? No game will ever match what we want in our heads, might as well give it to a company that never actually releases games so it stays in our imaginations forever. And then they can charge us $100 so our character in the never released game will have Anabelle's Red Leather Jackettm!

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Malkavian with Separation Anxiety? I can dig it.

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Captain Oblivious posted:

It's alright. It's a decent dungeon crawler but nothing to write home about.

The good stuff in NWN1 is player made campaigns mostly.

Yeah, but you could stumble into some weird poo poo going down that road. Looking at you, Dances with Rogues. :colbert:

jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





brap posted:

This is what makes me nervous about running the tabletop game. It is not clear to me if you can play it without being a 90s mall goth.

I once played in a pretty good Indiana Jones style Werewolf game where our pack of Wolves were racing around the globe trying to beat a coterie of Vamps to a bunch of artifacts. That worked surprisingly well.

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jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





Fuzz posted:

It's also heavily implied that Fiona may actually be the Ventrue PC from Bloodlines. It's a running theory in the LAbN fanbase.

Hadn't heard that one. Nifty, if true.

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