V5 new preview is out!!!

[MarkK]

Im just going to say this and move on. If you want to debate it via PM, that is fine, but I was not meaning to hijack the thread.

Nothing required you to make multiple replies to my posts, or even replying to when I'm responding to someone else entirely, to say I'm making "false statements" about Vampire just because I don't share your opinions/preferences vis a vis the Ravnos clan (and what blowing them up does) then dude. Nor does "no, I totally like other Ravnos options" jive with said multiple efforts to dismiss them as holding any substance, to be frank.

Anyway, it's a thread on V5, re-blowing up the Ravnos is a thing V5 looks to be rolling with. People having opinions on that seems on point just fine, but however you prefer.

[Beckett]

I'll assume it wasn't your intent. But this sentence is astoundingly dismissive of India. It's the second most populous country in the world, and the subcontinent has thousands of years of history.

To say the Ravnos aren't relevant because their seat of power is in India smacks of Western bias.

Um, no its not ??? and I meant exactly what I said.

With the exception of in India (their base of power) and tue Sabbat (they Embrace at will), the Ravnos have never really had a lot of numbers compared to other Clans. This is true for all of the Idependant Clans, though the Ravnos tended to have less than the others.

[Beckett]

Nor does "no, I totally like other Ravnos options" jive with said multiple efforts to dismiss them as holding any substance, to be frank.

Then maybe you should stop dismissing the Ravnos. YOU don't like them, that's fine. Stop attributing motives to me that are incorrect. YOU think they are uninteresting, that's your preference, and they are not for everyone.

[MarkK]

Then maybe you should stop dismissing the Ravnos. YOU don't like them, that's fine. Stop attributing motives to me that are incorrect. YOU think they are uninteresting, that's your preference, and they are not for everyone.

I'm not the one who described them as "barely a clan to begin with" as part of your stated confusion for why anyone doesn't think the Week of Nightmares was super awesome? Then responded to any effort to point to efforts made to give them identity beyond that as minor, ignorable, exaggerated, false or otherwise requiring a lack of understanding vampire compared to your own to put any stock in, while insisting that viewing them as vice addled caitiff with illusion powers is basically the only way to view them that has any heft behind it?

I'm not sure what you're even trying to say at this point with any consistency behind it? Yes, you like the Ravnos having little to no identity and huge clan smashing events that reinforce that because you feel that's what makes them interesting, while referring to anything else as being barely worthy of attention and it being false exaggerations to refer to them as worthy of attention, you've made that clear.

You've latched onto this one particular take on the clan, in order to defend this one event that you "can't understand the hate for", it's required you to dismiss any other takes on the clan as minor to unimportant at best, which makes this late going "No, I super like the Ravnos and all their options after all" just come off as really weird, given your own posts.

edit: At this point it mostly just reads like you're saying "anyone who doesn't like my particularly narrow take on the Ravnos that dismisses any other take on them as having ever held much substance are in fact the ones who are really dismissing the Ravnos." Which... okay...?

[Bluecho]

Um, no its not ??? and I meant exactly what I said.

With the exception of in India (their base of power) and tue Sabbat (they Embrace at will), the Ravnos have never really had a lot of numbers compared to other Clans. This is true for all of the Idependant Clans, though the Ravnos tended to have less than the others.

Perhaps it isn't what you intended, but it's very easy to extrapolate to.

The very fact that you said "with the exception of in India" implies that being big in an entire country - a country that holds the second largest population on the planet, well dwarfing the US, the third largest - is not worthy of consideration unto itself. That India "doesn't count", and thus should be dismissed out of hand.

You didn't have to intend that. Indeed, that you DIDN'T consider what it would say about India's worth as a country is half the problem.

It would be like saying the Wu Lung aren't important as a Mage Craft, because they are "only big in China".

[MarkK]

Then maybe you should stop dismissing the Ravnos. YOU don't like them, that's fine. Stop attributing motives to me that are incorrect. YOU think they are uninteresting, that's your preference, and they are not for everyone.

While I'm there, the reason I keep asking "so have you ever actually played characters from this clan or run games for people that want to" is that, doing the latter, it's required talking to my players about what they find interesting about the clan, what they'd like played up, what aspects of it they'd like to interact with, and then take some time to think about that and how to develop it as an ST so as not to blithely dismiss them. Of the several times I'd done so, "it's because I want to have no real clan identity while I throw illusion powers around" has never come up.

I imagine that's a valid playstyle just fine for whatever all might enjoy it all the same, from their perspective.

It's not, however, the only one, and things that discourage those other ones, are unfortunate. You can use all the allcaps for emphasis you like, as though you're feeling like you're talking down to someone who won't otherwise appreciate your wisdom unless it's really loud, but it doesn't actually mean that just maybe, as far as defining a clan, blowing it the hell up makes it feel like those options, which you already have gone on a fair bit about being minor side things anyway, aren't pushed that further away for holding any validity to expect.

Or, really simply: People who like a thing, maybe they don't like it when that thing is exploded. Maybe telling them how they don't appreciate then how much it serves the larger plot, or that the things they liked barely matter anyway, or that they never understood the game anyway, or that they didn't really like the thing they liked correctly compared to how you purportedly like it, are not actually going to be received well, no matter how perfectly correct you think you are.

[Nosimplehiway]

I have some random comments on the preview, mostly page by page stream of consciousness:

Cover: Oooh, pretty colors. Big shiney objects please me, even if they are impossibly large chandelier earrings. Upper left-hand corner, did someone leave their mug of blood on the art before posting it? The woman shown is a vampire experiencing pleasure. Oh, wait, is she dead... a victim of a vampire in a pool of her own blood? Oh, wait! It's visual ambiguity. Irony. Okay, high-concept makes me happy. Nice visual compostion to guide the viewer through the clues. (See I can say nice things aboutV5. I'm not just an aged fanboy who hates change. Remember, that for later.)

Intro: Good news, they have officially moved on from calling it VV. They only did it for about V minutes, but I was white-knuckling having to explain to new players that the second V was a number.

The Top Secret Thingie:
Good summary of Vampirism 101 for new players. Nicely done, and good visuals. Reminds me of Changeling, which was, imho, the prettiest layout of a WW game.

The content and tone is not even close to what a professional document would look like. "Sexually deviant individuals" would be a career-killer in most government jobs. Why is there a bunch of unrelated stuff grouped under 11? Why does 13 say "N", then say "inconclusive"? If this is the level of professionalism in the Second Inquisition, I think vampires will be okay.

One small visual quibble, if you are going to simulate hand-written marginalia, make it more easily legible. This is especially important for people who's first language is not English. This an rpg, not a word puzzle.

Also, the comments don't match the mechanics. "Nobody dies from staking!" They do if they've been tortured for a long time, and are almost dead, then staked. A chunk of wood in your chest is still damage.

Please, as a favor, some page numbers, please. I know it's pedestrian and looks like one of the old-timey book-things, but it is helpful. At some point, I would like to use an index to find this page during play, and how does that work without page numbers?

Next Page:
re: page numbers... is this page 68, or is that only in the torn off book page. Seriously, at some point I am going to be looking something up, and this layout will be pissing me the f--- off.

Why, in fictional worlds can no one seem to make a coffee-cup that doesn't leak in a ring-shape when you set it down? Your artists have used this twice in four pages so far. It's hackneyed.

Concepts
So named because it presents "Concepts", rather than what the rest of the book does?

para.1: It's a squat house attic, with a concrete floor. That is one over-engineered squat-house. What was it before it was a squat, a missile silo?

Yay, a page number! Pie for you! (Notice how nice I am. Don't get used to it.)

Page 34
para 1: Actually at the end of the night, they slip into a coma and humans are okay. Save your cutesie turns of phrase for when they make sense.

This should be the reviewers' quote of choice "... all the rules are different..."

para 4: Grammar Nerd Time: Pick a person and stick with it. Third person is awesome. Second person is awesome. Second and a half person in one paragraph is just sloppy. The sentence with "police brutality" is... complicated from a writing standpoint. Mixed metaphor alert: highlighting something shouldn't make it darker. Upside, the editors wisely put all of this page's bad writing in one paragraph for easy reference. So, yay?

para 6: I take that back. Somebody wrote "give of their undying blood to people", and an ambiguous pronoun in one sentence.

para 7: "This is not a roleplaying game where you play good guys." Or good writers, it would seem.

para 9: This paragraph ends on a comma, which I get is due to the "selected pages" thing, but creates a hilarious segue. "You can use it as a fictional space to explore terrible things," like?

Kindred Fashion
Oh, their fashion sense isn't that terrible of a thing.

Why does a rose print dress say "diva"? Really, it makes me think of a Sunday school teacher.

I enjoy this section as a fun break from heavier matters. I just hope there aren't too many of them, which could create a halting rhythm in the book. I would like to have seen a shout-out to vampires who don't adapt quite fast enough. At my age, I find myself sometimes looking around and realizing that absolutely no one is wearing what I have on. When did polo shirts begin to make people ask you for help in stores? Not every vampire is a cool kid.

64: Brujah
Nice portrait work, and I like the multi-name thing. One universal name everywhere for all time was one of my pet peeves before.

65
para 3: What is a "maladjusted immigrants rejected by the society that should protect them"? I'm not saying I dislike this, it's just I don't get it. Are they rejected from the society they left or the one they are entering? What sort of maladjusted? It sounds like a word soup.

para 4: "On many occasions, the latter are Embraced from former gender studies or sociology students, those who have survived near-death experiences, and people who have in other ways suffered and endured great personal loss." Grammar Nerd Time again! Okay, this sentence can be read as saying that former (not current) gender studies and sociology students count - definitionally - as people who have suffered and endured great loss. (Tuition's high, but not jut for them!) And, since when do the Brujah care about NDE's? Oh, and "survived" is what differentiates near-death from death-death, so "survived" is redundant.

65
Finally! Brujah paper dolls! I have wanted some of those for years. I'm gonna put the blue haired girl's head on the guy with the bandanna, that way he can see. And the leopard pumps (Kitten heels! Get it?) on the skinhead. Did no one tell the boys that with New Celerity you automatically pass all balancing rolls, so you can finally fight in heels? Combat boots are sooo V20!

66
Okay, umm, archetypes... I'm confused. Are these actual groups, like the Camps in Werewolf, or just social categories? In-world are people conscious of them? Going by the Brujah archetypes the clan consists of "anyone who is easily annoyed whether they act on it or not".

Disciplines. I really like the little write-up giving a rationale for each discipline. Well-done.

Bane. We don't know what this is, except that VtR did it already. If most of what's new in V5 turns out to be cribbed from VtR, why do both exist?

Chain-Mail Lady Page
1. You do not look at all comfortable in that outfit, ma'am. I hope they turned off the air-conditioning for this shoot. I highly suggest you not use Auspex in that.... I'm gonna go with dress. Also, your Mickey Mouse hat isn't on straight.

2. I know next to nothing about the international sales of books. I am also not a prude. Really, I'm not. I was doing S&M positive, safe-sex education with ACT-UP before many of the people reading this were born. But... is nudity like this going to cause unnecessary problems with distribution? Are there potential markets where this won't be able to be on the shelf? What does this mean for bringing young people into the game? I gotta say, I have friends with teenagers and tweens, and if one of them asked me to play V5, I'd have to think about it before handing them this book. I once ran an all-ages Buffy RPG game with a neighbor family who had never played an rpg before, but loved the show. It was a hoot! I get it, I get it, Vampire is edgier than thou, but, no, on second thought, I would not hand a twelve-year-old this book. Period. Full stop.

3. The wall is all grimy and grungey, so no disciplines for you, young lady!

4. I would not wear a loose chain-mail dress next to an un-shaded lamp. I never thought I'd use this sentence in my life, but here we go: Madame, your dress is highly electro-conductive. If I dance around you holding large enough magnets will your gloves light up?

87
para 1. Better hope that model with the overdose wasn't a Touchstone. You could get away with that shit back when Humanity was a roll, and could be bought back up with experience. Now, this to-do list is much, much harder to complete in the game. In this new game you are a monster, not a hero. Do you hear me? A MONSTER!... A monster who has to be nice to four or five people and protect them and love them and send them birthday cards and watch rom-coms together and tell them that the chain-mail dress they bought for you is awesome even though it is really uncomfortable and has nowhere at all to put a wallet. Because sharing is caring! Until you kill them with a pedophiliac overdose.

Nothing says bad writing like an uneven tone; it implies even the writer doesn't know what all this shit is about.

para 2 and the rest: "Hi, I'm the writer. Remember those incredibly edgy things I wrote in paragraph one? Never mind. It seemed cool at the time because I like shocking people, because my parents never set limits and ignored me, and that's the only way I could get attention, but, yeah... that stuff won't work in game, so... umm, yeah, here's paragraph two, taking back what I said before. Carmelita Niellson will walk it back further while talking down to someone so old they don't know about the Camarilla. Thanks for your time!"

Niellson's thing: "You're an incredibly ancient being so you think we spend our time in parlours. What? A parlour? Oh, it's like a living room. No, no, we don't have rooms made of living trees here in the future. No, umm, a parlour. Like a social space? Well, not a mead hall, exactly, more like a... God, I'm sorry I'm so bad at talking to an ancient. I'm even using modern English which is nothing like your language. How are we talking again?"

88
Toreador have a ritual for the embrace, now? Or is that just more florid writing?

How does a stage manager and a gadabout differ? They seem the same, except for being described on a different spot on the page.

89
What the hell is this? Seriously. What is it? It's smack dab in the middle of a chapter. In fact, it lands in the middle of a freaking sentence! Oh, wait, I get it. Somebody dripped ink into a thick liquid, maybe mineral oil, photographed it, inverted the image, hit Adjust Contrast on photoshop, then put some MSPaint triangles over it. Why are we looking at someone's freshman graphic design project? If the artist ever met a Toreador, they'd slap them upside their head. (Unless they're a Touchstone, then they'd give them a big hug, a cup of tea, and offer to help them with their portfolio, because... happy-friendship-yay!)

90
Celerity doesn't work like that anymore. The should have given the writer a copy of V5.

91
As for the weakness, I really can't complain. It's no vaguer than the old one. Plus, I have considered using a similar flaw for the Toreador in my own game, described here in post 10.


Enough for now, I'll ramble more later.

[JezMiller]

1. You do not look at all comfortable in that outfit, ma'am. I hope they turned off the air-conditioning for this shoot. I highly suggest you not use Auspex in that.... I'm gonna go with dress. Also, your Mickey Mouse hat isn't on straight.

Yet for those who fear that WW are throwing away all that has gone before, the return of the chain-mail bikini must surely offer reassurance.

But... is nudity like this going to cause unnecessary problems with distribution?

I'm not surprised that a game produced in Sweden takes a more casual attitude to nudity than a game produced in Georgia. But I don't think teens are their primary target audience any more. And I suspect that a lot of modern parents are more worried about smartphone porn downloads than something as relatively innocuous as this.

I get it, Vampire is edgier than thou

Oh, I don't know. They didn't put a naked guy in the chainmail dress, did they?

Although if those metal bands can move about and catch the model's... extremities, maybe their art budget just didn't stretch to the hazard pay...

[Growls]

Nipples and chains? That's why Toreadors get a single dot of Fortitude.

[Teylen]

The content and tone is not even close to what a professional document would look like. "Sexually deviant individuals" would be a career-killer in most government jobs. Why is there a bunch of unrelated stuff grouped under 11? Why does 13 say "N", then say "inconclusive"? If this is the level of professionalism in the Second Inquisition, I think vampires will be okay.

It is apparently an early excerpt. Maybe they learned.

Also, the comments don't match the mechanics. "Nobody dies from staking!"

I assume its due to the unreliable narrator who didn't think of that.
Otherwise they might have thought about that the kindred gotten damage to go into torpor.
Which would explain "holding still while being dissected" better than cunning.

Why, in fictional worlds can no one seem to make a coffee-cup that doesn't leak in a ring-shape when you set it down?

Same reason why they think that pages make for perfect full coffee cup placing spots.
Maybe they are very inept at filling the cup. Like trying to use blink to do so XD

When did polo shirts begin to make people ask you for help in stores? Not every vampire is a cool kid.

Personal anecdote:
I visited St. Petes, FL and went around the pool area in a polo t'shirt and short beige cargo pants.
The choice of, as I admit less than fashionable cloth, had a lady coming up to me and address me as if I were staff.
(I explained, with my German accent, that am just a fellow tourist, and tried to help the best I could)

para 3: What is a "maladjusted immigrants rejected by the society that should protect them"? I'm not saying I dislike this, it's just I don't get it. Are they rejected from the society they left or the one they are entering? What sort of maladjusted?

I would assume it is referring to migrants who have been brought in a generation or two ago, mostly to help with work, yet left behind in regards of being actually integrated into society. It might be more specific to Germany (See Gastarbeiter wikipedia) than to the US.

Bane. We don't know what this is, except that VtR did it already.

Apparently another word for "clan flaw".

Chain-Mail Lady Page
[..]
But... is nudity like this going to cause unnecessary problems with distribution?

Would she be really considered nude?
I mean, the blinds do cover up a lot and its mostly imagination, isn't it?

Niellson's thing: "You're an incredibly ancient being so you think we spend our time in parlours. What? A parlour? Oh, it's like a living room. No, no, we don't have rooms made of living trees here in the future. No, umm, a parlour. Like a social space? Well, not a mead hall, exactly, more like a... God, I'm sorry I'm so bad at talking to an ancient. I'm even using modern English which is nothing like your language. How are we talking again?"

Maybe its a French vampire and it would recognize parlours from parloir/parler to have something to do with conversation ^^

Celerity doesn't work like that anymore. The should have given the writer a copy of V5.

You can still attribute-boost with Celerity.

[James_Willoughby]

The tragedy of V5 is that the creators seem to think they are creating a great work of art, whereas in reality they are struggling to achieve basic competence.

[Camilla]

The fact that they are recognizing the Week of Nightmares is enough to make me say no to this metaplot-ridden trainwreck.

I will NOT be supporting V5 in any way, shape, or form. My games will keep having the Gangrel in the Camarilla and the Ravnos as a full clan.

[adambeyoncelowe]

I have some random comments on the preview, mostly page by page stream of consciousness:

Cover: Oooh, pretty colors. Big shiney objects please me, even if they are impossibly large chandelier earrings. Upper left-hand corner, did someone leave their mug of blood on the art before posting it? The woman shown is a vampire experiencing pleasure. Oh, wait, is she dead... a victim of a vampire in a pool of her own blood? Oh, wait! It's visual ambiguity. Irony. Okay, high-concept makes me happy. Nice visual compostion to guide the viewer through the clues. (See I can say nice things aboutV5. I'm not just an aged fanboy who hates change. Remember, that for later.)

Intro: Good news, they have officially moved on from calling it VV. They only did it for about V minutes, but I was white-knuckling having to explain to new players that the second V was a number.

The Top Secret Thingie:
Good summary of Vampirism 101 for new players. Nicely done, and good visuals. Reminds me of Changeling, which was, imho, the prettiest layout of a WW game.

The content and tone is not even close to what a professional document would look like. "Sexually deviant individuals" would be a career-killer in most government jobs. Why is there a bunch of unrelated stuff grouped under 11? Why does 13 say "N", then say "inconclusive"? If this is the level of professionalism in the Second Inquisition, I think vampires will be okay.

One small visual quibble, if you are going to simulate hand-written marginalia, make it more easily legible. This is especially important for people who's first language is not English. This an rpg, not a word puzzle.

Also, the comments don't match the mechanics. "Nobody dies from staking!" They do if they've been tortured for a long time, and are almost dead, then staked. A chunk of wood in your chest is still damage.

Please, as a favor, some page numbers, please. I know it's pedestrian and looks like one of the old-timey book-things, but it is helpful. At some point, I would like to use an index to find this page during play, and how does that work without page numbers?

Next Page:
re: page numbers... is this page 68, or is that only in the torn off book page. Seriously, at some point I am going to be looking something up, and this layout will be pissing me the f--- off.

Why, in fictional worlds can no one seem to make a coffee-cup that doesn't leak in a ring-shape when you set it down? Your artists have used this twice in four pages so far. It's hackneyed.

Concepts
So named because it presents "Concepts", rather than what the rest of the book does?

para.1: It's a squat house attic, with a concrete floor. That is one over-engineered squat-house. What was it before it was a squat, a missile silo?

Yay, a page number! Pie for you! (Notice how nice I am. Don't get used to it.)

Page 34
para 1: Actually at the end of the night, they slip into a coma and humans are okay. Save your cutesie turns of phrase for when they make sense.

This should be the reviewers' quote of choice "... all the rules are different..."

para 4: Grammar Nerd Time: Pick a person and stick with it. Third person is awesome. Second person is awesome. Second and a half person in one paragraph is just sloppy. The sentence with "police brutality" is... complicated from a writing standpoint. Mixed metaphor alert: highlighting something shouldn't make it darker. Upside, the editors wisely put all of this page's bad writing in one paragraph for easy reference. So, yay?

para 6: I take that back. Somebody wrote "give of their undying blood to people", and an ambiguous pronoun in one sentence.

para 7: "This is not a roleplaying game where you play good guys." Or good writers, it would seem.

para 9: This paragraph ends on a comma, which I get is due to the "selected pages" thing, but creates a hilarious segue. "You can use it as a fictional space to explore terrible things," like?

Kindred Fashion
Oh, their fashion sense isn't that terrible of a thing.

Why does a rose print dress say "diva"? Really, it makes me think of a Sunday school teacher.

I enjoy this section as a fun break from heavier matters. I just hope there aren't too many of them, which could create a halting rhythm in the book. I would like to have seen a shout-out to vampires who don't adapt quite fast enough. At my age, I find myself sometimes looking around and realizing that absolutely no one is wearing what I have on. When did polo shirts begin to make people ask you for help in stores? Not every vampire is a cool kid.

64: Brujah
Nice portrait work, and I like the multi-name thing. One universal name everywhere for all time was one of my pet peeves before.

65
para 3: What is a "maladjusted immigrants rejected by the society that should protect them"? I'm not saying I dislike this, it's just I don't get it. Are they rejected from the society they left or the one they are entering? What sort of maladjusted? It sounds like a word soup.

para 4: "On many occasions, the latter are Embraced from former gender studies or sociology students, those who have survived near-death experiences, and people who have in other ways suffered and endured great personal loss." Grammar Nerd Time again! Okay, this sentence can be read as saying that former (not current) gender studies and sociology students count - definitionally - as people who have suffered and endured great loss. (Tuition's high, but not jut for them!) And, since when do the Brujah care about NDE's? Oh, and "survived" is what differentiates near-death from death-death, so "survived" is redundant.

65
Finally! Brujah paper dolls! I have wanted some of those for years. I'm gonna put the blue haired girl's head on the guy with the bandanna, that way he can see. And the leopard pumps (Kitten heels! Get it?) on the skinhead. Did no one tell the boys that with New Celerity you automatically pass all balancing rolls, so you can finally fight in heels? Combat boots are sooo V20!

66
Okay, umm, archetypes... I'm confused. Are these actual groups, like the Camps in Werewolf, or just social categories? In-world are people conscious of them? Going by the Brujah archetypes the clan consists of "anyone who is easily annoyed whether they act on it or not".

Disciplines. I really like the little write-up giving a rationale for each discipline. Well-done.

Bane. We don't know what this is, except that VtR did it already. If most of what's new in V5 turns out to be cribbed from VtR, why do both exist?

Chain-Mail Lady Page
1. You do not look at all comfortable in that outfit, ma'am. I hope they turned off the air-conditioning for this shoot. I highly suggest you not use Auspex in that.... I'm gonna go with dress. Also, your Mickey Mouse hat isn't on straight.

2. I know next to nothing about the international sales of books. I am also not a prude. Really, I'm not. I was doing S&M positive, safe-sex education with ACT-UP before many of the people reading this were born. But... is nudity like this going to cause unnecessary problems with distribution? Are there potential markets where this won't be able to be on the shelf? What does this mean for bringing young people into the game? I gotta say, I have friends with teenagers and tweens, and if one of them asked me to play V5, I'd have to think about it before handing them this book. I once ran an all-ages Buffy RPG game with a neighbor family who had never played an rpg before, but loved the show. It was a hoot! I get it, I get it, Vampire is edgier than thou, but, no, on second thought, I would not hand a twelve-year-old this book. Period. Full stop.

3. The wall is all grimy and grungey, so no disciplines for you, young lady!

4. I would not wear a loose chain-mail dress next to an un-shaded lamp. I never thought I'd use this sentence in my life, but here we go: Madame, your dress is highly electro-conductive. If I dance around you holding large enough magnets will your gloves light up?

87
para 1. Better hope that model with the overdose wasn't a Touchstone. You could get away with that shit back when Humanity was a roll, and could be bought back up with experience. Now, this to-do list is much, much harder to complete in the game. In this new game you are a monster, not a hero. Do you hear me? A MONSTER!... A monster who has to be nice to four or five people and protect them and love them and send them birthday cards and watch rom-coms together and tell them that the chain-mail dress they bought for you is awesome even though it is really uncomfortable and has nowhere at all to put a wallet. Because sharing is caring! Until you kill them with a pedophiliac overdose.

Nothing says bad writing like an uneven tone; it implies even the writer doesn't know what all this shit is about.

para 2 and the rest: "Hi, I'm the writer. Remember those incredibly edgy things I wrote in paragraph one? Never mind. It seemed cool at the time because I like shocking people, because my parents never set limits and ignored me, and that's the only way I could get attention, but, yeah... that stuff won't work in game, so... umm, yeah, here's paragraph two, taking back what I said before. Carmelita Niellson will walk it back further while talking down to someone so old they don't know about the Camarilla. Thanks for your time!"

Niellson's thing: "You're an incredibly ancient being so you think we spend our time in parlours. What? A parlour? Oh, it's like a living room. No, no, we don't have rooms made of living trees here in the future. No, umm, a parlour. Like a social space? Well, not a mead hall, exactly, more like a... God, I'm sorry I'm so bad at talking to an ancient. I'm even using modern English which is nothing like your language. How are we talking again?"

88
Toreador have a ritual for the embrace, now? Or is that just more florid writing?

How does a stage manager and a gadabout differ? They seem the same, except for being described on a different spot on the page.

89
What the hell is this? Seriously. What is it? It's smack dab in the middle of a chapter. In fact, it lands in the middle of a freaking sentence! Oh, wait, I get it. Somebody dripped ink into a thick liquid, maybe mineral oil, photographed it, inverted the image, hit Adjust Contrast on photoshop, then put some MSPaint triangles over it. Why are we looking at someone's freshman graphic design project? If the artist ever met a Toreador, they'd slap them upside their head. (Unless they're a Touchstone, then they'd give them a big hug, a cup of tea, and offer to help them with their portfolio, because... happy-friendship-yay!)

90
Celerity doesn't work like that anymore. The should have given the writer a copy of V5.

91
As for the weakness, I really can't complain. It's no vaguer than the old one. Plus, I have considered using a similar flaw for the Toreador in my own game, described http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main-category/main-forum/the-classic-world-of-darkness/vampire-the-masquerade/910533-toreador-flaws"]here [/URL]in post 10.


Enough for now, I'll ramble more later.

I literally laughed out loud!

I'm glad this is an early excerpt, though. There were a few too many mistakes for something that might be going to print.

[Nicolas Milioni]

The fact that they are recognizing the Week of Nightmares is enough to make me say no to this metaplot-ridden trainwreck.

I will NOT be supporting V5 in any way, shape, or form. My games will keep having the Gangrel in the Camarilla and the Ravnos as a full clan.

Oh man :<,you will by any chance give the mechanics and the You Are What you Eat a chance?

[Bluecho]

I'm not surprised that a game produced in Sweden takes a more casual attitude to nudity than a game produced in Georgia. But I don't think teens are their primary target audience any more. And I suspect that a lot of modern parents are more worried about smartphone porn downloads than something as relatively innocuous as this.

Honestly, exposing kids isn't the problem here. The problem is that even people old enough for nudity don't necessarily want to see it in their game books. It's going to potentially put people off of getting into the game. It's why the slow disappearance of the "chainmail bikini" trope has been a boon to the fantasy genre. Some people just aren't into that, or don't want to be seen with it.

We can argue all day about whether that's right, or whether some people should "get over it". It doesn't change that people feel that way. So avoiding putting obvious nudity in a product serves to invite in people who otherwise wouldn't. Nor does the product need to have nudity to be seen as a mature game. If anything, it's more mature if the nudity is absent. Makes V5 seem more like Vampire: Edgy Edition.