V5 General Discussion: Let's Keep It Civil This Time

[Camilla]

After how the last thread went down, I figured I'd try and make it up to you guys and start the new V5 thread, hopefully this time we can keep the real-life political drama and bickering OUT of this thread and just discuss the game.

My opinions on V5 are already well-known so I'm not going to repeat them, but for those who are interested in V5, here's your discussion thread.

Let's keep it civil and on topic this time.

[Nicolas Milioni]

All right. I'll kick of the discussion. So, we saw the Nosferatu,Toreador,Brujah and Ventrue signature pics. They are respectively. An terribly pale face with black,bottomless eyes. Surrounded by darkness. An beautiful woman with a dress made of steel,an hairdo,and dom/sub imagery. An bald young woman with steel gloves,an leather jacket and a symbol on her hair. And a old lady with old fashioned clothing holding a leash with a ghoul wearing a gimp mask made of diamonds in the other hand.
What do you think,Gangrel,TremereAnd Malkavian will look like?

[thebiglarpnerd]

All right. I'll kick of the discussion. So, we saw the Nosferatu,Toreador,Brujah and Ventrue signature pics. They are respectively. An terribly pale face with black,bottomless eyes. Surrounded by darkness. An beautiful woman with a dress made of steel,an hairdo,and dom/sub imagery. An bald young woman with steel gloves,an leather jacket and a symbol on her hair. And a old lady with old fashioned clothing holding a leash with a ghoul wearing a gimp mask made of diamonds in the other hand.
What do you think,Gangrel,TremereAnd Malkavian will look like?

I think we've seen the Malkavian one, with the three-part shattered mirror picture. Not sure on the others. I feel like the Tremere one will be a bit of a comingling of a 'mystical' style into something modern, or perhaps a straight-up neopagan angle? Gangrel I could see being something along the lines of the descriptions, someone in a patchwork leather coat with fur edging showing off a 'wild' angle, with some eye manipulation for the (assumed to be still the same) Gangrel flaw.

[PMárk]

All right. I'll kick of the discussion. So, we saw the Nosferatu,Toreador,Brujah and Ventrue signature pics. They are respectively. An terribly pale face with black,bottomless eyes. Surrounded by darkness. An beautiful woman with a dress made of steel,an hairdo,and dom/sub imagery. An bald young woman with steel gloves,an leather jacket and a symbol on her hair. And a old lady with old fashioned clothing holding a leash with a ghoul wearing a gimp mask made of diamonds in the other hand.
What do you think,Gangrel,TremereAnd Malkavian will look like?

Gangrel will be POC urban neo-tribal, I'm 99% sure of it.

Tremere, well, that's an interesting thing, I really don't have an idea. That is the clan I can't attach a strong visual impression anyway. The Revised and V20 ones were practically a Ventrue with a book and pendant. Earlier, it was a Constatine-like street wiz. Could be anything this time.

Malkavian could be also anything. I'm nost sure the broken mirror picture is it, but could be. Likely will be more "troubled youth" than the "dark messiah" of Revised, or "cool easygoing surfer kid" of V20 (oh, how much that was a letdown after Revised...).

[Nicolas Milioni]

Gangrel will be POC urban neo-tribal, I'm 99% sure of it.

Tremere, well, that's an interesting thing, I really don't have an idea. That is the clan I can't attach a strong visual impression anyway. The Revised and V20 ones were practically a Ventrue with a book and pendant. Earlier, it was a Constatine-like street wiz. Could be anything this time.

Malkavian could be also anything. I'm nost sure the broken mirror picture is it, but could be. Likely will be more "troubled youth" than the "dark messiah" of Revised, or "cool easygoing surfer kid" of V20 (oh, how much that was a letdown after Revised...).

If they'll show an traditional Tremere. We may see a classy person,adorned with subtle occult symbols,like the moon,maybe some tarot cards,astrological images. Maybe they will go for the unexpected like they did with the Ventrue and show us an little kid maybe holding a goblet of blood.

[JezMiller]

I'm not so much interested in the Gangrel visuals as in the clan weakness and culture. There's been a subtle shift in recent OP products, with the back-to-nature side de-emphasized in favor of the survivors-and-individualists side. I wonder if V5 will continue that trend or push back against it?

[Nosimplehiway]

I'm not so much interested in the Gangrel visuals as in the clan weakness and culture. There's been a subtle shift in recent OP products, with the back-to-nature side de-emphasized in favor of the survivors-and-individualists side. I wonder if V5 will continue that trend or push back against it?

I'm guessing continue the unnatural survivor thing. The (slight) problem with Gangrel loving nature was how they interacted with Garou. It made sense that Gangrel had an environmentalist vibe back when Gangrel were the designated ambassadors to the Garou, but as the splats split over the years it no longer worked.

My favorite Tremere image was from... 2ed, I think? Tween girl (yet quite old-looking) Tremere pulling a rabbit from a hat and looking altogether unimpressed with her own work. The best art usually has counterpoint and undercurrents like that one did. I used to... many lifetimes ago... be a tattoo artist, and that was one piece I always wanted to do and never got the chance.

That same edition had my favorite Nosferatu. He was wearing a very smart bespoke suit, bowler, and was clearly quite cultured. His style looked like a trader from the City with a double-barrelled name and old school ties. I sometimes find it a little disheartening that Nosferatu get embraced, look in a mirror and announce, "I'm hideous! I know how to make things better. I'll move into a sewer and dress like a homeless person. That'll help." I love the Nosferatu who try to make the best of a bad situation. Again, counter-points and irony is sort of my taste.

So far I really like the Betty White Ventrue. She genuinely looks like the sort of person I'd like to meet, maybe at a slight distance for safety's sake.

The Toreader and Brujah portraits, while technically quite proficient on the part of both model and photographer, were both a little on-the-nose for me. Absolutely the only technical quibble I can make against either is the use of negative space in the Toreador. A scene cluttered with old lamps and bric-a-brac would have worked; completely void negative space would have worked. But the photographer chose not to decide and lost what could have been a really good composition either way. Artists must have courage! This really is just a quibble with a nice piece, though.

[PMárk]

Honestly, what I'm most interested in at this point is the long-term future of this edition. I know it's way early to ruminate over it, but still, I wonder, if the wider community would accept it and how much new people would pick it up and if that will be enough? Or, if not, will we see a shift back to earlier style and concepts, just as we've seen with D&D 5e, or with Sahdowrun with its 5e, 5-6 years down the line from now? It will be interesting to see. I don't think even if V5 won't be embraced (no pun intended) by the wider community, that would be a disaster. WoD outlived the actual killing off of the whole gameline, after all.

[Heavy Arms]

I have to say, the "licensees will handle it" model seems like it could make or break V5 in regards to longevity, and I have no idea of it will play out. On one hand, it could provide V5 with a lot of long term appeal because WW will make the core books that everyone has to get, but a smaller local studio can focus on books more relevant (and pre-localized for languages) to subsets of the audience so everyone feels catered to. On the other hand, it could also dilute the brand and make it hard on the collector-fans to have a single solitary "edition" that they convince people to play. If one company is doing the Clan books, and five different companies are doing city books local to their primary writers, and none of them coordinate with each other, WW has a lot of work on their hands to keep that coherent.

The problem as I see it, is that while the licensee focused model has had a lot of success in RPGs, it's been successful for games that are more about a core engine rather than a core setting. Evil Hat can have a lot of success with this, because there's no expectation any two companies publishing Fate based RPGs will be compatible. You can kinda like Spirit of the Century, love Atomic Robo, hate the Dresden Files, and still be a Fate fan that ends up actively promoting the Fate brand.

However, if (hypothetically and all) Onyx Path does a V5 Lore of the Clans series, and By Night Studios uses their connections with different large LARP groups to do a bunch of official V5 city books... what happens when they clash? Because you want all the V5 books to work together, and that's a lot harder if the official books are coming out of studios that aren't directly working together. It's a lot of energy, effort, and possibly strained business relationships to be the middle group pushing those products to match up.

If WW can get this together and make it work (assuming V5 is successful as a base game in the first place, we all know I'm not the most positive about that), it could significantly help with longevity because of the expanded pool of creative folks coming up with books that WW didn't think to make, and maybe we didn't know we wanted to see (or simply dismissed as being unrealistic for a company like WW or Onyx Path to dedicate time to with everything else they're doing). If they can't strike a good balance on editorial control and contractor freedom, it could easily make it nearly impossible to hold the line together for years to come.

[JezMiller]

Individual licensees are conceptually no different from what they're already doing with Storyteller's Vault,. They can simply say, "You can use the rules and setting of the core books, but we reserve the right to do things in the core metaplot which may contradict what you're doing in your own products".

I actually believe it will be a success. I wouldn't put money on a critical mass of players using the rules exactly as written, but some of the sillier ideas - "I can't believe in a defining principle unless I fixate on some random mook who embodies it for me", for instance - are also among the easiest to houserule. And they have invested a large amount of effort in revisions and updates to the setting, meaning that V5 potentially has a lot to offer to anyone who wants to keep playing using the V20 rules - or for that matter, to anyone who wants to keep playing using the first edition rules.

I wonder if they will allow the use of the revised setting - the metaplot changes - with SV products using the earlier edition rules?

[thebiglarpnerd]

Individual licensees are conceptually no different from what they're already doing with Storyteller's Vault,. They can simply say, "You can use the rules and setting of the core books, but we reserve the right to do things in the core metaplot which may contradict what you're doing in your own products".

I actually believe it will be a success. I wouldn't put money on a critical mass of players using the rules exactly as written, but some of the sillier ideas - "I can't believe in a defining principle unless I fixate on some random mook who embodies it for me", for instance - are also among the easiest to houserule. And they have invested a large amount of effort in revisions and updates to the setting, meaning that V5 potentially has a lot to offer to anyone who wants to keep playing using the V20 rules - or for that matter, to anyone who wants to keep playing using the first edition rules.

I wonder if they will allow the use of the revised setting - the metaplot changes - with SV products using the earlier edition rules?

I know Shane at one point said on FB that V5 isn't yet in the cards for STV, so I don't know. I would say insofar as they don't require a V5 page reference, then they can do something similar enough.

[Pluvinarch]

With the introduction of Hunger Dice I am excited to think about dice possibilities for the next releases. Hunger is tied to Vampire so what to expect for W5, M5, C5 and W5?

Since it is a game of taking risks (discipline activation, trait enhancement, etc) against possibility of hunger... Then I suspect the other games will have a similar concept:
Werewolf 5: taking risks get you Rage dice and you risk losing control...
Mage 5: taking risks get you Paradox dice and you risk reality breaking on you...
Wraith 5: taking risks get you shadow dice and you empower the player that is playing as your shadow...
Changeling 5: Hmm, I have no clue about that one...

Feels cool and very themed. But I imagine that it would be hard for crossover lovers because then you have to know different dice systems and dice results for each splat and for each subsplat (Gangrel hunger failures are different from the Nosferatu, etc so therefore a Bonegnawer rage failure would be different from a Wendigo rage failure... many tables to read during play)

[Cifer]

Changeling 5: Hmm, I have no clue about that one...

Perhaps something glamour-related - the more you give in to your faerie soul, the weirder stuff happens.

I'm fairly certain Werewolf will be Rage. It's the one constant affecting everything Garou do. However, it might also be more beneficial than Vampire Hunger, where getting more Hunger is strictly negative. Rage is a far more ambiguous force and while it may cause loss of control, it also propels you onward. It will be interesting to see how that works out in a game system.

[thebiglarpnerd]

Perhaps something glamour-related - the more you give in to your faerie soul, the weirder stuff happens.

I'm fairly certain Werewolf will be Rage. It's the one constant affecting everything Garou do. However, it might also be more beneficial than Vampire Hunger, where getting more Hunger is strictly negative. Rage is a far more ambiguous force and while it may cause loss of control, it also propels you onward. It will be interesting to see how that works out in a game system.

Banality dice would function just like Hunger dice, really, except perhaps rolling more successes on banality dice in your pool than Hunger causes the effect to go awry or not even happen.

[Heavy Arms]

Individual licensees are conceptually no different from what they're already doing with Storyteller's Vault,.

Kinda?

I mean, the basic structure of the relationship is, "WW owns this IP, and you get into a contract with them to produce material using it and sell."

But the perception of things to consumers is generally going to be very different. The STV is a fan made book outlet. Everything you get there is by the fans, with the inherent caveat that it's not official material. If different STV books on the same subject contradict each other, nobody is going to be frustrated. Publishers getting official licenses for books that WW isn't going to produce in-house, but are supplements that most fans want an official version of and will be marketed as such. Contradictions there are a problem that, "use which you want," isn't a panacea for.

I have no idea if it'll turn out a good move, a neutral move, or a bad move. But there's clear risks involved.