World of Darkness versus Chronicles of Darkness

[dragon8u]

I want to know why people seem to massively prefer the World of Darkness 5th edition instead of The Chronicles of Darkness second edition?

Is there a preference comparing the rules? Is there a preference comparing the lore?

[Amethyst]

I want to know why people seem to massively prefer the World of Darkness 5th edition instead of The Chronicles of Darkness second edition?

Is there a preference comparing the rules? Is there a preference comparing the lore?

Chronicles of Darkness has relatively little lore, while World of Darkness has a lot of lore. That’s the main reason I prefer WoD (also I think the mechanics are a little simpler).

[Father Enoch]

I admit my opinion is biased, but I stand by it; Chronicles of Darkness, and most of their supplements are superior to World of Darkness in almost every way, and were so even in First Edition.

I've given up on convincing anyone they're superior, but I stand by it.

[TempleBuilder]

Chronicles of Darkness has relatively little lore, while World of Darkness has a lot of lore. That’s the main reason I prefer WoD (also I think the mechanics are a little simpler).

You know, I don’t know if that’s the whole story. I’ve seen the sentiment repeated a bunch, all over the internet. But in my opinion, it’s because Chronicles had a weak start. Fans of World didn’t like it, because it wasn’t very much like World, being mysterious where World was specific, and generally not being very sure of itself and its themes. I’d say that with the second editions, Chronicles has found its footing and is very good, (most of the time,) but many of the fans of World seem to prefer to stick to World. Newer people are generally find and are recommended World first, because World has tons of advocates constantly talking about that lore. Chronicles, on the other hand, has less people talking about it, and has way lower publicity. So most people will try World first, and either like it or don’t, and those who don’t like World are probably not going to be willing to try Chronicles.

Basically, I think Chronicles is distinct enough to have to compete for fans, and not distinct enough to get people who don’t like World. It’s like when you plant a sapling right under the parent plant. It can’t get enough resources to grow, and is stunted, maybe even eventually dying.

(Personally I really dislike most of the lore I hear about World, very little of it seems fun to play with, and I feel like I would be chucking most of the material because I don’t like the very specific genres the games work in. But tons of people seem to like it. To each their own.)

(I can’t speak on mechanics, because I’ve never played anything of World, but the general descriptions of mechanics I’ve read of World are way more complicated than Chronicles.)

[Heavy Arms]

Of course, for all that people complained about how "little" lore Chronicles has/had, they also tended to complain about how the lore present was somehow not good. The CofD are variable in lore depending on the needs of each game line. Some are lore light because lore isn't as important to them, while others are much lore heavy because the core premise calls for it. Many of the people that complain about CofD 1e having "no lore" also compressed a whole chapter on the story of Wolf and Moon into "excuse to be spirit cops," and then say how little lore it was.

For me personally:

CofD 2e > WoD 20th/Revised > a messy mix of CofD 1e and early WoD > a bunch of other games > WoD 5e.

WoD 5e is a massive disappointment (at best) to me. There are gems hidden in it of good ideas, but none of them are worth all the work to salvage to other systems. Especially because I know the games those ideas actually came from and I can just steal from those directly.

[Damian May]

CofD 2e > WoD 20th/Revised > a messy mix of CofD 1e and early WoD > a bunch of other games > WoD 5e.

With the very slight alteration of:

WoD 20th/Revised > CofD 2e >early WoD > CofD 1e > the rest of my collection > WoD 5e.

Agreed.

[Shakanaka]

I can't like CofD because it removed Appearance and Perception as Attributes. And every single roll has a base 8 difficulty for everything. everything

poop

[Cauthon]

I can't like CofD because it removed the Appearance Attribute.

Gotta be honest, this is one of the reasons I prefer CofD. I mean... I love Exalted, but even there Appearance is kinda a dumb Attribute.

Overall, I'm in the same boat as TempleBuilder. WoD's heavy focus on lore as being front-and-center is a detractor for me personally. In CofD, lore I don't like (Beast...) can be excised pretty easily. From what I understand of WoD, I can't, say, remove the existence of the Tremere without massively fucking up the setting.

Plus -and this is just my opinion based on cursory understanding- most of WoD just seems kinda... childish. The vampires are violent children, the werewolves are... violent children with fur, the Changelings are literally and inconsistently children... I kinda like the Mages, at least, if I go in assuming it's a grey-vs-grey conflict.

[Heavy Arms]

While I know there's no point in arguing the aesthetic values you might place on those, they always strike as such odd complaints when I hear them and things like them.

Appearance as handled horribly in most of the games before CofD 1e, and Perception is a one-trick pony which is the opposite of what Attributes are supposed to be. Moving their mechanics elsewhere in the system means what they do is still there. It's not like CofD characters don't have mechanical ways to be pretty, or have superior hearing, if you want to make them that way.

Every Story* game eventually switch to set target numbers for the dice. 1e Aeon/Aberrant/Adventure! did it. Exalted did it. Scion did it. Storypath did it. WoD 5e finally did it. Reducing the number of variables that went into each roll makes it much easier to have an idea of what the remaining variables actually do to impact your character. All that matters in the end is if the math of the dice produce results in line with expectations.

They're different systems that handled things differently. What matters is if they work with internal coherence, and perform according to the expectations they set in what they mean.

[ArcaneArts]

My comment on Appearance and Perception as Attributes is that I would love to hear people got mileage and usage out of them as stats. I ran into the problem of them feeling like dumps stats, where Striking Looks felt like it added on significantly to the social element of my character and said("looked", I suppose might more grokkable) different things depending on what my array of Presence, Manipulation, and Composure looked like, and Wits+Composure for perception made being perceptive feel more like an aspect of my character than Perception as an Attribute ever did.

As for the target number being fixed, and also keeping a general rule of a fixed success target(being one*), I gotta say that I actually really appreciate systems where the averages are easy enough to figure out that both game masters and players can have reasonable expectations of how rolls work, and then how to build both characters scenarios. In the case of Chronicles, the general principle that emerged from those factors, that a final dice pool of three is a reliable-enough pool to get an action done, makes it easy for me to take stock of a situation and work for either success or tension (as a player and as a Storyteller, respectively), and in particular to make modifiers dramatically significant(again, either way). It's an easily controllable and understandable...standard, that fits my expectations for an urban horror game (the relative 1-3 chance does a lot to make it feel like the world itself makes things a struggle, and while it's tangential, the old combat rule that, all else being equal, three people against one will reliably see victory for the three makes that general principle have versimilitude for me).

On the over arching subject, while I know I have a bias because of the way Chronicles affected my growth and development as a person and that that could just have easily been World if had just been those books, there's a lot of things I like about Chronicles over World (I prefer the more archetypal and organicallly street level approach to the subject matter[particularly because it makes the times it doesn't do that all the more notable and impactful], and that the overall vibe of Chronicles is that it's a much more versatile setting for players and Storyteller's alike, particularly as crossover is concerned), but I think if I had to draw a particular line of my preference that I think can be assigned to a design issue...

...it's that while I enjoy the lore of World, it makes World one of the only settings where I can be stopped from playing particular characters by the lore unless I ignore it.

I don't mean that in the sense of where I come in with an idea that just doesn't work for the setting and gameplay**, but where unless you ignore the setting and lore, some character basically just can't exist except for as a hard mode. There are a couple of moments where I ran into this, but for me the defining moment was, early on in exploring World, I wanted to play a Lasombra Kiasyd for a Masquerade game, and was told I couldn't-well, probably shouldn't, because the game was in a Camarilla setting, and even if we ignored the logistics of how that happened, I'd basically be spending the entire game hiding and trying to not die, because the general response to a Clan with such strong ties to the Sabbat wasn't really going to be given a chance on the ground of not knowing anything about the Sabbat.

Now, it can be easy to pin that on the Storyteller, and being older and wiser now I can see how I should have worked that out with the Storyteller-but that issue came from the way World handled and talked about all those things. You don't really have those problems in Chronicles, and the few times you do (I'm thinking the Zeky in Promethean), it's an explicit (and rare) tragedy, with almost all other instances either being a part of the individual table setting and/or story conceit (There was a Requiem game I played where the players established that the Ventrue were an almost outcast clan because of the Elysium's history and the ways the Daeva and Nosferatu, now the dominant Clans in Paris, held the Ventrue accountable for elements of that) or otherwise a result of character choice (a neonate has no power over who sires them, but if you decide to be a secret Tenth Chorister or a Scelsti in Awakening, the majority of the time that's completely on you).

That said, even with stuff like that, it all honestly just comes that I like the setting and pieces of Chronicles more than World, and a whole breakdown of why that would be long.

Anyways, this isn't directly addressing the original post, and on that.....You know, while I can try to logically explain based on what I hear second hand, I can't and won't try to pretend I get what World 5E fans get from the game. My main assumption is that the two main camps for Masquerade 5E are people who are just happy to see Vampire restored in any method, and people who groked the particular attitude it came out with. For Reckoning and those people anticipating Apocalypse, I'm at even more of a loss, because that attitude that was in Masquerade seems to be missing from those, and the only way I can imagine the existing fanbase for them being okay with the product is if it's an absolutist desire to see lines continued regardless of the form of it. Anything else relies on a total newbie's first exposure, and I can't quite get into that head space. I have too much of the curse of knowledge.

*barring how things like Armor and certain magic effects can muddle that, which as a Storyteller I am always as careful as the setting will let me about rolling that out, usually in later-stages of the game)
**a mild but hilarious example, I got tired of not being able to play an Acanthus because the group I was with kept fucking running Ascension, so I tried playing Dual-Traditioned Ecstatic/Euthantos mage, and while I will not say that it's impossible to get what I wanted out of that notion, I think you can imagine all the work I did for half the payout in my particular attempt

[Amethyst]

Of course, for all that people complained about how "little" lore Chronicles has/had, they also tended to complain about how the lore present was somehow not good. The CofD are variable in lore depending on the needs of each game line. Some are lore light because lore isn't as important to them, while others are much lore heavy because the core premise calls for it. Many of the people that complain about CofD 1e having "no lore" also compressed a whole chapter on the story of Wolf and Moon into "excuse to be spirit cops," and then say how little lore it was.

For me personally:

CofD 2e > WoD 20th/Revised > a messy mix of CofD 1e and early WoD > a bunch of other games > WoD 5e.

WoD 5e is a massive disappointment (at best) to me. There are gems hidden in it of good ideas, but none of them are worth all the work to salvage to other systems. Especially because I know the games those ideas actually came from and I can just steal from those directly.

I actually like the lore in Chronicles. I just wish there was more of it.

[ZakRulz]

Nostalgia is the big reason for me. I got into roleplaying through VtM Second Edition and stopped when I graduated high school. I got back into the hobby a few months before V5 came out. (not because of V5. I rewatched Kindred: The Embraced and it got me wanting to play again.) This really only applies to the vampire and werewolf lines though, since those were the ones I was into back then. I could go either way Ascension/Awakening and prefer Lost and Vigil.

[Rhywbeth]

I want to know why people seem to massively prefer the World of Darkness 5th edition instead of The Chronicles of Darkness second edition?

They do? Most people I've met have said they prefer older editions WoD, with CofD coming second and both outclassing WoD5. The others preferred CofD to WoD and felt both outclassed WoD5.

(Ignoring fifth edition, which could've been fine but has since shot itself and become dead in the water to me) I enjoy both. I've gone through phases over the years where I heavily favour one over the other for a while, and I think ultimately I do prefer WoD but I love both. I don't bother comparing mechanics, they're just different and each enjoyable in their own ways.

I do however feel like World has a, uh, "weight" to it; part nostalgia, part a kind of 90's aesthetic and "end of days" vibes and a grounding in an established history (albeit one of lies and half-truths) which gives it a gravitas CofD doesn't have (but gives Chronicles a leg up over WoD in a different way with its more open mysteries.). Also Chronicles doesn't have Wraith/the Underworld/Dark Umbra which tips the scales in favour of World in my eyes.

WoD lacks the Strix though, so points to CofD for that one.

[Heavy Arms]

Uh, the CofD does have an Underworld. It was fully detailed in 2009 with the Book of the Dead, which was a mixed source book for core blue book and Geist. Geist 2e has also expanded on it a lot to make it more playable (even if pure ghosts ala Wraith is still not a core splat).

[Shakanaka]

Geist isn't really in the same "avenue" as Wraith so to speak. It more-so follows along the line of Orpheus. Both Orpheus and Geist fall short of being anything heavily thematic compared to Wraith, as in both games you're basically just humans+ (which is a niche Mage already fills), without the significant impact roleplaying an actual ghost character and the events that surround being one thereof.