Paradox Interactive (the Crusader Kings people, not the Conan/Mutant Chronicles ones) buy the White Wolf properties [Merged x10]

[MeetsInTaverns]

Hey Murder of Crows, I don't think anyway should, or will lose.

I'm a friend of a developer who writes for both CWoD and NWoD - and do you know what he really enjoys? - writing man.
He loves it and writes it and spends much of his life wrapped in it. I doubt that will be ignored.

I am *sure* what they want to hear - is what we like and want. And not what we don't.

I'd like to think they'd base stuff off the positives that come from our conversations.

[Murder-of-Crows]

I would not have picked that up at all from any of your previous posts.

Sorry, I am kind of disenchanted with the way some developers and writers are handling stuff. That's why I am currently more interested in the cWoD and Vampire: The Masquerade in particular. I fully acknowledge that the nWoD is a lot better ruleswise. Initially, when V20 was announced I was briefly hoping that it would be based on the Translation Guide and use nWoD rules instead of the older, more fluid rules from cWoD.

But basically, back in 2004 I was a rabid VtR fanboy Only that's pretty hard to pull off in Germany, where the sentiment strongly runs toward Masquerade and cWoD. Also, I like to be a fan of gamelines that publish stuff regularly (like Requiem used to back in 2004 to 2008).

[Jacob]

I know this is a few pages ago, but I wanted to address it (and my apologies for going off-topic here): I just wanted to say thank you for these exceptionally kind words. I sincerely appreciate them, and they quite literally made my day.

You're welcome. You guys really hit it out of the park. I have never come across an RPG that is so well written and put together. It's the mark all OPP products should strive for. (It literally has something for each and every one of my players. Including obligatory, 'I only play humans' guy.)

(Although, it's also why I'm a tad disappointed in how Beast seems to be shaking out. )

[Almarck]

Sorry, I am kind of disenchanted with the way some developers and writers are handling stuff. That's why I am currently more interested in the cWoD and Vampire: The Masquerade in particular. I fully acknowledge that the nWoD is a lot better ruleswise. Initially, when V20 was announced I was briefly hoping that it would be based on the Translation Guide and use nWoD rules instead of the older, more fluid rules from cWoD.

But basically, back in 2004 I was a rabid VtR fanboy Only that's pretty hard to pull off in Germany, where the sentiment strongly runs toward Masquerade and cWoD. Also, I like to be a fan of gamelines that publish stuff regularly (like Requiem used to back in 2004 to 2008).

So long as you know, I suppose everything is fine.

Murder we don't know what happens. For all we know, everything you've said comes true exactly as you propose it does, even the presence in book stores. For all we know, everything works out better than any of us can hope. We don't know.

Still, plenty of us are unwilling to part as you have. And that's what we will cling to. Currently, though, most of our worst fears are likely to disapate given that we now know who our Lead Storyteller is at this point.

For now, we should probably just ease up and joke around. We'll know the truth within a week.

Also, silly idea. What if by One World of Darkness, they meant that BOTH settings occupy the same world. Requiem AND Masquerade Vampires in every city. Forsaken and Garou have territory conflicts. God Machine and the Weaver comparing notes.

[Beckett]

So until we wait to see what will really happen, I thought to explore what could happen if the cWoD and nWoD lines were to be united. This is all speculation and is not based on any actual information about the change in ownership. I just thought it would be fund to play around a bit with how concepts can be combined.

Vampire seems to be the greatest point of contention, since it is probably the most developed line in both classic and new WoD. If they intend to unite the versions, I'd suggest to keep the gothic punk atmosphere and the clans from VtM but go a long with the covenants and the more fluid plot in VtR. I admit I like a lot more nWoD lines, but I'm not going to deny that VtM has a lot of things that work for it. I can't see which one is better, as they are different enough to stand on their own. What I didn't like in VtM was the heavy metaplot, based mostly on Judeo-Christian mythology, which I find limiting, as well as vampires' social structures. Somehow, the VtM setting worked better for me in the Dark Ages lines, rather than in modern times.

Regarding clans, I don't care that much about them, as I'd personally prefer a more fluid structure where vampires can be very different. Both settings allow it, of course, but let's say clans have never been the deciding factor when I'm playing either version. Given how VtR developed and the creation of a number of bloodlines, it is clear that clans are an important drawing point for the community, so it would make sense to keep them, not to mention it works better with a video game. However, political divisions only along clan lines are limited and should be dropped.

Werewolf will probably also create divisions, since many apparently like the Apocalypse setting more. However, I consider the setting quite limiting, especially when you have werewolves crying "Wyrm!" all the time. Yes, I am aware it is much deeper than that, but I find the game too similar to VtM in structure for my liking. The mechanics of the Forsaken, especially its 2nd edition, gives you much more freedom at a more basic, feral level. I find it much more based on classic werewolf tales than Apocalypse, though doing some different is certainly not a bad thing. I believe Forsaken gives more depth than Apocalypse at character level, but I admit it is more straightforward (i.e. closer to classic werewolves). Mechanically, I do believe Forsaken is superior, since I never liked all those tribes from Apocalypse.

So I'd say keep the mechanics and social structures from Forsaken but maybe update the plot from Apocalypse, since it is always a good thing to have a well-known mythological creature, but with a twist. This is the main reason why I researched Apocalypse back in the day, because the story of a slowly dying people, fighting desperately (and losing) against human progress. I'd suggest to keep the theme from Apocalypse but throw out the metaplot and search for inspiration from indigenous myths. The Forsaken does that to an extent, but not too well regarding the big picture.

Mage is a tough one. If we compare already published lines, then Ascension is certainly superior. Awakening may lead to some very interesting stories and interactions, but its whole Atlantis metaplot brings it down. Yes, you can certainly play without it and I hear that many do just that. However, Ascension has this mind-warping bit that makes it so attractive. However, from what I see from the 2nd edition of the Awakening, I am not so sure which line is better. It is not fair to compare with an unreleased book, so at least at this point, the Ascension should be preferred as a starting point, at least until we see what 2nd edition is really about.

Not trying to make anyone angry here, just making a point. My dislike of the nWoD doesn't outweigh my desire for other fans to have what they want from the game. :P

To be honest, I didn't make it past the Vampire part before I found this idea to be exactly what I don't want. So, the problem is, I've both played and read Requiem, (and most of the other nWoD lines up to Promethean), and I just don't like them. You mentioned probably the number one aspect I often use to simplify my dislike of the nWoD, in that they left out the PUNK! of Gothic Punk. In my opinion, and that's all it is, and I honestly don't care if I'm alone in this, a lot of the nWoD felt like a watered-down game. I understand that others like it, and even that to other's, it's better. In my opinion, (again, just an opinion, and thus subjective), it wasn't.

A lot of the reasons I didn't care for, for example, Requiem is because of all the aspects of Masquerade it didn't contain, or tried to improve up. I detest Blood Potency, (and also that people use the acronym for Blood Points to refer to it, ha ha). Generation is just better. Again, my opinion, only, not an objective fact, and if the idea is to try to implant Blood Potency into a Masquerade-like game, I'm not interested. Period. And I say this as one of those 25-35 year old, old school fans. While I, on the surface do think the Covenants are a cool idea, the fact is I hate all of them that Requiem pushed. Three of the five are designed to be far too localized to work, and all three of them are both to focused and not focused enough to matter, while the remaining two are pretty iconic to vampire Vampire the _________.

So, while at it's heart meshing the original and new World of Darknesses might sound kind of cool, or even intriguing, every single person is going to have a very different view on just what is required from one of those versions. I found the Requiem clans, well there really isn't a better word, dumb. They are non-descript, unimportant aspects except for their starting bonuses. That's it. They went too far in trying to make them more universal concepts.

In my opinion, the one and only thing I would want from the entire nWoD system is basically the one thing that nWOD seems tailor made for, but never done. Crossover potential.

[dxanders]

So long as you know, I suppose everything is fine.

Murder we don't know what happens. For all we know, everything you've said comes true exactly as you propose it does, even the presence in book stores. For all we know, everything works out better than any of us can hope. We don't know.

Still, plenty of us are unwilling to part as you have. And that's what we will cling to. Currently, though, most of our worst fears are likely to disapate given that we now know who our Lead Storyteller is at this point.

For now, we should probably just ease up and joke around. We'll know the truth within a week.

Also, silly idea. What if by One World of Darkness, they meant that BOTH settings occupy the same world. Requiem AND Masquerade Vampires in every city. Forsaken and Garou have territory conflicts. God Machine and the Weaver comparing notes.

And no one left happy! Hooray!

[Delta]

Only that's pretty hard to pull off in Germany, where the sentiment strongly runs toward Masquerade and cWoD.

I feel you there. I was pretty active in a LARP community back in the day around that time, and boy even uttering the name "Requiem" made some people I knew lose their shit in a way that was just troubling. Especially since most of them hadn't even taken a look at it and were just going on second-hand information from someone who had read the original core who wasn't actually very good at English, so it was all just a mix of misunderstandings, hearsay and flat out lies. You felt like you were insulting their religion by even considering Requiem anything but the devil incarnate, I've witnessed a lot of edition fights, but nothing ever came close to that.

[Staffan]

Of course, this is assuming they do RPG games at all. Paradox, to me, has always largely been around Grand Strategy.

Paradox actually have their roots in PnP RPGs.

Back in the 80s, there was a company called Target Games, which published RPGs under the brand of Äventyrsspel (Adventure Games). During the 80s, they had close to a monopoly on the Swedish RPG market, primarily with the game Drakar och Demoner (the first edition of which was a translation of Basic Roleplaying + Magic World, but soon evolved in its own direction, sort of like the way Pendragon is different from RuneQuest 6 despite having the same roots), but also their own game Mutant, translations of Chill, Star Wars (D6), and Middle-Earth Roleplaying. They were in toy and book stores all over the country, and in the 1991 edition of Drakar och Demoner they bragged about Sweden having the most RPGers per capita in the world. They also translated a whole bunch of fantasy fiction, such as Conan, Elric, Discworld, Thieves' World, and many more, as well as game books like Lone Wolf.

In the early 90s, they started to go "edgier" - they released KULT, which was translated into English, as well as the Warhammer 40K-inspired Mutant Chronicles. They also made a Cooler And Edgier (tm) version of Drakar och Demoner, centered on the mega-city of Chronopia, which was quite different from the patchwork fantasy world Ereb Altor they had previously used. At about this time, we had a bit of a moral panic about RPGs in Sweden, partially fueled by two kids murdering a third, with the murder being blamed on RPGs. Unlike American RPG-related moral panics, this was more about the violence in the games and, particularly for KULT, the sexual content. This lead to the games being pulled from toy store shelves, and combined with the ascension of CCGs and video games, Target Games went bankrupt in 1999 (and hadn't really been doing RPGs for a few years before that). Well, I'm sure there were other reasons, but that whole thing certainly didn't help.

Out of the ashes of Target Games came two companies. One was Paradox Entertainment, which held the rights to most of the RPGs and eventually bought the rights to various other IPs (for example, Conan). The other was Paradox Interactive, formed out of Target Games's nascent computer games division.

Me, I'm cautiously optimistic about the whole thing.

[dxanders]

Not trying to make anyone angry here, just making a point. My dislike of the nWoD doesn't outweigh my desire for other fans to have what they want from the game. :P

To be honest, I didn't make it past the Vampire part before I found this idea to be exactly what I don't want. So, the problem is, I've both played and read Requiem, (and most of the other nWoD lines up to Promethean), and I just don't like them. You mentioned probably the number one aspect I often use to simplify my dislike of the nWoD, in that they left out the PUNK! of Gothic Punk. In my opinion, and that's all it is, and I honestly don't care if I'm alone in this, a lot of the nWoD felt like a watered-down game. I understand that others like it, and even that to other's, it's better. In my opinion, (again, just an opinion, and thus subjective), it wasn't.

A lot of the reasons I didn't care for, for example, Requiem is because of all the aspects of Masquerade it didn't contain, or tried to improve up. I detest Blood Potency, (and also that people use the acronym for Blood Points to refer to it, ha ha). Generation is just better. Again, my opinion, only, not an objective fact, and if the idea is to try to implant Blood Potency into a Masquerade-like game, I'm not interested. Period. And I say this as one of those 25-35 year old, old school fans. While I, on the surface do think the Covenants are a cool idea, the fact is I hate all of them that Requiem pushed. Three of the five are designed to be far too localized to work, and all three of them are both to focused and not focused enough to matter, while the remaining two are pretty iconic to vampire Vampire the _________.

So, while at it's heart meshing the original and new World of Darknesses might sound kind of cool, or even intriguing, every single person is going to have a very different view on just what is required from one of those versions. I found the Requiem clans, well there really isn't a better word, dumb. They are non-descript, unimportant aspects except for their starting bonuses. That's it. They went too far in trying to make them more universal concepts.

In my opinion, the one and only thing I would want from the entire nWoD system is basically the one thing that nWOD seems tailor made for, but never done. Crossover potential.

See, I'm in the opposite camp regarding my view on the games but of the same opinion regarding a synthesis of the lines. I got into VtM almost 20 years ago, stuck around in some capacity through the End Times books and didn't really explore the New World books until a few months ago. VtR is everything I liked about VtM in theory synthesized with mechanics I find clever. That said, I'd grown tired of the preponderance of metaplot in VtM and the almost superheroic action-adventure tone the game seemed to have developed toward the end of its life. I don't want to see the two merged, as practically every aspect of VtR is better tailored for my experiences than VtM. The other games that interest me (Demon, Wraith/Geist, Changeling) are SO different in their two iterations as to make a synthesis unfeasible.

I think the conversion kits that have already been released are really the furthest the company needs to go in combining the two versions of the games. As far as new releases for the nWoD though, I don't mind them scaling back production to make way for new cWoD releases. It's not a metaplot heavy game, and I don't need a bunch of books to integrate it into my table. Give me cores, fatsplats covering the factions and clans/tribes/etc. and the occasional supplement up to the standards of books like Damnation City and I'm happy.

[Murder-of-Crows]

You felt like you were insulting their religion by even considering Requiem anything but the devil incarnate, I've witnessed a lot of edition fights, but nothing ever came close to that.

Happened to me in 2013. Someone was going: "Don't tell me about your game. I am not interested in Requiem. At all."

[wyrdhamster]

On the new WoD front, our new owner put this out on Facebook:



I personally find that kind of comforting. Promethean fans tend to be good people.

I'm on the Martin Ericsson Facebook profile and do not see this post...

[ArcaneArts]

I'm on the Martin Ericsson Facebook profile and do not see this post...

That would be because he said it on a post on John Kennedy's wall.

[strider1276]

That would be because he said it on a post on John Kennedy's wall.

Oh, that John Kennedy. Him and his face. Grr.

(To be clear, the "face" thing references a joke John made to me prior to GenCon, I'm not actually ripping on the dude. He's a cool guy.)

[A_Newfie]

In a swing of patriotism I'd like to help soothe people by reminding you all that Sweden is basically the Mekka of roleplaying games and has been so for a long time.

http://www.modiphius.com/mutant.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jk7UBlwUPI

Video description: Coming this winter, Mutant: Year Zero is a post-apocalyptic tabletop role-playing game, published by Modiphius Entertainment and developed by the Swedish games studio Free League Publishing, under license from Paradox Entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1dHE7jlsMI

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eon-iv#/

Not saying it is Eden, but there is a proportionally HUGE roleplaying industry and market in Sweden for roleplaying games.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...nt-maskinarium
This one got funded in less than a hour

To elect further proof, check this news articles from Swedens largest newspaper
http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/rollspe...for-aventyret/


And here, commercials in Swedens largest newspaper for an autumn read for kids and teenagers:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9wxr43crag...12.49.jpg?dl=0

And yes, that is spiderman going to the potty.

Elsa, do you want some recommendations on Sweden housing?

[Beckett]

That doesn't make sense. The thing that makes D&D 5e better is the simplified and streamlined rules. The settings and stories are exactly the same as previous verions of D&D. If streamlined rules are what's needed to reach a mass market, then logically nWoD 2e would be the one to pick.

A bit off topic, but I disagree. I actually prefer more in depth and complex rules over simplified ones. Obviously, this isn't a universal opinion, but I also know I'm not alone on that front. While, from my perspective, 5E does seem to be doing a lot better for the community as a whole than 4E, it also has not brought back a lot of the 3E fans either, which is arguably the highest number of fans for D&D out there. I say that understanding that times where different for 1E and 2E, and that the hobby as a whole has grown, so it's a bit unfair to compare either to 3E, and also that 4E and now 5E have a few unique obstacles in things like Pathfinder being a direct competition, 5E still being fairly new, and the major one that 5E, for whatever reason, has chosen not to sale their books in PDF. But, all that taken into consideration, I'd rather have a more complex system over a more simplified one. I could just as easily play D&D using Pathfinder or Gurps, or Cortex, or whatever system I wanted if I didn't care so much about the system. Or I could play Pathfinder Core (an organized play variant that only allows the Core Book) if I wanted. Actually, I've highly considered playing Pathfinder Organized Play using Monte Cooks World of Darkness, or even outright porting some of the Blakros Museum Scenarios over as stand alone Halls of the Arcanum stories just to test it out.