OPP V5 and what I like about it

[Heavy Arms]

Um... what's the definition for "a lot" here?

Matthew Dawkins was the only regular Onyx Path freelancer that's done a lot of work on V5 outside of the Onyx Path books, and even then, most of his experience at that point was as a writer, not a developer. Who else that's developed a V5 book has meaningful developer credits with Onyx Path?

[CTPhipps]

Has it ever actually been explained why they decided against having oynx path design v5 and moving forward having them as primary source post white wolfs Implosion?

I get the impression the game would be in a lot better place if they done that.

Well they hired a lot of the designers from it.

So it's more complicated than it sounds.

[Ragged Robin]

I mean, it's too late for it now, but this is one of the key places nWW really fell down by keeping Onyx Path out of helping develop V5 (and thus WoD5 in general) rather than just OPP having a better handle on presenting the setting in ways that are easier to engage with.

Has it ever actually been explained why they decided against having oynx path design v5 and moving forward having them as primary source post white wolfs Implosion?

I get the impression the game would be in a lot better place if they done that.

[CTPhipps]

I should clarify that what I'm suggesting is not a defense.

I have a reputation as one of V5's defenders but that's because I love certain elements and am happy to argue for them all night but rarely get asked about what I think is wrong with the setting. I think it's because of the assumption I'm a V5 stan.

I think V5 has a lot of problems and OPP did the best they could with what they had and the fact they weren't recruited for The Second Inquisition or The Sabbat is a worrying sign for the future. However, to get back to the "too much rolling", the biggest problem with V5 is not that there's way more rolling or way less rolling, it's the fact that the books never state how much rolling there should be.

V5 is CRIPPLINGLY short on examples of how to run the various news systems. There's very few example play and the crunch elements are often ignored for unnecessary fluff.

I think I said it in the original book's review, "Maybe we need less feeding styles and more inclusion of all 13 Clans."

[MrNatas]

I call for skill checks all the time. My games are often very weighted in the political drama spectrum, so my players like to make sure they have the information to act, the allies to back them, and the court to support them. This means, knowledge rolls, charisma rolls, subterfuge rolls, manipulation rolls, spending blood to make ghouls, keep ghouls, and spending time on deals and maneuvering pieces.

Sometimes a session will have no rolls and sometimes a session will have 10 rolls back-to-back. I think just saying, "well I don't have an issue with this," isn't exactly a shining recommendation of a mechanic. Especially when said risk mechanic isn't fun to deal with. And yes, I get it the idea being it to add tension and a wrench into the works and makes the resource management aspect of blood something the player does constantly. (Players are going to keep hunger dice to a minimum at all times if available.)

As Ragged Robin stated, you can either roll infrequently so that the mechanic becomes closer to its intended goal to add risk to rolls for drama or as Heavy Arms stated, roll frequently and have 1-2 messy critical a session and the mechanic becomes an albatross.

[CTPhipps]

Yes exactly, so to successfully run v5 you have to ignore mechanics hard boiled into the game.

To put this another way how often do you think I skipped investigation rolls in the call of Cthulhu game I just ran?

I've run V:TM since 1993 and generally think that rolls should be done at important moments.

So, no, I don't think it's hardboiled into the ground.

[Heavy Arms]

I mean, it's too late for it now, but this is one of the key places nWW really fell down by keeping Onyx Path out of helping develop V5 (and thus WoD5 in general) rather than just OPP having a better handle on presenting the setting in ways that are easier to engage with.

If you're going to layer narrative mechanics on top of an otherwise more traditional resolution system (which is what V5 does, and what OPP has been doing for a long time now with CofD 2e and Storypath), it has to be better integrated into the base-line rules. Trying to make Messy Crits and Bestial Failures a consequence of the randomized part of the system was a big mistake with such a statistically dense method of resolution. I doubt the designers at Paradox or Renegade actually have a solid understanding of the math of the system to do a real "how to adjust the game to your play-style" document because the math is just that obtuse. I've crunch the numbers as hard as I can, and I can't' suggest anything that's useful beyond, "don't roll too much based on your groups tolerance for complications to come up from the dice rather than character actions." It's all going to be vague feels because trying to put actual numbers to something like "if you roll more than X times per session, reduce Messy Crits from every roll, to this subset of rolls," would be nearly uselessly vague, or take a page of charts to explain but that gets too unwieldy to be functional.

There's a reason why OPP focuses much more on "opt-in" mechanics where you get prizes for letting bad stuff happen to your character. Opt-in based complications naturally tune themselves to the group, because the group is picking how often they come up rather than the dice.

[Manfr]

Yeah, ultimately it's down to different table play styles, they are going to influence a lot these kind of outcomes: at our tables, 10 rolls a night for each player would be rare, outside of a combat-heavy session, for instance, this surely helps maintaining the Hunger curve under control.

It's kind of rare to see this kind of advice in many products, but we could definitely use a sort of "How to run" guide, which joins rules impact with framing story structures.

[Heavy Arms]

That's a hell of a lot! 😱

It isn't really though. It's high, but not that high.

The reason why "how often do you roll" impacts people's experiences with V5 so much is because Messy Crits esp. have relatively low individual odds per roll, but not so low that they become unreasonable to see over a gaming session. If you roll, say, 10 times a night on your good dice pools (6+), you're probably going to Messy Crit at least once. So with 5-6 players, it's a bit high to hit six Messy crits, but four would be average at that rate of rolling.

The math here is obnoxiously hard to detail, because even for the statistics nerds here like myself, the WoD5 mechanics are hell to calculate. There is no simple formula or procedure to offer up to eyeball the odds, because there's too many variables in-action.

Fundamentally, part of the problem is this thinking: "So, in normal situations, if you just have the ability you succeed, and you can bring it home as long as your skill is good enough: when something is really at stake, you will be brought outside your comfort zone and risk the Beast."

Because what happens is that when you equate "rolling the dice" with, "when something interesting is happening," a lot of groups are going end up rolling the dice a lot, because they want to do the interesting stuff. For most groups, well beyond WoD games, only rolling when there are high stakes is already the normal, and they roll a lot because that's the juicy part of the mechanics that means you're in the fun part of the game. For people that have long since internalized only rolling when it's interesting, but rolling is still a major part of the system, the natural result is to put the PCs in situations to get them rolling a lot because that means they're doing interesting things.

When you take people that are in that gaming mindset, and run them head first into a system that mechanically penalizes you for rolling too much, it creates a predictably bad gaming experience. By which I mean nWW received specific feedback about just this turn the play tests.

[Ragged Robin]

This is an extreme point of view (then, Cthulhu without investigation rolls works just fine, it's the GUMSHOE system 😄).

V5 is similar in design choices to games like the Year Zero Engine of Fria Ligan: more than a simulationist tool with which you can solve every possibile situation, is a narrative system in which is assumed that you will roll in relevant, dramatic situation, where something important is at stake.

This is reinforced not just in concept, but also in rules, both
by the general reduction in the number of rolls (combat passed from four-six rolls in a opposite contest to two) and by the Take Half, Three and Over and Fail Forward optional mechanics.

A fair criticism is that this framework is more implied than announced, as designers probably just assumed that people wouldn't like to roll that much and that most rolls would happen during combat.

In his W5 revision, Justin has (rightfully so, I think) already announced that Take Half and Three and Over rules will be default mode and explicitly called as such in the rules.

So, in normal situations, if you just have the ability you succeed, and you can bring it home as long as your skill is good enough: when something is really at stake, you will be brought outside your comfort zone and risk the Beast.

I think that's partly it, but it's actually quite hard to pin down what exactly they intended with v5. The rules for feeding and the beast are way more rigorous and were ultimatly speculating on what was intended. Especially as their retroactive justifications often contradict earlier statements of intent and a lot of v5 designers have 'moved on' :ahem:.

This seems further complicated by the way v5 is often sold by players as more immersive mechanically. If the dice are treated as proposed by this outlook then the blood pool is effectively superior, v5s big edge is its very very good at early neonate. It struggles beyond that and if the response is too simply ignore the mechanics then it becomes difficult to justify purchases.

(It probably doesnt help I have criticisms of year zero and gumshoe as the be all and end all, it has merits but I don't consider minimalism intrinsically a good thing.)

[Damian May]

That's a hell of a lot! 😱

Thats the thing though, when I talked/talk to other play testers and folks who have run V5 since I get about 50/50 answers on that being fairly average or that being ' a hell of a lot'.....its odd.

We did eventually move to Take Half and Auto-succeed for 95% of the game but it honestly felt more like just playing Mother-May-I or freeform and we decided that we liked the feel of ' playing a game' more so moved back to the ' Legacy' systems.

[Manfr]

I think this shows how dependent the system is on luck of the dice as during playtesting our five to six person group would average half a dozen Messy Criticals and one or two Bestial Failures per session and we were absolutely paranoid about getting above 2 Hunger because of how those rolls tended to throw plans for the session out of the window on a regular basis.

That's a hell of a lot! 😱

[Damian May]

Along with how much you roll, it's important to manage how high is your Hunger.

I'm not a monster of statistics, but in normal situations (Hunger 1-2, possibly 3, dice pools between 4 and 6, Hunger dice less than half your dice pool), you don't have that many possibilities of rolling a Messy Critical or a Bestial Failure.

Likelihood increases a lot when you have a high Hunger track, that shifts most of your dice pool. Then, raising Hunger is not automatic unless you wish so using other optional rules, and then even in that case it's not on a use-by-use ratio.

I know my personal situation is not a scientific test, but I've ran both high roll and low roll numbers, without an explosion of Hunger results. Highest frequency so far waa one Messy and one Bestial in a roll-heavy, 8-people session where I was automatically awarding Hunger to speed it up, without using Take Half and such (so it was a very RAW and more unforgiving set of games).
.

I think this shows how dependent the system is on luck of the dice as during playtesting our five to six person group would average half a dozen Messy Criticals and one or two Bestial Failures per session and we were absolutely paranoid about getting above 2 Hunger because of how those rolls tended to throw plans for the session out of the window on a regular basis.

[Manfr]

I think it kind of showed what an actual issue was across the board.

Jason Carl and a lot of STs don't actually make a lot of rolls and their games are primarily narrative. Thus Hunger Dice work just fine.

People who DO make a lot of rolls are driven absolutely BANANAS by Hunger Dice.

Along with how much you roll, it's important to manage how high is your Hunger.

I'm not a monster of statistics, but in normal situations (Hunger 1-2, possibly 3, dice pools between 4 and 6, Hunger dice less than half your dice pool), you don't have that many possibilities of rolling a Messy Critical or a Bestial Failure.

Likelihood increases a lot when you have a high Hunger track, that shifts most of your dice pool. Then, raising Hunger is not automatic unless you wish so using other optional rules, and then even in that case it's not on a use-by-use ratio.

I know my personal situation is not a scientific test, but I've ran both high roll and low roll numbers, without an explosion of Hunger results. Highest frequency so far waa one Messy and one Bestial in a roll-heavy, 8-people session where I was automatically awarding Hunger to speed it up, without using Take Half and such (so it was a very RAW and more unforgiving set of games).

Messy Critical results do come out much more easily on large dice pools , thus making Elders and Ancillae more prone to snapping and revealing their monstruosity: very low dice pools and high Hunger instead make for higher chances at Bestial Failures, as unexperienced Neonates face challenges and fall prey to their Beast when overwhelmed.

I like this because it's very thematic, and still manageable with the use of Willpower.

Then, "Play Unsafe" mode, in which you embrace your failures to create more narrative output, is a game style derivative of Nordic LARP, which is not everyone's cup of tea, not even in the LARP community, so it's surely more divisive than the old Blood Pool.

[Manfr]

Yes exactly, so to successfully run v5 you have to ignore mechanics hard boiled into the game.

To put this another way how often do you think I skipped investigation rolls in the call of Cthulhu game I just ran?

This is an extreme point of view (then, Cthulhu without investigation rolls works just fine, it's the GUMSHOE system 😄).

V5 is similar in design choices to games like the Year Zero Engine of Fria Ligan: more than a simulationist tool with which you can solve every possibile situation, is a narrative system in which is assumed that you will roll in relevant, dramatic situation, where something important is at stake.

This is reinforced not just in concept, but also in rules, both
by the general reduction in the number of rolls (combat passed from four-six rolls in a opposite contest to two) and by the Take Half, Three and Over and Fail Forward optional mechanics.

A fair criticism is that this framework is more implied than announced, as designers probably just assumed that people wouldn't like to roll that much and that most rolls would happen during combat.

In his W5 revision, Justin has (rightfully so, I think) already announced that Take Half and Three and Over rules will be default mode and explicitly called as such in the rules.

So, in normal situations, if you just have the ability you succeed, and you can bring it home as long as your skill is good enough: when something is really at stake, you will be brought outside your comfort zone and risk the Beast.