Ok....apparently we are going full Forsaken.

[Mizu]

Yeah, Loresheets are one of those things where I wonder if Justin Achilli will keep those around in W5. In H5 there's a whole sidebar explaining why there are no Loresheets despite those being a thing in V5. And it says that since Hunters don't know anything about the World of Darkness there's no need for Loresheets to exist. Comparing that to his comments on playing "Anarch fledglings" in V5, I assume he personally wouldn't allow Loresheets into a V5-game.

Justin Achilli is talking about wanting more interactive worldbuilding but H5 is a good demonstration of how on one hand it wants to be this weightless, accessible sandbox but on the other hand, it's a game with strong statements on what hunter-organizations are and what their place in the setting is. He strives to present an open sandbox with the freedom that allows groups to make of it what they will but there's also a part of him that wants the game to be one thing and only this one thing. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

This is probably risking getting close to a lack of respect, but it seems to me that when he talks about 'freedom from the metaplot' he is actually talking about his freedom to make the game into what he wants. Rather then viewing it as 'the fifth edition of World of Darkness' he views it as 'World of Darkness by Justin Achilli' and chafes at having his vision chained to writing a work beholden to what the people who came before him have written.

[Heavy Arms]

Oddly including his own past self at times.

[Damian May]

Considering the utter lack of traction or interest that H5 has had I'm not sure that's a great model....also H5 is a few dozen pages of actual game material stretched over near 300 pages is kinda taking the piss with Renegades price point.

[Mizu]

Oddly including his own past self at times.

I've been told that a lot of artistic types hate their old work.

[Ana Mizuki]

Wouldn't Justin Achilli just say that it would stop being V5 if the player-characters "grew up" and stopped being low-status and knowing next-to-nothing about the setting/world?

Case in point: H5. Your characters start as street-level Hunters and the big hunter-organizations are potential antagonists/dubious allies (at best). There's nothing for the street-level Hunters to evolve beyond. In fact, all the hunters that organize themselves and operate on a larger scale are painted as bad/untrustworthy.

I'm really curious about how Justin Achilli plans to apply this to WtA where community and tradition are so important.

Okay, if the POINT is that getting anywhere above newbie is bad, why the heck do characters even get XP? Also, how long does he expect your basic chronicle to last, if the characters will never move from street level?

[Knightingale]

Okay, if the POINT is that getting anywhere above newbie is bad, why the heck do characters even get XP? Also, how long does he expect your basic chronicle to last, if the characters will never move from street level?

Martyna Zych, the Brand Community Developer for WOD, talked about that in the replies to Justin's Tweet:
(It's a discussion about why V5 doesn't do more world-building and these are here thoughts on that)

We've observed through research (done not only via socials) that this is generally more true to older players, while also creating barriers for the new ones. Hence, as you greatly put, the "missing" part. VTM has never had this big of an audience, and design keeps it in mind.

I understand! For a lot of players, this is actually less labor intensive, because they find learning existing lore to be a blocker; instead, they build more streamlined stories with less overarching lore, and more street level intensity. V5 goes that way.

It's the question of needs and expectations - if you were "raised" on the previous editions, you expect from yourself as ST the same depth of in-game knowledge you used to have back then, while your players may not expect the same. It's a difficult thing to balance.

So I guess that sort of thinking is at play here as well for going into that direction with WOD5. Lore is perceived as a "barrier to entry" and therefore is deemphasized in the design. And the expectation is apparently for groups to just produce "streamlined lore" for the game at their table rather than get it from the books. I think that describes H5 better than it does V5 but I think it fits what Justin Achilli has been talking about in his take on "fidelity" to old lore and such.

[Heavy Arms]

And hey, going back to the title of the thread.... one of the reasons a lot of folks around here don't like how Paradox handles things and don't find Justin and Outstar's attempts to spin it convincing, is because we have all that CofD material that worked so hard to actually balance having world building and lore for players/STs to use, and not turn those into massive barriers of entry. The CofD also doesn't railroad people into one mode of play.

The CofD is an actual sandbox to play in. It has lore, setting, and so on. ST and players that want to rely more on premade material are served fine, while also having lots of support of people to do whatever they want. And people come up with all sorts of levels of play from that. The fact that V5 generates "streamlined" lore for street level games is just a nice spin on, "players play the only thing we actually give them tools to play, and because we only care about the younger and newer audience, they don't know enough to know if they'd like something different." New players to the CofD don't narrowly focus like this, because they have the tools to do so much more. If only WoD5 would copy things like that instead of poorly handling Touchstones.

But maybe I'm biased because I find Outstar incredibly condescending when she's talking to older fans of the games and how our preferences don't matter because V5 is the most objectively popular game (not just RPG) ever but no we can't see the numbers to back that up

[Ana Mizuki]

So I guess that sort of thinking is at play here as well for going into that direction with WOD5. Lore is perceived as a "barrier to entry" and therefore is deemphasized in the design. And the expectation is apparently for groups to just produce "streamlined lore" for the game at their table rather than get it from the books. I think that describes H5 better than it does V5 but I think it fits what Justin Achilli has been talking about in his take on "fidelity" to old lore and such.

I think that is rather short-sighted and situational. There are situations I think the lore is cumbersome, but those situations are in large 24/7 games where you are expected to know your tribebook, the corebook and any book related to your auspice. And that is not by the ST but by other players.

In a normal tabletop situation, the ST has MUCH more control over the lore and so newbies aren't at such a disadvantage.

And these games are meant for the latter, the former is a duct-taped together monster.

[Mizu]

Martyna Zych, the Brand Community Developer for WOD, talked about that in the replies to Justin's Tweet:
(It's a discussion about why V5 doesn't do more world-building and these are here thoughts on that)



So I guess that sort of thinking is at play here as well for going into that direction with WOD5. Lore is perceived as a "barrier to entry" and therefore is deemphasized in the design. And the expectation is apparently for groups to just produce "streamlined lore" for the game at their table rather than get it from the books. I think that describes H5 better than it does V5 but I think it fits what Justin Achilli has been talking about in his take on "fidelity" to old lore and such.

Isn't expecting the players to make up their own lore giving them more work then they would have if there was already lore for them to work from? They are basically forcing you to bring homebrew into your game and not everyone is good at that (I'm terrible at it, for example. I'm very much a guy who is better at taking an idea and going 'well what if you did this alteration to it' then I am making an idea from scratch) and that seems like a bigger barrier to me. But again, I am terrible at homebrew so maybe I'm a bit biased in wanting to have a robust game world to use as a basis when making ideas.

[Ana Mizuki]

And hey, going back to the title of the thread.... one of the reasons a lot of folks around here don't like how Paradox handles things and don't find Justin and Outstar's attempts to spin it convincing, is because we have all that CofD material that worked so hard to actually balance having world building and lore for players/STs to use, and not turn those into massive barriers of entry. The CofD also doesn't railroad people into one mode of play.

The CofD is an actual sandbox to play in. It has lore, setting, and so on. ST and players that want to rely more on premade material are served fine, while also having lots of support of people to do whatever they want. And people come up with all sorts of levels of play from that. The fact that V5 generates "streamlined" lore for street level games is just a nice spin on, "players play the only thing we actually give them tools to play, and because we only care about the younger and newer audience, they don't know enough to know if they'd like something different." New players to the CofD don't narrowly focus like this, because they have the tools to do so much more. If only WoD5 would copy things like that instead of poorly handling Touchstones.

But maybe I'm biased because I find Outstar incredibly condescending when she's talking to older fans of the games and how our preferences don't matter because V5 is the most objectively popular game (not just RPG) ever but no we can't see the numbers to back that up

Exactly, CofD let your characters become extremely powerful. Heck, there were gifts for that exact purpose in WtF.

Besides, it isn't like STs have not fudged with WtA lore over the years. Just on this forum, we have ran into so many different takes on the tribes, lore, setting,etc. just from how each ST ran it.

Forcing everyone to stay in the mud won't work in the long run.

[heinrich]

In Germany there is "Das schwarze Auge", branded "The Dark Eye" for the English/American market (while the very old computer games set in this game universe are called 'Realms of Arcania'). And it is a complete fictional world with a background just as detailed, if not more, as Tolkien's Middle Earth and Martin's Westeros/Essos continents. And it has a living history, like some D&D campaign settings have. About 20 years ago, when I was already playing RPGs for five years, one year on earth was one year in the game world, it was later changed to a 1:1 ratio. But Emperors came and went, Kingdoms were destroyed by wars and all of that. Does this make the game inaccessible for new players? Maybe. It certainly has it's drawbacks when people tell you that in this village the local Baron is named Paul not Fredrick and hates his neighbour baron with passion, while you are trying to story-tell an adventure that has nothing to do with this, except being placed in this area. But most players I know don't care about this detail in the game world. It is good to have it, to draw from it if needed and when preparing a story it can help to get inspiration and set a certain mood but it is not constricting if you don't let it.
And the rule books make sure to tell new players that they don't have to worry about this. The game, much like Pathfinder Adventure Paths, has a huge catalogue of adventure books that give the ST and players all they need for a specific adventure, if they don't invent their own. Sure, in some cases, there are NPCs with statements like "See some other book, page X", but this is relatively rare.

The price for this huge detailed game world is an editorial team and lots of help by fans, fans who turned freelance authors and a lot of hours put into it. That is what White Wolf, possibly deliberately, did fail to do. Atlanta White Wolf set the tone with a lot of material being in-character descriptions. Not all of it, granted. But in itself a huge amount of material was deliberately unreliable and when I talk about some passages in earlier books with a friend of mine, who is Australian, he tells me, that his or that statement is meant to be sarcastic or ironic. So, I myself, but in some cases even the translators to German, did get stuff wrong that is in the books, because authors tried to convey material in a means not necessarily suitable for a print medium.
Maybe for the first and second edition of the WoD this was actually something that made the books stand apart from other RPGs.

When Paradox White Wolf published their requirements for an editor in chief - the job going to Karim - extensive WoD knowledge was a requirement. When V5 came out the rise of the 2nd Inquisition was tied to some federal agents mentioned once in some supplement or VTES card. And that possibly was to much of a deep cut for me, personally. I mean, it was fun to read and thanks to all those who update the white wolf wika and make these connections and cross-references. But I can see, how the V5 usage of the game world background can make it harder for newbies to join in. I mean the introduction story mentions a lot of characters with lots of background and kills them of. What should one take from that? It does, to me, feel like being thrown into a story "in media res". I'm not sure how any newbie felt about that. My passion has always been WtA but I know most of the vampire NPCs at least by their names.
Still, less background and a sandbox with a lot of questions that "you can fill yourselves" is not necessarily a better approach. Because depending on how you answer the question of "where the Sabbat went" or "what the Elders move to the Middle East means" in your game your game world can be very different. And while that is not a bad thing in every regard, it robs us of the consensus we as a fan base need as a reference point.

I mean, even now, when there are some questions, like the vampire/garou relation ship, we have to ask any original poster "do you see your game more in a 1st Edition style game play or a revised Edition like style", for these differ as some regards of the game world became fleshed out in a way not anticipated by the authors of the 1st edition books. If there aren't even reference points to questions like this, because it is sandbox-y and every ST or troupe has to fill the blanks like they think is best, the consensus is rather difficult in any discussion.
But maybe that is the long time goal. Make people stop asking in forums for other people's opinion, but go to Storyteller's vault and buy the answers to the questions the core books left you with in different variants.

So, there is one thing to start out with the "Fledgling" status and have a rule book detailing what the players should know when they start playing and what to have the experience of not knowing the background of the game world. But there are the players who want that and the STs who might need it. And those are left out cold, I feel. Also, any newbie will eventually transform into an experienced player, so the newbie accessibility thing is sure important to get new players, but really, what it the marketing idea here?
That someone moves into a hobby store or surfs to drivethru by accident, finds any 5th Edtions core book and buys it without pre-knowledge and has some friends who never played it before, too, to play it with?
Or an experienced troupe bringing in new players?
Or people coming over from D&D and other RPGs?

For whom should the Core book be designed, and for whom is the Quick-Start-rules?

I get that there are changes in W5 because of things in the previous editions that are offensive towards groups. I can accept that. I prefer this being discussed in a sidebar so there is context to any changes, and not just a retcon. Acknowledging the previous editions is something V20 did pretty good, other X20 not so much. But without these games, and the people who loved to play (and buy) them we wouldn't be here.

What I can't really see as helpful is to radically change the status quo in the game world, to forcibly change the play style from cliaths, who are properly indoctrinated as garou, rising through the ranks and seeing the ugly sides of the (spirit) world and do something about it to something else.
If I wanted a game about werewolf younglings who don't know shit about anything, I could do that in WtA, WtF, Everlasting, hell, even the Buffy RPG. Such a game should not be a 5th Edition of something else. It should be some sourcebook akin to "Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras" with alternate Settings. For, it is a valid approach to play a game like this. Even WtA suggests to play this, as a Prelude.

I don't know how Paradox came to the decision to buy the White Wolf property off from CCP. They must have seen some value in it. Surely, the fan base was a factor. That fan base was created by the WoD of old. I hear there are also CoD fans. Personally I like the rules but never played it much.
So, I can't see the logic in it to change the world more or less drastically. Removing politically incorrect elements, sure, to move it to other media, that might be necessary. Are the over doing it? Possibly.
One could argue a lot about why the Giovanni had to be changed, for example, and there are arguments for changing and for leaving them as they were.

Making the Core Rulebooks more Sandbox like seems like the are trying to sell us there licensee guidebooks. And with the Storyteller's Vault out there, they kind of are. But a sandbox by itself is not all you need. There is added value in shovels, rakes, buckets and moulds. All toys to play with in the sand box. This is the thing that the game world background provided for me. Or at least some options. H5 told us what scenarios to play (cells, not organisations, if you do organisations use the PDF only book of another publisher), and doesn't do anything to tell us about the Imbued, neither what happened to them or if they were ever part of the world. It not even gives us sufficient ways to recreate them with the Edges of the new version. It is sandbox-y in not forcing specific adventures on us (apart from some monster descriptions), but forces us to play a cell. It would have been better the other way around. Having the choice to play cells or organisations and even cross overs between both and have a more narrow toolset of how to set up stories, with how to start a new Hunt, how to build up tension, how to upper the stakes and so on.
From what I remember of H5, there is the danger level for the current hunt, but only a handful of possibilities what this could mean (like, the big bad has 2 + danger level body guards). So, for my taste, the game is sandbox-y in the wrong place. I hope W5 does this differently. But, I think it will, since it has more material to draw from, unlike H5, who threw away the Imbued and therefore had nothing old to draw from, really. The whole game line is redundant to "WoD: Ghost Hunters". How is that for good management at Paradox White Wolf, letting two licensees create games for the same niche simultaneously?

So, as a collector and ST of a LARP game who cannibalises other games for inspiration I will buy W5. Which is possibly the wrong signal to the game developers, if the game is not what I actually want. But maybe the game will be surprisingly good....

Maybe, by the 6th edition, we will learn that the 5th Edition was only a dream.
That said, I played about an hour of "Blood Hunt" and I can see, how V5 can be a nice setting to tell stories in.

[heinrich]

But maybe I'm biased because I find Outstar incredibly condescending when she's talking to older fans of the games and how our preferences don't matter because V5 is the most objectively popular game (not just RPG) ever but no we can't see the numbers to back that up

It is even a question about what metric to use.

Long term sales?
Short term sales?
Number of companies approaching Paradox to license stuff?
Awards won?
Addition revenue from Story Tellers Vault material?
Does this take into account new delivery options - if I buy a book of DriveThru I don't pay taxes on the PDF and the PoD might be under the tax allowance. Previously game stores had to pay those taxes and added their additional costs to the books, making them more expensive. So, the market grew drastically by internet orders and shipment. Is that factored in?

[Heavy Arms]

In some fairness to her, she talks about things like "audience size," and popularity, not sales. That's one of the reasons why I find the lack of figures more frustrating. It should be easy to find examples of things like "is the official Paradox V5 Discord server significantly larger and more active than Onyx Path's Discord server's sections for WW owned properties?" Someone who's in charge of brand community developer should have a decent idea of how popular V5's big name streaming APs are compared to the smaller but numerous ones for the other games... because her job is developing the brand, not just hyping the brand on social media. There should be public (if work to compile) data to cite on this that doesn't fall into the category of internal non-public figures.

Then again, part of my bias here is that Outstar didn't get into the WoD until after the oWoD was ended. She, as little as she's publicly talked about it, wasn't into RPGs much and only heard about VtM because of the Bloodlines video game which inspired her to become a digital artist (her industry background starts with doing digital art in video games in 2015). I don't think she was actually aware of how popular the WoD was (esp. much less reach into non-English speaking areas int he 90s comparatively) in its original run. When her primary person to talk to about what fans from the original run are like is Justin - who's had a long contentious history with us - it's hard to imagine she's really spent the time to... work on brand community development targeted at what might make older fans feel less off-put by Paradox design decisions. She doesn't seem inclined to, nor does Paradox seem inclined to ask her to care.

[monteparnas]

Seriously, all those tweets sound just as standard corporate talk. They're not really explaining things, just making big talk as justification for anything they did. Pay attention to how their tone isn't directed just to describe future releases, but also to "explain" previous ones. They pretend to have been following such guidelines since ever and perfectly, regardless if the actual material did anything like their statements.

Case in point, the Sabbat book. This is a sandbox with a book entirely devoted to say this group that exists has history, plot weight, they have a thorough canonical lore that shouldn't be deviated from, yet are completely unplayable. It isn't the only one, but it is the simplest example of what they're really doing behind their stated purposes.

It is par of the course for companies to make statements where they pretend to be playing 5-D chess, justify with pretentious assertions of long term strategy and package everything with the goodness of their heart at the most vulnerable customers. Condescension with old fans is just a final, personal touch, but otherwise it is pretty standard talk.

Reading corporate statements demands a lot of between-the-line reading as the purpose of the general statement is always to generate good press and not actually inform meaningfully. And however he feels personally for that, Justin is now a corporate public speaker and is playing the part. Nothing against it, by the way, he's an employee and talks in behalf of the company, he's paid for that, it's fine.

[Knightingale]

The corporate-speak matters only insofar as it's the only way to get a glimpse into what's going on with WOD5 these days. And there isn't a constant stream of new releases. WOD5 saw the release of H5 this year and that was it, right? There have been various books announced but it's all "At some point in the future, probably next year it gets released". The lack of "meaningful information" isn't just a tone-choice, it's an indication of where things stand with WOD5. We have from Justin Achilli this assortment of various thoughts and ideas because W5 is in the early stages of development for Justin Achilli and the team at Renegade. When he talked to Outstar about H5 a couple of months back, it didn't sound like there was even a first draft for the text of W5. He couldn't say with certainty whether Touchstones could be places or not. But he did say that the manuscript for a Hunter-supplement was finished... which was odd. You'd think the priority would be to finish W5.

And in terms of strategy H5 is an indicator of where things are headed with what WOD5 is supposed to be. It's a monsterhunter-game in the WOD but it didn't want anything to do with the idea that it's a new iteration of the original HtR and was about Imbued and it also didn't want anything to do with the idea that as a monsterhunter-game in the WOD the vampires are Kindred, the werewolves are Garou, the mages are Tradition/Technocracy etc. H5 rejected the premise of the original HtR and the WOD as a specific setting. And the corporate speak at least hints at the thinking behind the choices that led to this.

Not that it's even consistent all things considered. If the games are supposed to be sandboxes with a focus on "What you can do" rather than setting/lore then why is a big component of H5 to really hammer home that hunter-organizations aren't good and definitely are not player-character-material? If old lore is a "barrier to entry" for new players and therefore shouldn't be at the forefront, then why is there a whole chapter in H5 describing organizations from the old lore?