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

[TyrannicalRabbit]

I am a bit compelled to mention this but from what I gathered the reason behind that is people don't want to compare them. Throughout a lot of talks involving requiem I don't think anyone's tried to compare them beyond the occasional "Requiem does touchstones better." Or "Touchstones shouldn't be in V5"

This is also goes into the account that the really hardcore and older fans aren't really willing to listen or are willing to ignore. I don't mean this as an offence if a person doesn't like WtF that's fine but whenever people do the comparison between them it is usually using 1e and from what I can tell only hearing what 2e is like without actually reading it.

Like people hear about WtF having touchstones and compare it to requiem or V5 without realizing that the vast majority of cofd games that use touchstones are nearly all different. Like a vampires touchstone is different from a Sin Eaters who's different from a werewolf.

A sin eater is trying to resolve there's while a werewolf is trying to balance there's out for example.

But everytime they usually come up from people who don't read cofd it's just comparing to Requiems touchstones.

What I tend to see on a variety of platforms I won't mention by name is that it leads to people posting intentional misinformation on the subject. And to head off some people at the proverbial pass, the people that haven't kept up on CofD and WoD in a long time in said places tend to be very forthright about asking for clarification and updates so there is a stark contrast.

And on Paradox and CofD. As Heavy Arms detailed, there just oesn't seem to be a coherent plan or public face on the matter that isn't extremely frustrating. The most I've ever seen someone who is a Paradox face is Outstar snidely saying, "Isn't CofD just another edition of World of Darkness after all."

[Ragged Robin]

To be fair their are subtle advantages to having them not doing much with cofd. You don't really have to deal with the economic pressure of new releases which might turn out to be rubbish and you don't run the risk of controversial changes leaving the iron masters either get'd or lasombra'd. plus less fandom division it might not be so bad to have to not deal with endless arguement of the supposed inferiority of the mana pool or some such shite.

I ground on pretty fine post time of judgement wilderness era if anything I prefer those days to v5 in terms of developing setting were I find myself cringing my way through the fluff while picking out ideas I can use.

[TyrannicalRabbit]

Ah yeah, the "economic pressure" of new releases potentially being ill received, right. *Stares at a timeline of fan reaction to a number of 5e releases, then stares at the camera*

[Ragged Robin]

Ah yeah, the "economic pressure" of new releases potentially being ill received, right. *Stares at a timeline of fan reaction to a number of 5e releases, then stares at the camera*

Perhaps it's a UK thing as our economic status is best described as "increasingly bleak." But its hard to justify forking out 40 quid to for about a page of rules and the loss of a previous ed play option or two.

[ArcaneArts]

To be fair their are subtle advantages to having them not doing much with cofd. You don't really have to deal with the economic pressure of new releases which might turn out to be rubbish and you don't run the risk of controversial changes leaving the iron masters either get'd or lasombra'd. plus less fandom division it might not be so bad to have to not deal with endless arguement of the supposed inferiority of the mana pool or some such shite.

I ground on pretty fine post time of judgement wilderness era if anything I prefer those days to v5 in terms of developing setting were I find myself cringing my way through the fluff while picking out ideas I can use.

So, speaking as someone who's not just invested in getting more of those products, but also making those products, this is not a great argument, putting aside the train/-wreck (depending on your point of view) that is happening with WoD 5E.

The really big and obnoxious thing is that a lot of the people who were reliably contributing to the quality of Chronicles in it's second edition, really helping it get into it's stride-are now severely blocked, with minimal options. Sam Young and his company of No More Night is pretty successfully occupying a psuedo-legit, treated as canon producer of Requiem products over on the Storyteller Vault, but that's a lot of work that not other freelancers can pull off to coordinate, and it's not as financially satisfying as getting legit contracts to work with-and the contracts offered were still very much in the pocket padding category, let's keep that in mind. And of course, none of that is addressing how Requiem is the right sort of product for No More Night's sort of move-franchises like Awakening or Lost have a lot more attention and scrutiny can't as reliably have a second hand source get the same sort of clout in producing, and by contrast, franchises like Primordial have so little interest that any attempt to act as a soft rework of the material in STV comes more or less as a sunk cost fallacy of those involved, nevermind how solving the bigger issues in reaching audiences with such basically doesn't exist.

THe thing of the matter is, right around the time Chronicles was ramping out and had a reliable stable of writers and developers ready to keep it going, Paradox started starving projects, and it's been long enough that that stable is starting to wander. If things do pick up, but it's not done while the Chronicles boom of interest is still in memory, both for the creators and the audience, that pick up might have a whole new cadre of authors who are more uncertain in terms of their quality, which just spirals the problem out.

Like, yes, economic pressures leading to rubbish products is a concern-it's why Onyx Path abandoned the treadmill production, and some of the return to those pressures show in the products that were affected by them-but as a general rule, the approach OP was taking was working, and it had refined an increasingly reliable a system of releases and workers for them. What's happening now is a reduction of that reliability if it ever picks up.

There are people who want to make good Chronicles products, who know how to make them, and have earned the trust of the audience to do that. THe longer this particular bullshit goes on, the less true that is, and the more from ground zero the whole process has to start with. I'm not saying I want Paradox's fingers in my pie, but I do want them to let me bake my god damn pie.

[TyrannicalRabbit]

Perhaps it's a UK thing as our economic status is best described as "increasingly bleak." But its hard to justify forking out 40 quid to for about a page of rules and the loss of a previous ed play option or two.

That is great and all, but doesn't really have to do with my reply like, at all. It's that your thought process on why you think Paradox is doing what it is doing is bewildering and not coherent with what we know.

[Heavy Arms]

On top of all of that, it's also really hard to get new people into the CofD where there's a spectrum of opinions on what from the STV should be treated as "canon" because it's basically a book Onyx Path would have done if they were allowed to do, so the freelancers just made it for the STV instead.

A lot of people are not actively involved on places like this, where there's people very well informed on these things. They don't know which STV products are being made by the same people that wrote most of the current edition's books. It's great for those of us that are super-involved in the community to be able to know certain STV books are as good as official supplements, but a lot of fans don't know that, and it's not easy to learn if you get into a CofD 2e game of some stripe that's just using the actual official books and want to branch out only to run into a messy fog of what supplements "count" and which don't because it's all so group dependent with CofD makers having to rely on the STV just to get stuff out at all.

This just makes maintaining the CofD creator-continuity harder because no matter how good anyone is at social media and marketing, the situation is just messy and confusing, and that's off-putting to new and casual customers. No More Night's model adds a layer of frustration I'm sure everyone involved would rather not have to deal with of having to explain the state of things. Even if it's only somewhere between 5-10% of potential customers for the product that get turned off by trying to understand why things are being done the way they're being done, the margins are small enough to make the "might-as-well-be-official" CofD content creators question their bottom lines for keeping at this, or moving on to green pastures.

Even if things get addressed in a satisfactory way, there's still a lot of potential for what happened with M20: there being a popular STV book that covers the same as a official supplement that finally came out, and creating actual negative competition within the wider franchise. There's just a giant freaking mess of what happens if Onyx Path is left to make the CofD 2e they want to make, and suddenly wanting to do books that have popular STV iterations. Not unsolvable of course, but it's just another stumbling block that could send the CofD stumbling if it's finally allowed to flourish properly again.

[ArcaneArts]

On top of all of that, it's also really hard to get new people into the CofD where there's a spectrum of opinions on what from the STV should be treated as "canon" because it's basically a book Onyx Path would have done if they were allowed to do, so the freelancers just made it for the STV instead.

A lot of people are not actively involved on places like this, where there's people very well informed on these things. They don't know which STV products are being made by the same people that wrote most of the current edition's books. It's great for those of us that are super-involved in the community to be able to know certain STV books are as good as official supplements, but a lot of fans don't know that, and it's not easy to learn if you get into a CofD 2e game of some stripe that's just using the actual official books and want to branch out only to run into a messy fog of what supplements "count" and which don't because it's all so group dependent with CofD makers having to rely on the STV just to get stuff out at all.

This just makes maintaining the CofD creator-continuity harder because no matter how good anyone is at social media and marketing, the situation is just messy and confusing, and that's off-putting to new and casual customers. No More Night's model adds a layer of frustration I'm sure everyone involved would rather not have to deal with of having to explain the state of things. Even if it's only somewhere between 5-10% of potential customers for the product that get turned off by trying to understand why things are being done the way they're being done, the margins are small enough to make the "might-as-well-be-official" CofD content creators question their bottom lines for keeping at this, or moving on to green pastures.

Even if things get addressed in a satisfactory way, there's still a lot of potential for what happened with M20: there being a popular STV book that covers the same as a official supplement that finally came out, and creating actual negative competition within the wider franchise. There's just a giant freaking mess of what happens if Onyx Path is left to make the CofD 2e they want to make, and suddenly wanting to do books that have popular STV iterations. Not unsolvable of course, but it's just another stumbling block that could send the CofD stumbling if it's finally allowed to flourish properly again.

I'm going to be chatting with Cinder regarding our projects for Beast on basically all of this. We could release our ideas for a 2nd Edition and supplements as STV, but a) We'd have to do it ourselves, because the money's just not going to be there for writers otherwise interested in following us on Primordial, and I'm not sure we'd accept paying less than the professional standard even if they were willing to do so, b) we'd have to accept our main goal of getting the game's reputation up to the bare minimum of "mediocre but fine" would be a wash, and c) basically have to accept that we'd lock off any of our material being used in canon going forward, because the alternative is taking down the STV content when it got greenlit and basically piss people off by charging more for material already tread, which no one's going to do. We can possibly answer some of that by seeing if No More Night would be interested in getting in on that, but we're not holding our breath on that and it doesn't really do enough.

But on the other hand.....it's starting to look like if we want to do it at all, that's how we've got to do it, because holding our breath for Paradox is proving to be a good way to asphyxiate ourselves to death.

And keep in mind, Cinder and I are deep enough into the subject on a personal level we're willing to accept the cost sunk fallacy of it all. How many other projects that I promise you are better than ours will not see that sort of release because people aren't going to deal with the losses that come with trying?

[Heavy Arms]

I really hope that, relatively soon, Paradox finally decides it's best to get whatever money they can, and sell CofD to Rich on the condition that CofD 2e ends official production, and CofD 3e has to use Storypath. It's hardly ideal (but I can't see any ideal way out of this), but it means a lot of CofD 2e material can go out to the STV without worry of what we just brought up about retread/overlap. It makes the WoD and CofD more distinct properties to everyone's benefit, CofD 2e fans that don't like Storypath can at least expect a few years of good 2e STV material. And I thin CofD fans will understand 2e ended short if it's necessary for IP rights reasons.

[ArcaneArts]

I really hope that, relatively soon, Paradox finally decides it's best to get whatever money they can, and sell CofD to Rich on the condition that CofD 2e ends official production, and CofD 3e has to use Storypath. It's hardly ideal (but I can't see any ideal way out of this), but it means a lot of CofD 2e material can go out to the STV without worry of what we just brought up about retread/overlap. It makes the WoD and CofD more distinct properties to everyone's benefit, CofD 2e fans that don't like Storypath can at least expect a few years of good 2e STV material. And I thin CofD fans will understand 2e ended short if it's necessary for IP rights reasons.

Hrm. While definitely good, the part of me that is a PbtA stan wonders how well Chronicles might do going forward as a series of PbtA games.

Probably not as well as it would with Storypath (or better horror derived version) for the purposes of being Chronicles, but still.

[Asmodai]

I really hope that, relatively soon, Paradox finally decides it's best to get whatever money they can, and sell CofD to Rich on the condition that CofD 2e ends official production, and CofD 3e has to use Storypath. It's hardly ideal (but I can't see any ideal way out of this), but it means a lot of CofD 2e material can go out to the STV without worry of what we just brought up about retread/overlap. It makes the WoD and CofD more distinct properties to everyone's benefit, CofD 2e fans that don't like Storypath can at least expect a few years of good 2e STV material. And I thin CofD fans will understand 2e ended short if it's necessary for IP rights reasons.

I don't see that happening. I think Paradox still sees value in the setting elements, mechanics and critical and popular recognition - things they can port from CoD and/or Exalted at their leisure. Selling off the line and the related IP seems like a bad deal for them.

[TyrannicalRabbit]

I really hope that, relatively soon, Paradox finally decides it's best to get whatever money they can, and sell CofD to Rich on the condition that CofD 2e ends official production, and CofD 3e has to use Storypath. It's hardly ideal (but I can't see any ideal way out of this), but it means a lot of CofD 2e material can go out to the STV without worry of what we just brought up about retread/overlap. It makes the WoD and CofD more distinct properties to everyone's benefit, CofD 2e fans that don't like Storypath can at least expect a few years of good 2e STV material. And I thin CofD fans will understand 2e ended short if it's necessary for IP rights reasons.

Yeah I would much rather have that happen than alternatives. I would hate to some extent having to get new cores and supplements and probably stick to just my favorite few lines, but that and the sheer potential for getting multiple books for lines with a potential for more fleshed out settings is better than...whatever the hell it is now.

For that matter,to address a different comment. Gutting CofD to use it's ideas elsewhere (like oh say 5e WoD) is personally going to have the opposite effect for me. IE makes me far less inclined to give WoD another look.

[Heavy Arms]

I don't see that happening. I think Paradox still sees value in the setting elements, mechanics and critical and popular recognition - things they can port from CoD and/or Exalted at their leisure. Selling off the line and the related IP seems like a bad deal for them.

But the part of the CofD that they clearly want the most, is the part that you don't need to own the CofD to do: the mechanics. And if they keep the rights to the Storyteller/ing systems, and force OPP to switch to something else as part of the deal, Paradox retains ownership of the mechanics as much as anyone can own those (which is basically... they can't. Loresheets are a complete ripoff of a system Paradox doesn't own).

Paradox doesn't seem to care about the critical and popular recognition of CofD... or they would be letting Onyx Path do more with it to maintain those (and make money in the process). The core of this whole tangent is that the critical and popular recognition of the CofD is going to die if things don't change. The CofD isn't going to keep producing new mechanical designs to work into WoD5 if the best design minds currently invested in the CofD step away because they can't do it for the CofD, and either aren't being hired for WoD 5 or don't want to work on it vs. other options.

I think Paradox might have a bit of a problem because they're a video game company. Software is a lot easier to put one project on the shelf for awhile, and sometimes raid for legacy code ideas, than TT RPGs are.

[reaperfrost8]

I'm going to be chatting with Cinder regarding our projects for Beast on basically all of this. We could release our ideas for a 2nd Edition and supplements as STV, but a) We'd have to do it ourselves, because the money's just not going to be there for writers otherwise interested in following us on Primordial, and I'm not sure we'd accept paying less than the professional standard even if they were willing to do so, b) we'd have to accept our main goal of getting the game's reputation up to the bare minimum of "mediocre but fine" would be a wash, and c) basically have to accept that we'd lock off any of our material being used in canon going forward, because the alternative is taking down the STV content when it got greenlit and basically piss people off by charging more for material already tread, which no one's going to do. We can possibly answer some of that by seeing if No More Night would be interested in getting in on that, but we're not holding our breath on that and it doesn't really do enough.

But on the other hand.....it's starting to look like if we want to do it at all, that's how we've got to do it, because holding our breath for Paradox is proving to be a good way to asphyxiate ourselves to death.

And keep in mind, Cinder and I are deep enough into the subject on a personal level we're willing to accept the cost sunk fallacy of it all. How many other projects that I promise you are better than ours will not see that sort of release because people aren't going to deal with the losses that come with trying?

Your not alone Chris Allen and great white Oak in particular plan on releasing some storyteller vault stuff, white mentioned that they were trying to convince paradox to let him release a night horrors for mummy but to no avail so plans on dropping it on the vault.

Recently I've been showing server the storytellers vault and they were pretty shocked that official writers were still dropping stuff assuming that cofd was dead seeing the slow down and paradoxes attitude towards cofd so I can agree that it is a niche.

As for paradox selling cofd... Respectfully its not gonna happen, it becomes a product they ignore to a product that's now competing with 5 edition something that paradox knows is a bad idea.

Fortunately for onyx path they still seem to be doing well with Scion, Trinity and there other games the fact there releasing a new ip is telling that there trucking along fine.

[Heavy Arms]

Oh, I don't imagine Paradox selling the CofD off is likely. But it makes way more sense than not, because owning an IP just to keep people from making stuff for it is... not really a great way to make money. There's no way the CofD being sold to Onyx Path results in a net loss of Paradox. Paradox isn't getting CofD to come to WoD5 in significant numbers by starving CofD, so the idea that they'd lose money to competition is shaky. It's shakier when you look at 20th and CofD coexisting for years just fine, and even more so when you look at the sheer amount of resources Paradox has to promote WoD5 compared to Onyx Path's ability to promote CofD on its own.

Paradox selling CofD is a good move. It's a good PR move. It's a way to recoup money they spent on an IP they're not profiting on at this point. Selling it is - beyond again some tax stuff I might not understand because it's hard enough to have a lay grasp of US's laws - better for Paradox than keeping it just to kill it.