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

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Wondering what homids have to do to get accepted by Griffin... worst case scenario is all of the lurid "yuletide rite" stuff from early editions, I guess.

[Ragged Robin]

Wondering what homids have to do to get accepted by Griffin... worst case scenario is all of the lurid "yuletide rite" stuff from early editions, I guess.

At this stage I'm half expected the wyrm as a tribal totem in terms of consistency.

[Ana Mizuki]

Cause the Black Furies are defined by feminism and the Red Talons by their connection to their wolf side. Doesn’t mean men and homids can’t be members.

The Furies are a bit more open, but Red Talons treat humanity the same way a closeted homophobic preacher treats his sexuality. Something shameful, disgusting and unholy. Yet in their rants, you get a very strong 'The Talon doth protest too much'-vibe.

Other tribes already do the 'feminism' and 'closer to wolf-side' thing, what Red Talons and Furies are is an entire rejection of it. So if the point is to be open, why keep tribes who by definition aren't.

[Knightingale]

What's been bugging me about W5 so far, I think, and what has kept it from exciting me is its approach to its premise. Like, disconnecting Tribes from human cultures/ethnicities... In WtF that's a decision and there's a premise and a game built around that. With W5 it feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too. The base is still the old familiar WtA but all the changes the new edition is offering are cutting out parts of it. I feel like once again the target-demographic is new players who have little to no knowledge of what WtA used to be like. And rather than going down the hard road of finding creative, culturally sensitive ways to rewrite WtA for 2022, in order to make sure none of the bad stuff from the past pops up, good and bad stuff from previous WtA-editions gets cut. And the result will be a blander game that wants to say as little as possible about the setting.

[AkatsukiLeader13]

Yeah, I too find myself thinking more and more that this is a case of wanting to have their cake and eat it too. And more and more I'm getting worried and apprehensive of what M5 will be as while I've never been the biggest WtA fan, MtAs is one of my favorite lines and it getting a treatment like H5 and how W5 is looking would be utterly demoralizing for me. V5 has been a mixed bag but at least it's still fairly in line with previous editions. W5 on the other hand seems to be a Frankenstein of WtA and WtF bits messily thrown together.

Maybe it will be decent but much like when H5 was announced without the Imbued, I don't have any hype or interest in W5 as it currently stands. Hell if the prices of just the PDFs of recent 5E products continue, I probably would only get W5 via a Kickstarter Tier Reward or as part of a bundle with other books I actually want or something like that.

[Ana Mizuki]

Okay, to be perfectly clear, the issue I have with keeping Furies and Talons and having them still be called Furies and Talons is that it does not let the new versions stand on their own. Instead, the legacy of the tribes is going to hold them back.

If this truly is a rework, I'd say switch the names to Wardens of the Land and Bacchantes. They are still -a- reference, but they are clearly their own thing.

So here it is, in black and white.

[Knightingale]

Isn't that explained by Justin Achilli saying that Lupus will be a part of W5 because Breed was a part of the legacy-edition but in W5 "Homid or Lupus" is just an aesthetic choice? In the same way Tribe is also just an aesthetic choice... What matters is the relationship with the Patron Spirit (ie the Favor and Ban from it) and Starting Renown. Other than that the corebook probably won't care. That's one of those blank spots like in H5 with its antagonists where the expectation is that people at the table and/or people who release stuff on STV will make this work.

H5 core wasn't written to stand on its own. Future releases and (mostly) community-content are expected to deal with its blindspots.

What if W5 core will be the same? It's a new take on WtA but it's not a comprehensive one and its scope is very small. And the expectation is that community-content and (maybe) future releases will fill the blank spots left by the corebook.

EDIT:
Wow, so Black Furies and Red Talons are just holdovers in name only... One hell of a re-imagination...

At that point, I really gotta wonder what even the point is of having 11 Tribes...

[Heavy Arms]

OK, I'm going to get back to a less loaded comparison.

Ignore all pre-W5 stuff.

What's the point of having both the Ghost Council and the Silent Striders?

They're both Wisdom Tribes.

They're both tribes that deal with moving around ("Travel" and "Journey"). They both use their knowledge to hit the enemy sideways ("Subvert" and "Sabotage"). They both find hidden things ("Unearth" and "Scout"). The only real difference between them right now is "Solve" vs. "Deliver." So basically the Ghost Council is just the less cooperation friendly version of the Silent Striders? There's nothing else that makes them distinct here.

Obviously we don't have Favors/Bans to separate them a bit more, but we also don't have Auspices either. From what we know so far it seems like they could easily be one Tribe. The Silent Strider verbs are just the Rabagash/maybe Galliard take (focusing more on getting information out to people), while the Ghost Council verbs are the Theurge/Philodox take (taking more time to intellectually dissect the information).

While as a general approach to making splat selection approachable the verbs thing is actually a good method, in this case it really feels like the thesaurus was out to try to make the Tribes more varied than they really are. There's a lot of synonyms flying around with only minor connotative differences. If we weren't expecting Auspices to also be a big deal to character creation (and we are, because Justin has said they're going to be significant character aspects), it might not be so bad. But right now it seems way too crowded to help differentiate the Tribes instead of clarifying their narrative roles.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

They might have meant Scout to be an active military capacity for recon in tactical time, whereas Unearth might mean a more support role on a longer, strategic time scale. Subversion also implies taking over the enemy, whereas sabotage literally means to ruin something by tossing a shoe into it, like they take point if a caern is under direct threat and furtively ruin the enemy's gear. Travel could also imply something more concrete than journey - the former being about going to actual places and covering ground, the latter having implications of gaining something, such as with "the real journey was the friends that we made along the way!"

[Knightingale]

My bet is that ultimately Tribe won't really be a big thing in W5. You have your player-character's relationship with the Patron-Spirit and however starting Renown works and that will be it. I don't think there will be Gifts tied to Tribes anymore. They will be tied to your Patron-Spirit, Auspice and Renown.

The text will act like that isn't the case but mechanically that's what will be going on.

[Heavy Arms]

They might have meant Scout to be an active military capacity for recon in tactical time, whereas Unearth might mean a more support role on a longer, strategic time scale. Subversion also implies taking over the enemy, whereas sabotage literally means to ruin something by tossing a shoe into it, like they take point if a caern is under direct threat and furtively ruin the enemy's gear. Travel could also imply something more concrete than journey - the former being about going to actual places and covering ground, the latter having implications of gaining something, such as with "the real journey was the friends that we made along the way!"

But this all goes into my point about Auspices still being a significant thing. These kinds of minor parsing of the example inspiration-verbs feel like they should be the differences between Auspices of the same Tribe, not what justifies having so many Tribes.

As a counter-point, if we assume the Shadow Lords and Silver Fangs retain their general concepts at the two Tribes most interested in political leadership of the Garou, their verb selections strike a very strong separation between them. It is a very short, and very effective, communication of what playing a Shadow Lord trying to amass political power looks like vs. a Silver Fang with political aspirations is going to look like. You do not have to think, at all, about any sort of nuanced differences between the verbs in question.

Once you're trying to figure out if "Journey" or "Travel" better defines what actions your character does, the chart has failed in its intended purpose.

[Damian May]

Honestly all I get from the Verbs is ' We don't think Zoomers are smart enough/ have a long enough attention span for full sentences. There's ample room in that box for a concise descriptive text but we're reduced to primary school level communication. Maybe it's the done thing now but it feels like talking down to your customer base to me.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

But this all goes into my point about Auspices still being a significant thing. These kinds of minor parsing of the example inspiration-verbs feel like they should be the differences between Auspices of the same Tribe, not what justifies having so many Tribes.

As a counter-point, if we assume the Shadow Lords and Silver Fangs retain their general concepts at the two Tribes most interested in political leadership of the Garou, their verb selections strike a very strong separation between them. It is a very short, and very effective, communication of what playing a Shadow Lord trying to amass political power looks like vs. a Silver Fang with political aspirations is going to look like. You do not have to think, at all, about any sort of nuanced differences between the verbs in question.

Once you're trying to figure out if "Journey" or "Travel" better defines what actions your character does, the chart has failed in its intended purpose.

Journey vs. Travel

(I kid)

Yeah, I did some pretty loose BS with the verbs, and it was only my personal take on what those probably meant given my bias for filtering everything through the "War vs. Hunt" dichotomy of Apocalypse and Forsaken. I'm still reeling from the Homid Talons; I suppose now The Jungle Book and Princess Mononoke are more appropriate to W:tA than ever before.

[Heavy Arms]

Honestly all I get from the Verbs is ' We don't think Zoomers are smart enough/ have a long enough attention span for full sentences. There's ample room in that box for a concise descriptive text but we're reduced to primary school level communication. Maybe it's the done thing now but it feels like talking down to your customer base to me.

I think you've got some rose-colored glasses on.

RPGs have been using this sort of thing since they began (including 1e WtA, even if not for Tribes). It's not about assuming the audience is lazy, but that you need to hook people on concepts quickly. Lists of sample concepts, alternate names for a group, tables to roll against to generate details about your character... it's all about getting people into the concepts fast, so they then read the full sentences and paragraphs that detail these things fully. There's nothing new or specific to Paradox about doing this sort of thing. Companies do it because it's effective when done well. You want potential players to get an idea of a character they want to play ASAP, because that's the motivation to read the rest of the book.

[Damian May]

I think you've got some rose-colored glasses on.

RPGs have been using this sort of thing since they began (including 1e WtA, even if not for Tribes). It's not about assuming the audience is lazy, but that you need to hook people on concepts quickly. Lists of sample concepts, alternate names for a group, tables to roll against to generate details about your character... it's all about getting people into the concepts fast, so they then read the full sentences and paragraphs that detail these things fully. There's nothing new or specific to Paradox about doing this sort of thing. Companies do it because it's effective when done well. You want potential players to get an idea of a character they want to play ASAP, because that's the motivation to read the rest of the book.

Possibly. Though I don't recall it in any of them.......maybe the Lone Wolf Adventure Game but that was based on simple gamebook rules so it stands to reason. Definitely don't recall it from any of my WoD/Shadowrun/TOR or other books, but my memory is not the best.

Though considering the number of posts I've seen trying to work out what the fuck the verbs actually mean in relation to the tribal culture.....not sure they're fulfilling their intended purpose.

I mean we'd actually know a lot more if there was a brief description rather than some vague words. *shrug*