W5 QA

[MyWifeIsScary]

Werewolves as survivors is kinda a joke considering how much of a fucking jack up in power werewolves have over humans at relatively little cost. Do they have to avoid sunlight or feed on the blood of others or something? Yeah, Rage is intimidating towards the weaker willed, and if you cultivate your rage a little too much you have a very real risk of going postal, but that's more something you should pay attention to rather than something that should outright send you into survival mode. For the massive benefits werewolves get, it's a trade the vast majority of people would make, especially if we take out the stigma of metis as V5 has done. It's only when Garou have a greater purpose that they actually have a conflict.


Roleplay between Vampire and werewolves is half shadow lords/bone gnawers/Uktena trying to fuck over vampires and vice versa and half good friends applying plenty of handwavium to their games in order to get things to work as they will it too. As miraculous a substance handwavium is, it really shouldn't inform the decisions regarding the base form of the game.

Vampires want to overpopulate and enlarge their domains for better feeding
Werewolves want more wild spaces, so they're directly at odds.
Vampires want to worsen the gap between rich and poor and to create systemic corruption in order to make safe and better control their feeding environments.
Werewolves don't like the wyrm, which will surely thrive from the above.

[TyrannicalRabbit]

As an old millennial I for one am absolutely shocked to find out that the rpg protagonists of a game I played in the nineties were anti heroes during one of the biggest eras of anti hero media in recent memory. Flabbergasted honestly.

[heinrich]

Werewolves as survivors is kinda a joke considering how much of a fucking jack up in power werewolves have over humans at relatively little cost. Do they have to avoid sunlight or feed on the blood of others or something? Yeah, Rage is intimidating towards the weaker willed, and if you cultivate your rage a little too much you have a very real risk of going postal, but that's more something you should pay attention to rather than something that should outright send you into survival mode. For the massive benefits werewolves get, it's a trade the vast majority of people would make, especially if we take out the stigma of metis as V5 has done. It's only when Garou have a greater purpose that they actually have a conflict.

Yeah, totally depends on how you play. Kinfolk is affected by the Curse to a lower degree then humans, but not immune (and no mechanic is given). The Curse even has next to no mechanics besides percentagees of the population for specific willpower rating. So, a ST can totally make you regret your amazing powers when you don't have a human connection or real relationship apart from you packmates. I mean, one blink of an eye the Rage might show and destroy the trust, love, believe your spouce or kids had in you.
Really, if you could trade Mages, Sorcerers and even Mummies have it better...

So, the Curse is often not very prominent in games, but like I said it totally depends on the mode of play.



As for vampires. They literally steal life force from humans. They are parasitic and withing the way the Wyrm and corruption is described in WtA it makes sense, that the garou regard vampires as something to destroy.

[MyWifeIsScary]

Are they affected by the curse? I recall that they weren't. Or maybe I'm reading between lines too much again. Kinfolk often do fear Garou but that's more a perfectly rational fear of tigers rather than an irrational fear of spiders. Even at their very best Garou are like a workplace boss that can ruin you if you don't mind your behaviour around them.

I can imagine some Garou would be like "oh yes, it's the curse, definitely, has absolutely nothing to do with my poor temperament, my propensity for cruel pranks, my ability to rip them apart like playdough, and that our society has a significant discriminatory bias since it has plenty of uses for hard-to-replace me and much less need for easy-to-replace-you."

[Heavy Arms]

The books, in OOC fashion not in-character stuff up to unreliable narrator, have fairly consistently said that the Kinfolk are impacted by the Curse. It's not just a Garou rationalization for things.

This is also presented as an aggravating factor regarding the decline of the Lupus: It's much easier to raise and indoctrinate human kinfolk to help them psychologically adjust to the Curse. Wolf kin are more disrupted by Garou trying to mate with them. For mos of history the wolf population was large enough to absorb that disruption without very time intensive methods of keeping wolf packs together despite the Garou wanting to have some lupus pups with them. Even with successful wolf conservation efforts, the total number of wild wolf packs is small, so it's harder for the Garou to adopt breeding strategies that account for kin wild wolves still being subject to the Curse.

[heinrich]

W20 page 262

This Curse makes normal relationships with humans and wolves very hard, and maintaining a family next to impossible. The Rage within a werewolf makes even their own Kinfolk uncomfortable, albeit to a lesser degree.

Like I said, totally vague. And it is similarly stated in revised and 2nd Edition, iirc.

And, the Garou/Kin-Relationship within the whole Setting massivly changed between 2nd revised and W20:
Pre-W20 one sniffing Philodox could find out if a new born was garou or kin and there were other ways like a talens. So, you were either a chosen warrior, even during your upbringing among Kin, or not. And while being Kin might have been crushing the hopes of your parents, it happened in up to 90% of the cases (depending on pure breed). Still, garou and kin had their lifes and their expectations planned out for them, if they were what W20 calls "Kenning", meaning close to the garou and "in the know", so to speak. And sure, this Setting was the foundation for Sam Haight and a lot of other tragedies happening to Kin - which make up a lot of the notable Kin section of "Unsung Heroes". But, there is still a vast majority of Kinfolk who are totally fine with the garou and not necessarily afraid of them. I often point out, that the Player's Guide to the Garou (revised Edition) within the Kinfok section, on page 205, has a out-of-character description of a day in the life of an active kinfolk - and this should be the baseline. Even lost cubs might have been found out and marked with the Rite of Baptism as garou, while the other kids are kin and probably not "active" or "kenning" as W20 calls it.
W20 and beyond sees a drastic (in my opinion) shift. Retconning the FAQ of revised Storyteller's Handbook not pre-change garou register for "Scent of the true form" as kinfolk would, and all the fluff is written as if it is impossible to tell pre-change garou and kinfolk apart (I know, there are talens copy&pasted into W20 that allow to tell them apart, like in revised, but the fluff doesn't concern itself with these, neither is there an explanation for why Baptism of Fire still mentions Scent of the true form as being able to make the distinction. Well, the most likely explanation was missing quality contol before release). But the games describes that now any kinfolk could at any time have a late first change. So, the whole expectation for the life to live and all that doesn't really apply anymore. The garou kid isn't all the way into the teenager years taught that its birth is a blessing. And the kin siblings aren't brought up being told that their purpose in life is to support their chosen warrior family members. In contrast, every kid is told that they might be a chosen warrior, getting their hopes up, maybe, but when adolescence ends, adulthood starts and the first change has still happened, society might regard the kid as kinfolk, for it doesn't seem to be a garou.... unless, it is and has a late first change, which happens. So there are stories about that publicly known. It's rare, but it happens, so people believe in it. Like winning to lottery or making it from dishwasher to millionaire...
With this social dynamic, kinfolk has a somewhat different standing...

That said, I don't ever see that garou have a "discriminatory bias since it has plenty of uses for hard-to-replace me and much less need for easy-to-replace-you". because...

• Garou are supposed to be honourable people. While brutal towards the minions of the Wyrm, society not necessarily condones brutality towards bystanders, kinfolk or allies. Not being able to control one self is reason for renown loss and punishment. Even the Get of Fenris, who have a rougher social structure then most tribes, don't condone cruelty.
• Sure, nine out of ten kids in a generation are kinfolk, but that doesn't mean they are easily replaced. Imagine your spouse is killed out of negligence by a co-worker of yours and let's see how you replace that loss.
• The fight against the Wyrm is the garou's duty and they take pride in that. While kinfolk might assist, especially in areas where garou are not helpful, due to the Curse, they are usually excluded from the action. 'Dies Ultimae' and groups that operate like this, including kinfolk, are rare. And while kinfolk might have their own military organisation, they usually work without garou participation.

Also, like I said, garou aren't necessarily the ones to condone cruelty. That includes cruel pranks. "Let a fool die a fool's death" is a Nuwisha thing, not a Ragabash thing (or general garou thing). So, I don't where the for cruel pranks comes from.

So, maybe you and I have a very different view on how WtA depicts relationships between Kinfolk and garou, or garou society as a whole.

[heinrich]

1) Garou now just fight for survival. They never deserved to be heroes, first of all. W5 seems to put them in their place.

Everyone is the hero in their own story. For the garou it was and should be totally fine to be heroes, from their point of view. That they are all multi-layered characters and their deeds should be controversial from the players' perspectives.

Forcing the players into a survival mode games style be providing only Setting, Rules, Mechanics for such a style of play robs the game of something.

2) It seems their hatred toward vampires will be softened. Good change, all tgis furVSfungs crap didn't bring anything to the game.

It did bring a another faction of clearly outlines enemies to the game - vampires. If a ST used VtM as source it is the most detailed enemy faction to garou ever.

Softening the clearly drawn picture of the enemy and then make player characters rethink it during the game by making it more ambiguous to begin with is lame. Like taking away the "fun" from fundamentalist.

3)Garou lost anything and everything and not gonna have even a glorious death. Finally their screwups bite their asses.

Well, or the screw-ups of everyone else. Garou have fought long to keep the world spinning - and sure, in hindsight they made bad decisions. But so did everyone else. We as players can easily judge the fictional garou, but who are we to mock them when we don't live in an utopia ourselves...

In any case, changing core aspects of the game or rather game setting to make a different game should not be presented as a new version of the game. Either you have the guts to brand it new, or you don't.
Old White Wolf once had the guts, when they created the new WoD. New White Wolf works on Ericsson's flawed premiss that the WoD needed to change and the 15 years between the end of the WoD and V5 needs to be filled. From 2nd to revised the changes in Metaplot were also heavily discussed by players, the jump from revised to V5 was even bigger and therefore more controversial. But, also, V5's changes to the world at large didn't really incorporate much of what they meant for WtA, MtA and the others. There was no guiding line - well, maybe in Ericsson' head canon. And that now leads to a mess.
I mean, H5 is called Hunter the Reckoning, but has nothing to do with the Hunter game of revised era. It is closer to Hunters Hunted, which unfortunately got a new edition in the 20th Anniversary era so it maybe wasn't suitable as a new core book from a marketing standpoint. It is also closer to Hunter the Vigil.
Has it the potential to lead to great game sessions? Possibly, although there are mechanical issues as well.
Is it what people who loved HtR need to elevate their chronicles and characters to a new edition? No - it is not.

The same seems to be the case for W5. Retcons between revised and W20 were bad enough, but it was still to some extend the same game set in the same Setting. W5 doesn't seem to be, because it doesn't change the Setting by moving along the metaplot, it drops you into a massively new world by skipping ahead 15 years.

[TwoDSix]

I mean, WoD definitely had to change, have you seen those rules? I'd also argue that an update to better satirise modern trends rather than decade and a half old ones was the right thing to do, even if it could be handled better.

That said I'm not on board with every change, both crunch and fluff-wise. Blood Potency in Masquerade is a big bugbear of mine, and some of the new setting elements really needed fleshing out shortly after release. Fluff-wise going for a more W20 level of changes would probably have been better, at least initially. Or like Scion 1e to 2e, start by trimming the unnecessary elements before you begin grafting on the new stuff.

W5 goes way beyond that, throwing out the old themes and in the pre-release material not really giving a clear replacement. Except for the environmentalism parts I guess, those are mostly intact.

[Knightingale]

Regarding the Curse and Rage, the Q&A mentioned this:

Will Rage still be a barrier for basic contact between mortals and Garou?
Not a mechanically-enforced hard system. More a question of risks, because of the volatility of the Garou.

That sounds to me like W5 will have nothing like the Curse but instead, you have this concept of "volatility" and the way this gets expressed is that rolling badly with your "Rage-Dice" means you get Compulsions in a manner similar to vampires in V5.

[heinrich]

I mean, WoD definitely had to change, have you seen those rules? I'd also argue that an update to better satirise modern trends rather than decade and a half old ones was the right thing to do, even if it could be handled better.

Sure, the rules of revised WoD left a lot to be desired. Especially combat. And I'm all for the move to the attributes that the new WoD introduced.
And sure, the Setting needed updates, answering questions that arose regarding new technology or changes in culture. But there was not need, neither for V5, nor for W5 nor for BNS's WtA to tear down major chunks of the established Setting to create something new.

[Lashet]

1/ How is that a good change? Toning down the very nature of the game is counterproductive, and the garou are litterally meant to be heroes in the classical sense, larger than life individuals with both a destiny toward greatness and a tendancy toward tragedy, by making them mere survivors, you kill the very nature of the setting.

2/ Except countless interesting roleplay experiences between vampire players and garou npcs and vice versa, an interesting conundrum for garous existing in the cities, a logical reason for vampires to be as cities bound as they are in the wod, etc///
3/ Except they can have a glorious death if they fight for their caern, which seems to be the scope of W5

1) Than they should be writen more heroic from the start Delete at least some of their screw-up (in short, it can be War of Rage OR Impergium, not both).
2) VtM is the most popular gameline. It is THE basic gameline of oWoD. Making Garou vamp-haters sparks the controversy in the fandom... not in the WtA favour.
And vamps never were described as good guys. Mntion some Sabbat atrocities, and its fun will just shrug: "Yep. Now what?" They are not hypocrite. If players want vampire or Garou antogonists, they can just use one for that specific campaign.
3) Make Garou better, more sympathetic (and wrote at least one canonical GarouVS Methuselah duel, which the former win, altough it's my personal dream) - and then it will be far easy to like WtA.
P.S. You know, once upon a time (a long, long time ago) I wanted to like WtA, I really did. I was a fun of the concept of 'werewolf superheroes who fight for better future'. But WtA seems to have more haters than any other WoD gameline. It's really hard to protect them from haters, considering how unsympathetic Garou are. There' no hater is more vicious than disappointed fun))
I'd say, the largest problem of WtA is positioning errow.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

1) Than they should be writen more heroic from the start Delete at least some of their screw-up (in short, it can be War of Rage OR Impergium, not both).

The errors of the Garou are there to demonstrate the need for examination of faith and how the consequences of one's own actions matter above some kind of divine slap on the wrist.

2) VtM is the most popular gameline.

No one cares. This isn't the 90s and no tabletop rpg game is getting anywhere near D&D's numbers anymore.

It is THE basic gameline of oWoD. Making Garou vamp-haters sparks the controversy in the fandom... not in the WtA favour.

How do you judge what's in something's favor, really? Vampire's creative direction wanted werewolves to be deadly threats to vampires back in the core and demonstrated more personally in Hunter's Hunted. And I can tell you - again, because this has come up before - that it's all actually the fault of Vampire, but you're probably just going to be back on the same shit in a few months or years anyway.

And vamps never were described as good guys.

Yet people still flock to Vampion play and make excuses as if they were. On a related note, why do you keep coming back here?

Mntion some Sabbat atrocities, and its fun will just shrug: "Yep. Now what?" They are not hypocrite. If players want vampire or Garou antogonists, they can just use one for that specific campaign.

They're not hypocrites, but they are violent, rapacious, existential threats to most lives that should be killed on sight for safety's sake. So why do you typically object when other game lines' protagonists want to administer Final Death to vampires post haste, no compromise and no negotiation?

3) Make Garou better, more sympathetic (and wrote at least one canonical GarouVS Methuselah duel, which the former win, altough it's my personal dream) - and then it will be far easy to like WtA.

There's a canonical Garou vs. Antediluvian duel that the Garou technically won (when Shu Horus took on Sutekh). Obviously, it's still not enough for you. Also, this is yet another time that your paens for sympathy are oddly wound up in how powerful they're presented. NB: the Vampire fandom typically presents Garou as unfairly powerful, and liable to kill their characters. The view from the ground is already causing friction; having Garou stomp on elders would probably make the Vampire base do what the Werewolf base is doing with W5.

P.S. You know, once upon a time (a long, long time ago) I wanted to like WtA, I really did. I was a fun of the concept of 'werewolf superheroes who fight for better future'. But WtA seems to have more haters than any other WoD gameline. It's really hard to protect them from haters, considering how unsympathetic Garou are. There' no hater is more vicious than disappointed fun))
I'd say, the largest problem of WtA is positioning errow.

You complain about "haters", yet you're the one in here refusing to find anything to like. Also, Garou and Fera haven't been advertised as anything akin to superheroes since that one campaign possibility in first edition, which even then was noted as being a rather different kind of game from the typical course of play. Where did you get your reads on the game from? From whence came these highly unrealistic expectations? The game has let you know that it's running a likely tragedy from day one of picking it up. It's not what's at fault here.

[Lashet]

The errors of the Garou are there to demonstrate the need for examination of faith and how the consequences of one's own actions matter above some kind of divine slap on the wrist.



No one cares. This isn't the 90s and no tabletop rpg game is getting anywhere near D&D's numbers anymore.



How do you judge what's in something's favor, really? Vampire's creative direction wanted werewolves to be deadly threats to vampires back in the core and demonstrated more personally in Hunter's Hunted. And I can tell you - again, because this has come up before - that it's all actually the fault of Vampire, but you're probably just going to be back on the same shit in a few months or years anyway.



Yet people still flock to Vampion play and make excuses as if they were. On a related note, why do you keep coming back here?



They're not hypocrites, but they are violent, rapacious, existential threats to most lives that should be killed on sight for safety's sake. So why do you typically object when other game lines' protagonists want to administer Final Death to vampires post haste, no compromise and no negotiation?



There's a canonical Garou vs. Antediluvian duel that the Garou technically won (when Shu Horus took on Sutekh). Obviously, it's still not enough for you. Also, this is yet another time that your paens for sympathy are oddly wound up in how powerful they're presented. NB: the Vampire fandom typically presents Garou as unfairly powerful, and liable to kill their characters. The view from the ground is already causing friction; having Garou stomp on elders would probably make the Vampire base do what the Werewolf base is doing with W5.



You complain about "haters", yet you're the one in here refusing to find anything to like. Also, Garou and Fera haven't been advertised as anything akin to superheroes since that one campaign possibility in first edition, which even then was noted as being a rather different kind of game from the typical course of play. Where did you get your reads on the game from? From whence came these highly unrealistic expectations? The game has let you know that it's running a likely tragedy from day one of picking it up. It's not what's at fault here.

Well, and where is WtA now? IMO, they were nerfed and re-written cuz all this 'hate-bubble' (as Asmodai named it). And this hate-babble IMO, in many ways caused by those 'vocal minority' of VtM fans who compained about 'fascitic' Garou, wished to defeat werewolf gameline. They created enough memes and ill-name for WtA. Any problematic, too edgy or just unfortunate desicion was used as hate-fuel. And after all, Parawolf themselves recognized WtA 'the most PROBLEMATIC gameline of WoD'.
IMO, if attitude toward vamps would be less agressive (like, 'they are bastards and we don't trust them, yet we aren't at war, either, except some local conflicts between specific parties') - like, you know the attitude of any other gameline... WtA would probably less hated, wouldn't have that much bad publicity in the fandom, and probably wouldn't be rebooted to the core.
P.S. As for Sytekh - again, we don't know , how much of this victory belong to -personally- Shu Horus. There were the whole coalition of Sytekh enemies. Even Sytekh 'daughter' is more relevant.

[Knightingale]

1) Than they should be writen more heroic from the start Delete at least some of their screw-up (in short, it can be War of Rage OR Impergium, not both).
2) VtM is the most popular gameline. It is THE basic gameline of oWoD. Making Garou vamp-haters sparks the controversy in the fandom... not in the WtA favour.
And vamps never were described as good guys. Mntion some Sabbat atrocities, and its fun will just shrug: "Yep. Now what?" They are not hypocrite. If players want vampire or Garou antogonists, they can just use one for that specific campaign.
3) Make Garou better, more sympathetic (and wrote at least one canonical GarouVS Methuselah duel, which the former win, altough it's my personal dream) - and then it will be far easy to like WtA.
P.S. You know, once upon a time (a long, long time ago) I wanted to like WtA, I really did. I was a fun of the concept of 'werewolf superheroes who fight for better future'. But WtA seems to have more haters than any other WoD gameline. It's really hard to protect them from haters, considering how unsympathetic Garou are. There' no hater is more vicious than disappointed fun))
I'd say, the largest problem of WtA is positioning errow.

So, to summarize: You like the notion of vampires being good guys and one of your biggest issues with old WtA is that they aren't good guys...? Of course, you won't find plenty to like in a franchise called "World Of Darkness" then as it's talking about supernatural monsters struggling (in various ways) with being monsters. Naturally, the core-premise of that setup isn't that the player-characters are righteous and morally good people.

And you say "make Garou more sympathetic" but the whole "War against the Wyrm"-thing is more resonant now than ever. If anything, I'd bet you people would be even more on-board with the militaristic zeal of Garou in a game than they were in the 90s. We all know how the whole climate-change-prevention-thing is going. This game potentially offers the fantasy of actually getting to do something about it. Except, of course, the route W5 takes is of a Pack hunkering down in some Caern. And, of course, everything potentially good has already collapsed before you started playing. You're just playing around with your pals in the ruins and that's the in-game-perspective. Supposedly the mortal world is the 2023 we experience right now but as far as the Garou-Nation is concerned we're middle-Apocalypse and Garou-society is dying. And well, that's the setting you get when you just want to "put Garou in their place". You get a game all about Garou being relegated to the sidelines and being unable to do anything about it.

[Lashet]

So, to summarize: You like the notion of vampires being good guys and one of your biggest issues with old WtA is that they aren't good guys...? Of course, you won't find plenty to like in a franchise called "World Of Darkness" then as it's talking about supernatural monsters struggling (in various ways) with being monsters. Naturally, the core-premise of that setup isn't that the player-characters are righteous and morally good people.

And you say "make Garou more sympathetic" but the whole "War against the Wyrm"-thing is more resonant now than ever. If anything, I'd bet you people would be even more on-board with the militaristic zeal of Garou in a game than they were in the 90s. We all know how the whole climate-change-prevention-thing is going. This game potentially offers the fantasy of actually getting to do something about it. Except, of course, the route W5 takes is of aPack hunkering down in some Caern , of course, everything potentially good has already collapsed before you started playing. You're just playing around with your pals in the ruins and that's the in-game-perspective. Supposedly the mortal world is the 2023 we experience right now but as far as the Garou-Nation is concerned we're middle-Apocalypse and Garou-society is dying. And well, that's the setting you get when you just want to "put Garou in their place". You get a game all about Garou being relegated to the sidelines and being unable to do anything about it.

1) No, I think that puting WtA against VtM was a bad decision, that provided a ton of unnessesary hate toward the former.


"Pack hunkering down in some Caern"
2) Garou overcomed it for... how may, 20k years? And they've lost. Mostly cuz of their own fuckups. The world conditions is their fault. What else they gonna do in W5?


"And well, that's the setting you get when"
3) ... you write your protaganists as a hatesinks. It's WtA funs who are most PROBLEMATIC, according to the authors, remember?