W5 QA

[Heavy Arms]

It was you who claimed to have special insight into the minds of the original designers...

That's not what I said. If you want to get into a snit because you misread my post, don't complain to me about pissing contests.

I said the origins of the push back against "rulings not rules" for saddling the GM to things that were beyond simply their role as adjudicator. Having to make up for rules Gygax and Arneson just forgot to include for example.

I did not bring up Gygax and Arneson to appeal to their authority,...

Whether you intended to or not, it's exactly what you did. Further you haven't actually backed off from that.

...but to simply point out that their design philosophies clearly positioned the referee, not the rules text, as the final arbitrer of what happens at the gaming table.

Except that's not what defines the rigid vs. free Kreigsspiel debate (just like it's not really the core of the rulings vs. rules debate) because even in rigid Kriegsspiel the umpire is the final authority at the table. The rigid vs. free debate is whether or not the umpire is allowed to exceed the powers granted to them by the rules, because Kriegsspiel didn't come in with the presumption that the umpire was above the rules instead of the arbiter of what to do when the rules did not provide a clear cut result (which Kriegsspiel has happen on purpose as part of simulating the imperfections of battlefield communications and the fog of war). Even free Kriegsspiel proponents weren't arguing for the "GM is the highest authority" style approach where the rules were merely guidelines, they just wanted a less constrained umpire that could apply more variations on the fly and less complex rules to make it more fun game and less training.

Gygax and Arneson considering themselves free Kriegsspiel proponents doesn't explain what oD&D was the way it was in terms of rules because the game is full of rules that get extremely detailed in some places that doesn't result in a more freewheeling "rulings not rules" experience, and instead comes off as more "we're shirking are rules as designers by not putting in rules here, or making the intent of the rules over here more clear." Which is also attested to by plenty of people that played with them.

We have not only the original game, but over thirty years' worth of commentary by the designers and many of the players in their original campaigns to back this up. If you want to make claims about the intent behind the original rules, you cannot spin around and say that you don't care what the designers thought when you are challenged on the topic.

Conflating my feelings about their opinions on Kriegsspiel with their positions as the inventors of the modern RPG hobby is exactly why you're just making an appeal to authority instead of refuting what I'm actually saying.

I can also make claims about the intent of the original rules when there are plenty of examples of things like rules references that point to rules that don't exist. Or how Gygax insisted on sexist rules because enforcing bioessentialism into D&D was more important to him than "rulings not rules." I can point at the hypocrisy of their stated philosophies vs. the actual game(s) they made that go beyond accidents and unintentional omissions.

Or rather, you can, but at that point it's obvious that you are looking for a pissing contest, not a discussion. You'll have to continue that contest alone.

The pot would like to register a complaint about your stealing its role about calling the kettle black. You started all of this as a complaint against a small off-handed comment about D&D 5e design philosophy.

[Elphilm]

No. Just as 4e's structure was set up to make the combat something for all participants, wolf-born characters need a structure that displays the differences between the now only two varieties of Garou. Not having it, and just making the ST wing it, not only produces the kind of bland and flavorless character of Hunter 5e, it also places an undue burden on the ST, just like how 5e places an undue burden on any DM that steps forward to run it.

I purposefully refrained from commenting on the design of Werewolf in the post that you're responding to, because I have no strong feelings on the matter one way or the other. I only objected to your characterization of the "rulings not rules" principle as an abdication of game design responsibility. It is a misleading and needlessly hostile representation of a style of play that many people (myself included, needless to say) have enjoyed for decades and continue to enjoy to this day. I say misleading because what "rulings not rules" is trying to accomplish is not accurately described by game designers calling it quits and leaving it up to each GM to come up with entire subsystems on their own. The principle is about trusting the GM to make judgment calls in situations of actual play that are not explicitly covered by the rules in order to keep the game moving. Sooner or later, you are going to encounter such lacunae in every single RPG ever invented, simply because the act of roleplaying is too open-ended for any ruleset to cover all possible scenarios in a convincing and satisfactory manner. It is not something to disparage or to be afraid of, and in general I find it a poor analogy for the kinds of missing character generation features that you are criticizing current and upcoming White Wolf games for.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

I purposefully refrained from commenting on the design of Werewolf in the post that you're responding to, because I have no strong feelings on the matter one way or the other. I only objected to your characterization of the "rulings not rules" principle as an abdication of game design responsibility. It is a misleading and needlessly hostile representation of a style of play that many people (myself included, needless to say) have enjoyed for decades and continue to enjoy to this day. I say misleading because what "rulings not rules" is trying to accomplish is not accurately described by game designers calling it quits and leaving it up to each GM to come up with entire subsystems on their own. The principle is about trusting the GM to make judgment calls in situations of actual play that are not explicitly covered by the rules in order to keep the game moving. Sooner or later, you are going to encounter such lacunae in every single RPG ever invented, simply because the act of roleplaying is too open-ended for any ruleset to cover all possible scenarios in a convincing and satisfactory manner. It is not something to disparage or to be afraid of, and in general I find it a poor analogy for the kinds of missing character generation features that you are criticizing current and upcoming White Wolf games for.

If I'm sinking 50 USD a book into something, the designers had better have a structured game of substance that doesn't yawn open and welcome those same lacunae in, and expect me to sew up everything. I don't have the energy to do shit like that anymore. They need to have more foresight if I'm going to buy into this... especially in the case of the aforementioned lupus characters, who were formerly a huge part of the game. A coy answer of "figure it out for yourself" is not going to fucking cut it, especially after they've changed so much for the worse.

(That 5e is three books each at 50 USD exacerbates the problem for that iteration of D&D. The character types have a very deliberate lack of variety with some outright busted and nonfunctional shit like the Frenzied Berserker, the DMG was egregiously copy-pasted in many places from its 4e iteration down to the production staff not understanding what the wuxia genre actually is, and the monster stat blocks are a soup of numbers nearly identical to what PCs use that give little in the way of encounter-usable guidance).

[Elphilm]

I have no great love for D&D 5E, so you won't find me defending that particular edition of the game any time soon. I agree fully that the steep price of the hobby has long been a problem, and WotC's recent blunders in their attempts to further monetize the brand have all but killed my interest in the current iteration of the game.

This tangent has likely tested everyone's patience by now, though, so I'll refrain from further comments that are not directly related to the upcoming edition of Werewolf.

[Ragged Robin]

To pull back the w5, the DIY attitude of 5th ed wod is often quite frustrating. The thing about indie mindset writting is I expect to pat indie tier prices. Asking 50 bucks for "figure it out yourself." and minimalist mechanics is quite an ask, especially considering the reduction in setting lore and statements such not believing in canon.

[Heavy Arms]

*The indie arena isn't exactly DIY focused these days either*. While lots of indies do things like Convictions in V5 where you pick (esp. as a group) custom set of terms, I see that more as "fill in the blanks." When you pay to have someone remodel a room in a house, and you pick out the paint colors, flooring style, etc. it's not suddenly a DIY project (esp. if you have an interior designer guiding you a bit like a good indie game should with fill-in-the-blank parts of a game).

I'd say the biggest trend in indies is much tighter individual play experiences. If we look at PbtA (including FitD as a spin off of it too) as the current indie RPG engine darling, the top recommendations aren't the big open sandboxes of earlier decades. Masks isn't a generic superhero system, it's not even something like Aberrant with a more detailed setting and context for super powered beings that explores some aspects of superhero stories. Masks is very specifically about playing a team of young up-and-coming superheroic teenagers. If you want to play Teen Titans or Young Justice, it does great, but it's not the game to pick up to play the Justice League. That's why, despite PbtA getting more mainstream in certain ways, it's hard for one PtbA game to really build up a franchise that we associated with non-indie style designs. That focus on making a really good game about a more niche topic means they can really support that topic, but they can't really support other topics and it's really hard to nudge them into being something similar without just having to make your own.

I included FitD because the Blades in the Dark specific branch of the wider PbtA style is really good for a lot of what WoD5 seems to be trying to do:: rules about a specific band of people that for whatever reasons set by the individual game have to be outsiders to mainstream society, fighting the system and other peers groups over territory, resources, and power within a relatively confined space (like a single city). There are good FitD games that are basically playing a coterie of Anarch vampires carving out a space for themselves in a city while dealing with vampire rivals and politics. But.. just like Masks doesn't "age up" into the Big Established Hero Team Up Squad, FitD really isn't meant to keep going once (or more often if) you manage to really secure your place in your city. That's basically as close to "winning" as you get because it's the natural end of the arc for those characters.

The W5 previews fun afoul of trying to be this sort of FitD niche games, without actually having the focus of a FitD or PbtA game. Hence the DIY feels: you have to make that niche from the pile of rules-parts the base WoD5 set hands you, so W5 can say it supports lots of different approaches.

* - At least not for playing the games, the indie scene is replete with DIY game engines to build games around

[Knightingale]

I think the design-approach for both H5 and W5 is really standing in the way of ever coming close to the focus of games like FitD or PbtA. On one hand, you have the aversion to lore and worldbuilding. So a lot of questions in those areas have to be answered by the people at the table. So you won't get any focus in that department. But then you add the other aversion and that's the one against systems.

From the Q&A:

Will 'Chronicle Tenets' feature in W5? If yes, will they be a gameplay-element like in V5 or more of a mix of gameplay and 'Safety Tool' as in H5 (which I think has some problems)?
Still in development. Werewolf has a lot of "moving parts" systemically, and the more systems in place, the more of a challenge to uninfluenced play there are. Werewolves don't have Convictions, for example, for that very reason, while the tribes have Ban and Favor suggesting key attitudes and values.

When your take on systems is that they're a "challenge to uninfluenced play", like they're some obstacle that needs to be overcome or something, then of course establishing any kind of focus through the system will be quite hard as well. And with that approach, you get something like in H5 where core-ideas and concepts like Creed, Drive or stuff like Touchstones barely matter. And it's also this attitude that then leads to decisions like "systemically there's no difference between Lupus and Homids" because adding a system around that would "challenge uninfluenced play".

And with that approach you don't get anything quite as focused as structuring FitD around mission and downtime or the specificity of what kinds of Moves you include in a PbtA-game. It's about taking the WOD5E and really worrying about the number of systems in it but that's the main-thing that's worried about here, the number of systems. To make sure that the system comes up as little as possible with the expectation that additionally all the narrative blank space also has to be filled by the people at the table. Does it make sense to dump Convictions and only have Tribes (with their Favors and Bans)...? Well, it's one system instead of 2. And that's consideration enough for whether this is better.

[TwoDSix]

Wasn't the last big DIY system success Fate Core back in 2013? Okay, probably actually Fate Accelerated, which didn't include all the additional 'and here's how to make the rules actually work for you' of Core. Although even Fate has been narrowing down, everything beyond the three mostly redundant corebooks and the first Toolkit is pretty much a specific way to do a rules or setting concept?

That said I should really pick up Monster of the Week and Monsterhearts 2 at some point. The former even looks like it'll be better at being H5 than H5 is.

[Heavy Arms]

Depending on how you want to define "big," Cortex Prime was a successful "DIY core system so people can make their own iterations for specific games" thing that's more recent (Kickstarter funded in 2017, released in full in 2020), though it got hobbled a bit when Fandom bought the Cortex brand even if that didn't really impact that quality of Prime itself.

Despite Cortex being the system behind a lot of well regarded games, the reception to a big book of, "Make your own Cortex games" having waned so much from Fate's success in the same space does imply that at least as a product aimed at the general audience, those sorts of things are on the decline. Though Fandom spooking indies from making a bunch of Cortex games for sale as it wasn't clear how the licensing for them would work for a bit is also an issue.

Also, Fate is still really successful, the fact that they haven't felt the need to do a new edition of it isn't a bad thing, as lots of games are still being made and sold for the current one.

[adambeyoncelowe]

*The indie arena isn't exactly DIY focused these days either*. While lots of indies do things like Convictions in V5 where you pick (esp. as a group) custom set of terms, I see that more as "fill in the blanks." When you pay to have someone remodel a room in a house, and you pick out the paint colors, flooring style, etc. it's not suddenly a DIY project (esp. if you have an interior designer guiding you a bit like a good indie game should with fill-in-the-blank parts of a game).

I'd say the biggest trend in indies is much tighter individual play experiences. If we look at PbtA (including FitD as a spin off of it too) as the current indie RPG engine darling, the top recommendations aren't the big open sandboxes of earlier decades. Masks isn't a generic superhero system, it's not even something like Aberrant with a more detailed setting and context for super powered beings that explores some aspects of superhero stories. Masks is very specifically about playing a team of young up-and-coming superheroic teenagers. If you want to play Teen Titans or Young Justice, it does great, but it's not the game to pick up to play the Justice League. That's why, despite PbtA getting more mainstream in certain ways, it's hard for one PtbA game to really build up a franchise that we associated with non-indie style designs. That focus on making a really good game about a more niche topic means they can really support that topic, but they can't really support other topics and it's really hard to nudge them into being something similar without just having to make your own.

I included FitD because the Blades in the Dark specific branch of the wider PbtA style is really good for a lot of what WoD5 seems to be trying to do:: rules about a specific band of people that for whatever reasons set by the individual game have to be outsiders to mainstream society, fighting the system and other peers groups over territory, resources, and power within a relatively confined space (like a single city). There are good FitD games that are basically playing a coterie of Anarch vampires carving out a space for themselves in a city while dealing with vampire rivals and politics. But.. just like Masks doesn't "age up" into the Big Established Hero Team Up Squad, FitD really isn't meant to keep going once (or more often if) you manage to really secure your place in your city. That's basically as close to "winning" as you get because it's the natural end of the arc for those characters.

The W5 previews fun afoul of trying to be this sort of FitD niche games, without actually having the focus of a FitD or PbtA game. Hence the DIY feels: you have to make that niche from the pile of rules-parts the base WoD5 set hands you, so W5 can say it supports lots of different approaches.

* - At least not for playing the games, the indie scene is replete with DIY game engines to build games around

Well put. The WoD was never very focussed -- it was intensely detailed, but that's not the same thing. It was broad and deep, rather than narrow and shallow, and that's why VTM let you play Lestat, Louis, Blade, Dracula, Count Orlok, the nest from Near Dark, Wamphyri, zombies, gargoyles, Frankenstein's monster, 3x3 Eyes, banshees, sirens, drow, mummies, Tulsa Doom, those shadow-warping vampires from an Italian B-movie, and probably a load of other things I'm forgetting. Yes, sometimes it was silly. Yes, sometimes it was cheesy. But it was also a very broad church.

It was also rich enough that you could zoom in on just one thing and spend a whole chronicle focussed on that one element, if you really wanted to.

[TwoDSix]

I think it's probably better to compare WoD to Dad Schwarze Auge/The Dark Eye. It's incredibly detailed, but more concerned about letting you play [genre] idea X than anything else, although without the rules for what happens if you don't sharpen your sword. CofD arguably goes further on the breadth but sacrifices some of that sexy sexy depth.

There's definitely a market for that kind of game though, purchasing DSA5 made me not want to play D&D ever again, but it's a bit weird in today's landscape. Although honestly CofD's sandbox nature is also not really in style, and you don't have to do the fashionable thing to be successful. WoD5 is going to succeed or fail based on style.

Where WoD5 fails, and CofD2e succeeded, is that it narrowed the archetypes it presented as legitimately. Talk as much about gothic punk as you want (and I love it), but most people want to play Dracula instead of Blade. Which can be even more fun than starving anarchs, you're a 400 year old Ventrue and still barely qualify as middle management within the Camarilla...

Or in WtA terms you've climbed your way to Rank 4/5, only to find that nobody actually wants to change.

[Nicolas Milioni]

Vote on each tribe will get a preview of their 5th edition version

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdYqhnlri-lFU9HG4gUb0fEyuMY_DEi9CNN3Dc-t6ev6P--GA/viewform?usp=sf_link

[Ana Mizuki]

Vote on each tribe will get a preview of their 5th edition version
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...usp=sf_link

Voted Talons, because I'm VERY curious about them.

Also, Fianna are now called Hart Wardens.

[Damian May]

Voted Talons, because I'm VERY curious about them.

.

Same....it was between them and the Furies my two favourite tribes. I hope they won't take my engagement with the poll as interest in the product.....of course they will...

[MrNatas]

Also, Fianna are now called Hart Wardens.

I'll put my money where my mouth is. Good on them for actually seeing for renaming the Fianna after the whole "Fianna is just a word" thing. I still don't think this book will be good at all but, they corrected something I criticized specifically so I appreciate that.