W5 QA

[Heavy Arms]

The Ivory Claws from Forsaken manage to be obsessed with breeding... but they're also a Pure Tribe so that's generally painted as a bad thing for them to consider important where anyone anywhere can become a werewolf, and Tribe is something you pick rather than something you're born into. As eugenicists without any supernatural backing to justify their claims, they're as wrong headed as any real world eugenicist (if with very different standards of what they're looking for), just way more dangerous and possessing the power to kidnap werewolves they consider of strong blood to indoctrinate, and kill those they deem guilty of miscegenation, in their attempt to purify the world of the taint of Wolf's death and Luna's betrayal.

But yeah, the feeling that eleven Tribes is just too many is really enforced the more I hear from Justin and Outstar. More and more stuff just seems to indicate that the only way to really differentiate who becomes what in W5 is by diminishing even the 1e "core themes" of WtA in order to try to create some narrative space between them. The Black Furies are just Children of Gaia with less patience apparently, making the Furies ineffectual because if you want to fight beyond killing what's in front of you and really do meaningful long term change, you'd be a Child of Gaia instead. The Children of Gaia are now going to be even more "hippy" since their dedication to self-restraint to find the best choices before unleashing all the fury in their hearts will have to make them even less Ragey so they wouldn't end up as smarter than average Black Furies.

[Ana Mizuki]

I think the most frustrating part of this is that these elements from Forsaken are taken and the scale is lowered, but nothing is really done to make it all cohesive and unique.

For one, Forsaken is street level because each pack is on their own. There is no greater uratha society. There is no doomsday clock other than what the ST creates. The scale of Forsaken stays personal, because the whole game is focused on keeping it personal. W5's personal is forced, the Apocalypse is still there, most threats are way above personal level and yet the PCs are discouraged from stepping up.

Second, what made NWoD/CotD splats work so well was the 5 archetypes and 5 groups to pick from at the start. Anything deeper was in addition to the base 5+5. W5 keeps 11 tribes of WtA, but as many things making these tribes distinct are removed, there are tribes that do very similar things but slightly differently.

Third and rather petty, despite homid and lupus now being freely picked and IRL wolves having it easier now, the assumption is that most PCs are homid. Which then raises the question, why keep the lupus as an option at all if you are not going to make use of it? Because of legacy?

If this is truly a reboot, why is W5 leaning so much on Forsaken for replacements rather than making its own? Why not use the reboot as a way to explore the garou or werewolves in general in another way?

[Manfr]

2) Silver Fangs: Their population is kept up by careful breeding. The number of the elit x chance of becoming a werewolf - the chance is becoming anything else should be minimal. There could not be enough Fangs to rule.

.

That was a bad idea to begin with, to be honest. Inbred aristocracies have fallen from power for a reason. It makes much more sense for the Fangs to recruit in the global ruling class, now they are not restrictred anymore to exterminated Russian noble families.

There is much less shortage of super-rich, or Ivy League graduates, or PPE people in the UK etc than there is of true blue blood aristocrats.

[Asmodai]

That was a bad idea to begin with, to be honest. Inbred aristocracies have fallen from power for a reason. It makes much more sense for the Fangs to recruit in the global ruling class, now they are not restrictred anymore to exterminated Russian noble families.

There is much less shortage of super-rich, or Ivy League graduates, or PPL people in the UK etc than there is of true blue blood aristocrats.

... and that's what the Silver Fangs do. Or, well have done before W5.

[Manfr]

I think the most frustrating part of this is that these elements from Forsaken are taken and the scale is lowered, but nothing is really done to make it all cohesive and unique.

For one, Forsaken is street level because each pack is on their own. There is no greater uratha society. There is no doomsday clock other than what the ST creates. The scale of Forsaken stays personal, because the whole game is focused on keeping it personal. W5's personal is forced, the Apocalypse is still there, most threats are way above personal level and yet the PCs are discouraged from stepping up.

Second, what made NWoD/CotD splats work so well was the 5 archetypes and 5 groups to pick from at the start. Anything deeper was in addition to the base 5+5. W5 keeps 11 tribes of WtA, but as many things making these tribes distinct are removed, there are tribes that do very similar things but slightly differently.

Third and rather petty, despite homid and lupus now being freely picked and IRL wolves having it easier now, the assumption is that most PCs are homid. Which then raises the question, why keep the lupus as an option at all if you are not going to make use of it? Because of legacy?

If this is truly a reboot, why is W5 leaning so much on Forsaken for replacements rather than making its own? Why not use the reboot as a way to explore the garou or werewolves in general in another way?

To be fair, we still don't have enough information to jump to all these conclusions. They are legitimate concerns, but may be addressed from now on, and may even be already solved in a way Justin still hasn't revealed.

It's absolutely ok to voice them, to be clear, I' just feel "may be" is at this stage more proper than "are".

Tribes might just be a bit more like Vampire Clans: you are embraced into them, they have some cultural origins and some preferred places, but generally speaking they are global (and they are 13).

[Manfr]

... and that's what the Silver Fangs do. Or, well have done before W5.

Yeah, but without the cultivation of Kinfolk everything is just easier, OP was concerned that without them there wouldnt be enough Fangs to fill power positions.

For the front line leadership of a warlike race, to rely on blood dynasties for replacement is a very bad idea.

Career officials of standing armies were born for this reason, in the end: there are still armies, and still high officers,even though they are noble-born.

[Ragged Robin]

If this is truly a reboot, why is W5 leaning so much on Forsaken for replacements rather than making its own? Why not use the reboot as a way to explore the garou or werewolves in general in another way?

Probably because Justin would rather be designing cofd games and wanted to be done with wod decades ago.

[TyrannicalRabbit]

Probably because Justin would rather be designing cofd games and wanted to be done with wod decades ago.

I wish that was true, maybe we'd not be getting CofD book pitches shut down.

[TwoDSix]

I wish that was true, maybe we'd not be getting CofD book pitches shut down.

Would you want to compete with a line that's doing what you're doing better? Reckoning and Vigil both had their second editions out this year, and Vigil 2e is just far and away better than H5 (admittedly partially due to having like an extra half a decade in development). CofD 2e is also really homing in on regional level play, whereas Justin wants to be even more street level.

Justin doesn't want to write for Chronicles of Darkness, he wants to write for the new World of Darkness. nWoD2e/GMC/CofD was a pretty big mechanical shift that caught up with the tonal solidification Requiem and I believe Awakening had halfway through 1e, and maybe not one that fits in with Justin's vision.

Also I'd somehow managed to miss CofD book pitches getting shut down. I've just started to really beef up my CofD collection, and it feels horrible for the more promising game to have a stranglehold put on it. Just comparing Requiem 2e to Masquerade 5e I feel like the former is the one with a clear tonal and mechanical direction.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Yeah, but without the cultivation of Kinfolk everything is just easier, OP was concerned that without them there wouldnt be enough Fangs to fill power positions.

Playing a Silver Fang isn't supposed to just be playing a royal who happens to be a werewolf, but rather like being Aragorn. Which includes the arc where no one knows that he's a king and everyone just calls him Strider.

For the front line leadership of a warlike race, to rely on blood dynasties for replacement is a very bad idea.

Career officials of standing armies were born for this reason, in the end: there are still armies, and still high officers,even though they are noble-born.

Garou don't have human-style armies. They'll certainly take pages from them if they can use styles of management, command, and conflict, like how Golgol Fangs-First set up the Amazon War, but they've never been truly populous (in the olden days, they were more likely to live as wolves than humans, which means vast territories to support wolves going on hunts for prey, and that tradition has been very hard to die), and Rage means that anyone trying to do an R. Lee Ermey impression is likely to accumulate battle scars and die from provoking berserker monsters with claws that ignore supernatural healing.

Now, if you want to know what kind of changer handles wide-scale, human-style conflict? That'd be the Ratkin. In fact, the rats are explicitly around to counter humans doing this shit, which they do by a wide variety of methods both upfront (Rat Warriors and their martial traditions utilizing Pain Daggers) and underhanded (biological warfare, stealth attacks, sudden teleportation, turning areas into deathtraps, and utilizing whatever weapons that they can steal from humans, as well as terrorism, blackmail, and sabotage).

[TyrannicalRabbit]

Would you want to compete with a line that's doing what you're doing better? Reckoning and Vigil both had their second editions out this year, and Vigil 2e is just far and away better than H5 (admittedly partially due to having like an extra half a decade in development). CofD 2e is also really homing in on regional level play, whereas Justin wants to be even more street level.

Justin doesn't want to write for Chronicles of Darkness, he wants to write for the new World of Darkness. nWoD2e/GMC/CofD was a pretty big mechanical shift that caught up with the tonal solidification Requiem and I believe Awakening had halfway through 1e, and maybe not one that fits in with Justin's vision.

Also I'd somehow managed to miss CofD book pitches getting shut down. I've just started to really beef up my CofD collection, and it feels horrible for the more promising game to have a stranglehold put on it. Just comparing Requiem 2e to Masquerade 5e I feel like the former is the one with a clear tonal and mechanical direction.

Mostly I am being sarcastic because I don't think that Achilli wants to make CofD material and considering the fine people that are line developers and freelancers, I'm pretty happy with who has been.

And beyond that, I don't want to go down some rabbit hole about if Vigil etc is better for a couple of reasons.

1. I prefer CofD, as a WoD vet, but I'm not here or anywhere else to push rhetoric about that because I don't want to fall into traps of confirmation bias.

2. It shouldn't be a competition and frankly the older I get the more damn tired I get of all that. Constant competition of splats, competition of game lines by fans. I'd be happy to see CofD and WoD5 get books and think that is more than easily possible.

3. And finally, Paradox seems hellbent on not recognizing any questions on the matter including some playful ones on Twitter of someone offering to buy the IP with her leftover crisps. And the more time passes, the times I've seen of certain figures making caustic remarks about CofD, the way that filters down into the fanbase. If they even bother to say anything at all I don't expect anything but some corporate speak where they invented a divide and problem to "solve" by shuttering it. But I doubt they'll even make that effort

[Shakanaka]

W5 is going to be a complete disaster.

[Heavy Arms]

2. It shouldn't be a competition and frankly the older I get the more damn tired I get of all that. Constant competition of splats, competition of game lines by fans. I'd be happy to see CofD and WoD5 get books and think that is more than easily possibly.

To add to this, pretty much the best time to be a fan of either the WoD or the CofD was... when both were being made. The 20th books, while far from perfect, reinvigorated the WoD and were doing a great job of laying the ground work for a 5e that would have probably had a better balance of keeping the legacy of the WoD while modernizing things. The CofD was really getting going as it's own game with its own strengths and weaknesses. Many Onyx Path freelancers freely switched between them bringing experiences from each that helped make them all better at being what the fans wanted out of them rather than blurring stuff between them.

Now the 20th books besides some Mage stuff are effectively done even if lots of things never got updates. The CofD 2e is unofficially cancelled because Paradox isn't saying anything, but we know Onyx Path is struggling to get permission to make books for it, and Paradox isn't doing anything to address this to CofD fans making the worst assumption rumors feel all the more plausible. And WoD5 is, well, controversial and having a major tonal shift as it moves lead developer hands that's not helping the edition as a whole for now.

[Shakanaka]

The CofD 2e is unofficially cancelled because Paradox isn't saying anything, but we know Onyx Path is struggling to get permission to make books for it, and Paradox isn't doing anything to address this to CofD fans making the worst assumption rumors feel all the more plausible.

I feel like Paradox stopped making CofD content because classic World of Darkness has a massive legacy cultural imprint. Especially in regard to Vampire the Masquerade, and more especially, Bloodlines.

With Paradox being a game developer / publishing company, it wants to shift all the branding and developmental resources purely to WoD. They could care less about CofD. Hell, I don't even particularly favor CofD in the first place - but even I have to point what the oddities of what's going on here. CofD fans could likewise care less about WoD, which is fair.

The problem is that Parawolf is taking all the things based from CofD - tone, mechanics, metaplot-lite narrative, and "street level" (the "street level" being the stuff I hate the most being added into WoD) - and putting it into WoD.. this is stuff people who like WoD hate; not just so-called "old timers"; there are people like myself who only were introduced to this franchise years ago, and just prefer WoD over CofD.

CofD fans just want more CofD content to be released. Littering CofD-style stuff in WoD isn't going to attract them to the 5 Edition stuff that's coming out. They'll just keep playing CofD content ad interregnum like how 20th or even older edition World of Darkness players play their games with that content.

This why I think Werewolf 5 is going to be a disaster. Vampire 5 could maybe get some middling amount of newcomers.. because Vampire, no matter what, is an attractive flagship that is easy to market and getting people to want to try it.

But Werewolf? Most of what fuels it is the previous fanbase. With how this on the drop Q&A is being received, it's not looking good. By making all these inane changes, holding soft-contempt for past franchise material, gutting fundamental aspects of the game (with the most egregious of them all, making the Umbra less important and having the Garou know less it, when that categorially breaks SO much of lore and even past game mechanics) etc. is not going to work out well.

I'm not saying change is bad, but when you make changes, make sure when you make changes, make them good..

What Parawolf doesn't understand is that they can't keep getting away with making these rebooted "5" edition games, but keeping the brand title marketing so it can sell. It can work for Vampire the Masquerade for reasons like I said before... but the other lines?

Not so much.

Most of WoD lines besides Vampire need support from the WoD fanbase to sell well. Werewolf has some marginal outside notoriety, especially due to the game that came out for it, but a lot of Werewolf obviously was financially driven by WoD Werewolf fans. I don't know how this is going to sell well.

As a matter of fact, I wonder how Hunter: "The Reckoning" Fifth Edition even sold; that line HEAVILY (if not only) was supported by die-hard classic World of Darkness fans, especially for its lore aspect (which of course was gutted via the modus operandi of how this entire Fifth line operates). It's only going to get worse as they keep branching out to the other cWoD games lines with this design philosophy.

[Ragged Robin]

W5 is going to be a complete disaster.

It's hard to get a feel for how well it's going to do. V5 did alright but it seems to have been partly fueled by goodwill from v20 (which has slowly been eroded over the last few years), a solid pr campaign and it's status as a flagship game. w5 doesn't really have that stuff going for it, it also doesn't have the idea of a returning to a 'purer' version of the game v5 was able to rationalize some of it's decisions since wta has been pretty simular across history.
The games going to somehow maintain the core appeal of the franchise despite gutting the setting while at the same time building in uniquely appealing concepts for the hypothetical new audiences who not only wouldnt have found classic werewolf appealing but are in larger numbers than the people they're going to inevitably alienate with this new game.

Tricky.