The Fight Isn't Over

[MrNatas]

I am struggling to understand how players are not going to want to side with the Get on this. Like, as far as I know, no one plays werewolf to be a rational thinking centrist but, instead be this extremist that is trying to do something about a situation that is perceived as hopeless so that maybe there could be a brighter tomorrow (from the werewolf perspective).

It seems like, to me, that no one is going to be fine with just sitting in a city because 'apocalypse already happened.' I think it would be natural to take the stance of 'As long as I breath and can move, the apocalypse hasn't happened.' Maybe the actual printed material will state what is actually going on better than what has been said in Q&A and tweets but, it not doing a good job stating why it would be a good game for werewolves to sit in a city and ... protect it?

[Knightingale]

That's what I meant when I talked about "arbitrary-seeming limits". The whole deal with H5 and hunter-organizations is arbitrary. There are no shades of grey or complexity. It's just: hunter-organizations are bad and the people who work for them aren't real hunters. Period. And there's no compelling natural or supernatural explanation for why that's the case. H5 just makes a definitive statement about it and does a poor job of explaining why it's like that.

The real reason is probably that Justin Achilli is seemingly convinced that epic storytelling makes it harder for personal storytelling to happen and therefore W5 has to find ways to tell readers "Do NOT do any type of epic storytelling with this game!".

[MrNatas]

The Odyssey seems like a pretty personal epic story to me. Unfair comparison aside, what really gets me about it, is more the aspect that because event is happening you have to be in the thick of it. Because that's what it boils down to it comes to 'apocalypse already happened.'

Like you can't have a story about some pack in Detroit dealing with the water contamination because THE END IS NIGH AND YOU HAVE TO BE READY FOR THE WAR ON THE WYRM RIGHT NOW. Which is what I gather from what Justin seems to think about what it means to have a metaplot or stuff going on in a setting.

[Knightingale]

I would be fine with it if the game came with a campaign-framework equipping STs to portray a setting where all that's left to do for Garou is protect their Caern and the book offers tools/suggestions to portray how as the player-character pack is managing the Caern and protecting their turf, the wider world is dying around them, civilization is breaking down and the idea of "the apocalypse is happening now" is truly embraced.

But instead... Well, one of the brand-new ideas for W5 is "The WOD used to be a darker version of our world but now... it's just our world!". It seemed to me that Justin Achilli believes that's all you need to express that in this game's setting the apocalypse is happening.

In an extension of the WOD just being our world now (and I'm being sarcastic here), I could picture the book offering some snide commentary along the lines of "Wait, you think a bunch of frat bro-werewolf-warriors with anger-issues would be capable of stopping human greed that's fueling climate change and the Wyrm...?! Oh come on...! What a silly idea..." and the point of the game is for young Garou to mope in their Caern and bemoan the fact that Gaia's dead/dying as they slowly realize that the whole idea of the Garou-Nation and the Garou-warrior-culture was stupid to begin with... in fact, even the idea of werewolves being the ones who would stop the Wyrm was stupid. Because you know who the real heroes are the world needs? Your very human Touchstones. And you're just there to help them make the world a better place.

[Black Fox]

One of the things very funny to me is that Justin Achilli and his ilk during the Revised era did everything they could to turn the epic up to 11 by making the setting about the End Times and emphasizing metaplot needs over more personal stories. Now he's decided that is the wrong approach and is blowing up everything that came before in order to force the setting into his specific vision of a "personal" or "street level" story.

The original beauty of the World of Darkness is that an ST could decide for herself what kind of game to run. If what you want to do is encourage more personal or street level games, the answer is not to destroy all the other elements of the setting that could run contrary to that. It is to produce interesting and compelling sourcebooks that cater to that. Stop describing things at the high level, and provide more local details. Produce Rage books that have different geographical locations (a city spot, a wilderness location, a rural area, etc.) and provide the local details and local plots that provide examples of the kind of interesting things Garou handle personally.

Once players have meaningful examples of interesting local setting details that don't involve over-the-top quests, you'll see a lot of players take that ball and run with it.

Of course, that would mean a lot more work, effort, and imagination to create those kind of examples. It's much easier (and lazier) to blow up the setting and announce this now provides for personal stories. But the setting always allowed it. If there was an over emphasis on epic quests and the like, it was because people like Justin was writing sourcebooks that emphasized that and not other kinds of plots. You don't need to destroy parts of the existing setting to accomplish that.

Justin has a serious problem with telling other people, "You are having the wrong kind of fun! Only what I (now) consider fun is to be allowed at your gaming trouble!"

[Ana Mizuki]

In an extension of the WOD just being our world now (and I'm being sarcastic here), I could picture the book offering some snide commentary along the lines of "Wait, you think a bunch of frat bro-werewolf-warriors with anger-issues would be capable of stopping human greed that's fueling climate change and the Wyrm...?! Oh come on...! What a silly idea..." and the point of the game is for young Garou to mope in their Caern and bemoan the fact that Gaia's dead/dying as they slowly realize that the whole idea of the Garou-Nation and the Garou-warrior-culture was stupid to begin with... in fact, even the idea of werewolves being the ones who would stop the Wyrm was stupid. Because you know who the real heroes are the world needs? Your very human Touchstones. And you're just there to help them make the world a better place.

Sadly, I get the feeling this might be the direction. If Touchstones have to be people and not animals/area/etc. it belies an effort to bring the garou back from the Nation to their human families or friends. Then you have to balance keeping your family with being a werewolf, with sacrificing the former being seen as bad.

This might be controversial, but Touchstones make more sense for vampires than the garou. Because you aren't born a vampire, you are made one and so you are constantly at the risk of losing your touch with who you were. Garou, even in W5, are born. They never have been anything but garou and so how they are is how they will always be.

This is why the narrative of WtA is not focused as much on the horror of being a werewolf. Because your character was never anything else. As the Abomination creation rules states, garou cannot take Humanity since they were never human to begin with. There is no humanity to lose here.

If this narrative of losing yourself to the raging animal extremist was wanted, then I'd say it would have been MUCH better to use the reboot to make being a werewolf into a curse or a bite. That way, there would be a disconnect between the beast and the person. Keeping your human life or giving it all up for a cause that seems hopeless.

[MrNatas]

Not to belabor this point since I've said in other threads but, I am of the opinion that there was mandate from Paradox that the team couldn't make huge changes to the material. 'WtA is going to be about the Garou and the Apocalypse,' or something similar. Justin couldn't call it "Werewolf: The Apocalypse" unless you hit some checkmarks from all high. That's the only think that makes sense to me how we got here.

I agree what having lycanthropy being a curse would make more sense to the "keeping your human life or giving it all up for a cause that seems hopeless" angle and that might be what Justin wanted to make but, that isn't WtA and that's not W5 from what I've seen either.

[TwoDSix]

It feels like everything must be meme vampire. You know what I mean, the neverending angst that is very much not the Gothic Punk the original game was going for. You know I miss that Gothic Punk feeling in both Requiem and V5, although at least I can use the Carthians to showcase a different sort of authority.

Really the horror and punk aspects are being stripped down to their most basic levels. Punk is anti-authoriry, so organisations are bad! Monsters kill people, so monsters should feel bad! It's very one note, and even throws all the characters at the same kind of horror (barring Hunters). What's the likelihood that Garou will now have Humanity scores as well as Touchstones?

[Black Fox]

If you want your Lon Chaney, Jr tragic wolfman who fears what he might do when he changes, you emphasize aspects of the setting like Lunatics, Lost Cubs, Ronin, Rage, the Curse, and certain Flaws. They exist precisely for that reason. It's not that the game does not have them, but that they are often forgotten or not mentioned. A single chapter in some sourcebook is probably all that is needed to provide the tools to STs and players who want that kind of experience in the game. You don't need to radically change the setting.

If you want something like Touchstones, then make it an optional rule, or maybe a Flaw, tied to Rage and the Curse. Maybe high emotional connections to people inadvertently confuses some Garou with high Rage so that when they Frenzy or have some other trigger, then they instinctively target the people they love as if they hated them or were a threat. But this shouldn't be a thing that affects all Garou, just a tool for players to customize their character concepts if that is what they want, or to give STs a tool to introduce certain plots through an NPC.

Providing options for players isn't bad. Just don't destroy the setting to eliminate other options for other players simply because you made an arbitrary decision that only one style of play is acceptable.

I personally like lower scale play that uses a lot of cinematic and literary tropes about werewolves that are often neglected in WtA. But I created additional tools and emphasized certain setting elements to do so. I didn't get rid of anything in the setting.

[Jachra]

I think it's less about the game saying that stopping the apocalypse is impossible and more about saying "The apocalypse is happening and this isn't a game about you doing anything about it. You're supposed to play this game as a personal horror street-level game. This is the only option for play given.". And like H5 there will probably be some arbitrary-seeming limitations that will express that. Like the H5 idea that there are no good hunters in hunter-organizations and all hunter-organizations are compromised. I assume with W5 it will be the Get as a symbol for the idea that really springing into action and wanting to do something about the apocalypse is a bad thing. Instead, you're supposed to stay in your street-level-setting, look for Kin, protect your Caern, agonize over your Rage and manage your Touchstones. And deviating from that is portrayed as a bad thing.

I mean all Hunter orgs probably should be compromised. WoD should always be punk, and being an op isn't punk.

The thing that kills me about this new direction is that this is basically Werewolf: the Forsaken.

You want the nation not to exist, there to be nothing big to fight for? That's Forsaken. It's always been an OPTION in Werewolf the Apocalypse, like the Heart of the Forest game is intensely personal and not really that concerned with the big picture even though it's also a story about heritage and the environment.

This was never needed.

[MrNatas]

I mean all Hunter orgs probably should be compromised. WoD should always be punk, and being an op isn't punk.

I'm not sure if I agree with 'WoD should always be punk' because that limits creativity when it comes to storytelling. Like is wanting to play an OP that is wants to climb the Corpo ladder any less valid then playing some MacGyver Hunter that makes a flame thrower out of a gas-station butane torch, a rifle stock, and some hair spray cans?

I think saying 'WoD should always be punk' is exactly how you get to the situation where you have the creative head saying, 'This is what true gothic-punk looks like and previous editions were neo-noir.'

This was never needed.

I definitely agree that the complete collapse of the nation doesn't actually do anything to the story of WtA and moreover personal stories about a pack of werewolves isn't something you can force to happen but instead in the hands of the Storyteller in question. That as someone making a setting for other people to play in its more important to have that setting be complete and look like something others can tell stories in, any story in, rather than something you want play in only your way.

[Knightingale]

I mean all Hunter orgs probably should be compromised. WoD should always be punk, and being an op isn't punk.

And wouldn't it be interesting to have narrative room for hunters who work within those compromised hunter orgs? What are the pros and cons of this type of mortal hunter? But H5 doesn't just say that every hunter org is compromised but also every hunter who works for them is. And when they aren't they are ex-members or about to come into conflict with the hunter org. Because the good hunters you're supposed to play are like oil and water when it comes to hunter orgs. Hammering home that difference is especially strange because at the end of the day we're talking about mortal hunters here. Why would there even be a need to to make such a distinction in the first place? Just a passage in H5 saying "There are many types of hunters but this corebook is about street-level hunter-cells" would've been enough. But no, there has to be some kind of distinction established that forces you to only play this one type of hunter because that's the only true type of hunter in this new setting.

And the thing with Haugslosk, the Get and the fate of the Garou-Nation is about achieving the same thing: Using the setting to really enforce the one true way to play the game.

[Jachra]

I'm not sure if I agree with 'WoD should always be punk' because that limits creativity when it comes to storytelling. Like is wanting to play an OP that is wants to climb the Corpo ladder any less valid then playing some MacGyver Hunter that makes a flame thrower out of a gas-station butane torch, a rifle stock, and some hair spray cans?

I think saying 'WoD should always be punk' is exactly how you get to the situation where you have the creative head saying, 'This is what true gothic-punk looks like and previous editions were neo-noir.'



I definitely agree that the complete collapse of the nation doesn't actually do anything to the story of WtA and moreover personal stories about a pack of werewolves isn't something you can force to happen but instead in the hands of the Storyteller in question. That as someone making a setting for other people to play in its more important to have that setting be complete and look like something others can tell stories in, any story in, rather than something you want play in only your way.

Op detected.

Jokes aside, that's because it's true in real life as well. Organizations like that are inevitably corrupted. That's the nature of them.

This is like saying "The CIA is evil" is limiting your creativity. It is evil, that's just how it is, and similar orgs won't be much better.

[Ana Mizuki]

Also, why wouldn't the street-level hunters be compromised? They have no oversight or marching orders and are just doing what they can. Being a Hunter is mentally draining and compromises with non-hostile supernaturals could feel like a godsend.

The separation is artificial, it does not come from the story itself.

[Ana Mizuki]

Op detected.

Jokes aside, that's because it's true in real life as well. Organizations like that are inevitably corrupted. That's the nature of them.

This is like saying "The CIA is evil" is limiting your creativity. It is evil, that's just how it is, and similar orgs won't be much better.

Sure they are evil, but in terms of hunters the question is not IF they are evil but are they evil in a way that compromises supernatural hunting. If not, as long as the vampires and werewolves get killed, who cares?