@nogling on Tumblr

nogling reblogged

thesummoningdark

demonicsymphony

I’m curious, given the length of time I’ve had my own online moniker:

Please reblog for sample size!

demonicsymphony

Making this poll and seeing some of the responses made me realize it’s been closer to thirty years than twenty that I’ve had this name

#I have been Nogling since 1997 #so almost 30 years

nogling reblogged

cavegirlpoems

you know what? I'm nailing my colours to the mast:

The default rpg that's used as a yardstick, in my view, is not D&D. It's Vampire The Masquerade 20th Aniversary Edition.

It has everything: Action! Melodrama! Politics! Intrigue! Horror! Romance! Bleak Social Realism!

Still want a fantasy game with swords and dragons? We got that, it's called Dark Ages Vampire!

When pitching me a game, the big hurdle you need to overcome is "why am I not running this in Vampire?" Call of Cthulhu? Vampire has plenty of cosmic-horror tentacle monster cults, just throw a hidden baali cell into your setting. D&D? Play a dark ages game and all be members of a vampiric order. Monsterhearts? That's just standard Camarilla Toreador behaviour! Paranoia? The prince is a malkavian, have fun. Rolemaster? That's just dark ages again, and trust me our mechanics are fiddly and pedantic too.

Being picky and don't want to play a vampire? No problem, there's a splat-book for playing as regular mortals, who may or may not have psychic powers.

Seriously, Vampire: The Masquerade has so much range as a game. Even more if you throw in bits of other WoD gamelines or elements from v5. Mage even has sci-fi space explorers fighting tentacle monsters on the surface of jupiter and I am not joking.

This is not a bit or a funny joke. I genuinely, 100% believe that Vampire is a better Default Game that can Do Everything than D&D and its imitators.

cavegirlpoems

I disagree! I've played vampire as a gothic horror game plenty, but I've also had pulpy adventure games, torrid romances, and at one point a Yes-Minister-Style political comedy (which worked surprisingly well). Everybody is a vampire, sure, but that can cover everything from Interview With The Vampire, to Blade, to Twilight, to What We Do In The Shadows.

birdfriender

Sure, but mechanics like humanity and hunger are pushing you back towards that gothic personal horror core. I feel like the game is constantly nudging you into situations that address the core questions of like "who are you willing to hurt in order to survive?" and "what are you willing to risk to remain human?" Admittedly, my experience of v20 is just one campaign and I've mostly played V5, which is definitely more opinionated about the kind of games its designed for (kind of the reason I like it), but I feel like even in v20 you're still kind of having to ignore the tonal cues of the game to get to What We Do in the Shadows.

cavegirlpoems

Skill issue, be on a path and have dots of herd, problem solved. Like you absolutely can lean into that if you want to, but you can equally play a bunch of Sabbat nutters on The Path Of Caine and go full splatterpunk. Shit's flexible like that.

cavegirlpoems

you will also notice all the people insisting to me that vampire is an edgy superhero game, suggesting that perhaps it can be multiple things depending on how you approach it.

dee-the-red-witch

And that core attribute/ability dicepool engine from v2 andneven nWOD? Inherently adaptable. I have pulled that sucker and stuck it into SO MANY homebrews as a primary system and y'know what? It works. EVERY TIME.

cavegirlpoems

Right? I've run a lot of games in modern settings which is just "use the wod mortal rules, no supernatural powers, you're actually [film noir detectives/stranded on a desert island/archeologists in the antarctic/the french resistance/etc]". It's a very solid generic engine, and even works for medieval fantasy if you use the dark ages version and add sorcery powers back in.

dee-the-red-witch

The one thing I haven't done with it yet that I still want to is build a cyberpunk+mecha setting that it slots into. Might have to actually do that next.

nogling

@dee-the-red-witch I’d have to dig through some boxes to find the notes, but my partner and I converted Cthulhutech to use nWoD mechanics and I’d be happy to share the framework we built for the mechs. IIRC, we ended up essentially building out a modified physical stat block and skill list for each mech class that replaced the character stats when they were suited up, and just sort of scaled up regular character stats. It was flexible enough that we could do custom stuff like Ripley in a power loader or “what if we commandeered this combine harvester” on the fly without too much headache.