This is an alpha playtest with feedback forms attached. And if the big swings go ahead I’m sure it will find an audience. I may not be in it.
Most of the major changes from V5, many of which I really liked, are gone. Hunger Dice are gone. Plot points like the Beckoning and Second Inquisition have been shut down. Sabbat will be playable again in some form.
Multiple powers to choose from for Disciplines does stay, at least.
Keeping the V5 Attributes taken from Chronicles.
(And picking up its 8-10 successes. So no more easy Taking Half math.)
Banu Haqim and Ministry naming, and the Malkavian focus on oracles and Nosferatu not necessarily being breaches. Those are good, I think.
(Giovanni are back though. And Obtenebration and Necromancy have been popped apart again, Obten keeping the Oblivion name)
No clan Disciplines... sort of. Now we have Clan Traits, which are clans getting access to some optional powers as they rise from neonate up. That could work, but...
The examples serve to make clans more hidebound and restrict choice for other clans. Like the Brujah have five and four are about hand-to-hand combat. I hate that.
I think the Humanity sliding scale where Beast and Mortal can go up and down with specific things could be interesting, and high Humanity making it more difficult to access vampire abilities is fine. Losing your character at either end, though? Might work differently than it reads but it feels easy to do.
Player choice in how they fail. How oddly Nordic Larp for the edition after the Nordic Larp edition.
GM doesnt roll? That’s fine, I largely do that anyway.
GM metacurrency? Need a Drama token to change this or that? I first saw that in Ghostbusters where players get a handful of Brownie Points and the GM gets a million. No thank you.
Overall it seems about a big a change as V5, but seems set to alienate 1-20 fans and 5 fans as well. As someone who thought 1-20 were largely okay get-out-of-the-way systems and 5 did some things I actively engaged with, while all had subsystems I ignored... I could probably ignore a lot of this at the table, but that doesn’t feel like an improvement. And so much of V5 has been undone it leaves me feeling unwelcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment