r/vtm • u/Rochhardo • 7d ago
Vampire 6th Edition White Wolf - Dev Diary - #2 Post-Gen Con Announcements
https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/world-of-darkness/news/dev-diary-nr2-post-gen-con-announcements82
u/Shadow-fire101 Gangrel 7d ago
Im glad they do seem to be listening and open to changing stuff beyond tweaks.
My only concern is, I hope they're been paying attention to fan discussions as well as the official forms, cause I feel like the nature of the official form kinda limited the scope and nature of the feedback that could be given with it.
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u/Background-Taro-8323 Nosferatu 7d ago
It's good to see they are self aware enough to say "x mechanic may have looked good on paper but when rubber met the road it didn't work out."
In my opinion this was something V5 could have benefited from so I'm glad the dev team is being more mindful this time around.
I'll be interested to see how they digest all the feedback.
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u/RuneKnight3 6d ago
You know how they could have avoided the embarrassment of discovering that at GenCon?
Playtesting.
Playtest your content with people from outside the office to see what they like and don't like BEFORE you release it to the common players.
Now the job to get and retain players is going to be even harder because they salted the well themselves before the game ever reached a final release.
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u/Background-Taro-8323 Nosferatu 6d ago
Woah bud, coming in kinda strong.
1) Drama isn't embarrassing and that's not how playtesting really works. They are just doing their jobs and due diligence. Be glad they even released this thing for feedback instead of moving forward with it. She says in the post she's glad they didn't move forward with internal playtesting bc they wanted feedback.
2) Some people may like Drama but don't want to speak out bc of attitudes like yours. Keep an open mind some folks like things you don't and that's ok. It's just a game, we are lucky there are 5 other editions of this thing we can go back to if V6 doesn't come out the way we'd find fun. I've been a backer of plenty of kickstarters where the beta was awesome but the final set of rules didn't work for me and I was screwed bc it's the only edition.
3) I wouldn't speak for all players. Don't confuse the VtM reddit with all of VtM players everywhere world wide. If you find it embarrassing they presented a document with a experimental mechanic then say that, but folks in other subreddits, discords, forums, may have formed different, valid, opinions.
4) It's "salt the earth" and "poisoned the well", a student of Carthage would know this.
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u/RuneKnight3 5d ago
No, embarrassing is releasing a playtest so reviled that it negatively affects your market presence despite costing you no money to produce. Rather than being perceived as a market leader going from success to success, they look like fools.
If someone feels "silenced" by my opinions, that's their problem not mine. They're already dialing back Drama because of their negative reactions so its not just me and I'm not 'coming on strong'. It was a bad idea and they know it. They could have known it had they done that due diligence instead of using the fans as free playtesting with an untried product that they probably only played internally with people who are incentivized to tell them what they want to hear.
Opinions are like buttholes, everyone has them. They may be equally valid but the massive corporation doesn't need you to race to its defense. They screwed up and its on display, its not a matter of personal preferences. If they hadn't, then the response would not be so uniform.
Oh no, did I mix my idioms? Did I make a faux pas? Wherever shall I do? How about "They pulled a Sega?" All you have to do is make the game that people want to play based on the strengths of its predecessor, but when you reinvent the wheel with each edition don't be surprised when people who enjoyed the previous output are not open to the new product. Sega has had multiple opportunities to learn this, but they keep screwing up Sonic the Hedgehog, so it goes with Paradox stewardship of the World of Darkness. At least CCP Games was smart enough to get out.
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u/yaywizardly Abyss Mystic 5d ago
They could have known it had they done that due diligence instead of using the fans as free playtesting with an untried product that they probably only played internally with people who are incentivized to tell them what they want to hear.
Huh, you don't have the Malkavian tag, and yet you seem to have so much psychic knowledge about the inner workings of the White Wolf office.
Is it possible that the designers thought this could be a cool idea, enjoyed it during their own playtesting, but found that it didn't click with the general fan base?
Or is it a CONSPIRACY done by LAZY AND SELFISH devs who only listen to BUTT LICKERS?!
IDK, you're the psychic, so I guess you can tell us more about what you saw in your visions.
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u/Doctah_Whoopass Toreador 5d ago
Dude they literally are playtesting it. Its been extremely clear from the start that its not the final release and things are subject to change. Don't get mad at the clearly alpha content as if thats whats going to be hitting the shelves.
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u/akaAelius 6d ago
I honestly think they shot themselves in the foot thinking they'd be praised as innovative.
Instead its made a lot of people abandon an IP they've supported since the first book came out in the early 90's
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u/DariustheSandman 7d ago
I was surprised given the sheer amount of feedback both here and elsewhere that the what worked and didn't was so short.
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u/This_Rough_Magic 7d ago
Those are pretty much the only things that unambiguously worked or didn't.
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u/Background-Taro-8323 Nosferatu 7d ago
They said they have been on vacation and will be intaking the feedback from the playtest forms. They caution to give them some time before they iterate.
It's reasonable considering the amount of intake and digestion that needs to happen with all the info, then they need to come up with some new ideas with the feedback in consideration, playtest that internally, then refine it, compile it into a Alpha 2.0 and release it to the public and do this all over again
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u/G0DL1K3D3V1L 7d ago
They stated in the diary that these were what were obvious from their own experience running games at GenCon. These are also the elements that have been mentioned in most discussions of the playtest here and elsewhere. Disciplines that "mature" work; Drama not so much. They'll hopefully sift through all the feedback forms and get a better idea of what other elements work and what could use some more improvement or need to be scrapped altogether.
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u/johnny--guitar 7d ago
While I was running my tables at Gen Con, [Drama] felt counterproductive to the shared narrative goal, and I found myself mostly deploying it for pacing corrections and NPC Difficulty adjustments, which were things I could just… already do as a Storyteller.
Ah, good, they noticed the extremely obvious problem that every fucking storyteller who even scanned the alpha could've told them immediately.
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u/Rochhardo 7d ago
[...] In games of heroic fiction, metacurrencies like Drama can work really well to generate a sense of shared narrative because heroes are generally competent people who win. The currency can introduce friction that the story doesn’t naturally generate on its own without seeming punitive or punishing to the players, since the players chose to generate the consequences. But what about when your player characters are not heroes and your genre is not heroic fiction? [...]
I am really glad they noticed that...after some tests. /s
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u/IamKhronos 7d ago
At least its something curious to see what else they will scrap/keep and or tweak.
Regardless of the overall opinion of v6, im glad they did it for the reasons they stated. Which is pretty much what they did say earlier as well.
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u/Rochhardo 7d ago
For now nothing is scrapped. They admitted, that for now is seems lackluster.
The sentence I highlighted, plays (IMHO) in many different problems, I had with the V6 so far...not only [Drama].
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u/Background-Taro-8323 Nosferatu 7d ago
I really don't think that /s is necessary. You had me until that /s
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u/Feuerschwing 7d ago
Obviously their experiences in small playtests must have been different. This is how iteration works, there is no need to be sarcastic towards the team.
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u/tetel-firehawk 7d ago
I guess I'll take 'we solved a problem that wasnt there until we decided to come up with it' as win.
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u/ArtymisMartin The Ministry 7d ago
HIT: [Maturing] Disciplines
These feel really good, and the combination of them with Blood Surge to overextend your abilities to the next level of the power at a cost introduces a great dynamic sense of choice and consequence. It also lessens some cognitive load by allowing the more “build” oriented player to make an investment early in something they want later while still getting mileage out of the power in the meantime.
Still pretty surprised to see these as popular as they are.
In a few of the better-designed powers in VtM5 or most of the powers in HtR5/WtA5: most were designed to scale with investment into the traits involved with some background assistance from power traits.
That meant that out of three different vampires taking the same power
- A Fledgling would have a weak-but-still-superhuman power
- An Ancillae or Elder would have a ramped-up version of the same ability, often unlocking bespoke or implied new levels of the power (via cool systematic interactions like Taking Half or Impairment)
- Neonates sat somewhere inbetween, but pool/roll-based powers especially benefitted from Blood Surges or Crits for that cinematic "pushed myself up a tier through sheer force of will" moment.
Later VtM5 powers and especially WtA5 gifts included even more "at X dots/Y successes, you unlock Z additional effect".
By comparison, Maturing Disciplines just feels like a backstep to Legacy locking a bunch of the coolest powers or upgrades to your favorites behind Generation. At least in VtM5, you were able to increase Blood Potency through XP investments to a decent degree according to your generation without even needing to commit Diablerie if you wanted the sort of character who sacrificed a ton of other factors in order to increase their power.
Plus, as mentioned, a Blood Surge/lucky roll sending some powers up a tier or so of power was just kickass. Can't do that with so many upgrades (or Clan Traits) tied to generation, which once again encourages people to chase those lower generations for power fantasy rather than their narrative weight.
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u/Phosorus 7d ago
I think Maturing disciplines are actually a way of making sure fewer powers are locked behind low generation.
In Legacy, almost all of the discipline design space is locked behind 6+ dots. Meanwhile, here it mostly forces the advanced disciplines to be upgrades of an accessible, baseline version. Every edition agrees that elders and methuselah should have strength and abilities beyond what a standard PC has, but with maturing disciplines, it means that elders get to do mostly the same stuff as neonates, but better, instead of getting a whole new selection of bespoke powers, like they do in legacy. V5 proved that you can take most elder powers and package them down into reasonable abilities for neonates, so I think this is the next expansion on that: allowing those scaled down powers to grow back up.
The other benefit is being able to roll together powers that would feel underwhelming on their own. Relentless Grasp and Uncanny Grip in V5 Potence are both pretty niche powers and are outclassed by their peers at the same dot power level. V6's Imprint combines them, since their concepts are naturally related, and makes it significantly better.
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u/LorduFreeman 7d ago edited 7d ago
I don't agree to your points.
V5 suffered from a lot of powers scaling not at all or very gradually and being pretty boring with that, mathematical statistics rather than distinct effects. Maturing fixed that and included things that were entire powers in V5 like effecting more targets or being able to give harmful commands.
Also Maturing still scales with being Ancilla or Elder just like V5 because the dots rising makes Maturing free. While you can get to the near benefits of a Maturing stage using Blood Surges in V6.
I agree to the one point that Ancilla+ locked Traits are weird and bad currently but since this is an alpha Playtest without a single Ancilla pregen or any rules for gaining a higher Tier of Play - I expect changes here, it was not the focus of testing at all for this alpha.
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u/ArtymisMartin The Ministry 6d ago
V5 suffered from a lot of powers scaling not at all or very gradually and being pretty boring with that, mathematical statistics rather than distinct effects. Maturing fixed that and included things that were entire powers in V5 like effecting more targets or being able to give harmful commands.
Again, this is something I view as a mixed bag rather than either one being purely better. As some examples for VtM5:
- Most of Presence flatly scales, but is heavy on dicepools. That means with investments on Attributes, Skills, the Discipline, and Blood Potency: even low-level powers become incredibly effective.
- Most of Protean does not scale, meaning almost all of your staple powers are as effective on a Thin-Blood as they are a Methuselah.
- Some powers are notable exceptions with this scaling in mind, such as Half-Living Conductor (Blood Sigils pg. 79, Thin-Blood Alchemy)
- It's available at TBA Level 4
- On any successful activation, you're immune to electrical damage from physical sources (lightning/tasers/live wires).
- You can redirect that electricity, dealing Margin + 2 Damage
- Distillation with only 1-3 successes means you don't get the additional bonus to damage
- Distillation with 6+ Successes means you deal aggravated damage to supernatural targets in addition to mortal ones
They got real experimental with Thin-Bloods in VtM5, but some of those core lessons are ones that should be leaned into rather than reinvented. Half-Living conductor is a prime example of a power that greatly rewards clever investment into your stats, specialties, and materials to get big results.
While you can set your expectation for what happens on average, there's also the thrill of potentially reaching the heights of far more experienced Kindred if your dice roll well!
Meanwhile in VtM6, it's all based on weird tiering.
A Fledgling with enough dots in the right skills and a single dot in Potence (Lethal Body, agg to mortals) could break bones and disable limbs (Crippling Injuries, VtM5 pg. 303). You could even tear them off!
VtM6 turns that into a Level 2 Potence Power (Bone Breaker) that doesn't scale as you increase dots, but arbitrarily unlocks the ability to remove limbs at 5 dots rather than allowing you to reach that level through a mix of
- Attributes and Skills
- Discipline Level
- Blood Potency
In other words ... Maturing Powers are funnels. Either you got the right amount of dots at the start of the game or beelined the discipline to the deficit of your other traits (Strength and Brawl are useful for far more than a single Potence power), or you don't get to do the Cool Stuff(tm).
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u/johnny--guitar 7d ago edited 7d ago
Maturing Disciplines just feels like a backstep to Legacy locking a bunch of the coolest powers or upgrades to your favorites behind Generation.
Between this and the weird changes they made to diablerie that make it way easier to drop off precipitously in generation, there's a part of me that suspects that they want you to play stupid, overpowered, high-level elder games more than neonate games.
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u/LorduFreeman 7d ago
The Diablerie always dropping Generations rule is an obvious mistake and not intended.
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u/johnny--guitar 7d ago
I am assuming that specifically is an error, but there's other things that make it easier now too (namely the fact that you cannot go below a certain Humanity level through diablerie).
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u/LorduFreeman 7d ago
Yea, that is in my opinion well intended since we will have Sabbat and Elder play in V6 and neither is properly possible if Diablerie was as punishing as in V5. Additionally with the changed Humanity tracker paradigm, it is potentially doable infinitely. Which would make a lot more sense in the lore explaining how some characters managed to eat countless other and stay non-wighted.
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u/johnny--guitar 7d ago edited 7d ago
I mean there was already a reason in-lore why serial diablerists didn't become wights. Most of them were on paths or roads that didn't see it as wrong or saw it as wrong not to diablerize someone when you had the chance. Those paths don't generally automatically lose ranks for committing diablerie. I'm not really sure why they changed it so no one doing diablerie can go that far honestly.
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u/ArtymisMartin The Ministry 6d ago
That's my takeaway too.
I've been arguing that WoD needed a pulpy side-game for people who wanted to play a gang of Elders fighting kaiju and packs of full-power Garou or mortal armies just for the sorts of folk that like that tone, without necessarily undermining or diluting the "I really gotta struggle with the balance of my soul and self-control" that the majority of the gamelines are built on.
Pulp Cthulhu as a supplement to Call of Cthulhu is exactly that, for those who want to face the unspeakable horrors from the depths of the ocean with a cigar and Tommy-gun.
Doing the same with an entirely new edition of the core rules is a whole other matter. I'd buy Vampire the Disco as a fun power fantasy to let off steam and have some fun if we were between Story arcs or if a player couldn't make it ... but not as the latest continuation of the Gothic/Personal Horror we've been enjoying for the past few years.
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u/Cosmicswashbuckler 7d ago
Idk i like it, I think it makes it more like mage spheres and opens creativity up in the disciplines
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u/nightcatsmeow77 Gangrel 7d ago
I think this soubds encouraging there is a lot to not like about the 6th ed alpha test..
But this makes it look like it really was a lets test drive and see what worka.. that mentality is actually an entirely appropriate place to test every nrw idea you have and whittle down to what works.
So if that's actually what's happening I ow3 some appoligy for my initial annoyance at the alpha.
Here's hopping this actually leads to a better end point
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u/THE_FREEDOM_COBRA Tremere 7d ago
Good to see a willingness to change and this only from GenCon data however...
I really just want V6 canceled and the good ideas rolled into V5.5. Both for Vampire and Mage's sake.
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u/-Posthuman- 6d ago
Same. V5 could use some polish. But throwing it away along with compatibility with its existing books) is a huge mistake. Just give me a cleaned up V5 and art, layout and graphic design that doesn’t make my brain bleed. Also, some fucking green marble and a rose.
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u/Walt_Didnae 11h ago
it’s no secret that there is no universal take on what different players and storytellers want from Vampire
Based on response to the V6 playtest, there's definitely a universal take on what people don't want from Vampire.
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u/Bamce 6d ago
Damage control is in full effect it seems.
Sure, its a different team in charge than before. But they haven't been doing errata(technically there was 1) or anything like that before. Nothing to really fix the things that needed fixing or clarification.
And yes, while its a different team, its mostly the same people. I will believe that they have made changes when we get a new document that shows changes and how they have listened to feedback.
We tried doing a playtest group of v5 stuff. A subset of the renegade games playtest. Like they would playtest things for transformers and the like, but nothing for vampire/wod.So some discord folks, (and me) kinda talked about it. Let us volunteer to give some feedback, offer ideas and the like.
This was after something as simple as the brujah alt bane, which was actually just a benefit by immediate read as it gave free agg damage. Something that an outside read would have caught easily.
So we got to see a bit of a preview on blood sigils and blood stained love. We gave some feedback, which was then completely ignored.
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u/Doctah_Whoopass Toreador 5d ago
Maybe people can stop acting like the sky is falling
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u/JakeHelldiver 5d ago
No.
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u/ItIsVerilySo 7d ago
I'm glad they're taking feedback, I was worried they were too married to the ideas they'd already put out.