Well when I heard about it coming out, I had to chuckle because how the heck was this going to play out in the modern moralities. I mean if you know the game you know there is no way the back of the Tzimisce clan book could be accepted or the first line of the Giovanni clan book be written.
"gen x are busy raising families... and they've long since checked out of the RPG market" man i feel this, thats why for me a game has to be 2-3 hours, meet after work at a pub (or bar as Americans call it) eat, drink, tell a story and go home.
Tell this to my wallet! I grew up with BECMI, Advanced in Middle School and 2nd Ed in high school. Now I've got a book shelf full of games, some of which (like VotM 5e) that I haven't played. But not due to time constraints (divorced and my daughter is 24) but lack of players. Currently I'm wrapped up in Warhammer 40K Wrath and Glory. I have every book Cubicle7 has put out on it and hope to GM the system after the New Year.
I’m an elder millennial that turned 40. My gaming groups have always been Gen Xers that made me an honorary member. We play 3-5 hour sessions with a meal - usually weekly. It can be hard, but we make it happen.
That's not true for everyone, though. I'm an ooooold Gen-Xer who has never stopped playing games. Heck, I introduced my kids to gaming. It's harder for us to make time. We don't pull the all-nighters like we did when we were young, but we still game. Our kids came to games as babies with a portable crib. We made allowances that you sometimes need to work around family (kid) obligations while gaming. Despite what that one zoomer I ran into at our LGS said, I don't need "grown up" hobbies at my age. I've had my hobby since I was 12 and i'm not changing it.
It's funny, they really hit on a great mechanical/narrative integration with that Hunger Dice mechanic. Same for the idea of 'blood you drank has a mechanical benefit based on how they felt at the time' both fit amazingly well with the idea of the ideas of the Vampire setup. So those who care for it will port these ideas backwards to the better designed works of the older era.
Or even the btter designed works of the same era, like CofD, which had superior mechanics, but lacked the Branding the investors wanted. It astounds me how the V5 writers managed to blend OWoD and CofD to make something with the benefits of neither.
Another thing that could be said about the stratification of vampire clans along faction lines reflecting the millennial zeitgeist is that it turns the sects from actual shifting power blocs into vampire Hogwarts houses. "My personality is x, therefore I'm part of team y!" It's the constant search for a team to validate one's own identity instead of from an actual principled position, vibes win out over nuance.
Except that's always how it's worked. People have always played a stereotype, and it's always been badly written. There isn't some big need of millenials to validate their identities by seeking teams.
this is not a generational tendency to “validate one’s own identity” by aligning with a group and then arguing from that groups determined identity instead of a principled position….it is a human flaw affecting most people. Look at nearly all of global politics. None of these Lich care about abortions or any of the stuff they pretend to. their team has a set of positions they are required to toe the line on.
That's the split within millennaials I noticed. Like a lot of us act more or less like younger gen Xers. Yet there a lot of that fall into being controlled by others yet claiming they're so unique and rebellious. Like a bunch of Anarch posers that pisses off older Anarchs because they cause too much trouble for even their taste. They don't know how to go with the flow, or I should say they're loud for the wrong reasons.
The first half of this video is absolute word vomit. Just a shitload of baseless arguments with nothing to back it up that amounts to "waaah it's not like how it used to be! It's terrible! Millenials! (for some reason)"
I´d add Lore of the Clans (For obvious reasons) and Rituals of the Blood too. Unless you are allergic to blood magic it adds WAY too much depth and flavour to the various blood magics to pass up.
As a Millennial or what it turns out I fall into, Zillennial, I disagree with your take on them. I was born in 93 and i'm 30 now and my cohort are considered the youngest of the Millennials. The rest are all heading into their middle ages. This book was meant for Gen Z, that is the generation that will get the most out of it for. The glitzy, hazzy bisexual lightining of the cover really represent that to me. So first lets take our rose tinted glasses and look at what VTM really was and how it was played. It was born in an era where RPG's were just begining to realise you could do more than just a dungeon crawl and we were seeing the trend towards more unified and simpler mechanics in a more storytelling format. Because of that the game, whilist being rules lite back in the day and innovactive, is imo when viewed today, is clunky as hell and the mechanics do little to help you ground yourself in the themes of the game. We saw throughout Vampires publicaiton with their modules + supplements like Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand a shift towards Gonzo style play. There was a reason people started using Super Hero with Fangs. The authors of the game WANTED it to be a deep and engaging dark roleplaying expereince but more often than not the rules and the reality of what the bulk of its gamers wanted flew in the face of that. They wanted more cool powers, they wanted more factional infighting, being able to play as elders. The game quickly devolved into a world of urban fantasy than it did a dark reflection of our own. As for who wrote it, well it wasn't written by Millennials. Ken Hite, Karim, Erriccson, Matthew Dawkins, they were all avid players in the 90s/00s who firmly sit in that Gen X bracket. This was a game written by Gen X fans who were desperately trying to create a true VTM expereince in their mind, one that hashed closer to the feel that Mark Rein Hagen was aiming for when he first released the game and honestly they got damn close, a lot closer than Whitewolf did back in the 90s. As for the game being factional in nature, honestly the 90s version was even worse for that. It was just the Camarilla and the Sabbat and there would be no inbetween. Now things are a lot messier and murkier, the line of what Clan you belong to and what Sect you belong to aren't clear and they've been broken up. That represent Gen Z more than anything. They're living in a culture that's been totally fragmentised by globalisaiton and the internet. There isn't a set trend anymore you could point to like oh they're the Goths, Punks, Greasers. Honestly though its just a poor carry over from Vampire's 90s days. Kids playing at the time thought it was cool more to belong to a specific group, that your born into that group and there your family and there is this kind of collective thinking that takes place. Oh I'm a Toreador so all Toreador are the same, we're all the artsy clan, Oh i'm a Ventrue nad we're all nobles etc etc. When you look at it as an adult you realise just how childish that is. Take Vampire The Requiem, which honestly was the Vampire game for my generation and the one I played, that is far more mature and refined in how it approaches these things. Your Clan is just your hertiage but who you are and what you believe are defined by the Covenants which are made up of a multidude of different types of people and ideas. And finally lets face it, the World of Darkness is such a self-indulgent term. It was a term designed by middle class Gen Xer's who had the luxuary of imagining an angtsy filled world of corruption, misery, rampant coporate greed and poverty. We are in a World of Darkness now. You don't have to crank it up to 11, most of us already feel it and see it every day of our lives.
Mostly true i say. I dislike Requiem for precisly the reason of the covenants. I find them suffucating. 5 or so belvieve systems that maybe even codified? Nö thanks. That felt childish to me comparded to: you are embraced in a Clan that mostly IS in an Organisation. The org expectes Something of you, your sire fldefinitly does expect Something of you. Your Clan mayby the Rest will asume maybe Something of you. Deal with IT. That left much more room imo to create your Own Person. Compared to requiems"oh Look how edgy Our believes are" covenants. I meaning IT worked for you great. To me IT felt Like a downgrade.
I played and mastered/narrated VTM (2nd edition) and Dark Ages couple of times and really liked it, except some problems with "dice bucket" but nothing that coudnt be fixed changing some rules.
as someone whos recently dove into the WoD i find the older versions so much richer, it really does feel like they tried to make this current version palatable for a simplistic game, I've taken so much more from the older versions reading the different abilities and option that flourished. ive remolded the system to hash together the old an new and im going to attempt a game this sunday
Young Buscemi you are amazing , really enjoyed your review and also explaining what VtM used to be...Having played VtM back when it was new and groundbreaking. VtM ended for a reason White Wolf knew what it was doing. However its awesome seeing thevnextbgen carry it on and helping to modernize a Great idea. Always a great and comfortable stay when you can get a room in the Black Lodge.
The clans being so tied to factions is an odd decision, to say the least. It's not even that the creators are so sure of one ideology or another that they think no Gangrel would ever reconsider the importance of regulation and join the Camarilla, they're also saying no newly vampirised Ventrue would ever balk at this secret society they've been inducted into and join the Anarchs.
It's not true. No clan is inherently tied to any faction. There are Anarch Ventrue, Tremere or Toreador, there are still some Brujah and Gangrel in Camarilla. I don't know why people spread so much disinformation about V5.
@@legionhut2443 It really isn't and how much people lie about it is just beyond me. Clans were never so open and widespread among all factions as in V5. How anyone can say that they're factionalized if there are three difderent Tremere Houses (Shreckt for Camarilla, Ipsissimus for Anarchs, Carna for Independent and of course Goratrix)? How they're locked in factions if there are Red Nosferatu, Free Ventrue, Brujah & Gangrel still in Camarilla? "Clans locked in factions" is false opinion that does not hold after single lecture of V5 materials.
@PrzybyszzMatplanety Because it's something they state outright. Brujah and Gangrel have left the Cam and no longer have Justicar representation. Lasombra and Banu Haqim have abandoned their previous allegiance for the Cam. Setites joined the Anarchs. The Player's Guide outlines the factional allegiances of the Clans, with notes for dissidents. Also the Hecata/Giovanni remain the most independent Clan. You may disagree with it, and they hardly adhere to their own rules, but it is definitely a thing they try to push.
@@legionhut2443 Every time they mention these things it is accompanied by a caveat that states that the general trend does not hold for all clan members. So they shift things around a bit, but to me it looks like if anything clan's were more tied to sect in the older lore than they are now. I don't see any push, just unprompted pushback.
This video is awesome! Succint but also covers a lot of ground and actually digs into the relevant themes of the game. Wish i could find reviews on RPGs a tenth as good as the ones that you guys make!
Haven’t watched the video yet, and I’m entirely out of my element with this system for sure, but seeing the way people talk is super interesting. I feel like I missed an entire era of history and I’m only now discovering it for the first time.
What an amazing review. The best review of a tabletop RPG that I've seen. Your analysis of the setting was very inspiring and well thought out. I never thought I'd run vampire, but you recontextualized it in a way that I think I could. I really want more vampire videos!
Back in the 1990s, I liked the whole idea of playing these classical monsters in a cool modern setting. But one thing I never warmed about was the game mechanics. It may work for each game, but it doesn't have any crunch to it. While I never played anything other than a bit of Vampire (2nd edition), I also heard the rules don't work when you have vampires and werewolves and faeries and (God forbid!) mages in the same game. Thinking about this today, I think making a game with different breeds of monsters is trying to play World of Darkness like you play D&D: humans, an elf, and a dwarf in the same party. One other thing: the cultural commentary in the rewiew seems to be on point. I hang on mostly OSR places these days, as all the other venues of RPG discussion were taken by the usual suspects, but I often find at odds with the grognards when it comes to their takes on culture. Grognards, being mostly boomers and genXers, dream about an apolitical world that never was and don't even think about subverting a flawed work to their own enjoyment.
I tottally disagree. I have been here since vampire 1st edition, I have mastered all five games and crossover games and I can say that the systems works, with a couple of tweaks. The problem in the wod system is the multiple actions. That breaks the rules when you crossover games.
I would honestly recommend requiem to you, the lines were developed in a way to make crossplay easier, and there are no longer the hard barriers in lore that WOD had.
@@Konietzko My problem was always aggravated damage, it is far too common, and it in my opinion even more than multiple actions damages the combat system. That is not to say multiple actions are not a problem they absolutely are, and they can make fights drag on where one player gets to do action after action and makes the other people at the table annoyed.
Man, I wish it was possible to have deeper discussions on a platform like this. As a fellow OSR fan, I understand where you're coming from with the politics, but the issue is less that the idealized past was 'apolitical' than that there was less polarization. Because there was more of a broad consensus on most cultural issues, it was easier to put politics aside (or at least push them into the deep background) in most RPGs. These games also had no pretense that they were appealing to a global audience and needed to take worldwide cultural sensitivities into consideration.
Good video by Young Steveo here, I agree with mechanics informing and promoting good roleplay and immersion for a given setting, the best ones provide hooks for players and the GM to draw upon, this is why I loved the quirks and flaws system in the original Hackmaster game
Maybe it's because I married a Millennial and our kids are athletic nerds, but I'm a Gen-Xer who's lived all over the world and most people of my generation either still play tabletop RPGs or are just now getting into them. Meeting one who has absolutely no interest is rare at this point. And I haven't met a single person who's liked V5, largely because they feel the virtue signaling, subpar art (where even the worst Nosferatu looks like a fashion model), and anemic lore (streamline, streamline, streamline) make it less attractive than either picking up a new game (Vaesen anyone?) or just cracking open & homebrewing the older editions. And for what it's worth, Goth isn't cringe -- EMO is cringe. And the problem is that outsiders & dilettantes couldn't tell the two apart.
Goth is probably the cringiest thing that's ever been invented. People from the suburbs pretending they're hardcore and into the macabre because they don't see it in their day-to-day life.
Neither is cringe, you're just an insecure contrarian that wants to feel better than someone else despite being yourself a massive freak lol. The only thing cringe here is your attitude towards others. You want people to respect you, without you having to respect others. Entitlement at it's finest. Sounds like Gen X alright.
I agree, the hunger mechanic is great. In old editions blood pool was basically a mana bar. I didn't like the way they wrote out elder vampire. The struggle against the established order was at the core of the game. You either had to fight the system from the inside or try to destroy it from the outside. Now the book expressly says any newbie kindred can be the prince. If I run the game, I change this of course. However, the one sin I cannot forgive is the absolute dogshit artwork in the core book. I have no idea what they were thinking when they designed the art. The step down in the art quality from old editions is staggering.
It only played like a mana bar when your ST handwaved feeding. When you had to be a horrible monster at least once every other session it stopped feeling like that.
In our VTM 2nd edition game we had to figure out how to capture a different snapshot in time (started, in character, in 2014...last time we played it's November 2016). But we made the game in 2021, looking back and interpreting what the post-Gothic Punk setting would really be heading toward our current time period. It had to be different. It had to really capture the specter of the 2010s going toward the 20s in order to work. Anyways, that was a brilliant review of 5th edition and it made me reflect on how important the snapshot in time element really is to a VTM game in any version of the game.
This is an amazing video. I am one of those original Gen-X players (Born 1978) who played with friends in dark basements in the mid to late 90s. The descriptions of millennial culture are captured perfectly by Young Steve Buscemi. This is a wonderfully done video and I look forward to more.
The biggest sin of this book is that I read it two times, and it never made me want to play an actual game! I was too lost in the myriad of weird characters, strange images, and complicated rulings to even figure out what I wanted to play.
I like the video, but I'm pretty confident GenX still has a robust roleplaying contingency. "Long since checked out" needs some fact-checking. Have you glanced at the demographics of the OSR, for example?
This video's got some pretty strange ideas. The youngest millennials these days are in their 30s. Many are in their 40s. Millennials' edition of Vampire was Vampire: the Requiem (1e, and to a degree 2e). V20 was a nostalgia edition the for Gen Xers who passed over nWoD or missed VtM from the 90s, and V5 is a (mostly fumbling) attempt to appeal to the nostalgic Gen X VtM crowd (with the "remember Gehenna?") and today's Gen Z twentysomethings at the same time. The edition was originally headed by a specific subgroup of Nordic LARP types who fumbled the bag pretty badly (including quotes like "Requiem didn't say Vampires did 9/11 because Americans are pussies"), and the game since then has mostly been their corporate owners desperately trying to avoid controversy after managing to do things like making headlines for claiming currently-ongoing anti-gay pogroms in Chechnya is actually just a smokescreen by vampires (simultaneously pissing off internet keyboard-warriors who were mad about "trivialization" and the Chechen government for claiming that such pogroms were happening at all). As for things like "V5 has gone out of their way to lump every single clan into one faction as a monolith", V5 is the furthest edition of VtM away from that. I remember having to bend over backwards to justify, say, a Camarilla or Anarch Tzimisce back in 2e or even the 20th anniversary edition. There were always "Camarilla clans" and "Sabbat clans" and whatnot in the old editions, the existence of minorities of antitribu (that occasionally got completely wiped out by metaplot changes) notwithstanding. V5 has gone out of its way to justify any and every clan showing up in any and every faction. The clan writeups are in different faction books as another corporate move to try to get people to buy as many sourcebooks as possible to get all of the available PC options, but the actual metaplot changes include things like "The Tremere pyramid has been shattered, and there are new, different subgroups of Tremere in every sect". Half of the bulk of Clan Lasombra joined the Camarilla, the other half of that bulk remained in the Sabbat, and some of them have joined the Anarchs. The writeup for the Tzimisce, the other founding clan of the Sabbat, mentions that it has members in all three factions, but particularly in the Sabbat and the Anarchs. Hell, Paradox White Wolf's attempt at their own version of Critical Role, LA By Night, has an Anarch Ventrue, an Anarch Nosferatu, an Anarch Tremere, and an Anarch Malkavian all as major characters, and none of them are called out as weird unique exceptions the way a Camarilla or Anarch Lasombra or Tzimisce would have been in older editions (not even the Ventrue)! "All of the Ventrue are in the Camarilla" is even less true in V5 than it was in previous editions. The only "Anarch Clan" player character in their flagship Anarch game is the one Brujah. I don't even like V5 (I don't like how the mechanical system is a half-thought-out hybrid between VtR and the older editions of VtM, elders and the Sabbat were practically removed from the game by very clunky metaplot developments, as a couple of examples). I mostly played VtR, and V20 when I wanted to play VtM. I can still pick out several sizable misconceptions about the game, here (and the fixation on "millennials" as the problem with the corporate cowardice of the game when they're not even the target audience is weird - Millennials were the consumer zeitgeist for games like this in the mid-late 2000s and the early 2010s, which was the new World of Darkness' heyday - it's Gen Z's hobby now, and I'm not willing to blame the corporate blandness of V5 on Gen Z either).
Will respond more later when I have a bit more time but it's less about who v5 is for and more about who it was written by. Millennials had their hands all over this edition and their world view is implicit in it.
Agree he completely fucked up his generational definitions. Other than that it’s a great review if you just grit your teeth and internally note “he means Gen z” every time he says millenial you’re golden.
Feels weird to see it pinned on millennials, since all the millennials I know prefer Revised for the same reasons you outline. Really, it seems like more of a problem with the West Coast Corpo-progressivism that took down Occupy and every movement after.
Gen X has “long since checked out of the RPG market”?!? HELL NO! They can have my Dark Sun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands! Also - do Dark Sun next. 😊
Millennial and Gen denotations are nebulous and shift with the current culture zeitgeist. Gen X and Y elders tend to lump everything after themselves as Millennials. pop culture and mass media discourse still use millennial to refer to woke progressive NPCs, snowflakes and the entitled brats with their Karen's. on the flip side the brainwashed zombie hoarders of woke refer to everyone older than themselves as Boomers. Typical modern hyper galvanization trying to force everyone into Red vs Blue team bs. so like no offense to actual millennials heh
Great video. I played a lot of Vampire back in the 90s. I was lucky enough to be friends with a number of the original White Wolf crew members and later work with them at other game companies. I have yet to check out 5E, but now I have to take a look at it if only to see what you are talking about.
This left me with exactly one question: Do you hate the millenials as much as the Tzimisce hate the Tremere? I feel you tried to make a pretty decent game review, but wrapped it into so much "millenials bad, they took our toys" (Hint, they didn't, they are not a fking monolith, they are not White Wolf representatives and while the culture did indeed shift, and storytelling and the stories are mostly the same since the cavemen were hiding from Impergium-enjoying Garou. And liking, supporting or playing any version of the lore is possible - even at the same point once you agree on the mechanics, letting you make compelling stories even from these misunderstanding ("What do you mean by Ministry, and what do you meant by allegiance to the Anarch Movement. I've been a proud Follower of Set for the last 400 years and my allegiance is only to the clan and Set himself, no new movement I should share with the Brujah and Gangrel barbarians and vice-ridden Tzimisce hedonists incapable of subtlety!").) it made it so damn hard to listen to. "The people younger than me make everything worse" is such a Camarilla Elder take, in all of its monstrous and hypocritical ways.
I love this game in all it's editions. I have since the 90s and always will. I appreciate this review tremendously and love that, despite its obviously flawed facade, you've found some hidden gems as I have.
I appreciate, and agree with a lot of your criticisms towards the book, but I think that blaming Millennials is a mistake. I'm speaking as a member of Gen Z when I say this, but I think that a more likely suspect is the company who acquired White Wolf Entertainment, Paradox Interactive. Paradox Interactive is a studio primarily known for their work on video games, and likely acquired White Wolf specifically for the rights to make a VtM:B game. Personally, I think what's more likely than an entire generation of genetically enhanced HR employees created by the Technocracy to destroy the TTRPG community now striking the WoD franchise is that, instead, Paradox Interactive, after acquiring White Wolf, is trying to "clean up" the books in case of any possible controversies that could arise from players checking out the older books after playing VtM:B 2. No offense meant toward you, but your age is showing in your words, and I think you need to reevaluate who your enemy is. The internet is, while a reflection of reality, still a funhouse mirror of constantly twisting proportions, and shouldn't be used as a tool to measure what the real world is like, as you seem to be doing here.
Gen X have checked out of the RPG market? Bullshit. We are the RPG market.. we have the disposable income to support our lifelong hobby. We're backing the kickstarter content to provide us the tools to continue our hobby as our friends have moved across the country instead of playing around a rickety game table in the back room of our local game shop; we're playing online via VTTs on 42" widescreen monitors. When you back a game for $50 dollars; we're at the God Tier spending hundreds or more. You don't see us at the watering holes; because the games now come to us. Rant aside.. the rest of the review is spot on. As players since the first editions running Chicago by Night. we found the new "lore/setting" simply lacked the depth inspired by the Book of Nod and similar sources. So our stories remain in the War of Ages with the Apocalypse looming but having never arrived...
While I understand the sentiments in this video, it does come across as o wow the world changed and we didn't want a beloved IP to change with it. Take some advice form a product of the 90s man , wear sunscreen. Accept certain inalienable truths Prices will rise, politicians will phalander, you too, will get old And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you where young Prices where reasonable, politicians where noble And children respected their elders The world has changed, in one breath you criticise melanials as a nostalgia machine and in another you state that the game is no longer what it was in the 90s. But great work none the less. My criticism is more around opening a dialogue. I think the video is great
This was my take, too. The video poster has such strong “old man yells at cloud” energy. He whines that a tabletop game has different lore and theming from when he was a kid, while also bagging on Millennials (like him) for being nostalgia fiends who need things to be just like they were when we were kids It’s literally a “[franchise] killed my childhood” argument, the very hallmark of someone terminally defined by the media IP they consume Let people revisit old ideas in new ways. Let them fail, like Nu-White-Wolf *mostly* did. It’s bringing eyeballs and money back to a dead game. I know that without V5 we wouldn’t have had “Night Road,” for instance, and Night Road was the best adaptation since Bloodlines!
Your highlighting of the zeitgeist as the cursed burden of VTM is The Truth. I shared this with the first gaming group that dared brave vampire the dark ages instead of jumping in to the gothic punk setting with me as storyteller back in 1996.
After watching a few Let's Plays of V5 and being a fan of the 2004 video game, I decided to learn and run a campaign for the first time back in 2021. I cannot BELIEVE how shit the corebook is written-- its narrative, organization, explanations of fundamental concepts... You saying the narrative voice of the book assumes the reader has the context of the game already hits the nail of the head. I didn't even bother asking my players to look at any part of the book in preparation to play; I sent them a few youtube video introductions and did my best to explain what I knew myself. Over time I've learned the rules, lore, and ambience of the game from other places, but rarely the books themselves. It kinda makes me angry now that I think about it! Which is all to say, I do still think its a good RPG with some great mechanics and concepts; but you gotta dig to find them and then you gotta jerry-rig them to make them work.
On the plus side, being plucked out of the mortal world to end up in all this that you have no idea about is a classic introduction to the word in-universe :D
Only the latter half of the Millenial cohort and the entirety of Gen z. The first half of the millennials LIVED FOR revised and V20 along with their Gen X siblings.
I'm one of the very early Millenials (going by whoever arbitrarily sets the dates for these categories) and I loved VtM and Werewolf as a teen. I spread it amongst all my friends, some of whom are still fans to this day. I remember one time I was buying VtM books, or maybe it was the Wraith core book. The old guy at the game store obviously thought I was a bit young for it. He peered over his glasses at me, saying "This stuff will give you nightmares you know?". That only made me love it even more.
I recently just got into Vampire, and hearing you say that "The creators make it seem like rules themselves get in the way of the *real* game of storytelling" made me feel vindicated. Reading through the v5 book has been a nightmare trying to understand the mechanics. You have the chapter that discusses rolls, but then if you want to know how rolls are used for disciplines, or how to roll for willpower, it's on a completely different chapter. Or, if you are reading disciplines, but then want to know how to heal yourself, it's on another chapter. It's like the creators made the mechanics so hard to find that you try to ignore that they are there. It would've been so much better to have a full page of core mechanics instead of having to flip back and forth for one or two mechanics, and then having to go through half the book for another mechanic.
The redesigned Humanity system is...a huge problem, too. Just design your Tenets so your characters never break them, and voila: your characters now has a license to not lose Humanity. It's....pretty sad.
Snark and irony is the current counter culture of today. I imagine some day someone will be making this video about a future version waxing about this edition as a product of its time...these damn kids and their new games.
Well I GM it since the 90s and with every campagin I was going backward instead of forward in time. Exploring the Vampiric world of the 1970 and 60s Chicago was some of the best things I ever did. I think the same about the new edition but I indeed like some of the ideas and incoporated them into my game.
I played a mini campaign of V5 recently. My first actual roleplaying in a long time. I haven't read the book but I believe our GM ignored most of the lore. I did have fun with it and would play again. I haven't played the older V:tM games though I do have V:tR (1e). I prefer the cleaner rules of nWOD but the blood dice mechanic is an interesting addition. Messy criticals did feel a bit weird to me sometimes though (especially outside of combat). The combat seemed a bit too stripped down. (Both of these could be because of how my GM runs things, combat isn't the most important part of vampire anyway IMHO).
I stuck with your review, at times taken aback by how derisive your critiques felt. Yet I couldn't deny how flavourful your points were, even if I think millennial society is more nuanced than you give it credit here, and was relieved to hear that you do see some merit in the game. As someone relatively new to the game (Came in via LA By Night during the Lockdown) and have yet to play their first session (Endlessly tweaking my character concept), I'd welcome more of your insights into V5. Character creation, Clans, factions etc. All the best.
Check out our videos on the camarilla and the mafia as game concept, I think you'll get a lot of value out of them. We are planning a series on the clans that will start rolling out over the next couple of months. Despite its flaws, we are big fans of V5 and the previous iterations
Well put... you said everything that I might had. It saddens me how they have to walk on eggshells, which does in fact encapsulate this age. I remember when they were making the werewolf book, and they had a picture of a native american in the glass walker tribe, they found the reference picture that the artist cribbed from and cried they were culturally appropriating native americans, then they immediately took it out, even though Native american images has universally always been big in werewolf. It sorta hurt my heart that they caved so easy... and probably had to to stay alive.
Gen X are busy raising kids and paying the mortgage? Are you sure? Because I am a Millennial and so are several friends and family members and our mortgages are paid off and our kids are starting to graduated college. Or did every one change the definitions and I never got the memo?
Hi. I just found your channel. I only play VtM. I agree with all of your analysis and interpretations. Is there a way to watch one of your vtm games? Have you ever filmed a vtm series? I don't see in your Playlist.
Part of a broader problem... culture in general is incredibly stagnant. Worse, those wearing the nostalgia goggles so hard that drive the relentless regurgitation of old franchises insist on changing them to suit the current political climate instead of just enjoying them for what they are. Its all so bleak.
On 08:30'ish when you are talking about all clans being packed in certain faction is false but I am guessing this view was only about the core book when it was released. You can have and should have wide variety in all factions with all clans because there is nothing in any of the books (Core, Anarch, Camarilla, Sabbat) that says that it is not possible.
I also disagree with the point of view that clans like Malkavians have lost their identity. Fuck that shit, Malkavians are still Malkavians - there is no need for overly bloated discipline pool when Dementation is a Dominate based power.
I love the Hunger system and the new flaws that work with; however, I don't like what they did with meshing the Disciplines and a few other things. Ultimately, when I get to it, I plan to bring the things I love about V5 and incorporate them into my V20 game, with the V5 metaplot updates. Right now, I'm running my players (consisting of 2 Millennials and 1 Gen Z (I'm a Xennial, who got into Vampire during high school in '94.) through all the Chronicles released in order, and when we move onto V5, we'll probably play that system just so they can give me feedback on how to merge the two, as I don't see a V6 ever coming.
I am a Millenial and V5 marked the end of TRPGs for me. V20 Beckett's Secret Diary and a few insights about how V5 planned to play out Gehenna made me realize our hobby is going in a way I am not interested anymore.
My response to this is: is this the intent of the authors, or is this the result of corporate control? Is the lack of edge intentional or did some middle manager tell the author to excise it? That feeling, of atomization, of corporate blandness, of lack of authenticity in modern culture, is absolutely a huge jumping off point for a campaign.
what do you think of the LA by Night actual play series by Jason Carl? I myself have learned a tremendous amount as a game master from watching Jason at work.
It's quite a good representation of some aspects of the WoD, and a notable improvement over Critical Role because the actors stay in character. Jason Carl appears to be a solid GM who takes both rules and roleplay seriously.
@@DareToWonder My early 90s Vampire 1st Ed Brujah Punk would prove your point of them being assholes by ripping you limb from limb and drinking your blood from the stumps for that remark.
Love the new hunger mechanic and would find a way to use it in any vampire game. But I will never touch V5. The writers eviscerated the feel and world of Masquerade. Nothing epitomizes that better than their treatment of The Giovanni, the Lasombra, and the Sabbat. Originally choosing to make Sabbat a non player faction and solely a bad guy faction was brain dead and short sited. There are no good guys in Vampire, so the framing that the Cam or Anarchs were the default good guys was just silly. Cam were always the status quo and representation of stagnation and futility. The anarchs were change in the form of a Molotov cocktail wielded by a maniac, and the Sabbat were the only ones who had a clue of what terrible fate was coming…wrapped up in a religious cult and vampire superiority belief. All of them were awesome. All of them were awful. Lasombra were just brutalized in the new edition. Complete misunderstanding by whoever was writing it as to what the Lasombra are. Same with the Giovanni. One: necromancy and void magic are not the same and should not be the same discipline. They aren’t even close. Two: I lied above. There is a bad guy and it’s the Giovanni. They would NEVER combine with the other “clans of death.” Especially not from clans such as the Harbingers. The Harbingers want nothing more than to kill every single Giovanni.
Lasombra were beaten over the head with a baseball bat. They can't interact with technology without a lackey to do it for them. The famously self-motivated Lasombra, notorious for rarely using ghouls, apparently now wholly dependent on their servants to open doors, drive cars, make phone calls, or buy something off Amazon. Their Bane is Schrodinger's Invisibility; they are invisible and indistinguishable over telecommunications except that it gives a penalty to hiding your identity or remaining hidden. Horribly designed Bane paired with a terrible Discipline that requires so many Rouse checks to get anything done, and gives Stains 20% of the time, for effects that don't justify the added risk. I would add the Setites to that list. A doomsday cult built around the worship of their Antediluvian ancestor, bent to the corruption of mankind one mortal, one vampire, at a time... transformed into the Ministry, what appears to be a parody of that one disingenuous religious guy who always dies in Stephen King novels. Seems like they ditched the actually interesting Egyptian chaos god lore for another unsubtle dig at religion. As for "no good guys", I would reframe it as "no good Sects". Though the V5 line certainly implies the Anarch ideals are virtuous. It is possible to defend or tear down each Sect if you try hard enough, I've encountered many a player who insists on the virtue of the Sabbat because they know the Antediluvians exist.
Except the Anarchs are definitely the least evil of all the factions, and the Sabbat was fucking brain dead. It belongs in the 90s. The Sabbat was never interesting, they were a token bad guy faction that WW desperately tried to make interesting and failed.
@@TheJDough1 it's a mixed bag. Has some really good stuff and really bad stuff. Each edition has strengths for what made the game cool. I really like V5 for the lore consolidation and new mechanics though. The newer books for V5 are pretty bad though.
@@blacklodgegames Thank you for such a prompt reply. I have VtM 20th anniversary edition which has tons of content. Are the new mechanics that you like, portable into the older system?
U know I had an idea for a humanity system that includes your Connation (will power, capacity to initiate mental energy etc.) and Affect (sensitivity, capacity to feel, be present.) That go from 1 to 5. When either becomes 1 u are clinical and the beast takes over. You combine both to get your humanity score. Also u want to resist something u need to roll under Connation but if you want to be possessed by someone you need to roll over. Affect would be to emphasize and sense things roll below. So high is good. You want to keep your cool while seeing a massacre roll over so low is good.
Virtue signaling and inclusivity without adding narrative substance at best waters down the game and is a distraction at worse. I wish the writers understood that adding characteristics for it's own sake betrays the story. If a character is introduced as (x) there needs to be a reason and a narrative benefit. It can't just be so that people who fit the (x) group feel represented and validated. I wrote a book that had no race descriptions for any of the characters. It was unnecessary and allowed the reader to add their own flavor to the story. By the same token there's no reason to describe a character's orientation or gender identify unless the narrative is enhanced by doing so.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the Blood Potency mechanic and how it's implemented in this game. They seem designed to work well at low levels, with higher BP more of an afterthought. Certain side effects of BP aren't clearly explained, like the reduced Hunger slaked her mortal. Does it apply at the start of feeding? At the end? As a percentage of the whole? Does Vitae have the same restrictions on resting Hunger level as mortal blood, and how does it interact with the Methuselah's Thirst Flaw? And do the Rouse re-rolls compensate for the higher resting Hunger level in a meaningful way, assuming the high BP character doesn't drain (possibly multiple) victims per feeding (speedrunning towards Wightdom in the process)?
'80 dude here. I have dozens of friends who still play TTRPGs, whether it's in person or online. Hell, some still larp. Anyways, I don't think this is a "millennial" thing, per se. Overcorrecting to attract a non-existent mainstream market is the problem. Aesthetically, the younger crowd is a fusion of late '90s goth and cyberpunk, and their headphones are blasting screamy metal or Scandinavian tribal/folk revival stuff. Basically, they're trying to cast a bigger net, but the holes get bigger the further away from the center you get.
I had to sub just because of the line “faux intellectualism you see in disgusting sewers like Reddit or Harvard” 😂 This whole video is the most brutal take down of the Millennials I’ve ever seen. Not always fair, but thoroughly entertaining. Also, you’re dead on with how good an innovation the hunger mechanics were.
I think that the argument that rule simplification is purely bad isn't one that sees the full picture. Point 1: I'm in my mid-twenties and have been playing ttrpgs since I was 13. As time goes on, and as I try more and more systems and different campaigns and whatnot, I realise the rules really matter fuck all. The generation that V5 has been made for, largely sees it the same way. We want to have a quick and easy to pick up experience because we like trying new things. It's hard to delve deep into complex and broad systems for a campaign that will probably last all of 3-5 sessions before real life gets in the way because people are crunching for exams and can't DM these 3 months, or because you gotta work 2 jobs just so you can maybe make rent this month, and any hobby just comes secondary to survival. Point 2: I don't know if this is the same for all parties, but I find that it's a lot more fun to roleplay rather than ruleplay, or rollplay or whatever other fancy word exists to describe it. Basically, even in games I DM I do this little neat thing I call "narrative moments" where basically, I temporarily give the storyteller role to one of my players, and they get to narrate everything that happens through the eyes of their character, as if they were a temporary DM of sorts. For these, I ignore most actual in-game rules and just go with whatever idea is coolest and best for the story we're trying to collectively tell. The point is that I find an overcomplicated rule system to be stifling to the creativity of both myself and my players, and thus we prefer systems with less rules to not limit that creativity.
This is a fascinating review of the game. I loved the comparison of the game to vampires themselves. I feel like a big reason the games are so different is because of who is writing them. The new writers definitely have corporate expectations to meet. I'm someone that very much has identified a lot of transgressive views in previous edition, and while some are better left behind, I do believe that some did give the games an identity that can not be replicated in a sterile corporate office. Ultimately when people write these books, there are those who will assume that any depictions of graphic material is an endorsement of such. Also let's be clear, I am most assuredly what many would consider woke. I think that many issues with this book are totally a fault of corporate interests. They want to introduce their product to as many people possible which does not work for a niche product. Still they hire people to that end. I don't think the ideologies might be to blame, but instead the corporation. The suits want a product that sells well and only do surface level research as to what people like about those products. So sadly they see that since progressive themes are on the upswing, they put it in as much as they can. For me, as someone who ultimately benefits from this progressiveness, many of their efforts come off as tokenism. I think if you want a better written vampire story about counter-culture you'd need people from the counter-culture to write it. A corporation could never do it.
I started playing Vampire in 1993. It was a breakthrough in RPGs. Over the years, White Wolf put out too much crap, too inconsistent in quality of writing and in connecting to their own canon. When V5 was in development, I was initially excited. I even got a preview copy before it was released. After I read the preview copy, I knew it was going to be a tragic failure...and indeed it looks like you did too. On a more positive note, me and 3 of my Gen X college buddies who all played back in the 90s started up a campaign using our own mash up of 1st and 2nd edition rules. We've been playing since 2020 and it's incredible.
@@blacklodgegames I will admit, like you indicated, there are some cool mechanics that they implemented to try and realize the vampire's curse. Certainly some of those things could be adapted and implemented into a home game.
"The ladies call me Oh God, but you can call me Fat Larry with an F A T cuz I know I got a weight problem, I just don't give a fuck" - Fat Larry
You sound like you have been through a lot of millennial writing.
@@riches3581 That better be bait
the best character of all times and all games 🤣
@@riches3581 Omg... Tell us it's a joke, for the love of the Ivory Queen!
@@cornchaptermasterofcarmine5902 it was
Antidiluvian yells at cloud
That is exactly what the creators of V5 want you to think!
Its weird that the game mechanics lean towards being containing the monster within, but world building is afraid of being edgy or even morally complex
Well when I heard about it coming out, I had to chuckle because how the heck was this going to play out in the modern moralities. I mean if you know the game you know there is no way the back of the Tzimisce clan book could be accepted or the first line of the Giovanni clan book be written.
@erjoh305
Could you tell me what the back of the Tzimice clan book and the the first line of the Giovanni clan book were?
@@snakeyman5560 not here.
@@erjoh305And yet the Tzimisce and Giovanni are still as horrifying
@@simoneidson21 Lol nah not even close
"gen x are busy raising families... and they've long since checked out of the RPG market" man i feel this, thats why for me a game has to be 2-3 hours, meet after work at a pub (or bar as Americans call it) eat, drink, tell a story and go home.
Tell this to my wallet! I grew up with BECMI, Advanced in Middle School and 2nd Ed in high school. Now I've got a book shelf full of games, some of which (like VotM 5e) that I haven't played. But not due to time constraints (divorced and my daughter is 24) but lack of players. Currently I'm wrapped up in Warhammer 40K Wrath and Glory. I have every book Cubicle7 has put out on it and hope to GM the system after the New Year.
@IndyMotoRider well YOU might have time and interest, but the people around you might not. That's kind of an issue.
I’m an elder millennial that turned 40. My gaming groups have always been Gen Xers that made me an honorary member. We play 3-5 hour sessions with a meal - usually weekly. It can be hard, but we make it happen.
a 3 hour game seems pretty reasonable. People who role play for 5+ hours in one session are ridiculous.
That's not true for everyone, though. I'm an ooooold Gen-Xer who has never stopped playing games. Heck, I introduced my kids to gaming. It's harder for us to make time. We don't pull the all-nighters like we did when we were young, but we still game. Our kids came to games as babies with a portable crib. We made allowances that you sometimes need to work around family (kid) obligations while gaming.
Despite what that one zoomer I ran into at our LGS said, I don't need "grown up" hobbies at my age. I've had my hobby since I was 12 and i'm not changing it.
Rick and morty the masquerade
This guy gets it
You have my attention...
Gen X here… post kids and back to Roleplay.
Hell yeah fellow Gen-Xer
My brother, you have the same weight behind those words as a seasoned veteran
Retired Gen X and have lots of time for gaming :)
It's funny, they really hit on a great mechanical/narrative integration with that Hunger Dice mechanic. Same for the idea of 'blood you drank has a mechanical benefit based on how they felt at the time' both fit amazingly well with the idea of the ideas of the Vampire setup.
So those who care for it will port these ideas backwards to the better designed works of the older era.
Planning to do that next time im running WoD. Running a campaign since 19 atm, a shame i did not know of it when i started it
Or even the btter designed works of the same era, like CofD, which had superior mechanics, but lacked the Branding the investors wanted. It astounds me how the V5 writers managed to blend OWoD and CofD to make something with the benefits of neither.
Another thing that could be said about the stratification of vampire clans along faction lines reflecting the millennial zeitgeist is that it turns the sects from actual shifting power blocs into vampire Hogwarts houses. "My personality is x, therefore I'm part of team y!" It's the constant search for a team to validate one's own identity instead of from an actual principled position, vibes win out over nuance.
Excellent point
Yep, they truly managed to make a Millennial game 😂!
Except that's always how it's worked. People have always played a stereotype, and it's always been badly written. There isn't some big need of millenials to validate their identities by seeking teams.
this is not a generational tendency to “validate one’s own identity” by aligning with a group and then arguing from that groups determined identity instead of a principled position….it is a human flaw affecting most people. Look at nearly all of global politics. None of these Lich care about abortions or any of the stuff they pretend to. their team has a set of positions they are required to toe the line on.
That's the split within millennaials I noticed. Like a lot of us act more or less like younger gen Xers. Yet there a lot of that fall into being controlled by others yet claiming they're so unique and rebellious. Like a bunch of Anarch posers that pisses off older Anarchs because they cause too much trouble for even their taste. They don't know how to go with the flow, or I should say they're loud for the wrong reasons.
The first half of this video is absolute word vomit. Just a shitload of baseless arguments with nothing to back it up that amounts to "waaah it's not like how it used to be! It's terrible! Millenials! (for some reason)"
20th anniversary is probably the only Vampire book you need.
Agreed. It's got most, if not all the mechanical rules you need to run the game. Only reason to buy other books is for lore and fluff.
@@Nyrufa The mechanics aren’t very good though and the lore is bloated.
I´d add Lore of the Clans (For obvious reasons) and Rituals of the Blood too. Unless you are allergic to blood magic it adds WAY too much depth and flavour to the various blood magics to pass up.
V20 was fine. Werewolf and Mage 20th were aggressively awful and foreshadowed 5th edition's woes.
V20 is well-built structure, but Revised is a concrete fundament beneath it
I think this is the best-written TTRPG review show on UA-cam now.
Thanks man, that means a lot
Exatelley. Kudos to young Steve Buschemi.
As a Millennial or what it turns out I fall into, Zillennial, I disagree with your take on them. I was born in 93 and i'm 30 now and my cohort are considered the youngest of the Millennials. The rest are all heading into their middle ages. This book was meant for Gen Z, that is the generation that will get the most out of it for. The glitzy, hazzy bisexual lightining of the cover really represent that to me.
So first lets take our rose tinted glasses and look at what VTM really was and how it was played. It was born in an era where RPG's were just begining to realise you could do more than just a dungeon crawl and we were seeing the trend towards more unified and simpler mechanics in a more storytelling format. Because of that the game, whilist being rules lite back in the day and innovactive, is imo when viewed today, is clunky as hell and the mechanics do little to help you ground yourself in the themes of the game.
We saw throughout Vampires publicaiton with their modules + supplements like Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand a shift towards Gonzo style play. There was a reason people started using Super Hero with Fangs. The authors of the game WANTED it to be a deep and engaging dark roleplaying expereince but more often than not the rules and the reality of what the bulk of its gamers wanted flew in the face of that. They wanted more cool powers, they wanted more factional infighting, being able to play as elders. The game quickly devolved into a world of urban fantasy than it did a dark reflection of our own.
As for who wrote it, well it wasn't written by Millennials. Ken Hite, Karim, Erriccson, Matthew Dawkins, they were all avid players in the 90s/00s who firmly sit in that Gen X bracket. This was a game written by Gen X fans who were desperately trying to create a true VTM expereince in their mind, one that hashed closer to the feel that Mark Rein Hagen was aiming for when he first released the game and honestly they got damn close, a lot closer than Whitewolf did back in the 90s.
As for the game being factional in nature, honestly the 90s version was even worse for that. It was just the Camarilla and the Sabbat and there would be no inbetween. Now things are a lot messier and murkier, the line of what Clan you belong to and what Sect you belong to aren't clear and they've been broken up. That represent Gen Z more than anything. They're living in a culture that's been totally fragmentised by globalisaiton and the internet. There isn't a set trend anymore you could point to like oh they're the Goths, Punks, Greasers. Honestly though its just a poor carry over from Vampire's 90s days.
Kids playing at the time thought it was cool more to belong to a specific group, that your born into that group and there your family and there is this kind of collective thinking that takes place. Oh I'm a Toreador so all Toreador are the same, we're all the artsy clan, Oh i'm a Ventrue nad we're all nobles etc etc. When you look at it as an adult you realise just how childish that is.
Take Vampire The Requiem, which honestly was the Vampire game for my generation and the one I played, that is far more mature and refined in how it approaches these things. Your Clan is just your hertiage but who you are and what you believe are defined by the Covenants which are made up of a multidude of different types of people and ideas.
And finally lets face it, the World of Darkness is such a self-indulgent term. It was a term designed by middle class Gen Xer's who had the luxuary of imagining an angtsy filled world of corruption, misery, rampant coporate greed and poverty. We are in a World of Darkness now. You don't have to crank it up to 11, most of us already feel it and see it every day of our lives.
Mostly true i say. I dislike Requiem for precisly the reason of the covenants. I find them suffucating. 5 or so belvieve systems that maybe even codified? Nö thanks. That felt childish to me comparded to: you are embraced in a Clan that mostly IS in an Organisation. The org expectes Something of you, your sire fldefinitly does expect Something of you. Your Clan mayby the Rest will asume maybe Something of you. Deal with IT. That left much more room imo to create your Own Person. Compared to requiems"oh Look how edgy Our believes are" covenants. I meaning IT worked for you great. To me IT felt Like a downgrade.
If you believe 70-80s were pink colors years, maybe you have to study history.
Or maybe you are american, so a lost cause 😅
@@lucatirelli545 Typical xenophobic, unintelligent slop. You represent the best of other countries and that is a sad thing.
I played and mastered/narrated VTM (2nd edition) and Dark Ages couple of times and really liked it, except some problems with "dice bucket" but nothing that coudnt be fixed changing some rules.
@@lucatirelli545 Yes he obviously is american. I mean come on dude, 90% of people here are americans.
as someone whos recently dove into the WoD i find the older versions so much richer, it really does feel like they tried to make this current version palatable for a simplistic game, I've taken so much more from the older versions reading the different abilities and option that flourished. ive remolded the system to hash together the old an new and im going to attempt a game this sunday
Best video I’ve seen about V5. Awesome work!
Thanks! A lot more v5 content to come
Young Buscemi you are amazing , really enjoyed your review and also explaining what VtM used to be...Having played VtM back when it was new and groundbreaking. VtM ended for a reason White Wolf knew what it was doing. However its awesome seeing thevnextbgen carry it on and helping to modernize a Great idea. Always a great and comfortable stay when you can get a room in the Black Lodge.
Thank you!
"gen x are busy raising families..." but they are now off to college and we are comin' back baby.
...or so I hope...
The clans being so tied to factions is an odd decision, to say the least. It's not even that the creators are so sure of one ideology or another that they think no Gangrel would ever reconsider the importance of regulation and join the Camarilla, they're also saying no newly vampirised Ventrue would ever balk at this secret society they've been inducted into and join the Anarchs.
It's not true. No clan is inherently tied to any faction. There are Anarch Ventrue, Tremere or Toreador, there are still some Brujah and Gangrel in Camarilla. I don't know why people spread so much disinformation about V5.
The factionalized Clans in V5 is one of its many frequently broken new paradigms.
@@legionhut2443 It really isn't and how much people lie about it is just beyond me. Clans were never so open and widespread among all factions as in V5.
How anyone can say that they're factionalized if there are three difderent Tremere Houses (Shreckt for Camarilla, Ipsissimus for Anarchs, Carna for Independent and of course Goratrix)? How they're locked in factions if there are Red Nosferatu, Free Ventrue, Brujah & Gangrel still in Camarilla?
"Clans locked in factions" is false opinion that does not hold after single lecture of V5 materials.
@PrzybyszzMatplanety Because it's something they state outright. Brujah and Gangrel have left the Cam and no longer have Justicar representation. Lasombra and Banu Haqim have abandoned their previous allegiance for the Cam. Setites joined the Anarchs. The Player's Guide outlines the factional allegiances of the Clans, with notes for dissidents. Also the Hecata/Giovanni remain the most independent Clan. You may disagree with it, and they hardly adhere to their own rules, but it is definitely a thing they try to push.
@@legionhut2443 Every time they mention these things it is accompanied by a caveat that states that the general trend does not hold for all clan members. So they shift things around a bit, but to me it looks like if anything clan's were more tied to sect in the older lore than they are now. I don't see any push, just unprompted pushback.
This video is awesome! Succint but also covers a lot of ground and actually digs into the relevant themes of the game. Wish i could find reviews on RPGs a tenth as good as the ones that you guys make!
More on the way!
15:27
That's so depressing, goddamn.
Yeah, it’s actually rather beautiful if you think about it
Most savage evisceration of two generations in a single intro i have ever heard
Haven’t watched the video yet, and I’m entirely out of my element with this system for sure, but seeing the way people talk is super interesting. I feel like I missed an entire era of history and I’m only now discovering it for the first time.
What an amazing review. The best review of a tabletop RPG that I've seen. Your analysis of the setting was very inspiring and well thought out. I never thought I'd run vampire, but you recontextualized it in a way that I think I could. I really want more vampire videos!
Sounds good and you should.
@@blacklodgegames would love a video on how to prepare a vampire campaign.
Back in the 1990s, I liked the whole idea of playing these classical monsters in a cool modern setting. But one thing I never warmed about was the game mechanics. It may work for each game, but it doesn't have any crunch to it. While I never played anything other than a bit of Vampire (2nd edition), I also heard the rules don't work when you have vampires and werewolves and faeries and (God forbid!) mages in the same game. Thinking about this today, I think making a game with different breeds of monsters is trying to play World of Darkness like you play D&D: humans, an elf, and a dwarf in the same party.
One other thing: the cultural commentary in the rewiew seems to be on point. I hang on mostly OSR places these days, as all the other venues of RPG discussion were taken by the usual suspects, but I often find at odds with the grognards when it comes to their takes on culture. Grognards, being mostly boomers and genXers, dream about an apolitical world that never was and don't even think about subverting a flawed work to their own enjoyment.
Completely correct, the world was never apolitical
I tottally disagree. I have been here since vampire 1st edition, I have mastered all five games and crossover games and I can say that the systems works, with a couple of tweaks.
The problem in the wod system is the multiple actions. That breaks the rules when you crossover games.
I would honestly recommend requiem to you, the lines were developed in a way to make crossplay easier, and there are no longer the hard barriers in lore that WOD had.
@@Konietzko My problem was always aggravated damage, it is far too common, and it in my opinion even more than multiple actions damages the combat system. That is not to say multiple actions are not a problem they absolutely are, and they can make fights drag on where one player gets to do action after action and makes the other people at the table annoyed.
Man, I wish it was possible to have deeper discussions on a platform like this. As a fellow OSR fan, I understand where you're coming from with the politics, but the issue is less that the idealized past was 'apolitical' than that there was less polarization. Because there was more of a broad consensus on most cultural issues, it was easier to put politics aside (or at least push them into the deep background) in most RPGs. These games also had no pretense that they were appealing to a global audience and needed to take worldwide cultural sensitivities into consideration.
Good video by Young Steveo here, I agree with mechanics informing and promoting good roleplay and immersion for a given setting, the best ones provide hooks for players and the GM to draw upon, this is why I loved the quirks and flaws system in the original Hackmaster game
Have not tried Hackmaster
Maybe it's because I married a Millennial and our kids are athletic nerds, but I'm a Gen-Xer who's lived all over the world and most people of my generation either still play tabletop RPGs or are just now getting into them. Meeting one who has absolutely no interest is rare at this point. And I haven't met a single person who's liked V5, largely because they feel the virtue signaling, subpar art (where even the worst Nosferatu looks like a fashion model), and anemic lore (streamline, streamline, streamline) make it less attractive than either picking up a new game (Vaesen anyone?) or just cracking open & homebrewing the older editions.
And for what it's worth, Goth isn't cringe -- EMO is cringe. And the problem is that outsiders & dilettantes couldn't tell the two apart.
Goth vs. Emo - Emos have to have validation. Goths don't give a fuck.
Goth is probably the cringiest thing that's ever been invented. People from the suburbs pretending they're hardcore and into the macabre because they don't see it in their day-to-day life.
Neither is cringe, you're just an insecure contrarian that wants to feel better than someone else despite being yourself a massive freak lol. The only thing cringe here is your attitude towards others. You want people to respect you, without you having to respect others. Entitlement at it's finest. Sounds like Gen X alright.
I agree, the hunger mechanic is great. In old editions blood pool was basically a mana bar. I didn't like the way they wrote out elder vampire. The struggle against the established order was at the core of the game. You either had to fight the system from the inside or try to destroy it from the outside. Now the book expressly says any newbie kindred can be the prince. If I run the game, I change this of course. However, the one sin I cannot forgive is the absolute dogshit artwork in the core book. I have no idea what they were thinking when they designed the art. The step down in the art quality from old editions is staggering.
I actually like the photographic art quite a bit but it's definitely a huge departure from the previous vibe.
Some of the art was repurposed from the cancelled MMO game.
It only played like a mana bar when your ST handwaved feeding. When you had to be a horrible monster at least once every other session it stopped feeling like that.
I really only cared for Christopher Shy's photographic style.
A lot of the art is concept art from the failed WoD MMO thats been repurposed.
In our VTM 2nd edition game we had to figure out how to capture a different snapshot in time (started, in character, in 2014...last time we played it's November 2016). But we made the game in 2021, looking back and interpreting what the post-Gothic Punk setting would really be heading toward our current time period. It had to be different. It had to really capture the specter of the 2010s going toward the 20s in order to work. Anyways, that was a brilliant review of 5th edition and it made me reflect on how important the snapshot in time element really is to a VTM game in any version of the game.
A man of culture and learning. Thanks for the support, that chronicle of yours sounds awesome!
@@blacklodgegames You're welcome, and thank you!
It's interesting.
Old VtM in modern times is the basically low tech Cyberpunk with vampires.
This is an amazing video. I am one of those original Gen-X players (Born 1978) who played with friends in dark basements in the mid to late 90s. The descriptions of millennial culture are captured perfectly by Young Steve Buscemi. This is a wonderfully done video and I look forward to more.
Excellent review. You guys do great work. Love the writing and presentation here. So mentally stimulating and informative. Can’t wait for more.
The biggest sin of this book is that I read it two times, and it never made me want to play an actual game!
I was too lost in the myriad of weird characters, strange images, and complicated rulings to even figure out what I wanted to play.
I like the video, but I'm pretty confident GenX still has a robust roleplaying contingency. "Long since checked out" needs some fact-checking. Have you glanced at the demographics of the OSR, for example?
This is why im working on my own game. Inspired by the classic feel of wod, but it is its own thing
This video's got some pretty strange ideas. The youngest millennials these days are in their 30s. Many are in their 40s. Millennials' edition of Vampire was Vampire: the Requiem (1e, and to a degree 2e). V20 was a nostalgia edition the for Gen Xers who passed over nWoD or missed VtM from the 90s, and V5 is a (mostly fumbling) attempt to appeal to the nostalgic Gen X VtM crowd (with the "remember Gehenna?") and today's Gen Z twentysomethings at the same time. The edition was originally headed by a specific subgroup of Nordic LARP types who fumbled the bag pretty badly (including quotes like "Requiem didn't say Vampires did 9/11 because Americans are pussies"), and the game since then has mostly been their corporate owners desperately trying to avoid controversy after managing to do things like making headlines for claiming currently-ongoing anti-gay pogroms in Chechnya is actually just a smokescreen by vampires (simultaneously pissing off internet keyboard-warriors who were mad about "trivialization" and the Chechen government for claiming that such pogroms were happening at all).
As for things like "V5 has gone out of their way to lump every single clan into one faction as a monolith", V5 is the furthest edition of VtM away from that. I remember having to bend over backwards to justify, say, a Camarilla or Anarch Tzimisce back in 2e or even the 20th anniversary edition. There were always "Camarilla clans" and "Sabbat clans" and whatnot in the old editions, the existence of minorities of antitribu (that occasionally got completely wiped out by metaplot changes) notwithstanding. V5 has gone out of its way to justify any and every clan showing up in any and every faction. The clan writeups are in different faction books as another corporate move to try to get people to buy as many sourcebooks as possible to get all of the available PC options, but the actual metaplot changes include things like "The Tremere pyramid has been shattered, and there are new, different subgroups of Tremere in every sect". Half of the bulk of Clan Lasombra joined the Camarilla, the other half of that bulk remained in the Sabbat, and some of them have joined the Anarchs. The writeup for the Tzimisce, the other founding clan of the Sabbat, mentions that it has members in all three factions, but particularly in the Sabbat and the Anarchs.
Hell, Paradox White Wolf's attempt at their own version of Critical Role, LA By Night, has an Anarch Ventrue, an Anarch Nosferatu, an Anarch Tremere, and an Anarch Malkavian all as major characters, and none of them are called out as weird unique exceptions the way a Camarilla or Anarch Lasombra or Tzimisce would have been in older editions (not even the Ventrue)! "All of the Ventrue are in the Camarilla" is even less true in V5 than it was in previous editions. The only "Anarch Clan" player character in their flagship Anarch game is the one Brujah.
I don't even like V5 (I don't like how the mechanical system is a half-thought-out hybrid between VtR and the older editions of VtM, elders and the Sabbat were practically removed from the game by very clunky metaplot developments, as a couple of examples). I mostly played VtR, and V20 when I wanted to play VtM. I can still pick out several sizable misconceptions about the game, here (and the fixation on "millennials" as the problem with the corporate cowardice of the game when they're not even the target audience is weird - Millennials were the consumer zeitgeist for games like this in the mid-late 2000s and the early 2010s, which was the new World of Darkness' heyday - it's Gen Z's hobby now, and I'm not willing to blame the corporate blandness of V5 on Gen Z either).
Will respond more later when I have a bit more time but it's less about who v5 is for and more about who it was written by. Millennials had their hands all over this edition and their world view is implicit in it.
As a millennial myself I played a ton of Requiem, and we have videos in the pipeline about that game as well
@@blacklodgegames Oh Requiem, looking forward to that one. Love cofd (especially 2e) myself.
Agree he completely fucked up his generational definitions. Other than that it’s a great review if you just grit your teeth and internally note “he means Gen z” every time he says millenial you’re golden.
Feels weird to see it pinned on millennials, since all the millennials I know prefer Revised for the same reasons you outline.
Really, it seems like more of a problem with the West Coast Corpo-progressivism that took down Occupy and every movement after.
Gen X has “long since checked out of the RPG market”?!?
HELL NO! They can have my Dark Sun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!
Also - do Dark Sun next. 😊
Always up for some more Dark Sun!
Dark Sun is a trip. I'd happily watch that content.
Bruh WTF is with all the Millennial bashing!? We are turning 40!
Millennial and Gen denotations are nebulous and shift with the current culture zeitgeist. Gen X and Y elders tend to lump everything after themselves as Millennials. pop culture and mass media discourse still use millennial to refer to woke progressive NPCs, snowflakes and the entitled brats with their Karen's. on the flip side the brainwashed zombie hoarders of woke refer to everyone older than themselves as Boomers. Typical modern hyper galvanization trying to force everyone into Red vs Blue team bs. so like no offense to actual millennials heh
Eh, it seems you've gotten so wrapped up in culture war rubbish and dunking on the millenials that you've forgotten to have fun...
Honestly, if I ran a VTM campaign, I would set it in the 90s.
1900 or nothing! lol
This definitely the best review of Vampire 5E i've seen
You mean the forty year old millennials? Those millennials?
Yes.
Man millennials are dying.lol I think it's Gen Z that killed it.
Great video. I played a lot of Vampire back in the 90s. I was lucky enough to be friends with a number of the original White Wolf crew members and later work with them at other game companies. I have yet to check out 5E, but now I have to take a look at it if only to see what you are talking about.
We have a follow video on the new Camarilla Source Book as well.
awesome. I'll have to check that out.@@blacklodgegames
This left me with exactly one question: Do you hate the millenials as much as the Tzimisce hate the Tremere?
I feel you tried to make a pretty decent game review, but wrapped it into so much "millenials bad, they took our toys" (Hint, they didn't, they are not a fking monolith, they are not White Wolf representatives and while the culture did indeed shift, and storytelling and the stories are mostly the same since the cavemen were hiding from Impergium-enjoying Garou. And liking, supporting or playing any version of the lore is possible - even at the same point once you agree on the mechanics, letting you make compelling stories even from these misunderstanding ("What do you mean by Ministry, and what do you meant by allegiance to the Anarch Movement. I've been a proud Follower of Set for the last 400 years and my allegiance is only to the clan and Set himself, no new movement I should share with the Brujah and Gangrel barbarians and vice-ridden Tzimisce hedonists incapable of subtlety!").) it made it so damn hard to listen to.
"The people younger than me make everything worse" is such a Camarilla Elder take, in all of its monstrous and hypocritical ways.
I love this game in all it's editions. I have since the 90s and always will. I appreciate this review tremendously and love that, despite its obviously flawed facade, you've found some hidden gems as I have.
Yeah, we don't want people to sleep on this game. Not perfect, but still great!
I appreciate, and agree with a lot of your criticisms towards the book, but I think that blaming Millennials is a mistake. I'm speaking as a member of Gen Z when I say this, but I think that a more likely suspect is the company who acquired White Wolf Entertainment, Paradox Interactive. Paradox Interactive is a studio primarily known for their work on video games, and likely acquired White Wolf specifically for the rights to make a VtM:B game. Personally, I think what's more likely than an entire generation of genetically enhanced HR employees created by the Technocracy to destroy the TTRPG community now striking the WoD franchise is that, instead, Paradox Interactive, after acquiring White Wolf, is trying to "clean up" the books in case of any possible controversies that could arise from players checking out the older books after playing VtM:B 2.
No offense meant toward you, but your age is showing in your words, and I think you need to reevaluate who your enemy is. The internet is, while a reflection of reality, still a funhouse mirror of constantly twisting proportions, and shouldn't be used as a tool to measure what the real world is like, as you seem to be doing here.
V5 be like: “you call play as an undead, sadistic serial killer that tortures and cannibalizes people but playing as a fascist is too transgressive.”
Gen X have checked out of the RPG market? Bullshit. We are the RPG market.. we have the disposable income to support our lifelong hobby. We're backing the kickstarter content to provide us the tools to continue our hobby as our friends have moved across the country instead of playing around a rickety game table in the back room of our local game shop; we're playing online via VTTs on 42" widescreen monitors. When you back a game for $50 dollars; we're at the God Tier spending hundreds or more. You don't see us at the watering holes; because the games now come to us.
Rant aside.. the rest of the review is spot on. As players since the first editions running Chicago by Night. we found the new "lore/setting" simply lacked the depth inspired by the Book of Nod and similar sources. So our stories remain in the War of Ages with the Apocalypse looming but having never arrived...
We've been waiting for this exact comment since we wrote the script to this video.
I remember that vampire 5E had a lot of rewrites because the material was problematic, they even had to reprint it.
It was a travesty that they caved
I miss the time when "problematic" actually meant there was a problem.
While I understand the sentiments in this video, it does come across as o wow the world changed and we didn't want a beloved IP to change with it.
Take some advice form a product of the 90s man , wear sunscreen.
Accept certain inalienable truths
Prices will rise, politicians will phalander, you too, will get old
And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you where young
Prices where reasonable, politicians where noble
And children respected their elders
The world has changed, in one breath you criticise melanials as a nostalgia machine and in another you state that the game is no longer what it was in the 90s.
But great work none the less. My criticism is more around opening a dialogue. I think the video is great
This was my take, too. The video poster has such strong “old man yells at cloud” energy. He whines that a tabletop game has different lore and theming from when he was a kid, while also bagging on Millennials (like him) for being nostalgia fiends who need things to be just like they were when we were kids
It’s literally a “[franchise] killed my childhood” argument, the very hallmark of someone terminally defined by the media IP they consume
Let people revisit old ideas in new ways. Let them fail, like Nu-White-Wolf *mostly* did. It’s bringing eyeballs and money back to a dead game. I know that without V5 we wouldn’t have had “Night Road,” for instance, and Night Road was the best adaptation since Bloodlines!
Whatever. I'm Gen X. We did it for the BTGs. (Big Tittied Goths).
Man, that description millennials is ruthless, cutting, and accurate.
The irony of a millennial saying millennials suck is hilarious
Exactly. This reviewer has no sense of irony.
He could have just said that VTM 5e is badly written and left it at that.
Man stopped eating the propaganda and just started mainlining it
I’m a millennial and I hate my generation as we are just like the boomers only without a silver spoon in our mouths
@@TheOrangex88 you are too damn old to still be in this phase.
Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't care who is currently living now to play its game. Is WtM5 being self-conscious about that?
Your highlighting of the zeitgeist as the cursed burden of VTM is The Truth. I shared this with the first gaming group that dared brave vampire the dark ages instead of jumping in to the gothic punk setting with me as storyteller back in 1996.
i wonder what themes vampire the masquerade would have if it was really counterculture in 2023.
It would be about starting a family and playing with your kids.
@@blacklodgegames I know you want to feel oppressed but no dude, there isn't some attack on families. Also, WoD has always been leftist
@@blacklodgegames It would be about Tzimisce using Vicissitude in your gender studies class.
After watching a few Let's Plays of V5 and being a fan of the 2004 video game, I decided to learn and run a campaign for the first time back in 2021. I cannot BELIEVE how shit the corebook is written-- its narrative, organization, explanations of fundamental concepts... You saying the narrative voice of the book assumes the reader has the context of the game already hits the nail of the head. I didn't even bother asking my players to look at any part of the book in preparation to play; I sent them a few youtube video introductions and did my best to explain what I knew myself. Over time I've learned the rules, lore, and ambience of the game from other places, but rarely the books themselves. It kinda makes me angry now that I think about it! Which is all to say, I do still think its a good RPG with some great mechanics and concepts; but you gotta dig to find them and then you gotta jerry-rig them to make them work.
On the plus side, being plucked out of the mortal world to end up in all this that you have no idea about is a classic introduction to the word in-universe :D
Only the latter half of the Millenial cohort and the entirety of Gen z. The first half of the millennials LIVED FOR revised and V20 along with their Gen X siblings.
I'm one of the very early Millenials (going by whoever arbitrarily sets the dates for these categories) and I loved VtM and Werewolf as a teen. I spread it amongst all my friends, some of whom are still fans to this day. I remember one time I was buying VtM books, or maybe it was the Wraith core book. The old guy at the game store obviously thought I was a bit young for it. He peered over his glasses at me, saying "This stuff will give you nightmares you know?". That only made me love it even more.
I recently just got into Vampire, and hearing you say that "The creators make it seem like rules themselves get in the way of the *real* game of storytelling" made me feel vindicated.
Reading through the v5 book has been a nightmare trying to understand the mechanics. You have the chapter that discusses rolls, but then if you want to know how rolls are used for disciplines, or how to roll for willpower, it's on a completely different chapter. Or, if you are reading disciplines, but then want to know how to heal yourself, it's on another chapter. It's like the creators made the mechanics so hard to find that you try to ignore that they are there.
It would've been so much better to have a full page of core mechanics instead of having to flip back and forth for one or two mechanics, and then having to go through half the book for another mechanic.
@@blade1hunter100 That is a problem of organization/editing (that I completely agree is a problem!), not the rules themselves.
@@blade1hunter100 That is a problem of organization/editing (that I completely agree is a problem!), not the rules themselves.
I have a feeling that throughout the history the game has been pretty light on mechanics in general.
The redesigned Humanity system is...a huge problem, too. Just design your Tenets so your characters never break them, and voila: your characters now has a license to not lose Humanity. It's....pretty sad.
Snark and irony is the current counter culture of today. I imagine some day someone will be making this video about a future version waxing about this edition as a product of its time...these damn kids and their new games.
Well I GM it since the 90s and with every campagin I was going backward instead of forward in time. Exploring the Vampiric world of the 1970 and 60s Chicago was some of the best things I ever did.
I think the same about the new edition but I indeed like some of the ideas and incoporated them into my game.
I played a mini campaign of V5 recently. My first actual roleplaying in a long time. I haven't read the book but I believe our GM ignored most of the lore. I did have fun with it and would play again.
I haven't played the older V:tM games though I do have V:tR (1e). I prefer the cleaner rules of nWOD but the blood dice mechanic is an interesting addition. Messy criticals did feel a bit weird to me sometimes though (especially outside of combat). The combat seemed a bit too stripped down. (Both of these could be because of how my GM runs things, combat isn't the most important part of vampire anyway IMHO).
VtR is extremely underrated and unfairly overlooked. We will be making videos about that game eventually.
I stuck with your review, at times taken aback by how derisive your critiques felt. Yet I couldn't deny how flavourful your points were, even if I think millennial society is more nuanced than you give it credit here, and was relieved to hear that you do see some merit in the game. As someone relatively new to the game (Came in via LA By Night during the Lockdown) and have yet to play their first session (Endlessly tweaking my character concept), I'd welcome more of your insights into V5. Character creation, Clans, factions etc. All the best.
Check out our videos on the camarilla and the mafia as game concept, I think you'll get a lot of value out of them. We are planning a series on the clans that will start rolling out over the next couple of months. Despite its flaws, we are big fans of V5 and the previous iterations
You nailed it YSB! Great video!
Thank you for this very correct analysis!
Well put... you said everything that I might had. It saddens me how they have to walk on eggshells, which does in fact encapsulate this age. I remember when they were making the werewolf book, and they had a picture of a native american in the glass walker tribe, they found the reference picture that the artist cribbed from and cried they were culturally appropriating native americans, then they immediately took it out, even though Native american images has universally always been big in werewolf. It sorta hurt my heart that they caved so easy... and probably had to to stay alive.
Gen X are busy raising kids and paying the mortgage? Are you sure? Because I am a Millennial and so are several friends and family members and our mortgages are paid off and our kids are starting to graduated college. Or did every one change the definitions and I never got the memo?
You nailed it. Regardless of its flaws and writing, I’ve still had a blast with it.
Really digging this channel. Keep it up guys
We will
Hi. I just found your channel. I only play VtM.
I agree with all of your analysis and interpretations.
Is there a way to watch one of your vtm games?
Have you ever filmed a vtm series?
I don't see in your Playlist.
We have not played it online on this channel
Part of a broader problem... culture in general is incredibly stagnant. Worse, those wearing the nostalgia goggles so hard that drive the relentless regurgitation of old franchises insist on changing them to suit the current political climate instead of just enjoying them for what they are. Its all so bleak.
One can only imagine what horrible fate will meet Changeling
On 08:30'ish when you are talking about all clans being packed in certain faction is false but I am guessing this view was only about the core book when it was released. You can have and should have wide variety in all factions with all clans because there is nothing in any of the books (Core, Anarch, Camarilla, Sabbat) that says that it is not possible.
I also disagree with the point of view that clans like Malkavians have lost their identity. Fuck that shit, Malkavians are still Malkavians - there is no need for overly bloated discipline pool when Dementation is a Dominate based power.
I love the Hunger system and the new flaws that work with; however, I don't like what they did with meshing the Disciplines and a few other things. Ultimately, when I get to it, I plan to bring the things I love about V5 and incorporate them into my V20 game, with the V5 metaplot updates. Right now, I'm running my players (consisting of 2 Millennials and 1 Gen Z (I'm a Xennial, who got into Vampire during high school in '94.) through all the Chronicles released in order, and when we move onto V5, we'll probably play that system just so they can give me feedback on how to merge the two, as I don't see a V6 ever coming.
Dude! You're talking is like poetry!
I am a Millenial and V5 marked the end of TRPGs for me. V20 Beckett's Secret Diary and a few insights about how V5 planned to play out Gehenna made me realize our hobby is going in a way I am not interested anymore.
I mean, Millenials saved Vampire via Chronicles Of Darkness.
My response to this is: is this the intent of the authors, or is this the result of corporate control? Is the lack of edge intentional or did some middle manager tell the author to excise it? That feeling, of atomization, of corporate blandness, of lack of authenticity in modern culture, is absolutely a huge jumping off point for a campaign.
As a millennial it's fascinating listening to zoomers talk about us. Curious how much is honest perspective and how much is the online character.
@@Morpheusbrutus don't know what video you were watching that had zoomers in it, we are millennials
as an elder millenial that shit pisses me off too. I remember a lot of the complexity/texture in older media and miss it
what do you think of the LA by Night actual play series by Jason Carl? I myself have learned a tremendous amount as a game master from watching Jason at work.
It's quite a good representation of some aspects of the WoD, and a notable improvement over Critical Role because the actors stay in character. Jason Carl appears to be a solid GM who takes both rules and roleplay seriously.
@blacklodgegames with that being said. Let's tell a Vampire story.
@@blacklodgegames also I love how the show figured that Anabelle being an SJW and a Brujah fits with Brujah being... well assholes.
@blacklodgegames u know even the critical role cast in LA by Night act much better in their roles there than in critical role
@@DareToWonder My early 90s Vampire 1st Ed Brujah Punk would prove your point of them being assholes by ripping you limb from limb and drinking your blood from the stumps for that remark.
Beautiful review. Congrats
Thanks!
Love the new hunger mechanic and would find a way to use it in any vampire game. But I will never touch V5. The writers eviscerated the feel and world of Masquerade. Nothing epitomizes that better than their treatment of The Giovanni, the Lasombra, and the Sabbat.
Originally choosing to make Sabbat a non player faction and solely a bad guy faction was brain dead and short sited. There are no good guys in Vampire, so the framing that the Cam or Anarchs were the default good guys was just silly. Cam were always the status quo and representation of stagnation and futility. The anarchs were change in the form of a Molotov cocktail wielded by a maniac, and the Sabbat were the only ones who had a clue of what terrible fate was coming…wrapped up in a religious cult and vampire superiority belief. All of them were awesome. All of them were awful.
Lasombra were just brutalized in the new edition. Complete misunderstanding by whoever was writing it as to what the Lasombra are.
Same with the Giovanni. One: necromancy and void magic are not the same and should not be the same discipline. They aren’t even close. Two: I lied above. There is a bad guy and it’s the Giovanni. They would NEVER combine with the other “clans of death.” Especially not from clans such as the Harbingers. The Harbingers want nothing more than to kill every single Giovanni.
Lasombra were beaten over the head with a baseball bat. They can't interact with technology without a lackey to do it for them. The famously self-motivated Lasombra, notorious for rarely using ghouls, apparently now wholly dependent on their servants to open doors, drive cars, make phone calls, or buy something off Amazon. Their Bane is Schrodinger's Invisibility; they are invisible and indistinguishable over telecommunications except that it gives a penalty to hiding your identity or remaining hidden. Horribly designed Bane paired with a terrible Discipline that requires so many Rouse checks to get anything done, and gives Stains 20% of the time, for effects that don't justify the added risk.
I would add the Setites to that list. A doomsday cult built around the worship of their Antediluvian ancestor, bent to the corruption of mankind one mortal, one vampire, at a time... transformed into the Ministry, what appears to be a parody of that one disingenuous religious guy who always dies in Stephen King novels. Seems like they ditched the actually interesting Egyptian chaos god lore for another unsubtle dig at religion.
As for "no good guys", I would reframe it as "no good Sects". Though the V5 line certainly implies the Anarch ideals are virtuous. It is possible to defend or tear down each Sect if you try hard enough, I've encountered many a player who insists on the virtue of the Sabbat because they know the Antediluvians exist.
Except the Anarchs are definitely the least evil of all the factions, and the Sabbat was fucking brain dead. It belongs in the 90s. The Sabbat was never interesting, they were a token bad guy faction that WW desperately tried to make interesting and failed.
More of this.
Ask and you shall receive.
This is one of the best reviews ive ever encountered. Well done sir!
Is V5 the best version of Vampire though?
@@TheJDough1 it's a mixed bag. Has some really good stuff and really bad stuff. Each edition has strengths for what made the game cool. I really like V5 for the lore consolidation and new mechanics though. The newer books for V5 are pretty bad though.
@@blacklodgegames Thank you for such a prompt reply.
I have VtM 20th anniversary edition which has tons of content. Are the new mechanics that you like, portable into the older system?
"I'm young Steve Buscemi"
Subscribed
Do you house rule the setting?
Aside from making my own city, no. I maintain the factions as presented.
Dang that review really did hit 💯
TLDW; 40 year old man rants about "kids these days" un-ironically for 8 minutes before reviewing a game.
It's almost as if the main criticism of the game is that kids these days ruined portions of what made it great.
U know I had an idea for a humanity system that includes your Connation (will power, capacity to initiate mental energy etc.) and Affect (sensitivity, capacity to feel, be present.) That go from 1 to 5. When either becomes 1 u are clinical and the beast takes over. You combine both to get your humanity score.
Also u want to resist something u need to roll under Connation but if you want to be possessed by someone you need to roll over.
Affect would be to emphasize and sense things roll below. So high is good. You want to keep your cool while seeing a massacre roll over so low is good.
Virtue signaling and inclusivity without adding narrative substance at best waters down the game and is a distraction at worse. I wish the writers understood that adding characteristics for it's own sake betrays the story. If a character is introduced as (x) there needs to be a reason and a narrative benefit. It can't just be so that people who fit the (x) group feel represented and validated.
I wrote a book that had no race descriptions for any of the characters. It was unnecessary and allowed the reader to add their own flavor to the story. By the same token there's no reason to describe a character's orientation or gender identify unless the narrative is enhanced by doing so.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the Blood Potency mechanic and how it's implemented in this game. They seem designed to work well at low levels, with higher BP more of an afterthought. Certain side effects of BP aren't clearly explained, like the reduced Hunger slaked her mortal. Does it apply at the start of feeding? At the end? As a percentage of the whole? Does Vitae have the same restrictions on resting Hunger level as mortal blood, and how does it interact with the Methuselah's Thirst Flaw? And do the Rouse re-rolls compensate for the higher resting Hunger level in a meaningful way, assuming the high BP character doesn't drain (possibly multiple) victims per feeding (speedrunning towards Wightdom in the process)?
'80 dude here. I have dozens of friends who still play TTRPGs, whether it's in person or online. Hell, some still larp. Anyways, I don't think this is a "millennial" thing, per se. Overcorrecting to attract a non-existent mainstream market is the problem. Aesthetically, the younger crowd is a fusion of late '90s goth and cyberpunk, and their headphones are blasting screamy metal or Scandinavian tribal/folk revival stuff.
Basically, they're trying to cast a bigger net, but the holes get bigger the further away from the center you get.
As a millenial that played previous edition, what they did to the Malkavians pretty much turned me off from Vampire The Masquerade forever
I had to sub just because of the line “faux intellectualism you see in disgusting sewers like Reddit or Harvard” 😂
This whole video is the most brutal take down of the Millennials I’ve ever seen. Not always fair, but thoroughly entertaining. Also, you’re dead on with how good an innovation the hunger mechanics were.
Young Steve Buscemi ... cannot unsee.
I think that the argument that rule simplification is purely bad isn't one that sees the full picture.
Point 1: I'm in my mid-twenties and have been playing ttrpgs since I was 13. As time goes on, and as I try more and more systems and different campaigns and whatnot, I realise the rules really matter fuck all. The generation that V5 has been made for, largely sees it the same way. We want to have a quick and easy to pick up experience because we like trying new things. It's hard to delve deep into complex and broad systems for a campaign that will probably last all of 3-5 sessions before real life gets in the way because people are crunching for exams and can't DM these 3 months, or because you gotta work 2 jobs just so you can maybe make rent this month, and any hobby just comes secondary to survival.
Point 2: I don't know if this is the same for all parties, but I find that it's a lot more fun to roleplay rather than ruleplay, or rollplay or whatever other fancy word exists to describe it. Basically, even in games I DM I do this little neat thing I call "narrative moments" where basically, I temporarily give the storyteller role to one of my players, and they get to narrate everything that happens through the eyes of their character, as if they were a temporary DM of sorts. For these, I ignore most actual in-game rules and just go with whatever idea is coolest and best for the story we're trying to collectively tell. The point is that I find an overcomplicated rule system to be stifling to the creativity of both myself and my players, and thus we prefer systems with less rules to not limit that creativity.
Look how they massacred my son.
This is a fascinating review of the game. I loved the comparison of the game to vampires themselves. I feel like a big reason the games are so different is because of who is writing them. The new writers definitely have corporate expectations to meet. I'm someone that very much has identified a lot of transgressive views in previous edition, and while some are better left behind, I do believe that some did give the games an identity that can not be replicated in a sterile corporate office. Ultimately when people write these books, there are those who will assume that any depictions of graphic material is an endorsement of such. Also let's be clear, I am most assuredly what many would consider woke. I think that many issues with this book are totally a fault of corporate interests. They want to introduce their product to as many people possible which does not work for a niche product. Still they hire people to that end. I don't think the ideologies might be to blame, but instead the corporation. The suits want a product that sells well and only do surface level research as to what people like about those products. So sadly they see that since progressive themes are on the upswing, they put it in as much as they can. For me, as someone who ultimately benefits from this progressiveness, many of their efforts come off as tokenism. I think if you want a better written vampire story about counter-culture you'd need people from the counter-culture to write it. A corporation could never do it.
Excellent points
I started playing Vampire in 1993. It was a breakthrough in RPGs. Over the years, White Wolf put out too much crap, too inconsistent in quality of writing and in connecting to their own canon. When V5 was in development, I was initially excited. I even got a preview copy before it was released. After I read the preview copy, I knew it was going to be a tragic failure...and indeed it looks like you did too.
On a more positive note, me and 3 of my Gen X college buddies who all played back in the 90s started up a campaign using our own mash up of 1st and 2nd edition rules. We've been playing since 2020 and it's incredible.
Give vampire the Requiem 2nd edition a chance some time. It is unfairly overlooked
@@blacklodgegames I will admit, like you indicated, there are some cool mechanics that they implemented to try and realize the vampire's curse. Certainly some of those things could be adapted and implemented into a home game.
thank you BLG, money saved
Steve Buscemi is cool though