As we move forward with the V20 Companion, it’s important to learn from what has come before. Both to avoid repeating any mistakes and to ensure that we’re hitting the same high notes that kept players happy with the core V20 book, I want to take stock.
What worked about the Open Development process for you? What didn’t?
If you have the book — and if you get it later, please come back to this topic — what most excited and surprised you once you cracked its hefty covers?
What can we do to make this process work better? What do we need to keep doing?
Your feedback is important here, which is the whole reason we’re doing Open Development. How can we fine-tune this hands-on system to get even better results?
Unrelated: If you’re looking for the Succubus Club playlist from the Grand Masquerade, you can find it here.
What I think was amazing about the Open Development process during V20 is that by listening to the constant feedback from your fans you guys created what I can define as a definitive roleplaying game which incorporates years of information and enthusiasm in one single book and still keeps the feeling of its predecessors.
My favorite part of V20 was that the way it is written which made me remember my older chronicles and the characters from the novels. Still it feels like a new vision from the World of Darkness, more focused on a personal level, which is what I like the most in “Vampire: The Requiem”.
Maybe to improve the Open Development process it could help you guys to open some kind of polls or voting contests for the gaming community.
I’ve been reading other commentaries and I guess I’ll have to support the idea of more of the “Cities By Night” book series. Since, there are lots of information which you can get from place of the world that have changed during the last decade.
Long Live V20!
My favourite part on reading over the book and the pdf is that it’s the game I know… the game I love, but it’s the game that that game should be. It had old elements that brought back memories and had new direction that balanced some of the things we always talked about, and knowing that the changes were something that the players really had input on made a difference.
Having been a part of the open development process, both by reading and contributing, it was an excitement to see what we had said and argued for and about make it into the book, as well as to know why some of the suggestions didn’t… it wasn’t like when revised came out where it was a surprise, but an arbitrary one – this had new developments in it, but it was more about seeing how it was all implemented.
Knowing that White Wolf were reading from the comments people left in the threads and then seeing the discussions turning into printed material in the book (which I have only just started to read in it’s pdf form – so HUGE! *^_^*b). Knowing the impact was real, the opinions of loyal old players being taken on board; the sense that it really was a book whose final form grew out of the family’s input. 🙂
I loved the fact that it really was left open to players and fans to take our input from years and years of running this game in a variety of fashions.
Also that it seemed that the fans really got what you were trying to do with minimal confusion, that White Wolf was looking to really boil the game down to it’s base components and left plot and overall arching metaplot to the storyteller.
Furthermore, how everything is written really takes the handcuffs off players and storytellers by leaving everything up in the air, like: are there really only 7 salubri? The ‘dead’ bloodlines, are they really gone? Almost every plot point or major detail is presented in such a way that storytellers and players and really work with the details presented.
The one single thing that negatively surprised me most about the V20 was that you had all the discipline levels from 1 to 9 in it, but none of any combo-disciplines. Regarding the fact that you had “only” 530 pages room for it I can understand that… there were so many combo-disciplines published in the clanbooks and other sources that this might have exceeded the limits of V20.
I would be very glad if you might find the room to implement those combo disciplines into the V20 companion. I know this might take up a lot of space. I would be willing to pay as much as for the V20 or even 20 bucks more for the V20 companion if I had the chance to get “the complete VtM stuff in two books” with it and the V20.
Best regards from Germany,
Durro
I second the comment on combo disciplines, though I will readily admit, there’s so much in this book already it hardly surprises me. (Still, would’ve been nice)
The book was awesome to look through, it made me relive a ton of what I’ve done in the past as an ST and a Player and I was happy to go back to that time.
The open development was great, I enjoyed watching as each opinion was weighed and thought out, then responded to. Even if it was turned down it was heard, and that said volumes for what I felt was one of the best endeavors you guys have done in design.
I’d like to see more of that sort of cooperation between the developers and the player base, it seems to really open the floor up for the process’ that do, in fact, work the best.
I would gladly have a bit information about the types of vampires and sects that were neglected in V20. It can very well be in simplified form.
* The Laibon (African vampires). Their society, unique bloodlines and special kind of morality.
* The Ashirra (Muslim vampires). A sect much older than the Camarilla and the Sabbat. Though only powerful in northern Africa and the Middle east, it is is important in several books.
* Cathayans (Kuei-Jin). Even though they are not Cainites and not subject to the curse of Caine, they are still vampires, though of a different kind, and from time to time interact with the kindred.
I also missed mechanics for creating ordinary mortals, and the mechanical changes by the embrace . In almost all of the best chronicles the characters started as ordinary mortals and where embraced quite a bit later. I know this is easily taken care of by a creative storyteller, especially by using a slight modification of the Ghoul-creation process, but I still want it.
The way I do this these days is Attributes 6/4/3, Abilities 13/9/5, Virtues 7, Background 3, Freebies 15. Vampiric Merits and Flaws may be taken, but will not have effect before embrace. Storyteller decide Generation. Other vampiric backgrounds must be earned from scratch. The embrace gives one more dot to one Attribute in primary and secondary groups and 3 Discipline dots. Players may ask nicely for a particular clan, but ST decides.
As a free pdf I would like a conversion guide and summary of the changes to from 2nd and Revised to V20. Mechanical changes: like present the new Awareness Talent with a list of the Discipline rolls now using it instead, and short explain what happened to Dodge and how the maneuver dodge now is performed (Dexterity + Athletics), etc.
It would be useful for a Storyteller who uses V20 to give to his troupe whom didn’t manage to get V20, but still got the older editions. Also useful to easier find the changes as V20 is very massive and it is easy to fail to notice some of the differences if the reader is used to the older editions.
Going off on the combo discipline tangent, I was often disappointed with them. They were neat powers, but fell into the realm of “you can’t have this” because MOST of them required 6+ dots in a discipline, or higher generation than a PC could have. If the ST needs to make up random powers for NPCS, he can do so and doesn’t really need printed material. Print combo disciplines that players can buy.
I liked the fact that, late as I was coming to the process of Open Development, that some of the very ideas I’d wanted to find in V20 arrived. The change to Necromancy’s Sepulchre Path were awesome, but I wanted a more succinct description of how it differed from the Ash Path…
Still, it was the very fact that I WAS late coming to the process that still cheeses me a little. I don’t have a huge issue with anyone involved, but I found there were weird barriers to my participation that I couldn’t overcome. Most of it was my own fault, but other parts were perhaps more institutionalised in nature.
The above notwithstanding, I feel that the experience was a wonderful hybrid of transparency, collaboration and ‘crowdsourcing,’
I’m sure the open development process would greatly benefit if there was an initial material offered by the creators to be used (read and playtested(!)) by everyone involved; who would then have a common ground to build the final product (and offer better grounded input).
I’d really like to see some alternative rules for combat, etc. (like the ones presented by Christopher Kubasik on the Mage screen.)
and the ones on the introductory Vampire booklet that used D6s instead of D10s.