Playing the Tabletop RPG Online?

[Brother Erxkum]

I never played the tabletop RPG and I'd very much like to try it, is there any community that does it online?

[Star★Dive]

Not that I know of, but I have been in a few online groups which I fell into by chance. I've never seen one done well, tools, resources, communication, player availability. If there is such a group though, i'd be interested inknowing about it.

[Brother Erxkum]

Add the problem os newbies like me not understanding much and you have a bigger issue.
I'd love to play it here with my group, but first I want/need to experience a campaign in order to be able to have an idea of how to master a vampire session.

[Touch of Oblivion]

I would check roll20 dot net. They may have people who play on there and maybe one of those groups would be willing to take you in and teach you. No promises though, but it's the only option I can think of for you unless you find a local gaming store that has a group you can learn with IRL.

[Star★Dive]

I've been in 4 online games, 2 of which had non-toxic players, and were friendly enough with eachother to comply with the rules and go along with those who had played before, without causing a big deal about things. These two groups weren't the best stories I've been in, but they were good, they had a final session, and resolution.

The third group I was in had a few toxic players, people who didn't want to go along with the main flow of the group or team, and tried to get the ST to basically "give them a one man show" (which is being unfriendly, and makes more work for the storyteller to have to breakaway a spinoff for another individual, even though they thought they were being cool). My third group ended up cutting out two players, who had to be "written off" as having been killed while on assignment because they were impolite. The three remaining players had to slow down participation, between real life and the story being shifted due to the actions of the two rude players mucking up the investigation. It never saw a final resolution, and the group just drifted apart after the bad taste left everyone feeling dry.

The fourth group I was in had a VERY DEDICATED ST, she made every effort to facilitate our schedules, and produce a virtual tabletop with cheat sheets for our discilpines, contacts, and backgrounds for us to use. It was the most organized group I had been in. This group had four people, but one person wanted to be a "vampire hunter", halfway through the chronicle, and wouldn't take no for an answer. They started trash talking people behind their back, which caused two other players to end up getting into an argument about a difference in political ideology, which left the ST and I being the only two left who actually wanted to continue the story. It was impossible after the three of them decided they all hated eachother, so I asked the ST to just write up a summary for how my vampire's story ended. A few dice rolls, and a time shift five years later, my vampire faked their death after escaping their haven being set on fire by "hunters". Changed their name, and started over in a new city where they ended up doing pretty well as an uber driver, who ended up becoming the personal driver of the son to a corporate exec. Later discovered the other two political vamps that got left behind, ended up getting killed as sabbat/camarilla fodder. I ended up being the only one who survived "deathtrap city". Had the ST of been anyone else, fairly sure the chronicle would have fallen apart.

[Brother Erxkum]

Thank you both, you were a great help.

Edit: I've created an account on roll20, and created a LFG thread on the community forums, currently the only game that's about to begin is spoken in spanish and while I speak spanish, roleplaying in spanish would be detrimental for native speakers.

[Bloodartist]

There is a facebook group for Vampire the masquerade. If you use FB try looking for it.

[Birck]

Vampire is more of a social game than a blasting through dungeon type stuff like D&D usually goes. So, it has in some ways kept the game a bit more unpopular, while you can run a game like a D&D game it's just not built for that. The best storytellers in the Vampire world understand how vital good characters and world building is.

Obviously occasionally fights will go down but even the rules system of Vampire doesn't work as well for combat usually as something like D&D.

[Cryptic]

Alas, you're way late to the party. About fifteen years ago, White Wolf (the now-defunct publishers of the original pen'n'paper RPG) ran some official text-based sites where you could play their games in a persistent gameworld via the then-cutting-edge technology of JavaScript(tm). They were pretty much riddled with teenaged drama, cliques, and admins enamoured of the petty power that they had over players, but they were still the best thing on tap.

Those were shut down when White Wolf rebooted the World of Darkness into WoD 2.0, which nobody liked very much, and then the WoD 2.0 servers died when White Wolf did, not long after. There were some attempts to have unofficial player-run servers, but they pretty much all succumbed one after another to the death spiral of waning interest. These games (along with various other MUDs and MUSHes) got popular right when dial-up was widespread, but once MMOs with real graphics became a thing, most players gravitated to games where they didn't have to type so much or deal with "OOC" angst and bickering.

In a way, it's kinda suitable that this game is so focused on the End Times, because it really was this game series' last hurrah. If you really want to play it as it was meant to be, the best (and likely only) way is to get some friends together in person, order a pizza, and do it face-to-face. All the source material is available in PDF if you know where to look, and honestly, just reading a lot of the setting material is worthwhile as a thing unto itself, even if you don't ever wrangle a group to play.

[Brother Erxkum]

Originally posted by Birck:

Vampire is more of a social game than a blasting through dungeon type stuff like D&D usually goes. So, it has in some ways kept the game a bit more unpopular, while you can run a game like a D&D game it's just not built for that. The best storytellers in the Vampire world understand how vital good characters and world building is.

Obviously occasionally fights will go down but even the rules system of Vampire doesn't work as well for combat usually as something like D&D.

Ho I know, it's just my girlfriend started watching The vampire diaries on netflix and she's enjoying very much, she's not a gamer so she doesn't really care for fights or dungeons & dragons, I figured a game more story oriented like Vampire is perfect for her, and I want to host a game for her and a couple of friends, but I can't do that without experience and risk everyone having a bad time, discussing rules, checking the rulebook, etc.

I really wanted to experience the game once to have an idea of how to be a decent storyteller.

Originally posted by CrypticReference:

Alas, you're way late to the party. About fifteen years ago, White Wolf (the now-defunct publishers of the original pen'n'paper RPG) ran some official text-based sites where you could play their games in a persistent gameworld via the then-cutting-edge technology of JavaScript(tm). They were pretty much riddled with teenaged drama, cliques, and admins enamoured of the petty power that they had over players, but they were still the best thing on tap.

Those were shut down when White Wolf rebooted the World of Darkness into WoD 2.0, which nobody liked very much, and then the WoD 2.0 servers died when White Wolf did, not long after. There were some attempts to have unofficial player-run servers, but they pretty much all succumbed one after another to the death spiral of waning interest. These games (along with various other MUDs and MUSHes) got popular right when dial-up was widespread, but once MMOs with real graphics became a thing, most players gravitated to games where they didn't have to type so much or deal with "OOC" angst and bickering.

In a way, it's kinda suitable that this game is so focused on the End Times, because it really was this game series' last hurrah. If you really want to play it as it was meant to be, the best (and likely only) way is to get some friends together in person, order a pizza, and do it face-to-face. All the source material is available in PDF if you know where to look, and honestly, just reading a lot of the setting material is worthwhile as a thing unto itself, even if you don't ever wrangle a group to play.

Really that is awesome, why doesn't anyone re-create this? Would it be that much of an undertaking? Well, with V5 coming out this year I'd figure the interest would increase.
Also, I've read Requiem V2 rulebook completely and nWoD Corebook, I found the story of the corebook really interesting, "when you see it, it sees you and there's no going back" and the god-machine thing.

As for requiem I didn't find it bad and I had mixed feeling with some mechanics:

• + Blood Potency, I really enjoyed this mechanic. An ancient vampire is more powerful in itself, and a young vampire could become very powerful very fast if he committed Diablerie, with proper penalties to dissuade from doing it.
  
• + Blood Potency, I really enjoyed this mechanic. An ancient vampire is more powerful in itself, and a young vampire could become very powerful very fast if he committed Diablerie.
  
• +Owl demon thingies, I didn't really understand the stryx or whatever they were, background very well but I found them to be an interesting supernatural enemy to have.
  
• +/- No Cain storyline, but that could be integrated I guess.
  
• - Committing Diablerie, makes a vampire stronger, doesn't that mean there should be some very strong "Beast" or "animal" vampires with little sense of discretion running around EVERYWHERE? Or would the clans/Princes squash them before they were a threat to them and to the masquerade? This puzzled me.
  
• - No Vampire generations, I really think the generation mechanic is good, the lack of it seems odd, a mix of blood potency and generation would be better wouldn't it?
  
• - Older/stronger/less human vampires, scorch under the sun, while vampires with high humanity can stand some degree of sunlight. What? Why? How does this work thematically? I know as a mechanic it sounds right but thematically, a stronger vampire should be able to resist longer.
  
• - Vampires in turpor forget, have dreams and get confused? What a load of bull****.

But I have no experience whatsoever with both games, I found Requiem different but no really bad, so why is requiem and nWoD disliked?

[Bloodartist]

https://www.worldofdarkness.com/

nWoD ditched massive amount of old WoD lore and clans, and disciplines and so on. People were understandably upset. It was an attempt to reboot the franchise, it kinda failed. VtM has since become the new standard.

[Cryptic]

Yeah, they had built up a long history and dedicated playerbase, and folks don't like massive changes. There had been previous "Editions" of the books that altered the setting and changed mechanics, but they clearly felt the need to massively overhaul some of the more problematic stuff in VtM more than they figured they could with a Fourth Ed.

In particular, I think they did the right thing in doing away with generations and the Gehenna plotline. Around the turn of the century, that kind of apocalyptic thinking was pretty popular (remember X-Files and Millenium?), but by 2003, we were a post Y2K society and it wasn't really a thing anymore--not to mention, sooner or later, you have to either pay off that storyline or reveal that it was, indeed, superstition.

Not having a looming Armageddon makes the new setting more sustainable, and the way blood potency works now avoids some pitfalls as far as keeping power levels from getting out of control.

Had they tried harder to finesse it and retcon a few things, they could have held the ship together. As it is, they burned up far more goodwill among their players than they could afford to, and most of the old guard (m'self included) just packed up and either moved on to other games or just kept playing by the old rules, instead of buying an entire *new* library of books because they tried to make the old ones obsolete (which many of us suspected was the real motive).

[=(eG)=™Cthulhu]

White Wolf wrote themselves into such a corner that they literally had no other way out than to actually end the setting. Once Demon was released they had passed the point of credibility in terms of 'yet another sign of the end times'.

Personally I liked most of the new games though. As an ST Requiem gave you a lot more to work with in terms of having clan and covenant allegiances instead of just Camerallia or Sabbat games. The sheer number of bloodlines and disciplines they put out was great. (Architects of the Monolith, yes)

I never could get into the first Werewolf. Playing captain planet with claws was just dumb. It had no direction and no real point to any of it beyond how heroically can you die. Forsaken actually had a goal. A decent turf, cleaned up and controlled with local spirits intimidated, working for you or hunted, was a goal players could actually achieve.

And some of the core books are worth getting no matter what system you play. Ghost Stories, Mysterious Places, and Urban Legands have material that works for any game.

[Bloodartist]

Oh, and another complaint I remember being spoken about requiem: it was too vague. It tried to offer more freedom in creating your story, but GM's apparently got too confused about its lack of guidelines. There was no concrete timeline or history. Truth was what you wanted it to be.

[Cryptic]

Originally posted by =(eG)=™Cthulhu:

White Wolf wrote themselves into such a corner that they literally had no other way out than to actually end the setting.

You're very right about that. Had I been in their shoes, I'd probably have just gone ahead and run the Apocalypse scenario and sold a buncha books, but had the aftereffects be something along the lines of "Now that the Old Ones are truly dead, a ripple effect spreads throughout the world and changes X, Y, and Z occur", leaving the setting more like Requiem, but still enough like Masquerade to keep people happy.


They already established a precedent for something like that when they torched the original Wraith and revamped the whole afterlife gimmick into something recognizable but streamlined (and did something similar for Mummy).

They absolutely had to make a change and get out of the corner, but too many babies went with the bathwater for my liking, and as Bloodartist points out, the new setting is rather... bland. The original one had a lot of flaws, but it also had a feel and personality that jumped at you, the new stuff just feels enormously watered down.

Also, given that they also ended up axing Aberrant because of its inevitable apocalyse, I gotta wonder... what is it with White Wolf and writing themselves into these corners?

[=(eG)=™Cthulhu]

Originally posted by CrypticReference:

Originally posted by =(eG)=™Cthulhu:

White Wolf wrote themselves into such a corner that they literally had no other way out than to actually end the setting.

Also, given that they also ended up axing Aberrant because of its inevitable apocalyse, I gotta wonder... what is it with White Wolf and writing themselves into these corners?

The same thing that happens with many companies and teams who suddenly have an unexpectedly successful product - you stay the course because it works. Looking at a number of games, computer, miniature, and RPG the unexpected hit tends to keep milking itself until it falters*. At that point most teams double down on what is actually the flaw and end up making things much worse.

They had a template. Create monster, create relationship lines and abilities, tie into end of reality, profit. Sadly they never evolved it.

Exalted and Scion escaped the whole apoc theme but never really took off like the WoD titles.



*How Call of Duty and Battlefield have avoided this still stuns and infuriates me. Nothing but reskinned sequals one after another.