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[Scytale]

http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/06/05/1428216.shtml

This makes me very happy I'm  a huge fan of the WoD universe, I used to GM a game of Vampire: the Requiem and I still play Mage: The Awakening every so often.

I haven't played a MMORPG since I quit playing Ultima Online 3 years ago. So I hope it is up and running in quicker then the four-five years the article suggests it will take. I think the way they'll run it is by releasing vampire as the first part of the online universe and then later on they'll probably introduce add on's that will allow players to be Werewolves and Mages etc...

WRT to Vampire: I hope they stick with the system of Clans and Covenants used in the requiem setting  a lot of the roleplaying revolves around politics so I think getting the Covenant's right will be really important if the game is going to work. Combat between players will be interesting especially if it takes Blood potency into account, which basically means the older the character the stronger it will be (I think EVE online, which is made by the same company is a bit like this, with skills that increase over time rather then through use).

Anyway anyone else here played any of the WoD games or have any thoughts about how well it will translate to a mmorpg?

[0bsessions]

I've been eagerly awaiting something of the sort for years. Pretty much any tabletop RPG has the capacity to translate into an MMO, it's just dependant on how well it's done.

World of Darkness has a lot of buot in potential with all the races and classes involved. PVP's a must and an effective given. Aside from the warring vampie clans, you have the Hunters and Werewolves.

I'm one of the people who quite enjoyed Bloodlines and that game proved how effective this game could be. Being that, I believe, Vampire is their most popular seires, I figure that aspect will be a given, but I get the feeling it'll likely be a full-fledged World of Darkness, as opposed to just one setting.

I haven't played since Masquerade, but I figure they'll go with Reqiuem setting as, to my knowledge there are less clans. Throwing in too many clans while throwing in werewolves, mages and hunters would make it way too complex and take way too long to develop into the game.

The prime difficulty would be in setting up the passage of time. Some kind of liberties would need to be taken with vampires and their fatal vulnerabities to sunlight.

[Storm Rider]

*shrug* Yet another MMO, only this one's 5 years off? Sounds rather inconsequential to me.

[Scytale]

What I think will be good about a WoD game is that unlike a lot of the traditional RPG games it's not focussed on gaining skill points and levelling up, it's more about roleplaying, climbing the ladder of vampire politics interactng with the other characters. It's not the sort of game where you acquire all these mega magic item max out all your levels and go around PKing everyone in site.

Wrt to the differences between Masquerade and Requiem: the way clans work is a bit different now, Basically it's split up in two:

Firstly you have the clan, which represents who sired you, what your lineage is etc. There are 5 clans (ranging from Nosferatu, which are the disfigured monsterous type vampires, through to Ventrue, who are sort of the elite aristocratic type group), the choice of clan affects your appearance, the disciplines you have access too and how the outside world percieves you. Within the structure of the clans there's also the idea of a  'Bloodline', which are kind of off shoots of one of the clans (Morbus are a good example, they are a bloodline of the Mekhet clan, that has 'mutated' over the centuries, they are only able to sustain themself by feeding on the blood of the dieing or disseased).

The second part is the idea of a covenant, the covenant is basically a political organisation, which represents your characters beliefs and idea's. There are 5 covenants + an extra 'unaligned' grouping. Each of the covenants have a different goal ('The Carthian Movement', is kind of like ultra liberal democratic sort of vampire society, its members believe vampire society needs to adopt ideas from Mortals, they are kind of like the reformists of vampire society. The 'Ordo Dracul' are a kind an estoic order formed by Dracula, who believe it's possible to transcend the curse of vampirism and become mortal again, so most of there actions revolve around finding a cure for vampirism. Then there's the 'Lancea Sanctum' who were formed by Longinus, they are kind of like a maleformed christian sect who believe vampires have been choosen by god to enforce he's will, they believe that their purpose is too demostrate what happens when people stray from god's will and consider it heretical to suppress the vampiric urges).

Your clan kind of affects what role you have within the covenant, so Nosferatu and usually spies, Mehket are information/intelligence,  Gangrel are the enforcers\muscle  etc.

The vampire powers you get (called disciplines) are affected by both your clan and your covenant.
Ther are two common types of disciplines, physical and psychic (stuff like Resilance, vigor, Obfuscate) and then there are the unique discplines that the clans have access to eg (Mehket get Auspex discipline, related to their enhanced insight. Nosferatu, get Nightmare discipline and are able to manipulate the fears in others). Some of the covenants grant you powers if you advance far enough along them, eg. If you advance far enough through The Ordo Dracul you can eventually overcome some of the vampiric weaknesses, like being able to stand in sunlight for a limited amount of time and things like that. The rarest disciplines are specific to a particular bloodline and can take years to emerge, to use the morbus as an example, eventually they can gather the power to spread dissease.

All the covenants mingle together within the city (called a domain) and try to influence the decision of the prince (ruler of the domain) in various ways.

I guess people reading this are going "so how is it any different to generic rpg X with races and classes" the major thing that makes V:TR stand apart is the idea of a blood potency, the more blood you consume the more powerful the blood you need to consume to survive. So a newbie vampire can gain sustance by feeding off animals and things but eventually they need to move onto humans to survive, as you increase in power (eg skills) the blood potency goes up until eventually you have to start feeding off other vampires to gain sustance (which is forbidden and punishable by death in vampire society). This has a sliding scale as well until eventually you'll only be able to survive by feeding off master vampires. To counter act this a vampire can voluntarily (or is sometimes forced) to enter a kind of hibernation (called torpor). While in Torpor you start loosing power (stats decrease) and your blood potency is lowered until you can sustain yourself on regular humans again.

This will make the stats/levelling side of the game really interesting, eventualy a charcter will reach a certain point where you will have to make the choice betwen going into hibernation and loosing some of your abilities or attmepting to feed off another vampire in secret in order to level up further. So once a character starts getting uber powerful he won't be able to remain that way for very long.

Feeding off a vampire also grants you extra powers, eg if a newbie vampire fed off an older vampire they would gain skills a lot quicker then they otherwise would because their blood potency would be so high, if caught though it would have pretty servere consequences. This would make the PVP aspect of the game really interesting. At least for vampire vs vampire combat.

The RPG also has the idea of morality (humanity for vampires) and derrangements. The higher your humanity the easier it is for you to get by in the mortal world and pass for human. The derrangment side of things is pretty interesting as well, say your character gets trapped in a burning building and comes near to death, there is a chance you'll develope an derrangement like an unnatural fear of fire (eg if you see a fire, someone lights a match near you, you smell smoke etc, theres a chance you'll either freeze up and be unable to act or go into an uncontrollable frenzied rage). In the game I gm'd one of the characters was captured and tortured, as a result he developed an intense fear of knives, if someone pulled a knife or a sword on the character he usually reacted very badly, often going into a frenzy.

If they can incorporate things like this into an online RPG it will certain be unique from most other games out there and thats just the vampire side of it. The other supernatural beings (Mages, Werewolves etc) have their own societies rules etc. Eg. Mages are forbidden from using 'vulgar' magic in front of other non mages etc.

[McTaggart]

I think if they get a good roleplaying userbase they should pull off the clan/covenant fairly well. Especially now that CCP have some people who actually know roleplaying on board.

What I would like to see is a real fear of loss (and a reason to bring shiny stuff to the fight), nonconsentual pvp with loss conditions that don't start and end with 'death' (but can if you mess up or force it). Some thing bigger than just the player to work for and completely inconsiquential pve.

[Scytale]

I'm not sure how they would handle death, in most role playing games (table top) death is usually final and you have to start a new character, obviously in something people are paying a subscription for Final death will be pretty contriversal.

When I used to played UO they had stat loss on death for a while, people would abuse it by res-killing though and it was eventually removed, before people started abusing it was pretty good all pvp was non consentual there.

As far as V:TR goes the only way to kill a vampire is to hurth them with something that deals agravated damage, stuff like Magic, Werewolf claws, sunlight and fire. Weapons that deal Lethal damage (guns, knifes etc) send the vampire into torpor if they run out of hitpoins. So my guess would be you would have to rely on someone from your party to cary your unconcious body away from the scene. If your whole party was rendered unconcious then you'd be pretty screwed. My guess would be lethal exposure to sunlight or fire would be a permanent death for the character.

[0bsessions]

I sincerely doubt they'll include permanent death in any way, shape or form. It's never been succesful in MMO's. In tabletop, if a character dies in a campaign, odds are you've invested much less time than in an MMO. The only time I can recall seeing permanent death being a factor was in the original iteration of Star Wars Galaxies. In the original setup, Jedi characters were the only ones who could face permanent death, as it was intended to be the most hardcore and powerful class out there (In the original build, it was insanely difficult to gain force sensitivity). It took six months for the first Jedi to show up and by the time they started showing up in larger numbers, they eliminated the permanent death idea due to incessant whining by Jedi players. Cow-towing to the players' demands at the expense of the gameplay in that situation was the first big blunder on a long road to turning that game into its current state of mediocrity.

Permanent death just doesn't seem to fly with players, hardcore or casual. It's easy enough to write it out, though. In Galaxies, they had KO and THEN death, which was followed by respawning at a cloning facility. In WoD, you could go into Torpor, requiring a death blow of some sort to actually finish you off. Just write something new into the mythology (The fun of mythology is it's maelable) as far as respawning exclusively for the MMO. Anyone who would expect it to follow any specific literal iteration of the table-top game would be simply kidding themself, it'd never work. Just give the player a Crypt, along the lines of the mandatory Mog-houses in FF XI, and insert some kind of mandatory teleport/enchantment thing that automatically brings you back there at the expense of some XP debt. It requires some stretching of the original idea, but that's necessary with the persistant nature of an MMO.

I'm more concerned with the passage of time than permanent death. They'll probably have to make it perpetually nighttime, as throwing in a passage of time, including daylight, would utterly break the game. Can't really enjoy a game when you simply can't do anything for a certain time period. You lose the dramatic limitation of having to escape the sun, but adding it in would be way too much of a hassle overall. The only thing I can think of would be maybe have a mandatory timeframe in which you have to be back to your crypt, but that would be more inconvenient than a fun gameplay mechanic. Plus, it'd be Hell on the servers if everyone was coming out of "sleep" at the same time constantly. I say just refer to any server maintenance downtime as the occasional daylight hours and be done with it.

[Dimmukane]

A friend of mine had a really good idea for implementing permanent death into an MMO, in which loot is passed on to the next character as an heir, and releveled to where the new player is.  Actually, it was an idea for an MMO, that worked permanent death into gameplay somehow.  But it probably would've worked, the way he had everything set up.