Tabletop Gaming: How best to play WtA/oWOD or RPGs like them in general?

[Story]

I found out recently that there are a few World of Darkness fans in the Escapist so I thought I would give it a shot.

Basically, I over the last year, I've been collecting Werewolf the Apocalypse books both old and new and fell in love with the setting and concept. I flat out just liked reading the fluff. It's like, everything I love in life rolled into one. Now its not perfect...after doing a little research I've found that it's...not actually mechanically sound in many ways. I have very little experience with Tabletop gaming in general, only playing D&D for a few months and a handful of Gurps (which even then I'm not a mechanic's type of player, I find it boring and much more enjoy the roleplay part myself).

Still, it would be a dream to run Werewolf with my usual group. They've indulged with me though and so far, we've had 2 and a half-ish sessions just so I can get my feet wet on running a game for the first time. However, most are not into the game because of the fact it's not a mechanically focused, dungeon crawler type of thing. I even tried using mini's and a map to help us out a bit but I think that just makes it more confusing with us all.

So I have a few questions for anyone whose played old World of Darkness or any other RPG that is roleplay focused.

Am I going about this the wrong way? Are mechanics everything to have a good time with a tabletop game? How do you play such games in the past and what would you recommend for first time Storytellers/game runners? Any thing I should avoid in general?

Thanks for your time guys.

 

[TheFinish]

Well, the only World of Darkness game I ran for any period of time was Hunter: The Reckoning, and that ended up being pretty much a dungeon crawler anyway (so much so we ended up switching to Savage Worlds while keeping the setting, because WoD in any incarnation is absolute trash at combat.)

However I think mostly the problem is more the interaction player/system than fault of your own. Mechanics certainly aren't everything to having a great game, though they help. But it appears (to me, and I may be wrong) that your players are looking for a much different experience than what you want to run, and that's something that's only solveable by sitting them down and talking to them.

As for how to run WoD, I've found they're much better suited to politics/investigation with a veeeeeery slight dash of combat thrown in when it's absolutely necessary. Which ironaclly makes Werewolf kind of hard to run since they're supposed to fight a lot (between themselves, with dem bad spirits, with vampires, with hunters...).

Sorry I can't be much help, but I do hope your game takes off!

 

[Saelune]

I am unfamiliar with that game, but I started a 1 on 1 5e DnD campaign with my brother a couple of days ago, and it is SUPER roleplay focused, that more and more I have been striping away the actual rules. Classes? Nah. Xp leveling? Gone. Most of the stuff is very experimental though, and even our first two sessions have had me re-thinking this and that. Next session I am going to suggest removing rolls entirely unless he wants to do something questionably achievable. I say this because his first real event had him trying to snoop around and steal from some shipping containers being moved by an Orc/Goblin gang, and his rolls were counter to his actions and kind of forced me to DM override his poor rolling.

Really it just might be a matter of your audience. Players unreceptive to RP are not really going to be easily swayed. Sure, sometimes mechanics and rules CAN push for more RP, such as the background system of 5e DnD, but really it is a matter of personal preference.

Side thought: Is this the game that is the basis of the Hunter: The Reckoning games? Cause those were neat...though Id think they would be combat heavy if so...

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Avoid minis. Otherwise your players will spend more time looking at the table and it will detract from the mood. If you want a great tactical roleplaying game that balances miniatures, easy rules, and fun exploration, you should look at something like Fragged Empire. It's like Star Trek only without the humans, with 4 (corebook wise) post-humanity races ... where most tech is salvaged, but still the Haven civilization press onwards into space once more.

All World of Darkness chronicles require a central theme and they require the players knowing about the world around them. The players have to have an idea of what lay ahead of them, but obviously not blatantly. Particularly any iteration of werewolf which holds the idea of territory up as to be something that simply transcends 'Thing we live in' ... after all, you're fighting the Wyrm so you do kind of need the 'why we fight?' to justify the desire for solidarity coupled with unbridled passion to make the world right (whatever that may require and whatever vision held by the beholder, and is ultimately that which in simult divides all the Garou) ...

So it might pay to flesh out the territory more fully that the players live in. Maybe key points of interest? Maybe get your players involved by telling them in secret whispers, about minor alterations, and unseemly coincidences depending on where those players might consider their haunt in that expanded territory?

I love every iteration of Werewolf. But it is probably the hardest game to set up for. It requires a level of investment in not just fleshing out NPCs but an exhaustive look into where those children of Gaia/Urfarah live, who they would regularly deal with (predator or prey), who are their major competition ...

Unlike many other gamelines, with the possible exception of Geist ... there needs to be a fluid-like dynamic that transcends; "Big bad is here." It requires other Garou to have dynamic goals, dynamic strength, and dynamic territory. All as casualties mount, and property damage and control takes shape and changes hands.

Ultimately Werewolf requires more than Mage or Hunter ... it operates the polarising opposite of more braindead settings like any iteration of Mage or Hunter. You can just take a map and map out the key factional holds, some other cell's activities, some NPCs. Werewolf painfully (though for the reason why it is beloved) operates from the exhaustive, cityblock level detail of the world around them ... to give reason why the Garou fight, but ultimately justify their worldview and also why they seek to confront the machinations of the Wyrm, but this becomes a highly personal journey which will require them to sacrifice to see it through. Calcifying what is, in all honesty, quite reasonable reasons for other Garou to stand in their way.

I think the key to any good werewolf game is to treat the players as if sniffing aout their territory. What they control ... provide whispers, a scent of something they feel the need to investigate collectively ... as well as provide enough environmental set dressing that they can say; "Well, if we talk to these people we might gain better understanding ..." >>> which leads to; "We need to entreaty this group of Garou elsewhere about a mutual threat." >>> Which leads to "Someone may be working against our temporary accord... etc"

The reason why Werewolf games require so much set up is the primary opponents of the Garou tend to be other Garou. It requires the enemy to have reasonable goals, and the underlying tragedy of the Garou that the Wyrm seeks to destroy them all, but for the Garou to adequately fight back may more often than not disturb the peace with their own.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Side thought: Is this the game that is the basis of the Hunter: The Reckoning games? Cause those were neat...though Id think they would be combat heavy if so...

Hunter is pretty violence heavy, but not as much as you might think. In World of Darkness, violence isn't merely fisticuffs. All the supernaturals are violent in one way or another. They propagate various shades of violence. Maybe it's the Lost (changeling) that poisons your dreams at night to feed on your emotions? Maybe it's the vampire that uses one of your family members as if a blood doll? Maybe it's werewolf that you so badly should never have tried to start a pub brawl with, and they mop the floor with you? Or maybe it's the Mysterium mage who values the preservation of a magical site ... by buying up your apartment and evicting your arse? Or closing the local school you send your children to to stop the local pollution of Quiescence by sleepers (unawakened mortals)?

It's more like they share a universe. With White Wolf W/CofD you have numerous supernatural templates that apply to a baseline W/CofD character. Like, theoretically, your game could start with perfectly normal(ish?) character. A medical doctor for instance, which is like any G.P. you may visit.

But your ST might organise that the players are abducted by the Fae and brought to Arcadia ... where over the psassage of time, exposed to alien metaphysics of the terrible beauty, madness, and the whimsical 'desires' of your alien gaolers and Arcadia itself, that you lose your humanity. Twisted till the point where your humanity is merely a simulacra of mortals who cannot quite clearly see the insanity that has remade you in its image.

So you apply the Changeling template in this regards, with your kith(s), etc. CtL/upcoming 2E Lost is awesome. Dark fairytales more in line with Yeats and pre-Grimm than modern interpretations, replete with twisted former humans who can never truly escape that which made them in their image, merely outrun.

Ditto in a Mage game you might be the same M.D. and your ST deigns that the campaign is going to be a mage chronicle and you Awaken to the Supernal Realms that the beacon light of the five watchtowers provide you the path to power. All so that one may reach enlightenment and reorganise your pattern and fates to wield the energies of that which begifts mastery over them, by the lights beyond the Fallen World.

So you apply the mage template, and your path, etc.

Hunter (for the most part) isn't so much of a template. As the name suggests they kill those like the above for numerous reasons, objectives, or simply out of necessity.

Of course it also depends on the edition of WoD that you play. Some of these gamelines have changed *a lot*. Werewolf dropped Gaia at the Time of Judgment story arc and the recreation of the world. In all iterations afterwards it's all about Urfarah (Father Wolf) and capricious, whimsical, begrudging, insane and incomprehensibly alien touch of Mother Luna ... bearer of the firstborn. She is a spirit reflection of the Moon as the name might suggest. A celestine of awesome power, whose waning/waxing eye shapes the fate of her children and her children to be.

Basically Hunter is kind of a spin off, using universal rules set (though not necessarily universal template set) of humanity struggling against the supernaturals within a shared world (though one sufficiently skewed by the ignorance of humanity as if viewing the alien). Hunter is odd in this regards, because the supernatural enemies may not be like those with the usual supernatural templates in other game lines ... but it assumes they exist.

Most hunters are like you or me. They're effectively human (or 'mortal') ... outside those inexplicable forces. But they can also be beyond you and me. Through the power of faith, dogged determination to which the nature of humanity is to scream at the night rather than go quietly, or simply understanding some vague aspects of weird science, magical invocation, an infernal touch, or some other grasp of unknown quantities that allow hunters to survive (maybe) where you or I might fall.

But essentially most hunters start off like your or me. And have been touched by the supernatural (likely unwanted in the extreme) ... that births as if a soul that seeks to destroy the wretched and the damned. So you might be someone who saw your sibling killed by a vampire, maybe your mind wasn't entirely shattered by seeing a werewolf transform into a monster, or maybe a spirit tried to possess and consume your soul and wear your flesh like a puppetmaster, or a ghost haunted a home you bought and you survived long enough to see it exorcised...

Something shapes you into being a hunter.

Hope that cleared things up a bit?

 

[Story]

Thanks so much for your responses guys, I really appropriate it!

However I think mostly the problem is more the interaction player/system than fault of your own. Mechanics certainly aren't everything to having a great game, though they help. But it appears (to me, and I may be wrong) that your players are looking for a much different experience than what you want to run, and that's something that's only solveable by sitting them down and talking to them.

Really it just might be a matter of your audience. Players unreceptive to RP are not really going to be easily swayed. Sure, sometimes mechanics and rules CAN push for more RP, such as the background system of 5e DnD, but really it is a matter of personal preference.

Yeah you know, that just might be what it boils down to. They want to play the number crunching battling kind of game (which are fun in their own right) and this system though it kinda claims otherwise...wasn't really built for it. It doesn't help too that in my attempts to make the transition easier for them, I've kinda confused myself with how I want to run things, how they like things, and how others have run things in the past. I just need to find a system I'm comfortable with and stick with it.

I am unfamiliar with that game, but I started a 1 on 1 5e DnD campaign with my brother a couple of days ago, and it is SUPER roleplay focused, that more and more I have been striping away the actual rules. Classes? Nah. Xp leveling? Gone. Most of the stuff is very experimental though, and even our first two sessions have had me re-thinking this and that. Next session I am going to suggest removing rolls entirely unless he wants to do something questionably achievable. I say this because his first real event had him trying to snoop around and steal from some shipping containers being moved by an Orc/Goblin gang, and his rolls were counter to his actions and kind of forced me to DM override his poor rolling.

A 1-1 campaign is actually very, very interesting to me. In Werewolf it kinda encourages it too because players need a type of backstory to truely enjoy the events game a type of setup like Addendum_Forthcoming partly mentioned. I thought about just sitting down with them individually, with their character ideas and roleplaying them out up until they become their perspective were-creatures. I don't know why I'm nervous to do so maybe because the main reason why they enjoy RPGs is that we can play as a group instead and enjoy each other's jokes?
Also thus far I haven't been afraid of tossing out mechanics as needed, however I have a few concerns when I do like: When do we draw the line between what is fair for the players? If I say the monster horribly hurts them outright or that them shooting a character in the head doesn't kill them is that fair? Can they use how it is stated mechanically to defend refute that action and does it stop that narrative of the roleplay?

Maybe I'm just flatout overthinking it.

Avoid minis. Otherwise your players will spend more time looking at the table and it will detract from the mood.

I like minis but you do have a good point...there isn't really any rules in the book for using minis so it does just make more work for myself.

All World of Darkness chronicles require a central theme and they require the players knowing about the world around them. The players have to have an idea of what lay ahead of them, but obviously not blatantly. Particularly any iteration of werewolf which holds the idea of territory up as to be something that simply transcends 'Thing we live in' ... after all, you're fighting the Wyrm so you do kind of need the 'why we fight?' to justify the desire for solidarity coupled with unbridled passion to make the world right (whatever that may require and whatever vision held by the beholder, and is ultimately that which in simult divides all the Garou) ...

So it might pay to flesh out the territory more fully that the players live in. Maybe key points of interest? Maybe get your players involved by telling them in secret whispers, about minor alterations, and unseemly coincidences depending on where those players might consider their haunt in that expanded territory?

Great advice, seems I'm on a good track then. So far, I've decided a theme and have been fleshing out the area a lot thanks to a resource book that gave locations, maps, concerns, ideas for chronicles and NPCs. So I have a lot of the fluff covered for me and the stats written of NPCs out for me as well. Also all the lore and things I have pretty much memorized at this point since I've been reading so much of the fluff and even the books they've published over the years...man do I love this setting.

I should mention that they all choose other were-beasts besides the Werewolves. Which complicated things a bit as they have their own culture, language, ideology ect, not helpful too when the players themselves don't know anything about the setting. I thought I could get around this by providing them with their individual fluff in a binder and have NPCs that are willing to explain things to them (in that they are treated like newbies in general) but one of the problems they gave me about my way of Storytelling/DMing/GMing is that I expect them to know too much...on the contrary I expect them to not know anything to better flesh out the NPCs and the lore. After all, in Werewolf, new people who have changed have to learn these things from someone right? That was my thinking anyway though I feel instead I should have given them all selective amnesia
to avoid confusion.

I love every iteration of Werewolf. But it is probably the hardest game to set up for. It requires a level of investment in not just fleshing out NPCs but an exhaustive look into where those children of Gaia/Urfarah live, who they would regularly deal with (predator or prey), who are their major competition ...

Unlike many other gamelines, with the possible exception of Geist ... there needs to be a fluid-like dynamic that transcends; "Big bad is here." It requires other Garou to have dynamic goals, dynamic strength, and dynamic territory. All as casualties mount, and property damage and control takes shape and changes hands.

Ultimately Werewolf requires more than Mage or Hunter ... it operates the polarising opposite of more braindead settings like any iteration of Mage or Hunter. You can just take a map and map out the key factional holds, some other cell's activities, some NPCs. Werewolf painfully (though for the reason why it is beloved) operates from the exhaustive, cityblock level detail of the world around them ... to give reason why the Garou fight, but ultimately justify their worldview and also why they seek to confront the machinations of the Wyrm, but this becomes a highly personal journey which will require them to sacrifice to see it through. Calcifying what is, in all honesty, quite reasonable reasons for other Garou to stand in their way.
The reason why Werewolf games require so much set up is the primary opponents of the Garou tend to be other Garou. It requires the enemy to have reasonable goals, and the underlying tragedy of the Garou that the Wyrm seeks to destroy them all, but for the Garou to adequately fight back may more often than not disturb the peace with their own.

Gosh that that's why I love it! I don't mind doing the extra set up, I just wonder if my players do, they might not. One of my players, who does not like to shapeshift being a recently "awakened" Baset Homid likes using his guns a lot (which would make him a better hunter). However he doesn't like the fact that his guns do less than his claws in general. I think there is a good opportunity for roleplay on his part (the classic denying the beast within kind of deal) but he might not see it that way...to him its more like a problem with the game itself.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

oWoD eh? Just sling on a trenchcoat and pack a couple of katanas, you'll be fine...

...sorry, I got nothin' but 20 year old snark.

If your players just want to do a "kill them and take their stuff" style dungeon crawl, then I don't really think there's a huge amount you can do. I tended to find that the longer people played PnP RPGs, the more they preferred the RP side of it over the mechanical combat simulator that pretty much every game was to start with.

Maybe let them read some of the books, perhaps it will inspire them to come up with a bit of a character that isn't based around the most efficient way to ice a ************. See what kind of stories they like, what sort of tone they are into. Back in my "kill them and take their stuff" days, the dice usually stopped rolling and we started roleplaying (sort of) when bit of comedy was injected into the proceedings.

Anyway, that vague general advice is the best I can do, never actually played any WW stuff myself.