Why v20 is exciting me...
Whitewolf has announced v20 - A 20th anniversary edition where they're tweaking some of the rules, and publishing a 400~ page book of vampiric awesomeness, and it's got a lot of people nostalgic - myself included. To say Vampire changed my life is an understatement...
It was 1994 and I'd just dropped out of college (for the first time), and we had AOL on the computer. I was poking around, found a place called Vampyre Inne (because nothing is as cool as adding y's instead of i's...) and entered. Everyone was pretending to be a vampire, and I said "Hey... I can do that..."
I didn't realize it was a game with rules until someone was suddenly throwing dice at me, and telling me how to roll, and then told me I was dead. Confused, I asked what the hell he was talking about, and he told me to go get the book. Well. My knowledge of roleplaying was that it was games like AD&D that my brother and his stupid friends played, and there was no way I was going to get into one of -those- things... but this guy killed my imaginary persona and that wasn't going to stand. So I wheedled the location of where one bought this sort of book from my brother, headed down, bought it, and made myself a character. And I was hooked... forever.
Now, AOL was the twinkiest game in the world - it was nothing to have 14 hours of combat with everyone grabbing obscure passages from random books, and no one ever died because they were all 6th gen abominations with awakened avatars who were really risen who wore trench coats and had Desert Eagles and twin silver katanas... and we knew it. When your "reasonable" character was a 7th gen with only 14 disc dots, you know your game is wonky... but it was ok.
I went from AOL to smaller games on IRC where we weren't ridiculous, and played normal characters. I finally started tabletopping in about 2001, and miss it. I avoided NB like the plague, though I'm now a fixture at one of the online oWoD games and nWoD just never appealed. VtM was my game, and I wanted those damn kids to get off my lawn - I didn't mind being curmudgeony about it. I learned how to play from the bottom up, like a normal person, and not be ready to quote book and page the moment there was a rule in question... I learned to go with the flow, and that the story was the important element,
I learned how to communicate with people through gaming. I learned how to write - before I played, I had a teacher once tell me the only reason he gave me a C- in Creative Writing was so that he didn't have to read my essays for another semester. But with roleplaying, I learned how to describe things, or how to set a mood. I wrote constantly - either in games, or in downtime posts. I learned how to reason with people, both IC and OOC, and how to negotiate and mediate. I learned how to not take things personally, and to be objective.
Granted, one could say roleplaying in general could teach a person that - but no other game ever caught my eye.... not like VtM and the rest of OWoD did. I never wanted to dungeon crawl - it's always been the very personal touch that drew me in, the character development, the interaction between players, the emotional ties it all had. There's all sorts of stories of people meeting their spouses through the game - I did too, and while we're no longer together, it was gaming that brought us together.
Because of Vampire, I'm the person no one will play Trivial Pursuit with, and inevitably when someone asks something like "... You're an MBA major - why do you know detailed history of the Hapsburg Empire?" the answer is almost always "Well, I had a character once...". The wealth of knowledge I've picked up from research is generally only matched by that of other gaming friends who've picked it up for the same reasons.
VtM was real... I wasn't trying to play an elf in a fantasy land... this was -my- world, with -my- cities, and yes, it was a dark and twisted world that was through the looking glass, but it was enough like mine that I could fall into it easily and focus on who I was, and my place in it, whether that was as a Neonate Toreador poseur or a Tremere Primogen with the city council under my thumb. Did I lose myself in it? Yes. But it also saved my life, on more than one occasion... Not only did it give me friends, it gave me an outlet, a place to pour everything that hurt inside, to put it out there in a "safe" way... and as silly as it sounds, on more than one occasion when I was in a dark dark place, I knew I could go be someone else for a little bit, and... if I could survive their problems, I might just be able to survive my own.
I play most OWoD games, now... CtD, WtO (<3!), WtA, MtA - but Vampire... man. Vampire was the beginning of a lifelong obsession, the first thing I've ever really felt passionate about, the one constant in my life since I found it, and the thing I always go back to. And having something new, for VtM? Seeing all the excitement and the nostalgia and the energy surrounding something that I alway felt like I was clinging to? It's invigorating. I am loving being able to tug out my old books and see where the new stuff deviates and finding new people to discuss with and knowing that I'm not the only one. I'm not some freak who's still in love with a game that's been OOP for ages.... that there are others that share that passion, still. And that... knowing there's still a community, and reading everyone's input... it's just brill.
It was 1994 and I'd just dropped out of college (for the first time), and we had AOL on the computer. I was poking around, found a place called Vampyre Inne (because nothing is as cool as adding y's instead of i's...) and entered. Everyone was pretending to be a vampire, and I said "Hey... I can do that..."
I didn't realize it was a game with rules until someone was suddenly throwing dice at me, and telling me how to roll, and then told me I was dead. Confused, I asked what the hell he was talking about, and he told me to go get the book. Well. My knowledge of roleplaying was that it was games like AD&D that my brother and his stupid friends played, and there was no way I was going to get into one of -those- things... but this guy killed my imaginary persona and that wasn't going to stand. So I wheedled the location of where one bought this sort of book from my brother, headed down, bought it, and made myself a character. And I was hooked... forever.
Now, AOL was the twinkiest game in the world - it was nothing to have 14 hours of combat with everyone grabbing obscure passages from random books, and no one ever died because they were all 6th gen abominations with awakened avatars who were really risen who wore trench coats and had Desert Eagles and twin silver katanas... and we knew it. When your "reasonable" character was a 7th gen with only 14 disc dots, you know your game is wonky... but it was ok.
I went from AOL to smaller games on IRC where we weren't ridiculous, and played normal characters. I finally started tabletopping in about 2001, and miss it. I avoided NB like the plague, though I'm now a fixture at one of the online oWoD games and nWoD just never appealed. VtM was my game, and I wanted those damn kids to get off my lawn - I didn't mind being curmudgeony about it. I learned how to play from the bottom up, like a normal person, and not be ready to quote book and page the moment there was a rule in question... I learned to go with the flow, and that the story was the important element,
I learned how to communicate with people through gaming. I learned how to write - before I played, I had a teacher once tell me the only reason he gave me a C- in Creative Writing was so that he didn't have to read my essays for another semester. But with roleplaying, I learned how to describe things, or how to set a mood. I wrote constantly - either in games, or in downtime posts. I learned how to reason with people, both IC and OOC, and how to negotiate and mediate. I learned how to not take things personally, and to be objective.
Granted, one could say roleplaying in general could teach a person that - but no other game ever caught my eye.... not like VtM and the rest of OWoD did. I never wanted to dungeon crawl - it's always been the very personal touch that drew me in, the character development, the interaction between players, the emotional ties it all had. There's all sorts of stories of people meeting their spouses through the game - I did too, and while we're no longer together, it was gaming that brought us together.
Because of Vampire, I'm the person no one will play Trivial Pursuit with, and inevitably when someone asks something like "... You're an MBA major - why do you know detailed history of the Hapsburg Empire?" the answer is almost always "Well, I had a character once...". The wealth of knowledge I've picked up from research is generally only matched by that of other gaming friends who've picked it up for the same reasons.
VtM was real... I wasn't trying to play an elf in a fantasy land... this was -my- world, with -my- cities, and yes, it was a dark and twisted world that was through the looking glass, but it was enough like mine that I could fall into it easily and focus on who I was, and my place in it, whether that was as a Neonate Toreador poseur or a Tremere Primogen with the city council under my thumb. Did I lose myself in it? Yes. But it also saved my life, on more than one occasion... Not only did it give me friends, it gave me an outlet, a place to pour everything that hurt inside, to put it out there in a "safe" way... and as silly as it sounds, on more than one occasion when I was in a dark dark place, I knew I could go be someone else for a little bit, and... if I could survive their problems, I might just be able to survive my own.
I play most OWoD games, now... CtD, WtO (<3!), WtA, MtA - but Vampire... man. Vampire was the beginning of a lifelong obsession, the first thing I've ever really felt passionate about, the one constant in my life since I found it, and the thing I always go back to. And having something new, for VtM? Seeing all the excitement and the nostalgia and the energy surrounding something that I alway felt like I was clinging to? It's invigorating. I am loving being able to tug out my old books and see where the new stuff deviates and finding new people to discuss with and knowing that I'm not the only one. I'm not some freak who's still in love with a game that's been OOP for ages.... that there are others that share that passion, still. And that... knowing there's still a community, and reading everyone's input... it's just brill.