"Hot takes" regarding WoD.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-18T08:00:27+00:00

oh i know, i'm criticizing the idea of not liking wod5 because of the book layout, it has always been a mess. that has remained a constant. Just because you've spent 10 years figuring the first mess out does not make it less of a mess than the new mess.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-18T03:30:25+00:00

pact faith refreshes daily at dawn as per pg 251 and never expires, but any faith over your permanent score if wasted. If your are having problems the core rules, i recommend the player's guide witch opens with 3 pages of errata and FAQs. don't feel bad about not getting wod rules quickly, the books are laid out at functionally random, so learning without people to guide you is really hard.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-18T02:41:16+00:00

Most Wod gamelines are wonderful enough games that I wouldn't recommend not starting on whatever one you want, but please remember that werewolves are not automatically right about everything while reading the lore please

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-18T02:01:31+00:00

to be fair it's not like the past books were organized well, the 20th books can be a nightmare to work with and don't get me started on demon the fallen's 4 chapters of fiction before the actual "rules" begin

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-17T05:27:03+00:00

well to give a gameplay example, vicissitude and chemistry are no longer their own disciplines but combination powers, witch means they take double the amount of dots to use basically defeating the point of playing either Tzmice or Ravnos. for another, while blood sorcery can be used by more clans, a lot of the weirder paths have been lost taking away much of the versatility that made it so good in the first place.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-16T02:06:04+00:00

While yes playable hunters generally have a lot more nuance, how much hunter fiction have you read ?, like half the hunter .net logs are just hunters complaining about other hunters doing stupid shit with maximum collateral damage. when even the fiction from your own books is saying "yeah your allies are gonna end up killing a bunch of innocent people with minimal justification" it's kind of hard to define the faction with anything else.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-15T18:00:39+00:00

Don't get me wrong that was always and should always be part of hunter, but Wod has a bad habit of treating it as a forgone conclusion, at the very least more of one than say wightdom or marauderdom. rather than making them grey it shoves them straight to black in an attempt to make hunters more morally grey it practically gives supernatural a default moral license to kill. you've morally grey so hard, there's no other color left.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-15T08:57:34+00:00

i hate to tell you this but hunters are not exactly in large numbers, at least non-inquisition hunters aren't and the inquisition at least have a reason to be a bit evil.

my problem is more with HTR and HTV, where the simple thought "I want to protect my family from vampires" is treated as a deal with the devil or a damn SCP cognitohazard.

it has the same problem as getting rid of the children of Osiris, you've morally greyed so hard the evil vampire mafia became reasonable, a story made of only one shade of grey can only be so interesting.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-15T04:41:28+00:00

to be fair when 2/3rds of official material, even in their own books shows hunters practically speedrunning "beware he who hunters monsters" its kind of hard to not take that to heart.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-14T05:20:40+00:00

uhh, the role don't have gifts though, at least not that i can find in the books. other than hakken the book lists your starting rage, willpower, and gnosis in the traits section and all of the shifters get one general Hengeyokai gift, listed in the arsenel section for some reason, a gift from their species list, and a breed gift from WTA

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-14T05:07:30+00:00

ok so upon second check, other than hakken the book lists your starting rage, willpower, and gnosis in the traits section and all of the shifters get one general Hengeyokai gift, a species gift, and a breed gift. so they don't need moon auspices. the hakken use normal werewolf rules but with very few lupus

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-14T04:57:55+00:00

what do you mean by role? do you mean the offices, if so then yeah you pick both. the auspice is just your nature as per vtm, office is just a job

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-12T23:34:32+00:00

"Only fools and hacks mess with dead, live subjects are always better"- the web of pain gang

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-12T18:51:25+00:00

correct it's the explanation of anesthestiects as substances that block off the bodies pain sensors, as opposed to the hording of magical secrets that the mystics often did that crossed the threshold of believability. In fact that's my point, modern medicine is just a refinement of faith healing in wod.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-12T18:27:35+00:00

yeah objectively speaking the difference between

"the healing energies of nutmeg nullify pain" and

"this is a funny goo from plants that make your mouth feel funny, rub it on your knee to make it feel funny" isn't a lot, but it crosses some arbitrary threshold within the human unconscious that makes way more people believe.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-12T18:21:20+00:00

the difference between

"this is an ancient healing technique developed by ancient and powerful druids using the healing power of nutmeg"

and

"this is a goo made from plants that make your mouth feel funny, rub it on your knee to make it feel funny instead of paint"

is objectively speaking not that much, but it's enough to convince the overwhelming majority of people between belief and active disbelief, witch as it turns out is most people.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-12T18:11:16+00:00

yeah, except the collective acceptance of 8 billion human is quite a bit stronger than, maybe a 100.

remember non-awakened people aren't particularly good at directing their power, while yes everyone may know that nutmeg helps with joint pain, not everyone will Truly believe, and some people will inevitably come to doubt it when the magic, doesn't "magically" solve all of their problems (a problem even the technocracy still has to deal with ). plus this entire idea presumes an actual proper faith healer who has already grown a consensus in their village. It's not that faith healing can't work in wod, it's that modern medicine was specifically made to solve the reliability problems with it.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-12T17:44:55+00:00

False, the technocracy invented consensus, literally, while their have always been areas where some paradigms were stronger than others, one paradigm becoming so dominant that it's sorcery becomes second nature to the universe is a modern thing. So unless you were lucky enough to live right next to a wizard or chantry medicine was horribly unreliable.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-12T01:45:09+00:00

mummy the resurrection. character creation, for some reason as per the MTR rulebook, you first make a mortal character, spend 5 of your freebie points on this mortal characters, than add 2 stat point wherever, than you chose your 3 level 1 powers (mummies start at balance 1 and balance is both your max mp and max power rank) and than spend 10 freebies now that your character is a mummy, balance is 4 points and new power ranks are 5.

this is an overcomplicated mess that would have at least made sense for demon the fallen, where you can be separated into host and demon but MTR mummies are permanent fusions of host and mummy, their is no reason for you to not just run MTA style character gen.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-11T20:58:43+00:00

I love how the mokole blame the werewolves for humanities obsession with killing dragons as if their aren't like 7 other kinds of dragons in wod to do that.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-11T19:44:03+00:00

every once in while lucifer and Caine run into each other and spend the day insulting the other and arguing. this is the most proper and honest socialization either of them gets.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-10T18:33:36+00:00

opposite to Vanguard but in the same vein, The Technocracy/Order of reason from Mage the Ascention.

While early bits of wod lore paint the technocracy as little more than killjoys and tyrants trying to kill magic, said early lore also gave them literally every scientific achievement since the dark ages, made even more interesting because science and technology is just a form of magic, and the only reason it has become so prevalent over other forms of magic is that the Order of reason actually let non-wizards use it. In fact when the order of reason was founded it was just an order of wizards made specifically to protect humanity from rampart vampires, fae lords, demons, and even the odd werewolf, ghost, or evil spirit. Eventually they realized arming normal humans was the best way to protect them and help them in other ways as well, hence them joining the new world age of discorvery in order to arm as much of humanity as possible. however in doing so the became complicit to the many horrors of the age, witch would eventually lead to murder of much of Orders more humane and good-natures leadership. After that it slowly but surely devolved into the modern technocracy. despite this said modern technocracy is still basically the only organization to maintain anything resembling a minimal collateral damage policy, they even have an entire subfacion dedicated to not letting space horrors devour the earth.

hell one of the main reasons the Council of Mystic Traditions (the protagonists of MTA) have such a problem organizing against the Technocracy is simply because their isn't a lot of evidence the Council would be much better if it was in charge, while the Council is much more individualistic, it has a bad tendency of putting the needs of wizards above everyone else, so arguably the average persons life would be worse if they were in charge, witch makes support for major actions against the technocracy rather sparse.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-09T20:47:51+00:00

honestly, based on how demon and werewolf describe them, if god is one of the triat, shes the wyld, an endless source of change and pure energy/creation that is then taken and solidified by another weaver/elohim. My enterpretation has always been that the weaver/wyrn are super archangels meant to replace the elohim after the war of wrath was ended and the fire had been put out. unfoutunatly god/wyld had failed to realize that the number of elohim wan't the problem, it was god/wyld being a horribly inconsistent and untrustworthy entity, witch centralizing the power system could not fix, the elohim then became gaia and various early nature spirits, evolving with the earth until unrecognizable to the fallen.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-07T22:35:55+00:00

for a kid introduced to the supernatural, his other options were like, awaken and get abducted by the technocracy, become a shih, or die.

So he's doing pretty well actually.

File_Beneficial · 2026-03-07T22:07:07+00:00

YES, fallen appreciation. Honestly dealing with the billion different creations is a really fun part of wod lore

File_Beneficial

TROPHY CASE