These folks are a selection of smart and talented folks in both the tabletop RPG industry and outside of it who are dedicated to Vampire: the Masquerade in its many forms. So when we looked at 2016, I proposed V4 to Eddy Webb, our VtM line developer, and all this last year we have both discussed this ourselves, and Eddy has been in contact with folks we’ve called the VtM Stakeholders in order to try and define the parameters of just what a new edition of Vampire should be. Every year we’d talk about the next projects and we’d run into so many blockers to the amazing projects we could create. Set against both setting and rules needing attention was the simple fact that V20 is really great at being exactly what we wanted it to be, so for a while we tried to make it work as the basis for the line. And that is a really long time to go with a bunch of systems that need fixing, not to mention that system design for RPGs has been in a constant state of evolution since then. So that means that the last time the rules were changed for VtM was Revised, and that’ll be 18 years ago next year. Fixing them isn’t a priority for a compilation edition like V20. In addition, the rules had been tweaked a tad, but not a lot, because as I said on a few panels at the time, if you’ve been playing for 20 years those little odd bits to the rules are something you’ve learned to work around for years, and will actually miss in some cases. Stymieing your writers and developers is really not the best way to get their most creative work. Every supplemental book had to deal with that in some way, and we tried them all.
But part of the intensity of VtM is feeling like it is happening Right Now, in a world very much like ours, but darker.
For example, V20 was written with the idea of not abrogating any chronicle that folks might still be playing, so we went back to a nebulous time frame that was just not quite the start of VtM Revised but mostly VtM2. We’ve smashed our creative heads against that almost since the first supplement. Nor was it created with the idea that we’d spring a whole new V20 game line from it. What it was not was a true new edition that moved the game design or setting forward. It was, as I’ve said many times, a “love letter to the fans of VtM“. V20 was designed as a singular book that compiled and polished all of the best and most iconic parts of the previous three editions. We started talking about having started work on V20 five years ago, and how 2016 will be twenty-five years since first edition Vampire: the Masquerade arose to darken the dreams of RPG gamers everywhere. Once we have the panel audio ready I’ll link it, and if I miss anything here that audio should have it. This isn’t really a press release announcement so much as a recap of our announcement from the What’s Up With cWoD? panel at Gen Con last week for the many folks who weren’t there. News, The View From the Path, Vampire: The Masquerade Vampire: The Masquerade 4th Edition Announced at Gen Con!
0 kommentar(er)
