PDA

View Full Version : [oWoD] Differences between the three editions of Masquerade and others?



Aron Times
2010-03-20, 08:30 PM
Most of what I know about Vampire: The Masquerade comes from Revised (3rd Edition) books. I have only read one and only one 2E Masquerade book, and the main difference I noticed was that Camarilla Malkavians got the more useful Dominate over the relatively useless Dementation. Being a Malkavian fan, I was quite happy at seeing the Malkovian bloodline in Requiem, a nod to pre-Revised Malkavians in Masquerade.

Is there a list of differences between the three editions of Masquerade and other oWoD games? Or were the differences mostly in the fluff?

Zeta Kai
2010-03-20, 09:00 PM
Here's the deal with oWoD books: the editions were mostly just typo fixes & organization tweaks. The later editions were basically the same as the earlier editions, just better written & easier to use.

The first edition of Mage (which I own :smallsigh:) is a mess, with a worthlessly inaccurate index & the organization of a drug-addled Alzheimer patient. Seriously, do you wanna know about Paradox & how it works? Then you get to reference 3 different sections, spread across half the book, no two of which fully agree with one another. IIRC, Mark Rein·Hagen himself apologized for the way Mage1 was laid out.

The bottom line is that for the most part, the oWoD books didn't add a lot of content to the later editions. They did update some meta-plot stuff, tweak some clunkier rules (not enough, to be sure), & add some things from other books that worked better. But they mostly just did a bang-up job making the books easier/better to read/use.

comicshorse
2010-03-20, 09:10 PM
I remember the rules for first edition being quite unworkable. Weapons had a difficult number that you had to roll to hit with them, making a broadsword ( diff. 8) terrible to use but a switchblade ( diff. 4) fantastic. Or Celerity given you extra actions and adding its level to your Dex., while you were using it......
The background was fine but the rules, they really needed redoing

Brother Oni
2010-03-20, 09:39 PM
I know that 2nd ed Masquerade doesn't have bashing damaging, just an 'optional' ST rule that particularly tough humans like soldiers can have limited soak against lethal damage.

It drove me nuts trying to find a reference to it in order to follow some Vampire threads I was interested (I didn't realise they were using 3rd ed rules).

comicshorse
2010-03-20, 10:28 PM
I think 1st ed allowed mortals to soak damage with their stamina. I remember a fight with a witch-hunter inside his car where I shot him 6 times and he took no damage because he had a high Sta ( and some lucky rolls)

Satyr
2010-03-21, 02:46 AM
The differences are - mostly - inthe combat system. The later editions included bashing damage, and more fixated difficulty levels for weapons, as already mentioned.
None of which were that relevant if you had the Combat splat book, whih was something like the best way to turn fights in WoD in something interesting and sometimes even spectacular.

In the case of Masquerade, there were also a few changes to specific discipline powers. In Werewolf, they changed the Fame mechanism between 1st and 2nd edition.

comicshorse
2010-03-21, 09:32 AM
there were also a few changes to specific discipline powers.

Yeah they changed bits of Serpentis and Obteneration as I remember and kept fiddling with the Giovanni clan flaw ( there are THREE versions of it man, sorry pet peeve:smallsmile:)