Clean up tagging for "World of Darkness" related questions

Question

I find the current tagging for world of darkness to be quite confusing. world-of-darkness what's the purpose of this? it seems to refer to what is now canonically known as "classic world of darkness" not what is officially referred to as "world of darkness" also known as "new world of darkness" by fans.

with "world of darkness" 2.0 announced/coming out/out (whatever pseudo state it's in) it's even more confusing. So if I want to ask a thematic question about the new "world of darkness" do I tag it world-of-darkness? or nwod and nwod-god-machine? because it's been stated, for example, that even though Belials Brood doesn't appear in the Vampire the Requiem 2 core book, they still exist in the setting (meaning they are attempting to retain fluff). if the question is about demon-the-descent is that nwod or nwod-god-machine?

On that note, how does nwod-god-machine still make sense, I know the origin, but the rules are being reslated as 2.0.

Does it make sense to tag things vampire-the-requiem-2? for example? or should we require two tags nwod-god-machinevampire-the-requiem? and if we use vampire-the-requiem what does that mean then? version 1? any version? demon-the-descent is even worse on this because technically it's v1 uses wod v2 rules

Basically I'm confused about the current state of the tags and how to tag thematic questions, or questions regarding updates, or questions that may otherwise span games.

update I've asked these questions which apply to bother nwod and nwod-god-machine but do not apply to classic world-of-darkness (which the tag wiki says VtM is the flagship and thus this represents classic and not new).

• Qashmallim, and the similarity to Angels?
• How can I make a shapeshifter that takes human forms?
• Does Blood and Smoke invalidate previous Vampire books?

this question was written to resolve how I should be tagging so I can stop arguing with people on here, and to hopefully remove ambiguity. I would like to see tag updates as a result of the answers, but if there is a clear answer which explains how and why I should use the existing tags that is acceptable (such an answer must explain why a promethean question would get lumped in with vampire the masquerade, and/or why my questions are unacceptable as both). Also if we are deciding to use the pan world-of-darkness I would like to see a question that equally applies to cwod, nwod, and nwod2

Answer 1

I'm going to chime in with my own organisation proposal here, based on what I've learned from the D&D and Fate tags, which have fairly robust tagging.

That might be surprising, since I don't play these games and you've probably never seen me active in their questions. I have lurked though and learned about how your rules are organised, and recently in light of these issues you're experiencing I've tried to learn more (e.g. with help in chat). This might work out, or it might be terrible, or it might at least satisfy some of your needs and give you something else to build on.

My understanding I'm operating on

If I've made grevious errors in my understanding of the structure of your rules, please let me know.

My understanding is that the structure of the World of Darkness books can be broken down like this:

• Old/Classic World of Darkness. No core book. A series of splash books (e.g. Vampire the Masquerade), each covering a type of creature for play.
• New World of Darkness. Core book, new version of each splash (e.g. Vampire the Requiem).
• God Machine Chronicles comes out. It's effectively a new splash, except it also comes with a nWoD rules update. New versions of each splash (e.g. Blood & Smoke) are released for this rules update.
• New World of Darkness Second Edition. This incorporates the rules update of God Machine Chronicles.

If we consider how we'd version these, I think it's something like this:

• oWoD = version 1.
• nWoD = version 2.
• nWoD 2e = basically version 2.5, since it's a rules update but not exactly a whole new version in its own right.
  • god machine chronicles's rules update provided the .5 to be added to nWoD. Now that .5 has been formally added in a new release.

Each version of the game has its own splashes attached. These are basically their own game. You don’t play nWoD, so much as you play Vampire: the Requiem. You can mix these together though and play that with Mage: the Awakening, but you have to be careful with doing so.

Because each splash is its own game, it needs its own tag. Even the rules updates like B&S, so as to connect experts with questions on that topic, and to make it clear whether an NWOD 2e player is using the rules update or not.

Here's how I'd structure this in tags

• world-of-darkness for questions about the World of Darkness line of games and settings in general. You may end up using this, or you may not, so use it if and when you eventually need it. See dungeons-and-dragons for an example of the questions something like this might contain: it might generally involve version comparison questions, or historical questions, or questions about consistent design choices, or so on.
  • old-world-of-darkness for oWoD questions.
  • new-world-of-darkness for nWoD questions.
  • new-world-of-darkness-2e for nWoD second edition questions.

Now, for splashes: there's several splash lines. Each splash gets its own tag if it's something new altogether, including if it totally supersedes an old splash. Rule of thumb: if you leave the other books on the shelf when playing with this one, it probably deserves its own tag.

• vampire-the-masquerade and so on for oWoD splashes.
• vampire-the-requiem and so on for nWoD splashes.
• blood-and-smoke, that one that's apparently in a kind of god-machine/2e overlapping pseudo-state?

So the overall structure comes to:

• world-of-darkness
  • old-world-of-darkness
    • vampire-the-masquerade
    • mage-the-ascension
    • etc
  • new-world-of-darkness
    • vampire-the-requiem
    • mage-the-awakening
    • nwod-god-machine (after nWoD 2e comes out, these may move. ↓)
      • demon-the-descent
      • blood-and-smoke
    • etc
  • new-world-of-darkness-2e (nwod-god-machine may become a synonym of this)
    • demon-the-descent (after nWoD 2e comes out)
    • vampire-the-requiem-2e (blood-and-smoke may become a synonym of this)
    • ???

(Tags are named after the book titles: no '1e' for Vampire: the Requiem or anything else, because the book isn't titled that way. D&D deals with this just fine with adnd and adnd-2e.)

Questions get tagged with the core edition & game(s) the player is running:

• old-world-of-darkness mage-the-ascension
• new-world-of-darkness-2e vampire-the-requiem-2e
• new-world-of-darkness nwod-god-machine demon-the-descent (I think?)
  • later new-world-of-darkness-2e demon-the-descent
• new-world-of-darkness vampire-the-requiem mage-the-awakening
• new-world-of-darkness blood-and-smoke mage-the-awakening
• new-world-of-darkness-2e new-world-of-darkness (a specific version comparison between two editions)

Would that work at all well?

Let me know if something's broken, or I've mistaken something in my understanding of how your game works, or I've done something stupid somewhere.

Answer 2

Let me stop my endless comment chain and put forward a proposal:

• world-of-darkness gets replaced with world-of-darkness-classic, which synonyms to wod, owod and cwod. The wod-20th-anniversary tag should just be burninated and existing questions clarified. We don't have tags for softback, hardback and revised, either.
• Replace nwod with world-of-darkness-nwod, which matches best what people actually look for, and synonymize that with world-of-darkness-new. Change nwod-god-machine to world-of-darkness-nwod-2e.
• Don't make separate tags for the second editions of existing games; pair them with the edition tag that's relevant. Blood and Smoke entries would get world-of-darkness-nwod-2e and vampire-requiem.
• Create a new tag for the blue-book, mortals-focused game line that uses the book titled The World of Darkness as its core. (The one that God Machine Chronicle will become the second edition of.) This way, we can keep to the previous suggestion. world-of-darkness-nwod-mortals would be a good start.

I still think the umbrella world-of-darkness tag is useful, since pan-WoD fandom continues to be a thing in a way that pan-edition-D&D or L5R isn't so much. But I think this is a good core to start from.

Answer 3

as sort of a proposal, I believe we should burninate world-of-darkness there isn't enough similarity between classic and new for it to be useful. After we migrate it to a world-of-darkness-classic (although cwod would be closer to nwod) (maybe on the name cwod, owod, and long versions would make sense for synonyms)

we should then rename nwod and nwod-godmachine to world-of-darkness-new-1e and world-of-darkness-new-2e respectively, because it's consistent. Although programmatically I prefer this postfix version, we could do classic-world-of-darkness which is nicer linguistically, and then tag synonym the postfix for typing world of...

I believe that we need a -universe tag, to deal with things like Belial's Brood which is mentioned currently only in 1e, but was stated as an official response to exist in 2e, as well as Demons and Angels which only have 2e rules, but technically existed without rules in 1e. It is also important for questions where you may currently be playing. The storytelling is more emphasized than the mechanics. I would like to state that I define fluff as things I can simply describe, where as mechanics count as dots, and rolls. For example Obfuscate exists in all World of Darkness games (including VtM) and I believe the core concept has never really changed, though dots and detail may have in some cases -universe should be fluff only. This is an attempt to address what is (according to @Oxinabox) a consensus that you should not tag both rule systems. However due to single universe one or the other is not necessarily relevant. I would be ok with tagging with all perceived acceptable systems. I just want to resolve the issue of multiple acceptable systems.

for specific games they should also follow demon-the-descent-1e which could then be tagged with world-of-darkness-new-1 if someone was trying to convert something to those rules, for example.

since long versions seem to be preferred, we should also make tag synonyms for nwod-*, cwod,owod, etc.

Answer 4

Ok, I am going to throw some ideas out in this answer, because it is too long for a comment.

I am going to use owod and cwod interchangably throughout this post. They are the same thing, owod == old world of darkness (opposite of nwod), cwod == classic world of darkness

owod 1st ed, owod revised, owod 20th anniversary.

As I understand it, revised just incorporates more or less an errata. 20th anniversary incorporates another errata, and adds rules for things that weren't invented when owod first came out -- like mobile phones and the internet.

Thus these all deserve one-tag between them, if it matters that a question is not using the errata then it can be clarified in the post.

(Correct me if I am wrong, I am not really too cluey about oWoD, I'll mark this community wiki).

Commonality between all three systems(owod, nwod 1.0, nwod 2.0):

Setting elements

They all have vampires, wizards, werewolves... but so does Dresden-files. So does Buffy. So does Supernatural. (all of which have RPGs). Things that are common between all 3 editions, are common in all urban fantasy. If someone is in a situation where they have a question that general, they should use a more generic tag.

("What does the average modern person know about vampires?" would go under a urban-fantasy tag (since it is actually asking about characters, who are in the dark about setting specific elements anyway) , "How to create dark atmosphere?" would go under a gm-techniques and maybe horror)

But really, they are not asking a WoD question at this point.

There is no real usecase for a tag for setting elements common across all 3 editions.

Setting elements the asker assumes (or even knows) to be common to both editions should use the tag for the game they are playing. Since they could be wrong about that assumption, and it could change with new books coming out.

If the goal is to compare elements between the editions, eg "What happend to the Malkavian Clan?" then this is a good use for using two tags. It is specifically to two editions.

When WoD reachs truely deep numbers of editions like dnd has, by that stage it might be worth having a global world-of-darkness that is for questions like "How have vampires changed across WoD editions?", but for now that isn't useful. It is better to not have that global tag their to confuse people.

Rules

The rules are boardly similar, but so are the rules for Sion and Exhalted.

In general small difference in rules matter. People come to the site when things are unclear, and alot of that time it is boarder cases when things are unclear.

Small differences in rules matter enough for the tagging to change. The exception being if the difference is from using an erata, as I suggest the owod editions are, and that nwod-gmc is not. (Dark Heresy for example has had 3 erratas, we do not have 4 different DH tags)

So common rules is no motivation for a common tag.

No reason for a common tag across all 3 editions.

• Common Setting elements are also common to all urban-fantasy
• Rules are not similar enough to be useful

The only concrete thing they have in common is the current rights holder (not even a common publisher). and any question that is onyx-path-publishing, is going to be along the lines of "What is Onyx Path's policy on Fan-created Books?", not a WoD question at all.

nwod 1.0 vs nwod 2.0

See discussion: Lets get a clear consensus on the use of [nwod] vs [nwod-god-machine]

The issue we have right now, is that over the next few years, onyx path will finish republishing all the content they intend to cross over. Right now there is the implict (and sometimes explict) understanding that most nwod 1.0 supernaturals are assumed to exist in nwod 2.0. Eventually, all of them will come across. But as we have seen with Vampire, and from what I have heard of Werewolf, and from how Second Sight minors were merged into core, they will not make the transition without major changes.

Such questions have the final purpose of being used with nwod-2.0 and should be tagged as such. Given time, the new books will be out and they will have canonical nwod-2.0 answers, that will be better than anything from nwod-1.0. People looking to answer will for now be familiar with both systems, and by the time that is no longer the case, all content that is going to be offically republished will have been. Thus in those cases nwod-2.0 is all that is needed.

This is distinct from questions specifically about the differenced between nwod-1.0 and nwod-2.0 which definately should be tagged with both.

There is also the case of asking how to do the conversion, which is more problematic, think should be tagged with both, (I don't know if we have seen any such questions though so this may be moot)

Questions that are for final use with nwod-2.0 include:

• Qashmallim, and the similarity to Angels? : which will actually I believe be concretely answered in the Promethean: The Created Second Edition, coming out in Spring. Til then speculation can be made based on the existing nwod-1.0 books. But it is speculation.
• How can I make a shapeshifter that takes human forms? The question asker is playing nwod-2.0, but is willing to port content from 1.0. Since as GM he can create new supernaturals, and since is is going to have to do alot of rules work anyway, limiting the scope to things that have appeared in a past edition of the setting is likely unnesc. He just wants to know about shape-shifting monsters. This question I think might be better tagged: [nwod-god-machine] [urban-fantasy]

We will be wrong

An issue we will see with questions about 1.0 setting elements in 2.0, is that we will be wrong. That is Ok however, so long as it is clear.

If someone had asked me before Blood and Smoke (aka VTR 2.0) came out: "Could I have a GMC plot, where the party ambusses vampires while they are sleeping and kills them by openind the blinds?, I am willing to port content from 1.0", I would say "Sure here are the 1.0 rules that support this idea. It will be a fairly easy fight, so easy that I don't think vampires would be foolish enough to be in such a position" but now with 2.0 my answer would be: "Sure, but it will be hard. Sunlight hurts vampires abit, but not enough to disable them before they kill half the party. Their occult checked should tell them this. They might be better off barricading the doors and torching the place."

Some questions will be unanswerable:

"If a changeling takes a physical condition, eg Blinded, with-in a dreamfight, what happens when he wakes up?"

We can speculate but can not answer. We strongly expect there to be changeling in God Machine, but we have no rules.

I think between nwod-1.0 and nwod-2.0 we are doing the right thing.

I asked about this in Lets get a clear consensus on the use of [nwod] vs [nwod-god-machine]

I believe there is enough clearness there to solve any issues.

Applying it to the example questions:

• Qashmallim, and the similarity to Angels? This is actually a different question dependign on if it is tagged nwod-1.0 or nwod-2.0. It if it about nwod-1.0 then the answer will be based on the Sample Adventure from Saturnine Night and on the core "Secret Histories", if it is nwod-2.0 then it is based on the paragraph from GMC-RU and whatever can be gleaned from demon, as well as the upcoming Promethean 2nd edition. If it is tagged both then it can not get a really good answer. Because the God Machine is presented differently between the books.
• How can I make a shapeshifter that takes human forms? This question is very broad. It is asking about something to use with nwod-2.0. It wants to take inspiration from nwod-1.0, but it is for nwod-2.0. The nwod-1.0 tag might attract people from 1.0 who can answer, but that is similar to asking a question about zsh and also tagging it bash on Unix.SE. While answers for bash might help and you might be willing to convert them, its not actually about bash
• Does Blood and Smoke invalidate previous Vampire books? is the a listed example of something that should use both, it is asking wether books from one can be used for the other (and the answer is no)

Answer 5

This question is failing to achieve consensus. Evidenced by the fact that most answers have equal number of upvotes and downvotesm and even the best has multiple downvotes.

Last time this was tried, the implementation did not occur, even with the stronger concusses.

• Clearing up White Wolf World of Darkness tags
• Shall we review the various World of Darkness tags' use?

Possibly this is because it is too big to get a handle on.

This answer suggests that it may be better to not tackle the problem all at once, but subpoint, by subpoint. This has been happening and has been making forward progress:

• Lets get a clear consensus on the use of [nwod] vs [nwod-god-machine] (Could do with maybe some enhancing based on answers here)
• Tag synonym request: [storytelling-system] - > [nwod] (Done and implemented)
• Synonym [nwod-god-machine] to [new-world-of-darkness-2e] (No answers, plenty of upvotes, generally agreed to be a good thing by posts in this thread)

Thus in this answer I recommend the creation of more meta questions focussing on fixing specific issues with WoD Tagging.

This is community wiki, feel free to add more targetted questions here.