[Booberry]

I tend to agree with Wood as well. I've never been all that interested in all the Gamist/Simulationist/Narrativist business, but if I had to pin it down I'd say Vampire (like most WW games) tries to give you a set of tools to represent a kind of umbrella genre of dark adventure with horror trappings.

Like a lot of people, I found the original release of Vampire to be so defiantly different from D&D that it struck me like a lightning bolt. I quickly abandoned D&D and all "lesser" games in favor of a new (terribly important, it seemed) "Storytelling" game. Of course, the enormous, angst-ridden ego of my teenage years was probably a significant factor in all this.

After a while, I realized that Storytelling games, at least the way I played them, weren't all that different than D&D (which was also a storytelling game, just one with a smaller 'S' and less high falutin' jargon). It was at this point that I began to relax and actually have fun with RPGs again. The reason I left Vampire had more to do with it's player base than the game itself. I was never able to find a group that didn't take itself too seriously.

Anyway, I don't know why I felt compelled to share this, except to say that I'm glad Venger Satanis chose to review this game. I like seeing a heartfelt review that simply describes why someone enjoys a game, especially for a game that already has several informative reviews on RPG.net. This review, along with several recent threads, have convinced me to finally pick up a copy of V:tR and explore it for myself. I am very satisfied with the core mortals game and Hunter: the Vigil (and I'll run some combination of these if I ever end up running a nWoD game), but it's high time I checked out the Requiem.

Which is an annoyingly long way of saying "thanks for the review".