Is Anyone Still Playing Vampire 5th Edition?

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Ben Adams said:
I'm not complaining, just giving my preference.
I understand why they do it. Color art is more of a 'collectable' and attractive selling point.
I personally find B&W art to be more horror inducing, like the spookiness of an old silent film w/out music or creepy static filled old record from the 40s similar to Bioshock. I don't think The Shining would have been scarier if they put in disco.



But then again...

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You should have been involved in the raging debate about colour vs B&W art that happened when Wraith 20th Anniversary was being developed. Some felt that B&W was integral to the game invoking the Shadowlands. Some others, including the Developer, didn’t.

The use of colour in art is an aesthetic choice, and of course old movies like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were not just B&W, but also captured the German Expressionist movement as an art form.That said, movies like Videodrome, Mulholland Drive and Suspiria managed to capture their own aesthetic with much more colorful approaches.

I think colorful art in Vampire 5th is actually an important way of conveying the contemporary world which it is set in. This, in its own way, is an important part of the horror of the game. That is, it conveys that vampires aren’t just something from old folklore of the past, but are actually living among us in the 'here and now’. For Vampire to work fully as a horror game, it needs to feel modern.
 
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Trippy said:
I think colorful art in Vampire 5th is actually an important way of conveying the contemporary world which it is set in. This, in its own way, is an important part of the horror of the game. That is, it conveys that vampires aren’t just something from old folklore of the past, but are actually living among us in the 'here and now’. For Vampire to work fully as a horror game, it needs to feel modern.
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I believe you are correct and, especially in this day & age of young culture the color is a more appeasing aesthetic to give that connection to the modern world for vampires. But I see the world of vampires as the shadow world, the not straight in your face world where the monsters hide & I think that the B&W gives more of a 'from the darkness' vibe to it. Again, just me.
Maybe, if modern vampires are in color & the 5 or less gen are B&W. To give that 'old timey' feel. I have the V20 dark ages & as much as I love the book I always felt the art of 1e gave me that longing beyond the grave feel.

All that being said I don't have V5 so I should probably STFU.
 
Trippy said:
You should have been involved in the raging debate about colour vs B&W art that happened when Wraith 20th Anniversary was being developed. Some felt that B&W was integral to the game invoking the Shadowlands. Some others, including the Developer, didn’t.

The use of colour in art is an aesthetic choice, and of course old movies like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were not just B&W, but also captured the German Expressionist movement as an art form.That said, movies like Videodrome, Mulholland Drive and Suspiria managed to capture their own aesthetic with much more colorful approaches.

I think colorful art in Vampire 5th is actually an important way of conveying the contemporary world which it is set in. This, in its own way, is an important part of the horror of the game. That is, it conveys that vampires aren’t just something from old folklore of the past, but are actually living among us in the 'here and now’. For Vampire to work fully as a horror game, it needs to feel modern.
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I love B&W films but Herzog's Nosferatu and Near Dark certainly show that vampires in colour can work wonders as well.

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Voros said:
I love B&W films but Herzog's Nosferatu and Near Dark certainly show that vampires in colour can work wonders as well.

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The Nosferatu movies, is one of the few times where I actually like both the original and the remake equally well. I also find Nosferatu vampires much more horrifying than the typical Anne Rice stuff, we see today.
 
The whole color vs. black & white issue reminds me of the idea among some in the extreme (especially black) metal scene that music has to be raw and poorly produced to be "troo kvlt". It fails to take into account that, for many of the early bands, this was a financial, rather than aesthetic, choice. Aspiring bands rarely had the funds or resources to record, let alone produce, professionally. And the "tape trading" culture among early extreme metal fans meant that, especially in far-flung parts of the globe, obscure bands were often heard, if they were heard at all, on nth-generation dubbed cassettes.

I certainly get warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia when I hear an old band's demo with a crappy production, or see a nice, smeary VHS quality picture. But it helps to remember that the aesthetics of the past were often dictated by availability and cost.

Newer isn't always better, but older isn't always better, either.

I ask you, if it had been cost effective, do you think White Wolf would have missed the opportunity to fill every book with oh-so-goth models? Not bloody likely.
 
Gringnr said:
It fails to take into account that, for many of the early bands, this was a financial, rather than aesthetic, choice
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Black metal? Both, probably, if we're talking second-wave, 90s. Wasn't He Who Shall Not Be Named famous for it?

For horror it really depends on the genre, I guess. If you were raised on Lugosi, Chaney etc., and even the cheap B-movies from the 50s, your horror was black & white. Later, horror means color, but with VHS artifacts – a trend that was a bit extended by the popularity of "found footage" horror. Although that doesn't really translate that well into RPG art, I guess…
 
When it comes to the art of V5, the complaint isn't really that it's full color, it's more that it's actual photos. Some people don't like that.

An interesting note about old black & white movies, that also applies to Nosferatu, is that they were filmed in black & white. Afterwards they were then color-tinted.

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The Mad Hatter said:
When it comes to the art of V5, the complaint isn't really that it's full color, it's more that it's actual photos. Some people don't like that.
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That's what I disliked about it. Though I tend to prefer the aesthetics of B&W art for horror rpgs, I would much rather have color art than photos of any kind.
 
carpocratian said:
That's what I disliked about it. Though I tend to prefer the aesthetics of B&W art for horror rpgs, I would much rather have color art than photos of any kind.
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I'm on the fence about photos. Maybe if they were made up to look more like vampires vs fashion models.
 
Sosthenes said:
Black metal? Both, probably, if we're talking second-wave, 90s. Wasn't He Who Shall Not Be Named famous for it?

For horror it really depends on the genre, I guess. If you were raised on Lugosi, Chaney etc., and even the cheap B-movies from the 50s, your horror was black & white. Later, horror means color, but with VHS artifacts – a trend that was a bit extended by the popularity of "found footage" horror. Although that doesn't really translate that well into RPG art, I guess…
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I'm talking about the bands that influenced the earliest BM bands. Bands like Venom and VON (whose only output up to that point had been demos).
 
The Mad Hatter said:
When it comes to the art of V5, the complaint isn't really that it's full color, it's more that it's actual photos. Some people don't like that.

An interesting note about old black & white movies, that also applies to Nosferatu, is that they were filmed in black & white. Afterwards they were then color-tinted.

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Some of it is photos but there's lots of illustrations as well, some are quite good but not available online for some reason.
 
I think the photographic art goes along with what I mentioned before, really. The game needs to look like the real modern world to feel horrific, and photo art adds to the verisimilitude. Moreover, I like it. I think the main people who complained about it were, really just rallying against doing anything different to previous editions. However, the MET books have used photo art or illustrations for years. Also, the Toreador (above) are very much the Clan that would look like fashion models, eh? Not all the other clans, even in the photo art, look that way.

And yes, Voros is right. The books have a mixture of art of different styles. I guess some of the pieces may have some sort of copyright to stop them proliferating, but I am not in the know about such things.
 
Trippy said:
The game needs to look like the real modern world to feel horrific, and photo art adds to the verisimilitude. Moreover, I like it. I think the main people who complained about it were, really just rallying against doing anything different to previous editions.
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For me, at least, it had nothing to do with it being a horror rpg. I don't like using photographs as illustrations in general, outside of non-fiction books. I don't care for them in rpgs, in fiction, or in comics.

When it comes to horror, I don't think something needs to look modern to look horrific.
 
carpocratian said:
For me, at least, it had nothing to do with it being a horror rpg. I don't like using photographs as illustrations in general, outside of non-fiction books. I don't care for them in rpgs, in fiction, or in comics.

When it comes to horror, I don't think something needs to look modern to look horrific.
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Well, that isn’t what I argued, is it? What I argued is that Vampire’s horror, specifically, is based on being in the modern world (around us), and that modern colour imagery, including photographic imagery is a good way of conveying that.

If you don’t like photographic art in any circumstances, then that is down to your own tastes.
 
Trippy said:
Well, that isn’t what I argued, is it? What I argued is that Vampire’s horror, specifically, is based on being in the modern world (around us), and that modern colour imagery, including photographic imagery is a good way of conveying that.

If you don’t like photographic art in any circumstances, then that is down to your own tastes.
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Photographs and color don't really convey modernity to me, but evidently they did to the designers, at least from what I recall about discussions and interviews at the time.

Overall, though, I was responding to "I think the main people who complained about it were, really just rallying against doing anything different to previous editions." I don't think that was necessarily the case, particularly since (in my experience, at least) there are a lot of people who don't care for photographic illustrations in rpgs in general.
 
carpocratian said:
Photographs and color don't really convey modernity to me, but evidently they did to the designers, at least from what I recall about discussions and interviews at the time.

Overall, though, I was responding to "I think the main people who complained about it were, really just rallying against doing anything different to previous editions." I don't think that was necessarily the case, particularly since (in my experience, at least) there are a lot of people who don't care for photographic illustrations in rpgs in general.
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Well, I think this going to be one case of ‘agree to disagree’ and move on.
 
Personally, I like the photos and most of the other art in V5. For me it's just that, when someone says Vampire: The Masquerade, I instantly think of Tim Bradstreet. Just like I instantly think of Tony DiTerlizzi, when I hear Planescape.

The photo art of V5 also beats, whatever the hell Cyberpunk V3.0 was doing.

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The Mad Hatter said:
Personally, I like the photos and most of the other art in V5. For me it's just that, when someone says Vampire: The Masquerade, I instantly think of Tim Bradstreet. Just like I instantly think of Tony DiTerlizzi, when I hear Planescape.

The photo art of V5 also beats, whatever the hell Cyberpunk V3.0 was doing.

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I like the artificiality of the V3.0 doll pics. It's distinctive, it's weird. I get what they're going for.

I don't like it or think it was executed well at all, but I get it.
 
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