Why Talk about Storytelling?

Why do it at all?

I want to encourage people to play games in the World of Darkness. In specific, I want to encourage people to play games in the World of Darkness V5 system - currently Vampire the Masquerade V5, Hunter the Reckoning V5, and Werewolf The Apocalypse V5. These are hard games to start for beginners - both because the books are quite opaque as far as rules and lore and because there is literally decades of lore at this point. Yeah, V5 reset some stuff, but man, there's still a lot to know.

Why those games?

I've played a lot of games and the World of Darkness games are ones that always spark my imagination. I love how much the players and StoryTellers end up building the world together, and I love how relationship and personality focussed the games tend to be. Why V5? I really like it. The games I have always loved in the World of Darkness are smaller scale, street level, neonate focussed games, and those are the games that V5 build for. I love the fledgling, fish out of water, gaining their feet, small fish in a very big pond style of gameplay. I am not saying these are better than previous versions, or better than other systems, just that I think the systems reinforce the mood I particularly want to build. In the beginning, I will likely be concentrating on Vampire, because I've played more of it and it is the current Chronicle I am playing.

Why me?

I'm a long time gamemaster. I've run Storyteller systems since the 90s, Dungeons and Dragons since the 80s, FATE and Pathfinder, Palladium systems, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun - I've run a lot of games. I think I've had some really fun campaigns and chronicles over that time period. I think deeply about gaming and I want to share those thoughts and experiences. And I have written some material already - originally for my current Chronicle, but that I've used to answer new ST questions on Reddit. Hopefully someone finds it helpful.