Quote from: TristramEvans;920885I disagree. Had many a fine campaign with that game back in the day. Some people just don't have the right tastes or imagination to pull it off.

I would have preferred a more classic take on faeries, myself.  I wanted a more classic take of pretty much every White Wolf monster, though, so my tastes never did totally line up with anything White Wolf.  I played in a few good games of Vampire the Masquerade in the early years but I was perfectly satisfied when I stopped.

Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;920869The University of Alabama Gamer's Guild was very involved in the original Changeling playtest back in the '90s.  The universal reaction to it from those involved was that it sucked ass.  The guys who were in on that playtest were real WW fanboys, too.

Changeling was just a bad game, and I don't think more time would have helped.

Knowing they playtested and simply ignored the feedback just makes it worse.

I think the game could have been better if they stuck conceptually closer to what was done in Ars Magica. It made faeries creatures essentially made from story archetypes. Left to their own devices in Faerie, they acted out the same cyclical stories over and over. In Ars Magica, character with True Poetry could alter Faerie and its inhabitants with new stories about them. This way why faeries like to lure such characters into their world.

You can see traced of that in Changeling, but it is done in a much more boring fashion. The best part is the way that the archetypes used to refresh Willpower are like types of characters in a story. However, I think this should have been the way to gain Glamour instead. If you had the Knight archetype, you got Glamour by running around the WoD trying to be a chivalrous hero. If you were the Jester, you could play elaborate pranks to get Glamour. By pursuing stories tied to your nature, you would gain magical power.

Instead, you got Glamour by hanging out at poetry slams and galleries, draining artists of their creativity. It's just a boring incentive that lead nowhere from a story perspective. Rather than Glamour being a cause to push you into stories, it pushes you to go hang out at the coffee shop. I also just makes Changelings feel too much like vampires as well.

Quote from: Baulderstone;921059I think the game could have been better [...]

Changeling: the Jack of Kinrowan RPG would have been fine and dandy, accessible, very White-Wolfy with its special snowflake PCs and kiths and secret worlds and all, and likely would have sold better.

Quote from: Baulderstone;921059You can see traced of that in Changeling, but it is done in a much more boring fashion. The best part is the way that the archetypes used to refresh Willpower are like types of characters in a story. However, I think this should have been the way to gain Glamour instead. If you had the Knight archetype, you got Glamour by running around the WoD trying to be a chivalrous hero. If you were the Jester, you could play elaborate pranks to get Glamour. By pursuing stories tied to your nature, you would gain magical power.

Instead, you got Glamour by hanging out at poetry slams and galleries, draining artists of their creativity. It's just a boring incentive that lead nowhere from a story perspective. Rather than Glamour being a cause to push you into stories, it pushes you to go hang out at the coffee shop. I also just makes Changelings feel too much like vampires as well.

Which probably says more about the designers than the source material.

jg