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Author Topic: New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY  (Read 35913 times)

Darrin Kelley

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #15 on: March 01, 2017, 01:56:53 PM »
Quote from: san dee jota;948290
Enh, they hate the -new- White Wolf.  

They love the old-freelancers-and-staffers-who-used-to-work-for-White-Wolf-but-now-work-for-a-different-company-on-all-the-old-White-Wolf-games that is Onyx Path.  It probably helps that they have a sizable percentage of the mod staff doing freelance work for Onyx Path.

Yeah, That's not a conflict of interest at all! :rolleyes:

Whatever happened to an actually independant RPG media? It doesn't exist at the big purple.
 

TrippyHippy
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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #16 on: March 01, 2017, 02:25:11 PM »
Quote from: Skarg;948292
Why do you care, and why are you bothering to come to a gaming forum to post it? Or why, if what you care about is sales, don't you just hop to Magic: The Gathering, or Pokemon, or Hollywood films, or pop music, or the fossil fuel industry, since they make all RPGs "small fry" and are "-bigger-"?

What a bizarre response - as if I am supposed to have an existential crisis about why I care and why am I bothering to post!? Why do you care to type on this thread yourself?

Anyway, in response to your comments, neither Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon or Hollywood movies or the fossil fuel industry are the subject being discussed, and White Wolf and their documentary is. In terms of their sales, it is merely an illustration of their cultural impact within the RPG hobby, which was significant.
I pretended that a picture of a toddler was representative of the Muslim Migrant population to Europe and then lied about a Private Message I sent to Pundit when I was admonished for it.  (Edited by Admin)

ZWEIHÄNDER
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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #17 on: March 01, 2017, 02:37:54 PM »
White Wolf was a cultural zeitgeist, whether you want to believe it or not. It brought mall goth to the fore of the RPG community, bastardized from post-punk music and fashion. Other games at the time - Talislanta, MERP, GURPs, Runequest, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, et al. - didn't enjoy the fecundity that White Wolf had with convention-goers. Its spread across the community, in a time when web 2.0 and social media didn't exist as we know it today, was pretty awe-inspiring.

In retrospect, I'm personally glad it's done and over with... for now. 90s 'gothic fiction' wasn't all that exciting to me. However, we know that RPG trends are cyclic. Who knows what will turn up next.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2017, 02:57:39 PM by ZWEIHÄNDER »
No thanks.

Darrin Kelley

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #18 on: March 01, 2017, 02:43:22 PM »
Quote from: TrippyHippy;948295
Anyway, in response to your comments, neither Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon or Hollywood movies or the fossil fuel industry are the subject being discussed, and White Wolf and their documentary is. In terms of their sales, it is merely an illustration of their cultural impact within the RPG hobby, which was significant.

They rode a trend. Which was a once in a lifetime thing nobody is likely to ever see again.

The golden age of the goth movement's popularity ended in the 90's. And by and large, that fandom has become passe`. The world has moved on.

Will they have enough customers to actually make them commercially viable as a company? That's the big question.

In the ensuing years, White Wolf/Onyx Path games have utterly disappeared from brick and morter stores. They are exclusively PDF or print on demand now.

If the next edition of Vampire isn't available from conventional retail outlets. How successful could they possibly be? I don't know. I don't have the sales metrics.

Appealing to a shrinking audience never works in publishing. You have to constantly be cultivating new outlets to even remain viable. And until we know what exactly White Wolf is doing in all of those regards. There is no way to tell if they will actually succeed at producing anything.
 

Gronan of Simmerya

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #19 on: March 01, 2017, 02:51:11 PM »
"If you're a Goth, why weren't you there when we sacked Rome."

True in the 90s, true now.

And really, the whole "seXAY Vampire" thing has left me colder than a dead mackerel since Anne Rice books were new.
You should go to GaryCon.  Period.

The rules can't cure stupid, and the rules can't cure asshole.

HappyDaze

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #20 on: March 01, 2017, 02:57:28 PM »
World of Darkness had its time, but it has certainly passed. And D&D seems to still be going on...

Bedrockbrendan

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #21 on: March 01, 2017, 02:59:35 PM »
I kind of agree with TrippyHippy here, people are being a bit thin-skinned reading into some lines in the trailer (it sounded to me like they were just saying the world tended to see you as a geek or nerd if you were a gamer in those days-----that matches what I remember growing up, and a fair number of us were geeks and nerds to boot). Definitely Vampire changed things a lot. They gave TSR a run for their money and changed the way a lot of people were gaming. There were definitely other games though, and plenty of us were playing them. Most gamers I played with, played D&D but also played TORG, GURPS, TMNT, Cthulu, etc. There were plenty of alternatives around before Vampire game out. But when Vampire landed it was loud. I remember a friend of mine had the book and lent it to me on the bus. It was quite different from what I expected from RPGs. I stuck with D&D, but I saw a lot of folks migrate to WoD. Plenty of people played both, and we had a guy in our group who ran Vampire and Changeling every so often. I think what Vampire did was bring people into the hobby who might not otherwise have thought to play RPGs. And it seemed to connect with the culture of the 90s in the same way D&D had connected with the culture when it first came out.

Darrin Kelley

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #22 on: March 01, 2017, 03:15:43 PM »
Calling that a documentary would have been like calling Billy Mays a documentary filmmaker. It's an infomercial for a product that hasn't even been produced yet.

If they are throwing money away on infomercials at this stage. Without even having a product to sell. It raises some serious questions about the business sense of the people involved.

WotC never made a D&D infomercial. And that's because they are really expensive to produce. Well beyond the budget Hasbro grants them.
 

Dirk Remmecke

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #23 on: March 01, 2017, 03:29:55 PM »
Quote from: san dee jota;948247
pushing supplement treadmills and "game book fluff as cheap fantasy literature",


This is one aspect that I honestly don't understand about modern (= post Dragonlance) module and supplement design and writing.

Why do gamers buy expensive RPG supplements instead of cheaper novels?
Swords & Wizardry & Manga ... oh my.
(Beware. This is a Kickstarter link.)

Charon's Little Helper

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #24 on: March 01, 2017, 03:30:26 PM »
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;948304
WotC never made a D&D infomercial. And that's because they are really expensive to produce. Well beyond the budget Hasbro grants them.

Actually - I seem to remember several videos produced before 4e to start getting people hyped up.  And while the product as a whole did poorly, losing D&D the #1 slot to Pathfinder until 5e - the release sold out of their initial print-run.  

So... maybe not stupid?

Willie the Duck

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #25 on: March 01, 2017, 03:45:41 PM »
A few thoughts:

1) White Wolf made a big splash in the 90s, and it did bring in some people to TTRPGs who otherwise wouldn't have come to it. No one can deny that. That's about all that is really clear. For an equivalent 90s phenomenon, White Wolf is the sitcom Friends-- it was popular, talked about a lot, brought some serious money to the parent company, and is remembered fondly. No more, no less. Is there any one big thing about WW games that you can point to as an innovation that no one had thought of before and completely changed everything? No, it was Friends, not Seinfeld- but that's probably asking to much of it (although the documentary wants you to think otherwise).

2) The documentary is trying to make you mad. Its' creators knows damn well that it will get more views if we all go sharing it with each other saying, "have you seen this BS?!" If you are upset, you should contact the director of this promo, so they can include "pissed off ____" on their resume/CV.

3) Club culture--Y'know, when I was 12-17, I assumed that clubs I couldn't get into must be exceedingly cool. Even moreso, when at 20 and had started dating a woman with a child, and my Friday nights were full of Candyland and cut-up hotdogs for dinner, I really resented the idea that other people my age were spending their Friday/Saturday nights out at clubs. You know what, I've since been to clubs--they're mostly a bunch of trying-too-hard young people spending money they don't have in the desperate attempt to be cool. Selling WoD/WW as inherently tied to club culture is not going to impress me. Not that I believe it is a real link. I knew lots of WoD players in the 90s, and most of them were people who would have been playing Shadowrun or West End Star Wars or something if WW had never existed.

4) Nerdom and losers-- neither RPGs nor this nebulous beast known as nerd-dom are in any way tied to loser-ness. They are simply a pastime that the socially stunted could engage in because other people could determine whether you were part of it. That was true before the 90s, during the 90s, and after the 90s. Admittedly, since Xfiles, LotR, good Superhero movies, and your grandmother playing computer games, it's a lot harder to argue that nerd-type interests are less mainstream than (say) Monday Night Football. However, WoD had very little to do with that.

5) I do not care what TBP thinks on the matter. They (or at least their forums) are not "independent(sic) RPG media," nor are they supposed to be. They are a collection of individuals expressing opinions. I do not favor TBP's moderation policy or its negative effect on freely expressing one's thoughts. That's why I'm mostly here and not there. That does not mean I'm going to leap on their opinion about either this documentary nor White Wolf as also inherently wrong. They dislike this clip, we dislike this clip. We're allowed to agree on such things.

Anyways, nice little bit of psychological manipulation there in the link. I don't like people implying that people like me (TTRPGers from the pre-WoD era) were losers, but I've been called worse by people whose opinion I value more than these guys.

Simlasa

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #26 on: March 01, 2017, 04:40:50 PM »
Quote from: Premier;948257
I'm willing to believe that most WoD players are club animals, but that doesn't mean they influenced club culture in any way.
A lot of games from that era seemed to think their audience were going to clubs... all the modern/cyberpunk games seemed to have floorplans of dance clubs in them somewhere. But were gamers really going to them?
The goth kids I knew weren't... well, they went to shows, at bars... but not 'clubs'. They spit on that whole 'dance' subculture. The vampire players I was most aware of couldn't afford going to clubs anyway and wouldn't have gotten the attention they craved there... instead, they cluttered up coffeehouses around the university... and played at the Vampire LARP places on weekends.
They were every bit the same degree of awkward maladroids that the D&D players were... but while the D&D kids were taking computer classes the Vampire kids were all in the theater and art department.

Were the Vampire players really big 'club animals' elsewhere? Was I around the only ones who weren't 'hawt' and cool?

Voros
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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #27 on: March 01, 2017, 05:16:03 PM »
I remember Goth kids being into a melange of industrial and electronic dance music like Skinny Puppy and Front242 so yes there was a good portion of them into clubbing. VtM appealed to more than just goth kids though.

Unfortunately most of the docs about the hobby that I've seen have been uncritical fan projects and this looks like it could be more of the same. Hard to judge from a trailer though as misrepresenting a doc is par for the course in marketing.

A more interesting question I think  is whether they address why VtM went into such decline? And I mean beyond 'it was a game for poseurs.' D&D's sales also fell precipitously in the early 80s as the media panic that temporarily boosted sales faded.

And of course TTRPGs suffered seriously due to the explosion of console and computer games (I think that is where a lot of number crunchers, power gamers and solo gamers disappeared). But why is it that RPGs seem to have historically done such a poor job of recruiting new players? That is one thing I think 5e has actually done a good job at.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2017, 05:19:13 PM by Voros »

Charon's Little Helper

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #28 on: March 01, 2017, 05:33:30 PM »
Quote from: Voros;948320
And of course TTRPGs suffered seriously due to the explosion of console and computer games (I think that is where a lot of number crunchers, power gamers and solo gamers disappeared). But why is it that RPGs seem to have historically done such a poor job of recruiting new players? That is one thing I think 5e has actually done a good job at.

While I don't disagree - I've also read that the prevalence of video games - especially casual - meaning that virtually everyone knows the gist of games is one of the major factors which has led to the recent board game Renaissance.

It's interesting to guess if whether 5e and some other more recent TTRPGs can tap into the same thing.

Bedrockbrendan

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New White Wolf Doc coming...and its going to piss off EVERYBODY
« Reply #29 on: March 01, 2017, 05:36:58 PM »
Quote from: Simlasa;948314
A lot of games from that era seemed to think their audience were going to clubs... all the modern/cyberpunk games seemed to have floorplans of dance clubs in them somewhere. But were gamers really going to them?

I have never been into clubs, but back in the 90s, I definitely knew local gamers who went to clubs. And I remember here in Boston there was a goth club called the Manray, and I've known gamers who went there (especially among the WoD crowd). I don't think anyone in my immediate gaming group went as far as I can remember.