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Author Topic: The RPG Site and White Wolf  (Read 19677 times)

Ratman_tf

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« Reply #45 on: May 13, 2020, 10:02:04 PM »
You know who I hate? Mokey Fraggle. That stuck up bitch must die.
The notion of an exclusionary and hostile RPG community is a fever dream of zealots who view all social dynamics through a narrow keyhole of structural oppression.
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remial

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« Reply #46 on: May 13, 2020, 10:07:48 PM »
Quote from: Darrin Kelley;1129856
I own it. And all of the sourcebooks for it. It was the only White Wolf RPG I kept. Because I pretty much love that game;.

yup, I too have the whole like of the game. including Combat. I did a conversion of Street Fighter to Combat once, for all the super powers and such, but lost it in a computer crash many moons ago.

had a friend offer me $200 cash for the complete line back at a time I really needed money. I'd sold a bunch of other books, but I turned him down on that.

mAcular Chaotic

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« Reply #47 on: May 14, 2020, 05:06:33 AM »
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs
Battle doesn't need a purpose; the battle is its own purpose. You don't ask why a plague spreads or a field burns. Don't ask why I fight.

CTPhipps

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« Reply #48 on: May 14, 2020, 05:29:06 AM »
I am EASILY the sickest.

Because it's my job.

I'll explain.

:)

Basically, I got into White Wolf when I was about 13 years old and pretty much have played it semi-consistently since then. I played Vampire: The Masquerade first then moved onto Changeling: The Dreaming and Mage until about 2004 when the Old World of Darkness ended. I dropped it for a few years afterward to do Mutants and Masterminds and played it along with Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game for West End Game rules until they lost the license. From there, I got into quote-unquote "real life" to finish my masters.

I was interested in V20 but not REALLY interested. I tried to get into Vampire: The Requiem but the two had the problem of no metaplot. As stupid and weird as the Old World of Darkness sometimes was, it was a beautiful and stupid weirdness that I'd grown up with. The characters were old friends of mine and the idea of them returning with Beckett's Jyhad Diary was what REALLY brought me back to the WOD.

It's funny because I'm fairly critical of V5 in a lot of places and I have a bunch of house rules and corrections for it. I didn't have NEARLY the reaction a lot of people seemed to have to it, though, so I seemed like a huge defender of it. That was when they mentioned they were doing a 5th Edition of Chicago by Night.

Chicago by Night was my nostalgia heroin. I knew all of the characters intimately and back and forth. Annabelle, Anita Wainwright, Gengis, and so many others. I actually annoyed the SHIT out of the developers with my questions and fanboy antics. However, its existence got me back into things and I jumped headfirst into it.

I should note that I have a reason to be UTTERLY OBSESSED with White Wolf because it technically qualifies as research material. I write urban fantasy novels for a living and while my superhero novels are my best sellers, I've got 5 interconnected urban fantasy novels about vampires, mages, and shifters. I can write them off as a business expense along with Anne Rice, Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, and Kim Harrison.
« Last Edit: May 20, 2020, 09:14:25 AM by CTPhipps »

Abraxus

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« Reply #49 on: May 14, 2020, 07:59:12 AM »
Quote from: PencilBoy99;1129897
I really like all the new Chronicles of Darkness products, and I've had a ton of fun running V20 and Vampire LARPS.

Your not the only one. Not much of a Larper yet prefer cOD because of the modular nature of the rules and more importantly the lack of metaplot. Not a fan of it.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1129911
You do a poor job showing that by always jumping into any thread anyone mentions WW/WoD/VtM, et al, to mention how much you hate those products. :p

Agreed and seconded.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1129931
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs

Nothing at all really. It's not my rpg system of choice yet much worse rpgs out on the market. The company stupidly painted themselves into the corner with the overreaching end of times metaplot so it needed to be scrapped imo. After awhile what was the pointing of playing since no matter whatever OWOD rpg one played nothing stops the end of the world. Sure one can play without yet toward the end the damn metaplot permeated everything White Wolf. As much as I sometimes like playing the underdog I and many in gaming circle will admit we don't like continually playing the underdog. It's the same reason why many Palladium fans love Rifts yet hate Chaos Earth because once again same metaplot and nothing one does in character stops the coming of the Rifts.

It's too bad Kevin had to change the original premise of Chaos Earth to fit his damn "vision" as the original concept was Rifts yet a much more limited Nuclear attack. The world comes close to ending yet their is a good chance to turn back the darkness vs "your screwed no matter what" from PB Chaos Earth.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2020, 08:07:26 AM by sureshot »

remial

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« Reply #50 on: May 14, 2020, 03:57:52 PM »
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1129931
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs

the games aren't the problem, the problem is the most vocal of the fans. the old line was that white wolf games draw broken people, like all you can eat buffets draw fat people.  the other problem is that the authors and the PTB at white wolf, and now Onyx Path, take what the vocal ones are shouting, and run with it.  They think echo chambers like big purple speak for the entire fan base.

BoxCrayonTales

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« Reply #51 on: May 14, 2020, 05:23:56 PM »
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1129931
whats wrong with white wolf games? they seem like normal rpgs


WW holds a virtual monopoly over the urban fantasy tabletop market. There aren't any other urban fantasy games that compete or have communities where you can play and discuss the game. (Shadowrun is post-apocalyptic cyberpunk urban fantasy, which is too specific despite its popularity.)

I have creative disagreements with the way WW games are designed in terms of rules and setting. There are no alternatives. Hence, my continuing frustration and suggestion of creating a game to address my complaints.

I have so many complaints, but here are a few important ones:
  • World of Darkness is divided into many sub-games with very different rules, rather than unified rules like The Everlasting, WitchCraft, or really any other roleplaying game ever made. World of Darkness is unique in that it has dozens of different sub-systems to handle the same thing.
  • World of Darkness is really bad at playing together with multiple different splat types due to incoherent world building and unbalanced rules.
  • The metaplot is overbearing in the extreme, and there's no option to ignore it or remix it.
  • Aside from a few obscure mentions in supplementary books, there isn't a plethora of campaign worlds to play with like there is in, say, D&D or Rifts.
  • The Chronicles of Darkness only make token attempts to address complaints aimed at World of Darkness, introduce new problems, and are constantly subjected to flame wars by the cult of fandom.
  • The setting is arbitrary and doesn't really let you change it up. For example, ghost PCs only exist in World of Darkness and not Chronicles of Darkness unless you homebrew it, and demon PCs are tied to Christianity or to the God-Machine rather than something more open-ended like Vigil or Lost.
  • After WW exhausted the original five splats of vampire, werewolf, mage, ghost, and fairy, the additional splats were varying degrees of torturous or unnecessary in the creation of their lore by WW's authors.
  • The fandom is cultish. For example, when Mage: The Ascension 3rd edition came out in 2000, lead developer Jess Henig received hundreds of death threats by email and was terrified to open his inbox for years. (The cult of fandom is part of the reason why I suggested making a new game entirely rather than trying to hack the X of Darkness rules. I specifically want to avoid attracting cultists.)
  • The writers of the games are varying degrees of crazy themselves. They promote bizarre or extremist political views in their writing, at least two of them have been outed as pedophiles, Mark Rein-Hagen himself has been blacklisted by the company for reasons unclear, and the Chechnya incident needs no introduction.
  • Pretty much the best games of the lot are Hunter: The Vigil and Changeling: The Lost because of their extreme flexibility and toolkit nature compared to the other games. Sad that the same style couldn't be applied to all the other games.
  • The organization of the books and the setting itself is a complete mess. Fanboys make a big deal about the expansive history and metaplot (even Chronicles developed one, not that WoD fanboys know anything about that), but good luck finding out what it is.
Any questions?

CTPhipps

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« Reply #52 on: May 14, 2020, 06:24:33 PM »
  • White Wolf is really awesome because it helped create the Gothic Punk genre as we know it and has been an influence on a huge number of urban fantasy lines as well as images. The creators of the Blade movies said they used the art of Tim Bradstreet and writings of the game to help create its feel. That's in addition to Underworld and the fact some of the writers on True Blood were fans.
  • There was a pretty big dispute early on whether it should be a unified World of Darkness or a bunch of separate splats with some similarity. Pretty early on they decided that it would just be a bunch of similar lines. The Judeo-Christianity of Vampire is different from the animism of Werewolf and the Gnosticism of Demon. No one group is right and fans who want a "definitive answer" are shit out of luck.
  • As a artist, I have to say that I appreciate that Vampire doesn't just "publish games" as nothing ticks me off more than people who want brainless entertainment instead of something with social value. I don't always agree with the politics depicted in White Wolf games but I appreciate they're games with a broadly progressive agenda. More gay, black, and other minority characters appeared in early White Wolf splats than the entire history of roleplaying games prior to that point.
  • The fact it's written for "mature audiences" was something of a joke in the fact its original audience was primarily 13 year old boys but the fact is that it did attract an adult college aged audience more interested in something edgier with actual relevance to their lives. Adult focused RPGs were a new thing back then and tackling mature topics is something I strongly approve of.
  • Mark Rein-Hagen lives in Georgia (The Eastern European one) and was there when the Russians invaded the country. He also is active in the promotion of LGBT rights in the area as well as raising awareness for them against the Russian Federation's oppression of them. I agree with all of his political views and his general anti-Putin regime sentiment. However, the story goes certain higher ups felt this actually put publishers of the Russian editions of the game in physical danger and they wanted nothing to do with the controversy of such or the activism involved in it.
  • Paradox upon discovery of the accusations against one of their writers, took down his text-based game despite it selling like gangbusters.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2020, 06:40:51 PM by CTPhipps »

Snowman0147

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« Reply #53 on: May 15, 2020, 12:54:33 AM »
How in the hell did I not make it on the list?  Doc Sammy you wounded me...

Though seriously the mechanics are shit.  The staff, freelancers are truly horrible people, Onyx Path owner might be a vile cheat that screws workers from their pay, and the fan base lost its fucking mind.  There is a lot to hate about it.

Chris24601

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« Reply #54 on: May 15, 2020, 01:13:43 AM »
Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1129995
World of Darkness is divided into many sub-games with very different rules, rather than unified rules like The Everlasting, WitchCraft, or really any other roleplaying game ever made. World of Darkness is unique in that it has dozens of different sub-systems to handle the same thing.

Unified rules are vastly overrated.

The best RPGs have systems built to reinforce their settings; ex. WEG Star Wars, D&D, Vampire. The worst are the ones where the mechanics are completely misaligned with the setting; ex. d20 Star Wars or any of the countless d20 settings where the setting fought with 3e D&Ds basic assumptions of level-based advancement, magical healing and armor as your primary defense.

Frankly, kitchen sink urban fantasy is rather rare. Far more common to the genre is a focus on a particular type of supernatural, possibly with a token teammate that is another type (the most common seeming to be a token werewolf ally in a vampire story where the werewolves are traditionally the enemies of vampires).

Also common is a "conservation of detail" origin for all the supernatural elements of the setting; ex. the shared ancestor of the vampires and lycans in Underworld, everything being a demon of some kind in the Buffyverss, Vampire Diaries/Originals vampires and werewolves both being the result of witch's spells/curses, or all the supernaturals in Lost Girl being Fae.

Each of the main WoD game lines is self-contained to focus on particular themes. The Biblical origins of vampires fits perfectly with its themes of guilt/sin and holding onto your humanity in the face of a monster within you struggle to control. The consensus reality with magic as willworking supports what I call "the dark fantastic" themes of magic being both dangerous and wondrous.

The themes of Vampire would be lost if they're not suffering God's curse, but are actually thaumivores resulting from Caine's long ago botched Awakening. The themes of Mage would be lost if the Biblical God were real and therefore every form of magic outside of Christian miracle workers and the natural magics (precursors of the natural sciences) are actually the work of infernal powers.

Neither of those play well with "lets roll massive piles of dice as we play Captain Planet furries in a doomed war against the love-children of Geiger and Lovecraft."

Allowing each to focus on its respective strengths both thematically and mechanically instead of getting lost in a bland stew of a fantasy kitchen sink is a big part of why nothing has managed to eclipse WWs settings; they're evocative in ways more universal settings can never be because they're a ready to play world with distinctive archetypes, not a toolkit filled with generic examples.

Quote
  • World of Darkness is really bad at playing together with multiple different splat types due to incoherent world building and unbalanced rules.
You call this a bug; I call it a feature.

D&D also sucks at having multiple different monster PCs in the same party. There's a reason you're typically limited to humans/near humans of approximately the sams level of ability. Try writing an adventure for a party consisting of a human fighter, a lich, a gold dragon, a balor and a medusa.

By creating the game lines as separate entities, you're limiting your pallet just as D&D limits you to humans, elves, dwarves and similar.

That said, the system is eminently hackable. For a Mage/Vampire crossover we made only direct sunlight do damage to vampires and removed the "must sleep during the day/limited daytime dice pools" entirely.

Quote
  • The metaplot is overbearing in the extreme, and there's no option to ignore it or remix it.
No, the metaplot is entirely ignorable... or I would have had to end my Mage game in 2004 when the metaplot said the world ended. Also, if it was overbearing and unable to be ignored I would have had to include the Avatar Storm in my games instead of ignoring it entirely for years until playing up the Storm's end was a useful plothook for a new campaign.

When I was ready I also managed to mix Gehenna, the Apocalypse and Armageddon into a single narrative where the PC mages managed to stop the whole thing and turn the wheel towards and upwards trajectory where, though still dark, there is now hope for a better tomorrow if you're willing to work for it.

I've been playing a post-Gehenna/Apocalypse/Armageddon setting for 13 years now with all manner of interesting developments (ironically, I'd introduced the concept of a "Spirit Technocracy" made up the disembodied masters about 5 years before the revised Void Engineer convention book introduced them. Mine though were seeking to regain control over the Technocrats on Earth once the storm died down... resulting in a permanent schism with a Technocratic faction semi-allied with the Traditions and another who'd been completely subsumed by the spirits until they were little more than drones).

So this claim is just flat out wrong.

Quote
  • Aside from a few obscure mentions in supplementary books, there isn't a plethora of campaign worlds to play with like there is in, say, D&D or Rifts.
Do there need to be? Again, taken at face value, there's the Vampire campaign world, the Werewolf campaign world, the Mage campaign world, the Wraith campaign world, Changeling, Hunter, Demon and Orpheus campaign worlds. Each presented its own supernatural type as preeminent with the others defined in relation to it.

Gaia and the Triat are not the supreme spirits of the Vampire setting... if they exist at all they're demons who once masqueraded as the pagan gods.

Calling them all a single setting is like saying Forgotten Realms, Eberron and Nentir Vale are all the same setting because all of them have humans, elves, orcs, dragons, clerics, fighters, rogues and wizards.

Quote
  • The setting is arbitrary and doesn't really let you change it up. For example, ghost PCs only exist in World of Darkness and not Chronicles of Darkness unless you homebrew it, and demon PCs are tied to Christianity or to the God-Machine rather than something more open-ended like Vigil or Lost.
Clerics being the only ones with healing magic and all arcane magic being Vancian is equally arbitrary and the system fights you if you try to change it. What's your point?

OWoD also had plenty of different types of demons... each specific to their settings.

Demons in Vampire are tied to Christianity because the whole SETTING is tied to a Christian mythos.

In Werewolf the demons are lovecraftian horrors born of the personification of entropy itelf.

In Mage they're entities from the Astral umbra, the embodiments of mankind's beliefs about demons.

In Demon they're again Christian-themes because Paradise Lost featuring Lucifer as the protagonist is perhaps the most iconic depiction of sympathetic demons in Western culture. The other biggie is Dante's Inferno which also depicts specifically Christian demons.

Quote
  • The fandom is cultish. For example, when Mage: The Ascension 3rd edition came out in 2000, lead developer Jess Henig received hundreds of death threats by email and was terrified to open his inbox for years. (The cult of fandom is part of the reason why I suggested making a new game entirely rather than trying to hack the X of Darkness rules. I specifically want to avoid attracting cultists.)
All fandoms are cultish. Or was D&D 4E embraces by one and all with open arms and no threats whatsoever made against the developers of that edition?

Mage Revised was basically the same thing as 4E D&D... a radical change from previous editions that attempted to for a "One True Way" that was meant to bring the game into line with the bleak hopelessness of the other WoD settings; cutting off the fantastic elements of the spirit world, turned Avatars into symbiotic organisms that humans merely hosted, introducing the concept that magic was dying and then adding the never before even hinted at End Times called Armageddon (so it would line up with Gehenna and Apocalypse) that they claimed had always been on the horizon.

There's a reason he wasn't asked to return to do the 20th Anniversary Edition of Mage. His changes to the setting were an absolute misread of what the customers enjoyed about it; namely that it was NOT like all the other WoD settings.

* * * *

What your main beef could be summed up as is; "it's not a toolkit."

You clearly enjoy tinkering with rules, but you seem blind to the fact that not everyone does.

Not everyone wants to build a motorcycle from scratch. They're not interested in how you could customize it to be the perfect ride for them... they just want a bike that runs  so they can take it out and enjoy the sun, fresh air and countryside.

Your complaint is that the WoD only sells fully assembled motorcycles and not boxes of parts you have to assemble yourself.

Opaopajr

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« Reply #55 on: May 15, 2020, 03:36:48 AM »
Sailor Luchador Disco Mayberry by Night is so in right now. :cool: We should run it with Streetfighter + Changeling the Dreaming, that way we can use the Cantrip tagging system for multiplied madness. This time you will not be forgiven! In the name of love and justice, fairies will wrassle inspiration into your goth-punk banal hearts. :p
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CTPhipps

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« Reply #56 on: May 15, 2020, 03:49:55 AM »
Youtube: https://youtu.be/VqgNPA5KdWA

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/World-Darkness-Steve-Wieck/dp/B07J5Y2XWP/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=White+Wolf+Documentary&qid=1589528822&sr=8-1

I recommend everyone who wants a very flattering and congratulatory view of White Wolf's WOD and its effect on gaming to watch this documentary. It talks at great length about all the changes and benefits that it made to the hobby as a whole as well as many individual fans' lives.


Ghostmaker

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« Reply #57 on: May 15, 2020, 08:30:33 AM »
It doesn't help that some fan-made supplements and games are more sane and coherent than 'official' splats.

Changing Breeds, for example, versus Genius: The Transgression or Princess: The Hopeful.

CTPhipps

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« Reply #58 on: May 15, 2020, 08:33:41 AM »
"The insanity is the point."
-Malkavian

Chris24601

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« Reply #59 on: May 15, 2020, 12:41:08 PM »
Quote from: CTPhipps;1130042
"The insanity is the point."
-Malkavian

Indeed, the Werewolf line in particular seems built around the idea of over-the-top ultra-violence to the point of parody.

I mean, over on Onyx Path's forums there's a guy arguing that wereDINOSAURS from Africa with spirit gifts taught only to an obscure sect of werewolves who never leave China and a totem spirit from Central America is perfectly reasonable and normal character for Werewolf. Their enemies are basically right out of Captain Planet (we're talking "let's pollute the planet and laugh about all the people we're making sick because that's what capitalism is... hur hur hur!" level of motives and complexity).

There's a reason I've never, outside of theory-crafting, seen actual crossover campaigns with WtA. You can pretty easily merge Vampire, Mage, Mummy, Wraith and/or Changeling into something reasonably coherent and balanced as long as the players and GM are on the same page in terms of what they want the campaign to be about (ALL WoD games benefit strongly from a session zero, but crossovers particularly).

The main outlier is Werewolf with its insistent cosmology, ridiculous 2D villains and inflated combat dice pools while at the same time being really gimped in any campaign not centered around combat. NOTE: there is nothing wrong with WtA as its own entity... but it's basically camp horror in the same vein as Army of Darkness or any of the long running horror franchises after they descend into self-parody and almost invariably result in any campaign they're featured in as PCs descending into campy schlock too.

It's why I've deliberately replaced Garou with Lycans (the cursed descendants of the mythical Lycaon) in my Vampire campaign (and to be fair, Awakened magic doesn't exist either because the focus of this world in on Vampires... I've got a whole other setting for my Mage games where vampires are just another type of thaumivore and werewolves are embodied nature spirits from the middle umbra where Awakened magic reigns supreme).