Quote from: Balbinus;262254Really?  I was put off by John Wick designing it as a reaction to his perception of D&D, which as best I can tell is based on nothing resembling the text of D&D as written or the experience of it as played by the vast majority of its fans.

I'm uninterested in The Wick and his ideas about how he's going to make D&D better, make a better version of D&D, etc.. But I can ignore all that and just read and play the game I buy. It's possible it'll be good despite all the pseudo-intellectual wankery.

Seanchai

Quote from: flyingmice;262706Methinks Melan missed the point...

:heh:

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;262667I wish someone knew something about The Barbarians of Lemuria.

:mischief[1]:

I've just got back in from work and I see this!

I feel really stoopid.

Yes, Clash, I was really having problems this morning, I was not intending to take over this thread. Sorry if it looks like it.

Can we get back to normal please?

Goodbye and out.

Quote from: Simon W;262728I've just got back in from work and I see this!

I feel really stoopid.

Yes, Clash, I was really having problems this morning, I was not intending to take over this thread. Sorry if it looks like it.

Can we get back to normal please?

Goodbye and out.

No problem, Simon! It's a cool game, and worth a little extra boosting!

Of course I've never done dumb stuff like that... Wait! Does search work on this site! Crap! :O

-clash

Quote from: RPGPundit;262387Hasn't John Wick gone on record as despising D&D and the people who play it, multiple times?

If so, that's a pretty boneheaded thing to base an RPG on.

Does this mean we won't see a Pundit-written version of World of Darkness?

Because that might be funny.  

Didn't Monte Cook already do that?

Quote from: droog;262815Didn't Monte Cook already do that?

Yes, he did.

RPGPundit

Quote from: droog;262815Didn't Monte Cook already do that?

Monte Cook didn't despise the people who played.

Rein*Hagen despised Monte Cook, and everyone else in the universe.  Thus Rein*Hagen despised Monte Cook, Sam Chupp, and many other folks.

Monte Cook's introduction to his version of the WoD contains some good notes on why game designers who center their lives on contempt and hatred for others make for such an interesting world, and why Rein*Hagen became less fascinating to most of his former co-workers as time went on.

Quote from: riprock;263841Monte Cook's introduction to his version of the WoD contains some good notes on why game designers who center their lives on contempt and hatred for others make for such an interesting world, and why Rein*Hagen became less fascinating to most of his former co-workers as time went on.

That's first time I hear about that. Care to share any details? Or was this discussed in a thread I could find?

Quote from: Consonant Dude;263849That's first time I hear about that. Care to share any details? Or was this discussed in a thread I could find?

Long story, and I don't have the book handy from which to re-write it.  I think I discussed this in some length on rpg.net.

It looks like I have a copy of the first draft:


Quite a lot of people seem to have gotten the impression that Mark Rein*Hagen had a big ego, no respect for others, and a propensity to use cults of personality whenever possible.

I speculate that Rein*Hagen managed to establish a particular design culture with these aspects at White Wolf, and that this culture, carried on by Brucato and others, limited the long-term goodwill that the company managed to accumulate.  I speculate that Rein*Hagen found a considerable short-term payoff from the cult of personality, but had trouble in the long term.

I advance this speculation in the context of three areas of evidence:

1. A Cult of Personality Must Have a Hard-to-reach Leader

QuoteAnyway, Rob took me over to a little table with one guy behind it. On the table were arrayed a number of freshly printed Vampire books. Rob chatted with the guy behind the table and introduced me to Mark Rein*Hagen. I told him that I thought his new game looked amazing and gushed about it a little. He silently listened to me with an expression that spoke volumes: I wasn't telling him something he didn't already know.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rob give Mark a knowing look and motion with his head toward me. Mark sighed, and then said as condescendingly as I've even been spoken to, "Here you go, kid." He didn't need to add, "Now get away from me, son. You bother me," because it was already clear.

That was both my first and my last interaction with Mark. I did (and still do) love and appreciate the book. But because of that, it's not without a feeling of more than a little irony that I present to you Monte Cook's World of Darkness.

You see, today, I count most of the folks currently at White Wolf among my best friends in the game industry. I've worked with them for years as publishing partners for my own Malhavoc Press.
I was a little flabbergasted when Rich Thomas and Stewart Wieck approached me with the offer to take the World of Darkness...

--Monte Cook's World of Darkness, p.10

I suspect Rein*Hagen *had* to be snooty about it.  If he had been willing to open up, he would have dissolved the cult of personality.  In the short term this seems to have worked very well -- fans pored over his every scribble, trying to fit themselves to the Rein*Hagen vision.

If my analysis of the printed books is accurate, Wieck seems to have been resistant to the cult-of-personality culture at White Wolf.  That's just an impression, however, not a textually supported argument.


2. Gaming Sadism Can Stimulate Player Imagination
Sam Chupp, a former employee, describes  dysfunctional relationships between White Wolf designers in his essay "Birthing Death."

QuoteMark Rein*Hagen really wanted to do Wraith. He was hot for it. This is because he is a gaming sadist. He had already run a game-like *thing* at one point wherein all of the players had found themselves to be in Hell from the start, and their job was to fight their way up to the top of the food chain, or out of Hell, or whatever. It was very depressive, very much a mind-fuck, and not what I would call "fun gaming."

I suspect that Rein*Hagen was not a "sadist" simply to put people through the experience of imaginary pain, although of course the player characters usually suffer a considerable amount of pain in White Wolf games.

I suspect Rein*Hagen was experimenting with "sadism" in order to find new ways to *control* the game experience.  If one reads Camus' essay on de Sade, (reprinted, if memory serves, in The Rebel) it reads like Rein*Hagen's design documents for Vampire.  Camus even describes de Sade as having "the immortality of Cain."

And, lest this read as a deprecation of Rein*Hagen or of sadism in general, note that Rein*Hagen's "sadism" seems to have worked well for a huge number of fans and a long time.  Players who imagine themselves to have no control are stimulated to imagine and speculate about how the game universe works.  

3. Control the Language to Control the Discussion and the Imagination

White Wolf wrote its books in a jargon so florid that most books require a specialized glossary near the beginning.  Just as wargamers are often math geeks who enjoy working the equations that determine wargame events, White Wolf fans are/were often vocabulary mavens who were thrilled to memorize a contrived, obfuscated vocabulary

Over the years I have seen many White Wolf fans become "true believers," endlessly reading the White Wolf canon and debating finer points of how the imaginary universe worked.  Numerous outsiders were repelled because they could not even discuss game issues with the True Believers due to the contrived language barrier.  The "cult of personality" had achieved a remarkable boundary between the faithful and the outsiders.  This not only enhanced the loyalty of the believers, it prevented them from even conceptualizing criticisms that were clear to outsiders.

This kind of control of language is sinister when it is done from a position of real coercion.  The propagandists who enforce "politically correct" terminology in totalitarian societies really are suppressing people.  Domestic abusers sometimes train victims to use jargon in order to rationalize abuse. It is not uncommon to see socially isolated groups of actors fall under similar jargon-domination from a charismatic leader, such as a theatrical director. (Such actors are generally desperate for work in their chosen profession, and thus they are under pressure to obey.) What is remarkable is that a voluntary association of consumers embraced and enjoyed this kind of conformity.  It is a marketing victory on par with the artificial language of Klingon, which is difficult and useless, but enthusiastically studied by those who enjoy it.  

Clearly Rein*Hagen received tremendous success and cooperation until late 1996.  I suspect the concentration of authority in one person limited the effectiveness of the organization as it grew. Whether he left White Wolf in a position of strength or weakness, the White Wolf "cult of personality" design culture continued without him.  In particular, I suspect that Brucato elaborated on it, but other designers may well have been more important.

I suspect "cult of personality" game designs are unstable in the long run.  However, while they last, they offer a very different gaming experience than cut-and-dried, easily audited systems such as GURPS. (IMHO, GURPS uses little jargon, can be readily compared with outside standards, and requires GMs to make more calculations than subjective value judgements.  I speculate that Steve Jackson is the anti-Rein*Hagen and if the two men were ever to shake hands, they would annihiliate like an electron and a positron.)  I speculate that the next evolution will be to replicate the florid, over-stimulated, elaborately interconnected fantasy worlds that can be produced by the "cult of personality" by means of a more stable system that does not tend to concentrate control in one authoritarian Storyteller.  (Greg Stolze's In Spaaace! and similar systems might have the germ of this control-sharing.)