Quote from: thedungeondelver;399272Who was that who had a shit fit over Hackmaster winning an award?  Yeah, that guy.

Oooh, good call. Wish I could recall who that was. I think he flipped out over HackMaster winning the Origins' "Game of the Year, 2001" award.

Quote from: Novastar;399281Oh, you know the old truism:
"Give a man fire, he's warm for a night; light a man on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life..."

LOL Nice.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;399338Oooh, good call. Wish I could recall who that was. I think he flipped out over HackMaster winning the Origins' "Game of the Year, 2001" award.

Oh that guy. We talked about him in an epic thread here about "Vintage Gaming: Rose-colored glasses?" It's in a post of Melan with a zillion quotes sampling the opinion, and at the end, he reposts this guy's rant. Epic Douchebag.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;399338Oooh, good call. Wish I could recall who that was. I think he flipped out over HackMaster winning the Origins' "Game of the Year, 2001" award.

If they actually manage to get it done in time, I think there's a good chance that Advanced HM will do it again next year.

FOUND HIM.

It was Bruce Baugh.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;399359FOUND HIM.

It was Bruce Baugh.

Were there any repercussions or reprisals?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;399359FOUND HIM.

It was Bruce Baugh.

Ha! He doesn't have a right to bemoan anything.

I'm pretty sure he's put his RPG writing on hiatus, last I heard.

Quote from: mhensley;399358If they actually manage to get it done in time, I think there's a good chance that Advanced HM will do it again next year.

I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Maybe someone can mail baugh a review copy.

lolololol

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;399280I am having a hard time understanding that argument, could you elaborate? Are you saying, that roleplayers that were already there (playing D&D and Shadowrun) stopped because of WW/WoD, or that the influx of new members to the hobby stopped because WW/WoD were the (most)prolific game and genre? Or just that the gamers who joined playing Vampire, left when they didn't wanna play Vampire anymore?

No matter what, I don't see White Wolf could cause more people to be driven away from the hobby, than actually joined it? Out there, a lot of people are still playing Vampire...

I'm saying, let's assign a number to the people who joined RPGs because of white wolf. Let's say "100".

Ok, great, you say, that's a net gain of 100 gamers!
Except that White Wolf swine weren't particularly keen on crossing over to other games, lots of those people saw playing "vampire" as part of a totally different hobby, they weren't so much getting into rpgs as a whole, as they were playing ONE RPG (vampire) as part of their existing hobby (pretending to be a vampire, being a goth, pretentious wankery out of touch with reality, etc.).
So let's say that 40 of those 100 never play anything but Vampire and quit the hobby after a relatively short while.
That means that the gain is +60.

But meanwhile, White Wolf became hugely influential. The entire hobby looked and said "wow, they got +100 players! We have to be just like them!!".

What this means is that the whole hobby changed into metaplot and pretentious wankery. And gamers who weren't into that were shit out of luck.  Suddenly, you have a number of people leaving the hobby. Let's call that 100 too (though I think that its a conservative number).

Suddenly, the net loss is -40.

But we're not done yet; you also have to count all the people that WOULD have joined gaming, had it still been quick and easy to do so, with a focus on having fun, rather than requiring elaborate "splat" books and black eyeshadow on men, and talking a lot about Art and not actually doing anything.    The kids said "Gaming? it used to be about kicking ass in dungeons, but now its for college-age guys listening to the Cure and questioning their sexuality", and they get into Magic or online games or pokemon instead. So that is a loss of 100, every year, for the better part of a decade.

So now the value representing the total contribution to gaming's popularity thanks to White Wolf is something like -640!

White Wolf was the classic wrong-turn in the hobby, where pretty much everyone (with a couple of notable exceptions, like Steve Jackson or Kevin Siembieda) saw the short-term dollar signs of latching the entire hobby onto a  FAD (Pretentious Goth Vampire-Wankery), that seemed to show big short-term potential gains (never mind that pretty much NO gaming company other than white wolf itself ever had any prolonged success with the metaplot-heavy splat-book pretentious "storytelling game" model) without any thought to the long-term consequences.

RPGPundit

Quote from: noisms;399286I don't think a single person stopped playing RPGs because of the direction White-Wolf's Swinery led the hobby.

I did. I specifically quit, for about a six-month period, on account of how sick I was of the general collapse of the hobby and the sort of shit that was coming out at that point.  The hobby stopped being fun anymore. I heard that again and again from people who quit in the gaming circles I was in back then.  Out of 20 or 30 people who were in my general gaming environment back then, I know of only one other person (besides me) who I am still absolutely sure games.

RPGPundit

Bruce Baugh isn't worthy of the title of "biggest villain", unless you're talking in terms of literally biggest, as in "most rolling mounds of fat".

He's just a pathetic bloated gasbag, a worthless talentless loser who turns any game he touches to shit.

RPGPundit

Ironic how White Wolf jumped onto the d20 bandwagon shortly thereafter.

If WW had not jumped onto the d20 bandwagon at the time, wonder what would have happened.

Pundit, you sound like everything stopped and went goth in 1991, but it didn't, did it?

Same year as Vampire came out (1991) TSR put out Rules Encyclopedia and the amount of supported settings for AD&D was freakin' huge from 1989 and onwards.  In 1992 Chaosium put out the, in my opinion, best edition of Call of Cthulhu, FASA published second edition Shadowrun and Atlas Games gave the world my all time favorite rpg book, Over the Edge 1st edition. Just to name a few, that was blissfully wank free!

Sure Vampire became popular, but that it had an actually negative effect on the other games I don't believe for a second. There were, and still is, plenty of options for quick, easy and completely ungoth ways to get into the hobby, for the yearly +100 you include in your equation and I never heard of a single person who quit playing what they thought was fun, because someone else in the hobby started playing Vampire.  If there was a decline in the roleplaying circles in this period of time, I find the explanation about people growing up and getting other priorities much more likely (A lot of people started gaming in the late 70s/early 80s while teenagers. 12-15 years later they hit an age of kids/job/lawns needing to get mowed, and a large group of those gamers stop gaming – circle of nerd life)

To me it seems like you in your dislike for Vampire gives them far more (negative) credit than they deserve.

Quote from: RPGPundit;399391Bruce Baugh isn't worthy of the title of "biggest villain", unless you're talking in terms of literally biggest, as in "most rolling mounds of fat".

He's just a pathetic bloated gasbag, a worthless talentless loser who turns any game he touches to shit.

I had to read this twice because I thought you were talking about Darren McClellan....

Everything you said applies to him equally....


At least Bruce has actually produced something...