Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;401439Yeah, but again, hardly the biggest villains of the industry, just like Jabba wasn't the worst baddie of the Galaxy? I mean, no one forcing you to go there and read the posts, and you can even read and post there without checking out TT, right? It's seems a bit masochistic the way some people can't stay away from a place that they really dislike, and compared to people who cheated a lotta gamers or ran rpg companies into the ground, it doesn't seem that villainous to me.

Well, admittedly the fact that they're some of the biggest assholes connected to the game industry (Especially you, Maclennan) may not make them some of the biggest villains in it, but then again the fact that they tend to let their presonal preferences in games affect how games can be discussed on the purple sewer can adversely affect the sales of a good, deserving game that some member of the modstapo doesn't like while promoting the sales of a bad game the modstapo likes.

Now that qualifies them for at least minor villain status.

Pundit

You keep saying "White Wolf almost killed the industry", but you keep providing nothing but your own anecdotes and "numbers" you pull out of your ass.  You hated it, you hated a lot of people playing it, but that's not "proof".

I played a lot of games, but I disliked AD&D.  I played it because my friends did, and I had fun with it, but I hated the system, and when we were looking to start a new game, I always pushed for Cyberpunk, or TMNT, or Marvel FASERIP, or Star Wars, or anything else.  Internal group drama (the DM sleeping with my girlfriend - he later married her, which at least made me feel better that he wasn't flushing our long friendship down the toilet over a fling) made me leave the group.

Round that time, I discovered White Wolf.  It was different, it wasn't AD&D and it seemed cool and edgy.  I loved it.  But here's the thing - we always played other stuff.

There were MANY reasons why the games industry hit a nosedive at that time.  White Wolf stepped in and filled a void that TSR was quickly vacating.  For every person who played WW and nothing else, for every person who left gaming because they were annoyed with pretentious goths in their city, there are MANY more, like me, who simply latched onto WW when the gaming industry as a whole was on the way down, and played the guts out of it, AND RETURNED to other games as the industry ramped up again.  I will guarantee you that.  I have met, and spoken to, FAR more people who enjoy WW as ONE of their many gaming options than who only run it, or who feel as you do.

I play 3.5, I am currently running Werewolf the Apocalypse, I play ANYTHING other than AD&D and most indie games and shit like FATAL.  I'd give RC D&D a whirl sometime, just for shits.  

See, I can do anecdotal evidence as proof too!  But I am positive my anecdotal evidence is closer to the truth than yours.

Many companies hit the skids chasing the WW market.  many more companies hit the skids chasing the 3ed/3.5 market.  I once tried to game with some annoyingly pretentious goths who only games Vampire.  It was painful, so I stopped.  Even a small city like Halifax has a diverse enough gaming community so that I didn't have to get stuck with them.

Biggest VILLAINS, not most annoying players?

Certainly most have been mentioned - Lorraine Williams and the rest of late model TSR who screwed fans around, Siembeda for fucking his fans around, the cockbags who wrote FATAL and RaHoWa and any other shit racist/hate game so they could get their premature jollies off.

There aren't many TRUE villains.  A lot of selfish, petty douchebags, yeah, but noone I'd label as actively evil.

I mean, Hitler had a D&D homebrew he tried to peddle, but noone wanted it, and it didn't sell.  He was too early for direct sales PDF market, but rumor has it even the SS hated playing it, when they were forced to playtest it.  All his adventures were railroaded heartbreakers too.  And don't get me started on the Mary Sues and metaplot!  Every adventure, Adolfft Do'Hittler'r comes in with his double uzis and kills all the bad guys before the party has a chance to do anything, and Elhimmlerster shows up all the time to berate the party for not hating Jews enough, and then solves all the problems and goes off to bang the goddess of Aryan Magic while the party has to watch...

But that was hardly part of the INDUSTRY, since he never sold any of it, and noone would touch it.  Wonky mechanics, you see.

Quote from: Hackmastergeneral;401464See, I can do anecdotal evidence as proof too!  But I am positive my anecdotal evidence is closer to the truth than yours.

Yeah, White Wolf games were just games that people played in addition to all the others (including AD&D), in my experience. I never met anybody who exclusively played White Wolf and I had a pretty large player base. Back in the day, it was Magic; The Gathering that got all the blame. While it probably had a big impact on retailers, just about every gamer I knew played Magic and RPGs.

Quote from: Cylonophile;401435The mods are like jabba the hutt, the suckups are like that obnoxious little bird like prick that sat on his shoulder and laughed at the victims jabba condemned.

Salacious Crumb.

Why the hell do I know that?

My vote is for Gary Jackson!!  


eh -- the biggest villian was the guy who worked in the mail room at TSR in the 80's. He was screening/blocking my letters to Gygax. I'm sure of it.

Quote from: Machinegun Blue;401538Yeah, White Wolf games were just games that people played in addition to all the others (including AD&D), in my experience. I never met anybody who exclusively played White Wolf and I had a pretty large player base. Back in the day, it was Magic; The Gathering that got all the blame. While it probably had a big impact on retailers, just about every gamer I knew played Magic and RPGs.

Back in the mid-1990s, I almost exclusively played/ran WoD games.
That was the case of a lot of gamers in my Eastern French area as well. WoD games were extremely popular back then.

Quote from: Benoist;401568Back in the mid-1990s, I almost exclusively played/ran WoD games.
That was the case of a lot of gamers in my Eastern French area as well. WoD games were extremely popular back then.

Oh, they were popular and everybody had their favorite. Some liked Vampire, others liked Wraith (though nobody played it as far as I knew), the girls liked Changeling and so on. Changeling is the only one I ever owned. My little sister has my books now. There were always other games going on too. Mostly Fasa games and AD&D.

Quote from: PaladinCA;401540Salacious Crumb.

Why the hell do I know that?

Because you have serious Star Wars Geek Cred.

When you can name three or more people in Jabba's entourage (other than Jabba, Boba Fett, and Lando), you're flexing your Geek-Fu.

It gets worse if you remember Salacious is a Kowakian monkey-lizard.
(seriously, what kind of f'd up obsession do I have with Star Wars, that I just KNOW this shit...?!?)

I would never put the WW games/WOD as villains. Despite their pretentiousness (which is actually part of the charm, and its good they took their ideas seriously otherwise it would have been a joke), and despite the trenchcoat clove smokers it did a lot, IMO/E for the gaming industry. Certainly the gaming world. I think part of it was a zeitgeist thing; something we don't have right now in gaming.

Quote from: Hackmastergeneral;401467Elhimmlerster

:rotfl:

Quote from: Machinegun Blue;401538Yeah, White Wolf games were just games that people played in addition to all the others (including AD&D), in my experience. I never met anybody who exclusively played White Wolf and I had a pretty large player base. Back in the day, it was Magic; The Gathering that got all the blame. While it probably had a big impact on retailers, just about every gamer I knew played Magic and RPGs.

This mirrors my experience in the 90s down here. CCGs, more than WW, were perceived as "The Enemy" that was "killing RPGs" (with people abandoning RPGs in droves in favor of collecting and playing M:tG).

Quote from: PaladinCA;401540Salacious Crumb.

The sort of name you'd expect from an old TSR module NPC.

Quote from: JollyRB;401567My vote is for Gary Jackson!!  

It's shaping up to look like his return isn't all that much of a positive, huh? That was a nice bit of a twist, or at least the foreshadowing of a twist.

Quote from: Benoist;401568Back in the mid-1990s, I almost exclusively played/ran WoD games.
That was the case of a lot of gamers in my Eastern French area as well. WoD games were extremely popular back then.

I would say this isn't uncommon.  Pundit has the grain of truth regarding White Wolf games.  They were clearly a reaction to the fantasy genre; as such, many, many people played them exclusively.  The common theme seemed to be that AD&D and its ilk were for the kids, the World of Darkness was for adults.

The truth is, of course, that White Wolf games were for angsty middle-class goth/emo poseur kids that wrote bad poetry and pretended to like Joy Division.  

My only memory of WW in the 90's, is it was the game girls were actually willing to play, and most of them made a point to show off their boobs.

That one thing makes me willing to forgive a lot of the douche-ry that a lot of male WW players presented.

(and hell, Anne Rice novels were more the cause, than the WW books.)

The girls in my circle of 90s gamers were hooked by Shadowrun and Ars Magica. WW was what kept them in the hobby. That and Castle Falkenstein.