Years before the Vampire puffery, C&S and RQ tried to carve out a niche as more than just another couple of games about elves and wizards, by making much ado about "realism," which as Mr. Gygax observed could get a bit silly given the subject matter.

I've been a big BRP fan since RQ, but getting snooty about it would be like putting down the majority of gamers for being totally into genre fantasy, while I'm a fan of science fiction (as opposed to fantasy with "futuristic" costumes like Star Wars) and dig historical games such as Flashing Blades and  Gangbusters without injecting orcs or magic.

There was slightly more sense to schoolboy rivalries over computer brands in the 1980s, which only makes adventure-game tribalism all the more ludicrous.

At the same time, the clique around Vampire and Ars Magica and various other anti-D&D distinctions got to my mind taken too far when it came to subverting the D&D brand itself. Trying to "re-educate" a customer base that didn't give a shit about philosophical navel gazing but did know what it liked was bad business.

No, what White Wolf did was different.  They weren't saying you were more sophisticated or smarter because you played their game.  Sure Rune Quest and C&S did that but Gary Gygax started it.  As well ask Stan Lee if this issue of Iron Man is the greatest ever that you will treasure forever.

What White Wolf did was call gamers losers for gaming.

Quote from: David Johansen;789835What White Wolf did was call gamers losers for gaming.

Care to quote from an actual WW game book?

An Inphobia magazine editorial is the one I specifically remember.   Beyond that I've honestly not looked at a White Wolf product since.

Quote from: David Johansen;789886An Inphobia magazine editorial is the one I specifically remember.   Beyond that I've honestly not looked at a White Wolf product since.

Hang on -- a single dimly remembered inhouse magazine editorial from twenty years ago = White Wolf Hated Gamers?  Errrrr ... right.

I've an anecdote.

I live not too far away from Boston, which those of you who pay any attention to sports might know has won a disproportionate share of sporting championships in recent years: the last decade represents only the second time in history where a North American city has won championships in all four major sports within a single decade.  In the last dozen years, the Red Sox have had 90+ win seasons nine times and made the playoffs seven times, more than any other MLB team in that stretch, and had the best record in the league last year.  The Bruins have made the playoffs seven straight years, won their division four times, and had the best record in the league last year.  Over the last thirteen years, the Patriots have won their division eleven times and been in the Super Bowl five times.  In the last seven years, the Celtics won their division five times and appeared in the NBA finals twice.

Despite all that staggering achievement, for a few years now the media has acted like cats on a hot tin roof.  Any time a Boston sports team wins three games in a row, the sportswriters freak out and act as if the team will never lose another in their rampage to championship glory.  Any time a Boston sports team loses three games in a row, it's all Doom and Gloom and management needs to break up those bums and losers just before committing seppuku to expiate their crimes.  This flip-flops in the same season, often several times, and judging from the comments sections online, the fans find the screeching very tiresome.

And it's the same thing here.  You don't create buzz by reasonable, calm talk.  You create buzz by flinging rocks at the Enemy -- and if there's no Enemy, you need to invent one.  Newspapers do this, magazines do this, talking heads on TV do this, Internet forums do this.  We routinely act as if the pronouncements of a few online chatterers or some purported Big Name Gamer represent the views of Gamers Everywhere.  We routinely conflate our personal experiences, in our isolated bands of a half-dozen friends around dining room tables or the banter of three people at the FLGS day before yesterday, as representing the experiences of Gamers Everywhere.  And we routinely give the most props to the most outspoken among us.

Heck, take Old Geezer.  People don't listen to him because he was there at the very beginning of our hobby.  People listen to him because he's a caustic, opinionated fellow who was there at the very beginning of our hobby.  

Being caustic and opinionated myself, I don't knock it, but we should recognize the limits: that likely the majority of gamers would roll their eyes and find all the chatter tiresome, if they ever noticed at all.

Quote from: Ravenswing;790064Heck, take Old Geezer.  People don't listen to him because he was there at the very beginning of our hobby.  People listen to him because he's a caustic, opinionated fellow who was there at the very beginning of our hobby.  

Wait, people listen to Old Geezer?

A dimly remembered house organ from the time period before the internet where was where a company would actually talk about things like that.  By modern measures it's like they talked about it on the front page of their website for months on end.  It is fair to say that White Wolf has grown and changed a great deal from those early days but to discount the attitude they cultivated in their house publications when discussing how they pissed people like myself and the Pundit off?

It's not just trash talk.  It's discussion of how things got so crazy for a while when the internet was young and the roots of the tribalism that persists in gaming to this day.

GDW had a rebuttal in Challenge Magazine, the cross board drama of the time.  They had multiple digs against White Wolf and Vampire fans in the magazine and even in a few products.  Letter columns were the flame wars.  It is true however that only a small percentage of gamers would read the magazines monthly.  Just as only a small percentage bother with message boards.

I listen to Old Geezer because he has interesting insights, he's often funny, he doesn't put up with a bunch of stupid shit, and he's a nice guy.

Sometimes he gets entrenched or stubborn and I stop paying attention.

I basically think a lot of people are too fucking uptight about petty shit, and gaming has a lot of that.

I didn't like D&D back in the 90s. I also didn't like White Wolf. I had a bunch of friends who played or wrote for it or whatever, and some of the ideas were interesting, but... enh. But, whatever, gaming.

The TV show coming out was pretty cool, and it was a chance to get some visibility on gaming.

But, frankly, getting your panties in a twist because of one article a long time ago and then burning everything to the ground and salting the earth and saying NEVER AGAIN is... really, really, really fucking petty and stupid.

I mean, fuck, WW isn't even owned by the same people now. Arguably, they are owned by stupider people! But _differently_ stupid. (CCP, oy)

Quote from: Will;790111I basically think a lot of people are too fucking uptight about petty shit, and gaming has a lot of that.

Amen, brother.

I kind of want to sig this.

If you do, maybe rewrite it a little more cleverly so I seem smarter!

meh, if my internet persona was any less bombastic and ridiculous nobody would ever respond anyhow.

It also helps that White Wolf has never produced anything that interested me.  Seriously, not a single product.  Maybe it's that I don't like dice pools, at all.

Any interest in D&D? They had some somewhat interesting stuff for 3e. (I was a contributing author in that)

I agree with dice pools and I'm not a huge fan of Storyteller system.

Also, WW republished a bunch of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books, which were cool. (And alas lost in a move, bah)

Nah, I'm not quite the D&D hater I was ten years ago but it's still not a game I'd play by choice.  "Adventure!"  almost got me but that was because it was pulp, but then there were dice pools and I already had GURPS Cliffhangers and Daredevils so why bother?

'why bother?' is a perfectly good reason to play a narrow range of systems — the most important thing that underlies all the nerd rage about these sorts of subjects is that table top roleplaying is essentially the same game regardless of the game title on your book (though one has to be careful not to pay too much attention to all the nonsense inside them!). I think the OSR Taliban fringe mostly get keyed up over D&D hatred or indifference because they correctly recognize that this game we all play under different guises is some sort of house ruled D&D.

Curious misunderstandings grow up over time.

Using d% instead of d20 often reflects  less concern with precision. It's simple to add an ability score directly  to a  skill rating, or multiply it by a number reflecting a task's  difficulty. To divide by 5 and round off would be additional labor.

Indicating a 20% or 25% chance, as in the original (Supplement I) presentation of the D&D thief class, can reflect an assumption that the reader understands that the probabilty is what matters, not what dice may be tossed.  The % sign takes two characters less than "/20" and % statements are common in a wide range of everyday, non-game contexts. Likewise, one might take for granted  that  it  hardly matters whether one states 2/6  or reduces it to 1/3.

Armor Classes in their original presentation in Chainmail Man to Man were simply codes for literal classes of armor. They could as well have been alphabetic, since the numbers (ascending  from 1 for unarmored) had no arithmetic use: The 2d6 roll to hit had to be looked up by cross-indexing weapon type  with armor class on the table. I guess the flip around to a 9 to 2 range had to do with a rule experiment along the way,  but it didn't matter when practice returned to  using a matrix. There are lots of ways to pull out the numbers from the OD&D tables and substitute a  formula, and insisting on a  particular way of doing something the guys had no great interest in doing in the first place was understandably not a  high priority.