Quote from: GrimGentSpeaking of resonance and ambience, my favourite passage from the first edition of Exalted was...

"Before the world was bent but after the Great Contagion, there was a civilization built in the image of the First Age. It sought to emulate the splendor of the bygone Golden Age, but it was in all ways less. It was a time of sorcery and heroism, of fabulous wonders and treacherous betrayals. Ruled by a decadent empire, it slipped inch by inch into barbarism and darkness, until one last cataclysm blotted it out forever. Yet, in its sunset, it was a splendid thing, and glorious were the deeds of the Exalted."

...And that simply doesn't have nearly the same feel without the connection, no matter how tenuous, to the modern world.

But it isn't our modern world. It is, as far as I've ever been able to tell, the mythic earlier Ages of the WoD. Their cosmology really only looks a lot like ours, but it's really just some crazy parallel-evolution shit. I know what they did; it looks more like anti-science then I assume it really means to be. It's a somewhat logical extention of trying to hammer out a theme and still create a universe where these things could happen right under people's noses.

EDIT for clairity: I don't think they thought hard about the ramifications of their early works. Sloppy writing, imo, but passionate.

Quote from: Thanatos02But it isn't our modern world. It is, as far as I've ever been able to tell, the mythic earlier Ages of the WoD.

That line of thought was abandoned early in the development, and you can really only see any significant hints of it in some of the very first books for Exalted. Since then, the game has been completely separate from the WoD, new or old. (It does explain the "wicked old men" bit, though.)

Quote from: malleus arianorum:harp:

Ok yes you caught me, I was harping on "occult Cauccasian males" when the word I was really thinking of is "Aryans." Certainly there are non-Aryan protagonists in WW fiction but the mere inclusion of asians, indians, and women does not prove a contradiction so long as they conform with their archetypical oriental, nobel savage, and hysterical man-without-a-penis roles.

And yet, you certainly can't accuse WW of having pro-western ideals.  It just shows how utterly fucked up they are: These guys can't show someone of ethnic background other than Caucasian without turning him/her into a stereotype, and yet they are constantly shrillingly squealing about how EVIL western civilization is.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditAnd yet, you certainly can't accuse WW of having pro-western ideals.  It just shows how utterly fucked up they are: These guys can't show someone of ethnic background other than Caucasian without turning him/her into a stereotype, and yet they are constantly shrillingly squealing about how EVIL western civilization is.

RPGPundit

They turned every group and race into a stereotype; I feel it was one of their greatest mistakes. I like WW games, and enjoy playing them (most of them, anyhow), but their exoticising of non-western nations (and many western ones, actually) and blanket assumptions about western culture and structure just tell me that they didn't fully understand what they were talking about at the time.

They just came off racist and reactionary. After all, the 'noble savage' and 'wise, pure yellow man' are just as dehumanizing as 'spear-chucker'. They've gotten better and more sophisticated, but I won't pretend that this a. wasn't an issue and b. bugs the shit out of me.

But, really, this is off topic. Can we get a new thread if that's what we've changed the discussion to? (And, has anyone actually reconsidered their old opinions of any of these games? I have, a bit, but I wonder if I'm wasting my breath.)

Quote from: GrimGentThat line of thought was abandoned early in the development, and you can really only see any significant hints of it in some of the very first books for Exalted. Since then, the game has been completely separate from the WoD, new or old. (It does explain the "wicked old men" bit, though.)

Yeah, in the initial stages it was a marketing strategy that established tenuous, thematic links between the Exalted and various WoD splats. The idea was that the WoD was one possible future that Creation faced if the characters did nothing. The subsequent success of the game made the connections more harmful than beneficial, resulting in the canon nazis having yet another war of attrition, and thus the idea was allowed to die a quiet death.

Quote from: Thanatos02Can we get a new thread if that's what we've changed the discussion to? (And, has anyone actually reconsidered their old opinions of any of these games? I have, a bit, but I wonder if I'm wasting my breath.)

Actually, I've considered starting a "White Wolf: Then & Now" thread, considering some of the outdated statements made by the WW-haters around here. Some, like Pundit, are still railing against a WW that existed in the mid-90s, seemingly unaware that their products, design goals, and customer base are almost entirely different now. As many have said before, White Wolf is mainstream now. There's nothing rebellious about playing White Wolf games anymore, and they don't market themselves as any kind of "alternative" roleplaying experience. The vast majority of folks on the WW forums play D&D, too, and White Wolf publishes D20 materials under the Sword & Sorcery imprint (which takes up near half of their quarterly catalogue and is prominently displayed on their website) and has resurrected Ravenloft under the Arthaus imprint (along with other classics like Pendragon and BESM). In short, Pundit & co. are fighting a battle with straw men from the past. To whatever extent there might have been a conflict before, it ain't there now.

Yes, the old WoD was full of stomach-churning errors in judgment, many of which the current designers readily admit were errors. The ethnic stereotyping was just one example (which you'll also find in abundance in "oriental"-themed D&D products, along with many others). The insistence on Po-mo "consensual reality" nonsense and other New-Age faux-spirituality was equally nauseating to me personally. As was the obvious disjunct between how we were told the games were "supposed" to be played and how people actually played them. And yes, there was certainly an air of pretentiousness in the early products (although it had more to do with marketing to non-gamers than with trying to subvert the gaming world or make it more exclusive, as Pundit has claimed).

But lots of folks around here seem to have written White Wolf off so long ago that they haven't bothered to see how they've changed over the past couple of years. As I see it, it's the equivalent of avoiding D&D 3.5 like the plague and ridiculing it and its players, all because TSR were dicks in the early 90s and alienated a lot of fans. And the new WoD isn't just a new "edition" (as Pundit has referred to it), it's a whole new game with only the most superficial resemblance to its predecessor. Thematically it's as much of a shift as 3E D&D was in the area of mechanics. The whole design philosophy is different, from the ground up, including lessons learned from the previous decade. The resulting difference is such that, despite my having soured on many aspects of the old game, the new one is easily one of my favorites. It's not for everyone, certainly, but neither is D&D or any other single game.

Quote from: Black FlagSome, like Pundit, are still railing against a WW that existed in the mid-90s, seemingly unaware that their products, design goals, and customer base are almost entirely different now.

Stop the WAR?  Pigs'll fly first, methinks.

Quote from: WarthurLet's put it this way: in big letters on the back of the 2nd Edition of Exalted there's a massive "Science is Wroooooong!" statement. (I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't quote the precise wording, but it's pretty damn unambiguous.) Exalted is the only fantasy RPG I have encountered which does this; no other fantasy RPG I have had any experience with has felt a need to say "Step away from 21st century science, because this is a world of fantasy and magic" in quite such an in-your-face way, because it's one of those things which really doesn't need to be said.

Why does Exalted feel the need to make this bold statement on the back cover in the first place? Yes, granted, it is fiction, but it is fiction with an avowed hostility towards science. Fantasy authors and game designers who don't have a big problem with rationalism and empiricism and whatnot don't feel a need to distance themselves from those concepts.

oh dear lord, it's just a game. :rolleyes:

If you are seriously suggesting that Exalted is some kind of subversive creationist dogma in the guise of an rpg then you're an idiot.

I sersiously also doubt that WW actually belief that science is wrong/a lie/evil/ whatever.

ffs!

Quote from: J ArcaneI may be thinking of 2nd Ed. Vampire, but I know for certain that one of it's editions held the same rant.

It's not a rant at all; that's just your silly interpretation. It's just a bit of mood setting hyperbole.

Good grief, some people need to get out more.

Quote from: RPGPunditAnd yet, you certainly can't accuse WW of having pro-western ideals.  It just shows how utterly fucked up they are: These guys can't show someone of ethnic background other than Caucasian without turning him/her into a stereotype, and yet they are constantly shrillingly squealing about how EVIL western civilization is.

RPGPundit

Do you have any factual basis for this nonsense other than the blurb of a fantasy rpg?

What a load of twattery.

Quote from: RPGPunditAnd yet, you certainly can't accuse WW of having pro-western ideals.  It just shows how utterly fucked up they are: These guys can't show someone of ethnic background other than Caucasian without turning him/her into a stereotype, and yet they are constantly shrillingly squealing about how EVIL western civilization is.

RPGPundit

Western civilization didn't do the Aryans any favors. What do you think was keeping them down between Reichs 2 and 3? :rolleyes: The "meek & mild" mindset domesticated the Aryan warrior spirit. It cut them off from their Hindu and Norse religious heritage. It idealized Truth and Reason and Right and Wrong -- ideals that were appalling to their nihilistic sensibilities. It's real life success was a threat to the make-believe success of Aryans living in prehistoric Iran and sunken islands and so forth.

But regarding your complaint, this kind of fiction can't work without stereotypes. Lovecraft's mulattoes have to be irreversibly brain damaged. His inbreds have to be irredeemably degenerate. His monsters have to be eternally out-to-get-you. The universe has to be unchangingly uncaring. The genre depends on it and falls apart if all that can be sorted out with a heart-to-heart conversation.

So ultimately your complaint is silly. I can tell you right now, you'll never* read one of their stories where a Christian scientist offers a prayer and heals them, allowing them for the first time in their lives to take responsibility for their own choices. No! Everyone is the way they are because of what they are, not who they are. That's the way the genre goes so if you don't like stereotypes, stay the heck off their lawn!

*Never say never. I've heard that Anne Rice is Christian now so who knows what the future holds? Grownups: the accountability?

Aryans? Hindu & Norse heritage? Dude, I didn't know 19th-Century pseudo-ethnology had made such a comeback after that last gasp in the '30s. That's hilarious!

Seriously, though, the Noble Savage conceit is a Romantic reaction to White Man's Burden and Euro-American imperialism. They're both essentially racist and condescending, of course, since they both make impossibly broad statements about other cultures and downplay complexity and individualism. Unfortunately, RPGs in general (being written and designed largely by white boys who seldom leave their countries of origin) tend toward exoticism and the caricaturization of foreign cultures. The old WoD was bad about this, but so was D&D in all its incarnations, L5R, et al. I'm not defending it, but to the degree that the game relies on stereotypes and broad brush strokes, it will tend to succumb to this phenomenon.

And the two possible ways of ignorantly dealing with other cultures is to denigrate them or romanticize them. For obvious reasons, RPG designers tend to err on the side of the latter. That doesn't make them "anti-Western-civilization" (as if there could be such a thing in the first place). After all, the thing they're praising is something that they, Westerners, have concocted and projected onto the "other." Of course, the more enlightened way of dealing with foreign cultures is to assume that, underneath the superficial differences in custom, language, and ritual, people pretty much share the same flaws and the same aspirations. But that's not nearly as exciting, is it? It also doesn't lend itself well to the sorts of stereotypes that RPGs tend to be grounded on.

On the charge of being anti-science, yeah, the old WoD fell into that trap as a sort of cheap cop-out explanation for why there were so many supernatural things running around. Then with Mage: The Ascension, and later Changeling: The Dreaming, it became canon that reality was based on consensual belief (yep, the ultimate cop-out). It was just an exercise in metaphysical masturbation, however, and it wasn't meant to be taken seriously as a philosophy. It's also extremely dated to that period in the 90s and is even harder to swallow post-millennium.

Good thing the new WoD has none of that. No pop-philosophy, no anti-science mentality. Of course, science must be assumed to have some blind spots in order for the supernatural to have a presence in the modern world, but that's exactly what the majority of the real-world population believes--at least those that are Christian, etc. But the new game doesn't treat science as a false paradigm foisted on the world in order to stamp out magic and kill fairies (as the old game regrettably did).

As for Exalted, I seem to remember one of the developers explaining the quote that Pundy mentioned as an homage to pulp stories of yesteryear--sort of like Howard's Hyborean Age was supposedly our real history pre-ice-age. Not sure I'm satisfied with that explanation, and I wish they'd kept the old blurb instead, but I'm willing to overlook a single stupidly-worded teaser on a book that has fuck-all to do with the entirety of the game's contents otherwise.

Quote from: Black FlagAryans? Hindu & Norse heritage? Dude, I didn't know 19th-Century pseudo-ethnology had made such a comeback after that last gasp in the '30s. That's hilarious!

I think he made the reference as an ironic jest. At least I had no trouble understanding his post as referring to self-styled "Aryans".

!i!