Quote from: RPGPunditThey also led a movement in game design and structure that would later be pegged as "Story-based Gaming", which caused the mainstream gamers to abandon roleplaying games as a hobby in DROVES.
RPGPundit

You assume that WW did this.
Which is a logical fallacy.

The whole premise is bollocks. If anything i'd say WW brought a lot of new life to the hobby, even if they were a bunch of angsty goths

To claim the opposite, without evidence, is gonzo in the extreme.

If WW's audience wasn't D&D'ers, or at least, was looking to attract non-gamers then the fact that people stopped playing D&D doesn't have anything to do with WW.

Unless you posit something along the lines that people simply playing WW games made D&Ders quit, or that White Wolf gamers spent a bunch of time seeking out people who played D&D just to make fun of them and that caused them to quit. Which is silly.

So, what's your concept, Pundit? It can't be those, so what is it?

Quote from: Thanatos02If WW's audience wasn't D&D'ers, or at least, was looking to attract non-gamers then the fact that people stopped playing D&D doesn't have anything to do with WW.

Unless you posit something along the lines that people simply playing WW games made D&Ders quit, or that White Wolf gamers spent a bunch of time seeking out people who played D&D just to make fun of them and that caused them to quit. Which is silly.

So, what's your concept, Pundit? It can't be those, so what is it?

Don't you remember the packs of Vampire players who roamed the streets and forced the poor innocent D&D players to roll up Toreadors at gun point?

Did White Wolf really cause the exodus of so many gamers from the hobby in the 90s? Or rather was it the death throes of companies like TSR, who still represented the majority of gamers. As I recall, White Wolf was expanding and earnestly trying to appeal to a new generation and bring new blood into the RPG world, whereas the older companies were largely resting on their name-recognition laurels and/or quietly imploding due to years of virtual stagnation. It wasn't until 3rd edition that D&D got a proper kick in the ass and was made to appeal to the casual gamer again. It was also the first time in years that its designers seemed to give a flying fuck about their audience.

And there were grognards who complained about that, who insisted that D&D was selling out, that no new edition was necessary (since 1st ed. was still perfect, naturally) and that enticing all those kids to the hobby would just dumb it down. That phenomenon leads one to wonder whether the real threat to the hobby isn't the old farts who dogmatically proclaim that their style of play is the One True Way and that all newcomers are wannabes and posers. Those guys exist among the fans of every established game line and can usually be found proclaiming the superiority of a now-outdated edition of their game of choice (with the addition of 500 pages of house rules, of course). Their obscurantism feeds their elitism, and as such they prefer their games incoherent and impenetrable--the better to keep out the unworthy. Of course, they can't support an industry by themselves, and they drive away more people than they convert.

Quote from: J ArcaneDon't you remember the packs of Vampire players who roamed the streets and forced the poor innocent D&D players to roll up Toreadors at gun point?

It was terrible man!!

 There were riots in the streets and everything
 Twenty sided dice all over I-75.... traffic jams galore.

Quote from: Thanatos02If WW's audience wasn't D&D'ers, or at least, was looking to attract non-gamers then the fact that people stopped playing D&D doesn't have anything to do with WW.

Unless you posit something along the lines that people simply playing WW games made D&Ders quit, or that White Wolf gamers spent a bunch of time seeking out people who played D&D just to make fun of them and that caused them to quit. Which is silly.

So, what's your concept, Pundit? It can't be those, so what is it?

No, it was a combination of WW's ideology, and the fact that TSR's (intellectual and then economic) collapse created a vacuum of leadership in the hobby, that led to everyone fashionably following WW's ideas and trying to force them on the hobby as a whole.

As I've stated in the past, if WW had existed alone, and done its thing, and you'd had a strong TSR, producing its own things its own way; nothing much would have happened. You'd have  had a surge of goths and pretentious wankers getting into the industry, bitching and moaning about how bad "roll playing" is, but they would have been mocked and largely ignored (as they usually are today), and most would eventually have gone away.

But because TSR had gone all to shit under Lorraine Williams, the entire hobby, in a moment of weakness, got taken over by Story-Based Swine, and there was no place left (or very few places) that held onto regular styles of design and play. It wasn't just that WW showed up, were Swine, and everyone left the hobby.  It was that WW showed up, and their ideology came to be followed by TSR, by Pinnacle, by WEG, by FASA, by ICE, by Mayfair games, etc etc. and suddenly people who'd been in the hobby and loved it for 15 years were finding that EVERYONE had decided the hobby was all about "art" and "Metaplot" and they and the kind of gaming that was fun for them was seen as stupid and unwanted.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Black FlagDid White Wolf really cause the exodus of so many gamers from the hobby in the 90s?

As I remember it, the rise of CCGs hit RPGs in the nutsack because third party distributors found out that they could make more money pound for pound by moving CCGs instead of RPG books. So instead of shipping out the low value per weight RPG books to eager FLGS, they shipped out high value per weight CCGs instead.

Also, as was mentioned above, the death throes of TSR and the devastating lawsuit between TSR and GDW had something to do with it as well.

Quote from: jeff37923As I remember it, the rise of CCGs hit RPGs in the nutsack because third party distributors found out that they could make more money pound for pound by moving CCGs instead of RPG books. So instead of shipping out the low value per weight RPG books to eager FLGS, they shipped out high value per weight CCGs instead.

Also, as was mentioned above, the death throes of TSR and the devastating lawsuit between TSR and GDW had something to do with it as well.

That's how it went in my neck of the woods.  

The shops smelled the CCG fad, and at the time, that shit was a license to print money.  Stopped stocking RPGs, stopped letting people run them at the tables, a lot of them went to the extent of actively driving off their RPG customers, to turn their shops into havens for the little kiddies and their Pokemon cards.

What tanked RPGs in the late 90s was greedy shop owners trying to cash in on the latest fad, and a lot of them have been dying off in the 2000's as the CCG market has petered off and one hot item after another has faded off into the sunset.  The only shop left in this area now is actually a comic shop, that started stocking RPGs again after having ditched them for years, because all the other shops are dead now, and he figured it was a safe enough bet with him being the only game in town.

Quote from: J ArcaneYour sense of history is so off it's not even funny.  

Mummy wasn't released as a standalone game until 2001.  Before that it was just a supplement for Vampire, like the Risen were for Wraith.  

Street Fighter predates it by 7 years.  By the time Mummy came out they didn't even have the fucking license anymore, it had been passed on to someone else.

So the 2001 Mummy was the real real disaster? Fine, but the original Mummy stuff didn't sell well either.

(I like your avatar btw)

Quote from: malleus arianorumSo the 2001 Mummy was the real real disaster? Fine, but the original Mummy stuff didn't sell well either.

(I like your avatar btw)

Actually, I think the problem with Mummy was that people DID like the old Mummy sourcebook.  It had the same cult favorite status that the Risen did for Wraith at the very least (hell, if not Wraith itself).

The problem was, they tried to capitalize on that by pumping out a game that was nothing whatsoever like the original writeup for Vampire, and so it bombed horribly.  They had the same thing happen with Hunter.

Much like Hollywood, WW has a staggering talent for taking a property and completely missing the point of it to try and pander to a wider audience, only in WW's case it's worse because in theory they did make the original game in the first bloody place.

I suspect they've got a fairly large turnover with their writers.

Quote from: signoftheserpentI'm still not understainding why designing a Streetfighter rpg is considered selling out or a bad thing.

"Selling out" does not mean "designing an rpg" it means mis-branding a product. That's a "bad thing" because it betrays customer loyalty and weakens the brand in exchange for trying to make a quick buck. (OTOH, selling out is a good plan if you value the buck more than your brand or your customer base.)

Quote from: malleus arianorum"Selling out" does not mean "designing an rpg" it means mis-branding a product. That's a "bad thing" because it betrays customer loyalty and weakens the brand in exchange for trying to make a quick buck. (OTOH, selling out is a good plan if you value the buck more than your brand or your customer base.)

Yanno I held off making the point, but now that you've described it like that, really, the 2001 Mummy standalone was more "selling out" by that definition than Street Fighter was.  

Quote from: J ArcaneActually, I think the problem with Mummy was that people DID like the old Mummy sourcebook.  It had the same cult favorite status that the Risen did for Wraith at the very least (hell, if not Wraith itself).

Hmm, must of been a secret cult. I never knew anyone with a kind word for the early Mummy stuff.

EDIT  Re: Mummy 2001 the ULTIMATE(?) sell out.
So lots of their products are sellouts, even more so than Streetfighter. How does that help the Pundit-is-wrong camp?

I liked 2001 Mummy.