Honestly, while White Wolf was circling the drain desperately begging for someone to buy them out, they produced product at a ridiculously unsustainable rate. Book after book of shovelware to make a quick book and damn the future. And when CCP bought them? The exact same thing kept happening.

New World of Darkness is the longest fiction series printed in English. And a lot of it is shovelware. Urban Legends is about one step away from being wikipedia copypasta.

If White Wolf has found that they have finally exhausted the customer's attention span and can no longer get people to buy a 38th Requiem book or 35th  Generic World of Darkness book (those numbers aren't pulled out of my ass for comedic effect, you could seriously own 37 Vampire: The Requiem books, not even counting World of Darkness books that don't have the Requiem stamp on them), then why is anyone surprised or confused? Why do people feel betrayed by White Wolf feeling that they can't sell more shovelware? Personally, I feel betrayed by Midnight Roads and VII.

-Frank

Quote from: Cylonophile;387516Big corporation takes over rpg company to get it's IP, doesn't give a damn about RPGs or the people who play them.

Big corporation?  The hell?

EVE Online is CCP's only other product, and it's an extremely niche MMO compared to the behemoths in that industry.  CCP is a small company (limited, I believe) run out of Iceland.

The initial partnership was joint because CCP was already experimenting with tabletop games -- the CCG was already in print before they partnered with White-Wolf, and they needed someone to keep pushing those out and publish the board game and other print materials.

White-Wolf, conversely, was looking for someone to put their print products into MMO form.

It was a good idea at the time, but the business end of things (as always) put priority on where the money gets the most returns, even if those returns aren't WoW-sized.  I didn't see it as a "hostile" takeover for IP then, and I still don't.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;387564New World of Darkness is the longest fiction series printed in English. And a lot of it is shovelware. Urban Legends is about one step away from being wikipedia copypasta.

If White Wolf has found that they have finally exhausted the customer's attention span and can no longer get people to buy a 38th Requiem book or 35th  Generic World of Darkness book (those numbers aren't pulled out of my ass for comedic effect, you could seriously own 37 Vampire: The Requiem books, not even counting World of Darkness books that don't have the Requiem stamp on them), then why is anyone surprised or confused? Why do people feel betrayed by White Wolf feeling that they can't sell more shovelware? Personally, I feel betrayed by Midnight Roads and VII.

Shit, Trollman, you're spot-on.

The quality of the "core" World of Darkness books is very, very erratic.

The first two, Ghost Stories and Antagonists, were pretty good, and got everyone pumped about "core WoD". Then an avalanche of stuff started coming out, some good (both Armory books, Book of Spirits), some average (Myterious Places, Dogs of War) and some really horrible (Urban Legends).

Slasher, despite the "World of Darkness" tag, is clearly a Hunter: the Vigil supplement. It's a brilliant book, too, perhaps the best of them all IMHO.

Of course, I have access to no sales figures. But I get the feeling that the idea of the "core" World of Darkness as a stand-alone horror RPG -- one which I loved and embraced right from the start (having run my share of "mortals" games in the oWoD) has possibly failed. Ironically, Hunter: the Vigil may have been the death-knell, by refining the "core mortal" character into the "hunter" template, and therefore forever delegating the "core mortal" as a prelude to some other Splat: the Whatever game.

I still love the nWoD, but the rate at which they put out material was annoying. So to be honest, I hope nothing else comes out for nWoD, unless it's a small, useful, cheap PDF like Compacts & Conspiracies, or a long-awaited book like Werewolf: the Forsaken Chronicler's Guide or World of Darkness: Mirrors (possibly with a PoD option that won't gimp overseas buyers).

The nWoD feels "complete", and another reboot would be disingenuous, to put it mildly.

So, let the WoD rest for a while. If you must return to RPGs, you could try Exalted 3e, with a more functional system. Or maybe revisit the Aeon family of games, with a more functional system. Or maybe a brand-new IP, with a more... well, you get the idea.

Not a surprise, considering this-

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ryan-dancey/5/858/8b3

Quote from: mhensley;387610Not a surprise, considering this-

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ryan-dancey/5/858/8b3

Oh man that's hilarious.

"It took time, dedication, money and a sheer hatred of WW but I found a way to beat them."

Quote from: The Butcher;387600The nWoD feels "complete", and another reboot would be disingenuous, to put it mildly.

Oh they will. As long as there's a chance to make a buck, you bet your ass they will.

Quote from: Benoist;387619Oh they will. As long as there's a chance to make a buck, you bet your ass they will.

Besides making a quick buck, what was the original purpose of nWoD?

Quote from: ggroy;387620Besides making a quick buck, what was the original purpose of nWoD?

Well first, there won't be any new editions of the current core games given the current direction they're taking their business model (micro products and limited lines).

Second, the purpose of nWoD was to integrate all of the lines into a system where pieces could more easily interlock.  oWoD was plagued by poor design choices and a general schizo direction in terms of where each line went with metaplot and mechanics, so trying to take mechanics or templates from one game and using them in another generally resulted in shittyness.

Generally speaking (in terms of mechanics only), they succeeded in cleaning things up and giving material more value and portability, but at the cost of losing some of the flavor of the original lines (well, the good ones, anyway).

Though there were some good things that came out of nWoD, like the revamped Hunter (which actually, you know, is about normal hunters and not Supers in Disguise As Muscly Blue Collars) and Geist.

Let's not tread to close to reason and logic here. Martians might be involved.

The funniest thing about this is that WW is releasing bonus Return of the Empress content for Free RPG Day and that little booklet is already printed (in fact, I got one a week or two ago).

Quote from: ggroy;387620Besides making a quick buck, what was the original purpose of nWoD?

Justin Achilli wanted several things:

• MOAR CHRISTIANITY!
• A "smaller" character foot print. Remove all global effects. In fact, nothing even extends between cities, so no character action or metaplot declaration is liable to have any effect on anything written in another book.
• Punish "Power Gamers" - which Justin considers anyone who wants to be good at combat.
• Let people play Monster Squad games, by putting everything on the same mechanical base instead of making separate rules for each type of monster.
• Reign in the crazy. No more blowing up continents. We're trying to play a horror movie, not one of those ridiculous things on SyFy.

I want to go on record as saying that all of those goals are understandable, even in some cases laudable. Christianizing the game was a bad idea. Not because there aren't a lot of World of Darkness players who respond to Christian themes, but because there are a lot who don't. If you're going to make it generic and cover the whole world, you shouldn't make it specific to a religion that less than one person in three actually subscribes to. But they weren't all bad ideas by any means.

Making the footprint of the game smaller was a good idea, if only because the oWoD had had conspiracy inflation until everything was controlled by like three to five groups simultaneously (the NYPD works for Technocrats, the Wyrm, and the Sabbat at the same time). I think they went too far with it. At this point there's no real reason to care about any of the conspiracies at all. Because they can't apparently do anything. Rising high in the Invictus gets you what, access to the company car? They don't own anything except some things that are worth actual money. Rather than dealing with vampire politics at all, you could just get a job. Taking out the planet buster powers was straight necessary if you wanted the plot to hold together. Planet buster powers in the hands of people for whom destroying the planet was their actual life goal made the entire series make no sense.

Punishing one group of players is never a good idea. And the end result has been that NWoD has an unacceptably terrible combat system and combat related magical powers are basically worthless.

Making Monster Squad playable is a great idea and exactly what the doctor ordered. Unfortunately, they ended up writing so much material that they farmed out the design of the different splats to radically different people with radically different visions, and the power levels of the different splats are simply too divergent to play the same game. The difference between a Werewolf and a Mage is so stark that justifying the Werewolf's existence is really hard.

Bottom line: nWoD had to happen. But it should have been a smaller, tighter body of work that paid more attention to the fundamental questions:

• How do we play the same game together?
• Why should anyone care about the metaplot?
• What do the player characters do?

-Frank

Funny, I found nWoD a lot less "Christian", in both tone and quotations from different works at the beginning of chapters.

Quote from: Peregrin;387753Funny, I found nWoD a lot less "Christian", in both tone and quotations from different works at the beginning of chapters.

Yes, that's something that surprised me in Frank's post.

What is more "Christian" about nWoD as compared to oWoD exactly?

Quote from: Benoist;387754Yes, that's something that surprised me in Frank's post.

What is more "Christian" about nWoD as compared to oWoD exactly?

First off, the characters have Christian virtues and vices on their character sheet. Even mortals. Even non-Christian characters are required to define themselves within an explicitly Christian moral framework. Why can't a Buddhist character's virtue be Upekkha (Acceptance of Pride and Shame)? Why can't a Confucian character's virtue be Xin Yong (Trust)? Why do we have to accept Lust or Sloth as a vice?

Secondly, the vampire line (which let's face it: is the World of Darkness) has had its entire backstory replaced with one that is Jesus-centric. Half the sorcery has been replaced with Christ-themed prayer magic. And of the five available factions to be a member of, one of them is a Christian cult and another is a Christian order of knights from Romania.

And so on. But the really big deal is going in and replacing the philosophically neutral "natures and demeanors" with aggressively and specifically Christ-centric "Seven Mortal Sins" that you get to puzzle over even if you are a 2nd century Egyptian. If you're a Roman, "Dignitas" (Pride) is a virtue, but you have to write it down as a Vice, because you have to play within a Christian framework of sin regardless. Forcing people to interact mechanically with a Christian moral framework is about as in-your-face as the religious proselytizing could possibly get short of putting "There is no god but Allah" or something equivalent on every page.

-Frank

Well, let's suppose you're right (I've never so much as cracked a WoD book, new or old).

What does it matter? If someone is a Christian, It is there right to write a Christianity-centric book. The same as a Buddhist is perfectly within their rights to write a Buddhism-centric book; a Muslim to write an Islam-centric book; a Shintoist to write a Shintoism-centric book and so on.

Your claim, if true (Again, I have no personal factual evidence either way), comes down to a complaint that "They wrote the books according to their religion!".


Or, let's look at the worst claim you could have here: That they are not writing the books according to their religion, but simply "going mainstream". That makes them hypocrits, but has nothing to do with the religion they chose, insofar as, to give an analogy, if Shintoism was the perceived mainstream, they would have written (Presuming the charge of hypocracy is true) a shintoism-centric book.


They are forcing no-one to do anything. It is impossible for them to do so by writing a role-playing game book.