What the hell is wrong with White Wolf's fluff writers?

[Lago PARANOIA]

The more I hear about their splats the more I want to bang by head against the desk. It's like you're going along, enjoying the artwork or promises or badassery, then there's just something that rolls up and punches you in the throat. Whether it's the random Cretinist rant on the back of the Exalted book or the bestiality programs in Werewolf or me reading an Exalted splat and then there's a graphic picture of a nude woman tearing out her own eyes or that WoD technocracy thing, it's like I can't read or hear about more than a little bit without having my brain blown.

What gives?

[K]

I personally believe that WW writers are community college drop-outs.

So they have had enough exposure to the actual ideas to be able to bring them up, but their understanding of those ideas is at the level of a guy who smokes too much pot and got a pity C- in his Into. to Philosophy course because the teacher was afraid to fail half the class.

That's not to say that community college is not academically rigorous.... but it does tend to let a certain kind of student slide by with a passing grade, thereby gaining an unrealistic opinion of their own skills (I took one Philosophy class where a guy was allowed to write.... wait for it.... a song instead of his final paper).

I mean, all the WW stories tend to have an undercurrent of serious abuse issues, but you can still play the games as various kinds of dark super-heroes and ignore the significant squick factors in the implied setting. The problem is that the average WW player is not doing that. I've met some of the short-story writers, and they are deeply dysfunctional people.

[Username17]

Think of it like Anne Rice, because that's the inspiration for all this anyway. Interview is actually pretty powerful stuff and it's built on a lot of genuine emotion. She was writing it while her 6 year old daughter was dying of leukemia, and it shows. That's a pretty potent pain well. But most of her imitators, her included, have been unable to get that back. Goth writing requires that you be able to tap into some genuine emotion or fake it very well. Otherwise you get poseur garbage - like Rice's own Jesus porn.

The original Vampire: the Masquerade was actually pretty damn cool. It had a terrible game system, but it was the early 90s and no one knew any better. But it was driven by some genuine emotion and the weird pretentiousness was forgiven. But pretty much everything since has been poseur bullshit. The attempts to be edgy for the later pieces are clearly grafted on. Each writer is trying to be edgy so that they can "fit in". That is fucking pathetic.

So instead of going back to the roots and grabbing some people who are going through hell in their lives and asking them to channel their angst into a depressing melodrama, or getting people who are good with mechanics and story structure to make something that holds up on its own - they are getting the writing down with fan boys who think edginess and bad mechanics are "cool".

Of course they get choppy mechanics held together with drama llamas that wander back ad forth across the line between edgy and reprehensible.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Also, place WW and it's writing style in it's time frame of the 90's. Especially the early 90's when the tone of the games was established.

The goth thing hadn't been run into the ground and beaten with sticks yet (but was on it's way), Ann Rice was super popular, and the proto-hipster obsession with obscure topics that you don't really understand was making the rounds.

[TheFlatline]

The original Vampire: the Masquerade was actually pretty damn cool. It had a terrible game system, but it was the early 90s and no one knew any better. But it was driven by some genuine emotion and the weird pretentiousness was forgiven. But pretty much everything since has been poseur bullshit. The attempts to be edgy for the later pieces are clearly grafted on. Each writer is trying to be edgy so that they can "fit in". That is fucking pathetic.

Good point. Wraith was one of the most fucked up yet strangely alluring settings I've ever read. It remains my favorite WOD setting, yet I've never played a long-term successful game of it.

It took Jungian psychology and really ran with it. I think Wraith would probably work best in a one-on-one game setting, because really more than any other game it's a personal story. The rest of the Shadowlands and Skinlands are a distant minor issue compared to wrestling with what is a perfect enemy to you.

[K]

Wraith: The Best Game You'll Never Play. I remember it fondly.

The problem is that people don't play the story implied by the game. They can't do the morality play that is Vampire so they play bloodsucking super-heroes instead. They twist the setting to the closest playable setting they CAN play, and gloss over the problematic bits.

Vampire defaults to dark superheroes pretty easily. I assume that this is why it's the most playable of the games.

The problem with the other games is that they don't default to something that people can wrap their head around even when they share some elements. You can't even pretend to do dark superheroes with Wraith, you can't do DnD with Werewolf, and you can't do Shadowrun with Mage.

Changeling is almost convertible to DnD, but the conceptual leap of having things in your pretend world sometimes be pretend confuses people as much as Inception. I mean, people can do it, but don't expect to get those people in the same room to play.

[TheFlatline]

Wraith: The Best Game You'll Never Play. I remember it fondly.

The problem is that people don't play the story implied by the game. They can't do the morality play that is Vampire so they play bloodsucking super-heroes instead. They twist the setting to the closest playable setting they CAN play, and gloss over the problematic bits.

Vampire defaults to dark superheroes pretty easily. I assume that this is why it's the most playable of the games.

The problem with the other games is that they don't default to something that people can wrap their head around even when they share some elements. You can't even pretend to do dark superheroes with Wraith, you can't do DnD with Werewolf, and you can't do Shadowrun with Mage.

Changeling is almost convertible to DnD, but the conceptual leap of having things in your pretend world sometimes be pretend confuses people as much as Inception. I mean, people can do it, but don't expect to get those people in the same room to play.

I ran Changeling as "nobody dreams as brightly as children, but nobody's nightmares are as terrifying as children either". Having to hunt down and slay the Big Bad Wolf, because he came *real* and was killing children and eating them was a fun game.

What got really weird was the half immortal soul that has thousands of memories vs a six year old. Two players decided to play old lovers from a thousand years ago finally reunited, but were like 8 and 9. The game took on pedobear levels of uncomfort, and died soon thereafter.

[K]

I've never seen a Changeling game, or even changeling characters, that didn't make me deeply uncomfortable just to be in the same room as the players. The in-character baby voices and squick factor was epic every time.

I mean, it made hot twenty-something chicks into people I didn't want to be around. That was not what I expected when I read the game, and to see it played that way over and over with different people.... well, it just got more disturbing. I don't even know how the game attracts those people.

[TheFlatline]

I've never seen a Changeling game, or even changeling characters, that didn't make me deeply uncomfortable just to be in the same room as the players. The in-character baby voices and squick factor was epic every time.

I mean, it made hot twenty-something chicks into people I didn't want to be around. That was not what I expected when I read the game, and to see it played that way over and over with different people.... well, it just got more disturbing. I don't even know how the game attracts those people.

I never saw people talk in baby voices. Well I take that back, people thought pookahs were license to do that and other annoying shit. If entire groups did that... Yeah... that'd creep me the hell out.

The problem is that they never really discussed how to balance/merge playing a 1000 year old fae who has seen and done countless things, and a kid. It might have been easier if they just pushed the emergence of the fae self up to say 13 or so and let you run around as teenagers, who when nobody was looking were noble lords and knights and shit. At least you had a level of maturity there from a character standpoint.

[magnuskn]

Vampire defaults to dark superheroes pretty easily. I assume that this is why it's the most playable of the games.

I'd say Werewolf: The Apocalypse is the easiest for that style, because fighting the agents of the Wyrm is pretty much the nearest thing to real heroism in the WoD. Although maybe the Mummy game also is pretty heroic. Never played it, though.

Of course there are quite unheroic heroic parts of WtA, like killing innocents who discovered the existance of Werewolves, because this is a WW game and gods forbid that a WW game exists without extensive navel gazing and handwringing over how horrible your life as a supernatural being is. But a good part of the setting has a quite interesting mythology and the core principle of "Werewolves against the incarnation of corruption, who wants to destroy the universe" is at its heart a much more uplifting message than what Vampire gives us.

[K]

Vampire defaults to dark superheroes pretty easily. I assume that this is why it's the most playable of the games.

I'd say Werewolf: The Apocalypse is the easiest for that style, because fighting the agents of the Wyrm is pretty much the nearest thing to real heroism in the WoD. Although maybe the Mummy game also is pretty heroic. Never played it, though.

Of course there are quite unheroic heroic parts of WtA, like killing innocents who discovered the existance of Werewolves, because this is a WW game and gods forbid that a WW game exists without extensive navel gazing and handwringing over how horrible your life as a supernatural being is. But a good part of the setting has a quite interesting mythology and the core principle of "Werewolves against the incarnation of corruption, who wants to destroy the universe" is at its heart a much more uplifting message than what Vampire gives us.

The setting wants to default that way, but the rules don't support it. I mean, Werewolves are wicked strong in some fields, but they don't seem to get good powers and definitely don't get a theme (a major prereq for a super-hero). I personally can't even tell you more than two Tribes off the top of my head because they are so flavorless, but I can name all the vampire clans and most of the bloodlines because they all have a strong theme.

Werewolf is more of a war narrative as well, where Vampires seem to fight just because other vampires are total dicks. It leads to easier villain/hero relations.

[magnuskn]

The setting wants to default that way, but the rules don't support it. I mean, Werewolves are wicked strong in some fields, but they don't seem to get good powers and definitely don't get a theme (a major prereq for a super-hero). I personally can't even tell you more than two Tribes off the top of my head because they are so flavorless, but I can name all the vampire clans and most of the bloodlines because they all have a strong theme.

Werewolf is more of a war narrative as well, where Vampires seem to fight just because other vampires are total dicks. It leads to easier villain/hero relations.

Well, I can name all thirteen tribes and five auspices off the top of my head, so I guess it's a question of how much you like the setting. A normally built just freshly changed Werewolf would also rip off the head of any neonate, so I think power-wise the Werewolves are ahead from the beginning... it's only after Vampire characters get tons of experience that they get even near the level of a Werewolf. Vampire powers seem to scale better, though, since Werewolf gifts are not logical progressions but rather random powers with a heightened power-scale.

And there are of course the Black Spiral Dancers, so Werewolves do have their own internal wars to fight. Although the Dancers are of course not part anymore of the Garou Nation, but traitors to Gaia. I personally prefer the war setting to the internal backstabbery of the Vampire.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So instead of going back to the roots and grabbing some people who are going through hell in their lives and asking them to channel their angst into a depressing melodrama, or getting people who are good with mechanics and story structure to make something that holds up on its own - they are getting the writing down with fan boys who think edginess and bad mechanics are "cool".

Really? The pretentiousnes isn't hat bothers me. If I didn't enjoy on some level people waving their dicks at me while pretending to be cool I wouldn't be here.

What gets me is that all of that offensive/squicky/confusing bullcrap is drawn or written down with a totally straight face. There's not even the 'we're being so edgy to annoy you please notice me' factor, it's the 'what we are writing is totally normal and not weird' stuff.

[Username17]

Well, I can name all thirteen tribes and five auspices off the top of my head, so I guess it's a question of how much you like the setting.

There are 18 tribes, I think K's point is made.

What gets me is that all of that offensive/squicky/confusing bullcrap is drawn or written down with a totally straight face. There's not even the 'we're being so edgy to annoy you please notice me' factor, it's the 'what we are writing is totally normal and not weird' stuff.

It's a couple of things. K's point about these guys having failed to grasp intro to philosophy is well made. Combine it with the fact that these people are wannabes for a game about pariahs. Many of them are actually pariahs.

They really have views that are simply unacceptable. Sometimes because they lead unexamined lives and don't really understand their own positions well enough to defend them or eliminate the ones that are untenable. And sometimes just because they are horrible people whose actual moral compass points to "chocolate sunday".

For fuck's sake, look at how many people on this board will get defensive about fucking actual dogs when we bring up Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Now multiply that by someone who decided that they wanted to fit in with the White Wolf inner circle in Atlanta enough to actually get a writing assignment back when Starbucks was an unknown up and coming brand.

-Username17

[FatR]

There are 18 tribes, I think K's point is made.

There are 16 and three are dead/NPC villains, so they don't count.

For fuck's sake, look at how many people on this board will get defensive about fucking actual dogs when we bring up Werewolf: the Apocalypse.

Says the proponent of date rape in RPGs.

[Molochio]

Once a rubric of poor fluff writing becomes the accepted norm, it is difficult to raise the bar for quality that would make good writing the accepted norm in it's place.
This is true for most artistic mediums.

[magnuskn]

There are 18 tribes, I think K's point is made.

Not commonly available from the core book. Bone Gnawers, Black Furies, Children of Gaia, Fianna, Get of Fenris, Glasswalkers, Red Talons, Shadow Lords, Silent Striders, Silver Fangs, Uktena, Wendigo and ( still counting them ) Stargazers.

Not sure where you get the other five tribes from. Black Spiral Dancers? Those are antagonists. Hengeyokai? Not from the core book and pretty much separated from the Garou Nation, just like everything else asian somehow is something exotic and mysterious in the WoD. Other shapechangers? Also not in the Garou Nation and mostly enemies or very reluctant allies of the Garou, due to the War of Rage. The dead tribes are not available for play either.

[Ancient History]

The people that are writing White Wolf games now fall into two camps: the people that were reading White Wolf games 10-15 years ago, and the ones that didn't. The former are excited about being apart of a game they first ran into when they were children or teenagers, back when books with all-black covers and insanity with the possibility of sex seemed cool. I know it well, because that's basically me and Shadowrun to an extant. These ascended fanboys have varied level of skill and vision, but they're not creating as much as they're regurgitating and chewing the old cud to try and reclaim some of the original flavor.

The other group of people are ignorant of what made the White Wolf games popular in the first place. They're the johnny-come late-lies who started off reading Anne Rice's rip-offs instead of Anne Rice herself. Some of them are skilled literary technicians who got into the game because Underworld and Twilight seemed popular, and they figured they could write that pap too.

[tzor]

The original Vampire: the Masquerade was actually pretty damn cool. It had a terrible game system, but it was the early 90s and no one knew any better.

I think a better description was that it had a revolutionary game system (the notion of rolling N dice counting everything above a set value and including critical successes and failures in that count) that no one had fully worked out the details of (those details would be worked out a few years after printing by third party math majors). Once they did they realized how easy it was to get into strange results land.

Then again, in my not always humble opinion, I think the second incarnation, Vampire: the Dark Ages, was also pretty cool as well.

[tzor]

One other note: I think it would be wrong to fixate on the Ann Rice / Vampire: the Masquerade link. The setting beame popular because it really was new and different. Part of the setting was the deliberate mystery. You had various clans each (it was claimed, mystery and rumor is rife in the original works) by a 3rd generation. (Odd that, starting with the ordinal number 3 for the counting.) Each of the clans have a complex relationship with each other. Then there is the inside the masquerade and outside the masquerade angle.

This is as much Ann Rice as calling Gygax's Hobbits Tolkien's Hobbits.

[K]

WW's source material was never in question. They included a fucking bibliography in the back with the movies and books they used.

[tzor]

A bibliography is just a list of things they read or saw while working on the books. Gygax does the same for D&D, but I can guarentee you there is not a single mention of infravision in Tolkien's works for either dwarves or hobbitts.

Inspiration does not mean duplication.

[FatR]

The people that are writing White Wolf games now fall into two camps: the people that were reading White Wolf games 10-15 years ago, and the ones that didn't. The former are excited about being apart of a game they first ran into when they were children or teenagers, back when books with all-black covers and insanity with the possibility of sex seemed cool. I know it well, because that's basically me and Shadowrun to an extant. These ascended fanboys have varied level of skill and vision, but they're not creating as much as they're regurgitating and chewing the old cud to try and reclaim some of the original flavor.

The other group of people are ignorant of what made the White Wolf games popular in the first place. They're the johnny-come late-lies who started off reading Anne Rice's rip-offs instead of Anne Rice herself. Some of them are skilled literary technicians who got into the game because Underworld and Twilight seemed popular, and they figured they could write that pap too.

So true.

[TheFlatline]

A bibliography is just a list of things they read or saw while working on the books. Gygax does the same for D&D, but I can guarentee you there is not a single mention of infravision in Tolkien's works for either dwarves or hobbitts.

Inspiration does not mean duplication.

Err... each of the clans mirrored the popular vampire origins of the times. Torries were the Ann Rice vampires, Brujah were from the Lost Boys, Ventrue and the Fiends are two sides of the dracula coin, Nosferatu are... well... yeah...

Besides, as far as a "revolutionary" system, their dice system was a ripoff of Shadowrun from what I learned over at the White Wolf forums in years past. Seriously. Some of the people who worked on SR worked on WW in the early days, and then when SR ripped off WW's dice system, the circle of ripping off became complete.

What was revolutionary about it was that it hit the zeitgeist of teenage counter-culture perfectly with it's introduction of the anti-hero RPG and helped mesh into the counter-culture of the time. I remember when White Wolf came out in High School. Literally almost overnight everyone in the counter-culture cliques suddenly started playing vampire. It was kind of eerie how quickly and completely it happened.

[Bihlbo]

This subject hits the nail on the head as to why I can't stomach most WW games. Exalted is fine, because I like weird LSD trips in my games. But crazy evil BS pretending to be normal behavior seems to flow through Vampire and Mage and Werewolf and etc. like a carload of McDoubles on the way to your toilet. I have some friends who are Vampire fans, and I'd play the game with them because they aren't already horrible outcasts of society, but they are the only Vampire fans I've ever met who aren't trying to play out sexually deviant, antisocial, ultra-violent murder fantasies with the game. It's like the target audience for WW games are horrible outcasts of society, and they're just pandering to their fanbase.

I want to be part of a better fanbase, TYVM.