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

[TheFlatline]

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.

Don't play RPGs then.

[Lago PARANOIA]

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.

You know, I was WONDERING why Shadowrun 4E decided to adopt the uber-crappy system of having both your hit boxes AND your toughness scale with Body rather than sticking to one or the other.

It all makes sense now. It all makes sense now.

[Don Strudel]

You do realize that the 2004 reboot is far better about this kind of thing, right? The old games aren't supported anymore (as shown by the DELETION of all supplementary materials, such as FAQs, on the website several years ago).

If you want to criticize the old World of Darkness, be my guest, but please do take into account that they've since moved beyond their earlier, amateur writing.

[TheFlatline]

You do realize that the 2004 reboot is far better about this kind of thing, right? The old games aren't supported anymore (as shown by the DELETION of all supplementary materials, such as FAQs, on the website several years ago).

If you want to criticize the old World of Darkness, be my guest, but please do take into account that they've since moved beyond their earlier, amateur writing.

You're right. They realized if they have nothing good to say, they won't say anything at all. Then charge 40 bucks for it.

The new games are bland.

[Don Strudel]

Actually, I think the oWoD is the bland one. nWoD is actually playable and fun. Any faults in the games are grossly exaggerated and easily fixed if they become noticeable.

[Ganbare Gincun]

Actually, I think the oWoD is the bland one. nWoD is actually playable and fun. Any faults in the games are grossly exaggerated and easily fixed if they become noticeable.

Just exactly which drugs are you on right now?

[TheFlatline]

Actually, I think the oWoD is the bland one. nWoD is actually playable and fun. Any faults in the games are grossly exaggerated and easily fixed if they become noticeable.

Ah yes, which is why nWOD is so successful compared to the dark ages in the 90's when nobody knew or played White Wolf games.

[Username17]

nWoD's biggest problem is that mandatory Christian themes are as offensive to WoD's primarily counter-cultural fanbase as ranting about dog fucking is to people in general. Requiring every single person to sign up for Christian virtues and vices is probably the single worst thing they did to themselves from a sales perspective. That seriously alienated a lot of goths. You can't survive as a game called "Vampire" if you alienate goths.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Give some examples, Frank.

[TheFlatline]

nWoD's biggest problem is that mandatory Christian themes are as offensive to WoD's primarily counter-cultural fanbase as ranting about dog fucking is to people in general. Requiring every single person to sign up for Christian virtues and vices is probably the single worst thing they did to themselves from a sales perspective. That seriously alienated a lot of goths. You can't survive as a game called "Vampire" if you alienate goths.

-Username17

The mechanics system is an improvement, I'll grant that, though combat still feels... weird. I can one-shot vampires with shotguns and torpor them, and I wasn't even geared out to be a combat-capable vampire.

My biggest complaint was that the setting in the core book felt dry, uninteresting, and static.

In the novel Master and Commander they talk about how two people who have to mess together every day for two years, who are enclosed in a tiny wooden ship for that same amount of time, with no privacy, seeing each other every few minutes, can amplify small problems into major fucking grievances.

Which is the main antagonism in Vampire: Requiem. Though they do a pissy job of talking about it. Even then, that requires a lot of work to set up grudges that actually make sense between players. Otherwise, you're looking at a whole big fat lot of nothing. They talk about Belial's Brood and VII a bit (and by a bit I mean 3/4 of a page each) as other antagonists, but really, it's not more than "hey these guys exist, buy the splatbook!".

Other than that there's no inherent conflict in the setting. It's up to the troupe to create conflict and opposition out of whole cloth. Which is shit. You pay good money for a setting, not for being told "come up with it yourself kid, thanks for the 40 bucks".

[TheFlatline]

Give some examples, Frank.

An entire group of vampires are descended from the Roman soldier who stabbed Christ in the chest. You know, the spear of destiny and all that shit.

Which immediately means that the Christ story is real. For hundreds of years you could talk to the fucking vampire who was personally cursed by God to become a bloodsucker for stabbing Jesus.

Yes, now after a few thousand years you get the whole "nobody remembers due to the blood sleep, so who knows" handwave, but really, such a strange concept wouldn't have endured if it hadn't been some level of truth to it.

[Don Strudel]

An entire group of vampires are descended from the Roman soldier who stabbed Christ in the chest. You know, the spear of destiny and all that shit.

There are no vampires descended from Longinus. There's just a group of vampires (the Lancea+Sanctum) who claim that he was a vampire and that they profess to follow his teachings.

Which immediately means that the Christ story is real. For hundreds of years you could talk to the fucking vampire who was personally cursed by God to become a bloodsucker for stabbing Jesus.

There is no definitive proof that Longinus ever really existed. Any evidence could have been fabricated.

Furthermore, their traditional "Theban Sorcery" is believed to have been given to them by an "Angel," but it is also implied that it was actually stolen from Ancient Egyptian vampire cults.

Yes, now after a few thousand years you get the whole "nobody remembers due to the blood sleep, so who knows" handwave, but really, such a strange concept wouldn't have endured if it hadn't been some level of truth to it.

Tell that to people who worship Jesus Christ. There's no evidence he existed, and yet millions of people worship him two-thousand years after his death. And humans only live for about eighty years, and have to rely on things like oral history and writing to remember their history.

nWoD's biggest problem is that mandatory Christian themes are as offensive to WoD's primarily counter-cultural fanbase as ranting about dog fucking is to people in general. Requiring every single person to sign up for Christian virtues and vices is probably the single worst thing they did to themselves from a sales perspective. That seriously alienated a lot of goths. You can't survive as a game called "Vampire" if you alienate goths.

-Username17

I don't really have a problem with the Virtue/Vice system. The Virtues are actually the Theological and Cardinal virtues taken from Roman Catholic and Pagan Greek belief systems, respectively. Mirrors includes a system for combining Nature/Demeanor with Virtue/Vice, for the extra level of personalization.

Other than that there's no inherent conflict in the setting. It's up to the troupe to create conflict and opposition out of whole cloth. Which is shit. You pay good money for a setting, not for being told "come up with it yourself kid, thanks for the 40 bucks".

There is. Invictus versus Carthian, Lancea+Sanctum versus Circle of the Crone, Unaligned versus everyone else, intra-covenant conflict, etc. Just because it's not Kill-On-Sight doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Even then, there are some factions that do merit a Kill-On-Sight warning, such as heretics and diablerists.

[tzor]

Ah yes, which is why nWOD is so successful compared to the dark ages in the 90's when nobody knew or played White Wolf games.

In the 90's nobody knew or played ANY GAMES. The gaming population was a minor blip on any radar. Most of that blip was directed to AD&D. I would say out of the bulk of the other games WW had the biggest share. Some people still played the games of the 80's and some of the market was devoted to the minor niche games like DC heroes. Still WW was the only market that managed to get into the LARP field in the 90's.

Not that it mattered. We all drove our Chevy's to the levy and said "role playing has died." The BORG had come, resistance was futile. In other words everyone at the conventions was too busy playing Magic the Gathering to do any role playing games anymore.

On the economic scale back then oWOD was highly successful ... ironcially that wasn't saying a lot. Remember "God awfull" successful T$R was going bankrupt during this time.

[Username17]

Give some examples, Frank.

I'm not talking about the fact that The Lancea Sanctum and the Ordo Dracul are explicitly Christian religious organizations. Or that the Invictus is based on European Feudalism, and is therefore implicitly Christian as well. Nor am I talking about the fact that Theban Sorcery has an explicitly biblical theme, or that you can select numerous bloodlines that have overtly Christian themes. Those are available options, and even though there are only five vampire factions that you get to choose from and one is secular and one is pagan and three are Christian, that is still a choice. However meager a choice it is, it still exists.

But New World of Darkness went past that. They forced everyone, regardless of factional associations or even whether they were magical or not, to define their character in terms of Christian morality. Instead of the old (and reasonably popular) "nature and demeanor" section on the top of your character sheet, the nWoD character has "virtues and vices". And here's the thing: you only have seven Christian virtues and vices to select from. Even if you are an ancient Roman or a Confucian, you still must write one of the seven deadly sins on your character sheet, because in nWoD Christianity is "true".

If you had a longer list of available virtues, that included crap like Ren and Liberality, it probably could have gone over well. But I have lost count of how many Vampire fanboys/fangirls I have had ranting at me about how they didn't want/believe in Christian virtues and vices and were deeply offended that they were being asked to select one for their character.

-Username17

[Don Strudel]

Your entire tirade is ironic, Frank, considering that in oWoD Christianity was explicitly 100% true and all the vampires were descended from Cain, even the Indian, African, and Egyptian ones, except for those weirdo Kuei-Jin who were also cursed by the Christian God except that he was called Jade Emperor. Demon: The Fallen was quite explicit about how Christianity was 100% true and every other gameline was forced into a Christian backstory. Mages were pieces of God, Gaia was an angel, the Labyrinth was built by angels, etc.

Whereas nWoD repeatedly demonstrates that this is not the case. Angels are eldritch abominations that each exist solely to perform a single "mission," the closest equivalent to "God" is gigantic clockwork cyborg monstrosity that would be more appropriate in a Stephen King novel, and the afterlife is taken straight out of Greek mythology.

[K]

Your entire tirade is ironic, Frank, considering that in oWoD Christianity was explicitly 100% true and all the vampires were descended from Cain, even the Indian, African, and Egyptian ones, except for those weirdo Kuei-Jin who were also cursed by the Christian God except that he was called Jade Emperor. Demon: The Fallen was quite explicit about how Christianity was 100% true and every other gameline was forced into a Christian backstory. Mages were pieces of God, Gaia was an angel, the Labyrinth was built by angels, etc.

Whereas nWoD repeatedly demonstrates that this is not the case. Angels are eldritch abominations that each exist solely to perform a single "mission," the closest equivalent to "God" is gigantic clockwork cyborg monstrosity that would be more appropriate in a Stephen King novel, and the afterlife is taken straight out of Greek mythology.

Lol. Did anyone ever play or even read Demon: The Fallen? Like, ever?

That being said, the other games never explicitly make the Christian vampire story the one true story as far as I can tell. I mean, they never had Caine with the 1st under his generation, did they? (I honestly don't know as once crap like Demon started getting printed I checked out).

Still, the backstory fluff for nWoD doesn't make the core mechanics less offensive. Using Christian Virtues still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths that isn't going away even if they ever care enough to read several hundred pages of backstory fluff from other games in the nWoD universe.

It doesn't even matter if it's a weird and perverted Christianity with God as a clock. People like WoD games for the cosmopolitan feel, and being stuck Christian feels small and terrible no matter what kind it is.

[Orca]

Yeah, I played Demon: The Fallen. Not reading the backstory probably helped immensely.

Trying to work out how to transport & use an archangels sword when said sword wanted to kill us and drive us insane was probably the high point of that game. The low point was when the GM tried to impose flavour text on us ("you feel ..." etc.)

The explicitly christian stuff didn't help, but as a player you could ignore a lot of it.

[Prak]

Er, there's really not actually a whole lot of explicitly christian stuff, at least not strictly christian, in Demon. It combines a number of things, and can be looked at a number of ways.

...of course, people on this board know what I'm like about demons, so...

[magnuskn]

Mages were pieces of God, Gaia was an angel

Wait, what? When did this happen? Especially that thing with Gaia?

[FatR]

Wait, what? When did this happen? Especially that thing with Gaia?

When he decided to troll TGD (again), obviously.

[violence in the media]

Mages were pieces of God, Gaia was an angel

Wait, what? When did this happen? Especially that thing with Gaia?

I was always under the impression that the setting had the Christian god as some sort of powerful umbral spirit, but certainly not the mightiest one in existance. I could be wrong about this.

Though I remember this being a pretty common thing that would come up in werewolf games, where an antagonistic player would ask another one how they could be devoted to [human religion X] considering they could actually talk to Gaia, or the essence of the Wyld, or whatever, through their magic powers and get a straight answer about who was "correct."

[JigokuBosatsu]

I'm pretty sure the only time the Christian God thing was explicitly hammered down in oWoD was in the "Time of Judgement" horseshit.

Which I suppose is why we did our own ToJ years earlier. It was at least fun and awesome horseshit.

[souran]

I have really mixed feelings about NWOD and OWOD.

NWOD is closer to being a playable GAME as in it has Mechanics that are performable for most of its actions, those mechanics function to give a result that actually has meaning.

This is a HUGE step from OWOD where the games core mechanics were just broken. The game was MTP all the time because of the game system didn't actually allow you to challenge players with situations where there was a possiblilty of failure AND success.

Also most of the subystems DID NOT work. Including the mandatory morality system in EVERY GAME.

All the OWOD mandatory morality systems were fundamentally Christian. If Frank's arguments about Goths being pissed about the inclusion of seven virtues and deadly sins to being included then the astounding biblical humanity scale where a person can lose humanity for Lustful, angry, or homicidal ThOUGHTS at the high end and partaking in evil acts can actually result in LOSS OF CHARACTER at the other end should have been a giant gothic dickpunch.

Also: Short history lesson

The cardinal virtues (courage, prudence, wisdom, temperance) are GREEK. They go all the way back to aristotle.

The seven deadly sins are not christain dogma but catholic dogma (I am not saying that catholics are not christians just that not all catholic dogma is christian dogma). They were developed by midevil monks as a counterpoint to the greek virtues and as as sort of a form of theological psychology on where kinds of sin orginate.

While the sins may be of christian/catholic origin, they have a distinct influence on western culture. For all that influence I think that the NWOD authors developed their entire understanding of the vices/virtues from repeated watchings of the movie "7." So as opposed to Frank I really would think that their Goth audiance woudl be all over the new non biblical morality and into morality that usually shows up as heavy handed and bloody punishment.

Anyway, I don't really care for NWOD because it fails at the test of "be a playable game." The fact that it fails less than OWOD which basically didn't even try is of little consequence.

However, for how silly the vices/virtues morality system is it amazingly works better than OWOD morality, D&D alignemnt and whatever the fuck you call the pointless system in Exalted.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Aristotle? Christianity? WHAT DO YOU THINK'S IN THE BURGERS!?!?!?!

[Username17]

The cardinal virtues (courage, prudence, wisdom, temperance) are GREEK. They go all the way back to aristotle.

That's great, but nWoD doesn't use the cardinal virtues, it uses the Seven Heavenly Virtues from Catholic teachings.

Now don't get me wrong, there was clear Christian thought processes going into Masquerade. It just wasn't that in-your-face about it.

All the OWOD mandatory morality systems were fundamentally Christian. If Frank's arguments about Goths being pissed about the inclusion of seven virtues and deadly sins to being included then the astounding biblical humanity scale where a person can lose humanity for Lustful, angry, or homicidal ThOUGHTS at the high end and partaking in evil acts can actually result in LOSS OF CHARACTER at the other end should have been a giant gothic dickpunch.

This is not true. You can only lose humanity when you make a sin against the level you are on or below. And thinking about sex or violence isn't a sin at any point. Here's the oWoD Masquerade table for Humanity:

Humanity	Moral Guideline
10	Selfish thoughts
9	Minor selfish acts
8	Injury to another
7	Theft
6	Accidental violation (drinking a vessel dry)
5	Intentional propery damage
4	Impassioned violation (killing in a frenzy)
3	Planned violation (outright murder)
2	Casual violation (thoughless killing)
1	Utter perversion of heinous acts

The first thing to notice is that the enlightenment you get at the end of the path of Humanity is actually pop-culture Buddhism. You don't transcend gluttony, you don't accept Jesus, you escape selfishness.

The second thing to note is this piece:

You should be aware, however, that vampire embraced in other cultures or other eras of the world will probably have a different view of humanity. This was just an example of what Humanity would be like for a average citizen of the world today. A vampire who used to be a Viking raider or Samurai in life would probably have a very different set of "morals" than those mentioned above.

And the third thing to note is that Humanity wasn't even mandatory. You were totally allowed to go apeshit and follow other moral codes that had been made up by power gamers. Like the Path of Typhon:

10	Pursuing one's own indulgences instead of another's
9	Refusing to aid another follower of the Path
8	Failing to destroy a vampire in Golconda
7	Failing tp observe Setite religios ritual
6	Failing to undermine the current social order in favor of the Setites
5	Failing to do whatever is necessary to corrupt another
4	Failing to pursue arcane knowledge
3	Obstructing another Setite's efforts
2	Failing to take advantage of another's weakness
1	Refusing to aid in Set's resurrection

Yeah. If you can find the deep Christian message in that, I'll be very impressed.

-Username17