nWoD is really over. Really.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 3:06 pm

Really.

Yes, they are bringing back oWoD. Vampire: 20th Anniversary Edition. It's oWoD. It's what's new. All the people who said that the announcement that nMage was over and done with didn't mean that White Wolf was really abandoning the line, all the people who said that the video game being based on oWoD didn't really mean that oWoD was coming back... all of them are wrong.

Edit: More Info.

-Username17

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 3:14 pm

Must resist the compulsion to visit rpg.net again, just to hear nWoD fanboys' screams. Must resist...

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 3:25 pm

Here, I'll give you some of their sadness so you don't have to go there yourself:

nWoD fan on rpg.net wrote:So, that's... unexpected. This seems odd, and makes me sad. But hey, evidently we who like New World of Darkness are a minority, and have to concede to the majority who likes oWoD. Too sad, though, to see that you spend production time and values on something like this. But hey, the old fans'll be happy!

-Username17

souran · Post by **souran** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 4:06 pm

OWOD mechanics suck even worse than NWOD mechanics.

However, the entire appeal of white wolf is based on their settings because there rules have been garbage from day 1.

In that case if you want to update your rules you sure as hell do NOT screw up your setting by just ditching it all.

The only sad thing here is that they will almost certaintly not fix any of the massive rules issues with OWOD. So they will just be selling both a game with a crappy storyline and a functional but extremely booring ruleset, and then they will have a game with an average vampire storyline but a crappy ruleset. Awesome, its like picking between a turd taco or a shit sandwich.

On the other hand, until I see a product line to go along with it I will assume that this is a novelty release.

They know that there are a lot of people who they could get to buy a V:TM corebook even if the contents were just poorly drawn pictures of vampires looking emo.

For them to re-release a book from an unsupported product line, take the cash and then do NOTHING else with it seems like a key part of the white wolf buisness model. It will probably be the best selling product they have this year and it will probably be a one and done money grab.

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 4:31 pm

It states right in their FAQ that they aren't bringing back oWoD and that nWoD will continue to be supported.

If they were really bringing back oWoD, then they would have brought back all the FAQs and Errata from the old website that are only accessible on the Internet Archive. But they haven't.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:01 pm

Don Strudel wrote:It states right in their FAQ that they aren't bringing back oWoD and that nWoD will continue to be supported.

If they were really bringing back oWoD, then they would have brought back all the FAQs and Errata from the old website that are only accessible on the Internet Archive. But they haven't.

Taken as an individual point, then yes... you're right, it's not significant. But if you take all the oWOD incidents over the last few years, it's leading in a general trend. If the this mega-compendium outsells anything nWOD is pushing out, they might ressurect the old line.

Sad thing is, I'll probably pick it up, just because it compiles most of the clans/bloodlines into one place. We still play oWOD vampire occasionally.

Ferret · Post by **Ferret** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:06 pm

D&D Essentials isn't 4.5, either, huh?

And the rarity treasure system works.

In actual useful commentary: count me as another nostalgia-driven +1 to picking this up. We still play Vampire and Mage occasionally, and having all the resources in One Big Book will be great. And, I have to say, I kind of miss having the green and black marble spine on my gaming bookshelf.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:15 pm

If the thing sells like gangbusters (and people spend 300 f*cking dollars on a limited edition Rogue Trader or Deathwatch RPG edition, so they don't have to keep the price point low), it'd be stupid of White Wolf *not* to bring the old setting back some how, even POD.

souran · Post by **souran** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:47 pm

What ever gave you the impression that anybody working for white wolf was smart at all.

This thing sells like gangbusters or it falls flat on its face they WILL NOT CARE.

They will take the prophets it earns and produce "Sleeper: the snoozing" next year using the NWOD ruleset.

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 7:47 pm

The reason the oWoD was canceled in the first place was because it was failing to attract new customers.

How many new players had oWoD attracted since its cancellation? Because as far as I can tell, the only fanbase it has are long-time fans.

Even if they did bring it back, it would not improve their profits. oWoD doesn't attract new players and the existing market simply isn't nearly as big as it used to be.

But if you prefer to live in a fantasy land where the RPG market is still as big as it was in the mid 90's then be my guest. By the truth remains true: the RPG market has declined immensely, and continues to decline. Competition from video games is a big factor, as well as the general decrease of RPG retail stores.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 8:01 pm

The reason RPG marked has declined is flagship companies producing shit people do not want and deliberately insulting their own customer base at the same time. And any of the comparatively unsucessful product lines of oWoD, like Changeling or Wraith, was more popular than the entire nWoD, save for Vampire and, maybe, Mage, combined. Heck, mere spinoffs like Kindred of the East, produced more titles than most nWoD games. Deal with it.

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 8:52 pm

Reprinting Masquerade will not attract new customers. It's always been the province of long-time fans. And that demographic is gradually shrinking due to attrition.

Furthermore, what will they write new material about? Endless rehashes of old material?

Do you really expect them to continually reproduce Masquerade for decades?

What you're talking about is stagnation. Complete stagnation. Stagnation is not good for business.

But you must obviously be an economics major who has insider access I don't.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 9:11 pm

Like Scrabble has stagnated and needs to be redesigned from the ground up because it's been around for decades. Gotcha. Because that New Coke effort worked out so well.

Your argument about stagnation is shit even when compared to the RPG market. For evidence, I point to Pathfinder, which took 3rd edition D&D, which is arguably about as old as revised OWOD vampire, and ran with it. And Pathfinder is nipping at the heels of D&D itself in the sales data we have. But Pathfinder is bad business because it relies on a stagnant, dead system that's decades old.

Look, here's how it works. If you make a product, especially if it doesn't cut into your existing market, and it makes a profit, it's stupid to completely abandon that product because it's an "old" product.

As you said, oWOD fans are holdovers that generally aren't buying nWOD product, so offering oWOD on POD or something similar isn't going to cut into nWOD's sales. It's just profit, especially since you don't *really* need to come out with any new books. You have a huge catalog that you can sell without spending a dime on writing, layout, or anything else up to the point where you print the book.

Saying that the market is shrinking when the source material is out of print is misleading and disingenuous. We know that the installed base for oWOD was larger than it is for nWOD, since White Wolf is no longer the industry player that it used to be, and ever since it's merger it's been stated that they want to edge away from table top RPGs (which would probably be the overwhelming reason why they wouldn't offer any other oWOD books even if this one sells like crazy).

And as for rehashing the same old material to purchase over and over again, that's what the nWOD books did. They rehashed the same old shit, only mostly in hardcover, and expected us to buy it all up again.

souran · Post by **souran** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 9:44 pm

Flatline:

This is stupid either way.

OWOD was killed off because it wasn't moving product. Its that simple. The system was losing player base.

Your argument about pathfinder ignores all the actual facts of the situation.

Pathfinder is not WOD. Do any pathfinder groups actually use their basic setting? That isn't what pathfinder is using to move books. Further, pathfinder has a new core rulebook, a new rulebook for monsters, an "advanced players guide", a guide to magic etc.

These are similar to 3.x products wizards produced but they are not reguritations of existing books. They assume all the pathfinder tweaks to the game. There are feats in them that had never been written before.

OWOD was about the setting, there was very little in the OWOD setting that didn't have a book on it. Seriously, the next releases would have been things like "Nights of Witchita" and "forgotten kindred of the deep amazon rain forest"

and even if they had, NOBODY WAS BUYING OWOD books.

Similarly, nobody was buying 3.5 product anymore. They just didn't need it. There was a glut on the market of 3.x books. The reason people started buying pathfinder books was becuase the adventures and other material they were producing are no where near as backwards compatible as they claimed.

That is what causes companies to do edition updates. When the existing player base starts saying "meh, I really don't need this for my game" then you publish a new edition and get everybody buy 3 corebooks, a book on equipment/magic items and a suppliment about their favorite class/aspect of the game again.

Your other examples are silly as well. Scrabble, monopoly, risk actually do get updates. Although you can of course play them with "classic" rules all of them offer variants with timers to change the pace of play or other kinds of modifications because the classic versions have all the elegance of junior high dodge ball - as games they reward being the biggest prick possible.

The only example you have that is not completely stupid is new coke. Perhaps this is White Wolfs "New Coke" moment.

However, remember that the reason we got new coke was

1) Coke spent 20 years losing market share to pepsi
2) They did extensive taste testing and of the testers a CLEAR and DECISIVE majority liked pepsi more than coke and NEW COKE more than pepsi.
3) The coca cola classic that was "reintroduced" wasn't actually the same thing as "old coke" EITHER because it used High Fructose Corn Syrup instead of sugar as all coke had used up until the new coke fiasco.

So they didn't just stick the same old failing product back on store shelves they continued to use the knowledge that people said they like sweeter soft drinks and made "classic" coke sweeter as well.

The moral of the story is that "reverting" to a dieing product doesn't work even in the one supposed case were it did.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 22, 2011 10:21 pm

souran wrote:Pathfinder is not WOD. Do any pathfinder groups actually use their basic setting?

This is totally tangential I know, but yes. Yes they do. Paizo got their start making adventures. Their primary selling point for them as a company was the adventure paths, and those adventure paths were and are set in Golarion. Books in the Pathfinder Chronicles series are entirely set in Golarion and don't even make a half hearted attempt to be setting neutral. Gods and Magic is Golarion this and Golarion that all the way through. The Pathfinder Wikis report Golarion-specific information without even flagging it as such.

Pathfinder is and always has been world specific. And a lot of Pathfinder players play in that world. And have since the beginning.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Wed Mar 23, 2011 1:41 am

Golarion is pretty neutral for a setting. They have all the alt-Earths like a Eastern European-inspired vampire nation and basic tropes you'd expect to find in a default fantasy setting.

I mean, unlike everyone else with middling sales like Earthdawn or Monte Cook's setting or Eberron, they didn't try to "set fantasy on it's head!!!" with their bizarre setting elements.

Finkin · Post by **Finkin** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 1:54 am

And somewhere on the planet, Rein·Hagen begins to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, while jamming one last pin into his Achilli voodoo doll.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 2:41 am

Maybe they'll rewrite Exalted so its mechanics are good. Man, I would love that.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 3:43 am

Or so that the story was good. If exalted had better mechanics, story and theme I would totally play it

souran · Post by **souran** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 5:00 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
souran wrote:Pathfinder is not WOD. Do any pathfinder groups actually use their basic setting?
This is totally tangential I know, but yes. Yes they do. Paizo got their start making adventures. Their primary selling point for them as a company was the adventure paths, and those adventure paths were and are set in Golarion. Books in the Pathfinder Chronicles series are entirely set in Golarion and don't even make a half hearted attempt to be setting neutral. Gods and Magic is Golarion this and Golarion that all the way through. The Pathfinder Wikis report Golarion-specific information without even flagging it as such.

Pathfinder is and always has been world specific. And a lot of Pathfinder players play in that world. And have since the beginning.

-Username17

I should have been more careful before entering anectodal information into a post here, but:

In my area all the pathfinder people play pathfinder like they used to play D&D.

They use the default gods, and the default assumptions of the rulebook. Many/most run the adventurepaths (or at least they were). However, they didn't know jack shit about any basic setting implied by the pathfinder rules.

Doubt that any of the people who I know who play pathfinder know that the name of the default world is Golarion.

However, the main point still stands:

The advanced players guide for pathfinder does not advance any sort of metaplot. An adventure path might occasionally reference back to a previous adventure path but there story is totally self contained... and totally transferable to a generic 3.x homebrew world.

The "default world" in the pathfinder books I have seen is no more intrusive than 3.x default world of greyhawk/oerth.

V:TM is/was sold exactly opposite. There were clues to freaking metaplot in everybook. The books built a loose timeline. Yes these are all ideas they stole from FASA/shadowrun and Shadowrun does them better but they were still central to making V:TM go.

V:TM was never sold as a "vampire roleplaying system" it presupposed its own world inside its rules. The background/Setting was the selling point to VTM. Even books with lots of crunch were selling V:TM flavored crunch.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 10:24 am

deanruel87 wrote:Or so that the story was good. If exalted had better mechanics, story and theme I would totally play it

Yep. At this point Exalted is such a clusterfuck, that you need to ignore 80-90% of the published books to have a game that is not stereotypical fantasy about good stabbing evil in the face, played absolutely straight, except with "good" being morally bankrupt (which goes unnoticed by the authors).

But I think that even simply rewriting rules for either WoD or Exalted into something decent is beyond WW abilities now. Houserules they pass for Exalted errata and net materials are shit. They are like Tomes, in that they rewrite alot without even intending to fix most of the fundamental gameplay problems. But with less balance (i.e., there are still whole Charm trees that don't do anything anyone would ever might want to do). So, I'm unimpressed with the level of crunch writers WW can call upon at the moment.

This, unfortunately, means that their anniversary edition likely still won't have good crunch. The best we can hope for is the core resolution mechanics not being all screwed up.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 1:59 pm

souran wrote:OWOD was killed off because it wasn't moving product. Its that simple. The system was losing player base.

OK, time for the stupid looking question. What is OWOD?

You see, unlike other games, like D&D, OWOD is ...

A ruleset
A campaign scenario

While I wasn't paying attention to the death of OWOD, I was looking at the extended illness portion. It was the later that killed OWOD. The original attempt at fixing the probem of an overdeveloped campaign world was to spin off other campaign worlds as game variants. Thus you had Vampire in the Dark Ages and Werewolf in the Wild West. But these were only diversions from the main scenario that was already so crowded with stuff that there was little else to write about.

The more you start adding, the harder it is for the new stuff to play well with the old stuff. That's a whole lot different from, say a D&D expansion glut. There might be only a couple of a new class/Prc in a campaign world or not, but every new clan or type needs an entire supporting crew, an entire back history and a good reason why people hadn't noticed them before.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 2:51 pm

As for the rules modifications for Vampire 20A, they are pulling a Paizo on it. They have a special forum where they are taking ideas from the fanbase and are doing an open playtest so that Vampire's 20th Anniversary book will be fully transparent and the best it can possibly be.

Or to put it another way: they are pulling a Jason Bulhman, and they are going to hack out some random perplexing house rule patches on the Vampire 2nd Revised rules and claim that the giant open playtest validated very random change in the final product in September.

-Username17

Don Strudel · Post by **Don Strudel** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:34 pm

You're completely right, Frank. A CCP dev over on PlanetVampire admitted to nWoD being a market failure and the MMOG being a replica of Masquerade with Gehenna and everything.

Malkavians forever!

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Mar 23, 2011 6:38 pm

Don Strudel wrote:You're completely right, Frank. A CCP dev over on PlanetVampire admitted to nWoD being a market failure and the MMOG being a replica of Masquerade with Gehenna and everything.

Malkavians forever!

That surprises me. Not that it's true, but that they would admit it in public before V20 is out.

Oh, by the way: Vampire 20th Anniversary edition is called "V20". That's not a d20 joke from naysayers, that's the actual internal name for it. And while they are doing the Paizo "we want to hear from the fans" media blitz, they aren't actually taking submissions for chapters. I checked.

-Username17