Daniel wrote:Masquerade's success was an example of a rpg going viral.
There is nothing there beyond ripping of Ann Rice, rules that looked easy and the green marble with a rose cover.
By historic happenstance that clicked with a large group of people that wanted to play something, but certainly not AD&D 2e.
I would definitely say that Masquerade's success was about being in the right place at the right time. AD&D had kind of shat the bed, and people wanted a game that promised more social stories than endless dungeon crawls. The goth esthetic was also a big thing at the time.
But it also had an elevator pitch that resonated with people better than its competition. Remember that
Nightlife came out slightly earlier, and people did not rush to embrace it the same way they embraced Masquerade the following year. Some of that is because Nightlife is incomprehensible hot garbage, but in many ways so was Masquerade. We saw the crushing dominance of Masquerade because:
- Better art and production values.
- Better written prose.
- An explicit statement that you did not have to do the hack-n-slash that so many other games were offering.
- The promise that you could play different kinds of vampires.
That last one is pretty key. Nightlife let you play all kinds of crazy crap: Daemons, Vampyres, Animates, Inuit[sic], Wyghts, Werewolves, and Ghosts. But whatever you played, you still had to be one of the monsters from Nightbreed. If you had a favorite horror movie that
wasn't Nightbreed, you could get fucked. While Masquerade let you play the vampire from Nosferatu, Lost Boys, Interview With the Vampire, and several different versions of Dracula, Nightlife really only let you play the monster from
Vlad the Impaler even if you weren't technically even a Vampyre at all.
Now Masquerade did
fail to achieve its design goals. The vampires it presented did not live up to their promise. You actually
couldn't do the Lost Boys or Interview With the Vampire, or fucking any of it because the vampire types weren't fit for purpose. But you could imagine a new version that successfully managed to present various types of vampire that appealed to a 21st century audience
and actually delivered the fucking goods.
Mage can't say that. Neither can Werewolf. Those books were cargo cult all the way down. Divided up into various tribes and circles because it worked for Vampire but the underlying justification for fucking any of that was missing. There are
seventeen fucking Werewolf tribes, and over and above the fact that not one person can actually remember what all seventeen of them even are, I can't name a single piece of source material that
any of them are referencing. None of the Tribes serve as a bridge or an entry point. If you want to play one of the monsters from Dog Soldiers or American Werewolf in Paris or The Howling or Teen Wolf or Wer, or
fucking anything in the genre, where's the connection? What is the fucking justification for
any of the tribes?
Mage and Werewolf are just too far up their own assholes to be in any way salvageable. Nothing that happens in either of those games is an actual hook that would make someone remotely familiar with any bit of urban fantasy or horror to say "I wanna play
that." It's all self-referential naval gazing all the way down.
-Username17