But who cares, right? People don't care about the world of darkness because of Werewolf, they care about it because I've played Vampire with every single woman I've had sex with - and I'm not alone. So the very real problems that the nWoD has in its non-vampire spinoffs will hae to be reviewed elsewhere because the world of darkness sinks or swims on the merits of its vampire line alone.
Well... the world of darkness is sinking. Not in a manner in which you might expect where the imaginary world is going to hell in a handbasket - but that the actual publishing line is collapsing like a wet paper bag. Stores don't order new White Wolf material and no one even fucking notices. You don't know what the latest White Wolf release was and neither do I because White Wolf is dying.. White Wolf doesn't release specific sales figures, but they proudly claimed that they had over 5.5 million total book sales (as in, ever) back when nWoD hit the shelves. And they claim over seven million total sales today. Which puts nWoD sales at slightly over a quarter of what the oWoD sales were. Further, they also claimed over seen million sales last year, meaning that either they stopped updating their home page or they suck now. Also, at the end of oWoD's print run they confidently stated that they had a 26% market share of the rpg industry, and now they don't mention their market share at all. So how did this happen? How did nWoD fail so badly? Let's look at their design goals, as explained by Justin Achilli:
Clean Up the World!
This is a design goal that even diehard True Brujah players would grudgingly admit had to be attempted. The oWoD was too complicated and had too much bullshit supernatural crap in it. I mean, did you know that it had dragons, manticores, and harpies in it? Secret manticores. I don't know how that works. But even worse, they had to retcon out an entire book because a secret society of assassins inside a slightly less secret society of assassins inside a secret vampire cult dedicated to ending the secrecy of vampire cults that was secretly run by an evil ancient sleeping vampire god in a secret city in the land of the dead who was in turn the pawn of a secret alien space virus was apparently going too far (see: Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand). It didn't help that literally four of those secret organizations were called "The Black Hand."
But the result... wasn't clean. And more importantly, it wasn't interesting. I mean sure, they failed to live up to their promise to not have any secret vampire assassin cults led by a secret evil space virus (see: VII). And while the prospect of Bloodline Bloat is actually a lot easier to take than Clan bloat, because a Bloodline could literally be like six vampires rather than requiring a whole new secret clan structure every time you visit a new town and meet a guy with a new power - the fact remains that the very instant that you have a bloodline composed of just Vampire Prostitutes who make Vampire Perfume you setting has exploded the fucking fridge. But that's not the part that sucks. The part that sucks is that the new setting has no reason to give a shit about any of it. With the removal of the metaplot (unless you count the space virus thing) came a rudderless existence.
The introduction of the whole "vampires fight like vulcans in heat when they meet in person" meant that not only had they left the game without any fucking political disagreements that you knew or cared about, they actually made it so that vampires couldn't engage in politics of any kind without just stabbing each other. If four PC vamps walk into a room with four NPC vamps in it, all four PCs and all four NPCs have to make a resolve check to keep from flipping out for each vampire in the other group. That's literally thirty-two rolls just to determine if your audience with a minor functionary and his pals turns into a blood bath. So not only is the coterie very unlikely to actually be able to have a chat with any other vampires without having it turn to bloodshed, but any possible tension has been bled out of the scene like black bile from a stone before you even get that far while the Storyteller rolls die roll after die roll. Combine this with the fact that Aura reading is now a secret discipline, so the supposed restrictions on diablerie basically don't even matter and you've got a recipe for mindless hack and slash because there is nothing else to do now. Sure hope the combat system is sound...
Clean Up the System
So World of Darkness now has a book just for the system and a separate one for Vampire. This is explicitly an attempt to get all the rules together so you didn't have the old bullshit where the melee combat rules changed beyond recognition within the same edition based on whether you were a mortal police officer looked at from the perspective of vampires or werewolves. Also the "worst excesses" of the combat system have been reigned in. And the system for success and failure has been standardized.
Well apparently the worst excesses of the combat system were best summed up by the idea that immortal vampires with super speed could take on a second grade special ed class in a stick fight and take out more than two of the vicious children before they were brought down. I don't think this can be said enough times: there is no fucking damage roll. No damage, no soak. Your to-hit roll is also your damage roll. And it's a dicepool system. If I roll 2 dice I am handing out exactly and linearly half as much damage as a guy rolling 4 dice. If there are two of me, we are handing out the same damage (actually more, because there are multiple attacker bonuses, but you get the idea). This means that a handful of anyone with sticks has the combined offensive output of anything in the whole game. So actual combat is pretty much just War with the cards replaced by piles of dice. My side has a pile of dice, so does your side. The biggest pile almost invariably wins and no one cares.
But remember that unified system? Yeah, they bork it immediately. It's a fixed target number dice pool system, except that they allow you to change the numbers on which you get extra dice and count negative successes. Which means that while an 8 is always a success, the actual average successes per die aren't constant at all, making you wonder why they bothered. The average successes per die vary from 22-42%. And that's just for starting characters. Anyone with some XP behind their eyes is in for a horrible revelation: the action resolution system does not take into account high powered characters. High end characters get critical success against each other, because the determination of whether you critical or not is based on the absolute rather than relative number of successes they score. Furthermore, they don't even stick to the rules in the rulebook. Special cases for unique electricity, explosives, and even falling damage weave in and out of the books like clockwork men.
Personalize the Horror
There is a concerted effort to take things off the scale of the divine and profane and fit into a more introspective story of... oh blech.I can't even stomach regurgitating this pretentious jackassery, I'll just let Justin rant for a bit on his own:
A lot of the personalization seems to take the form of haphazardly dumping Christian messages all over everything. You literally have to take a Catholic celestial virtue and deadly sin. I'm not kidding. But a lot more of it is just scaling things down so that it's just about you and your city block or some shit. Like literally the Crips want to move in on Myrtle and Montgomery to drive your drugs off the market with their shipment of cheap Peruvian. But you know what? I don't fucking care! If the antagonists can't be classified as right or wrong and the shit they want does not - in the larger picture - make any fucking difference, why are we fighting again? How about instead of risking our immortality on some gray scale conflict that specifically doesn't mean two shits - we just don't do that. Fucking walk away. Because you can. It's like fighting in Iraq: there's nothing to win so you should just leave.Justin Achilli wrote:The setting's new antagonists fit the far more localized experience. Things like Nexus Crawlers and rampaging Antediluvians don't fit the xenophobic, isolated moods of the games, so we scale down their power or otherwise configure their stories so that defeating one isn't a matter of 'Save the world!' It's more, 'We saved our own asses.' I think there's a lot more grayscale morality in the new World of Darkness, and a lot less room for the players' characters to be overt heroes. The antagonists reflect that. Check out Promethean's qashmallim, for example. They're incarnate pillars of flame that embody the utterly amoral Divine Spark. How do you even deal with something like that, let alone cast it in the light of right or wrong?
Maybe this is all supposed to teach you some stupid fucking Christian message about turning the other cheek. I don't even care. Considering that this game used to have the largest collection of half naked pagan goth women in the hobby their smothering of everything in senseless Christianity can only be seen in the light of trying to skull fuck eggs out of the golden goose.
Now while we're on the subject, there are a lot of minor things that piss the fuck out of me. For example there's the thing where people wrote rules without reading other rules. Like how you can start with a Bloodline discipline that isn't yours and cannot ever pick it up again ever if you don't. Or how the Khaibit get the special bloodline power to pay blood to get shitty darkvision when they have to be Mekhet and therefore get no-restrictions darkvision for fucking free.
And then there's the fact that in their zealousness to purge the world of celerific combat monsters they for some reason thought that leaving social monsters with Save or Lose effects would somehow be OK. And there's the fact that Stamina doesn't do anything because there aren't any fucking soak rolls.
But really I think the reason that no one cares is because the world has been left without anything to care about. You can't do vampire politics because you can't talk to other vampires safely and it wouldn't matter anyway because vampires don't run anything in the new world of darkness.
-Username17