Paradox Buys White Wolf from CCP

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Dec 19, 2015 8:55 pm

Part of the issue with the full-on Doctor Strange route is the simple fact that a non-trivial portion of PCs--especially vampires--are going to be 20 something kids who until fairly recently didn't know about any of this shit because they were too busy chasing skirts and DJing at Das Bunker every weekend.

I mean, hey, the end of the world is cool and all, but it apparently doesn't actually happen all that often. Hilariously, this means that more often than not the real "hook" of an apocalypse cult isn't that they want the world to end, it's whatever they are doing to keep the lights on or stay entertained in the meantime. For example, in my experience people don't spend much time worrying about whether the Followers of Set might be getting closer to achieving snake god nirvana. It's a cool wrinkle in their write up, but oftentimes it's functionally secondary to the part where Setites spend their free time stacking up hookers and blow like cordwood.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Dec 19, 2015 10:03 pm

Whipstitch wrote:Setites spend their free time stacking up hookers and blow like cordwood.

How do I apply to work in that warehouse?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Dec 19, 2015 10:52 pm

Longes wrote:
Onyx Path release schedule:

VTM – The Black Hand: A Guide to the Tal’Mahe’Ra: Akin to the previous Guides to the Camarilla, Sabbat, and Anarchs, a sect book covering the True Black Hand. 240 pages. PDF/PoD/Possible Deluxe Kickstarter.
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY????

They are allowed to produce any nostalgia products that White Wolf doesn't want to make themselves. I can virtually guaranty you that White Wolf isn't going to be making that any time soon.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Dec 19, 2015 11:46 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
Longes wrote:
Onyx Path release schedule:

VTM – The Black Hand: A Guide to the Tal’Mahe’Ra: Akin to the previous Guides to the Camarilla, Sabbat, and Anarchs, a sect book covering the True Black Hand. 240 pages. PDF/PoD/Possible Deluxe Kickstarter.
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY????
They are allowed to produce any nostalgia products that White Wolf doesn't want to make themselves. I can virtually guaranty you that White Wolf isn't going to be making that any time soon.

-Username17

I understand that, but really? The Black Hand? I'm pretty sure we had an OSSR on the train wreck Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. Is there really a demand for the third useless vampire organisation (after Anarchs and Inconu)? Over, say, revised clan books or V20: Victorian Sucking?

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Sun Dec 20, 2015 12:13 am

Onyx Path's concept of 'demand' is 'enough people to throw money at a kickstarter sufficient to pretend to pay freelancers next to nothing, to really, really slowly develop layout, and to conduct the operating expenses of one guy.' The capital expenses and operating costs are so low that a few hundred people paying the incredibly inflated 'deluxe level' cost is enough.

And there are absolutely a few hundred diehards out there for each splat with sufficient disposable income to keep the train limping along.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Dec 20, 2015 12:36 am

I think Onyx Path kickstarters tend to rake in a few hundred thousand, and seem to be done a few times a year, so Richard Thomas has a pretty good racket going even if it takes 2/3 of the funded amount to produce and fulfill.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Dec 20, 2015 6:55 pm

Longes wrote:I understand that, but really? The Black Hand? I'm pretty sure we had an OSSR on the train wreck Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. Is there really a demand for the third useless vampire organisation (after Anarchs and Inconu)? Over, say, revised clan books or V20: Victorian Sucking?

Onyx Path has a very weird business plan. Actual content is mostly produced by cheap, free, or even negative cost labor. Printing (if any) is done by print on demand, so the costs go entirely to the consumer. Downloading is handled by a third party aggregator, so the costs of bandwidth are born by someone else as well. Anything they "produce" is almost guaranteed to be profitable, because unless they do one of those special editions there are almost no costs on their side and they just get a cut of every unit sold by an e-shop.

The bottleneck in their setup is writer enthusiasm. They aren't paying scale and have no professional integrity. They have a bunch of Hamlet Typing Monkeys, and they get whatever those monkeys hammer out in whatever time frame they do so. So a book that would be a relatively big seller but is never actually completed (like Exalted 3) is not that useful for them. While a book that will only sell a couple hundred copies at the high end but is shoveled up by a couple deranged fanatics that will turn their shit in on time is worth money. Maybe not a lot of money, but infinity times something that doesn't get finished.

Remember, Onyx Path made that guy's Otherkin Sex Fantasy into a nWoD game. That probably didn't make a lot of money, but I'm sure it made something, and the really important part is that a draft got turned in complete for that pos because it was wank material for whoever made it.

Obviously they are in contact with one or more people convinced that they have the true key to making sense out of the Black Hand and are totally itching to write it out in a semi-official venue to prove how cool they are. At which point, Richard Thomas has made money already. Because he has almost no costs to stamp his semi-official stamp on it and he just gets a kickback from every copy that is ordered as a download or POD.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 3:56 am

I can see people wanting The Black Hand to work. It has such a cool name. Whether you first heard of it from WWI or from the Sooty Show, it sounds good and has the potential for intrigue. Now White Wolf fucked it up, obviously, but people wish it had lived up to the name.

I would love an adventure about tracking down the Black Hand: MASTER of disguise.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 5:47 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
Prak wrote:So there's no real shortage of potential enemies if your big over arcing plot is "The World Is Ending Because The Universal Force of Destruction Has Gone Bonkers." Pretty much each splat can have their Doomsday Cult faction, mostly people who think the end of modern society is the tits because then they get to own people (by which I mean mundane humans) like cattle for feeding/breeding/occult experiments/whatever. Hell, you can draw on Hellboy and lovecraftian stuff for this sort of thing, and keep Pentex (if you're inclined) as the shadowy privatized "Reset the World" plot, just maybe cut out the Saturday morning cartoon villainy and evil genitals stuff.
The point isn't that you can't find Captain Planet villains in White Wolf. The point is that the world destroying villains are shitty villains. You can fight the Nephandi, but that's all you can do. You can't have tea with them. You can't team up with them. You can't even have a meaningful tense truce. They are bad and the moment you find them you are compelled to stab them in the face.

That's a shitty villain. They might as well be dangerous wild animals.

-Username17

So can you tone the villains down from Captain Planet levels of eco-stupidity? Strike something more ambiguously vague at the level the players will interact at?

I'm thinking something closer to how In Nomine treats angels and demons. A lot of angels and demons are friends, or at least were friends, and God *and* Lucifer are pretty much absentee landlords. Meanwhile, PC level characters and NPCs are stuck in The Suck on Earth, doing shit they might not believe in because it's literally their nature to do this. And some of them get tired and just stop fighting one another. One of the city settings in In Nomine was a detente between the factions. I've run games with intentionally ambiguous morality and with anyone who is interested in story and character they enjoy the extra room to hang themselves. Werewolves should wonder if they are fighting for the right team. Cam vampires should have to admit that the Sabbat does things better frequently enough that defection should be a real thing, and vice versa. The Technocracy should have a mage acceptance program to "reeducate" them in the ways of enlightened science. I mean, who doesn't like antibiotics?

For as morally ambiguous as oWOD claims to be, it certainly has ended up drawing very distinct lines in the sand along their own morality system. I'd like to see the sides muddied up a lot more.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 7:59 pm

TheFlatline wrote:So can you tone the villains down from Captain Planet levels of eco-stupidity? Strike something more ambiguously vague at the level the players will interact at?

Absolutely you could. The problem is that such as Werewolf has fans, they probably wouldn't be happy with that choice. Werewolf is bout hulking out into a 2.8 meter tall clawed monster fueled by rage and going on a rampage. They need enemies who can be fought on those terms. And people who are in any way morally ambiguous don't really fit that bill. If all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well... all Werewolf has got are some frenzied furry blenders.

So Werewolf asks for and gets enemies that are no different than rabid wild animals. But the problems with this are as obvious as they are severe. Enemies that are no different than rabid wild animals are no better than rabid wild animals. The Werewolves might as well have been fighting stirges or otyughs for all the difference it made.

The big problem you have in trying to get the secondary games of Werewolf and Mage to play nice with Vampire is that Werewolf and Mage are in fact horrible, and the design decisions for them are fucking awful. The things the fans of those lines remember are actually grotesqueries that we'd all be better off if they didn't get. Mage and Werewolf present cartoonish and simplified battle lines in no small part because what they are actually for is platforms for a bit of mindless hack and slash in between serious Vampire games. The fact that Werewolf worldbuilding is simplistic and stupid and fit only to tear to pieces is a feature.

So yeah, you could replace Werewolf with a game that wasn't so abysmally stupid. Where the villains had gravitas and you could plausibly have meaningful discussions and alliances and double crosses and shit. You could have such a game where two thirds of the characters weren't expected to write "incest baby" or "character's mother is a dog fucker" on their character sheet. This would be a good thing. But I suspect doing something like that would be rejected by the Werewolf fans.

-Username17

Miniature Colossus · Post by **Miniature Colossus** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 9:14 pm

Just how numerous are the Werewolf and Mage fans actually? How much does White Wolf risk losing if the were to chuck the whole WtA/MtA-canon in a bonfire and then redesign everything from the ground up so the concepts fit better with the VtM-world? They could even reuse the major names to maintain some plausible deniability about doing so.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 9:19 pm

They could just, you know, keep the villains you can't plausibly negotiate with and have people negotiate with villains from other lines you can plausibly negotiate with. And maybe write in some more werewolf-centric villains that can be negotiated with.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 9:20 pm

White Wolf doesn't exist anymore, so Onyx Path would essentially have to make and market new games from ground up. Onyx Path doesn't really do that. They probably wouldn't even be able to keep the major names, because all the rights belong to Paradox.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 9:23 pm

We're talking about the new White Wolf that has been spun off from Paradox and licensed crap to Onyx Path. Check previous pages in this very thread.

Miniature Colossus · Post by **Miniature Colossus** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 9:45 pm

Longes wrote:White Wolf doesn't exist anymore, so Onyx Path would essentially have to make and market new games from ground up. Onyx Path doesn't really do that. They probably wouldn't even be able to keep the major names, because all the rights belong to Paradox.

As name_here said I was referring to the new White Wolf as owned by Paradox. I'm certainly not expecting OPP to ditch anything that angers the three or four fans that cared about said thing, since this is the target audience that brings in the money for OPP.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Dec 21, 2015 10:29 pm

Miniature Colossus wrote:Just how numerous are the Werewolf and Mage fans actually? How much does White Wolf risk losing if the were to chuck the whole WtA/MtA-canon in a bonfire and then redesign everything from the ground up so the concepts fit better with the VtM-world? They could even reuse the major names to maintain some plausible deniability about doing so.

Actual Mage and Werewolf fans per se are thin on the ground. The dropoff in sales between the A-ranked Vampire and the B-ranked Werewolf or Mage seems about as big, relatively speaking as the dropoff from from the B-list to the C-list (with like Changeling and Hunter and shit). We talk about the Big Three, but we could just as easily be talking about the Big One and the Middle Two.

How much is that drop off? I'm not really sure. At least an order of magnitude. Maybe two. I'm really unsure of how many Vampire players are left. There was a time when the number of Vampire players numbered in the low millions, but obviously that night has passed. I don't know if the number of Werewolf players was ever counted in the hundreds of thousands, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it was.

But that's not the real issue. The real issue is that an unknowable but possibly large number of Vampire players read Mage and/or Werewolf books for setting information. They might not have played Mage (and honestly, how could you?), but they maybe read Technocracy: Progenitors and used some of the rants inside to inform their Vampire game. Or maybe they used Rage Across Appalachia to do their Deliverance campaign. Or whatever. Vampire had an extensive history of bringing in "guest stars" from the other minor lines.

These three Vampire: The Eternal Struggle cards are all references to other game lines.

I guess the best way to think about it is like Comics. Batman sells the most comics, and lot of people only read Batman. Sales figures for last month show that fucking Dark Knight III was the bestest most sellingest comic on the market. It sold 440,000 copies. Now Red Hood and Arsenal sold less than twenty thousand copies. They have their own deal where Jason Todd and Roy Harper go off and do stuff together. They used to have Starfire with them, but now they don't (she has her own comic that sells somewhat better, go figure). Obviously, the number of people who care enough about Red Hood and/or Arsenal to follow a monthly comic about their exploits is nowhere near the number of people who would like to know about what Batman is up to.

But you know what? Jason Todd used to be Robin. He is a Batman character. If you fuck too much with Red Hood you risk Batman fans taking notice and getting pissed off that you're fucking up their world.

That's about where I think Werewolf lives. It's a small subset of your Vampire that are in any danger of actually buying a Werewolf book. But the number of Vampire players who would get all angry that the World of Darkness isn't really getting brought back if the Werewolf shit isn't in it might be pretty big. I dunno, and I doubt the new guys at White Wolf know either.

But I suspect that's why they are doing the whole "One World of Darkness" thing. They want to convince everyone that they are bringing back the old World of Darkness that sold millions of books, but they also don't want to support separate publishing lines of books that measure sales in the tens of thousands or less. They'd really like to just put the Mage shit into the Vampire books and make the Vampire players fucking pay for it.

-Username17

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 1:36 am

FrankTrollman wrote: But you know what? Jason Todd used to be Robin. He is a Batman character. If you fuck too much with Red Hood you risk Batman fans taking notice and getting pissed off that you're fucking up their world.

Batman fans killed Jason Todd. Literally. The Joker captured Jason, and DC ended the issue on a cliffhanger. As a publicity stunt, they had a 900 number that ou could call and vote to save him or kill him. Now DC had no intention of killing him off. And they expected the save him votes to win out.
But kill him won by such an overwhelming majority that they had no choice but to run with it. Batman fans hated Jason Todd so much that they paid actual money to have the Joker brutally murder him.

And for decades, it was considered a truism that no one stays dead in comics except Jason Todd, Bucky, and Uncle Ben.

And there is a reason for this. Jason Todd was a thousand times more interesting as the dead Robin than he ever was as anything else, Red Hood included. Really. He's more compelling as a tattered costume in a display case than as a living character. And no one wanted to bring him back. Everyone was baffled by the fact that DC did it.

If Jason came out as Transgendered and started openly living as a women, the only people who would care would be Transgendered Batman fan, who simply wouldn't want him.

If Jason Todd become a Neo-Nazi, no one would be remotely surprised and no one would care, except possibly Neo-Nazi Batman fans who wouldn't want him.

This makes it a rather bad point of comparison. Batfans were angry that he was alive at all. Grayson would be the better comparison. People actually like Dick Grayson. Red Hood is more like World of Darkness Gypsies and Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand.

They used to have Starfire with them, but now they don't (she has her own comic that sells somewhat better, go figure).

Starfire's comic is actually pretty good, and appeals to a large market subset that is suffering from Grimdark fatique. Plus, she's the second most popular Teen Titan after Robin and actually has a lot of fans who she isn't being written as a vapid and emotionless sex maniac.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 2:45 am

You're wildly overstating the case against Jason Todd. The kid died by less than a hundred votes out of ten thousand. And you know what happened? People in the larger batman fan community were actually pretty divided by it. You know, because the subset of people who are actively reading comics at any given time is piss-in-the-ocean tiny compared to the number of people who are casually interested in Batman and thus impacted by the ripple effects. Ultimately, the important takeaway is simply that guys like my dad who hadn't read a Batman comic in decades were actually rather disturbed to hear that a Robin was brutally murdered even if it wasn't the Robin he had grown up with himself. Did that ruin comics forever? No. But it handily demonstrates that you can't easily predict the way things will be perceived simply by noting sales numbers, which is really the only point Frank was getting at to begin with.

Almaz · Post by **Almaz** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 9:15 am

Better question: Given that a lot of people who buy WoD also buy "supernatural romance" novels featuring hot, hot Vampire x Werewolf (x Human, sometimes) action, why would you pass up the market? Sure, the werewolves are usually second-string to the vampires in those stories, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sell like hotcakes.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 10:33 am

Almaz wrote:Better question: Given that a lot of people who buy WoD also buy "supernatural romance" novels featuring hot, hot Vampire x Werewolf (x Human, sometimes) action, why would you pass up the market? Sure, the werewolves are usually second-string to the vampires in those stories, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sell like hotcakes.

Given that Twilight, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, and so on have been selling over a hundred million copies, I take it as given that oWoD never reached a tenth of its potential market penetration. At its height near the end of the nineties, the number of World of Darkness players was a couple million. But clearly there is room for that number to be twenty million or more. World of Darkness could be a quarter billion dollar a year industry.

But reaching big also involves the possibility of failing big. For every Twilight movie franchise there's several failures like Vampire Academy or Mortal Instruments. There's no reason to believe that an attempt to reboot the World of Darkness into something more mass market wouldn't fail catastrophically like the last reboot.

What they are going for is something much more modest and also probably achievable - getting a million people to buy their books by revitalizing World of Darkness as a nostalgia property. So trying to get as many of the people who were onboard for oWoD (and their kids! 19 year old nuGoths who got into 1st edition Vampire are in their early forties and have teenage children of their own). So I'm expecting a Star Wars VII style handling of the product. And I mean that in every sense of the word. Everything unpopular will be just sort of... not... talked about. Everything that focus groups tell them are important to fans will be trotted out for a retread with slightly higher production values but ultimately exactly the same.

I don't think we're going to see a reboot in the active sense. More of a reboot in the passive sense. The Black Hand is not going to be disavowed, it's just going to be unmentioned. People who don't like it will be free to ignore it entirely, while whatever fanatical fans it happens to have are free to treat silence as ascent.

The thing that worries me is that I don't think the new White Wolf has terribly good information about what is and is not popular. They are mostly getting information through internet channels, and as we all know the internet gives the loudest voices to fringe weirdos. Big Purple has hundreds of posters who care about Onyx Path releases. But Onyx Path only sells a few thousand copies of each of their "major" books. The entire Onyx Path gestalt is less than one half of one percent of the World of Darkness fans and more than a tenth of them are regular posters on rpg.net. If you read rpg.net, you'd come away with all kinds of ideas about what "the community" thinks about "nWoD 2nd edition," but the reality is that more than 99% of the World of Darkness community is unaware that it exists.

So really we're looking at The Force Awakens if the only focus groups that Disney had available for what was and was not important to Star Wars were self selected people from fringe fan message boards where people debate the merits of The Crystal Star. We're talking stagnant waters of obscure fan obsessions so far removed from the main stream that many of the tributaries haven't seen the original at all.

-Username17

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 4:55 pm

name_here wrote:They could just, you know, keep the villains you can't plausibly negotiate with and have people negotiate with villains from other lines you can plausibly negotiate with. And maybe write in some more werewolf-centric villains that can be negotiated with.

It's worth mentioning that they eventually did smarten up and do that in Mage. Every edition made the Technocrats steadily less awful until by the time some of the supplements to Revised came out, the two factions were cool enough with each other that Tradition magi could have a sit-down with Technocrat magi and pass them information on people who were doing bad shit, so the problem could get cleaned up without shots getting fired across faction lines. They weren't friendly, but they had transformed from actively hostile to something more like this.

Which is honestly a lot more interesting. While it's not a hard sell to get people to believe that Team Demon Worshipper is bad and you should feel bad if you want to deal with them in some way other than napalm and sowing the fields with salt, the idea that people who believe in science are so irrationally evil that they all need to be stabbed in the face was always pretty dumb.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 5:28 pm

talozin wrote:he idea that people who believe in science are so irrationally evil that they all need to be stabbed in the face was always pretty dumb.

Obligatory tick reference:
https://youtu.be/t6i5p8RbTCg?t=573

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 5:33 pm

In some sense, by Revised, MtA was actually 2 games, Mage and Technocracy, and speaking as someone who ran both on multiple occasions, Technocracy was by far the better game even though it used nominally the same rules. In particular, it was way easier for players to understand. The amount of cognitive dissonance necessary to try to turn a party of mages into the good guys was immense. Telling a gaming group that 'you're playing WoD X-files so go grab some laser pistols and shoot some vampires in the face' was much easier. In fact, playing as the Technocracy allowed you to do all the things you wanted to do as 'hunters' but didn't have the oomph to get away with.

The ultimate justification for the existence of Werewolf and Mage is that you could do things in those games you really couldn't do in VtM. Werewolf allowed you to fight giant wars, while Mage allowed to actually save the world of darkness. I ran a Technocracy campaign whose principle plotline was fighting the WoD's 'Deep Ones' and whose ultimate conclusion involved assaulting the Marianas Trench with nuclear submarines, genetically engineered dinosaurs, and extinct extradimensional sharks. It was over-the-top and ridiculous as all hell and it was the kind of thing Mage could do and Vampire couldn't.

One of the big advantages of combining the games is that you could use vampire characters to engage the themes of werewolf and mage games. The Vampire Diaries - in my admittedly limited experience of watching chunks of the show over my girlfriend's shoulder - is an example of this. While the majority of the characters are vampires, a significant amount of the stuff that happens is driven by the actions of the witch characters.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Dec 22, 2015 6:26 pm

Technocracy got the best stuff. The revised convention books released in the last few years were absolutely amazing, especially the Syndicate book. The Syndicate Revised is pure awesome. Replacing Prime (glowing tron lines sphere) with Primal Utility, explaining how a Syndicate mage might channel magical effects through management skills. It did a really great job of making Syndicate interesting and playable.

Heaven's Thunder Hammer · Tue Dec 22, 2015 7:51 pm

Mechalich wrote:In some sense, by Revised, MtA was actually 2 games, Mage and Technocracy, and speaking as someone who ran both on multiple occasions, Technocracy was by far the better game even though it used nominally the same rules. In particular, it was way easier for players to understand. The amount of cognitive dissonance necessary to try to turn a party of mages into the good guys was immense. Telling a gaming group that 'you're playing WoD X-files so go grab some laser pistols and shoot some vampires in the face' was much easier. In fact, playing as the Technocracy allowed you to do all the things you wanted to do as 'hunters' but didn't have the oomph to get away with.

The ultimate justification for the existence of Werewolf and Mage is that you could do things in those games you really couldn't do in VtM. Werewolf allowed you to fight giant wars, while Mage allowed to actually save the world of darkness. I ran a Technocracy campaign whose principle plotline was fighting the WoD's 'Deep Ones' and whose ultimate conclusion involved assaulting the Marianas Trench with nuclear submarines, genetically engineered dinosaurs, and extinct extradimensional sharks. It was over-the-top and ridiculous as all hell and it was the kind of thing Mage could do and Vampire couldn't.

One of the big advantages of combining the games is that you could use vampire characters to engage the themes of werewolf and mage games. The Vampire Diaries - in my admittedly limited experience of watching chunks of the show over my girlfriend's shoulder - is an example of this. While the majority of the characters are vampires, a significant amount of the stuff that happens is driven by the actions of the witch characters.

Interesting point about the Technocracy and The Traditions being two different games that happen to share the same rules. Now that you mention it, I think a lot of people in the wider mage community would agree with you.

I would have a way easier time running a TU game with people unfamiliar with mage and telling them that what they use is super science and they need special tools to do their super science and not get into really wacky issues of paradigm. The TU is right and everyone else does things wrong.