The Gaming Den

Here.

It's clearly a carefully-managed PR-spiel, but I find it to be a very revealatory PR spiel. Also rather less than promising, when the stated new direction of the company includes things like this:

Martin Elricsson, in that interview wrote: ”What if the monsters are real, hidden among us?”, is the elevator pitch for the new metaplot. Gothic-Punk is dead and buried as an aesthetic. (...) In line with this we integrate dramatic real world events to feature prominently in the story. We face difficult social subjects like the rise of fascism, religious fanaticism and the death of ideology in mainstream politics, head on. This naturally leads us to focus on areas where dramatic change is happening. Also there are more books on the US of Darkness than the rest of the world combined.

I'm sure that won't ever be akward or in questionable taste at all.

He's right that you shouldn't shy away from the real world and real world issues in a work, the question is can their writers and designers handle them in a way that isn't a complete tire fire.

He seems to hit the right notes of being a pretentious cock for WW PR, and tells nWoD to go fuck itself in the most polite way possible repeatedly. I'm worried about the dismissal of Urban Fantasy, since that's basically what the zeitgeist for monster squad shit has shifted to. Entering competition with MET is gonna cause anal potentially as well. The setting bibles are the only thing that sounds like a unequivocally good decision.

Also there are more books on the US of Darkness than the rest of the world combined.

I know their main consumers are in the US, but come on guys

The thing I found most interesting is that this guy is apparantly a game character himself.



I mean, come on. This is the guy you'd expect to be an end boss in a gothic fantasy video game.

Why do they need a metaplot at all? And isn't that the old theme?

Their political leanings are also showing. Although I suppose depicting the rise of evil socialism wouldn't be consistent with the current fads.

Occluded Sun wrote:Why do they need a metaplot at all? And isn't that the old theme?

Because they want to sell video games. And novels. And probably movies.

Their goal is not building a better tabletop role playing game. Their goal is to leverage the IP they bought into a successful transmedia franchise. You need metaplot for that.

Old World of Darkness has legs as an IP. It was huge. It still has fans. There is nostalgia factor to it. If someone were to write a Vampire: The Masquarade movie right now, it would probably sell.

New World of Darkness's lack of metaplot makes it a shitty IP for building a multimedia franchise. It's lack of popularity is just more piss on its face.

Mask_De_H wrote:He seems to hit the right notes of being a pretentious cock for WW PR, and tells nWoD to go fuck itself in the most polite way possible repeatedly.

I think he could have been more polite...

Swede Guy on NWoD wrote:Too bad it never sold for shit and that old players hated it. It lacked the epic scope and the punk passion of the classic WoD. Had it done even remotely as well as the classic WoD things would be very different.

Occluded Sun wrote:Why do they need a metaplot at all? And isn't that the old theme?

Because it is good when things happen in the setting. Particularly if you want to keep a modern-day setting constantly up to date.

While I haven't yet seen a metaplot I liked without serious reservations, I found that I prefer shitty metaplots from which I can scavenge a few parts for my own use to total absence of metaplots..

WW: Thw WizKids of the tabletop world.

All I can think is: The Camarilla Did 9/11.

Eikre wrote:All I can think is: The Camarilla Did 9/11.

I'd actually peg the werewolves for it.

I've actually been thinking of running a W:TA game on the premise that the Twin Towers were actually massive and absurdly powerful bane spirits.

Assuming you're willing to peg a supernatural group for an event like 9/11, you want it to be one of the irredeemably evil ones. The best classic WoD group for this particular incident is the Nephandi - specifically corrupted Islamic Celestial chorus or Ahl-I-Batan members. The incident allows them to subsequently cause the War in Iraq which is unleashes enough chaos that they can unbind some group of ancient demons/djinn that have been chained up in Mesopotamia since Solomon. It also makes the Technocracy-backed US army kill all the Taftani in Afganistan, who are the only ones who know the relevant binding spells...

And now I have an idea for a Mage campaign I will probably never run...

Occluded Sun wrote:Why do they need a metaplot at all? And isn't that the old theme?

Yes Metaplot is an oWoD thing. But oWoD was succesfull. So I'm not surprised.

Btw. I did like to read about the Metaplot in oWoD. It wasn't like I read it for the rules...

hyzmarca wrote:The thing I found most interesting is that this guy is apparantly a game character himself.



I mean, come on. This is the guy you'd expect to be an end boss in a gothic fantasy video game.

I barely know who he is and I already ship him with Glenn Hetrick.

tsuyoshikentsu wrote:WW: Thw WizKids of the tabletop world.

They wish.

The Swede wrote:Unless something weird happens and people start buying roleplaying books, WoD novels and comics like they were Harry Potter. As things are now tabletop publishing hardly breaks even.

Dude, make a good game, with good art and it'll sell. Sure, you won't be rolling in millions, but if you can put actually good rules in a book, with good art, with an IP people are excited about, you'll be the best company out there. Paizo only manages two-thirds of that (well, maybe 1.5 thirds) and they're doing pretty well.

What form will the computer game take? MMO? Are you able to bring over content from CCP’s “World of Darkness”?
All releases will be announced when we feel confident they will release on time, reach our very high bar of quality and have enough material to be discussed by the community in a meaningful way. We own all assets connected to WoD, including the CCP content that they kindly gave us as a bonus when we made the purchase of the IP. I for one intend to make sure those 8 years of work by a hundred exceptionally talented creators doesn’t entirely go to waste.

Look, if you manage to do Saints Row: World of Darkness, that'll probably be a pretty big success.No need to chase the MMO market.

Future editions will move the setting, mythos, metaplot and mechanics almost 15 years forward into present day. It’s the same world, but a lot has changed. It’s useful to see the Classic and Anniversary books as highly subjective. The ultimate truth can’t be found in the books, but we can glimpse it through the multiplicity of perspectives presented. For instance Humanity is a mechanic presented from the Camarilla point of view, while Paths of Enlightenment give us the Sabbat perspective on the subject of morality. None of them are True. Both are models and simplifications.

I definitely want to know more about this. The "fuck them all, they're all groping an elephant" approach is probably the best one for reconciling OWoD.

Martin Ericsson clearly gets to see sales figures and other inside baseball numbers that we do not. And he's obviously a dedicated fan of many years who pays more attention to the World of Darkness than any of us do. Possibly more than anyone in the world does. That said, a lot of this looks just plain wrong.

Martin wrote:Short answer is that the economic centre of the company will be computer games. Unless something weird happens and people start buying roleplaying books, WoD novels and comics like they were Harry Potter. As things are now tabletop publishing hardly breaks even.

The thing is that comics do put up Harry Potter like numbers. Over the last 19 years, the Harry Potter books sold over 450 million copies. And that's a lot. To pick a month at random, in February of 2013, the top ten DC Comics titles sold in excess of 1.5 million. Now extend that for twelve months a year for nineteen years and you get about 350 million copies. And while the drop off from a top ten title to a lesser title is pretty steep, remember that in February of 2013 that DC was publishing 52 titles. If you add it all up, it probably comes to about 450 million - same as the seven book Harry Potter series. It's a different market, but sales are basically fine in it.

What Martin is noting is that the sales of World of Darkness paper products aren't very good of late. But he's pretty much looking at Onyx Path and late era White Wolf numbers to draw that conclusion. And as he notes:

Martin wrote:I love CoD and find that is a much more playable game with a more vague and unsettling aesthetic than WoD ever had. Too bad it never sold for shit and that old players hated it. It lacked the epic scope and the punk passion of the classic WoD. Had it done even remotely as well as the classic WoD things would be very different.

So basically he's looking at the sales of a product line that had failed worse than New Coke and somehow draws the conclusion that there isn't a market for soda. Once you acknowledge that public reception and sales of the NWoD era were worse than even doomsayers like me were saying at the time, you don't really get to point to those sales as evidence that tabletop products barely break even these days. 4th edition D&D and NWoD were really poorly received, but that does not mean that those poor sales numbers are the new normal. It means only that those sales numbers are normal for an edition that nobody likes.

Martin wrote:The attempt to create a deep mythology by linking the setting to Exalted was the worst choice ever. That was the last step in WoD’d death-march from being an artistic horror-IP to full on immature, escapist Urban Fantasy.

I... have no idea what he thinks this means. While he is correct that Exalted was the beginning of the end of the company and that all of the "Exalted Tie-In" books like Mummy: the Resurrection were shit that nobody liked, that's not what "Urban Fantasy" means. I feel like there might even be a language barrier issue here, because Urban Fantasy is the name of a genre that Vampire: the Masquerade has always been solidly inside of. Contemporary settings with real-world locations and supernatural elements are Urban Fantasy by definition. The only way to make World of Darkness stop being Urban Fantasy is to set it on Tatooine or Athas.

I feel like Martin Ericsson has a much more encyclopedic knowledge of World of Darkness than I do, and I feel that he likes and respects the subject matter. I also am impressed and heartened by the fact that he is able to put on his big boy pants and admit that not everything in the past was good and that some of the White Wolf design directions were actually terrible. I also like that he is willing and able to point to objective criteria to make those decisions.

But... and you knew that a "but" was coming... I am not convinced that Martin Ericsson has a lot of external perspective. Whether he's talking about book sales or literary genres, he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about in the wider context of the world outside White Wolf fandom. Which is really most of the world and even most of fandom. Even when White Wolf was the champion for a few years in the late 90s, it was still a plurality of the fandom rather than a majority.

So when he says this:

Martin Ericsson wrote:Onyx Path also have a license to produce nostalgia books for the classic WoD settings. These are official but set in the same nebulous ”eternal nineties”, using the old-school buckets-of-dice-system featured in the original lines. Future editions will move the setting, mythos, metaplot and mechanics almost 15 years forward into present day.

I have literally no idea what he thinks a "present day" mechanic is or would look like. Seriously: none at all. He seems to be disavowing dice pools, but dice pools are still one of the main core mechanics for a game to use. NWoD had terrible mechanics and OWoD had terrible mechanics, but the fact that they were using buckets of dice wasn't the reason. And yet, he's talking like he thinks it is. Switching WoD to a d20 system would not inherently solve anything, as McWoD showed.

-Username17

Switching WoD to a d20 system would not inherently solve anything, as McWoD showed.

I have a terrible feeling that he's talking about something far more sinister than d20. Something that has a vocal minority preaching the gospel about wonders of their system. Something that has produced numerous hacks oof varying degree of badness. Something... like this


Dun-dun-DUN!!!

Longes wrote:

Switching WoD to a d20 system would not inherently solve anything, as McWoD showed.

I have a terrible feeling that he's talking about something far more sinister than d20. Something that has a vocal minority preaching the gospel about wonders of their system. Something that has produced numerous hacks oof varying degree of badness. Something... like this


Dun-dun-DUN!!!

I wish I knew how silva looks like, so I could do a "three laughing Tom Cruises" macro with him, for just this occasion.

So... quantum werebears?

FrankTrollman wrote:

Martin wrote:That was the last step in WoD’d death-march from being an artistic horror-IP to full on immature, escapist Urban Fantasy.

I think at this point it is worth reminding that the first, and perhaps still the greatest, of oWoD city books, Chicago by Night, had vampire Helen of Troy, among other things.

You know, if he actually meant this, when he said this, instead of just spinning words to attract hype among the old crowd, there is no hope for the WoD reboot. The moment when the developers and authors started seriously believing that they are writing "artistic horror" was the moment when oWoD started going to shit.

FrankTrollman wrote:Contemporary settings with real-world locations and supernatural elements are Urban Fantasy by definition.

Your definition does not match the one in common use. Urban fantasy and horror are different genres that are marketed as distinctly separate categories to different audiences. Jim Butcher's books sit in "Fantasy" on Amazon but Anne Rice is in "Horror".

That said, WoD was always better as former, because horror just does not work that well in tabletop.

FrankTrollman wrote:NWoD had terrible mechanics and OWoD had terrible mechanics, but the fact that they were using buckets of dice wasn't the reason.

Actually yes, it was one of the reasons. If you system demands from players to roll 10+ dice regularly, which was the case with both WoDs, that's a problem that observably slows down the game.

FatR wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Contemporary settings with real-world locations and supernatural elements are Urban Fantasy by definition.

Your definition does not match the one in common use. Urban fantasy and horror are different genres that are marketed as distinctly separate categories to different audiences. Jim Butcher's books sit in "Fantasy" on Amazon but Anne Rice is in "Horror".

Fantasy is not the same thing as "Urban Fantasy." Urban Fantasy is a fiction subgenre which very much includes Anne Rice. And if we're going specifically by Amazon for some reason they also have a category called "Paranormal & Urban Fantasy," which like the literary classification includes Jim Butcher, Anne Rice, J.K. Rowling, and Hamilton. For Serious.

When someone says that they don't want Vampire: the Masquerade to become Urban Fantasy they are saying that they do not know what those words mean. Nothing more, nothing less.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:When someone says that they don't want Vampire: the Masquerade to become Urban Fantasy they are saying that they do not know what those words mean. Nothing more, nothing less.

I find it perfectly understandable. I mean, wouldn't you be upset if they turned Star Wars into Space Fantasy?

It almost sounds like "urban fantasy" is being used a a shibboleth or dog whistle and we're outside the loop.

I understand what they mean. They want people to use their game for highbrow psychodrama and not Kim Newman or Laurel Hamilton fanfic. But that is a dumbshit thing for them to mean, because you cannot police what people will use your game for at their own tables and the moment you become too elitist to acknowledge your own audience is the moment you get hopelessly lost up your own ass.

Edit: that said, since they, in fact, cannot police what people will use their game for, this new tone might on balance become a good thing if it leads them to publish less wacky crap in the vein of Temporis, the Salubri or the True Black Hand.

ETortoise wrote:It almost sounds like "urban fantasy" is being used a a shibboleth or dog whistle and we're outside the loop.

Yes. Fans of stories about monstrous (yet beautiful) vampires brooding about their guilt over feeding from the innocent from their New York penthouse really don't like being lumped into the same category as fans of vampires boinking random mortal teenagers, or a high school girl who has magical powers and whose magical powers are specialer than her magical family, or a high school girl who has a fairy companion who's really chirpy and annoying and won't let her do anything fun, so she's trying to ditch the fairy, which I'm pretty sure is the plot of that one book about how to ditch your fairy. Which, honestly, if someone gave me that book, I'd read that, but I wouldn't read any of the others. Brooding vampire fans dislike that kind of thing for being insufficiently pretentious, though, so they insist on being apart from the category of Urban Fantasy, which contains all those other things, except maybe the Paranormal Romance, which might be its own category, but is in any case definitely not the category that brooding vampire fans are in. The actual category they call themselves is inconsistent even amongst the brooding vampire fans, except in that it is basically guaranteed to have "Horror" somewhere in the title.

virgil wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:When someone says that they don't want Vampire: the Masquerade to become Urban Fantasy they are saying that they do not know what those words mean. Nothing more, nothing less.

I find it perfectly understandable. I mean, wouldn't you be upset if they turned Star Wars into Space Fantasy?

\implyingStarWarsisntGarbageTierScienceFantasy

Either epic trolling; hidden chasm,sar; or totalfanchild. None of that matters really.

The truth is that Star Wars is primae facie Space Fantasy, none of it "cares" about how space works at all, and its poorly thought-out pseudo-mystic themes inculcates the narrative from the opening act. The rest of the series has more in common with the 1920's Buck Rogers film serials Lucas was trying to replicate, than it does with how actual space works. Any one who has played Space Station 13 can tell you just how easy it is for space to murder you (without needing Xenomorphs or Communist Space Wizards to chase you down).

It is such a dominant genre touchstone that when other genre content is defined, it will generally have to give its relation as to how much like Star Wars it is, or is not.