Let's Try This Again (White Wolf)

[Jonathan Walton]

So here's a new clean thread where we can start over without all of the venom of some of the recent threads about White Wolf, their publishing model, their motivations, and the relaunch of the World of Darkness.

I'm not a moderator, obviously, but this is my thread, so please try to keep things civil and on topic.  If someone says something you disagree with, go ahead and try to work out where the exact lines of disagreement are, but be willing to back off and agree to disagree.  I'd like to try to learn from each other instead of trying to convert one another or defend against attacks, imagined or otherwise.

Here's what I'm interested in discussing:

1. The place that White Wolf games have in roleplaying, as a starting point for new gamers, as a group of documents that give specific opinions about what roleplaying is and should be about, and, generally, as a model of how to do things in this business.  

White Wolf seems to have some pretty strong opinions on how to bring new gamers in (iconic games and settings with step-by-step character creation and a high focus on story and drama), how roleplaying should be done (as melodramatic art, with a lot of pressure on the GM to create narrative and on the players to really get into their roles, not as much focus on mechanics), and how to sell games (several core books with lots and lots of info, followed by supplements that expand on player options and give more setting).  What are the merits, problems, and possible outcomes of this kind of approach?  Some of this has been covered already, so please don't just rehash the opinions that you gave in another thread; let other people jump in first.

2. Let's talk about the intentions of White Wolf staff and freelancers, and how we see them manifest in the games they produce.  Many people, both here on the Forge and elsewhere in RPGnet and the like, have said that they don't see how the Storyteller/telling System actually promotes storytelling and etc. etc.  But I'm interested in how White Wolf's intentions actually do make it into their games in some form or fashion.  

For example, "Blackhat" Matt McFarland, Dark Ages Line Developer, made some very interesting choices in Dark Ages: Fae (choices that, I believe, led to the book now being sold out).  From the bit of online reading that I've done, Matt seems to have a very distinctive approach to making White Wolf games.  He doesn't seem to buy the whole "games as art" rhetoric and appears to have developed Fae with an eye towards creating an entirely different type of game, with a much wider range of play options than typical White Wolf faire, and this shows through in the text, which reads more like Nobilis and less like Vampire.

We can talk about more traditional White Wolf ideals too, and how they appear in Vampire or Werewolf or whatever.  Or we can work backward from the games themselves and try to discern the decisions behind certain approaches.  What's up with the splats?  Malcolm suggested that they're a way of simplifying the vast gameworld and making groups of people that are instantly recognizable.  Why is this important?

I'll show back up with my own opinions in a bit, but I wanted to first create a space for other people to talk.

[Matt Machell]

What's up with the splats?  Malcolm suggested that they're a way of simplifying the vast gameworld and making groups of people that are instantly recognizable.  Why is this important?

I used to play in a university-based Mindseye LARP game. At the start of term we'd get non-gamers turning up, lost and unsure of how to play. Splats were a great way of saying "Well, you could play a guy like this.", but also of giving a new player an instant way of being connected to other characters ("these are the guys in your clan").

Sadly we had a high dropout rate of these people in that game too.  But that's a whole other topic.

-Matt

[Inner Circle Inc]

White Wolf, from a buisness point of view, is a successful company, it sells a product that reaches many people, and quite frankly, can be a hell of a lot of fun to play.  I've tried several different white wolf games, though I keep coming back to Vampire and always with the same critiques and same praises for the game.  Let's break it down for a moment.  .  .

What White Wolf did right,

Simplistic, and easy to learn mechanics,

this is really a must for just about any roleplaying game that doesn't cater exclusivly to hardcore gamers, you have to have a system that a complete newbie to roleplaying can pick up, and learn to play, if not, then new players will spend most of thier time just trying to understand what exactly that THAC0 means, and what just happened to the character who botched his psionics roll.  

A world with a lot of detail already attached

The World of Darkness is one that most will be instantly familure with, even those who have never played it before.  It's been popularized in movies, books, television shows, comic books and the like. . . nearly everyone is familar with what a vampire or a werewolf is,  not to mention the fact that said mythos can, and is incorporated into the games at nearly every turn.

It's fun and almost more importantly, it's fast

The games are fun, the fact that people keep playing them is indictive of this, though with my experience, games go by much more rapidly than my average D&D game, meaning that I have more chance to roleplay.  I admit, this could be partialy because my D&D group and my White Wolf group are two seperate groups of people, however, this speed of gameplay allows more storyline, and more character development to occure.

It included a Larp

The fact that White Wolf was willing to expand a system from a tabletop environment to a live action game belays a level of expantion to the game that most miss.  It gives anouther option for players, and anouther venue for it to be played. . . and without a supliment unless I've missed one.

Now, what did they do wrong?

Expantions. . . oh god the expantions. . .

White Wolf, I enjoy the game, really I do, but do you have to rape me through my wallet to get everything I can out of the game?  A retorical question, yes, as they stay in buisness by putting out as many products as they can as rapidly as they can, however, I question wether it was really nessisary to have a seperate book for each of the clans, or wether it would have been better to consolidate them all into the core rulebook.  It would have been a larger rulebook, and it would have been more epensive, however, why not simply releace the basic rulebook at regular price, and throw in all those neat little addins from all the clan books, in one, single, consolidated peice of material?  They already have so many other systems out, that I can't imagine that they would need to nickle and dime me to death.  This is really the single largest reason I haven't and likely won't be getting version 2.0, not because I don't want to or I'm an elitest indie asshole, but because as a college student, I simply don't have the finances to do so.

Balance issues

Call me crazy, but I got a little bit sick and tired of my three game vampire getting owned by a first game far east shapeshifter. . .  While I've heard rumblings that this has been fixed in version 2.0, I'm still a bit leary as to wether or not the balance in this game will be as skewed, but we'll see.

It's too simplistic

If there is any bastion of tactics, micromanagment, or complexity that will take me a long time to master, please let me know.  Granted, it may seem that I've just contradicted myself here, as I just finished stating that the game is good because of the ease to learn.  Not so, as a game can be simple to learn, yet difficult to master, such as poker, chess, or any number of strategy games.  The best games are those that are not only easy to pick up, but also those games that have a degree of mastery that takes much time and effort . . . though if I've missed that aspect, please let me know.

The Larp was really, really baddly done

While they did include a Larp, something that they should be given props for, they included a really poorly designed Larp.  I admit, that my view on this is biased, as my first experiences with Larping were in boffer larps, and the rock/paper/scissors combat resoultion rubs me the wrong way, though once again, if the game is based more on roleplaying than combat, then this should not be a problem.  Still, replacing dice rolling and difficultly with the extreemly one sided game of R/P/S flattly removes any element of chance, and turns it more into a game of psychological warefare and chance. . . and unlike skill dificulty, it's difficult to stack a game of R/P/S against the player for difficult tasks.

In conclusion,

The games produced by White Wolf would seem to easily fit into the "begining gamer" catagory, being a game that takes very little real skill in character micromanagment, and even less knowledge of traditions and paradigms of roleplaying at a whole.  It is an excelent place for people who have limited to no experience in roleplaying to get a taste of it, however, it is limited in the fact that it does not have the level of complexity that more experience roleplayers, particualry of the Gamist flavor, would require for them to have fun, these people move on to more complex games designed for hardcore players.  

However, I admit that I have a limited knowlege of the White Wolf systems, and I could be wrong on any number of points here.  My reasoning for this post was not to stand atop a soap box and preach from the view of a designer or RPG theorist, but rather to give my impressions of the game from the point of view of a casual player. . . a point that White Wolf would do well to listen to, seeing as how players are the ones who keep White Wolf in buisness.