Alt-white wolf?

[Username17]

Ikr?

In the meantime, I decided to just go ahead and adapt M:tA to V5's system and will run a game at some point next year... I mean, no point waiting for the next edition now, right?

But why do that?

White Wolf's Classic World of Darkness has been out of print so long, and the attempts to revive it by Swedish Edgelords so faceplantingly failtastic that you really have to ask the fundamental questions: Why should we care about any part of these properties at all?

Like, why use the World of Darkness setting? And also too, why use the Storyteller system? Why use anything at all from that branch of gaming?

Sure, I'd like to play a game about modern wizards or vampires. I think Urban Fantasy is a genre that has a lot of legs. Let's be honest, pretty much the entirety of notable modern fantasy works are somewhere on the spectrum of Superheroes to Urban Fantasy. Those are important genres, and it's difficult to imagine a modern-day setting that I'd want to play in that didn't dip heavily into one or the other. But why would I want to use the World of Darkness brand for that?

If you're going to convert some intellectual property to an RPG, why not start with Buffy? Or Underworld? Or True Blood? Or any of a dozen Urban Fantasy novel series from Vampire Academy to Anita Blake?

If you're going to use an RPG base to convert things into, why not use Shadowrun 4 or Feng Shui 1, or GURPS or HERO or some FATE-based ruleslite?

It's kind of weird, because there was a period in my life when Masquerade was so important to me that I literally lost my virginity at a Vampire: the Masquerade after-game meetup. But at this point I honestly don't see what any part of the actual intellectual property of White Wolf brings to the table. There seems to be no added value in trying to use any portion of the World of Darkness brand.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

I think there comes a point in any sprawling property where continuity ceases to become a virtue. Which is weird coming from me. But you look at something like Vampire: the Masquerade or Batman or Spider-Man, there comes a point where not only can no one keep track of it all, but so much of it is bad or just fucking meh that it just gets ignored unless you just bring in a few characters as cameos and callbacks and shit.

And that's a fundamental difference between Vampire and Batman: nobody gives a fuck about the characters in Vampire. I dare you to name the major NPCs in Vampire that aren't like the fucking Antediluvians. They tried to make stories about some fucking vampire archaeologist and shit, and nobody cared. Why would they?

Properties can be influential without necessarily being good. Underworld owes a lot to Vampire: the Masquerade, but that doesn't mean V:tM was objectively well-written. Varney the Vampire was influential, and it's painful to read now.

[Mord]

Brand recognition is a powerful thing. The reason V5 was worth doing in the first place is that you recognized the name Vampire: The Masquerade and that caught your interest in a way that Undying, After Sundown, and Generic Vampire Thing did not. The debacle that was V5 may have squandered the residual goodwill left in the community, but there may yet still be some left in the tank, and in any case the brand recognition is still there. A living TTRPG tie-in would have been a good marketing channel for the eventual video game, but neither CCP nor Paradox bought the IP for the sake of the TTRPG.

When Paradox gets around to releasing that VTM video game, you are going to notice, and that's really all they're paying for at this point. The VTM name is part of a branding and marketing strategy for a video game that doesn't yet exist, that's all. If they had crunched the numbers differently and decided that their unreleased vampire game would be just as effectively promoted for less cost by getting the rights to Nightlife or doing a TV ad campaign or whatever, then they would have done the cheaper thing instead.

At this point, the gremlins at Paradox have surely recalculated the brand's value to account for the swastika-shaped cloud hanging over it, so the only question left is this: do they think the brand has become unusably toxic? If they judge the brand name to still have positive value, we'll be seeing that VTM video game within a couple of years. If they judge the whole thing to be irredeemably radioactive, then we might still see that game with a generic "Vampire" title, or they might scrap any vampire game-related ambitions entirely and look to unload the IP on the Norwegians or Danes or some other bunch of Viking nerds. Maybe there's a Faroese development studio who could do something with the property.

[jt]

Gamers are particularly suspicious of non-gaming brands, so whatever is officially the next Vampire: The Masquerade does have a leg up over the licensed RPG for True Blood or whatever (within reason; I'd expect Twilight to power through). When the Dresden Files RPG came out, the reactions I saw were overwhelmingly "Wait, it's actually good?" and not "I'm getting into RPGs because now there's a Dresden Files one." (Of course there's sample bias on that via which audience I talk to more of, but I don't only lurk RPG forums.)

[Username17]

Brand recognition is a powerful thing. The reason V5 was worth doing in the first place is that you recognized the name Vampire: The Masquerade and that caught your interest in a way that Undying, After Sundown, and Generic Vampire Thing did not. The debacle that was V5 may have squandered the residual goodwill left in the community, but there may yet still be some left in the tank, and in any case the brand recognition is still there. A living TTRPG tie-in would have been a good marketing channel for the eventual video game, but neither CCP nor Paradox bought the IP for the sake of the TTRPG.

When Paradox gets around to releasing that VTM video game, you are going to notice, and that's really all they're paying for at this point. The VTM name is part of a branding and marketing strategy for a video game that doesn't yet exist, that's all. If they had crunched the numbers differently and decided that their unreleased vampire game would be just as effectively promoted for less cost by getting the rights to Nightlife or doing a TV ad campaign or whatever, then they would have done the cheaper thing instead.

At this point, the gremlins at Paradox have surely recalculated the brand's value to account for the swastika-shaped cloud hanging over it, so the only question left is this: do they think the brand has become unusably toxic? If they judge the brand name to still have positive value, we'll be seeing that VTM video game within a couple of years. If they judge the whole thing to be irredeemably radioactive, then we might still see that game with a generic "Vampire" title, or they might scrap any vampire game-related ambitions entirely and look to unload the IP on the Norwegians or Danes or some other bunch of Viking nerds. Maybe there's a Faroese development studio who could do something with the property.

I agree that from a marketing standpoint it makes sense to tie your new game to an existing nostalgia property. The faceless corporate overlords could reasonably want to own the Vampire: the Masquerade brand because you can still probably sell shirts with the Malkavian clan symbol on them. I don't know if the brand is worth as much as it costs, but that's a question to be asked and answered by marketers and accountants, not writers and designers.

The issue I had was with someone saying that they were going to hodgepodge various World of Darkness games together to run a campaign at home. And I genuinely did not - and do not - see why you'd want to do that. White Wolf's setting was influential, but it isn't good. The revolution already happened, there's no particular reason to want to have the Ventrue instead of the Volturi in your home campaign.

Any game or book series or movie series or comic book that has modern vampires in it will be on some level influenced by Vampire: the Masquerade. There will conceits of Masquerade that will be explicitly rejected, there will be ideas that are unconsciously recapitulated, and there will be tropes that are referenced or subverted. But it's part of the culture now, it's inescapable. Even fucking Stephanie Meyer was clearly and demonstrably influenced by the idea of Vampire Clans and individual Vampire Powers even though she definitely hadn't actually read any White Wolf books before writing her stuff. Clearly she talked to people who'd talked to people who'd read Masquerade and there was a trickle through of concepts.

From an individual creative's perspective, what part of the World of Darkness intellectual property is something you'd care about? The World of Darkness cultural influence is inescapable when making Urban Fantasy, but very little of that is in any meaningful way "owned" by whoever currently holds the rights to the old White Wolf IP. Anything you want to do in your home game can be done without using anything that Paradox "owns." So why not do that?

-Username17

[Dogbert]

When Paradox gets around to releasing that VTM video game, you are going to notice, and that's really all they're paying for at this point.

Well, they're already payola-ing Penny Arcade for an extra video channel for V5... so yeah, I'd say they think (wrongly, probably) they can still turn this ship around (and no, I don't think Paradox is banking on "Team Dickwolves" shit).

Why should we care about any part of these properties at all?

Like, why use the World of Darkness setting? And also too, why use the Storyteller system? Why use anything at all from that branch of gaming?

I can't help it... I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for mage, I discovered the game during a time in my life when basically "the stars aligned." I even happen to love the spheres system.

(that means that yes, I can't be objective regarding that game in particular... which disqualifies me in objective debate).

However... I can't deny that, if I was in charge, I'd end up with at least three sets of spheres, depending on paradigm (after all, physics already acknowledge three primal forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong/weak force), so I see little point in Technocrats using "the nine spheres")... except going all the way down the rabbit whole of splitting real-life mystic paradigms into the fundamental building blocks of their realities alone would probably take me years of research... something that would take more time, money, and dedication, than it would be prudent to invest on a passion project.

P.S: Merry Fucking Christmas, denners.

[Username17]

I can't help it... I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for mage, I discovered the game during a time in my life when basically "the stars aligned."

However... I can't deny that, if I was in charge...

That's the core issue right there. If you were a gamer of a formative age in the 1990s, there was a period when at least one World of Darkness game was important to you. You would like it if someone came and rebooted those properties well. If you could contribute towards rebooting them well, you would do that.

But the desire to see something nice done with a property does not mean that anything nice is actually going to be done with a property. I rather liked Aquaman because it just went the full gonzo with its source material and had a campy D&D plot with deep ones and crab men and dinosaurs and shit - but the fact that I was primed to like a version of Aquaman that was done well wouldn't have made a shit version of Aquaman less shit. Man of Steel was still hot garbage, even though I wanted it to be good. Suicide Squad was something I really wanted to be good, and which I could have very easily written a screenplay for that was much better than what they made - but the movie was still extremely bad.

World of Darkness was revolutionary and important. Was. Past tense. Indeed it's been clear since before Revised that World of Darkness was in need of a massive reboot. It had grown bigger than the original vision, and people needed to do something about that. But importantly, it didn't get the reboot it needed. Revised was divisive, but the arguments in its favor weren't particularly good. If you were to name the top five problems of any of the original World of Darkness games, could you honestly say that any of those problems were fixed with any of the Revised editions? Of course not! There are some changes you might approve of, but you wouldn't dare to say that any of the core problems were fixed. Even low hanging fruit like switching to fixed target numbers wasn't completed, with tons of Revised Edition books talking about varied target numbers for all kinds of crap.

The subsequent reboots were to one degree or another more extensive, and you could probably say the nWoD did fix at least one of the top five issues of whatever your favorite game was. For example: Vampires were no longer required to murder each other based on the "sect" line on their character sheets, and Werewolves were no longer asked to write "incest baby" or "mother raped dogs" on their character sheet. That's some serious problem solving right there. But let's be real for a moment: nWoD, God Machine Chronicles, V20, and V5 were not the reboots that the series needed. They just weren't.

And how many chances does the property get? It's been twenty years and five attempts at rebooting, and none of them have been up to the standards of the year 2000. 3rd edition D&D ate Revised Edition's lunch, and none of the reboots of World of Darkness have clawed their way back to the top of the heap even when they were up against shovelware like 4th edition D&D or straight up abandonware like 5th edition D&D.

There are people who were born after Masquerade stopped being cool that can vote now.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

I love how Suicide Squad has one unequivocally well-executed character but he can't even really be used in the sequel without kinda shitting on his previous arc a bit. I mean, it's still probably worth it to bring him back and slot him in as the team's Hulk forevermore, but I think it really highlights how nothing about that franchise can really be called a clean launch.

[Username17]

I love how Suicide Squad has one unequivocally well-executed character but he can't even really be used in the sequel without kinda shitting on his previous arc a bit. I mean, it's still probably worth it to bring him back and slot him in as the team's Hulk forevermore, but I think it really highlights how nothing about that franchise can really be called a clean launch.

Yeah. Suicide Squad is a fractally bad movie. I was going to make a joke about how it was like they got the worthless actor from fucking Terminator Genisys, and then I checked on IMDB to find out what his name was and discovered that they actually had done that. The worthless stand-in actor they got to play Kyle Reese was Captain Boomerang.

But like other fractal failures like New World of Darkness and 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, it wouldn't be as much of a disappointment if there weren't solitary good things you could point to whose lack of integration into the whole could make you despair a little bit harder. Deadshot and Harley are played by very charismatic actors. El Diablo has a well realized character arc. It's just the everything else about that movie that is amazingly awful.

-Username17