Paradox Buys White Wolf from CCP

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Post by name_here »

It's also got a fairly big chunk of content people are interested in. People actually know the names of their major clans and what their deal is. Being able to have Gangrel, Nosferatu, Ventrue, Malkavians, Brujah, The Black Hand, etc. without having to make IP-scrubbed versions and explain them to people is very nice.

I know Malkavians have a reputation among people who play the tabletop, but in video games people remember the Bloodlines Malkavians, which were fantastic.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Dogbert wrote:
PockPaperShotgun wrote:and confirming that the purchase “includes everything,” even assets CCP created for unreleased games.
...RPGnet waambulances of fanboys crying VEENDEEKEESHUNS and "The MMO wasn't killed after all!" in 3...2...1...
The response on the Big Purple is... dumber... than I expected.
Actual Statement wrote:My personal 2 cents. The 20th Anniversary Editions have been the end-all-be-all products of the WoD for me and I'm unlikely to sign on for another edition no matter who puts it out. In that way, what Paradox does with the IP is irrelevant to me but if Paradox pulls the plug on Onyx Path before they can put out a Changeling the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition, I will be a very sad panda.
It's sort of sad to watch. Rpg.net has insisted on taking "Onyx Path" shovelware vanity printings seriously so long, and been so hostile to anyone and everyone who pointed out how fucking empty that crap was that there's nothing left. Onyx Path isn't a real game company and it doesn't make real games. But rpg.net insists on treating it as if it was, and as such is way beyond relevancy a lot of the time.

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The funniest thing is that you could totally scrub most of the metaplot off of VTM, give it a real system, overhaul the disciplines so they aren't batshit insane, and have a viable game. Which I guess is what V20 tried to do but fucked up on the rules part pretty hard.

As a fan of Changing (Always have been since I first played American McGee's Alice, which is like what I kind of always imagined changling *could* be), I really, REALLY don't want to see a 20th anniversary version of it. Let it live in the past. Where I can pretend that there weren't overtones of loli and pedobear permeating the whole thing.

I'm rather grateful that... wait... *googles* MOTHERFUCKER THEY MADE WRAITH 20.

BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND.

Also, I'd totally play all the game concepts listed too. That would be super.
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Post by vagrant »

Wait, so Onyx Path isn't gonna be releasing Mage splats? That's a shame, mage 20 is actually not terrible (as it could have been, and it seems just a little bit tighter than 3rd revised, which honestly beat my expectation by like a thousand percent.)
Then, once you have absorbed the lesson, that your so-called "friends" are nothing but meat sacks flopping around in the fashion of an outgassing corpse, pile all of your dice and pencils and graph-paper in the corner and SET THEM ON FIRE. Weep meaningless tears.

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Post by Username17 »

vagrant wrote:Wait, so Onyx Path isn't gonna be releasing Mage splats? That's a shame, mage 20 is actually not terrible (as it could have been, and it seems just a little bit tighter than 3rd revised, which honestly beat my expectation by like a thousand percent.)
The truth is that noone knows what Onyx Path is going to be able to do. Paradox said they were going to revoke all the unperforming licenses, but we don't know what kind of revenue per year they consider non performance.

You could certainly expect Paradox to leave licenses that are basically worthless in place, but what do they think has value? I wouldn't walk across the room to pick up the license to print nWOD books, but Paradox isn't me. The guy in charge of the new White Wolf apparently started with nWoD, so it's entirely possible he really cares about that stuff. Also there's arguments about brand purity and shit that someone might make.

Onyx Path is really small potatoes. The structure of the operation is such that I doubt Richard has to settle for bathing in domestic sparkling water, but it supports zero employees and the numbers are tiny for a company with global publishing aspirations. What Paradox does and does not let them do in their bullshit corner of the internet is up to the whim of a couple Swedish nerds.

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Post by Longes »

FrankTrollman wrote:What Paradox does and does not let them do in their bullshit corner of the internet is up to the whim of a couple Swedish nerds.

-Username17
No, it is up to the whim of a couple of US managers. Paradox the Publisher bought the license, not Paradox the Developer. Now, Paradox might give the license for the development to their branch company (and it probably will), but the devs aren't the ones who decide what's going on with the company.
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Post by Username17 »

They are making their new White Wolf a semi-independent division, with its own leadership. The nerds in charge of the new division are indeed Swedes.

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Post by OgreBattle »

So if After Sundown were to get published, make a splash, get a video game deal, would they get sued by whoever owns World of Darkness?

Heck, if After Sundown was put up as a PDF on DriveThruRPG would legal action occur?
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Post by Zaranthan »

After Sundown contains no copyrighted terms or characters. All the names that give it flavor predate the advent of the steam engine. Nobody's getting sued.
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Post by Grek »

OgreBattle wrote:So if After Sundown were to get published, make a splash, get a video game deal, would they get sued by whoever owns World of Darkness?

Heck, if After Sundown was put up as a PDF on DriveThruRPG would legal action occur?
There would almost certainly be a lawsuit. It would be legally baseless, but a lot of lawsuits get made as a scare tactic in hopes of a settlement rather than because the claimant thinks they have a solid case.
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Post by Username17 »

White Wolf had no legally valid basis to sue Underworld, and they did anyway. You can file a lawsuit over anything you want, and companies often do just to try to intimidate people. It often works too, because the cost in money and time to defend yourself in court is not zero, so if the demands are low enough it might be worthwhile to cave to extortion rather than grind it out in court.

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Post by Hiram McDaniels »

FrankTrollman wrote: The response on the Big Purple is... dumber... than I expected.

-Username17
That ban you caught was some bullshit. You were clearly criticizing the lore behind WtA, not the people who play it.
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Post by Username17 »

Hiram McDaniels wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: The response on the Big Purple is... dumber... than I expected.

-Username17
That ban you caught was some bullshit. You were clearly criticizing the lore behind WtA, not the people who play it.
Heh. Yes. The moderation policy on big purple is worse than you can imagine, even taking into account the fact that it's worse than you can imagine. Not only is the thing I was accused of doing not a thing I ever did, but it ramped up to a ban by having multiple moderators issue warnings for the same post. So I retroactively violated the warning I got for the first post by having made the first post in the first place.

But let's be honest: I wasn't banned for dissing the Werewolf players, and had I actually done that I wouldn't have been banned. I was banned for pointing out that Onyx Path is small potatoesand no one cares about it. Several of he moderators on big purple are stakeholders in Onyx Path products, and they insist that everyone treats its fan-made shovelware as serious and official.

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Post by Longes »

name_here wrote:I know Malkavians have a reputation among people who play the tabletop, but in video games people remember the Bloodlines Malkavians, which were fantastic.
Because Bloodlines is a single author fiction and Malkavian is a joke character. In a tabletop, with other players and a GM, Bloodlines Malkavian would be infuriatingly annoying fishmalk who talks to stop signs for no reason.
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Post by Mechalich »

Presumably VtM is the key property. It's core setup: there's a vampire society in the modern day that hides itself from humans, is basically how vampire fiction is done at present. There are tons of vampire novels and TV shows that can easily be glommed onto the Masquerade framework.

I wouldn't be surprised if Onyx Path wasn't allowed to play around with everything but Vampire - keeping books in circulation at least keeps the names in the mind of the hard-core gaming community - at least until Paradox had some sort of highly successfully VtM-based product to build outward from.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Longes wrote:
name_here wrote:I know Malkavians have a reputation among people who play the tabletop, but in video games people remember the Bloodlines Malkavians, which were fantastic.
Because Bloodlines is a single author fiction and Malkavian is a joke character. In a tabletop, with other players and a GM, Bloodlines Malkavian would be infuriatingly annoying fishmalk who talks to stop signs for no reason.
The thing is, the stop-signs are actually giving the fishmalk valuable information that will help the entire coterie, so they can deal with it. At least, that's how it would go if a GM actually tried to run Bloodlines style game. It isn't just crazy, it's useful crazy.

And also the text driver is Caine.
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Post by Longes »

hyzmarca wrote:
Longes wrote:
name_here wrote:I know Malkavians have a reputation among people who play the tabletop, but in video games people remember the Bloodlines Malkavians, which were fantastic.
Because Bloodlines is a single author fiction and Malkavian is a joke character. In a tabletop, with other players and a GM, Bloodlines Malkavian would be infuriatingly annoying fishmalk who talks to stop signs for no reason.
The thing is, the stop-signs are actually giving the fishmalk valuable information that will help the entire coterie, so they can deal with it. At least, that's how it would go if a GM actually tried to run Bloodlines style game. It isn't just crazy, it's useful crazy.

And also the text driver is Caine.
Uh. No, they don't. In the game you just scream at the sign for a few minutes while it stays silent.
The Malkavian PC knows the plot. That's the joke - he read the script. He knows that the driver is Caine and he knows that there's a bomb in the sarcophagus. But none of that knowledge is actually used in the game to influence anything, so the Malkavian PC just talks in the gibberish metaphors that even the NPCs whine is annoying to decipher.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Zaranthan wrote:After Sundown contains no copyrighted terms or characters. All the names that give it flavor predate the advent of the steam engine. Nobody's getting sued.
Obviously someone is unfamiliar with the concept of SLAPP...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic ... ticipation
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Post by TheFlatline »

hyzmarca wrote:
Longes wrote:
name_here wrote:I know Malkavians have a reputation among people who play the tabletop, but in video games people remember the Bloodlines Malkavians, which were fantastic.
Because Bloodlines is a single author fiction and Malkavian is a joke character. In a tabletop, with other players and a GM, Bloodlines Malkavian would be infuriatingly annoying fishmalk who talks to stop signs for no reason.
The thing is, the stop-signs are actually giving the fishmalk valuable information that will help the entire coterie, so they can deal with it. At least, that's how it would go if a GM actually tried to run Bloodlines style game. It isn't just crazy, it's useful crazy.

And also the text driver is Caine.
They basically did that in tabletop. It was called the Malkavian Madness Network, and it was fucking *terrible*.
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Post by Longes »

Oh, Malkavian Madness Network was much worse. MMN was a telepathic internet with no search engine and 70% packet loss. You could theoretically find any information some other malkavian knows (or knew, before he died) in there, but you could also find criplling insanity, nothing, or sweet cat pics. The result depends 100% on the itchiness of the MC's balls, the phase of the moon and the current Dow-Jones index. And you need to invest into a skill (or was it a background?) to use it. That same book introduced the secret Malkavian language which you can use to talk to other malkavians secretly. Which you buy as a skill running from 1 to 5 which means you never buy it.
As a bonus fuck you, MMN is the [Malkavian] himself, so if your MC runs Time of Judgement then you lose your Dementation, go more insane, and get eaten by a grue the [Malkavian].
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Post by Heaven's Thunder Hammer »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Hiram McDaniels wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: The response on the Big Purple is... dumber... than I expected.

-Username17
That ban you caught was some bullshit. You were clearly criticizing the lore behind WtA, not the people who play it.
Heh. Yes. The moderation policy on big purple is worse than you can imagine, even taking into account the fact that it's worse than you can imagine. Not only is the thing I was accused of doing not a thing I ever did, but it ramped up to a ban by having multiple moderators issue warnings for the same post. So I retroactively violated the warning I got for the first post by having made the first post in the first place.

But let's be honest: I wasn't banned for dissing the Werewolf players, and had I actually done that I wouldn't have been banned. I was banned for pointing out that Onyx Path is small potatoesand no one cares about it. Several of he moderators on big purple are stakeholders in Onyx Path products, and they insist that everyone treats its fan-made shovelware as serious and official.

-Username17
Ah man, the big purple kills me. It used to be such a large thriving forum, and still is one of the bigger places to go to to get general RPG discussion. But that was bullshit. The trouble ticket actually sounds very reasonable.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?769 ... rollman-11)-Six-Month-Ban

Even me, an avowed prudish conservative gamer got squicked out by the realization that you can fuck wolves if you want as a garou to make lupus babies. Ew. That isn't an attack on the players of Werewolf, it's just blatant fucking reality.
Last edited by Heaven's Thunder Hammer on Sat Nov 07, 2015 5:37 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:
Hiram McDaniels wrote:
That ban you caught was some bullshit. You were clearly criticizing the lore behind WtA, not the people who play it.
Heh. Yes. The moderation policy on big purple is worse than you can imagine, even taking into account the fact that it's worse than you can imagine. Not only is the thing I was accused of doing not a thing I ever did, but it ramped up to a ban by having multiple moderators issue warnings for the same post. So I retroactively violated the warning I got for the first post by having made the first post in the first place.

But let's be honest: I wasn't banned for dissing the Werewolf players, and had I actually done that I wouldn't have been banned. I was banned for pointing out that Onyx Path is small potatoesand no one cares about it. Several of he moderators on big purple are stakeholders in Onyx Path products, and they insist that everyone treats its fan-made shovelware as serious and official.

-Username17
Ah man, the big purple kills me. It used to be such a large thriving forum, and still is one of the bigger places to go to to get general RPG discussion. But that was bullshit. The trouble ticket actually sounds very reasonable.

Banned From RPG.net

Even me, an avowed prudish conservative gamer got squicked out by the realization that you can fuck wolves if you want as a garou to make lupus babies. Ew. That isn't an attack on the players of Werewolf, it's just blatant fucking reality.
It took me a while to figure out there was a thing here. rpg.net used parentheses in the url, which doesn't play nice with bbcode. You need to use % codes to unfuck it.

But basically yes. The moderators announcing that I wasn't making an argument in good faith is basically them admitting that they had no argument. I preempted all possible equivocation about talking animals and furries at the very beginning and their only way to "win" or even not admit that I'm 100% right is to ban me. Because I am right. It's not even up for debate. There is a definition of bestality, and W:tA is objectively on the wrong side of it.

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Post by FatR »

Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote: Even me, an avowed prudish conservative gamer got squicked out by the realization that you can fuck wolves if you want as a garou to make lupus babies. Ew. That isn't an attack on the players of Werewolf, it's just blatant fucking reality.
And nobody cares, really. Terry Pratchett wrote a fucking love triangle between a human, a werewolf and a normal wolf, well past the point when the Diskworld books got largely serious, and nobody cared. So, even before browsing actual WoD-related forums, we can safely say that the problem only exists in the mind of Frank and local TGD prudes

Frank's whole point, besides containing several factually incorrect statements, also entitely hinges on the very bizarre assertion that fucking a wolf (or, say, a magical pony) who can say "Let's fuck" in human words is perfectly OK, while fucking a wolf who can indicate the same through the normal wolf (which you, being a fellow wolf, perfectly versed in wolf communication, can interpret with just as much certainty) means is somehow repulsive. And is rape. I guess all sex that ever happens in the animal kingdom must be rape in Frankverse.
Last edited by FatR on Sun Nov 08, 2015 5:45 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Kaelik »

I have strong opinions about animal sex and rape. In that I strongly think everyone should shut the fuck up about it.
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Post by Username17 »

Every so often I think FatR has reached the lowest he can get. I thought it was bizarre racist tirades, but I think coming out as pro-bestiality might be lower. Hard to say really, because he's an impressively reprehensible person either way.

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Post by Grek »

Whats worse is he spells Discworld with a k. Fuck that.
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