Paradox Buys White Wolf from CCP

[Starmaker]

And I have to admit, if I was forced to pick only one of the Big Three WoD splats' raisons d'étre, "make it take longer for the Wyrm to destroy the world" seems to be more fitting as the overarching biggest issue than "inter generational bickering" or "the fight against the evils of flush toilets and central heating".

"Make it take longer for the Wyrm to destroy the world" is an issue big enough that no one reasonable can be on the other side of it. You can't negotiate with mad cultists who want to hur hur destroy the world, and as soon as mad cultists are relegated to window dressing for variety's sake -- to be perhaps sicced on or allied with against your other opponents -- whatever issue is the point of contention between you and those other opponents is in fact the overarching biggest issue.

[Whipstitch]

Vampire is the core game that pays the bills: absolutely, completely true. But the material in Vampire doesn't support even the existence of these other supernaturals in any meaningful way. In fact VtM would probably be a better game if they didn't even exist.

A nearly blank slate is actually a way better start than the big "No Homers" sign that Werewolves lug around. Vampire is a better line than Werewolf in large part because the metaphysical and political underpinnings are ill-defined enough that strange alliances and some diversity is vaguely plausible. One of the big reasons that Vampire has historically been more successful than the other lines is because it doesn't actually claim to have all the fucking answers and thus avoids insulting people's intelligence quite so often. Well, at least until they put out Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, anyway. Stupid fuckers.

[Dogbert]

I think Paradox is thoroughly trapped.

WoD. You can't keep it as-is. You can't change it without alienating 30% of the player base.

I think we can all agree that the WoD holds together on Superhero Genre Logic only, which is to say, just dial your WSOD all the way to eleven and don't even try to ponder on why hasn't Reed Richards turned earth into a cientific utopia yet. Now, is it possible for the WoD to actually change without alienating its core demographic? Time will tell, but it doesn't take an Einstein to see that Vampire, being WoD's actual breadwinner, HAS to be the baseline all other parts of the WoD will have to conform to.

One thing is for sure, if WoD is going to become a profitable property on the scale of the videogame market, it's going to have to compete with Assassin's Creed and the new Tomb Raider and Batman's Arkham games, and that won't happen until it starts making sense. Roleplayers are gullible and will let you pull the wool over their eyes, but the mainstream market not so much. Paradox makes videogames, not tabletop books, so the path they should take is clear.

[Mechalich]

One of the big reasons that Vampire has historically been more successful than the other lines is because it doesn't actually claim to have all the fucking answers and thus avoids insulting people's intelligence quite so often.

Vampire also had the advantage in that it simply didn't need to explain as much. Take Disciplines: the explanation is simple, you have special empowered vampire blood, invoking its energy lets you do stuff. No further answers required.

Explaining the physical prowess of werewolves is also about that easy - the weird spirit powers, not so much. If you have spirit powers, that means you have to have some kind of spirit framework. Explaining mages is even worse - it means you have to invent a magic system of some kind, and how that magic interacts with modern technology.

I can see completely reworking werewolves and just dropping the whole spirits part entirely. They could have 'beast path' or something abilities instead that enhanced senses, or gave them pheromones, or allowed them to track like Wolverine, or even gave them Lunar Exalted style shapeshifting. That could work in a Vampire core.

For mages though, making a magic system that is dependent on Vampires is weird. Maybe if all the mages are actually the distant descendants of dhampirs or ghouls or something and the ability to use magic is actually some vampiric genetic legacy thing. That could work and might even fit the sort of relatively low-powered spellcasting needed alongside vampire. it wouldn't bear any resemblance to MtA at all though.

Heck, I'd probably go so far as to make mages simply mortals who can use thaumaturgy but they power it by some alternative essence reservoir that isn't blood.

[Username17]

WoD. You can't keep it as-is. You can't change it without alienating 30% of the player base.

One thing is for sure, if WoD is going to become a profitable property on the scale of the videogame market, it's going to have to compete with Assassin's Creed and the new Tomb Raider and Batman's Arkham games, and that won't happen until it starts making sense.

Unfortunately, they've just about ruled out doing that. During the Q&A a Hungarian (?) woman with extremely bad English skills and no ability to conjugate verbs pipes in that she really likes the fact that World of Darkness is a contradictory mess and the truth in one book is totally different to and incompatible with the truth in another. And the creative guy says that yes, the contradictory word salad is an essential part of the look and feel of the WoD and it was his intention that moving forward the books would still be giving you incomplete and possibly incompatible puzzle pieces so that you could piece together a plausible narrative for yourself over several years given off-hand comments in a bunch of books. You know, like the old days.

What WoD needs is a council of nicea that hacks together a world bible. That sets first and final answers to questions like "How many planes of existence are there?," "How many souls to people have?," and "What happens when one type of creature uses their magic against another?" But while this is necessary, they've pretty nearly promised that they aren't going to do it. The future is foggy of course, but it doesn't appear that these tracks go all the way to the next station.

In nWoD, the Mages had a world they interacted with called "Arcadia" that apparently had faeries in it. Also in nWoD, the Changelings has a world they interacted with called "Arcadia" that apparently had faeries in it. These were not the same world! That is unacceptable. And yet, if you don't have a concrete setting bible to work from, that kind of horse shit is also inevitable. And it's looking very unlikely that White Wolf 3 is going to do anything to avoid that particular trainwreck.

"Make it take longer for the Wyrm to destroy the world" is an issue big enough that no one reasonable can be on the other side of it. You can't negotiate with mad cultists who want to hur hur destroy the world, and as soon as mad cultists are relegated to window dressing for variety's sake -- to be perhaps sicced on or allied with against your other opponents -- whatever issue is the point of contention between you and those other opponents is in fact the overarching biggest issue.

That's the general problem with the high-stakes battles in most of the Old World of Darkness splats, to be honest. While the Technocracy putting electric light and vaccines in the path of our freedom is a dumb thing to fight a war about, I can't honestly say that there is a whole lot you could even imagine that's more important than fighting a war over the nature of reality. Anything else you do or don't do only matters within the context of reality as you know it, so if the fundamental rules of existence change, then literally every other thing you've ever done or tried to do is probably a waste of time. Assuming that time still exists in some form, but you know what I mean.

The New World of Darkness splats had the opposite problem, where everything was so small scale and personal that I couldn't imagine caring about it. There wasn't one conflict in WtF as presented that would make me engage with it rather than ignore it or leave town.

oWoD Vampire mostly struck the right balance: conflicts over power and respect that came with real rewards for the victors that you could imagine giving a shit about which could also be put aside at a moment's notice when threats to life and property came to the fore. That's why oWoD is and was the flagship property for White Wolf.

Of course: there's still the Sabbat problem. As the new creative director noted, finding a plausible way for the Sabbat to fit into the world as it exists in the 21st century is wicked hard. I actually respect that he has admitted that. I further am impressed and respectful of the fact that he admitted that doing Vampire/Mage/Werewolf crossovers is "very hard" and that in many cases it was derided as impossible or unnecessary merely because people were lazy and didn't want to put in the work. Recognizing the importance and difficulty of a task is the first step to completing it. But it's not the last. Time will tell if he can actually do it. He literally can't keep all the promises he has made. We will see whether he's making all these ridiculous promises as a marketing stunt or if he's an insane FlavorAid drinker who thinks he can deliver on them all.

-Username17

[FatR]

One thing is for sure, if WoD is going to become a profitable property on the scale of the videogame market, it's going to have to compete with Assassin's Creed and the new Tomb Raider and Batman's Arkham games, and that won't happen until it starts making sense. Roleplayers are gullible and will let you pull the wool over their eyes, but the mainstream market not so much.

A good joke.

Oh wait. You're fucking serious. You're seriously providing AssCreed and Arkham games as examples of "making sense".

Well, at the very least that completely disproves the last phrase.

[maglag]

Warhammer 40K gets away with contradictory fluff between books.

Between pages in the same book.

Between paragraphs in the same page.

I'm not talking just about the tabletop books, I'm also talking about the RPGs made by fantasy flight, where RogueTrader/Inquisitor/Deatwatch is all "chaos is completely evil, we're actually the good guyz and we've got them totally cornered" while Black Crusade is all "The rotting imperium is an evil minority of humanity, actually most humies in existence are scattered in worlds that no inquisitor even heard about, and we quite like being free thank you very much."

As long as you throw enough rule of cool, people won't care if it doesn't make much sense.

[FatR]

I further am impressed and respectful of the fact that he admitted that doing Vampire/Mage/Werewolf crossovers is "very hard" and that in many cases it was derided as impossible or unnecessary merely because people were lazy and didn't want to put in the work. Recognizing the importance and difficulty of a task is the first step to completing it.

The problem was not limited to the amount of work that needed to be applied.

Sure, incompatible mechanics were a major problem.

The bigger problem was that you couldn't crossover the game lines without compromising themes of all but one of them. The future of the Earth simply cannot be determined by squabbles and intrigues of ancient conspiracies in turn manipulated by even more ancient blood gods, if it is actually determined by war of cosmic spirits who can destroy the world, and both these cosmic spirits and the conspiracies don't mean shit, if the reality is consensual and people who think of Big Brother as their role model can wipe both from existence as a side effect of the paradigm shit they're working for.

And this incompatibility is, again, thematic. And no, saying that "Vampire is our flagship, and therefore every game must follow its thematic paradigm" observably doesn't work. nWoD did exactly that. It sucked. People did not want to buy yet another game of supernatural turf warfare, when they already had Vampire. Exalted is yer another example of a gameline which was observably hurt when its second edition made clear that the setting caters to the most profitable splat, and players preferring anyone else can go suck on a dick.

Keeping the truths of the setting obscure and letting individual groups choose whose viewpoint is correct observably worked better. So they have a point. While they should write a setting bible for themselves, I strongly doubt that disclosing that setting bible to their customers in published books would be of any benefit to them. Being vague about the real metaphysics of the world might piss off some of your audience. Being specific is practically certain to do so, particularly if they intend to keep anything at all from oWoD.

[Username17]

And this incompatibility is, again, thematic. And no, saying that "Vampire is our flagship, and therefore every game must follow its thematic paradigm" observably doesn't work. nWoD did exactly that. It sucked.

Your "Vampire players ruined nWoD" conspiracy theory is a thing you've been trotting out for how many years now? When are you going to admit that it's in fact wrong, and that as a person who explicitly "never cared about nVampire enough to even pay much attention to powers" you are not in a position to make any claims backwards, forwards, or lengthwise about how much Vampire shat on the rest of nWoD and not vice versa? Every time you bring it up, and I do mean every single time, people point out for you that it's wrong and that you don't know what you're talking about. Please take a fucking hint.

Werewolf combat abilities were not nerfed for the sake of the feelings of Vampire players who wanted their combat monsters to be able to stand up to Werewolves. All combat abilities, Vampire and Werewolf alike, were nerfed into oblivion because of a general claim that players who made characters that were good at combat were powergaming munchkins who should be punished.

Mage organizations weren't reduced in importance to the point of puzzling apathy for the sake of the feelings of Vampire players who wanted their organizations to be the most important. All organizations, Vampire and Mage alike were nerfed into oblivion because of a general claim that the entire game should be more "personal." Which apparently meant that the most power you could get out of any secret society of fantastical creatures was the ability to use the company car on your own time.

NWoD sucked because they hamhandedly took out all the things the Real Roleplayers™ on their message board complained about, and replaced it with nothing you might actually care about. No fighting, no secret societies of the damned, no big conspiracies, no metaplot, no antagonists whose plans actually matter, no nothing. Just a half-assed suggestion that you might want to play out a personal struggle of Christian weakness before sin (which by the way: you do not).

Your conspiracy theory that nWoD sucked because the Vampire players got everything they wanted is fucking wrong. It's been wrong, and you've been told it's wrong every time you bring it up. It's just wrong. NWoD was all about punishing the players who played the game "wrong" by taking away their toys. Most of the players were and are Vampire players, and most of the toys that got confiscated were Vampire toys. The vampires got shat on in more ways than any of the other groups. It just looks so much worse for the Werewolves because they were such a one-dimensional piece of bullshit in the first place that the loss of meaningful combat abilities, political advocacy, and apocalyptic metaplot conflicts left them with nothing at all. But the Vampires also lost those things, and a bunch more things.

-Username17

[FatR]

Your "Vampire players ruined nWoD" conspiracy theory is a thing you've been trotting out for how many years now?

A nice strawman you have here. I particularly like your manner of dismissing bloody obvious facts, like most nWoD games very explicitly patterned after the exact same sort of gameplay that nVampire offered (local turf wars between supernatural gangs and equally local political games) as a "conspiracy theory". Replacing the statement "Vampire is our flagship, and therefore every game must follow its thematic paradigm" with "Vampire players ruined nWoD" in an attempt to portray me as having a grudge against a certain group of players is also a good touch.

When are you going to admit that it's in fact wrong, and that as a person who explicitly "never cared about nVampire enough to even pay much attention to powers" you are not in a position to make any claims backwards, forwards, or lengthwise about how much Vampire shat on the rest of nWoD and not vice versa?

Why should I ever make an obviously idiotic admission you want me to make for the sake of strengthening your own argument? System knowledge necessary to crunch out maximized builds wasn't ever necessary to judge a White Wolf setting, given their long-standing tradition of completely ignoring the impact of their own rules, like Humanity or Predator's Taint. nWoD mages still can break the fucking world, together with just about any proposed plot, and are insanely overpowered compared to the rest of supernaturals (if Jon Chung is to be believed at least, and given his work on Exalted optimization I'm inclined to believe him, even if I did not run the build calcs for myself). Doesn't mean that they are supposed to be the secret masters of everything in the setting.

Mage organizations weren't reduced in importance to the point of puzzling apathy for the sake of the feelings of Vampire players who wanted their organizations to be the most important. All organizations, Vampire and Mage alike were nerfed into oblivion because of a general claim that the entire game should be more "personal."

Which - cutting back world-spanning plots and concentrating on "personal drama" - notably was what they already strived for in VtM Revised, as written many times by Justin Achilli himself, but couldn't accomplish due to the existing oWoD baggage. nWoD was when this desire reached fruition. That it was not your desire does not mean it did not exist. And its primary root was among the people who developed their flagship game, Vampire. See, for an example, "The Game as it is Played" and the following paragraphs in the Vampire Storytellers Handbook Revised edition (p.7 and following). It is not difficult at all to see the exact same pretentious attitude on which nWoD was later based. Speaking of "a general claim that the entire game should be more "personal."", do you remember which game was always called "A Storytelling Game of Personal Horror", hmm?

VtR was how late-oWoD Vampire developers vaguely wanted their game to be for a good amount of time before the Time of Judgement. And the rest of nWoD was explicitly patterned after VtR, with Promethean being the first significant departure. That's just how things are.

By the way, did you forget to adress my actual point regarding providing players with absolute statements on a setting's metaphysics vs keeping them limited to in-settings points of view in your whole diatribe, or was that intentional?

[Username17]

Which - cutting back world-spanning plots and concentrating on "personal drama" - notably was what they already strived for in VtM Revised, as written many times by Justin Achilli himself, but couldn't accomplish due to the existing oWoD baggage.

Your argument is exploded on the platform by the fact that they were striving for exactly the same thing with Mage Revised. Remember the Avatar Storm and how it was going to make everything more street level and personal?

Nothing Vampire specific about it. The templates used for nWoD were shit like Hunter and Mummy: the Resurrection. Things which very definitely are not Vampire. NWoD is based on late period Old World of Darkness books. And the trial balloons for the project were done outside the Vampire product line.

If you want to blame specific product lines for the fiasco that was nWoD, you have a much better argument for Werewolf or Mage than Vampire. After all, it was Mage that did the Avatar Storm and literally excised all of their high end characters (and most of the alternate dimensions). And Mummy: the Resurrection was (mostly) a Werewolf expansion.

You're just factually wrong. You keep coming back with your harebrained theory that the shit happened because Vampire was allowed to shit on all the other lines, but it's just not true. It wasn't true the first time you said it, and it wasn't true the fifth time you said it. You're an embarrassing broken record and you should stop.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

And no, saying that "Vampire is our flagship, and therefore every game must follow its thematic paradigm" observably doesn't work. nWoD did exactly that. It sucked.

That doesn't make much sense. Justin Achilli was a Johnny-come-lately who wasn't involved in the creation of the V:TM 1st and 2nd editions. A lot of his work is best understood as a stupid One True Basket Weave repudiation of the manner in which many--perhaps most-- people actually played V:TM. That makes it hard for me to buy the idea that the milquetoast nWoD failed because it was too much like the gonzo but entertaining oWoD flagship.

[TheFlatline]

Which - cutting back world-spanning plots and concentrating on "personal drama" - notably was what they already strived for in VtM Revised, as written many times by Justin Achilli himself, but couldn't accomplish due to the existing oWoD baggage.

Your argument is exploded on the platform by the fact that they were striving for exactly the same thing with Mage Revised. Remember the Avatar Storm and how it was going to make everything more street level and personal?

Nothing Vampire specific about it. The templates used for nWoD were shit like Hunter and Mummy: the Resurrection. Things which very definitely are not Vampire. NWoD is based on late period Old World of Darkness books. And the trial balloons for the project were done outside the Vampire product line.

If you want to blame specific product lines for the fiasco that was nWoD, you have a much better argument for Werewolf or Mage than Vampire. After all, it was Mage that did the Avatar Storm and literally excised all of their high end characters (and most of the alternate dimensions). And Mummy: the Resurrection was (mostly) a Werewolf expansion.

You're just factually wrong. You keep coming back with your harebrained theory that the shit happened because Vampire was allowed to shit on all the other lines, but it's just not true. It wasn't true the first time you said it, and it wasn't true the fifth time you said it. You're an embarrassing broken record and you should stop.

-Username17

Ungh. The Avatar Storm. I get that they wanted to put agency back into the hands of the players. That was the supposed aim of the Revised lines. It was basically an attempt to avoid what was wrong with Forgotten Realms: That no matter how badass you got you were insignificant because the big Mary Sues were stomping around on everyone.

That at least was the perception on the forums back when I was still participatory.

Part of the problem with the scope of nWOD was that somewhere along the line they thought that less was more and decided instead of giving agency to the player, they'd just make things petty enough to make the player agency feel irrelevant. We're not even talking the futility that oWOD loved to hype as one of it's core themes (futility against the elders, futility against the wyrm, futility against the technocracy, etc...) but moreso just... futility.

You can do a street-level gang warfare style game. That's totally doable, but you have to have problems and achievements and opponents that matter. It still has to feel dramatic and huge. And WTF and VTR failed spectacularly at that. The idea that as a human I can drive from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles without a problem, but as a vampire it just. didn't. happen. was fucking terribad.

Aside from the furries, I'm actually sort of okay with approaching the cosmology, at least from a reader's standpoint, with conflicting and vague information based on the different factions. Obviously, if you're going to have furries and vampires playing together you have to ditch the "WYRM TAINT! KILL!" stigma that werewolves have towards vamps. That's really the biggest problem. Fix that, and maybe push the triad back towards faith instead of "I can fucking see the wyrm from my front porch!", and push back the absolute knowledge of consensual reality from mages to a theory that they hope is right, and you might be able to have a messy stew of faiths. Sort of like our world today.

I agree that a big-ass bible though is needed. Definitions, secrets, what the hell is actually going on, hash all that out absolutely so you have consistency. But we don't need to see the man behind the curtain out of the starting gate.

[Whipstitch]

Basically, the physics of the setting needs to be nailed down even if you're leaving the historical events and identities of major players largely up to the MC. Not knowing who betrayed who during the Crusades is a fine mystery. Not knowing which underworld your necromancy deals with is bullshit.

[Username17]

nWoD is best understood as being the result of taking out every single thing that the basketweavers that Justin Achilli surrounded himself with complained about. No additions, just subtractions. Every single thing that people complained about was taken out and it was replaced with... nothing.

So all the big bad NPCs are gone (no more being stomped by big ticket NPCs). All the combat powers are gone (no more "Vampions"). All the world spanning conflicts are gone. All the world controlling secret societies are gone. All the things that would get in the way of wangsting in character, gone.

And replaced by nothing. Just you as a monster with a blank canvas to do whatever you want. As long as what you want doesn't include interacting with any interesting setting elements, because those are all gone.

-Username17

[Prak]

And I have to admit, if I was forced to pick only one of the Big Three WoD splats' raisons d'étre, "make it take longer for the Wyrm to destroy the world" seems to be more fitting as the overarching biggest issue than "inter generational bickering" or "the fight against the evils of flush toilets and central heating".

"Make it take longer for the Wyrm to destroy the world" is an issue big enough that no one reasonable can be on the other side of it. You can't negotiate with mad cultists who want to hur hur destroy the world, and as soon as mad cultists are relegated to window dressing for variety's sake -- to be perhaps sicced on or allied with against your other opponents -- whatever issue is the point of contention between you and those other opponents is in fact the overarching biggest issue.

You're assuming none of the potential villains believe that the world as we know it will be destroyed, allowing a new world more to their liking to rise from the ashes. Also a lot of werewolf villains were pollution and bad emotions spirits that weren't agents with their own decision making ability.

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 werewolf specific enemies can be evil spirits who are basically sub-sapient tools of the Wyrm, but then each other splat can probably get an enemy that isn't a Doomsday Cultist variant, vampires should obviously have to fight monster hunters, mages should probably ditch the whole technocracy thing for a Dresden Files-esque White Council deal that tries to get all mages to play by the same (draconian, reactionary, overly cautious) rules, but that doesn't exactly give them a proprietary enemy. Fuck, give mages a highlander deal, where killing a mage unleashes a short-lived but powerful magical energy, marauders are mages who go around killing other mages to harness this.

In fact, you could put in a highlander asymmetric power grab sort of deal for all the splats- mages get a rush of magical energy they can use for other stuff, werewolves can get a sort of totemic cannibalism thing, and vampires can keep diabolism

I'm don't know much about pretty much any of the other splats, except demon, but demon... is sort of dead easy mad libs of quasi-spiritual/biblical words.

[Username17]

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

[Prak]

Ok, but I'm not talking about "kill it all and piss on the accumulating ashes before we die with" villains, I'm talking about villains like the Board of Pentex, who at least believe that the destruction of the world is a destruction of the existing social order rather than the actual world, that there will be something to rule over, even if its just a bunch of naked peons rolling around in ashes and no stone stacked atop another.

The point of Captain Planet villains is that they were business men (and a woman) who at least ostensibly polluted and ravaged nature for profit, usually monetary, but I do seem to recall them being totally down for temporal power too. Oh, and Dr. Blight was an evil scientist who... it just now occurs to me, was basically an ecological Mengele, and thus did her evil deeds for knowledge (and profit).

The point I was trying to make was that you can have "postpone the end of the world" as an overarching goal if you have villains who have an genuine and comprehensible motive behind advancing the end of the world. Now, the Pentex execs were all corrupted by wyrm spirits, so its not like you can play Corporate Takeover For GODGAIA and just offer them a better deal. However, the entire point of the Wyrm plot was that the Wyrm, and by extension, wyrm spirits, were corrupted. So, you can't sit down with a nexus crawler and have a chat, no, but what the game should have allowed you to do is try to purify spirits and those who are possessed by them, which might allow you to then play Corporate Takeover For Gaia and make Pentex execs better deals once you've gotten rid of the corruption of Wyrm spirits.


Now. Of course the point of werewolf was to play The Hulk as directed by Ang Lee, so this sort of shit was not an option. But there's no reason you couldn't make it an option if you were trying to rehab the World of Darkness (though whether your target audience wants this is another question entirely, since a big thing with True ScotsmenWoD Roleplayers was the whole hopeless deal)

[Omegonthesane]

Now. Of course the point of werewolf was to play The Hulk as directed by Ang Lee, so this sort of shit was not an option. But there's no reason you couldn't make it an option if you were trying to rehab the World of Darkness (though whether your target audience wants this is another question entirely, since a big thing with True ScotsmenWoD Roleplayers was the whole hopeless deal)

You could probably reconcile that with some pieces moping about how the Wyrm can probably outbid you and human nature is such that Pentex can't be made to think about the long-term profits from simply leveraging their existing position as a massively influential multinational in a non-destroyed world because the short-term profit boost from serving the Wyrm is so big.

Might even fit the tone of WoD.

You could also not cater to True Scotsmen because fuck those guys, they're dragging the hobby down.

[Prak]

Oh, certainly, WoD True Scotsmen are assholes and can fuck off. It was just a concern that came to mind, since they are a portion of the market, and unlike Frank, I don't have an actually vital skill set to pay the bills with while I make games as a hobby, so I keep an eye towards, or try to keep an eye towards, what would make a game most marketable.

Of course, if you want to make money, you don't design games for a living. But still.

[hyzmarca]

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

I've got to disagree with that. You totally can have tea with the Nephandi and team up with them against a greater threat.
One of the reasons for this is that their method of destroying the world isn't exactly efficient. I mean, the Technocracy has a massive bureaucracy that exists for the sole purpose of controlling the beliefs of the sleepers and has its fingers in everything.


And while the Nephandi are basically trying to convince the Sleepers that the world sucks so much they'd be better off not existing, they're basically stuck doing it one person at a time because they operate as lone individuals or tiny cells with few resources. In other words, they can't actually end the world. They're basically just some random edgelords who read some Buddhist writings about how existence is suffering and took away the wrong idea.

There is no logical reason why the Traditions couldn't team up with the Nephandi against the Technocracy, except for their mutually incompatible philosophies.



But, it's also really easy to make protagonist factions who are trying to end the world. You just have to make a cosmology where the end of the world is inevitable or desirable.


Lets say you've got a setup where whomever is left standing when the world ends becomes God/Galactus/Whatever in the next one.

So you've got a situation where Doctor Doom and Doctor Strange can team up and make sure that the world ends on their terms, so that they can rebuild it afterwards.

And you've got room for protagonist factions who rage against the dying of the light and villians who fight to save the place where they keep off of their stuff.

The Triat is actually useful here,since they establish a cycle of death an rebirth. When the Wyrm destroys the old world, the Wyld creates a new one.

[name_here]

Even with a cycle of death and rebirth, you don't get good guys expediting the apocalypse until it's actually in progress and delaying it will have catastrophic consequences for the next world in the cycle. The hero-villain teamup to bring about the end of the world doesn't become a thing until the sky is already on fire.

[Longes]

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????

[Maxus]

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????

HANDS.

EVERYWHERE. HANDS.

[name_here]

They can generate money from confusion and hatred?