Paradox Buys White Wolf from CCP

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Since I'm on a few WW kickstarters, here's a copy of their monday meeting notes that I felt was relevant.

First, we are changing the overall title of New World of Darkness (nWoD), to Chronicles of Darkness (CofD) in order to differentiate the game lines under that brand from the classic World of Darkness lines. For more details, check out my blog from Saturday: http://theonyxpath.com/announcing-chron ... -darkness/

For Onyx Path, this is delightful. The biggest threat to us doing more Chronicles of Darkness games was the potential of issues surrounding the branding. And that problem is gone. We are able now to move ahead with several books that were awaiting the new branding, and to keep going with our announced and scheduled but not announced projects.

In addition, the process of solving this problem was very collaborative between our two companies, which was quite refreshing.

Second, we are continuing to move forward with Exalted 3rd Edition. Once the errata is input and a new backer PDF is uploaded, we can keep going with our announced and scheduled but unannounced projects.

Last, but by no means least, Onyx Path is continuing to publish the cWoD 20th Anniversary game lines. We will not be publishing the 4th Edition of the WoD game lines as we planned as that effort is being superseded by WWP‘s own efforts in the creation of their One World of Darkness. Here is a teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wewNseVo24 They may in fact call the next editions of the WoD game books 4th Editions, or they might not, but they absolutely need to be the ones pulling together the threads of WoD and creating a coherent single entity that can then be the cornerstone of the many licensing efforts they are working towards.

For Onyx Path, while we would have enjoyed the creation of the next edition as we were previously set to do it, we are consoled by two things:

The kinds of synergy that the new White Wolf is talking about and capable of pulling together is something that as a licenser we just couldn’t do. We had rights to tabletop RPGs only, and had to fight hard for anything else like t-shirts. Triple A computer games or Netflix series were not something we could arrange or even consult on with CCP. But as the owners, who want the World of Darkness to spread its dark stories over the world, WWP can. Which is pretty freaking exciting!
We at Onyx Path wanted to create the next edition of the WoD games because we saw a need for an edition that shook things up, that was relevant to today’s players and ways of playing, while still steeped in the dark drama of decades of storytelling majesty. Everything we’ve discussed with Martin and Tobias indicates that their vision for the One World of Darkness is coming from looking at most things the same way, and while no one knows yet how that vision will be executed, we are looking forward to helping their efforts however they need it as things come together.
As an example of this, last year the Onyx Path crew attending MidWinter Convention charted out how we would ramp up our presence in stores leading up to a traditionally printed version of V4 as the first of the WW core rulebooks to return to retail stores. I’ve spent several years plotting a course that allows that but doesn’t bog us down into broken sales models that might hurt Onyx Path, and after a few test projects, V4 would have led the way. In the video, WWP also talks about getting One WoD into stores. Great minds, and all that.

You’ll see the first two of those tests next month, actually, as both the Scarred Lands Kickstarter and the Pugmire Kickstarter are set up specifically to enable us to print traditionally and get those books into stores. We’ll be making another announcement soon that takes this thinking a bit further, but the ink is barely dry on that contract.

[Username17]

For Onyx Path, this is delightful. The biggest threat to us doing more Chronicles of Darkness games was the potential of issues surrounding the branding. And that problem is gone.

That's as good a face as they could put on that. I'm sure there was a lot of nail biting when it was up in the air whether they'd be allowed to keep the World of Darkness trademark. It's worth quite a bit of money, after all. Now it is clear that the trademark has been revoked and moving forward they can't call theirselves "world of darkness." That's almost as bad as it could possibly be. The only silver lining is that they aren't actually being asked to IP scrub the entire contents of their pdfs, just the titles. Also, they don't seem to be being hit with any cease and desist letters, which has got to be a relief.

But the bottom line is that people threw money at them because they waved the "World of Darkness" IP at them and promised to "keep it in print" (for certain extremely dubious definitions of "in print"). They can't do that anymore, so I don't know how many suckers they are going to be able to grift.

As to that One World of Darkness promo. That's... kinda sad, actually. They seriously couldn't do any better than rounding up three Scandinavian LARPers with mediocre English skills to dry-read monologues? Dude, I could get three fluent English speakers with neutral or diverse accents to dry read a radio play on short notice. It's not even a thing.

Obviously they don't give a lot of information there. The premise of the One World of Darkness, combined with the explicit wording that the different creature types are "trapped together" indicates that they are doing the thing they should have done twenty actual years ago and trying to get all the different monsters playing the same game. Or at least, trying to do that. That deserves some props.

The actual intros for each of the monster types are recognizable, but not inspired. I didn't get any feels from any of the pieces. Some of that is the poor quality of the reading (I hesitate to call it "acting"), but really the writing bears significant guilt there as well. They set themselves the arbitrary task of introducing Vampires, Werewolves, and Mages with three lines each in a 9 line poem. That's weird enough to have worked... if the poem was strong enough to stand on its own. But it really dives off a cliff with the first line, which to fit with the structure of the rest of the poem is "Once you hunted us," which is clumsy as fuck because as the rest of the poem makes clear that "you" is "humans" and "us" is Vampires, who fucking hunt humans and not the other way around for the most part. The takeway is that Vampries manipulate humans, Werewolves are environmentalists, and Mages are naval gazing about enlightenment and anti-authority stuff. Those are themes from World of Darkness, but none of them are particularly strong or good themes. They would have done better to stress something about deceit for Vampires or rage for Werewolves. Something a bit more basic and universal. The themes they ended up stressing are kind of... esoteric and specific.

This presentation has more information.

Goes on (and on) for quite a while. But the bottom line is that White Wolf is semi-independent from Paradox and they have concrete plans to do Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage. And plans to do other stuff that are very vague and totally in flux.

Their creative director comes off as a deranged fanboy who faps to the "storytelling first" crap. So I'm not super optimistic about the new rules being "not extremely terrible." They do sound the right notes about mature content, so I expect less senseless dog rape and vaginal dentata going forward.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

So they didn't revoke their licensing, but they boxed the sweatshop confining them to their current toys.

...sounds good enough to me.

[Username17]

So they didn't revoke their licensing, but they boxed the sweatshop confining them to their current toys.

...sounds good enough to me.

Well, they revoked the license to make the new edition of Vampire. I think it's notable that when they said that Onyx Path would still be coming out with their nWoD 2nd edition, Exalted 3rd edition, and the 20th anniversary nostalgia products there were no applause lines. An entire room packed with people wanting to know what the new White Wolf was up to, and no one gave so much as a "yeah" on hearing that anything Onyx Path at all would continue.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Incidentally, the OP announcement was one of the most poorly worded articles I've ever read. I read it three times and had to check out the notes Heaven's Thunder Hammer posted to make sure I was reading it correctly.

If that's who is going to be fishing for COD then yeah. That bodes horribly.

I love how they're like "nWOD is still a valuable concept!" AHAHAHAHAH yeah right tell that to White Wolf back in the day.

[Omegonthesane]

Incidentally, the OP announcement was one of the most poorly worded articles I've ever read. I read it three times and had to check out the notes Heaven's Thunder Hammer posted to make sure I was reading it correctly.

If that's who is going to be fishing for COD then yeah. That bodes horribly.

I love how they're like "nWOD is still a valuable concept!" AHAHAHAHAH yeah right tell that to White Wolf back in the day.

Valuable enough to pay their rent and cocaine out of Kickstarter funds.

Which isn't "valuable" in any objective sense on a world scale.

[Username17]

The Q&A from after the White Wolf presentation is also up. It's in Germany, with attendants from all over Europe and the US - so some of the questions are in extremely bad English. I think the presenters did a great job of parsing the sometimes fumbling language of the crowd.

Mostly they are brainstorming means of getting the various fan groups "back into the fold." It's a real problem. Recall that oWoD officially got canned in 2004, and that the fan community has been going on doing their own thing for over a decade. Convincing these people to go back to using official storylines is obviously going to be a bit of an uphill struggle. People who started playing in a Vampire LARP as teenagers after old White Wolf had washed its hands of the setting have graduated from college and had kids of their own and have never had a relationship with White Wolf as a company. Also lots of discussion of brand management and multimedia licensing.

They give some good answers. None of the Time of Judgement crap actually happened, which is good. The creative guy has a weird idea about having the antedeluvians waking up and being responsible for the rise of ISIS? I dunno. But the answer to "which Gehenna scenario is going to be official?" is "none of them," which is the correct answer. The creative guy also says that he'd like a hypothetical White Wolf comic to be written by Grant Morrison or Alan Moore but not Frank Miller, which is also the correct answer.

They also give some bad answers. It's impossible to tell what either of these guys think about any previous WoD product, because they have coached themselves to specify that each and every thing they mention is "fantastic" so as not to alienate any of the fans of the various product lines. So they are repeatedly praising things which were terrible, but that's a rhetorical strategy so not much information can be gathered from that. More directly, the creative guy says that they are keeping Generations as a mechanic, which is straight up the wrong answer.

I think the big takeaway here is that they aren't far along in this process. They explicitly haven't decided how many core books they are going to have and it sounds like they haven't even hired a rules guy yet. I don't think either of the guys they have at the top have the first idea of how to make the rules better, and I'm not sure either of them realize that's an important thing that has to happen. The story guy seems to think you can revitalize the line and redethrone D&D by just telling more World of Darkness stories. And that's either extremely naive or silly pandering to old STORYtellers.

-Username17

[FatR]

Mostly they are brainstorming means of getting the various fan groups "back into the fold." It's a real problem. Recall that oWoD officially got canned in 2004, and that the fan community has been going on doing their own thing for over a decade. Convincing these people to go back to using official storylines is obviously going to be a bit of an uphill struggle.

I won't go back to using official storylines because I stopped using them far before the Time of Judgment. But I can say, that if they write a setting update that is not completely retarded, plus make semi-useable rules that reduce the amount of time wasted on rolling to a manageable level, don't immediately implode when people start taking efficient Disciplines or Gifts, and don't require writing houserules to run different supernaturals in the same game, I'll at least very strongly consider buying and using their book.

To think of it, another thing I want is a decent local setting book that allows to start playing without an extensive preptime. Most of X by Night and Rage Across X books did not deliver that. They gave you hooks, but you still needed to make a coherent whole of them yourself.

[Orca]

The story guy seems to think you can revitalize the line and redethrone D&D by just telling more World of Darkness stories. And that's either extremely naive or silly pandering to old STORYtellers.

Silly pandering hasn't exactly hurt Paizo. And using mostly rules which people can remember bits of from when they last played might actually be a winning scenario for them. I mean, it isn't likely to succeed big, but it might succeed enough if their fluff is good enough.

[Username17]

I won't go back to using official storylines because I stopped using them far before the Time of Judgment.

They don't really care if you use official storylines. You're a home tabletop player. They wouldn't even mind if you kitbashed your home table some weird homebrew thing out of CoD crap. They are quite explicit about that. "We are in the business of selling wine. What kind of glass you put it in is up to you. Maybe we have some suggestions..." was the metaphor they used when telling all the table top players that they could go on doing whatever and that was fine. Or "fantastic" as they had coached themselves to say whenever they mentioned any segment of the gaming community no matter how marginal or massive.

What they want is to get the organized play people back on board. Some of these LARP groups and [City] by Night groups are massive, and have been going for like twenty years. There are Vampire LARPs that are old enough to buy alcohol in the States. And the fact is that most of these groups have been mostly or wholly divorced from White Wolf's output for more than half of their lifetimes. The new White Wolf wants these groups back. They want them buying White Wolf products, recruiting new players, and getting those new players to buy White Wolf products.

There's still a big Vampire community. The Grand Masquerade happens every year, even though the world it celebrates was officially discontinued over a decade ago. The new White Wolf is desperate to get that community on its side for One World of Darkness and not staging walkouts like they did with Old White Wolf's nWoD fiasco.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

I won't go back to using official storylines because I stopped using them far before the Time of Judgment.

They don't really care if you use official storylines. You're a home tabletop player. They wouldn't even mind if you kitbashed your home table some weird homebrew thing out of CoD crap. They are quite explicit about that. "We are in the business of selling wine. What kind of glass you put it in is up to you. Maybe we have some suggestions..." was the metaphor they used when telling all the table top players that they could go on doing whatever and that was fine. Or "fantastic" as they had coached themselves to say whenever they mentioned any segment of the gaming community no matter how marginal or massive.

What they want is to get the organized play people back on board. Some of these LARP groups and [City] by Night groups are massive, and have been going for like twenty years. There are Vampire LARPs that are old enough to buy alcohol in the States. And the fact is that most of these groups have been mostly or wholly divorced from White Wolf's output for more than half of their lifetimes. The new White Wolf wants these groups back. They want them buying White Wolf products, recruiting new players, and getting those new players to buy White Wolf products.

There's still a big Vampire community. The Grand Masquerade happens every year, even though the world it celebrates was officially discontinued over a decade ago. The new White Wolf is desperate to get that community on its side for One World of Darkness and not staging walkouts like they did with Old White Wolf's nWoD fiasco.

-Username17

From a business standpoint your'e dead on, and they stand a good chance to recapture that market segment.

From a development standpoint it's probably going to be terrible. Because the LARPs and organized groups are wretched hives of scum and villainy. If WoD is developed pitching towards them, it's going to be a rocky new edition.

[TheFlatline]

Incidentally, the OP announcement was one of the most poorly worded articles I've ever read. I read it three times and had to check out the notes Heaven's Thunder Hammer posted to make sure I was reading it correctly.

If that's who is going to be fishing for COD then yeah. That bodes horribly.

I love how they're like "nWOD is still a valuable concept!" AHAHAHAHAH yeah right tell that to White Wolf back in the day.

Valuable enough to pay their rent and cocaine out of Kickstarter funds.

Which isn't "valuable" in any objective sense on a world scale.

Well yes. If you have 2 guys doing lines of blow while your fanboys pay for the privilege to write a glorified vanity press publication, then nWOD still has value.

But nWOD killed white wolf off. Completely.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

The new White Wolf is desperate to get that community on its side for One World of Darkness and not staging walkouts like they did with Old White Wolf's nWoD fiasco.

-Username17

Frank, when you say "walk outs" do you have any links for what actually happened? Or can you get into more detail? I'm curious just to read the history on this.

[Username17]

The new White Wolf is desperate to get that community on its side for One World of Darkness and not staging walkouts like they did with Old White Wolf's nWoD fiasco.

-Username17

Frank, when you say "walk outs" do you have any links for what actually happened? Or can you get into more detail? I'm curious just to read the history on this.

When nWoD happened, White Wolf told the official fanclub that oWoD was no longer to be supported. All the various LARP groups and shared world communities that had their official connections would have to make the switchover to nWoD or get their support cut.

Some did. Most didn't. A lot of groups that made the switch only stayed switched for a brief period and then went back. The Mind's Eye Society (established 1992) eventually just said "fuck it" and operated "unofficially" for years. CCP came crawling back to them and let them be "official" again despite running oWoD games in 2013.

From a business standpoint your'e dead on, and they stand a good chance to recapture that market segment.

From a development standpoint it's probably going to be terrible. Because the LARPs and organized groups are wretched hives of scum and villainy. If WoD is developed pitching towards them, it's going to be a rocky new edition.

So far I haven't seen anything that makes me think this is going to be anything other than a trainwreck. There's a lot of encouraging noises. There are a lot of kinda cool ideas they are tossing around. But one of the things they aren't doing is repudiating... anything. White Wolf was a company between 1991 and 2006 (when it went bankrupt and became a subsidiary of CCP), and during those 15 years it produced a lot of content. And both from a rules standpoint and a fluff standpoint, a lot of it was extremely bad. Some of that bad stuff must be repudiated.

Now they are in a coalition building phase. They don't want to say anything negative, and they are scrupulously avoiding doing so. Obviously they aren't going to be able to do Wraith and Orpheus at the same time. Obviously they aren't going to be able to do all the Mummies together. Things are going to get cut. And from a strategic standpoint, right now they are refusing to admit that this is going to happen because they don't want to end up alienating any part of the fanbase.

But it's hard not to look at this and say "You're seriously going to put together a setting with generations from Caine and dog fucking in 2016? Fucking seriously?" Maybe they are lying about that. I mean, they are obviously lying about some of it, and we can hope that they are lying about that. But there's no particular reason to believe that they are.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

But it's hard not to look at this and say "You're seriously going to put together a setting with generations from Caine and dog fucking in 2016? Fucking seriously?" Maybe they are lying about that. I mean, they are obviously lying about some of it, and we can hope that they are lying about that. But there's no particular reason to believe that they are.

While I am aware of how Generation is a godawful idea as a stat you can change at character gen with XP (and that higher numbers should be better...) listing "generations from Caine" alongside dog fucking implies there's a fluff issue profound enough to lose a meaningful chunk of potential fans (similar to dog fucking). Could you elaborate?

[Username17]

But it's hard not to look at this and say "You're seriously going to put together a setting with generations from Caine and dog fucking in 2016? Fucking seriously?" Maybe they are lying about that. I mean, they are obviously lying about some of it, and we can hope that they are lying about that. But there's no particular reason to believe that they are.

While I am aware of how Generation is a godawful idea as a stat you can change at character gen with XP (and that higher numbers should be better...) listing "generations from Caine" alongside dog fucking implies there's a fluff issue profound enough to lose a meaningful chunk of potential fans (similar to dog fucking). Could you elaborate?

They were chosen as examples of a horrible and pointless rules issue and a horrible and pointless fluff issue. However, the generations thing has huge problems from the standpoint of verisimilitude.

Every new vampire takes on a generation one removed from the first blood that enters their system. All Tremere are required to drink the blood of the head council, who are 4th generation. If the Tremere gave the first two drinks of blood in the opposite order, they'd all be 5th generation. The very moment they remember they can do this, they can create a bunch of 5th generation vampires. And if necessary, have all their loyal members diablerize themselves down to 5th generation. It beggars belief that they haven't done that in the last thousand fucking years.

The whole "generations" thing only works if everyone is striking out on their own and never has access to the blood of their sire or grandsire. If even one clan had any sort of cohesion at all and access to the blood of the lower generation vampires, the entire system fails to make any sense. And since there is in fact at least one clan in the fucking original seven that does exactly that, the system has never held up to even the teeniest scrutiny.

From a fluff standpoint, it's a ridiculous failure. I hate nWoD, but Blood Potency fulfilled all the design goals of Generations better. There is absolutely no reason to talk about Generations in a new edition. It's a massive problem that is also solved.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

But it's hard not to look at this and say "You're seriously going to put together a setting with generations from Caine and dog fucking in 2016? Fucking seriously?" Maybe they are lying about that. I mean, they are obviously lying about some of it, and we can hope that they are lying about that. But there's no particular reason to believe that they are.

While I am aware of how Generation is a godawful idea as a stat you can change at character gen with XP (and that higher numbers should be better...) listing "generations from Caine" alongside dog fucking implies there's a fluff issue profound enough to lose a meaningful chunk of potential fans (similar to dog fucking). Could you elaborate?

They were chosen as examples of a horrible and pointless rules issue and a horrible and pointless fluff issue. However, the generations thing has huge problems from the standpoint of verisimilitude.

Every new vampire takes on a generation one removed from the first blood that enters their system. All Tremere are required to drink the blood of the head council, who are 4th generation. If the Tremere gave the first two drinks of blood in the opposite order, they'd all be 5th generation. The very moment they remember they can do this, they can create a bunch of 5th generation vampires. And if necessary, have all their loyal members diablerize themselves down to 5th generation. It beggars belief that they haven't done that in the last thousand fucking years.

The whole "generations" thing only works if everyone is striking out on their own and never has access to the blood of their sire or grandsire. If even one clan had any sort of cohesion at all and access to the blood of the lower generation vampires, the entire system fails to make any sense. And since there is in fact at least one clan in the fucking original seven that does exactly that, the system has never held up to even the teeniest scrutiny.

From a fluff standpoint, it's a ridiculous failure. I hate nWoD, but Blood Potency fulfilled all the design goals of Generations better. There is absolutely no reason to talk about Generations in a new edition. It's a massive problem that is also solved.

-Username17

The last time I tried to explain that to someone they swore blind that there was some kind of fluff text that they couldn't point their finger at but totally existed honest that implied there was any sort of lasting exhaustion involved in the Embrace beyond "spend a point of blood" as a half-assed gloss for why the Tremere aren't all Methuselahs by blood. That and something about wanting your minions to be weaker than you rather than simply trusting to a full blood bond to do the job.

But as you say none of that would be necessary if shovelheads started at Potency 1 whether their sire was a thinblood or Caine himself.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

The new White Wolf is desperate to get that community on its side for One World of Darkness and not staging walkouts like they did with Old White Wolf's nWoD fiasco.

-Username17

Frank, when you say "walk outs" do you have any links for what actually happened? Or can you get into more detail? I'm curious just to read the history on this.

When nWoD happened, White Wolf told the official fanclub that oWoD was no longer to be supported. All the various LARP groups and shared world communities that had their official connections would have to make the switchover to nWoD or get their support cut.

Some did. Most didn't. A lot of groups that made the switch only stayed switched for a brief period and then went back. The Mind's Eye Society (established 1992) eventually just said "fuck it" and operated "unofficially" for years. CCP came crawling back to them and let them be "official" again despite running oWoD games in 2013.

.....

Ok - yes, this is ringing some old bells in my head. I've never done LARPs or paid much attention to the scene, but I recall back in '07 a big LARP player telling me how stupid WW was over this and how they were going to lose so many fans and how so many LARPers bought books etc.

[FatR]

From a fluff standpoint, it's a ridiculous failure. I hate nWoD, but Blood Potency fulfilled all the design goals of Generations better.

Then you don't understand the design goals of Generations. Forcing the decision between forever remaining at the bottom of power pyramid and murder/soul eating was intentional. Blood Potency did not fulfill the same design goals because they allowed you to gain more power without committing the worst imaginable crime (even if you had to drink vampire blood eventually, you, being a powerhouse at that point, could just add vampires to your collection of bite-junkie sheep). Blood Potency rules also prevented you from having people all the way from Troyan war as vampires (or more accurately, such ancients would not be able offer any substantial proof of their origins or meaningful memories) and rendered all PCs' efforts to become show-off Kings of Night completely meaningless. Not that by the rules you could realistically accumulate enough EXP to obtain ultimate power, but if you ever did, the Blood Potency rules took you out of play! They are worse than the Generation rules, because the Generation rules at least had a goal, even if one you disagree with, and mostly fulfilled it (the problem you've described above is more of a problem with the overall Embrace rules, actually - it is far from the only way in which the setting does not work if vampires can be made so easily as the rules describe). The Blood Potency rules are unsatifsying both for those who want PCs to suffer, and for those who want PCs to power trip.

There is absolutely no reason to talk about Generations in a new edition. It's a massive problem that is also solved.

Uh. If you want to attract still-active actual oWoD fans there is every reason to talk about it.

Now, I personally think that the commercialy wise move for them would be to unashamedly go all the way towards "we want the Twilight audience" and write supernatural conditions with only mild drawbacks that can be avoided if PCs want to work on that at all. But that is clearly not the route they are taking.

[Username17]

Then you don't understand the design goals of Generations. Forcing the decision between forever remaining at the bottom of power pyramid and murder/soul eating was intentional.

Generations doesn't do that. It keeps you in the middle of the power pyramid. The Elder disciplines are beyond you and will forever be beyond you, but you can always shit on ghouls and thinbloods.

Regardless, the actual design goal of Generations is to make things be like Queen of the Damned. Because Vampire: the Masquerade can only be understood once you realize that it's Ars Magica wearing an Anne rice mask. The Elder vampires are more powerful than you in that model and you can never catch up to them without murder-drinking your way there. But you don't need to be denied advancement altogether to achieve that. If Veddhartha or Arikel have several thousand years on you and are also advancing, then you'll never catch them. If the elders are a moving target that keeps getting older as you do, you will never catch them. It's the most basic fucking thing in mathematics. You don't need to freeze everyone at their "current" blood potency, you just need everyone to advance one year per year and call it done.

The thing where higher blood potency brings more stringent blood consumption requirements is also a better fit for the source material. At higher blood potency you lose the ability to satiate your thirst with the blood of animals, and then with the blood of humans, and finally only potent blood from powerful vampires will do. That sets up the whole Queen of the Damned style ancient vampires awakening problem much better than generations do. We fear the ancients waking up because we are their food is much more compelling than we fear the ancients awakening because we highly suspect they are assholes.

Blood Potency rules also prevented you from having people all the way from Troyan war as vampires (or more accurately, such ancients would not be able offer any substantial proof of their origins or meaningful memories) and rendered all PCs' efforts to become show-off Kings of Night completely meaningless. Not that by the rules you could realistically accumulate enough EXP to obtain ultimate power, but if you ever did, the Blood Potency rules took you out of play!

The thing where ancient vampires got alzheimers and no one had any clear memories from before 900 CE was flippin retarded. But that's not really part of the blood potency rule itself. That was a separate design idea of nWoD where there wasn't any metaplot, no ancient terrors to worry about, no meaningful ancient conspiracies, and just generally nothing to interact with for good or ill. That, obviously, was shit. But I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting that anyone should fuck around with that.

The secret histories should go back a long way. Way longer than the thousand years of fucking around that nWoD gave us, and considerably longer than the six thousand years of embarrassing young earth creationism that oWoD delivered. Ancient Babylonian vampires stirring in their tombs and shit.

The last time I tried to explain that to someone they swore blind that there was some kind of fluff text that they couldn't point their finger at but totally existed honest that implied there was any sort of lasting exhaustion involved in the Embrace beyond "spend a point of blood" as a half-assed gloss for why the Tremere aren't all Methuselahs by blood.

Interestingly, nWoD actually had such. Making a new vampire required you to be on site and cost a willpower. Therefore, mass producing vampires from victims so that your friends could drink their souls and become one generation worse than you was no longer a thing elders and near elders could do with abandon. Of course, as you noted, once you do Blood Potency instead of Generations, the problem doesn't even exist, so that particular fix isn't even needed. Indeed, it gets rid of the Caitiff backstory that a character rose as a vampire when their sire thought they had left them for dead without any particular compensation. It's a heavy handed fix for a problem the edition wasn't even going to have because they had preempted it other ways.

But that's nWoD for you. Every change is there based on a real issue real people had with oWoD. But all of the changes are overboard and there is no point at which the monkeys in charge asked themselves if perhaps they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater - which of course they were.

Ok - yes, this is ringing some old bells in my head. I've never done LARPs or paid much attention to the scene, but I recall back in '07 a big LARP player telling me how stupid WW was over this and how they were going to lose so many fans and how so many LARPers bought books etc.

Yeah, that was during the dark ages when White Wolf had basically cut ties with their oldest and most loyal fan clubs. What's odd is that being an "official" fanclub didn't really get you much. Most of the time it just meant that they'd talk to you and send promotional material to your clubhouse. Like being an Onyx Path kickstarter backer today.

Of course, when CCP finally caved and let the Mind's Eye Society be an "official" club, they didn't get anything for it at all except the right to claim they were official on their website. CCP didn't have any staff working in "White Wolf" at the time and was giving out nothing to the official groups.

Basically, White Wolf's line in the sand for official fan groups served no purpose but to give a giant middle finger to their own fans. It was like when WotC closed down Living City or canceled the contract for Dragon & Dungeon and then discontinued the magazines. Basically it just came off like a temper tantrum directed at their own fans.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Issues like the Generation mechanic are minor compared to the far broader issue of attempting to create a new One world of Darkness where the three main groups play together while appeasing hardcore fans who have decades of experience functioning in a universe where they explicitly don't, on a mechanical and fluff level.

In order to make the games work together you have to rework the core metaphysics of the various games to acknowledge each other's existence. Never mind Generations from Caine, is Caine even going to be the origin of Vampires anymore? That really doesn't work for the werewolves, who don't acknowledge Christian myths and consider Vampires ultimately a really specialized type of fomori, and it sure doesn't work for Mages, who have a different explanation for vampires across every faction that all basically boil down to 'WW doesn't allow us to build up legit understanding of these things because reasons.'

For my money WW's most stable metaphysical setup is the werewolf triat, and you can probably shoehorn most of Mage under that with a bit of effort, but you'll need a big compromise to appease the Vampire diehards - who are of course the most important fan block. However, there's simply no way to use Vampire's mythology to explain Werewolf or Mage, VtM is a much smaller, much more focused game.

Also, if the world is going to be integrated they have to deal with the Kindred of the East problem. Werewolf and Mage are games with global scope. Such a oWoD werewolf in Japan behaves differently than one in Wyoming, but it's still a werewolf and can be covered by the same mechanics. Vampires...not so much.

Kindred of the East (and the horrid mess of Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom) really, really needs to be detonated, and classic VtM Kindred should just be the only type of Vampire walking the world. Doing that, however, requires drastically changing the existing Vampire background history and geopolitics to account for clans in China, India and Africa and so on. Either that or there's simply no Vampires east of the Volga because reasons - which is stupid and destabilizing.

And the mechanical issues are at least as bad. Balancing Vampires and Werewolves is doable - it's like balancing fighters and barbarians versus thieves and bards. Balancing those against the mages means bringing fully optimized wizards into the mix. As currently constructed, making the monster types play together means hitting the Mages with the nerf bat hard - possible but I don't really know what you're left with if you do that.

Remaking the WoD in a good way means fighting the inertia of the existing WoD, but the LARP groups that they want are those who the most invested in that same inertia. I wouldn't bet against Frank's trainwreck prediction.

[Whipstitch]

Disaster is a good bet given that Werewolf is dumb as shit and there's pretty much no occasion where borrowing heavily from it is a good idea. Of all the oWoD lines it's the one most dedicated to playing completely insane cultists incapable of playing nice with others.

[Username17]

The Werewolf Triad is stable only in the sense that a 3 year old's drawing of a happy family doesn't change for as long as you leave it on the refrigerator. It's simplistic to the point of childishness. And it actually can't cover the Vampire game into it without groaning because there's no room for nuance and politics and factions when you're yelling "Wyrm Spawn!" at things.

Both Werewolf and Mage spent a lot of time in oWoD mansplaining all the other splats, but they did so in the most pedantic and insulting ways. Every "theory of everything" ever proposed in any sourcebook (way back to Mummy) ended up going with a Werewolf based theory or a Mage based theory. And all of them are shit, because what both of those theories have in common is a complete marginalization of Vampires, who are the flagship splat and the whole reason why there is any money to make books about any of the other factions at all.

Any attempt to work from the point of view of the big war in Werewolf or Mage is basically doomed to be a complete catastrofuck. Those big wars are, when you come down to it, actually pretty juvenile and dumb. If you're going to make One World of Darkness work, you need to have a coterie of one Mage, one Werewolf, and four Vampires of different clans, because that is what you are actually going to get. And that means that whatever Mage and Werewolf plotline you end up using, the Garou and Mages need to be able to work with diverse groups of Vampires. And that means that all thhis Suicide Bomber: The Reckoning shit has to fucking go.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Currently in the back end of a WoD/Exalted crossover campaign, the GM claims having to shoehorn in the Yozis and the Exalations made it easier to make all the WoD settings exist in the same place - and even then the Kuei-Jin got rewritten to be just a weird strain of vampires to the point that they have identifiable bloodlines of all the recognised clans and were directly hit by the Week of Nightmares when all their Not-Ravnos went crazy along with the actual Ravnos.

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".

I also wonder if a better writer than myself could actually come up with some text about how the cosmic insignificance of the condition of vampirism is rather trumped by the temporal power of actual vampires as a faction and (if we go with 'fancy fomori') the Wyrm is actually kind of scared of what it's unleashed given that vampires want the world to stick around as long as possible and act accordingly.

[Mechalich]

The point I was making is that there are huge issues trying to integrate the fluff to answer even the most basic issues of What do the terms Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage mean in a one World of Darkness.

Yes the Werewold Triad is dumb, but you could potentially use it to meld Werewolf and Mage into one game. You can't use it to meld Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage into one game. And there's nothing else in the oWoD you could use in its place.

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. Given that, I do not see any viable path to take the three games (never mind Wraith, Changeling and the rest) and meld them into one game with Vampire at the core.

I think Paradox is thoroughly trapped. Their best hope is probably trying to ignore all complex world-building and just try to make The vampire Diaries RPG, but insofar as that show 'works' it does so by being a teen soap and having an hot cast, the latter of which is hard to duplicate at a tabletop. Honestly I think it would actually be easier to make a good One World of Darkness TV Series than a good RPG.