The Gaming Den

Frank Trollman wrote:I genuinely don't know what they expect to accomplish by posting a bunch of insults at various parts of the fanbase without having any products released or even on the horizon.

I seem to remember player and storyteller advice in their books being really derisive of D&D players (and even their own fan base.) I think that superiority has been a big part of WW's marketing and brand identity. That was in the 90's though, when AD&D was eating their dust.

FrankTrollman wrote:As far as I can tell we are not getting a new edition for the tabletop. The promise of a new metaplot and the promise of a new tabletop edition seem to be complete vaporware. All we have so far is some videos promising that they are the true Edgelords and also that people who play D&D are a bunch of uncool nerds. I genuinely don't know what they expect to accomplish by posting a bunch of insults at various parts of the fanbase without having any products released or even on the horizon.

Right now it seems like NuWhiteWolf is just a clique of Scandinavian LARPers who are using their ownership of the White Wolf IP to lord it over other groups of LARPers on the internet. Like seriously, that's it. They've spent more than a year and a half swinging their dicks around about how they own the White Wolf IP and you don't and that is it. It's fucking mind boggling.

-Username17

That's why i put the smile in )
Wasn't new edition supposed to be presented at Gencon this year? I don't think we'll ever see it, even less hope that it turn out any good

Also, I've read the new edition of MET for werewolf that moved metaplot further and it's.... not good.

Smirnoffico wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:As far as I can tell we are not getting a new edition for the tabletop. The promise of a new metaplot and the promise of a new tabletop edition seem to be complete vaporware. All we have so far is some videos promising that they are the true Edgelords and also that people who play D&D are a bunch of uncool nerds. I genuinely don't know what they expect to accomplish by posting a bunch of insults at various parts of the fanbase without having any products released or even on the horizon.

Right now it seems like NuWhiteWolf is just a clique of Scandinavian LARPers who are using their ownership of the White Wolf IP to lord it over other groups of LARPers on the internet. Like seriously, that's it. They've spent more than a year and a half swinging their dicks around about how they own the White Wolf IP and you don't and that is it. It's fucking mind boggling.

-Username17

That's why i put the smile in )
Wasn't new edition supposed to be presented at Gencon this year? I don't think we'll ever see it, even less hope that it turn out any good

Also, I've read the new edition of MET for werewolf that moved metaplot further and it's.... not good.

For MET or for their super real Scandinavian one-true-Scotsman only valid way to Larp? With full grapples, screaming, sexism and racism included.
https://blog.white-wolf.com/2016/07/17/ ... he-shadow/

The other blogs are worth scrolling through for their mindset, and for already issuing an apologia for shitmuffin, and for claiming they've since put him on a leash.

As for the game itself, yeah, surprisingly 2016 turned out to be super unrealistic for turn around time. I suspect financial stakeholders also stepped on them and informed them in no uncertain terms that it was a business venture for making money, not just acting out rape fantasies in 'illegal clubs'. They now claim 2018.

I just want to play Highlander but with fangs but nooooo...

I want a vampire vigilante...

Anyways, where are these videos?

I think he's talking about the announcement video, or the anniversary video. Those might or might not be separate from the time they wanked hard about their identity as the one true source for dark horror or some shit, and how they would do a metaplot but it wouldn't fuck things up by incorporating all sorts of real world problems that will be forcibly inserted into your vampire porn escapism. They seem to actually believe this as well. Because white wolf and (for example) racism has always gone super well, now they're going to do it for serious.

They're on some of the several sites you have to flip through to find dried turds of information. Some of the sites are under Paradox as the owning body (the corporate site, basically), another is white-wolf.com.

They released a teaser for a documentary about how cool and transgressive they are. You can watch it here. Apparently in the 70s and 80s there was no Traveler, Champions, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, or GURPS. And then World of Darkness came and changed everything and definitely wasn't basically the same thing as Nightlife but with slightly higher production values.

The arrogance and tone-deafness is pretty stunning. For fuck's sake they are claiming to have influenced Blade. Blade's first solo-comic appearance was in 1974. The Dotmeister was ten years old when Blade was starring in Vampire Tales #8. I'm not entirely sure what the point of releasing a "documentary" that is just a series of interviews with old and new White Wolf employees while they are masturbating and claiming to have invented sliced bread and soap. It seems like a demo reel for investors rather than a real thing.

Voss wrote:The other blogs are worth scrolling through for their mindset, and for already issuing an apologia for shitmuffin, and for claiming they've since put him on a leash.

That was weird as hell. He's a contract writer, he doesn't own or speak for the company. They didn't have to weigh in on his controversies at all. All they had to say was that he's a contract writer and they like some of his writing and contracted him to do it, and that whatever he does or doesn't do the rest of the time is none of their business and they don't care. By claiming that they've actually vetted him, they take ownership the next time he sock puppets or cyber stalks people. And there will be a next time, because fucking obviously.

-Username17

Apparently ( I only got a summary on a random link I followed) he pretty immediately brewed up a shitsorm on their own forums after their blog post about him, and rather than handle it, they swooped in and deleted the thread and tried to bury it. That got called out, and they apparently decided to go with a public contrition pose.

It sounds exactly like what you would expect to happen, but apparently they didn't expect it to happen to them while they're trying to convince people that they're the real standard bearers of the night. Except it's shitmuffin, so he immediately did.

Wait, new White Wolf has a forum? Where?

Ah. My mistake. I figured that 'community' button on their website actually did something. I hadn't clicked it because there's no fucking way I'm exposing myself to the rambling WW fanatics.

So everything I said took place somewhere else that they felt obligated to apologize for.

Wait, White Wolf has enough life left in it to support its very own internet drama? I'm not one of the tens of people in the know on this. Can somebody explain what I missed?

Voss wrote:For MET or for their super real Scandinavian one-true-Scotsman only valid way to Larp?

Missed opportunity to torque off both the Scots and the Norwegians with the phrase "One True Scandinavian".

FrankTrollman wrote:All they had to say was that he's a contract writer and they like some of his writing and contracted him to do it, and that whatever he does or doesn't do the rest of the time is none of their business and they don't care. By claiming that they've actually vetted him, they take ownership the next time he sock puppets or cyber stalks people. And there will be a next time, because fucking obviously.

As they've demonstrated, the people who bought White Wolf have no idea how companies work. If they had the wherewithal to hire a business consultant to run decisions past and swat them with a rolled up newspaper before they did shit like this, we might have an actual product by now.

FrankTrollman wrote: That was weird as hell. He's a contract writer, he doesn't own or speak for the company. They didn't have to weigh in on his controversies at all. All they had to say was that he's a contract writer and they like some of his writing and contracted him to do it, and that whatever he does or doesn't do the rest of the time is none of their business and they don't care.

I'm not sure that actually works in the twitter era with its instant controversies.

DSMatticus wrote:Wait, White Wolf has enough life left in it to support its very own internet drama? I'm not one of the tens of people in the know on this. Can somebody explain what I missed?

Here, this is the summary I found.
https://kaptainvon.com/2017/02/18/meta- ... hite-wolf/

The 'drama' is a fair bit down. It wasn't forums, but the VtM facebook page. Mea culpa.


'tens' seems the right way of thinking about it. Digging up any information at all about what they're doing with the games was ridiculously hard given that they have a website and have a schedule where they are showing up in person at events (in theory at least) this year. As in seriously last week they claim they had people that could be talked to at GDC in San Fran, and at DICE in Vegas the week before that.

But fuck knows if they actually did, and there certainly doesn't seem to be product to talk about.

WW website wrote:MEET US HERE

Meet the executives and core creatives of White Wolf at the following events:

2017

January 16-17th. Pocket Gamer, London.
February 21-23rd. DICE, Las Vegas.
February 23-26th. Knutepunkt, Norway.
February 27th - March 3rd. GDC, San Francisco.
May 11-14th. World of Darkness: Berlin.
June 13-15th. E3, Los Angeles.
August 17-20th. GenCon, Indianapolis.
August 26-28th. GamesCom, Cologne.
If you want to meet up with us in any of these events, contact us on info@white-wolf.com. More events will be added soon.

That sounds less like they have a booth you can go visit and pester them, and more like they're ATTENDING the con and if you email them, they'll hook up with you at the food court or something.

Zaranthan wrote:That sounds less like they have a booth you can go visit and pester them, and more like they're ATTENDING the con and if you email them, they'll hook up with you at the food court or something.

Eh. It could be that, I suppose. But I think they'd actually want to establish themselves as legitimate and have a booth and shit to talk about, however. Even if it is only the shitty documentary they tweet about, or the fanfic app.

Plus with the ego on these fuckers, coping with merely existing in the crowd of plebs seems unlikely.

FrankTrollman wrote: And as far as I know, right now it only has two pieces of fanfic in it, and one of them is co-written by shitmuffin.

-Username17

When they announced that the first piece of "We're back!" from White Wolf was "interactive fiction", and that the vampire one was actually called "We Eat Blood", my eyes rolled so hard they did a barrel roll.

Knowing now that shitmuffin was at least partially responsible for that piece of crap explains so much.

Who is shitmuffin again?

Smirnoffico wrote:Who is shitmuffin again?

To post his name is to summon him.

Smirnoffico wrote:Who is shitmuffin again?

We can't actually name him, because he has google alerts on his name and then comes in here and spams the board with really bad arguments. Seriously, it's really bad.

-Username17

I'm moderately proud of some of my creative achievements (keeping things in perspective of course, some people here have had works published and fucking Tim Allen once had the best-selling book, movie and TV series in the same year), but I think my greatest accomplishment to date has been coining that name for him.

Didn't someone have his name in their sig for a while so he'd turn the alerts off or get swamped? What happened to that?

Did some digging. How much I have missed!
And... wow, some people do have boring lifes if they need all this drama to keep them going

Voss wrote:They do blather a bit about their super-transgressive full contact scandinavian LARPs

I did find this:
http://www.white-wolf.com/news/

apparently, 5th edition vampire the book is a 2018 operation. But mostly "As our strategy is all about delivering World of Darkness in different medias, we are working hard to develop our plan of having several video games released in the years to come. Games of different styles and by different developers and publishers."

So it sounds like someone is going to jerk off in a sock and publish it, but mostly it's a computer game IP now, with random hopes for TV shows and movies. And a license to be super-creepy at LARPs

That's pretty reasonable, all things being equal. Vampire was a viable multimedia IP and did have a prime time TV show on Fox. This is pretty much better than every RPG brand that isn't D&D. And people are still playing and making mods Vampire:The Masquarade: Bloodlines today, and that's pretty good, too.

Honestly, its a good IP, which you can do a lot with. It's not a great IP, because it doesn't have any iconic characters, but it's good enough to leverage a teen drama on the CW out of through nostalgia alone.

It had a prime time tv show on fox in the aftermath of Buffy* that failed miserably, being too confusing for the general audience and too hand wavy for the True Fans.

*with a number of cast members that were monsters of the week or short arc adversaries on Buffy.

The IP isn't good for a general audience, because it's just now+weird ass terminology that means nothing or something real that is entirely different (see Antediluvian, Brujah and Jyhad). It can work for computer games, because a larger chunk of the audience there is looking for clan names, wacky power terms, and lexicon terms to nerd out to. With the TV show (and possible future TV shows and films), people hear a litany of gibberish nonsense and tune out- even though they toned it down quite a lot for the show. If you strip all that out, you just have a fairly terrible generic vampire show.