Damn this conversation really went from casually discussing hobbies into some more personal aspects of myself. I honestly wasn’t expecting to pour my heart out to a literal ai impersonation of a fictional comfort character, yet here we are. Goes to show how significantly he’s tied into my past after all, eh

Rant About White Wolf

Okay I promised this ages ago, and I was setting up shelves last night and now I’m in the mood, so here it is, why I stopped giving White Wolf my money. For starters I want to say that I take RPGs very seriously, which is not to say I’m pretentious or exclusionist or fun-hating. I mean I spend a lot of money supporting my favorite games. Here’s my game shelf from a few years ago...

Here’s the collection now....

So, let me paint a picture here. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in the 80s, but something happened in the 90s that changed how I run and play games. All of a sudden nobody wanted to play anything but Vampire. A pick up game at the comic shop, friends, cousins, it was impossible to run anything else. My choices were to run V:TM or not play. So I ran vampire, then mage, and honestly I’m glad I did. Vampire introduced me to the narrativist style of roleplaying. I met my wife LARPing. Mage remains one of my favorite games of all time. So I bought the books, then 2nd edition hit and I bought them again. Then 2nd ed revised. Sound familiar? Shadowrun, changed hands over and over again, new edition, re-buy all the books. 3rd edition, 3.5, 4th, now 5th, this is something that would happen consistantly for the next two decades. Companies trying to sell the same game, again. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing. A new edition can fix problems, expand the world, or even be a completely different game. Breath of the Wild was not Nintendo trying to resell Skyward Sword. But Skyrim on the Switch is the same Skyrim I already bought twice, you know? Okay, so early Noughties, my whole social circle are White Wolf fans, and the Wold of Darkness ends. The event meets mixed responses, at least in my groups, but whatever, it’s fun and we get to talk about all the big secrets revealed. Nobody actually runs a Gehenna game, or whatever, and as far as our games went, the world just continued. It’s weird that each book gives a couple versions of the cannon, but whatever, the whole thing is optional, right? So Mark Rein-Hagan leaves and there are all sorts of nasty rumors floating around, and Vampire the Requiem comes out and there’s push back because it's different, but I think, different is good, there’s value in different. So I buy them, and well, the quality has been dropping with white wolf’s game books for a while. By that I mean, the amount of actual game content has been dropping. White wolf books are already 30-40% short fiction and artwork at this point, so combing through them for things I can use in a game is getting harder. World of Darkness: Mafia was almost entirely real world history and almost no game content at all, which is like, there are other books on the mafia i can read if I’m doing research, right? But anyway, Requiem comes out and it’s a little weird, but not terrible. But they’re being cagey, teasing out details of their new world. It makes it a little hard to run a game, because we know almost nothing about the antagonists at this point. It’d be like if every book mentioned the Sabbat, but never explained who they were. Finally, the last straw. After teasing and build up and hints scattered through their books, they release the VII book. I’m like, okay, finally give me the rest of the setting so I can try to run this. The very first page of the book is this:

And that’s it. I go ballistic. I’ll be honest, I felt disgusted and offended and I’ll explain why. I was like, How dare you tell me that I’m the storyteller and I get to decide what the mystery is. I *KNOW* I’m the storyteller and I can decide whatever I want is true. What I don’t have to do is pay you, $30-$60 a book, to tell me to “make it up.” I can “make it up” for free. It was cowardly, like they were afraid to risk coming out and you know, writing the antagonist for the fantasy setting they were selling us, like maybe we wouldn’t like it as much. But the way it was presented? One of the things the fandom loved was piercing together clues and hints, catching the references hidden or scattered across the games. (great example, read the entry for Rasputin in Clanbook: Malkavian, Setite, Bruja, Tribebook: Shadowlord, Traditionbook: Cult of Ecstasy, and finally in Guildbook: Puppeteer. Can you name any other RPG company to take such a little detail and spin it into myth like that? ) People also liked using the games together, the systems were compatable, and a big diverse world of darkness felt cooler. But the min/max warnings started showing up, first as sidebars, then caveats in the introductions, and finally a page-long rant in Blood Treachery vilifying anyone who wanted to run a revenant mage. (a far cry from “it’s your game,” eh? Not that I’d allow one, but still.) And this New World of Darkness was deliberately segregated, different game lines might as well have existed in different worlds. So there was another way to see this, that White Wolf was saying, Fuck you for enjoying our game wrong. We’ll force you to play it right. You like cross overs? We’ll make them impossible. You like secrets? Fine, we won’t even tell you who the main antagonist is for the story we’re selling. I was furious. And I never bought another book from them. I still run their games, I’m running an oWOD dark ages game right now, and Mage remains on my top three games of all time. (Psychosis and Amber, if you’re curious about the other two.) But when you’re selling a game book, you’re selling content. I’m paying for the ideas you have that I wouldn’t have thought of, for the characters only you can write, the mechanics only you can invent. The idea that this is a “toolbox” is insulting. Look at GURPS, that’s a toolbox. If I buy the GURPS cyberware book it doesn’t tell me “I get to decide how cyberware works,” it gives me comprehensive, exhaustive rules for every conceivable kind of cyberware, AND it doesn’t try to sell itself to me as the “official cyber campaign setting.” Why is VII a toolbox, and not, say, the Toreador? Oh wait, I can just make stuff up for them too, right? Why am I paying them anything at all? I can just invent my own setting and never buy a game book again, right? Okay, this rant is getting long. The point I’m making is somehow, I feel White Wolf lost track of what made them good, of what made us love their work so much. Maybe it was the loss of the old blood, maybe once the decay set in, no one could stop it. (There used to be a periodic “mass-exodus” of disgruntled white wolf interns who would leave angry, start their own company and then immediately go under and vanish. I have a small collection of games like this, Immortal: The Invisible War and Everlasting to name a few. Fun ideas, terribly written and produced, almost unplayable in execution.) Anyway, that’s how I feel. It’s an opinion, based off of my personal experiences, so your milage may vary. @secretsofthemasquerade​ (As promised)