A different thread has me thinking about Vampire the Masquerade and the other World of Darkness games (this is…not the thread
@Manbearcat requested I make…). To be honest, I haven’t played those games since I was a teenager, and my memories are fuzzy, and therefore warm and hazy and perhaps sepia toned. I remember loving the writing, the setting, and the aesthetic. I think Mage was my favorite, though I remember trying to play it with its free form magic system being…not successful. As a 14 year old goth kid, I saw myself as oh-so-“mature,” and dnd wasn’t cool anymore. So these games were a whole world.
So fans of World of Darkness games: what do/did you enjoy about these games? The writing, the aesthetic, the setting, the system? Speaking of, is the system any good? I didn’t keep up with the later editions, having fallen out of ttrpgs at that point in my life. What edition would you recommend? If you were to use the setting with a different system, what would you choose?
I played a fair bit of Vampire and Werewolf, played a little Mage, and collected and read a lot of Mage, Wraith and Changeling. Even at the time, I recognized at least a half-dozen or so variations on what the games 'were' -- the games found in the fiction and theme and style of the published books; the games the rulebooks actually produced; the games the fandom (/authors) insisted it was; plus 2-3 main flavors of the games people ended up actually playing. Also, alongside all this was what I think was what kept me buying the books: -- the
potential that I thought could come out of the composite of those different forms of the game, the one I really wanted the games to be.
The game fiction was, IMO, imaginative and evocative. Whether it was good is an open question and I was 50/50 on it even then. I know a lot of people who find the world and the fiction and the factions (particularly of the 90s original editions) really engaging, and others who consider it someone's college writing assignment best left unseen by future eyes. However, I think there were definitely kernels of good ideas inside that middling execution. Vampires as secret organizations which value keeping their existence secret over all else; Wizards who fight over the nature of reality (and science works as it does only because they people who favor that kind of magic are winning); Fae and ghosts raging against the dying of the light (personal passion for ghosts, creativity in the modern world for faeries) -- these are all interesting ideas the deserve to be explored more thoroughly.
About the only thing I think was truly bad was the foreign exoticism, and there (sort of in its' defense) I think it was only a little worse than the rest of the culture at the time. Every non-Western society or non-Christian religion was an exotic place full of exciting and interesting and oh-so exotic things that are cool and unique and different and have I mentioned exotic? All of which fawningly written with what I will call '
a very enthusiastic undergrad on a deadline's understanding of said cultures/religions. All of which done lovingly, but often unintentionally insultingly. However, as said, they were not alone in this in the 90s. D&D was still putting out pajama ninja style supplements at the time, movies were still cringingly bad about this, and you (if you were the target audience) probably had a friend who was exploring Wicca or just took a course on ______ culture and was really enthusiastic (but not wholly knowledgeable) on the subject.
The game rules were... well, there's a reason why lots of people played the game as 'superheroes with fangs' (and a reason why places like the Forge sprang up for another pass at narrative-driven games*). The games presented themselves as 'about' the stories and personal journeys of the characters created, but then went to great lengths to make that really hard to do. Lots of rules for making these personal explorations challenging, and not many social rules at all. Plenty of (actually still fairly complex, and maybe not that enjoyable either) combat and direct physical contest rules, though. So it was easy to just turn the game into D&D/Cyberpunk, but with modern-day Vampires/Werewolves/etc. instead of elves, wizards, or street samurai.
Having Vampires do political posturing while having to manage complete secrecy and keep yourself supplied with blood would be a game-playtime timekeeping nightmare even if the entire group went about it in the same fashion (unlikely given individual power sets). Doing so when the assumptions are that you are all on the absolute bottom of the political heap, and when the party is made up of members of different sub-groups who kinda don't play nice together, and with a relatively lethal combat system where there can be a huge turnover. Changeling was even more dangerous, with walking by a boring place of business a life-threatening ordeal. While I loved the concept of Wraith, that one was perhaps the ur-example: everything was trying to kill you; what passed for a 'society' amongst ghostkind was an unfriendly, vaguely fascist bureaucracy that saw people as literally fungible resources; nearly everything you ran into probably had more use for you dead than alive (and nearly everything did aggravated damage); your own inner demons were trying to lead you into capital-O Oblivion (not to mention actual evil ghosts scouring the countryside trying to kill you into oblivion); but throughout that you were supposed to both hang onto the passions you had in life and resolve your personal hang-ups.
*super simplification.
I never really got into the old world of darkness games from the 90s. I always found the writing ridiculous and the ‘we’re role players, not roll players’ stuff to be tiresome. The only thing rolling was my eyes. There was even a sidebar in Dark Ages Mage called ‘ye olde twinkery’ that told the reader that WoD players aren’t stinky nerds like those dnd players, so they shouldn’t min max and kick ass. Instead they should explore Deepness and Sadness like the cool kids they are. Gave me a laugh.
On Condescension: this was a real issue. In the books, but also in the gaming community at the time. There were people that treated this as RPGs 'growing up' or the like. People are still grinding axes over this (and then over the Forgites afterwards). The only thing I will say about it is: this (posturing, and the fight over whose game/gameplay is cool, mature, or enlightened) is not new. When
Chainmail was introduced, there were people in the community ready to call it pedestrian for including a fantasy supplement. D&D was a frivolty compared to 'mature' war games. Gygax had some eye-rolling commentary about the right way to play his games (counter to the way people wanted to play them). Certainly by the time BBSes and Usenet groups got involved (and I think a lot of the White Wolf games cultural communication took place in this environment), anonymity let people become truly awful to each other when trying to declare one selves the in-group. This seems to be a universal quality in gaming (and fandoms in general), and White Wolf was perhaps a notable peek simply because of time and place (and maybe because it sought audience outside the traditional gaming community), but I'm not sure it was really all that much worse than any of the other proverbial pissing matches in gaming.
On edginess: There was a lot of 'I'm a tortured soul and no one really gets me,' vibe that one can make fun of, but honestly is a pretty universal feeling among the teens and young adults who were undoubtedly the primary target audience. There was also a lot of fishnet/razor blades/leather 'edginess' that can be laughed at, but also really made sense given to whom they were trying to market the game. It's the equivalent of sweaty barbarians next to chainmail bikinis and pajama ninjas with katanas and heavy metal cyber-bikers with futuristic uzis and a such and such other tropes that other games were using to capture their market (just for people that consider eyeliner and skinny black jeans to be cooler than massive muscles or shiny cars).
Summary: White Wolf games were an interesting experiment. There's some good, some bad, and a lot of potential locked away in the games (or at least the concepts of the games). I'd gladly play them again, but I'd probably not use the game systems included, and I'd definitely not be beholden to the official canon, letting an experienced ST cull and supplement the official world to curate an experience more resembling what part of me wants the game to be than what it is there on the pages.
