Then you’d better start providing quotes, because you are talking absolute garbage as far as I can see. You don’t speak for the majority of gamers playing Vampire, for sure.
What you are doing is revising history to make your own narrative. It is not factual, and no I don’t agree with you, and I doubt Justin Achilli would either. The derogatory phrases, as you insist, of ‘superheroes with fangs’ or ‘trenchcoats and katanas’ were around way before Achilli - which you can find in White Wolf magazines as much as anywhere else.
If you played the game in this manner, you were seen as playing the game as a parody of its intent - and no, the majority of gamers did not try to play it that way. If you did, then I can see why any utterances from Achilli would have upset you - or indeed any developer worth his/her salt. It is simply not what any of the creators of any edition of Vampire intended - merely a hiccup in the looseness of the game’s mechanical design that anybody could interpret the game as ’superheroes with fangs’ if they chose to. Regardless, the Revised and V20 versions of the game still encouraged an open inclusivity for all types of games - and were more open than previous editions, explicitly and practically in terms of support.
However, if your accusation against his stewardship of the game was that he ‘purified’ it from playing the game from playing it like ‘superheroes with fangs’ or ‘trenchcoats and katanas’, then you’d be disappointed as I am that some people were shocked to find that V5 was not built around the idea either - and its mechanics are much more clear to the intent. Either way, I don’t think this game is aimed at you. As such, I doubt Achilli or anybody else should heed your advice about how it should move forward.
You're continuing to support my point after initially contradicting me, which is kind of amazing, I have to say. You keep trying to have your cake with "Achilli didn't do it!" and yet eat it with "Achilli was totally right to do it!". I dunno man, you didn't add anything to your previous post, and you demand "quotes" from a time you know perfectly well is just gone from the internet, and I'm not even sure what quotes you want, or from who.
As for "a parody of intent", that sounds a lot like I was right about you being confused re: the RPG I mentioned, and you're backpedaling, because if you'd meant that, you wouldn't have said "literally" (unless you're one of those people who uses literally to mean "metaphorically").
V5 I haven't played or bought but a lot of people seem to think it repeats the same mistakes as Revised, whilst making a whole bunch of new mistakes to boot.
This whole thing where you want it both ways though is amazing. You're claiming Revised was inclusive, but also claiming that "any developer worth their salt" should have been angry about "superheroes with fangs". As for "I don't think this game is aimed at you", that's amazing after you claiming it was "open inclusive", because you're literally saying it's exclusionary by saying that. You're just contradicting yourself directly.
And the rules absolutely supported, even encouraged "superheroes with fangs" or "katanas and trenchcoats". Humanity basically meant that acting like Nick Knight or other vampire quasi-superheroes/goody-two-shoes was absolutely the way to go - and the combat and ability rules very much made you a superhero.
This hysterical stuff where you try and argue that the Sabbat are some latter-day addition is absolutely amazing too. Dude, they're from 1993 at latest. When did Vampire 1st come out? 1991. So what, you think "TRU VAMPIRE!" is like a two-year period in the early 1990s? Come on. You're not allowed to talk about "moving goalposts" when your idea of what VtM is, is limited to a two-year period. Maybe that's not what you meant, but that claim, wow.
As for claims re: "not aimed at that audience", that's a ridiculous approach, because that's not only the audience who made it successful, but it's an audience that WW pandered to. Even in Revised, just not initially. The peak of success, financially, for WW, was the 2E era for their various games, and they pumped out huge numbers of splatbooks, many of them very mechanics-heavy and with a ton of combat stuff - including making katanas particularly good weapons, IIRC. But that pandering alone hard-disproves the notion of "not aimed at that audience". Achilli was essentially being juvenile, like one of those musicians who decides the mass appeal of his music sucks, so he's going to tell most of his audience that they suck. And it clearly worked - Revised was a lot less financially successful and less broadly popular than previous editions (I don't think was the only or even dominant factor, to be honest). But again the pandering disproves the claims re: not aimed at. This is a company who brought out the Street Fighter RPG for goodness sake - they nearly convinced Capcom to created a WtA-based Street Fighter/Vampire Saviour (i.e. Darkstalkers)-style beat 'em up at one point in the 1990s.
Also can I just say, from an entirely personal note, how extremely unpleasant it is that you're basically telling me I need to not like VtM, when my brother and I were fascinated by it from 1991, and I still remember the shock and amazement when he threw the copy he'd just bought onto my bed, and I started reading it (I was getting up at like 1pm, to be fair it was a Saturday), and we basically bought everything that came out for 2E (and a lot for 1E), and played it a ton (in a way that was both personal horror and superheroes-with-fangs, because they're not incompatible, whatever Achilli thought in like 1998). We even pre-ordered two (2!) copies of Revised Special Edition, before Achilli made his various comments. I still have one unopened on my shelf (shrink-wrap still on!) because we really didn't enjoy the changes. And I know I wasn't the only one, because I was at university, and most of the people at the RPG club (which wasn't small, 30+ people turning up a lot of the time, not always the same people) ran WoD games (I mean, it was 1998 so...) and when Revised came out, a lot of people were unhappy or unimpressed.
But honestly, as I've said a few times, V20 makes this a moot point. I've got a copy now, and it's basically 2E updated, without the Revised lore and style changes for the most part. So Achilli is forgiven.
