Ryujin
Legend
"Kindred: The Embraced" tried to ride that wave, in 1996, but failed miserably. It drew directly from the RPG.
Did the nerds win?
- Thread starter Kromanjon
- Start date
Stormonu
NeoGrognard
What caught my attention about Vampire was the chapters and chapters of lore before you got to mechanics. I really got the impression reading through it the designers had disdain for mechanics and only put mechanical rules into the book because it was expected, not because they wanted to. (BTW, I first encountered Vampire with the revised v2 book).
Ruin Explorer
Legend
The bolded bit isn't really true in anything but a simplistic way though.
It licenced the RPG, but it didn't follow it terribly closely, taking a bunch of weird liberties, but the main thing it got wrong was the tone and audience. It was all about a bunch of butch, dull cop/mobster men (some of whom happened to be vampires) in their 30s and 40s, rather than hot/weird/edgy vampire guys, and had a bizarrely Melrose Place-like vibe with the acting, directing, sets, and so on which vapourized any cool vibes the bits of the setting it did use would have - unsurprising given it was a Spelling production. It didn't resemble the tone of any of the VtM products or eras, and didn't appeal to either that audience, nor the Anne Rice audience, nor even the Forever Knight/Highlander/Soon-to-be-Buffy audiences.
It's a classic example of purchasing the rights to an IP and then totally failing to do anything which really benefited from you doing so. Sometimes which you might recall was bizarrely common from the mid '90s through to about the late '00s, at which point people started slowly working more towards actually leveraging the IPs they licenced.
Ryujin
Legend
Yes, pretty much what Spelling would do with anything, barring that he didn't stick his daughter in it.
... and how I felt about "Starship Troopers", just so I can belabour that point again
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Which is why burning it all down and starting over (and over) is so disatisfying. I hate reboots.
Shades of Eternity
Legend
The truth is the answer is both yes and no.
Until about the mid 90's, nerds were treated as pariahs.
The satanic panic was the equivelent of a witch hunt, but the target was as much nerds as witches.
Watch any show from the era and how even good nerds were treated: aka badly.
but the simple fact that nerds are a lot like mutants in x-men.
There are a lot of them and not all of them are good.
For example, the movie Revenge of the Nerds shows them as both being true victims of persacution and real life victimizers and unfortunately both are true.
the simple fact is that nerds became mainstream about the same time as the rise of the alt -right.
but paradoxically, it also sidelined a lot of people that would be classificated as outsiders further.
we are living in an era where dungeons and dragons is more popular then rock and roll.
Guys like Elon Musk are the personification of King Nerd and it's kinda terrifying what the consequences what could happen.
on the other hand, the old cycle applies. Pariah gets kicked out, they do their own thing, it becomes cool, other people show up and then throw out the pariah from something he/she/they started is also true.
I guess the answer is follows:
Nerd culture is mainstream and therefore won.
but a lot of nerds lost to get there and sometimes they lost their soul in the process.
Until about the mid 90's, nerds were treated as pariahs.
The satanic panic was the equivelent of a witch hunt, but the target was as much nerds as witches.
Watch any show from the era and how even good nerds were treated: aka badly.
but the simple fact that nerds are a lot like mutants in x-men.
There are a lot of them and not all of them are good.
For example, the movie Revenge of the Nerds shows them as both being true victims of persacution and real life victimizers and unfortunately both are true.
the simple fact is that nerds became mainstream about the same time as the rise of the alt -right.
but paradoxically, it also sidelined a lot of people that would be classificated as outsiders further.
we are living in an era where dungeons and dragons is more popular then rock and roll.
Guys like Elon Musk are the personification of King Nerd and it's kinda terrifying what the consequences what could happen.
on the other hand, the old cycle applies. Pariah gets kicked out, they do their own thing, it becomes cool, other people show up and then throw out the pariah from something he/she/they started is also true.
I guess the answer is follows:
Nerd culture is mainstream and therefore won.
but a lot of nerds lost to get there and sometimes they lost their soul in the process.
I think this is a very goofy opinion to have. People don't accidentally write a hundred pages of heavy crunch. If they had a "disdain for mechanics" or did not think the mechanics mattered, they would simply not have written them. Game designers do, in fact, design games.
I'd say Starship Troopers is very faithful to the book's themes, it's just Verhoeven identified that the themes were foul.... and how I felt about "Starship Troopers", just so I can belabour that point again
Man Ray? Or somewhere else?
What about the guy who wrote F.A.T.A.L.?
delericho
Legend
I found that one quite convenient - I have a huge number of the old VtM books, and then nothing from the Vampire line after that. Likewise, when Star Wars ditched the old EU, I stopped paying attention to anything that wasn't on-screen. Some nice savings there.
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