WoD renaming, White Wolf returns

[Thomas Shey]

Who thinks ttrpgs are a hugely profitable sector, anyway? Most “publishers” are single hobbyists!

That's true but there are companies who are at least at the high-end cottage industry end, and those people have to pay attention to how well something is likely to move, because they can't treat it just like a hobby.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Witchcraft doesn't need some of those splats... The Full Unisystem games are fully interoperable. The ones I remember by name being Witchcraft, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, and Terra Primate. AFMB has a ton of splats.

Unless you're getting into the Buffy-adjacent games or Conspiracy X that's most of them. They had some other plans (a broad-band supers game for example) but they never happened.

(Note: Unisystem Lite works a little differently, but is closely related; it's convertible but not really directly compatible, and adds BTVS, Angel, Army of Darkness & Ghosts of Avalon...)

Should have read further.

In terms of setting, I tend to agree that Witchcraft and Mage are the same genre... but Mage seems to have a larger range of power and epicness... but I've not actually played/run WC, while I've run M:TA a few sessions. M:TA also had, in the editions I had/have, interoperability with VTM, WWTA, CTD, GTO, HTR, and Street Fighter... learn one, and the others are readily grasped.

Using just core WitchCraft that's true--but the moment anyone brings in Armageddon, it changes dramatically. Though not pushing the power, there's also a great degree more variety once you get into the Codices.

 

[aramis erak]

Unless you're getting into the Buffy-adjacent games or Conspiracy X that's most of them. They had some other plans (a broad-band supers game for example) but they never happened.

The preview/quickplay released for it. I wound up with it at one point.

The irony, despite their licenses ending, FOX lets them continue to sell PDF of BTVS, Angel, and AoD.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The preview/quickplay released for it. I wound up with it at one point.

The irony, despite their licenses ending, FOX lets them continue to sell PDF of BTVS, Angel, and AoD.

Yeah, that's pretty unusual.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The setting that includes incursions from outsiders that existed before the universe and Atlantis? And even more things that show up in Armageddon?

I'm afraid I just cant' see it. Witchcraft is plenty esoteric. Some of it may not be visible until the later books, but its there.

There's esotericism sure, but it's multiple orders of magnitude less that Mage: The Ascension, where reality itself is completely malleable, and the main adversary, the Technocracy, is itself inherently more wild and demented than anything in all of Witchcraft.

And yeah absolutely more than Armageddon - I'm not trying to be mean or disrespectful to WitchCraft/Armageddon, it's just a profoundly different take. If stuff "went loud" the way it does in Armageddon in Mage: The Ascension it would an absolutely insane battle of wills and beliefs where the universe and its laws constantly changed and totally bizarre beings and forces were involve, not some fairly straightforward if truly apocalyptic clash of pretty typical-for-TV/movies angels, demons and pagan gods - they're not even at "biblically correct angels" levels of weirdness unlike some contemporary RPGs of that era.

That's not a diss! The point is that it's a particular kind of more bounded fantasy that actually has a lot more in common with the kind of urban fantasy we commonly see on TV (i.e. Buffy, Supernatural, Lucifer, etc. etc. - I think Supernatural even has a period where they go into a future which is essentially post-armageddon or during armageddon, but it's 15 seasons and I could have hallucinated that lol), whereas Mage: The Ascension was about something more bizarre and unusual, about people and beings trying to alter the very rules of the universe, including ones we take for granted, in truly strange was that would be hard to even convey in a lot of mediums. The central clash between the Traditions and the Technocracy is itself a really weird one, and kind of a ballsy one to the put the players on the side of the Traditions, too.

(I'm not aware of Armageddon's splatbooks, maybe things got weirder there if it had those, but I think at that point we're pretty far from comparing WitchCraft and Mage: The Ascension.)

 

[Staffan]

To a point, I'm the same way. I'm more interested in a Trek Like than a novel science fiction setting. I was excited for 2d20 STA when it released. I've run a bunch (a couple campaign-years of almost weekly sessions) of STA, and I like it. I like how it makes it easier to get my players to think in terms of drama, and how it added nifty mechanics that other trek games would benefit from a similar bit. It does, however, have a couple big issues... ship combat being the big one.

Ship combat is often one of the big problems with sci-fi games. 1e Star Wars D6 is probably the only one that's done it fairly well, and they did that by focusing on fighter/light transport scale, and by centering things on one-on-one or one-on-many fights, not many-on-many. Though the Clashes system in Savage Worlds Science-Fiction Companion seems promising, but that also leans pretty heavily toward the narrative side.

 

[VelvetViolet]

That's not a diss! The point is that it's a particular kind of more bounded fantasy that actually has a lot more in common with the kind of urban fantasy we commonly see on TV (i.e. Buffy, Supernatural, Lucifer, etc. etc. - I think Supernatural even has a period where they go into a future which is essentially post-armageddon or during armageddon, but it's 15 seasons and I could have hallucinated that lol),

Exactly. That’s why I like it.

I could never get into Mage, even when they changed the origin of magic to Atlantis. Awakening introduced the Ascension War again and even crazier by making it a war to rewrite not only physics but also time. It was like a mix of Marvel comics, Doctor Who and Ascension. I couldn’t get into it.

But an rpg that replicates urban fantasy tv shows? That’s something I have wanted for decades but they always got cancelled. It’s so obnoxious.

That's true but there are companies who are at least at the high-end cottage industry end, and those people have to pay attention to how well something is likely to move, because they can't treat it just like a hobby.

Fine.

But I disagree with you otherwise on the basis that I believe art should be diverse, because artistic monopolies are bad. White Wolf being the only game on the market makes for a bland and homogeneous market. Can you imagine if we wrote books and movies that way? Is that a world you want to live in? I certainly don’t. Things are already bad enough with the current creativity crisis.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Exactly. That’s why I like it.

WitchCraft/Armageddon have a vastly more approachable and easy-to-comprehend setting and antagonists and central conflict than either Mage game, and I think one with inherently broader appeal. On paper it almost seems like they should have gone big, not WoD (even if WoD got there first).

Where WitchCraft/Armageddon fell down was the clunky-as-hell unisystem mechanics (sorry to those who like them, but they are) which didn't even really have anything to recommend them over other generic systems, and the frankly dubious visual design and art. The visual design is just bad, like, I'm sorry, it's actively not good. When the cover of WitchCraft is accidentally prefiguring/evoking the CoExist bumper sticker you know you're in trouble, and the heading font immediately confirms that. The art is not bad in the sense of low-skill - plenty of it is very well-executed or by talented artists - but it's fundamentally not anything that surprises or delights or really intrigues. And rather than going for a general audience, or a gothic audience even, the primary intended audience for an awful lot of the art seems to be "edgy teenage boys and men who have goatees and own a top hat". That's not zero crossover with WoD's audience, but it's a limited one, and I would argue it was, in the 1990s and 2000s, a smaller audience, and is even smaller today (certainly for RPGs). I am being a little unfair re: the art? Yes. But not that unfair (especially re: Armageddon, wherein horny-in-a-cringe-way art of angels and demons abounds). And this was not a good era to be not having "cool" art, either, because a lot of games did.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's esotericism sure, but it's multiple orders of magnitude less that Mage: The Ascension, where reality itself is completely malleable, and the main adversary, the Technocracy, is itself inherently more wild and demented than anything in all of Witchcraft.

I'm sorry, I really can't see the Technocracy as more wild than the followers of the Mad God. Heck, I don't even consider them more wild than the Nephandi and their offshoots in other lines.

And yeah absolutely more than Armageddon - I'm not trying to be mean or disrespectful to WitchCraft/Armageddon, it's just a profoundly different take. If stuff "went loud" the way it does in Armageddon in Mage: The Ascension it would an absolutely insane battle of wills and beliefs where the universe and its laws constantly changed and totally bizarre beings and forces were involve, not some fairly straightforward if truly apocalyptic clash of pretty typical-for-TV/movies angels, demons and pagan gods - they're not even at "biblically correct angels" levels of weirdness unlike some contemporary RPGs of that era.

What in the world makes you assume that isn't true in Armageddon? The setting where the Hosts of Heaven and Hell are all over the place, working together against the Mad God's forces? Seriously, this is coming across from where I sit as someone who really doesn't understand what's going on in the WC universe by the time Armageddon is rolling around. They're literally fighting against something ripping holes in the universe, and pretty much everybody knows it.

(I'm not aware of Armageddon's splatbooks, maybe things got weirder there if it had those, but I think at that point we're pretty far from comparing WitchCraft and Mage: The Ascension.)

Armageddon didn't have any splatbooks (at least from Eden); it didn't need it. Most of the weirdness had either come in during the corebook, or earlier on in the WitchCraft codices.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ship combat is often one of the big problems with sci-fi games. 1e Star Wars D6 is probably the only one that's done it fairly well, and they did that by focusing on fighter/light transport scale, and by centering things on one-on-one or one-on-many fights, not many-on-many. Though the Clashes system in Savage Worlds Science-Fiction Companion seems promising, but that also leans pretty heavily toward the narrative side.

Fragged Empire does it reasonably well, though as you say, they're very focused on one-on-one fights.