WoD renaming, White Wolf returns

[Thomas Shey]

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.

"Should be" is not a term I ever used. I just said there are practical reasons that works that way, same as there are reasons D&D is as dominant as it is. Personally, I don't find either the WoD or the WitchCraft systems and settings particularly satisfying. but that's got nothing to do with why the former is largely taking up most of the mindspace even now; it has to do with timing and just how that works in the RPG space.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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).

I'd make the same claim about some other games over D&D, but here we are.

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.

As someone who played in a WC campaign and ran an Armageddon one, it doesn't help that certain types end up easily dominating the play space. Carella may have thought he was designing them so there were tradeoffs, but that requires the GM to handle everything really carefully for anything but the magicians proper to pretty much matter more than anyone else. (Its really easy for Necromancers or psychics to come across anything from second-rate to nearly useless if they don't, for example; and the buy-in variation doesn't help enough to really matter).

 

[MGibster]

Now you guys are making me sad the very existence of Eden Studios is tenuous at best. They were really ahead of the curve with All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Now you guys are making me sad the very existence of Eden Studios is tenuous at best. They were really ahead of the curve with All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

Probably their best design, honestly; it didn't try and do more than it was capable of.

But at one point George realized on some level he was attempting things he didn't have the resources to do, and just dropped back to running his store and selling an occasional product. There were books that never saw the light of day in more than one line.

 

[MGibster]

But at one point George realized on some level he was attempting things he didn't have the resources to do, and just dropped back to running his store and selling an occasional product. There were books that never saw the light of day in more than one line.

I'm still waiting for Beyond Human.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm still waiting for Beyond Human.

At a more than usually educated guess, I expect you'll be waiting forever. I didn't think the last draft was ready for primetime and as far as I know no work has been done on it in--a decade?--now. Only ones who know are George and Thom.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm sorry, I really can't see the Technocracy as more wild than the followers of the Mad God.

The Mad God/Leviathan in Armageddon is pretty straightforward AFAICT, it's just a powerful force of destruction, a supernatural Genghis Khan but without the style or ideas, there's nothing to really think about or consider about it. It doesn't have a philosophical perspective or anything to say - it's similar to a particularly boring Nephandi. The Church of the Revelation has absolutely nothing going on conceptually, it's just a generic oppressor without any interesting weirdness. Also, re-reading Armageddon, wow setting-wise it is a very dated compared to contemporary and even earlier RPGs, it did not see the 21st century coming at all, not even slightly. It's really stuck in a sort of 1992-ish vision of the world, even though it didn't come out until 1997, and got revised in 2003. I think that probably factored in to its lack of success.

(Unfortunately it also has some really dodgy ideas about religion and culture outside the US which border on the racist, but that's separate and sadly fairly common for the 1990s.)

With the Technocracy you have 5 (or more) different and loosely linked philosophies that are trying to change reality to conform to them, that's tremendously complicated, all with their own unique takes, unique combatants (which don't just conform to fairly bog-standard demons/angels/pagan gods etc), unique ways of doing things and so on.

 

[MGibster]

At a more than usually educated guess, I expect you'll be waiting forever. I didn't think the last draft was ready for primetime and as far as I know no work has been done on it in--a decade?--now. Only ones who know are George and Thom.

I'm also waiting on Mechanoids Space from Palladium.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The Mad God/Leviathan in Armageddon is pretty straightforward AFAICT, it's just a powerful force of destruction, a supernatural Genghis Khan but without the style or ideas, there's nothing to really think about or consider about it. It doesn't have a philosophical perspective or anything to say - it's similar to a particularly boring Nephandi.

I just don't see it given all the emphasis on corruption and cosmic poisoning.

The Church of the Revelation has absolutely nothing going on conceptually, it's just a generic oppressor without any interesting weirdness. Also, re-reading Armageddon, wow setting-wise it is a very dated compared to contemporary and even earlier RPGs, it did not see the 21st century coming at all, not even slightly. It's really stuck in a sort of 1992-ish vision of the world, even though it didn't come out until 1997, and got revised in 2003. I think that probably factored in to its lack of success.

(Unfortunately it also has some really dodgy ideas about religion and culture outside the US which border on the racist, but that's separate and sadly fairly common for the 1990s.)

I will just point out that C.J. Carella neither was born in nor grew up in the U.S. I'm not sure which specific country he was from, but he's South American (note his full name is Carlos J. Martijena-Carella. That doesn't mean your assessment is wrong, but its a context you need to keep.

With the Technocracy you have 5 (or more) different and loosely linked philosophies that are trying to change reality to conform to them, that's tremendously complicated, all with their own unique takes, unique combatants (which don't just conform to fairly bog-standard demons/angels/pagan gods etc), unique ways of doing things and so on.

Yeah, but for the most part they're also pretty much each bog-standard over-the-top spy agencies in practice. The only thing really interesting about them is the fact some of them think they're the good guys. Detail doesn't intrinsically make anything more interesting.

(There's a problem with doing direct comparison because there simply is massively more material for the WoD, the equivalent on the WC line mostly never arrived (I know because I was editing them, and of the five we were working on, only one ever came out (two others were edited in part of whole). So there are interesting things buried in some of the Mage material, but its a certain degree of if you keep going long enough with people with any talent you're bound to get that.).

 

[Staffan]

Yeah, but for the most part they're also pretty much each bog-standard over-the-top spy agencies in practice. The only thing really interesting about them is the fact some of them think they're the good guys. Detail doesn't intrinsically make anything more interesting.

I'm pretty sure they all think that. A reality where magic works according to the whims of mages is far too dangerous for mortals, and solidifying the laws of reality means mortals can exploit them to build mundane technology that helps them.