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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9275811" data-attributes="member: 4937">Experiences so different than my own always make me want to sit in on a game just to figure out what other people are doing and what they call play.CoC did a particularly good job of providing examples of play, which is one of the reasons the system survived and is still played.  That is to say, you probably had one core rule book playing CoC, but very few groups didn't also purchase the campaign and setting guides.  Still, while I grant you could play CoC for a long time with just the core rulebooks, it wasn't until 7e came out that I really felt just how much I was missing good additional rulebooks for CoC.  Like I don't know how long the game has needed the 'The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic' or the 'Pulp Cthulhu' book and a really great price/setting guide to the 1920s, 1930s, etc.  VtM represents I think a real edge case in that the original core book is so good and virtually everything else published by White Wolf so bad, that you probably were better off just playing with the original VtM book.  One of the interesting things about VtM though is that almost everyone having fun with it was very much not playing the game described by the VtM book, but their own take or spin on it.  Ok, wow do we ever have different tastes in games.  You're listing games I either had no interest in at all or else games which the first time I experienced them I pushed them away faster than Calvin pushes away a plate full of his mother's green mush.   OtE and Amber in particular push the definition of what constitutes rules for an RPG into territory that I am not at all comfortable with, as they move RPGs very firmly back into make believe play with all the baggage and problems that comes with that.  I haven't played OtE (though did you really play a lengthy game with just the original core book?) but Amber I have touched and yeah, it was less like playing an RPG than it was flashbacks to playing house or make believe or whatever on the playground as a kindergartener with the rules not only providing no help but actually reinforcing dysfunctional dynamics.  Or at best, it reminded me of attempts in high school to pass around a notebook and have each person add a page to the story, which is to say complete failure.</blockquote>

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