Perhaps we could return to something resembling substantive topical discussion?
I'm no deep expert on V:tM, we avoided it like the plague back in the day, but it seems like the sort of game that it would work for is basically 'GM Story Hour', lol. Sure, some of those are likely pretty fun, I have had a couple GMs who were actually pretty good at telling a story. I never was, so always avoided that sort of thing.
That may be true, and at that point I'm not familiar enough, especially 30 years later, to say. Though I would point out that the meta-plot and all the setting elements that go with it, is so central to their idea of the play of the game that saying the core rules don't say X, especially after they told everyone to basically ignore those rules, says a lot about how it was played. It was a performative sort of game, as WW represented it, and the performance was meant to correspond with the meta-plot and setting, not the rules!It at least wasn't more "GM Story Hour" than most trad games. Some people may have run it that way because WW tended to present metaplot so hard, but there was nothing in the system that especially rewarded that more than most trad games.
You don't think there are mutually exclusive priorities?There are no cursed problems, just unimaginative (and often stubborn) design.
No, they don't? There's nothing about tacticality that fundamentally requires it being slow. It's a difficult problem in tabletop space (although, no, it's not particularly difficult either, it's just TTRPGs consistently find the slowest solutions for some reason), but certainly not a cursed one.Take tactical combat vs quick combat. On a surface level, these appear contradictory, but that isn't actually true and they can be reconciled.
Can you write out an example or two to illustrate what you mean? I’m interested specifically in how the attempt at organic mechanics fails.For instance, as someone who has done a lot of purist-for-system RPGing, I think there is a tension that is very hard to reconcile between the desire for the mechanics to reveal, emergently/organically, the fiction and the desire to have interesting fiction.