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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9341407" data-attributes="member: 82106">Looking at it from here, this game was an utter disaster. So much so that the authors' response was &quot;well, system doesn't matter, just ignore all the rules!&quot; Of course Edwards panned it, what good is there to say of such a system? People may have had a great time playing V:tM, I'm sure many did, but it wasn't because of anything in the game itself. My take on it, from my experience of that time period, was that the RPG hobby was in kind of one of its periodic downturns. People were getting tired of D&amp;D, TSR seemed to have nothing much to offer, and the whole Vampire/Urban Fantasy wave was strong. It was just at the tail end of the whole Anne Rice craze, Vampires was a huge thing, and so WW hit at a great moment for them. Had they had the design chops to actually build a decent game, who knows what might have happened? Well, they didn't, the moment kind of faded, WotC bought TSR eventually and did something at least moderately interesting with it, enough to get people playing again, and OGL plus fairly mature DTP brought on a wave of newer games. I do think V:tM did some things that have had positive benefits ultimately. It certainly showed that the Hickmanesque elevation of meta-plot and DM-driven story has serious limits and flaws. It showed that system DOES actually matter, beyond any reasonable argument, and kind of kicked off the whole discussion that eventually lead to modern Narrativist play. Heck, I don't doubt that, with the right Storyteller and the right set of players, V:tM was fun. Lots of people had fun with Dragonlance too, up to a point. I think that branch of RPG design showed us that there was real power in RPGs, that the 'West Coast Crowd' was not wrong back in the early days, they just hadn't got an advanced enough theory to do what modern Narrativist games do today.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 9341407, member: 82106"] Looking at it from here, this game was an utter disaster. So much so that the authors' response was "well, system doesn't matter, just ignore all the rules!" Of course Edwards panned it, what good is there to say of such a system? People may have had a great time playing V:tM, I'm sure many did, but it wasn't because of anything in the game itself. My take on it, from my experience of that time period, was that the RPG hobby was in kind of one of its periodic downturns. People were getting tired of D&D, TSR seemed to have nothing much to offer, and the whole Vampire/Urban Fantasy wave was strong. It was just at the tail end of the whole Anne Rice craze, Vampires was a huge thing, and so WW hit at a great moment for them. Had they had the design chops to actually build a decent game, who knows what might have happened? Well, they didn't, the moment kind of faded, WotC bought TSR eventually and did something at least moderately interesting with it, enough to get people playing again, and OGL plus fairly mature DTP brought on a wave of newer games. I do think V:tM did some things that have had positive benefits ultimately. It certainly showed that the Hickmanesque elevation of meta-plot and DM-driven story has serious limits and flaws. It showed that system DOES actually matter, beyond any reasonable argument, and kind of kicked off the whole discussion that eventually lead to modern Narrativist play. Heck, I don't doubt that, with the right Storyteller and the right set of players, V:tM was fun. Lots of people had fun with Dragonlance too, up to a point. I think that branch of RPG design showed us that there was real power in RPGs, that the 'West Coast Crowd' was not wrong back in the early days, they just hadn't got an advanced enough theory to do what modern Narrativist games do today. [/QUOTE]

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