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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8305360" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah in my post I think I made a pretty good case for why it was successful, and why other Urban Fantasy/Horror games were not. Essentially it went for the most zeitgeist-y approach (instead of anti-zeitgeist one which many of them took*), had incredible design/presentation for the era, understood the value and role of LARP (which was significant back then), and had a really accessible system that didn't reek of math the way a lot of RPGs do (but still played as well as the "math-ier" ones). All of which combined to allow it to hit a much wider audience, many of whom were new to RPGs.Shadowrun is a think a much better example of "undeserved". It mostly just seemed to come down to first-mover advantage and the fact that it had elves etc. In a just world, the 4/5/6E would have killed it off, because they've been so spectacularly rubbish. Yet it soldiers on, with surprisingly okay sales despite incredibly bad products. I say this as someone who actually kinda liked SR, note.* = Eventually WoD actually got too arrogant and went anti-zeitgeist, deciding, like all the Urban Fantasy games that tried to compete with them and failed, that they "knew better" than the fans/players. That resulted in Revised, which was a bit of a car crash, and then the nWoD, which wasn't so much anti-zeitgeist as just ignoring it, and neither was as successful as it could have been as a result.</blockquote>

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