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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 9836116" data-attributes="member: 6686357">Agree to disagree. I think that’s a completely valid motivation. Paizo did it and to great success. I think grognards should do that instead of complaining and bullying. I never had an issue with WoD lore before its fans bullied me into hating it. If they had left to live in their walled garden, then I wouldn’t’ve cared.For your personal games, sure. Otherwise, it’s a form of cancelation that kills the community. All of my favorite games have been canceled, the communities dried up, and there’s no one to discuss it with. It’s disheartening.I’m gonna provide a personal example. I like the canceled 90s game Nephilim. It’s the only game that made me like lore because you play immortals who were personally involved in the lore. It has this elaborate structure of Major Arcana tribes that provides culture for the immortals. Each differs wildly from the next. They’re tied into the historical figure Akhenaton, making an otherwise forgettable historical footnote into a huge occult flashpoint. The game is unfinished so I had to frankenstein stuff together using unpublished material, conversions from the French, and my own interpolation of what I think Chaosium would’ve made had they been better prepared. That includes ditching the thetan angle in favor of making the Nephilim into basically Avatar: The Last Airbender. But I digress.Anyway, According to some leaks going around, the upcoming second edition is allegedly gonna remove all that in favor of a WitchCraft-esque covenant setup. Among many other extreme changes, like tweaking the thetan angle so they steal bodies from unborn babies. At that point it sounds like a completely different game devoid of what drew me to the original. I have no reason to interact with whatever new fans are brought in because we don’t like any of the same things. If I tell them “hey I like this completely different thing I made with the same name, are you interested in talking about it?” then at best I’m gonna get weird looks.I’m at the point where I don’t like ttrpgs anymore. I don’t share any interests with the people who make or play ttrpgs anymore. I’m only here because I liked some now forgotten ttrpgs in the past and feel nostalgic about it. Actually no, I do still occasionally find new games to like such as Night’s Black Agents or StokerVerse, but it’s just not the same. They don’t scratch the itches I want scratched. It’s so frustrating.Yeah. It becomes a straitjacket that strangles creativity after a while. It’s never relevant to the PCs, but just an excuse for the writers to stroke their own egos. I don’t understand why the fans even like it because it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. If I’m playing a guy who became a vampire five minutes ago, then what should I care that some woman dumped her boyfriend 80,000 years ago? This is why I preferred the loose modular player-focused Vampire: The Requiem continuity over the Vampire: The Masquerade continuity. That said, Requiem did eventually suffer from its own problems because the writers couldn’t seem to decide what they wanted to do with it and ended up running up against various limitations. Bloodlines like Kallisti, Morotrophians and Children of Judas made more sense as emotional vampires instead of being shoehorned into bloodsuckers, they could’ve stood to add more covenants a la WitchCraft, I think they could’ve stood to add some immortal intrigues that spanned time periods, and the clan and bloodline bloat really showed that they needed to overhaul the systems handling that (I’m now critical of the whole concept of clans as a result). I also hate those stupid morality meters and I will die on that hill. Not to mention that I don’t like grimdark anymore after outgrowing my teen angst phase and being kicked around like a soccer ball by life. Ultimately I decided that I preferred WitchCraft or Everlasting instead (among other things you can play crime-fighting angels a la Touched by an Angel), but I only wish those got the same attention and number of supplements.I think a lot of that vitriol would go away if copyright law didn’t prevent fans from forking their own version whenever the copyright holder decided to do another reboot. I think grognards should be allowed to fork their own versions, if only to maintain peace of mind. Like how Paizo made their own D&D clone. It worked out for them.Like, the root reason I hate WoD is because I was bullied by its fans for liking CoD. They bullied me because they felt entitled and betrayed. But they never bullied me for liking WitchCraft because they don’t feel betrayed by that, so I don’t have the same trauma response.I think publishers need to toss the idea of canon in the trash and adopt a multiverse model that satisfies everyone. D&D already does this. Fans can publish their own campaign settings whenever they want and build their own communities, like Paizo did. We need more Paizos.I never understood the appeal. These are supposed to be games that you play, not passive media that you passively watch like books or movies, not religions you must obey or be punished. If the information isn’t relevant to PCs and will never come up in play, then it’s just irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction. This doesn’t belong in a game, it belongs in a comic book. Those publishers should leave the ttrpg hobby and go into comic books, where they belong. Open up market space for new publishers to write actually player-focused content. Yeah. I don’t like it either. I think from a design perspective you should either have 3-5 clans expressing excessively broad archetypes a la Vampire: The Requiem (ignoring bloodline prestige classes here, as well the additional clans added in supplements), ditch the concept entirely like WitchCraft does, or have hundreds like The Everlasting: Book of the Unliving does. I mean, really, what is the purpose of having clans to begin with? I’ve grown weary of the concept because in practice they end up being these weird bioessentialist high school cliques that make fantasy race bioessentialism look tame by comparison. The writers squashed together ancestry, race, culture, class, personality, politics, etc. into these ugly frankenstein mishmashes that I can’t take seriously anymore. That’s one of the reasons why I prefer Nephilim or WitchCraft instead. Instead of your PC’s personality being determined by what vampire turned him, he chooses a secret society to join based on shared interests and goals… like how people behave more or less in real life, but with magic added.I think it works for antagonists in a vampire hunting game, where they’re just cookie-cutter monsters that don’t have three-dimensional personalities, like Captain Kronos or the Foundling series of urban fantasy books. It falls apart when you try to explore them as if they were actual people.It also unfortunately betrays some really gross bioessentialist biases on the part of fans. I’ve listened to hairsplitting discussions about how “you should play your character this way because of their clan” and it just sounds really gross. Imagine if they were talking about a person from a real ethnic group to see what I mean.</blockquote>

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