White Wolf viciously attacks everyone who roleplays for fun

[Navar]

Nisarg = Troll

Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll, Troll.

Everyone Sing along.

 

[Rel]

We've got an important announcement people. Please listen up:

Do Not Drink the Purple Kool-Aid!

That is all.

 

[eyebeams]

While I agree the statement is drivel - it's pure marketing crap - I think you're going way overboard with this.

Part of the problem, of course, is that this section isn't written for internet scenesters with a decade of gaming under their belt. WoD will, in all likelihood, usually be the second RPG anybody picks up.

Roll-playing/role-playing is an intentional cliche. Storytelling sections are not normally written for very experienced gamers. My own work on Mage and DA: Fae writing this section has always started out with acccessible language. I've often had the luxury of writing this sort of thing for a more established audience so that I could just jump past the initial introduction to what It Is About and head right for more interesting permutations, but when you're dealing with someone who might be taking this as their second (or first!) RPG, you are going to be more cliched and more familiar.

Note that I'm not drawing this from conjecture, but actual devvelopment notes. Bill Bridges once remarked to me that ST/GM sections are normally for folks in the "middle" of gaming experience: folks who don't need a ground-up explanation, but who aren't experienced enough to develop a lot of this stuff organically. In the case of WoD, we're probably talking about something more fundamental than what went in the Mage Storytellers Handbook (what Bill was talking about when he said this).

Maybe 95%+ of the readership of WoD have never heard of Enworld, RPG.net or any other online gaming community. The set of gamers who have heard that cliche far outnumbers the set of gamers who've had an ironic encounter with it. Hell, I heard it last week from a D&D player I supervise at work. There wasn't an iota of sarcasm in his voice.

WoD does have a different emphasis than games with a tactical orientation. Communicating that clearly is more of a priority than pleasing the 5% who are jaded on particular turns of phrase.

Of course, this section not only says that the aim of story-orineted games is something that gets fulfilled in *all* games, given enough time (amazing what you loose with ". . .") but it concludes by destabilizing the implied premise entirely, concluding that fun is the goal and whatever gets people there is cool. I don't know how someone could miss that, but they'd have to be trying really, really hard to.

 

[billd91]

That there would be white-wolf apologists and agents in here to try to defame me is not suprising, its just standard operating procedure.
That there would also be some D20 players saying "who cares", expressing apathy, is not a huge surprise either.

What is interesting is that no one has been able to refute what I have posted: it is there, in the book, marked in stone. How else can it possibly be interpreted?

Even the "official white wolf guy" who came on here to try to do damage control has, as his very best argument, the rather weak statement that the people who wrote it somehow didn't really mean it, implying that they were forced to write it(?).

When they say "don't get lost in the Ivory tower", how else is it to be interpreted than to be saying "White Wolf=ivory tower, all other games= gutter"?
If they say "please don't deride those who roleplay for fun, or who don't aim higher", what they are implicity stating is that roleplaying for fun is inferior to what WW players are supposed to do (which is obviously NOT roleplay for fun), and that the fun-rpers are inherently at a lower level.
When they say that WW players should "encourage these players to stretch their boundaries" what they are really saying is that people who don't play WW games are inherently ignorant savages who need to be enlightened to the one true way of roleplaying, which is to say, pretentiousness over fun (because remember, fun is NOT what WW players are RPing for).
They've said all this.. this isn't just hateful anti-WW propaganda, this is THEIR OWN WORDS.

Heh, paranoid rambling aside, I don't think you are getting it. They aren't necessarily saying that White Wolf=Ivory Tower or residing in said tower is a good thing. The ivory tower is a metaphor invoked to refer to intellectualism, or I suppose pretention, residing in splendid isolation away from reality. If you think WW is equating themselves with that ivory tower in a good sense, then I think you lack understanding of that metaphor.

The only really hateful propaganda I've seen in this thread has been yours directed against WW. If this is the jury here, the prosecution has really (over)blown the case

 

[Jim Hague]

Part of the problem, of course, is that this section isn't written for internet scenesters with a decade of gaming under their belt. WoD will, in all likelihood, usually be the second RPG anybody picks up.

Roll-playing/role-playing is an intentional cliche. Storytelling sections are not normally written for very experienced gamers. My own work on Mage and DA: Fae writing this section has always started out with acccessible language. I've often had the luxury of writing this sort of thing for a more established audience so that I could just jump past the initial introduction to what It Is About and head right for more interesting permutations, but when you're dealing with someone who might be taking this as their second (or first!) RPG, you are going to be more cliched and more familiar.

Note that I'm not drawing this from conjecture, but actual devvelopment notes. Bill Bridges once remarked to me that ST/GM sections are normally for folks in the "middle" of gaming experience: folks who don't need a ground-up explanation, but who aren't experienced enough to develop a lot of this stuff organically. In the case of WoD, we're probably talking about something more fundamental than what went in the Mage Storytellers Handbook (what Bill was talking about when he said this).

Maybe 95%+ of the readership of WoD have never heard of Enworld, RPG.net or any other online gaming community. The set of gamers who have heard that cliche far outnumbers the set of gamers who've had an ironic encounter with it. Hell, I heard it last week from a D&D player I supervise at work. There wasn't an iota of sarcasm in his voice.

WoD does have a different emphasis than games with a tactical orientation. Communicating that clearly is more of a priority than pleasing the 5% who are jaded on particular turns of phrase.

Of course, this section not only says that the aim of story-orineted games is something that gets fulfilled in *all* games, given enough time (amazing what you loose with ". . .") but it concludes by destabilizing the implied premise entirely, concluding that fun is the goal and whatever gets people there is cool. I don't know how someone could miss that, but they'd have to be trying really, really hard to.

See, this I can agree with, except for the 'different emphasis' bit - the game is what you make of it. Can we say WoD: Combat, or Exalted? WW games are as much into kicking ass any any out there...but that's ok, not that you need a part-time freelancer like me to tell anyone that; it's implicit. You can run a combat-heavy WoD game (Exalted, Werewolf, a Mage game with a War Chantry), or run a political-intrigue based D&D game. Emphasis falls upon the GM/DM/ST and their players.

 

[Desdichado]

What is interesting is that no one has been able to refute what I have posted: it is there, in the book, marked in stone. How else can it possibly be interpreted?

Did I wake up this morning in Bizzaro world? Does not the phrase actually say the exact opposite of what you're claiming it does? I don't know, Nisarg, you really seem to be coming out of left field with this...

 

[Mystery Man]

Dude, I've never seen the acronym before and I managed to work out "If You Know What I Mean And I Think You Do."

Ha! I knew it!

 

[Piratecat]

Please quit with the troll comments, folks. Either refute him, agree with him, or choose not to post.

 

[eyebeams]

See, this I can agree with, except for the 'different emphasis' bit - the game is what you make of it. Can we say WoD: Combat, or Exalted? WW games are as much into kicking ass any any out there...but that's ok, not that you need a part-time freelancer like me to tell anyone that; it's implicit. You can run a combat-heavy WoD game (Exalted, Werewolf, a Mage game with a War Chantry), or run a political-intrigue based D&D game. Emphasis falls upon the GM/DM/ST and their players.

Sure, but every game has its default stance, too. This is mapped in the mechanics and in the supporting text. Successful games normally allow many, many different play styles, but there is typically a loose locus where each game really puts effort. You can play a D&D game chock full of political intrigue and pacifist morality (and I have, in fact, played a pacifist cleric-sage in a politically oriented D&D game!). While a group can bring this to the game, this isn't a design side issue. The design side issue is what the game can bring to the group. D&D chooses to bring detailed systems and play structures for tactical (and puzzle) adventures in a peril-heavy environment. This is not a limitation of the game -- only a baseline for GMs to build upon.

WoD emphasizes ethical and social challenges in a haunted environment. It has lots of stuff about how to do this. Its combat system and associated rules are designed to be fairly quick and simple. Detailed options are there, but you have to work for them (contrasted with the many tactical options available to everyone in a D&D game). For instance, the kung fu master we playtested had to work to differentiate his character's combat mechanics from everybody else's.

Now Exalted is different, as characters rapidly develop distinct combat profiles and the CCG elements of the game come to the fore, but the systems are much, much different.

In all of these cases, different games bring different things to the table. The writers are supposed to tell you what these assets are and how to use them to good effect. A chapter on tactical combat in WoD would be something of a ripoff. One in Exalted orr D&D would extend something that's already there, begging for detail.

In the end, though, you're right: Variations are there and should be enjoyed without any value judgments. Maybe the new WoD will have a sourcebook devoted to blazing action-horror some day, but for now, it's talking about its roots.

 

[Crothian]

Who's to say that the WW statement is wrong though? There are role players and roll players. And if they want to think one is better then the other then more power to them. If they want to try to attract the role players and to encourage people to become role players and not roll players, then again I think that's great.