White Wolfs pay to play deal...

[painandgreed]

At least Kevin has the common sense to stay out of public forums for the most part. A friend of mine (Bill) met Kevin @ GAMMA (IIRC) and he said KS was one the coolest publishers he met while he was there. He asked Bill to autograph a copy of the RPG that he just released and gave him a signed copy of one of his in return. They had a real good coversation and Bill said he had heard of all the stuff KS was accused of but after meeting him couldn't believe it.

My impression of both of them are pretty much limited to what I read on this board (although I did get a letter from Mark Rein•Hagen once). Still, putting both of them on a panel to discuss game design sounds like it would be interesting at least.

 

[PJ-Mason]

Let's put him and Kevin Siembieda in the same room together and see if they combust.

I thought exactly the same thing!

Man. White Wolf. They are making Palladium look good.

There, but for the grace of god, go i............

 

[eyebeams]

If this was for Trademark protection reasons, why did they wait well more than a decade after publishing their first LARP books to do so?

White Wolf has proven itself very litigious in the past. They did sue Sony over Underworld, which was thrown out. They sued the Camarilla and forcibly absorbed it as a house organ, instead of a fan club that operated with WW's blessing.

No and no. Sony and White Wolf reportedly settled the suit (it was not "thrown out"), and in fact, the former Camarilla sued White Wolf (not the other way around) to try and claim trademark over the name "Camarilla."

Despite this, I think this is a bad move from White Wolf.

 

[Grue]

Firstly, I think it's highly objectionable and downright stupid to try to charge people for the privelege of playing in an RPG that you run. It is SO not the point that it's staggering. As a correlation I find it nearly as stupid to run D&D COMPETITIVELY at a convention as a general rule. How can you compete (and why would you want to try) at a game that BY DESIGN has no way to win much less keep score?

Check out some of the old 1st ed competition module series. While by their nature competition modules are more goal oriented and geared for problem solving it can be a nice change of pace. And in KoDT fashion it can be fun to compete to see who has the 'best' group on the block.

As for charging for LARPs, well the level of work a storyteller has to do to get a moderately sized one off the ground (and in good shape afterward for a 30 to 50 member troupe) is head and shoulders above any prep work I've ever had to do for any tabletop game. Even if you don't have to rent a place to hold the game, the cost in paper, ink, folders, name-tags, and other props make a small fee a reasonable requirement. Add in the hours of the not so fun work of writing up and updating character backgrounds, then figuring out story arcs and plots, setting character goals, clues, and rumors, and the actually running of the game (mass combats are always tricky) and I'd consider the part of the fee past cost I'd a small gratuity.

 

[Grue]

Should be interesting to see if this is going to hurt the convention LARPs.

 

[Vocenoctum]

Let's put him and Kevin Siembieda in the same room together and see if they combust.

I've never directly interacted with Siembieda, but from what I gather his ego is mostly concerning his game(s). It's been a couple years since I interacted with Achilli on newgroups and forums, but his ego seems to stretch beyond his work, and into his actual sense of self.

He's also just plain mean.

I tend to think this policy was ill thought out, and thrown togethor too quickly. They saw people "making" money off their products, and in a huff, drafted a policy to get a cut of it. I still think it's a joke, given this will just make the CUSTOMERS pay more, not the promoters, plus the membership stuff... it's just badly done.

 

[Tinner]

White Wolf has proven itself very litigious in the past. They did sue Sony over Underworld, which was thrown out. They sued the Camarilla and forcibly absorbed it as a house organ, instead of a fan club that operated with WW's blessing. OWBN is likely to be wiped out by this, and as the Cams major competition, that may well be a goal of WW in this. To be honest, what I've heard from OWBN players is that it has a reputation about as bad as the Cam though.

As a former OWbN ST for 5 years, I can tell you firsthand that the org is just as cheesey, full of munchkins and bad players as the Cam is.

OWbN also has at rough estimate more than twice the membership of the Cam, and that's before you count international groups.

Also bear in mind that OWbN is still playing with oWoD rules, and has voted (for now) to NOT adopt the new WoD. The Official Cam org is REQUIRED to use the newest rules for their games. (Check the Cam member constitution. There are some choice bits in there about making every effort to support the new official rules, as well as a caveat that you can not bar ANY Cam member from your game!)

I find it VERY telling that this announcment was formally presented to OWbN at Origins, where the OWbN LARP had twice the attendance of any other larp present.

New WoD ain't selling, and isn't likely to sell as long as there's a MASSIVE group like OWbN still supporting the old material. (Which WW no longer spports in any way.)
IMO this move was a very concious decision to try and "break" OWbN in hopes of forcing more purchases of the New WoD material.

Dumb move White Wolf.
Possibly an even dumber move than the New WoD was in the first place.

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

I find it VERY telling that this announcment was formally presented to OWbN at Origins, where the OWbN LARP had twice the attendance of any other larp present.

I don't know how well nWoD is doing (everyone I've spoken to seems to like it, and they certainly have plenty of books out there, though that doesn't really mean anything). However, I also think that this new policy is mostly meant to target OWbN, although maybe not for reasons of collecting fees or making these folks convert to the new books.

The biggest indication to me is in the thread linked on the WW site at the start of this thread. The WW rep pretty much came out and said that they were making it a point to give this policy directly to OWbN participants. That's pretty much a clear target IMO. Also interesting is the later statement that they're not going to worry about smaller groups, only larger, more organized ones. IOW, those that directly compete with the Camarilla.

I've run an ongoing convention LARP for about 8-9 years now. We were never involved with the Camarilla, because we didn't like the politics, game system, or interference from WW. When nWoD came along, we made the decision to change our game around so that it wasn't WoD rather than transfer over to the new one. Although it cost us a lot of players, I'm now very glad that we did so, because even though we aren't with OWbN we definitely would've been running a WoD event in a manner of which WW didn't approve.

As a side note, for those interested, we do charge money, usually $15-$20 depending on our anticipated expenses. This is to cover costs including materials (rules, dice, props, etc), travel, and rooms space (we run at hotels, but we still need rooms to act as HQ). If there's anything left over, it gets divided among the ref crew, but this generally isn't more than thirty bucks or so per person. And I couldn't tell you what that breaks down to per hour, when you calculate in prep time and all that. It would probably be in the pennies per hour, considering that we keep the game active for the entire weekend (most LARPs that I've seen run either only at night, or even during specific hours of a night). Factor into that the fact that we generally have multiple meetings beforehand, and most of them out of town for many refs, I'd be hard pressed to say that anyone is profiting from the game.

Oh, another reason that I can see this being a target against OWbN (which I've never played in, as it just seemed like an alt-Cam to me). There's past history- lots of bad blood between the two groups. Even if WW doesn't have any Cam members in positions of authority to make a policy like this, there's still going to be some bleedover hatred coming from those elements of the Cam that do interact with WW brass. This, and the fact that WW is already paranoid about people stealing their stuff, and it seems to me it's obvious who the main target will be. The funny thing is, years ago when the problems began, they could've worked to absorb the Camarilla into an RPGA-like organization, and there wouldn't be any of these problems, and everyone would be happy. But they didn't, for whatever reason, and now it's jus one bad move after the other.

And, for those who've never played in any WoD or similar type LARPs, I don't know if you can really understand how incredibly petty some of the interpersonal conflicts are among players. Tinner can back me up here, since I'm sure that I'm not talking about him or his group . But I find it quite believable that the two groups would be taking shots at each other and going to court over stuff like this. Even in our game, which we tried to keep as free from organizational politics as possible, we still had a ton of personal stuff to deal with. Things like "so-and-so has dumped such-and-such, who won't be at the game along with the five people they generally bring. And, since the character concepts were tied together, so-and-so has a totally different character now, so we can't use them to complete the Ultimate Pentacle of Evil which will destroy the world." Stuff like that.

Overall, I think this is a really poor move on WW's part, but nothing surprising. And I'm very glad that my group moved away from WoD when it did.

 

[Staffan]

Trashing hotel rooms, getting into brawls with gamers and non-gamers alike, moshing into wedding parties at the dance club pissed out of his gourd, and partying with Peter Adkison until Peter gets up ont he table and starts table dancing while we someone starts slipping dollar bills into Peter's pants, and so on.

If there's one person in the world of gaming who doesn't need any more dollar bills, especially for table-dancing, it's Peter Adkison.

 

[eyebeams]

As a former OWbN ST for 5 years, I can tell you firsthand that the org is just as cheesey, full of munchkins and bad players as the Cam is.

OWbN also has at rough estimate more than twice the membership of the Cam, and that's before you count international groups.

*cackle* At a "rough estimate?" What orifice was this pulled out of? OWbN doesn't have any formal method for tabluating numbers, while the Cam actually tracks every member.

I find it VERY telling that this announcment was formally presented to OWbN at Origins, where the OWbN LARP had twice the attendance of any other larp present.

Um, that's because the Cam actually has enough people to have cons where the sole focus is the Cam, and not as an adjunct to another event. The Camarilla is very much its own thing.

New WoD ain't selling, and isn't likely to sell as long as there's a MASSIVE group like OWbN still supporting the old material. (Which WW no longer spports in any way.)
IMO this move was a very concious decision to try and "break" OWbN in hopes of forcing more purchases of the New WoD material.

The New WoD? It's doing fine. But OWbN is irrelevant. The fact is that LARP itself has undergone a dramatic decline in popularity and did so long before the old WoD ended. There used to be at least 4 major North American MET orgs and many, many independent games. Now there's basically you and the Cam, and far fewer indie street and club games. In this context, moving to a membership-based model makes sense, because the company is better served by having a core of habitual consumers. The idea that they're "out to get" OWbN is silly, because OWbN's members haven't meant much to the company in ages. You are being alienated because you are irrelevant to their plans, not because you're thwarting them.

That said, I think the whole thing is a massive mistake. I understand that White Wolf wants to protect their property, but they should have adopted a model that differentiated between groups that collect modest dues to rent space and those that might abuse the company's IP. But again, I suspect that there's a marketing motive as well, and that this is a misguided attempt to combine both.