Because I don't want some of my OSR readers to tune out on this post, let me begin by saying this post is going to be setting the stage for another post in the next few days that builds on these ideas in a totally different direction. However, I need to establish some concepts and I feel like they need to be given serious attention. It pays to build a solid foundation, if you know what I mean.
I also want to say that I truly deep love the World of Darkness, even though I will contest actually applying that term to those games, and that I enjoy the fictional work of all the writers involved in the entire project (old and new). My beef lies with marketing and game design, NOT the fiction. I apologize in advance to anyone who is a big fan of new World of Darkness that is offended by some of the points made in this post (hint: I am going to come down strong in favor of the old). Edition wars in White Wolf land can be just as vicious as the OSR vs 4e, but this is a post that I feel I need to put down in print.
Alright, now that all that blah is out of the way, let's proceed...
The basic argument of this post is two fold.
1. That a game can have a unique and profound impact on the geek culture IF it efficiently distills the dominant themes of the subject into a functional basic framework that can quickly be taught to others.
2. A game which began as an exciting new thing can become bland and tasteless through over-integration, over-complication, and reverse innovation.
It is my contention that both of these things happened to World of Darkness. I use the post-mortem language because I feel that World of Darkness is now trapped in a place where it must either totally reboot itself with a new structure OR it will die. A fate that I think also applies to D&D (but more on that in the future).
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Argument 1:
Vampire the Masquerade was a genre-defining game. I am using this term in the future, so take note. A genre-defining game takes a cultural concept that has many aspects and places them into an internally consistent logic structure that sets a standard for future development. D&D was also a genre-defining game, so was Call of Cthulu. These kinds of games set the benchmark of what a game in this genre should be about. And when people try to play these sorts of games with GURPs or some other universal system, they are trying to use that system to emulate the genre-defining game as closely as possible, not actually forge much innovation of their own.
VtM took several ideas that were bubbling up in the culture and unified them into a coherent structure. It took a set of bones and added a lot of meat to them.
1. The idea of a secretive vampire society
2. The inner struggle between their beastly nature and their desire to be like humans
3. The expansion of vampire powers into the quasi-super range
Vampires used to be thought of as solitary evil creatures that had a few basic powers (like mesmerizing gaze and similar stuff), but that was changing in the post-war period thanks to people like Anne Rice. VtM was able to create a structure into which these new ideas could be placed and then moving forward it served as a basis for geek culture to adopt it's terminology (kindred, sire, embrace, etc). Other media would follow VtM's lead. It was the pathfinder, so to speak.
It was able to do this in a very simple, yet mechanical way.
Characters choose a clan, this is their firm hook into the secret vampire society. The clans either follow the Masquerade or they don't. Then each clan has it's own kind of schtick.
Characters have a humanity score that rises and falls based on their actions. Gaining and losing humanity has consequences in the game mechanics. There are also virtues of Self-Control and Conscience/Conviction that establish how your Vampire relates to their Humanity. This aspect of your character is tied into almost all activity from feeding to politics.
Characters have a number of points to spend on disciplines, each of which has an obvious and immediate utility, and adding more points gives more power. You can customize, but it isn't excessively deep. Basically, you choose the kind of vampire you want to be.
Now combine the above with a really solid baseline system of mechanical resolution and you have a great game. The mechanics are strongly related to the genre elements and easy to teach. It just works in a very fundamental way. And VtM has had an ENORMOUS impact on geek culture as a result of this quality framework. When people run a Vampire game (I would argue, even a nWoD game), they are trying to emulate this basic mode of play; much in same way that all medieval fantasy games are trying to emulate D&D. They are obviously trying to do it better, easier, faster, stronger, deeper, whatever. But they are trying to emulate the core of the genre.
Argument 2:
Where things went awry, in my opinion, was where the game evolved from this starting point. And it happened because of.. in a word.. greed. Corporate greed, to be more specific. The kind of greed that crushes art and replaces it with blandness.
VtM begot Werewolf the Apocalypse, then Mage the Ascension; then the throwbacks of those games to the Dark Ages. Then the supplements for Victorian period and whatever else. Clan books, supplements out the wazoo, this shit just got out of control. It wasn't about the core genre anymore, it was about min-maxing your character. And if you are seeing parallels in the D&D world, you are not alone.
As the coup-de-grace on the whole thing, White Wolf decides to not just have these three alternative systems that you can obviously see would work well together and place them into a single unified framework; the World of Darkness. The unique way in which each game captured the essence of being a vampire, a werewolf, or a mage would be steamrolled into the bland WoD character that can then be modified upwards. That wonderfully flavored mixture would be covered in molasses and deep fried. And this is where the game became one big steaming pile of goo.
Before this unification, I don't know that you could even firmly say these games are occuring the same worlds. Yes, Mages knew about Vampires and Werewolves, but did they really interact with them in the way that they are presented in their respective books? I didn't perceive it that way at the time (though someone is now almost guaranteed to appear with some supplement and refute me), I just thought of it as a potential overlap; not a fixed one.
I will stick with just Vampire, to be fair, because I am not really a Werewolf person and I don't have the Mage books to be comfortable making hard claims (besides, I was always a Dark Ages Mage dude, more than a modern).
Vampire went from a pretty simple "choose a clan and your disciplines" to "choose a clan, and a covenant, and maybe a bloodline too; then do some page flipping to determine your disciplines, then think about how you are going to combine those disciplines later into combos, etc etc etc. You couldn't just say "I am a Toreador who likes to be low-key and take in the world with Auspex". No, now you were a Daeva Invictus Toreador with a dot in this discipline and a few dots in that discipline so that later you can combine those into a powerful synergistic discipline.
It seems like throughout the entire game, any system that could be pointlessly made more obtuse was "enhanced" as such (ex. Blood potency, Vices, Virtues, etc). Meanwhile, systems that enhanced those core genre elements were removed (self-control, conscience, paths, etc). The importance of the Masquerade was even downplayed. The game became much more about character building than actual vampire flavor.
Meh...
Color me unimpressed.
What was once a really good game was turned into bland drivel that didn't relate to the genre itself. And I can't see myself going back to being a White Wolf customer unless I feel certain this trend has been abandoned.
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So that's basically how I feel about World of Darkness, where it is coming from and where it is going. In my next post, I will be building off this basis to talk about a genre I feel LACKS a defining game. And how I intend to provide it.
Stay thirsty, my friends.
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