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World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate
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@insomniac You still haven’t told everyone which book the jizz-blood ghouling is in and honestly, why are we even married if I can’t wield your terrifying knowledge of WoD minutiae and random internet things for my own fun and profit?
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@Aria Oh, yeah, sorry.
…I think that one was from CoD’s Ghouls book, but I might be mixing it up with Ghouls: Fatal Addiction from the original WoD line, which also features…
…uh, is there a spoiler feature here? I don’t know about dropping some of this “For Mature Minds” material on here for just anyone to stumble on.
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But seriously, I love WoD. Both incarnations. They mean a lot to me.
People are talking about what a huge shift it was to be in games where women were playing, and that was a deliberate choice on White Wolf’s part. They were deliberately mixing up pronouns for both players and characters in play examples only a couple years after D&D was including sidebars about how “he” is totally gender-neutral and so they were gonna keep using that in every case thanks.
On top of that, they were a huge branch in the idea of who they thought would want to play their RPGs, trying to expand the appeal from the basement-dwelling pocket protector crowd to the pseudo-countercultural drama nerd wannabe author set. (I say this with all love to both demographics.) They did this in the focus of their writing, and they did this by going against the whole trend of RPG design at the time, making more and more ultra-specific rules cases for every possible eventuality (probably with a percentile chart) to rolling single-digit numbers of dice and counting high numbers on your hands.
They were a revelation, to me, in terms of what someone could do with an RPG. I know they weren’t the first people to make an RPG that went from “heroes in secondary world completely removed from our own fight monsters and get treasure” to doing something else, but they were the first one I dived into. They were writing with an eye on commentary on social issues and the world around them and the zeitgeist and a real intent of including more diverse ideas.
Now, I will absolutely acknowledge that they often did a really bad job at all of this. The social awareness and criticism were often profoundly adolescent. They frequently started from a place of “we want to really say something with our games and fiction” to unbearably pretentious “we’re doing real roleplaying for real role-players, people who pretend to be wizards in dungeons are doing baby games for babies, our games where you make pretend you’re a sexy wizard who fucks all the time and does magic with freshman-level philosophy is super deep.” The attempts at inclusion were frequently clueless to the point of being offensive, from with the Werewolf ultra-90s “colors of the wind” treatment of Native Americans to the weebtastic treatments of Japan and China (mostly treated as interchangeable) to… everything they tried to do with the Romani. One of the biggest influences on modern game design can trace its origins to a V:tM player who got hyped at the promise of a game about internal emotional struggle and then got a book whose rules were about badass fight scenes and that supposed focus amounted to “RP it out or whatever.” That image above where you get a talk about the seriousness of mental illness on the same page as the fish-smooch picture is really emblematic of a lot. I don’t want to ignore the gamelines’ faults, and for whatever it’s worth most of the people who’ve been working on the games for at least the last couple decades (barring a period right after Paradox picked up the rights) have been making active efforts to be better on these points.
The reason I’m familiar with these faults is because I do care about the games, a lot, and I think there’s a reason so many of us cared so much about them.
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I think one of the greatest things that WoD games did was to put so much focus on social competition and solving problems for your community. Those communities were made up of agency-ignoring blood parasites or narcissistic reality benders or whatever, but the context of the interactions you had with them were light years away from the murder-hoboism of “traditional” RPGs of the time. Our community is being threatened by such and such and outside force. The person in charge of this important community function is bad for their job. This group of people fucked with my friends and need to be adjusted. Especially in a LARP format, where you might have 50+ players, this was transformational.
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@insomniac said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
…uh, is there a spoiler feature here?
I asked that recently and was told there is not. I believe they said the plugin is broken.
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@GF Fair enough. Then I’ll just say that I was going to comment on how “Games For Mature Minds” often drifted into “Games For Overgrown Adolescent Edgelords Peddling Cheap Shock” by bring up the Revolting Revenant sample character from Ghouls: Fatal Addiction and then maybe talk about White Wolf’s Black Dog sub-line in general, specifically one of the abilities that even they decided to remove in later printings of Freak Legion (not mine!).
If you know, you know.
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@insomniac said in World of Darkness: The Weird Little Monster We Love and Hate:
If you know, you know.
It is known. Black Dog was… a lot.
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On my first WoD game, my first PC ended up getting the Fomori treatment and I distinctly remember reading the Savage Genitalia merit with quiet concern after getting a scan of the Black Dog book. Those books were wild!
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Wasn’t Freak Legion also the book that basically dedicated a page or two to saying how awful you and your table were if they contemplated actually using anything in it?
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@Wizz Sounds about right.
Which means it is due for an x20 update on one of these games, who wants to step up and get weird?
