Whoa, careful with that hot take, bruh. You might burn yourself on it. And then cut yourself on its edge.
So, just to demonstrate that you
know nothing about what you're talking about, White Wolf at its most successful did not have a universal ruleset, and in fact was a supplement treadmill which was entirely exception-based in its ruleset and certainly didn't have points-buy powers as its mainstay. It's also laughable that you claim not to care about "camarillas, technocracies, god-machines, or whatever the hell else you ripped off from Anne Rice, Brian Lumley or H.P. Lovecraft" when, again, when WW was most successful, it was running a metaplot that cared incredibly much about those first ones and was certainly stealing from all three. And again, when it was most successful (notice the running theme here) it was running a lot of incompatible universes that basically shared aesthetics and nothing else and attempts to cross over between them were a disaster.
So, basically, you know nothing and you just decided to dump nonsense on this thread. Which you have never posted in before.
You probably meant to post
here, as it's the kind of ill-informed take that's at home in that thread.
White Wolf was most successful in the 90s, probably due to social and economic factors at the time rather than because their approach to setting and rules was better than their competitors.
(Boy, were there a lot of competitors. Nightlife, Nephilim, Immortal: The Invisible War, Nightbane, In Nomine, The Everlasting, C.J. Carella's WitchCraft, etc. And we still have indie competitors even now like Dresden Files, Strands of Fate, Vampire City, Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows, Feed, etc.)
The idiosyncratic approach to game design and world building did not save them from the tabletop crunch in the late 90s and early 00s. The Time of Judgement and Chronicles of Darkness were marketing ploys intended to offset the crunch. As we can see, that didn't work. (When Mage Revised was released in 2000, fans sent the developer tons of death threats by email, which I never understood because it was a marketing ploy intended to sell books because sales at the time were falling.) Despite the revisionist history being spouted in various places, that wouldn't have changed even if White Wolf didn't try introducing those marketing ploys. White Wolf was ultimately purchased by CCP, dissolved, scandalized, and then the resulting holding company sold to Paradox when CCP couldn't make a profit out of it.
And you know what Paradox has (or had) planned? Unifying the Worlds of Darkness into one World of Darkness. At least until another scandal convinced the higher ups to dissolve the newly revived White Wolf and hand off production of the tabletop to Onyx Path. Now they're focused on their video game implementations, which are making a ton of changes to the setting and rules. And will probably make way more money than the tabletop ever did.
I'm pretty meh about all this. There was a time when I fought vehemently in the edition wars, but that time has long passed. Now I'm the sort of person who thinks that all editions are fairly silly and arbitrarily restrictive in their rules and setting. I've probably been spoiled by studying up on D&D's bazillion campaign settings and studying up on the indie urban fantasy games that introduced their own innovations to the genre.
Like,
Vampire advertises itself as a generic vampire toolkit sometimes, but it is anything but. You are restricted to partly Anne Rice-inspired mechanisms for vampirism, like vulnerability to sunlight and fire, drinking blood, etc. The various bloodline/clan/etc weaknesses and superpowers added on don't change the underlying chassis. You cannot emulate vampires from X work of fiction without either watering down your initial concept, using elaborate workarounds, or making homebrew. The ST rules themselves are messy in the extreme: there are numerous variants of the system and they all have their idiosyncrasies.
The lore... touching on that would be far and beyond the scope of this post. What I will say is that I'm not a purist at all. I was never invested in the lore and I always thought it was more of an impediment to play than anything else, what with fans apparently seeming more interesting in talking about it than ever playing the actual game. I would like to be able to mix and match elements from every iteration of the IP, but socially that makes me a heretic in this fanatical fandom and in practice it would require homebrewing everything anyway. I'd be better off playing Urban Shadows or another indie game.
Long story short, I'm an ex-fan who has been burned out, disillusioned by scandals and toxic fans, better educated on game design by being exposed to other games, and I don't buy into revisionist history and dishonest propaganda.
