Hey all FOC again,
Roleplaying is a funny thing. What one person likes, another person will hate. The reason for this is that playing a character is a personal thing and we each get something different from it. Some people treat it as a game, something to win or beat. Others treat it as a form of self expression, whilst there is yet another camp that likes the simulation aspect and looks for as realistic a game as possible.
All this leads to some pretty entrenched camps. Optimisers vs. Roleplayers; Realism vs. Abstract; Dice vs. Diceless and often System vs. System. As I have previously said roleplayers love to argue.
The big gaming debate when I left home in the mid nineties (other than “will Magic: The Gathering kill roleplaying?”) was the battle between Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire: The Masquerade. D&D had been around since 1975 and it ruled the roleplaying environment. There were other games out there but they either folded in direct competition (Rolemaster, Runequest) or carved out their own niche so as not to compete with D&D (Traveller, Call of Cthulhu). D&D by the early nineties was the big dog on campus.
Vampire and its successors (collectively the World of Darkness or WOD) changed that, at least for a while. This was the first big challenge to the hegemony of D&D and at that time you could find just as many Vampire players as players of D&D. At this point I was playing and running both D&D and Vampire equally. I also played and ran Vampire LARP. For a time they were the two dominant games on the market.
However, this rivalry lead inexorably to a war of words between the adherents of both systems. Hardcore WOD players accused D&D of being a simplistic dungeon hack and D&D players accused WOD players of being mopey Lestat wannabes. It got pretty heated for a while. I clearly remember reading a letter in the White Wolf magazine that said Vampire was better than D&D because it was a “storytelling” game not a “roleplaying” game. The inference was that Vampire was for roleplayers and D&D was for munchkins.
Of course none of this is true. You can have awesome roleplayers in D&D and munchkins in Vampire. But it must be said that after a few years of WOD I gave it up and concentrated on other games, primarily D&D. My last big bash playing a WOD game (aside from Changeling which is an honourable exception to everything I am about to say) was a Vampire LARP game I played about 10 years ago. I realised that the WOD was not for me about then.
Why? What is it about WOD that makes me dislike it so much? Well I’m not a fan of the mechanics and systems of WOD but I can ignore that in other games. Likewise the Paper-Scissors-Stone nonsense of Vamp Live I can get past. No, my objection to the WOD is more deep rooted than that. It comes down to four things:
1) It’s depressing: Everything in WOD is downbeat and pessimistic. That’s just not me. I don’t want to play a whiny depressed soul wailing for the loss of his humanity. I just can’t empathise with that. I don’t want to be the bad guy; I want to beat the bad guy.
2) It’s largely pointless: In WOD whatever you do is pointless. There’s always some bigger, badder, nastier ubervamp/wraith/wyrm thing waiting to beat you, manipulate you or turn you into something horrible. If I have no control over the destiny of my character I don’t want to play
3) The deferential attitude: In WOD games you must defer to those with more status and more power and it takes a buttload of booklicking to work your way up the greasy pole. How is that fun? One of my favourite cinematic moments is Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood marching into the Sherriff of Nottingham’s court and telling him to bugger off. It’s audacious and cool. In Vampire that scene would have ended with a quick bit of dominate and a staking. It’s a game about being a toady not a hero.
4) It’s not conducive to party cohesion: WOD in many instances sets itself up to have inter party conflict. I never like that, PvP is generally nasty and unwarranted. In LARP that is magnified five fold as PC’s eat each other alive. This is not fun.
Basically no-one in the World of Darkness smiles. There are other dark games out there but they all have a joie de vivre about them. Cyberpunk 2020 is a good example, you may only have a plastic gun with 2 bullets, a pair of sunglasses and a leather jacket but damn if you don’t look cool.
WOD is miserable and it’s characters are miserable. I don’t want to be miserable. I want to enjoy myself and play the hero. I want to jump out of a dirigible over Iceland, I want to hold the bridge against an army of thousands, I want to look into the teeth of the 1,000 year old dragon and know that it’s toast. I don’t want to explore my angst or be afraid to use my powers or defer to a corpse. Give me heroes anytime.
Your resident hero wannabe
Fall Of Camelot
Giles here 8)
ReplyDeleteWe've already discussed this at length and he have widely differing views on this particular subject so I won't waste time covering old ground.
What I will say however is that at this point in my roleplaying life, I've come to the realisation that a game's quality is not down to the system or the setting but by how it's run and how it's played.
As such, I would argue that Hope can be a powerful force in a WoD game and although thematically, WoD does not lend itself well at first glance to a heroic style of play, that's not to say it *couldn't* be run that way.
I'm about to start up a Mage/Tomb Raider game that's going to be a High Adventure, Pulp Fiction game. In part, the format has been decided by the sporadic availability of the players but also to show the missus that Mage isn't all politics and hubris.
Ultimately, I think the reason that I favour WoD over D&D is that I've yet to play in a D&D game that went beyond levels, treasure and xp and where I've had as many awful roleplaying experiences in WoD (particularly oWoD) as I have had in D&D, there have been many more memorable moments of intense roleplaying in WoD.
I am of course more than happy to give a decent D&D (or better yet, Pathfinder) game a go if you happen to know one going ;)
Hi there, long time lurker, first time poster here.
ReplyDeleteTo draw a parallel between programming and role playing, the quality of frameworks were once described to me thusly:
A good framework will encourage a less proficient programmer to do something correctly.
A bad framework will encourage a more proficient programmer to do something incorrectly.
The above comment does not relate to the merits or flaws of either D+D and Vamp (both have many), more that a setting will encourage certain kinds of behavior in its players, which leads to different experiences of the game as a whole.
However, sometimes a group or GM will overemphasize or forget about one aspect of the rules or setting in a way that causes the game to go into its own surreal niche. This renders the D+D vs Vamp argument completely moot, as the players experience something different to the game's original intended state. Whether it is a party that renders all enemies in a setting completely pointless in D+D (due to their being optimized to hell), or a vamp GM that completely disregards degeneration rolls when human murder occurs (meaning the players can get away with anything), these oversights happen all the time and are often the cause of many of the disappointing experiences which lead adherents of one system to dislike the other.
I often get great enjoyment from playing good guys simply because it is very hard to be someone who is proactively good and makes a difference in real life. Although I can see why the machiavellian politics, endlessly gloomy drama and angst can be to many people's taste, it's definitely something I would rather take as part of a healthy, balanced diet. Corporation: The Climbing can get a little too close to the daily grind for my liking sometimes because it forces you into making decisions you know are wrong in order to survive or get ahead.
Also if you could do a rant on PvP some time that would be epic :)
I'm not going to go into the general discussion on this (though I'd be intrigued to do so in person at some point), but I didn't think it'd be fair to go without mentioning a couple of other games that fit into the changeling bracket as something very different - namely Hunter and Mummy, the latter being the one I have a lot more experience with. They are much more "heroic" games - you may be against the odds, but you're fighting for something and they don't have the bowing and scraping cultures that a lot of the others do. Mummy is more my thing, as it lends itself well to a very investigative game, whilst Hunter tends more towards the kick-in-the-door concept (mostly because the progression of character requires you to).
ReplyDeleteOh, and Mummy is the only game I've come across where the way to get more powerful is to be a nice guy...
In extension on my previous comment, I think WoD often gets a bad rep because of the fact that the three main lines can be summed up as:
ReplyDeleteVampire: the Whining
Werewolf: the Eco-terrorist
Mage: the Drama Queen
Whilst I've played in some very good games (hell, I was a Cam officer for a good while and was an ST for the 5.5 years that Zeitgeist's multi-venue insanity ran in London), this tends to be how the games can come across if they're not so well run or you get the wrong player-base.
Thanks for your replies folks, nice to see I have an audience :).
ReplyDelete@Giles GM role and player role are very important to the success of a game. A GM puts his own spin on a game and that's important. Case in point is your Mage game, sounds like fun.
However, I would contend that that's not really the Mage that's in the book. It's playing around with the system and if you do that eventually all you are left with is a dice rolling mechanism and a basic framework from which to hang your own ideas. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not WoD as written.
@Intbloom. Well said. I will talk about PvP at some point.
@Portilis. Not checked out the new Mummy stuff so I can't comment but it's nice to see a WoD setting that rewards good deeds.
Keep it coming chaps
I'm using Secrets of the Ruined Temple, so it's actually by the book 8)
ReplyDeletenWoD is a very different kettle of fish from oWoD. There's no world ending uberplot to contend with so the focus is on the player group, which is why I prefer it.
Mummy is oWoD, the new version (sort of) is Promethean: The Created. Promethean is basically Frankenstein's Monster by way of Pinocchio.