So That's It! (RPG blather ahead)

[alors_indikaze]

Finally figured out what bothers me about WoD: How so much of the fiction jeers hackneyed cliches then turns right around, trips, and falls into a deeper pit of cliched hackneyness that is somehow more "authentic" than the old one

Comments

Exalted

[alexpshenichkin]

It sounds like Creationist Sour Grapes, to be specific. Check it out

[lula_vampiro]

On WoD: Agreed. A great deal of the World of Darkness is built on cliché, for better or for worse, although some game lines are better or worse about this point than others. Mage strays from cliché by means of pure diversity, Changeling elevates cliché to a cosmological principle, and Vampire … uh … does exactly what you're describing. Ultimately, though, I find the tension you're describing (set up cliché, hate on cliché, rinse, repeat) really fun to splash around in, for the same reason I enjoy watching Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series (in America) (in a steel cage). I think that VtM: Bloodlines walks this line really effectively. Many Batman stories, especially The Dark Knight film and, even more, The Killing Joke, also come to mind: dark, intense, psychological crime dramas about two nut jobs dressed as a bat and a clown. Consider, also, Native Speaker (a gaucho, a Nazi, and a Soviet arms dealer walk into a hotel …). Vampire is camp, but I don't think I would enjoy it so much if it weren't

[alors_indikaze]

I like it when people play around with cliché stuff as well; my problem with Hunter is that the source material doesn't. Rather it goes into diatribes several pages long in several different places, wanking about "true authenticity" and how "real people" are and it is really. Fucking. Obnoxious. (Vampire cliché, on the other hand, is mostly kind of funny and harmless)

More disturbingly, it also claims that its postulates are required for any sort of "proper" horror game, and it can't even step away from its own bullshit in the sidebars. I think that's what gets me more than anything else.