White Wolf & Me
I wrote the following back on the 3rd of December, in the middle of my internetless wasteland. It's sat waiting for me to upload it. Now I do just that. :-)
For some reason I’ve been on a bit of a White Wolf reading bent of late. This is always taken as something to be wary of by some of my regular RPGers, who even if they have little RPG experience outside me have still developed a healthy distrust of World of Darkness games. Our current crop of players do include more people with happy memories of White Wolf: Charles owns a fair few of their games and Matthew played Vampire back in the day. That said, I think even they understood what Ailsa meant when she said “I’d be all for playing White Wolf games… if I didn’t have to play them with White Wolf people”.
My relationship has always been a bit spotty with the games. When I first got into RPGs it was the full-on, metaplot-and-crossover drenched World of Darkness I would have encountered: one which didn’t seem even remotely beginner friendly. Arguably all RPGs can be intimidating to newcomers: large hardbacks with hundreds of pages of texts, a host of tables, unique game jargon and references to other product you may not have heard of. Despite that, there is something I find particularly opaque about White Wolf games. I have picked up and read a few, and even ran a one-off of one game and played in a campaign.
Even just reading the books can be more a chore for me than other RPG books - Demon: The Fallen and its expansive prose opener springs to mind, which I find much slower to read and harder to pick out key details from than a more factual textbook style. The big problem I have is that I often find it difficult to work out What The Hell You Do after reading a White Wolf book. For me, a good role playing book is one where after reading it I immediately have an idea for a session or a campaign - one where I want my current game to end soon so I can try out this new one, one where you read a description of something and go “That’s it! That’s what I want to do in my game!”. However, I really struggle with White Wolf’s games to get the ideas out of the book and into a shape that forms into a tabletop game. Part of this may be the focus of most World of Darkness games on the politics of a group of supernatural creatures and their local environment, which is more fiddly for a GM to assemble than something like scribbling a new dungeon on graph paper. It’s made more complex sometimes by supplements: Demon vaguely mentions big scary demons called Earthbound in the core book but it’s only in a supplement they get promoted to Major Villain status.
Despite all these misgivings and issues, I have read the core rules to both Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem lately. I’ve also been going over Requiem For Rome, a supplement covering playing Vampire in ancient Rome in the twilight of the Western Empire. Even though some or all of the above problems apply to these various books, I still find myself oddly drawn to give these games a shot. If nothing else, I think most people will accept that campaigns and one-offs are very much coloured by the GMs who run them - I find myself curious what a George Quail’s Vampire would be like.
For some reason I’ve been on a bit of a White Wolf reading bent of late. This is always taken as something to be wary of by some of my regular RPGers, who even if they have little RPG experience outside me have still developed a healthy distrust of World of Darkness games. Our current crop of players do include more people with happy memories of White Wolf: Charles owns a fair few of their games and Matthew played Vampire back in the day. That said, I think even they understood what Ailsa meant when she said “I’d be all for playing White Wolf games… if I didn’t have to play them with White Wolf people”.
My relationship has always been a bit spotty with the games. When I first got into RPGs it was the full-on, metaplot-and-crossover drenched World of Darkness I would have encountered: one which didn’t seem even remotely beginner friendly. Arguably all RPGs can be intimidating to newcomers: large hardbacks with hundreds of pages of texts, a host of tables, unique game jargon and references to other product you may not have heard of. Despite that, there is something I find particularly opaque about White Wolf games. I have picked up and read a few, and even ran a one-off of one game and played in a campaign.
Even just reading the books can be more a chore for me than other RPG books - Demon: The Fallen and its expansive prose opener springs to mind, which I find much slower to read and harder to pick out key details from than a more factual textbook style. The big problem I have is that I often find it difficult to work out What The Hell You Do after reading a White Wolf book. For me, a good role playing book is one where after reading it I immediately have an idea for a session or a campaign - one where I want my current game to end soon so I can try out this new one, one where you read a description of something and go “That’s it! That’s what I want to do in my game!”. However, I really struggle with White Wolf’s games to get the ideas out of the book and into a shape that forms into a tabletop game. Part of this may be the focus of most World of Darkness games on the politics of a group of supernatural creatures and their local environment, which is more fiddly for a GM to assemble than something like scribbling a new dungeon on graph paper. It’s made more complex sometimes by supplements: Demon vaguely mentions big scary demons called Earthbound in the core book but it’s only in a supplement they get promoted to Major Villain status.
Despite all these misgivings and issues, I have read the core rules to both Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem lately. I’ve also been going over Requiem For Rome, a supplement covering playing Vampire in ancient Rome in the twilight of the Western Empire. Even though some or all of the above problems apply to these various books, I still find myself oddly drawn to give these games a shot. If nothing else, I think most people will accept that campaigns and one-offs are very much coloured by the GMs who run them - I find myself curious what a George Quail’s Vampire would be like.