Wither White Wolf?

Usually, I try to keep my posts in the 500-800 word category, and usually end up around 600-1000 because of that.  That was not the case here.

The perpetual fall of White Wolf Games is something that’s unavoidable, and somewhat expected, but still a strange and miserable way for a former major gaming company to end. Its parent company CCP has finally shelved the World of Darkness MMO for the duration, also pulling back their Dust 514 Ps3-based EVE shooter. There’s a number of reasons for this, the big two being the numbers: the number of fans dropping EVE, and the number of executives who’ve been working on projects that aren’t CCP’s existing cash cow, directly correlating with the first. Oh, and the numbers of the current depression/recession, which caused the Icelandic economy to enter the spin zone.

To get the full view of the setup, we have to go back to 2006, to when CCP was raking in the cash, the Icelandic economy was a booming bubble, and White Wolf was looking like hot property.

Dark Ages, Morality, and Horror

With Netflix all but pushing me to see Black Death, popping up in multiple suggestion categories, I caved to peer pressure and gave it a view. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking movie; if you’ve seen an action-horror hybrid flick in recent years, you’ve probably seen this movie. Not that it’s a bad film; Sean Bean gives his usual stellar performance, the atmosphere is damn creepy in a non-horror way, and the movie’s big twist was one I didn’t actually see coming. It’s a tad short, and doesn’t feel fully developed—not living up to its full potential—which is kind of a letdown.

Still, what sticks with me from the film isn’t the film itself; instead, it put me in mind of Dark Ages Vampire, and I keep coming back to that.

Vampire players usually get typecast as gothy, tortured soul, fairy-wiccan-neo-pagans. And like most stereotypes, there’s an element of truth there. And the game isn’t actually a White Wolf line that interests me, partly because of the weird player base, and partly because I have no idea what I’d do with it. (Not that the latter stops me from liking Mummy or Changeling at all.)

And how does this relate back to Black Death? Dark Ages turned a lot of the WoD stereotypes on their head. See, as a historical supplement/setting, a surprising chunk of the game’s material deals with religion. Think about it: it takes place in a time period where the predominant part of the world is deeply religious, be it Catholicism or Islam. Bam, now you’re the living dead, unable to ever see the sun again, and forced to drink blood to survive; everyone you knew withers and dies while you remain untouched by the pass of ages.

Having turned into a supernatural being scorned by life—or, having discovered that such beings exist—how do your character rectify that? Is this a sign from divine, punishing you for sins you must have committed? Is this a reward, giving you the powers of the enemy to strike back at them? Do you embrace your base animal urges, having been cut free from morality? Plenty of interesting roleplaying opportunities, though I’m not sure every group would have fun delving into those questions, particularly with the slippery slope of roleplaying religion.

That’s also a huge part of Black Death, too: dealing with faith in a dark, oppressive world. It’s a character study, in a way, of how different people cope with the hellish world of the plague: compare the protagonist Osmund with Sean Bean’s crusader knight Ulrich, and if you think you’ve pegged it, wait until the end. This also ties into the other study, warring religions rolling into the “battle of good and evil” trope, where things are purely in shades of gray. The voice-over intro is what really caught my attention:

The fumes of the dead are in the air like poison. The plague, more cruel and more pitiless than war, descended upon us. A pestilence, that would leave half of our kingdom dead. Where did it come from? What carried its germ. The priests told us it was God’s punishment. For what sin? What commandment must we break that could earn this? No, we knew the truth. This was not God’s work, but devilry. Or witchcraft. But our task, to hunt down a demon, was God’s cure.

Black Death is a solid example of the World of Darkness in a Dark Ages setting. The film’s not exactly Dark Ages Vampire in particular—its plot and characters are far closer to Inquisitor—but there’s a lot of inspiration for the whole line in there. The time period is roughly a hundred years later (depending on your Dark Ages edition). It has a gloomy, oppressive world, pretty much the best visualization of the historical World of Darkness I’ve seen. And it has a solid blend of action, mystery, and horror.

White Wolf’s 2011-2012 Schedule Unveiled

White Wolf’s 2011-2012 schedule is now out (thanks to Tenandys for the link), and there’s a lot of interesting stuff on there. Namely, the return to Old World of Darkness, possibly as a tie-in to the WoD MMO (already confirmed to be using the OWoD Vampire: The Masquerade rules), less possibly because irate fans have been clamoring for Old WoD for years.

In all honesty the Old World of Darkness had some serious flaws. With each new game, and each new edition, things began to suffer from not only a bad case of bloat, but also a bad case of power scaling. Oh, the lines didn’t always gel together  mechanically or story-wise. Like how everybody but mages could enter the Umbra fine in Revised. This wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if White Wolf had stuck to its “the games are totally separate” guns, but 2e and Revised had such an over-abundance of crossovers as to make things silly. (Look up Sam Haight if you think I’m wrong.) OWoD was also very much a product of the ’90s, particularly visible in Mage and Werewolf’s Captain Planet, “save the whales!”-esque settings.

New WoD fixed these issues, balanced the game lines, made the games all adhere to the fixed World of Darkness setting, and streamlined the rules (namely by not having every player’s guide/companion feature six dozen worthless new skills). It also managed to piss off most WoD fans; amongst other things, the lines were heavily modified. For example, instead of the bloat of each game having 10-12 playable clans/traditions/tribes, there are a mere five each. And the rules were also “dumbed down:” a little harsh, but true, like how Mage relied more on premade spells (rotes) than ad-hoc freeforming your own. The general consensus is that while NWoD has the better rules, OWoD has the better setting. I buy into that argument and can thus make such biased statements.

Anyways, White Wolf’s moving to reprint its OWoD books… via Drive-Thru‘s print on demand (PoD) services. Having conversion books (“translation guides”) is an interesting idea, since the two lines share roughly the same system (dice pools of “attribute + skill”), but have divergent backstories and settings. Also interesting: Mummy returns, but as a player-developed game and plot line. Given that the last physical NWoD release is already out, Mummy will be PoD/.pdf only… or, perhaps, the first in a return to OWoD. Which would be a bit ironic, since Mummy was almost the last OWoD line released, coming out right before Demon: The Fallen.

The new PoD stuff is great for those of us who still like/want to play OWoD instead of NWoD, but wake me up when they start coming out with new OWoD releases. Not just putting the old lines on PoD, and making conversions between WoDs possible; I’m talking about new material. Yes, the line was jam-packed with bloat to begin with, but:

• a.) the fact that it’s coming back for PoD and is the line for the MMO reveal the level of fan support, and a new edition of OWoD has a lot of potential as a marketing tie-in for the MMO
• b.) it’ll be a while before they get around to doing all the weird OWoD releases in PoD
• c.) to be honest, OWoD needs some cleaning out, revising, and updating so that it all works properly together, so a third (fourth?) edition would work wounders
• d.) what the hell else is White Wolf going to publish? If anything?

Exalted!

Moving on to the White Wolf game line I care most about.

A glance down at the bottom and you’ll see that most of the Exalted .pdf-only releases, including Thousand Correct Actions and Broken-Winged Crane, are heading into the Now In Print part of DriveThru. Thousand Correct Actions tops in at $10, which isn’t bad, since it’s interesting but only really half a sourcebook; my guess is Broken Winged Crane and the other .pdf releases will go for the same. (Waiting for the Scroll of Errata, dammit.) Also, being able to PoD a copy of Autocthonia rules.

There are also three new releases: an update of Manacle & Coin (yay!), more martial arts (double yay!), and Shards of the Exalted Dream, the Exalted version of NWoD: Mirrors. Mirrors was one of the most interesting books in recent memory, and of course, it’s already out of print. (Hey, White Wolf, about that new Print On Demand service…) To be honest, I already thought I’d bought Exalted Modern when I got Scion, but if this one’s half as good as Mirrors, Shards/Exalted will be fantastic. Still, what sells Exalted is the depth of its setting, not the rules—otherwise Scion could have become a longer line, like Changeling did—and I’m not sure that Shards can carry the game without that setting. Wait and see.

On The Move

For such a large publisher to jump into the PoD market is an interesting change of pace. PoD has long been the stomping ground of small-press and indie markets; now, we have a major publisher moving into the mix. Still, the DriveThruRPG Now In Print share is opening up to a number of other large publishers, so it looks to be a cost-cotting move by game companies across the board.  The World of Darkness has such able neighbors as AEG’s L5R and 7th Sea, Catalyst’s Shadowrun (including some old FASA releases), and Monte Cook’s Ptolus.

Having the option to buy hard-copies of out-of-print games—especially AEG’s Swordsman’s Guild for 7th Sea, which goes for a hundred or more on eBay—is pure awesome. The same thing goes for most of White Wolf’s Revised books, which have been demanding some serious scratch online for the past decade. (Well, serious if you want new copies; used ones can be found at or below retail with some work.) And the prices have so far been pretty low: low as in original MSRP, which feels pretty damn low for today’s age of high-gloss, high-price softcovers ($20 for a 96-page Pathfinder Adventure Path module; $20 for the 60-page CthulhuTech: Dark Passions; $35 for all those 160-page L5R 3rd softsplats).

On the flipside, this downsizing of their print lines and move to PoD could be another step of White Wolf turning into nothing more than a content developer for CCP. Truth be told, CCP is probably the best choice for a WoD MMO developer, if it turns out to be a player-driven game like EVE. (EVE doesn’t have developer-written quests or storylines, so it’s totally up to the players to derive fun from its galaxy of pixels and spreadsheets.) EVE’s heists and fuckery is legend, deriving from CCP’s hands-off approach to things like griefing and scamming. Also legendary is EVE’s intense learning curve and hostility to newbs. All of this fits the traditional mold of the World of Darkness, particularly the LARP side, in terms of player-driven paranoia and backstabbing.

But it’s a little disconcerting to see the second largest roleplaying publisher in the country erode as badly as it has. (Yes, there was a long period of time where White Wolf ate up the largest chunk of market after TSR/WotC. Now, that second-tier slot is under some pressure from Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo, Pinnacle, and a few others.) My guess is that White Wolf is gearing up for a major release event to tie in with the WoD MMO, or otherwise is building steam for some new release.

If they did end up cutting their ties to the print RPG industry to focus on the MMO, I wouldn’t be surprised; White Wolf’s had its time in the sun, and while it had a major impact on 1990s roleplaying trends, things have changed. The Storyteller system is a crunch-tastic behemoth compared to the new indie gaming trend. The slower output of the NWoD game lines, last years’ underwhelming Gen Con booth, the ending of the Exalted and NWod product lines, and the CCP buyout… yeah, White Wolf is a mere shadow of its self from a decade ago.

Exalted Combat 095

We’ve been metagaming Exalted a lot more, having two fairly long-running Dragon-Blood games on campus, plus a number of one-nighters, a failed Solar experience, and several plans for Sidereals and Dragon Kings that came and went almost overnight. Rummaging around on my hard drive, I found this quick batch of formulas I’d once whipped up to help out both myself and some newer players, before finding the fine Exalted Combat 201 lurking around the net. Still, nothing should go to waste, so here it is–Exalted remedial combat basics.

Hitting and Damage:

1. Hitting: Calculate your general accuracy/to hit dice; this would be (Dex + Ability) + Weapon Accuracy, plus any stunt dice, willpower successes, virtue dice, or any other bonuses to your roll. Did you exceed the target’s Defense Value (DV)?
   1. If yes, you’ve hit; go to Hardness.
   2. If no, you missed.
2. Hardness: Calculate your damage dice by adding your successes over the target’s DV to your raw damage (Str + base weapon damage). Did you exceed the Hardness of the target’s armor?
   1. If yes, you’ve damaged them; go to Soak.
   2. If no, you made a glancing blow and damage is ignored.
3. Soak: Calculate how much damage you’re doing at this point, which would be your raw damage (Str + weapon damage) plus the number of successes over the target’s Dodge/Parry. In other words, any dice left over from step 1. Subtract the amount of dice in the target’s soak from how many dice you’re currently at. Are you still in the positive?
   1. If yes, proceed to Damage.
   2. If no, the target’s armor and toughness soaks all the damage.
4. Damage: Roll the amount of dice left from step 3; in other words, your raw damage dice left minus the target’s soak. Results of 7 through 10 are equal to one success each.

Here’s a quick example to illustrate the formulas. My Terrestrial, Iselsi Ethryu, is smacking around another Dragon-Blood with his Wavecleaver Daiklave, for some reason.

• 1.) First, I roll my attack. Dex (4) + Melee (5) + Accuracy (3) = 12 dice, meaning my attack is equal to 12. I roll, and get a spread of 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9, for five successes. The target’s highest DV is Dodge at 4, so I manage to sneak in a hit. Barely.
• 2.) Next, I add my raw damage to my successes. Str (3) + weapon damage (8L) + successes (1) = 12 dice of the Lethal damage variety. This more than surpasses the target’s paltry 5 hardness from wearing a Buff Jacket. The attack hits and allows me to apply damage.
• 3.) This leaves me with 12L dice against my target’s soak; luckily for him, his Reinforced Buff Jacket isn’t so terrible, with a Lethal soak of 7, plus half of his 2 Stamina (… Matt, what kind of gimp character did you make?), which totals for a Soak of 8L. Subtracting this Soak from my raw damage, 12 – 8, I’ve got a final damage value of 4L dice.
• 4.) Rolling these 4 dice, I get the result of 3, 5, 7, 7, for a total of 2 successes, a pitiful roll if I don’t say so myself, but pretty standard for our Exalted group. We record this data, and hope that Matt wonders why his gimpy character has taken two Lethal damage before the game even started.

The other thing to keep in mind is the Flurry ability, shown under your weapon’s Rate in the books. This is the number of times you can attack with your weapon per round; for example, the Wavecleaver Daiklave has a Rate of 2, so you can make up to three attacks with it in a single round. For each attack you make, your overall dice pool subtracts that amount for the first attack and one additional for each following attack. So, if I were making three attacks with my Wavecleaver, I’d receive a -3 penalty for the first attack, and a -4 for the second. Don’t forget to flurry often, especially if you’re the lowly archer or mage doing a measly 2L+ from your arrows or Elemental Bolt.

This is somewhat countered by Onslaught, meaning that every attack past the first on a single enemy modifies its DV by -1. So, if I made all three of my attacks, the second would give the target a -1 DV, and a third gives a -2 DV. Note that this only applies to a single attacking character; Onslaught doesn’t continue to apply for multiple people, so if another person attacked with a Wavecleaver, they’d only get -1 to the DV on the second attack and -2 on the third.

Each action you make in combat modifies your DV by -1 until your next action; so, if I couldmake three attacks with my Daiklave, I’d have a -3 penalty to my DV until my next turn. This can be very helpful when you’re attacking, and balances nicely with the fact it screws you when you’re on the defensive.

Initiative, or the “Wheels and Parasites” system, is a lot easier than some would have you believe. The basic strategy is to download a battle wheel and use that as a guide, then follow the instructions in the books: roll your Join Battle, the highest roller taking tick 1 and the first action. Everyone else subtracts their roll from the highest Join Battle roll and act on the according tick. So, if the highest was 6, the highest would act on tick 1, the 5’s on tick 2, the 4’s on tick 3, and so on. After making an action, move that many ticks along the battle wheel, and then the next tick can act. If your action is so slow that you’d go around the battle wheel and pass another actor, instead move into the secondary ring of the battle wheel; you’ll move back out once the actor on the last tick has gone, bringing it back full circle to you.

Rollplaying 101

For the Halloween game, we decided to focus on a meat-grinder Dungeon Crawl to kill everyone off. What started with my normal Exalted playgroup eventually took over our Friday game, where half of the players are from the Exalted game and the other half are Freshmen new to gaming or transfers new to the group.

Running through the 3.5 version of Tomb of Horrors, a lot of problems become pretty inherent in the system. Obviously, the game isn’t meant to handle a lot of characters (like, say, two per player) running around at the same time, especially since combat, traps, spells, etc. tend to take up a lot of time: crawl is an apt description. Four sessions in and we’re only halfway through the tomb, though a good number of characters have bit the dust. Likewise, dungeon crawls specifically cater towards the tactical, the skirmish-based, and are direct offshoots to the game’s miniatures (Chainmail) roots; the problems inherent in the dungeon crawl are many, specifically after running and playing a number of other games since my last dungeon delve.

Though, the biggest problem I found with the system is the total lack of innovation or incentive to roleplay actions. This is a problem I’ve had with the system since I started playing, and it feels like it’s gotten worse with each edition’s attempt to streamline things. At one point, developer Mike Mearls (who helped design 4th Edition) ran an OD&D game (Original D&D, as in the little brown books that are damn near impossible to find), and came up with the following:

I think that OD&D’s open nature makes the players more likely to accept things in the game as elements of fiction, rather than as game elements. The players reacted more by thinking “What’s the logical thing for an adventurer to do?” rather than “What’s the logical thing to do according to the rules?”

OD&D and D&D 4 are such different games that they cater to very different needs. For me, in OD&D things are fast, loose, and improvised…[OD&D players] are probably more likely to accept…a game that requires a bit more deductive reasoning (I disable a trap by wedging an iron spike into the lever that activates it) as opposed to D&D 4 (I disable a trap by finding the lever then making a skill check).

This is the problem I’ve had with D&D all along, and continues to this day. People who started with earlier editions of D&D, or other games in particular, tend to approach problems from a specific logical viewpoint: what can I do to achieve the desired results. They then roll the dice to see if their intended action succeeded or not. However, a lot of newer players–particularly those who started with 3.x–come at it from a different mindset: I make a skill check, therefore it works. There’s little actual innovation there; the players like this I know seldom actually give me a description of what happens, or what they even wanted to do. It’s kind of annoying, for a number of reasons: I know these players are better and more capable than that, and besides, I feel kind of bad when it’s always the same couple of guys who do the really awesome stuff.

For example, running Tomb of Horrors, a number of instances came up where some of my Exalted playgroup tried intricate means of disarming traps, sticking pins in and making excellent use of ropes and poles, while some of the D&D-based players gave me the standard “Well, I made my check, so I disarmed it.” Disarmed it how? A lot of the traps don’t make much logical sense, so I’d like to hear the explanation of how they were disabled, usually resulting in “I made my check.” Rollplaying has always been a part of the game–some people just like the stats-crunching, tactical-skirmishing, and loot-grabbing aspects, which is fine. I can roll with that. And while it’s not all the player’s fault, it’s not all part of the system either.

In another game (using the White Wolf Storyteller/d10 system), one of the D&D players was trying to climb up the roof of a tower to escape; when he neared the top, he realized a guard was posted on the roof. The GM then asked him how he was getting onto the roof, hoping for a wild flip to knock the guard off, or for the player to otherwise do something cool to get some stunt dice. “Well, I reach up, and get one leg over, and pull myself up, and stand up.” This continued for about ten minutes, until the player, getting pretty irritated, snapped back with “Well, I made my damn check, so that should mean I’m on the roof,” followed by a “Yes, but *how* did you get on the roof?”

Compare to one of the other guys; Matt started gaming during my Freshman year in a homebrew Fallout pnp game, and played a lot of Deadlands, Exalted, and Star Wars d6 with us. After moving out of town for a semester and a summer, he came back with some pretty hilarious stories. One friend of his coaxed him into a d20 Modern game, where he gave the GM headaches by thinking so much outside the box. For example, during the first firefight, he shot out power lines to blind and distract the enemies, since the players had low-light vision while the enemies did not. This so boggled the GM and other players that they literally had to ask why he would shoot out the power lines, and further, what it would do. Matt ended up leaving the game because it grew into a homebrew munchkin fest rather quickly, to the point where he got sick of it (his character had a bluff of 36 at 3rd level, yet couldn’t do pretty much anything with it).

It’s that kind of thinking that I love as a GM–watching players come up with brilliant ways to combat whatever I’ve thrown at them, more than just “I shoot at him with my rifle,” or “I made my skill check.” Originally, I used to hand out extra XP for doing cool things and thinking outside the box, but by now I’ve realized that some people do it instinctively while others have a hard time with it, to the point where some characters will be a level or two above everyone else. That doesn’t encourage creativity–in fact, it just disenfranchises people who think tactically instead of cinematically. Rewarding the lateral thinkers just hurts the horizontal thinkers. Still, I do think it’s good to reward players who do amazing things, although I now hold them to a higher level to try and balance things out. For example, I expect Matt and Reuben to try something nuts on the go-big-or-go-home level, and while I’ll still reward them when they do it, I’ll be comparing it to their past few stunts when I hand out XP.

Granted, this isn’t a problem for everybody, and therefore I have no good solution for it. It all goes back to the standard dichotomy on how you want to run your game: tactical or cinematic. I do love some tactical gaming–don’t get me started on my various ideas for linked miniatures campaigns–but for roleplaying, I always enjoy a blended game, though a blend which leans more towards cinematic. Mostly, it’s the problem with the dungeon crawl format–there really isn’t much to do for anyone without intelligence bonuses or trapfinding abilities. It’s also something that really turned me off from D&D 3.0, and now 4.0: the difference between gaming group styles. Until I found my current group, I’d just about sworn off D&D, having run in some miserable adventures (see the GM’s Workshop article I wrote a few months back). When you have a gaming group that you can mesh well with, every game is fun; but until then, you’re stuck in the realm of differing play styles.

———
A related issue was brought up by one of my players, who happens to be the major GM in our group. After watching two characters come very close to making DC 18 will saves and failing (rolled 15 and 17, respectively), thus becoming dominated, this player mentioned to me the arbitrary nature of D&D dungeon crawls; no matter how close you came in a skill check or save, if you failed, you failed miserably. I’d like to branch this out into gaming in general: games, as a whole, need to have certain gaming elements in them. Without the win/fail scenario, games don’t have the challenge, and thus they need certain elements like this to stay games. But, I agree with him my player: as a GM with a story/campaign planned, we don’t want to see characters bite it just because they were a point away from an arbitrary number. D&D, while a fantastic game, is still somewhat bogged down in this respect as a tactical dungeonpunk game, with the “Press X or Die” mentality. I see each cumulative edition trying to break that mentality as much as it reinforces and streamlines it: to fix non-weapon proficiencies, which enable characters to be fleshed out, we have skills, which leads to skill-checks and “Well, I made my check.”

As always, this is incredibly subjective; I already view rules not as an absolute but as guidelines. The point of gaming is to maximize fun, and if there’s something that detracts from that fun, get rid of it. (Yes, this is probably a throwback to my 2nd Edition AD&D days, when we jokingly referred to half the rules-as-written as “poorly designed optional rules,” such as the demihuman level limits, the rules for non-weapon proficiencies, character kits, etc.) That’s not to say I don’t kill characters–some situations, and some games, like Deadlands/Call of Cthulhu, demand it. I wouldn’t change the way DCs or skill checks work for 3.5–that’s just the milieu, the style and focus of the game. Most of the group is very intuitive, and the rest are grasping the concept of a cinematic game pretty quickly. But it does make me a lot more appreciative of how my players handle Exalted and their dice pools.