Numetal/Retromux
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@Ashkuri While that’s all true, and it may explain some of the behaviours seen in WoD games, it doesn’t make anything we’ve seen exclusive or even more prevalent in WoD when compared to other genres.
I’ve seen just as much egotistical bullshit from Lords and Ladies games, Star Wars games, Star Trek games… Alas, I’ve only heard about the kind of bullshit that happens on comic book games, but that’s a whole different kettle of sparrows.
WoD was simply one of the more popular genres in our corner of the hobby for an extended period, so we have a stronger institutional memory of the problems.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
Star Wars games
AoA is probably the current prime example of near constant shitfuckery, just based on the thread here.
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While I agree that many genres have similar issues, I do kinda think oWoD has a unique brand of chaos thanks to allowing a certain kind of player to gesture to the sourcebooks and go “it’s thematic for me to be a raging asshole”. Most players don’t do this. Some do. Some buckle down hard. The older books have a lot of sexually charged lore as well, and that particular player may latch onto that with some… colorful manifestations that everyone gets to deal with.
I say this as a wod player who loves wod, though I prefer newer stuff.
Sure there’s probably star wars/star trek/lords and ladies sourcebooks that give players carte blanche in this regard. But man… wod has a secret sauce or something.
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@Ashkuri said in Numetal/Retromux:
This system was never meant to be in a MUSH format.
This is always a very silly complaint to me. With the exception of systems like (presumably since its creator is the developer of Ares – also I may be incorrect but I believe it was designed as a tabletop system first) FS3, no tabletop system was meant for a MUSH environment. Even systems designed with VTT in mind are designed with the same dynamics as World of Darkness where you have a small handful of people who are exceptional representatives of whatever larger group they belong to – adventurers, werewolves, wizards, investigators, nobility, etc., etc. – and people external to that group are either benign NPCs or enemies. One could also say that Star Wars doesn’t work because you’re not intended to run Imperial and Rebel Alliance characters at the same table.
I’m not disagreeing with the overall point that WoD games always seem to have the wildest and weirdest stories, but blaming the system of a collection of separate tabletop games that people insist on shoving together because they use the same names for stats digresses from the overall point of why WoD games end up as a huge mess, which is usually:
@Yam said in Numetal/Retromux:
thanks to allowing a certain kind of player to gesture to the sourcebooks and go “it’s thematic for me to be a raging asshole”. Most players don’t do this. Some do. Some buckle down hard. The older books have a lot of sexually charged lore as well, and that particular player may latch onto that with some… colorful manifestations that everyone gets to deal with.
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@somasatori said in Numetal/Retromux:
no tabletop system was meant for a MUSH environment.
Hence my belief that LARP systems would work better.
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I fear that the all-too-common assertion of this or that genre being particularly problematic abnegates the true bearers of responsibility: the players and staff playing those games. We can talk ad nauseam about systems and lore and thematic appropriateness, but that’s basically irrelevant—we’ve been having those conversations for the better part of two or three decades at this point.
Poor behaviour is only acceptable because people in positions of authority continue to accept it. Couching the problem as “this genre has its issues” is lazy and reductive and passes the buck from staff enforcement of behavioural standards to some ineffable ‘theme’ problem.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
I do not think saying you generally have your work cut out for you when running a game with very, very dated social mores is lazy and reductive.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
I fear that the all-too-common assertion of this or that genre being particularly problematic abnegates the true bearers of responsibility: the players and staff playing those games. We can talk ad nauseam about systems and lore and thematic appropriateness, but that’s basically irrelevant—we’ve been having those conversations for the better part of two or three decades at this point.
I don’t disagree here, as there are many normal (or whatever) people playing and staffing on WoD games. I think the problem is a precursor to what we have now. Long ago no one curbed the behavior. Then we all put up with the behavior to our own detriment. Now it seems that the true WoDheads left are either very traumatized by said poor behavior and therefore trust no one, or are the perpetrators of said behavior. Then there’s are the people who are new to WoD on a MUSH and are deeply confused about this dichotomy.
But as you said,
Poor behaviour is only acceptable because people in positions of authority continue to accept it. Couching the problem as “this genre has its issues” is lazy and reductive and passes the buck from staff enforcement of behavioural standards to some ineffable ‘theme’ problem.
And while that is true, there are certain elements that may attract a certain kind of player to WoD over Star Wars. But it comes back to the historical “that’s how it’s always been” approach. If you see someone playing a Black Spiral Dancer, you have a short hand association of the kind of player they most likely are. It may not be accurate, but we’ve played with enough of them and have enough general understanding of the theme to know what RP they’re going for.
But hell, that’s probably incorrect now that I write that out given that the player who was banned from RetroMUX for violating the policy around erotic RP as a minor enacted this RP on a star wars game.
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A while ago I was perusing the policies of oWoD games and I was heartened to see that most of them are at least attempting to get with the times! There’s that extra effort. That extra work you have to put in. Naturally this involves deviating from the theme. You have to house rule a bunch of shit.
It also showed that a lot of staff were tired of dealing with the bad actors that certain splats attracted. Like… this tension exists! People try to work around it. To what effect, I’m not sure. But the theme invites it, and to insist otherwise seems a bit odd.
Like if I was deciding on a theme for a new game and I wanted MINIMAL work and stress and chaos between friends and enemies, I think I might just go for a custom theme as opposed to WoD. WoD is hardmode. It’s fun, but it’s fkn hard.
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@Yam said in Numetal/Retromux:
You have to house rule a bunch of shit.
I think this is a whole different conversation, because looking at the documentation for all of the active WoD games out there, at least a couple of them have house ruled too much.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring whether you like how any particular person does it or not, yam’s point is that there is necessary work that must be done to make different spheres work together on MU. You will absolutely have to house rule system interactions, and if you don’t do it at the outset you will be doing it on the fly during scenes when players ask ‘how will this work?’.
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@hellfrog said in Numetal/Retromux:
yam’s point is that there is necessary work that must be done to make different spheres work together on MU.
I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m saying that there are games claiming to be WoD games that have house ruled their mechanics and the overall WoD plot so much that they aren’t WoD anymore.
It’d be like if I claimed to run a baseball league, but baseball in my league involved driving modified cars down a quarter mile track.
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@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:
I think this is a whole different conversation, because looking at the documentation for all of the active WoD games out there, at least a couple of them have house ruled too much.
At one end of the spectrum, Changeling has so many unclear and sometimes self-contradictory rules that it’s difficult to avoid ending up with a lot of house rules, even if most of them are essentially just “and this is the interpretation we’re going with.”
At the other end is “We don’t like the way Vampire Disciplines work by the book and so we’re going to introduce a completely new set of rules for them.”
My extremely cold take is that if you’re advertising your game as using such and such system, you should probably make an effort to stick to the rules of game system as much as possible, and that the fewer differences your players have to learn, the better. But then again, two different people may have wildly different ideas about how that looks in practice for any given game system.
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@Yam I think it’s as simple as because in WoD you play as ‘The Monster’ in some various way. Like you can play as a bad criminal guy or whatever in Star Wars and probably Star Trek too, or ‘bad people’ in Lords & Ladies etc etc. But they all still start with the premise that you’re a person just like any other in your particular situation.
WoD positions the players as monsters and oWoD even does things like having different morality as part of the systems of play and somehow I think that extra step removed from being a ‘normal person’, even a bad person, gives people that extra edge (heh!) to be horrible.
