But, yeah, this reinforces the importance of brands, contrary to what @RaggleFraggle is trying to preach. People like familiarity. This is one of the reasons why DnD-like fantasy settings are so popular, and not just in games.
This is a false equivalence. People like fantasy
tropes popularized by D&D, but you’d be hard pressed to find many people who can name a specific fantasy
setting other than Middle Earth or Westeros. Also, most fantasy fans would never say “there’s no fantasy story you can’t tell in this one setting I like” because the fun of fantasy comes from imagining all these different worlds.
D&D isn’t glued to a specific setting like WoD. It’s not limiting all creative horizons to a single campaign setting and its specific idiosyncrasies. The majority of fantasy fans would agree that’s a silly thing to do. Even so, I’ve still gotten sick of all these oversaturated fantasy tropes that lazily copy Arda or Faerun. The sheer repetition makes the genre boring and not fun anymore. I’m burned out. Jaded.
Back in the day I and many others tried to do exactly the creative stuff you guys suggest using WoD.
B.J. Zanzibar’s archive is full of people adapting various works of fiction to the game rules. White Wolf got into it by making
Chronicles. The lorefags hated this and killed it all.
WoD isn’t the urban fantasy equivalent of D&D. It’s the urban fantasy equivalent of a single D&D campaign setting. All attempts to make more campaign settings were killed by lorefags who hate creativity and fun. These toxic asshats killed my interest in this IP years before most people in this thread even knew this IP existed.
I don’t believe that this obsession with brand recognition is good for art. People might prefer familiarity, but people have tons of stupid psychological biases. I think beliefs like “you can tell any story in this specific IP that I like” is hugely limiting your creative horizons. I used to think that way before I grew out of it and broadened my creative horizons by reading more books and watching more movies. Like D&D. I think I’ve been personally enriched by growing beyond that phase where I invest my entire identity in a single IP. Especially when every single IP inevitably gets run into the ground, loses what attracted you in the first place, and then insults you for not continuing to buy product like a good little mindless consumer.
This is probably the most important bit, though:
Paradox can’t be creative as you just said. They’re never going to use any of the ideas suggested. They’re never gonna produce good games period. Corpos drive franchises into the ground, as we’ve seen at length. So saying “WoD could totally tell great stories with good writers, so put aside your hate for it stemming from being cyberbullied by lorefags for years” is academic because it’s never gonna happen.
I guess people just aren’t very creative in general. It’s easy to say “
Bloodlines is the textbook WoD game” years after it came out, but how many people would think of that premise before it did? I don’t think it’s a textbook example. It doesn’t even have a party like
Redemption did. I think people say that because they’re uncreative and can’t imagine anything else. Like how fantasy is stuck in Tolkien’s shadow despite the plethora of works that predate him or weren’t influenced by him.
wtf you've never heard of the
I already know about all of that. I was in the tabletop fandom for a decade and read hundreds of the books. I’m probably the most well versed in the lore out of anybody in this thread and can spout trivia meaning nothing to you, like “process-based determinism versus results-based determinism”. I was a huge lorefag myself.
And you know what? My fondest memory of this IP is interacting with the waifus in
Bloodlines. All my positive memories of this IP come from playing that game, because it’s a fun game.
No amount of lorefaggery substitutes for actual gameplay and storytelling. That’s not how humans engage with games or stories. Despite what lorefags might think, no IP has gotten famous based solely on a list of factoids. IPs get famous because they’re spun off famous books or movies with cocktails of compelling characters, situations and themes. Nobody would give a fuck about Arda or Westeros if we weren’t already invested in Frodo Baggins and Ned Stark. Few here would give a fuck about WoD if we didn’t already fall in love with Jeanette, Damsel and Heather.
