Hey everyone, welcome back. Today I’m covering one of my favorite companies of all time, White Wolf. Responsible for smash hit RPGs like Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse and Mage: the Ascension. From their meteoric rise from a literal garage magazine to gobbling up nearly 26% of the RPG market. At one point it was thought they may even be able to eclipse Dungeons & Dragons. However, some poor acquisitions led by some edgy writing would lead to their downfall.

Learn how this 90s darling would go from the just a couple of guys, to CCP Games, publisher of EVE Online, to their own failed World of Darkness MMORPG attempt before eventually falling to today, owned by Paradox Interactive who has done a ton with the license so far.

  • Flushmaster
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    1 year ago

    While I have very little direct personal experience playing WoD games I wouldn’t think anything associated with the setting would actually make a good MMORPG. At least not anything remotely resembling resembling a “traditional” one, such as World of Warcraft, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, ESO, etc. Games like that fundamentally focus on, to use fancy game design terminology, bonking and blasting things. While there are combat mechanics in WoD and combat situations can be very important to the games, combat is not inherently a primary focus of the system. While D&D is basically a combat game that you can tell stories around WoD games are designed primarily to tell stories that sometimes just happen to involve violence.

    The dice pool mechanics that WoD uses are a big example of this: gradient levels of success and failure are great for giving wiggle room to tell a good story and using for social interactions but simply do not define combat as clearly and neatly as the much more specific system that games like D&D use. MMO combat is almost always based on a clearly defined ruleset modeled after something along that latter idea; a clearly defined formula (typically using some automated RNG in place of physical dice) determines if you either hit or you miss, then another formula decides how much damage you do by taking into account any and all the myriad bonuses and penalties involved from class traits, gear, target resistances, etc. With WoD games that really isn’t the point. In a WoD game you generally take some time to roleplay and set up a dramatic situation then maybe have a brief but intense fight that erupts as a result. It’s the kind of thing that might take up a two minute scene in a movie as opposed to, well, a video game where the majority of the gameplay is just bonking and blasting things in different ways occasionally broken up by a cutscene or to clear your inventory at a merchant.

    Short version: You play MMOs to go on “dungeon crawl” type bonking and blasting sprees and you play a WoD game to tell a story that might occasionally involve brief bits of bonking and bashing. If you want to do a tabletop dungeon crawl style bonk/blastfest you probably aren’t playing WoD. You play WoD to focus on telling a story about your characters and the format of an MMO just isn’t a good match for that. And I’m not even going to try thinking of how you’d adapt Mage’s magic system into a video game.

    • Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary@dice.camp
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      1 year ago

      @Flushmaster @copacetic I dunno, there’s one WoD game that could be pressed into the MMO mold with some work: Werewolf: the Apocalypse.

      Be a furry, shapeshifting, rage-fueled ecoterrorist, tearing apart fomori in the streets at night, raiding Pentex buildings, diving into surreal Umbral landscapes to learn Gifts from spirits, attacking Black Spiral Dancer strongholds…