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Apr 1, 2012 -- 4:00PM, K.530 wrote:

Apr 1, 2012 -- 12:15PM, DavidArgall wrote:

    Now I can hardly give precise figures, but I will note that none of these game are for sale at my local game store.  That may be the whim of the owner or that I have just not looked closely at the products for sale, but it's at least a straw in the wind that these games are not doing as well as their producers would wish.

Yeh, those games are not being sold in game stores in any of the places I've lived the last three years.

I didn't know that the old books were still available in PDF downloads and print-on-demand, but I think that's probably the definition of a dead game. That's a business model that serves hundreds or maybe thousands of fans, not the hundreds of thousands of fans that DnD can expect to get if they make a decent Pathfinder-killer.

Hopefully, 5e DnD takes a look at the games that people actually buy in the gaming stores and stays with low-lethality. I'd really hate to see DnD die for five or six years like it did when TSR folded.

I have two game stores close to me, both of which carry White Wolf products. I go to a game in Glen Burnie about once a month or so at a game store, and they have White Wolf products. So my experience is 100% opposite of yours.

Also, I find it amusing that there has been on these very boards a push for WotC to bring DDN out in PDF format (perhaps editable for modules, etc). White Wolf is doing exactly that, plus providing a Print on Demand option so that their books will never be out of print for those who prefer hard copies. And yet, since it isn't WotC, they're being hailed as a dying company? Really?

Apr 1, 2012 -- 8:17PM, Qmark wrote:

However, they are also all crippled by a hard-coded "don't use your awesome abilities too much, or this version's boogieman will appear out of nowhere and eat you!" gimmick for some reason.

Well in Mage the Assention the bogeyman is the universal snap back they call paradox which corresponds somewhat to "Thricefold Returns" but generalized to any form of magic that isnt scientifically explainable .. rather than just agressive magic which actually is pretty interesting.

Is it in Vampire or Werewolf the over use drives you insane with loss of humanity?
 

Apr 1, 2012 -- 8:17PM, Qmark wrote:

My experience with White Wolf is that all of its lines play pretty much the same (even one-shots like that Street Fighter RPG, or the Highlander fangame from twenty years ago), which is the best part.
However, they are also all crippled by a hard-coded "don't use your awesome abilities too much, or this version's boogieman will appear out of nowhere and eat you!" gimmick for some reason.

You say "for some reason" like it's something that's just arbitrarily attached onto the game because the people at White Wolf are jerks and don't want anyone to have fun. (Hopefully you don't mean that, but that's sort of how it reads.)

Instead, that reason tends to be "all the humans who have access to things like armies, missiles, and if necessary, nuclear weapons to remove the monsters in their midst." Add the fact that the humans outnumber the supernaturals by a rather large number, and there are many ample reasons for the PC's to not use their supernatural abilities blatantly in public.

Of course, there are lots of subtle abilities that one can use - Vampiric Majesty is one, as is Obfuscate (if done in hiding first). The Gift: Anybeast allows an Uratha to appear like a normal animal even in wolf form. A number of sensory Gifts (Two-World Eyes, Death Sight for two examples) are easy enough to cover with sunglasses. Etc etc.

It's not a "don't ever use your powers" thing. It's a "don't use your supernatural abilities in full view of the public like an idiot," that's all.