Did NWoD Kill White Wolf?

[Lysander]

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

[Knightingale]

what always weird me out is how 95 wod themes are as applicable as it was back then. It isn't so much prophetic as condemning.

That reminds me of that section in Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" where it's all about the idea of "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.".

[Heavy Arms]

While Fisher has plenty of good points, he's also over a decade out of date and Capitalist Realism really doesn't hold up after the last decade of financial crises. Millenials and Gen-Z broke majority non-favorable to capitalism in 2018. That's only gotten more traction since. The generations not raised in the shadow of the Cold War are not nearly as indoctrinated into capitalist dominance as previous generations, despite efforts to continue such bias in society. The future of a capitalist base economy is actually fairly unlikely at this point because capitalism has repeatedly failed stress test after stress test over the last decade.

To bring this back to the larger topic, I think one of the things that keeps the WoD so relevant is that inter-generational conflict is baked into the themes of the games. Older generations that have had time to amass power continue to stymie younger generations from making changes to solve problems everyone agrees are problems; but the older generations don't want the change necessary.

The CofD toned down this conflict for other things. This isn't bad. There's lots of compelling conflicts to tell stories about through games. But many of the CofD games don't focus on quite the same immediate yet enduringly resonant attraction we have towards generational conflicts.

[LordOfAsh]

No it didnt. The excellent World of Darkness doc currently streaming on amazon prime mentions it just didnt sell as well but theres no reason the company couldnt recover from it or change tack. I agree that the real culprit was mismanagement by CCP - they bought it and cannibalized it when EVE ran into trouble (also mentioned in the doc).

[Iguazu]

New RPGs really aren't that expensive; and a lot of older RPG-books are now, "Collector's Items", ridiculously priced on Amazon, it's not Gen Z or Millennials that's buying RPGs nowadays, it would seem.

Even, back in the day, I was able to pay my bills and have money left over to by RPGs.

[Mr Gone]

what always weird me out is how 95 wod themes are as applicable as it was back then. It isn't so much prophetic as condemning.

I know! It's crazy how that works sometimes... time really is a flat circle!

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

That's just what I was thinking! LOL.

[Heavy Arms]

New RPGs really aren't that expensive; and a lot of older RPG-books are now, "Collector's Items", ridiculously priced on Amazon, it's not Gen Z or Millennials that's buying RPGs nowadays, it would seem.

Even, back in the day, I was able to pay my bills and have money left over to by RPGs.

RPG prices are artificially low because of a number of factors, but they're significantly more expensive than they used to be (esp. when you consider the average consumer's relative buying power not just raw price).

Also.... remember that the older Millenials are in their 40s now. Millenials are definitely a big part of the current RPG customer base, and have been for some time.

That said, there is a different cultural shift to consider with why both of the * of Darkness lines have struggled despite having strong content:

Millenials considering "nerd" and "geek" things much more mainstream. Part of D&D 5e's massive success is that you can play it with your kids, and generally speaking if your kids are into RPGs, D&D style games aren't going to be weird for playing with your parents The * of Darkness games are inherently transgressive. As a generality 15 year old kids don't want to play Vampire with their 40ish year old parents and more than they want to talk about their Internet porn search histories with their parents; your parents being cool with it can make even if more awkward. But that makes it harder to capitalize on RPGs becoming more mainstream because the nature of the material cuts off a lot of avenues of getting newer and younger players into the games.

[Cauthon]

I could see twisting some of CoD's gamelines into kid-friendly stuff to play with your kids though. Mage you just need to up the "Captain Planet villain" feel of the Seers, and tone down the more gruesome elements like blood sacrifice. Most of the 2e core rulebook is pretty safe, unless I've forgotten some pretty glaring things. Changeling too. Promethean is a bit to esoteric even for adults to have a large audience, but "what makes a human" is an interesting question for most age groups.

I don't know enough about WoD, so I won't try speculating there.

[Ragged Robin]

I ran Sorceror tier mage for a bunch of pupils at my school as a training wheel intro to roleplay. They've stated they'd like me to run a sequal next term once they wrap up their first d&d campaign and have apparantly been probing about wod and cod so there is potential to hook the young uns their