commoner said:

Sorry to hear that stagnation is what killed the world of darkness where you live... Welcome to the real world where the Old World of Darkness ended after a thirteen year run, an industry leader and holder of the second biggest market share in gaming. Welcome to a world where a company actually had the guts to do what their game had always said was going to happen, end. Welcome to a world, where there was still plently to write about. Mage alone had room for revised edition convention books for NWO, progenitors, syndicate, Void engeneers, setting material for outerspace, for the technocrasy, a technomacy book, book on academia, and a book on time travel.

And that is just what pops into my head. If anything, the new world or darkness, a game which is tool box game, i've ever there was one has stagnated more in less than a decade than OldWoD did in close to a decade and a half

Amigo.

Not to burst your bubble, but WW is in a bit of a jam. Its numbers are less than a third of what they were, and looking at the quarterly reports and the numbers in their own fanclub, they are definitely not close to 'industry leaders' anymore.

This however is a WFRP forum, so I'll stick to commenting on that. There are two schools of thought on genre codification. One is that great detail inspires great creativity, the other is that great detail stifles and limits the creative potential.

I'm personally somewhere in the middle and I think that having some high level info is good, while low level is stifling. For example, while I do want to know the name of the patriarch of the bright order, I don't need to know the floor by floor layout of the College, the name of every Wizard Lord, Battle Wizard and Acolyte, where their quarters are, or how much the novices trade a pint of ale for. There is a middle ground I think that inspires in broad strokes to fire up the imagination, while leaving the details in the hands of the GM. I see the previous posters point though, that there needs to be a bit more detail to reach that balance, but overall I think they're erring on the side of 'possibility' rather than 'stifling'.

As a point of note on Morrslieb: didn't I read that one of the Morr high holidays was at a high point of the moon? So is it necessarily all bad?

zombieneighbours said:

Hey, I was simply siting what I heard from a handful of company insiders. Maybe they were mislead or listened to someone's grumbling, but the source(s) were never wrong in the past. So if that's too much real world, then I don't know what is. Also, all this gravitas about their "guts" created a very weak re-launch to create a faultering product. It has nothing to do either with the sandbox nature of the new genre. It has to do with the flatness in the treatment of their original design principles. Compare the two mages, and the second one is clearly not half of the game the first one was. Their best, new products are those that are completely new such as Promethian.

My point was and still remains, too much codification kills gaming potential. Sure, it might be exciting to get codified definition of a character in a the WFRP setting, but defining who the patriarch is does not necessarily add to the game either. People will either take it or leave it.

The new edition has codified a number of things in their edition, but in the big-picture sense. WOM walks us through what it would mean to be a Wizard from the day we're born, to how we get there, to what we could potentially experience at school. This gives us a world view. Knowing that Hans-Franz is the Primarch of magic is pretty much window dressing IMO. Gamers will use it or they won't. But, if FFG wants to ever right a module where the party throws down with the Primarch then they will have to match the original design principle and can't change it to the needs of the story. Just as some people play by Canon and other's don't. That canon shapes tons of minor details which eventually mount to major details.

On topic with inspiration, I know the general opinion of these boards is not hugely supportive of the Location Cards. But those things can be (and have been for me) a great source of inspiration. They are little windows into a potential story. Build a story/scene off one of them (Beastmen Herd Stone) for example and the plot becomes somewhat second nature. What encounters would happen there? Who would be there? What type of conflict would occur there? What type of obstacle?

The modules, at the same time, are sort of creating for those who want a codified world a world with definition. They are capable to be played stand alone or in an arc between them (as it seems). Playing the modules is playing in the Meta-plot the design team have established throughout their game. The Storm is coming, to launch it, The Gathering Storm. In the books, we deal with each individual incident of the rise of a new corrupting influence popping up here, there, and everywhere throughout the world. Inevitably, these small events lead to the storm of chaos, as per the Meta-fluff (God, kill me for that one) of the great war that is soon to come. I think it's perfect and deals with the overall narrative in a great way. If you're not a fan of the module yourself, find what inspiration you can from them. What's great is they show the rise of the storm also from the POV of the world low-level character's have access to. The Grand-Theologians and a rank one ratcatcher probably will never cross paths in the first place.

I love the detail we get from FFG: World POV, but not enough to drown us in.

shinma said:

My point was that in the inital period after the release of NWoD, they did hold onto that placement as an industry leader, (if not a market leader market share is something almost no one can really speak on that accurately) to a some extend. I will be the first to agree that WW have taken a nose dive of late, but that hardly seems suprising. They haven't really put out a good product since the release of changeling line. Both Hunter and Giest are lack luster, exalted has slowed down, and the support for vampire, werewolf and mage has been poor since the release of the Mysterium book.

NWoD brought us two of the best books WW ever did, Core WoD and Changeling: The Lost, which is a truely stunning game.

I really agree. The less coded stuff is, the more room I have to be creative. Make it to coded and we get to near "Do XXX, go to page 127, do YYY go to page 37".

I also prefer as few maps as possible, I ran Witgenstein (TEW) without using the map, because I had halved the rooms anyway, and it was much easier to run it by using logics and not be tied down to the map.

One of the reasons why WW has slowed down so much is that most of the staff are now working on the MMO. The company was bought out by CCP the makers of EVE online with the expressed intent to create a nWoD online game. so far the info on this has been sparse, but it explains a few things.

What FFG is doing right is that they are focusing on the loves of common man which is what we want, lets face it the players will only rarely have any interaction with the movers and shakers of the world. KF and Tyrus are not normally part of a game.