Siranui said:
I'm not sure it's fair to call it 13 years of WW metaplot. The game was fine without it for a number of years after release. I think the metaplot thing really kicked off with 2e, and went downhill from there. At first (aside from being written by people who couldn't do maths) 1e really fitted my kind of ideal release schedule, and there was zero metaplot.
I agree. I think the metaplot problem with oWoD spawned from the fact that the WW writers wanted to tell stories as well as just write mechanics. Unfortunately, this lead to the fans taking every story they wrote as Gospel Truth about the WoD. Honestly, I neve rpayed any attention to the metaplot in any edition of WoD I played, and I loved it through and through. The only people I saw getting cranky about "balance" or anything, really, were the ones who insisted on adhering to the metpalot at all costs.
The nWoD decision to emphasize that "none of our little stories are set in stone" was a very good move. In addition to cleaning up the mechanics, they made clear something that most people really should have been able to see for themselves - an RPG is a framework for you to tell your stories, it isn't a straightjacket setting that your players must conform to.
Looking at the 40k RPGs, I think they have a strong danger of going down the same road oWoD did. 40k already has a strong and storied history of fluff which people naturally want to stay true to int he games they run, but if the fluff is getting in the way of the story you want to tell, you shouldn't feel constrained by it. You want to have a female space marine? Sure, whatever. You want to have a tiny 5-man space ship that's Warp capable? Go nuts. You don't need the approval of all 40k fans on this forum, you only need the approval of the people sitting at your table. Do what makes your group happy.
The 40k books are also making the oWoD mistake of describing all the rules over again in each "splatbook" and not even keeping them even between the books. People will naturally want to combine space marines and Inquisitors and Chaos and RTs, it would be better if the system jived form the get go. It took WW three full ediitons to realise that (4 if you count nWod, which I wasn't.) I much prefer the idea of a single "corebook" that describes all the basic rules and then each "splatbook" that tells you how to convert a standard "core" character into a Space Marine or a Rogue Trader. That might be trickier for aliens if FFG has any plans for an Eldar book or a Tyranid book (WW had the advantage that all of their splats started off as humans), but they could probably come up with something to make it work.