Transcendent rites or transcendence maybe:

Transcendent - Something beyond the material universe and our experience or knowledge of it.

Mostly, it's the fans I don't like. I'm about to generalize, and I'd like everyone to know... I'm not referring here to everyone who's ever played a White Wolf game (after all, I have played and continue to play White Wolf games), but rather to a sort of statistical blending together of the traits of White Wolf players I have interacted with, particularly the ones who first came to roleplaying through White Wolf, or who came to White Wolf through D&D (the traditional "entry level RPG") fairly quickly and then stayed there. Not all of the players like this share all of the traits I'm about to mention, but most of them will have some portion of these traits, and altogether, it makes for a bad mix.

First of all, White Wolf players know nothing and care nothing about role-playing, beyond the simple forms the game structure itself encourages:

"I hate werewolves because I'm a vampire." "I hate vampires because I am a werewolf." "I am a Ravnos, therefore, I am mischievous." "My humanity score is 7, therefore, upon witnessing this shocking act of brutality, I flinch." "I am on the Path of Nihilism, therefore, I use my mind-powers to encourage the priest to rudely assault the nun with a crucifix."

I've heard it said that anything that encourages role-playing is a good thing, but the above are not examples of role-playing. They're more like "rote" playing. In an RPG forum I used to post to, I found an article written by a woman who was a Storyteller for a White Wolf game. The theme of the article was something like "When role-playing goes too far." What she was describing was a situation in which one player's slavish addiction to the letter of the law version of the Path (similar to alignment, for non-WWers) his vampire was following caused him to sacrifice one comrade and slaughter another, without giving any thought to the context of his actions or how his past history with the two other player characters would affect his judgement. She came to the conclusion, at the end, that there are times when "role-playing must be set aside, so that we can consider the actual motivations of our characters, and ask ourselves, what would they really do in a given situation?"

My interpretation of this phenomenon (which I've witnessed again and again amongst WWers) is that non-roleplayers, exposed to a system that encourages/forces a superficial version of roleplaying, will learn that system, and then never bother to learn the nuances of actual role-playing. Someone playing D&D for the first time is likely to either play "themselves" (react as the player more than the character) or a stereotype of their character type, but over time, they'll learn more and more to project themselves into their character's shoes, and they'll gradually become actual role-players. WW gives no reason to do this: the role-playing is built in!

Also, and I cannot begin to speculate as to the reason for this, but WW players I have met tend to think of vampires and werewolves and such only in WW terms, as if they believe that WW invented these things and thus has the definitive version! Witness my roommate who tries to pinpoint all the times that Angel or Spike "uses Celerity," "goes into torpor," or experiences "the Red Fear." She actually finds "plot holes" when one of the vampires on a TV show or movie does something that is impossible according to White Wolf.

On a lesser note, I dislike the fact that with such rich culture and folklore and legend and whatnot available, WW makes so much $#!+ up. Again, this is mainly a fan concern, because as a rule, I encourage originality. But so many of the fans seem to think that WW is getting all this stuff from somewhere, when most of it is entirely original or has been thoroughly pureed. Every WW fan thinks that he or she is an/occultist folklorist... it's very frustrating to those of us with any actual occult or folkloric knowledge. I've seen one of my favorite GURPS books, Blood Types (a reference on vampire archetypes; cinematic, literary, and legendary... one of my three most-consulted sources when writing Elysium) castigated as being a "White Wolf rip-off," when all it is is a reference book on different interpretations of vampirism. (Since Steve Jackson Games has a license for producing GURPS translations of WW properties, I fail to see why GURPS would need to "rip off" WW games.)

I could keep on going for hours, but I have to go to work.

I was kicked out of a V:tM circle because my character was genuinely evil to the point that the other players were afraid of me. Not my character. Me. That's how little these people understood the concept of roleplaying.

Now, when I play White Wolf games, I play as a Corvid (raven-person)... they're about as tame as WW characters get, so I don't have to worry about frightening the civilians... plus, they're supposed to be non-combatants, so I don't have to worry about Storytellers telling me that my non-walking-tank character "isn't viable."

This reminds me of a roleplaying game which I found quite fun, if because of the great Game Master if nothing else. The world and most of it existed inside of a large corporation, you were part of the military, and lived in the Alpha complex. Computers ruled everything, as did hi-tech programmers, communists where the enemy. The rules on combat and different things were quite simple, and allowed large room for the GM to expand on them. You could secretly be a communist, and everything up to a form to fill out if you wished to turn in a communist or turn in yourself was included in the game set (If anyones tried this, please remind me of the name, if nothing more than trying to find it on the net). You had 6 clones, and then your character was gone. The GM made the game very wacky, and I remember my third clone coming out inside-out due to a programmer spilling coke on the keyboard. *Winces*

Another fun moment was battling with the vending machine. When you wake up at the Alpha complex the computer wakes you up, and directs you to the Vendoring machine, to take your "Wakie Wakie Pill". Problem was that even though you had been there all your life, you still had to figure out which button did what. Once in a while he would include signs from a Rune Book he found somewhere, or sometimes it would be simple signs such as a Christmas tree that you just have to try out of curiosity. Of course the christmas tree led me to a deep death at the bottem of a 600 foot hole with a christmas tree at the bottem, of which I was impaled.

Game sessions lasted 2 hours, once every saturday from 9-11 or 12 sometimes with half an hour break in between to get pizza/food etc. Great great times :P Now im in snowy cold denmark, bah humbug. Almost an entire hour was spent getting to the briefing room sometimes because things were this wacky, and there were ALWEASE new obstacles, it was NEVER the same.

Anyways, if anyone knows the name of this RPG please tell me because I cant really remember :P

(Dont ask me why I wrote this, cept I miss the game!)

Alathon

If you enjoy paranoia (and who doesn't), check out GURPS IOU (IOU stands for Illumaniti University... don't ask what the O stands for), from Steve Jackson games. You'll need GURPS Basic Set and Compendium I to play it, but not to enjoy it. :)

LexyBitch wrote:

If you enjoy paranoia (and who doesn't), check out GURPS IOU (IOU stands for Illumaniti University... don't ask what the O stands for), from Steve Jackson games. You'll need GURPS Basic Set and Compendium I to play it, but not to enjoy it. :)

Will check it out as soon as I can :) Thx for the reminder on name as well, too bad no one I know here wants to or knows how to roleplay(this country is a sad, sad place)

I wonder if a roleplaying game in line of paranoia, GURPS, etc on BYOND would be something worth trying (I guess a heavy amount of administrative commands to create fun effects, the basic creation tools with hundreds of different turfs/objs/mobs, save the world state etc etc etc might give it a chance)

Any thoughts on that?


Alathon

Yes, but his was geared more towards single sessions at a time. And the pure amount of commands that would have to be done to obtain the spontanity can never be achieved, unless I manage to get a working online-coding system working somehow. This would also require a quite fast typer tho :P
Anyways, as I think of it now because of that it can never be the same, and mostly ruins the fun of such games like paranoia, the complete spontanity which simply cannot be achieved in a computer, atleast not in the same way that you can as a GM irl.


Alathom

Spuzzum wrote:

I wonder if a roleplaying game in line of paranoia, GURPS, etc on BYOND would be something worth trying (I guess a heavy amount of administrative commands to create fun effects, the basic creation tools with hundreds of different turfs/objs/mobs, save the world state etc etc etc might give it a chance)

You know, it isn't overly difficult to have a game where the GM has ultimate control over tons of special effects, assuming a text-based game. Just give the GM the capability to edit variables and narrate story text.

Then after playtesting a couple sessions, you just make some of the more often used variable edits and stuff that requires calculations.

Graphical games, on the other hand, are much more difficult to gamemaster. You have to provide all of the effects in the code first.

The code isnt the difficult part, but the need for new things out of the blue is. You can never achieve the same type of feeling where the GM does something that even he didnt think of before, that, in code might not be possible to do at an instant of notice, without having to code in an entirely new proc/verb and rebooting.

And also of course the fact that graphics are a problem, they also raise the standard especially in this type of game. Because normally you have the GM to describe everything, I guess you could add a description to everything but I think in graphical games the need for...good graphics once they are finally there is higher.

Alathon