The World Of Insufficient Light

I was exposed to the World Of Darkness by a well-meaning classmate in high school. He had heard that I had been playing Dungeons and Dragons and wanted to spread the word of something a bit more contemporary.

He gave me a role-playing game called Werewolf: The Apocalypse, part of White Wolf’s The World Of Darkness series of Gothic-Punk roleplaying games.

At first, it didn’t seem that much different from Dungeons and Dragons. It even began with the same form of introduction: “Imagine something that’s not roleplaying. Now imagine that it is!”

But as I read deeper, I wanted to give the game a spin. It was the first role-playing game I had encountered where a character wasn’t created by randomly generated numbers. And being forced to choose between pre-defined stereotypes to play made things even easier, allowing a person to easily role-play their character without having to spend time on a backstory. There was even flavortext sprinkled liberally across each page…bad poetry, stories in unreadable fonts, outright lies deluding you into thinking that with five points in Law, your character was the reincarnation of Perry Mason. But the flavortext didn’t have to be good, it just had to exist. Even the mechanics seemed novel back then, rolling and re-rolling dice like a game of jacks.

Werewolf was set in a world where nature was Good, and technology was Bad. You fought businessmen with a penchant for turning into tentacle demons when cornered, and evil werewolves that looked just like you, but slimier. In downtime, you got to jockey for political renown amongst your clan, who were all power hungry assholes and/or sage mystics. In other words, it was a game steeped in anime insisting it was Gothic-Punk. But since I didn’t know a damn thing about anime, Goths, or punks, I just accepted this as fact.

Likewise, the storyline of the rest of the World Of Darkness games were a schizophrenic mish-mash of conflicting ideas, and for a while, that was what I was looking for. I enjoyed the fact that each book featured an entirely different conspiracy that controlled 80% of the world, and didn’t know about each other. What I didn’t realize for a while was that each game put the players in the position of being given goals they could never actually achieve. You could play as Mages who couldn’t use magic, or Ghosts who couldn’t save themselves from Oblivion. Werewolves were already extra-doomed, to the point that “The Apocalypse” was in the subtitle of their book. And of course, there were Vampires. Ancient, alien intelligences that would plot and scheme for thousands of years to bring about the downfall of their enemies. You didn’t play as those people. You played as their henchmen’s henchmen, so far down the totem pole that there was no way in hell you could ever gain a bit of political power. But since no game company could put out modules based on a character’s individual struggle to gain contentment and peace in their lives, all adventures were about being sent to fight people much stronger than you in an attempt to gain favor with a powerful Vampire lord. That was unless you were involved in storylines that could equally be defined as a “Comedy of Manners” or “Dilbert.” Could you bluff your way into the inner circle of upper-class twits who could read your mind and then rip it out of your skull? Of course not.

At the time, we didn’t know any better. Most of the role-playing games we played offered sadistic advice we’d choose to ignore. Dungeons and Dragons would warn that actually letting the players collect the wealth and fame they sought would destroy your precious storylines. Call of Cthulhu was about defeating the undefeatable, and in Paranoia, everyone was trying to survive to see the next day, and that simply wasn’t going to happen. The difference is that World of Darkness was the first role-playing game publishers to take deviation from their vision as insulting. Players who became the prince of their city were simply carving out adolescent fantasies, and werewolves who kicked too much ass were not being realistic enough. The very idea that people were playing Vampire-Werewolves in the privacy of their own home really annoyed them, and they weren’t shy to say so. Repeatedly. In sidebars of books that you had just paid too much money for to few pages of information. Then they’d publish a book featuring a werewolf with a cybernetic arm and nothing to lose. Of course, he has a mysterious past.

But I played the games because role-playing games are viral in nature. Each time my group of friends got tired of the strange mechanics and awkward storylines, someone else would come up with a new idea, and we’d be back on the wagon. In college, this trend continued, as any new game was as likely as not to be about things that went bump in the night.

As time went on, White Wolf became more concerned with defining what the game was not than what it wasn’t. In an entire supplement devoted to wire-flying humans and people armed with robots powered by the dreams of Japanese children, they took the time out to explain why Blade was stupid, and you were stupid for thinking vampires could learn kung-fu. But that wasn’t what finally tipped the scales. In the end, it was the simple fact that the good people at White Wolf games would reissue new editions of their books every few years, usually with hard to define rule changes, and a lack of hooks that would drag a player in…and a steeper price tag. This is the sort of thing that stops a player from continuing on, and also causes him to re-evaluate his previous investments.

My final exposure to White Wolf was Adventure!, a game based on pulp novels from the '20s. It ended with trying to play it. In a game of fast moving action and dramatic flair, I question mechanics that divide “rolling on the ground, picking up a knife, and then throwing it at a goon” into three separate actions, each requiring a separate roll to determine success.

I’m told that eventually White Wolf decided that their storyline had gotten much too complex, and that it was time to end over a decade of interweaving books, comics, and in-game fiction by weaving them together into the final ending that the series had been striving for all those years.

The ending was, “Well…what do you think happened?”

Then White Wolf rebooted it’s series of games from ground zero. It featured the same plotlines, the same themes, and suspiciously similar characters…but it did have better statistics.