Brianne asked in the comments why I felt White Wolf needed to do away with all the clans.
My reasoning on doing away with the groupings is this: I see it as unneccesarily adding more complexity. Character motivations and backgrounds should and will vary anyway. All the multiple groups within groups makes the setting a lot busier than it needs to be. For a long time, I've felt that the Gothpunk world had too many Vampires and the two most successful games I ran in Vampire was a Dark Ages game where the PCs new very few other vamps in the world and a Sabbat game where the PCs were a bunch of Sabbat vamps travelling through the US in an old R.V. like the one in Near Dark and in each city they found that weren't nearly as many vamps in the world as they had heard. (The basis of the game, the players eventually realized that the Vampire organizations like the Camarilla and the Sabbats were nothing but rumours.) By making the world less populated with supernaturals, it kept the game from getting too busy and gave more reason for the PCs to roleplay between eachother and eventually create the conflicts between eachother. It's like in Amber. You give them a lot of power (there were no methuselahs breathing down my PCs necks) and a big playbox and they eventually make drama between eachother. The game becomes less about the powers and all the different factions and more about the personalities.
Let's compare Vampire: The Masquerade to Amber. Both Amberites and Vamps come from the same bloodline and choose from a limited set of powers based on being from that bloodline. Amberites don't need all the different political factions to cause the conflict for the setting. The groups in Vampire are an artificial way to cause conflict.
In Changeling, the Kiths made sense. When Vampire came out, the Clans were a pretty neat idea. When White Wolf went and applied the same idea to every one of their games, it became to much. By the time White Wolf finished the first five games, the world was already getting pretty crowded, with almost a hundred different supernatural factions, each with their own agenda. Then, the success of those lines led to Hunter, Mummy, Demon, etc. It's just too much.
I'd like a simple system for creating supernatural creatures and a basic world a lot like ours with a darker, supernatural edge. That's all I think the game needs.
Posted by Nuadha at November 30, 2003 10:07 PM