When the World of Darkness died …

A couple of years back I played in a lot of World of Darkness games. Everything started with “Vampire – The Masquerade”. The game was pretty new (at least to us) and in the beginning we had a small group of excellent roleplayers that enjoyed exploring the vampiric nature of their characters. We took great care in building atmosphere and everyone had a blast. When our GM opened the group for new players things started to go downhill. Especially when we had approx. 10 people sitting around the gaming table and when the player I always got in trouble with became Co-GM, I knew that the campaign had jumped the shark (at least for me).

Since I still enjoyed playing Vampire, I joined another gaming group and soon noticed that I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. In my experience the old WoD games has always been prone to severe cases of Munchkinism but things get worse when the GM itself is a Munchkin. When every second NPC you meet is at least a couple of generations above you and either looks like the GM’s wet dream and/or what he/she would love to look herself, things get boring fast.
But the worst thing by far was, that in some campaigns I played in, there were more vampires in any given city than normal humans. *sigh*
Intrigue and politicking can be fun, but it definitely hurts the game when the party doesn’t get anything done because of the constant fighting between the group’s members.

I also played in a couple of Werewolf campaigns and a short-lived Mage campaign. But in the end I stopped playing World of Darkness games. It’s not that I didn’t like the premise of the world or the rules (although I think the current Storyteller rules are much better). Slowly I turned my back from World of Darkness games. In a way the WoD died for me a long time before White Wolf’s Time of Judgement.