Here is my elevator pitch – ymmv.

“You were hit by a semi and as you were laying there on the road, dying, a guy leans over you. “You don’t want to be dead any more than I do” he holds out his ghostly hand and you make a pact with something else and are reborn but not quite alone.

You live, you are hard as hell to kill now and have spooky powers. Oh and you see the dead everywhere.

Where do you go from here?”

All I ask is that you quit writing/developing games that make me want to freelance again. It’s like dangling the heroin outside the methadone clinic. Leave me in peace, dammit!

Josh: It took me almost a year to be sold on nWoD, I had a lot of reservation about the system (and to be perfectly honest, I still do – and that’s why the Golden Rule is still the best one). The fluff of nWoD is OMFG amazing though. My wife loves vampire fiction but hated The Masquerade, and the Requiem’s story got her so much that not only did she try it out, she ran a game for me (and let me tell you, playing one of the few Invictus in a town full of Crones is a very suspenseful game). Of all the backstories, I enjoyed Werewolf and Changeling the most. For total kick ass seat-of-your-pants games, Hunter takes you by the balls then spits them in a Salad Shooter (There you go Chuck. How’s that for a fluff quote?).

I have a very hard time explaining it. It’s not easily summed up –”You hunt monsters,” “You play vampires,” etc.

I ramble when I try to define it for others: “Well, you play these people who may or may not have had a scrape with death, and now they’re inhabited by a geist, not a ghost, and it’s part spirit, but they’re not *possessed* so much as they have a symbiotic relationship with it, and they’re called Sin-Eaters because… errrm.”

(The “Sin-Eater” moniker, while hot, I think could’ve been given more juice throughout the text, but that’s just me. Also, “You play characters that eat sins” is equally not helpful.)

You can describe it in a loftier way: “It’s a game about embracing life after being touched by death,” or even the tagline, “It’s a game about second chances,” and that might hook people. Alternately, it might be too esoteric a description.

– c.

Again, I just don’t get it and it sparks me back to Wraith/Orpheus which had the same problem. To examine it more, Wraith is easily what I consider oWoD’s best game. Hands down, with a bullet and a hardon. It was just so well put together, the concepts so personal and powerful, and the afterlife so beautifully represented. Even the artwork was cooler than two handfulls of C4. With all that going for it, the game flopped on a local play level, and from what I understand it did not do well for sales or with other gamers as well. But you see people (even still) that are absolutely devoted to it, they “got it”. I would be one of those people. I didn’t like Orpheus so much, though I tried it and thought it was pretty neat… it just wasn’t Wraith enough for me.

I was worried that maybe I approached Geist with to much Wraith baggage, but I don’t think that is the case. While I easily see similarities, it is in no way the same game and I love it for what it is. That being said, I still struggle with where to take a game on the long run. And I want to know, goddamit I would love to be able to hit that “stop overexamining shit” switch in my brain and just let the game take me wherever, but I can’t. It’s also the one game I’ve met where my own enthusiasm for a system or setting can’t win anyone around me over to giving it a try.

Too long, didn’t read version: Wraith = Great. Orpheus = Pretty Neat. Geist = Fucking Kickass. Erotic fish reference. Am I fucking it up? Can’t get other people interested.

DIE! DIE! I KEEL YOU! JIHAD!

…

Oh, wait, no! That’s not it at all.

I get you. Every game is not for everybody. No sweat. I’m a little surprised, though — Wraith I find just… troubling to pick up. Beautiful game, elegant and dark and wonderful, but very hard to throw together a game and jump in with both feet. Geist, I find has so many cool and easy elements that it feels like it’d be fun to just put a game together, use half of what’s written without worrying about the other half (you choose which!) and boom, game-time.

Orpheus, too. So easy. Corporate espionage + ghosts. Awesome.

Sorry to hear Geist isn’t for you.

Hunter, of course, must be.

IT MUST BE.

(jihad!)

– c.