DANGER- MUST SILENCE said:
I think years and years ago, well before I started posting here, I read some column about how to make a good D&D campaign, and the writer was very critical of WoD's storytelling system and I've come to agree with him. I went from being a big fan of the SS system to feeling quite unsatisfied by it, and he (unfortunately I can't remember his name or column) pointed out very clearly why- The SS is all about gamemasters storytellers telling a story. They put all these hooks out there, but in the end the story doesn't emerge from the players' actions, it's pre-planned by the leader. And this is exactly what my experience with the company ended up being. We even had one guy in our group who would literally just have some unassailable power show up and bully the group whenever we didn't follow his pre-planned path- at one point when we were feeling particularly rebellious Cain and then the Biblical God Himself showed up to beat us up until we followed his directions.
Now most of the rest of us weren't obnoxiously childish to quite that same extent, but our games did tend to be very similar to today's AAA games in a "run down this narrow plot corridor, kill some bad guys, and then marvel at this big set-piece we created for you. But please don't try anything too unexpected." That's not immersive. That's only minimally a game, because the players' choices don't really have consequences. Now D&D can absolutely be run in the same way, but its reliance on random generators and so on provide an easy way to avoid the railroading that the SS doesn't strictly speaking force, but indirectly encourages by its constant emphasis on "telling a story" over playing a game.
So in that respect it doesn't surprise me that so many WW alumni are moving into fiction writing- that's where their strength lies. Good on them for using the experience to advance their career in a meaningful way, but I'm not going to shed any tears for the loss of White Wolf or the WoD.
If I remember right, that was an excellent series called Check for Traps. I also believe it was extremely critical of the advice given in the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide for precisely the same reasons. I love Check for Traps, I still believe it contains some absolute gems of wisdom, but I don't think it ever made the mistake for blaming the game for the advice it gives to GMs.
I spent the last year running a Changeling: The Lost game. I just started running a Mummy: The Curse game. Two fantastic New World of Darkness products that I will champion forever. Both of those games I run, or ran, in a sandbox style, with a large setting that operates on fundamental principles remarkably similar to those outlined in the Check for Traps articles. You can have a dynamic, changing, player-driven world regardless of the system you use. There is nothing inherent to the World of Darkness mechanics that forces you to railroad the players. Just as D&D can be run as a railroad, World of Darkness can be a brilliant sandbox. In fact, with the emphasis on politics and social interactions that many WoD games have, they actually feel like they're outright advocating a sandbox style play.
White Wolf and Onyx Path even published books in this respect. Damnation City, for example, is a brilliant book on how to construct a gameplay environment. It's intended as a Vampire: The Requiem supplement, but as someone with no interest in Vampire I still found it immensely interesting and useful.
My point is that the experience you had isn't any fault of the system or game line. It might be the fault of a GM taking the Storyteller advice too seriously, but really it just boils down to GMing style. The best World of Darkness games I've heard of, and the ones I strive to emulate, are sprawling, open-ended experiences wherein the players and the NPCs all simultaneously try to manipulate one another into doing their bidding. One giant web of duplicity and political maneuvering that no GM could possibly predict from the start. You'd be a fool to even try.
