As in many conspiracies, you have to follow the age old conflict of money
versus art, and in art, of creativity versus style, to truly understand
*WHY* things are the way they are in the WoD.

Money:

* Says that making Crossover books is a Good Thing, it opens the market for
each book.

* Says that the # of books per year per game line is very limited

* Says that every game should be accessible and somehow make sense, even to
the uninitiated

Art, on the other hand:

* Wants a single perspective and "feel" for each game, so that you can
differentiate the game experiences

* Desires a single motif and theme for each game

* Desires to communicate the subtext and hidden meaning of each game's
milieu and back-story

* Hates just glomming everything together and tacking it together with
ticky-tack.

* Isn't concerned with everything making *sense* per se, but would like to
have things at least maintain a certain style

The sub-conflicts of Creativity over Style are:

Style:

* Needs "to be cool" (i.e., have sex, violence, or rock and roll in it, or
some combination thereof)

* Needs everything to be consistent and repeatable

* Needs to have a recognizable characteristic for each game (i.e. Vampire
is Rose/Green Marble, Werewolf is Rust, Mage is Purple, Wraith is Black
with Chains, and Changeling is Stained Glass)

* Needs to have an easy hook, "This game is about vampires", "This game is
about playing a killing machine bent on saving the world", "In this game
you play a dead guy in a horrific world" , "In this game you get to screw
with reality", "In this game you are a magical creature who's in on the big
joke."

(As you can see, some of them don't have too easy a hook)

Creativity, however:

* Wants to explore the inter-relationships between each game, to see what
happens

* Wants to create its own stories and pick-and-choose from the wealth of
background and setting and characters that exist in the WoD

* Wants to somehow make it all make sense on some level - even if it's only
mythic sense

* Wants to take other kinds of stories and fit them in to the WoD somewhere
(i.e. Highlander, cyberpunk, whatever)

* Wants it to be *FUN*

Think of these as Major Forces governing game design at White Wolf, at
least from my perspective when I designed games there.

....Sam