Hi Everybody!
What is Metaplot? Well that's a good question, because it seems like everybody has their own definitions of it. Even internally at WW it took us a while to all agree. Our official definition and therefore the one that informs all of our choices to avoid it and is what we mean when we mention the term, is: Moving the storyline forward past the assumed Day Zero implicit in the core rulebooks. Day Zero is the day that the corebooks end on, everything before Day Zero is history or backstory, anything after is Metaplot. If the third book in the line after the core starts discussing an event that occurred after the corebook, then it is creating Metaplot.
Why is that so bad? White Wolf did pretty darn well with spinning an ongoing story that grew with each release after all. Pretty cool stories indeed, and fun to follow and collect in order to read them all. Seems like a version of a collectible card game or a serialized story like in comics- certainly a great business model to keep readers coming back for more. Unfortunately, all those stories soon reach a critical mass where the complexity is only appealing to those who have followed the stories from a less convoluted, earlier time and are very daunting for a newcomer to understand and get started with. Additionally you get a situation where even someone who has generally followed the Metaplot misses a few books- maybe they had tuition to pay or needed to spend time out of the country- and then can't find their way back into the story- they've lost the thread, if you will.
Back in the day, we noted that we were losing fans and not regaining them the way we had anticipated and got some pretty strong anecdotal evidence that the Metaplot fatigue issue was coming into play. So for the WoD re-imaging, we decided to stop going past Day Zero in the game books and leave that for our Fiction. Unfortunately, some months after that decision was made, the declining market meant that we no longer had the available manpower to keep Fiction going as well as relaunch the WoD- something had to give and it was Fiction. Losing the ongoing story in Fiction as well as history and backstory being lumped a bit too closely with Metaplot (I told you the internal definition of Metaplot was still being hammered out longer than we'd realized), and thus being very lightly or hesitantly presented in the first releases, meant that we'd lost both the negative and positive aspects of Metaplot at the same time. Consequently, there's a pretty legitimate claim to be made that the Big Three, particularly the core rulebooks, just don't feel as deep and involved as they should- the ancient mysteries which always have been an integral part of the mystique of the WoD aren't as compelling.
So what are we going to do about it? (I mean, obviously, I have a point in bringing this up). As you can see with Changeling and with the Rome books for VtR, we're putting richness and depth back into our backstories. You'll get an incredible dose of the new thinking when the Clan Books start releasing with clan histories and mysteries dripping from every page. At the same time, as you saw with Rome, there will still be doubt as to which histories are the Truth- just like in real life. As Russell Bailey pointed out, being made a vampire doesn't change your ability to remember every little detail of your life, and the older ones have several lifetimes of memories to sift through- when was the last time you forgot a phone number, or where you left a book, or an acquaintance's name (sorry, Craig!). The Fog of Ages doesn't need to be a supernatural device when you look at it that way. Additionally, I'm moving forward with our plans to restart Fiction- in fact this was a given in my talk about the coming year with El Presidente Mike Tinney- I'll keep you informed how that develops.
Hope that covers the whys and wherefores of Metaplot- let me know if there's more I could cover.
Thanks-
--richt
