This was literally my stereotypical character when I'd guest star as a PC when one of my friends was GM'ing, to the point people would groan when I showed up, knowing some kind of Machiavellian bullshit was about to go down.
They did Arneson dirty.
Gygax was an abysmal businessman, and he was bit of an authoritarian douche in public life in general to anyone he felt had slighted him. He was prickly.
Putting it lightly... dude Rekieta'd it up to the extreme to do blow and starlets in California when the D&D animated show deal was going down, leaving his wife & keedz alone to fend for themselves alone for a few months.
I went to check this but damn it is spread across a couple rulebooks and they are frankly kind of expensive. Does any website do like a bundle or something so I am not spending $150 to just read through the system to see if I like it?
I mean it also didn't help that he had a horrible habit of picking the wrong people to assist him. Remember the guy that he had as a partner was responsible for backstabbing him and basically taking the company out from him. I mean admittedly, that was while he was doing insane shit in California, but that was how Lorraine Williams got her hands on it.
He was an absolute god, as much of a weirdo as he was.
You're not wrong, but the entire cyberpunk genre does basically the same thing. It's just a different form of dystopia. In Shadowrun and Cyberpunk you can go around trying to eek out a living doing heists or jobs for corpos and other much more powerful entities but if you're ever at the point of taking out a corporation, dragon, etc. your campaign has gone totally off the rails into fantasy land doing god knows what stupid shit and the game system falls apart. The same thing happens with OWOD if you decide to let the players actually interact with anything of any importance or possibly gain some of that power for themselves.
It's just dumb short-sighted contrarianism. "Da EVIL CHUDS like playing paladins? Well guess what, liches are good akshyually!" I can guarantee there was no more thought put into the concept than that and telling them how it looks just makes them double down.
The only people who would become liches IRL are unemploymentmaxxing MOBA addicts. Like, think about it. Your nerves don't work, no one wants to be near you because you smell like a dusty cadaver, and you will only get more and more out of touch sitting alone in your goon tower losing track of time as you review your Genitalus Explodus spell for the thousandth time.
For all of of the issues oD&D had, it at least recognized that players will want to make changes to the world at a high enough power level. Cramming a setting full of party wiping Villain Sues because the upper bounds of ability would allow players to meaningfully change the setting is obnoxious.
I started during V2 and never tried anything else but it was really fucking annoying to see that every Vampire player and GM I ran into treated it as some kind of a superhero game at night. My Brujah was as dumb as a rock but even he missed his life. He was a Chad from a rich family who used to play in a punk band, partied a lot and was drowning in pussy. I actually knew someone almost like this who lived in a mansion but was bumming cigs and change for beer. I'm doing a monologue about how undeath sucks and trying to keep it as simple as possible while the other players are giggling that they can flip over cars, grow large claws, etc. Fuck all of those 80s and early 90s movies that showed us how being a vampire isn't fun like The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Subspecies, Midnight Kiss/Vampire Cop, Interview, Dance of the Damned, John Carpenter's Vampires and Fright Night 2, right?
liches are often powerful magic users, its safe to assume that a proper lich knows some illusion magic that can make people not realize its a lich
That's sort of the reason I was so interested in getting the original editions: I made the assumption that the original version would probably have much edgier and more interesting writing and artwork, and that seems to be the case. The 1st Edition book really hammers on VtM V1 being a horror game. The experience of being a vampire is painted as being abusive and self-loathing at best, and when the going gets rough it's a literal mind-breaking horror experience as you have to do shit that drains your Humanity (they call it 'Humanitas' in V1, but whatever). Almost cosmic horror-ish with the way it says that there's no real "win" condition to any story, and you should expect your character to end up dying or eventually going insane. The artwork I've seen so far reminds me a lot of some OG Fighting Fantasy books back when they were published by Puffin.
The funny thing is people tend to complain about munchkins and minmaxers in d&d, but the world of darkness I think competes with it in terms of power gaming.
The thing is that the angsty stuff is its own level of cringe as going full murderhobo. VtM is infamous for the pretentiousness of some players, and they are locked in an eternal battle with the guy who just want to max out strength and leap tall buildings.
You're thinking of Brian Blume. Same guy also advised Gygax that compiling expansion & house rules for D&D into one book, changing the class system, and calling it "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" would mean they didn't have to pay Arneson any more. Shocking that a Jew would behave that way.
Party-wiping villain sues are bad, but not every RPG setting needs to be about super heroes saving the world. I like Shadowrun exactly because I'm not a super important hero, I'm just a bastard trying to live without being shackled like the niggercattle population. Sure, my actions can affect something in the setting, but I'm not capable of bringing a big corpo down on my own, and my name will probably be forgotten in less than a week after my death.