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Since the topic sort of briefly took over the business thread, let's talk about World of Darkness LARPing! When you think of LARP, most people probably think of people in homemade armor hitting each other with foam swords in a field outside of town, or possibly in a park if no private property can be arranged. Good fun in the sunshine (or rain, because life's like that), plenty of exercise, and all kinds of fun arts and crafts! But what if you're averse to sunshine, exercise, and the construction of foam weapons? You can still LARP! It's just going to somehow be even more embarassing. World of Darkness LARP, generally under the name Mind's Eye Theatre, mostly involves a lot of standing around talking to people, and occasionally making particular gestures. There are no foam weapons, and in fact anything that is or looks like a weapon is specifically banned. Combat, and indeed all task resolution, is done by rock-paper-scissors (in the Old World of Darkness games) or drawing cards or rolling a die (for New WoD). Orgs By far and away the most popular WoD LARPs are Vampire: the Masquerade and Vampire: the Requiem, both of which tend to revolve heavily around fictional secret political structures and the use of backbiting politics to ascend in them. Or, more often than anybody'd like to admit, murdering people. Somewhat less popular are Werewolf: the Apocalypse and Changeling: the Lost. Many games are independent, but there's a few organizations that run networked games with shared settings. By far and away the largest (and oldest) of these is The Camarilla, also known as The Mind's Eye Society in the US. The Camarilla runs both networked games in shared continuities, where characters from one location are part of a larger setting using a common set of house rules called an "Addendum", and "troupe games" that are basically independent games run under the aegis of the Cam/MES. The shared continuity chronicles are wrapping up right now, with new continuities for Changeling, Mage, Vampire, and Werewolf starting in a couple of months, as well as for Old World of Darkness Vampire and Werewolf. There's also an nWoD game, "The Accord", which is not supposed to be Super Friends fighting a horror from outside time and space but is totally going to be Super Friends fighting a horror from outside time and space. It's kind of a pain in the rear end to get an idea of what's going on in the Cam because the Cam does all its business on email lists instead of on forums, so if you're an outsider who isn't subbed to all the right lists, there's not an easy way to figure out what's up except to check out the internal wiki. The second largest group is One World by Night, which has been running the same shared-continuity Old World of Darkness chronicle since 1996. OWBN (which it's customary to mispronounce as "Obi-Wan") mostly runs Vampire: the Masquerade, but the other OWOD games exist as well. I dunno what's up with OWBN, actually- it's kind of hard to find solid info on what's up with OWBN and since I'm not involved, I can't really say from experience. They do have a wiki, so maybe that's helpful. The third large group is The Garou Nation, a small group of shared-continuity Werewolf: the Apocalypse games focused in the midwestern and southern US. They either have merged or are merging with (I'm not 100% on the status) the Cam/MES and are providing expertise/experience in running the Apocalypse games that the Cam is offering starting this year. I'm sure there's other orgs that I'm not aware of (I used to play in a regional one that nobody remembers anymore), but those are the three that White Wolf generally acknowledges. Tools If you're running an Old World of Darkness LARP, there's an indispensable piece of software called Grapevine by Adam Cerling. It's ancient as all hell and written in VB6, but a lot of groups still use it to create and manage characters, plots, Influences, and so on. Cerling gave up on it after oWoD ended and while there've been efforts to produce an nWoD-compatible version, I haven't seen any finished products. Jennifer Orsini is good at Excel and has made a ton of handy character sheets which are made for the Cam/MES but useful even if you're not a member. World of Darkness LARPs are infamous for being black holes of drama, powergaming, and cheese; I'm sure there'll be no shortage of amusing and mortifying stories.
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| # ? Mar 9, 2013 04:22 |
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| # ? May 21, 2013 14:23 |
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I've only been in a few vampire LARPs, and I've never played tabletop, but my main reaction is WTF? It's like being a teenager again. It's all about who is betraying who, and who you can backstab in order to get power. How did it evolve into this from the tabletop? I've read the tabletop books, and while there is some political stuff involved, it seemed to be a lot more about man versus his inner demons. I've never seen a LARP where a bunch of vampires band together to fight off a group of werewolves, even. It's always %100 politics, with no backstory and no real plot. Why not just play diplomacy at that point?
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| # ? Mar 9, 2013 21:37 |
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In my experience, that's precisely how the tabletop game worked out too. The assorted clans, kiths, foobars, ad nauseams mapped very closely to traditional high school cliques, and since most of the people who really bought into it were high school students it only stands to reason that they'd scribble their melodrama all over it. Edit: Beyond 'pee pee, doo doo, Vampire players are immature', the scope of LARP tends to be city-wide rather than small group/troupe based. You don't have a traditional coterie made up of assorted clans, with NPC elders and NPCs occupying the power structure, but rather enough people to represent entire clans as power groups and players occupying positions like Prince and the Primogen Council... which usually turns attempts at organized plotting by the storytelling crew into an effort at cat herding. Politics happens because there's little else going on, because people like to sit on what morsels of plot come their way, and the people in positions of power like to sneak off and ignore the rest of the crew entirely. If you have a bad ratio of players to staffers, or people who are really only there because they're bored and their friends are, things get even worse, fast. Bieeardo fucked around with this message at Mar 9, 2013 around 22:15 |
| # ? Mar 9, 2013 22:02 |
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Mage: The Awakening is objectively the best LARP
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| # ? Mar 10, 2013 04:35 |
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This is as good a time as any to repost the "opening cutscene" for the final year of the Mage campaign that I played in. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFUFM6FHalk
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| # ? Mar 10, 2013 10:06 |
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cptn_dr posted:This is as good a time as any to repost the "opening cutscene" for the final year of the Mage campaign that I played in. Holy gently caress, that's fantastic. As for Vampire LARP chat... a badly-run game of Vampire: the Masquerade results in a different kind of horrible than badly-run tabletop or badly-run wargame might. But well-run games of Masquerade can be a pretty drat good time. If you get an ST that knows how to engage the players, and the proper ratio of assistants-to-players, and someone to send something into the people scratching their butts back at Elysium, things have a way of coming together. The politicking in Masquerade is sort of baked-in to the rigid clan structures and generation structures, and the sort of horrible rivalries and conflicts that happen when you have blood-drinking monsters try to hang out for prolonged periods of time can help feed into the "you're all a bunch of monsters" theme that's part of the game. It also helps enormously to have lots of OOC events, so you get to know the people who are trying to mess with you IC and to prevent hard feelings from forming. Our local group has really benefited from this, in particular. We've regained some members that quit years ago, because they came to hang out at an OOC event and realized that the local club wasn't composed of douchebags. Though really, everyone should all play Changeling: the Lost instead. Way better. Way funner. (No, I am not biased because I run it locally, why do you ask?) Oh! And to return to the original thread-derailing topic of Mind's Eye Society administrative bullcrap, the one fella who had been insisting on that crazypants history for the upcoming Masquerade chronicle has apparently been given the boot. While I can't speak for any other member countries, Canada and the US are now back on track to building a new game together. There may be some minor rules differences, but there have always been those. So, hooray?
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 13:02 |
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cptn_dr posted:This is as good a time as any to repost the "opening cutscene" for the final year of the Mage campaign that I played in. Goddamn I miss playing in that LARP. Bring it back 
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 19:42 |
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FeatherFloat posted:And to return to the original thread-derailing topic of Mind's Eye Society administrative bullcrap, the one fella who had been insisting on that crazypants history for the upcoming Masquerade chronicle has apparently been given the boot. Which crazypants history is that?
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 22:35 |
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Plotac 75 posted:Which crazypants history is that? Basically the Camarilla "won" hundreds of years ago. The Sabbat is nonexistent, the Sabbat clans are broken and few, and the independent clans tremble before the might of the Camarilla. Just stupid, point-missing crap, especially for an organization that still tries to sell itself as the totally not official but come on, totally the official World of Darkness LARP organization.
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 22:47 |
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In the UK there are a few different groups for WoD Larps. The main one I'm familiar with is the Isles of Darkness, or IoD. It used to be CamUK but some kind of disagreement lead to them splitting off and doing exactly the same thing. (Some of the mailing lists still have CamUK address from them). They still use e-mail lists because they're apparently stuck in 1996. Also for some reason a lot of them use google+. I don't know either. It runs all your standard vampire, werewolf, mage, changeling and sometimes mortal games. They don't do hunter and there is even a Geist domain. I'm one of the ST team for a changeling game & Its really fun. Like every Larp group it has drama but on the whole its not too bad really. The main other one there is or was is UKMasquerade. Which we used to have in Norwich but it kinda folded. It had house-ruled a bunch of stuff (including allowing you to buy generation with XP long before nWoD was a thing) mostly to favour the Tremere, which most of the ST Council played. One thing that is really apparent in nWoD compared to oWoD is how much better the game is balanced politically for live games. The old clan-aligned political system never really worked and live games would form power blocks really quickly that would often be impossible to dislodge (Especially because oWoD combat just favoured high xp people, gently caress you proles). The new 5x5 politics means that to become prince you need to have friends from other covenants, the combat system now favours numbers over xp. In live games it makes things more interesting and forces more give and take.
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 23:01 |
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Well, one thing I've noticed about the local MES games is that if you've never LARPed with them before, you cannot play any interesting or unusual characters. If this was for a month or two, I'd be fine. But it's for an entire Chronicle. That's YEARS. That's just stupid. Again, just filled with all this stupid high-school bullshit. "No, you only get to have fun if you're part of the COOL group". I'm not saying you can't take a boring char and make it interesting with time, but if you want to play a Samedi first time around? No, screw you. We can't dare let a newbie upset the current power structure.
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 23:18 |
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The MES has seen a LOT of horrible bullshit and horrible people come and go, and not knowing you from Adam, they're not eager to have random people who wandered in play weird poo poo off the bat. There's actually a process of approvals for playing weird poo poo, but unless you're a) known to be trustworthy and b) submitting a full set of approvals, yeah, you're not going to just walk in and play a Samedi. Sure, you know yourself to be cool and good at roleplaying and not a jackass, but if the MES doesn't know you, they have no way of knowing you're not an rear end in a top hat.
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| # ? Mar 11, 2013 23:32 |
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The main game that I played (and where I got this nickname from) was an independent Vampire game that lasted several years back in the late Nineties. We had some ties with a couple of regional games, including one that a contingent of us would drive out to every few weeks, and at one point we supposedly linked up with One World by Night, though the ST in charge of that had an... interesting relationship with the truth. Nice guy, spun a hell of a yarn, but Don Quixote would have given him funny looks. Mainly we were twentyish players, between early university and late high school. It worked somehow, though we had some really annoying problems. I vaguely recall a rule in Laws of the Night banning play before dusk, but while that was probably meant to preserve flavour it illustrated a problem that we had: most of the younger players went to the same secondary school, and they would play and politick during lunches and free periods. Not only were a lot of the other players left out, but the storytellers were often out of the loop while cockamamie (and ultimately pointless) schemes were hatched. There were similar issues with the one game we'd travel for, because they'd do all of their behind the scenes stuff during a different, designated non-game day. We did have some... interesting characters. And by that, I mean both players and characters. There was the Mastermind. He was a manipulative, mooching git who happened to be sleeping with one of the head storytellers. That probably explains how he ended up with an impossible number of Beast Traits that he never copped to, or was ever called out on. Thought he was clever for pulling one over on credulous teens. We had Whiter Than White. He was an import from another city and was desperate to make himself seem cool. He'd make ridiculous claims like 'We played full-contact in Toronto, so Assamites actually killed people', was unreasonably fixated on The Crow, and played Assamites whenever possible. His most out-there moment was basically cosplaying as The Crow in white pancake makeup, black lipstick and black electrical tape, while playing an Assamite... who, as a clan, were unique in getting darker as their undeath wore on. Whiter Than White wanted to drop out of high school and join the Air Force as a fighter pilot. The USAF. He was Canadian. There was also the Masturmind. He was a friend, but... oh, god drat. This dude was convinced that the sample sheets in the back of the various Clanbooks were the be-all and end-all of what the clan would embrace, and if you varied an iota you were begging to be ashed. Often allied with the Mastermind, but rarely thought his own cunning plans all the way through. Once gave my character a stack of cash and asked him to spy on the clan Primogen. My character promptly turned around and told the Primogen, 'Masturmind gave me money to tell him what you were up to. What do you want me to tell him?' Ended up with even more cash and less respect for his fellow Kindred. There were fishmalks. Oh Christ, were there fishmalks. When I was invited to join, I said I'd play a Malk, and they replied that there were too many already. Warning sign. Most were infantilized monkey-cheese sorts, but we had a couple that were... inspired, like: Captain Kirk. Yes. We had a Malk who thought he was James T. Kirk, that Nosferatu were Klingons, and that the Enterprise was in orbit over the city. He had an alternate personality, a nameless redshirt that would come to the fore when mundane things like driving around needed to be done, so that the Captain persona could convince itself that he had instead beamed up to the ship and back down. It was an interesting idea, but went no further-- none of the other clans were mapped to aliens, and instead of having a likely, risky Beast Trait like 'flips out when his delusions are threatened', the ST team let him get away with 'flips out when betrayed by "klingons"'. Which never happened. The Mime. I liked this guy. He was one of our youngest players, but he dressed the part, stayed in character, and was one of those quietly creepy Malks that you never want to risk being alone in a room with. His schtick was silently using Dominate to make people suffer brief but embarrassing emotional collapses. The game we drove out to was played entirely by adults, and operated out of a naval cadets training hall. Huge indoor space, with a handful of side rooms for off-Elysium shenanigans, really fantastic place to play in. The players were generally pretty awesome too, except for Gorgeous Guy. Mastermind and his ST girlfriend were part of the group that went up to play with these folks. She was really strikingly pretty, in her early twenties, and Gorgeous Guy... wasn't. Gorgeous Guy had probably pushed past forty, was showing signs of rosacea, and walked around with his 'Gorgeous' social Trait pinned to his coat because it was definitely not self-evident. Each time they ran into one another, he made a point of reminding her that his character was, indeed, Gorgeous. This happened more often than anyone but him particularly liked.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 00:29 |
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Well, I guess that's my point. "Submitting a full set of approvals?" This is something that's supposed to be fun. I guess I compare this set of rules to the game I run, which is tabletop Low Life. Even if an occasional session turns out kind of boring, we work around problems so everyone has a good time. The guy who doesn't pay attention? We ignore him, or try to make plots that drag him into the story. The guy who always has to be overpowered? Throw overpowered stuff back at him. The whole party runs off the adventure rails? Great, make something up on the fly. I guess I feel angry on behalf of my husband, who tried to join his friends in MES, and came back utterly befuddled as to why anyone over 20 would participate. He pitched a lot of fun ideas at them (my favorite was the HIT mark undercover for pentex), but they were all non-standard, so they all got shot down. It's co-operative story telling. It's wonderful when unexpected things happen.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 00:45 |
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See, the thing is, that's your game. That's maybe what, 5 people? There's thousands of people playing in the MES game. It's not a local game where nothing affects anything outside of the game and you can go as nuts as you want (and I'm certainly not intending to besmirch that sort of game, which I like as well as anybody else), it's a game where the things you do affect potentially thousands of other players. I don't even know. If you can't bear to play unless you can be something super-special from a sourcebook I'd honestly rather not be playing with you, especially if your response to "okay, go through our process where you explain why you want to play that and how" is to throw a tantrum. MES has a process for doling out the special stuff because we don't want a worldwide game that's nothing but Samedi and Lasombra Antitribu and Daughters of Cacaphony. If I go play in a Werewolf game, I want the vast majority of the characters to be Gaian Garou, not ten Fera and The Last White Howler (#14 for this game so far!). And hey, if you want to play a special snowflake, fill out the forms. Explain to the Storyteller staff why you want to play the clan or whatever that you want to play, how you intend to play it, and so on. If you're not willing to do that, why should the Storyteller accommodate you?
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 01:32 |
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My region is oddly non-Vampire, and I'm going to be running the Vampire revival game. The politics and drama was mostly centered around the Steampunk-fashioned Changeling games, and things that happened four years ago about Werewolf games that are still looked back fondly.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 02:35 |
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Pope Guilty posted:See, the thing is, that's your game. That's maybe what, 5 people? There's thousands of people playing in the MES game. It's not a local game where nothing affects anything outside of the game and you can go as nuts as you want (and I'm certainly not intending to besmirch that sort of game, which I like as well as anybody else), it's a game where the things you do affect potentially thousands of other players. Most of the 'form filling in' is really convincing people (and remember that as a national/international system it's easy to be explaining to someone who's never met you) that you want to play it for interesting reasons and not superpower reasons. I did hear in... possibly Cam? that due to player actions. South America is now largely ruled by Holy Carthian Empire, a carthian/lance alliance. Which sounds really cool to pull off.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 02:40 |
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I get what you're saying. I've just never heard of any local stuff actually making an effect on things. Sure, it may very well do so, but as vampire stuff tends be people hiding knowledge, I've never seen sign of it. And that can really turn people off. I've played in other games that were nationally interlinked, like Hackmaster, and never run into the same kind of stuff. And please don't mock my husband. I don't think it's that he had to be a special snowflake (we don't even own any sourcebooks), I think it's that he had 4 or 5 ideas, and instead of being willing to flex to make it work, they said no way, he didn't have the seniority points. Not "Let's try that as a one time thing" or "Can you do that, but with this handicap?". Just no. How is that fun?
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 03:25 |
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They aren't seniority points- MC isn't part of the approvals process. Approvals are based on how restricted the given thing is and need to be approved, depending on the thing, by the local, regional, national, or master ST. If the local ST wasn't working with your husband, yeah, that's lovely; they should be making suggestions and trying to find something workable. But if everything that ST is hearing is something severely nonstandard from somebody who they don't know and isn't willing to jump through the hoops that every other Cam/MES player goes through, what impression does that give?
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 03:41 |
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Coming into a new game, with no background with the other players, and no bona-fides to indicate you're not a walking expression of the Worst Experiences thread, and asking to play an undercover Terminator robot is a huge red flag, no matter whether it's LARP or tabletop. It's also vastly easier to say 'no, because...' rather than retcon or otherwise clean up whatever messes arise by accident or design. Plus... well, if everyone else is having a good time playing within the strictures they've laid out then the problem doesn't lie with them. It's with the guy who wants to play the Conquistador in a game of Cowboys and Indians.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 03:51 |
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Man, memories. I played in and ran my hometown game, which was one of the oldest continuously running LARPs and for all I know, might still be. We were briefly a part of the Shared Universe org. We did some great things: a 300 person in character wedding, for example. In addition, they joined the local community theatre and ran weekly soap opera shows based on the old World of Darkness which were well-received by ordinary theatre goers -- they paid money to see it. But org stuff was painful. Orgs want a universe filled with Generic Science Vessels, and every ST wants to helm the Enterprise. And compromise led to all kinds of infighting and enforced mediocrity to support the guys who wanted low tech PVP. I remember going to Montreal for an event. We were supposed to meet in a bar. We went downstairs and there were some dispirited guys RPSing in a boring black room. We went upstairs to the dance club -- entrance was under a giant sphinx's head, and we invited to play in the indie Sabbat game run by good looking people who did the subtle integrated-with-normal-people play we knew a significant part o the S-U's player base couldn't handle. And I always had to tip extra because of cheapskate gamers who didn't and nursed a plate of fries all night.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 05:43 |
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My region has sub-18 year olds as a distinct part of it, ostensibly Running Start students that came to see their friends from the local community college. Some games allow them, most games don't. They're an interesting 'townie' contingent of the regular college and post-college crowd. Most of the in-town roleplayers rather would do boffer LARP. How often do normal LARPs run as a distinct on-campus experience versus being a local RPG thing?
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 06:52 |
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One of the universal rules of WoD LARP is that nearly everyone will want to play something unique/rare to the venue. A friend of mine ran Vampire games at his college and he was continually getting requests to play Asian vampires. So he ran a Kindred of the East game... and everyone asked him to play western Vampires.
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| # ? Mar 12, 2013 10:14 |
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Bieeardo posted:Coming into a new game, with no background with the other players, and no bona-fides to indicate you're not a walking expression of the Worst Experiences thread, and asking to play an undercover Terminator robot is a huge red flag, no matter whether it's LARP or tabletop. Well, I guess the problem to me is that anyone cares. It's pretend. It's not real. For fun. But WoD LARPers take it so seriously. No one is really getting hurt in any way if the story doesn't go like the ST planned.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 00:43 |
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Its less 'the story' and more everyone elses play experience (at least personally, I'm of the opinion the game belongs to the players).Gerund posted:My region has sub-18 year olds as a distinct part of it, ostensibly Running Start students that came to see their friends from the local community college. Some games allow them, most games don't. They're an interesting 'townie' contingent of the regular college and post-college crowd. Most of the in-town roleplayers rather would do boffer LARP. Personally all my LARP-ing stems from university society. I stopped being a student some time ago but the games still run (and tend to have non-students as the STs) and let us play. edit: As a university thing it leads to a fairly regular, yearly, intake as first years arrive. Which obviously leads to an xp disparity. One game has reacted to this by occasionally increasing the starting xp kicker (and increasing some players xp so no-one gets overtaken) while a game is is slated to start in a while is making noises of just having a campaign xp level, which is an interesting idea and I'm curious to see how it'll work in play. Little_wh0re fucked around with this message at Mar 13, 2013 around 00:57 |
| # ? Mar 13, 2013 00:55 |
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Yeah, the Cam/MES game introduced a thing last year where if you don't get a certain amount of XP each month, you get extra to bring yourself up to the floor for the month, and new characters get (XP floor * months the game's been going) XP to start with. I haven't seen the new addendum, but the one for Accord has a floor.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 01:32 |
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Is everyone still playing Masquerade? I love the potential of Requiem, as a LARP system, though I feel global LARP structures really weaken it in some ways and turn it into something it isn't quite. I've ran a few now, and it's always really curious to me how extremely polarized everyone is by Requiem. Mind you I don't think there's anything bad about playing Masquerade. And there is absolutely no 'but' to that statement.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 01:42 |
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I have a player trying to be confirmed in a WoD Vamp game (LARP) as a Carthian Ventrue with Animalism 3 and a socialite background/merit selection. How much boned would he be with his discipline choice? I've never thought of a non-farmer/wilderness Animalism vampire. (cross-posted from the base WOD thread) Mendrian posted:Is everyone still playing Masquerade? What's the problem with global Requiem other than the lack of Sabbat Cold War?
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 01:56 |
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The Camarilla and Sabbat actually have worldwide structures, where at best the Covenants have ties and lines of communication. I'm not saying Requiem is bad for large-scale, but the structure of it's going to definitely be different.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 01:59 |
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Bucnasti posted:One of the universal rules of WoD LARP is that nearly everyone will want to play something unique/rare to the venue. A friend of mine ran Vampire games at his college and he was continually getting requests to play Asian vampires. So he ran a Kindred of the East game... and everyone asked him to play western Vampires. Huh. In my Mage LARP, it's all Hermetics (4 Mages, 1 Hedge Wizard) and Verbena (3 Mages), with a Chorister and my Cultist as the "odd ones out." Anyone wanting to play a Technocrat/Nephandic would probably be gently encouraged to think again... And great to see a LARP thread! I've been LARP'ing oWoD Mage in Fredericksburg, VA for about a year, and I'm having a great time. It's actually a very active LARP scene here - we have a Vampire LARP in Culpepper/Winchester on Fridays and a rotating Mage LARP and a Mummy/Wraith LARP on Saturdays in Fredericksburg. Even picked up a new player for Mage last week.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 02:24 |
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I was never at many LARPs, but I went to a few to help out a friend who was running a Vampire one. My job at one of them was simple - I was to be an NPC, a human working for a crazed Hunter. The only supernatural anything the guy had was a pallid aura, so that he couldn't be outed immediately. As far as I could tell, that never became an issue - I was kind of surprised at how I was responded to. See, I had gone in assuming that most Vampire characters would be paranoid about newcomers, and my cover story was a very, very vague one - 'Oh, I'm...one of those thinblood...things. Yeah.' I may have gotten lucky in that an actual new Caitiff had shown up the same day, so I hung around with him and pretended to be the same deal. Or I would have, if anyone had even bothered to ask. I ended up completely and utterly unquestioned by anyone the entire night, and the Tremere primogen even handed over a bit of mystic plot artifact stuff to me on the grounds that he thought I was trustworthy and wouldn't misuse it. (I ended up handing it off to the actual Caitiff because he didn't seem like a completely terrible person and a lot of the others did, and I wasn't coming back.) I'd just like to know - was this the normal reaction, or did I end up with a particularly unparanoid group of Vampire players?
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 02:31 |
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cptn_dr posted:This is as good a time as any to repost the "opening cutscene" for the final year of the Mage campaign that I played in. Watching this was worth it just to see the Wizard of Christchurch show up as a real wizard and help rebuild the city. :nz:
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 02:42 |
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Mendrian posted:Is everyone still playing Masquerade? At least here theres a Requiem game. Theres a oWoD game running but its Sabbat rather than Camarilla. Theres also a Mage game thats a hacked together mix of old setting (ish) and new rules. Those are local games. Then theres nWoD changeling and mage games that are part of a larger group, with some degree of plans to include a requiem game in that (the STs of the local requiem want it to start so they can play) I mentioned it above but the new politcal system is much, much better for political games. Enough so that I have to admit I assumed it was a design decision. In my experience old vampire didn't entirely work because what tended to happen was all the powerful characters would work together to keep control over the city. And they'd be able to trust each other because after the 3rd time you've worked together to kill Sabbat you pretty much have to. Old vampire very easilly just became about how long you'd be playing and the only time power changed would be when a player stopped playing oc. It's a big criticism I have of old vampire in general. The theory is that everyone backstabs everyone else, but when you've got the wolves at the door you can't afford to do that, so the Sabbat/Camarilla conflict really undermines the themes of the game. In new vampire you can align yourself with your clan or your covenant. The covenants all have in-built enemies so as long as the STs put some effort into helping numbers balance then the political system won't fully stagnate, every prince will always be worrying about what their enemies are planning. Clan politics are ok but won't really get you too far. Also the bad guys are not quite as prevelant so you can afford to have some degree of infighting without worrying that if you do something then bad guys will take advantage of the weakness and kill everyone.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 03:03 |
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Mors Rattus posted:I was never at many LARPs, but I went to a few to help out a friend who was running a Vampire one. My job at one of them was simple - I was to be an NPC, a human working for a crazed Hunter. The only supernatural anything the guy had was a pallid aura, so that he couldn't be outed immediately. It varies, some players don't want to be jerks to new people so try and involve them in plot. It could just be they thought you were new and were being nice and trying to get you involved :3 Personally it depends on my character but in general I try and be wary of new people, but as has been pointed out being too keen on not sharing isn't really fun for the game as a whole.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 03:06 |
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Little_wh0re posted:Its less 'the story' and more everyone elses play experience (at least personally, I'm of the opinion the game belongs to the players). This. It's not a matter of upsetting a ST's carefully laid plans, but the risk of ruining a dozen or more people's Friday evening, or month of Fridays if a problematic concept is on a low boil. Yes, it's make-believe. It's make-believe with a shared theme to keep a couple of dozen people on the same page, which is a lot harder to do on that scale than it is with a handful of people sitting around a table. It's make-believe with just enough rules to keep 'Slurp! You're diablerized!' from descending into 'Am not!' 'Are too!' Approvals rules don't just appear fully formed, ready to stymie good, new players who have unusual ideas. They happen because countless asshats have ruined it for the sane ones, and ST teams are typically spread too thinly to make sure the new guy is integrating well. They're particularly important when you can shuttle between games in different venues, because it makes STs accountable for saying 'Yes, this guy is playing an Irish Kuei-jin, but he's a good player and we trust him.' Old-school on-line games like MUSHes often require character applications for the same reasons. Hell, even tabletop players have stories about that new guy who turned out to be psycho, or wanted to play his level fifty son of Satan in a hardscrabble low-level D&D game. It's not about slighting new players with unusual ideas, like Domus's husband, or nepotism, but vetting people to make sure they're a good fit and can handle themselves before letting them get into weirder, more disruptive stuff. Play something vanilla for a double-handful of sessions, help with setup and teardown, make it obvious that you're good people and not just some goof with grandiose ideas that are going to screw up everyone else's good time. Everyone has stories about that guy. And while rejections always stink, in any context, complaining about being asked to play something vanilla at first is a poor idea. The implication (fair or not) that you can't do something interesting or satisfying with the basic tools doesn't help claims to being a good, creative player.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 03:38 |
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*Shrug* It really seems to be vampire more than any other one. Again, like the players can't get away from the high school group mentality. I've been in a couple of mixed WoD LARPs that were alright, but I never really wanted to go back. In fact, my first two LARPs were mixed WoD. Then, for my third, I went to an MIT assassin's guild game. Halfway through, our host came up to me and asked if I was feeling OK. I said sure, and asked him why he thought I wasn't. He said it was because I was standing around, pretending not to know what was going on. I didn't realize you weren't supposed to do that in all LARPs. Since then I've been in Paranoia LARPS, Rules to Live By LARPS, homegen LARPS, Mythos LARPS, zombie LARPS, even a crazy school-in-the-center-of-the-anime-universe LARP. All of them seemed quite straightforward and fun. No insane history to learn, no political infighting. Just...having a story. But I didn't come here to troll. From your OP, I took quote:World of Darkness LARPs are infamous for being black holes of drama, powergaming, and cheese; I'm sure there'll be no shortage of amusing and mortifying stories
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 04:14 |
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Gerund posted:
Rant incoming. Okay. I'm about to get deep into opinion territory, so put big, 'IMHO' tags around everything I say. I think global conflicts undermine political games. Any time you have a conflict that is 'bigger' than the domain, it weakens the importance of local struggles. It makes them petty. It also puts strain on local conflicts by imposing events on the players that they have no power to affect. They create a class of player who have the funds to travel and the free time to play the game on the global scale, and thus compete politically even against players who are equally savvy, but not as wealthy IRL. I mean ideally, you want players to spread their wings, make their own rivalries, and pursue power for its own sake. The best political game is one that runs itself - it has incentives for seeking power, penalties for losing it, and enough inherent drama to fuel the engine after a little momentum is applied. A global game has a higher level of upward potential, but fewer people are able to compete, which makes local politics an exercise in apathy. Nobody but the highest ranking members are playing politics, so the engine runs down. This is just my experience with such games. Requiem can support global play. It has, in fact (more on that in a moment), but I don't think it plays to the strengths of the game. You have to first ignore the Gilded Cage to enable global play. Default Requiem is firmly focused on local, personal issues. Second, the Covenant structure is at its most elegant when emergent political play develops on its own. The Carthians do not always oppose the Invictus, the Dragons do not always remain a neutral third party, etc. These relationships emerge as characters push the story from within, and probably change several times over the course of a Chronicle. Global play enforces at least some relationships from without. Even if you had a totally hands-off, Storyteller-free global Chronicle, you still start to see global structures emerge that are less personal and more motivated by drives far outside of the local characters' control. Covenant expression is no longer unique to your domain and is dictated by a global structure. You have less power to affect those political relationships. I've been involved in a Requiem MES game. What I saw were a lot of people with global-sounding titles, a lot of people traveling from nearby cities, and a lot of other people waiting for plot to happen that never seemed to come down the pipe. What I found was an already-globally-unified Invictus and nothing of the sort of several other Covenants. This is because players of Invictus characters were able to organize a massive global conspiracy of some kind on an OOC level to create an IC global organization. Great. Sounds exciting, right? Except that new players coming in were immediately frozen out of it with almost no opportunity to participate on the global scale, which is really the only political scale that matters in that case. Oops. I see virtually no advantage to global play beyond never having to make a new character. Even then, I'm not convinced that's a good thing, since it results a high number of mid to high xp characters who randomly show up in people's domains, stick around long enough to confuse the local plot or make a few grand proclamations, and then leave in a puff of discordant storytelling. Global play might be exciting in concept - thinking about electing a Pope for the Lancea or whatever - but I find it robs the game of much of its drama and leaves the local scale drab and lifeless except for the occasional monster plot or power play for a petty position. Even then, in the game I was playing, making a play for the position of Harpy meant trying to compete with three different Princes from nearby domains who showed up to this domain every month because they had nothing better to do. gently caress that.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 04:41 |
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Domus posted:to mean that this was kind of a poo poo-on-WoD thread. I didn't mean to make you defend it quite so much. If you enjoy it, hey, more power to ya. Maybe my STs were just lovely. Frankly, your husband comes off as the immature one. If your and his idea of a good character is an undercover critter from one splat, working for an outfit from a second, trying to fit into a third, you really need to reexamine your definitions of special snowflake. Pouting here because an established group won't trust a random walk-in with a ridiculous concept does neither of you any favours.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 04:59 |
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Bieeardo posted:Frankly, your husband comes off as the immature one. If your and his idea of a good character is an undercover critter from one splat, working for an outfit from a second, trying to fit into a third, you really need to reexamine your definitions of special snowflake. Pouting here because an established group won't trust a random walk-in with a ridiculous concept does neither of you any favours. Also insisting that you need to play a one-off/rare/non-standard character type to be interesting or fun indicates a lack of understanding of the venue.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 07:42 |
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| # ? May 21, 2013 14:23 |
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Mendrian posted:SNIP Okay. This is one of those times when the 'bomb throwing anarchist' carthian is needed. The Invictus are a shadowy government stretching across the world, neglecting new embraces? Approach them, and then make the local outpost of that shadowy world government bleed.
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| # ? Mar 13, 2013 07:43 |
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