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Yawgmoth posted:I have yet to hear a LARP story that makes me think "man, I wish I could find a LARP group because it sure doesn't sound like a continual shoryuken to the balls!" I've had some amazing LARP experiences. In fact, some of my all-time favorite gaming experiences. But they were always with highly curated groups, and designed with a specific, narrow focus in mind.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:17
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Yawgmoth posted:I have yet to hear a LARP story that makes me think "man, I wish I could find a LARP group because it sure doesn't sound like a continual shoryuken to the balls!" At the same time, I always hear those stories and go "wait, other people really LARP like that?" If not for the internet I would have been used to the idea that it's more-or-less a tabletop game with friends, but with 6 GMs and 30 players.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:18
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I can't really imagine myself LARPing around the age when I had that kind of free time. One, because I was always content to waste my free time, and two, because my sleep schedule was poo poo and I drank less than a liter of water a day. You're going to ask me to wear black and be creative? While walking around? No thanks.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:21
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I was in a really good LARP like twenty years ago and every so often I forget that it was created not only by the STs but also by a confluence of location, subcultural trends, and so on.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:50
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MachineIV posted:Machine Four. It's a reference to an old Sister Machine Gun song of all things. But it stuck with me. This has made me reflective, suddenly, as I look at names like Yawgmoth, Pope Guilty, and Basic Chunnel, and realize that there's a thousand-thousand stories living on the internet in the names people choose to self-identify with alone. Long live the New Flesh. Yawgmoth posted:I have yet to hear a LARP story that makes me think "man, I wish I could find a LARP group because it sure doesn't sound like a continual shoryuken to the balls!" There's a LARP group not far from me. I periodically see people with cloaks wandering around on weekends during the summer. I kinda want to ask them where they get their cloaks made because I hear they're actually really great for dealing with cold weather. Ever since Dave compared the Adamantine Arrow to Greycloaks, that's pretty much the mental image I have, though. There's also a medieval fair that happens every year. Last time I went, a very nice old man offered me a lifetime supply of mud, while a much saucier gentleman asked if I wanted to try his pickle. None of that's relevant to LARPing but the two are intertwined in my memory.
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Mar 9, 2017 04:54
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crime fighting hog posted:Out of curiosity, have any of you actually used the God Machine in your games? Obviously a given for Demon but what about in Vampire or Hunter? Going about disabling infrastructure, fighting angels and stuff. It sounds like a pretty great "here's the creepy cosmology for our game" if that's what the players want. In my Mage game the player characters ran into an interconnected series of biomechanical spider colonies, and some sentient spyware with memory leak issues, and heard a few apocryphal stories of giant walking furnaces and so on, and correctly concluded that there were multiple "god machines" of unknown provenance with distinct powers, aesthetics, etc scattered around the world, at least one of which was under direct Seer control.
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Mar 9, 2017 04:58
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I asked this a bit earlier, but it got lost in the shuffle, so let me ask this is a slightly more detailed and specific way: In the near-ish future, I'm going to be running a Requiem for Rome game, but since the sourcebook is for VtR 1E and we're playing 2E now, I have a few things I need to sort out to convert the rules. Most of what's in there could be used as-is, or the rules that apply are kind of no-brainers-- clans have their proper 2E banes and mechanics (and I found a port of the Julii on the OPP forums somewhere), debates are Social Maneuvers, etc., but I'm a little less sure what to do with Wings. I guess the Cult of Augurs and the Lancea et Sanctum could just use the 2E rules for Cruác and Theban Sorcery? But I'm less sure what to do with the Senex, Legio Mortuum, and Peregrine Collegia, since they have advantages in the style of the 1E Invictus and Carthians-- i.e., discounts on various thematically appropriate merits, rather than anything like 2E Carthian Law or Invictus Oaths or whatever. Does anybody know what the best way forward is? Should I just try to reskin Law and Oaths? If so, who should get what? Is there some other fan conversion of Wings I haven't stumbled onto yet? I guess if anyone else has any other things I should keep in mind trying to run RfR in VtR 2E, that'd also be good to know. 
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Mar 9, 2017 05:02
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Basic Chunnel posted:Come to think of it, when people cite Skype/Discord as an alternative to PbP, do they just mean it in terms of facilitating a virtual tabletop experience, or a more viable means of asynchronous collaborative storytelling? Because the potential for more considered prose and the lack of time-sensitive improv are the real draws of PbP for me. I always assumed the former. My own experiences with PbP is through the various online chats I'm on though and I have the same views on it as you do (considered prose and the like).
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Mar 9, 2017 05:13
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MachineIV posted:I ended up only LARPing in very tight, curated groups where I fundamentally redesigned the game mechanics. One of the old jokes we used to make was that if you wanted to do something sneaky, never, ever use Obfuscate. The arm gesture for Obfuscate just invited curiosity by those with Auspex about what you were doing, whereas you could often sneak around or eavesdrop more reliably by just pretending you were supposed to be somewhere. A friend once eavesdropped on a secret Camarilla leadership meeting by overhearing where the meeting was to take place, sat down beforehand, and faked reading a book. The folks showed up and held their "secret" meeting, not questioning his presence for well over a half-hour.
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Mar 9, 2017 05:31
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Alien Rope Burn posted:One of the old jokes we used to make was that if you wanted to do something sneaky, never, ever use Obfuscate. The arm gesture for Obfuscate just invited curiosity by those with Auspex about what you were doing, whereas you could often sneak around or eavesdrop more reliably by just pretending you were supposed to be somewhere. A friend once eavesdropped on a secret Camarilla leadership meeting by overhearing where the meeting was to take place, sat down beforehand, and faked reading a book. The folks showed up and held their "secret" meeting, not questioning his presence for well over a half-hour. People love throwing that poo poo around. I had a friend who used to toss things into play randomly to find out who had what power. "I think he's lying!" Then everyone starts using Auspex. "I don't think we can trust him unless someone can Condition him..." Someone volunteers to use their Dominate. Also, throwing up the hand signal for language usage was good to find out quickly who could and could not use what language. At one point, he and I got a cretin player to spend all his points on buying new languages, because every game session, we'd prepare some set phrases in a new language to use in public. The guy would ask what language we were speaking. He'd grumble when we told him. Then next session, he'd come with that new language on his sheet. We'd use a new language, he'd grumble, then he'd go buy another language. I think by the end of the game, we'd tricked him into wasting his points on like twelve different languages.
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Mar 9, 2017 05:40
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If I were STing that I'd just make a "polyglot" merit around the fourth or fifth language.
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Mar 9, 2017 05:54
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Empress Theonora posted:I asked this a bit earlier, but it got lost in the shuffle, so let me ask this is a slightly more detailed and specific way: I would be tempted to actually give the Senex something resembling Carthian Law (since it mostly involves the supernatural binding of their collective authority) and give the Legio something like Invictus Oaths and also access to other fighting styles. That is of course the lazy option because gently caress rewriting two whole wings for a game, but you may be more ambitious than me. You'd still have to adjust all the Merits to fit better with the setting. The Collegia I'm unsure about. They're really just a collection of all the other disaffected groups in Rome and don't really have a concrete 'message'; you could always go the option of not actually giving them anything special aside from the collective support of the Collegia.
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Mar 9, 2017 08:54
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You could reappropriate the Contract with the Uncanny Merit from Dark Eras's Elizabethan England period, emphasizing the Wing of Strangers' role as opportunistic rabble not bound to conventional alliances.
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Mar 9, 2017 09:17
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Axelgear posted:As others have pointed out, board-based things have their advantages, but my experiences haven't been positive. That might be mostly because I was organizing games with strangers on forums, so it wasn't as coordinated as it could've been, but they had problems related to player engagement and a high frequency of simply dying. If you know people you consider good, or are simply willing to take the chance, do it. Don't let me scare you off from something. It costs you nothing but time you wanted to spend on it anyway, right? Do iiiiiiiiiiit
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Mar 9, 2017 10:22
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LARPing is the sorta thing I think I would've enjoyed in high school and early college if I were more social, living in a different area, and substantially less sadbrains'd.Axelgear posted:This has made me reflective, suddenly, as I look at names like Yawgmoth, Pope Guilty, and Basic Chunnel, and realize that there's a thousand-thousand stories living on the internet in the names people choose to self-identify with alone. And then there's people who go for lovely memes based on random Japanese doujin games.
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Mar 9, 2017 10:34
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Yawgmoth posted:I have yet to hear a LARP story that makes me think "man, I wish I could find a LARP group because it sure doesn't sound like a continual shoryuken to the balls!" The only time I went to a LARP the ST guy and I rolled up my character and after making him as a mortal, I went with a backstreet mechanic that was a recovered-ish ex-junkie, I decided to roll randomly what kind of vampire he was and figured hey, the character wouldn't choose that so just randomised and ended up a nosferatu? The sewer ones that look weird. So I was basically walking around a busy pub with two stickers on me that said "makes you uncomfortable" and "UGLY". The other abiding memory of it was a greasy guy that kept saying how good he was at Dominating with a little smirk and realising the whole thing was basically foreplay for him and his partner.
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Mar 9, 2017 11:46
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ProfessorCirno posted:LARPing is the sorta thing I think I would've enjoyed in high school and early college if I were more social, living in a different area, and substantially less sadbrains'd. My college games were basically LARPs but using dice. I had props and everything because I was also in the combat club. Somehow, I think real LARPs are way more tryhard than what we did.
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Mar 9, 2017 12:13
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Vitamin P posted:So I was basically walking around a busy pub with two stickers on me that said "makes you uncomfortable" and "UGLY". This actually sounds like a kind of fun way to do Nosferatu stuff, if it weren't in a public space where a bunch of strangers would judge you for being proud of your looks.
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Mar 9, 2017 12:22
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lovely poker hand posted:This actually sounds like a kind of fun way to do Nosferatu stuff, if it weren't in a public space where a bunch of strangers would judge you for being proud of your looks. Yeah it would have been fine if there weren't normal people around too looking at me like I was doing some kind of bizarre therapy or an undergrad psychology experiment.
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Mar 9, 2017 13:57
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Pfft, who needs stickers?
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Mar 9, 2017 14:06
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MachineIV posted:I've had some amazing LARP experiences. In fact, some of my all-time favorite gaming experiences. But they were always with highly curated groups, and designed with a specific, narrow focus in mind. Did you ever have a chance to use your conversions for 2E Requiem? I liked the 'aside' mechanics you posted on the OPP forums under Auspex, for example. Wondering if you ever fleshed those all out and gave them a try.
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Mar 9, 2017 15:15
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Vitamin P posted:The other abiding memory of it was a greasy guy that kept saying how good he was at Dominating with a little smirk and realising the whole thing was basically foreplay for him and his partner. I wonder if they're still managing to wrangle in a single student each year to be their official "president" so they can keep being a student organization and using the rooms for free or if they've had to go back to being the creepos in the back of mcdonald's again.
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Mar 9, 2017 17:36
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MachineIV posted:People love throwing that poo poo around. I had a friend who used to toss things into play randomly to find out who had what power. "I think he's lying!" Then everyone starts using Auspex. "I don't think we can trust him unless someone can Condition him..." Someone volunteers to use their Dominate. I remember a friend of mine using blood points to heal himself and just marked them off before describing his wounds closing back up without explaining how. Certain people became convinced he was some unkillable immortal or something just because he didn't say "I spend blood to..." Just not outwardly stating what power you were using could throw some people for a loop because they'd think you were hiding something. LARPs are, if nothing else, an interesting way to find out just how easy it can be to manipulate people. I remember so many dumb scams I pulled that should not have worked. 
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Mar 9, 2017 17:52
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On the topic of PBP vs Live things, the Werewolf game I was in end of last year did a hybrid style where we would do downtime things in the thread and every two weeks we had a 4-ish hour session of live game in discord to handle combats and pack adventures and it worked splendidly since no one had to sit around waiting their turn for one person to do like, 'I set up all these things/did social stuff' and there was no in-thread combat to bog things down. I'm in two PBP games on SA that are over five years old at this point. The key is to have a group who hangs out together in a text-based chatroom (Skype, IRC, Discord, whatever) because that way you actually become friends independent of the game over time and can bother each other to post. There's no need to do live game or voice, but part of the draw of a social game is you know, social interaction with other gamers. Making friends means you all have a vested interest in continuing the game because it's the reason you hang out together. And hell, several of the groups I'm in have stayed together to play other games once the first one ended. It's good stuff. Also: GOOGLE DOCS. I can't stress how useful googledocs are. Part of the issue with forums PBP is that you end up with really stilted dialogue and it's hard to do character voices. By writing posts collaboratively on a google doc you can do much more natural dialogue asynchronously since you just post back and forth to each other during the day until the conversation's over, then someone textdumps it to the thread. It also lets you edit as you go, if you mess something up or have a better idea for the scene.
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Mar 9, 2017 18:34
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While I think the devs have left the thread, I am curious if anyone knows if they plan to update 90s celeb culture of Aberrant to 2010s celeb culture, since I heard Trinity is getting revived? The idea of playing superhero celebrities who are slowly and secretly turning into monster mutants on a system that sounds pretty legit, storypath, is my kind of poo poo right there. mistaya posted:On the topic of PBP vs Live things, the Werewolf game I was in end of last year did a hybrid style where we would do downtime things in the thread and every two weeks we had a 4-ish hour session of live game in discord to handle combats and pack adventures and it worked splendidly since no one had to sit around waiting their turn for one person to do like, 'I set up all these things/did social stuff' and there was no in-thread combat to bog things down. Stealing this.
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Mar 9, 2017 19:08
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Covok posted:While I think the devs have left the thread, I am curious if anyone knows if they plan to update 90s celeb culture of Aberrant to 2010s celeb culture, since I heard Trinity is getting revived? The idea of playing superhero celebrities who are slowly and secretly turning into monster mutants on a system that sounds pretty legit, storypath, is my kind of poo poo right there.
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Mar 9, 2017 19:10
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mistaya posted:On the topic of PBP vs Live things, the Werewolf game I was in end of last year did a hybrid style where we would do downtime things in the thread and every two weeks we had a 4-ish hour session of live game in discord to handle combats and pack adventures and it worked splendidly since no one had to sit around waiting their turn for one person to do like, 'I set up all these things/did social stuff' and there was no in-thread combat to bog things down. On that note, I haven't forgotten about you guys! Getting back into academia has been a full time endeavor, but I am still interested in continuing once I am settled fully. You are an amazing group!
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Mar 9, 2017 19:48
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Oh hey! I actually left the Discord room since I thought it was dead. If there's a chance at more Pack Antics I am fully on board just re invite me. (That's one more thing- especially if you plan to GM- always status update for yourself. If you got life, people got patience, but not telling your players what's up means we can't plan around it and eventually that's it.) Honestly 9 times out of 10 if a PBP fails it's the GM who gave up on it, at least in my experience.
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Mar 9, 2017 20:33
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Glad to hear you're still alive Smoke! I'd be stoked to get the band back together. And yeah, I wanna echo mistaya's observations. A lot of my failed online trad games would have been improved by asking, "What are we actually looking forward to here? How can we skip to the good bits?" It's the reason the games with fun paperwork elements (Pendragon, hard scifi, etc.) which can be really fun in the flesh, struggle on PbP without a firm hand.
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Mar 9, 2017 21:12
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I've been thinking a lot about how I'm going to manage a game on Discord, so this is all really useful. It sounds like integrating text based downtime stuff is the way to go?
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Mar 9, 2017 21:28
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It's up to you and how quickly your group gels. If it's a bunch of randoms from an open recruit, they might just want to do the game for a while, but at least throw an OOC chat-room up for people to shoot the poo poo. You will get a ton of good ideas just from reading your players discussion of the game and what they might want to do or what they are afraid will happen next, too. (Steal everything.)
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Mar 9, 2017 21:45
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mistaya posted:(Steal everything.) Honestly, the best GM advice. Last night I had a player who mentioned something that had happened a month and a half ago that he had half-heartedly started investigating in his downtime, so on a dramatic failure while trailing someone, I used the opportunity to let the person slip away and have him confronted with an escalation in that other plot that he had half started. It worked out really well and really gave me a way to bring the ever continuing and changing world up in a way that I wasn't expecting to do.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:09
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Barbed Tongues posted:Did you ever have a chance to use your conversions for 2E Requiem? I liked the 'aside' mechanics you posted on the OPP forums under Auspex, for example. Wondering if you ever fleshed those all out and gave them a try. Yes, I did. They worked pretty well. I'm actually going to be hammering out some notes about them for a friend probably some time next month. So I may share them if that becomes a thing.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:51
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Yawgmoth posted:Yeah that was the vibe I got off roughly 70% of the LARP group at my college. Lots of dingy canvas overcoats, fedoras, ill-fitting corsets, and about half as many showers in the last 24 hours than I would have desired. Also hilariously insular despite advertising they needed new people, so you had the same group of a dozen or so So I have a theory on this. The highest quality players tend to want to keep the game running, and typically become the STs and/or coordinators. Granted, they might be the best players in a lovely group but still. And really the art of welcoming new players is an action best perpetrated by other players. A good ST can keep a tabletop running smoothly even with one or two lovely players but a LARP needs one or two exemplary players to keep running smoothly. The kind of players that go out of their way to acclimate and include new players, who are willing to leave themselves open and vulnerable to rivalry, or who graciously let other players shine even if they, themselves, could run a plot by themselves. The best LARPs I've been in have had amazing players moreso than amazing STs, and that's because the reason you come to a LARP is to sit around in a room and be a vampire for a few hours behind a backdrop of important stuff happening. I say this having run LARPs and been in games with great and terrible STs both; you notice good players way more than you notice good STs. Bad STs are a whole other kettle. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 23:58
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MC Smoke Sensei posted:On that note, I haven't forgotten about you guys! Getting back into academia has been a full time endeavor, but I am still interested in continuing once I am settled fully. You are an amazing group! Yay, I posted in our thread after the holidays asking when we were getting back in.
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Mar 10, 2017 01:09
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So the campaign I'm working on right now is almost done,, so I'm looking towards the future. I want to run a hybrid mage/demon as the campaign after. The working title is The Violet Lights. quote:Edvard Masaryk's The Violet Lights: Beings From Beyond is a poorly written screed with an incomprehensible plot, made even worse by an English translation that could be gently referred to as "clumsy". Characters randomly disappear without warning, only to appear again two hundred pages later as if they never left, plotlines are picked up and dropped with no rhyme or reason. At least one page is simply a recipe for borscht. It's no wonder it's out of print. Essentially, an angels fall starts a chain of events of that leads to a misfiring occult matrix tearing a hole in reality that leads to a massive Abyssal invasion. Most of the party is mages dedicated to stopping it - along the newly fallen demon and maybe another demon. The big problem I'm having with this concept is how do I handle PCs mucking around with the plot in the book? The simplest solution seems best - as they start altering, pages simply disappear. You go from page 85 to 87 as if it was printed without 86. It leaves a lot to the imagination, and I find that's your best weapon against PCs. On the other hand I'm worried it's so open or so cliche it would suck tension out of the narrative. The other solution I've thought up is damaged plot points are replaced with text that directly addresses the reader with threats and insults. The Unlife Aquatic fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 03:14
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Damaged plot points describe the next day for the characters' loved one. It doesn't end well. As the characters continue to be successful undamaged plot points describe their loved ones winning the lottery, having cancers go into remission etc.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:23
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Relevant Tangent posted:Damaged plot points describe the next day for the characters' loved one. It doesn't end well. As the characters continue to be successful undamaged plot points describe their loved ones winning the lottery, having cancers go into remission etc. Good idea, thanks. I really want to make interacting with the book an important part of the plot, and trying to figure out what exactly the gently caress is happening to it - is it forecasting the future, or making it? Just who is rewriting it?
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Mar 10, 2017 04:46
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At first, damaged plot points just look like printing errors that have rendered segments illegible, but over time, various words are left legible, though no one remembers someone saying "gently caress you, rear end in a top hat" in the section before. e: One page simply leaves instances of all the PCs names.
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Mar 10, 2017 05:22
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Having it break the 4th wall once and start e-detectiving the Players would be pretty funny. (Who the hell is DAVE?? Asks the Demon, played by Dave.) Though you don't want to overdo that so probably a one-time gag. Maybe if something specific is supposed to happen it could trap them in a groundhog-day loop until they do it right.
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Mar 10, 2017 07:40
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