Hi

Last night we met for character creation. In fact it was for Chronicle creation too. Our Pendragon game (which I played in) had imploded and I was asked to run a game of Vampire, as that is what the majority wanted to play. I know there is a lot of resistnace here and negativity about World of Darkness people, but bear with us here.

Ironically the main pushers for Vampire did not attend, but Player #1, #2 and #3 did.

I offered to run a game in America or London. They chose London. I outlined that my game would contain a number of rule changes,and that I would be running a game that largely ignored the established metaplot, in so far that they would find that it had little impact on our forth coming chronicle. The truth is that the game is to be heavily influenced by Sorcerer. The main rule changes are to the die rollling,which isa pretty direct port from Sorcerer. Time will tell how well it works out.

I outlined that the Humanity method of V:TM would be removed and we are using the Sorcerer method. Curiosuly we began with the traditional method of interpereting humanity a la World of Darkness, but judging by the strong 'Lust for Power' motif's of each character, the Social Empathy Humanity model from Sorcerers Soul (p.70) seems spoton. I will discuss next session prior to play.

The Protaganists

Michael - A Gangrel. This guys started from very humble roots and has fought hard to get money and recognition, leading him into the underworld of organised crime. The player had the least enthusiastic input in to the design of his character. His first concept was basically a loner who was a loner. This I veto'd, insisting that each character had three important relationships, one which must be their sire.

Michaels kicker is that when he returns home his haven has burnt to the ground.

Elizabeth - A Mekhet (Lifted from Requiem). A rich kid who managed to convince her fathers master (her father is a ghoul) to embrace her.

Elizabeths kicker is that she wakes up and the hotel she is staying in is on fire and it is during the day.

Igor - Toreador. A rising star politician his embrace changed that. Now he uses his considerable skills for the betterment of the kindred.

His kicker is that his highly strung lover who he has revealed his vampiric nature to has just been arrested by the police.

What I would be very interested in is feedback about the kickers. I amnot an expert, and I wonder if they are good kickers?

Regards
Rob

It's hard to say without knowing anything about the players, but off the top of my head Michael and Igor's sound very promising.  Elizabeth's is not a very good one IMO; it's a challenging situation, but there's one obvious response to it (escaping!) and I don't see much room for follow-on conflicts or Bangs.  Once Elizabeth escapes, there's no reason she couldn't settle back into her everyday unlife. 

By the way, the players came up with these, right?

Danny_K wrote:
It's hard to say without knowing anything about the players, but off the top of my head Michael and Igor's sound very promising.  Elizabeth's is not a very good one IMO; it's a challenging situation, but there's one obvious response to it (escaping!) and I don't see much room for follow-on conflicts or Bangs.  Once Elizabeth escapes, there's no reason she couldn't settle back into her everyday unlife. 

By the way, the players came up with these, right?

You're exactly right Rob.  Elizabeth's kicker might be a tad weak (by which I don't mean bad, but rather a weak force), but that's  just asking you to spike it.  Of course she'll want to know who did it, and that invites all kinds of opportunities for bangs.  Pay close attention to her realtionships and really hang a twister on it.  Like "You wake up and the room is on fire, sunlight still streams through the windows and there are sirens outside.  There is a boy of about 12 laying on the floor and he has a picture of himself with a man you assume to be his dad.  It's the same man you killed two weeks ago..."

Trevis

Hi

Trevis wrote:
You're exactly right Rob.  Elizabeth's kicker might be a tad weak (by which I don't mean bad, but rather a weak force), but that's  just asking you to spike it.  Of course she'll want to know who did it, and that invites all kinds of opportunities for bangs.  Pay close attention to her realtionships and really hang a twister on it.  Like "You wake up and the room is on fire, sunlight still streams through the windows and there are sirens outside.  There is a boy of about 12 laying on the floor and he has a picture of himself with a man you assume to be his dad.  It's the same man you killed two weeks ago..."

Trevis

Yep, keep in mind that kickers are best if they're bangs. That is, if you can say, "She'll want to find out who did it" then that's not a bang. The kicker should propel the character into some sort of action, but you shouldn't be sure what that action will be.

Now, to make that possible, sometimes you have to complicate the situation. Potentially quite a bit.

What are you intending to use for a "Centralizing Construct?" That is, what's going to make this one story with three protagonists instead of three separate stories. Relationship Map? Whatever it is, look at that to find where your complications are with the kickers, and get that stuff incorporated immediately.

Like using a Relationship Map, and Trevis' suggestion, who is the boy? More importantly who else is he related to besides his deceased father? Who is he connected to that's connected to the other PCs? How are they connected in a way that creates potential for follow up action, when events transpire?

Mike

As an alternative to unifying the player-characters' back-stories, look into the techniques I describe in Sex & Sorcery: Weaves, Crosses, and Bobs. They work incredibly well and permit the conflict-heavy situation of play to evolve through players' choices rather than be pre-set by you. It's possible to play with a strong back-story without railroading (that's what Mike is aiming toward; it's what Sorcerer & Soul is all about), but if you already have habits that tend to combine the two, then I suggest the ones in Sex & Sorcery instead.

Best, Ron

Hi

The fundemental scenario that I am running is 'The Forbidden Tome' from Sorcerors Soul, adapted to London and to Vampires, of course. We will also be using the definition of humanity that goes with that scenario too.

Regards
Rob

I'm not recommending any one method for centralizing (the one's in Sex & Sorcery are great as are more mundane ones like mission structures). Just wondering what he's planning so we can move on to discussing the specifics of how to use that plan to make the kickers less certain in outcome.

I have to admit that I can't recall the scenario in question at the moment. But instead of going and looking at it, it'll obviously need adaptation for the purposes here. So, Rob, tell us how you plan to tailor the scenario to the characters, and then I think it'll become more clear what you can do.

Mike

Hi

We actually got to play tonight- hurrah! It went something like this,

There was me – the gm, and four players. I will refer to the players by their characters names to maintain their anonymity.

The Game

As discussed before, we are playing Vampire second edition, varied from the canon. I have changed a number of rules, being heavily influenced as I am by Sorcerer. What I am shooting for here is narratavist play, and I was conscious that there is no reward  mechanism for good roleplaying in V:TM, and that the humanity system is broken. Therefore I pretty much directly ported in the die rolling mechanics from Sorcerer and the humanity system.

Everything worked except for disciplines that worked against willpower. I had the urge to roll die v die, but I think that for simplicity I will maintain the system that exists in the game as is, in that the npc’s resist with their will power, which becomes a target number for the die rolling. But other than that things seemed to work just fine.

What vampire is this? I was a big fan of the TV show (cheesy I know). In the show Vampires could move about in the day if they kept out of direct sunlight. This meant that essentially the vampires could hold down day jobs, which is a bit of a departure from the game which rules that a vampire will be really groggy and he would need to have a high humanity to be effective and also spend willpower. I prefer the TV paradigm, that the vampires are among the humans, living similar lives but having to feed on our blood to survive.

The Scenario

The Scenario we are using is the Forbidden Tome. Celine is a rogue Malkavian. She has ghouled Mickey Sharpe. Killian was a Ventrue that Celine had been duelling with for centuries. Killian is relatively new to London, and therefore so is Celine. Killian was putting together a deal to sell the fragments of the Demonicon to the Tremere (a player character) when he disappeared, which sets off a chain of events.

The Characters

Elizabeth – The player had wanted to create a Tremere. At character gen night I ruled out Malkavians and Tremere as being best suited to NPC’s. Luckily I had the error of this pointed out to me by my good buddy, and in the tradition of giving the players the chance to play a character they are into I let the player change the Mekhet (lifted from Requiem) to Tremere. It was really just a case of changing the disciplines and a few other minor tweaks.

Elizabeth is a WoD nut, she loves it. She works hard at the game and is an excellent and very intense roleplayer – I really enjoyed our scenes.

Elizabeths Kicker

She said that she wanted to wake up in a hotel room, in the middle of the day with the room ablaze.

I spiked this by putting in a dominated room service guy called Greg. The thing that woke Elizabeth up was the sound of a woman cackling, when she sat up after smelling the burning she saw Greg.

To cut a long story short she incapacitated him and dragged him in the bathroom, where they were rescued. That’s when I dropped on her that the room had been booked for her by Killian, who had gotten in touch. He was to meet her there that night.

She spoke to the police and her sire and made some plans and that was as far as we got.

Igor – Is played by a thoughtful, intelligent soft spoken foreign student. She also is a very good roleplayer.

Her kicker was that her character, a male toreador who was more in the venture mould gets a call from the police regarding his girlfriend Kate. She was picked up wandering the streets dishevelled. My spike here was that evening she had gone to her occult society thing that she does (unknown to player, run by Greene). Kate has been embraced (secretly by Celine for a reason I have yet to decide).

Igor with some die rolling and play managed to get her out and arranged a separate time for them to come to the station. On the way home he got her to feed.

Charmaine – Is played by an energetic girl who has a kind of impulsive and crazy streak (as it turns out). Another very into it player, you get a very strong sim Agenda feeling from her. Maybe that’s just me. Her character is a drug dealer with a heart. She is very protective about children and is a Brujah.

She never really came to the table with a kicker that I could recognise, just this thing about kids. I asked about her family, and it turns out they all died tragically. This was tough on me. I looked at her character sheet and picked up on her contacts. She said that they were related to her drug dealing. The kicker then (sort of generated by me) was that she got a call to take round more stuff to her contact Ginger, and low  life tough. She played it that she wasn’t comfortable in the modest surroundings of the estate (or Projects) drug dealing den and didn’t really like Ginger, it was a business arrangement. That’s when I dropped in Alfie the street kid who was about 10-12 years and was coming round for his 3rd hit of crack. Charmaine sort of flipped and used vampire presence to make the kid run off. Ginger wasn’t pleased and there was a scuffle, resulting Charmaine shooting Ginger!!! She then started to feed on him!! Of course she had forgot about Gingers wife Donna and his friend Pete, all who were in the other room while they ‘did business’. They now caught Charmaine sucking blood from the wrist of the shot Ginger!! Upshot being that Charmaine mesmerised and then murdered them to keep them quiet. I reminded her of Gingers 2 year old daughter! She resolved to take the kid and get out of there. Imade her roll a humanity loss for each murder, 3 of them. She failed two rolls and now only has 3 humanity (each player starts with 5).

Micheal – Theplayeris a buddy from my Heroquest campaign, and I think its his first attempt at playing RPG in a modern setting. His character was a self made man, a guy who had broken a few eggs on the way to success. He has a number of legit businesses and connections to the underworld, partaking in a number of scams.

Kicker – His house/ haven was on fire when he returned home. His brother is an Anglican Vicar, and I spiked the fire with having a Dog Collar with ‘Next’ written in blood hung on the gates to his house.

He inspected the dog collar, saw that it wasn’t his brothers (he said that his brother writes his name on his dog collars!! LoL) He contacted European Bob (a name that he made up). This guy is none other than Robert Sharpe (Mickey Sharpe in the scenario). It is he that fired Michaels house in order to intimidate Michael to back out of a property deal.

In fact the play about the fire and his brother came out a little flat. Any suggestions for spiking it a bit more would be appreciated!!

Regards
Rob

Rob, nice writeup.  I'll have to digest it a bit more before I can say anything smart.

Hi

Just a note: Borrowed the Vampire Requiem rules from a player in  my Vampire game. The first few paragraphs telling you about the game start very promising. But within a few paragraphs you get told how your character is really no longer a human and any human feelings are nothing more than an echo of a past life.

How can you play morally relevant scenario's when you have already declared that every character is just a freekin monster!! Surely the point is to play a human who has become a vampire and has to struggle to maintain their humanity and sense of reason whilst being forced into engaging in socially repugant behaviour (drinking the blood of another person) just to survive. Go figure.

Regards
Rob

I suppose one can create meaningful actions from "echos" of feelings. There's always allegory. I think that they mean what you mean, more or less.

I don't think they mechanically enable it particularly well in V:tR, but I think that the goal is the same.

Mike

Hi Mike

Mike wrote:

I suppose one can create meaningful actions from "echos" of feelings. There's always allegory. I think that they mean what you mean, more or less.

Hi Rob,

Disinterest in the McGuffin is a good thing, when combined with high interest in the NPCs and their interactions/history. The very word "McGuffin," as I employed it in that scenario, means that it is unimportant. If they find some importance for them in it, that'd be good, but if they were obediently caring about it because it's what you throw at them, without interest in the NPCs, then its whole point would be lost.

Best, Ron

Hi

Ron wrote:
Hi Rob,

Disinterest in the McGuffin is a good thing, when combined with high interest in the NPCs and their interactions/history. The very word "McGuffin," as I employed it in that scenario, means that it is unimportant. If they find some importance for them in it, that'd be good, but if they were obediently caring about it because it's what you throw at them, without interest in the NPCs, then its whole point would be lost.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
Hi Rob,

Disinterest in the McGuffin is a good thing, when combined with high interest in the NPCs and their interactions/history. The very word "McGuffin," as I employed it in that scenario, means that it is unimportant. If they find some importance for them in it, that'd be good, but if they were obediently caring about it because it's what you throw at them, without interest in the NPCs, then its whole point would be lost.

Best, Ron

Hi Rob,

I especially suggest reading the additional text in the back of the book, the dialogue between me and Tor Erickson. I think you'll see that his situation, and the points I raised for him, and which he applied to his game, are very similar to yours.

Best, Ron