[Vampire: the Requiem] White Wolf crap at its best

[kris_h]

[Larry L.]

Hi Chris,

I am, to put it mildly, not a big fan of White Wolf. I guiltily admit to reading this in the hopes of being able to say "Yeah! That's totally why Vampire sucks!" But, from what you've described, I'm not seeing any evidence of dysfunctional play. I'm a little confused. The stuff that's going on in the game fiction actually sounds like it might be reasonably entertaining. It's clear this particular game is not your particular cup of tea, and that's 100% okay. But do the other people in the game seem to not be enjoying themselves?

Do you know some of these people in some non-game context? (Friends, co-workers, whatever)

Welcome to the Forge!

[Callan S.]

Hi Chris,

I kind of get the vibe that play for them was becoming just boring, so they turned on someone in real life in order to get some jollies.

I'm not sure how much one can attribute this to white wolf, except in that they hand you a book with no real procedure to play that has begining, middle and end, then without any boundries you basically had a lord of the flies situation at the gaming table (not between your characters, but between yourselves at people - think of the gaming table as an island...). I'd think more the sort of brain damage that is the idea that lack of procedure IS a procedure, which is propergated around roleplay culture as a whole.

I dunno, where do you want to go with this? Perhaps with some compassion I'd say often people are often used to someone else restraining them rather than self restraint - when the other guys at the table are told by the stupid book it has procedure, but actually provides no restraint on them really at all, it's plausible that they were shits simply because they thought they were being restrained by someone/something else.

And on the personal responsiblity side, are you going to keep playing games without any real structure/procedure to them? I mean, it can go well, but it's essentially a gamble. Though I'll grant there aren't many RPG's with complete procedures (though on the other hand, there used to be none).

Where do you want to go? You might have come at this originally like everyone does with board games - you can just play. But as far as I can tell, try 'just playing' with an incomplete procedure and...you get your actual play account or similar, alot of the time.

[Mobius]

I have to admit I see this a more a problem with the GM/group then anything that is WW or Vampires fault.  Personally I love sim type worlds where you are let loss to do whatever so I might have really enjoyed that game.

But if you are not having fun there is absolutely no reason for you to stay.

[JoyWriter]

There's an interesting problem there, in that there was a pretty mundane reason to deprotagonise your character while you weren't there: You weren't playing him!

How did you leave your character? What were the expectations in your group for what to do if someone is absent? Because one natural way I've seen people treat this is to say "well let's just sideline that character until X comes back to play them".

The snag is, that can turn into something else, particularly if you haven't explicitly worked out what to do in that situation:
People can do a sort of "serves you right for not being committed", and de-emphasise your contributions until you "earn" back credibility, which is a pretty daft and cliquey way to go about things.
On the other end of some scale people can really like what you contributed, have it be fundimental, but with you not there to suggest what happens, move it in ways that don't match what you've intended.
Or people can even play your character for you, either in person or not, giving it a specific role that they think you will like, regardless of if you actually will.

Loads of options, some or many you might not be happy with. It's one of those risks of putting work into something and leaving it in someone else's hands. It's extremely hard to give you creative influence in the game without you being directly involved, and so in that situation protagonising your character might damage your own creative vision just as much.

To comment on more (ie the specific events of the crappy session) I'll need some more information about how that GM normally does stuff, particularly "big events" (it could be, irony of ironies, that this was actually done "for" you as a big entrance!).