WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?
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I think preventing the “all other spheres must die” thing is on the staff to prevent but at the same time, you can’t hold to theme for some of the WoD (especially OWoD) spheres if they’re expected to be buddy buddy because some major magical aura is preventing it. (Mostly talking about Vampire - Werewolf here.) Ultimately “a ritual long before the start of game says no” is sort of lazy in my opinion.
As far as day zones / night zones go, I prefer that people just set the time of day / night when they set the scene, and adapt to whomever they’re playing with. Day zones / night zones, again, seem lazy to me.
The families thing that TR / FC had was cool because at least you had the whole “blood is thicker than water” thing which didn’t feel as arbitrary as “ancient NPC said no”.
At least in CWoD / NWoD, the whole “kill other spheres” is replaced with “we’re wary of other spheres, but we don’t try and kill them outright as long as they stay in their lanes” (with a few exceptions, like the Cheiron Group with their whole we chop up everybody else to make ourselves better).
I think I’m done rambling now.
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@Jennkryst said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
@Roz said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
@catzilla One splat, or a VERY limited selection of splats. Basically I think that your whole staff should always be able and willing to handle all splats that you make available, or else you’re going to run into the inevitable issue of how you continue support when someone needs to dip.
Depends on how in-depth you want the knowledge of other spheres. Enough to handle scenes? Great! In-depth knowledge of all rotes or something?
handwobble
You can always just ask the players to explain shit, with the caveat that more knowledgeable staff will be double-checking, and if they’re cheating or something, CONSEQUENCES.
I think it’s best to have all your staffers capable of supporting all your spheres with a reasonable level of comfort. If a sphere’s support is going to suffer if you lose one specific person on your team, then I think it’s best to not add that sphere.
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@Solstice said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
and there’s no way to square the drastic differences in player power without extensive homebrewing.
If differences in PC power were really an issue, MUs would give everybody the same amount of XP and new PCs would be expected to spend, in chargen, an amount equivalent to what the oldest (and thus all) PCs have spent.
Having PCs at different power levels is fun. Unless the GMs don’t make any effort to give them all stuff to do that they can do and that more powerful PCs won’t or can’t take over.
@MisterBoring said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
I think preventing the “all other spheres must die” thing is on the staff to prevent but at the same time, you can’t hold to theme for some of the WoD (especially OWoD) spheres if they’re expected to be buddy buddy because some major magical aura is preventing it.
I agree that the ‘powerful rituals from before the game’s start forbid the conflict’ is answer is lazy.
So is the whole “all other spheres must die,” idea. The WoD sourcebooks themselves repeatedly make exceptions. Yeah, yeah, werewolves hate vampires and kill them whenever they can, except how the urban tribes of werewolves sometimes work with vampires and the rural vampires sometimes work with werewolves, and the core books let you buy stats representing NPC allies from spheres that yours supposedly hates. Often there is a major magical aura preventing MU PCs from the different splats from interacting; it’s the OOC howling of, “OMG SUPERFRIENDS SO LAME”.
@Roz said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
I think it’s best to have all your staffers capable of supporting all your spheres with a reasonable level of comfort.
This is probably the origin. Running multi-sphere WoD games as separate games on the same MUSH has been a tradition since the first, and to do this if you rather must discourage the groups from interacting outside of simple conflicts. So emphasise that the spheres hate each other, characterise cross-sphere connections as SUPERFRIENDS SO LAME.
All superfriends all the time does indeed kinda suck. My take is that it sucks less than never being able to cooperate or interact without murder no matter what evar. Milage may vary.
I think it’s not only best to have GMs capable of supporting all the splats, but to actually have them do so. One major point of suckage about ‘spheres’ being kept separate and having separate GMs is that the timeline/order of events tends to go stupid. Abelard builds a magical tank in his garage in less time than it takes Brigid to make a telephone call to her mentor, because Abelard’s staffer was quick and Brigid’s was away this weekend. It’s pretty typical for GMs not to triage for IC timeliness even within their own sphere.
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@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
Abelard builds a magical tank in his garage in less time than it takes Brigid to make a telephone call to her mentor, because Abelard’s staffer was quick and Brigid’s was away this weekend.
Having a staff that’s on the same page as far as activity and response times is so crucial in my opinion that it should always be on the mind of at least the person in charge of the whole game. I’ve been on more than a few games where spheres died because the staff assigned to them do next to nothing beyond the bare minimum, even less in some cases.
I understand that staff is completely voluntary, and RL > Game, but staff is volunteering to make the game run well, and if they’re not able to keep up with the rest of staff at a certain level of productivity, they shouldn’t be kept as staff. And if headstaff of a game can’t find anyone they trust to do the job correctly that’s also able to maintain that activity level for that sphere, maybe they shouldn’t have that sphere open.
It’s absolutely frustrating when the staffer assigned to you, or your sphere, or whatever is basically just a voicemail at capacity because they would rather play on their other PC or focus on some other staff task they’ve been assigned.
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Yep. I dislike the sphere system because (among other things) it makes it super easy to let this happen. Frankly, it regularly happens within spheres anyway – the magical tank vs phone call thing really happened, though my character was actually taking a forty-five minute bus ride, not making a phone call. The tank-builder was in the same sphere as I, same GM, it was just, eh, indifference to the issue, or favouritism. It was not actually as frustrating as spending five RL weeks waiting for twenty IC minutes to pass while the staffer I needed to tell me what happened in those twenty minutes was having weekly adventure and daily sphere-baRP with their PC.
It kinda blows me away that gamerunners don’t all acknowledge the timeliness problem and have a stated course of action to deal with it. In my long experience, if you want to lose friends over an RPG the easiest way is to SKIP SOMEBODY’S TURN A LOT. That’s pretty much the simplest way to be a shitty GM. (If you want to really guarantee that friendships’ death, skip their turn a lot and then have a hissy fit when they point out how unfair and shitty it is.)
An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)
I don’t think this analogy quite works. I think it’s more like someone running a community center. The work entailed in organizing the space and arranging the Valentines Dance Party is in no way comparable to the work entailed in showing up and dancing at the party. Even though, yes, the dance can’t happen without people showing up and dancing.
But even though the organizers of said community center may be volunteers, that doesn’t mean they have no accountability. If you signed up to organize the dance party and bail on it for no good reason, that’s a crummy thing to do even if you’re a volunteer. You can control the boundaries of what you volunteer for, but once you sign up for something, you should follow through (extenuating circumstances aside).
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@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
Yep. I dislike the sphere system because (among other things) it makes it super easy to let this happen. Frankly, it regularly happens within spheres anyway – the magical tank vs phone call thing really happened, though my character was actually taking a forty-five minute bus ride, not making a phone call. The tank-builder was in the same sphere as I, same GM, it was just, eh, indifference to the issue, or favouritism. It was not actually as frustrating as spending five RL weeks waiting for twenty IC minutes to pass while the staffer I needed to tell me what happened in those twenty minutes was having weekly adventure and daily sphere-baRP with their PC.
It kinda blows me away that gamerunners don’t all acknowledge the timeliness problem and have a stated course of action to deal with it. In my long experience, if you want to lose friends over an RPG the easiest way is to SKIP SOMEBODY’S TURN A LOT. That’s pretty much the simplest way to be a shitty GM. (If you want to really guarantee that friendships’ death, skip their turn a lot and then have a hissy fit when they point out how unfair and shitty it is.)
An aside, I wish we’d all get over the idea that MU staffing is volunteerism. Yeah, sure, it’s voluntary. But volunteerism implies community service. And okay, yeah, sort of, technically, but also, no. GMs are players playing a different role in the game. Yeah, we need them or we can’t play, but. Weellllll. You need a pitcher to play baseball, but you can play without a left fielder if you must. This does not make the pitcher a volunteer whose services you must constantly applaud and the left fielder a mere player who owes the pitcher. (For the same reason, gamerunners and players should all remember that GMs are players too, and they, too, should be having fun.)
It sounds like your bad experiences with MU staffing have soured you on staffers and their value. But don’t let your bad experiences with bad staffers blind distract from the importance staffing has on the hobby or the value in the service they’re offering the community. If anything, your bad experiences should show you just how valuable staffing is and how damaging it can be to have someone stepping into that role who won’t/can’t do it well. They should show you why good staffers should be applauded whenever they can be. Because good staffing is invaluable, even though many people take it for granted and are happy to sour on all of it because of the bad apples.
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I like the sphere system because it, theoretically, allows subject-matter experts to focus their attention and time on areas for which they are particularly qualified or passionate. Theoretically. I’m also not generally one to engage in the Super Friends/cross-sphere style play that is often advocated for on multi-sphere games, so the siloing effect that the sphere system can have is actually, often, a positive from my perspective.
That said, the MU community is twelve people and an outraged grapefruit, we don’t have the manpower to maintain a constantly rotating/shuffling party of subject-matter experts who burn out after six months. Not while also maintaining a group of interested and passionate players, limiting conflicts of interest, etc.
One also, largely, wants to avoid being in a position where only one staffer knows what’s going on. Faraday frequently manages it, from what I’ve seen, but I think she’s part dragon or something, so she doesn’t count. We’ve all seen games die because the lone Staffer With The Book burns out/goes missing/gets bored/starts dating someone.
So, ideally, one would prefer a team of subject-matter experts in all fields one wishes to run, with enough time and energy to coordinate story, timing, and mechanics decisions as if they were a hive mind.
Has anyone asked the Borg if they can start a WoD game?
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@Pavel said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
One also, largely, wants to avoid being in a position where only one staffer knows what’s going on. Faraday frequently manages it, from what I’ve seen, but I think she’s part dragon or something, so she doesn’t count.
LOL. It only works for me because I expressly set up the games to require minimal staff intervention. I don’t recommend it as a general strategy for most games.
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@Faraday Eh, analogies. The better one is, I think, that of an actual tabletop RPG. It has a host who either reserved the table somewhere or is holding the game at their home, and a GM who is probably the same person but not always. Both roles must be filled or there’s no game this week. But normally any other person can be away for a session or two.
The hosts of my tt sometimes GM and sometimes don’t, and provide tables and chairs and battlemats and minis and dice the computer that the people who play remotely appear on, and keep your character sheet for you if you’re prone to forgetting it. And serve a meal. We are very appreciative, our little ten-person community, and they assure us that they do this because they enjoy it.
@Warma-Sheen Naw. I think I can appreciate and value GMs and gamerunners, and I do, without thinking that those roles should be characterised as ‘volunteering their time for the community’. It’s not really untrue but it’s the wrong framework, I thinks.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
It’s not really untrue but it’s the wrong framework, I thinks.
That depends entirely on how one typically views “volunteering their time for the community.”
MU staffing is not like the volunteering their time of someone volunteering to pick up trash from the sidewalk, it’s more like my volunteer gig working the trauma helpline. It’s very nice that I’m taking time out of my schedule to help, but if I bail without telling anyone, people are rightfully annoyed because there needs to be someone available during the period I said I could be there. And if I do a piss-poor job, people are going to be negatively impacted.
It’s a community service, it wouldn’t exist without unpaid people doing hard work, but it’s also a job. That, on a much less drastic scale, is MU staffing.
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@Pavel The difference I’m getting at is more that when you volunteer at the trauma helpline, it’s because you want to dedicate part of your time in service to fellow human beings. The work may be engaging and it may benefit you professionally, spiritually and otherwise, but it’s probably not fun, and it’s certainly not a game.
I don’t feel like I was doing volunteer work by running a MUSH when I did. I was doing a hobby. It was a role where other people would be annoyed if I didn’t do what I agreed to do and some of it was more work-like than play-like, and it benefited a little community of people and I didn’t get paid, and I felt I had a level of responsibility to not let it be emotionally hazardous and to avoid destroying people’s fun, but. Hobby. Game.
Not really relevant, but still, Maturin’s face.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
I think I can appreciate and value GMs and gamerunners, and I do, without thinking that those roles should be characterised as ‘volunteering their time for the community’.
Analogies are always imperfect, otherwise they wouldn’t be analogies. Since you recognize the value of the work GMs/gamerunners do, it seems that it’s mostly just a disconnect on wording. To me, it’s pretty straightforward. If I do a bunch of unpaid labor for a group of people, and much of that work doesn’t benefit me personally? That’s volunteering my time for the community. However, I recognize that my definition is not the only possible one.
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@Gashlycrumb said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
Hobby. Game.
Ah, I see. Where you’re making the distinction is not where I thought.
I, also, don’t think that it’s a distinction worth making. It’s a hobby-game-fun-thing, sure, but it’s unpaid mental and/or emotional labour in service of people who aren’t me. Thus, volunteer work. Much like being a sports person and being an air traffic controller are both work. One is fun (hopefully) and ultimately frivolous where the other is neither of those things, they’re both still work.
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@Faraday The time and exercise of professional skill you’ve put into the hobby is probably above next level to the kind of thing I’m talking about.
@Pavel Valid, but I guess I didn’t exactly consider it to not be in my own service. I wanted a game with theme-x, and more players than just me, there were things I needed to do to make that happen.
But I’m making a distinction of degree. No matter anyway, I think we can agree with Faraday above saying that voliunteering doesn’t exempt one from accountability, and Pavel’s point about still being responsible to do what you agreed to do. (Which is true for showing up at tabletop RPGs and baseball practice and the bird-count and many other only-a-game/hobby things.)
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@Gashlycrumb Oh absolutely, we’re not really disagreeing about anything substantial. Staff shouldn’t be treated as martyrs for deigning to volunteer their time, but should be politely respected and thanked a little, they should be held to the same standard as anyone making a promise of commitment outside of exigent circumstances, and if code staff they should probably just be left alone to ensure they don’t make something weird out of boredom.
ETA: For the record, staffing a WoD MU is worse than working a trauma helpline.
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all super-goths, all the time
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@Prototart said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
all super-goths, all the time
With the occasional trenchcoat-wearing, samurai-sword-carrying genre-savvy wanker.
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@Pavel said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
@Prototart said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:
all super-goths, all the time
With the occasional trenchcoat-wearing, samurai-sword-carrying genre-savvy wanker.
first off, they’re called street samurai, ok
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There is a game for that particular group:
