@somasatori said in Historical Games Round 75:

@labsunlimited said in Historical Games Round 75:

The beef between ancient Assyrians and Greeks might as well be a beef between vampires and werewolves for how relevant it is today.

I think that this is a good point, but man, some of these ancient grudges are 100% still around. From my own experience, they also tend to manifest in very strange ways and usually when you might not expect it (especially as an American).

Dude, from 1993 to 2018, North Macedonia was officially entered into the United Nations under the name The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Because they were fighting with Greece about who got to be Macedonia and who got to be Macedonians and whether or not there was the potential for annexation of one state by another. You might assume that this was all the result of the Balkan Wars in the early 1900s and the regional conflicts of the early to mid-1990s, which were absolutely the central point of contention.

But, like, you also had national governments throwing around references to what names had been used and where the borders were during the Roman Empire.

Some Roman guy who died in 150-whatever BC scribbled some stuff on a map after Rome conquered Greece and literally two thousand years later, people were using it to say “Hey, fuck those people over there in particular.”

@Tez said in Historical Games Round 75:

@DrQuinn said in Historical Games Round 75:

Especially since there are definitely players out there drooling to put that white hood on and let the things they don’t dare say in real life to a person out online.

Throw them out. Throw them the fuck out. I don’t think they are as subtle as they think they are. If you see it, if you sniff it, throw the poop out. You’re right that you will get people pushing boundaries, but you get people pushing boundaries regardless. Flush 'em.

Like a social contract is great, but also is going to probably ensure that your player base is mostly white.

Maybe.

I think we also have a tendency (duh, obviously) to take a very modern (duh, obviously) western idea on what isms are and what we would expect to see in play.

I have, on two different games about ten years apart, run into entire groups of people playing actual, literal neo-Nazis. Both instances were disturbing, but the second instance was particularly strange. Somehow, my character – who was Jewish – got painted as the asshole for not wanting to deal with some dude walking around with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo.

But even weirder than that? I found out after the fact that one of the women in the group was someone I’d known for a years. In fact, it was a friend I’d lost contact with. A friend who I’d had long conversations with most of a decade earlier about how she was never going to play a black character again after dealing with a guy on the White Wolf mods who had sent out a really gross email including a lot of stereotypes about black people and then got very much called out on it by, like, half the Mage sphere. Long conversations about how upsetting that was for her because she was no longer comfortable playing characters who looked like her because of that incident.

To this day, I don’t really know how I should feel about that or if I even get to have an opinion on that, because her feelings on the subject are entirely her own and not something I get to dictate. But needless to say, I was shocked to discover that one of the most racist characters I’ve ever encountered on a game, with a player that took umbrage to people not wanting to interact with a group of neo-Nazis, was played by a person of color who had previously felt personally victimized by racist stereotypes proposed in RP.

(Also, sorry if the quotes got busted. Phone typing sucks.)

@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:

I admit, I am a person who wants historically accurate -isms and resistances in historical games. Does that mean I want to see a bunch of racist, sexist, bigoted PCs? No, of course not.

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

This is a huge part of why I opted not to open that game–not because I don’t agree with you, but because I do.

My original intention wasn’t to muck with The -Isms or the timeline at all, trusting that the vast majority of the player base wouldn’t engage in anything so egregious and that the few who’d come in with the worst intentions would be obvious and easy to boot from the game.

It was the very first question I got being “But what about the racism?!” that led to me to a bit of a knee jerk reaction of “Well, I’ll just lift it out. Blah blah blah, players imagine all sorts of crazy stuff, they can imagine this, too.” Especially since, given the OGoA setting, there would be plenty of other horrors for characters to come up against.

It was my attempts at presenting historical examples and this person who is intelligent and insightful and whose opinions I generally trust going nowhere that ultimately changed my mind. Despite evidence to the contrary, it seemed like they just couldn’t be convinced that while this was the predominant attitude of the time, it wasn’t universal and it would be perfectly reasonable and also historically accurate for people to play characters who didn’t hold those views.

That left me sitting there thinking that my options for running something in the time period would effectively be:

• Erase the history of this very real oppression that people experienced and those that fought against it.

• Neglect the history of the people that fought against that oppression and potentially expose players to really awful prejudice and abuse.

• Write a guide that would effectively boil down to “Okay, But How Much Racism is Cool versus How Much Racism is Too Much Racism?” with all of the ick I feel even typing that, nevermind the potential for any of it to be taken out of context or implied to endorse at least some terrible things as acceptable.

When I realized that none of these seemed like very good options, or at least not options I was comfortable with, I couldn’t move forward with the game. Not because I don’t think those stories are worth telling, but because I think they need to be approached with a level of awareness that I’m not sure I trust a mass of strangers to consistently demonstrate on a public game.

@Ashkuri said in Missed Settings:

@Aria said in Missed Settings:

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!”

This comment made me go and read through this thread about MU* historical accuracy again. I guess some players find it disruptive to delete The -Isms from a historical setting, some find it disruptive not to delete that, and (like your friend and yourself) these types don’t easily mesh together.

To be fair, if they’d been pointing out the need to develop a divergent history or something, I think that would’ve been entirely reasonable. If they’d been pointing out that intersection of early labor movements with fights against racial injustice, this also would’ve been an excellent point! Wanting to see those things included in games instead of lifted out as if that solves everything, I totally get. But this was like…

“It’s Appalachia. Of course all the characters are going to be horrifically racist. Because it’s Appalachia!”, effectively painting all of the people of an entire region as a monolith of unvaried views or possibility for nuance without exception. And, like, that’s just not true of any single point group of people literally ever or history wouldn’t have gone the way that it has. Hence the examples I was providing. For every predominant view and systemic issue that’s historically accurate, there’s also counterpoints to it that are historically accurate without having to engage in presentism.

But! I digress, and if I digress anymore, this should probably be Historical Accuracy Argument #385 or something.

@somasatori said in Missed Settings:

The same as above, but leveraged towards The Strange and some other Monte Cook projects as well. Even stripping away the Cypher system altogether, things like The Strange or Old Gods of Appalachia seem like they’d be great MUSH fodder and you could probably do OGoA with something like FS3 given that the main characters are rarely supernatural themselves. Some of those other radio play style podcasts would be cool as well: the White Vault, Magnus Archives (also a Monte Cook project), and so on.

I was, at one point, actually actively working on an Old Gods of Appalachia game with the full intention of using FS3 and then stealing some of the inspiration available to me in the OGoA game system. (There is a published one. I backed it on Kickstarter awhile ago.)

My plan was to set it in a mining town to allow us to both mix the eldritch horrors aspect along with some of the politics of the labor movement so players could contrast the ancient horrors beneath the earth with just, y’know, people? Kind of the way 28 Days Later has zombies but those soldiers are also just as scary and threatening?

The thing is, the first person that I brought the idea to was like, “But what about the racism, Aria?!” and I was like, “Well, if I’m asking players to imagine a world in which the bones of the earth are full of unknowable monstrosities older than mankind itself, maybe even older than the world itself, I’m pretty sure I can ask them to imagine a world that’s just not inherently shitty to people of color.” And they were like, “But people will be confused without the racism because of historical accuracy.” And then I pointed out a whoooooooole bunch of examples of coal miners in Appalachia banding together across racial lines and they were still like “BUT PEOPLE. HISTORICAL ACCURACY.” and I took that to mean “BUT THE RACISM.”

And then I decided that if I couldn’t persuade one single person that we could probably just, y’know, not include 1920s style racism and generally be fine, with less people being offended by the erasure of it than the allowance of it, this was actually a terrible idea and promptly gave up.

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria said in Your first game?:

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria My very first scene on New Bremen my character was meeting her new packmates (on New Bremen you had to start in a pack so there was basically LFG/PUG packs on the game).

She walked in on one of her packmates cuddling/kissing a Pookie. In their animal form.

@catzilla I don’t remember that rule, though I’m not sure if it was because it didn’t apply by the time I made my Fianna or if it’s because in Werewolf, I mostly played a Kinfolk…

…who was the mate of Sturm Magnarsson. Ohh, god, the horror stories I could tell that came as a result of dipshit late teenage me being like, “Well, she has Survivor as a Nature and he’s the alpha of the Fenrir and he’s asking for her, so it makes sense IC.”

If there were ever a lesson in “It’s what my character would do!” blowing up in a player’s face but in exactly the wrong way from how it should, that was it. That was it right there. No, little baby Aria. No. You tell more people to fuck off when they start getting weird at you. (Adult Aria, too, honestly.)

That name kind of rings a bell but I don’t think I ever properly played with them. I did play a Shadow Lord kinfolk that was mated to a big shot PC named Aldrich something? I can’t think of anything the player did but the PC provided a bunch of drama/trauma for my kinfolk (in what I remember as a fun way).

Dude, if you’re talking about the PC that I think you’re talking about–and I might be wrong here since it’s been twenty years–he was awesome. The player was from Brazil, learned most of his English RPing online, and was still a better writer than 90% of the people I’d run into. We lost touch over the years, but I still tell stories about him and his Vampire PC in the VtR reboot as prime examples of how to play an asshole without being an asshole OOC.

Aldrich/Chris March/Eduardo, wherever you are in the ether?

@catzilla said in Your first game?:

@Aria My very first scene on New Bremen my character was meeting her new packmates (on New Bremen you had to start in a pack so there was basically LFG/PUG packs on the game).

She walked in on one of her packmates cuddling/kissing a Pookie. In their animal form.

@catzilla I don’t remember that rule, though I’m not sure if it was because it didn’t apply by the time I made my Fianna or if it’s because in Werewolf, I mostly played a Kinfolk…

…who was the mate of Sturm Magnarsson. Ohh, god, the horror stories I could tell that came as a result of dipshit late teenage me being like, “Well, she has Survivor as a Nature and he’s the alpha of the Fenrir and he’s asking for her, so it makes sense IC.”

If there were ever a lesson in “It’s what my character would do!” blowing up in a player’s face but in exactly the wrong way from how it should, that was it. That was it right there. No, little baby Aria. No. You tell more people to fuck off when they start getting weird at you. (Adult Aria, too, honestly.)

@Pavel said in Your first game?:

@Aria I never did play the DigiChats, at least not for any length of time that made them stick in my memory, but I’ve heard that they were a layer of hell all unto their own.

I played on the oWoD ones until they rebooted them with the release of Vampire: the Requiem, then played/staffed on the nWoD ones until they shuttered entirely in 2008? 2009? Somewhere around there. So basically almost their entire lifespan.

To be frank, they had their problems. Sometimes particularly horrific problems, usually caused by the ratio of players to staff and thus the reduced ability to catch unpleasant shit unless it was really, truly egregious. The worst bits of WTF that I could recount from those years are definitely, uhhh… let’s go with ‘special’, including the guy who was single-handedly responsible for the 18+ age rule for exactly the reason you’re thinking.

That said, they also had their high points and their charm that I look back on fondly, and they heavily influenced my views on staffing, some of which I still hold to this day. I’m not going to pretend every staffer there was awesome or lived up to, like, basic decency, let alone professional standards… but the vibe is very different when you’re working on what ultimately amounts to a marketing tool for a company than a private game. And I think in a lot of ways, the level of accountability that was supposed to come with it was better, at least when they had rolled over to the nWoD games and I could see behind the curtain. I wasn’t staff for the oWoD bits, which is where I remember the worst of the really questionable stuff happening and can’t speak to the behind the scenes there save what I was told by friends who were.

Also bear in mind it’s been a decade and a half since those games closed, so I may be looking at them through rose-colored glasses. Especially because I got to travel internationally because of them, still have a few friends I made on them 20-some odd years ago, and know three different couples that met on them that are still married–including me and my husband.

@Pavel said in Your first game?:

@Aria said in Your first game?:

It’s like I did everything in reverse.

You didn’t even go through the Firan gauntlet. Gosh.

I did not! My first Lords and Ladies game was actually Arx. Unless you count a DigiChat based Legend of the Five Rings game that opened alongside Wanton Wicked, which was a privately owned WoD game modeled very much off of New Bremen in terms of game and website functionality.

The unmoderated WoD server hosted by White Wolf, before they opened up their moderated New Bremen setting, way back in 1999/2000.

They used DigiChat, a Java-based interface that ironically looks a bit like the Ares web portal, what with clickability and sidebar navigation. I wasn’t on an actual MU* of any kind until Haunted Memories in 2011 and wasn’t on a Pern game until the 2020s. It’s like I did everything in reverse.

@Roz said in Multisphere pressure:

i think this one is pretty simple: players push for the spheres they specifically want to play in. they’re not thinking about the big picture health of the game. people just want their favorite splat

What Roz said.

I also think that there’s this general fear among game runners that if they’re not offering enough spheres, they’re not going to draw a large enough playerbase for the game to perpetuate player-led RP. Like if someone’s favorite sphere is Mage, they’re just not going to join a game that only offers Werewolf and Changeling or something.

And while that may be true to a limited degree, what will more often end up happening by adding Mage in is that you may get a few new people, sure. But mostly what you’ll see is people who love WoD and willing to play there are already on the game, and if they love Mage or just love shiny new things, will make Mage alts. At which now you’ve simultaneously splintered the player base into smaller groups, spread the concentration of RP out over more characters, and compounded the work for staff. That might be worth it if you’re expanding staff to accommodate that and have someone who is both competent and interested in telling stories in your new sphere, but mostly? It’s not going to be worth it.

@MisterBoring said in FAT BEAR WEEK 2025:

Chunk is the winner. Also, I found out he’s got a broken jaw, so the injured contender story probably pushed a lot of votes his way.

“His face looks sad and that makes me sad” versus “his belly is very round and that makes me happy” definitely came into play in a few of my votes for Chunk. The broken jaw is going to be a permanent issue for him, so I hope he continues to have several more years of being a very fat bear despite it.

@Mushling-0 said in Re: Dies Irae:

I would never play a game where she staffs or even seems to be heavily influencing staff on, because her pushiness for sexual roleplay with men edges a bit too close to harassment imo and because her targeting of female alts crossed the line into cheating and harassment imo. It also was directed toward several different females, not just one.

I have virtually no experience with Scylla whatsoever. She was really nice to me the few times we talked on Dies Irae, I didn’t know her on Liberation, and I don’t play on Retro. But just…

Regardless of what she has or hasn’t done, 'cause I honestly don’t know and am not gonna weigh in on it?

Thank you for saying this out loud. Last summer, I started playing male PCs for the first time in my 20+ years in this hobby. I knew it happened. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve had to step in, either as staffer or as a head of house on a L&L game, when I saw guys being harassed. But man, being on the receiving end of sexual harassment when playing a guy IC and perceived to be one OOC was just wild. Somehow totally the same as experiences I’ve had being harassed while playing a woman and assumed to be one, and yet mind-bogglingly different.

I also don’t really know what my point is with saying this either, except… props for being Team Women Staffers Can Be Creeps Too, I guess?

@Roadspike said in Factions:

I do also think that one thing that can help is making sure that the opposing factions are fighting past each other, not fighting against each other. As an example, way back on KotOR MUSH, we had the Sith and the Republic fighting over a neutral system. Except they couldn’t attack each other, because if they did, then the neutral system would support whichever side was attacked. So each side had to work to make the other side look bad, and themselves look good, without ever actually fighting one another.

I really like this idea. Like, I like this idea a whole lot because I’ve spent the last several months slowly poking at a setting and thinking about ways to have two fairly large factions inherent to the gameline I’ve been looking at work without either unleashing a wave of conflict I don’t want to deal with or stripping it out of the game entirely. It may not actually matter if I can’t get this off the ground (my kingdom for a coder, I swear), but essentially, my plan was:

These two factions don’t get along canonically, but they also have a bigger, scarier enemy in common. That bigger, scarier enemy is right there, just on the other side of this geographical feature, looming as a constant threat. So it’d be baked into the theme that these two factions have a tenuous, uneasy, but extremely valuable peace that pretty much everyone–by which I mean all the NPCs, but also hopefully the PCs–have a strong incentive to keep in place because without each other, they are, to use the technical term, completely screwed.

That would mean that people wouldn’t exactly have to be friends. It would mean that sure, people might occasionally take a poke at each other. But that conflict can only escalate so far before it would potentially cause a setting-breaking rupture, and then NPCs on both sides would be looking at the people involved going “WTF is this? You better put a stop to this before we do and you’re not going to like that.”

A bit heavy-handed? Yes. But also something I’d be spelling out pretty explicitly both in the theme and the game policies, once again leaning hard into ideas of both transparency and clear consequences for stepping outside the bounds of what is or isn’t allowed. Will it work? I dunno. I’d have to actually get the game going to find out, but I think there’s at least some potential there. At the very least, it would certainly remove the prospect and thus hopefully the fear of PvP (or CvC) conflict that can’t ever be recovered from.

@Yam said in Factions:

I wonder how this plays out in oWoD games where these factions are absolutely enemies. From what I gather, that’s what the layer of secrecy is for. You just have to live with the possibility that it all might go to shit if people find out. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.

That is a HUGE part of what the layer of secrecy is for and also why crossover tends to go very badly. Because the thing is, it’s well within the theme of the game for that crossover to exist. It’s explicitly written into the setting, especially the second edition of oWoD…

But it’s also well within the theme of the game for every vampire that’s met Brujah Bob and every Werewolf that’s met Shadow Lord Sally to look at the two of them making a pact to do a thing and go, “Uhhhh, excuse me. What the fuck is this? Are you out of your mind? Also, good job on breaking the Big Law of Secrecy, which is now an excuse for anyone in authority to issue you a very public punishment.”

It’s part of why I think single-splat games are generally better for WoD than multi-splat ones. Then if crossover happens, it’s entirely part of a controlled narrative and makes sense within a story. It’s way less likely to read as declaring a pack of players’ RPing with their friends as wrong-fun when it’s perfectly within the theme as written, especially considering that (ICly) declaring it wrong-fun is also part of the theme. That only results in a situation where, in varying degrees depending on the specifics of the situation, everyone is kind of right but also everyone kind of sucks here.

@somasatori said in PyReach:

@Wizz said in PyReach:

@somasatori said in PyReach:

The one I hear the most is Changeling Kiths and Seemings no longer being attached to one another.

sidebar obvs but, why? from my (admittedly fairly limited) experience with Changeling it seems like most peeps in MU-land were basically doing that anyway, just with a kind of pricey Merit that existed in the first edition?

Your guess is as good as mine! I think the detached system tends to simulate the Make-Your-Own-Dark-Faerie-Tale emulator that Changeling is trying to do, but I’ve personally never gotten an answer beyond “I don’t like it”

Ohh, man, do I have opinions on why I preferred the first edition of C:tL and the disconnect of Seemings and Kiths is one of them, though for a very particular reason. The update allows you to mix and match your Seeming (broad theme) with your Kith (pointed narrative), but doesn’t allow you to mix Kiths. This was incredibly frustrating for me when making my last PC because it was billed as “more flexibility”, but didn’t actually allow me to mechanically do the thing I would’ve preferred where none of the Seemings seemed to fit quite right but multiple Kiths did. It felt like settling on something I had to take but being locked out of something I wanted, with no obvious reason as to why this should be an issue if their goal was for me to be able to custom make my own dark fairy tale. You can fully customize your character! Except… not the way you actually want to. Sorry!

I also really disliked what they did with the Pledge system. In the previous edition, Pledges had to be mechanically balanced. This didn’t always make them fair, mind you. It’s is Changeling after all, and fairies are jerks. But it did make the rules for them, from an OOC standpoint, consistent and clear. The new version of Pledges seems to operate on a sliding scale of “much more open-ended depending on Pledge type”, with the examples of consequences given both very broad in scope and fairly limited in how many were presented. This is particularly true for Bargains, which have almost no mechanics attached to them whatsoever. That flexibility is great for TT but terrible for a MU* where, as noted elsethread, players hate to lose and are likely to react poorly to suffering consequences that can have such broad interpretations of what counts as fair. In the first edition systems, and frankly even in the oWoD Pledge system, which had a limited list of what Oaths you could swear, the consequences for breaking it were obvious and clear. “If you do this, you get X benefit but if you do this, you face Y consequence” is harder to argue with when that’s explicitly what someone signed up for, right here on the dotted line of their request.

Finally, and this is less about mechanics, I hate how the book is laid out. It drops you right into Seemings and Kiths without explaining the society that they’re living in. You might think that’s because they wanted to get all the CGen stuff lumped together first, since players reference that so often, but nope! The CGen chapter is then the THIRD chapter in the book, with the theme and society information sandwiched in between. But wait, wait! The explanation of Attributes and Skills is then listed in the FOURTH chapter, along with… combat mechanics, Pledges, and Tokens. If you’ve been playing WoD/CoD for twenty-some odd years and know what you’re looking for, this is a mildly irritating inconvenience. If you’ve never played these games before and know nothing about how this works? You’re getting a slew of character creation mechanics thrown at your face with zero context, get the context in the next section of the book, and now need to flip back and forth between three different chapters to actually make a character. I… what? No. No, that’s just bad design and I want to give their editor a stern look and a solid, “I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.”

I will note that there’s also a lot of really good things about the 2nd edition that I thoroughly enjoyed, as well as few other, nitpicky things I didn’t like. But those are top three things that I found actively difficult to deal with in game play as opposed to being a minor quirk or hiccup, like all systems have.

@Jennkryst said in Re: Dies Irae:

@MisterBoring said in Re: Dies Irae:

Some super powerful changeling somehow performs a Sovereign Unleashing declaring over a loudspeaker that reaches the entire city, “VIOLENCE IS FORBIDDEN!”

In order to do violence, you must submit paperwork to your local Boggan representative.

@mietze said in Factions:

I’ve never seen this done successfully in a public game. Nor have I seen it last well in a game that turned from private to open invite.

I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?

I too am eager to hear of examples where it was able to last, especially post-open-invite or when the size grew to more medium+ sized MU instead of glorified table top or very small community.

I will say that right until that one staffer crapped all over it, the conflict I saw happening was managed really well. Had it not been for that one move, I don’t think it would’ve been too much of a problem except for one bit of OOC side-eyeing about how the IC betrayal went down, but that was also resolved IC with a duel because it was set in an honor-based culture.

The takeaways from there were basically:

1. The conflict was over a single, clearly defined outcome.
2. All of the players knew what the win condition was.
3. All of the players knew the mechanics behind the win condition.
4. How characters achieved the win condition was left open IC, so it actively generated a lot of RP without being as strictly dictated as the mechanics were.
5. The conflict didn’t totally devalue other groups outside the two main rivals. On the contrary, it made working with them critical to winning.
6. The outcome was something that had a measurable impact on the world, but was limited by the time frame of how long it would affect the game. Since it was only for one season, that meant about two months of RP on a game set to run for roughly 15-18 months. As a result, winning or losing wasn’t going to make or break the entirety of the game for anyone and everyone knew that going in.

@Ashkuri said in Factions:

You can navigate around this stuff as best you can by trying to have those very clear rules, lots of transparency, and as much give and take between “winners” as the story will support. It’s just hard.

I have actually seen this done well, exactly once. Or, rather, it could’ve been done well, except then one staffer decided to intervene to screw with the outcome on the very thinnest premise and based entirely on her dislike of a player.

It was an L5R game where were people were vying for a very clear and very specific goal that would impact the next arc of the story and where it was set. The win conditions were made very clear and actions taken towards achieving that outcome were pretty public once they were made final because the influence mechanic outlined meant posting on the game forum in specific threads. It required player coordination and while this favored larger factions than others, no single faction on the game was large enough to take the prize on their own. They’d have to negotiate with other factions to win, and several factions if they wanted to be really, really sure.

The problem was that one staffer who is to this day, more than fifteen years later, one of three staffers I hold up as the epitome of What Not to Be as a Gamerunner (and frankly just as a person) did not like our faction head at all. About three-quarters of the way through the process, when this has been going on for weeks and we’re running out of time to do much than has already been done, she declared that what the faction was backing wasn’t actually appropriate to the next arc’s setting and had to be swapped out to something else. It was something she could’ve warned us about literally weeks earlier, had seen and replied to, but waited until pretty close to the last minute.

Everyone supporting the faction changed their votes, except for one character. Whose player was on vacation, had acted early knowing that, and couldn’t be reached to switch it in time. The faction was also betrayed by someone they’d negotiated with, which was entirely fitting IC…

But meant that the deciding factor came down to that one player and their unchanged vote, with said staffer ruling that no, no, not changing it meant they were continuing to support something they’d declared totally inappropriate IC rather than working to the benefit of their faction. So the faction lost, based entirely on that ruling.

Naturally, people were pissed–to the point that several players in the winning faction felt pretty gross about it and were surprisingly apologetic. A few people in the losing faction actually just straight up quit the game. And honestly? I don’t blame them for it. Everybody’d been playing by the rules outlined, except for one staffer that decided to implode what had been, until that point, a case of PVP that had stayed pretty neatly within the lines of IC-only. The one upside I can think of that still came out of how that’d been set up? It was really, really obvious when she pulled that stunt and it warned the playerbase of what they were actually dealing with.

So I do think that it’s possible, but it has to be clearly outlined in advance, as transparent as you can make it, and–here’s the kicker–actually carried out fairly and consistently according to the rules that were laid down at the beginning. Because as much as we hate to admit it, sometimes the problem with PVP isn’t just the players engaging in it. Sometimes it can be the people adjudicating it, too, even when their bias is way less obvious.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

We were opening up one of those big multisphere affairs and, in the process of doing so, had lost our entire Vampire staff that had come up with the base meta for that sphere. Rather than delay, given the fact that Vampire is a pretty core sphere when it’s introduced, we brought in someone who had no previous connection to the meta that had been created by Tellurium, and no one else really seemed to buy in on the Sabbat (or seemed all that interested in running a Sabbat chronicle).

This was one of my big hurdles in being convinced to join the game, though I did ultimately make a Fera that I think I took IC… twice.

I like the Sabbat. I think there’s a lot more depth to the lore there than is commonly recognized or used when they’re just being run as antagonists to the primary chronicle. That said, the Sabbat is dark and intentionally so. Although I’d been invited multiple times by multiple people, I just kept looking at it and thinking that between the Sabbat and Wyrm spheres being open, the game was going to end up attracting the very worst sort of edge lords, the sort of jerks we’d get on the old White Wolf servers screaming things like “This is the World of DARKNESS, not the World of DISNEY!” as their excuse for playing characters whose sole purpose seemed to be antagonizing other players and then laughing about it.

The fact that the game was open to pretty much every single splat and subsplat was also a mistake, in my opinion. Was it exciting to get to try something I’d never played before? Sure. But unless you’re running an absolutely massive game, all that’s going to do is spread your playerbase too thin to provide consistent RP and require more staff than you’re likely going to be able to find to do the job actively and competently.

As much as I want to see more WoD games out there, I’d strongly advise most game runners to limit themselves to one sphere, maybe two if they’re spheres that can somehow play nicely together–though most don’t. Whether it’s from a thematic standpoint, incompatible rules, or in some cases both, even all the crossover that White Wolf has written into the books can’t always make it work well together.

(Plus, some of it is also very, very stupid. I’m looking at you, Nocker/Etherite moonbase.)

Pick a handful of things you want to do very well, focus there, and if players complain that they don’t get to play their totally amazing Ailil concept on your Mage game? Remember that “because we don’t think it’s a good fit for our theme” is a valid answer for why something’s not included. Frankly, so is “because we don’t want to”, so long as your vision is clearly laid out and consistently applied to everyone.