Orion wrote:
How many Elders is it reasonable to assume exist in your average city?
I've been thinking about how to answer that question. Because it
is a really hard question. First of all, you have cities like Ciudad de Mexico that seriously just have an order of magnitude more of everything than Prague does. But over and beyond that, the answer is pretty complex. Too many elders and the PCs can't matter. Too few and the anthill gets kicked over right away.
That is, what's the ratio of Potency 2+ types with elder disciplines to ordinary PC-Level supernaturals? Should we assume that most WCL Ministers/Sabbat Priests have at least one? Or are they substantially rarer than that?
A definite hint is that the answer to that can - and should - change depending upon the campaign. If you run a higher powered campaign where the PCs quickly break into a few Elder powers, you're probably going to want a ratio around 2:1. If you want to keep things rare and mysterious with the PCs mostly operating at or near the mortal level, a ratio of more like 10:1 is going to be more reasonable.
Even if the PCs are running around fighting Elders as a regular thing, you're always going to want Potency 1 to be more common than all other Potencies combined - because packs of out-of-the-box werewolves are always going to be great henchmen. But the extent to which higher Potency monsters are common major players is left intentionally blank.
I don't want the PCs to be overshadowed too badly by NPCs, but a lot of elder disciplines seem designed to be puzzle abilities for a monster-of-the-week, so the scooby gang is evidently axing an "elder" pretty commonly.
Heh. Yes. Also, there are "generic" elders from other worlds to throw in - Ifrit and Pods for example - should you need an instant elder level villain and don't want to hem and haw about what effect they had on the world or bother to give them any allies.
Which brings up another question: How badass does an elder has to be before they can be diablerized? It's a little weird if some dude with one Elder power can give one to a whole party. Plus, if you use elder disciplines as adventure premises, the party will take down an "elder" pretty frequently.
The basic answer is "more powerful than the PCs."
-Username17
