Posted: Fri Jul 31, 2015 2:01 pm
Crypts was an absolute blast to read. It was more like a novel than a game (to me, at least).
The crap I stuck in group backgrounds was less focused on outlining a 50 point plan to control state government(which would be interesting) than on trying to not let pooled backgrounds overshadow individual backgrounds. The pool's Military Force 6 is currently described as being modified animals, church-funneled townies, and limited police, but since the priest has turned out rather more milquetoast than paramilitary that's not necessarily accurate. With Suzanne now an NPC, and considering her retainer and m. force in the local SWAT team, how about we just refluff the pool's description, and have Verge take point in dealing with the cops?hyzmarca wrote:In hindsight, I would have taken the Sheriff's department as a military force and the Sheriff as a retainer, for example.
Indeed.Ancient History wrote:You go to game with the PCs you have, not the PCs you want to have...
I think that Erris was a poor choice for a first antagonist for a great many reasons.Ancient History wrote:Sure, why not.
Princes of the City OOC/IC
Princes of the City was motivated by something suggested in the GURPS:VtM OSSR: the idea that the players would be the sole vampires operating in a smallish city and effectively were the major supernatural element in the city, running the Masquerade and so forth. This was very different from the other games I had run on the forums for a couple of reasons, not least of which is because it was set in modern-day Juneau, Alaska, which meant that I and the players could (and did!) use internet facts, maps, and lore to really flesh out the setting in a level of detail that would have been difficult for me to convey otherwise.
The system was Vampire 3rd edition, in the oWoD, ignoring some of the peskier elements of the setting and giving the PCs beau-coup extra points to buy backgrounds that would help them secure their personal power and position as elders in the city. I was hoping to attract 4-5 players, and ended up with seven. It ran from 11 Feb 2015 to 22 Aug 2015, and at five months was the shortest completed game I've run on this forum.
What Went Right
The players seemed to grok the concept fairly immediately, and were enthusiastic. They got into a lot of the details of self-sufficiency, the natural limitations of the Juneau setting, and needing to make a show of maintaining control to the Camarilla. The players generally responded well to the more subtle efforts to undermine or circumvent their control of the city, and there was a lot more talking and negotiation than fisticuffs - while guns and tactical teams did come out at one point or another, most of the actual action was resolved without combat.
I think, too, that they were generally intrigued by the details of the mystery laid out in front of them (even if the default Tremere technomancer response was "I google it!"), the little twists I made on the established setting (like the Змей)...and maybe it was imposter syndrome, but I think they were genuinely surprised at how readily the NPCs accepted their authority and/or they succeeded at various tasks.
There were some funny moments too, like when a slight slip-up on the part of the PCs sent one of their allies to the wrong place for a while, and I just rolled with it.
What Went Wrong
On the other hand, the game had a hard time finding its direction without an established leader. Like in Crypts, players started breaking off and doing their own thing almost immediately, and some of the players were posting more frequently than others, with Koumei eventually having to drop out as life intervened and she didn't have time for the game.
Player attrition combined with a general inability to really grapple with the main antagonist of the story was leading the game up to a pretty messy conclusion...until stopped by diplomacy, which sort of surprised me. I was getting ready for a big, nasty cinematic battle when the PCs offered the main NPC a way out without fighting...and t'be honest, at that point she had already achieved all of her main objectives with pretty much zero losses, so it would have been out of character for her not to accept. That led to a bit of an abrupt and anticlimactic ending, especially for players that might have been used to the rather lengthy combat sequences of some of my other Den games.
Why
I think I overplanned a lot of things that ended up never happening. That happens a lot in sandboxes, and you learn to live with the fact that players are going to go their own way. The main issue with Princes of the City, I think, is that the players did not, by and large, have a lot of ease working together as a team, something I noticed a bit during character generation, where they managed to pool a lot of background points but not really forge as cohesive a control over the setting as they maybe should have had. As a consequence, they spent a lot of time reacting rather than acting proactively, many players seemed not to know what to do (or not have anything to do). Unable or unwilling to act as a group and without any real leadership to move them, the PCs shifted uneasily from scene to scene, seldom really taking charge of the situation, their investigation almost always a step or three behind.
For me, it felt a bit kid gloves, in part because I could see that the players were new to this whole Princes of the City concept, and while they had thought through issues like keeping fed off the radar, they weren't terribly well-equipped to handle some of the nastier stuff I could have thrown at them, like a Sabbat-style mass embrace. This is tricky, because there are lots of "guerrilla vampire tactics" which are easily setting-breaking, even for relatively high-generation vampires, and I think one of my mistakes was making my PCs a bit too effective - a bad habit of mine, I have a really had time differentiating between "challenging, but not unfuckable" and "Oops, I just killed the party."
And in part the issues were my own fault, because I haven't run a vampire game in years and this is the first time I was running it PbP. In a dungeon, you're running on dungeon-time, everything in the now, rest periods pretty much determined by when your spells and hit points start running low. Vampire works on a much different pacing schedule, since you're limited to the night-time hours, and that's tricky to get across in a play-by-post game; as it is I glossed over a lot of the usual feeding stuff as "you hit up your regular blood supply/herd/whatever" to skip straight to the action/investigation.
Sort of like this, I suspect.Ancient History wrote:It was definitely a learning experience for everybody. I wonder how it would work in a D&D setting, where the PCs are, for example, in charge of a dungeon or small city.