Roster Characters & WoD?

[HorrorHound]

I personally find Rosters sorta tacky, and given WoD is already quite tacky, it's too much tacky and becomes sticky. Wet paint, even. I'd humor hearing a legitimate idea about it once MU* players in general can game well together, or something.

[chibichibi]

Wouldn't the equivalent of a WoD roster character just be those templates found at the end of each and every splat/tradition/convention/tribe/clan book? You could easily take those and boom, ROSTER.

[23quarius]

@chibichibi I was thinking much the same thing. Just copy down the pre-made characters in the various books. Voila.

[Ganymede]

I think they are a great idea, for the reasons Ghost pointed out.

Rosters are usually capped or limited. This is a good thing.

[Derp]

@ganymede said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I think they are a great idea, for the reasons Ghost pointed out.

Rosters are usually capped or limited. This is a good thing.

Until Jenny#574 marries Luke#31 in a whirlwind romance that lasts all of two days and has a bunch of kids with him or whatever, and then life eats her so the character idles. And then Jenny#575 picks her up a week later and decides that she doesn't wanna be saddled with all of that and wants it retconned because like ohmygosh no roster should just come with a relationship like that.

Your continuity goes all to hell as each and every person plays them in a different way because they don't actually give a shit about their story or history, they just don't wanna do the chargen work.

Nah.

[Ominous]

I shall continue to stand on my soapbox and shout that all characters should always be on the roster and anyone can pull any of them off for the night to play them. When the log off, the character goes back on the roster for someone else to play. Also I would have a time limit that auto forces a person out of the character after 24 hours to keep people form idling in a character so no one else can play them. This would take MUSHes in more of a collaborative novel direction rather than the MUD-y standard it tries to stick to now.

[3543thrh67]

@ominous That really doesn't sound fun to me. I don't want to have to always pick something new to play.

[Solstice]

And I shall boo! I shall boo relentlessly!

... I mean, not really, but I think Rosters are a clerical boon but are one of my least favorite ideas in MU*.

Your character is yours. If you leave, that character goes away. If any one character is important enough to grind the entire game to a standstill if they left or vanished, you've found your actual problem.

[Derp]

@solstice said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

Your character is yours. If you leave, that character goes away. If any one character is important enough to grind the entire game to a standstill if they left or vanished, you've found your actual problem.

Just tacking this onto here since I completely up and forgot my other side of this --

I want you to make your character because I want you to show me that you have a working knowledge of the rules.

I get it, the books are big. I'm struggling through the 700 pages of the behemoth that is M20 myself, and have a few books on top of that.

The number of times I've felt myself having sympathy for the people who go "I don't have tiiiiime to read the giant book, I just wanna plaaaaaaay" is exactly equal to the number of times someone has made a giant fucking mess in a sphere because they didn't have the first clue what they were doing.

Rosters make it too easy for people who have no idea what they're doing to come in and make a huge mess of things, on so many levels. It just doesn't work. It's not like FS3 where you can pick up the system in 15 minutes and be good to go. There's a level of effort that has to go into it. It's just the nature of the game.

[Ganymede]

@derp said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

Your continuity goes all to hell as each and every person plays them in a different way because they don't actually give a shit about their story or history, they just don't wanna do the chargen work.

It's funny to me because this does not seem to be a huge issue on large games with a roster like, oh, Arx. I mean, sure, it has a host of attendant problems, but this really isn't one of them. And frankly, I think what you said before says more about World of Darkness players than about rosters.

To be fair, though, I'd probably allow every player to make 1 OC when they come on board. After that, like, do what you will, but if you hand-off your PC to an idle-out, like on most WoD games, that PC's fate is in staff's hands unless you give some sort of last-will instruction.

[Derp]

@ganymede said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

It's funny to me because this does not seem to be a huge issue on large games with a roster like, oh, Arx. I mean, sure, it has a host of attendant problems, but this really isn't one of them. And frankly, I think what you said before says more about World of Darkness players than about rosters.

If this forum is to be believed, then it's a problem on Arx too, lol. I seem to remember various iterations of -- who was it. Cullen? Being mentioned as problematic all around.

And I mean, yeah, it might not be rosters in general, and could be WoD players. Buuuuut this is a thread about Rosters in the World of Darkness, so I feel like my comments are still valid.

[Ganymede]

@derp said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

If this forum is to be believed, then it's a problem on Arx too, lol. I seem to remember various iterations of -- who was it. Cullen? Being mentioned as problematic all around.

Cullen's specialness had little to do with the roster system itself.

And, yeah, I think we can recognize that WoD players, by and large, are special folks.

I'll be elsewhere for now.

[3543thrh67]

@derp Any game is going to have an exception to something. 'All Mages are super powerful, don't share, and players aren't pleasant' is the gist of what I get from everything you guys say but then you get people you go 'Oh but so and so is not like that!' Over all on Arx, I've seen far more prefer to keep up with relationships over asking for everything to be retconned or ignoring things. Having roster and PC on Thundergultch also seems to be working too. But, it is still to young to fully judge that.

[Devrex]

@icanbeyourmuse LOL, trust, all mages are not super powerful. As my mage shakes off the effects of a month of magical botches over minor cantrip-style stuff. Also got reduced to hamburger meat.

Many players are pleasant, but WoD is a huge, popular theme. Attracting a larger population means attracting more people who selfishly do not care about anyone's experience other than their own, is all.

I wouldn't put rosters on any game, because I've seen those same continuity issues play out everywhere, regardless of the theme. I never played on Arx, and maybe it and Thundergulch will be the exceptions that prove the rule, but I've seen it just result in broken stories and screwy continuity across a multitude of other games that have tried it. Nice idea to try to round out character types people don't think to play, maybe, looks great on paper, messed up in practice. Might be better served to provide a concept list: here are some neat concepts we've thought of that you are welcome to use as a starting point for your character, and that we'd love to see played.

[Jennkryst]

I would do quasi-rosters on WoD. Which is 'here are a bunch of pre-baked character hooks. You need X, Y, and Z minimums to reflect these things here, but aside form that, go nuts!' to save on 'I am new and know nobody in town' issues. I have no time for writing your personality, and once you grab that roster person with those hooks, THAT CHARACTER IS YOURS. And we write a new person to go on the roster next.

Or something like that. Kinda. Maybe.

[mietze]

@jennkryst yeah, that's how I was thinking it would work best on a wod game, rather than 'traditional' rosters that would be re-rostered between players.

A plug and play thing. Just change the @name or somesuch. I do think it would be helpful for people who like the theme, and understand the basic mechanics, but get intimidated by sheet building. Which can be a thing for WoD in particular.

[Derp]

@jennkryst said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

I would do quasi-rosters on WoD. Which is 'here are a bunch of pre-baked character hooks. You need X, Y, and Z minimums to reflect these things here, but aside form that, go nuts!' to save on 'I am new and know nobody in town' issues. I have no time for writing your personality, and once you grab that roster person with those hooks, THAT CHARACTER IS YOURS. And we write a new person to go on the roster next.

Or something like that. Kinda. Maybe.

Alright. So then what happens when someone picks up that roster with those, presumably, unique hooks and whatnot and then just doesn't play them?

Do you write another carbon copy of that character?

what happens if the first one comes back?

And how does that work better than just a 'Wanted Concepts' post somewhere public?

Serious questions, btw. I'm interested in why people think that this would be a better way.

[GreenFlashlight]

@derp said in Roster Characters & WoD?:

Do you write another carbon copy of that character?

It does have an honored history in RPGs. We've all heard the stories of the time Bob the Barbarian died in combat with an elf, so he was avenged by his long-lost twin brother Rob the Bob-barian or whatever.

[Sunny]

Roster vs premade characters; there have been WoD games that did offer premades -- it worked a lot like the rosters do, except once you took it you took it and it was just yours, and you could generally make minimal changes to adapt it. I never played one of them, but several games definitely tried to use the system. It never seemed to cause any particular headache that I recollect, but I also don't recall it ever being something utilized as heavily as it could've been.

eta: The term that applies here though is definitely "premades" and not rosters, and that WAS a convention in WoD mushing for a while. Probably got carried over from Cam-LARP.

[mietze]

Are there ever hooks in a game that can ONLY be pursued/done by an individual character? So like if any PC who is active enough to get involved at a high level for a time suddenly goes idle, the game will come to a screeching halt? Or is there always a willingness to move on to another active PC/group that has the potential/is already pursuing something similar? If you have one pc of a certain type, do you ignore all other PCs of that type, even if you don't have a quota? Or is your story flexible enough that there can be more than one pc of a certain archetype or skillset active at a time without making things fall apart?

Hooks can be recycled, if there's a need. The interesting thing about rosters is that you might get more information about what hooks are actually interesting/understandable to real players, and what seem to actually provide enough play to keep someone going for a while.

I don't know I would term it a better way. Just a different approach to use in combination with others. Some people are inspired if someone's done a task that they find demotivating (like number crunching in chargen OR writing up a character idea), and given the opportunity to have their least favorite part done, they'll jump in. It would be nice for some people to not have to worry about numbers dickering around with staff in the approval process too.

But like Sunny says, I don't know that it's a panacea. It will help some people, and be pretty neutral/not helpful to others.