CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.

[Arkandel]

@Sunny It's okay - what I was arguing is that historical accuracy can easily cripple gameplay by making it so portrayed females, minorities, etc could be essentially locked out of participating in the game if it goes too far, but it's still important (in my opinion) to not reverse it completely because it could actually be interesting to portray such struggles in game.

For example, to avoid the sexism angle, someone mentioned earlier playing an independent Chinese store owner. In most modern games the choice isn't very significant - in every western world big city these days there are plenty of Chinese store owners! But in the Victorian era or any basically reflecting the time period that wouldn't be normal at all, so that's an opportunity to play something which isn't available to be played elseMU*.

I personally couldn't care less about ultra faithfulness to the depicted morals of a time but I like having roleplaying venues open but playable at the same time. So for instance the owner in question should still be part of the game's large factions, have access to every IC hangout, etc - it'd really suck if they couldn't go to where RP is happening because 'that cafe doesn't allow orientals' or whatever.

[Creepy]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would also make for an amusing setting for a vampire game. Just sayin.

[Thenomain]

@Sunny said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

Why is 'how women and minorities are treated' the benchmark for making a game 'historical enough'?

Because this is exactly the time period where we have our modern take and modern problems about both. I saw on some Nova episode or other that the reason for the "hidden civilization" myths of Africa and America was because the European explorers and historians did not give any credence to the idea that the natives they discovered could possibly have that kind of civilization.

It's also a reflection of the social issues we see today, which are mostly about race but also still some about women, and in more recent days about gender as a whole.

Gender and race issues were still pretty damn big around the late Elizabethan. Add "now" to "then" and I'd be surprised if your historical game didn't make a definitive statement about it, even if that statement is that things happened so that we don't have any issues.

[peasoupling]

I sometimes wonder why fantasy/science-fiction settings have to copy our familiar forms of bigotry and discrimination for the sake of 'realism'. Especially when they're game settings, and create a hostile environment for a lot of possible character concepts and for players who'd rather not have to deal with it in their games too. Besides, there are whole untapped realms of speculative bigotry.

With historical games, fuzziness and alternate political history are fine, but deliberately whitewashing the setting sits poorly with me. I kind of feel like it trivializes the issues to pretend you can have the fun stuff without the horribleness that was historically attached and, besides, it starts to feel incoherent. Can you have imperialism and colonialism without the racism, for example? But I'm a history grad student, so this could just be me!

However, I don't think historical accuracy should be policed, particularly when it comes to the nastiness of the period! More importantly, it really should be fine for characters to be exceptional, to have modern sensibilities, to be able to get away with things that others might not. Are they active abolitionists, socialists or women's rights pioneers? Are they scandalous figures that get away with deviating from the norms by being amazing? If so, how do they feel about it? There are all sorts of ways one can engage with the problematic nature of a historical setting without being ground down by it for the sake of supposed realism, anyway. For me, that's actually part of the draw. It's not just about the tragic, angsty, historical oppression porn. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

You might end up with a grid full of exceptions, and there might be some friction if two players with different approaches to how they handle the setting cross paths. Not to mention that some people really, really like to use historical accuracy as an excuse to be assholes, and that's exhausting to deal with. So I can understand not wanting to deal with that.

[Pandora]

Re: the daunting size of London

I don't play WoD, MUSHes aren't my thing. But with regards to setting your game in a RL-city that is bigger than anyone might want to build a grid for all at once, an idea I had would be to set the game after some supernatural cataclysm of sorts, which constrains the game to a specific area of London. Over time, through either metaplot or player exploration or ingenuity or what have you, open up another area once you have it built, and you can go on in that vein for as long or as briefly as you'd like, expanding the grid at your own pace.

[surreality]

@Pandora Quick question; I am guessing RPIs tend to be more like MOOs in terms of how they're built area-wise; namely, you have a fairly well fleshed-out representation of any given area in a sequence of multiple rooms. For instance, a forest area would have X number of rooms (X being greater than 1-2) to represent the forest?

Most modern MUSH/MUXes tend to go with one single room to represent the whole forest (and the forest may not even be a room, it may be a sentence in the desc of a room meant to represent an entire county), so even a fairly expansive area can be more or less summarized in a fairly small number of rooms. I think BITN's grid, which covers several counties of southern Maryland, for instance, is under 30 total grid rooms for the better part of a whole state, as an example, with each county included having about 1-3 rooms.

...I like some aspects of this approach and hate others, because I liked the nooks and crannies and twists and turns of oldschool grids, but I like that broad areas can be summarized fairly well. Would still love to see more hybridization of the general approach, with the few base grid rooms for areas, but with something neat and mood-inspiring or generally interesting just as a backdrop if nothing else in a sprawl of meandering rooms here or there at least.

[Thenomain]

@peasoupling said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

I sometimes wonder why fantasy/science-fiction settings have to copy our familiar forms of bigotry and discrimination for the sake of 'realism'.

Two reasons.

1. Because our modern bigotry is formed from historical views (and as you admit, even our modern views are pretty damn progressive comparatively and therefore not even "realistic"). But more importantly:
2. Because that's what we know, and connecting to the reader tends to be kind of important to a writer, at least a writer who wants to sell stories.

[Ganymede]

@peasoupling said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

I sometimes wonder why fantasy/science-fiction settings have to copy our familiar forms of bigotry and discrimination for the sake of 'realism'.

Another reason.

3. Science-fiction/fantasy is often used as a mechanism to point out flaws or problems with our modern institutions, e.g., The Handmaid's Tale.

[Coin]

@peasoupling said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

I sometimes wonder why fantasy/science-fiction settings have to copy our familiar forms of bigotry and discrimination for the sake of 'realism'.

Because that is the point. Science Fiction in particular is allegorical.

Also what @Thenomain and @Ganymede said.

[Songtress]

By extension all stories are allegorical whether you know it or not!

[Creepy]

That's all very deep and enlightening, but really I just want players to not feel restricted overly much in playing the game in a way they enjoy. I'm not trying to make a statement about modern prejudice/sexism or its historical roots. I simply want to explore a time period which, in my humble opinion, gave birth to fictional horror.

So I think the best way forward is to have Women's Suffrage be a recent event (say, within the last 5 years from the start date of the game). There will still be those who oppose it, including some human political leaders and business owners. The average "Joe on the street" would likely be divided personally but would keep his mouth shut else risk a smacking from the wife.

This would allow female characters an option to play the role of trying to solidify equality and work towards snuffing out the vestiges of any remaining sexism. But there would be no laws or societal-based reason why they wouldn't have equal rights to their male counterparts.

I'm still debating how the vampire community would feel about all this since Kindred tend to react slowly to change. On the one hand, you have elders who were mortal when slaves served the Romans. On the other hand, female assassins and warriors were present before "civilized" society forced them into corsets and billowy dresses.

[Arkandel]

@Creepy A way to distance the game from traditional or expected bigotry - which funnily enough is common in science fiction by the way - is to detach mortal tropes from the Kindred's. Their point of view is different, they have heard, read or even seen things their mortal counterparts in government and good society simply don't have access to.

For example let's take racism. In the Victorian Age (or an alternative era reflecting it) the British Empire has reached all the way to India, Africa and the Middle East, and its military successes and suppression of the populaces there are causing mortal citizens to look down on those from these lands.

Vampires though? Vampires remember what the truth really is - those are some of the cradles of civilisation, ancient lands with deep rooted secrets, horrors and of course... power. They are still subject to discrimination especially among the neonates of course but the Elders among them realize there are major players in those parts of the world, things slumbering who might awaken and ancients who may be already active - they are not going to underestimate other Kindred travelling from those areas, it would be very foolish to do so.

There are many directions a game can take obviously. Interpreting theme in different ways is part of the fun of both making and playing on MU*.

[bored]

I'm going to go ahead and say that when I play historical I want it to be vaguely accurate. That doesn't mean knowing who the Prime Minister is, but it does mean the social norms, class structure, general politics, and includes all the gender/race stuff being argued about. I guess I fall on the 'it gives you something to RP' rather than the 'it takes away things for you to RP' side, especially because there are 100x more modern games where you can play your woman-with-pants. Why go Victorian OTHER than for the costume drama aspect and everything that goes with it? Playing an aristocratic land owner with near-slave servants (because even in the places that abolished it, this continued) is something you can't do on a modern game (ghouls and BDSM fantasies aside). Neither can you play one of those servants plotting for greater things in life.

I think you want to make it abundantly clear that people aren't going to be OOCly punished for their character choices, or forced into RP they don't want, and that people are free to play outliers (ie, don't restrict concepts based on the supposed rarity of someone acting like that). But beyond that, I don't feel a lot of motivation to play history with mostly modern social norms.

[Arkandel]

Just throwing this out there - how would you feel using the CoD rules for a Vampire: the Masquerade themed sphere?

[bored]

@Arkandel If I'm following you right, you mean using the newer ruleset and the older theme? I'd probably be down for it, I've never really liked most of the WoD 2.0 theme stuff and it's the main reason I'm not as heavily into WoD MUing as I used to be. I just never 'got' the new games.

Keep in mind there are places where the rules aren't theme-agnostic, like with Generation/Blood Potency/Torpor/etc.

[Arkandel]

@bored Yeah, that's what I meant. It might be a complication when it comes to a multiple-sphere game unless Generation is capped but otherwise I feel that theme fits a Victorian era MU* much better.

And yep, mechanical adjustments would have to be made.

[bored]

@Arkandel I assume you could still use it as the power stat, just deriving your value from Generation, and then toss out all the thematic stuff about torpor and potency loss.

The probablem with multi sphere is that you wouldn't be buying it up with XP and if other people could it would exacerbate the typical 'Vampires are the weakest splat always' problem. But I'm also a universal mage hater, and tend to be pro less spheres in general, so ymmv.

[Arkandel]

@bored Yeah, mechanically it's probably not hard to make it work with a few well thought-out house rules, but thematically it'd be much more awkward.

Elders in VtM are true powerhouses - even if they are strictly reserved as NPCs - so in a multisphere game unless every other sphere had something to keep them in check then their weight would push metaplot in a certain direction pretty quickly. Which by the way could still be awesome, but it's something to be accounted for.

[Coin]

@bored said in CoD - Victorian - Penny Dreadful-ish.:

@Arkandel I assume you could still use it as the power stat, just deriving your value from Generation, and then toss out all the thematic stuff about torpor and potency loss.

The probablem with multi sphere is that you wouldn't be buying it up with XP and if other people could it would exacerbate the typical 'Vampires are the weakest splat always' problem. But I'm also a universal mage hater, and tend to be pro less spheres in general, so ymmv.

This is honestly my biggest concern regarding using VtM theme with CofD rules. Generation is one of the most useful tools for keeping other players down.

If you wanted to use Generation in a game I would just say "any vampire of 8th+ Generation has the same peak of power in their blood, but it requires lower Generation to reach the levels of the Elders (re: Blood Potency 6+)". And then don't allow Elders.

[Arkandel]

@Coin Yeah, that'd work. Essentially take thin-blooded out of the equation and control (but really control, as opposed to allowing special cases) Generations. For instance if you lower your PC's Generation via diablerie they becomes an NPC, done-fixed.

Addendum: It still leaves Elders in game as a concept though, which affects theme overall.