Interest Check: Single Sphere VtR Game
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@vanderlylle and I are toying with an idea for a single-sphere 2e (with tweaks) VtR game with a heavy political focus. And while we’re committed to working on it as a personal project, just to see what we can come up with between ourselves, we also thought we’d check with the community to see what interest might be out there for something like this.
The broad strokes are:
- VtR 2e with some Mind’s Eye Theatre and other revisions
- Single sphere, with mortals/ghouls allowed but no mortal+.
- Focus on political play. Yes, vampires are violent monsters but we want to explore the long-term games they inflict on each other.
- Automated systems for feeding, downtime, territory concerns, etc.
- Focus on influence through the mortal world; we want to recreate the importance of mortals and ghouls to ancient creatures who have to hide from the daystar.
- Set in Paris, France, in modern times, and after an event that left the previous Praxis gutted. Paris needs to be reclaimed from occupying threats while also navigating the night to night dangers of dealing with your fellow Kindred.
Right now we have lots of ideas, we have some unpolished writing done, we have lists and lists of Things We Need to Do and Write and Prettify. We have a work in progress wiki. We have the possibility of a server but no present coding ability to get the systems and code that we need in place (though @vanderlylle has been working on learning some coding, so that’s a work in progress too!).
But we also know we’re facing a few challenges here separate of our lack of coding ability. Single sphere games tend not to be popular. Foreign-set single sphere games, less so. Political-focus single sphere games set in non-English countries might well be too small a niche for most..
So what say you, community? Is this something you’d want to be involved with?
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Kingsmouth is basically this, though not foreign. But everything else hits on the mark. It's struggling because of OOC vs IC actions and metaplay.
Maybe look at them and see what they do right and wrong.
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So what say you, community? Is this something you’d want to be involved with?
Very much so.
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@Caryatid
My only suggestions might be...- Foreign is going to potentially hurt you in the end. People are going to be less inclined to have to learn about a new real city (or they'll just play all tourists/expats) to play appropriately.
- Don't delve too extremely deeply into the systems. If half of the game's time is spent writing up +jobs for feeding, territory, fucking with other territory, and investigating random shit... it's going to eat up all of staff's time responding to the +jobs.
- I'd suggest making the city have been conquered by Belial's Brood, and use the 1e Brood book writeup for the Hexad. Have them have a group of coveys, led by a particularly powerful triumvirate of Scarlet Rite, Throne of Smokeless Fire and The Nameless and have it be an actual conflict; have staff (or players you trust) run the Brood with the assumption that, after a particular timeframe, there will be a reckoning as the Brood either come down on the guerrilla Covenant Kindred or the Covenant Kindred oust the Brood.
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@Caryatid I'm much in the same spot. I have an outline for a single sphere vamp game that I'd love to run. I have a wonderfully deep theme and setting, and I have some good settings. But, like you, I don't have the code to pull it off.
That being said, if you get some code for this, I will be there in a sec to help.
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@DnvnQuinn We aren't looking to recreate RfK. We do think that on paper they had a lot of good ideas there and we believe that there need to be more games out there incorporating some of those ideas.
@Bobotron Yeah, we are most worried about being three niches into an already small niche. On the one hand, a game like this seems to work best when you're dealing with a slightly smaller player based. On the other hand, some level of critical mass is needed to keep things fresh and dynamic, especially in a setting where a lot of the action centers around character agency and the choices they make on the political playing field. So that is something to consider.
Another concern is absolutely the staff load, which is why we would like to automate as much as possible. I served time on RfK as staff and the workload was immense. Automated bloodpools for territory for use with +hunt code. An automated territory system that allows you to patrol, investigate, buff your own territory, and infiltrate and degrade others.
I'm digging the Brood suggestions! I haven't read that material but on the list it goes.
@Lisse24 If I had my way there would be five of these sorts of games out there already.
Thank you! We'll for sure keep that in mind if/when we progress to that point. -
Super hyped to see more games trying to tackle these types of 'richer political' WoD games - as an ex coder on RFK myself, I know first-hand just how much work it was to manage these systems - whilst we did our best to automate as much as possible, there was still a LOT left over that had to be manually processed. VERY intrigued to see how folks handle the system design and implementation of this sort of stuff as these sorts of games are my bag.
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@Bobotron Something like that is currently my plan for theme and a long-term through-line -- I am hesitant to call it a metaplot, but at least something that will give the game a framework beyond Bland By Night: Now with Other People Touching Your Stuff. I figure in an ancient city of vampires you'd have a certain level of entrenched power, and the best way to reset that scenario to the zero level for new PCs at game start would be some sort of Event that cleared things out and set the city into disarray. And I figure that having NPC antagonists control parts of the grid gives both external threats to let people fight--or to use in their power games--and lets me corral a smaller playerbase into a manageable IC footprint of a very large city.
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I'd consider it but I can't promise to not be a Carthian firebrand.
I'm a rodeo clown.
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@vanderlylle
Cool. I wish you luck on that.
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@tragedyjones Why do you say that like it's a bad thing?
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@Caryatid I mistyped. Carthian Firebrandisher. Imma burn motherfuckers.
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@tragedyjones Still not seeing the problem.
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@DnvnQuinn said in Interest Check: Single Sphere VtR Game:
Kingsmouth is basically this, though not foreign. But everything else hits on the mark. It's struggling because of OOC vs IC actions and metaplay.
Maybe look at them and see what they do right and wrong.
Some of us don't want to play on RfK
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@skew I know, but there's still good and bad things to take away from it.
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@DnvnQuinn said in Interest Check: Single Sphere VtR Game:
@skew I know, but there's still good and bad things to take away from it.
There are definitely take aways... I'll 110% agree with that.
You need to find a sweet spot where VTR's myriad of merits can build into a system that can be automated without trivializing them.... thats not easy. Minimize need for Staff to intervene... its less easy for someone to whine about 'staff bias' or some such if its based on dice rolls. It HAS to be scalable. What was manageable with 10 people doesn't necessarily work with 50, or 100.
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MAYBE SECRETS OF THE COVENANTS WILL RELEASE SOME DAY
I'm a rodeo clown.
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@tragedyjones said in Interest Check: Single Sphere VtR Game:
MAYBE SECRETS OF THE COVENANTS WILL RELEASE SOME DAY
Seriously, what the fuck is going on with it?
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Will I be able to post grammatical and spelling corrections of the IC posts made by other characters?
He/Him
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@Tinuviel Yes. I will deduct beats if you do not.
