What locations do you want to RP in?
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While working on the grid for Sin City Chronicles, I am left with the realization that I don't know what is important to most players for what is a good hangout and the like. I am looking at significant real world locations in our area right now, while some things are obvious - some major casinos we have plots for and the like, others are less clear.
So, what places do you look for on a grid, pre-built?
I'm a rodeo clown.
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@tragedyjones Sphere-only hangouts (Turs, Elysium, etc), mixed-sphere supernatural hangouts if applicable, and general public hangouts (bars, restaurants, etc).
Everything else is circumstantial for me, and usually/often spoofed as needed.
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Is vegas that city with the burger-joint/gun range that made the news for the little girl shooting the instructor?
It should have that.
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I love iconic, flavorful locations that include their own hooks - as long as these are actually used and supported by staff. Give me slums with tragic histories and mysteries attached, or creepy Stepford suburbs, or haunted forests with their own bodycounts. I love any location where I can look at the desc and say, "Oh, yes, I know what I want to play here."
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The locations need to add to the theme so that players can feel invested into the theme and that the world is what it is.
Locations are the only static way to do that beyond news files.
Hangout 1 place where people can play games, drink, eat, socialize.
Hangout 2 place where people can play games, drink, eat, socialize.
Two identical locations...
Except that if 1 is a bowling alley, and the other is a chuck-e-cheese, then two totally different environments.
Then there is tone... is this part of a city horrible or not. If people actually take the time to read descriptions and such, it can add a whole lot more to the game than who is banging who.
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One suggestion is that if you're going for full World of Darkness to never allow relaxed, ambiguously friendly settings.
No family friendly restaurants and the only Chuck-E-Cheese is an old, half burned down husk of a family fun place.
Then again, my own personal interpretation of the WoD is kind of Frank Miller's Sin City meets Dark City where there are no truly safe places, and every place you visit has a film on it.
Personally I'd like to see more of that.
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@Ghost In WoD/CoD I've always felt that you needed a bright place to contrast the darkness. It doesn't have to be a family restaurant or a chuck e cheese, but there shouldn't be everywhere is grim/dark.
There should be a dark side to everything but it's not exactly necessary to be out in the open where everyone can see it. Most people even in the WoD/CoD do not come into contact with the monsters, so having a slice of life place can be fine but yeah, lately, I agree that there's not enough 'bad' on the grid on many games.
Or at least the games that I've glanced at.
EDIT to Add: Without contrast, things have less impact.
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I like any public space that is actually representative of the supernaturals foothold/hegemony in the mortal world.
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@Ghost said in What locations do you want to RP in?:
One suggestion is that if you're going for full World of Darkness to never allow relaxed, ambiguously friendly settings.
No family friendly restaurants and the only Chuck-E-Cheese is an old, half burned down husk of a family fun place.
Then again, my own personal interpretation of the WoD is kind of Frank Miller's Sin City meets Dark City where there are no truly safe places, and every place you visit has a film on it.
Personally I'd like to see more of that.
In contract, my take would be to have these places, but make sure storytellers are fully aware and willing and capable of lifting the surface and allowing players to see a corrupt, grimy, seedy underbelly (a la Pentex but maybe a little less overt). The Chuck-E-Cheese borderline hypnotizes kids, etc.
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That idea of everything is actually messed up always goes against the grain for me. I've been in places where bloody revolution was about to happen, where you don't walk on the side of the road because (not mines) there are bodies in shallow graves, places where corruption is the norm, and still people are people. They try to live normal lives.
To push it so far reminds me of Paranoia, where yep everyone really is a traitor, etc. Farcical. The film Brazil is about as far as I can see things, because the oppressor is human, and the populace is still human.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure said in What locations do you want to RP in?:
That idea of everything is actually messed up always goes against the grain for me. I've been in places where bloody revolution was about to happen, where you don't walk on the side of the road because (not mines) there are bodies in shallow graves, places where corruption is the norm, and still people are people. They try to live normal lives.
That's still the real world, though. The World of Darkness, at least as described in the core books traditionally, is not the real world. It's a place where humanity has been corrupted by forces they can't perceive or understand and that corruption is reflected back at them in every facet of their lives and/or they literally live in a broken reality meant to subjugate them. Anything bright and shiny is there just to distract them from the existential horror that is their entire existence.
I mean TBH I don't know that I would enjoy it either if a game laid it on that thick 100% of the time and everything was only ever super grimdark, but at the same time I find a lot of people playing it completely straight with characters in their early twenties owning and operating happy little themed candy shops and I don't find it satisfying at all.
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Bathrooms.
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Bright and cheery is just as valid a horror trope as creepy violent.
I'm a rodeo clown.
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@wizz One thing I never want to lose in any setting is the sense that (for players) they understand and can relate to the typical NPC of the setting. Human beings can adapt to a great deal (because among other things we are a terrible species to ourselves), but there is some point where I feel like that common ground, that common grounding in human experience no longer applies.
Even in Dark City, where no one was who they seemed to be, there was that idea of core humanity coming through. I personally see that in the various Vampire moralities, though some are definitely real attempts to become something else. Many, however, seem to be justification to indulge in very human behaviors.
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@tragedyjones said in What locations do you want to RP in?:
Bright and cheery is just as valid a horror trope as creepy violent.
Absolutely, but to be a horror trope the bright and cheeriness should be a veneer. I mean come on like at least make it so you had to sell your ability to laugh to a demon or something in order to run The Baked Bean.
@Misadventure said in What locations do you want to RP in?:
@wizz One thing I never want to lose in any setting is the sense that (for players) they understand and can relate to the typical NPC of the setting. Human beings can adapt to a great deal (because among other things we are a terrible species to ourselves), but there is some point where I feel like that common ground, that common grounding in human experience no longer applies.
I don't really think it's all that hard to imagine a universe where the forces that paranoids rave about are actually real and influential and to picture yourself or someone you know in that world, and how they'd/you'd eventually degrade and succumb. I know that's pretty dark but that's kind of the idea.
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One of the most indispensable things in any setting in the World of Darkness is hope.
Because true tragedy and narrative darkness is about loss and people can't lose something they don't have.
<.<
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@Misadventure said in What locations do you want to RP in?:
That idea of everything is actually messed up always goes against the grain for me. I've been in places where bloody revolution was about to happen, where you don't walk on the side of the road because (not mines) there are bodies in shallow graves, places where corruption is the norm, and still people are people. They try to live normal lives.
Counterpoint: WoD isn't based on our world. Many of the forwards paint the World of Darkness as a place of dimly lit alleyways and all-night diners where something is just a little bit off. The setting is described in many of the splat-books this way to help support the atmosphere of horror where the PCs may be able to find safe geound, but it would be constantly dimmed by the fact that it would be surrounded by a world filled with actual monsters in the shadows.
So, constructively, I feel like WoD games that assume our own real world are missing a very key element to this setting. Ive been in far too many coffee house/bar/birthday party scenes, or scenes where the PCs didnt seem to be at all bothered by the setting.
Were I in charge of these games, I'd find the places where these PCs were getting far too comfprtable and remind that there are monsters who hunt monsters in the setting.
So, on topic? I suggest less playing supernatural house bedrock and far more organized crime fronts.
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I like a grocery store. It's good for a random meet. Everyone needs groceries.
Okay, most people need groceries.
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@Quibbler I would love that. Especially if it's one of those crowded little corner market type places that is perpetually grungy, they owner is always sitting behind a counter framed in bullet-proof 'glass' with the booze and the cigarettes and the register, and isoften the only light on on that street at all hours, save for maybe an after-hours club or similar.
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No more businesses for individual PCs.
If you're going to make a location, make it significant. A tur; an Elysium; a sanctum.
And then, make it something cheery or mundane as a veneer. Like an Olive Garden Elysium. Or a Chuck-E-Cheese Tur.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
