Being within a half hour makes competing groups more like street gangs. They will be in each others face often, which makes sense if they are out there to grab from the big pie of illicit gains, or have cultural divides. For survivors? Why wouldn't they merge?
If they had radically different behaviors, maybe. Perhaps one side is a cult, or believes in slavery. I don't see players digging deep into that RP though.
My approach was aimed more at allowing the players to always have things to do, without rushing events at any one site, or forcing all themes and characters to be in one place. I hadn't intended on any transfer between the two.
However, I am fond of downtime being used off screen, and I haven't played daily in years, so I don't want pressure to fill my onscreen time with fluff.
What is the difference between differing spheres, alts, and alts who are in different locations?
I, personally, have never been at a place where that seemed to matter. Being in another sphere was like being on another planet often. Sure I was in public places where other supers were at some other point, but rarely with any interactions, and sphere specific places had almost none.
I do agree that four separate places seems like it might be too many, but you can't have competition without at least two sites.
I suppose if you liked modelling social change more than supplies and such, you could battle for the soul of the survivor culture that comes out of the apocalypse.
You could remove one of the settlements from the immediate area, or a pair I guess, and give them a significantly different experience and allow alts in each of the very different environments.
EG one place is wilderness and somewhat isolated with trips into danger zones for supplies while the other focuses on people who have forts in the high rises of NY and face a very different world. A world rich in enemies, a cluttered tight environment, and a lot of dangerous people. I realize I just described The Division with zombies, but I meant more like Mad Max or sky cities with bridges between skyscrapers and rooftop gardens a la Freak Angels type setting.
It is a game, and so it should focus on what the designer (and players) want it to focus on. While the idea of hunting a human being is interesting, and you could certainly play up that whole aspect for vampire, serial killer, or criminal profiler, or recruiter RPGs, players don't seem that interested in it any more.
So some take it to be a good driver for competition and conflict, and place it off to the side as a feeding and downtime choices minigame.
Lies.
Use pregenerated characters.
OR ask them what they want, and make the characters for them. If they end up liking it, allow rebuilds.
However, I think they are lying.
Do some math.
Using the OWoD number of 1 vampire per 100,000 people.
1 Pint of blood a night, you can skip a few nights, but you always make it up. You can't go hungry like a human. That's 365 pints a year.
Assume you can take 2 pints and not hurt someone badly. Thats 180 feedings a year.
Let's say you feed of the same people often, so only 100 a year are anyone new.
Now that can be 20 corpses. Sure.
However, if not, its 1 per 1000 people a year. In a decade 1% has been fed from. By the time you are a 30 year old 3% of the people you know have been fed from.
That gets noticed.
Those sound like problems with how you play, not something that the system makes you play, if that makes sense.
I prefer design systems where what you describe matters. Savage Worlds is simplified to the point of meh-ness for me.
Replace afflictions with any number of mechanisms where things only give you benefit when they actually hinder you. Talk about abusive power builds to avoid. And more than anything, talk about what super hero RP is supposed to look like on this game. This is where White Wolf's Aberrant and EABA Eschaton both excel: imparting how this is supposed to look and feel.
Were there any games that WERE focussed solely on babies and romance?
Do you meant the fantasy of aristocratic privilege?
Give an example or three of various grades of memorable?
(I am coming from a space where there was a mystery in a campaign, and when others wanted to ST, I laid that one mystery beyond their authority, and BOTH not only directly went after that secret, but tried to define it via their stories. So I lack trust in either human nature, my friends, or my ability to communicate "NO, do NOT do a plot about X. You don't know enough to do anything that deals with its complexities beyond what you have already seen. You can do more of what you've seen if you like.")
Anyhow, meanwhile I am hoping to look at how grand a thing players would like to create. And hopefully accept risks for.
This may be a topic for another thread, but I will ask here anyway.
Players (sometimes) talk about wanting to have an effect. My own personal experience is that when this is said, they mean something theme or setting changing, often beyond the parameters of play. EG they want to complete destroy the government on a white house politics game. I probably have bad luck.
When you think about having an effect, how big an effect to you hope for?
The whistle to blow here may be more about players thinking they have it worse than anyone else, as discussed above.
The folks who tend to post to MSB and WORA are a pessimistic lot.
I'm okay with supporting character.
Extras are just bodies on the screen.
I just think its wasteful of the primary resources for fun: another players time.
I just want to get out what I have thought up for my character. I dislike being removed from play before that by something I had little to no interaction with. it MIGHT be possible to make players feel their actions have repercussions beyond their immediate RP, and thus understand the escalating states of tension and so on with effectively remote seeming RP.
Seriously though, players are not there to be someones extras.
Now I want to make a character named Sport.
Or Scout. Tiger. Champ.
Also: I'm not your pal, buddy.
There are a lot of discussions about how to be a ST, and many of them tell you to avoid the patterns that STs and players tend to fall into anyhow.
A common example is the ST who has a single story path laid out in their mind, and keeps the players from getting off it. This is a terrible thing if your players want unpredictability, and to be able to make choices that change where the plot goes (this is called Agency).
HOWEVER, if your players aren't proactive, if they want to have the story fed to them, or just have a chance to show off their awesome strengths and quirky weaknesses, or other interests, then this may be a good fit for them.
Know your current style. Write up how you do things, and what folks can expect. Post links to other logs where you ST'd.
Players may benefit from knowing many things:
How do you prefer to handle information flow, do you hand it out in plain text and OOC questions and answers, or do you want it all in sets and poses both going from you and from the characters?
Do you want players to ask to apply a skill or merit, or are you going to assume they do so unless told otherwise?
Do you assume the players will do whatever is the safest, or with the best payoff, or that they have deep knowledge of the setting and rules so if they make a dumb choice you know they are doing so knowingly and with a character based purpose (their own character, or perhaps for the benefit of another character or player), and so on.
Do you like quick and furious, or prefer careful investigation and interactions with NPCs and contacts and so on?
Are the character heroes in the story, or just protagonists? Superheroes?
Do you prefer questions for the ST to be in a +job, pages, OOC chat, or emails?
Will you have regular nights to run the stories?
How do you feel about absenteeism?
Do you prefer to place the events in the current timeline, where delays in scenes mean time passes in the story? Or are you okay placing the events in a nebulous IC time/date until they are resolved?