Whither vampire?

[mnemosyne]

I've heard from one player thus far and I'd like to hear from more people with characters in the vampire game or people who want to play vampire: what would you like to see?

Please send me an email or an FPM and let me know.

Cheers,

Liz

PS - or, hell. Feel free to reply here. Open discussions are pretty fine with me.

[Kenna]

To begin, I should say that I'm already not being super active on the site (sorry everyone, you know how life is).

In my heart of hearts I'd like to see a continued story for the vampire game-- certainly not the exact same storyline as before, as Joey's brainspace isn't around for that anymore, but some kind of story to keep things interesting. I personally find that without an overarching story in a system, especially one as small and pinpointed as Vampire, the play becomes stale and character development stalls out and then the system actually does wither.

I can't volunteer to be the storyteller myself. I don't have the time, energy, or know-how. I would TOTALLY keep playing Molly if somebody else stepped up to the plate, though! I've worked hard on that little mortal and gotten her to an interesting point in development.

If we can't get to a point where we have somebody wearing the ST-pants and running an overarching story, though, it would be good to at least have the players be allowed freedom in creating their own stories. Big ones, important and cool and meaningful ones, not just measly little one-shot fodder stories here and there. At least that way we, the players, could keep perpetuating stories for one another.

</twocents>

[FadedNoel]

I also want to say, despite my own lack of playtime with Vampire lately, I would not like to see the system go (ahem) dead.

My problem has always been trying to figure out something to do with Verna after plans for her [got shipped off to a Tzimisce] fell through. It does require someone else stepping up to the plate and driving some supernatural interaction with her though, as she has (at this point) no willingness to believe anything but completely mundane things are happening.

And that's boring.

I want character development, character devolvement, or at least some kind of shaking up, you know? Death could be a form of shaking up, but Jess insists she wants to do more Dririmancy-ish things with her, so I haven't thrown her off a cliff yet

In other words, there is definite interest, but I do believe that something needs to be done to smoosh our characters together and get them to interact a bit. In Mage, you have a society of people who have to stick together to survive. So we have tons of play even when there's no SL going on, just because the sharing of knowledge and viewpoints is so important to Mages. In Vampire, you have a society of people who are essentially puppets on strings, forced to distrust one another to survive. And if there's no puppeteer currently at the helm, nobody knows what to do. There's no goal to reach. The distrust factor naturally leads to some isolation unless characters have a good reason to glom together. Most of the time, from what I've seen, that reason was two or more people got together and created characters specifically for each other to play with. Or, they made extremely volatile characters that everyone else wanted to kill (which is a valid form of interaction, right!?) But that only works up until the point someone's character dies, or their partner quits, etc.

[Samael]

I echo a lot of what both Kenna and Noel have to say. I really like the vampire game we've had in play to date and all I think it needs is some more regularity in terms of storytelling. I'm not putting that on Joey as a bad thing, I know that the on-off situation was due to various reasons that do not reflect on him. But Laurel (my mortal) basically ended up in a situation where literally as soon she definitively found out that the supernatural is real, things came to a halt and it was difficult to play her for the same reasons as Noel had with Verna. And sadly, Laurel and Verna aren't going to be able to chat it out and figure things out between them because...uh, reasons. My vampy folks, or at least Kali, was in a similar situation where her SL involvement had caused a certain direction for her that came to a halt of sorts.

I am 100% interested in playing vampire with 1000% more regularity. It just requires the system becoming more active, and that became harder for a lot of us I think once things came to a halt.