State of the System + Call for Feedback: WtA

[Damon]

I'm going to chime in again to agree with Jacqui -- esp re: less detail on The City being helpful. I feel like when there's too much detail, sometimes I feel paralyzed and afraid to make a mistake because I don't actually know the city as well as someone who lives there does. Also! I really enjoy Googling shit and incorporating it. LOL. So sometimes just a rough framework to hang things on is fun.

Also agree re: original creations conversely needing that detail. Maps, man. I love maps. Remember that map we had of the boarding house on Chicago? THAT WAS AWESOME. And I promise I'm not necessarily bringing that up to try to force another boarding house on Denver (though ... that would also be awesome). I'm just using it as an example because... well, then all of a sudden you could do things like: have scenes where someone overhears someone else because they're next door to their room. Or someone walking down the hall toward some destination would necessarily pass by someone else because of how things were situated.

And stuff. *out of steam* I JUST AGREE.

[kai]

As before, I'm going to answer some of my own questions:

I prefer urban settings, but I like to have rural areas available. I've always loved Roxborough, but like any park open to the public, it's not necessarily conducive to much RP.

I prefer smaller septs with fewer NPCs and less of a 'looming authority' feeling from elders and so on. Otherwise, the PCs aren't really free to be center stage or do what they would naturally do without being smacked down immediately. They need to be background, there when absolutely necessary but otherwise leaving the PCs on their own, which increases the sense of urgency that keeps being brought up as necessary for a good WtA game.

One of the biggest adjustments that needs to be made with the Denver WtA game is to strongly limit its relationship to reality. Setting a game in a city where I live can give interesting details and flavor, but mostly it's just stifling, as the urge to correct RP back to reality rears its very insufferable head with annoying frequency. The World of Darkness Denver needs to exist in much, much more flexible time-space than Actual Denver, and for the most part, that's on me. So I'll work on that. It mostly involves just shutting up more and saying "Yeah, go for it" when someone asks me if I think they could get from Fort Collins to Roxborough in 30 minutes, or puts a farm in Estes Park, or whatever.

So yeah. Go for it.

That isn't to say I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and turn WoD Denver into WoD Metropolis Template, Version 49, but I'm not really worried about that happening. I've known most of you for several years and you're seasoned players. The flavor and idea of the city is great, but too much "real" detail and (as Damon put it) players get paralyzed. And stop playing.

[kai]

Now for part two, which I wanted to keep separate from my above opinions/preferences on settings. Part two is about specific ideas for What To Do With Denver WtA.

Namely, what I've heard so far has pretty much convinced me that the setting as-is did not work, is not working, and will not work for the kind of game we actually want. So let's change it.

Right now we have a very large, very powerful sept with very many and very powerful NPCs. We have a second sept, which just adds more structure and more rigidity to the game no matter how cool I think that building downtown is. The two main WtA play settings are stifling. There are a lot of other changes to WtA that I think can (and should) be primarily player-initiated, such as the inception of a boarding-house-esque whatever. But the setting and the NPCs and the caern/septs... that's what I'm going to focus on for now, because that's sort of my job here and I feel like it can set the foundation for the things you guys might want to change and contribute.

I have a couple of ideas so far, but I'm open to others. Hell, I'm actively seeking help thinking about this, so please speak up.

Idea 1: Reboot. None of it ever happened, none of it ever existed, we start over. We can figure out a way for people to keep or bring back PCs they've already played, but otherwise we just start from scratch. I'll admit I don't love this idea. I worked hard on this setting and I worked very hard for 6 months on that first major storyline. To knock it all off the table would kinda suck for me, and make me feel like everything I made was shitty from the get-go. But it is a possibility and I want it on the table with the others.

Idea 2: Gloss. It's been nearly a year since WtA was widely active on Denver. What activity I know about has had fuckall to do with the current setting or past storylines. So we fill in the blank of the past almost-a-year. They figured out a way to close the Pit. Garou/Kin presence has pulled completely out of 1999 Broadway; Cold Crescent doesn't exist anymore. Maybe closing the Pit involved a great big Final Battle and most if not all of those big authoritative Garou NPCs died. Maybe Forgotten Questions was severely weakened, or even left in a sort of slumber where it's barely even a Caern anymore. How it looks could take many forms, but the basic idea is to give ourselves a relatively clean slate without completely wiping anything that's happened before.

Idea 3: Side Game. With a smaller number of active players, we shrug off Denver entirely (or not) and make a pack (or two) of Garou who are traveling, or in another place, or in another version of Denver, or whatever, and we take turns STing for each other. Maybe this involves at least 1 or 2 scheduled nights of group play a month where we can get most/all of the PCs on. This doesn't preclude the inclusion of Kinfolk, by the way. We're creative people. We do creative things.

Ideas 4 - ???: You tell me.

I want to point out that I don't want this thread to become a proving ground for any single idea. Bring up suggestions, discuss merits and drawbacks, honestly tell us about kneejerk reactions (see Idea #1), but keep an open mind.

And again: please speak up. This isn't idle chatter.

[jamie]

Werewolf the Apocalypse: Hotel.

Serious answer:

I think treating this like a TT group and having one person ST while everyone else plays in a pack for a campaign is where everyone's head is at now. If everyone wanted to keep their characters for the next campaign that would be dope. If the ST wanted to pass off the baton that would also be dope. Burn out is real. A smaller not-tied-to-one-setting system would also not be super disruptive during an ST changing of the guard. Especially if we all committed to a traveling pack. Nobody in Final Fantasy gives a fuck when you swap out party members so I figure it shouldn't be a big deal if the ST shelves their character to run a campaign.

I know I listed "stable yet dynamic setting" as a thing that's done it for me in the past but that was like... the past. On a big-ass site with a lot of players. We aren't realistically going to have more than like eight people onboard so yeah imagine me fist-bumping Idea 3.

[Jacqui]

I actually think Idea 2 has a lot of potential. You could always find ways to tie in why and how some of the Garou weren't around for it/survived some great big battle (i.e Morgan, my Fianna, could very easily have been called home and returns to the ruin), so you could mix in survivors with new blood that perhaps hear word that Denver is vulnerable and needs protection.

So you sort of have elements of Idea 1, but you don't lose all that work that Kai put into the setting. It's just ... a sort of 'after the rubble settles' atmosphere which could be quite interesting. Shake up dynamics, see what comes loose.

[Damon]

I like idea 2 as well. I don't want to obliterate history, esp since a lot of it was fun and cool, but I like the idea of seamlessly bridging from the past to a different present. And also: yes. Having that sort of shakeup with a bit of a power vacuum left behind can encourage melding of new chars with old. People might flock in to protect a vulnerable area, or maybe they're here because they're looking for a (relatively) lawless place, or maybe they're here to stage a takeover precisely because there's a power vacuum, or... etc etc.

[jamie]

Because I didn't say this last night: I don't see any reason to reboot and I think Idea 1 is bad and should feel bad.

So Idea 2: I personally am not all that interested in a sandbox-type setting where my character's long-term motivation is Help Make This Place Not Collapse In On Itself. I'm kind of over the "city under siege" premise as a long-term storytelling device. It gets meta real quick. I'm also not interested in politics or Making A Name For Myself or whatever. I have Crusader Kings II for that. If we're going to play Werewolf I want to do werewolf shit. If the home base is kind of chill (it's Denver, ffs) and we do investigative/creeping horror types of stories there but have to go other places to have big claws-out explosion-y adventures that would keep my interest longer.

I was wondering if there would be a way to incorporate elements of Idea 3, which is a little different format-wise than what we've been doing and seems like it'd keep the ideas flowing for a longer period of time, into the Idea 2 setting. Like the rotating STs/one or two packs/commitment to plot-driven RP a couple times a month. Or have Idea 2 be the initial Thing We Do in the Idea 3 scenario and if it sticks then the next ST can run with it and if it doesn't then hey, we've got another ST coming up anyway, we can try something different.

I know this isn't meant to be the Thunderdome thread so I'm not going to keep harping if I'm the only one who's like YEAH IDEA 3 WOO. Idea 2 has its merits. I just don't see myself hanging out in Idea 2 for longer than a few months unless there's something else at stake besides "there's a power vacuum and this place needs fresh bodies."

[Kenna]

Being brief, 'cause one hand is on baby forever.

I prefer something along the lines of Idea 3. We're a smaller group, so there doesn't have to be a huge wide open setting. We could incorporate Idea 2 in making it our Home Base/Jumping Off Point

I just know that I'm ready to try something new. I want something small, something concentrated and spanning the course of several scenes. I want to try a fleshed out, politically intense rural setting that's not shared with the public so Garou can be Garou. I want way more involvement with the spirit realms, not just the Penumbral City. We get that kind of freedom and flexibility in the realm of Idea 3.

[Damon]

I'm against Idea 3 because of how poorly most ST rotations pan out (and Idea 3 is basically ST rotations on steroids). It depends too heavily on people planning ahead and showing up for their shift (often months after setting the shift), and we RPers are notoriously flaky. Usually by month 2-3, ST rotations are in shambles. I just can't imagine an actual "tabletop troupe" sort of model working out any better.

Also: even assuming the STs keep showing up, I feel like it would limit player more than it would encourage it. Players would basically be bound to a schedule and an STed world. What happens if you can't make a session? Two? Five?

All that said: I don't mind the idea of putting Idea 3 inside Idea 2. Like... have a home base still, but maybe we can experiment with a traveling group of characters. I do like the idea of exploring other places (and times) -- and in fact a lot of my favorite storylines of the past have done just that. But... yeah. I just don't think we can base a game ENTIRELY on a moving target.

[Jacqui]

Or we could go all The Walking Dead and have warring bands of Garou that don't 100% trust that the other isn't solely to blame for what happened to Denver out there as well as some sort of undefined threat (wyrm? weaver, the black fog from Lost (!) ). So you can have patrols and maybe even entire periods where there's movement but it ties into a home base.

Touches of Idea 2 and 3.

What's scarier than a civil war within a bigger war against the Big Bad where nobody quite knows why or how it began.