On my way to the showdown with the Prince (now with Laszlo in tow) I picked up the Coterie's "punching bag", a Ravnos gypsy called Mickey (Ravnos are tricksters and all victims of their own vices - Mickey's being gambling) and persuaded him - through exploitation of his obsession with gambling and my own blood powers - to join the Sabbat and I in our takeover. After killing the Prince (we had to, honest!) and the thing possessing him, the Sabbat turned round and asked if we were going to fight them for the city. I was invisible at this point, having pretended to be killed by a fireball.
I slipped out of invisibility (not entirely on purpose) by saying that I would welcome them - and that I had the support of the city's Ravnos (all one of him), Malkavians (that clan's leader had earlier promised her support to the coterie in general on this matter, I was the first person to remember and claim it for the new guys), and my own clan, the Followers of Set. The Nosferatu (ugly sewer spies) leader then appeared at my shoulder to lend his own support. The Coterie was as followed:
-Me: Follower of Set, used to pretend to be a Ventrue, welcomes the new leadership but doesn't want to, strictly speaking, join the Sabbat - they have different religious views.
-Laszlo: Was with the Sabbat all along, also pretending to be a Ventrue.
-Mickey: Ravnos, was under magical compulsion from me to join the Sabbat, but thought it sounded like a good idea anyway.
-Richard: Lasombra Antitribu, had hated the Sabbat but now realised that he'd only dealt with the bad sides of it. Didn't join, but instead started working to weed out the weak among their ranks for them.
-Kristian: Malkavian, had his body taken over by a powerful Sabbat he ate and joined the Massive Malkavian Network - Is now making the already insane Malkavian clan super-violent too, by whispering orders to cut into every one of their heads. His body became Dundee's new Sheriff (only there's a special Sabbat name for it).
-Tony: "True" Brujah, thinks the Sabbat are stupid and so went to take over Perth. Is raising an army to come invade Dundee for the Camarilla later.
-Nina/Ezekiel: Less active players than the "core" 6, these two decided to stick with the majority of the Coterie and join the Sabbat.
Over the next year, Sheriti turned her ghoul Mandy into a vampire, and trained her to go infiltrate the Camarilla in Dundee, posing as a Malkavian. The cyclical thing is cool, also I like the idea that, now my character's an Elder in terms of power, she's willing to stay put, extend her influence over the Kine (vampirese for mortal) of Dundee, and send her Childe out to do some hard work bringing down the false society of the Aeons.
At some point over the Easter holidays, I intend to write up a "final" character sheet for Sheriti, and a starting one for Mandy (complete with a new name now she's a Setite vampire). These will likely serve no purpose, other than for me to gush about how awesome Sheriti is/was to future acquaintances, and possibly for Mandy to be a new character in a new game later on. The latter's not likely though, as the Vampire GM is going to be running a Wraith game over the 3rd semester and a Mage game next year (he'll be beaten if this changes).
A couple of off-topic notes: Firstly, one specifically to Dob: April Fools
Secondly, the shoe repair shop up the road needs better opening hours. Grr
Thirdly, time flies. The last two hours passed before I'd noticed, I meant to be in bed by now XD. To say nothing about how fast this semester passed.
Finally, a note to Scion players: Thursday 2nd April, the next session of Scion, will be the penultimate Episode of the Series. As such, I'll be trying to finish it a wee bit early so that everyone has time to work out how they'll spend their last bits of experience in such a way that they end up with little or no spare experience left - I'll not be rewarding any for the final Episode (on April 9th) of the Series. Characters taken to any later Series will not keep any leftover experience - and I'll mention this again at the beginning and end of both these remaining sessions.
And now onto WoW. I originally meant to blog predominantly about this game, it just so happened that I started this blog at the same time as I've been playing WoW less and less. However, today I spent some time levelling my shaman alt, Jorianka.
Firstly, a note on my alts. In addition to my main character (main), Jastanka, I have a few alternate characters (alts): Jielanka the Death Knight (71), Jorianka the Shaman (23), and Sontanka the Priest (1, bank alt). When I get a chance, I'll start up Sarlanka the Paladin. The observant among you will notice a naming pattern there. That's on purpose. I am in a guild which consists of an awful lot of alts, none of whom I can ever remember the "real" identities of, and so I determined that my alts would all have some aspect of their name in common, specifically the last 4 letters "anka", and the name length being 8. All of my characters are female draenei. Draenei because they're my favourite alliance race, mainly for their starting area (it's newer and therefore better than the other 3) but also their racial power, a mana-free heal over time spell called Gift of the Naaru. Female because male draenei are ugly squid-faced meatcakes. :<
Anyway, I was playing Jorianka, the shaman, and running around in Ghost Wolf form (which I think of as Hoverdog form, in reference to the oWoD Werewolf game I played in last year) picking up flightpaths and doing killquests against orcs in Wetlands and skeletons in Duskwood. And really enjoying it, I guess just because there's a goal. Jielanka, the Death Knight, has no real reason to level higher, she's half a level behind my brother's priest, but because I'm a tank and he's a healer, I would like to just level those two characters together as much as possible. So while I might go and grind some xp to catch up to him occassionally, there's no *real* incentive to play Jiel. Jastanka has nothing to do except for the daily cooking quest when I remember, and enhancing some magical cloths every three days. She used to raid every week, but with the current arena tournament going on, I've stopped signing in order to grind out some fights for my £12 armoured baby murloc.
Jorianka, on the other hand, has a goal. She wants to be higher level. Specifically 30, for reasons I may spill later, but the point is that it's something I'm not yet. So that gives me a reason to play her, a reason to get on and do stuff. So yeah, I'm questing in Duskwood on her, and loving dropping totems and spamming shocks and all that. the playstyle is very different to both my mage and my DK, but isn't unenjoyable - if anything, I prefer it to my DK's playstyle of runic cooldowns and so forth.
For the time being then, it seems, I am the shaman king. Trying to be, at least.
So the internet died last night, which was to say the least annoying. But hey, I watched Serenity and a bunch of Robot Chicken, so s'all good.
Tuesday was Vampire night, which I was going to write about yesterday. The campaign's been going for as long as the Scion one, which is to say since October '08. It's set in the city I live in, so naturally my character lives in the house next door to mine. She's also a very creepy vampire. She was an 8-year old girl when she died, and now she worships Set, who's a really powerful vampire and who she (along with the rest of her vampire clan) believes is an incarnation of the Egyptian God. She's a schemer, mainly, though she's recently gained a heavy religious streak which I'm enjoying playing out. Oh, and she's pretending to be a different type of vampire, and inspired half the rest of the group to do the same (to the extent that our "true brujah" is pretending to be a "brujah").
Recently, the group has inflated to 8 people, and we've all been sent off to beat up a mathuslei, which is a word I can't spell that means "really powerful vampire". Should be fun.
Now, time to talk about GMing a bit. Specifically, a GM's limit. Now, in basically anything, each person has their own individual limit as to what they can manage. A few things apply to the GM here:
-How many players are in your game?
-What is the product of your NPCs and their AI?
-How good are you at mental arithmetic?
These 3 things combine for your game of choice. For instance, I know through experimentation back in the days of Paranoia (a game I played online with some school friends and their web friends, which we played without any system) that I can run a game for 6 people, but not really 7 (though I might try 7 again someday soon, now I've GMed more). The GM of my Vampire game can, from my observations, cope well with 7, but starts to fall apart at 8.
A while back, I realised that I can't support much overall AI. I can run a whole bunch of "extra" NPCs, whose only decision is "I hit this person", but more complicated NPCs like Hitler, who had a whole bunch of different powers he could use, I was a bit swamped by. Needless to say, multiple complicated people I tend to lose track of easily (my players have occassionally had to remind me that one of the NPCs is missing, or has come back to life).
Mental Arithmetic plays the most into what game/system you use. Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, that classic of the PnP RPGs, the one which outsiders often think is the only one, is pretty maths-intensive. Less so in its newest, 4th edition, but certainly in previous editions there is at least a token amount of quick maths to do for everyone involved. Old World of Darkness games, on the other hand, have no maths more complicated than counting. New World of Darkness, Exalted and Scion, have a few specific static values in addition to the counting, but these don't often change.
Any maths done by the players, however, has to be done by the GM as well, more often in fact. In any game, for instance, any maths the player does for their character, the GM does for every NPC, and sometimes the PCs as well. In addition, the GM might have to do things like work out what's possible for players, what's challenging, etc. For instance, ensuring that if, say, an invisible NPC is meant to be "accidentally" discovered by the PCs, it is *actually* possible for at least one of them to pass the "see invisible bloke" test.
These 3 things are important, and if you're GMing, you should be aware of them. As a guideline to new GMs:
-Start with 4 players, and gradually increase if you're feeling that it's easy. If you're not sure about 1 more person, try and organise a one-off in which you can play with that many, and see how it goes. Every Paranoia game back in the day was a one-off, and that helped me out a lot.
-NPCs is a tough one, start with mob NPCs with simple choices (who to attack, not what attack to use) and individual bosses with more complicated choices, and try to work your way up to complicated groups.
-As for mental arithmetic, start with a simple system like DnD4, oWoD, or rules-free. Stick with one-offs at first when trying more complicated systems, and if possible be sure that you know that you can at least play in that system
-As you may have noticed, I like one-offs. In terms of "trying out" GMing, they're a wonderful thing and should be embraced. If you try to start a campaign and find out in the first session that you don't like it, that's potentially a lot worse than if noone was ever expecting more. So try for these as much as possible.
-Finally, *listen* to your players. After a game, set aside some time for asking people what they thought, and try to take it on board for next time. If they ask for something you don't think you can do, try to explain that and work out if there's a way the players can help you do more.
Anyway, talking of GMing, I have to go do some prep for my Scion game tonight, so that'll have to do for now. Will report on that later tonight!
Posts
All Comments
