[OSSR]The World of Future Darkness

[Username17]

If I were making an analogy, I'd say Clan is to Race as Covenant is to After-School Club.

That's a good analogy. The Covenants pretty much just gave you a thing you could buy with XP at a modest discount. If you wanted to buy none of the five things and instead buy other things (such as bloodline powers or skills), your Covenant choice meant nothing. If you wanted to buy two or more of those things, your Covenant choice still meant nothing.

The Covenants were an attempt to solve the problem of Syndicate membership being a choice of such weighty consequence that you couldn't even play the game if not everyone made the same selection by making the choice of Syndicate completely meaningless. Which doesn't actually solve the problem. It just makes a supposedly important character creation decision completely meaningless.

I can see why they did it, but I don't understand how people could have looked at that final draft and not said "This is fucked up and we need to go back to step two."

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

@Frank, @AncientH: I want to know why the PCs need to be together in a group (coterie or band or party, whatever) within the game. Nevermind the talk about factions and sects and clans, why do the PCs have to team up to go on a mission? Why do they all have to be the story equivalent of the Expendables for some big-dick NPC? Can't the PCs have their own goals and problems they're trying to solve, and through the course of playing the game, come into contact with the other PCs and act (or not) cooperatively as it suits them?

Like, rather than having all this business about classes and roles - your Face, Mage, Gunner, Chicken-Chaser, etc. - why not have the individual PCs let loose within the setting and collide with the setting and NPCs and suffer the consequences? And in doing so, they influence the other PCs directly and indirectly.

[Whipstitch]

Turn length. A lot of GMs can't even keep straight who is in what room, but even if your GM is on the ball and good at keeping track of things it's still really unsatisfying to have players working in different time frames from one another. For example, one of the reasons that Shadowrun hacking has always been a train wreck is that groups don't really want to order a pizza and play a round of Munchkin while the Decker does a solo virtual reality dungeon crawl.

[deaddmwalking]

@Frank, @AncientH: I want to know why the PCs need to be together in a group (coterie or band or party, whatever) within the game. Nevermind the talk about factions and sects and clans, why do the PCs have to team up to go on a mission? Why do they all have to be the story equivalent of the Expendables for some big-dick NPC? Can't the PCs have their own goals and problems they're trying to solve, and through the course of playing the game, come into contact with the other PCs and act (or not) cooperatively as it suits them?

Like, rather than having all this business about classes and roles - your Face, Mage, Gunner, Chicken-Chaser, etc. - why not have the individual PCs let loose within the setting and collide with the setting and NPCs and suffer the consequences? And in doing so, they influence the other PCs directly and indirectly.

Ultimately, if there is nothing constraining group activity, there's nothing that prevents a player from choosing an activity that doesn't involve contact with the other PCs. Like, one PC could decide to launch a base on the moon. At that point, all the other people playing in Detroit are effectively playing another game. Presumably, since you've gone through all the trouble of getting all the players in a room together, you want to involve all of them as often as possible.

Cooperative play ensures that players are part of the game as often as possible.

[Ancient History]

@Frank, @AncientH: I want to know why the PCs need to be together in a group (coterie or band or party, whatever) within the game. Nevermind the talk about factions and sects and clans, why do the PCs have to team up to go on a mission?

This is something that every game has to come up with. If you don't have a reason for there to be a team, then how and why the fuck are the PCs together? That's why D&D and Shadowrun start out with the assumption that you're a group of adventurers/shadowrunners out to do an adventure/shadowrun. That's your prime gameplay motivation right there. Solves a LOT of hassle.

Why do they all have to be the story equivalent of the Expendables for some big-dick NPC? Can't the PCs have their own goals and problems they're trying to solve, and through the course of playing the game, come into contact with the other PCs and act (or not) cooperatively as it suits them?

From a sandbox perspective, that might sound like a good idea - and indeed, as players grow into their characters, they might take more initiative and come up with their own plans - but you still need an initial impetus to get the team together, and a common goal that unites them to some end. They may be thrown together by fate and forced to cooperate to survive, or maybe they've all been hired for their individual skills and have their own motivations for achieving some common goal, but you still need to have something that gets all the players together and moving in mostly the same direction at the same time, because Mister Cavern cannot do individual one-on-one roleplaying sessions with multiple PCs at once. It just doesn't work.

Like, rather than having all this business about classes and roles - your Face, Mage, Gunner, Chicken-Chaser, etc. - why not have the individual PCs let loose within the setting and collide with the setting and NPCs and suffer the consequences? And in doing so, they influence the other PCs directly and indirectly.

Having individual functions defined by class or archetype is about more than just filling out a slot in the team - it gives shape and focus to the character. Granted, archetypes are usually a bit more important (and less forgiving) in class-based games, because abilities are strongly restricted to specific classes, but it's still the case that most PCs don't have enough points to make good generalists, and specialist characters have a better chance to find individual moments to shine during a session.

[DrPraetor]

AH, I don't think you're quite responding to AC0's question.

This puts me to mind of something Frank's dad said about running games of Champions (liberally paraphrased):
In comic books, splitting up the team is great, because it enables the writers and artists to really focus on a few of the characters, and you can develop Mister Miracle into a more interesting character if he gets some alone-time away from the other New Gods. In a roleplaying game, this is a trainwreck, because the players with characters in Team B have to go into the other room and play Wizwar or whatever.

AC0 is basically asking to take the splitting-the-team narrative to the ultimate extreme, "why not just have the characters take turns in a series of loosely connected narratives, ala Pulp Fiction or Short Cuts?"

Well, you could try that as an experiment, I suppose - but it's a pretty niche experience, because most people want to play RPGs as a group rather than taking turns in one player sessions with occasional guest spots by the other PCs. So to avoid falling into this undesirable niche, you need some conceit to actively avoid it. In fact, the assumption that you want to play as a group as so strong that AH is taking it as a categorical imperative, but I think that's (obviously) justified.

[Username17]

Yeah, the disconnect between cooperative storytelling games and other forms of media when it comes to splitting the protagonists is pretty massive. The key is that in a novel the author is continuing to contribute regardless of which character or characters is getting screen time, while in a traditional RPG players other than the MC only get to contribute to the game while their character is in the scene. George RR Martin can have his books meander off on long indulgent diversions about side characters that never amount to anything or kill off major characters and scrap entire plot lines without resolution or whatever because wherever the story goes it's still him writing it.

In the traditional RPG, the authorial control closely follows a single character for most of the players. This means that every scene which has fewer than the entire collection of protagonists is necessarily excluding one or more players from the entire game. And that means that any impetus towards splitting the party is deeply corrosive to the game and exclusionary to the players trying to play it.

Now you could imagine a different structure, where the cooperative portions of the cooperative storytelling were handled differently. Imagine a game in which one player played the protagonist and the other players collaborated to act out the minor characters and write in the world and scenarios. In such a scenario, you'd only need a single protagonist and their ability to work with or even acknowledge a group would be irrelevant. Or you could imagine a troupe structure in which players had a stable of potential characters and jumped from one to the other as necessary. In such a scenario the characters wouldn't need to keep a constant set of companions and individual characters wouldn't need to be remotely balanced in terms of "power" or narrative weight so long as each player had access to narratively greedy characters.

But within the context of a standard Player == Player Character model of roleplaying, the hard admonition to have the player characters spend most of their time in physical proximity to each other while pursuing complementary goals is essentially axiomatic. The reason people haven't successfully produced an alternate system of motivations for role playing game characters in the last forty four years is that there isn't one. If the player characters aren't strongly motivated to work together and be together there just isn't a game. Full fucking stop.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Troupe play isn't even unprecedented, or particularly difficult to ad-hoc sellotape in if the game has small stretches of party splitting. In one In Nomine campaign I was in years ago, if the party went somewhere my Kyriotate was totally useless I switched to playing his human servant. More recently, in my current Rogue Trader game someone's been allowed to play "a special weapons minion" for boarding missions rather than have their narrative greedy PC be on the boarding mission.

[ArmorClassZero]

"AC0 is basically asking to take the splitting-the-team narrative to the ultimate extreme, "why not just have the characters take turns in a series of loosely connected narratives, ala Pulp Fiction or Short Cuts?""

Dr. Praetor's got the gist of it, but I would make the loosely connective narratives more interweaving. I've been reading about Fiasco, and looking at other GM-less games (share some if you would) like Polaris and 1001 Nights, and I was wondering if Vampire would benefit from a GM-less structure. PCs can (should) start with a relationship to another PC, and rope them in to each other's goals and missions by calling in favors, making deals, being allies of necessity, etc. And there would be mechanical incentive (in addition to the social incentive) of weaving another character into your scene and plot - you get access to their unique skills and abilities. The PCs don't start out as a cohesive group necessarily, but part of the rising action is them coming together. Gameplay results in a created web of connections between the players and have them be gradually coming together for a more singular purpose.

[Trill]

I've been reading about Fiasco, and looking at other GM-less games

The Problem I can see with that is that fiasco is

1. short
2. well defined (through all those items, connection types, etc.) and
3. VERY player dependent

I can totally imagine a VtM hack for Fiasco, but the problem is that for most players it's not a viable long term thing. It's something you do now and then.

[DrPraetor]

@AC0: Vampire LARP tends to work that way.

In fact, I think most vampire LARP would probably work better without nominal storytellers, who aren't very good referees, aren't telling very good stories using theoretical NPCs, and spend a lot of time cheating on behalf of their girlfriends.

[Zaranthan]

In fact, I think most vampire LARP would probably work better without nominal storytellers, who
...
spend a lot of time cheating on behalf of their girlfriends.

The purpose of Vampire LARP is to get people laid, so this does not improve it at all.

[Username17]

As noted, Fiasco is short. Munchhausen is short too. DM-less games I would even consider playing in Table Top are pretty much universally one-shots. And usually one-shots you might play before or after another game in the same evening at that.

Vampire LARP is pretty notorious for only working with very large numbers of players. The basic dynamic leads to large numbers of people "going with the flow" or being too shy to do much or just trying to hit on various women and/or men in the group or whatever. It takes a large number of players before enough stuff happens that the gossip machine can get going and it can actually feel like something is happening.

I don't think a game powered by player ambitions can work for a tabletop campaign. Too many players just don't have much in the way of ambitions for their character and it wouldn't really go anywhere. Those players that did want their characters to do specific things would mostly just do those things and then you still don't have anything going for your next session.

Without the structure of a mission or event, most player generated content sputters and dies. I'm not sure what critical mass is to make player generated content self-perpetuating, but I think it's something close to fifty players. Certainly any number of players you are likely to get around a home table is going to too few in number to keep a campaign of that type going. There just isn't going to be enough drama.

-Username17

[kzt]

A joint NSA/CIA Special Access Program called FIRSTLIGHT coordinates aware agents all over the Western world, liaises when possible with the Brujah-hunting Eighth Direction of the GRU, and funnels arms and support to the Entity, the secret service of the Vatican. The traffic in intelligence does not go only one way: the Entity now incorporates the newly re-canonized Society of St. Leopold, which provides FIRSTLIGHT and others with records from the last Inquisition and important perspective on the “ blankbody” threat. The Entity also provided cadre and vital support for Brazil’s BOES anti-vampire urban death squads, bringing them into the global picture.

In 2008, FIRSTLIGHT analysts identified the Tremere Prime Chantry in Vienna as “Vampire Central” and directed their largest operation to date. A coordinated USSOCOM and Vatican ESOG force augmented with experienced Brazilian hunter-killer teams annihilated the Chantry, destroying it with drone strikes and relic-reinforced ground operations. The official cover story blamed the explosions on ISISaligned terrorists, just as FIRSTLIGHT has concealed dozens of other strikes under the blanket of “counterterror operations.”

Well, that's just silly. You'd use JDAMs from B2s, not drones. Drones don't carry heavy enough ordinance to do the job.

[Nicotranchet]

Thanks for this deep dive into "The World of Future Darkness." I especially appreciated how you highlighted the tensions between Cyberpunk and Vampire: The Masquerade—two genres that seem intuitively compatible but quickly fall apart when combined carelessly. Your points about how Masquerade's core mechanics struggle against cyberpunk tech are spot-on; I laughed out loud at your description of Vampire Dominate versus Cyberpunk’s organizational hierarchies. It's amusing (and a bit sad) how much White Wolf struggled to integrate these concepts, despite it seeming like a natural fit.

Also, great point about the problematic demographics of Vampire factions. Your rant about how there are literally more clans than available vampires in a typical city scenario perfectly encapsulates how overstuffed the WoD became.

On a lighter note, your comments got me thinking about costume aesthetics in gaming. Speaking of aesthetics, sexy maid costumes are always a hit—they range from classic French maid outfits to more playful or gothic variations, each offering a distinct charm that can enhance thematic immersion or simply add a bit of fun to game nights or conventions.

Thanks for such a detailed and hilarious write-up—really enjoyed the nostalgic dive and your analysis!