Post by Skir on Oct 19, 2012 20:22:37 GMT -8
Esteemed Players of Emerald City Chronicles,
Staff would like to change the feeding system. Blood is the very essence of everything that drives the Jyhad. How do we feed on mortals, how do we say who can and cant? How do we maintain our control over them as they get smarter and better armed? Supposedly, the Second Tradition is just about feeding area, but from it the whole of the Camarilla's authority base and the power of Princes is derived. Blood is so important. It informs every decision vampires make. The Domain lines in a region are the truest statement of which clans have real power over the city and her politics, because blood is power. Blood is the only power. Neonates and anarchs scrape by in alleyways making it work while powerful kindred sip gently from crystal glasses looking down, secure in their power and the stability of their station.
The beast is always calling, never satisfied. When you call to your blood, you think about what you are doing, what you are giving it, because the more you call upon that dark power, the closer you slip to wild rage and feral evil. Always walking that line between man and beast, feeling the weight of your vampire hungers on your conscience as you try to be a good man while violently taking what you want from an unwilling body, struggling with the idea that you are the worst kind of rapist.
Does that seem like the game we play?
We have a new system to propose that can help push these themes. The new system has some objectives. The first is to make you feel like a vampire. To make you care about blood and think about blood. The second is to make blood an actual finite resource that you have to think about spending. This balances a lot of things people feel are very powerful, like Thaum. Thaum actually doesn't have to be as overpowered as it becomes in a LARP setting like this one. It's only so powerful when Tremere can use it with impunity because blood is plentiful. When you are able to use every single Thaum power you have, all the time, just because you have it, Thaum is amazingly powerful. If you have to make intelligent decisions about what you do and how often, it becomes a power of versatility, not super-at-everything. It brings a lot more interesting choices to every combat, cause that's the place where Blood really matters. This is good for people who like combat, powers and action.
Another objective is to make people care about Domain and taking care of the place they feed. Feeding in a good area can be critical now, and people have more than just a token pride reason to care. This promotes more awareness of the setting and the ability to tell more stories about Seattle, rather than just one building in Seattle, the Elysium. That's good for those people who like to chase plot.
What this means is that blood won't be plentiful for everyone. There will be haves and have nots. There will be clever or careful vampires who have all they need and more, and they can sell the rights to their rich harvest to those who are in need to exploit them. One could gain a lot of political favors that way, or make important people rely on them in a way that is currently impossible. That's good for the politics part of the game too.
It also makes the Herd background pretty worthwhile, for the record.
It's not that something is really, really WRONG with the current Feeding system. It just isn't adding much either, compared to what we could be doing. In canon, the need for blood is basically the thing that spawns the entire Jyhad and the entire metaplot. We've got a system that can put all those aspects into play, and manages to do that without it being a giant math headache.
The first thing I want to warn you about is that it will make the game harder. For blood to matter, enter into decision making, have a stake in the game, it needs to be something of a finite resource. Right now it isn't, and people have become used to that. You'll have to get used to the idea that not every character will have full blood all the time.
Secondly, it is going to look like a lot of math at first. There actually isn't as much as it seems, but you as a player will not have to do any of the math in question. This will all be done for you by staff and the numbers won't change very often. This system will generally leave you with a specific amount of blood you start game with each Saturday, and it will only change if the way you feed changes or you get better at that. We will gladly help you understand the math so you can make decisions about it, but there isn't any math to worry about on a game to game basis - it'll all be handled by spreadsheet by staff.
Blood Debt Feeding System
Step 1: Determine your Blood Debt.
Your blood debt is the amount of blood you spend in a month. For most people, this will be 30, the amount of blood spent to wake up each day. For some, this will be higher. If you have a flaw that causes you to spend more blood, such as Stigmata, Parasitic infection, etc. You may also have habits that cost blood, such as using certain Thaumaturgy, or Earth Meld as your Haven each night, which costs a blood. Each ghoul also costs 1 blood per month to maintain.
Step 2: Feeding Pool
When you prey on mortals, how do you feed? Seduction? Mugging? Internet dating?
--Choose a dice pool that makes sense for your feeding style, one attribute, one ability. Almost anything can work here if you are creative.
How roughly do you feed?
Gently (1x, Humanity 9) , Roughly (2x, Humanity 6), Brutally (4x, Humanity 3), Animals only (0.5x)
This acts as a multiplier to your dice pool. The rougher you feed, the more blood you get, but it can hurt your humanity. If your humanity is too high for the way you feed, you make a Conscience check each game you feed that way. Gently means you take the minimum necessary with great care for the mortal's safety. Roughly is considered the default - you take until you are satisfied while avoiding a masquerade threatening loss of blood that might lead back to you, like serious anemia. Brutally feeding generally means you kill your victims when you feed, but you get a great deal of blood, enough to satisfy most anyone.
Step 3: Compare.
Your Feeding Ability gives you a number that you compare as a ratio to your debt. For instance, if your debt is 30, and your Ability is 9, and you feed roughly (2x) your Feeding Pool is 18. 18 divided by 30 is .6 or 60%. You have 60% of your total blood. Apply that to your maximum blood pool by Generation, round up. For a 9th Gen vampire with 14 blood, that is 8.4, round up to 9 blood.
9 Blood per game on Saturdays. That number stays the same, every week unless something changes. These are given to you in your Player Folder as red blood tickets, and also blue willpower tickets. These will help you track your expenditures. When you leave game, you put your unused blood back in your folder.
Bonuses and Modifiers
There are a number of things that can help out this total.
Herd - Every dot of Herd gives you one more blood at game, added on to your total. Herd is by far the most effective way to fix any blood shortage. In the above example, if the vampire had Herd 5, that 9 Blood would become 14 blood, their generational maximum. Any blood that takes you over your maximum, either with Herd or otherwise, can be given to you as an item card. You can sell this blood to other vampires, organically by sharing your feasts, or hooking people up with your herd in communal feeding. You can sell this for boons, or favors, or just to get them dependant on your help. All of this stimulates the boon economy and politics, and also allows for a sense of teamwork amongst allies.
Fame - Long infamously a useless background, Fame has a new use in the Influence system, but also helps with feeding. Every dot of Fame adds to your original Feeding Dice pool that gets multiplied by feeding style. This encourages the use of this background which is rich in story and encourages a lot of interactions that might get neglected and another reason to get into Influences.
Domain - If the Domain you are feeding in has special modifiers (which you'll see more of in the Domain system, which uses tags) A domain with the Nightlife tag is much easier to feed in, adding +4 to your dicepool. A domain with High Crime is more difficult to feed in, -2 to feeding. Managing domains and what sorts of attributes they have becomes an important role your vampire plays in the Emerald Domain. Certain territories will have desirable characteristics that vampires will want to politic over to get for their clan. Others will use influences to get the traits they want in their home territory, while making conflict and story by taking tags from other areas. Not every area can have Nightlife, and you can start a Riot in your rival's neighborhood, making it harder to feed while making masquerade risks easier to hide.
Merits and Flaws - Wherever possible, we will use the exact text of a feeding related merit or flaw, and other mechanics from the game such as Humanity social caps with mortals. Luckily, most of them work just fine with this system! Efficient Digestion will give 50% more blood, Eerie Presence gives a +2 Dif on your social feeding pools (if you go that way, the standard starting dif is 6) and so on. Some things are more easily used as forcing certain options into use, like for instance, Conspicuous Consumption would require you to feed Brutally, the Giovanni Clan flaw requires that you can't feed Gently, etc.
What if I am still not happy with my total?
Part of this is that you should realize that you don't HAVE to be at full blood all the time. Most players rarely ever spend a single blood point at game, so even if they had very little blood it wouldn't have mattered much. Failing that, you have two options -
Change the way you feed to something more advantageous, including feeding more harshly than you previously were.
You hear about these vampires in the fiction who are new embraces and are reckless, feeding in risky ways that brings the attention of their elders. Ever stop to think that you might be one of them, or at least that some people in the city might fit that description? If you are bad at feeding, the simplest way to make up the difference is to feed more brutally. The humanity suffers, but the beast is happy. That is good personal story, knowing that the hunger you feel on a nightly basis could be abated if you just took it out on the mortals and gave into the beast and lost humanity. Its another reason to lose humanity, and another way to add depth of conflict and angst to your personal story if humanity is something your character cares about.
You have one other option. We call it "Pushing the Envelope." Pushing the envelope means you are feeding in an effective but risky fashion. Maybe you are going house by house in the same neighborhood feeding, or you are taking a lot more than normal, or not super worried about the traffic camera at the intersection where you grab someone, or even just obviously using supernatural powers to make your feeding more effective. Any time you want more blood, you can go to paper table and say you are pushing the envelope. We will immediately and happily give you full blood and send you on your way. Your name will also be entered into a drawing of sorts. Every game ONE person who pushed the envelope will be randomly selected to run a scene where something bad happens, feeding gone wrong. If you are a Tremere using it to get 60 blood, you need to enter your name multiple times.
Retention
One last part - The amount of blood you spend at game matters too. If you are given 10 blood at game, spend 4 on Celerity and put the remaining 6 blood back in the folder, that missing 4 gets added to your Blood Debt for the remainder of the month. Your debt goes from say, 30 to 34, and things are recalculated based on that. It goes the same way the other direction, if you gobble down a bunch of blood in a scene, that gets subtracted. Same thing with mid week spends, such as healing aggravated damage.
What this means is that Thaumaturgy is now balanced. Thaum is always talked about in the material to be a power of versatility, not overwhelming power, and in tabletop where the storyteller has more control over the blood supply, it works out that way...but in LARP with a functionally unlimited blood supply, there is no reason to use every power every time. Summon some platemail, harden it with transmutation, why not? The more Thaum you have the more you can combine for power. You can do that now, but you have to make the decision about whether it is worth it and when. Thaum becomes more like a keyring with the right key to many doors than a sledgehammer that no door can possibly stop. Back to versatility.
Other things matter more too, like how currently, unless you were killed by Aggravated damage, there's no reason it shouldn't all be healed next week. It actually takes a phenomenal amount of blood to heal Agg. Healing 5 Agg takes 25 blood, compared to the 30 you are spending on average. Aggravated damage might actually stick around and be healed over time, which is how it was intended to be.
Results
This system is designed to make you feel like a vampire. When you have to think about the people you are forced to kill to get by, and how you do it, and really understand why, that happens. Feeling like a vampire rather than a politician with super powers is a really worthwhile thing to strive for in a game about trying to get into the head space of a vampire. In some ways, this is the most important goal of this or any other system.
It has ways to make combat more balanced, as well as more interesting for people with competitive mindsets who like rules and action. The game is designed to have blood costs of powers be a balancing factor. Having unlimited blood automatically means the game is out of balance and certain powers are just better than others in a way the designers didn't intend. This goes a long way to repair that.
It also makes ways for savvy characters who are careful to either indebt others to them with their blood resources or help their friends be more powerful in a way that was never possible before. More tools for social interaction and more things to barter for in diplomacy.
Domains, and because of that, the city of Seattle at large gets more characterization and thus more interesting. The city itself gets a little more real and alive, and you vampires who control and steward it have real ways to do that, and real rewards for doing it.
Darkness. A lot of people say that a storyteller's job is to make the World of Darkness dark. I've never really liked the idea, personally, that random acts of cruelty from the universe to you was the job of the ST. In my mind, making the world a realistic place gives the World of Darkness all the darkness it needs. Realism helps set the dire tone of this setting, and makes all your choices and triumphs matter more, making the game more immersive and rewarding. A system where Vampires have to fight, politic and worry about blood is all part of making the Vampire experience come alive - and that, is the the real job of your Storytelling staff.
Thanks very much. We will be open for questions. We are penciling in the vote for November 10th.
Your Vampire the Masquerade Storytelling Staff
Staff would like to change the feeding system. Blood is the very essence of everything that drives the Jyhad. How do we feed on mortals, how do we say who can and cant? How do we maintain our control over them as they get smarter and better armed? Supposedly, the Second Tradition is just about feeding area, but from it the whole of the Camarilla's authority base and the power of Princes is derived. Blood is so important. It informs every decision vampires make. The Domain lines in a region are the truest statement of which clans have real power over the city and her politics, because blood is power. Blood is the only power. Neonates and anarchs scrape by in alleyways making it work while powerful kindred sip gently from crystal glasses looking down, secure in their power and the stability of their station.
The beast is always calling, never satisfied. When you call to your blood, you think about what you are doing, what you are giving it, because the more you call upon that dark power, the closer you slip to wild rage and feral evil. Always walking that line between man and beast, feeling the weight of your vampire hungers on your conscience as you try to be a good man while violently taking what you want from an unwilling body, struggling with the idea that you are the worst kind of rapist.
Does that seem like the game we play?
We have a new system to propose that can help push these themes. The new system has some objectives. The first is to make you feel like a vampire. To make you care about blood and think about blood. The second is to make blood an actual finite resource that you have to think about spending. This balances a lot of things people feel are very powerful, like Thaum. Thaum actually doesn't have to be as overpowered as it becomes in a LARP setting like this one. It's only so powerful when Tremere can use it with impunity because blood is plentiful. When you are able to use every single Thaum power you have, all the time, just because you have it, Thaum is amazingly powerful. If you have to make intelligent decisions about what you do and how often, it becomes a power of versatility, not super-at-everything. It brings a lot more interesting choices to every combat, cause that's the place where Blood really matters. This is good for people who like combat, powers and action.
Another objective is to make people care about Domain and taking care of the place they feed. Feeding in a good area can be critical now, and people have more than just a token pride reason to care. This promotes more awareness of the setting and the ability to tell more stories about Seattle, rather than just one building in Seattle, the Elysium. That's good for those people who like to chase plot.
What this means is that blood won't be plentiful for everyone. There will be haves and have nots. There will be clever or careful vampires who have all they need and more, and they can sell the rights to their rich harvest to those who are in need to exploit them. One could gain a lot of political favors that way, or make important people rely on them in a way that is currently impossible. That's good for the politics part of the game too.
It also makes the Herd background pretty worthwhile, for the record.
It's not that something is really, really WRONG with the current Feeding system. It just isn't adding much either, compared to what we could be doing. In canon, the need for blood is basically the thing that spawns the entire Jyhad and the entire metaplot. We've got a system that can put all those aspects into play, and manages to do that without it being a giant math headache.
The first thing I want to warn you about is that it will make the game harder. For blood to matter, enter into decision making, have a stake in the game, it needs to be something of a finite resource. Right now it isn't, and people have become used to that. You'll have to get used to the idea that not every character will have full blood all the time.
Secondly, it is going to look like a lot of math at first. There actually isn't as much as it seems, but you as a player will not have to do any of the math in question. This will all be done for you by staff and the numbers won't change very often. This system will generally leave you with a specific amount of blood you start game with each Saturday, and it will only change if the way you feed changes or you get better at that. We will gladly help you understand the math so you can make decisions about it, but there isn't any math to worry about on a game to game basis - it'll all be handled by spreadsheet by staff.
Blood Debt Feeding System
Step 1: Determine your Blood Debt.
Your blood debt is the amount of blood you spend in a month. For most people, this will be 30, the amount of blood spent to wake up each day. For some, this will be higher. If you have a flaw that causes you to spend more blood, such as Stigmata, Parasitic infection, etc. You may also have habits that cost blood, such as using certain Thaumaturgy, or Earth Meld as your Haven each night, which costs a blood. Each ghoul also costs 1 blood per month to maintain.
Step 2: Feeding Pool
When you prey on mortals, how do you feed? Seduction? Mugging? Internet dating?
--Choose a dice pool that makes sense for your feeding style, one attribute, one ability. Almost anything can work here if you are creative.
How roughly do you feed?
Gently (1x, Humanity 9) , Roughly (2x, Humanity 6), Brutally (4x, Humanity 3), Animals only (0.5x)
This acts as a multiplier to your dice pool. The rougher you feed, the more blood you get, but it can hurt your humanity. If your humanity is too high for the way you feed, you make a Conscience check each game you feed that way. Gently means you take the minimum necessary with great care for the mortal's safety. Roughly is considered the default - you take until you are satisfied while avoiding a masquerade threatening loss of blood that might lead back to you, like serious anemia. Brutally feeding generally means you kill your victims when you feed, but you get a great deal of blood, enough to satisfy most anyone.
Step 3: Compare.
Your Feeding Ability gives you a number that you compare as a ratio to your debt. For instance, if your debt is 30, and your Ability is 9, and you feed roughly (2x) your Feeding Pool is 18. 18 divided by 30 is .6 or 60%. You have 60% of your total blood. Apply that to your maximum blood pool by Generation, round up. For a 9th Gen vampire with 14 blood, that is 8.4, round up to 9 blood.
9 Blood per game on Saturdays. That number stays the same, every week unless something changes. These are given to you in your Player Folder as red blood tickets, and also blue willpower tickets. These will help you track your expenditures. When you leave game, you put your unused blood back in your folder.
Bonuses and Modifiers
There are a number of things that can help out this total.
Herd - Every dot of Herd gives you one more blood at game, added on to your total. Herd is by far the most effective way to fix any blood shortage. In the above example, if the vampire had Herd 5, that 9 Blood would become 14 blood, their generational maximum. Any blood that takes you over your maximum, either with Herd or otherwise, can be given to you as an item card. You can sell this blood to other vampires, organically by sharing your feasts, or hooking people up with your herd in communal feeding. You can sell this for boons, or favors, or just to get them dependant on your help. All of this stimulates the boon economy and politics, and also allows for a sense of teamwork amongst allies.
Fame - Long infamously a useless background, Fame has a new use in the Influence system, but also helps with feeding. Every dot of Fame adds to your original Feeding Dice pool that gets multiplied by feeding style. This encourages the use of this background which is rich in story and encourages a lot of interactions that might get neglected and another reason to get into Influences.
Domain - If the Domain you are feeding in has special modifiers (which you'll see more of in the Domain system, which uses tags) A domain with the Nightlife tag is much easier to feed in, adding +4 to your dicepool. A domain with High Crime is more difficult to feed in, -2 to feeding. Managing domains and what sorts of attributes they have becomes an important role your vampire plays in the Emerald Domain. Certain territories will have desirable characteristics that vampires will want to politic over to get for their clan. Others will use influences to get the traits they want in their home territory, while making conflict and story by taking tags from other areas. Not every area can have Nightlife, and you can start a Riot in your rival's neighborhood, making it harder to feed while making masquerade risks easier to hide.
Merits and Flaws - Wherever possible, we will use the exact text of a feeding related merit or flaw, and other mechanics from the game such as Humanity social caps with mortals. Luckily, most of them work just fine with this system! Efficient Digestion will give 50% more blood, Eerie Presence gives a +2 Dif on your social feeding pools (if you go that way, the standard starting dif is 6) and so on. Some things are more easily used as forcing certain options into use, like for instance, Conspicuous Consumption would require you to feed Brutally, the Giovanni Clan flaw requires that you can't feed Gently, etc.
What if I am still not happy with my total?
Part of this is that you should realize that you don't HAVE to be at full blood all the time. Most players rarely ever spend a single blood point at game, so even if they had very little blood it wouldn't have mattered much. Failing that, you have two options -
Change the way you feed to something more advantageous, including feeding more harshly than you previously were.
You hear about these vampires in the fiction who are new embraces and are reckless, feeding in risky ways that brings the attention of their elders. Ever stop to think that you might be one of them, or at least that some people in the city might fit that description? If you are bad at feeding, the simplest way to make up the difference is to feed more brutally. The humanity suffers, but the beast is happy. That is good personal story, knowing that the hunger you feel on a nightly basis could be abated if you just took it out on the mortals and gave into the beast and lost humanity. Its another reason to lose humanity, and another way to add depth of conflict and angst to your personal story if humanity is something your character cares about.
You have one other option. We call it "Pushing the Envelope." Pushing the envelope means you are feeding in an effective but risky fashion. Maybe you are going house by house in the same neighborhood feeding, or you are taking a lot more than normal, or not super worried about the traffic camera at the intersection where you grab someone, or even just obviously using supernatural powers to make your feeding more effective. Any time you want more blood, you can go to paper table and say you are pushing the envelope. We will immediately and happily give you full blood and send you on your way. Your name will also be entered into a drawing of sorts. Every game ONE person who pushed the envelope will be randomly selected to run a scene where something bad happens, feeding gone wrong. If you are a Tremere using it to get 60 blood, you need to enter your name multiple times.
Retention
One last part - The amount of blood you spend at game matters too. If you are given 10 blood at game, spend 4 on Celerity and put the remaining 6 blood back in the folder, that missing 4 gets added to your Blood Debt for the remainder of the month. Your debt goes from say, 30 to 34, and things are recalculated based on that. It goes the same way the other direction, if you gobble down a bunch of blood in a scene, that gets subtracted. Same thing with mid week spends, such as healing aggravated damage.
What this means is that Thaumaturgy is now balanced. Thaum is always talked about in the material to be a power of versatility, not overwhelming power, and in tabletop where the storyteller has more control over the blood supply, it works out that way...but in LARP with a functionally unlimited blood supply, there is no reason to use every power every time. Summon some platemail, harden it with transmutation, why not? The more Thaum you have the more you can combine for power. You can do that now, but you have to make the decision about whether it is worth it and when. Thaum becomes more like a keyring with the right key to many doors than a sledgehammer that no door can possibly stop. Back to versatility.
Other things matter more too, like how currently, unless you were killed by Aggravated damage, there's no reason it shouldn't all be healed next week. It actually takes a phenomenal amount of blood to heal Agg. Healing 5 Agg takes 25 blood, compared to the 30 you are spending on average. Aggravated damage might actually stick around and be healed over time, which is how it was intended to be.
Results
This system is designed to make you feel like a vampire. When you have to think about the people you are forced to kill to get by, and how you do it, and really understand why, that happens. Feeling like a vampire rather than a politician with super powers is a really worthwhile thing to strive for in a game about trying to get into the head space of a vampire. In some ways, this is the most important goal of this or any other system.
It has ways to make combat more balanced, as well as more interesting for people with competitive mindsets who like rules and action. The game is designed to have blood costs of powers be a balancing factor. Having unlimited blood automatically means the game is out of balance and certain powers are just better than others in a way the designers didn't intend. This goes a long way to repair that.
It also makes ways for savvy characters who are careful to either indebt others to them with their blood resources or help their friends be more powerful in a way that was never possible before. More tools for social interaction and more things to barter for in diplomacy.
Domains, and because of that, the city of Seattle at large gets more characterization and thus more interesting. The city itself gets a little more real and alive, and you vampires who control and steward it have real ways to do that, and real rewards for doing it.
Darkness. A lot of people say that a storyteller's job is to make the World of Darkness dark. I've never really liked the idea, personally, that random acts of cruelty from the universe to you was the job of the ST. In my mind, making the world a realistic place gives the World of Darkness all the darkness it needs. Realism helps set the dire tone of this setting, and makes all your choices and triumphs matter more, making the game more immersive and rewarding. A system where Vampires have to fight, politic and worry about blood is all part of making the Vampire experience come alive - and that, is the the real job of your Storytelling staff.
Thanks very much. We will be open for questions. We are penciling in the vote for November 10th.
Your Vampire the Masquerade Storytelling Staff