HST Josh: Mk II (Reset Platform)

[Josh]

Hello everyone I wanted to let you all know that I will be running for HST come elections this August.

First and foremost this thread is less the Q&A thread and more of a way for my Staff to make their introductions.

I will be setting up a Q&A thread for my platform or if you want to post questions on the forums I will answer those as well.

That being said I will introduce myself:

My name is Josh. I have been playing at ECC since May 2007. I have played for the most part in the Vampire Sphere. I did take a break and play in Werewolf for a spell. While at Werewolf I served a year as an AST where I was in charge of the Umbra. Additionally served time as an AST of Changeling for about 6 months through the tail end of a staff.

As a player I have been a Rules Advocate for about 6 years and Player Advocate for about 2 years. I have worked with many staffs in arbitration and mitigation of some very stressful, tense, and sensitive situations both IC and OOC. When it comes to conflict and difficulty I am generally unflappable. I believe transparency as a requirement for staff and a thing to encourage among players. As a community and as friends I have a desire to transition the game from less of an "us versus them" mentality and move toward Staff as facilitators. I see a staff where if you approach your issue, plot, or NPC with the mentality of how do I "beat" them or "win" you will only entreat confused looks from us as we awkwardly ask how we can HELP you. What can we do as administrators to help you enjoy the game? Do you need someone to run that scene, questions about how the world would react or what you know, or maybe you just want to know how to best accomplish your goals and what dots might get you there we have answers to help you with that.

Staff is not an entity to put yourself at odds with, they are present to aid you in your endeavors and enjoyment of the game.

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I would like to leave this thread available to my ASTs to introduce themselves, their experience, and perhaps some of their philosophy as to how they see games run.

If you do have questions for me, or us, in regards to this thread please start a new thread and I/we will hop on and respond to such.

Thanks!

[The Mouth]

I already have questions. When will your platform be up and running?

[Taibelina]

Hello, all!

I'm the infamous Taibelina Suarez <3

I've been attending game since 2007. In that time I've served the game however I could, and the Community is a huge part of my life <3

I've served on several staffs, I've been a PA for 4 years, and a Narrator for 2 years. I've participated in the last three Haunted Houses, serving last year as the Producer. The last two years I've spent as an NOTR officer, and was elected this year to replace Kaine (we'll miss you!) as NOTR President.

My goal is to maintain organization of emails and characters, to not only avoid the frustrations of unreasonable delays but also to create great stories that tie into each other and generate excellent roleplay opportunities between players.

Feel free to IM me or see me at game if you have any questions on how I intend to do this, or anything else. Thanks! <3

(Ben, I'd start a new thread. Josh will see it and be happy to answer, or you could hit him up on IM or at game )

-Taibelina
xoxo

[Dimitri Vasilescu]

So, this is Tate, the current player of Jibran, which is what I have done entirely at my year and a half with ECC. Of course, I've spent years with tabletop, and have been familiar with Vampire, specifically, since the mid 90s like many of you. My storytelling experience comes from other games, but I bring a heavy helping of experience with people.

Professionally, I have managed groups of people for 10 years, and it has leaked into a lot of how I handle leading groups of people in games.

In the recreational, I also moderated hundreds of people for the video game publishing company Agetec for four years, and did the same for thousands on a fan website for three years.

Educationally, I bring knowledge of history and research to assist in bringing Seattle and the Emerald Domain to life, and assist in giving characters roots as they develop in the new story.

In regards to how storytelling should go, I think that characters should feel as though they have an impact, one way or another, and the world should react to them. I also believe that players should have to make choices, sometimes difficult ones, but ones that contribute to character development. Above all, however, is that everyone has fun.

[AST Jenne/Cullodena Duff]

Hi everyone, it's Jenne Walker-Suoja. I've been attending ECC for about a year and a half, and you've seen me as the Nosferatu Moira, the Malkavian Paris, and the Toreador Lily Carver, along with about four months I spent on staff. I have been a PA and a narrator as well.

With relevancy, I have worked in management for 10 years, been playing tabletop games for 15 years, and have been writing fiction since I was five. I consider myself a very good story teller, and while my time on staff was largely administrative, I would love to get to tell your story.

I want to bring to life an immersive world for your characters that is both challenging and engaging while keeping in mind that we are all here to enjoy a side of ourselves we don't often get to.

I look forward to bringing my analytical mind, creativity, organization and integrity to Josh's staff

[Barnaby Cuthbert]

Hi folks,

Chris Schetzle here. I've been at ECC since before it was called that (I remember because I made up the name myself!). I've run this LARP as HST twice, run about a buhjillion tabletop games in various systems (including a superhero game that has been running going on nine years now). I have a theatre background, a solid grasp on rules and common sense calls and I like to go back to the books. I do voices, I sing, I'm a terrible dancer, but I never let that stop me.

Six Important Things:

IMPORTANT THING ONE: Why I'm doing this as an AST under Josh: I'm not running as HST myself this time around because I have a lot of real life stuff going on, job, travels & other adulty-type things, but it's important to me, this community and this game specifically, and I'd like to contribute to, a fine quality End Of Days story that draws in individual character agency and goals and gives characters a real say in the way our beloved and twisted world dies a gasping, brutal, Shakespearian death. I want your characters as the antagonists and anti-heroes that shape the way the world ends. I also have experience heading up a reset, so I'd like to try to remove and smooth out some of the pain points that can surround it, both for Josh, and the community I care about. That said, I consider myself Josh's employee. I'm both willing and able to subsume and hone my vision to fit his. I've played under his storytelling before and I trust his judgement.

IMPORTANT THINGS 2 & 3: Why Josh is hiring me. He wants me to present creatively descriptive scenes for any scenes I might story-tell and help create some technology options that make it easy for the layman to get involved and get started.

IMPORTANT THINGS 4 & 5: What I'll mostly be doing. Step one, completely re-vamp the website from top to bottom. That's hundreds of hours. This means implementing a much more slimmed-down set of house rules (likely pure V20 rules). This means all side-systems will come under review, such as crafts, influences, businesses, etc. with a focus on simplicity and functionality. Folks should be able to count on an edge for their investment in any of these, but I hope to slim the margins a little more.

I'll run individual scenes for players at games based on their backgrounds and any NPCs Josh needs to fill out character's backgrounds. I personally have no plans for any 'big' NPCs other than what exists in Enemies, Contacts, Allies and Mentors, I consider myself a 'paid' actor. I'll toss story ideas at Josh in meetings otherwise. I tend to look to run stories based on what the character is sort of geared toward. Indiana Jones Gangrel gets ruins to spelunk and research or sell info about, the Tea and Arsenic Toreador gets Guild politics to turn their nose up at and ignore or dive into, lather, rinse, repeat by Clan and concept, all driven by merits, flaws, backgrounds and the concept in general with player feedback. I anticipate a bunch of interwoven arcs with my co-storytellers leading toward the greater whole of the end of the world, then a bunch of interwoven backgrounds to restart the world. Josh has been talking about some exiting prequel vignettes that will help build Seattle history unique to the rebooted PC's, so looking forward to helping him implement that.

IMPORTANT THING 6: Call it a REFRESH. I'm invested in this community and it's had a lot of challenges in the last year or so, and a lot of those things have really nothing to do with the game per se, just a number of personal tragedies that weighed on some important hearts and minds. A refresh of this story and system should feel refreshing, not unduly burdensome or unfair. In my opinion, you should feel like you're on a level playing field with transparent rules, clear expectations and goals for your character. You should feel you're respected as a human being, whether you agree with someone about a rule or character choice or not, by all, and the STs have a right to expect the same respect. I cast zero disparaging comments on any staff sitting or prior, I commend them for their hard work and dedication. The game has hemorrhaged players for awhile now though, so I feel it's time to pull down the old house and build a new one, while the fertile land it was built on remains solid. You've got a solid batch of dedicated regulars in Josh's crew, they're each honest, friendly, hardworking folk with that glitter of creativity and verve that makes stories special and memorable. I'm proud to stand behind Josh in this endeavor, and am looking forward to setting up some traditions that will bring ECC into the next decade.

Your friend,
Chris

[Jamie of Clan Tinney]

Greetings to All and Sundry,

My name is Jamie Tinney, as I'm certain you noticed. Most of you know me, I think, or at least, know of me.

What you may not know is that I started role-playing at the age of 13, on the day I dug my father's old AD&D books out of a box in the garage and toted them to school with me. I ran a 3.5 D&D game for eight to twelve people, some of them 'adults' starting at 15 and ending at 17, the same year that I first attended ECC.

In the time since I have seen the terms of several staffs dawn and set, and I have even participated in one or two. In my time I have played straight up, core-book cammies and twisted sabbat. I've played anarchs and independents, elders, neonates, even a ghoul. I've sampled the breadth of experience available at our game.

The simple fact is, the game is too much. The game that I joined five years ago? Frankly, it was shit. I only came because I was stubborn. I spent most nights in Elysium, bored and bullshitting with my similarly bored fellows. That's not what I want from a game.

But what we have now doesn't feel right either; the world feels bipolar and Seattle is too big, too vibrant. We feel the need for a happy medium somewhere, and I do not believe that it can be done without significant rebalance. I see the prospect of a reset as an opportunity to improve our game.