DGA: The Inside Thoughts on Concept
May 16, 2015 13:44:48 GMT -8
Barnaby Cuthbert, Blake Sterling Jr., and 1 more like this
Post by Magic Rob on May 16, 2015 13:44:48 GMT -8
Since we’ve taken over and reset pretty much everything from how the game used to run, we’ve had a few questions from players. It’s understandable; everything is new. Most things seem pretty easily explained. Mechanics tend to be straight forward, and we’ve brought pretty much everything back to book basics. There are a few things that haven’t been easily explained, however, and a lot of those have been or are being addressed in our podcasts. There is one item though that just keeps coming up: Concept Rarity.
It’s perfectly understandable how people might find this one a bit confusing. After all, it’s not really covered in any of the books (at least directly). It may seem a bit arbitrary when Staff denies a thing, and sometimes that stings a little. The purpose of this DGA is to explain why the Concept Rarity bead is a thing, how it can be used, and a rough idea for how Staff evaluates an item for Concept.
The primary purpose of the Concept pull is to defend canon and remove favoritism from the character creation process. Everyone has played in a game where there were Salubri and Gargoyles and Old Clan Tzimisce slinging around kuldonic sorcery. That’s all well and good, and some of those games are even great. Those games have elected to interpret canon in a different manner than we are, and are enforcing it in a different way. In order to understand what it is that we are defending, we must first define what canon is in our game. We are defining Canon as the following:
• Vampire-centric- White Wolf has produced many different games over the years, and they are all designed to mingle to some degree or another. This game, however, shuns the other spheres in favor of how a city looks from the exclusive point of view of the vampires and the humans they interact with. While there may be other spheres from time to time, they are purely in the role of the antagonists.
• Camarilla City- The Camarilla mandates that all vampires adhere to their rules, yet there are several splinter groups that either aren’t precisely welcomed or have openly shunned membership. While they exist from a vampire-centric point of view, they aren’t common or readily accepted within a Camarilla city.
• Modern Nights- In canon, the past had both more diversity and more ready mingling. While movement was restricted, there wasn’t an overwriting clan bias that was universally accepted. As the Camarilla was formed and the various wars took their tolls, bloodlines either disappeared or went into deep hiding. More than any other favor, the time-frame of a game limits what is ‘common’ to a game.
With this definition of ‘canon’ in mind, and from the understanding that the start of a game must be intentionally more draconian and restrictive than a mature game, we have approved or denied all concepts to come our way. The reason we have a Concept pull is so that we don’t have to say ‘no’ to literally every person that asks to play a Lasombra. We can answer with a very polite ‘those slots are filled’ or ‘your concept bead doesn’t support such a rare concept’. Further, it prevents staff from approving concepts provided by people they may have a particular like of; everyone draws and is held to the same creation rules.
How concept is used seems like it could be clearer and I apologize for the intentional ambiguity built into the system. When I was writing this system, I considered writing a complicated mathematical matrix to represent all of the things that Concept could include. I wrote a point system for Clans/Bloodlines, for weird histories, for weird lores, for weird disciplines, and for weird items. I wrote a complicated system that took into account merits and flaws and how many characters you had submitted with weird stuff in the past. I wrote a system that accounted for what OTHER people had purchased that was outside of normal to make it more expensive for you. I wrote a system that was beautiful and intricate and completely covered everything with a numeric value and what it would mean to game. I looked it over in all its glory (it spanned over 5 pages). I marveled at how perfect an abstract it was. Then I deleted the document.
See, the problem with what EC was when we reset was a matter of scope. To play a competitive character, you had to read the main book, then the source materials, then the historical books, then the magic books. After all of that, you had to read the house rules and try to figure out how that mess interacted with what you’d just read. It was way too much. Making a character was a college level course in reading, and you weren’t ever going to know the material as well as the twinks who had already combo-d up the death vultrons of doom. As I wrote another 5+ pages explaining a single aspect of the new character creation system, I had flashbacks to that, and I destroyed utterly that math. Now it’s simple, if abstract.
You can ‘spend’ your concept on merits that we have collectively determined to be uncommon to a canon game. You can ‘spend’ your concept on clans that might not be prevalent to a canon city as we’ve defined it above. You can ‘spend’ your concept on having access to a power that your build doesn’t normally allow. Or you can ‘spend’ your concept on our consideration of other controlled elements of your story. It’s a combination of this ‘other’ category and how Rob chooses to value certain things that has caused some of these issues in the past. I’m going to list a few elements of ‘other controlled elements’ for posterity and give you my interpretation on them.
• Your Embrace- By canon, your embrace needs to have occurred by a Camarilla vampire who had permission to embrace you. You need to have spent time under his/her Accounting, and you need to have been accepted into the Camarilla as a member of its organization. Every item that isn’t a canonical embrace adds to your concept rarity by a degree.
• Lores you may know- Starting with Rare lores (or some uncommon ones) is pretty outside the scope of a typical starting vampire. Sure, there are instances of people being embraced because of their extensive knowledge of Demons, but that represents a separation from canon and needs to be accounted for in your Concept Rarity. Typically you can ask for 1-2 lores per degree of rarity you are devoting to that end.
• Important historical events- All vampires interact with history in some degree or another. Mostly, this is a pretty minor thing. However, the greater your impact, the greater you deviate from what a ‘standard’ starting vampire is. Wanting to play Augustus Caesar is understandable, but I’m not willing to entertain that as a concept without excessive rarity dedicated to that idea. The same is true for important events in history. Saying that your vampire interacted with WW2 in some way is perfectly reasonable. Saying that you were Hitler’s chief advisor needs to be accounted for. This is to ensure that others don’t have this ‘perk’ as well as making sure that not everyone is in the history books. Being a part of something that several people could have would be uncommon (acting as part of a board, for instance); being the sole tie would be rare (that guy in the history book right there).
• Character ties to potent canon NPCs- Most characters could benefit from an important tie to a canon vampire. Having your sire be the Brujah Justicar could come in handy quite a bit, wouldn’t you say? Or having your Ventrue be the favored pupil of the Ventrue Inner Council member. These sorts of things need to be limited so that they can remain interesting on your character. Some of this can be accounted for in Caste or starting boons, but the majority of this needs to be soaked up in Concept. Especially if this is a tie you are going to expect benefits from moving down your characters life. Having potent canon characters with a loose tie would be uncommon if they are within your build (a Brujah tied to a Brujah), or rare if they deviate from that build or have a particularly close bond.
• Starting with rare or controlled items- Magic items are excessively rare in vampire. We have written a system where they don’t overwhelm characters, but are still a pretty valuable perk. To have one of these on your character sheet in any capacity needs to be accounted for in your concept. Not all Brujah have magic swords, and if they did they wouldn’t be special anymore. Starting with a ‘magic’ item that grants a +1 for a non-combat pool would be uncommon. Starting with a combat item would be rare.
• Starting on a Path of Enlightenment- The Camarilla truly espouses the ability to blend into human society. Those vampires that elect to follow a Path can never spend blood to attempt to masquerade as a human again. It is for this reason (and others) that we frown on Paths in this canon. If you are electing to play a Clan which has a Path associated with it, you may start on that path with appropriate story by increasing your Concept Rarity by a degree (minimum of Uncommon). Starting on any other path is considered quite Rare. Likewise, finding teachings in play for these sorts of thing is as difficult as this scale (Example: An Assamite looking for a teacher for Path of Blood would have some difficulty finding it, but could given time. Finding a teacher for Path of Feral Heart would be substantially more difficult).
• Side-stepping flaws- Some of the things that you want to have in your history will have given you Flaws. If you take these flaws, you can generally assume that you have not made your character any Rarer than they would have been if you’d omitted those elements from your history. For example: If you want your character to have been embraced by the Sabbat (a deviation from accepted Canon), but you take the Probationary Sect Member flaw, it is assumed that your concept is once more fairly standard. However, if you want this to have been a thing you got yourself out of long ago, you are trying to work the system in some way. The character is benefiting from a rarer story without having to pay for that rarity. If everyone can have this in their past, it starts to lose any sort of significance. The same could be applied to Caste flaws or other flaws that SHOULD be a part of your background that you are skillfully skirting. Sidestepping a 3-4 pnt flaw(s) would be something uncommon. Sidestepping more would be Rare.
Alright, so now we’ve listed why we have Concept beads and how they are roughly assigned value. So how do you spend your concept on something that isn’t as binary as a limited Merit? That’s not as complicated as you might think. First, you write your character sheet and history as you normally would. Be sure to highlight anything that you think is of particular interest to staff or might be a thing you’d like to come up down the road. Submit the character for approval. Most of the time when players submit a character, they have some sort of idea for what would be *really* interesting for them to play. Those items are what Concept accounts for. Ask yourself the following questions:
• Is my character a relatively new embrace from a parent Clan of the Camarilla?
• Do I want or need any particular merit to make this work?
• Does my ‘concept’ (meaning that one or two sentence synapsis of what your character SHOULD be) deviate from normal as Staff has defined above?
• Are there historical elements of my character that I’d like to have, but Staff might frown on?
• If I were the approving Staff for this sheet, what would give me the greatest moment of pause?
Staff isn’t out to get you, and we earnestly want to work with your concept. We just need to safeguard that the things that make your character unique and special remain unique and special. Sometimes you might have a thing that you want that staff hasn’t previously addressed; please bring it up. Sometimes you might want to link a few things into your concept. Staff will work with you to what degree we can to ensure that those elements are approved for play. Honestly, concept is a dialog between staff and the player for what you want to play and what we want to see populate the city. Don’t be shy, and feel free to ask me questions about this topic. It’s not cut and dry, and I am certain the most keenly aware of that fact.
Cheers!
-Rob.
It’s perfectly understandable how people might find this one a bit confusing. After all, it’s not really covered in any of the books (at least directly). It may seem a bit arbitrary when Staff denies a thing, and sometimes that stings a little. The purpose of this DGA is to explain why the Concept Rarity bead is a thing, how it can be used, and a rough idea for how Staff evaluates an item for Concept.
The primary purpose of the Concept pull is to defend canon and remove favoritism from the character creation process. Everyone has played in a game where there were Salubri and Gargoyles and Old Clan Tzimisce slinging around kuldonic sorcery. That’s all well and good, and some of those games are even great. Those games have elected to interpret canon in a different manner than we are, and are enforcing it in a different way. In order to understand what it is that we are defending, we must first define what canon is in our game. We are defining Canon as the following:
• Vampire-centric- White Wolf has produced many different games over the years, and they are all designed to mingle to some degree or another. This game, however, shuns the other spheres in favor of how a city looks from the exclusive point of view of the vampires and the humans they interact with. While there may be other spheres from time to time, they are purely in the role of the antagonists.
• Camarilla City- The Camarilla mandates that all vampires adhere to their rules, yet there are several splinter groups that either aren’t precisely welcomed or have openly shunned membership. While they exist from a vampire-centric point of view, they aren’t common or readily accepted within a Camarilla city.
• Modern Nights- In canon, the past had both more diversity and more ready mingling. While movement was restricted, there wasn’t an overwriting clan bias that was universally accepted. As the Camarilla was formed and the various wars took their tolls, bloodlines either disappeared or went into deep hiding. More than any other favor, the time-frame of a game limits what is ‘common’ to a game.
With this definition of ‘canon’ in mind, and from the understanding that the start of a game must be intentionally more draconian and restrictive than a mature game, we have approved or denied all concepts to come our way. The reason we have a Concept pull is so that we don’t have to say ‘no’ to literally every person that asks to play a Lasombra. We can answer with a very polite ‘those slots are filled’ or ‘your concept bead doesn’t support such a rare concept’. Further, it prevents staff from approving concepts provided by people they may have a particular like of; everyone draws and is held to the same creation rules.
How concept is used seems like it could be clearer and I apologize for the intentional ambiguity built into the system. When I was writing this system, I considered writing a complicated mathematical matrix to represent all of the things that Concept could include. I wrote a point system for Clans/Bloodlines, for weird histories, for weird lores, for weird disciplines, and for weird items. I wrote a complicated system that took into account merits and flaws and how many characters you had submitted with weird stuff in the past. I wrote a system that accounted for what OTHER people had purchased that was outside of normal to make it more expensive for you. I wrote a system that was beautiful and intricate and completely covered everything with a numeric value and what it would mean to game. I looked it over in all its glory (it spanned over 5 pages). I marveled at how perfect an abstract it was. Then I deleted the document.
See, the problem with what EC was when we reset was a matter of scope. To play a competitive character, you had to read the main book, then the source materials, then the historical books, then the magic books. After all of that, you had to read the house rules and try to figure out how that mess interacted with what you’d just read. It was way too much. Making a character was a college level course in reading, and you weren’t ever going to know the material as well as the twinks who had already combo-d up the death vultrons of doom. As I wrote another 5+ pages explaining a single aspect of the new character creation system, I had flashbacks to that, and I destroyed utterly that math. Now it’s simple, if abstract.
You can ‘spend’ your concept on merits that we have collectively determined to be uncommon to a canon game. You can ‘spend’ your concept on clans that might not be prevalent to a canon city as we’ve defined it above. You can ‘spend’ your concept on having access to a power that your build doesn’t normally allow. Or you can ‘spend’ your concept on our consideration of other controlled elements of your story. It’s a combination of this ‘other’ category and how Rob chooses to value certain things that has caused some of these issues in the past. I’m going to list a few elements of ‘other controlled elements’ for posterity and give you my interpretation on them.
• Your Embrace- By canon, your embrace needs to have occurred by a Camarilla vampire who had permission to embrace you. You need to have spent time under his/her Accounting, and you need to have been accepted into the Camarilla as a member of its organization. Every item that isn’t a canonical embrace adds to your concept rarity by a degree.
• Lores you may know- Starting with Rare lores (or some uncommon ones) is pretty outside the scope of a typical starting vampire. Sure, there are instances of people being embraced because of their extensive knowledge of Demons, but that represents a separation from canon and needs to be accounted for in your Concept Rarity. Typically you can ask for 1-2 lores per degree of rarity you are devoting to that end.
• Important historical events- All vampires interact with history in some degree or another. Mostly, this is a pretty minor thing. However, the greater your impact, the greater you deviate from what a ‘standard’ starting vampire is. Wanting to play Augustus Caesar is understandable, but I’m not willing to entertain that as a concept without excessive rarity dedicated to that idea. The same is true for important events in history. Saying that your vampire interacted with WW2 in some way is perfectly reasonable. Saying that you were Hitler’s chief advisor needs to be accounted for. This is to ensure that others don’t have this ‘perk’ as well as making sure that not everyone is in the history books. Being a part of something that several people could have would be uncommon (acting as part of a board, for instance); being the sole tie would be rare (that guy in the history book right there).
• Character ties to potent canon NPCs- Most characters could benefit from an important tie to a canon vampire. Having your sire be the Brujah Justicar could come in handy quite a bit, wouldn’t you say? Or having your Ventrue be the favored pupil of the Ventrue Inner Council member. These sorts of things need to be limited so that they can remain interesting on your character. Some of this can be accounted for in Caste or starting boons, but the majority of this needs to be soaked up in Concept. Especially if this is a tie you are going to expect benefits from moving down your characters life. Having potent canon characters with a loose tie would be uncommon if they are within your build (a Brujah tied to a Brujah), or rare if they deviate from that build or have a particularly close bond.
• Starting with rare or controlled items- Magic items are excessively rare in vampire. We have written a system where they don’t overwhelm characters, but are still a pretty valuable perk. To have one of these on your character sheet in any capacity needs to be accounted for in your concept. Not all Brujah have magic swords, and if they did they wouldn’t be special anymore. Starting with a ‘magic’ item that grants a +1 for a non-combat pool would be uncommon. Starting with a combat item would be rare.
• Starting on a Path of Enlightenment- The Camarilla truly espouses the ability to blend into human society. Those vampires that elect to follow a Path can never spend blood to attempt to masquerade as a human again. It is for this reason (and others) that we frown on Paths in this canon. If you are electing to play a Clan which has a Path associated with it, you may start on that path with appropriate story by increasing your Concept Rarity by a degree (minimum of Uncommon). Starting on any other path is considered quite Rare. Likewise, finding teachings in play for these sorts of thing is as difficult as this scale (Example: An Assamite looking for a teacher for Path of Blood would have some difficulty finding it, but could given time. Finding a teacher for Path of Feral Heart would be substantially more difficult).
• Side-stepping flaws- Some of the things that you want to have in your history will have given you Flaws. If you take these flaws, you can generally assume that you have not made your character any Rarer than they would have been if you’d omitted those elements from your history. For example: If you want your character to have been embraced by the Sabbat (a deviation from accepted Canon), but you take the Probationary Sect Member flaw, it is assumed that your concept is once more fairly standard. However, if you want this to have been a thing you got yourself out of long ago, you are trying to work the system in some way. The character is benefiting from a rarer story without having to pay for that rarity. If everyone can have this in their past, it starts to lose any sort of significance. The same could be applied to Caste flaws or other flaws that SHOULD be a part of your background that you are skillfully skirting. Sidestepping a 3-4 pnt flaw(s) would be something uncommon. Sidestepping more would be Rare.
Alright, so now we’ve listed why we have Concept beads and how they are roughly assigned value. So how do you spend your concept on something that isn’t as binary as a limited Merit? That’s not as complicated as you might think. First, you write your character sheet and history as you normally would. Be sure to highlight anything that you think is of particular interest to staff or might be a thing you’d like to come up down the road. Submit the character for approval. Most of the time when players submit a character, they have some sort of idea for what would be *really* interesting for them to play. Those items are what Concept accounts for. Ask yourself the following questions:
• Is my character a relatively new embrace from a parent Clan of the Camarilla?
• Do I want or need any particular merit to make this work?
• Does my ‘concept’ (meaning that one or two sentence synapsis of what your character SHOULD be) deviate from normal as Staff has defined above?
• Are there historical elements of my character that I’d like to have, but Staff might frown on?
• If I were the approving Staff for this sheet, what would give me the greatest moment of pause?
Staff isn’t out to get you, and we earnestly want to work with your concept. We just need to safeguard that the things that make your character unique and special remain unique and special. Sometimes you might have a thing that you want that staff hasn’t previously addressed; please bring it up. Sometimes you might want to link a few things into your concept. Staff will work with you to what degree we can to ensure that those elements are approved for play. Honestly, concept is a dialog between staff and the player for what you want to play and what we want to see populate the city. Don’t be shy, and feel free to ask me questions about this topic. It’s not cut and dry, and I am certain the most keenly aware of that fact.
Cheers!
-Rob.