Malkavian Status Tricks

[Daddy]

Ok, so I've been looking through the books and the website, and I can't find a thing about a malkavian advantage that lets you ignore status. And yes, I did check the revised MET book.

I found something about an "Old clan advantage" that lets you ignore status on the official camarilla malkavian page.

Anyway, for those of us who don't have a 2nd ed MET book, or access to an old edition of the Camarilla rule book, could we get a write up on this on the website? I'd rather not do something expecting to have an ace up my sleeve and find that it won't work in that situation.

[kevinz]

This would be interesting to find out. I have it from a player advocate that it's pretty much cut and dry. You get to ignore one person's status per night. I was, also, unable to find specifics of it but was assured it was just like that. I dont understand the logistics of it but it should be pretty interesting to see in use.

[Lady Dagger Rose]

As it was explained to me, back when this first came into effect here at EC, it's that you can ignore one person's status per night because Status works differently for Malkavians....or something of that nature. I might be wrong (so don't take this as fact), but I think it's because the Malks are insane, they are allowed one slip a night. I might be completely off base here, but that's what I seem to remember.

[Daddy]

The things I found researching on the net are a little more wide ranging than that. Here's an example:

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The Malkavian clan advantage states (in Laws of the Night) : "...any Malkavian may choose to ignore one of the following: any use of Status Traits in a Social Challenge, the loss of Status, or any of the other uses of Status. This benefit may only be evoked in a single situation and can only benefit the Malkavian personally. Any Status Trait risked in a challenge are neither lost, nor are they bid - they simply do not exist to the Malkavian". Our official interpretation : This advantage can be used once per situation. This means that once the Malkavian has activated her Clan Advantage, she is immune to any status use regarding that situation.
Example:

Prince: "Malkavian X, I hereby and forthwith among the Camarilla, do so strip you of the status of 'Honourable', for you were seen cavorting naked among mortals".

X: "Ah, you're just jealous" (Utilizes CA, clarifies out of character that she is doing so if necessary)

Prince: "But upon consideration, one doesn't expect the same sense of honor from a Malk. Never mind."

In this example, there is no net Status loss either to the Prince (since she did not succeed at the attempt) or to Malkavian X (since she used her Clan Advantage). Neither the Prince nor anyone else may turn around and say : "I said, I’m stripping you of status for cavorting!" since that is trying to strip Status for the same offense. This does not make Malkavians immune to status loss, it simply encourages new and creative (and well-thought out) uses of Status.

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So I'm wondering if we just get to ignore someone's status (ie mouth off to the seneschal), and if that's all we get, can we do it all night, or just once?

Can we ignore status in regard to a situation, so we can do something crazy and not get status stripped for it?

Does it work on other malkavians? I mean, is it based on a clan prejudice against malkavians, or is it based on a malkavian having a different paradigm, and as all malks are different they could pull it on each other.

An example situation: Daddy pulls rank on Lady Daniels. She responds by pulling out her status. Daddy chooses to ignore her status. Does this mean that between the two of them, Daddy has 5 status and Lady D has 0? Thus she must bow to his wishes (ignore another's status)? Or does it mean that Daddy's status can't be affected by his scandelous actions (negate status actions in regard to a situation)?

What I'm thinking is that it should allow you to get away with actions that would be bad for your status. A malkavian can't ignore someone's status, thus making them unacknowledged to the malkavian, but could avoid the unpleasant side effects of blowing off the seneschal as if she had no status.

[Elspeth]

*passes this one off to the vamp St's for clarification, having not played a Malk for over a year*

[Kevin K]

I don't get this clan advantage either, to be frank. Does "ignoring status" mean that they're immune to the repercussions? (I'm hoping STAdam can chime in here)

-ASTKevin

[Kenneth Ashland]

Hrm...

Anyone can choose to ignore status. It happens quite a bit, in all honesty.

The difference here is that Status traits in MET have a stricter mechanical aspect to play, if you're adhering to MET rules.

There, you can add your Status traits into the total of your Social traits in a Social challenge. Once a night, a Malk can choose to ignore Status, i.e. the opposing person cannot add their Status into the total for that challenge. It's an advantage, sometimes a great one, in that "mechanically," the 'Emperor has no clothes,' so to speak.

But ECC doesn't have such a mechanical structure for status.

If I were to add all of Kenneth's Status marks as "dice" for social tests...well, that's just cracked.

If we gave a higher/lower Diff between two people of opposing status in a Social test, that might be more fair.

Maybe in that case, a Malk could say OOC: "for this test, it's as if our status were equal," or possibly "for this one test, you have no status, so my Diff is 2," or something like that.

But I don't think "consequences" of ignoring status should as well gain immunity. This is a social game. Not everyone should, or should have to, laugh off a Malk bitching out the Prince merely cuz he's a Malk. Smart Kindred know better.

my .02

[Alex Rourke]

This is just my humble oppinion, but utilizing ANY of the MET clan advantages is uncool, because we only game one a week, rather than some LARPs who go mid-week and then weekend. Those advantages, applied to are game are waaaaaaay too easily abused.

Ok, so Malkavians can ignor status once per night in a *single situation* therefore, as I understand it, Malkavians can't "bitch out" the Prince, but they can get away with saying "Prince, you don't know what you're talking about. Shut up."

In which case the Malk player says "I'm using my clan advantage"

And the prince says something like "Normally, I'd make sure every one knew how foolish a Kindred was for saying something like that, but I suppose we can't expect the same from one of *your* line, now can we?"

I think there are limits to how far even a Malkavian can go. I also think that maybe we should apply status dots to social challenges, but only if you know IC what the satus of another person is (Which means making that Perception+Politics check) after that, social challenges work similar to majesty:

Add a number of dice to your pool equal to the amount of status you have OVER the target.

Therefore, let's say Kenneth isn't pulling rank and using his status as Harpy, so he's only got the 5 status, and he's taking on a Status 2 Kindred in say a Manipulation+Subterfuge test. Kenneth then, having 3 status higher adds an additional 3 dice to his pool.

Then if a Malkavian opts to use his clan advantage, Kenneth simply doesn't get the +3 dice.

But again I stress that a Malkavian can only do this for *one situtation.* If it gets too out of control I'd think it only fair to impliment other MET clan advantages, and some of those are just begging to be abused, for example, Ventrue get a free dot in Resources, Brujah get to ignor wound penalties, The Nos get to essentially pull Dread Gaze (And specifically to freeze an opponent with fear) and the Gangrel can automatically succeed at a hunting check or automatically gain initiative in combat. Those are pretty cracked out.

Honestly, I'd almost say that the Malkavians, if they get anything, should get the new advantage which in table top (Or our LARP) terms would mean that they get to make a percpetion check, diff 4. If this succeeds they get to ask a single yes or no question to the ST about the current situation which *must* be answered truthfully.

Just my thoughts though.

[Daddy]

Frankly, I don't think we have a choice as to whether we laugh off Malkavian faux pas. That's the clan stereotype, and the STs seem to be enforcing them. Just as no one but the Nos are allowed to take the information network background, and no one but the Ventrue are allowed to be a paragon of a background, Malks are to be underestimated.

Maybe one of the reasons that anyone can ignore status without much backlash is because our system isn't mechanical enough. We're using the MET status system, and trying to blend it with table top mechanics. Maybe if we actually blended it instead of cut and pasting it in, we'd have a better status system.

Sure, smart kindred know better than to ignore a malkavian's fuck ups just because he's crazy. Just as smart kindred ignore status because they know there's no consequences.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this rule comes from 2nd Ed, when teddy-bear-carrying-pajama-wearing-bubble-gum-popping Malks ruled the network. With revised, WW put a greater emphasis on scary malkavians, and took the power away from zany malks. They also took away the status rule.

So why do we have a single 2nd ed MET clan advantage in our game? Well, the question was posed to STAdam last weekend, and he said that it was to balance out the harshness of the malkavian disadvantage.

I didn't mean to open a can of worms here, but people have been saying that Malks can do this at this game for years, and if I'm going to play a malk, I'm going to take advantage of the resources available. And, since I've never seen this rule used, I wanted to know how it's supposed to work with Mod Dot.

And you know what, as silly as it sounds, I kind of think it makes sense. I see people ignore malkavians that try to help week after week, just because they're mad. What's so far fetched about the same people ignoring their fuck ups?

[Elspeth]

You know..I just thought of something that this would be useful for.

I'll use Majesty for an example.

Ventrue A pops Majesty. Malkavian B doesn't want to listen to him, so blows the Willpower to test to ignore Ventrue A. Normally, Ventrue A would add in his Status to the difficulty. If Malkavian B ignores the Status of Ventrue A, then he would simply be testing against the Charisma+Intimidation of Ventrue A.

Just a thought about how it could be used in our system. *wanders away again*

[Justin]

Actually it sounds pretty sound for Majesty. But I believe that using the MET satus means that a system must be implemented so that, if the Malk's are going to use their clan advantage they have a way to do it. Problem is lowering difficulties is the only way it can be used to be fair. if you use it anyother way as in using it for either automatic success or just dots then it will seem to be wow, why not buy 4 dots of status to begin with. you will see alot of new characters coming in cracked out with status. So a way to do it would be for each status you get ½ a difficult down, rounded up. I.e. you have a status 3 the normal difficulty of the act you want to do is 6 (lets say for this example you are trying to intimidate your way through a door into the alysum) your man.3 + Intimi 3 = 6 your dificulty would be 4 instead of 6 because you have 3 dots of status.

If it seems like I was rambling I am sorry about it. Also granted I don't play in the sphere either.

[Alex Rourke]

This is how I see it. I agree very much That the Malkavians aren't supposed to be cutsy baby doll Malkavians. I mean the opening line from their clan bio reads "Even other damned fear the Malkavians." Why? Because chaos follows them. Do I think the Malkavian status rule should apply? Hell no. Here's why:

Malkavians don't have a huge disadvantage. Their clan flaw is that they are all, ALL irredeemably insane. And that insanity is creepy. Very rarely have I ever seen an ST come up to a Malkavian player and say "What's your willpower? Ok, give me two tests" And then see a Malkavian's derrangement manifest. Usualy it's left to the Malkavian's player to play out that derrangement. But what happens when a Malkavian has Sanguinary Animism? Does the player just start balling or screaming shut up at the percieved voices, memories and emotions of the people he's drained? Now I'm not saying that the STs don't ever go and screw with Malkavians, but it's not often given the size of our game, I know it's not their fault, but that fact alone balances out the Malkavian weakness.

In defense of this here are a few more extreme clan weaknesses:
Setite: Double damage from sunlight, Lethal damage from the light of the full moon unless in the middle of a sweltering summer night you completely cover yourself in a long sleeved shirt, pants, hat and sunglasses. What are you some kind of freak?
Nosferatu: No appearance above 0, even with Mask of a Thousand faces it specifies that a Nos cannot raise his appearance above 2. The result of this, almost all tests based on appearance or first impressions fail automatically.
Gangrel: Frenzy and gain an animal feature, for every 5 such features, lose a dot in a social attribute (which results in wasted XP mind you). If the Animal feature is one found on Pgs. 56-58 of the revised clanbook for each ONE you lose a dot in a social attribute. That's pretty extreme.

The Malkavians can spend a point of willpower and negate, temporarily their clan flaw, the Brujah can learn meditation as a secondary skill and not have the +@ diff to resist frenzy, the Toreador can spend a willpower point and the Ventrue invest a dot or two in Herd (like they don't do that naturally anyway). But for Setites, Nosferatu and gangrel, there is no getting around that. Ok, Nos have Obfuscate, it's be ugly or don't be seen. For the other two however, there's nothing that allows them to get around that and I think if we're going to compensate the Malkavians with some cool shiny toy because they're all cracked eggs, I think we should do the same for a few clans who are worse off otherwise, we simply say, regardless of the fact that you're insane, you're still responsible for yourself, unless some one else wants to take that responsibility upon themselves.

Just my 2 cents.

[Daddy]

First, I want to say that Malkavians shouldn't be the only ones with a clan advantage. When I first heard they were given one, back when Chris was ST, I inquired about other clan advantages. I was told they were forthcoming, but the Malk one was to be used immediately. I didn't hear anything more. If anyone has a clan advantage, everyone should. The issue would be porting them from MET.

Second, if you want to discuss clan disadvantages, they're all puny except for the Tremere. They actually have an ST assigned to fucking them up 24/7.

Malkavians do a damn good job representing the disadvantage without an ST making checks with them. Arlo has two negative status traits simply because of his point of view. Jerris tells all kinds of people that he speaks to Malkav, and that doesn't do much for his credibility. Dr. Smothers is the same way with her talking to Caine. I don't see Brujah or Gangrel making frenzy checks on their own.

Speaking of ST checks, I don't see a lot of Brujah or Gangrel getting tapped on the shoulder when something embrassing happens in elysium. And they can spend willpower too. Except they don't go right back to making frenzy checks as soon as they leave the scene. Malkavians get crazy all over again.

Oh, and gangrel could use meditation too you know. Except when you actually look at the rules, it doesn't seem to help that much:

To steel your character against his Beast, roll Wits + Meditation (difficulty 10 - Self-Control rating); each success is an extra die you may use in your next roll for your character to resist frenzy. This roll can be made only once per night, and all benefits are lost when your character sleeps at the end of the night.

Oh, and you have to meditate for an hour.

If you took that to the STs, they'd tell you to start game at 11, and you'd get an easy time against your first frenzy check. I don't think it's worth the hour of game time, considering how often we make frenzy checks.

So maybe Gangrel have a hard time, if they happen to grow more than 4 features. Of course, they all pluck, shave, sand down, or cover up their features most of the time, so no one really notices. And those really bad ones? The ones that drop you one for one? Well, you can only ever get one, and it comes with special powers, so it's not really something to complain about.

And how often does appearance really come up? Only one discipline power uses it for a roll, and gangrel don't have it in clan. No one plays like appearance matters much. I should know, my character has 0. And aside from a few funny looks when he meets a new person, and a lot of annoying questions that I'm sure the nos don't have to deal with, it doesn't really do much.

Speaking of which, the nos disadvantage doesn't seem to do much either. No one shuns them that I have seen. Not even the toreador. And I can't find anything about obfuscate making people more pretty, but that doesn't matter much because we don't actually make any of those first impression rolls the nos are supposed to fail.

Settites don't have a bad disadvantage. Sure, they take double damage from sun, but I've never seen someone in our game exposed to sun in a manner in which they could escape. So it'll take a settite half as long to die. And they don't take damage from moonlight, that's the "Light Sensitive" flaw. They do loose a die to rolls while exposed to bright light. That kinda sucks.

Of course the others have it easy too. Toreador don't have STs breathing down their necks, and they can spend willpower. That's Malks, Tories, Brujah and Gangrel that can all spend willpower and ignore their flaws when STs aren't on their backs.

Ventrue can ignore their flaw unless they have to do a feeding scene. Then they're screwed. But they get the same amount of blood at the check as the rest of us. Well, they have a -1, but I understand that has something to do with influence centers.

Assamites are weird. They have castes. I won't go into it.

Giovanni have another feeding related problem. Yet again, if you don't go for a feeding scene, no problem.

And then there's Caitiff. They are spurned by society. We do a decent job of that. Except that we also adopt them into our clans, which takes a little of the edge off. I won't insult the caitiff players by saying it takes the stigma away.

Sooooo.... yeah. We're all wusses except the Tremere.

Wait.... what was it I asked originally? Oh, yeah, that's right.

STAdam told me the Malkavians have a clan advantage. It confuses me. I'd really appreciate it if he could explain how it's supposed to work.

[derrikruik]

Basically the Malkavian Disadvantage is balanced with the other clan disadvantages. Being insane does not necissarily put your characters life in danger, but in some situations it might. Same with a gangrel's or a setites or a nosferatus. It just depends on what the character does to try and work around the problem. A setite could go to bed an extra hour early every night so there is no chance of being caught out right? gangrel often live away from cities where having animal features draw no attention. Nos with out Mask LIVE in the sewers, there are ways to deal with all the clan disadvantages. It is not like the Malk disadvantage prohibits them from participating in the same things other clans can. What i am saying is that the disadvantages are just that. DISADVANTAGES, but you take the good with the bad, the system isn't broken, and if on clan has an "advantage" all clans should because there are advantages to being a gangrel (though my character would argue with me) there are advantages to being any clan, and balance is really what should be the goal of this.

[Ivaret]

Actually, for the Nosferatu, I can explain that. Look up obfuscate. Then, look up Mask Of a Thousand Faces. Then, look where it says the most you can have for your mask is 2, anything after that you spend a blood point per point in appearance. Then realize that everytime Ivaret is app4, he spends 2 bloodpoints.

[Alex Rourke]

OK, So while I can understand where Adam's coming from, the Tremere really don't have it that bad off either, they just have a harder time disobeying their elders. And they are more easily Dominated by their elders. The difficulty for that crap is always the same for other clans trying to dick the Tremere. And even then they can buy a merit that can negate their weakness (Embraced without the Cup). Sure it's expensive, but so are some of the other "Clan Advantage" Merits (Paragon is a 6 point merit and honestly, in most areas aside from Influence and Resources, it's useless)

See, Brujah can lower the difficulty of frenzy, making them just like any other vampires. If they still frenzy, great, they're subject to the same issues as other vampire.

Gangrel can lower their difficulty, but if they frenzy, they still get an animal feature. Any Gangrel traveling to Elysium, unless he's covered head to toe in trench coat, fedora and hazmat boots is gonna have it rough and risk breaching the Masquerade. Additionally, try sanding off lizard scales or dear antlers, that shit would hurt, take at least one level of bashing damage and spend some willpower just to make yourself look presentable.

Setites still lose dice in bright lights, which means in any club with a strobe light, they'll never have a pool higher than 8 while all those 10 pool vampires kick their asses. And to say that Setites don't hand out in clubs would be the biggest lie on the planet, Clubs are huge Setite recruiting grounds because in the WoD they're huge dens of vice, drugs, closet prostitution, back room arms deals or basement slave rings. That's tasty candy to the Setites. But they're still down one die from all thier stats.

I mean, don't get me wrong, but the Malkavians already get access to the madness network which contains (along with some really stupid useless crap) a plethora of usefull, albeit cryptic knowledge that other clans don't get access to. And the higher your Malkavian Time rating, the more info you get off of the network. Malkavians are cool, but they're not THAT cool, just like no other clan is THAT cool.

I agree that if the STs are going to give the Malkavians a clan advantage, we need a system for that, not only because I'm sure some time in the future I'll play one (Why not, I've played everything else) But because most of my characters have at least enough status to chat on that upper deck and if some Malkavian's going to tell, say Alex "Shut up you stupid doggy, you're talking crazy talk" I want to know how that's going to work so I know it's not being abused. But I do agree with Derrik also in that it's about balance and Malkavians having one more advantage than the rest of the clans does kinda unbalance things.

Just my thoughts.