Moving Forward After Disaster

[Cefyn]

I know there have been a lot of concerns over the plotline that was run at game this previous Saturday. However, I encourage you to understand that staff did take the time to discuss this before any official numbers were decided to be acted upon.

I will admit to the fact that I am not a specialist in the History of Natural Disasters worldwide. That being said, this is why when I was disseminating my estimation I was always clear that the number was 'unofficial' to every player I spoke to. Moving forward, the official death count in game as of this point will be 2,000, with upwards of 20,000 missing or injured.

Before reactions are had, please consider that this was a major disaster in a city that had no warning or preparation, along with the discrepancy in World of Darkness from the real world in terms of population, disaster relief, response teams, etc. Catastrophes in World of Darkness tend to be greater, outcomes more dark and destructive. These numbers are going to seem exaggerated and, in some ways, ridiculous by real world standards, but we are not playing in the real world. We have established in previous staffs that the population of the world is greater, and population density will add to the death toll.

For the next 3 months, this city will be in a state of crisis. Things will be harder, feeding tags will be added to the city of Seattle (not Bellevue, Renton, or any of outer-Seattle) that will called "Disaster". These tags will make feeding difficult, but masquerade risk basically non-existent. If you are tagged by a masquerade breaching plot, it will have great and terrible consequences, but the chance that you will be tagged in this time of crisis is basically nonexistent.

Characters can throw influences, use businesses and money, and make efforts to minimize the amount of time this crisis persists. Depending on what the characters do, this problem could subside and become a shadow of its former self in no time, but even if characters do absolutely nothing after 3 months, the city will return to basically normal, with the echoes of the terror before. This may seem like an accelerated timeline, but this is not the kind of climate we as staff want to bog through forever.

If you have questions on what actions could help or be meaningless, we encourage you to ask for assistance and a staff member will be able to give you the exact ways you could utilize your personal control to assist in minimizing the damage in this result from player action that had such wide-spread effect on the game.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

-- Kevin Shryock

[Katie Hester]

Is the city under martial law? What businesses (in which areas of Seattle) are affected? How is the day to day activity of Seattle affected by this?

As far as feeding tags go, are those to be updated then? Nothing has been done with tags for the past 4-5 months.

[Cefyn]

The city is not under martial law at the moment. we will be updating domain tags soon. (though it might take just a bit of time sorry.)

At the moment we will not be affecting player run businesses.

As for the area's affected if it is in the city of Seattle it is affected. (areas such as the down town domain and west Seattle are affected Bellevue and Renton and the like are not.)

Please feel free to ask any further questions.

[The Gentleman]

Can you give us an idea of the scope? Is this comparable to the effects of Katrina? Are there wrecked buildings around? Are the roads closed? Are there refugees living in the stadiums? FEMA camps?

[user/874]

So I have some serious problems with this.

Hurricane Katrina had a death toll of ~1800, with the missing / wounded in the range of 25,000. The New Orleans - Metairie metro area is about 1/3 the density and population of the Seattle - Tacoma metro. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas)

For reference, I was in college during Hurricane Katrina in Gainesville, Florida. I volunteered as part of the Red Cross disaster relief crews to go to Louisiana in the direct aftermath. I filled a lot of sandbags, handed out a lot of blankets and sandwiches, and dug a lot of trenches.

New Orleans, during this time, was utterly destroyed. I mean that in the most literal sense. I was in several hostile fire zones during my time in the Army, including Kosovo and Iraq.

New Orleans was, by far, the worst hell I have been to in my entire life, bar none.

A disaster of this scale, centered on the Smith Tower, makes downtown Seattle utterly unplayable. The streets would be vacant, except for the National Guard patrols and the relief crew clean up work. The impact would be far, far worse than just some adjustments to the feeding scale.

At a minimum, the entire 25th Infantry Division from Ft. Lewis would be patrolling the streets and providing disaster relief. Throw the 3/75th Rangers in on top of that as well as all of the support elements. That is a crazy amount of military presence on the streets. Figure in America's other "fire brigade", the 82nd Airborne (Who have a long, long history of hurricane recovery, firefighting, and other disaster relief efforts) would also have been airlifted in to help contain the disaster.

With 2000 dead, and 20000 missing or injured, the metro area would be empty. Everyone would have fled inland to get away from the disaster until the rebuilding process had begun. I can show you pictures of refugee towns in Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida during the direct aftermath of Katrina. NO ONE was allowed to stay in New Orleans in the weeks following Katrina once we could get them evac'ed.

Masquerade breeches would be /harder/ to cover up, because there is no "herd" to blend in with. You have soldiers, police and disaster recovery crews /everywhere/ trying to pick up the pieces.

Bellevue and Renton not being affected at all is just absurd. I cannot be the only person in ECC who has lived in the Deep South during a hurricane. If the descriptions were were given at game were accurate, as well as the numbers that are now being entered as "canon", there is no one in this entire game that is untouched.

I have seen some serious "World of Darkness" shit in my own lifetime, and the scale of what you are talking about is all out of whack.

If this is the world ending plot you want to run, cool, lets get down. I love me some disaster fiction. I don't think you have fully thought this through, though. This is going to be YEARS in the fixing, not just a matter of a few months. New Orleans is still recovering from Katrina. Eight full years later. There are outlying Parishes that are still virtually un-populated. Certain wards were without power for almost a full year after the storm. Accelerated timescale or not, 3 month is patently ridiculous for Seattle to suddenly "get over" a disaster of this magnitude.

As it is, I have trouble imagining that the Camarilla would survive as a "presence" under conditions like that. Feral sabbat packs? Sure.

[Thornstar]

Nov 20, 2013 18:54:43 GMT -8 Cefyn said:

... minimizing the damage in this result from player action ...

-- Kevin Shryock

Since this thread seems to be about stepping back and taking stock of the situation from an Out-Of-Character perspective, I have some questions:

If one was to get a percentage estimate of how much of this was directly player driven and how much was related to an ongoing antagonistic NPC presence, would that come out like 60/40, 50/50, 25/75... 10/90? How much of the damage was necessary to give the desired result from the situation? Could it have just been a dull thump in the distance? Did downtown NEED a new crater?

My question is based on the premise that we don't even allow explosives in game, let alone nuclear Tesla devices (or whatever we'll find out this was IC). I am interested in what justification there is for the event taking place at all, let alone to what degree it exploded to. The reason we've done that, on top of being respectful of people who've been harmed in some way by senseless tragedy, is that there's no way to un-explode that bomb. No way to put the pin back in that grenade. When there are huge, shocking events like this, nothing ever goes back to normal. There is just no realistic way to 'fix' it.

The reason I am asking this question is that I'd really like to have the focus back on PERSONAL horror. A storytelling game of personal horror. I would like to ask everyone to take a while and think about whether purple lightning ripping from an earthbound demon (or whatever; the specifics of Das Über means little to me as a player) has anything to do with the personal lives of their characters.

The long and the short of why I'm writing here at all isn't that I want this to come out as a harder situation than it needs to be for any player or staff member. I don't care what player or what staff member or who did it or anything like that. It's that I'd like to point out the amount of angst and frustration that an instant like this causes. It breaks suspension of disbelief. It pulls focus away from the characters and all of their efforts. All of what they care about.

At the end of the day, it's just an explosion. That isn't plot; it's just punctuation.

I know that the staff is working to bring a good, solid, fun game to the players. I don't want them to discourage them from doing so, or to discourage players from wanting to go to them for that game. I want the Staff to focus on the Characters, and the Players, too, to focus on the Characters. That's really the entirety of why I bring any of this up.

Thanks, everybody. I hope it's something we can all strive for together. Further, let me know if I can help.

--Aaron

[Just Evan]

Can we please get a revised and standardized description of what happened? I may have missed another post (and I apologize if I am asking for information already in the field - feel free to just toss a link at me).

What were the order of events from a Kine perspective?

That may well help put all of this in perspective for us as players.

Thanks!

[Bertie]

Hey everybody, Sabrina is already working on a more in character description of the events that occurred, while right now I'm working on an updated domain map. Sorry for the delays so far!

[Kevin K]

A specific thing that bothers me in this plot is that we seem to have found a loophole around the "no explosives" house rule that is intended to steer us away from city-wide 'zomg, city in ashes' kinds of plots.

You're about to say, "Oh, this wasn't explosives, it was magic! And omg the successes!" I know that, and I don't think that matters. It was an explosion. Explosives are what cause explosions. Just because it was Magic and Powerz rather than Manure and Petroleum doesn't make any difference. The results are the same. The reasoning is the same.

This, as I understand, isn't the first instance of a building being destroyed by magical kaboom. I think that's a bad precedent that we should nip in the bud.

I'm not arguing that whatever witchcraft and wizardry caused this to happen should have *zero* effect, just one that is slightly smaller in scale, and has the possibility of being a little more personal and less game-breaking. It could be long-lasting instead of extreme, or a million other options.

[Ross]

Aaron and Kevin K.'s posts brought something to mind that might or might not be useful as an alternative way of thinking here, because they made me think of the story "The Call of Cthulhu."

The short version: Cthulhu wakes and, for the people who are there to see it happen, and experience it directly, it shatters their sanity and in some cases takes their lives.

For the rest of the world? The rates of suicide rise for a short time, and particularly sensitive people have terrifying nightmares of eldritch monsters and cycloptian landscapes.

The effects are subtle and insidious for most; horrifying and perspective-altering for a very few. It's still significant, but it's also mysterious and atmospheric.

Could this event just have been bad for the ghosts, demons and necromancers? Could the temporal effects on the wider world instead be a shift in the mood, or the narrative device that an strange 'heaviness' suddenly weighs across Seattle? And from there, insert such subtle effects into the story via Oracular Ability; Medium; the Nightmares Flaw; or the dozens of other on-sheet and individual story hooks many players possess, but which are often underutilized?

Maybe?

-Ross

[Katie Hester]

Ross, I think that is a brilliant idea!!

[user/874]

+1 Ross


That is a brilliant way to spin it and keep the gameboard in a playable state.

[Kevin K]

It's not too late. The IC stories can straighten this out:

"Initial death toll massively over-hyped due to social media"
(blah blah, be afraid of social media reporting, only trust standard journalism)

"Smith tower still standing -- mostly"
Initial reports of a collapsed Smith Tower were only partially accurate. The tower's iconic upper portion did indeed suffer a collapse, damaging the lower floors and several surrounding buildings. The resulting cloud of dust and loss of power led many early eyewitnesses to conclude that the entire structure had fallen. "It's really almost like a magic trick" said one Pioneer Square resident, "Smoke and lights, you know? We couldn't see the building's lights anymore, there was rubble all over the street, and when you look up? No top. Of course we thought it had fallen."

[Shah-Khohr of Ventrue]

I must be really confused on why there's such a huge OOC response to this. With all the other stuff that was kicked into play recently, explosives seems like a minor thing at best.

But looking at the worst case scenario: having downtown a disaster area for a few months, isn't that bad. PCs didn't die in this series of explosions. Feeding gets tricky, which relates to story. Those with influence suddenly have a lot of value to them, and they have something to do. The mortals of Seattle are a mythical thing that don't really exist as anything in game other then a vehicle for the PC's stories. So what if even a third of them died? That gives us a mechanical feeding problem that can be resolved with story. We spend a bunch of Industry and have the city built back up. We spend a bunch of Media and it becomes a scenic place to live again.

I guess I don't see why this isn't being addressed in an IC forum. I can completely understand why the characters are pissed over this, but why are the players? With no PC death, I don't see a rules skirt. And it's one thing to say "Ban disgruntled PCs from buying a shitload of C4 and driving into Elysium." It's another thing to say "No story can have explosive consequences. Ever."

[The Gentleman]

I think Ross's idea was excellent.

[Thornstar]

Nov 21, 2013 10:52:17 GMT -8 Shah-Khohr of Ventrue said:

I must be really confused on why there's such a huge OOC response to this...

Beyond the scope (especially the initial figures), and that most of the responses want a spookier, less explody resolution to things, I think that at least a tiny part of the answer is:

[Shah-Khohr of Ventrue]

I understood what the the complaints were, I guess I'm not getting the 'why' of it.

It hits a point where OOC complaints pertaining to story events need to take a backseat to the story. If PCs were actually being affected, I could see a complaint (businesses being taken down, havens destroyed, retainers or other backgrounds lost), but as I understand it this hasn't happened to anyone outside the guilty party who started this event. Which, I have to say, strikes me a reasonable.

OOC complaints about IC events should be limited, I feel, and used only when your characters are actually being adversely affected. Saying that you don't like where the plot is going is valid, in so far as everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion, but I gotta say, there are an awful lot of former staff on this thread. Former staff that almost exclusively when they were in a similar situation would beseech the players to trust in their skills to handle the situation and keep the game balanced (if not fair) and reasonably close to cannon (read: this is a horror game about dark events; seattle in a crisis state is pretty dark, but not outside the scope of cannon).

I guess I'm asking for the same thing. Those of you who were former staff who are taking umbrage with current staff's story, reflect on your time in the limelight. Recall when you wrote a baby of a plot and had players kick it and turn up their noses. Recall just how abysmal that feeling of being completely impotent to pleasing everyone made your chest squeeze.

There was a plot. A player kicked the shit out of it. There are consequences / resolutions. Let them happen. If, in a few weeks, things are still shitty and adversely affecting your enjoyment of game, at that time start a formal complaint thread. But certainly not before we have seen the story that will unfold from this.

Thank you,
-Rob.

[Oberon Gault]

So, I've already shared with a handful of people, but here's my opinion on this thread past the first post:

There's some great ideas going on, however putting such things up publicly serves only to dismiss such ideas. It's a bad move, quite frankly, since then, if staff takes any of them, it gives the perception that players can just bully or argue their way into having OOC disagreement become IC canon. Even if they're considering them, or were already thinking about something to that effect, it doesn't matter. Its the perception of matters OOC that shape things OOC. If one person sees "Hey, I can get what I want by bullying staff in the public, I may as well do the same thing. If one person did it, that makes it okay."

Its that nasty word that people seem to dread and fall back on at the same time. Precedent.

Personally, I loathe the word and use it as a reason to go the opposite or entirely different direction.

Again, there have been some great ideas on how to approach matters IC, but saying "Hey, staff, you should do this instead" on a public setting only serves to have your idea dismissed for the only reason of being brought about publicly, or bring more semi-ire on staff by inviting future "critiques" of their story.

Just my $0.34, take it as you like.

[Thornstar]

My thought on the idea of public debate:

We have a message board, it is being regulated actively, so if people want to engage in polite discussion, then so be it.

One of the things highlighted recently is that what happens behind closed doors just inspires drama (ooc, of course. Secrets are the bee's knees, in character) and what is discussed publicly promotes community. The towers and factions that get built up over disagreements of how to game this game with the gaming could, in many cases, be put to rest by open discussion and compromise. Not saying that the staff has to react to every player's idea on how things should go, but they should certainly listen and keep track.

We used to do surveys every year to see what the players thought about a variety of issues, to help keep things on the rails and not spinning out of control. We stopped doing that along the way when people didn't want the input anymore. I would absolutely advise the staff to distribute that survey to get that info. And then act on it.

I think it's fantastic, at least, that we've got this far in the conversation without anyone being accusatory or decrying anyone's ability to have an opinion, by the way.

I guess at this point, the question is: Is the staff open to discussing any of this, either offline or here on the forum? It's not like the event itself is a secret or anything, so it might work.

Oh yeah. And the survey thing is a great idea. For reals.

[Ross]

As preamble, I am only speaking for myself here.

First, the term "bullying" has been used with some frequency of late, both here and elsewhere, with a bit too much ease in my opinion. Bullying is, in my unofficial definition, the use (or attempted use) of intimidation to get someone to do something that is against their wishes/better judgment.

In the overall, on this thread thus far I see a lot of relevant questions; some strong opinions/observations; and yes alternative suggestions (raises hand). But I don't see any threats of "change this or else..." going on.

Maybe there was a false sense of malleability created between Seth's initial post, the subsequent rumors of downgrading the reported casualty count, and Kevin's official announcement which did so further than that. Maybe there was still some sense the Staff would be open to input and suggestions/changes. I guess I thought that too, in a way, else I wouldn't have made the post I did.

Or maybe this is just all the natural and (relatively) civil catharsis some of us need after a disaster. Maybe my idea won't at all be applied to this situation, but maybe some future staff member will be inspired by it down the line. I dunno.

This game effects us. We *care*. Sometimes overly so. I've joked lately that my relationship with this game is only outdone - in time, energy and work spent - by my relationship with my own family. Been with this longer than any job, any school, any girlfriend.

Don't misunderstand, I can tell the difference between the real and the imaginary. But I also cry at sad movies, and get angry when my favorite character in a book dies in a punk way. When I hear that "Seattle was hit like Katrina," I think *back* to Katrina, and overlay those images both on the real world, and then what it must be in the game world. And...I have a reaction, yeah.

So maybe my post was, in some sense, the "bargaining" step in some kooky grieving process. I dunno. But I'm not here to bully; it is not in my heart to do so. And if this is how it is, I will roll with it. Most of us will. Because everything above this post is just evidence to me that people care, and they will care to participate lest Gehenna come (and even thereafter, I suspect).

-Ross