Highmoon's Ponderings

Because I’ve been writing about this game as I go along in a very piecemeal process, a lot of the systems have evolved as I set them down to “paper” from whatever I’ve been brainstorming in my head. The good thing about this approach is that it has let me focus on the different aspects of the game, making the process less daunting; the drawback is that there is a certain disconnect between the parts, and especially between things that are still in my head but not written down yet. Dice mechanics is the biggest item falling into that category at the moment; without knowing how the dice move during the game, a lot of the things I have already described just float in mid-air above the game. It’s time to bring them down to earth and tie them together. Let’s talk dice.

At the risk of this sounding like a preemptive apology, the dice mechanics is the one area where I am very unsure of how efficient the system is. Visualizing the complex interactions of dice probabilities is not something that my mind can do without considerable effort (I’m just right-brained, what can I say). The dice mechanics I settled on for this game are a mishmash of a couple of games whose dice mechanics I like and admire. Enough game designer angst, let’s go.

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Auspex, Celerity, Obfuscate, Animalism, Obteneration, Melpomine, Chimerstry, Protean, Dominate, Cachexy. Those are just 10 vampiric powers (Disciplines) from VtM/VtR that came immediately to mind, without pulling out either book, out of what must be a couple dozen total, spread over the entire oeuvre of these two games. The point is simple: vampires have awesome powers, and White Wolf has made a huge point of statting up the classical ones from lore as well as creating a host of new supernatural abilities for the blood drinkers. People like the powers of a vampire; besides immortality (and really, that’s just power #1), it is all these nifty tricks that folks attracted to roleplaying creatures of the night find appealing. It’s what makes the trade-off of subsisting on blood acceptable: you gain in return a number of powers that truly set you above the mundane humans!

I won’t deny it, when I played Vampire, it was the powers that I found most appealing. I played a Ravnos vampire just because their Discipline of Chimerstry, the ability to create illusions. My players spent about 90% of their Experience Points on improving Disciplines, on becoming stronger, more powerful, in those dark gifts bestowed them by the Beast. Vampiric powers are an essential part of the vampire myth, and as such, something I need to include in my rebuild of the game.

But how?

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If (as always, in my experience) Vampire had another underutilized game mechanic in addition to Humanity, this was Willpower. Yes, we used it to boost up rolls and such, but it just never had the oomph that it seems that it should have. I take some of that responsibility myself as the Storyteller; I rarely, if ever, pushed my characters to the brink of having to use their Willpower, nor did I force the scenes that I should have in order for them to recover spent points. It just sort of existed there.

In rereading the section on Willpower in VtM, I realize that it was mostly me; the advice is there on how to use it, I just didn’t quite heed it. Willpower is even better explained in VtR, I have to say, though I still feels like it doesn’t delve deep enough into what Willpower can truly mean for a vampire story (this, when it comes to VtR, seems to be a side-effect of the main book + monster setting book approach; the former has to keep it fairly generic, the latter can’t change it so much as to invalidate the core book).

Willpower, to me, is a driving force, and a very limited force at that. It’s what gives you the inner gumption to push back the darkness, but there’s only so much of it to go around, so much you can take before that reserve is depleted. That’s what the beast wants. That’s what I, as game designer, want as well.

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Though I’ve been silent for some time now because of classes and then finals, I’ve kept the Vampire project (it remains untitled and I really need to find a way to refer to it) alive in my head all this time. Maybe not front burner, but certainly slow cooker-simmering to the side. I can’t help it, really, not even with the other stuff I have going, like Ierne: Celtic FATE or my new obsession with the Colonial Gothic RPG and American Colonial/Revolutionary history.

One of the things that I’ve most been giving though to in between study sessions of human physiology (or perhaps because of it?) is the concept of damage as it relates to a vampire character. Both Vampire games go for the very traditional “hit point” approach: a vampiric character, much like every other character in the World of Darkness, has health boxes to track damage received. As they get checked off, health decreases until it either sends the vampire into torpor or, if it’s aggravated damage, it kills the character. In the WoD, because of the mechanical distinction made between normal and aggravated damage, this work ok; vampires can shake off fairly easily most damage, as it is mundane in origin and no match for their healing abilities, but aggravated damage really puts the squeeze on them, making them face mortality a second time. Yeah, it works for Vampire, but the more I think about it, the more I know that this isn’t what I want for my game. Or rather, I should perhaps say, this isn’t what I want for my game entirely.

I do want a way to track damage received by the character, but I’m far less interested in knowing how many more hits can the character take than what effect the hits already taken have had. I want to know how the damage the character has taken is affecting her and her circumstance, if that explosion at the night club she just escaped from did more than just singe her skin: did it destroy her reputation with the Blood Conclave, or cost her best (mortal) friend’s life, or both? I want damage to be a catalyst for enhanced drama. I don’t want a record of wounds, I want a record of consequences.

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Last week was the 20th Anniversary of the debut of Twin Peaks on television, a series that literally redefined the prime-time drama and opened the door to everything from The X-Files to pretty much every single geeky show on TV today. We didn’t get Twin Peaks in Puerto Rico (and I didn’t have cable) so I came to watch it about five years after it had been off the air, when the series first came out on VHS (my wife, however, watched the whole thing as it aired, behind her parents’ back, skulking down to the family room at night – she was the one who infected me with Twin Peaks fever).

I fell in love with this show once I saw it, and I continue to friggin adore it to this day. Given that at the time I was running a Vampire: The Masquerade Chronicle for my two players, I decided to express my love for the show in the one way I know how: by using it in my game.

More than 10 years after the fact, my players still remember, with unsettling fondness, that visit to Twin Peaks.

What I did was use a mix of elements from the show and Fire Walk With Me movie. The movie delved really hardcore into the mythology of the show, and given my player characters were supernatural creatures to begin with, I knew I wanted to make them realize that there are even stranger, stronger things out there than vampires. I also knew I did not want to define at all the nature of the Lodge denizens, and that I was not going to try in any way to speculate on what happened to Cooper and Annie after the end of the show (our adventure was taking place a year after the end of the TV series). I would maybe hint, but I was more interested in exploring the themes than in creating fan-fiction about a possible sequel. Because of the characters I had playing, I knew I would be playing on the idea of Nina being a possible next victim to BOB (thus why I presented the ring from FWWM), though the use of the little girl from a previous encounter Nina had had was truly what gave me the emotional key to the whole event. I also knew I would have the vampires face off BOB somehow, and the way it went down was amazing. As it should, it left scars on the characters, both emotional and physical (and spiritual, as in the case of Ben).

It was only a couple of sessions, and only two nights of in-game time, but wow, what a great story that was. It became instant legend in our circle of friends, and to this day we talk about the time the vampires went to Twin Peaks.

If you want to read a recap of the entire episode, then please read on.

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It’s not Spring Break yet so no new design posts from me. However, I think you should take a look at the posts I am linking to below.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, especially not creative endeavors, and since I both send links to my design posts to Twitter, as well as “think out loud” there, it is inevitable that a network of influences would eventually emerge. Take for example last week: I’m not sure how it started, but for some reason, my Twitter feed last week was awash in a number of conversations about the World of Darkness, both old and new. Over the five days of the work week, there was not one day when at least a handful of World of Darkness-related tweets flew by, sparking conversations and blog posts.

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