General WoD Discussion #1: Assemble

[Chambers]

The 1:50,000 ratio is an average. It says that in Big Cities the ratio could be much lower. I'm guessing something like 1:25,000 for the metropolises.

[comicshorse]

In OWoD the ideal was one Kindred for 50,000 mortals but more often it was 1 per 10,000

But yes there aren't many Kindred in a city but remember each one represents not just one Kindred but all the power and contacts he has amassed over the years. Meeting a Ventrue one should remember he has ghouls, mortal allies perhaps the resources of a corporation to play with ( and of course can be attacked through these). Similarily a Gangrel may have command of a gang of bikers and all their access to guns, drugs and the criminal underworld.
And thats before we get into all the weird contacts, allies and enemies they may have made among the other supernatural factions.

[battleburn]

I suggest using one prince per state.
The Netherlands has in total 16 million people, plus I think about 8 million in Belgium. We played a game once where there was a prince for the Netherlands and Belgium together. That makes about 500 vampires, that gives you at least a nice group to rule over.

-Battleburn

[Fouredged Sword]

I am running a game that takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

The vampires number around 1,000 in the whole state and there are three princes. One rules Atlanta and the nearby areas, one rules the less popolus south of the state, and the oldest princedom is in Savannah.

I think another important question is how old the vampire population is. In my games most vampires die before they reach 20 years post death. 50% of the population is younger than 60 PD. I roughly group the ages into generations. In my game I have the first generation, and they are 7 or so of them. The second generation is the group that turned or came to the area after the civil war. There are 200 or so of them. The other 800 or so are from after WW2.

I think it is important look into the history of the area you want to play in. History will effect the vampire culture more than the mortal one. When new mortals come to an area, so do new vampires. Each large shift in population brings a sharp divide between the old and new. Periods of small populations will have few new kindred created. Population blooms in an are will follow suit with a bloom in new childer as vampires see the greater population as a good time to spread the curse.

If one really looks into it, the history of an area is worth it's own game. Politics last the ages . History blends with yesterday in the mixing pot of immortality.

[Shadowknight12]

I think it is important look into the history of the area you want to play in.

*cough*

The other 800 or so are from after WW3.

[TheCountAlucard]

Actually, I'm okay with the current vampire ratio, though of course it'll be somewhat-inflated in cities (where factors like the transient population can allow for more Kindred than the city should seem to support) and spread thin in rural areas... after all, in a realistic sense, if even half a percent of the world's population was Kindred, we'd be tripping over Masquerade breaches...

Though I was a bit surprised to read that there's several times as many Forsaken as there are Kindred... and that the Pure outnumber the Forsaken.

[hiryuu]

Though I was a bit surprised to read that there's several times as many Forsaken as there are Kindred... and that the Pure outnumber the Forsaken.

And there's supposed to be only about 500,000 werewolves in the world, too, which is what, 160k-170k Forsaken?

[ToySoldierCPlus]

Technically, it just says that "less than half" of the werewolves are Forsaken, so there could be up to 249k. Though 160-170k would seem to be more reasonable, as the Pure outnumber them by enough of a margin to be able to launch regular raids.

In unrelated news, guess who just started reading Werewolf: the Forsaken.

[Ichneumon]

Any tips on creating a game with lots of political intrigue and maneuvring? (from a Vampire perspective)

[Hawkfrost000]

Any tips on creating a game with lots of political intrigue and maneuvring? (from a Vampire perspective)

This is just a random idea but:

A small European country with a parliament entirely dominated by vampires?

DM

[Caliphbubba]

Any tips on creating a game with lots of political intrigue and maneuvring? (from a Vampire perspective)

well when I do Vampire games that are political in nature, I do it a couple of different ways.

1st. I try to give the players some sort of leverage to use politically, which serves two purposes. It gets them invested in the plot and also, through the roleplay determines which faction they end up with.

2nd. I try to give the major NPC players definate goals and map out their alliances and enemies, and their shifting relationships. Now and remember that they are characters that initiate plots of their own. This lets you try to recruit the players to one side or the other and builds in conflict if different sides try to recruit the players.

3rd. You can use the players Mentors or backgrounds in general to give them nudges in the direction you think might foster politcal interaction. I used to write up rumors for each different type of influence at different levels so it would give leads and maybe a big picture type events if the players are savy enough to piece it together. Mine your players for ideas...

and finally

4th. Push out lots of politcal plots. And make sure that if the players DON'T do anything about them, they come to fruition and have to deal with the consequences. They'll learn that it's in their best interest to be pro-active if they get hints of things going foul.

[The Reverend]

The Lawn Chair Incident

I've been told this same story several times by unconnected Mage:The Ascension players and one prominent Vampire player I was looking for details on it.

Vampire and werewolf players have always out numbered mage players by a very very large margin, I've even run into masquerade players that have never heard of mage. This story is supposed to be why Whitewolf changed rules to nerf mages/buff everyone else. An example, early rules made doing True Magic easy on "dead" matter than on "living" matter since living matter by being alive reinforced its pattern. Of course vampires are dead..... meaning Three dots of correspondence and three dots of matter and the vampire is turned into an item of your choice pretty easily from a distance.

So the story goes there was a large gathering of prominent Vampire players playing old and powerful vampires, maybe werewolf as well and the convocation invited three mages. So the story goes something went wrong and Vampires are monsters in melee and its a rare mage that could match them, so the Mages preempted the onset of violence clap their hands as one and hand a binder to the storyteller outlining how they turned all the vampires into lawnchairs. The story teller looks over the rote, looks at the the players and says "you're all lawn chairs". Except for their cloths money powerful magic items etc, because being mages they nagged the loot.

now normally i would think this a mage urban legend,but the details have been consistent, the tellers unrelated, and one of them was a prominent member of the vampire LARP back in the 90s. Anyone got any info?

Thanks

[The Glyphstone]

I'd only ever heard it phrased as a joke myself:

"A Vampire and a Werewolf get into a fight. Who wins?"
"The mage wins initiative and turns them both into lawn chairs."

[The Reverend]

Buddy of mine and I were in a mage campaign and an experienced vampire player joined after a month or two. The next game we get mobbed by undead and my friend, a Hermetic, went ahead and unleashed holy sunshine super rote because eh its not him getting nuked. Afterward the vamp player asked to see a list of all his anti-undead rotes. Four pages later his mouth had to be picked off the floor. His only comments were " With an Apple? From halfway around the world? While you are in a pocket dimension? In another dimension?"

[Fouredged Sword]

Mages got hit by a nerf bat, but they are still powerful and vampires have some glareing weaknesses, and mages are very good at exploiting weaknesses.

I was in a game once. We all had a smattering of forces in a mages group. We faced a room full of powerful vampires.

They are looking like they want to be violent. We look at the DM and the first one of use uses matter magic to make the air around us and the walls not conduct heat. The second lit his lighter, and then everyone but the first mage used ther magic to make that flame fill the whole room and burn hot.

Everything undead burned.

We later had the first mage use that stratigy to turn a road flare into a lightsaber for melee combat.

This lead my group to have backup plan:LOLFIRE as a valid tactic in a pinch.

[The Reverend]

I'm no longer allowed to play a son of Ether or a Hermetic. When you figure how to make concrete burn, weaponize pandas, make giant pink ducks the center of your security system, make a short story into a memetic weapon, figure out how to safely pull the quintessence out of vampires without killing them, without their knowledge, and without debilitating defects on the mage that uses it. the storyteller got tired of it, a little.

god i gotta find a new bunch of mage players or maybe just some naive masquerade players.

although i admit i only harvested the vamps quintessence to fight nephandi.

[Hawkfrost000]

The exploits of these mages, are they from New or Old WoD?

DM

[The Reverend]

No exploits just the I intelligent use of paradigm, the nine spheres, and quintessence . The concrete trick I added phlogiston to make it burnable matter two forces two. The pink ducks were made using quintessence mind three, matter two. Whenever someone detected them it set of the alarm, so no matter how stealthy you were it would be set off. Who wouldn't notice a 3 foot high pink duck?

[One Tin Soldier]

In response to the actual question, OWoD

[Hawkfrost000]

In response to the actual question, OWoD

awwwww

Do you have any tips for doing the same/similar stuff in nWoD?

Thanks

DM

[One Tin Soldier]

Well I don't know about pink ducks, but there is a nifty little defense I've thought up for my own nMage game. Have a fairly standard Space ward around your sanctum. Then set up a Scrying spell, with the conditional trigger of "next time someone tries to break down the ward." (Requires Fate 2 and Time 2) So if mages are breaking in, chances are the first thing they do is start breaking down the magical defenses. Once they start, viola, you can see them.

It hasn't been play-tested yet though, since funnily enough our sanctum was invaded before I could implement it.

EDIT: Though come to think of it, you could probably stick the conditional trigger to "next time someone looks at this pink duck" and throw whatever spells you like on it.

[Wings of Peace]

awwwww

Do you have any tips for doing the same/similar stuff in nWoD?

Thanks

DM

Probably the strongest combo I've seen in nWoD (that didn't require an entire build focused around it) is using Summon Eidolon or Goetic Invocation in conjunction with Create Fetish to gain a rediculous number of bonuses from your summon. It requires Mind 4 and Spirit 4 but that's not really a handicap since Mind and Spirit are two of the most versatile schools in nWoD imo.

And because of how nWoD character generation works you can still put 1 dot in whatever arcanum has a mage sight you like (I'm very fond of Prime with Space in close second).

Edit: Here's a post that does a good job of crunching the numbers. Note, it doesn't even go into the advantages of Eidolon over Goetic Invocation.

[The Reverend]

Sorry, I dont play nWOD. The sting of whitewolfs abandonment has left a howling scar across my soul. I dont pay for their products anymore, I dont play their new products, and in short if I ever run into the person who decided to just completely throw away mage ascension under the bus like they did....i will ro-sham-bo them. I hates them. They had gold and said "ugh this stuffs too heavy". They could have had a TV sries, books, movies... But as I have seen time and again in order to play mage you have to not only be smart you have to be creative and most people just aren't. I' heard of two and been part of one incident in which a mage(s) were brought into another wod game and it never ends well for the non mage gamers. In the vampire game a friend had me brought in and after a few game sessions I politely left, because I didn't want to break their nice little game. Already assassinated one vampire doe the local prince by mind 3 rote, he thought day was night and went for a stroll in the midday sun.

rant off.

Sorry about that its just...ugh.

[comicshorse]

The Lawn Chair Incident

I've been told this same story several times by unconnected Mage:The Ascension players and one prominent Vampire player I was looking for details on it.

Vampire and werewolf players have always out numbered mage players by a very very large margin, I've even run into masquerade players that have never heard of mage. This story is supposed to be why Whitewolf changed rules to nerf mages/buff everyone else. An example, early rules made doing True Magic easy on "dead" matter than on "living" matter since living matter by being alive reinforced its pattern. Of course vampires are dead..... meaning Three dots of correspondence and three dots of matter and the vampire is turned into an item of your choice pretty easily from a distance.

So the story goes there was a large gathering of prominent Vampire players playing old and powerful vampires, maybe werewolf as well and the convocation invited three mages. So the story goes something went wrong and Vampires are monsters in melee and its a rare mage that could match them, so the Mages preempted the onset of violence clap their hands as one and hand a binder to the storyteller outlining how they turned all the vampires into lawnchairs. The story teller looks over the rote, looks at the the players and says "you're all lawn chairs". Except for their cloths money powerful magic items etc, because being mages they nagged the loot.

now normally i would think this a mage urban legend,but the details have been consistent, the tellers unrelated, and one of them was a prominent member of the vampire LARP back in the 90s. Anyone got any info?

Thanks

I remember reading in a review of the first Mage edition the reviewer saying that in theory a Mage could turn a Vampire Elder into a lawn chair. Never heard of it actually being used though

[Mr.Bookworm]

i will ro-sham-bo them.

...you'll play rock-paper-scissors with them?

They could have had a TV sries, books, movies...

No, they couldn't have. Tabletop RPGs are really a niche market. Neither the money nor the market is there for anything like a movie or TV show, even if White Wolf was interested in doing one. And they did do books.

Also, the oWoD was running out of steam. Three editions, hundreds of sourcebooks, and the metaplot grinding on... It was time for a reboot.

Already assassinated one vampire doe the local prince by mind 3 rote, he thought day was night and went for a stroll in the midday sun.

...there's nothing at Mind 3 that lets you completely mindrape a target like that. Even if there was, the Prince should have gotten at least one, probably more, rolls to avoid doing something blatantly suicidal and inimical to his nature. Should have gotten a +5 bonus to the rolls, too.

And even if he did step out of the door, it wouldn't have killed him. He should have immediately done a screaming about-face and run straight back inside.

Your story doesn't really add up unless you weren't playing by the rules.

Also, are you saying Mages are overpowered compared to everyone else in the nWoD here?

Because that's always been the case. It's less of a problem in the nWoD than it is in the oWoD, where you have the aforementioned lawnchair vampire shenanigans and similar.

[comicshorse]

No, they couldn't have. Tabletop RPGs are really a niche market. Neither the money nor the market is there for anything like a movie or TV show, even if White Wolf was interested in doing one. And they did do books.

Just for the record White Wolf did get a T.V. show. 'Kindred: The Embraced', lasted eight epsiodes before it got cancelled

[TheCountAlucard]

...you'll play rock-paper-scissors with them?

I'm guessing he intended the South Park interpretation of it.

[Ted_Stryker]

Actually, I'm okay with the current vampire ratio, though of course it'll be somewhat-inflated in cities (where factors like the transient population can allow for more Kindred than the city should seem to support) and spread thin in rural areas... after all, in a realistic sense, if even half a percent of the world's population was Kindred, we'd be tripping over Masquerade breaches...

Yeah, and thinking out loud through the numbers a bit really brings this home:

Every year, an active vamp has to ingest 365 BP worth of blood just to recover what time takes away. An average adult human has 10 BP, and also 10 pints of blood, so every BP is a pint of blood volume-wise.

Let's say you want to be ultra-safe and do this feeding entirely through your herd, and do so in a way that isn't damaging to any of those vessels. If you want to be really safe, that's 1 BP every other month from each vessel (think blood donation rate rules). So you'd need 60 vessels to do this with, which is five dots in Herd. It strains credulity to think that every single vamp in existence has five dots in Herd. Or, if you do it all through killing the vessels you feed off of, that's 36 (and a half) kills a year.

In the case of one vampire per 1,000 people, that means either you've got 6% of the population as part of some vampire's Herd, which is 60,000 herd members per million of population, or you've got a 3.6% mortality rate from vampire feeding. That's a rate that's about 4.5X the mortality rate of the US in 2007. Mixing and matching between Herd and killing strangers might help a little, but not too much.

And this is all just "subsistence farming" from the vampiric point of view, leaving nothing left for healing, fueling disciplines, creating and maintaining ghouls, and so on. What's the ratio of BP used for all that stuff vs. stuff lost to The Draining in your game? I bet it's at least 1-to-1, which means double all the feeding numbers I just went through. And if you want to keep secret the existence of vampires when ~ 1 in 10 adults is part of some bloodsucker's Herd by means of vampiric disciplines, that's gonna cost you some blood, too.

There's no way 1-in-1,000 works as a vampire-to-mortals ratio in my view, not in a way that has any real hope of maintaining the Masquerade. Even 1-in-10,000 is pretty grim, although by then you're getting to the point where dividing by a factor of two or three can really make a difference. That's where the 1-in-50K ratio as ideal most likely comes from.

[Ichneumon]

Just for the record White Wolf did get a T.V. show. 'Kindred: The Embraced', lasted eight epsiodes before it got cancelled

And a great 8 episodes it were. It got cancelled because the actor playing the lead character (Julian Lune, the Ventrue Prince) died in a car accident. A real shame.

[Friv]

In the case of one vampire per 1,000 people, that means either you've got 6% of the population as part of some vampire's Herd, which is 60,000 herd members per million of population, or you've got a 3.6% mortality rate from vampire feeding. That's a rate that's about 4.5X the mortality rate of the US in 2007. Mixing and matching between Herd and killing strangers might help a little, but not too much.

What about the third source? Hunt a mortal who isn't in your herd, don't kill them, use your vampire powers to make sure they don't realize that you fed from them (or alternately, pick drug-addled people who can't differentiate between a drug-fueled nightmare and you, or just get them super-drunk first).

I do think that one vampire per thousand people is pretty high, but it's not as dire as you're presenting it to be.