Simplifying Combat in Vampire the Masquerade

My V20 game that I'm currently running seems to be coming to a head. Multiple Sabbat packs will be attacking an ancient vampire and his minions, and a second ancient might join the fray. In the past, this has been the point where we have a whole session where two hours or more are all one fight.

One big culprit here is Celerity. Probably the biggest. Each round of combat involves multiple turns for a number of the characters. Not only does Celerity make it less fun to be in a fight when you don't have it, but there is more time spent as a player sitting on the sidelines messing with your smartphone or whatever while everyone else has multiple actions.

A second issue is that resolving a single attack requires at least four dice-rolls: the attack roll, a defense roll, damage roll and soak roll. One thing I really like about NWoD is that this is all simplified to one weighted roll per attack. I used to like the variability and flexibility of the OWoD system, but that was also back when I played with the same group every week, and we had tons of hours to devote to gaming minutiae.

Fix 1: Celerity
In the past I've adapted the LARP rules for Celerity, as I actually like them better than the V20 or previous rules, but in writing them up for this game, I realized they would just add another layer of complexity. We have two players who don't give a damn about the system and would rather it not get in the way, one who is in his very first tabletop RPG, and a fourth who is up for whatever, so I decided to go with simplification.

What I decided was that Celerity would simply add to all Dexterity rolls. I had changed initiative to Dexterity + Wits (rather than Wits + Alertness), so Celerity would also add to initiative rolls. This would be the equivalent of the LARP preempt ability that Celerity grants, and it just makes sense that characters with Celerity would act first. This would also add to pretty much all attack rolls, move around rolls, and so on. I decided Celerity would cost no blood, since frankly this is quite a nerf. I have also not been allowing split actions, and so the extra Celerity dice would not be useful for that either.

So far, the players seem to be happy with it, though one player moved her Celerity 3 point to become a Fortitude 4 point (from out of clan to in-clan), which was fine by me. When I make a change like this (and I don't seem to be able to resist) I always give players a chance to adjust accordingly.

Fix 2: Fortitude
I also wanted to nix the soak roll, and so I had to address Fortitude first. I decided that Stamina + Fortitude + Armor would be the difficult of damage rolls, but this meant that Fortitude would be less useful overall. (You still roll it to avoid fire and sunlight). So I decided that for a blood point, a character could add their Fortitude to their normal Health levels temporarily. These would be health levels that you couldn't heal, but would be a buffer between you and real damage.

Again, so far, so good.

Fix 3: Defense and Soak
As mentioned above, there is no longer a soak roll, but the difficulty of a damage roll is the target's Stamina + Fortitude + Armor. I also decided that the maximum for this difficulty would be a 9. Beyond that point, the extra health levels help, and you have dice to roll against fire and sunlight, but I found that my players had a lot more fun if they could at least bruise powerful NPCs in a fight.

Similarly, I got rid of the defense roll by simply having the difficulty of an attack roll be the target's Dexterity + Athletics + Celerity. Again, with a maximum of 9. This really short-changes my super-powerful Elders, but also makes dealing with those Elders a bit more fun in this game, at least so far. This could easily be adapted to another house rule (or is it a house rule?) that for difficulties over 9, you simply need more successes. So difficulty 12 = difficulty 9 with three successes required for the first success.

Problem: Stakes, and other attacks that are more difficult than normal. Not sure what to do with this, but it basically makes staking a bit more likely and common in the game, which frankly is not a problem so far.

Again, players are liking the rules change, I have to explain rules much less often during the game, and fights go a lot quicker overall.

Mass Combat
The next session of my game is going to be a big-ass combat, with more than 20 named NPCs. Obviously, this is nuts, but the players are feeling it and are excited about it, and it is kind of what has been set up to happen. They are attacking an ancient vampire and his minions, and have the assistance of a couple of NPCs in their pack as well as a Black Hand cell. Late in the fight, another ancient might jump in with her minions to try to diablerize the PCs target, her enemy for the last 3000 years.

So, cool stuff, if it goes quick enough to be at all interesting.

First thing, for the most part, I'm going to hand-wave NPC vs NPC parts of the combat. I have a very good idea of who would win in a given fight and how long it would take, leaving me to focus on the PCs. For the NPCs vs NPCs, I just note what the PCs would see (she tears him up with claws; he empties his clip into her, etc.) and move on. If they want to get detail, they have to go look. Otherwise, it's a mess, as fights should be.

Second, I have to have a way to keep track of NPC dots and numbers without having a fat stack of character sheets. Even the 3x5 cards I usually use for NPCs are a bit too large, as I want to have them out on the table so I can move them around. I decided to cut the 3x5s in half, and to have some notes for the combat only. What I have on the lined side of each card:

Name, Type (ghoul, clan, generation, etc.), Nature/Demeanor if they might come up in a fight
Physical, Social and Mental dice (these are just average pools for rolls of each type)
List of powers and level
Primary attack
Secondary attack
Special effect (if any - for example, Majesty with the Courage roll difficulty, an aura, etc.)
Path (if any) and Willpower
Blood pool total/Blood spent per round
Any other little note

Then, on the un-lined side of the card

Initiative number (I rolled ahead of time)
NAME
Boxes for the health levels, assuming that everyone has activated Fortitude who has it

And that's it. We'll see how it works on Sunday night.

Recent Developments in V20

I'm very excited about the release of Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition - I've already ordered my own copy and it'll be a great early birthday gift when it comes out.  You can see the huge banner above.

I'm also following the open development process, reading and commenting in the few cases where I think I have something smart to say.  Here is some of what has been going on lately:

The Tzimisce Clan document is up, as well as the Gargoyles and Giovanni.  These have been out for a few days, but I was away at UnConference11 and didn't have time to do much reading while I was getting ready and certainly not while I was there.

I'm currently working on a one-shot to possibly run with friends while on vacation in a couple of weeks.  I actually don't expect us to have the time, nor for enough people to have the inclination, but it takes my mind off work.

With any luck, when my V20 book arrives in October, I'll have figured out the basics of keeping a human larva alive and will be able to have some bitey adventures.

V20: Vampire the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

Not too long ago, White Wolf announced that they would be releasing a 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire the Masquerade.  20 years ago, VtM's huge impact on the gaming industry and overall geek culture began.  In terms of system mechanics, Vampire was a hymn to Shadowrun and others before it, but there was some kind of sweet spot that was waiting for something like Vampire the Masquerade to strike home.

According to demographic research done for Wizards of the Coast, Vampire is responsible for bringing in a huge number of women into the gaming hobby, what was up to that point apparently the purview of war-gaming grognards...or something.  I didn't start gaming until around 1991, and I started with Mythus and then GURPS, but one can imagine what a hobby with even fewer women would have been like.

From their official comments, it would appear that V20, as they are calling the anniversary edition, would only be available to those who are attending the Grand Masquerade in New Orleans this year.  Fortunately, I am pretty sure this is not true.  I asked the question via Twitter, using their preferred hashtag #v20, and got a quick response that the book (which is going to be around 400 pages) is going to be available apart from the Masquerade - they just aren't sure about the details yet.

I like how White Wolf is going about this process.  They are actively soliciting and responding on a forum devoted to the topic of the new edition, and they are also posting drafts of the rules and text that will go into the final book.  The book is going to have new, full-color artwork from 'classic' Masquerade artists, and will not be a new edition, nor will it be the beginning of a new round of book releases for Masquerade.  They are saying that it is simply something for those who have been playing Vampire since it was released 20 years ago.

That's what they're saying now anyway.  As always, we'll see.

I've been following the hashtag #v20 on Twitter, and that is where I am getting most of my information and updates, apart from the documents they release and the forums, where I am participating as time allows.

I can honestly say that this announcement has re-ignited my desire to play Vampire the Masquerade.  I started in 1998, my first year of college, and I played in games for the next 7 or 8 years with the same group of great people who are still some of my closest friends.  Before I played VtM, I was actually kind of contemptuous of a game that seemed to be all about being goth and bemoaning one's fate and blood fetishism.  And yeah, there's some of that.  What I got was a fantastic game and great memories and friends.  I'm not really a fan of vampire fiction or movies; I've never been even remotely goth; but VtM is still one of my favorite games out there.  I'm really excited about the new edition, and will definitely get myself a copy when it is available.

In the meantime, for any other fans, I recommend checking out the open development documents and blog, the forums, and also following the news as it comes out.  You ask questions and much of the time, one of the guys working on the book answer you.  That's one thing I really like about our little hobby - the people at the very top are not so high up as to not be accessible to even casual fans.

Updates:

Justin Achilli posts about the weirdness of dice, botching and probabilities.

Eddie posts an exhaustive (?) list of Vampire bloodlines to be included in the V20 book.

Hunter: the Vigil and the New World of Darkness

The New World of Darkness games seem to be intentionally designed to give players insane results. In the old world of darkness system, you could get crazy results, but it was because you gamed the system well - you set up a roll with lots of dice and low difficulty.

In the NWoD, everything is target 8, so successes can be relatively rare, but you also have "exploding dice", re-rolling 10's and sometimes even 9's and more rarely, 8's as well. This means that the most common results of rolls are one or two successes or a large number, and it comes out of nowhere. It is also less under your control. Even when you can make some of your successes explode, they are relatively rare, so its more of a game of luck and randomness.

One effect of this that I found in my own play is that it turns the game towards comedy. There is a lot of botching and absurd successes, and it is hard to handle.

The exception here is in combat, when some kind of defense number is subtracted from almost all of the dice-pools for attacks and special abilities. This means that you're rolling fewer dice than you're used to, which in turn means that combat involves a lot of singular successes or marginal failures.

This can get to be...a little unexciting. Your vampire grows her agg-dealing supernatural claws, leaps from the rooftop onto her opponent, slashes the claws down his back, and deals...one aggravated damage. Nowhere near a would penalty or anything. A scratch, really. Then in rage he turns around, pulls out his Desert Eagle, shoots you, and deals...two bashing. And so it goes until one of you has some exploding dice and randomly ends the battle in a paroxism of bloodshed.

I like a lot of the changes that were made to Vampire, Werewolf and Hunter. I think that Mage took a step backward both in its fluff and in the system itself in almost every way. But the dice system is just sort of hard to manage sometimes. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't deliver the play experience I want - it isn't reliable when it should be, and it isn't exciting when you want it to be.

I find that I'm left wanting to hack White Wolf's games all the time. When we used to run V3 (Vampire third edition), we probably had a minimum of house rules, but by the end of a chronicle we had a few to make the system more playable.

I wonder - did they playtest the new system before they brought it out? It just comes off as...unfinished in a lot of ways. So you have huge, beautiful books with unfinished systems in them that don't deliver what you want them to deliver.

I sort of want White Wolf's graphic designers and artists and setting designers to team up with Paizo, maybe, or a team of designers who can create a game that is tight, efficient, and delivers when you want it to deliver.

We just had a session of Hunter: the Vigil with some members of our new home group we're trying to put together, and it went really well and was a lot of fun. It isn't like I'm not having fun with White Wolf's games - I almost always do. It just isn't...reliable. Their new system, its core dice mechanic, just isn't as good as their old one, and it takes something away from the game that used to be there. I'd have kept a similar dice system, with variable pools and variable difficulties on d10s, because that just lead to a more interesting game, a system that the players can use to set their characters up for huge success or for big risks at critical moments. The dice helped the game along - not so much with the new WoD stuff. Its really too bad.

Mage: the Ascension and the Tangle of Entropy

A friend of mine is currently putting together a Mage: The Ascension game for us to play over the intertubes in the near future. This has been a good way for close college friends to keep in touch and keep in the hobby when we are separated by thousands of miles.

One thing that precedes any of these games, and has for years now, is a significant discussion of house rules. We house rule everything under the sun. It's part of the reason I stick with trying to be a game designer - I'd find almost the game I want to play, with almost the system I want to use, that is almost as consistent as I'd like. I got tired of almost. Anne Lamott says "Write the story you would want to come upon." In the same way, "Design the game you want to play."

If you've played Mage, you know that it is a game about everything, in which your characters can do almost anything. That's the point, and that's the incredible design challenge behind the game - to deal with characters who have improvisational reality-altering power with anything but a narrativist hand-wave. Because of this, we're tweaked our own ideas of what the Spheres do and some of the assumptions behind the game - we've hacked it significantly, such that I can't even run it as written in the book anymore at this point - and I don't mind. Our system is better in a number of ways.

But we got caught up in arguing over what Entropy, the Sphere that oddly covers both decay and chance, should function. The discussion ranged over dozens of emails, with all six of us chiming in at various points. There were votes, counter-votes, suggestions, and near-treatises written on the topic.

Ultimately, our ST had to say "Ok, this is over. I'll figure it out. Moving on to character backgrounds and group template..." (well, he doesn't say "group template" but that's the stage we're in) It was sort of a necessary anticlimax.

I can't help but think that we, the players of a game like Mage, have these long discussions because the designers of Mage didn't. That is, I'm sure they had lots of design discussions - but were they the right ones? Mage is probably still my favorite WW game, but it is also the one for which I have the longest house rules document. In part, it's a labor of love, like custom random-encounter tables for my pubescent AD&D escapades.

It is also one of the things that, as I said, motivates me to design games, and to pay special attention to magic systems, which are almost 100% garbage in the RPGs out there for the past 30 years.

After all of those emails back and forth, I'm left with the deep feeling - this could've been done better.

I will do it better.

We'll see if I live up to that.

Hunter: the Vigil

I don't know if you guys got a chance to check out White Wolf's offering for Free RPG Day, but it was a Hunter: the Vigil introductory scenario, and there was enough in there to get a good idea of what the Hunter game will probably be like, as well as how White Wolf is going about scenario design these days.

It looks like Hunter: the Vigil is going back to the roots of Hunters Hunted, rather than Hunter: the Reckoning. In Hunters Hunted, you were just regular people who hunted monsters. You did so for various reasons, and at most possibly had mild psychic powers, but ultimately you had to use your brains and teamwork to survive. Hunter: the Reckoning, in contrast, had a lot of character options that were freakishly overpowered and a other options that were almost worthless, and not a lot in-between. It was pretty easy to build a Hunter using the Reckoning rules who would never experience any danger from any supernatural. That...basically guaranteed a lack of fun (though I've heard the computer game was decent - never played it myself.)

In Hunter: the Vigil, you're back to being regular mortals built with the basic World of Darkness rules. Instead of super powers, you have two special advantages when facing down the monsters. The first is Tactics - a Tactic is a way that your hunter cell has developed where they work together to augment themselves against supernatural attacks, or to work as an efficient and effective team. The two that the introductory book mentions bolster you against mind control powers and make you a better investigator, respectively. The other thing that you can do as a Hunter is risk Willpower. Instead of spending Willpower, you can risk it, meaning if you succeed you get two Willpower back, but if you fail, the failure is treated as a dramatic failure.

For scenario design, White Wolf seems to be outlining and clearly delineating scenes. Each scene has a rating of Mental, Physical and Social, corresponding to what the scene will focus on and how it will challenge the player-characters. It also has a short introduction and a paragraph of "Storyteller Goals" and another paragraph of "Character Goals". I like what I've seen of the scene design system because it lends itself to a style of storytelling that I think works well with White-Wolf's games - a kind of semi-cinematic drama. I also like thought going into what the goal of a scene is from the storyteller side and the player side.

Overall, I think Hunter: the Vigil looks promising. Its a return to grittier and more frightening Hunter stories, where you pit cunning and courage against the supernatural powers of creatures of darkness. That's what I want in a modern-day Hunter game. When it comes out in August, I'll be looking at getting myself a copy.

On Production Values

An aspect of gaming that is often overlooked is presentation of the game itself. When buying a game book we certainly pay attention to the quality of the art, layout and printing. Why not pay attention therefore to the quality of the other materials we use in gaming? What about having beautiful character sheets, beautiful dice, beautiful tokens or markers etc...? Why not be concerned about the gaming environment as well? Isn't it cooler to game in a dank dungeon with flickering candles than in a room with doilies and floral print sofas?

Some things are beyond our control obviously, when we game, but some things can be done with a limited budget and plenty of creativity.

For example, Doug and I recently ran a game of Changeling: the Lost for our local game store (a perfectly brilliant place called Gamescape North Bay). To make the game more immersive and enjoyable we covered the tables with cloths, and set out candles and props suited to the game's setting. Then we spent a good amount of time and energy making sure the character sheets and materials for the game looked fabulous and set the tone.

The Character Sheets looked like this, unopened:














And we had special character sheets to represent the Others (the True Fae) who appeared late in the gaming session:
















We even had special 3x5 cards made up for single use items, Trifles, and Goblin Fruit that we handed out in game:

I recently ran my first session of Vampire the Requiem as a one-shot for my usual gaming group. We were taking a break from this for a night and I had an idea for a game. Overall, I think it went ok. Not great, but ok.

I generally don't like the dice-mechanic for the New World of Darkness as much as I liked the mechanic for the Old World of Darkness. I like having two variables, number of dice and difficulty, to manipulate in a game in different situations. In the NWoD, everything is difficulty 8, and the only variable is number of dice.

WW also took a turn toward D20 with the NWoD that I don't like. They added Merits that are obviously based on Feats, even to the point of replicating some Feats almost exactly. Maybe this is what other gamers are looking for who knows?

I think that, in general, to enjoy Vampire you have to want to play a vampire. There has to be something about you that likes when you finally frenzy and tear into people, doing things that you know you'll regret later. There's a particularity about vampires that isn't always there in other games. Even in Mage, there are a lot of kinds of Mage games, but Vampire is a little more limited, especially in tone.

As for me, I really like Vampire - both manifestations. I remember my first game, feeling sort of contemptuous of these stupid Goth kids and their Vampire game, hoping I could talk them into something else after this game was over. Turns out, Vampire is awesome. It does what it does very, very well. It also has the cool effect of combining the potential for severe, visceral violence, while still making it difficult to actually kill a PC. For modern games especially, this is very difficult to do in a way that makes sense.

Requiem works well, I thought. Its pretty intuitive. The dice mechanic is a step backwards from the last editions, but the rest of the game is a step forward. Five major Clans representing five archetypes of vampires themselves: sexy and dangerous (Daeva), bestial (Gangrel), intelligent and arcane (Mekhet), terrifying (Nosferatu) and manipulative (Ventrue). Under each Clan are a multitude of Bloodlines - I think there are four listed in the main book, and they have a lot of others in other expansions as usual.

Disciplines are a little more streamlined and a bit more logically laid out, and there are also multiple kinds of blood magic which I think is an excellent move. Making that available to any Clan, usually through their faction, means that you don't have to play a Tremere to use blood magic.

I also like that there are five major political factions, with other minor factions listed as well. It makes the political intrigues potentially richer and more interesting, since you have Clan politics going on, faction politics, and also the city's overall political structure. This makes it easier to involve player-characters at multiple levels.

One hallmark of the NWoD is the incredible production values in the core rulebooks. The paper stock, artwork, graphic design, and especially the incredible covers are all beautiful and evocative. The expansions move to a lower quality paper stock and no shiny foil in the covers, but that's ok. They're expansions. I think that when VtR came out, the cover especially was as embarrassingly better than other games as the original VtM cover was back in the early 90's.

Basically, its an awesome game if you like violence, political intrigue, and night-time. Having run it, I'd give it 4 stars - and I'd give Vampire the Masquerade 4.5 stars. The change in rules makes a difference.

Changeling: The Lost

Changeling: The Lost is the most recent game released by White Wolf. It is Changeling for the NWoD, and is actually quite different from the original Changeling: The Dreaming.

In Changeling: The Lost, you play the part of mortals who were taken to Arcadia to serve the True Fae but who have escaped, returned to the mortal world, to find that the world has moved on without them. The game seems to be about finding your identity in a world you no longer quite fit into, finding a way to return home, while avoiding the notice of the forces of Faerie which would like nothing better than to find you and capture you again - or worse.

Like Requiem and Forsaken, character creation in Changeling begins with creating a mortal and then adding the Changeling template. This comes with some advantages, of course. Wyrd is essentially the power of your Fae magic - similar, actually, to Blood Potency in Requiem, because Wyrd determines how much Glamour (magical energy) you can hold and how quickly you can spend it. Clarity is the 'moral' attribute for a Changeling - it is the ability to tell dream from reality, essentially. High Clarity sharpens perceptions and allows kenning - discerning what is magical around you clearly. Low Clarity means you are essentially a lunatic.

Instead of Arts, Changeling magic is expressed through Contracts. Each Changeling has one special affinity Contract based on her Seeming (Beast, Darkling, Elemental, Fairest, Ogre, Wizened) as well as her Court (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter). Contracts have Catches - things that must be done in order to use them that are special limitations - having thread from someone's bedclothes to affect their dreams, for example.

All Changelings also have affinity for the Contracts of Dream, Hearth (traditional blessings and curses), Mirror (changing appearance), and Smoke (stealth). When using your Contracts, you roll Attribute + Wyrd in dice, and even may high-level Contracts are pretty subtle.

New Merits include: Court Goodwill, Harvest (allows you to gather Glamour), Hallow (special housing, including the sub-Merit Hallow Amenities), Mantle (connection to a particular Court), New Identity and Token (magical objects).

If you're looking for similarities with Changeling: The Dreaming, there are many to be found. Beasts are somewhat like Pooka or Beasties, animalistic fae with nature-attuned powers. Darklings are similar to Sluagh, nocturnal lurkers. Fairest are similar to the Sidhe, beautiful manipulators. Ogres hearken back to...well, Ogres, as well as Trolls. The Wizened are artificers somewhat like Nockers.

The similarities are not very direct, however - Lost is very much a new game. The book, of course, is absurdly beautiful and well written. On first reading it seems easy to use, though like any WoD book the rules are spread out and interspersed with flavor text and examples. The game is dense with setting and tone, and it needs to be. It is quite evocative - reading it, I feel like I get a sense of what the designers and writers were going for in the game.

There's a great deal I won't get into here - Fetches and Hobgoblins and Goblin Markets, Entitlements. There is also the Freehold in the second Appendix, which is in this case Miami, presumably the iconic city for the Changeling setting - an interesting choice. Really, I need more time to read the book again, and ideally, I need to run a Changeling game, or play in one, to really get a handle on how everything works together. Just reading the book, however, gives the strong impression that this is an excellent game. It definitely, in my opinion, lives up to what I expected from another edition of Changeling.

Without even playing it yet, I give it 4 out of 5 stars, and that's partly because I actually prefer the dice mechanic of the Old World of Darkness. This game is dense with story, and is probably the best of the NWoD thus far.

Exalted 2nd Ed Review

I just finished a short-run game run by my friend using the Exalted system, Second Edition, by White Wolf Games. This review will be pretty brief because there isn't that much I feel like I need to say.

It does what it does pretty well - that is, allowing you to roll huge dice-pools and do amazing things, primarily in combat. I mean, if you want to level a phalanx of hobgoblins, put an arrow through someone's eye every time you bend your bow, or take a flying leap off of a giant's back and jam a fiery naginata into Dread Cthulhu (hey, I had to get His attention), this is your game.

It is unlike the other White Wolf games, in general, in that the focus seems to be on action. I'm sure you could run an intrigue game, but I imagine there's only so deep things will go when you have all of these abilities devoted to obliterating your foes. Gone, also, is the usual kind of internal moral or spiritual conflict that marks many of White Wolf's games. This game is all about external conflict.

I personally don't like the change that White Wolf has made in general (in Requiem, Awakening, Forsaken, Exalted, etc.) to a d10 system where the difficulty is always the same. Frankly, that takes away a dimension of the game that I liked a great deal - that successes always mean the same thing, and your capacity (dice-pool) is always placed against the difficulty (target number) of a task. In the new systems, the target number never changes. This just lessens the versatility of the dice mechanic for no good reason whatsoever (IMO).

Overall, I give Exalted 2nd Edition 3.5 out of 5 stars. It does what it does well, but is also limited, and the only meaningful conflicts you're likely to have are external. It's definitely fun, and a great way to blow off steam, and to use amounts of d10's that won't even fit in two cupped hands, but I'm not sure I'd be interested in a long-term Exalted game.

Learning Experience

Having just finished running the Mage: the Ascension game mentioned previously, I have some reflections concerning what I learned over the course of it, including helpful comments and feedback after the fact.

The main issue that I see is with providing information. I think I fall into the trap of seeing information as something I should make the players earn through effort, which leads to a problem whenever there is a difference between they think it should require and what I think it should require. This comes out of previous experiences, perhaps, where I have had players who are rampant and obsessive in following up every possible lead. It is also just part of a fundamental hoarding instinct - I want goodies for me, I suppose.

What this information should be is a way to drive the story forward. Sure, it shouldn't be lying on the ground, but any significant effort should probably be enough to get what the players are after.

(This brings me to briefly reflect on reasons why I like Burning Wheel. With the way the game is written, any Skills test involves making clear what is at stake. So if you go to research something, the GM makes clear what's at stake, so when you succeed, you know what you're in for. This is a meta-game process that I'm at first a little uncomfortable with, but I do see the value in limiting red-herrings and useless searching, as well as preventing misunderstandings at crucial points.)

The second major issue is one that was clear early on but there was nothing I could do because it occurred to me after the game had already begun - that is the issue of group template. In short, the group template for this game wasn't strong at all, and throughout the game it got in the way. It also led to opportunities for humor and development and character interaction, but at least some of this was motivated by frustration, which isn't a good thing in a game. Ideally, there would be room for the interaction, but with more cohesion and a clear idea of why this group is in this story together, I think this interaction would be more driven and would make more sense to everyone.

Detour

I have just recently finished running a Mage: the Ascension game with friends of mine here in San Anselmo. I think that the game was generally a success, though I certainly also learned a lot of things I can do better in the future.

As part of the game we maintained a blog which combined my writings, some out-of-character and some in-character, designed to add flavor to the world and move to plot onward, with the players' writings, all in-character, aimed at developing them further or in response to things happening on the blog.

I think that the result has some real gems, honestly. Some really cool stuff that we worked together to create. I figured out belatedly that I could invite the players to post directly to the blog, but in our next game, this'll be the case from the start, and the result should be even better.

In the meantime, check out our Mage game blog, which I'm leaving up for anyone's reading enjoyment. I have added the tag: "Quality Writing" to note what I particularly liked of what we produced. Treat them like vignettes, perhaps, since only a few people will understand what these things mean/meant in context.