Wtf: Which concerns creatures of darkness (and slash, but only a little)...

[black_sluggard]

Item the First:

I recently started up a D&D game with a couple of friends online. Well, Zeretal, and a friend who says he'll join when he's finished a paper, and a friend of Z's who I've only just met but is pretty cool, and a friend of mine that stood us up, and another friend of Z's who stepped in to fill in for him.

I'm really excited about it. I've wanted to do a game in the Ravenloft setting for years (I'd prefer to play, sure, but that's not likely to happen ever...), and this is the first time I've managed to do so. I'd been kind of nervous about it. I've only DM'd a couple of games IRL, and those were for my sisters, so I'm not an experienced DM by any stretch of the word. And its been ages. Plus, I hold Ravenloft on a pedestal as the ideal type of setting and gameplay experience, so I'm always worried I'll screw it up. But we ran our first game last night, and it went pretty well.

Though I painfully underestimated how much time the adventure I planned would take when translated to online play.

I'd planned out a (theoretically) short tutorial adventure for the players, because they were both new to D&D. My thought was that they'd have a chance to get used to combat using throwaways, and I could get an idea of how to run the game without putting their beloved first PCs at risk. It would also give them a chance to stock up on knowledge of the setting so they could really dig in to the RP once the "actual" game started. Needless to say, we didn't even get past the first encounter. First, the one player didn't show up. Then we recruited the fill-in. Then I had trouble because the IRC dice bot I'd downloaded and tested successfully failed to work when I needed it. We wound up moving the dice rolls to AIM (I hate AIM's diceroller). Having to manually add bonuses further slowed the game. Then the fill-in had to leave, and I wound up NPCing the NPC I'd given him.

There was some fun RP, but the weaksauce portion of the first combat encounter took forever. And we had to cut off in the middle of the larger part because the game ran so late.

Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun. I'd planned on cutting the tutorial short if it ran long, but the players were interested enough in finishing it, so I should manage to get to the rest of it.

I have logs of the first session. I've been thinking about posting them here, but I'm not sure whether there'd be interest, and if there was, whether I should post full logs, or just post links to the wiki I have set up for the campaign.



Item the Second:

Given my tendencies as a writer (i.e. my predictability when it comes to choosing subject matter as far from canon as possible), it was never a question of whether I would write a vampire story for the Roach pairing so much as when.

And how. Which is really the issue.

You can do vampires so many ways. And the thing about vampires is they're basic enough that readers would probably accept a vampire story where they might not accept, say, hive-minded alien abominations, sentient zombies, immortal ex-Nazis or magical mice. So, I have a plot for a vampire story that's been in my head for a while, but I've only the loosest conception of how the vampires in the story are going to act or operate.

On the one hand, nobody is going to want lame Twilight sparklepires (and I don't think I could respect myself as a writer if I went that route anyway).

On the other hand, nobody is going to want crazy, Lovecraftian, Necroscope-esque wamphyri either (except maybe me, but let's face it, I basically already went there with Sui Generis, so yeah, still no).

On a third hand still (wait, what?), I could go the traditional route and pull the rules from Dracula or earlier folklore. But , when you go traditional, you're pretty much giving up on making the rules do anything interesting and new. Plus, it would mean pretty much abandoning my usual preference to keep magic and science as ambiguously defined parts of a greater whole.

And I can't go the hard science route because...well, if I did, I'd just be writing Life again, wouldn't I?

So thoughts, should anyone care to weigh in?

Comments

[game-byrd.livejournal.com]

D&D - Our group does well with RPTools program MapTools, used in conjunction with Ventrilo. Both are free. Someone has to host the 'server' portion of both and I'm not sure what that entails, but participation for the others is pretty easy. Just install the program, enter in a few bits (a username, the address of the server, channel, etc.) and away you go. MapTools allows you to upload maps you either generate yourself or 'borrow' from an established D&D module. There's free ones out there you can download and use. I don't know how friendly they are for customizing, as our DM just takes existing modules and creates story reasons for us to need to go wherever and fight whatever.

If you could get Skype to work for you, you should be able to have a teleconference between all the players and use the share screen function to display pictures of NPCs or monsters, as well as maps to show where they are. Although there's no dice roller built into Skype. In MapTools, you can build your character using D&D's online character builder and then import them into MapTools, where they'll show up with all their abilities programmed into them.

Vampires - When I think of vampires (or anything, really), I like to think about the history of it. How did it come to be? What impact does that history have on today? What depth does it give the plot? So for vampires, I want to know if there have been any back in history, are any of them still existent, are their plots and schemes driving what's going on in the character's plots?

I come from the White Wolf background on vampires, 1st and 2nd edition. You can tell a really awesome story in that so long as you don't get bogged down in the arms race of powers, filling in dots on character sheets, and arguing about the rules.

I like Forever Knight vampires, or Moonlight or True Blood variants. The essential traits are:
> Drinks blood
> Long-lived or immortal
> Superhuman in several areas (usually speed and strength, but sometimes also charm and/or toughness)
> Has a few supernatural powers that defy explanation (like flight, turning into a wolf, etc.)
Everything else is pretty flexible. Whatever tells a better story for you.

[black_sluggard]

D&D-I've tried MapTools before, once upon a time. And also OpenRPG which was pretty similar. I couldn't ever get a server going on MapTools, though. OpenRPG has standing servers, if I remember, but it's a lot less easy-to-use. Either way, I didn't want to burden the players with having to download a new program, but considering one was having trouble with the lack of grid, I might just go head and give one of those another shot.

Vampires-Plots don't really factor into it much. I prefer my vampires mostly solitary, or in twos and threes at most. I don't know what it is about the long-stretching conspiracies or secret societies that just turns me off in a vampire story (it makes logical sense, after all), but I just prefer vampires as individual monsters rather than being part of this huge connected culture or network.

Yeah, anyway.

It's not so much the powers that I'm hung up on as the cosmetics. I mean, what can you really do with vampires? I mean, usually there's crazy eyes, often distorted faces, and fangs of some sort, in some combination. I'd be tempted to skip the fangs, but I do want to differentiate them from the post-vitals in the Life series.

On occasion its taken a step further and they are made very batlike. Part of me wants to make them truly inhuman looking, with their human appearance actually being some kind of illusion (and the mirror phobia relating to it reflecting the truth rather than the illusion). But I wonder how far I can successfully take that with the love interest in a story...

(and okay, in Sui Generis, Javier was basically a shoggoth, but whatevs)

[game-byrd.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read any of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series? In it, he had multiple kinds of vampires. One kind was much like you're describing - grotesqueries in their natural form, but covered by an unearthly glamor.

Another option on D&D is to make up a map beforehand with a grid on it, then label the axes with letters on the vertical and numbers on the horizontal. Have players announce where they are ('Ragnar walks onto the map at A4') and you tell them where the monsters/bad guys/whoevers are at. You keep a printed out copy and mark/erase as positions change, or you have an electronic copy where you move tokens. Whatever works. At the beginning of each round, you recap where everyone is.

Also, are you playing 4th edition or some other? Any game that plays up the role play (like 1st, 2nd, and to a lesser extent 3rd) vs the gaming elements (4th) is more forgiving as to exact map coordinates. You just can't play 4th edition without knowing exactly how many squares foe A is from foe B or whatever, because too many powers work based on that information, and they work in a binary fashion (yes she's close enough; no she's not). The earlier editions were a bit fuzzier, allowing more DM judgment calls about proximity.

[black_sluggard]

Love the Dresden Files. The Red Court vampires are somewhat along the lines I was thinking. I like the thought of doing something similar to that, because it makes the vampire hunter antagonists seem not so immediately crazy and evil.

Character A is stunned when Character B and his wife are murdered. Character B rises as a vampire, and explains that his wife's vampirism had been the motive behind the murders (and in the wife's case, her brutal beheading). Which is a lot to take in for Character A, but he handles it.

Later, they find out that the vampire hunters are still after Character B, and B winds up badly injured to the point of serious disfigurement. Character A notices the minor changes that are still apparent. As B heals, though, certain things don't seem quite right.

Eventually I want the climax to involve the hunters revealing Character B's true form. Because its one thing to accept his undead friend when he still looks like his friend, but seeing the illusion stripped away would have to inspire some doubt, especially in light of some of the things that have happened by then.

Full on humanoid bat seems a bit drastic. Maybe going with something similar to the vampires from 30 Days of Night, where they're plainly inhuman, but not quite animalistic.

We're using 3rd (3.5), so its pretty flexible. I'm planning on polling my players about using a different program, so that. :)

[game-byrd.livejournal.com]

You have my support!