Things you should never do in Elders games

[havocthecat]

Anyone else ever played an Elder, either in an Elder game, or just get enough points accumulated into your character that, no matter young your character was chronologically, you were an Elder?

Theoretically, they are of greater maturity than their Ancilla or Neonate counterparts, but let's face it. We're playing for fun, not to be boring and mature.

Anyone want to share a story of things you should never do in Elders games? I mean, I've got a whole boatload of them, and I'll kick it off with some terrible decisions I have made IC for my favorite character.

Comments

Miranda Graves

[havocthecat]

Things you should never do in Elder games: Sleep with Thor. Or make deals with Loki. OR BOTH.

Now that I've said that, let me give you the background:

Miranda Graves was an elder Ravnos who was masquerading as a very young Neonate Ravnos who had survived the Week of Nightmares by dint of being very, very weak and running and hiding a lot. Miranda had, in fact, survived it by being a super-murdery and ruthless bastard of an Elder, like you do. But this is not that story.

Our story begins in Chicago, where Miranda had conned her way into being elected the head of the local Anarch Movement, and the local Camarilla Prince and her Sheriff, both a couple of impulsive fuckwits, had teamed up to release Loki from his bindings, thereby kicking off Ragnarok. (It was a very mythologically-based era of our LARP.)

The main problem with this was not the impending doomsday of the human race (we had plans for hiding out a survivable population in a mid-range space between the Nine Realms), it was the fact that a bunch of dumb idiots thought, "No one ELSE is going to make a deal with Loki, so I'll take the shiny candy and do the errand, thereby advancing the world ONE MORE STEP TOWARD RAGNAROK."

Every time. Every. fucking. time. You have no idea what it's like being the one person going around saying, "Do not make deals with evil, immortal Trickster gods. Trust me, I am a trickster and I know it is a stupid plan." No one listens.

So, fine, Miranda is clearly going to have to take matters into her own hands to make sure that, at least, she survives. So she meets up with Loki and says, "What can I do to ensure that Surtr, your handy fire demon dude, does not burn the Nine Realms? Because that shit is the one thing I cannot survive."

Loki says, "Well, in the grand scheme of things, fuck Thor, I hate him, and he's prophesied to kill one of my babies. I want his hammer. If you get me his gloves, I will take care of Surtr."

Miranda, not being entirely stupid, has done some research, and knows those gloves will let Thor use Mjolnr, but okay, she's not exactly on the side of the Norse Gods here, because those guys are assholes too. She's Jewish; there is approximately one God she worships and none of these guys are it. (I say approximately because she's a closet Bahari.)

So. Okay. Deal done, Miranda scopes out Thor, who is also hanging around trying to get everybody to lock Loki up. Which Miranda could also totally do; she has the best chance of tricking Loki into it, but nobody has asked her. They're just interested in the shiny deal candy and nobody thinks they're going to end up with Ragnarok.

(PLAYERS. Ragnarok is on the table. Everyone's getting there.)

Thor is always wearing these gloves. ALWAYS. He sleeps in them. There is no chance of getting him out of them. There's no chance of stealing them off his belt, even with a maxed out Subterfuge and Security, which Miranda has.

But. Thor is susceptible to one thing, and one thing only: Trickery. So Miranda throws a party. Just for Thor. There are strippers. There is food. So. Much. Food. There is beer. Even. More. Beer. But he still won't take the damn gloves off.

So she finally says, "Fuck it, only one way to do this."

She sleeps with Thor.

While he is in a post-party food, drink, and sex coma, she steals his gloves, runs off, barely makes it to her hired hotel room for the day and calls a swarm of rats to guard her (that hotel is going to have health inspectors for MONTHS after, whoops), but she gets the gloves AND when Thor goes after her for it because one of her own people sends him off to her (they're assholes, but they're her murderous, traitorous assholes), she talks him out of being mad at her. Because Thor is very vulnerable to people talking him out of being mad at them.

Finally, everyone else made enough deals with Loki that the conditions for Ragnarok were fulfilled (because of course), Ragnarok came, Thor died real fast, and instead of Surtr burning the Nine Realms, Loki whacked him in the face with Mjolnr and no burning was had. Loki kinda won at Ragnarok.

So. That is the story of how Miranda Graves made a deal with Loki, slept with Thor, and saved the world.

Also she handed the rule of Asgard to Loki, so, whoops if you have a problem with that? But she kind of doesn't care, because tricksters.

[alatefeline]

Does playing in a Dark Ages game count? (I don't think so...)

I briefly played a number of NPCs who probably qualified, but none of my PC characters in my main LARP were Elders.

Playing an NPC elder I tended to make them calmer and more focused than a 'younger' vampire ... but also MONOfocused on their particular worldview ... I figured they'd likely started to calcify a bit.

[havocthecat]

Oh goodness, yes! I have stories about when I accidentally made a deal with a demon in my Dark Ages game, which means I say it does count.

I mean, it's a vampire game, so it should count, even if we don't have a tag for it, right? You're also so right about the monofocus. That's what's fun about playing an elder!

Share your stories!

[propergoffick]

Dark Ages Vampire, or indeed Vampire: the Dark Ages, TOTALLY COUNTS. I kind of roll the historical settings in under the general aegis of 'Masquerade' but I'm perfectly happy to have a separate tag for them.

[propergoffick]

I've played a couple of elders. The second wasn't particularly interesting: I built him for a Discord RP community which was a) always on and b) full of thousand-year-old Methuselae hanging around a bar that never closed making power moves at each other, which kind of limits your potential when your entire clan is four hundred years younger than your peer group.

The first was for an elder-tier Dark Ages game my friend Scott ran in the terminal stages of high school, after I said I wanted a break from Storytelling. Now Scott is a man given to ramping up the power level, or the amount of chaos, in a game environment: throwing all the chips up in the air and seeing what came down. And he said "use the template in the Storyteller's Handbook, just go mad, but don't go above sixth generation, that's all I ask." We'd be making our way across Europe in the wake of the... I want to say Fifth Crusade? The one into pagan Latvia, Lithuania et al. And he told us to expect werewolves.

Enter the players. Edd, who normally plays very grave and serious law and order types (he's a natural paladin player), opted to go against his usual flow and built FENRIC, a large and monosyllabic Viking Gangrel with enough Fortitude to wrassle the sun. Dan, who was a bit of a wild card, went for a Teutonic Ventrue who'd be bringing four newly Embraced neonates along for the ride, and also had an amount of Fortitude. I... took a darker path. I built a Tzimisce. I built him around Ecstatic Agony - that power that turns your wound penalties into bonuses - and I sank most of my freebies into Backgrounds, because I always do. So I say to Scott "What do I get with Retainers 7, Domain 7, Resources 7 and Influence 7?", and he says "a small Balkan nation and a revenant family". And those poor revenants, because we were all wargamers at heart and saw life as cheap, caught all the bad luck. The one I used as a battering ram got off lightly.

This game petered out after four sessions, as the dodgy ones tend to do, but I will always remember our last session: the one where the werewolves eventually showed up. One each. Now, Fenric could tank and spank a werewolf, being about as close to one himself as you can get while still being Kindred. Dan's Ventrue, whose name has been lost to history I'm afraid, could at least go toe to toe with one. Zarek the Voivode, however, had no way to soak the aggravated damage, and no way to deal it. What he did have, by the end of the second round, was a twenty-four dice melee attack pool. Which is why the last thing I remember from that game is a medieval warlord, distorted into a giant spiky hellmonster thing, jumping up and down on an eight-foot man-wolf in a desperate attempt to keep it unconscious long enough for his small army to finish legging it and get their shit together long enough to set the wretched thing on fire... and hope they didn't clip him in the process, because one more damage point would have finished him.

I don't think that's how Vampire should be played, but I can't say it didn't put a smile on my face at the time.

[havocthecat]

Sometimes you really have to love those ramped-up power level games on steroids, and as long as you were having fun - and it sounds like you were - then that's the important thing. A 24d melee attack pool is awesome. Also, your poor Retainers. Bless their darling little hearts.

You are reminding me of my Elder Lasombra who was an abbess' companion, who had one point in Obtenebration and all her other default Discipline points in Dominate, and most of her XP soaked up in Backgrounds, because in the Dark Ages, it's all about Generation and Backgrounds. She was always the abbess' boon companion, and had, in fact, been every single abbess' boon companion for the entire time that the abbey had existed, and no one ever seemed to remember that about her, because, well, all her points were in Dominate.

You don't really need more than your four basic Discipline points if you buy enough Backgrounds in Dark Ages and you surround yourself with nuns.

I wish that game had lasted, but we had a couple of min-maxers who wanted to kill everything we encountered, and didn't understand that Humanity was a legit mechanic, not a thing that everyone ignored so that they could play superheroes with fangs, and we had a Ventrue who wanted his feeding weakness to be only women with five dots in Appearance (ew), so we fell apart after a couple games.

But I loved my Background-heavy Lasombra on the Road of Heaven. I'm keeping her off to the side so I can use her again if I ever need to.

[harpers_child]

Your Lasombra sounds awesome. An abby is a great resource.

I hope your storyteller let the Ventrue starve. That is a stupid prey choice.

[propergoffick]

That's pretty much what happened with the elders game I described, too: it just wasn't going to hold together for more than a handful of sessions, so we sort of... collectively decided to run it into the ground and see how far the pieces flew. I'm not sure I'd enjoy it now, but y'know, when you're seventeen...

(Also, I miscalculated: twenty-two dice. Lost track of the wound level bonuses. Like it really matters. It's still Too Damn Many.)

Backgrounds are ALWAYS the way to go at character generation, that's what I tell people. You can't always buy them later, and a little Domain and Status and Influence will go a long way. (I'm gonna admit that I also like playing characters with Fame: it's such a delightful double-edged sword, an advantage that potentially turns on you every time you use it, which is... a very Vampire way to tune, I think. I'll put my hand up to making powerful characters but I try my utmost not to make them boring with it.)

(And yes: Dominate is best Discipline. Necromancy has a unique flair, Protean is definitely practical, and Celerity is... well, action economy is always worth keeping an eye on, but I'm absolutely in love with the mind whammy. Powerful, but also horrible, and you either think twice before you use it or your soul rots away.)

[harpers_child]

The first game I ever played with my current group (almost 20 years ago now) we were technically Neonates at the start. Except we were made with magic and Cain's blood (he gave permission) and were only made to save the world from Elder Gods invading. (There were people with time powers who were orchestrating the whole thing.)

By the end of the game we knew we technically didn't have generation. Other vampires were freaked out because they knew we didn't have generation. (It involved an angry Gangrel, an airport, and a salsa jar full of blood. I got my jar of blood back btw. You don't leave that stuff laying around.) We had powers our storyteller made up just for us. Casual observers had no idea what our clans were because we'd all cross-disciplined out the wazoo.

We were the reincarnation of King Arthur and the Knight of the Round Table.

I'll look around for my character sheet later and post a link. It was ridiculous.

My husband was another player in the group. Our storyteller did the in real life wedding ceremonies for both my sisters. And? We get together almost every Saturday night still.

Our current game? A replay of our first. Some of the players are different. No one is allowed to play the same clan. Some of us aren't even vampires. Storyteller has taken out some things, added new things, and changed the order of events. We're all having a blast.

[harpers_child]

Found my character sheet. It's posted over on my journal to save space here.
https://harpers-child.dreamwidth.org/290649.html

Please note I could have been way more OP at the end of the game, but didn't because the Fader wouldn't have. I now get to play things my storyteller would never let anyone else play.

If the SU finds his, I'll copy it too.

[arcanetrivia]

Anyone else ever played an Elder, either in an Elder game, or just get enough points accumulated into your character that, no matter young your character was chronologically, you were an Elder?

Oh yes. 10th-generation Malkavian Primogens who got there through Diablerie and who have, ahem, somehow acquired dots in Serpentis and Vicissitude probably are not a thing that should happen.