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.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chiming
no subject
Date: 2019-01-13 06:08 pm (UTC)From: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.