havocthecat: faith lehane is totally setting a bad example (btvs faith bad example)
havocthecat ([personal profile] havocthecat) wrote in [community profile] vampirethevarious2019-01-13 09:11 am

Things you should never do in Elders games

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.
alatefeline: Painting of a cat asleep on a book. (Default)

[personal profile] alatefeline 2019-01-13 04:41 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
propergoffick: Stylised wax seal, black 'wax' on white background; blackletter S in a circle (vtm)

[personal profile] propergoffick 2019-01-13 06:08 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2019-01-13 18:09 (UTC)
harpers_child: melaka fray reading from "Tales of the Slayers". (Default)

[personal profile] harpers_child 2019-01-13 08:06 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
arcanetrivia: a light purple swirl on a darker purple background (Default)

[personal profile] arcanetrivia 2019-01-14 09:49 pm (UTC)(link)
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.