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

[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.)