CFC Early Talks.

Thinking about new Org.

Advantages and opportunities
- Number of games? Canada is a separate entity – around 5,000 players in the US.
- Toronto? See above.
- Global House Rules? Pretty simple, they exist. But they're not particularly noteworthy.
- Love the Charity angle – this is actually bigger than we thought. You can gain prestige (if you want different types of starting toons) not just from doing a canned food drive (for example) or volunteering, but also have a dinner party/movie night with 5 players and things like that. Apparently it's stupid easy to rank up your CFC if you want to. But again, it's not necessary.

How does it work?
- OOC Xpies? As above, plus we're trying to negotiate a bump to you – the player – for moving en masse to CFC. Me and Bri have no particular interest in getting bribed... basically leveling up gives you more XP for starting characters and more options to play. You can play weird shit to start with, but it's harder to get it approved.... example being “I'm a rank 5 bastet.... with 10 starting xp....” their response “Whaaaa?”
- Pay to play? Stupid cheap. 20 dollars per YEAR per player. Which covers all games.. if you have 3 games that's .30 cents a session. If one it's less than a bottle of pop at UB a session. This is easily budgeted for. It gives us the advantage of insanely responsive people upstairs.
- Resets? Yes. They're looking for 5-6 years for the next one – perhaps pushed forward by the new rules, but they think a conversion is more likely than an early reset. They JUST reset in June – so no one is that ahead of you.



Stuff that worries us.
- Local Control? Pretty much absolutely.
- Can I redline? Absolutely
- Can I refuse admission? Totally.
- What can I do without permission on a night to night basis? Anything short of nuking another city. Basically if it doesn't have monstrous effects BEYOND our game domain (the greater Buffalo area) they don't really care.
- Walkthrough of a normal session - What can't happen. How to sell that IC? (****) No longer an issue after our convo.
- Local history = gone? No. If they can work in with plot, they will – because it's more elegant – other aspects like our game history of the region and work we've done they can work in by fiat. Which they're cool with doing.
- Rage Across New York = Shit. Not an issue, see above.
- Buffalo's homebrewed history? Ditto.
- 10 Years OWBN - Local perspectives going back to mid 90's. Our microverse will be respected up, and until, the point of shared continuity.
- Local continuity = gone? Somewhat. This is the big deal. Garou play with garou, vampires play with vampires, and everything else plays with everything else. Some players may see this as a feature and not a bug. I am of mixed views... it stops the worry of having vampire character roflstomped by Garou PCs... it just can't happen. You do lose something in the crossing of genres but... in a sense... this adds even more autonomy moving forward for the Vampire HSTs and the Vamp games. We can't go to war with the Vampires of Buffalo (as PCs) but they can do it to NPC vampires.
- Not a dealbreaker, but losing shared world with SAB and CAM games even if they join up hurts: All of the Vampire games could, prospectively be shared... but not with us, lol. We still have a massive (compared to OWBN) network of Garou games that know garou genre and don't.. well... suck as much.
- Would we have to come in the newb area? Yes and no. We're trying to get a negotiated bump of a few levels to the players (more starting XP, more options) by saying – boldly and to all and sundry – we as ST's ardently believe the game is for you – not us. We will wallow in noobland as long as possible to get the best possible deal for you the players. (Bucky note: Hell, we're just super cliaths anyway who never play.... but shhhhh don't tell them that.)

- When is the next reset? 2018...ish? We'll be fine. Plus this allows stories to end. Which is nice.
- New MET book triggering a reset? Apparently not. Most likely a conversion – they see it as a prospective trainwrecking argument – but at the end of the day players should be able to smoothly transition around... 2015.
- Doesn't the new MET stuff look promising? Yes.
- How much overhead / paperwork / micromanagement? Very little. Legitimately... very very little.
- Umbral Quests = Upstairs approval = Really? Really? Really. Yes and no... there is a level of prior restraint.. I used an example that has happened in game: 1) Player want to go to the cyberrealm.. for plot... and shopping. Approval required? Minimal. They will want to know if you accidently blew up a chunk of the cyber realm so the next people who go see the crater. This is NBD. Same for Totem quests and other near realm jaunts.
Other Example 2) I want to go to the cyberrealm and we'll all become cyberdogs, and we're gonna kill an incarna! Approval level: “WTF people?”

- Random jibber jabber.
Some notes. The big thing is NO MORE COUNCIL. You don't have to convince a hundred strangers about playing a toon. Approval basically works like this. You write a backgroung you work onit, you send it in. They send it to us with a yay or nay (generally yay) and say “Hey does this work for you as Sts?” we get the final say. Which is the opposite of the rumor mill.
Plus, as its one or two making the approval this moves exponentially faster than OWBN.



Events are 6 per year, 4 regional events which alternate through the US on a biyearly basis. Plus 2 national events (major events) plus Feature Games which are basically mini-events... like the Goblin Market. Which you could run with approval whenever you have the time, space, and wherewithall.



Max XP for toons is 6, with application for more if it's an event or a big deal. Up to 12 year for bonus XP.



You can have 2 toons (per genre... eg; 2 werewolves, 2 vampires -cam, 2 sabbat, etc.). Primary and alt. Your alt is more restricted than your primary as to what it can be. So the opposite of OWBN. No more Ventrue Main, Nagaraja Alt. That is national. So you can't have 12 vampires in 6 games. Which I think is a feature.



Ummm... oh their prestige is actually pretty balanced. No real ceiling effects and they came up with a novel way of pacing things. It'd take a while to type up but basically no more than 1 perm renown per session (2 if it's something awesome – caern raising, story ending, etc) 3 if it's nationwide holy shit inducing. And you can only rank once every 6 months. We kind of liked it. It's not broken, it's not slower, and it's paced right.



Thats about it.



Also they're willing to send a rep to our next session (a weekend day if not at session, because our next session is LA By Night) to talk to us like a union negotiation! Which is pretty frikin awesome. 20 bucks a year gets you a lot of love from up above apparently. And we represent – to put it in persepective – in our larp alone 1/3 the entire number of players... IN CANADA. So we have some room to negotiate around problems.


Cheers and much love
Bucky and Bri

Okay, so, forgot to put this in the main thread.

CFC is an adults only game. You have to be 18+ to play.

Also no RSOs or convicted felons in general.. There is a code of conduct all players agree to. 

So no one has to worry about their jobs being lost because of gamer laxity dealing with RSO's or murderers.

Even though most can afford it, I don't like the idea of pay-to-play. I don't think I have seen any regular LARP around here make you pay. Not to say same of us don't pay anyways (like STs and printing charcater sheets, webhost paying for webspace etc)

what happens to our current toons?

Yea, that is something I very much want to know about.  I know I am only a newer character, but I'd like to not see my sheet burned to ash.

Also, a change from 8 XP a month to 6 will feel different in some ways.

Their game just rebooted in June. Plus side is you won't be behind the curve. Downside is that we're gonna lose a buncha xpies. There are options and compromises. We will discuss.

Past or future XP?

In a way, that does make a trade off.  Though, how soon can we change over if this is the route.  We are already 18 XP behind the others. <_<    ...Don't judge me.

I did ask this on the Facebook group but I will repeat here. What about just staying as a troup game. Perhaps we just do a shared universe in the Buffalo area?

As a note, most games outside of our area are pay to play as they rent space.  So this is not a new idea.  We have just had the luxury of having UB be our play space for 20+ years.  Also please remember its a luxury, for the love of whatever you hold dear clean up after yourselves and make others do it too.

If we leave the OWBN system I vote for troupe play, with perhaps some sort of shared Buffalo universe.

And yes, we have been very lucky that UB provides a free gaming area, perhaps part of the reason Buffalo gaming is so active.

If the other OWbN Buffalo games stay with OWbN can we still share their universe?

I’d say a super majority of us have been LARP’ing a very long time and most of us are very rules / admin savvy.  Like others here I’m chomping at the bit to debate and dive into the nitty gritty of every aspect of this possibility but I’m trying to be patient to allow you guys time to talk to CFC about the details.   BTW, on the MES website I found the write up for their current Apocalypse setting.

Major world events within the last 10 years
  - War with the Ratkin
  - The dousing of the Red Star
  - Perfect Metis is born and active

http://www.mindseyesociety.org/games/genres/werewolf-the-apocalypse/apocalypse-settings-document/

I would like to see the essence of the characters continue for what that's worth.

But there would be a "depowering" effect... a spiritual calamity - something along those lines - to explain the discrepency between how powerful someone was and how powerful they'd be after we merged, if we do in fact merge.

To me it comes down to this: The money is a pittance. I'm not concerned with that. 20 dollars a year is nothing.

The real question is, does this game want to be part of a very large network with a lot of games curated by people who know the genre because, in many cases, they wrote it and care about it. Do they want events and major cross city things as a possibility.

If the answer is yes and we can negotiate a good deal with the CFC than I'd like to move in that direction.

If the idea of being isolated and everything outside of FW (and maybe buffalo) is NPC land, and you're more about your deeply personal stories and individual gravitas and don't want a larger world, the game can move in that direction as well.

We lose very little (aside from XP off sheets - and even then we have some wiggle room)... and we get a network. That's the trade-off.

I know how I feel about networked/troupe... but I'm not going to full court press the player base into a direction. From my straw polling and contacts with players and people who speak to me regularly the leaning seems to be troupe -> segue -> org (new). That's hardly universal, but it's definitely what I'm hearing. But I don't know if that's a majority if that's something people want until we've crossed other bridges.

Example: They want to send a representative to us to discuss our concerns and answer questions. That's a level of professionalism from go that OWBN, frankly, just doesn't offer. If they sweeten the pot enough to help with the bruising of transition I'm curious as to which way the game goes, but it's not the end of the world either way.

We've put a lot of time and effort into major overarching background, history of the area, and depth of the setting. You all have interesting and compelling stories you've been working on... preserving that is something very important to us.

A big thing, for me anyway, was the idea of game Autonomy and frankly, we have that either way. So it's a question of small vs. big, and networked vs. purely local. And that's something each of you need to ponder for a while. We have plenty of time to make these decisions.

Cheers.
B

I like the idea of a larger game world,  but have found little benefit personally from it existing as PC's instead of NPC's.   I am not strongly opposed to an org,  but would balk at having characters reset to be in one.

My biggest problem is the Prestige system. It annoys me greatly to have what types of characters we can play based on what we do OOC. It also annoys me to have different people entitled to different starting XP totals, based again on what they have done OOC.

For those who are interested, here is a link to the CFC's Prestige rules.

http://legacy.mindseyesociety.org/usnc/documents.php?src=handbook.02.05.04.html&subject=Camarilla%20Membership%20Handbook#Prestige

John

Notice the "legacy" on that URL.  That may be outdated.  Also, I can't access from work, but is that a 2004 timestamp?

My mistake. Correct link:

http://www.mindseyesociety.org/player-tools/prestige/prestige-awards/

Wow that is long real long.....  but the gist is from my perspective is I get rewarded some how for things I was going to do anyway... providing rides, set up, clean up that sort of thing??

*Put up a poll, cfc vs owbn vs troupe

Iggy,

Not yet.  I want to have enough info out there for this to be an informed position.  From the flood of questions I've been getting today, I know people have a lot of questions and concerns before we're ready to make a move.  Its only been a day.  We had to move quick to protect a lot of our players, thats why the crazy fast movement away from OWBN, but we can sort of slow down now and measure our options.  Hell, until I have a definite offer from CFC/MES about how they'd integrate us. I'm not willing to make that choice personally.  There's a long time to regret if we screw this up.

But, I can comfortably say that if the player base does want to go back to/stay with OWBN, they won't have current staff with them.

Make sense?

That is where it becomes a sticky wicket. Resets in the CFC aren't hard resets. Because of their prestige system, after the reset, higher prestige members are able to player higher-ranked characters.

Ex. A MC (Member Class) 15 player is authorized to play the highest ranking starting characters allowable within the system, with a great deal of XP. I don't know what that translates to in terms of Werewolf Genre, but in Vampire that means 6th Gens and over 50 starting XP. In Werewolf, I imagine that would allow one to start as Elders.

So, after the reset, you immediately have a number of players playing higher-ranked PCs, which means that unless you have an entire chronicle suddenly joining CFC (like we would be), there is no concern about everyone being a Cliath.

It sounds like Bucky and Brian are working on arranging an exception for us that would allow us to either keep the characters we have now, or get a big enough bump to our starting prestige that we would be able to have higher-ranked PCs, allowing a Caern to function.

John

Okay, the world gets steadily worse until it ends in the Apocalypse.  Sometimes the PCs win, sometimes the Wyrm wins.

New world starts.  Everybody rolls new toons.  Your starting Xpies are determined by your club rating ( what was discussed earlier ), as well as what rank you can start at.

The way that *should* work, is that the folks who did well last time around get to start with higher rankings and things like that.

That would be in 2018.  We have a while before that's an issue.

Basically, while it sounds weird, it actually makes for a much gentler curve than OWBN, which has never reset, and there are 1000xp toons running around.  More experienced players get to play generally larger sheets, but the actual power level of these older toons is much much lower than OWBN.  Experienced players just dont loose toons very often, so look at it this way.  This is using made up numbers, but I think it should get the point.

OWBN - New toon, 2000, let's call her Anya - > She gains 96 XP per year.  Currently has 1248 XP and eats citys for breakfast.

MES - New toon, 2000 -> 72 XP per year.  0 Starting XP.
New Toon - 2005 -> 72 XP/Year, but starting over at 30 XP, Comes in Rank 2
New Toon - 2010 -> 72 XP/Year, but starting over at 50xp, Comes in Rank, 3
New Toon - 2013 -> 72 XP/Year, but starting over at 100xp, Comes in Rank 4

Both players get advantages for playing forever, in so much as 'Anya' is a demigod who scares the shit out of everyone.  The MES toon is *new* in the sense that the sheet is new, but the player is playing a much saner sheet.

I feel like I can explain this much better by gesturing wildly and flailing my arms about.

Nope it actually make a great deal of sense it keeps game balance and such because an Elder with even say 70 EXP over start can barely afford  all there Stats and Abilities they should have ????

It given the game a balance do stuff to help the game and eventually when you reset you will be rewarded.

And Hey... Experience Players do Loose Characters especially in Werewolf Ive done it twice ....

I don't really see clear explanations of what prestige is attached to what activities, and what is needed to get "higher level characters",  but I would not want to be required to do IRL  rather than IC things in order to eventually build a more "elder" character.

It looked like it was listed under the earlier revisions.  I actually like the Prestige system.  The system encourages you to help out, which many of us already do, and rewards you.  With things like blood drives and charity drives being something that they increase your prestige for, it in my opinion shows that the organization wants to reward people who do things to help others.  There is no drawback for not ranking up (These are what you start as a base character, XP, etc), but added bonuses are given for doing extra things. (Prestige for cleaning up at the end of the night.)

but if you don't do the prestige system, you never get to play an older character?   so my in-game results are based on me doing IRL charity?  

charity's not a bad thing,  but we're getting awfully close to letting real life capacity differences determine who gets to play powerful chars with that approach, imo.   I'm not comfortable with letting people "buy" better chars through RL activity rather than through surviving IC.    there is a reason charity retest chops are limited to being used against NPCs or environment and are not allowed to be used PvP.  

 RL wealth or free time should not be encouraged as a factor for IC realities, imo.   Personally, during the school year, I barely have time to pay attention to the game, let alone doing "other" things IRL in order to buy the privilege of playing an older or more powerful character.

I don't see it so much as "These people are the only ones who get to play elders."  It's "These are the people who get to be the existing elders at the start of the game."  A five-year character cycle is a good, long time.  I have no idea if I'll still be playing this game in five years; if I am, I'm pretty darned confident that I can get a character from Cliath to Elder in that span of time.  What I wouldn't want is for every single reset to default to "Oh, look, a rag tag band of cubs and cliaths is...yet again...trying to establish a Sept by themselves against all odds."

What I am having trouble finding is a listing of exactly which levels correspond to what.  At what level can you start play as a Fostern?  As an Adren?  At what level could you play, say, a Ratkin?  A Corax?  A Bastet?

Yeah 5 years in a long time, but look at it this way. Let's say you are in year 4 and a half. Not as many people will want to make a charcater knowing it will be nuked in 6 months no matter thier actions.

Also I don't like the idea of PCs starting as Elders, it should be earned.

Clearly, we have a lot to discuss. :-)

I've never agreed with Ed and Tammy this much.

As one of the people who doesn't have a car or money, I'll be pretty limited in my options for gaining prestige, so I don't like it for that reason. I also agree with Ben that we should know what the various plateaus in prestige are for various things before we commit.

Perhaps most importantly, I hadn't considered Tammy's point about the reset until just now, and I have to say I REALLY agree with that. Let's say your character dies 4.5 years after the reset. You are really forced to make a character for 6 months? Won't this have a negative effect on the playing field? I mean, I for one would feel TERRIBLE killing a PC with only a few months left before the reset. So bad that I might even metagame not to. Not to mention the players we might lose because they didn't want to play a 6 month character, took a break, and by the time the reset had happened they had found something else to do with their 3rd Saturday.

John

Just ran, brain...  leaking.

But the prestige system actually allows for more comfort in player kills.  Sure you killed Bobs toon, but he gets to jump right back in with a decent sheet.  As for the last six months thing... its not like the last six months is where nothing happens, that's just the end of the world.   Also.  2018.  *grin*

I guess what I'm getting at is, don't dismiss this out of hand.  Three days ago, I would have agreed with a lot of these objections.  There are pretty decent counters to most of them.  But I'm going to leave it till sunday at least, I'm pretty damn fried by all of this, as yuo might expect.

Mischa Ivanoff wrote:As one of the people who doesn't have a car or money

Actually as someone who has a car that's kind of nice to see. I've given a LOT of people rides over the years, for nothing. It's nice to see some recognition for it as it DOES take up a lot of time and money to volunteer in such a fashion. So much time and money that I simply haven't been able to continue to the same extent because of money issues lately.

The only thing that does annoy me is the Blood Drive. While nice in theory, it's simply something that most of us can't participate in because of sexual orientation. Hell, I used to donate just to help out but I can't anymore because one of my exes is bisexual and that by their rules makes me ineligible to give blood now. That's just stupid.

Reposting from FB per Brian's request:

Under the Information Link, you'll find things like the different Codes of Conduct, and Membership handbook.

http://www.mindseyesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/WerewolftheApocalypseAddendum4102013.pdf

That's the Addendum that's current for Apocalypse. I can also get you relevant Settings guides and the like if you need them. ""

The more I think about this the more I like it.

I can essentially buy rank and renown? for me and my closest friends by giving them cash for charities etc(read my pack)? And all I have to compete with are you paupers? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!eleventy1 Back to your turnips, peasants!!

Fuck, change my vote to "Let's join'.

I suppose my biggest question is why would we want an org?  for players like me (no travel, no interest in national PC boards, only interested in accessing living world through local STs) it provides almost no benefit (and please, correct me if I'm wrong and seeing benefits I don't recognize).    I recognize that there are other players who do enjoy those benefits,  but is there a reason for a local-only player to support joining the org if it forces substantial concessions on other matters of import. 

i.e.  what can the game do/have because of an org that it cannot have otherwise?

One word.

Visitors.

Yeah, we have a subset of players who never gave a crap about the network.  In which case, OWBN or MES doesn't make much difference to you.  I respect that opinion.  But for those of us who do want to dive into that larger world, this is a really difficult and complicated moment.  Please don't poo poo MES because you don't like orgs in general.  There will always be troupe games, and troupe games are great, but given a preference, I'd personally like to be in an org... and OWBN is not an option for me personally anymore.  So, I want to explore other avenues, and I hope folks are willing to give it a fair shake.  

The game here really won't change at all.  We can hide a lot of the changes behind layers of abstraction and story... though of course the XP thing is going to mean different things to different people... I'm hesitant to make broad generalities.  Some may prefer to reroll, others may be fine with a respec and a depowering.  But I can't speak to that till I a can answer all your questions.  Getting stuff half right leads to misunderstandings and general messes.

tldr; due diligence is happening.

I'm cool with the Garou game going troupe, and staying that way until OWBN cleans up their act.

I'm going to be at RBN with Bucky tomorrow.  Hopefully we can open a open and frank discussion of what's happening and how to proceed there.  I think that'll be faster than me desperately jumping from forum to fourm to email to pm.

Sweet jesus I'm tired.

Something comprehensive has been Propped.

However, I don't know the odds of it actually passing. Which is the real question.

OWBN has chewed through so many code of conduct props and props regarding this sort of thing I'm not sure what I think the odds are.

However, I feel at this point many players are already so disgusted by the org that it would it might be viewed as too little, too late. But again, I don't speak for the entire player base.


Sigh - I don't even know what the turn around time on something like this is, but let's hope it's fast.