Vampire session!

We played our second session – first “mainstage” session – of Vampire: the Requiem last night. On the whole it was definitely a big success, and everybody had a lot of fun. I still think I made some mistakes that I can improve upon, but the overall objective of having a good night with my friends was met.

Long long accounting of what went down below. My big notes for myself are to remember to use the atrocity rules to full effect - I was good about polling the group for if they thought new atrocity dice were warranted, but I don't think I ever asked anyone to throw in atrocity dice in place of their regular dice pool. Also, most of the combat that took place was not important enough to merit a full blow-by-blow, so I think I'll read up on the simplified combat rules in Danse Macabre for a more "indy feel.".

A quick note about Danse Macabre: it's probably my favorite "crunchy" Vampire supplement ever. I love the clanbooks as an experience, but Danse Macabre has done the most to change the way I approach Vampire. The idea of tiers inspired my current game in certain ways; even though the players are at the "default" antediluvian tier, the tiers section of Danse unpacked some of the basic concepts of Vampire for me in a very useful way. I also love the atrocity system as a replacement for humanity and the hierarchy of sins, and the simplified combat rules saved my bacon when one ultimately unimportant scuffle threatened to drag out indefinitely with most of the players just looking on.

Danse Macabre is nominated for an Enny at the moment; I think I may just navigate right over and vote for it, in fact.

Long actual play follows:

Vampire: the Requiem game - first session

So I effing love effing Vampire: the Requiem to pieces. Someday I'll have to get into why - which will involve figuring out why, probably - but for now I'll just tell you I've loved this game for a long time and never really played it. I'm writing about Vampire now because I'm playing it again. We had our first session two weekends ago! We're playing again tomorrow night!

I'm playing with what I guess you could call my role-playing group. They're all close friends with varying degrees and types of role-playing experience. I had wanted to role-play and to run a game for a while, and through various circumstances it emerged they each had an interest in playing one. Our first game was an amazing run of Lady Blackbird. I will always be grateful to John Harper, designer of Lady Blackbird, for that wonderful experience, so thank you, John.  I'll talk about it sometime.

Everyone was so kind to humor my desire to run a Requiem game as well. Two things about Lady Blackbird: it uses pregenerated character, and setting creation is a part of the game (as the politically-correct goblin Snargle or the gigantic gems known as heartstones needed to navigate the Remnant from our game attest). So, playing Requiem provided two challenges for my players they hadn't needed to tackle before: creating their own characters and dealing with an existing setting. 

Read more after the break.