Roleplay Babble
Oh, goodness, are there really people who read this journal who like RP? (Smutlers, get out of here, you utterly disdain my V:tM fangirling. <3 )
As I was saying last night, I'm quite excited. Last night marked the first, if entirely unofficial, session of Strasbourg by Night, the Vampire: the Masquerade game that I am Storytelling.
Uh.
Storytelling has got to be the worst verb ever. I hate "Dungeon-Mastering," too. (Hello, whips and whipped cream, anyone?) So let's try that clause again: "the Vampire: the Masquerade game that I am running."
Now it sounds like a poker racket, but that's at least a step closer to the truth.
Jargon aside: I love running games. Seriously. I think of it like a giant net, a big web with different colored beads on it. Mentally I mouse over those beads and they turn into characters, with impossibly detailed histories and motivations and secrets, and it is just delicious to follow from thread to thread, to knot them together and pluck and see who trembles, and what card houses fall.
If you can't tell: I love secrets. I love knowing secrets. Writing and Storytelling the only two hobbies I've got that satisfy that desire. Nobody knows my worlds like me. I revel in the control and the tangibility of the experience, the challenges my players introduce.
That said, last night was not my best session. Although I did about an hour of simultaneous roleplaying with two of my players, we weren't able to finish their discussion about local personages because I am still working on dossiers and setting up the city map. That, and I was/I am incredibly tired. We'll give it another stab this weekend.
When I get them done, I think I will post some of the materials here. You don't need to understand Vampire terminology, especially, to appreciate and enjoy a good backstory, and I've got some really amazing backstories and secrets at work in this city. I'm pretty much gibberingly proud --and my players are excited for the game, which is always a good sign.
I've also done some good thinking on game mechanics, since we'll be running online. Rolls will play out like they always do --players will need dice, and they will have to report their rolls to me. But online is really flexible, so I will be able to do a lot more with Auspex, Derangements and varied perceptions of people. My players are actually going to be rolling to make their impressions socially, and to do research on a variety of topics which may (or may not) lead to them having privy knowledge of city events. This is something I learned the hard way from playing a Tremere character --there are clans and groups who do their best work off-stage, and if they're not encouraged to fulfill those roles, there can be consequences. In my Modern Vampire campaign, my Tremere got herself shipped off to Verona for extra training at the end of the story arc, and her teachers there were agast at the rudimentary quality of her Thaumaturgy. Explaining that her city had been besieged by slavering werewolves and that she had been disemboweled twice in the process of getting rid of the Lupines did not buy her much slack.
Okay, well, really, Tremere's the only clan where you're boned if you aren't doing things outside of game, or if you aren't taking game time to research. But other clans do benefit from manuevering that occurs away from the actual game table, and that's something I want to encourage. And I want to compensate those who do take social and mental attributes, because I don't think they have to roll for their use often enough.
Actually, here's something I've been toying with, maybe my commentators will have thoughts: how about an "it can only help you" social policy roll? All players, as long as they do a convincing job working it from a roleplay perspective, can generally expect to be minimally successful on the social scene --equivalent to a single success. However, if they want to accomplish anything impressive, they must roll, and while the can't botch, they can fail. What do we think? I'd like my players to be asking to make social rolls.
Still working on when we're going to run as a group, but we'll figure that out, I think.
All that aside, today was the worst day I've had in a long time. There are small moments of good, but generally --schlock, schlock, and really upsetting shit.
I didn't get much sleep --two hours from six to eight this morning. Finished the paper that I was supposed to have turned in on Tuesday for my poetry class --still have no idea what the exercise was that was assigned. (I missed the early part of a class last week and never quite figured out what I'd missed out on.) But today was supposed to be a workshop day, and I was excited and ready to go for class and I was packing up when I realized that I didn't know where I'd put my classmate's poems. I mean, I didn't need a copy of mine --where were my copies of theirs
I panicked. I tossed my room. I vented. (Actually, I raved.) Roomie can vouch: I'm really incredibly mild-tempered: I like my plants, my beagle, my down mattress pad, loose-leaf notebook paper (college ruled only) and black gel pens. Those are really the only things I need in life to achieve happiness, although a big cup of soup and some Triscuits never hurt matters.
This morning? I was angry. Despairing angry, storming angry, sinus-headache, out-in-traction, sobbingly angry. It made me nauseous, because I hate being upset, but I hate being upset at myself even more than that, and I just could not handle, at that moment, how much of a stupid and careless fuck I can be.
Yeah, I was pretty well wrecked. I was so proud of myself for being ready for class and I was going to show up on time because I'm always late and I hate that about myself, and I was even sort of hoping I'd get a good critique and give some good critiques and maybe begin to make up for being sloppy about my work over the last week, and getting behind and forgetting two assignments consecutively. Instead? I didn't go to class. I just couldn't. I didn't have anything to show for the other students, and I refuse to take a critque --to get help when I can't give it. I could try to go and pretend I remembered what I needed to and had my notes on their work, but I didn't feel like that was fair. I had nothing to contribute, so I didn't belong in class.
I went instead to my den mom, who's Secretary of the Classics Department. I vented for the better part of the hour and took comfort that not all the faculty here are terrifying or impatient. She wants me to email my poetry professor to meet with him and explain. I sort of would rather crawl under a rock and die, (he intimidates me quite terribly: all my professors do) but I'll do it because it's Cathy and I would walk across broken glass for her. The worst he can do is be catty and unsympathetic, and then I go tell Cathy he was catty and unsympathetic, have myself a good cry, and move on with life.
I finished up with most of my classes by mid-day, took myself home for a shower. Went in the bathroom and got the water going, and sat down on the floor on my towel because I was feeling kind of dizzy and sick. Bad mistake: I woke up two hours later, late to my massage appointment.
The massage was one of those tiny bright spots in my day. For half an hour the fact that I had gigantically messed up and could have gnawed my own arm off in frustration simply didn't matter. It was lovely. Definitely going to go to the next massage-teaching seminar they have at the places the woman recommended.
Other tiny bright spots? Procopius' Secret History is the most racy thing I've ever been privileged to read, and I quite love it. Who knew that the Empress Theodora was a tart?
It's funny. He tears her to shreds, mocks her as a whore and an infanticide and an adulterer, and --for god's sake, claiming to rule the kingdom. He jeers at her manner of walking, her low background (circus performer's daughter cum Empress, anyone?), her openness about her affairs. He says she is as implacable in her hatreds as Justinian is changeable in his favor, a woman clever at gouging the state of cash and too liberal with her favorites, permitting them to act even outside the law.
In summary, it's quite a damning critique, but I can't bring myself to wholy dislike either Theodora or Justinian. I just can't believe that they were 1) quite that terrible, though I'm sure they were bad and 2) I find myself rather admiring Theodora, for possessing the kind of avidity and calculation necessary not only to survive, but to thrive, as an Empress of Byzantium. She could have done it much more kindly, and recieved a much better treatment of history, but she is in her way one of the defining figures of that age, and I respect that.
Also, I think calling a woman a slut because she walks rather brazenly and propositions everyone in sight is rather outrageous. Procopius may/may not be a stick in the mud, jury's still out.
Other bright spot? King Cake!
For those that don't know, I hail from New Orleans before I hailed from Kansas, and while there's not a lot about my life there that has stuck (I like seafood, spicy food, spanish moss, and patois) my love of King Cake is one of them. Between us Smutlers and I demolished an entire King Cake and I'm still licking purple sprinkles out of the box. I was quite impressed --King Cake is basically cinnamon rolls meets special icing, with a bit of extra thrown in, in places, but it's easy to mess up, and the school's bakery did a quite-credible imitation. My homebaked ones are better, of course --but not by much. The whole thing had the right texture, tasted about like it should, and it even had the baby, which I just bit into. Ow.
I'm not going to buy another. I'm not.
Onward to face the day. I keep telling myself, it can only get better, and there are lights in the vast tunnel of crap-could-this-week-get-any-worse-? and maybe Cathy's right and I should just go easier on myself, because I'm really not such a terrible person except that--
I dunno. Giving myself permission to screw up just seems tantamount to giving in to "screwed-up-ness." It goes counter to my greater sense of "Thou Shalt Progress and Become More Interesting With Time, like Good Alcohol and Cheeses that Do Not Appertain to Goat."
I dunno. Thoughts?
-Rantza