Path of the Vampire forum

Really? Secrets for what? Where were they? What were they for? Why did we have to do that? What was the purpose of this chapter? How did this chapter affect my character? How did his nonparticipation hurt my character? How's this chapter affecting the city and the masquerade?

Its not as obvious as you might think. Yeah..we got random comments from humans on the grid..but they sounded weird and most times incomprehensible if you were doing it alone. What were we supposed to do with those comments? We had random puzzle pieces but nothing to tie it together. We had nothing to pull us into the story.

This is why we asked for a chapter summary or "Chapter Update" to let us know if anything we are doing has any consequence on the overall activity. How is any new person supposed to know how to help in a chapter if they come in midway through? Like myself. There was nothing to let me know what the hell was going on..I just had to tolerate all the weird stuff being said in city and be bummed out for not being able to participate with the group.

To be fair, there wasn't much participation, but all that info is under the NAVIGATION>Chapter menu, and then from there you should be able to find the ways of affecting the outcome.

I don't think I'm lacking in the braincell department, but Nix compiled all 7 'clues' for each candidate and yet what we were supposed to get out of those snippets eludes me. Even the 'secret' that I got wasn't much of a secret and because of which candidate it was (Spencer), it didn't really give us the ability to do anything with it.

Victor wrote:1. Secrets for what?
2. Where were they?
3. What were they for?
4. Why did we have to do that?
5. What was the purpose of this chapter?
6. How did this chapter affect my character?
7. How did his nonparticipation hurt my character?
8. How's this chapter affecting the city and the masquerade?

Answers for questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5(?)

Questions 6-8 will be answered in summary in the update section in the near future I'd imagine.

Additional Information 1

This is why we asked for a chapter summary or "Chapter Update" to let us know if anything we are doing has any consequence on the overall activity.

Additionl Information 2

From what I understand, any and all impacts made to the campaigns are found here. If an impact thread is completed in a timely fashion, it is reflected on that page (as David would manually update it).


The link to that can be found via one of the grid drop downs in the top left corner of the screen.


To answer your question about the secrets (because the pages I linked you to are rather information dense and a bit tl;dr inducing): There are 7 secrets for each candidate. Or there were at one point.

Those secrets could have been found via pickpocketting, B&E, and hacking.


I think the true problem with the chapter wasn't the lack of information on the OOC front so much as a lack of pull together on the IC front. For example, I only know of one group any of my characters belonged to, that actively pulled together secrets.

In that group, I don't believe any concerted effort was made to try and push any one person into office.

I've only seen a few impact threads relating to the chapter (though I could be wrong), etc.

My point is that I think things would have played out differently had more people been working together IC to accomplish something? Or maybe I just wasn't part of one of the groups that was doing things.


My only real criticism is that I think the chapter update threads should be stickied or made global announcements because I don't think everyone has it in their head to check the update section for information about chapters. Even if they do, having it buried half a page down doesn't help. And while the information is accessible from the grid, there are a lot of people who check the forum first.

Thank you. Your last paragraph also says a lot. Can't find anything. Hence my questions.

Also...the candidates...they really didn't matter. There was no substance behind them, there was no relationship made between them and the people they wanted to vote for them, and the clues were too evenly negative against them..why would anyone want to vote for those people? I just didn't get the chapter...it held no consequence to my character that I could see. Its any wonder there was interest at all. If there had been more character development in the candidates so that maybe my character could not have ignored the elections, maybe there would have been more participants.

How could we have done this any different as the player base?

Victor wrote:Also...the candidates...they really didn't matter. There was no substance behind them, there was no relationship made between them and the people they wanted to vote for them, and the clues were too evenly negative against them..why would anyone want to vote for those people?

That was basically my issue. None of em seemed like good choices from a person to person perspective, if that makes sense. The only real choice I could make out was between picking a human thrall, a demi fae and...a normal human I think was the last one. I think it might have played out differently if the nominees had RP'd personalities. From what I understand, we were allowed to use them as NPC's but that means a lot is left up to the determination of the ones writing.

Even then, the choices made for the characters would always have been based on grid-gained information. I think for a chapter meant to be RP intensive, it could have benefited from dedicated people writing the characters (even if it's meant to be in brief).

Jameson Dade wrote: I think for a chapter meant to be RP intensive, it could have benefited from dedicated people writing the characters (even if it's meant to be in brief).

Hindsight being what it is and all..

Each candidate should have been rp'd by someone .. to bring that character to life as it were. To me they were flat.

Our group collected all the hint's or whatever.. they were destroyed or turned over to the press.. but that did.. Nothing that I could see. I watched every time one was submitted or destroyed. there was no change on the sliders.

There was no real clear cut, this is what needs to happen. Everything was rather vague.

No choice of candidate was great. It was more 'which one is the lesser of three evils'? And once that one slider was all the way forward on one of them.. it was like 'why bother'? We don't know the consequences for any of the three.. what if we do all this work and coordination and then end up screwing the city worse? Cause there is going to be a twist no matter which one gets in office.

I was excited about GM events. I was prepared to participate in them. So that was disappointing. Even if my character's choice wasn't chosen in the end, my character's name would have been part of the city history for being in that event.

Doc wrote:No choice of candidate was great. It was more 'which one is the lesser of three evils'?

Ahh, politics. But seriously. What were/are the upsides of working to promote any of the candidates? We couldn't get away from the downsides, it seemed like every other in city message was about one of them, but they didn't seem to be making any campaign promises. Like, at all. Would the human thrall vow to get rid of the military taking up huge amounts of civic funding to surround the mausoleum? And so on. It seemed like it was just something happening in the background with no real relation to anything else going on.

Someone running for office is going to have a platform - what was theirs? They're going to have a comprehensive campaign that goes out to all forms of media, not just 'secrets' that can be found with roughly the same amount of regularity as a hacking raid (or, y'know, once in a blue moon). There was no real information, that I could find, on how each choice would effect what would happen in the next chapter, or in general, other than their political leanings (and two of them are 'conservatives' anyway).

On that note - two of them are, presumably, anti-vampire and the other one is a masquerade violation waiting to happen. I really can't see the upside of any of them getting into power.

I was excited about GM events. I was prepared to participate in them. So that was disappointing.

This.

... all of that.

Whit wrote:
My only real criticism is that I think the chapter update threads should be stickied or made global announcements because I don't think everyone has it in their head to check the update section for information about chapters. Even if they do, having it buried half a page down doesn't help. And while the information is accessible from the grid, there are a lot of people who check the forum first.

All of this. what with the auction and all the other things that go on, stuff gets buried fast. I make an effort to try and catch everything and I fail frequently.


I think also there were three inheriant problems with the theme of this chapter.

First, something like an election of politics could have used a lot more of a build up than the few months it had. Including more information on the current mayor and the dynamics of how the power structure has worked in Harper Rock, at least up until now.

Secondly, and I love you David, but I think some players were a wee bit nervous this chapter because of how last chapter played out. Many of us worked hard to make a change that ended up just making everyone unhappy and left our already unpopular characters even more disliked.

And last. It's politics.

Not just being a brat, here. It's also been an election year irl in a lot of places. I for one was so sick of the political ads on my telly I didn't turn it on for a week. When it's coming at you from every direction irl, who wants to play a game where you get more of the same?

Hate politics. Hate hate.