JULY 18, 1998

 Sky Sorenson (Head ST, for now)    625-5291 e-mail s.sorenson@home.com
 Sean Farough (Influence Narrator)   382-7426 e-mail scf476@mail.usask.ca

REMINDER
You can now add your current Ability score to your current Attribute score for the purposes of comparing traits in a tie.  The Ability must be the same one that you could use in a retest, and remember that it is your current score... if you’ve used the Ability in a retest, it’s gone for the night (just like Traits lost are gone).

PSYCHIC PROJECTION AND THE "MEDIUM" MERIT
"Laws of the Wild," the Werewolf Live Action rules, has a lot of updates that apply to the White Wolf LARP rules in general.  One of these is a clarification of the "Medium" merit.  In "Laws of the Night," it says that this merit allows you to sense "spirits."  We interpreted this in the past to mean that you could sense Psychically Projecting people also.  However, "Laws of the Wild" clarifies the merit and makes it specifically apply only to Wraiths. ("Laws of the Night" was published before White Wolf came out with Wraith rules).  We are going with the more recent ruling from White Wolf.  The "Medium" merit cannot be used to sense anything but Wraiths and the spirits of the dead.

"BEAST WITHIN" AND SOCIAL CHALLENGES
You need to make a Social Challenge to successfully use "Beast Within."  This means that you have to be perceived by your target, and it is probably obvious what you’re doing... trying to provoke a person’s Beast into taking control.  You may be able to hide what you’re doing.  If you are in a screaming contest with the person anyway, and trying to intimidate them just through normal social means, then you probably can slip an "Intimidating" challenge in without it being noticed by observers.  They’ll just think your target frenzied because you were being such a jerk.  It’s like Dominate; if you slip a "Command" into normal conversation, and if the Command isn’t too unnatural or out of place, it is likely that no-one will ever realize that Dominate was used.

The point is, that if you use "Beast Within" on someone from across a room, anyone watching you will probably know what you did, since you’re not camouflaging the Social Challenge with regular conversation or interaction.  Remember that you can never initiate Social Challenges from Obfuscate; the target must be able to perceive you (though not necessarily be looking right at you or talking to you).  This has been in the House Rules for almost a year, by the way.  I’m not just making this stuff up...

FROM RUMOR-CONTROL
 This was posted recently to the out of character Shared Universe list server, and I thought it might be of general interest... it is an excerpt from an essay written by Todd Erikson as part of his continuing series "Twink and Ammo."

 "In tabletop, we have a group of people getting together, albeit under the more steady control of a GM.  The  point is to have fun, to do things that would not normally be done.  Most gaming books emphasize the point that the players are not the normal of the world, but rather are the abnormal.  They're like the heroes out of a fantasy novel, that one group that goes out to fight the dragon, etc.  And that works okay in a table top environment, where there are likely no more than 10 people playing, and often far less, and where the action is all based around that one table.  The GM regulates what is and isn't done, backs rules, etc.  He sets the tone, controls NPCs in such a way as to give a view into the world and access to its resources, etc.
LARP, on the other hand, lacks a great deal of the structure of tabletop, yet is for the same purpose.  People getting together to pretend to be something that they are not, to have fun.  The STs have less power or control over the story, and the players must take some of the responsibility for creating story and background.  When one picks a clan, they should be familiar with the clan, and able to play that clan...
But we hit a bump here in the playing.  As we enter the world of Live Action, we are playing a character... in a phrase, we are improvisational acting.  Although, as a Theatre graduate, I can tell you that LARP carries much different rules that improvisational theatre as accepted by the theatre community.  LARP has many more rules, more structure, more accepted storyline.  Improv as a theatrical technique is used more as a way to break boundaries, to find the limits of one's acting experience and to, through ensemble acting, find ways beyond it into new areas of study and experience.  And while certainly LARP players become better and better at what they do, they aren't trying to perfect their acting ability, but are rather performing a live version of the tabletop experience.
But due to the fact that the ST/GM is no longer the lord of the table, the players must themselves often discern as to whether to kill, to plot, to interact, to make real, to make pretend... the player buys into the office of Game Master and themselves becomes aware of the rules.  And the rules are not just a government of rock/paper/scissors, but also reckon over social interaction, pretending, allowing the other person to pretend and accepting their story as part of one's story... to borrow from Dave Sim, "all of the stories are true, even the stories which say none of the stories are true."  The Shared Universe experience borrows from a number of games, all of which give a varied amount of credibility to the books and work of White Wolf which provides the background for the game at hand, and drawing from that, all characters attempt to act on an even basis.
However, as has been related back to me in response to the article of T&A 11, although the Vampires of the WoD likely are a certain way... we don't act like them in the game, because it wouldn't be fun.  Fun's an odd issue, really, in the face of what the SU has become.
While it's true that for the most part the game is made up of people who like role playing, it is also true that to a great degree the individuals playing the game are into theatre.  They are actors, or directors, or merely appreciators.  And so many of us who are of a theatrical nature have brought into the mix of the game our own understanding of acting, of performance, of how things should be.  And so we encounter a conflict between truth to character, and truth to game.
So what if in any instance one kept in mind both what's kosher and what would really be done...and seek to find a middle ground, where the right effect was given, but one didn't totally cheese off the other player by treating them like dirt?  So that an intimation of the correct feeling is given, even if the true one isn't?
Such a thing would of course take work.  People might want to discuss OOC how they'd want to do such a scene before working on it.  I think that a lot could be accomplished if people would discuss pre-game what they want to accomplish between characters.  As an Ensemble of the game, players grow to know each other and what they're about much better, and can grow to play into each other's hands to create a better scene.  Discussions of intent can give a longer, better scene, because both players will know what the other person would like to accomplish, and that can be worked toward.  "In the following scene, I would like to make clear how much my character hates your clan, while also bringing to light how you've been screwing the city over. How can we do this better?..."  It is a team game, a group experience.  I think that that's the key to a lot of what goes on in the game vs. character argument.  If the play were much less individual effort, and instead were made of a number of players helping and working with each other for the gaming experience, then it would be much less difficult to make clear...  "Pardon me, Mr. ST, but we'd like to do this.  What's the proper way to go about it?"  Believe me, the STs would love for folks to do this, to work with them in creating story.  It's more things that they don't have to do, and it generates story SO much better than them bringing in critters..."

OUR CORPORATE SPONSOR
 Dragon’s Den is a great gaming store, and has sponsored Saskatoon By Night for quite a while now.  Check them out!  They’re at 36-2105 8th St., in the Grosvenor Park mall.

ITEM OF INTEREST
Given: Barney is a CUTE PURPLE DINOSAUR
Prove: Barney is Satanic

The Romans had no letter 'U', and used 'V' instead for printing, meaning the Roman representation would for Barney would be: CVTE PVRPLE DINOSAVR.  Extracting the Roman numerals, we have:  CV    V  L  DI    V.  And their decimal equivalents are: 100 5 5 50 500 1 5.  Adding those numbers produces: 666.  666 is the number of the Beast.

Proved: BARNEY IS SATAN!