The Bay Area Masquerade

100% what Alison just said. Secret NPCs designed to prey on the better instincts of players regarding new PCs would be absolutely terrible.

I like secret NPCs. I think it's nice to engage naturally with new people, without having the flashing PLOT arrow over their heads, and having secret NPCs from among the player population is one of the only reasonable ways to do that. I don't really like to feel like there's some clear delineation w...

I'm not unfriendly to the idea that there may be exceptions, I just feel like *generally speaking*, all vampire characters should be following the same universal rules, including having bloodlines and unusual clans count as "special" and cost points appropriate to faction and/or region, as well as h...

Ginger, I think you have summarized accurately.

I think the concern over ignoring the merit cap entirely comes from this statment (from the other thread): "NPCs do not need to follow the rules of the setting document." If that's not a concern, great!

Ultimately, you're the GM, Ralph, so your rules are the rules, but I agree with Paul here. My sense is that merit points reflect "specialness" (I've heard and seen you use that particular word multiple times), and that being a rare clan or path is considered a type of "special", and I don't have any...

I guess maybe I should clarify that my concerns about safety and liability are only partly to do with legal repercussions should anything bad happen. Mostly, I am speaking to the burden of responsible and safe behavior I would, as a parent, want to see from a bunch of folks in their 20s, 30s, and 40...

FWIW, Megan, I think that not hearing complaints is not the same as there not being any. I never want to be the jerk who's complaining about kids at game (and upsetting other parents), but I've *always* gone out of my way to avoid being around minors at LARP, especially Destinee and other particular...

Unless there's something new and un-Google-able happening this year, there's no parade or street closure to worry about in the late afternoon/evening, but there *will be* a little more traffic than usual, and parking can be tricky (especially later in the evening). Mountain View's big July 4 thing i...

On the plus side, good for people who need to 'catch up' their starting characters from the feeble 7/5/3 competence level. On the minus side, everybody is Mozart. This. That said, I don't like the idea of accelerated starting XP--I feel that we get too much XP too fast anyway, and I'd rather see co...

I don't have a problem with the idea of Staff spending XP for me, but our current system seems to boil down to NEEPs never getting spent for players who use XP expenditures to reflect their role-playing experience, and being used as a stopgap in cases where players aren't reflecting their role-playi...