Actual Play Report – Werewolf in Paris (1/11/2009)

System: Werewolf: The Apocalypse

I’ve got some mixed feelings about our werewolf game last night. On one hand I think there was some very interesting character development, on the other, I had to acknowledge something about my character that I didn’t want to. He’s a coward. He’s also got a lot of bravado and threatens people all the time, which probably means that he’s also a bully.

The important decision for my character was: Do I act responsibly and stand with my pack or do I save the man that the woman I care about loves? My character didn’t respect the customs of the person we made a deal with, he didn’t care about being honorable, he caved to the fact that he was badly hurt, out of gas and would have to go through his Alpha in order to the right thing. I’m disappointed, he isn’t the kind of hero I thought he would be and despite what others may think, he does back down. In retrospect I was searching for justification to do something more rash and the reasons were there, they just weren’t coming to me quickly enough. 1) Javert was getting fucked over because something our PACK did, not him. 2) One of our pack mates loves him and hurting him means hurting her.

Having thought about that, I really would have like to have seen Curb Stomper challenge the samurai that held Javert as hostage. It probably would have meant having to challenge my way through the Alpha, but if I had thought of the above to things and could have articulated them, the master of challenges would have accepted. The end result would have been either that Francois lost the challenge, proved he was more loyal to an individual than he was to the pack and probably lost a lot of honor, or won the challenge, became the Alpha, and challenged the Samurai. We would have won because I would have fought dirty and had my entire pack jump him… with an effing flame thrower!

Alas, regrets.

What rocked

The character tension between Javert seeking revenge, Yvette trying to prevent him from getting himself killed and the pack trying to scrape together some shred of honor was great. I think all of the characters were put through the ringer.

Though I said above that my character failed, I can imagine him growing from that failure, provided Yvette is willing to entertain it. He’s constantly going to feel that he wasn’t as brave as Javert, who was only a human and stood up to that garou… by himself! This could make for some fun times as François (Curb Stomper) keeps trying to prove himself by comparing his courage to a person that isn’t even there.

The Big Brawl. Before all the drama we had it out with another pack. There was the Nazi, the Executioner, the bodyguard, the whip guy and a few others. It was a bloody brawl and both sides got pretty torn up. More gore ensued! With all the streamlined rules, I think the combat went at a pretty reasonable pace, I was happy. Woot!

What could have improved

We spent a whole lot of time at the end of the game working on paying a ransom to get back our missing “friend” only to have the character be unplayable. I get why people retire their characters, I’ve done it when I just felt like I couldn’t play my character with any real integrity in the current group or situation, but in this case I think the character could have really survived and stayed with the group. He took some very hard knocks, because of something we did. I could see why he would hate us, but I also could see why he would want to stay around to see if we would do good, and potentially kill us if we didn’t, which would be a very cool moral dilemma. Overall I really like having Javert in the game and most likely I’ll be less enthusiastic about his next character, although another player may connect with him (or her).

One of the other players is leaving the game. Understandable, he’s in a lot of games, and I’ve done the exact same thing with the D&D game when I started feeling overwhelmed. This isn’t really a “could have been improved thing”, it’s just something I’m a little saddened by.