Wow, was last night a lot of fun. It was a “downtime” episode. We wrapped up from our previous adventure, licked our wounds and spend some time doing R&R. Here are some of the highlights for me:
Meeting Yvette. One of our Werewolves (Sonya) was retired and Yvette came to take her place. I’ll admit it, I’m somewhat partial to Bone Gnawers, but even if I wasn’t this character is exiting, full of character and story. Awesome!
The Inspector. Another player who has specifically said he doesn’t want to regularly play Werewolves brought in a Hunter who started as an inspector but saw things he couldn’t not understand or explain to his co-workers. It was definitely surprise as at first I just thought the player was taking the role of some NPC for Storyteller and then it turned out to be his new character, who happened to be the previous lover of Yvette. The dialog between the inspector and Yvette was fantastic.
“Deux ex machina” (the name I’ve picked for my character’s new fashion line, an perhaps his werewolf name) has got started. I will be filling out the details on the particular article created soon. 9 successes baby, I’m going to make this thing awesome!
The various challenges, especially as the elders got tired of hearing the same line over and over, were great. “Didn’t you run over a bunch of people with a Limo?Yes, we accept that as wise.” Was great.
I had no idea taking Worm out to a strip club would be so much fun. That was great, and you know Francois will want to do it again.
Our Wendigo contacted the spirits and talked to the Umbral wind who gave us clues for what to do with our “guest”. That lead us to an institute (sorry, forgot the name) that could help our tortured Fianna. In fact, unless the next game starts off “Oh shit the building blew up” Francois will push for going to America.
My character Francois met an old crusty security guard name Jean, who Francois has really taken a liking to. I opted to take him as one of my so far unused “contacts” so the Storyteller was pretty generous with how much he provided (essentially a cover ID as a janitor for me to get access back into the complex whenever I want, access to a killer machine shop and probably a lot of scrap material).
What rocked:
Besides the highlights mentioned above? Mostly the fact that we got to direct the story. The Storyteller did a great job of playing off of the little projects we started. Each time we tried something, there was some interesting role playing that came out of it.
Our character got a chance to cash in some renown. One thing I really hate is when game as go-go-go all the time. Partially this is because it doesn’t feel realistic and partially because it never allows for downtime activity. In Werewolf it is especially important to have downtime near your sept, as that is the only way you can challenge for renown. I’m really glad we got a chance to do this.
Interparty interaction. Oh man, my character hitting on Yvette, Yvette and her ex-lover breaking up, Work at the strip club, and Dick harassing the management was all great. I really loved how our characters played off each other.
What could have been improved:
There was nothing that went wrong, but I did feel like some of the players weren’t prepared for this kind of session. Personally, I believe that if the GM ever says “there is no adventure going on, what are you doing” that characters should all have goals and drives they want to work towards. However, sometimes these come out of play and sometimes the players haven’t thought about them. In the case of last night’s game, we definitely had some players with longer to do lists than others and so I felt like there were a couple of times we went around and players didn’t have anything to do. This wasn’t horrible, but I think in the future we should know in advance when we’ll have downtime so we can better prepare. A minor nit pick at most. This game was a ton of fun for me.
