World of Darkness Details From The Grand Masquerade

So The Grand Masquerade filled New Orleans with all types of vampiric creatures this weekend, and as we somewhat expected, new details on CCP’s World of Darkness were shared at the event. Most of what was spilled has been summarized on the official White Wolf forums here and here, so that’s where I’ll be quoting from:

Big topics:
* Mortals: Everyone starts off as mortal. Your character might (or, perhaps likely) will have a chance to be Embraced into a given Clan, but you can chose not to be. However, if you die as a mortal, it’s for keeps. Speaking of…
* Perma-death. It’s real for Kindred as well as mortals. Seems there’ll be a “torpor” system in which you’re just out for a bit, but Kindred cahracters can also meet Final Death.
* Torpor, they said, isn’t going to have you in down-time for long bouts of time (won’t work like the “Sleep of Ages” thing in the table-top game), but rather gives the in-game reason why your character didn’t “die” when you lost all your health.
* Server: World-wide server, or at least continuity. Speaking of which, each “city” in which play happens will be a bit different, though they said it’ll be based on character actions.
* PvP: Yes, a lot of the interations will be “PvP,” but they’re really working on building the interactions systems into a model under which players have reasons to form alliances and work together as well as against one another. When someone from the audience said they hate playing with a$$holes, the dev guy said “You need to have a$$holes to make political games work. That’s politics.” (Or something like that). The over-all impression they gave was that they’re trying to work on creating a PvP environment that doesn’t feel like the petty PvP we’re used-to in other games.
More peripheral issues:
*Character sheets that look a lot like our paper sheets.
* Web-based interface: you will likely be able to go to a web-site and do things therewith that make things happen with your character, apparently without logging entirely into the game. They stressed that they want to allow for casual gaming as well as more thorough immersion (Which makes a lot of marketing sense)
* Player heirarchies: Yup, player-Princes. As well as Player Primogen, et c. Earning one of these roles will involve a lot of politicing, gaining the support of other powerful players, who likely have to have the support of other players, et c. The Prince will e the Heather with the red scrunchy, in other words.
* If there’s a guy who’s acting way out of character, there’ll be ways to deal with him socially, to “correct” the behavior, but doing so is intended to be sufficiently costly to you that you might not then (hopefully) over-use it. (ahem. Kind of like what I’d posted up-top. heh heh heh.
* Dementation will likely have effects that mess with players’ perceptions of the game (possibly similar to Sanity’s requiem, for instance).
* Dominate/Presence were briefly mentioned as being a way to wear down others’ will to resist doing something you want them to do.
* No Caitiff at this time. Sorry for the Caitiff fans.
* More akin to LARP than table-top, in general.
* Also, they’d mentioned that they really want to do more with encouraging players to tell the story, that players tend to consume hard-coded content a whole lot faster than WW can write it. That makes sense.
…
* Humanity: attacking other players will drop your Humanity. They said something, as well, about how having your Humanity drop below a certain point lets other players attack you (possibly without penalty? possibly costing them less to do so?Likely connected with the above thing about being able to get other players to attack someone, this might also imply that it’ll cost less to make that happen, but that’s pure conjecture. )
* No alternate Paths of Enlightment. Yet.
* Web-Access: they mentioned having a website through which one can do things with one’s character (Did I mention that?)
* There’s a localization engine they’re testing for EVE, called Cereberus, I think. It’s supposed to translate between five different languages.
******* OH yeah… How could I forget?
Permanent Night.
“Daytime” is pretty much just when the servers are down. They said they played with the idea of playing Ghouls during the day, but that they’re pretty set on it being night all the time.
* Nudity: Yes, your character can get disrobed. However, you can’t do so in public places. They said that if your want to get naked, you can do so in your Haven. Speaking of which:
* Havens. emotion-1.gif They also said that if you get tired of griefers griefing you, you can ditch them and go back to your Haven, implying that it’s possibly at least somewhat sacrosanct.
* Yeah, there’s talk of “World Events” (one of the players asked about, say, a bunch of Lupines mucking about in your city’s woods, and if players ignore them they’d get stronger, until being Dealt With. The dev onstage said they had something comparable in mind.
* However, they’re pretty much against having the kind of metaplot you’d get from most MMO’s, where huge things happen that players have to go handle en mass. They said that those tend to disempower players, and move the story away from what the players were creating with their own choices. A major theme that came out of the conversation was that the focus was going to be about having a lot more focus on player interactions, and a lot less on pre-generated “content.” Something about having a metaplot that unfolded differently from the way it has in the past.
* On the subject of Metaplot and such, they also mentioned that they really don’t like the idea of instances, that they tend to take players away from the “real” game, where the other players are.
* Also on the subject of player choices and influencing the game world, it sounds like the cities themselves might look *fairly* similar, but that the players would be working on who controls various things within them. One thing they mentioned was “A Church won’t ever change into a gas station,” so those looking to radically transform a neighborhood probably aren’t going to get to do that, so much as (and here’s my interpretation of what they said) gaining “control” of it, and maybe building up or tearing down certain aspects.
* Technology: They mentioned having two settings, “High” and “Low,” to allow players to access and experience the game either at the current cutting edge of technology, or a notaby lower level (that they hven’t sorted out just yet). There was a joke about how the dev would like the game to be playable on a laptop. Not sure how much of that was a joke, once again.

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