Pete Original Feedback Post

I think Em, conceptually, is a difficult kind of character to play. Period. He requires both a fair degree of ability to think on your feet and quickly get into people’s heads (or make large intuitive jumps). Those are both skills that tend to evolve a fair bit with time and life experience, so I’m not terribly surprised you’ve struggled a fair bit in general. I struggle with it a lot, and making that ability to understand and manipulate people at a deep level the core (one could argue only element) of your PCs strengths set you up for a fair bit of failure as a baseline. As Cal observed several times, you are often in situations where you have very little to offer other people (even before he lost his legs and such), and that makes it extremely difficult to actually move them. You need some kind of leverage, and again, pure emotional understanding is iffy at best. I guess I’m saying that as a whole, Em feels like he sort of, as a character, set you up for failure on that front.

Em also feels like a character that deals a lot in a world you don’t have a lot of experience in. E.g. street hustling, high society, and the criminal underworld. I don’t actually know much about your background, but you’ve been pretty thin on filling in blanks with some of this stuff, so I’m going to assume you don’t come from any of those backgrounds yourself. Now, you can play a character outside of where you have knowledge in a setting like this (indeed, a lot of the fun is getting to do things you don’t get to do in real life) but it tends to require both a fair bit of research (lead in, and ongoing), and tends to make it more difficult as a whole to get into their head and respond to situations authentically. I think that was another element that set Em up for a lot of hardship with your play of him.

Finally, it felt at times like you were having trouble keeping up with all the things you had going on. I don’t know how extensive your sheet is in terms of notes hidden, but I can tell you that with Caroline, and with a nearly photographic memory, I still have pages and pages of notes on her sheet, plus the stuff I have written out as well. It helps me keep up with things, remember things, and generally keep immersed in the character, especially when relatively little time has passed for her relative to the time that I’ve passed in real life (which gives me time to forget things, because I’m old). Plot threads build up. Details get buried or lost. Notes are your friend, and, even more than your friend, are the GMs friend, because it helps him keep track of what you think is important, and shows him that you’re actively involved in what’s going on, tracking, and pursuing various topics (which he can in turn prep for more easily). It’s essentially a feedback method, even if you don’t need them personally, that can only enhance your experience. Among other things, I track on my sheet, everything Caroline owes, major and minor plot threads open, character goals and aspirations, player goals and aspirations, and things that I intend on building towards in terms of merits and other resources. I’m not saying you need to do all of that, but it gives you an idea of things you could include and build off of.

In any case, what these three points build into is that my recommendation, if you bring in another character (as you’ve mentioned having an interest in, either as a replacement or alongside), is that you build a simpler, more straightforward PC, to get your feel for the game and navigating the world. Someone with a focus in an area you have more knowledge of, some greater assets than simply the ability to talk his way through things, and someone you keep relatively detailed notes on, when key or detailed topics come up (e.g. loans, debts, etc). You don’t need to play a mirror of yourself, but the more you can understand the circumstances, the easier you’ll find it to respond to them. If you don’t have money, have more and deeper resources in other ways that you can leverage (maybe status or authority in a business or organization of note). If they don’t share your age bracket / gender, give them some tie to a hobby of some kind you have knowledge of. If it’s way outside of your comfort zone, poke around. Read, watch, and do everything you can to fill in. If I were playing, for instance, a biker, I’d probably go watch some Discovery / History Channel specials on bikers. I’d consider their history. I might watch something like Sons of Anarchy. I’d do everything I could to familiarize myself with a culture that I myself had little knowledge of.

Perhaps most importantly, set modest and achievable goals at the onset, and kick those out first. It seemed like Em was chasing after big fish from the word go, and it really set him back. I liked that Em was a proactive character, but he was trying to swallow the whole cow. Have some outside features that your PC cares about. The more connections they have (be they potential weaknesses or strengths) the more Cal has to work with, and the more meaningful adversity you can throw at him. These don’t even have to be big things. Something like having a pet for instance, throws a little minor wrinkle into the storytelling, because now you’re concerned about feeding it and caring for it if you aren’t able to do so. It helps to create things worth fighting for, and things that push and pull on your character. Another aspect of Em, that I thought was difficult, was that he essentially had very limited positive relationships that he cared about (essentially only his sister, and even they were estranged). I had no feel for who he cared about, and who cared about him. Laying aside what a lonely life that is, and what it does for the reliability and realism of a character, it makes your character inherently selfish (and deeply so) on the IC level.

Pitching a scenario, think of how much deeper Em’s story is if he’s got a girlfriend that cares about him? If he’s got friends that show up when he’s hurt? If he’s a member of a street gang that is looking for revenge for what happened to him? Think of how many more options it gives him, and how much more proactive it forces his story to be. Essentially, as noted, his death or failure here is noted by… his sister? That’s about it. His estranged from everyone. It’s part of what dug him deep into a hole with this – he had no one to turn to. Every one of his relationships was usury. It also made him emotionally shallow. He pouts, he wallows, he’s sad, he’s made. But it’s hard to demonstrate that because he doesn’t, again, interact with other people as his real self… pretty much at all.

I’m also, somewhat, of the opinion that given the horror nature of the game that playing a character that is essentially a monster to start with, really diminishes the meaningfulness of the transformation and many circumstances that arise. Kindred Em feels empty to me. I feel like he’d actually embrace it, and want it, because he’s nothing but a predator to begin with, a blood-sucking tool that thinks nothing of hurting people for his own short term gain. Narratively, I don’t think that’s driving, and I feel it sort of boxed you in here in terms of responding to things, combined with his lack of other people to meaningfully interact with.

Just some food for thought going forward. Take it or leave it as you well. As others have noted, you’re a phenomenal writer for your age, and clearly excited for the game and interested in the world and history of it. I’m just trying to give you a poke in the right direction on a lot of this – something I had to get as well when I jumped into a game like this for the first time (ask Cal about the success of my first PC in our first game together, and I’ll tell you about his own).

Calder Original Feedback Post

I think we all had a productive chat last night, and Pete raises a great many salient points here. To recap,

Stuff that hurt Em:

• He was selfish, which isn’t the same thing as evil. He saw himself as the center of the universe, didn’t care about anyone else, and wanted to rip off/con everyone, which didn’t give other characters much reason to care about him.

Cletus is evil, but he isn’t totally selfish. He cares, in a twisted way, about his mortal and Kindred family. He has honor: he’s a Southern gentleman who keeps his word. Even McGinn, who’s a racist and power-hungry sadist hated by multiple players, has standards… he refused to smear Cletus’ reputation along with the rest of the Invictus, because he’d invited Cletus to his home as a guest, and he doesn’t speak ill of guests. Caring about other people gives your character depth and makes other characters care about the.

• He was also evil. I brought this up earlier in Hangouts: “I can see friendship, but I have time seeing a genuinely beautiful one when you consider Em’s past relationships with people. The only ones he’s been really nice to are his sister and her kids. And even then, he seems to care more about playing hero than their immediate feelings (wanting to pay her kids’ college tuition when they don’t lack for money, but lying to her about job hunting, wanting to gift her kids with stolen toys, getting along badly with her husband, etc)."

During Em’s character creation, we brainstormed what amounted to Touchstones for a non-vampire PC, and the result gave us Lena. I don’t think that was effective enough, as the character veered back towards his original conception. As Pete raises, the problem with sociopaths is that it’s impossible to horrify or morally challenge them with the Embrace. It’s a gift rather than curse for them. Having more humane PCs is one of the big reasons I made the switch from ancillae to neonates.

• He never learned from his mistakes. We brought up in the OOC room that Em’s tactics weren’t conductive to his self-interest, and he kept repeating them. Roberts dicked him over, mouthed off to Cash Money. Wound up somewhere horrible, mouthed off to his captor. Lost his legs, mouthed off to Gettis. Got arrested, mouthed off to Marv. Obviously, being a smartass to other characters is fun for you, and there can be a place for it. Em did it way too often, in the midst of situations where he didn’t hold any cards.

• He rarely had anything to offer people. Pete’s also mentioned this, and for a conman, it’s essential: you need to convince your mark you have something they want. That’s typically going to be either

1) Ability to fulfill a specific desire of theirs (“I want to be famous”) which you can find out with Empathy rolls or homework, or it can be
2) A general resource that people find desirable, like money/Resources.

Finding out #1 takes taking more work and isn’t something you have as much control over. Not everyone is a simmering kettle of unsatisfied wants: there’s a reason the biggest cons take time and effort, because you have to do homework on the mark and tailor your approach. But some people, like the guards outside the charity ball, will simply be doing their jobs and nothing more. Em chose the path of maximum resistance by trying to get in without an invitation. If he’d had resources like Allies (High Society), Status, or Resources, he could’ve simply procured an invitation automatically like Caroline did. A conman doesn’t have to be loaded to the gills with connections and resources, since the whole point of conning people is promising something you don’t deliver, but more tools is always useful. Tying into what Pete said about realistic goals, Em was a lot better suited to fleecing tourists with shell games than defrauding Saudi princes out of millions, because he had nothing to offer the latter.

(Incidentally, alt potential way in with the doormen, flirt with a guest and get her to take you in as a date. It’s harder for the guards to refuse two people with one invitation than one person with zero.)

Tying into this, if I were to rebuild Em’s Merits using his existing XP (and dropping the bump to his Resolve), I’d have given him Allies (High Society) 3, Allies (Underworld) 3, Contacts 2, Status (a team of hustlers he leads) 3. With more XP, I’d go with a Retainer who’s your girlfriend, more Contacts, Allies (Street), Allies (Police) (you’ve seen how corrupt they are), and Resources 3. Basically, connections to the areas he wants to be part of first, tangential stuff like Allies (Health) later, if at all.

• His struggles got hard to root for. This ties into the above. Em was selfish and mouthy, alienated a lot of people, got screwed by them, dragged his sister into his mess, alienated her, then got what was coming to him. A character who repeats the same mistakes and hurts the people who try to help him is hard to root for.

Take Walter White. We see his devotion to his family and willingness to suffer deprivation and indignity for their sakes grind down. He suffers for a purpose (to make their lives better), and we sympathize, rather than the “selfish suffering” epitomized by Em getting molested (which he simply uses as justification to be a dick to people). Then, Walter gets cancer, and vows to provide for his family, even if it means doing horrible things. We still sympathize. Walt turns into a monster, and eventually admits all he wanted was to break bad, fuck the family. At that point, he should by rights lose our sympathy, but he wins it back when he rescues Jesse and ensures his family is financially provided for.

Emmett also didn’t save his sister or redeem himself like Walt did. Instead of being horrible (not telling her about Bud), he did the expected thing (telling her about Bud) vs. the heroic thing (dealing with Bud himself, rather than making her shell out ten grand). Or to use another analogy, he could have set her house on fire and said nothing, set it on fire and said it was burning, or set it on fire and put out the blaze himself.

Stuff that will help your next PC:

• Care about something bigger than yourself. Most people in the world ultimately aren’t going to personally care about you. If you care about something they also care about, you have something in common, and they’ll care about you. Examples with the other PCs include Caroline’s devotion to her religious faith and mortal family, Lou’s pursuit of justice, and Rocco’s devotion to one of the Big Three. This is true for NPCs as well as PCs. If any of the Big Three were to die, someone else would likely step in to fill their shoes. The movements they champion are bigger than they are. Find a cause for your next PC to invest themselves in, and other characters will care about them.

• Care about other characters who aren’t just “morality pets." That didn’t work out with Lena. Having family, significant others, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, etc. who you care about is better than just having one special person. The more people you care about, the more people who care about you.

• Play something you have knowledge about. Pete’s worked at a law office, so he’s playing a lawyer (in training). He’s in the military, so Caroline’s developed connections with former soldiers. I had a very memorable eighth grade with a classmate who had severe autism, so I’ve played a PC with autism. You shouldn’t play a carbon copy of yourself, but as the maxim goes, write what you know.

• Keep track of details. When players forget stuff it comes back to bite them. For example, George forgot and defaulted on a promise made to Coco, so she testified against him during his trial. If players don’t remember something critical I usually won’t remind them, though I might grant Int + Composure rolls. I don’t do this to be a dick, but because if players keep track of things themselves, they’re more likely to spot other connections and plan intelligently than if I hand-feed them everything. You don’t have to keep as many notes as Pete, but if there’s something that seems detrimental to lose track of, might not be a bad idea to jot it down.

• Em-Unrelated: For all his problems, Arien was better than Kiera. Mari at least was sad when he died.

Might even say she was broken up.

The news really shattered her.

She was in pieces over it.

Izzy Feedback Repost

I said in my last feedback post that I enjoyed Em’s failures and the way he found himself (read: I led him) into a dire situation entertainingly.

Hoo boy, did I get to put that statement to the test.

I keep thinking of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, which I recommend seeing if you haven’t. It stars David Cross, Tobias from Arrested Development. The plot structure is as follows: idiot salesman thinks he’s far more capable than he actually is and, through a series of increasingly poor decisions (cough) gets caught up in events way, way comically over his head (like accidentally aiding and abetting a terrorist bombing). He suffers awfully but because his self-esteem is so pitiful and he’s dug too deep a hole for himself, he refuses to take the easy way out and just admit he has no idea what he’s doing. Instead, he lies (badly), limps, and claws himself into higher and higher stakes. He gets exploited by the few people he (erroneously) considers friends who get him into even bigger problems, humiliates himself beyond conception, and ends up inadvertently killing the one person who actually cares for him, brought up on an absurd number of charges in the trial of the century; the show ends with him getting exiled to North Korea. I liked it, but critics said the show had a problem of following a purely downward arc, a simple series of escalating gags and situations that just became increasingly hard to watch without cringing. It was a fun show, but ultimately, it wasn’t anything truly special.

Lot of parallels there.

I enjoyed a lot of what I did with Em. I understand he was a cringeworthy character in a lot of people’s eyes, and he is in mine as well, but I also enjoyed a lot of his arc. It was, if nothing else, an experience I’m glad I had. So I remember him with fondness, but I think that going forward, the single biggest change I’ll be making is that I want my PCs to leave an impact on the game just as my favorite characters have.

To get to the nitty gritty:

Em’s story was clearly impacted by the loss of his legs, which led to a) the Broken condition and b) a severe limiting of his mobility, both figurative and, obviously, literal. I don’t have any hard feelings there, but it’s definitely been implied that Em suffered as he did because of the way he/I interacted with the…visions? Dream? Auspex mind rape?
We’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating; that sequence was a pretty confusing time for me. Obviously that was intended, but I mean confusing as to how I as a player was meant to interact with a situation I was apparently blind to. I wasn’t sure what degree of consciousness Em was at (or, more specifically, how conscious he felt), whether he could perceive the pictures Cal provided with any detail, or even what physical sensations he was experiencing, or if the entire sequence felt cerebral. I don’t remember specifically, but questions about what his senses told him didn’t really get an answer.
As a result, I felt distanced from what Em was going through because it was dramatically unclear what he himself was perceiving (as opposed to what was actually happening, which was obviously withheld for good reasons). That led to me RPing him all over the place; he jumped from confused, to quipping, to begging for answers. I wasn’t sure what I was reacting to, and that meant I didn’t have a handle on how to react. Maybe I should have asked that more specifically during play OOCly, or maybe somehow ascertained it in character, or maybe I simply should have acted differently; whatever the case, I didn’t have any kind of grasp on the situation, which means Em may have lost his legs as a result of miscommunication and sloppiness (although I’m not actually sure how much him losing his legs was a result of that sequence versus that being inevitable in the Dungeon— I mean, er, wherever I was). :P

Again, no hard feelings— I just wanted you to know how that scene came across, especially if it had major ramifications (Em ending up crippled instead of Embraced, for example).

His final conversation with Lena had some of my favorite writing, both on my end and yours, especially because of the emotional tension. Em told the truth for once in his life, and it burned him to the ground. I think I find that to be the true tragedy of the story; he genuinely tried to do one good thing, and ended up making things that much worse in ways he couldn’t have seen coming.

Em’s fatalism in that scene was what triggered our big OOC discussion and the decision to retire him. I’ve had time to get over this, but I’ll say it here: one thing that slightly irked me about that situation was the feeling that you as a GM had had these serious concerns about the character/my playstyle for a while and not said anything. To be clear, you did comment on my poor tactical decisions, but lots of other issues, such as his flatness, unrelatability, and lack of connections via Allies only came out postmortem. I get that you have a very hands-off approach to GMing, which I respect, but my experience is that it’s always better to straight up tell people when they’re acting counterintuitively. That doesn’t mean telling me when I’m making an idiotic choice that my character might (for example, pissing off Roberts), but I don’t see a problem with telling me when I seem to be playing a character in a way you find unfulfilling, or when a character comes across as flat. I recall one of your key frustrations being that you felt as though I wasn’t building a story with you but simply reacting to yours; that’s the kind of thing I hope you’ll tell me if you see it going forward.
Again, I get the impression that it’s just how you like to run things. Still, I think it’s worth noting as it sharply affects how I play.

I’ll give myself some flack for how I played Em after we decided to retire him. I adopted a “screw it” outlook and wrote him as having no self-interest whatsoever, completely resigned to his fate. In a way, I think I was trying to speed things along. In retrospect, that cheapened the character in some ways, and I wish I had given him just a bit more indignation at the end, and maybe somehow tried to redeem him in a way that didn’t end with the slaughter of everybody he loved.

Which brings me to that gory sequence.

Oh, Lena. I really am sorry. I understand why it happened, but that was probably the most bitter pill for me as a player. I really had hoped Em’s one act of honesty would save her, but because of events behind the scenes, it ended up making things much, much worse for her. I suppose it was a mercy that Em never learned what happened, and a mercy he didn’t deserve at that. And hoo boy, did I underestimate Bud. I thought he was dangerous. I didn’t think he was that dangerous. I don’t think I’ll be able to use a stove without getting chills for a while.

I take a fair amount of pride in Em’s closing post. I’d always wanted to close his story with an allusion to curtains, and I’m glad I was able to do so. If nothing else, I like to imagine Em’s story is an entertaining read, and one I can visit again in the future.

The real tragedy? I can’t play another con artist now. A good one. Sigh.

All in all, though? I don’t mean to be a Negative Nancy. I’ve played and GM’d worse characters than Emmett, and had less fun with better-made characters. It was a great introduction to the game, and it only gets better from here. Onwards and upwards. Which brings us to:

Pete Feedback Repost

I sympathize with the feelings of confusion and lack of empowerment after Em was kidnapped / handed over by Cash Money. The events (especially the images) were intentionally confusing and horrifying, and as a player you felt like there was nothing you could do. I seem to recall very much the same with Caroline’s Embrace. My recommendation going forward (for all players) is that such events / images are not posted purely for GM jollies, and even if you can’t directly act, you can still emote. Show horror, intrigue, interest, happiness. Whatever it may be. I don’t recall specifically if that’s what happened with Caroline’s, but I do recall expressing something in response to each image, especially as they grew more and more depraved. Often it might only be one line, especially as it continues on, but it’s something.

Thereafter you were in a position where you had several people you could interact with in varying ways. Especially as a social character, telling people to piss off instead of trying to manipulate them was bad practice. Think about a character like Raymond Reddington (Blacklist) when he’s captured. He’s constantly trying to manipulate people, he’s reaching out for information, he’s trying to get anything he can use to his advantage. Think of batman’s famous (infamous?) scene in the 2000s Justice League universe. Much the same. Cal and I touched on this in the main chat, but I did want to touch on the topic here for the sake of posterity. Even when nearly completely disempowered, you can still be working to advance your position.

On some more positive feedback at you Izzy, I do want to note that all of this aside, your receptiveness to feedback, interest in the game, and support of other players and their storylines are all huge pluses as a player. Most of the other players in the game have 5-10 years of experience on you as players, have made these same mistakes, often with a more negative response. Not everyone reacts to the horrific failure and death of their character and everyone they ever loved with optimism and the ability to bounce back and attack a new character idea aggressively, learning from those mistakes and trying to get back on the horse again. Combined with your already stellar writing, I think you have a bright future as a player.