Suspension of Disbelief stretched to the breaking point in the World of Darkness

[Yair]

so.... why are you staying in the game again?

 

[SidusLupus]

It's a game about vampires, werewolves, and mages. The size of the structure bothers you?

 

[Agback]

Subways in New Orleans is way more believable.

Indeed. There is a stretch of teh New Southern Railway in Sydney that is tunneled through waterlogged and unconsolidated estuarine sediment on the shores of Botany Bay. The actual tunnels were bored (or rather pumped) out using a copy of one of the machines that dug teh Channel Tunnel, and the station boxes were built by excavating with hydraulic grabs in a trench that was filled with a slurry of clay (Bentonite) with a greater density than the sediment (hydrostatic pressure prevented the sides of the trench from collapsing. When the excavation was done reinforcing steel was lowered into it, then concrete was pumped to the bottom and the Bentonite wasw pumped off the top. That's only two stations (IIRC, maybe 3) and about 17 kilometres of tunnel. A complete system for New Orleans would be expensive and probably not economic, but I think it would be feasible.

 

[delericho]

If you're not enjoying the game, but feel it can be redeemed, speak to the GM. If you're not enjoying the game, and don't feel it can be redeemed, don't play.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

When I first read the title, I thought you had something against WoD in general. I was ready to watch the fires burn here. Instead, it's just some Storyteller (they're not Dungeon Masters or Game Masters in WoD, people! ) screwing up.

I have never encountered the "Elder Vampire Did It" syndrome, especially not like this. If anything, this would belong to the "Elder Mage from Atlantis Did It" category for Mage: The Awakening.

I did have something like this in a D&D game: We had to go down a staircase that was so long it took us 8 hours to go down. On the bottom, there was a vast room (we never saw any walls). We defeated a glabrezu down there (as well as some other Cyricist cultists conducting some anarchic ritual). We then had to flee back up the stairs as they were slowly crumbling after the demon died.
And the whole thing was under a large city.

 

[wedgeski]

If quitting isn't an option then you're just going to have to suck it up. I honestly don't think throwing insults at a person you're supposed to be friends with is a very productive avenue for change. Roll with it. Play the game in the spirit it seems to be intended - a James Bond style villain in a WoD setting. Fix problems that can be fixed, like the house rules thing, and force your disbelief out into the cold with everything else. Like you said, it's a diversion from the real business of the evening - hanging out with your friends - so why are you getting so worked up?

 

[Numion]

It's a game about vampires, werewolves, and mages. The size of the structure bothers you?

If I understood WoD correctly, a big part of it is keeping the existence of Vampires et al secret from the public at large. It kinda defeats that concept if keeping things secret is ridiculously easy compared to our world.

 

[Bront]

I say try to suck it up and have fun, but discuss your worries with the Storyteller before your next session. There's a point where you worry about things like that, and there's a point where you just let it slide. Having been a victem to the Uber NPC problem, sometimes you can enjoy being along for the ride, it just takes getting yourself in the right mindset.

 

[wingsandsword]

It's a game about vampires, werewolves, and mages. The size of the structure bothers you?

Yes, because the idea behind the World of Darkness is that it's superficially the same as the real world, the idea that to the typical denizen, our world and the WoD are pretty much identical.

Some quick calculations show this structure to have an internal volume of around 250 trillion square feet (~1.8 cubic miles). The entire Cheyenne Mountain Complex, aka NORAD, has an internal volume of around 4.7 million cubic feet, by comparison (around 1/53000th the size), and that was a monumentally expensive task for the US government to dig that out of a mountain (without including the huge machinery to rearrange the entire internal layout every few hours). Sicily isn't much easier to build a giant underground complex in.

The idea that there is some uber-Vampire who can build a complex that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, take many years (or even decades) to build and tens or hundreds of thousands of workers, and be the largest construction task ever undertaken in the history of mankind, but cover it up so that absolutely nobody knows anything, there is no evidence it exists anywhere, and only vague rumors of it exist among this Vampire's own social circle is to me far more of a stretching of disbelief than secret societies of strange creatures living in the shadows.

Is she a problem player too? You could always try inviting her to a one-shot game. Being a fan of a uber-NPC's doesn't necessarily make you a problem gamer, just a problem DM. (Although, she's more likely to be a problem player than any random player... but, you never know!)

I've not PC'ed with her in a tabletop game, but we both played together in a local long-running vampire LARP. As for being a "problem player", I can see a lot of the same behavior in her vampire NPC's as her old PC's (incredibly haughty and highbrow), but the GM's of the larp didn't trust her with an Elder character, so I never got to see if she'd try to act like this (Okay, she did play Lilith during the Gehenna plotline that ended the larp, but only under strict supervision, but she didn't have enough free reign to see how she would have acted with extreme power). In fact, that LARP may well have given her some of her skewed attitudes about Elder vampires, as PC's regularly made grave breaches of the masquerade which were hand-waved away by spending a few points of Influence, a flimsy cover story, and a few throws for Dominate (a fun larp, but the people running it were complete softies about the ramifications of masquerade breaches).

so.... why are you staying in the game again?

Well, as I said in an earlier post, the hostess of the game is a good friend of mine and the game is the only regular time I get to see her regularly because of our schedules (the GM is her daughter), and after the game we hang out and watch movies and chat and drink and have a good time. It's just dealing with about 4 hours of sub-par GM'ing that balances out around 4 hours of fun afterwards.

I'm doing what I can to talk to her, slowly, but part of me dealing with this is explaining to others just what I'm dealing with. It's one of those horror stories we all have.

 

[Huw]

Sounds fine to me, as long as the Storyteller's made a reasonable attempt to keep the place hidden. Sicily's a big place. Could be buried under an artificial hill with a vineyard on it. Maybe some ancient vampire build it centuries ago, so all the current owner has to do is refit the interior, which wouldn't arouse too much suspicion.

Ever played On the Edge? You'll have to pretend that an entire island in the Mediterranean can be hidden.