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

[Agent Oracle]

Die. Roll up a mulkavian. Maximize your diplomatic skills, while minimizing your combat effectiveness. Use the "big Brain link" that the mulkavians have to send out a Extremely persuasive S.O.S., summoning every other mulkavian in the world to your location. Have an agressively annoying verbal quirk while talking.

Option 2. Break out ye olde Feng Shui rulebook. Summon Cha Kwo Chau. That shoud shut up the DM. (Cha Kwo Chau can be seen in this image, she's the peteit one to the south.

Incedentally, there are plenty of subterranian structures of impressive size, though, to be fair, they all happen to be more commonly known as "supercolliders" and are mostly used for nuclear experimentation.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Sounds very Lovecraftian to me. I think its kind of neat, but its all in how you spin it, eh?

I'm not exactly a friend of Lovecraftian role-playing, especially not in the Realms. And a Glabrezu isn't really the power player to pull this off (This would take at least a god or similar entity, maybe nothing less than Ao himself). But let's get back on topic:

Technically, she has a Co-chair. Her boyfriend wanted to join the game, so he created a Ghoul PC with piles of disciplines and, some grandfathered-in merits from OWoD (when all the other PC's were starting mortals with only abilities from the main WoD book), and the PC's all strongly objected, so she named him as Co-GM and moved him behind the screen with her. Now, he handles a few rules-related issues (when she doesn't overrule him, which is often) and plays his (now N)PC who is the love interest of her plot-device uber-NPC.

By all what is dear and holy, get out! And don't leave your nadgers behind! (a cookie for the first person who gets this )

While the whole giant dungeon thing is fairly ridiculous, it seems to be the smallest problem. That could be explained somehow (elder vampire, vast powers and a lot of time - even though in Requiem, Vampires won't be awake for that long), though I doubt that she thought about it. Playing favourites is far worse. And cheating it past the players like this adds insult to injury.

And the butchering of rules without notice, making players sit there for hours without doing anything. That's not how you play any roleplaying game.

Most likely D&D since that's what I know well, but maybe NWoD to show how I think it should be run.

Yeah. It seems that she really wants to play D&D. WoD isn't made for dungeon crawls. If you don't plan to use any social interaction (I don't count any interaction with the Deus-Ex-Machinegun-wielding uber NPC here), you're better off with D&D.

I am not very familiar with NWoD, but I have played the old one, and in the old one, Elder Vampires WERE gods.

The new WoD works a bit differently. For example, there is no such thing as generation, since the origins of vampirism are lost in the mists of time. Instead of have blood potency. This builds up by one every 50 years. Higher potencies can use more than one point of vitae per round, can get more than 5 dots in attributes, skills, disciplines, and the like. But they also need a higher palate: Only the first couple of tiers (up to blood potency 2 I think) can get by with animal blood, later you need human blood. Starting with 6 or 7, you need vampire blood (this does not incur vinculum, though, and isn't diablerie). This, of course, can cause problems. Vampires might not be willing to give up their vitae, and before this gets out of hand, the elder can voluntarily enter torpor. This is the long sleep, and your potency decreases by one every 25 years then. If you lose access to higher dots (6+), points invested in those will be lost. If your blood lost enough of its potency, you can return to the "living" without having to prey on your fellow kindred.

But the torpor isn't a dreamless sleep - far from it: You relive your memories, and not only that: They start to change. over the years, or even centuries, your memory will be warped beyond recognition. You return to a world you don't know anything about, and even the past is not your friend: Did that other vampire really slight you or is that your imagination going wild? Some vampires take notes of all they think important, but how can you be sure your enemies - or even those who called themselves your allies - haven't messed with these notes?

So there are few if any really old vampires around. I don't know too much about relative power level, but something like the op has described isn't likely.

That is part of the reason, again in WoD not NWoD cause I don't know, you don't play humans. Even Hunters stood no chance when you started talking about Antideluvians and Children of Gaea. Mages COULD hold their own, but not very easily.

Well, if you decide to play a mortal here, you probably still won't have a chance against very experienced vampires - or werewolves or mages. On the other hand, I don't think that you're supposed to take on those as a mere mortal. Playing a mortal here is for ghost stories, maybe some light "shadow hunting" (going against vampires, werewolves, mages, or other supernatural creatures), some X-Files like game and stuff like that.

So far, the flood of different RPG's within the new WoD was held off. There's the core book (World of Darkness - containing the common rules and all the information needed to play mundane mortals. Much like the core rules in D&D) and 3 additional "Races" - Vampire, Werewolf and Mage (comparable to a D&D campaign setting, as it allows a differend kind of game), with rules supplements for all of them.

If this GM wants an endless Dungeon Crawl then I see nothing wrong with the setting.

I do see something wrong: Apparently the players don#t want and endless Dungeon Crawl, especially not with WoD rules.

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.

Can't agree with that. It may be okay if said character only appears sporadically. I confess about having my own god-like NPC, which was in part a test ("What does a character with an ECL of 50 look like?") and in part a policy for them to play fair. It was an evil campaign, and in the past we had tons of infighting in evil campaigns with a group that had a lot of the same players as this one, and I'm not a fan of this (especially after hearing the stories of some over-powered character single-handedly destroying the whole campaign because the DM wasn't really strong enough to intervene). So I told them in-game and out-of-game: "You're a team. Plunder, pillage, rape, whatever, I don't care (but remember that this can provoke reactions), but if you start fighting with one another - which usually leads to bad blood here - your characters are toast. The The Mega-NPC was the in-game insurance for decent party behaviour. He sent them on their mission, showed up one or two times, but was far from omnipresent. And I'm way off topic again.

What I want to say: Stuff like that might be okay - let the DM get it out of the system - but if this character gets any significant amount of screen time in the campaign - or even in a single session - it's not funny any more.

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.

Damn right! If one of them can do stuff like that for his amusement, I guess a cabal of powers like this can just take over the world and openly rule mankind (along with the other vampires), and there's nothing mankind can do.

 

[wingsandsword]

Die. Roll up a mulkavian. Maximize your diplomatic skills, while minimizing your combat effectiveness. Use the "big Brain link" that the mulkavians have to send out a Extremely persuasive S.O.S., summoning every other mulkavian in the world to your location. Have an agressively annoying verbal quirk while talking.

New World of Darkness, not old, so there are no Malkavians.

Also, the PC's are completely mundane normals from using the World of Darkness rulebook, not Vampires, Mages, or Werewolves, and no ghouls, wolf-blooded, or sleepwalkers either. Under pressure, she begrudgingly allowed some things out of Second Sight (the NWoD book for psychics and hedge mages), but only an incredibly nerfed version (a short list of the weakest powers we're allowed to buy, which our characters cannot activate at will, if we want to activate them she rolls percentile dice in secret and tells us if we can even try to activate the power, to date nobody has been able to actually even try to activate anything they've bought.)

Two of the 4 original PC's liked the idea of becoming Mages, but she said none of the current PC's ever become mages, because she rolled percent to see if anybody would awaken, giving PC's a 1% chance of having the potential to Awaken, and didn't roll it for anybody, ditto with the First Change and becoming a werewolf (at the beginning of the campaign she said it would be possible for PC's to become vampires or werewolves or mages, she's ruled the latter two out now, claiming it was theoretically possible, but she rolled otherwise for us). She's made it clear that if PC's want to become supernatural, they have to choose to be Embraced or ghouled (she said she won't force it on anybody, the characters will have to beg for it and earn it), although all the PC's are horrified at the thought of becoming vampires or ghouls, the GM doesn't understand why and always has NPC's telling us that there's nothing wrong with being a vampire or ghoul.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Die.

So far so good.

Roll up a mulkavian.

More problematic. They're only allowed to play mortal humans. They may not play vampires, much less one from a bloodline (remember: This is the new WoD. Malkavian isn't a clan any more, there's only Gangrel, Daeva - more or less the new Toreador - Ventrue, Nosferatu and Mekhet (nickname: Shadows. They're the sneakers and stalkers).

There's also bloodlines, which are off-shoots of the great clans with some extra abilities. There's a Ventrue bloodline called "Malkovian", and it deals with madness.

(Yes, I know the Malkavian part wasn't really serious, but it seemed like a good opportunity to shortly describe the new structure)

 

[Toras]

The sad thing is that I would have very littel problem with such a thing existing in Mage. It has plently of president for rooms much larger inside, mazes on uncommon size, and forcing mortals to quest for knowledge.

With Vampire, it becomes idiocy. Only thing I can think of is that you are all in the VR gear already and the second set is a blind. Or the, its in your head Alice explanation.

 

[Graf]

The GM sounds like she’s

Young (emotionally if not mentally or physically)
Bright
Creative
A bit under socialized.
A bit detached from reality.

Think about it like this: In ten years, if this person gets their emotions under control, gets some real world experience and can stop yelling at people (i.e. probably gets over the fact that some of her self estimee is attached to the fact that she feels she’s smarter than others) she’ll be a brilliant DM.

What she needs, really, from you, is patience.
People who are defensive (especially the puzzlemaker type who spend hours thinking things through and are trying to be internally consistent) aren’t going to react well to overt criticism.

In order to be patient you are going to have to detach yourself from the situation a bit.
Don’t take the game as seriously as you are. If your characters die, or you spend an hour on a puzzle just relax and yuk it up a bit.

When she throws something in weird, in character, have your character make a single, in character crack about something (like a one liner in a movie) and move on.
If the puzzles get too tough just stop and have fun roleplaying with your friends in the room.

 

[Agback]

Moving parts are noit a 20th century invention.

Indeed not. But there is a big difference between a mediaeval windmill, or even 19th-Century canal-locks and the kind of engines and bearings that could move around whole sections of a gigantic underground complex. I'm not quite clear on how big and heavy and hewn-from-solid-rock the moving parts in this complex are. If they are just like elevators and modest-sized rooms on turntables and tracks they could have been built with 1850s technology. If they are 100-foot sections of rock-hewn complex I doubt that we could slide or turn them even now. It is hard enough to build a house that stands still without cracking.

 

[Agback]

Incedentally, there are plenty of subterranian structures of impressive size, though, to be fair, they all happen to be more commonly known as "supercolliders" and are mostly used for nuclear experimentation.

They cost billions of dollars to build (though admittedly the huge vaccuum rings and electromagnets cost more than the tunnelling), and they are both smaller and simpler than the complex in question.

The CERN complex near Geneva is the largest. It is a bit over five miles in diameter, but vastly simpler than teh Ventrue complex in Sicily.

Tunnelling, especially in hard rock, is mind-bogglingly slow and expensive.

 

[Agback]

While the whole giant dungeon thing is fairly ridiculous, it seems to be the smallest problem. That could be explained somehow (elder vampire, vast powers and a lot of time - even though in Requiem, Vampires won't be awake for that long), though I doubt that she thought about it. Playing favourites is far worse. And cheating it past the players like this adds insult to injury.

And the butchering of rules without notice, making players sit there for hours without doing anything. That's not how you play any roleplaying game.

Quoted for truth. I say again: bail out, hit the sillk.

You aren't enjoying this: in fact, the opposite. Tormenting the GM isn't going to help. Staying around for the inevitable train-wreck isn't going to help your relationships with the people involved. You are worse than wasting four hours a week of your precious waking hours. Stop.

 

[Heathen72]

The GM sounds like she’s

Young (emotionally if not mentally or physically)
Bright
Creative
A bit under socialized.
A bit detached from reality.

Think about it like this: In ten years, if this person gets their emotions under control, gets some real world experience and can stop yelling at people (i.e. probably gets over the fact that some of her self estimee is attached to the fact that she feels she’s smarter than others) she’ll be a brilliant DM.

What she needs, really, from you, is patience.
People who are defensive (especially the puzzlemaker type who spend hours thinking things through and are trying to be internally consistent) aren’t going to react well to overt criticism.

In order to be patient you are going to have to detach yourself from the situation a bit.
Don’t take the game as seriously as you are. If your characters die, or you spend an hour on a puzzle just relax and yuk it up a bit.

When she throws something in weird, in character, have your character make a single, in character crack about something (like a one liner in a movie) and move on.
If the puzzles get too tough just stop and have fun roleplaying with your friends in the room.

What I said, but articulated better Just accept the game for what it is and try to have fun.

Quoted for truth. I say again: bail out, hit the sillk.

You aren't enjoying this: in fact, the opposite. Tormenting the GM isn't going to help. Staying around for the inevitable train-wreck isn't going to help your relationships with the people involved. You are worse than wasting four hours a week of your precious waking hours. Stop.

Or stay and decide to have fun. Players can be just as responsible for the game being 'fun' or 'not fun' as the GM is, and enjoying a game can be as simple as an attitude shift.