The Broken Promise of SA 2.0

  I want to note that I wrote this over a year ago when I stepped down from the Rules Team at SA. I was asked to wait to publish it because of some of the details it contained. There were attempts to revise it into a conversation between two people regarding the subjects it presents. It's been over a year at this point; I feel I've waited enough. It hasn't been revised or updated from the point of view of approximately October of 2014. I know that some rules have been changed, revised, and updated. But I feel that the underlying issues are likely to remain.
  In full disclosure, I probably won't ever be returning to SA. I've taken a role on Plot at SPITE which provides a very similar factional town feel to SA. While some of the same issues are present in SPITE, I feel that the leadership of the game is much more willing to address these issues rather than try to sweep them under the rug.

----

There have been some outstanding successes and some dismal failures found within the rules set. From a designer/developer perspective, I want to walk through what worked and what didn't in order to really show where the system remains strong and where it needs to continue to be refined. As I step away from the Rules Team I want to note that I feel the rules are in no way complete, stable, or solid. But continued progress on the rules hasn't really been a priority for the organization.

Successes

Energy Economy

 The infinite energy complex is dead. This has radically altered the game and finally disconnected the close interaction between Shifters and Wraiths. Honestly, at this point, the two really don't have a whole lot to do with each other. This is as it should be and I think the game is better for it. This was really what the game needed. It was the biggest and probably the most shocking change to the game.

 The addition of nodes has also created several interesting zones in the game. In my original write up of the rules I had people spending 10 minutes regaining energy at a node rather than 1 minute. I'm still not sure of the right decision here, but the nodes are clearly the right idea to create a game zone with interesting areas as well as handle the external sources of energy for these PC groups.

 While I consider the nodes a success I'd probably start messing with the amount of energy they provide. My experiences indicate that the target of 40 energy is probably too high. A 20 energy character could blow their entire energy pool three times per game without having any problems. This ended up being an easier game of resource management than we had intended. I might go so far as to cut this number in half and only have 20 floating energy. I feel this would do a better job creating a higher level of threat. This would be easy to handle by giving sorcerers 10 energy at sunrise, dropping haunts to one of each type, and cutting four of the shifter glades.

Character Creation

 We really opened up the options in character creation. Bringing in a handful of merits, lores, and clear rules on purchasing learned powers has given players the option to build more diverse characters at character creation. This comes at a significant cost but I feel it has helped experienced players enter the game with richer characters, ultimately making the game richer. Choices such as playing a Brujah that learned Valeren, while costing more XP, is a much richer addition to the game than just another Salubri.

 I've been excited to create and play new characters under this system and I've seen a number of people excited by the potential as well. I think this was a strength because it opened the box in a game that felt very boxed in at new character creation. There was fear that opening up BSD, Baali, and other “bad guys” as character creation would create a griefer issue. This fear has yet to be realized as I don’t think it really exists. The few PCs we’ve had in game that took these options have generally been clever, or devious. Overall I feel that new characters have become more exciting, which is why we’ve had so many of them.

Agg Damage

 This was one of the most heavily contested changes we brought in. It has created a very interesting level of depth into the game. I don't feel like this has really been explored as deeply as we had hoped but I feel that it is working. Someone throwing agg causes a big change in how PCs deal with a problem. From what I've seen the added math of agg hasn't been a problem and it has given ST a big tool for challenging players. While I think ST is yet to really make appropriate use of the ability to deal agg, I still think the concept has served to be quite a success.

Combat Feeding

 Vampires are still an incredibly powerful force in the game, especially when dealing with other vampires. Their power level drops drastically when dealing with Non Vampires and their ability to be an all game all-star has been seriously diminished. The new rules for feeding have allowed for successful feeding by vampires in social settings, the agg has made it undesirable, and has removed it as a combat technique. Feeding being removed from Wraiths has also had a significant effect on making damage the biggest way to deal with combat encounters rather than draining. It has also removed the parasitic relationship between wraiths and the living. Now, wraith are more able to be either friendly or not with the living based on their character concepts.

Sort of Successes

Powers

 I feel we clarified and fixed a number of broken powers but some still remain. We may have gone too far with obedience, making it a very weak power. Cloak seems more properly balanced and Presence has received a major functional upgrade. The removal of Regenerate and the old Majesty, as well as the burn out rules, has altered the survivability of certain PC groups while drastically increasing the survivability of certain NPC groups. Killing someone remains expensive but very feasible. I’m happy with the direction here but feel the continuous tweaks are required. Horrid Reality remains incredibly powerful, as does Venom Blood while Daze seems much weaker than previous incarnations.

Rituals

 I think we started off on the right foot with rituals. The new requirements add a lot of direction to the game and removing the silly limitations from the previous version has made rituals a big part of the “end game” of SA. Unfortunately, many of the rituals aren’t really completed, balanced, or well honed. Rituals were the last thing completed by the Rules Team as the new rules went into effect but they weren’t as well reviewed as other sections of the rule book. Some of the potential of the rituals is fantastic but I don’t feel that ST has done a great job getting the new rules for rituals into the players hands. There’s rituals to make a caern, the process for hiving a caern has changed, there’s a ton of cool changes that players haven’t adapted to yet because they haven’t seen the rituals yet. The Rituals are good in concept but not really well written or balanced.

Spirit Rules

 You guys don’t know it yet but the spirit rules are awesome. They’ve been ratcheted up to 11 and can provide a great source of challenge for Shifters looking for a fight. Again, like rituals, much of this hasn’t been realized by the playership because of how ST has handled spirits. At some point there’ll be an ST that realizes the tools that are there and makes the game fantastic for shifters.

Failures

Tags/Conversion

 While most of conversion went over pretty smooth, the tags at conversion proved a major debacle. I’m relatively sure there is items that are running around that should never have existed. The system was designed so that no fetish is capable of swinging Fire without paying energy, no weapon longer than a dagger could be both silvered and made into a fetish. I’m not sure where the communication broke down here but I don’t think that tags ended up converting into the same rules set we had created for them to exist in.

Willpower

 I feel like the change to the reliance on willpower hasn’t worked as intended. Personally, I love being able to take every mental thrown at me, at least for a few seconds. The majority of the playership doesn’t do this. Willpower is still a default response to a mental attack. What really happened was that the majority of old players and staff made characters with 8+ willpower under the new rules system. Honestly, I think this was bad for the game. Keeping willpower at 6 xp made it to cheap not to buy. I think I would have liked to have seen a tiered system for purchasing willpower where your second point costs six XP and your 10th point costs 15 or so xp. Currently, the 2 willpower for the cost of a learned level 3 power isn’t balanced. Willpower is just too useful not to have lots and I don’t think the game is actually more fun when you have lots of willpower. My priest has one willpower, and I’ve never spent it.

Adoption and Enforcement

 I’ll be honest here, I don’t think the rules have been adopted yet. I feel that this problem is two fold but most of the issue falls on the problem of enforcement. SA is the only LARP I’ve ever played with such a low level of rules knowledge among its players. It’s also the only LARP without some level of in game rules enforcement. I’m pretty sure the two are linked. Every other LARP I’ve experienced handles this much more professionally than SA. Attempts to correct people on incorrect rule usage is met with hostility on pretty much every level. I would say that overall the majority of the players don’t have a passable grasp of the rules. I see so many rules broken every event that I’m not even sure where to start to fix this, but I will say the biggest transgressors are ST. ST violates so many rules and tenants of the game that in any responsible LARP the individual members would likely end up banned from play. This isn’t a new problem, it existed under the old rules set and was evident in the example of ST killing a PC by misusing a power, then informing the individual how a power worked incorrectly.

 When creating the rules, the rules team believed that having a clearer and more coherent rules set would encourage better rules knowledge. This clearly hasn’t been the case. Even though the rules are much more consistent than ever before, there has been little to no change in rules knowledge among the playership. In a LARP I don’t expect perfect rules usage. I’ve forgotten to do the 10 seconds of RP before Possession, gotten the stages of death incorrect, misread how a power works, miscounted energy usage, swung my weapons too fast, and used Gauntlet Walk too fast after attacking. Errors happen, it’s a part of the game, especially in the heat of battle, and I’m the person who knows the rules best. The game has lots of rules and it gets confusing. But what I don’t see is a community of people working together to enforce the rules. Instead there is an overall casual approach to the rules which causes a “rules optional” environment to develop.

 At the last game the number of rules violations by ST in the combat at the tree was amazing. Some of these were on issues they had been previously warned about. Some were on “secret ST” powers, but none were acceptable. At this point, due to my own experience, I have absolutely no faith in ST to follow the rules of the game as they have been written down.

 One thing I’ve been pushing for a number of years is the existence of some sort of Rules Marshall program at SA. Most other games have people that are responsible for rules oversight which may or may not be the same people as the ones that are coming up with the rules. Currently in SA it is impossible to give a rules correction to someone without it coming off as an attack. The lack of an impartial arbiter of the rules increases the difficulty of bring about any sort of expectation that the rules exist to be followed. I’ve seen instances of two people taking different interpretations of the rules and sticking to their own understanding regardless of what they are being told. With a small rules team, it simply isn’t possible that there will be a rules member there for every improperly used rule.

 The final piece of this is that people need to get off their high horse about not wanting to interrupt a scene when someone has broken a rule. Nothing is more jarring to people who know the rules than someone breaking them. Signature calls become part of the music of the game and someone randomly inserting illegal power usage or incorrect signature calls breaks that down immediately. It is better to have a game in which someone can instruct another player that their call is a flub, stop for a moment to explain a rule, or raise a flag when someone repeatedly breaks rules than to have a game where the immersion is so special that it is not worth following the rules of the game. I view the rules as the contract between all players and staff in a game. While you may occasionally make a mistake, the expectation needs to be that you aren’t allowed to break the contract. If you do, there needs to be people standing watch to make sure it’s followed.

ST Rules

 The blame on this particular issue doesn’t quite lie with any one person or group. The big issue here is that the ST rules were never completed. What ST has been using for the past year is a mashup of rules I wrote for Magic Items, Shifters, Vampires, and Spirits, and what Trevor put together for Mages, Fae and Demons. The rules I put together were never reviewed in a meaningful way and most of Trevors were just quickly glanced over. This means that the entire ST book isn’t really balanced in any meaningful way.

 However, this isn’t the greatest failure in my mind. The biggest failure lies in the hand off from the rules team to the ST team in creating guidelines that fit within the rules system we had created. My original desire was to put together a real Storyteller Guide which included how powers were intended to be used, taught, viewed by the world at large. Also instructions on how common certain subfactions should be in the game world. Instead of creating a basic set of instructions and guidelines, we gave the STs some pretty powerful tools and just trusted that they knew what we meant -- they didn’t.

 This issue first came apparent with the power Tainted which adds the Tainted meta call onto every attack. This was intended to be a power that indicated “this creature is just plain dirty” and that you really can’t get into any kind of altercation with it without coming out tainted. Though it was a level one power in a BSD tree, I had always envisioned it as fairly uncommon among NPCs. Being the big ball of ickyness is great for that one guy in the group or a decently beefy bad guy, but I had never thought that we’d see put out on every bane as happened in the first few games. To their credit, once we informed ST of this they toned it down significantly.
 Though the Tainted power was the first instance of this, the pattern of using powers as was not intended was repeated again and again by ST. This isn’t really their fault as we never gave them any direction, but it has created a number of issues that have been terrible for the game. Another example of this is the commonality of Gaultlet Walk on spirits. Gauntlet Walk is a fairly rare level three power. It isn’t something that lots of spirits should have, or want. In fact there is a power that is available to spirits that NEED to do things in the realm which is available to spirits, it is Appear, the wraith power. Even Appear I’d expect to be a very uncommon power among spirits. There’s no reason for spirits to be in the realm any more than there is reason for Vampires to be in the umbra. Unfortunately, seeking to create threats to the town, numerous spirits were given the Gauntlet Walk power. It only took two games before the veil in Seaton Carou was as shredded as Ushaw Moore. It was shredded by STs partially because of this oversight.

 One of the things we talked about commonly while working on the rules set was making sure the rules prevented ST from griefing the playerbase. It was commonly discussed and believed that the rules set needed to decrease the options for ST to play unfair with their NPCs. Powers like Stonehand Punch replacing Realm Strike existed solely because of the lack of trust the Rules Team had in making the game enjoyable if they were able to attack the realm from the umbra in a meaningful way in which their could not be an form of return fire. Even though this limitation exists, STs have been caught multiple times trying to break this rule and beat on PCs from the Umbra. It seems even when it’s against the rules, they still want to grief PCs.

 What I think is needed here is a ST book that actually gives directions on how to use the rules to tell a story. The ST rules should be more like a Dungeon Master’s Guide and less of a Monster Manual. The last edition I handed over while on rules team included restrictions on how many of various subfactions ST were permitted to send out in a given event or year. This is to prevent the issues we’ve seen like using mages and fae as bruisers in order to ramp up difficulty of an encounter. It should also prevent the extensive use of special NPC snowflakes (like Rokea) as a lazy plot devices. I have little faith that these changes will be used and implemented but I do feel they are incredibly necessary.

 The other part of the ST book needs to be a guide to inform STs on how to make meaningful and powerful characters, how to run a game that preserves the veil, and how NPCs should treat things like someone wanting to learn their gifts. Unfortunately, these things have previously been left up to ST discretion which creates massive inconsistencies ranging from totems demanding the death of someone for teaching tribal gifts to NPCs handing them out for free. While some feel that these world consistency points don’t really fall into the realm of the Rules Team, I feel it is necessary that those who put powers into trees have some say in what they mean being there.

Conclusion

 While there is clearly a lot of potential in the rules set, I can’t say that I’m really happy with the result. I feel that much of the potential has yet to be realized and that the game we’re currently seeing isn’t any better than it used to be under the old rules set. It feels newer and there’s a few shiny new toys but considering the damage done to old characters in the conversion, I don’t feel we came out very far ahead. The game can now be more meaningful, impactful, and contain sharper edged stories but only if ST pushes it in that direction. I’ll be honest, I feel the location reset did more for the game than the rules change at this point.

 Finally, I don’t feel that players can trust ST to follow the rules. This is huge, but their violations have been so consistent and egregious, working against both the letter and spirit of the rules set, that I don’t feel that they deserve the privilege of having hidden rules. Because of this I’ve linked the latest version of the ST rules as I’ve stopped working on them since leaving the rules team. These rules will surely change and be overruled, but based on progress on them over the past year, it likely won’t be anytime soon.

SA 2.0 ST-Temp Rules

SA 2.0 Dev Blog #11: Blood Oath

This is What I'm Not Writing About

  I had originally started writing a post about the powers used to kill people dead. Unfortunately there's some discussion we're still having around certain powers that need to be resolved before that post can be completed. Specifically we're working with the concepts surrounding Element 1, 2, and 3 in the game. Currently the replacing nature of element attacks makes element 3 superior in almost every way to element 1 and element 2. (As a shifter I prefer element 2 simply because of the lack of solid level 2 powers available compared to level 3 powers).
  Really, no character benefits from having both element 1 and element 3. Also, the choice nature of element is horribly uncannon. I rarely see element used for anything but fire even though the specific gift or power that the power represents if often times specifically another element. For Black Furies it represents Wasp Talons, for Corax it's Hummingbird's Dart. Also powers that should specifically have elemental restrictions (such as something from Rego Aquam or Creo Ignam which under the current system allow people to go Darth Vader on someone) don't really have rules to restrict them making any restriction a significant nerf rather than something that helps define flavor of an attack.
  In attempting to balance this out we want to split out attacks that generally do Agg (fire), attacks that always do Agg (A new <type> of damage called Agg), attacks that do agg to a specific faction (silver, sunlight, stygian steel), and attacks that don't generally do agg to anyone (water, stone). I'll say that balancing this with the new energy limitations has been a significant challenge and we're not there yet. But that's not what I'm here to tell you about. I'm here to talk about blood oath.

One of the Weirdest Rules at SA

  The current blood oath rules represent one of the weirdest and most awkward rules in all of SA. I'm specifically talking about the 5 blood is too much rule. Now this rule has a lot of history as to how it came into being. There's much of that history I don't even know. But currently 5 blood in one sitting creates a blood oath that lasts for 24 hours. This means that vampires will routinely share 4 blood (also blood vials are 4 blood) and then stop specifically to avoid getting oathed. This represents a number of problems from a canon perspective. In canon a blood oath is formed by drinking a single point of blood from a single vampire on three different occasions. Then bam, you're oathed. Drinking from another vampire at all is considered very dangerous and is often times used as a punishment.
  Additionally the regular sentence for blood oath is 1 year to life, in SA 24 hours is the timeline. Looking at the rules for blood oath this makes sense. It's a relatively easy thing to get out of if you don't want to be bound because it basically makes you the total slave of your regent. Blood Oaths can very easily strip away the playability of a character turning you into an unwilling butler. Because of this the 24 hour timer makes sense for the current rules set but the current rules set doesn't do a great job matching canon.

The Problem with Canon

  One of the issues that you encounter using canon as a base line is that canon isn't really designed for LARPs. Where it has been converted to Minds Eye Theater it's designed for a slower pace, rock-paper-scissor's LARP where everyone can pull out their character sheet. So there's a number of things that are just plain difficult to do in a LARP setting. One of which is to take OOG notes. While teaching allows for a somewhat sensible pause to find a pen and write down what is being taught, blood oaths don't always offer the same flexibility. If we tried to move to a 3 sip total system (or 3 sips within a year) someone would need to track this. I've seen notable issues at LARPs where people were arguing about if this was drink two or three, when the last one was and if it still counted. One thing we don't have much of in SA is across game tracking. There's a couple of questions about taint, what you were taught, some stuff like that. But nothing as stat intensive as tracking one drink from Cecily, two from Morosa, two from Brennis, one from... you get the point.
  In the end if we wanted a more canon system we'd need to keep it manageable for players. Also the length is another issue. While a year in a tabletop game is fine, it feels excessive in a LARP. Especially considering that in a tabletop game you can leave, go to France and meet fine and interesting people there. In a LARP you can go to Durham but what happens in Durham, stays in Durham. Finally, if we wanted it to be more canon it needed to be more adoration less slavery. The do every command the person wishes is a bit overboard. You should want to please them, but becoming under a long term "Obedience: Do as I say" isn't generally the best form of character development. This doesn't mean that the teeth need to be kicked out of a blood oath but some toning down and ramping up seemed in order.

One Event

  Time periods in SA exist in a number of exponentially increasing increments. Most all aspects of the game fall into one of the following time periods: Immediately, 10 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes, 1 hour, at sunrise/sunset, or one event. There's some slight variation on length as some powers may last until sunrise or sunset or until the end of an event. But generally speaking these are the timeframes the game is based around. (As a side note a power tends to last for anywhere from half to double of it's stated duration on average considering counting speeds). I'd like to note that 24 hours isn't really one of these timeframes. It exists currently in the single case of Blood Oaths but once you reach this kind of duration it is better to revert to something that is more clearly delineated. For length of a blood oath the duration of these that makes the most sense is in the event magnitude. But tracking 6 events (one year) becomes a significant difficulty, especially since the question of alternate characters and missing games makes it a murky question.
  In the end the best way to handle this in a way that players can track without difficulty is to make a blood oath last for an event. But the possibility of ongoing blood oaths needs to be real to give them a strong canon feel. So rather than focusing on the duration of the oath, we made a rule that focused on the way to get rid of it. An blood oath lasts until a thrall has been played for a full event without consuming any blood of their regent. This gives ample opportunity for the oath to be upkept while preventing it from simply being dodged by playing other characters. It does mean that if an oathed character attends an event and their regent doesn't they can become free of their bondage. In a LARP setting this seems fair for the characters on both sides of the oath.

Three Drinks?

  The three drinks rule from canon is a real problem especially at a LARP. With an endless time frame it works fine but I've already discussed how this becomes a problem. When we look at time frames the only real one we have to work with is one event or sunrise/sunset. Trying to remember if you drank at the last event or not is too problematic to include. If we're going to cut down the time, in order to make blood oaths remain viable we'd also need to cut down the drink requirements. The problems with one drink have been apparent, especially if we're moving to a sip system. However, two drinks is a manageable number within a single event.
  Canon would dictate that these would need to be on different nights (resetting at sunrise, or sunset). One option was to have the "day" reset at both sunrise and sunset to open up the number of opportunities for creating a blood oath. The concern with this was that it would make oathing an NPC virtually impossible. The majority of NPCs see a couple of hours in game per event. Our game doesn't make following them home, going to their house and finishing the oath after sunset an option. If oathing an NPC was to be a functional possibility it would need to have a shorter gap between drinks than any measure of days.
  This brought us to our other time period options. With the number set at two drinks, immediately felt way too short. You could just grab someone and feed them once, stop and feed them again. This lacked some of the planning, plotting, RP and scheming that should be involved in bonding a target. 10 seconds and 1 minute faced the same problems as immediately. 10 minutes or 1 hour seemed to be closer to the right number to place as a gap between drinks in order to form a bond. With several NPCs staying IG for not much more than an hour it could make it incredibly difficult for someone to catch an NPC before they head off if you had to wait an hour. This left 10 minutes as the most reasonable time frame. It's enough time that if you're using force to create the bond you could have killed the person anyway and it is short enough that you probably don't need to watch the clock to have another chance to pull off the oath. Most importantly, it's long enough to require a good scheme as to how you'll pull it off.

  Final decision: 2 drinks within the same event, but not within 10 minutes of each other.

But What Does it Do?

  Considering that we had added steps back into the oathing process we could have steps of oath mean something. This means that one drink brings up that feeling of affection and interest (possibly making the final step easier to pull off). It brings the canon back to the power of a vampire's blood drawing you towards them.
  We also moved more canon with the power that the oath holds over you. No longer do you obey every command, you simply can't break powers with willpower that your regent uses on you. So you can get dominated around like a slave, but it's costing the regent energy to do so.

All of the following effects apply to a Thrall:

    Thralls always see their regent in the best light possible. Any negative characteristics are overlooked, and the best of intentions are always assumed.  The thrall has a very deep affection and respect for the regent that may or may not manifest as romantic love.
    Thralls may not use willpower to break from any power used by the regent.
    A thrall will never willingly harm their regent. This means the thrall will not attack the regent, and will make every effort to ensure that the regent does not come to harm. If a thrall thinks that staying close to a regent and fawning over them would be dangerous for the regent, they will keep their distance, and so on.
    A thrall will do everything within their power to protect their regent. This includes defending them from attacks, lying for them, and volunteering any information they think will help protect their regent.
    If a thrall comes under the effect of a power that forces them to act in a fashion contrary to the oath, the power takes priority over the oath.
    When the oath expires, the former thrall still sees their former regent in a positive light, and assumes that all emotions and actions they performed were of their own free will. It requires a great deal of evidence for a former thrall to see their actions as anything other than their own choice. The change in view from thrall to former thrall is seen as natural, as if the former thrall’s infatuation with their former regent had simply faded.

As you can see these rules are still very favorable for creating thralls and the increased duration makes it a very nice thing to have. But it gives the thrall a bit more flexibility as to how a thrall will play his character. Overall we like this approach because it's more canon, more fun, and doesn't require that weird 4 is fine but 5 is bad thing that is currently floating around at game.

SA 2.0 Dev Blog #8: The whole dying process

I wanted to break down the entire dying process just to give a clear picture of what it will look like under the new system. I included a chart below because that became a thing recently.

Alive
  You have health, you have maximum health, you're alive.

Incapacitated
  You have 0 health. You have been incapacitated. You are unconscious.
  If you have a regeneration rating it will automatically trigger at 1 minute and you can spend energy to heal. Characters may choose to move to dead at this point (NPCs with no friends).
  If you don't have a regeneration rating or you don't have energy to activate your regeneration, after 10 minutes you are now dead.

Dead
  If your maximum health is 0 or you've been incapacitated for 10 minutes you are now dead. Dead is an interesting state. First off your maximum health immediately drops to 0 if it wasn't already. You can be targeted by insight and you can be resurrected (even if you're not human). There's a couple of other powers that can target dead people, but we'll talk about those later. If you're dead, you're in a pretty bad spot, you don't want to be here.
  If you are dead for 10 minutes you become Decaying.
  
Decaying
  Decaying is when you can drop your tags and get up. Depending on what you are, you may not have to do so yet. A decaying vampire or wraith goes OOG immediately. A decaying shifter or human may continue to play a body for as long as they want, or until a power destroys their body (spoiler). Once you hit the decaying stage your character is gone and can not be brought back.

Look here. I made a chart:

  I'm also going to take this opportunity to show off some of the new formatting we're looking at for powers. While the majority of powers will continue to cost 1 energy, we wanted to clearly spell out what will not. Touch is a "new" category of powers that require touch to activate and are resisted with willpower. Touch powers are not considered attacks, unlike mental, status, and damage powers which are considered attacks.

Resurrection - (Touch)
Cost: 1 Willpower
Call: “Resurrection”
After the caster spends 1 minute meditating while touching a dead character he may activate this power to bring them back to life. A dead target will have their maximum health returned to 1 and be healed a single point of health. An incapacitated or conscious target will be healed 1 point of health.

Insight – (Touch)
Cost: 1 Energy
Call: “Insight <question>”
The caster touches a target that is dead. The target must answer any questions the caster asks truthfully per character knowledge. This power ends when the target becomes decaying or when the caster is no longer touching the target.
 
 

Why the changes to the above powers?

The infinite timer on Resurrection had some major concerns from a rules perspective. First off it encouraged people killing a target near the end of an event where the chance for resurrection was low. This artificial timer didn't sit right. Also, we wanted resurrection to be cool and not just a human thing. Shifters are alive and can be resurrected. There was some big war about that or something. We figured that the dead state gives a time period in which someone could be resurrected without becoming a burden. Another fear we had was a character staying IG as their character's body all night in hopes of being resurrected. While I'd admire the hardcore aspect of this, I don't think it's actually something we want in the game. This gives a clear path from which a character moves from living to incapacitated, to dead, to gone in a clear and concise way.

Insight has been heavily used as the best truth telling method of the game. The line I've heard repeatedly is "beat them down and insight them". While the energy restrictions that exist in a limited energy system would limit it's abuse the one question one answer system still isn't great. We wanted to take this power back to where it belonged. In canon the power was really used to extract information out of a dead body, not a live one. If you came across a corpse you could get info out of it (usually only about how it died). We wanted to keep some of the original investigative nature in insight but we wanted to up the ante on it. As it is written in the new system, if you want the truth, you need to get it from their cold dead eye. You also get tons of info for a single energy point.

SA 2.0 Dev Blog #7: Energy Economy - Vitae

Before I get this conversation rolling I'd like to note the change in name. In the new version we won't be calling it Blood any more, unless you're an Ananasi. Ananasi have blood, ghouls and vampires use Vitae.

If you haven't read the post on Aggravated Damage, do that before reading this post.

Draining

  Considering we had done away with wraith draining we figured we should just do away with vampire draining as well. We've decided to add spots around site that provide blood called blood fountains. Each player can access a fountain once per nig-- I'm kidding.

  Vampires pose a number of specific issues with regards to their source of energy. In one way their source of energy is endless. So long as they have targets to feed from there is no end to the amount of energy they can have. It ends up proving very difficult to totally close the energy loop with vampires. But we can significantly impact it. The problems we ran into with draining were the following:

1) Willing targets
  Currently there is no downside to being fed from other than you might be killed in the process. Therefore, one ghoul can essentially keep the entire court fed through the medicine/draining mechanic. This makes having access to a ghoul much like having access to usurer. (In the old days ghouls had spoiled blood, but we all agree, this is dumb). Being continually fed on needs a cost.

2) Combat drain
  Currently you can run after a target while trying to initiate draining on them. There is a single power that can stop this (hasty escape). This is basically the most effective way for vampires to kill someone, and it doesn't require the use of any energy. While draining needs to be an effective way to take health it shouldn't be the combat end all be all, especially if the target is trying to get away.

3) Non-combat drain
  The current rules make biting not an attack. Meaning that if I get stunned with a power, I'm can basically be dropped to 0 health quickly and efficiently. This isn't a massive problem in and of itself because most mentals can put you in a bad spot anyway, but it plays into the bigger picture.

4) Blood Bond
  The current blood oath rules make it so that feeding on another vampire is silly. You automatically stop at the artificial number 4 to avoid being blood oathed. We felt this needed to change. We've changed this but it is another conversation. Let's just say it's based on drinking a number of times over the course of an event rather than an amount at once.

5) Infinite targets
  From one perspective, each NPC that comes into game is basically another node for vampires to take energy from. This shouldn't change, but it does mean that it needs to remain risky for vampires to feed, otherwise getting energy becomes too easy.

6) Medicine
  The current medicine rules make it free and efficient to fill a human back up on health. I can drain someone to 1 then spend a minute and a half healing them and do it again. It is actually the slowest way to regaining large amounts of energy in the game, but any human or shifter is a viable participant

7) Taint
  One of the big concerns with vampires and taint is that they spread it. Currently this isn't the case. We'll fix this one good.

The Big Picture

  Unlike gnosis and pathos, the rules to which are basically tied to skills in their own faction, the rules for vitae bleed over into Abilities like brewing and medicine. They also bleed into cross faction issues (2 for 1 feeding, killing humans, tapping wraiths). Therefore each of these issues need to be dealt with individually. We broke the draining process into three (sort of four really) simple steps to make this clearer.

Initiation
  The one hand for a bite is simply too powerful. Instead we want the bite to be a more substantial action and not done while chasing someone down the road. In order to initiate a draining count, all forms of draining require an initiation of a three count with both hands on the target and both feet planted. We found in our testing that getting someone while in combat was virtually impossible without power use, getting someone that was sitting down was possible, but difficult.

Information Exchange
  In canon you can tell what kind of blood you're drinking. So we figured we'd just allow the character to know IG.  After an initiation count is successful there is a quick back and forth before draining occurs. The attacker will first state "tainted" if they are tainted which will cause the target to become tainted. The attacker will ask some questions OOG such as "What is your Faction?" and "Are you tainted?" (not necessary if the attacker is tainted). This places the responsibility on the attacker to request the information required. It is also the attacker's responsibility to know what the effects of certain draining are (2 for 1, etc) rather than the target's responsibility to tell them. Once information exchange has been completed, you may move to draining.

Draining
  Draining progresses like normal following all current rules. (We've got some changes for devouring but that is a later conversation). Once draining is complete a few new things happen. First, health draining causes aggravated damage. So immediately following the the draining, the target's maximum health is reduced by one (NOT one per health drained). This damage counts as an attack meaning that it will end all powers that are broken on attack. Secondly, the target enters a confused state and does not recall what happened from from the beginning of the Initiation up to this point. (Unfortunately, Ananasi don't get the second part of this, their draining is supposed to be horrible.)

  This means that the perpetrator can escape relatively easily but isn't able to use biting and draining to nibble someone down to 0 maximum health unless the target is being stupid. This also means that powers like merciful sleep can be used to drain a target down to 0 health, but if they have no health remaining, further bites have no effect because no health was drained.
  This also means that a ghoul who is fed on becomes weakened and won't provide as much health in future feedings.  Sure, they can still be passed around a bit, but eventually you're not going to want to drain your ghoul down from 5 maximum health because you'll only get 5 energy and they're now at 4 maximum health. It provides diminishing returns for feeding on the same target. We figure this will reduce the number of willing targets significantly, though not entirely.

Other Changes

  We wanted there to be some other variety going around with regards to feeding on different types of creatures so we added a little flavor that goes along with drinking on shifters and wraiths. Just little things like Induce Passion: Angry when you feed on a shifter. Gives a little of the flavor that is supposed to go with doing these things.
  We also wanted vampires to actually drain each others vitae. So draining health on a vampire takes energy, not health. You know, like canon.

  The final big change comes to medicine. We realize that we can't remove medicine as a whole even though it presents a massive unrealistic system into the game. LARPs in general simply require methods of healing. No one will enjoy playing the game stuck at 1 heath for the rest of the event. But we wanted to tone down medicine significantly. We did this by placing a cap on the effectiveness of medicine and making it a 1 minute flat skill.

Level 1: Bring a target below 2 health to 2 health.
Level 2: Bring a target below 4 health to 4 health
Level 3: Bring a target below 6 health to 6 health.

  Oddly enough this change makes healing a target at 0 health to 6 health take exactly the same amount of time as it currently does with a level 3 skill. What it changes is it makes medicine not able to heal a person to maximum health (unless they've suffered some significant agg). Meaning that repeated draining will not only cost maximum health, but if a target has a +4 health, it will take supernatural healing (want to buy a potion?) to push them above. This will increase the use of the Regeneration mechanic disclosed last week as well as make friends with Healing Touch even more valuable. It also gives more reward for having more levels of medicine. I think a lot of people are going to want some.

The final piece was hinted at in the Aggravated Damage post. Healing potions will likely be split into two categories. Small healing potions that heal health, and big ones that heal an agg (and maybe probably a bunch of health as well, we're currently rewriting skills to incorporate this). The idea is that healing health isn't very expensive but there is a financial cost associated with it. Meanwhile, healing agg is expensive so it becomes a serious decision point if you want to do it or not.. I'd expect people to start stockpiling healing potions as they are very effective, and when you've been beat up bad, you need to buy them.