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[Jimmy]

But then they don't get to loot the 5,000 gp that he robbed from the dwarves and they wrote off on insurance.

[SOLDIER First]

It's a completely irrelevant point, but legitimately befriending a maurader does bring the opportunity for more money later.

[Jimmy]

True, and I'm happy for my players to have the game turn out however they want. I've got a Lawful Good monarchy, a Chaotic Good underground democracy movement, a Lawful Evil theocracy nation and a Chaotic Evil arcane power working in the background of the campaign, and no alignment restrictions on the player's characters. If they want to support any particular side of the greater background they're welcome to do so, or they can simply just murderhobo their way to level X+1. I'm just here to play the other side of the table.

[BlackFlyme]

I don't think I've ever been in a free-roam campaign that ever ended well.

Mostly because bad DMs, or ill prepared DMs that can't anticipate player actions.

In my group, rails are necessary to keep people on task. Though sometimes those rails accidentally curve inwards on themselves and cause catastrophic crashes.

[Dorsidwarf]

I think that while rails are important even in open-world, "River" would be a better term. With a river you can go side to side, up a little, or downstream much faster, or even pull up on the banks for a while, but the river is going to keep on flowing.

I guess what I'm saying is that while "You abandoned your quest to rebuild a local economy, Calgor the Evil burns the world to ash" is bullshit, it should certainly allow the aforementioned evil Guy's world-burning plans to advance, putting the players under a little more stress to go be big damn heroes.

It's why it's important not to give hard time limits - they take away agency from both you and the players.

[Amperzand]

Very much so, yes.

[NullForceOmega]

Sometimes you do need the hard time limit, but it's best for it to not be something irrecoverable.  It would be fine if your DM set it so that unless the layers act quickly this (or these) locations would be destroyed/occupied/corrupted/w.e., but probably not for them to set it so that if the players don't resolve the situation within three months everyone dies.

[Rolan7]

Our socialite vampire decided that instead of feeding off someone, she'd just drank 3 gallons of pigs blood.
She got 1 vitae back from it- Requiem is very severe about feeding from animals and from stored blood.

I was laughing my ass off with everyone else, but my character felt sick and left for a while.  Being Jewish.  And also it was 3 gallons of freakin pig's blood.

[uber pye]

Our socialite vampire decided that instead of feeding off someone, she'd just drank 3 gallons of pigs blood.
She got 1 vitae back from it- Requiem is very severe about feeding from animals and from stored blood.

I was laughing my ass off with everyone else, but my character felt sick and left for a while.  Being Jewish.  And also it was 3 gallons of freakin pig's blood.

that's pretty amazing considering the normal human stomach capacity is a bit more than one gallon

[Rolan7]

We finally met up with our Gangrel's sire again.  The elder vampire I basically tattled on to the Prince.  The one who snuck into our haven one night to deliver our (staked, unconscious) socialite party member, and a demand for a meeting.

I had just received training in viewing auras.  What I saw was... terrifying.  I was hoping for some honorable warrior guy, who would appreciate my bravery in coming to the meeting.  Who might give me a thrashing, but let me go.

His aura was purple, with a shadowy tinge.  Veins of pure black ran through it.
Aggressive hatred, and the stain of diablerie.  This elder vampire ate souls.

Our socialite had never met this elder.  She held her ground for 6 seconds, turned, and ran as her beast screamed in terror.  He laughed.
My beast was under control.  *I* tried to run, terrified of the stain of diablerie.  Instead, thanks to my derangement, I stood there narrating my horror out loud.  He didn't laugh, just told me running wouldn't help.  To approach.  I had spotted his three allies skulking nearby.  I trembled and obeyed, pinning all hope on this monster having mercy... or no, a purpose.

Well, it was close.  He wanted to satisfy his curiosity before devouring my soul.  My stammered explanations were... true, but not convincing.  I tried to explain that I had badmouthed him to save his childe from the prince.  But when we called her, she didn't answer...

Fortunately it was because she was sprinting to the meeting place after all.  She appeared as a raggedy cat, missing most of her fur from serious aggravated damage.  In summary, she (somewhat disinterestedly) admitted that I had helped clean up her... massacres, on at least 2 serious occasions.  I had to desperately prompt her a bit, IC.

So yeah.  It turned out okay in the end.  My character kept his soul *and* is still alive undead, and only had to promise a unspecified favor in the near future.

Situation...

Okay 5 hours later we're in the sewers visiting the Lancea Sanctum and we're covered in shit.

Our socialite vampire decided that instead of feeding off someone, she'd just drank 3 gallons of pigs blood.
She got 1 vitae back from it- Requiem is very severe about feeding from animals and from stored blood.

I was laughing my ass off with everyone else, but my character felt sick and left for a while.  Being Jewish.  And also it was 3 gallons of freakin pig's blood.

that's pretty amazing considering the normal human stomach capacity is a bit more than one gallon

Yeah, fortunately the blood is instantly transmuted into vitae as it's drunk.  In this case, a veeery tiny trickle of vitae despite chugging gallons as fast as possible.  Basically the rest of the matter is destroyed, leaving only the magic telekinetic "liquid" that powers vampires.  Though she did have to make a will+composure to avoid throwing up, since animal blood tastes horrible.  Particularly compared to fresh human blood.

[Arx]

We had our first PC death last week. This week's session spent a fair amount of time on the aftermath of the situation that lead to that:

We'd just fought our way through an actual zombie horde, to find a bearded devil and a human cleric. Or rather, the rogue found them while scouting invisibly. We sprang an elaborate ambush on them, which started going downhill almost instantly when the skeletal snipers on the rooftops opened fire. Fortunately, the paladin and monk just brushed the arrows off.

While the devil tried to engage the monk, the cleric started to cast a spell. Unfortunately for him, the rogue was ready for this and was standing behind him, invisible, with a 3rd level Shocking Grasp ready. He went down instantly, which was incredibly convenient.

Some time later, the rogue tried to take on two of the skeletons on the rooftop after taking some shots and some falling damage. It... didn't end well. He passed out and was coup-de-graced.

So yeah, that was where this session picked up, basically. There was some pretty neat roleplay around it. The wizard kept brushing any sadness off as a result of his familiar's empathic link, I (fighter) ditched rationality in favour of anger, and the monk and paladin went silent for much of the rest of the time.

The end result was the evil cleric's corpse being pitched into a slowly closing portal to hell, the skeleton that killed the rogue's head being hacked off and taken, and some time later due to a combination of circumstances including drugging, the paladin stabbing the person who sent us after the devil. To be fair, at the time the rest of the party had just gone down to poison.

We're now in a comfortable jail cell with the new character, trying to find the best way out. My Knowledge: Engineering is actually somehow proving useful. O_o

[Neonivek]

I think I am just about the ONLY person alive who considers EXP to be Experience Points rather than "Reward Points".

Though I wonder how much of it is due to people wanting to be rewarded for their faux-altruism or for GMs to incentivize alternatives that aren't bloodthirsty.

I mean I know I don't reward EXP for killing what doesn't fight back, or that cannot reasonably fight back, but that is because there is nothing to be learned from it.

---

Then again I remember Call of Cthulhu where using a skill gets you a chance to level it up. Thus players tend to use it even when the situation doesn't call for it.

Thus treating EXP as reward points serves as a way to guide players to find alternatives to combat because they are faster, easier, and safer. As well as allowing you to reward players for handling the scenes anyway they desire instead.

[Jimmy]

Point of contention: there's quite clear rules for gaining EXP for defeating stuff that doesn't fight back. It's called disabling a trap.

On a more serious note, if you're looking for a game that focuses on roleplay over combat, Dungeons and Dragons isn't probably the best game for you to play. There's dozens of titles out there such as Call of Cthulhu which are specifically designed to mechanically reward roleplay over combat. Dungeons and Dragons is, at its heart, about being a monster slaying, treasure hunting badass that fights epic battles and saves the world. It has subsets of mechanics and rules for other stuff, but you're really trying to fit a square peg in a round hole by minimizing the core features of the game in favour of a non-combat approach.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

Wait, what? Don't you have a chance of the trap triggering whenever you try to disable it?

If not, dammit roguelikes, why?

[Rolan7]

Thinking about why we're having more fun in WoD than DND (and even that's not entirely true, we had a *lot* of fun in 3.5e)...
When we started the DND campaign, which was essentially 1 single campaign for 3 real-life years, we were noobs.  As a child I had run a few games with my brother and a friend which I think were...  first edition?  Possibly advanced?  Honestly we were very young and we ignored most of the rules, it was practically Roll To Die without the dying.  Very free-form.

Later on me and my best friend had separately tried a few systems like GURPS and CoC, but via text.  Not voice, at least for me and I think him.  Short affairs.  Whereas our DM had played DND 3.5e before and was teaching us...  But it was his first time DMing.

My point is that the three of us (the fourth player dropped fast) were basically new to 3.5e and were trying desperately to learn the system.  And that made us focus on the rules, and optimizing.  A lot.  We didn't actually need to, it was just that we were all worried about pulling our weight and demonstrating competence.  It was...  not Ravenloft-grimdark, but a pretty harsh setting.  I think maybe we (particularly I) panicked and rushed things.

Anyway.  With this new system, we had a fresh start.  It's kinda relaxed, because we know what became tiresome in the last campaign (again, 3 years!).  I spent two sessions worth of XP on Auspex 2 so I could read auras...  So I could tell that the evil renegade gangrel who tells us to murder people is, in fact, a dangerous dude.  And my only regret was that I failed to save up the 4 session's worth for Obfuscate 4 that'll help me atone for a past sin (and also be useful, of course.  It's a level 4 discipline).  Keeping in mind that mechanically, this atonement will do nothing for my struggle with Jake's beast.  It just makes for a good story.

I can "waste" XP on that because I no longer feel like we're in a race.  We're all pretty good in combat without any specialization, and we can shore up our weak spots relatively cheaply due to the quadratic XP costs.  But infiltration is just as important, and social situations are... well, significant.

So actually I don't know whether we're just more comfortable starting fresh, or that the new system mechanically emphasizes something other than combat.  Either way, this is great.