Today’s comic features a cameo by Chris Bermingham, who seems to be entirely nonplussed to find himself in the middle of a showdown between two vampire factions. Clearly, he has a Fair Escape lined up!
Which is a good thing, because this is usually the moment in a Vampire game when things go to combat and everyone stands around playing rock/paper/scissors or rolling dice for an hour or so. Luckily, this is a comic, so I can keep the action moving without all the pesky players interfering. 
(Nothing bogs down combat like having most of the game want to join in, which is pretty much inevitable, since everyone has really cool powers that they want to show off.)
thecoffeeguru Says:
I have been loving this storyline. Friday night at our Requiem game we (Lancea Sanctum led coalition) staked the Carthian Presidents childe and rolled into Elysium to claim Praxis. Things…… did not go as planned
Jollyskulls Says:
Oh wow Talon nonchalantly puts the big brujah infront of her problem, becuase we all now calws are going to get popped and more wall trashed plus yet another lecture from the king. Who knows but i want to see this kind of stupid fight before a venture or a brujah try to put it down.
Plus let us not forget ther e will be lots of other powers flying from the coventants. Owe this is going to get wacky.
jimmy Says:
the comic rocks. but i have been dieing to ask i read the comic and the comics but why do we never see alina gaming with dice and a group in moose head stew.
p.s. i know my spell ing and grammer sucks plz blame poor skill alocations and lack of sleep.
NC Says:
Ugh… I remember well storming a Sabbath stronghold in a (non-public) underground parking lot, when visiting a Vampire LARP group in a neighbor town. The whole scene involved 20-30 players and took 3 frickin’ hours. What a waste of time.
We always prefered the Fantasy-LARP-approach when it came to fighting. Nerf guns would act as firearms, and of course we had swords, fire axes, baseball bats, crow bars replicas as boffer weapons. When confronting a Brujah you would call yourself lucky if he was firing a gun at you because, boy, they were real damage dealers with melee weapons.
Anyway – fights were much faster and no longer the center of an action during a Vampire evening.
Chineselegolas Says:
In our Vampire chronicle (oWoD setting, nWoD system mostly via conversion book, with some small house rules), we go with a card draw system. Pack of cards with face cards removed, draw number of cards equal to test pool, 8+ is success, keep drawing for explosions. Really quick to resolve and don’t need to worry about having a stable surface for dice, nor endless p/s/r retests.
Of course playing the sheriff I like the combat times as is my chance to be in the lime light… But the social characters complain less about ‘their game’ being taken up.
FSilvermane Says:
Sometimes your grand entrance is spoiled by the slow deductive powers of your opponent,…. I am sure Talon and her Crew had expected that the rest of Elysium would already know what had happened and they could make the dramatic entrance as everyone was busy worrying and fretting about the disappearance of the King’s Childe. On the Game Mechanic note, yes combat did slow the game down a fair amount, but when I was playing OWoD we did a variation of the cards thing,…each player had a deck of cards with the facecards removed,…you pulled your deck, handed it to opponent, everyone shuffles, hands it back to owner, then each person pulls X cards depending on their stat pool,..highest total wins. This sped things up because after the initial shuffle by opponent/other, you would put the used cards in middle of the deck and shuffle your deck ,after each use, until end of that combat,…made it pretty fast combats. Since it was a Dark Ages game and my character was Viking Gangrel who was also a Rune Mage combats against me were especially tedious [I had a few Rune empowered items which boosted my pool alot] until we started using the cards for combat.
julinee Says:
Since we’re on the topic of combat…
I actually only know the approach to combat where you use actual boffer weapons and nerf-guns. It really helps suspend disbelief – also it’s way more fun. ^^
Come to think of it, I have yet to hear of a chronicle in Germany who actually uses the raw Mind’s Eye Theater rules.
SaintJames Says:
I’ve been enjoying the comic and the read of it. I will admit that combat does have the, “I wanna use up every cool power I got to show off” trick that comes around.” but the same time, as someone who runs a game, it can go a lot easier. For instance, the Carthians in my game have had power for a while, downside, the Invictus are moving to take it back, by the rules the carthian’s set down.
Maz Says:
I’ve played a lot of Vampire LARP in Denmark, most of it incrowd. And we never used rock-paper-scissors. I heard of it in rumours as “something they do in America”. But wasn’t really sure because the idea seems so silly to me. I would think it comepltly breaks any kind of suspense and action. And by the sound of it, it does.
As NC we always used the use buffer weapon to smack each other down.
Or when people use unarmed you quickly whisper your “combat number” to each other, and then make a big stage-fight where the winner is the one with the highest number.