Extreme Sportsmanship

Question: My game is just a parade of one Virtue Extremity to the next because four characters have Vengeance, two have Order, and two have Valor. They all trigger off each other and nobody can keep up with the loss of Willpower. How do I get my game back on track?

Good old Virtue conflicts. Our beginning advice is to sit down and talk to the players out of character.

You’re definitely feeling that everything’s a disaster all the time, but do the other players and/or Storyteller feel that way? Are they also frustrated by the constant Virtue Extremities or feeling like they can’t get anything done, or are they having a good time and loving the dramatic sparks flying as their personalities clash? If you’re the Storyteller and all your players are having a great time, it might not be broke and you may not have to fix it.

But it sounds like you’re having a lot of frustration and problems and it probably is broke, or it might be a little of column A and a little of column B, and it could use less column B. So, let’s look at how to fix it in-game, and how to fix it out-of-game.

The in-game fixes are easy – so easy, in fact, that you guys probably already know about and use them. Stunting can, of course, get you back Willpower, although it’s never 100% sure since different Storytellers give out two-die stunts on different criteria. Charisma knacks like Blessing of Importance and BFF are the star Willpower-returners, along with runners-up Believe Your Own Press and a few scattered knacks in other Attributes like Appearance’s Lasting Impression. Several boons also allow you to get some Willpower passed around, including Crescent Glow in Moon and several of the higher-level Sun boons. And, if you’re lucky enough to have a Moon-oriented Scion, Mirror of Lunacy is straight-up designed to prevent Extremities from running rampant. This doesn’t mean that your whole group has to invest in a bunch of powers they aren’t statted for, but if your characters inside the game itself are occasionally realizing, “Hey, Jimmy seems to go crazy a lot,” they might decide to prepare for that situation by boning up on their Charisma. It’s not a permanent solution, but other “crowd control” powers that can temporarily distract or incapacitate an Extremitying Scion can also help mitigate the problem, and at least give everyone else time to figure out how to contain the problem child or move him somewhere that he won’t hurt too many people.

Normally, though, when we’re having a higher percentage of unhandled Extremity craziness in our groups, we like to take a second to remind the players out of character about how these things work. Remind them that people are going to freak out when they do certain things, and that by now that should not be a surprise; if you know you have people with you who have Valor, then you know you run the risk of triggering them if you perform too many backstabs near them, and if you know you have people with you who have Order, you know better than to think you can break a bunch of laws and they’ll never have a shrieking fit over it. This absolutely doesn’t mean that you can’t do things that trigger one another; a Scion’s gotta do what a Scion’s gotta do, and often your own Virtues would get upset if you didn’t. But it does mean that since you know you may cause problems, you can actively try to avoid those things. You know you’ve got a Valor guy, so make sure you distract him when you do something underhanded, or sneak off to somewhere he won’t find out what you did. You know you’ve got a Vengeance guy, so throw up a smokescreen and keep him from seeing the object of his hatred if you don’t have time for him to go bananas right now. You know you’ve got an Order girl, so wait until she leaves the room before you start shoplifting.

Virtues are inconvenient and they often fight among themselves, but it’s key that you remember what Virtues your bandmates have and act accordingly. You may not know their exact spread or exact dots, but if you’ve been stuck in constantly-triggering Extremity hell for a while, you definitely know some things that will touch them off. Hide those things. Lie about those things. Do those things when they’re not around. Leave before you do those things. Use powers to cover up those things. You don’t need to necessarily buy a lot of sneakin’ stats for these things, either; a lot of the time, it’s just about the timing. If you know you’re going to stab a guy to death, for goodness sake, send the Valor people down the street for milk first or something.

This won’t work all the time; sometimes they won’t miss what you’re up to, or sometimes you’ll get away with it but they’ll find out later and still freak out. Sometimes your plan was flawless but they happen to innocently ask something about it at just the wrong moment and you’re a bad liar. But it certainly helps some, and that’s usually enough to take the pressure off so that the majority of the time your Willpower-producers can handle the rest.

You will still trigger one another sometimes. That’s just the breaks of being in a band. But if your character knows that can happen and takes steps to avoid it, you should be able to deal with it without resorting to frothing attack fits all the time, and trust us, those other players will probably often appreciate being kept in the dark rather than constantly pushed over the edge into murder territory.