Eerie Shores Resurrected Downtime/Influence Workshop

November 28, 2015

Presented by VST Phillip Hazlet esr.cam.st@gmail.com
Objective: Educate players on the Downtime & Influence systems of the By Night
Studios Vampire the Masquerade rules systems, answer questions about the
system, and encourage D/I activity.
Opening Statement: To me, what happens outside the four hours of play is just as
important as what occurs at the formal game. Vampires are calculating and
manipulative creatures. They are greedy, jealous, power-hungry, prideful, and
vengeful. As years roll by, mortal notions of life cycle (get educated, get a job, find a
spouse, procreate, save money, acquire stuff, retire, leave a legacy) lose meaning.
Acquisition of power stops being merely a means to an end; it becomes the end.
Vampires are predators yet they are highly social beings. There is a pecking order.
The Traditions prevent open warfare on your enemies. Instead, vampires fight by
attacking one anothers power bases. They attack each others egos. They prove
dominance by crushing one anothers holding. Mechanically, this is accomplished
through D/I actions.
The benefit of this play-style is that it is story oriented and gives characters reasons
to meet and socialize at salons and gatherings. It sets the stage for what to barter
and what to gossip.
Downtimes (page 307): Each character gets three Downtime Actions between
each game. The sample actions are generic enough that they can broadly cover
most things:
1. Crafting use your skills to make something
2. Feeding hunt. If you dont perform this action or use the Herd background,
you come into game at half blood. For ease, ESR allows players to check a
box on the sign in sheet to spend a Downtime to Hunt.
3. Investigation spend an action to follow-up on a plot. This is probably the
most broad. You need to specify what you are following up on. Note what
resources your character has to make him/her more likely to succeed and/or
what steps he/she will take and/or what information he/she already has as a
starting point.
4. Patrolling this is makes it harder for others to feed without getting caught.
You could patrol your territory and protect it from interlopers. Or you could
patrol someone elses territory to make it hard for them.
5. Beyond Your Means obtain an item that you cant afford with Resources.
6. Learn a Discipline (page 112): in-clan Disciplines only require XP expenditure.
Out-of-clan Disciplines require a teacher who spends Willpower AND 1
Downtime for Common/Uncommon Disciplines 2 Downtimes for Rare

Disciplines. Techniques do not require a teacher but do require a Downtime

(page 113)
Influence (page 509-515): The BNS rules combined the previous LotN influence
categories into two broad categories: Elite and Underworld. These represent
knowing legal/legitimate power brokers (Elite) versus illegal institutions or people
who break the rules/laws (Underworld). One of the best things of the new system is
that for a small XP investment, you can accomplish nearly anything.
A characters influence rating (dots) defines three things.
1. The number of actions per month (equal to dots)
2. The level of each action taken (equal to dots)
3. The number of specializations or categories of expertise
Three dots in Elite allows you to perform the Level 3: Bureaucratic Errors action
which lets you get nearly any legal favor that is not specifically reserved to a higher
Level action. Three dots in Underworld allows you to perform the Level 3: Illegal
Favors action to get nearly any illegal favor that is not specifically reserved to a
higher level. Three dots in an Influence is a mere 12 XP investment (6 for Neonates)
Specializations are misunderstood. They are not areas that your character can act.
They are the areas that your character is good at acting. You are treated as one
level higher if acting within your specialty. Anyone with Underworldx3 can get a
dirty cop to get them something out of the evidence room. Someone with
Underworldx2 with a Dirty Cops specialization could accomplish the same thing with
less XP invested.
Most general influence actions tend to fall in the Level 1-5 range so specializations
matter most to people at low levels, but they are also helpful when multiple
characters want to band together to accomplish higher Level actions. For example,
if your character wanted to steal a priceless painting from a museum, that would be
the Underworld Level 8 Want. Take. Have. action. That could be done by eight
characters with Underworldx5 combining to make one character with an
Underworldx8, or it could be accomplished by four characters combining to an
Underworldx7 if the character had a specialization in Art Thieves.
The other primary purpose of specializations is what information is learned via the
Elite Level 2 Gossip and Insider Trading action and the Underworld Level 2 Word on
the Street action. Those essentially give you leads on all influence transactions that
occurred in your specialty in the last three months. If you dont have something
important to do with your influence, this is an easy default action.
Goals: The most fun characters to play and the ones most fun to play with are
those that have goals. Simply showing up to a game and waiting for something to

happen can be fun from time to time, but our player base has widely vocalized a
desire for player generated plot and social interaction over ST/regional/national
plots that attack the characters. I agree.
To this end, characters need to have goals. Maybe your character wants to control
the night club scene. Buying Influence and having specializations in Night Clubs or
something similar is a mechanical way to do that, but no one will ever know your
story. Submitting actions to use that Influence to make the ABC Night Club of XYZ
neighborhood rise/fall in or out of popularity gives others a lead to investigate that
might get them back to your character so they can see how cool you are.
I am working with some volunteers on a Feeding Grounds project to better
mechanically define them and provide a mechanism where you can bolster/attack a
feeding ground to make it easier/harder to feed. We hope this will provide
social/political role-play opportunity for negotiating territory. Additionally it provides
a
The next project is to define some mortal NPCs and institutions of note that
characters might want to influence/control or interact with. As the feeding grounds
project wraps up, Ill be asking for volunteers to alleviate to restraints, pull from
different creative personalities, and encourage participation in shaping the future of
our story.