[CamRI] FW: [Camarilla-announce] A New Vision for Rules

[James A Ruggiero]

  "It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly
  secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is
  no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and
  exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is
  power."
  
  -Alan Cohen
  
  
  Dear fellow members,
  
  The Master Storyteller, in response to widespread feedback from the
  membership, has created the position of AMST Rules to address certain
  weaknesses of the Camarilla's current rules systems.  One of the
  problems, noted by general feedback, is that the rules addendum is too
  large and complicated for our current members.  The complexity of our
  added rules system, and the degree to which it has moved us away from
  White Wolf's setting, are also perceived as serious barriers-to-entry
  for new members.
  
  To address these issues, the future rules documents will embody a
  great deal of change.  I anticipate that a regular amount of initial
  anxiety will result from the magnitude of that change.  I am therefore
  writing this letter to explain some of the goals and reasoning behind
  the new rules documents and the changes contained therein.  It is
  important for the membership to understand the vision behind the
  direction of the Camarilla's new rules.
  
  
  CLEAN UP
  
  Rules documents are produced by the Master Storyteller's office, and
  their quality is a reflection upon that office.  The current state of
  the rules documents, including their formatting, organization, and
  grammatical structure, has the potential for significant improvement.
  Future documents will attempt to conform to White Wolf's editing style
  conventions for World of Darkness products.  They will also make use
  of consistent capitalization conventions and make use of the terms
  employed by the Membership Handbook.
  
  While I am here, I will note that the rules documents are consistently
  US-centric in form.  This is nothing new, but I want to acknowledge
  the fact up front.  The rules documents make use of American English
  for spelling and grammar to serve the majority of members, and assume
  a foundation of knowledge from the US Camarilla's Membership Handbook
  for explanation of approval levels and the like.  Affiliate national
  addenda will serve to cover any gaps this creates.  I apologize to
  those members who will have to put extra effort into reading the
  documents because of this, but I hope the reasoning for the default of
  US-centric composition is understandable.
  
  The structure of the rules documents is also going to change.  General
  rules will comprise the first part of the addendum, a document that is
  broadly applicable to games.  Storytellers will be able to print this
  document and carry it around, secure in the knowledge that it will not
  require frequent updates.  Chapter Two will be a compilation of other
  source books; a list of books sanctioned for the chronicle along with
  any changes to be employed with each.  This document will be updated
  more frequently as White Wolf continues its regular production of
  World of Darkness books.  Our goal is to find as much consistency as
  possible, while sanctioning new material in as timely a manner as
  possible.
  
  One of our particular goals is to pare down the size of our rules
  documents.  We intend to reduce them to one-third of their present
  size.  The current documents use small font and appear to have removed
  the separation between paragraphs; everything runs together into
  hard-to-read clumps of tiny writing, perhaps to keep the page count
  from appearing too large.  This is not what I mean when I talk about
  reducing size!  Instead we're going to remove the instances of
  repetition in our rules; repetition within themselves, and more
  importantly, repetition of the source material.  We're also going to
  take out lengthy, multi-page examples that would be better employed
  somewhere other than in the rules documents.  Normal size bits of
  example text will remain, and in fact we're probably going to see more
  of them.
  
  These are good, positive steps, but most of the upcoming size
  reduction will be based upon an overhaul of the approvals system.
  
  
  CURRENT APPROVAL LEVELS
  
  One way to reduce size and complexity is to redefine approvals in the
  new system.  This is the largest set of forthcoming modifications to
  the addendum.  Overall, the function of approval levels will maintain
  the same purpose regarding the enforcement of rarity, but each level's
  focus will include some specific areas that might not have been
  previously stated.
  
  Currently the Mid Approval Storytellers are called upon to enforce the
  mild rarity of "uncommon" items within local venues, but consistently
  we run into the problem of those Storytellers not being well-versed in
  all genres (typically anything non-vampire).  In most cases we see Mid
  Approval Storytellers simply taking the recommendations of Low
  Approval Storytellers rather than engaging in an examination of the
  relevant characters and settings.  Mid Approval has practically become
  synonymous with unnecessary bureaucracy.  It is a reasonable and
  feasible course of action to call upon the Low Approval Storytellers
  to now enforce "uncommon" rarity within their own venues.  This gives
  the local Storytellers more power over their own games and greatly
  reduces the size, complexity, and number of hard-coded restrictions of
  the rules documents.
  
  In order for such a change to work though, Low Approval Storytellers
  must be aware of their new role and understand that certain things
  within their approval bracket are naturally harder to get than others.
   Not everything set to a specific approval level should be as easy to
  get as everything else at the same approval level.
  
  Mid Approval Storytellers will continue to ensure that the different
  venues within the domain interact appropriately, keeping the
  separation that is necessary to maintain each venue's unique genre
  flavor.  This means Mid Approvals in the rules documents will focus on
  elements that might easily lead to cross-genre interaction such as the
  various "places of power" within a domain.  By controlling the
  placement of such locations as Loci and Hallows, the Mid Approval
  Storyteller can manage the areas of a city that each creature type
  frequents and better regulate the number and manner of encounters
  between them.  Non-player characters from different genres will also
  consistently require Mid Approval.  A horde of werewolf non-player
  characters frequenting a Requiem venue game makes serious ripples in
  the local werewolf game too.
  
  The new documents do acknowledge that White Wolf's games were intended
  to be played in a shared world, but the supernatural societies (upon
  which function live-action games are based) are simply not integrated.
   It is the Mid Approval Storytellers' chief duty to ensure their
  domains' maintenance of the paradigm.
  
  One of the major focuses of the High Approval Storytellers will be to
  manage and maintain the rarity of acquiring off-type items within the
  same genre.  This means, for example, that a werewolf trying to get a
  Merit or supernatural power specific to a different werewolf faction,
  lodge, tribe, or whatever will consistently require High Approval.  By
  homogenizing the approval level for off-type items, the rule needs
  only be stated once in the addendum and members are supplied with a
  simple, uniform expectation for applications.  In order for this to
  work, High Approval Storytellers must have the same understanding as
  Low Approval Storytellers; that not everything set to a specific
  approval level should be as easy to get as everything else at the same
  level.
  
  Top Approval is being applied consistently to characters' acquisition
  of off-type items from different genres.  This isn't a new concept,
  but by making the rule universal it does not need to be repeated
  throughout the rules documents.  A vampire acquiring a mage Artifact
  requires Top Approval, just as it does when acquiring a werewolf
  fetish.  Similarly, it is a "general rule" that Top Approval is needed
  for everything having to do with military-grade personnel and
  hardware, so that won't need repeating in multiple places in the
  addendum.
  
  
  FEWER APPROVALS
  
  In general, the new rules documents will not have nearly as many
  approval requirements in them as before.  Yes, that means some things
  will become more common.  Some restrictions will be attached to a
  lower approval requirement, though many restrictions will be lifted
  altogether.  The rarity of some things will shift, but I anticipate
  that heightened focus on paradigm within the Venue Style Sheets and
  greater empowerment and education of Low Approval Storytellers will go
  a long way toward curbing potential abuse.
  
  In some cases we will try to replace some approval levels with new
  mechanics or changed mechanics.  This will be done sparingly because
  we don't want to make the rules even larger, but in some situations an
  approval requirement is the worse option.  For example, the magical
  material "thaumium" is difficult and expensive to craft, but our
  current approval requirements have made it much rarer than its cost
  and difficulty to create (according to source material) would mandate.
   Only a couple of thaumium items have been approved this whole
  chronicle!  Instead of requiring High Approval for thaumium, we can
  simply spell out the previously unstated cost and leave it to Low
  Approval Storytellers to adjudicate.
  
  
  PARADIGM CHANGES
  
  We need to have changes in place to handle the fact that we're running
  a large-scale game and to handle the fact that live-action games play
  differently than tabletop games.  Because of the scale we can use
  player characters to fill a broad range of power levels rather than
  having non-player characters populate all the upper rungs of
  supernatural societies.  Our changes to Status rules facilitate
  inter-domain and international play alike.  That the Camarilla alters
  the manner in which the World of Darkness plays out is what allows its
  chronicle the global atmosphere unique to such a large-scale game.
  
  Unfortunately some changes are not serving that goal, or are serving
  it in such a minute way as to not justify maintaining them.  We've
  gotten so entrenched in controlling access to the character flavorings
  of the game, the spices so to speak, that parts of the World of
  Darkness have become unrecognizable as such.
  
  Here's a quick example.  The struggle over cross-recruiting from other
  covenants is integral to the setting (it is the subject of the
  introduction stories of two of World of Darkness books), but it is
  practically non-existent in our chronicle.  It is so difficult to
  change covenants in the Camarilla's Requiem genre that it is almost
  never attempted.  We need to revisit the approval levels previously
  employed and examine their exact impact on the game, ready to remove
  restrictions that do not serve to enforce the paradigm as written.
  
  
  CONCLUSION
  
  Changes on this scale are not new to our club; they are sometimes
  necessary to keep the organization on-track and thriving.  So don't
  freak out if more than one member of the consilium winds up with the
  Geomancer Merit or if a couple of Bruja pop up outside of California.
  We must leave behind whichever restrictions are not sufficiently
  serving us.
  
  As Cohen said, it takes courage to loosen our grip on old habits and
  give change a chance.  That's really the point of this letter; a
  heart-felt request from me to you to examine the coming documents
  carefully, and with an open mind for change.
  
  Thank you.
  
  --
  Randy Ochs / US2002022622 / AMST Rules

--
Kelley Barnes-Herrmann
Camarilla Club Director
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