The last Vampire game I played (a long time ago now).
Overall we had twenty-some people playing. Several as Storytellers, about 1/2 as
PCs, and the other half played assorted
NPCs. Depending upon who all showed up for any given session play style shifted back & forth between tabletop & LARP (or near LARP).
The Storytellers knew who was a
PC vs who had signed up to play
NPCs for us.
It started on New Years Eve1998, at a gala hosted in the cities Elysium. (
IRL we actually played on New Years Eve '98, starting around 7pm).
The first 4-5 hours were largely setting everything up for the players/
NPCs (even though they were supposed to have read the pre-game documents) & the characters all interacting, etc etc etc & general RL New Years eve party of twenty some friends.
At midnight 1999 was ushered in with everything going south as the Prince* & several ranked characters (all
NPCs) were killed off creating plenty of chaos & a power vacuum to be filled.
{*the prince wasn't really dead & he was never really ever not in control - but that's one of the things the players could discover through play. }
Official Game night was Friday.
But stuff could be run anytime through out the week Sat-Wed. if there were several people who wanted to play. And depending upon what it was a Storyteller didn't
have to be present. But players had to be honest & they had to brief the Storytellers on Thur about what had happened. (we Storrytellers got together Thur. afternoons to prep the Fri. sessions). If we weren't involved & weren't briefed, it didn't happen.
Now with several Storytellers, each with our own ideas & styles, we had quite the mix of stuff (and quality). Some was typical VTM stuff. Some was pretty good, some bad. Some just weird. One guy INSISTED that the game must include stuff from ALL the
WW game lines - vampires, werewolves, wraith, changling, Mage, mummies, etc etc etc. And the one womans stuff?.... didn't even fit the genre. It was speculated that she didn't actually understand the material.
To accommodate all of this? We decided that our story was actually the dreams of a fairly powerful slumbering Malkovian{sp?}. a fact that could be discovered during play. So it was alright to have disparate styles, the kitchen sink, & even stuff that made no damned sense. Plus whatever the players got up to. Afterall, the dreamer is insane. We also decided to put more focus on whatever the players chose to interact with.
We then blocked out a rough plot outline of what was happening regardless of
PC action (unless they did something waaay beyond expectation). And every month the problems/strangeness in The City {we intentionally never named it} increased.
We decided that the game would run for exactly 1 year.
It would end in one of two ways:
1) The players discover that there's a really powerful Malkovian slumbering beneath their city & that it's his insane dreaming that's the source of the growing problems.
SMART play is their character run far away to join some other city. (those players would then play
NPCs & be sworn to secrecy vs the other players for the remainder of the game. But congrats on "winning".)
DUMB {and fully expected} play is that they attack/kill/destroy (and possibly diablerize) the Dreamer.
This ends the game for everyone as the Dreamer is killed & the dream ends. The characters have just been echos of some group actually hunting him in the "real world" & they finally found him.
2) If not killed during play, the Dreamer will wake up as 2000 dawns.
Game ends as he's no longer dreaming.
Some of the players (one of the Tremere, a couple of
Nos, and a Malk) got close to figuring out what was really going on - but not quite.
One player managed to claim the title of Prince & hold onto it. He was mighty surprised to learn that he'd been masterfully played by several of the other players though....
There were some wonderful player based twists & turns throughout the year.
And in the end? One year later we held another New Years Eve party. NYE 1999.
No one had quite managed to solve the real problem by midnight, so....
When the Times Square ball dropped on the TV & Y2k began the Dreamer awoke & "The City" was destroyed.
Game Over.
{wich caught most of the people, PC & NPC alike, by complete surprise. }
I haven't played in, or run, a
WW game since.