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 another’s power bases.
They attack each other’s egos. They prove dominance by crushing one another’s 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 don’t 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 else’s territory to
make it hard for them.
5. Beyond Your Means – obtain an item that you can’t 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 character’s 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
don’t 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, I’ll be asking for volunteers
to alleviate to restraints, pull from different creative personalities, and encourage participation in
shaping the future of our story.