A S E N S E O F S C A L E When you’re sitting at home with your friends playing Vampire: The Masquer- ade, or any other tabletop game, the assembled group consists of your Storyteller andabout half-a-dozen players, including yourself. Your characters interact with numerous
Storyteller characters throughout the course of the game, all of whom are filtered
through the imagination and portrayal of the Storyteller. When you step into a live-action roleplaying game, however, everything changes. In a tabletop chronicle, your Storyteller represents all the roles that you
encounter, be they pivotal to the story or not. Now, it’s possible that of the dozens
of people milling about the venue, any could be a Storyteller character, could be vital
to your character’s plot, could be irrelevant, could be… anything. Real one-to-one
numbers represent the creatures of the setting, at least insofar as any given scene is
concerned. You’re now face-to-face with the situation, and you no longer have a
central single person presenting the worldview to you. We all prefer different styles of gaming. Some prefer one-shot games involving immediate plots and resolutions. Some of us prefer smaller, more personal chronicles
that focus on the characters and their internal issues and in which the external
politics are merely a background to the central characters’ lives. Smaller games allow
for more personal interaction between Storytellers, players, plots and the rules. If
your chronicle consists of seven players and one Storyteller, it can be run like a
tabletop game, describing the reactions of the World of Darkness and helping
everyone through the challenges they perform. The feel is personal, the plots can be
grand and world-changing, and the mechanics of the rules can be governed by the
consensus of the players. In a game of this size, the Storyteller has a good idea of what
each character is doing, and he can work on character development, personal horror
and intriguing plot twists from each character’s past.
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