Character Profile: Daniel Amsden

Ok, getting close to running out of characters, well at least the important ones, for you guys. Dan (aka Pence, aka Mr. Book) was my first World of Darkness character. I made him after much, much pressure from a couple of my friends ( you know who you are). I was really hesitant about joining the game, it's a LARP/table top hybrid and looked totally foreign to me. I'm used to a hard and fast tabletop game where everything is laid out for ya and all you need to do is sling some dice. This was nothing like that. Characters interacted with one another with and sometimes without GM presence, and it was a tremendous amount of actually thinking on your feet and actual role playing. An apt description given to me was "improv street theater with dice rolls" and that's really what it was. So, with all my previous characters I've played a spell caster of some sort with usually disastrous results (burned down a bar, almost killed an entire party, etc. etc.) so naturally I chose to play a Mage character.

The way I wrote him up is that he was a newly awakened (leading to the in house joke "He's new") Mage who had been on the run since his awakening. See, he kinda reached out with his new found powers and burned his house down with his sister still in it (whoops!). This event haunted him and drove him to drink constantly. He was also a blade master that carried around twin Katanna's hidden in his coat for easy access. I wrote a small backstory for him but I never really felt a connection with him like I did with Kai and I think it kinda showed when I played. I kept Dan going for a couple of months, getting him involved in a pretty big story line. Then is when I got slapped in the face with the higher sense of "reality" in this game. I made a couple of really big errors. One, I tried too hard to help a character out when I should have just left her on the doorstep in front of the ER. Hindsight being what it is, it wouldn't have changed anything to her if I stayed or didn't. The second mistake I made was trying to use Mage powers in public. That's a BIG no no. One of the other mage's and I were looking at a NPC who had his soul ripped away and trying to find clues as to who or why this happened when we were attacked by some snakes made of almost pure death magic. So, I tried to burn them out in front of most of the hospital. But wait, there's more! After fighting and fighting and losing, we were desperate and I ended up having to stab the NPC to get the things to stop long enough to escape. Now, you might think I'd escape in a different direction and then go back to my vehicle at a later time. Nope. I'm not that smart apparently. Instead, I stuck my bloody swords back in my coat and went back to my car now surrounded by cops. They were looking for me already since they thought I beat up the person I brought in earlier. I didn't deny that it was my car when ask, and upon being searched they found the swords and I was taken in and booked for murder. Yeah. That didn't end well. I was interogated and didn't even have a trial, just shipped off to some nameless place where he may or may not be dead the ST won't tell me.

I realized my mistake with this guy and it wasn't a total loss. I have now corrected a lot of the problems and I'm starting to be able to RP a little smother now with my new character (also a Mage). I did get a sketch of Dan done by one of the guys at the store, unfortunately he didn't finish it till after his "demise" but here it is any way.

That sums him up pretty well. Alcohol in one hand and a fireball in the other.