Roleplay NOT Rollplay

This is probably rutine for most players and storytellers alike, still its important to reinforce this idea to purge the opposite one.

Some so called roleplaying games or RPG as The Legend of Zelda, Knights of the Old Republic, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, among others allows the player to become a character inside a fictious world, some of these even permit the player to make choices, which affects your character's personality and fate, some are just limited to push buttons and kill stuff that just happends to pass by.

Roleplaying games as defined by White Wolf publishing inside The World of Darkness take this concept to a whole new level. Making choices that transform your character, or performing as you were your character, its not a complement to the game but the main stuff of it. In Vampire: The Masquerade all players MUST play and describe their character's action as close as possible to the concept of that character. From the gestures and the body language, to the words that she actually spoke, all got to be part and an extension of your characters Nature, Demeanor, Concept, Clan and being a Vampire of course.

This game puts limitations that are necesary to play the game itself, such as rules, disciplines to have 5 levels and each to have a name to label it, health bar have penalties related to how injured is your character and so on, that its important to comunicate between players (outside the game context) and to the storyteller how are things going as fair and transparent as possible. This doesn't mean however, that vampires trigger their powers to activate them, or that they spend blood points, neither that they are in "-2" because of the injuries they hold.

For simplicity, combat scenes will have some comments to declare what disciplines are active (i.e. Celerity) at the given round, or to attack and parry, since I comprehend that its not fair to ask for detailed descriptions of a sword swing technique since players simply can't know everything that her character know, still its important to make your  descriptions interesting enought rather than just a collection of acronisms and rules calls with disciplines activations.

Out-of-combat scenes however are very different, each discipline or action taken by the character must be declared properly from the point of view of the character in the current context she is playing in, sometimes, some players like to answer as quick as possible, excited by the next post to come, sometimes they are just lazy to explain and describe their characters actions as needed, in either case DON'T (if you are expecting the game to continue), take your time to think what would your character do at any give situation and try to play the role as good as you can, I'm sure you will find alot of fun in it, if you're not this game probably isn't the best option for you.

When the player is the one talking, if you really have to, it is mandatory to note it writting down "Note out of character:" or "OOC:" followed by the comment you urgently need to speak up. This is permited but please try not to do it often.