Things that are not immediately obvious about the New World of Darkness MET

With the advent of the new MET system, comes some troubles and growing pains and a few other weird symptoms of the changeover. With this will come the inevitable misunderstandings and changes in thought. Also, you'll have people doing dumb stuff and then complaining "But that's how it works in the OLD System..." This of course makes me want to hit those people with a brick. It also makes me want to hit myself with a brick when I realize that i'm doing something dumb based on old rules.

Maybe i should learn some fucking tolerance, ya think?

In any case, i'm starting to notice a few things about the new system, especially, how it collides with the old system.

1) Point costs;
New MET is more based on the tabletop model to the point of having nearly everything cost the same. (there are some exceptions, but not many)
As a result, much of the point based economy of the old system needs to be thrown out. In old MET, a single trait of experience could be used to purchase a lot of things. In fact, if your larp met often enough, you could see the time compression of characters with active lives versus the advancement of relatively static NPC in action. I've been in a larp or two that could boast 13th generation vampires with 5 dots in certain clan disciplines. The only thing halting their advancement was not having diablerized someone. A single point could go a long way. a batch of points, doubly so.
This is not true under the new system. a single point of experience won't get you dick. The break point on costs for things is usually at the point of 3 dots. Costs for objectives over three dots are sufficiently expensive that they'll take you a number of games sessions to acquire. and even if you meet twice a month, you'll advance no faster than if you participated in a tabletop game that met twice a month. As a result, GM's need to re-wire their expectations about giving out EXP to players, and how generous they can actually be without breaking their game.
Important Safety Tip: If you need to buy something high and you have a batch of EXP to make the character, Then you are better off purchasing all the things you need to purchase high with your base points than you are with you Exp. Use your EXP to fill up all the cracks in your character sheet.
For instance, If you want your Mekhet to really good at his Auspex, You might want to use all of his base discipline points in order to get Auspex 3
and then use EXP to purchase his Celerity and Obfuscate. If you were to spread your base evenly and then purchase Auspex up to 3 with your experience, it would cost a LOT more.

2) Expectations of new products
It is my considered opinion, that once a Core book for MET comes out, there will be no further books for it in the MET line. The reason for this is, nobody wants to buy the same material twice and since the character sheets are the same, you can effectively use the tabletop books as reference for the MET game.
This is not wrong. But it is not altogether right. There will be things that won't translate well to MET. Some won't translate well because they don't fit in as well well with the basic framework of how a larp story differs from a TT story. Certain things won't work as well because they call for a more intimate form of setting than a Larp allows. Other things won't work so good because they just don't seem to work as well ( I have never seen Animalism work incredibly well in a Larp. a 3" by 5" card with the words "Pack of Wolves" just doesn't seem to cut it.)
It's a good idea to be on the lookout for things that don't translate well and to weigh each new thing that comes down the pike in terms of how well it will intergrate. And occasionally, it's okay to say "No."

3) The TT Room
On the other hand, certain things in a larp are now facilitated by dint of a more TT structured system, as long as the GM sets aside for himself a room for handling such things. For instance, you tell a GM you intend to follow a character or NPC back to his lair. A car chase ensues. How many times have you ever seen a car chase run in an older style larp? I can't think of one i've seen, much less been in.
However, in the new system, if you want to do something outside the scope of, "I take 3 steps and then shoot" You can. You can retire to a room set aside for running things TT style and knock those things out. You could even run LARGE scale battles in this way as long as you can get everyone involved in the room. You might lay in a battlemat and some figs and some dice for these times.

4) Different Strokes for Different Folks
Some folks like fingers. Some like drawing the cards. Some like Dice. I like Dice, they're faster in my opinion and require less math. One die is easy to carry. you can hand another to your GM and save yourself some grief and he digs out his cards. Fingers are better for conflicts that go on at range and can be more easily read unless it gets too dark. Cards are best when a nearby table is lacking. Any confrontation in a hallway is likely to use cards. Multifunctionality in conflict resolution is a positive boon.

Sono Finito