Dö permanent i World of Darkness

*First and fore-most, this game is in pre-production, so they wanted everyone to know that whatever they said could be changed by the time the game comes out.

Big topics:

* Mortals: Everyone starts off as mortal. Your character might (or, perhaps likely) will have a chance to be Embraced into a given Clan, but you can chose not to be. However, if you die as a mortal, it's for keeps. Speaking of...
* Perma-death. It's real for Kindred as well as mortals. Seems there'll be a "torpor" system in which you're just out for a bit, but Kindred cahracters can also meet Final Death.
* Torpor, they said, isn't going to have you in down-time for long bouts of time (won't work like the "Sleep of Ages" thing in the table-top game), but rather gives the in-game reason why your character didn't "die" when you lost all your health.
* Server: World-wide server, or at least continuity. Speaking of which, each "city" in which play happens will be a bit different, though they said it'll be based on character actions.
* PvP: Yes, a lot of the interations will be "PvP," but they're really working on building the interactions systems into a model under which players have reasons to form alliances and work together as well as against one another. When someone from the audience said they hate playing with a$$holes, the dev guy said "You need to have a$$holes to make political games work. That's politics." (Or something like that). The over-all impression they gave was that they're trying to work on creating a PvP environment that doesn't feel like the petty PvP we're used-to in other games.
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More peripheral issues:
*Character sheets that look a lot like our paper sheets.
* Web-based interface: you will likely be able to go to a web-site and do things therewith that make things happen with your character, apparently without logging entirely into the game. They stressed that they want to allow for casual gaming as well as more thorough immersion (Which makes a lot of marketing sense)
* Player heirarchies: Yup, player-Princes. As well as Player Primogen, et c. Earning one of these roles will involve a lot of politicing, gaining the support of other powerful players, who likely have to have the support of other players, et c. The Prince will e the Heather with the red scrunchy, in other words.
* If there's a guy who's acting way out of character, there'll be ways to deal with him socially, to "correct" the behavior, but doing so is intended to be sufficiently costly to you that you might not then (hopefully) over-use it. (ahem. Kind of like what I'd posted up-top. heh heh heh.
* Dementation will likely have effects that mess with players' perceptions of the game (possibly similar to Sanity's requiem, for instance).
* Dominate/Presence were briefly mentioned as being a way to wear down others' will to resist doing something you want them to do.
* No Caitiff at this time. Sorry for the Caitiff fans.
* More akin to LARP than table-top, in general.

*Also, they'd mentioned that they really want to do more with encouraging players to tell the story, that players tend to consume hard-coded content a whole lot faster than WW can write it. That makes sense.