They did make the occasional attempt to balance the Arts so commoners had a few things . . . but it didn't work. Sidhe have a near-total lock on Sovereign, Chronos, and Naming. Commoners have Metamorphosis, and supposedly Soothsay -- but the writers went ahead and admitted what everybody was thinking anyway, which was that no way in hell would the sidhe ignore something as useful as Soothsay. (Meilge, for example, is a master of it.) The only real disadvantage sidhe have is that they take double Banality. But since they control most of the freeholds, they can just burn that off, problem solved.
(They also theoretically don't reincarnate. But I never really figured out how the heck that was supposed to work, given the amount of time that has passed since the Resurgence. Are new sidhe souls continuing to filter through from Arcadia? They must be, since your alternatives are to say that they do reincarnate after all, or new ones are being created from modern dreams. The latter would be interesting, but would run totally counter to the whole WoD setup. And the former just wipes the distinction away. Even saying they're coming in from Arcadia, though, undermines the notion of that being the place nobody can get to or from anymore.)
My other problem with a sidhe/commoner conflict is that in a LARP (or a large-enough online game), where you're pitting PC against PC, you're inevitably setting up half the player base to be the villain and/or the loser against the other half. If it's a game about the sidhe oppressing the commoners, it sucks to play a commoner. If it's a game about a commoner revolution, it sucks to play a sidhe. Were I to ST a game like that, I would probably create half a dozen sidhe NPCs for the local barony, and restrict PCs to commoners -- but I can see people being annoyed by that solution. If you want to play a Fiona, it isn't quite the same thing to play an eshu instead.
Re: add-ons to the kiths -- I kind of liked that stuff, but only because I appreciated attempts (however bad they sometimes were) to expand the setting beyond its very north-western European origin. Then again, I'm kind of, um, maybe a little crazy . . . <looks shifty> Okay so maybe I wrote an entire splat-book's worth of folklore-based Mesoamerican kiths and Arts that I'm now using as a setting for short stories shut UP I KNOW
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-10-19 07:29 pm (UTC)(They also theoretically don't reincarnate. But I never really figured out how the heck that was supposed to work, given the amount of time that has passed since the Resurgence. Are new sidhe souls continuing to filter through from Arcadia? They must be, since your alternatives are to say that they do reincarnate after all, or new ones are being created from modern dreams. The latter would be interesting, but would run totally counter to the whole WoD setup. And the former just wipes the distinction away. Even saying they're coming in from Arcadia, though, undermines the notion of that being the place nobody can get to or from anymore.)
My other problem with a sidhe/commoner conflict is that in a LARP (or a large-enough online game), where you're pitting PC against PC, you're inevitably setting up half the player base to be the villain and/or the loser against the other half. If it's a game about the sidhe oppressing the commoners, it sucks to play a commoner. If it's a game about a commoner revolution, it sucks to play a sidhe. Were I to ST a game like that, I would probably create half a dozen sidhe NPCs for the local barony, and restrict PCs to commoners -- but I can see people being annoyed by that solution. If you want to play a Fiona, it isn't quite the same thing to play an eshu instead.
Re: add-ons to the kiths -- I kind of liked that stuff, but only because I appreciated attempts (however bad they sometimes were) to expand the setting beyond its very north-western European origin. Then again, I'm kind of, um, maybe a little crazy . . . <looks shifty> Okay so maybe I wrote an entire splat-book's worth of folklore-based Mesoamerican kiths and Arts that I'm now using as a setting for short stories shut UP I KNOW