[OSSR]Victorian Age Vampire

[Lokey]

That's way better than the clan book's answer (god vamp fluff sucks): Cain made the 2nd gen then directed them to sire the clan leaders (name = clan). Ventrue was the first and was an advisor to Cain and the bestest buddy to him and so on. But there's probably a dozen incompatible answers across various books.

Correction, Protean 3 is the better off having a shovel discipline, 2 is death claws which is probably still not worth spending blood and standing around for an action for. Granted glancing over the wiki on what stuff does, I'm surprised we were able to have any fun with this mess of a system

[Username17]

Considering that you get bonus dice for using a weapon and just "do aggravated damage" for using claws, I thought you meant it when you said the second dot. A sharp shovel does lethal damage, which is mostly as good as agg damage for most purposes, and does more of it because you're armed. The first three dots of Protean are collectively pretty interchangeable with owning a flashlight and a shovel.

-Username17

[Daniel]

That's way better than the clan book's answer (god vamp fluff sucks): Cain made the 2nd gen then directed them to sire the clan leaders (name = clan). Ventrue was the first and was an advisor to Cain and the bestest buddy to him and so on. But there's probably a dozen incompatible answers across various books.

As long as we all understand that that is a transparent bit of Ventrue propaganda, that almost nobody in setting believes, it is a passable bit of background colour.

[Longes]

Correction, Protean 3 is the better off having a shovel discipline, 2 is death claws which is probably still not worth spending blood and standing around for an action for. Granted glancing over the wiki on what stuff does, I'm surprised we were able to have any fun with this mess of a system

One tiny problem. "Death claws" do Strength + 1 Aggravated damage. Which, coincidentally, is exactly the damage vampire fangs do. And you get those for free. You do need to grapple people to bite them, but grappling is a very defendable combat choice.

[Smirnoffico]

Don't you need grapple to suck blood and can just bite for damage right away?

[Username17]

Don't you need grapple to suck blood and can just bite for damage right away?

The exact rules for biting differ depending on what rulebook you're using. In many versions, each die requires a higher target number to bite, making biting absolutely worthless in any combat at all.

But enemies go down and stay down for a while if you just hit them for a bunch of lethal damage, and if you want to do agg damage to make them die for realz or just be super fucked up, you have plenty of time to bite them at that point. Having a weapon of pretty much any kind does more total damage than claws or fangs do, so in almost all cases you're better off just hitting your opponent with an ax and then chewing on them or setting them on fire after they drop if you want aggravated damage for some reason. Body weaponry is pretty much a joke in Vampire.

The exception is certain kinds of magical fire are actually pretty OK. I can't be fucked to remember which was which, but there's Fire Thaumaturgy that shoots fire bolts, Dark Fire Thaumaturgy that shoots fire bolts, Daimonion (or however that's spelled) that shoots fire bolts, and some other thing that shoots fire bolts, and they all use different mechanics. The costs and rolls and damage calculations are all totally different. And some of them are pretty cheap and brutal and others are very shitty and I can't be fucked to look it up. I think I'd bet a dollar that the fire bolts that the actual demonic Baali line shoot at people were one of the comparatively useless ones. But I can't remember why. High cost and low damage I think.

-Username17

[Longes]

Thaumaturgy (Lure of Flames) and Dark Thaumaturgy (Fires of Inferno) both shoot fires. The soak progression is identical (and you can only try to soak if you have Fortitude), but Fires of Inferno does more damage per turn.

Daimonion has firebolts at 3 dots, and they are pretty shitty. 1 damage die per blood point spent plus the successes from the attack roll. It is soaked normally. In DA:V20 the damage is doubled against the ghosts and spirits. On the positive side, Daimonion 3 is the only power in Daimonion that even requires blood spending, so you might as well shoot those 3-4 die bolts.

[Ancient History]

Victorian Age Vampire
Chapter 3: Character


Preacher character.

Musical accompaniment: In The Shadows.

AncientH:

I've decided to no longer try and read any more of these chapter openings. They're dark, black, pseudo-cursive font on a busy background and I find it very difficult to read. I don't know why this was ever acceptable. I mean, even back in the old days, they'd just have white text on a solid black background. You can read that.

Okay, this chapter, as you might expect, jumps right into character creation! You don't know anything about the setting that you haven't already brought with you and frankly if you've watched a Dracula movie and play Vampire: the Masquerade, you could pretty much have skipped the first 114 pages and gone right here! Isn't that nice?

New players should not be intimidated by the historical setting of Victorian Age: Vampire. This classic milieu for vampire stories is an excellent opportunity to bring new blood to the table. The vampire, and its curse of inevitable duality, is an intuitive part of the Victorian Zeitgeist.

I don't know what that last sentence means! It's like a fucking koan.

FrankT:

Normally, I get quite exasperated with game books that jump right in to asking you for a character concept before they come clean on what a character could actually do. It's all very well to come up with a character concept like “Batman” or “Daphne Black” but those characters exist at a specific power level and without knowing information about what power level the characters in the game are going to be, there's no reason to believe your blind choice is going to be in any way appropriate. It's generally easier to scale a character up than it is to scale them down (up to a point, obviously). Daphne Blake could be a doctor, a sharp shooter, or a master of fire magic without necessarily destroying the concept; while if Batman doesn't get enough skill points to be sneaky, fighty, and detectivish that concept is fucked.

Daphne Blake, demigod.

Now that's not a huge issue for Victorian Age Vampire. I doubt VAV was anybody's first exposure to a World of Darkness game. The game was aimed squarely at people already well invested into Masquerade. The people who bought this book not only already knew what a Toreador was, they already knew what they could expect a starting Toreador to be like. Once they knew what generation they started at, they could probably write the character creation rules from scratch. So it's less of an issue. The information may be out of order, but none of it is really new information and the intended audience already knows everything it's going to say.


I think I've seen this before.

Now that being said, the actual language used here is pretty annoying. Here is the literal opening of the chapter:

This is your chance. All the classic elements of the Victorian vampire legend are yours to play with. Will you use this opportunity to quench your thirst and play the ultimate Gothic creature of decadence and passion?

Fucking hell. Look, this book existed because the fans demanded it, and the authors thought that they could basically just whip their dicks out (weirdly, everyone writing and editing this book had and was a dick) and
have the fans cream their panties and manties. Places where the authors should have been doing research and design are instead spent dancing around the stage shouting “Are you ready to rock?!” at the fans. Like they already had a monster hit on their hands and all they had to do was just show up and let the fans cheering down out every flat note.


Not yet. Give us five minutes.

AncientH:

We now apply the generic World of Darkness character creation formula. Actually, I tell a lie, we apply the specific Vampire: the Masquerade creation formula. Literally, nothing has changed. Well, except that the whole fucking thing is just links to "go look up this step over in Vampire: the Masquerade 3e revised." I mean, seriously, it's like the Exalted books all over again. The only difference is that instead of starting out as 12th generation instead of 13th generation.

The one die roll of character creation remains unchanged, however. Roll a single die to determine the number of blood points at your character's disposal when the story begins.

FrankT:

Opinions differ on whether players should make their characters together around a table, or at home and then bring the sheets in for the first game. The arguments for building characters together are that if you don't make your characters together, they may not “fit” very well and you can suffer under a lack of motivation for the characters to work together towards common goals or even to travel to the same places. The arguments for making the characters on your own damn time at home are that together time is a logistical nightmare and setting fire to an entire evening that you got everyone into the same room for a game night to not actually play a game is a waste of precious resources and a good way to have the game fall apart without ever even happening.

In general, games with a strong intended set of character goals like D&D or Champions favor building your character at home, while games where character motivation is more unscripted like well, Vampire tend to favor joint character creation sessions. So it's really no surprise that this book suggests that you have a backstory discussion evening where you make a cooperative backstory to make sure all the characters have a reason to work together. That's pretty standard for Vampire of any age.

What is surprising is their explanation for this. Basically they come out and admit that they really haven't done any world building, and you're all going to have to take a lot of cues from the storyteller and each other if you want to have any hooks to hang your character on at all. That's... refreshingly honest actually. I mean, they drag this out with overwrought bullshit about how you have to find out from the storyteller what historical and fictional details your imaginary world contains, lest your collective imaginations break down, but it's basically that. This book does not present a clear vision for what the Gothic Victorian Age is like or contains, and does not even present a clear rubric by which you could figure that information out for yourself given fiction and non-fiction books set in and about the period.


And reading this book, you still don't.

So basically this book is useless. Not only could you procedurally generate pretty much every detail of this book by looking at other Vampire books you already own – but you still need a lot of details and this book's only suggestion is that you should probably talk it out and decide what those details are.

AncientH:

Beginning Vampire characters receive five dots for their Backgrounds. Freebie points may be spent to purchase more dots. Backgrounds quantify certain facts of your character concept with game mechanics, so you may spend your five dots on any Backgrounds you like. It's a good idea to select Backgrounds that reflect the way you want your character to be received by the other characters in the world.

Backgrounds are a measure of your character's external connections to the world, and it's the external world that is so different from Vampire: the Masquerade. Inwardly, vampires are inherently static and unchanging. Their ageless undead bodies often lead to rigid personalities and repeating routines. In this world of scientific and social growth, however, a vampire must adapt or perish. Thus, the way you select Backgrounds for your Vampire character must change. The old ways won't fly anymore.

I've read that second paragraph a dozen times now - those two paragraphs are all there are for the "Backgrounds" section - and either this is an atrocious piece of editing or someone just turned in an incomplete thought. Like, they felt they were going to write some rules for how selecting Victorian Age Vampire backgrounds was different and then...didn't. I can't tell if this is an artifact from a fresher draft, where somebody thought they were really going to innovate chargen, or if this is an artifact from the sole draft put forth by an incredibly lazy designer. It's really almost ironic, when you consider how rigid chargen design in VAV adheres to V:tM.

FrankT:

Perform this step as explained in Vampire: the Masquerade.

Now as it happens, that is from Step Two, but the book says something broadly similar on Steps One, Three, and several times in Step Four. Basically, you could replace this chapter entirely with a single page that was simply a page citation for the similar chapter in Vampire: the Masquerade (bonus points for telling you which edition of Vampire: the Masquerade it was sending you to, which the actual book does not) and it would be neither more nor less useful. But then it wouldn't have been allocated sixteen pages and the book would look thinner on the shelf.

I don't really know what the point of having a character creation chapter is if it's just going to tell you to go read a different book and follow those procedures and rules. I mean, there's some text cheerleading about how the masquerade metaphor and the public and private personas are super double important for Victorian Age characters, and fair enough. But they aren't actually any different.


Victorians did indeed have very different inside and outside activities and presentations.

The thing this book is struggling with is that to the extent that Vampire was ever anything other than an edition of Ars Magica crudely hacked into Shadowrun mechanics at the last minute and with some near copyright violations of Anne Rice – it was an exploration of Gothic fiction themes through the metaphor of vampires. Victorian Age Vampire really didn't have anything to say that the original Vampire: the Masquerade didn't already say. To the extent that this book ever had any chance of a purpose at all it was to expand the backstory and provide setting features that you could play out your Gothic themes in the historical Victorian setting that inspired a good chunk of the game in the first place. Since this book has pretty much abdicated on that premise and doesn't feel the need to present a complete playable set of mechanics, I genuinely do not understand what this book is for.

AncientH:

We've ranted about Nature and Demeanor before - they're the other half of Vampire's attempt to shoehorn alignment into the game, alongside Humanity/Roads/Paths. Basically, they're supposed to encourage a certain mindset in the player by giving a small but not negligible bonus for thematically appropriate actions. They're...not good. I mean, I can't even say it's better than Law vs Chaos and Good vs Evil. Most people can get their heads around the Alignment Axes, and even have shallow philosophical discussions about the morality of killing orc cubs. But Humanity/Roads/Paths have straight lists of sins with a 0-10 meter, and Nature and Demeanor are more roleplaying prompts than guidelines...and sometimes incredibly abusable ones. They rarely, if ever, actually interact with the game in any meaningful way.

FrankT:

This book does take some time to rewrite or add some Natures. These are motivation thingies. Unlike Humanity or whatever (which is purely negative incentives), the Natures were purely positive incentives. There was a thing you could do that would cause you to regain a spent Willpower point. So it was an incentive to have your character take actions, because it would give you concrete mechanical benefits whenever you acted according to your roleplaying prompt. Now, these were in no way “balanced” in the sense that some required actions that were compatible with taking actions that advanced character goals and some required self destructive antics. And also that some were things you could do frequently and whenever you needed to, while others were reactive or things that were by their nature (pun intended) things that could only be done at rare intervals.

But the goal wasn't to give people Willpower recovery at a fair and equal rate, the goal was to create incentives to get people to roleplay their characters and contribute to the story rather than being passive participants. And they do that. Making this absolutely the most effective game mechanic that White Wolf ever made. This book presents seven “new or altered” natures to pick from, but you can still pick the ones in other books if you want. I absolutely do not care enough to check other books to see which of these are new and how much the altered ones have been changed. The ones you have to pick from here are: Artiste, Coward, Earl Grey, Explorer, Fatalist, Futurist, Liver Disaster, Outsider, and Questor. Some of those might not be real.


Still no “Douchebro” nature though, which is a shame.

The connection between what a nature is called and what it does are often tenuous. There's a title, there's a rant about how you're supposed to play the character, and then there's a sentence or two describing the Willpower refresh trigger. Of those, the only thing that actually matters in a mechanical sense is the last one, and sometimes the trigger doesn't really seem to have much to do with the rest of the entry. The “Coward” gets Willpower back when they tell other people what their favorite composers are, and the “Outsider” gets Willpower back when they let other people order for them in an unfamiliar restaurant.


Lots of powergamers gravitate towards a Sadist nature for combat characters, because you get Willpower back for hurting people right after you spent it on combat tricks to hurt them with.

Speaking of roleplaying prompts that don't work well: Humanity. This book wants you to know that the Sabbat are wrong and their non-Humanity morality systems are fake. That doesn't even. Like, I get that the Sabbat were badly written in a lot of ways, but you can't just flippantly say “Those roads from Dark Ages and Paths from Sabbat that actual player characters use and have been using for 8 years? Fake.”



Fuck this book.

AncientH:

I kind of like "Futurist," who regains willpower "whenever you first come across a progressive device or concept." I'm not sure they quite thought through all the ramifications on that one, but you could milk it for a lot just by having your table-mates spout shit about giving <insert category of persons here> The Vote, or reading off a Barry Sanders to-do list. It's notable that they just have to encounter the concept, they don't have to do anything with it. In the modern nights, you could call this the Millennial or something.

FrankT:

Victorian Age Vampire can't quite decide what it wants to do with skills and traits and backgrounds and stuff. I suspect we're looking at the fact that there are five writers and one editor and none of them really gave a shit about this product. Someone writing this shit thinks that what you should do is leave the skills and dots as-is and just let things work on whatever culturally and chronologically appropriate stuff the characters are interacting with. Someone else thinks that things need rewriting. They sort of split the difference and the end result is that I don't think there's even a playable game here.

Fuck this book.

We've mentioned it before in other reviews, but the number of dots someone has in a trait doesn't really correspond to how trained or how skillful they are. It's a very weird thing: it measures what the difference is between the character's competence in an area from other areas of competence grouped into the same category. The thing that actually determines how good you are at a thing is just the dicepool totals, of which the number of trait dots you have is just one portion and usually not the largest portion. So when this book talks itself into circles asking itself what it really means to have 4 dots in Firearms in an era when there are early bolt action rifles, it's just puzzling. The correct answer is “nothing.” The fact that you have four dots in Firearms doesn't mean anything at all. The only thing that matters is the difference between 4 and the number of trait dots you have on other Dexterity themed abilities. Alone, four dots in Firearms – or in any trait – is like being shown an unlabeled bar graph. It means nothing.


As you can see, the second bar is smaller. How does that make you feel? How does that make you feel in the context of late Victorian Gothic Horror?

AncientH:

Honestly, they should have saved themselves some trouble and just ported some skills over from Dark Ages Vampire to fill the gap - which is what I half-think they did with the Ride skill. Which makes me sad, because Dark Ages Vampire had rules for ghouling your horse and maybe even breeding revenant horses.



We also get some slightly-adjusted generation background (since you start out at 12 instead of 13; all this really means is a default blood pool of 11 instead of 10) and some merits and flaws. One of my favorite of which is Frail Stomach (2 point flaw) "You are unable to stomach blood you consider filthy or poor." This is one of those flaws which you can combine with the Ventrue clan weakness to make a completely fucking worthless character; it's as close as you can get to dying during chargen in VAV.

FrankT:

Next up: Chasing the Sunset (Geography).

AncientH:

There's so little to talk about in VAV I feel bad.
But when I get philosophical, I feel like I'm reaching.

[Longes]

You also start at generation 12 in Dark Ages, which highlights the problem with the generation system and moving back in time in the setting. In 600 years between Dark Ages and Victorian Age the starting generation hasn't changed.

[Smirnoffico]

I think making starting generation 12 for VAV was just lazy pasting from 'that other past age book we did'. At least DA:V gave us the ability to play with cool six-point disciplines without drinking storyteller's favorite npc first

[Prak]

This review is making me think about rebuilding Vampire the Masquerade again...

I feel like the progenitors they created whole cloth is itself something of a problem. If they'd based the clans more directly on public domain vampire figures, there'd have been a lot more substance to hang the clans on.

I'm not aware of any tradition of Cain drinking blood outside of popular literature, but Lilith is an actual blood drinker in actual folk lore, and if you go further back, the stories about Lilith were heavily influenced by Lamashtu. There's a clan right there.

Ancient Greece had a daughter of Hecate, a secret lover of Zeus, and harpy-esque bird women who all drank blood and could each be a suitable basis for a grecian vampire clan, or you could mix them together, whatever. Hecate's daughter was a seducer, people don't commonly know that there even is a difference between harpies and sirens, and there's the whole "secret lover of Zeus" thing, so this can be your seductive clan.

You could do interesting quasi-nosferatu things with the Indian vetalas, which would possess corpses. So they get the "socially unacceptable appearance" thing of Nos, given that they are spirits who jump corpses, and they can have a whole Magic Jar sort of shtick.

In the myths of various tribes and cultures of Africa, there are some really interesting blood suckers, and given the size of the continent, you could easily have several African clans.

Obviously, people want to play Dracula, and I think it's a defensible choice, fuck, it's mandatory, to have a Dracula clan. All you really need to do is say that they're a relatively recent clan, and that's fine. Fuck, Clan Dracula could have been created yesterday since the whole origin shtick is a divine curse.

The next thing would be to define generation by time period so that when you get to writing Dark Ages, you know what generation people are playing, and when you get to writing Victorian Age, you know what generation people are playing and they aren't the fucking same, or at the very least, it comes off as an intentional choice, rather than "lol, copy paste, stfu"

[hyzmarca]

I Dark Ages, I expect that it was a balance issue. You don't want to give the PCs too low of a generation, since Generation is mostly a power-limiting mechanic. In Victorian, it was an issue of there being nothing between 12 and 13.

[Mechalich]

Obviously, people want to play Dracula, and I think it's a defensible choice, fuck, it's mandatory, to have a Dracula clan. All you really need to do is say that they're a relatively recent clan, and that's fine. Fuck, Clan Dracula could have been created yesterday since the whole origin shtick is a divine curse.

If you're willing to go with the Vlad the Impaler inspiration for Dracula - which you probably should anyway - that gets you back to the 15th century. That's plenty old enough to provide a suitably mythic clan history even if the other clans end up being a lot older.

[Prak]

Which is pretty much what I was assuming, yeah. All I mean is that, given that the origin of Dracula's vampirism is "divine curse," you could have that happen at any time.

That said, yeah, Clan Dracul would be descended from Vlad in my Vampire the Masquerade Redux.

[rasmuswagner]

This review is making me think about rebuilding Vampire the Masquerade again...

For all those ethnic vampires,you can (as usual) grab a 3E Gurps book and be 95% done. Gurps Vampires is all about the Not Dracula.

[deaddmwalking]

There's nothing saying that Vlad couldn't have been a notable member of his house, rather than a progenitor. In fact, I could see other vampires being upset that he was rather flamboyant and threatened the masquerade. Perhaps he is imprisoned somewhere...

[talozin]

Thaumaturgy (Lure of Flames) and Dark Thaumaturgy (Fires of Inferno) both shoot fires. The soak progression is identical (and you can only try to soak if you have Fortitude), but Fires of Inferno does more damage per turn.

Daimonion has firebolts at 3 dots, and they are pretty shitty. 1 damage die per blood point spent plus the successes from the attack roll. It is soaked normally. In DA:V20 the damage is doubled against the ghosts and spirits. On the positive side, Daimonion 3 is the only power in Daimonion that even requires blood spending, so you might as well shoot those 3-4 die bolts.

Vicissitude 8 lets you breath out a 6' cloud of flame that does 2 dice of aggravated damage (and might set the targets on fire). Not that it matters, because you aren't ever going to get 8 dots in any discipline unless the DM is 12, and if you were you certainly wouldn't waste it on doing a piddling 2 dice of damage when you could instead get any of several varieties of save or die (at least one of which the target is almost guaranteed to lose), or the ability to use Dominate long-distance, or make stakes shoot back out of your own heart while you're paralyzed.

[hyzmarca]

Thaumaturgy (Lure of Flames) and Dark Thaumaturgy (Fires of Inferno) both shoot fires. The soak progression is identical (and you can only try to soak if you have Fortitude), but Fires of Inferno does more damage per turn.

Daimonion has firebolts at 3 dots, and they are pretty shitty. 1 damage die per blood point spent plus the successes from the attack roll. It is soaked normally. In DA:V20 the damage is doubled against the ghosts and spirits. On the positive side, Daimonion 3 is the only power in Daimonion that even requires blood spending, so you might as well shoot those 3-4 die bolts.

Vicissitude 8 lets you breath out a 6' cloud of flame that does 2 dice of aggravated damage (and might set the targets on fire). Not that it matters, because you aren't ever going to get 8 dots in any discipline unless the DM is 12, and if you were you certainly wouldn't waste it on doing a piddling 2 dice of damage when you could instead get any of several varieties of save or die (at least one of which the target is almost guaranteed to lose), or the ability to use Dominate long-distance, or make stakes shoot back out of your own heart while you're paralyzed.

Heck, 8 is the point where Temporis actually becomes useful. Not that you'd want to waste all the XP on Temporis 1-7, but if you started with an 8 dot discipline, I'd pick the ability to reenact Groundhog's Day over 2 points of fire damage.

[Blicero]

Outside of the whole fire issue, was Dark Ages an okay game? I never really knew anything about it.

[Longes]

Outside of the whole fire issue, was Dark Ages an okay game? I never really knew anything about it.

The other DA problem is that to my knowledge there was no nightlife to speak of in 13th century, and that people generally went to sleep when the sun set. So when the corebook says that "Appearance + Subterfuge hunting roll might represent a trist with a maid in the tavern" I honestly don't know why the tavern is even opened at the time vampires start to wake up.

[Blicero]

The other DA problem is that to my knowledge there was no nightlife to speak of in 13th century, and that people generally went to sleep when the sun set. So when the corebook says that "Appearance + Subterfuge hunting roll might represent a trist with a maid in the tavern" I honestly don't know why the tavern is even opened at the time vampires start to wake up.

Yeah, VtM game styles do port more readily to ye olde fantasy not-Europe than they do to actual medieval Europe.

[Smirnoffico]

Besides whole setting being about vampires who are afraid of fire living in a world lit by fire?
Fine, I guess )))

[Username17]

Dark Ages Vampire has a lot of problems. Mostly, the vampires in Masquerade aren't terribly well thought out, and when you compare them to the past things break down rather a lot.

So there's population numbers. Dark Ages villages had very few people in them, and the people they had lived on poor diets. A modern day human can donate a pint of blood every 56 days, but a Dark Ages human sure as fuck can't. The vampire carrying capacity of most medieval towns is so small that you can't have vampire politics. Your coterie needs a herd of thousands of people to get through the year, which means that there isn't really anyone to talk to, vampire wise.

There's the problem of travel. V:tM is incredibly harsh about sunlight, which is a big problem for vampires moving around. They have to ship themselves as freight because they can't travel in a windowed anything. But before the era of the steamboat and railcar, there is no freight. If there was somewhere you wanted to go or something you wanted to do, that is too fucking bad. Because there are no shipping crates going anywhere for you to go with.

There's the problem of generations. In the original V:tM, the ancient vampires are powerful and you're basically just a cursed human for the most part. That's all nice and Queen of the Damnedish, so I'll allow it. But the way they chose to represent that was to have vampires who were less generations from the common ancestor be more powerful inherently. The ancient vampires aren't specifically powerful because they've been around for a long time but because they got the undiluted blood early in the program. Which means that if you go back in time when the ancient vampires were running around being all not-ancient, they are still ridiculously powerful. It's just everyone else that's weak and bullshit because they don't have automobiles, cell phones, or dynamite.

And yeah, you don't actually have the power to see in the dark, you can only operate at night, you're paralytically afraid of fire, and literally all artificial light is one kind or another of open flame.

V:tM simply has deep and painful structural issues. And when you strip away the modern setting, you also strip away all the means at your disposal to get around those problems and get to the story.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

There's the problem of generations. In the original V:tM, the ancient vampires are powerful and you're basically just a cursed human for the most part. That's all nice and Queen of the Damnedish, so I'll allow it. But the way they chose to represent that was to have vampires who were less generations from the common ancestor be more powerful inherently. The ancient vampires aren't specifically powerful because they've been around for a long time but because they got the undiluted blood early in the program. Which means that if you go back in time when the ancient vampires were running around being all not-ancient, they are still ridiculously powerful. It's just everyone else that's weak and bullshit because they don't have automobiles, cell phones, or dynamite.

T'be fair, it's not just Vampire that had that issue. Even in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, you could be stronger three ways:

1) Get embraced by a stronger vampire. Lestat was a special snowflake because he got embraced by a strong/old vampire. Magnus, the dude that embraced Lestat, was basically a Tremere and made himself a vampire with a whole-blood transfusion, which was a no-o.

2) Drink the blood of a stronger vampire. Lestat gets to tan because he drank from the Queen of the damned.

3) Survive to get old and your blood strengthens over time. Multiple Anne Rice characters go through this.

#1 is the Generations background, more or less.
#2 is diablerie, though with Rice you didn't have to drink her soul.
#3 is basically where they went with Blood Potency in V:tR.

Which is a long way to say that Generation is still bad, but also bad in specific ways related to their its-obvious-we-ripped-this-off source material.

[Longes]

Dark Ages Vampire has a lot of problems. Mostly, the vampires in Masquerade aren't terribly well thought out, and when you compare them to the past things break down rather a lot.

So there's population numbers. Dark Ages villages had very few people in them, and the people they had lived on poor diets. A modern day human can donate a pint of blood every 56 days, but a Dark Ages human sure as fuck can't. The vampire carrying capacity of most medieval towns is so small that you can't have vampire politics. Your coterie needs a herd of thousands of people to get through the year, which means that there isn't really anyone to talk to, vampire wise.

There's the problem of travel. V:tM is incredibly harsh about sunlight, which is a big problem for vampires moving around. They have to ship themselves as freight because they can't travel in a windowed anything. But before the era of the steamboat and railcar, there is no freight. If there was somewhere you wanted to go or something you wanted to do, that is too fucking bad. Because there are no shipping crates going anywhere for you to go with.

There's the problem of generations. In the original V:tM, the ancient vampires are powerful and you're basically just a cursed human for the most part. That's all nice and Queen of the Damnedish, so I'll allow it. But the way they chose to represent that was to have vampires who were less generations from the common ancestor be more powerful inherently. The ancient vampires aren't specifically powerful because they've been around for a long time but because they got the undiluted blood early in the program. Which means that if you go back in time when the ancient vampires were running around being all not-ancient, they are still ridiculously powerful. It's just everyone else that's weak and bullshit because they don't have automobiles, cell phones, or dynamite.

And yeah, you don't actually have the power to see in the dark, you can only operate at night, you're paralytically afraid of fire, and literally all artificial light is one kind or another of open flame.

V:tM simply has deep and painful structural issues. And when you strip away the modern setting, you also strip away all the means at your disposal to get around those problems and get to the story.

-Username17

The problem of travel is solvable. Whenever you need to go somewhere you get a ghoul and a gypsy caravan, get in the coffin and Dracula yourself across the Europe. It's not a good way to travel and it's not a safe way to travel, but it's a way. The game posits a speed of 40 miles per day on horse or with carriage. Tremere win the logistics game because they have a magic path that lets a caravan to travel at 40 miles per hour for an hour per success on the roll. So about 260 miles per blood point. There's also a magic path for teleportation, but it's personal only and has terrible accuracy.

The problem of fire is more complicated. By a friendly reading of the book a vampire has to roll for Red Fear only when fire is threatening or scary (i.e. someone waves the torch in your face, or the gust of wind flares the fire suddenly), and even then a saving throw against a torch is 5 on 3-5 dice. Meaning that vampires frenzy, but more like once a month rather than every night.

The problem of diet is completely ignored - the feeding and healing rules in Dark Ages and modern nights are identical. So much for modern medicine, eh?

But the problems of society and nightlife and the fact that there is no Masquerade aren't even discussed. Hell, DA:V20 doesn't even have a setting section. It has a section on Italy, it has a section on Middle East, but the game's primary setting of central Europe is not in the fucking corebook because they decided to publish it in a separate book.