OSSR: Player's Guide to the Sabbat
Chapter Five: Traits
White Wolf never fully established what the numbers were for.
Musical accompaniment is
Blutengel because I honestly don't know how we went this long in this review without having a Blutengel song. It's basically the Vampire LARP band. In German.
FrankT:
As we have mentioned in previous reviews, “Trait” in White Wolf speak is “anything that has a number attached to it.” If it has a number or a number of dots drawn in after the title, it's a Trait. That's not a particularly helpful distinction and there's no particular reason to collect things that have numbers into a chapter. But White Wolf did this fairly often. Stuff that has a number attached like Virtues and Skills and some kinds of magic powers is a pretty heterogeneous group. And stuff that doesn't have numbers attached like clan affiliation, nature, and derangements are also a heterogeneous group – but not really different in any way you could put your finger on.
Certainly it would superficially make more sense to group Virtues with Nature since those are things that describe your character's personality and motivation. Rather than grouping Virtues with Thaumaturgy Rituals because they both have numbers attached. But well, White Wolf just fucking
does this shit. It makes things easy to find if you know White Wolf, but explaining why anything is where it is in White Wolf books to someone who isn't already familiar is pretty hard.
We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
One thing to keep in mind is that while everything in this chapter has a number, these numbers are not on the same scale and a lot of the numbers are not used in the same way. Most numbers in White Wolf games are rated 1-5, but dicepools for actions are often two or three (or more!) different numbers added together. And some numbers just run 1-10 anyway. And then some numbers are just off doing their own thing. Merits and Flaws just have arbitrary values which determine how many you are allowed to start with, but don't actually do anything in play.
AncientH:
The main Sabbat Traits are "Secondary Abilities," which encompasses Talents, Skills, and Knowledges. These are layers of distinction that are never used for anything, and are therefore
bad. Seriously, one of the hallmarks of a mature game is to "simplify, and add lightness." If you have a tag or category which does not measurably add to the setting, that is probably a bad mechanic and you should get rid of it. This sort of thing normally shows up in CCGs, which is why both Magic: the Gathering and Legend of the Five Rings have multiple types/tags/keywords that basically just don't do shit, or what shit they do they do so badly that the game would be better off if those categories never existed.
So it is with the World of Darkness! There is no especial distinction between Skills, Talents, and Knowledges; they're all used about the same way and they're all increased at the same costs (except Mage, which made Knowledges cheaper). They also distinguished between Primary Abilities and Secondary Abilities. Primary Abilities were included in the core book and would be the skills/talents/etc. that tests were actually supposed to reference; while Secondary Abilities were largely stuff included in the splats and wouldn't generally be used by Disciplines or probably in any other use.
FrankT:
The core mechanic of Vampire is that you have stats and skills and these are both soft-capped at 5, and you add one of each of those together and the result is how many dice you roll. So normal dicepools are soft-capped at 10. Back in the old days, the number you were looking for on a die also moved up and down due to various stuff, and that was also terrible. But there are two core issues that the White Wolf guys don't seem to have thought about:
- The amount of dice that hit the target number is generally going to be lower than the number of dice in the pool.
- The amount of dice you have in an average pool is going to be lower the more different traits you introduce.
And so we see a bunch of “success inflation” where shit is constantly asking you to hit the target number on 5 or more dice to get results you want. And we get the constant introduction of new skills, despite the fact that writing these up makes everyone less skilled across the board.
So this book introduces the Panhandling skill. If that didn't exist, you'd probably just roll Manipulation + Streetwise or something to panhandle if for some reason it was important. But when there exists a separate Panhandling skill, the Streetwise skill stops letting you Panhandle. And so the player who has the Streetwise skill has to choose to either buy an extra skill, and become less skilled at the things he can do because he doesn't get any extra points to fill this hole with and something has gotta give – or he has to accept that as of now he just has less actions available to do with the skills he already has.
What this all boils down to is that the authors of Vampire never really sat down and crunched the math as to how good characters were at actually doing stuff, and just randomly wrote shit in all the time that undermined the players every which way. People were expected to play without using the rules much of the time, so when actual rules got popped out, people were like “holy shit, why does my character suck so bad?”
AncientH:
From a game design standpoint, Abilities are cheap and fast to churn out. You don't have to work out target numbers or anything else, they go on the character sheet, and some people will like them. In many ways, it's like the Big Dick merit. If the Big Dick merit exists, even if it doesn't do anything, some players will want to take the Big Dick merit just to point at their character sheet and say "My Character Has a Big Dick. It says so right here." So it is with Sabbat abilities like Fire Walking. Most of these abilities are just window dressing.
Now, there is also the slight power-creep options that people work in. For example, Blind Fighting adds:
For each level of ability the character has in this Skill, reduce the difficulty for performing actions while blind by one.
I looked up fighting blind, and I
think it's only a +2 difficulty modifier to fight completely blind, so this could be potentially useful for combat monsters. Sort of like those blind archers in AD&D who dump four proficiencies in Zen Archery.
And sometimes they add new systems (like Disciplines) and declare new abilities to use that system. So, like, Koldunic Sorcery used Heath Wisdom the way that Thaumaturgy uses Occult (except where Koldunic Sorcery uses Koldunism, because sometimes they make the systems incompatible.) Which is why have skills in this section like Body Alteration and Dreaming. But then we also have skills like Snake Charming, and wtf? Was Animal Ken just not fucking useful enough on its own?
Also, the Fortune Teller skill is racist:
* * * * * Master: Gypsies take lessons from you
FrankT:
Nomenclature in White Wolf games is fairly bad. We've been playing fast and lose with it, but technically all this shit had specific words that they used over and over – but were still shockingly unhelpful for people actually playing the game. So each die that hit the target number was called a success. But getting enough successes to achieve the desired result was also called a success. The things we call Skills were actually called “Abilities” despite the fact that everything your character could do was also called an “Ability.” The skills were grouped into three categories, called Talents, Knowledges, and get this:
Skills. As mentioned before, this chapter is called “Traits” because everything with a number after it was called a trait, but in-character the unit of blood was called a “blood trait.” So um... yeah.
AncientH:
Also, if you're wondering how the new abilities Fire Eating and Fire Walking work with Rotschrek: fuck you.
However, this does provide a good period to point out one of the weirdnesses of Vampire. I won't say a
weakness, but a
weirdness. Most of the abilities and merits and powers they make accessible to Vampires and other flavors of supernaturals take into account certain given norms. So when they provide mechanics for firewalking and fire-eating to Vampire, they're working under the assumption that you are a Vampire and are afraid of/vulnerable to fire and that this is a limited workaround. So how does it work if a ghoul or a werewolf takes one of those abilities? No one fucking knows. How does it work if your vampire is a pyromaniac or immune to fire? No one knows. There's just a lot of situations where it's not just that the skill isn't applicable, but there's a divide by kumquat error because you have entered unknown territory beyond what the designers ever envisioned...and that happens
a lot.
FrankT:
The new magical powers were an odd mixed bag. Vicissitude exists because the transformation powers in the basic game were pretty much bullshit. Level 4 Protean just to turn into a fucking bat, with no real incidental transformation at all. So since people wanted to have some sort of rubber skin melty-face
transformation powers and needed a whole new discipline for that because that is how White Wolf games worked. Obtenebration existed because someone wanted Shadow powers and they made a grab bag discipline full of awesome for that. And Dementation happened because Steve decided regular Malkavians just weren't crazy enough and needed more Crazy.
Dementation is actually completely fucking worthless. It's 5 dots worth of various magical powers that make your target have a kind of bad time for a variable amount of time. Get a good enough success and it's damn near permanent. But you know what else is nearly permanent? Hitting them in the face with a chain saw. Investing heavily in offensive magical powers where you use them on people and they
don't die is a complete fucking waste of time.
This pretty much gets to the heart of why the whole five dot discipline system was bullshit. While you
can itemize anything and split it up into five distinct levels, that doesn't mean you
should. So Obtenebration ended up being 5 distinct powers with shadow themes that (other than the first one) are each pretty distinct and powerful. On the other hand, Dementation is pretty much just five dots of incrementally creeping people out.
Nick Cage can creep people out and he probably doesn't have Dementation at all.
AncientH:
It's worth noting that these powers go up to
11 9 dots, which you are probably never going to see play with. Level nine powers are pretty badass, but your character is never going to be of the generation to use them, and even if they do manage to diablerize their way up to 4th generation, they're never going to get enough XP to buy those powers. So what the hell?
Obtenebration is weird on a couple of levels, but mostly because it became somebody's pet project in future splats with something called Abyss Mysticism. The thing is, the designers of Vampire twigged pretty early on that players were frustrated that all the really cool powers were 1) expensive and 2) completely out of their reach. They tried a few different ways to get around this, with varying levels of success.
Way #1 involved
combination disciplines, where if you had the right set of powers you could spend more XP and get new powers without actually going up in level - this was so successful they formalized it as
devotions in nWoD.
Way #2 involved finding a spin-off of your powerset that you could spend XP on. In extreme cases, this meant that you could have multiple disciplines that handled related subjects - Protean and Vicissitude for shapechanging, for example, or Necromancy, Nihilistics, and Thanatosis - but it also meant you could have spin-off shadow powers like Obtenebration and Abyss Mysticism.
Way #3 developed out of Way #2, and basically meant re-writing a discipline (or multiple disciplines) as a blood sorcery Discipline with a bunch of paths. Paths provided a bunch of relatively cool powers that were accessible to all vampires at your starting generation level and were fairly inexpensive. Yes, Thaumaturgy 6 existed, but you didn't
need it because with one exception, Paths all topped out at 5. Frank an I have talked about how this should probably have been the template for all Vampire disciplines before - Fortitude, Celerity, and Potence, if you need to have them, work better as paths of a single discipline than standalone Disciplines.
Also, sometimes they jumped the shark and combined #2 and #3, so you have both Voudoun Necromancy and Western Necromancy, but we'll get to that in a bit...
FrankT:
I defer to AH on the permutations and retcons that blood sorcery went through over the following editions. The bit I want to talk about is the setup right at the beginning. Vampire: the Masquerade was originally Ars Magica 1999, with the shift to Vampires as a subject matter being a last minute substitution. And so all the different vampire powers were divided up into disciplines, but all the “sorcery” abilities got dumped into a single discipline called “Thaumaturgy” that used a different system where you got to know several paths and learn a bunch of rituals and spells. This was originally given to just a single clan (who were originally an Ars Magica wizard faction), and that clan was much better than you.
But since the only way to really write in lots more magic powers people might actually use was to write new paths and rituals for Thaumaturgy, that kept happening. And because only Thaumaturgy let you actually get any of those magic powers, future sourcebooks pretty much gave access to Thaumaturgy to fucking everybody and their dogs. But at the time of Player's Guide to the Sabbat, Thaumaturgy was still basically a Tremere-only playground.
And it was a weird playground.
AncientH:
Yes, this is before we got the true Blood Magic bloat (which is an OSSR that needs to happen). One of the issues with early Thaumaturgy is that because it basically represented
all the blood sorcery available (outside of the highly obscure Enchantment discipline), it was highly eclectic. It basically encompassed any and all magical systems that the writers wanted, and Thaumaturgy rituals were a kitchen sink for any and all effects. The only common denominator is that they generally avoid rituals as D&D-type "spells." They're closer to Call of Cthulhu spells, where there is little to no consistency between effects, level of detail, or mechanics. Eventually they'd try to clean this up a little, but it was messy as hell for the first couple of editions.
In this book, one new Path (the Gift of Morpheus) and a shitload of rituals are introduced. None of these are Sabbat-specific. Gift of Morpheus lets you put people to sleep and enter their dreams, which is a bit like hacking in Shadowrun or Inception except you can't take your team with you so everybody else goes out to have a smoke while your RP one-on-one with the Storyteller for a bit. Gift of Morpheus also does not interact in any real way with any of the other dream-based powers written before or after this book for this or any other White Wolf game line...which is par for the course. What happens when you use this on a sleeper that a Sandman is currently visiting? Who the fuck knows?
The rituals are even more of a grab-bag, but include a couple of important ones. Preserve Blood is an alternative to having a minifridge.
Eyes of the Night Hawk creates magic birdseed that lets you see through the eyes of any bird that eats it, something that should basically should be an Animalism power, and is a classic example of Thaumaturgy making other vampires feel small in the pants. There's another ritual later on called "The Haunting" that should basically be a Necromancy ritual, but Necromancy wasn't a blood magic discipline yet at this point!
Power of the Invisible Flame lets the flames you make with Lure of the Flames be invisible. So they won't cause Rotschreck, but you can just watch fuckers burn anyway. Which could cause some really weird arson. Does invisible fire make smoke? I'd assume so.
Recure of the Homeland uses your native soil to heal you, and is plainly intended for Tzimisce but they never get it because fuck you nobody cares.
...I'm not going through all of these; there are a lot of rituals, and they do a lot of things, and many of them should just be discipline powers for other disciplines, and they go all the way up to Level 7 where you can cast Shadow of the Wolf and be a Werewolf for a night. No word if that's supposed to be a living werewolf or an abomination, but a lot of these rituals were pretty light on the mechanics back in the day.
FrankT:
Merits and Flaws are pretty insane. There are flaws that are not bad, even basically good to have. And there are Merits that screw you over. And there's no real correlation between the cost of a merit and how awesome it is. This was ported pretty much straight from Ars Magica, and while some
Ars Magica Fanbois tried to sell the basic insanities of the system as features, it was pretty obviously a poorly constructed rinky-dink operation even at the time.
AncientH:
Merits & Flaws are hilariously weird, in that they read like something from GURPS and should have been part of a general "build a vampire" kit, but nobody actually could be arsed to make that work.
Backgrounds: there are a few, but you don't get any free backgrounds so you're probably not going to spend Freebie points/XP on them. Do you care about Black Hand Membership, or being acknowledged as the Leader of your Pack, or about Sabbat Status? Probably fucking not.
Sabbat Virtues we talked about; they did not need extensive write-ups. Then we get to the tips on playing a Sabbat vampire.
Playing a Sabbat character is much like playing a Camarilla vampire. The major difference is that Sabbat accept their vampiric natures and thus do not try to act human. This can lead to many problems when you start playing, especially since part of what may have attracted you to the game is the tortured, tragically hip angst of humanity within the Beast.
If I drank, I would drink.
It is up to you to search out meaning for the character's existence. You should not play a stereotypical evil vampire, but should ask yourself questions about what it would really be like to believe oneself superior to humans and to be required to feed upon them or die. From these two aspects alone you can get many hours of entertaining roleplaying. Happily, there are few guidelines. Each player is encouraged to seek the answers in her own individual way.
I am filled with rage.
Please keep in mind that Sabbat are much more inclined to combat
than Camarilla characters.
Fuck you fuck you
fuck you.
Also keep in mind the Vinculum bonds and their effect on the character's mind. You should often encounter problems where the character is forced to act against her better judgment due to these Blood Bonds. The game can be greatly enhanced through portraying the character as externally free, while at the same time a prisoner in her own mind.
This almost approaches a philosophical point. The problem is, within the context of the game, the rules and mechanics
do constrain the character. If you're playing a game where you don't get to play how and what you want to,
you could be playing something else. The only thing that's stopping you
is your own mind.
Chapter Six: Templates
This is the People in Your Neighborhood song. We could have done the Mr. Rogers version, but 1970s Maria had a more impressive shirt. I don't think she was there to appeal to the children.
FrankT:
When White Wolf books say “templates” they mean “sample characters.” And they continue to savage the English language because no one stops them. I think part of the original deal was that the Dot Meister just went fucking hog wild with a thesaurus and named every single thing a thing that you wouldn't quite expect. And sometimes he strained this shit to the actual breaking point because I don't think his actual vocabulary was that big. But he very obviously had a thesaurus, and damned if later authors weren't going to use one too!
This book doesn't actually have fully fleshed out sample characters. Like, they don't got
numbers and shit. It's just some sample character backstories and roleplaying tips and shit. Not really a lot to say about these.
AncientH:
Not much to add here. White Wolf just paints in broad colors, doesn't fuck with equipment lists, and yet every single one of these characters has at least one weapon. It's weird, but not especially weird. Just kinda ho-hum wanking.
Next up: Appendices and Wrapup!