Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

[Whipstitch]

I guess, but I've never known a VTM player who was enticed by the "gotta drink blood" / "need to hunt" gameplay and not one of the other three.

The problem here is that you're defaulting to the sadly common assumption that things only matter if the player characters are actively partaking and that's not the case at all when trying to brew up setting material. Player characters are unpredictable agents of change by nature and by design. They are the bull, and your job as the designer or GM is to create an interesting china shop. As a player you can and do handwave your own feeding habits more often than not but meanwhile it's still good ambiance when NPCs routinely get their fangs wet.

[Sir Aubergine]

But honestly, you don't really have to go that far. You can trim down the background murder rate to something vaguely plausible and fit it into a world that has only slightly more violent death than ours does. In the real world, seven percent of people in the United States will ultimately die of some form of injury (mostly falls and car crashes). That's 472 injury-related deaths every day, of which 44 are murders and 93 are gun deaths (most gun deaths are accidents or suicides rather than muders). You could imagine a world where 8% of deaths in the US were injury deaths and that extra 1% was all stabbings, shootings, and bear attacks. That extra 67 violent deaths per day could be swallowed by the statistics and honestly most people in America believe that they live in a world like that anyway. The fact that murder accounts for less than two thirds of one percent of the deaths in the United States is something that people find genuinely surprising.

However, while you could have 67 supernatural related murders every day in the US and have the statistics swallow that and have a still reasonably recognizable Earth, that still doesn't leave room for vampires that kill a dude every day. The 67th largest city in the US is apparently Henderson, Nevada, and it has nearly three hundred thousand people in it. If you have one vampire in every city with more than 290,000 people in it, that's your whole allotment of magic murders, and that's obviously way too few vampires to have a meaningful vampire society.

67 supernatural murders every day is plenty of room to have supernatural gang wars and the occasional supernatural serial killer and a few zombie outbreak mass casualty incidents. It is, in short, enough to have something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the 13th getting resolved in two places around the country every day. But it's nowhere close to being able to support vampires who have to eat humans on any regular basis.
-Username17

Here's an idea to maintain verisimilitude. What if a vampire that drains a victim to death completely absorbs their body? The absorption leaves not a single trace behind, right down to the molecular level.

That keeps your uniform crime report statistics low, as I don't believe a death in absentia is added to the murder tally.

Now, leaving no corpse behind is not as visceral, and so some of the grisly nature of the murder is lost. But you could make the mechanics more interesting by saying that absorbing a victim is a time consuming process (taking an hour for each corpse, for example). That way, a vampire that was rushed or injured might leave corpses behind, especially if they were the result of a battle and the slaughter would result in the police showing up before the scene was "cleaned." You could even have a rule that says that all vampires have the supernatural ability to detect and extirpate microscopic traces of any mortal they have killed, ensuring that they clean up after themselves perfectly, every time, extenuating circumstances notwithstanding.

One thing to note Frank, is that the UCR, NIBRS, and the rest are not perfect. There is a "specter of crime," representing unreported crimes that, when added to the reported cases, form the true incidence of crime in the United States.

So a quick and dirty way to account for the vampiric maiming and killing is to proclaim that most or even all of those attacks are unreported.

[hyzmarca]

Its important to remember that this is the World of Darkness. It's pretty fair to assume that a probably a third of the human population should be off the grid and living in abandoned factories and burnt-out cars.

Honestly, the whole vampire conspiracy should just come with a salary in blood from blood banks. It would explain why most vampires listen to the local Prince at all instead of just having their ghouls set his house on fire during the day.

The degree to which the world is horrible is highly variable in World of Darkness products. The core problem is that the entire reason we are using "basically Earth" in the first place is because of easy buy-in and easy world building. Which is another way of saying that we are doing things low fantasy because the alternative is having to do a lot of work in world building and requiring players to read a lot of shit before they can play the game.

What's wrong with just relying on the fact that most of your players are so bad at math that they actually think your dice system isn't complete shit to smooth over any problems with the statistics?

the dark triad,

I'll stop you right there. No one wants to play that game, because it means sitting at the table with that guy, or someone who can reasonably fake being that guy. And no one wants to game with that guy.

It's like, if you decide to play an evil D&D game. All evil characters. You're all adults. You can handle some dark stuff. You can even handle the extremely softcore smut from the BoVD (which really should be called the Book of Ho-hum Kinks). And then someone brings to the table a character sheet for Braakor, the child-raper. It's stapled to a 337-page single-space backstory that's really quite publishable and enthralling. But you still don't want him in your game.

Roleplaying is acting. There's a line between a player and a character. You can, of course, play a guy called the child-raper and have no desire to rape children, either real life or in game. But rolyplaying is also improvisional acting. It's spontaneous. There are no scripts. And that requires a different level of care and trust. The emotional line between playuer and character is blurry. Your words and deeds don't come from the hands of a writer, half the world away and several years ago, they come from inside you in the moment. The comfort of all players is of paramount importance.


And no one wants to be in the room with a malignant narcissist who is having a blowout. That's just frightening and uncomfortable. That's not something you want to deal with at your table.

Vampions is easier.

If you start with the assumption that you are bad guys who do bad things then your game turns into a BDSM session. Players have to work out limits, comfort zones, boundaries, and safe-words. They have to be comfortable with each other and trust each other. This is because once you agree that you cannot rely on social norms to govern each-others behavior, then you can't rely on social norms to govern each-others behavior, that's a tautology. When the unspoken rules go out the window, then all rules must be spoken.

You don't have this problem with "good" games, because you assume that basic social rules actually apply. You don't have to say "don't skin my alive and make a me suit out of my skin" (or at least shouldn't). That should be a given. Characters are expected to act like good people, or at least decent ones. Players can become uncomfortable, but it's less likely.


Which is why you can vampions more often than you get Hannibal: The RPG.

It's not that no one wants to play Silence of the RPG. It's that few people want to play Jame Gumb in Silence of the RPG, and fewer people want to sit at the table with someone who does. And the set of players who can make that work is an exceedingly tiny subset of the set of all Vampire players.

[Voss]

That really sounds like shit. If you told me that we are going to play a game about vampires and then revealed that "vampires" really just means D&D Adventurers and/or bad people, I'd probably get up and leave. Aesthetics absolutely matter and a game about vampires can't exist without vampire aesthetics, except as a post-modern art piece.

1st, I wouldn't talk about vampires being a metaphor, and I wouldn't "reveal" to the players that they were metaphorical vampires. Doing that undermines the entire idea of "personal horror".

2nd, most games of VTM already are "you guys are like DnD adventurers, get ready to fight some vampires or werewolves for XP and loot". And really, is there a difference between D&D adventurers and bad people?

3rd, what are the aesthetics of vampires? I said immortality, the vampire magic powers, and the way they behave and act (the dark triad, among other traits). If leaving out "blood" was a mistake, I'm sorry, I thought it was a given because the other 3 guarantee that there will be blood. Do the vampires need to literally drink blood? I guess, but I've never known a VTM player who was enticed by the "gotta drink blood" / "need to hunt" gameplay and not one of the other three.

1) So... no one else knows or cares about the metaphor, so... would have to behave as if they were actually vampires, thus negating the whatever fucking point 'metaphorical' vampires would actually have. Uh-huh.

2) Strangely, not everyone plays like this, especially not 100% of the time.

3) If you've never met a VTM player who was a blood fetishist OR hunt fetishist, you pretty much haven't met many.

Not sure why magic powers or immortality would make blood a given, and have no idea what you mean by 'the dark triad,' but it sounds emo and sad.

[hyzmarca]

Not sure why magic powers or immortality would make blood a given, and have no idea what you mean by 'the dark triad,' but it sounds emo and sad.

The "Dark Triad" is Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.

Someone who possesses these three traits is a thoroughly unpleasant kitten-raper at best.

[ArmorClassZero]

[deleted]

[hyzmarca]

This is so asinine it has to be a joke. You can have these three traits in varying degrees and not be a necrophiliac pedophilic sadistic mass-murdering cartoon villain

Here are some examples: Dexter, as was previously mentioned. Petyr Baelish "Little Finger" from Game of Thrones. Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men. Louis "Lou" Bloom from Nightcrawler. The Joker from The Dark Night. Fucking Darth Vader from Star Wars fits the dark triad. I'm sure the list goes on and on.

Dexter doesn't. He's psychologically compelled to kill, and is basicially a murder addict, but he's someone who doesn't have a high opinion of himself at all. He knows he's screwed up and is rather humble about it. He lacks both pride and grandiosity. Furthermore, though his empathy is muted, it most certainly does exist.

The others, however, are all deeply unpleasant kitten-rapers. Especially Darth Vader.

[ArmorClassZero]

[deleted]

[Username17]

Here's an idea to maintain verisimilitude. What if a vampire that drains a victim to death completely absorbs their body? The absorption leaves not a single trace behind, right down to the molecular level.

That doesn't really help. The issue isn't that bodies are too hard to hide. There's like the entirety of Alaska. If you wanted to hide a mass grave somewhere, the chances of it being found within the next century are pretty low. Especially if you owned a big chunk of land and legally dumped some low-impact construction debris or something there on a different part of it on a regular basis. It just isn't that hard for any reasonable amount of bodies to be hidden by a sufficiently competent vampire conspiracy.

The problem is that we just don't live in a world where people can go missing and stay missing in the numbers required for there to be a meaningful vampire conspiracy where the vampires also had an individual mandate to disappear people at any measurable weekly or nightly rate. In 2012 there were 661 thousand missing people reported, but only two thousand of those people were still missing at the end of the year, and a considerable number of those people were also eventually found.

Two thousand people isn't enough to have the vampires from Lost Boys be in the city in Lost Boys (which only has 64 thousand people in it). Or rather, it isn't if each of the vampires is permanently disappearing people nightly or even weekly. Here's the demographic challenge:

• Vampires are active in cities all over the country.
• Vampires are numerous enough in the places they are active that you can have meaningful social interactions between them.
• Each Vampire remains active for a long time. Not months or even years, but decades and even centuries.

That means that if you have any demands on murders over time per vampire that your murder numbers get out of hand. You're talking about a demographic group that is actually much more numerous than the "prolific serial killer" demographic that are individually active for much longer. It's just not practical.

Which means that when you do have vampire murders, you shouldn't cheapen by having the corpses do something silly. It should be a big sexy bloody mess, because it's rare enough to be narratively important. Murder should never happen in the background, because that's not horror.

-Username17

[Ignimortis]

White Wolf never really decided for themselves whether a blood point is 1/10 of a physical blood supply of a body, or if it's just a 1/10th of some amorphous lifeforce which doesn't leave a human a liter of blood down from a "safe" feeding. They are still undecided on that, I think, because the blood rules suggest the latter, but the fact that draining a human completely leaves a shriveled husk conforms to the former. Running it as the latter makes way more sense, though.
It was my impression that Cam vamps just take 2-3BP from several people - that works mechanically, if you want to waste a night making hunt rolls, then yes, you can top off pretty reliably. On the issue of leaving a witness that way, the videogame adaptation, VtM: Bloodlines did this best - if a vampire bites a human, they're dazed and forgetful for a few minutes, which means they don't remember the feeding at all. The fact that the tabletop rules never caught up to that is baffling, though.

[hyzmarca]

In 2012 there were 661 thousand missing people reported, but only two thousand of those people were still missing at the end of the year, and a considerable number of those people were also eventually found.

The Dresden File's solution to the supernatural murder rate being way too high was to use the first statistic, but not the second. That is to say, they assume that the missing person rate is the permanently missing person rate, and that those people just aren't ever found.

It's an easy trick to use, because most of the places that advertise the big scary missing person statistics completely forget to mention that most of them are found the same day.

[Dogbert]

Something team Achilli keeps forgetting is that V:tM was the greatest case of Death of the Author in the hobby.

The percentage of the Masquerade playerbase who actually was in to play fanged emo hobos, moping in filthy alleys for being cursed with awesome? Negligible. The playerbase was divided in two: Those who played vampions and those who played Game of Fangs: Now with 200% Redder Weddings.

THAT was where it was at. And guess what? Neither of the two main demographics cared for the feeding minigame much.

Now, is it an important theme of the game? Of course it is, and it must exist... but it must not be inevitable/mandatory, let alone turned into the end-all-be-all of the gaming experience, because chances are your players are in for all the murder or cloak-and-dagger games, and having to waste game time to the feeding minigame cramps both of their respective styles.

The current Hunger system in 5E looks promising, but alas, given the huge turd the rest promises to be, that's as far as my expectations go.

[Thaluikhain]

As an aside, in media people cut their palms to get blood to give to vampire or make blood oaths or whatever. Where's the best place to cut yourself for this? Um...not that I'm likely to feed vampires or make too many blood oaths, myself, though.

The problem is that we just don't live in a world where people can go missing and stay missing in the numbers required for there to be a meaningful vampire conspiracy where the vampires also had an individual mandate to disappear people at any measurable weekly or nightly rate. In 2012 there were 661 thousand missing people reported, but only two thousand of those people were still missing at the end of the year, and a considerable number of those people were also eventually found.

Couldn't you pad those numbers out with undocumented illegal immigrants? Though, that might take the game bad places.

[deaddmwalking]

As an aside, in media people cut their palms to get blood to give to vampire or make blood oaths or whatever. Where's the best place to cut yourself for this? Um...not that I'm likely to feed vampires or make too many blood oaths, myself, though.

It's worth mentioning that movies aren't real. What looks cool in a movie is often a bad idea in real life. Your hand touches lots of surfaces - a cut there is likely to get infected. It's not a good idea to deliberately cut your hand under any circumstances.

[hyzmarca]

As an aside, in media people cut their palms to get blood to give to vampire or make blood oaths or whatever. Where's the best place to cut yourself for this? Um...not that I'm likely to feed vampires or make too many blood oaths, myself, though.

It's worth mentioning that movies aren't real. What looks cool in a movie is often a bad idea in real life. Your hand touches lots of surfaces - a cut there is likely to get infected. It's not a good idea to deliberately cut your hand under any circumstances.

It's not just infection. Scars don't stretch. The skin on your palm needs to stretch in order for your fingers to move properly. A scar on the palm will cause a significant loss of manual dexterity. I have a small scar on my palm, and it took me years to get used to it. I still can't move my fingers exactly the way I want to. They're just slower and it takes extra effort. There's no nerve damage at all, this is just the effort it takes to move because the scar doesn't stretch, which makes my skin put significantly more pressure on every single bone and muscle in my hand when I stretch out my fingers. It's not good.

The palm is also shit because it really doesn't bleed much. My palm was cut down to the muscle, and it didn't bleed at all. The heel of your palm will bleed, but the central part, where most people cut in movies and television, will not do so at a significant rate.

So not only is it a terrible idea that has a high risk of infection, it will permanently debilitate you and doesn't even work all that well.



The real answer is that there isn't one. Any cut that causes significant amounts of bleeding has the potential to be lethal if you can't control the bleeding. If you want to feed a vampire of make bleed oaths, the best thing to do is take a phlebotomy course and use a hypodermic needle.

That being said, historically barber-surgeons preferred to use the upper arms for bloodletting. It's not a bad choice. Convenient, accessible, scars can be covered by a shirt.

[Mask_De_H]

Finally, here's a helpful table to hopefully settle this issue:

Vampires risk killing people when feeding	Game Genre	Jimmies
YES	NOT HORROR	not rustled
NO	NOT HORROR	not rustled
YES	HORROR	not rustled
NO	HORROR	rustled

Table A: Incidence of rustled jimmies regarding vampires in RPGs (sample size: 1)

There was always the potential to kill when feeding in the discussion you dumb bastard. The argument was that vampires shouldn't always kill when feeding, because that makes it more impactful when they do and doesn't fuck with actual factual real world data.

Take your rustled jimmies and shove them up your ass.

[Grek]

As an aside, in media people cut their palms to get blood to give to vampire or make blood oaths or whatever. Where's the best place to cut yourself for this? Um...not that I'm likely to feed vampires or make too many blood oaths, myself, though.

You want to pick a location that will bleed, but which you are unlikely to want to move or touch things with. I suggest the earlobe, the ribs or, if you insist on using the hands, the side of the hand next to the pinky. And punctures and a way better idea than long cuts.

[Username17]

If you want to cut your hand for blood drawing purposes, you want to nick one of the veins on the back of the hand.



You can get enough blood to write a page in blood or have it dribble sexily out of the corners of someone's mouth with an injury the size of a sewing needle's point. Just poke the blue bumpy part downstream from the ring finger.

That whole area is hairy skin rather than sensitive skin, so it doesn't even hurt. And not only are you unlikely to get a scar because the wound will be so small, but even if it did scar you wouldn't care because the skin there isn't being asked to stretch and bend much and is already visually disrupted by small hairs.

When I took some of my own blood for testing while I was passing a kidney stone, that's where I took it from. Works fine.

-Username17

[K]

Every conversation about why people would become vampires must start with this.

[Username17]

Every conversation about why people would become vampires must start with this.

Definitely one of the parts that Masquerade got right was that some people want to play sexy vampires with black leather pants that lace up the sides and other people do not. Letting some people play Toreadors in leather pants who have super sexiness as an actual power while other people play Gangrel in dirty trench coats who have powers to cover themselves in dirt was fucking genius. I've never played a Toreador, but I've slept with women who did.

Of course, the actual powers that Rein*Hagen allowed vampires to have were way too "level 1." Whether you want to play the "Crazy Vampire" or the "Sexy Vampire" or the "Savage Vampire" I can pretty much guaranty that the kind of vampire you don't want to play is the "Weak-Ass Vampire with No Powers." Shows like Buffy and movies like From Dusk Til Dawn have some Vampires who are just disposable mooks that get killed by being stabbed with a pool cue or some shit, but no one wants to play one of those things. Even a new vampire like Michael in Lost Boys still gets to fly around and have super strength.

You can very easily make an argument that the initial seven clans weren't great. Do we really need Ventrue and Gangrel? Do we really need Tremere and Ventrue? While at the same time, if I want to play a flying vampire or a face stealing vampire, why can't I do that? There definitely weren't enough vampire types, and some of the vampire types they did have were redundant. Seems to me that if you want to play a vampire "like Dracula" you should be able to just do that by selecting the "like Dracula vampire" option. And yes, that might be the most popular option. So fucking what?

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

Yeah, I always felt like WOD had too many choices for choosing what group your character belonged to. My only actual playing experience was playing Werewolf, and there were too many tribes there too. Lots of overlapping concepts...

[Longes]

Yeah, I always felt like WOD had too many choices for choosing what group your character belonged to. My only actual playing experience was playing Werewolf, and there were too many tribes there too. Lots of overlapping concepts...

This is one of the areas nWoD covered better by reducing the number of clans to 5 and then letting you customize yourself with a potentially unique bloodline.

In oWoD while "Noble Vampire" and "Wizard Vampire" are broad concepts which you can claim are sufficiently different for both to be clans, you then also have clans for: "Satanist Vampire", "Egyptian Snake Cultist Vampire", "Indian Cannibal Necromancer Vampire" and "Finnish Sami People Gangrel Vampire". Which are all obviously "my concept is my clan" vampire that existed just to make a speshul NPC. I'm going to bet that there are zero people who chose Noiad over Gangrel because the concept space it covers is so narrow it could be a 3.5 prestige class. If at any point you are writing a vampire clan that requires you to be a Finnish Sami (Russian Sami need not apply) who lives in the far north of Finland, then you've lost the plot. Even for a game that revolves around vampires surviving in the northern Finland it's still shit because you only get Gangrel powers and obviously some people would want to have different powers.

[Thaluikhain]

By comparison, what about WHFB's vampires, where you had Traditional, Feral, Sexy Lady, or Scary Wizard? Or Knight, but as I forgot them for a moment, perhaps they are redundant.

(I don't like that the one that's all female has to be the sexy one, and has to hate men, though)

Not the same kind of game, of course, but AFAIK people weren't unhappy with the sorts of vampires you could have.

If you want to cut your hand for blood drawing purposes, you want to nick one of the veins on the back of the hand.

Huh, ok, hadn't heard that one, thanks.

[Schleiermacher]

In my own VtM house rules I use five clans:

Strigoi - traditional Dracula/"vampire as nobility" types
Lamia - Lost Boys/sexy vampires
Nosferatu - walking corpse/monstrous plague carrier vampires
Bruja - Spooky wizard vampires
Vrykolak - Savage wilderness-dwelling conflated-with-werewolves vampires.

Some of the more exotic vampire variants, like Vetalas and Asanbosam, are represented by bloodlines and obscure powers, and some are just chalked up to "Vow of Silence" style misinformation and don't actually exist. (You won't find any Pennagallan in my games for example, although some shapeshifters can do some things which could explain how such stories got started.)

[Longes]

Personally, I think it's a good idea to just have build-a-vampire constructor, and have clans exclusively as political structures rather than expressions of vampirism.