shinimasu wrote:Vampire's biggest failing was not letting the players start as princes. Giving ownership of the city from the start solves all engagement problems. Why should you investigate the weird rumors about the old mill? Because it's your city and if something is about to blow your sweet gig you want to stop it. Why do you care about politics? Because it's your city and no upstarts are going to unseat you if you have anything to say about it.
There's also the fact that a game about being the people who run the conspiracy is a lot more fun and a lot more interesting than being the mooks who just have to participate. Your exp going towards city management perks would be an interesting mechanic.
VtM failed in so many spots, I'm not sure this one would reach the playoffs. Before even addressing if PC should start or become princes, the problem starts with the position itself.
The President-of-the-anime-club joke is barely one. A Prince practical duties are to choose where the Elyseum is, draw the borders for hunting territories, allow or not the creation of new vampires, and punish violators. Choosing the Elyseum decoration is about as relevant to the anime club as one could imagine. Creating new vampires is outside the scope of the game as introducing new characters is either the realm of the gamemaster (in TTRPG) or new players (in LARP). For the latter 1) the laws do not let much to interpretation and thus power wielding, 2) for a supposedly established society, violations happen at an alarming rate, and 3) effective punishment ultimately relies on fighting capabilities (or delegating that particular task).
The office of princehood is whether solely about whipping ass and handed to a powerful vampire for that very reason, or a totally empty ribbon given to a powerful vampire anyway, because the character has to be somehow significant to be worthy of mention. While the title could have had some use to make the PC accept standing orders to go on quest and start playing, it obviously stops working once the players realize that the character was either made arbitrarily better than them or is weak enough to beat him into submission.
To me, one problem is that VtM focuses so much on
punishing people for
violating rules. Everything is about a NPC violating one rule or another, from breaking the Masquerade to Diablerie, until the PC understand they should as well. I guess it's the point of the source material that there is no room for rewards in this setting, only punishments, because the characters start as immortal and cursed for eternity. But as pointed out, VtM would work so much better as a game if it focused on PC
enforcing the Masquerade, and probably admitting that it's the natural state (at least in the modern times) for the Masquerade to be threatened, rather than some occasional misdeed that requires someone to be punished. That would also help define a number of roles within a team, and allow to punish or remove a Prince when the Masquerade is not properly defended against those "natural threats".
I actually wonder if someone thought about this at some point early in development, considering they called the game "The Masquerade", made the Camarilla the PC faction and the Sabbat the bad guys (then hold it for about five minutes, before people wanted to play Sabbat, LARPers obviously had to focus on vampires-on-vampires plot, and the writers throwing in dick NPC).
FrankTrollman wrote:Roleplaying out a "first hunt" or something might be OK. Once. But there's a fucking reason that actual vampire books and stories gloss over almost all (or even literally all) of the nightly feeding activities. The novelty wears off super fast, and then it's basically like narrating a character putting on pants or toasting their bagels or any other mundane activity they do every single fucking day of their entire fucking lives. The fact that the V5 people thought this should be a central tent pole of the franchise indicates that everyone involved had no concept of what this would look like as an actually playable game.
For a game that prizes itself in being about storytelling, I'm still bemused by how they introduce a rule that goes so blatantly against proper pacing of storytelling.