Yes.Thalukain wrote:Do vampires/vampire powers/vampire concepts need to be balanced?
At various points people have tried to make RPGs with the dodge "It's not supposed to be balanced!" or some other such nonsense, and it's just nonsense. RPGs are games, and gross imbalances are obvious and hurt the experience for everyone.
Basically, each player is going to look at your vampire types and think of various vampire movies and books that they are reminded of and they are going to pick a vampire clan based on those external associations. They aren't picking one of the Vagabonds because they think the group is "powerful" they are picking it because they thought Byzantium was a really good movie and they wanted to roleplay a character like Clara. They aren't picking The Sexy Ones because they've minmaxed what social bonuses they can get, but because they liked True Blood and the idea of roleplaying a character like Jessica appeals to them.
This means that if you tell the Vagabond player that they've chosen a tier three vampire concept so they get a tier one human concept, or you tell the Sexy Vamp player that they've chosen a tier two vampire concept and have to have a tier two human concept, they are going to look at you like your hair is on fire. That isn't what they came for. They came for the vampire references and hitting on goth chicks. It's not that you couldn't imagine a system in which it was balanced to pick a vampire concept and a human concept that added up to the same number of points - it's that doing that kind of thing would necessarily mean that you were showing people character concepts and then taking them away. If you have things in Column A and Column B, people should be able to select anything from Column A and anything from Column B. Otherwise it looks like you can play a Vagabond Highschool Student but actually you can't because they are both Tier 3 or some fucking thing.
Now this doesn't mean all powers have to be the same "level." You can have as many columns as you want. You can let people select one thing from Column G if you really want to. What's important is that options that are presented as being equivalent are at least roughly actually equivalent. And that very much includes your vampire clans, because those are definitely going into the same lists and presented one after another with equivalent page spreads with art and poetry interspersed with the writeups. That is definitely going to happen.
And that means that your monster face vampires are going to be interpreted by the reader as being on equal footing with your bad ass vampires whether you intend that or not. So you'd better work your ass off to make sure that they are at least arguably co-equal in an actual game.
-Username17