Grek wrote:
As for the actual mechanics, an idea hit me. A "Lore" dicepool or skill which is used in checks to protect yourself, other people and locations from the bad guys. This can manifest itself by saying prayers, hanging garlic everywhere, doing voodoo magic to drive out evil spirits or by waving a cross around. Why a thing works or why a thing doesn't work becomes flavour and keeping things thematic is left up to the DM saying, "No that's stupid and doesn't fit with the setting, pick something else."
This is exactly the same as the "Piety" mechanic, and it's still completely out of genre. The
entire point of this genre is that somebody with prior vampire experience can be told
over the phone about the fact that you've been vampire attacked twice, and he can tell you to run around wearing garlic flower necklaces to keep a third attack from happening
over the phone, and then you can do that and have it work.
In short, you don't need to "be" someone awesome to use knowledge of vampiric weaknesses, you don't even need to know all the weaknesses. You just need to know
a weakness and respond accordingly. You can be told what the weakness is in the middle of a battle, or look it up in book, or get an info dump during an adventure, or even just guess and check until you die or find something that works. This knowledge functions not like a personal power rating but like
actual knowledge, because it's
actual knowledge!
You don't wait for the level up music before you can act on being told about the garlic thing or shown a mystic protective ward, you can just do it immediately, because these are discrete facts that someone can tell you in a 3 second "did you know" segment. The D&D model, where you are expected to never fight the same monster twice and the party sage gives the exposition of what the hell you're up against each time - is totally not in force. There are only about 1-20 monster types in the entire world, and the expectation is that if you make a campaign of it you'll end up fighting the same monster type over and over again. And you get to respond like they do in Monster Squad or Lost Boys - by taking limited information and making weapons out of that.
It's about using personal ingenuity to take advantage of consistent and knowable physics to achieve a MacGuyveresque victory. Not about you using your inherent awesomeness to power through all problems with your huge die rolls.
-Username17