Anatomy of Failed Design
Vampire: the Masquerade
talozin wrote:part of the vampire aging process is that eventually you can't gain blood points from animals, and then eventually you can't get them from humans and have to get them from vampires instead, and then if you go far enough down the line you can't get them from just any vampire and have to get them from super old and/or low generation vampires.
That's only explicitly a thing in nWoD. It's a very good idea, but that was an effect of the Blood Potency rules. And that's as good a time as any to talk about...
The War of Ages
A central theme of Masquerade is supposed to be a power struggle between different vampire interest groups delineated by power. I've never seen this done well and most real world games don't even try to use it. It's fucked up in so many ways that we're gonna devote an entire post to it.
All Those Stupid Words
Vampire has a lot of stupid words. The glossary is quite long and isn't even complete. Mostly we make fun of them for stupid discipline and bloodline names, but we make joke disciplines with names like “Obscurica” because the stupid bloodline and discipline names are game terms that we can't really get away from. All those words like “Jyhad” (pronounced “Jai-had” not like the actual word “jihad”) don't get made fun of because they aren't used at all.
Now making catch phrases is hard. Joss Whedon movies are very quotable, but a lot of lines in Buffy and The Avengers are not things that you'd say. There's no shame in trying and failing to meme push in-world terminology. Shadowrun managed to get some people to say “Frag” but I don't think anyone really said “slitch.” Nightlife got people to say “Rinse and Floss” but didn't get people to say “Butt It.” And so on and so forth. The problem with Vampire's gibberish terminology is that there aren't really words you can use to talk about these things without the in-world terminology. So if you don't end up using the provided terminology because it's klunky, vaguely racist, or just plain stupid sounding, you're left basically just not talking about the context at all.
But the real problem here is that the terms just didn't mean things that made sense. A Methusela was 4th generation, but an Ancilla was 150 years old. There supposed to be different teams in the war of ages defined by these groupings, but the terms didn't mean the same things. How can an age group be opposed to a generation, when everyone's a fucking immortal and there are members of each generation that are also members of each age group? Masquerade failed to make these groups have explicable goals, but beyond that it failed to make these groups be exclusive enough for group goals to be a thing you
could grasp or explain.
Age, Power, and, Generation
Generations from Caine was just really fucking dumb. It was an immutable marker of power that was entirely dependent on shit that happened before the character was ever a vampire. You could be a 1000 year old bad ass but part of the 12th generation and still always suck (in a bad way) compared to some asshole upstart whose first taste of blood was from some other 7th generation asshole five years ago. The idea was that we were doing Anne Rice, so drinking powerful blood was supposed to make you more powerful. But the entire “only the first drop counts” thing was super bullshit all over the place. It created all kinds of perverse incentives like using your defeated enemies to sire your own offspring. Your childer had no reason to be “your clan” and should logically just be the clan of whatever the last boss villain you defeated.
Similarly, the diablerie mechanics were so bad that they what they encouraged was not for you to drink the soul of your defeated enemy, but to string them up and use their blood to turn a couple other helpless victims and then drink
their souls and only then drink the soul of the dude you were nominally pissed at in the first place. The fact that you only gained one generation for murder fucking someone with a better generation than you, but that the blood of someone with a better generation could always be used to make a new vamp with a generation only one worse than theirs was simply conceptual failure at its hardest.
What's going on here is that we're (poorly) duplicating Anne Rice tropes. In the Anne Rice novels, your blood gets more potent over time, but it also gets more potent faster if you drink the blood of someone with more potent blood. Now doing things
exactly like Anne Rice would be a nightmare without a computer. We're talking about something that's supposed to kick in over hundreds or thousands of years with every sip along the way contributing based on how awesome the blood was.
Obviously you can't do that justice in a tabletop or LARP game, but equally obviously having distinct points with permanent and difference engineable power effects is prone to abuse and doesn't actually provide the Rician flavor you're obviously looking for.
One of the few ideas that nWoD had that wasn't unsalvageable crap was the Blood Potency. Your blood just gradually got more potent as you aged, and you could also spend XPs to raise your Blood Potency. The end. That actually does the job well enough. Not perfectly, because we still haven't gotten a way to communicate to the
players that the characters want to be drinking the blood of elder vampires rather than whatever hobo blood they are drinking at the moment. But that brings us to our next problem: Blood Bonding.
Who is Sucking Who?
Meh. Close enough.
Vampire had this idea of vampire blood being addictive to drink. That vampires could enslave not only normal people but other vampires by getting them to drink their blood. This ultimately all has to do with the thing where Dracula forces Mina to drink blood out of his chest, but there's a bunch of kinky blood sex games in Anne Rice and other source material along the way. It's a neat image and blood bonding was an important part of the setting. It is, however,
terrible for the setting.
Vampires drink blood. It's a thing they do. Vampires need to be drinking blood from people to assert their dominance. If drinking blood from someone is a
submissive gesture, then we are severely unmoored. What are vampires supposed to be doing to normal people then? Using their magic powers and vampiric sexiness to run around
submitting to everyone in town? What the fuck?
It also puts a huge crimp in the stories we can tell about elders throwing their weight around. If they in fact
do not want to drink your blood, why do they care about you at all? The whole point was that vitae was supposed to be a thing you wanted, but if drinking it causes submission and dependency, obviously no one does. That is completely fucking wrong.
At step two, Mina is already under his power.
Dracula owns your ass because he drank from
you three times, not the other way around. Feeding you his heart blood is a way to infect you with vampirism, not to dominate you. The domination was already accomplished before he even takes off his shirt.
The entire blood bonding shit is backwards. It should be that vampires who drink from you three times make you their bitch. This would allow the elders to want and need to drink from lower tier vampires, which would encourage Dracula to keep his wives around, explain why powerful vampires make new vampires in general, explain why younger vampires feel afraid of and oppressed by the older vampires and so on and so forth. Really,
so many things would work so much better if the blood bond was caused by fang kissing someone on three different nights. You could even have the blood of vampires be a thing you wanted to drink so that you wouldn't have to constantly tell players that their character wanted to drink shit that the player absolutely did not want their character to touch.
Gehenna
The idea of Gehenna was a bit of Christian millennialism that sort of shat all over the Vampire metaplot. The idea was that the end of the world was coming and you might be in the Final Nights. Which was supposed to give a bit of immediacy to everything, but mostly just badly undermined the immortality theme. If the world is going to end in less than 40 years, whether you age or not is really not all that important.
The deal was that Antediluvians (3rd generation vampires from 6000 years ago) were going to wake up and go all Queen of the Damned on people. And that was going to be the end of the world, because they were super hard core 6000 years ago. This is a failure of theme on a bunch of levels.
Firstly, old vampires waking up and this being a
problem is something that only makes sense if you've fixed the blood bond issue and you actually have the expectation that older vampires are going to want to drink your blood. If the blood of weaker vampires is something that stronger vampires avoid like herpes hotpockets, then there's no reason for higher tier vampires to give a second fuck about the doings of lower level vampires and thus the great awakening should be visited by a collective yawn.
But secondly, the whole “ancient power” thing only makes sense if you posit that people are
gaining power over time. The ancients are powerful
now because they are 6000 years old
and have been growing in power. If the presentation is instead that they were world floobifying badasses
back then, then history just doesn't make any sense. It's a failure to understand the entire thought process behind ancient powers being at all relavent.
And of course there's the somewhat minor issue that the Noah's Flood shit is shit and you should be ashamed of yourself for writing that YEC garbage into a game.
The ancient vampires preparing to awaken from the sleep of ages and issue in a reign of terror where they eat a whole bunch of younger vampires is
totally awesome. But by having that actually
end the setting, it loses any narrative power. And of course, all the details were shit. If you were going to make a vampire game that wasn't stupid, the threat of the awakening elders should be there, but it should be different in almost every respect from what V:tM actually delivered.