Vampire: the Masquerade
Yeah, that seems like a thing we could do. Vampire: the Masquerade is a thing we talk about a fair bit. Because it has a really good pitch and has gotten so many of us laid. But also because it is a flaming trainwreck which almost invariably fails to deliver on its promises even on seemingly trivial shit. It fails to motivate players to do the things they are supposed to do (when was the last time you saw anyone even consider transforming themselves back into a human?), it fails to hold up at all when considered in any depth. But let's do this piece by piece, because there are a lot of pieces.Lokey wrote:I wonder if there's a more general Vampire: the * topic to go over this stuff in. RAW (as wonky as they are), as long as you're not saddled with disciplines (which of course means power gaming the crap out of character creation) that suck and you can reliably get a few blood points per day, you're good to slowly build whatever power structure you want. The problem is the horrid setting/npcs: they're there to keep you from doing anything interesting.
Guess I'd like Frank to unpack his vampires that can't feed themselves comment, because that's the main problems of the system in a nutshell.
The Mechanics
OK, the Mechanics of White Wolf games are awful. They just kept being awful through the company's entire publishing history. We went in a little bit into how fucking bad they were in the NWOD Anatomy of Failed Design, but it really needs to be said many many times: Vampire had a shitty system. That doesn't mean there weren't clever bits here and there, and we'll get to those. But the core system was an incomplete and incompetent last minute conversion of a d10 roll-over system into a dicepool system. It didn't work at all, and White Wolf authors have mostly taken to just spouting random shit under the idea that the audience was just going to ignore the rules anyway. Which of course they would, because the rules were so shit. When nWoD came around, they actually tried to make a half decent system and they failed. The later authors eventually gave up pretending to care what those rules were and went back to their safety blanket: spouting random shit under the assumption that the audience was going to ignore it all anyway.
Vampire had shit mechanics that the audience was encouraged to not use. And the writers of the expansion material had no idea what the mechanics even were because they fucking ignored them all. So the result is that not only are the mechanics incomprehensible bullshit, but they aren't even the same incomprehensible bullshit book to book or even chapter to chapter.
Vampire badly needed someone to write a decent set of core mechanics and then force all subsequent authors to use them or explicitly update them if they were going to do that. Like nWoD, if hypothetically nWoD had had a mechanical system that wasn't completely asstastic. As is, there's really no point in talking about what the RAW even is, because the rules aren't written coherently enough for that to be a thing. Everything that is written is written to the heavily mindcaulked headcanon of whatever author is writing at the moment, and there is no consistent framework to be found anywhere. So throughout this rant, I'm gonna stay away from the nitty gritty details of what the dice mechanics imply, because no one actually plays them as written and it just doesn't matter. We are instead critiquing the design of the game's concepts.
The Care and Feeding of Vampires
Vampire: the Masquerade posits vampires who have to drink a tenth of a human's blood every night just to stay alive. And then drink even more to use a lot of their powers, heal, or have sex. A tenth of a human's blood is about a pint of blood. Now, Vampire: the Masquerade never really thought through what that means, and is stupid and contradictory about how much you can drink from an individual. But in the real world, a healthy modern human is able to give a pint of blood about once every 56 days. This means that every vampire who isn't leaving a giant pile of corpses in their wake needs to have a herd of 56 people times their burn rate. Most vampires have more than 10 blood traits, and could plausibly be spending them all every night, which implies a herd need of several hundred per vampire. If you do want to leave a trail of corpses in your wake, the trail of corpses is huge. Each dead human only gives you ten pints, so that's 35 dead humans a year times your burn rate. A vampire who uses their powers or heals injuries or any of that shit is looking at killing hundreds of people a year.
Now let's consider what this means for secrecy. First of all, famous serial killers generally kill less than twenty people. Jeffrey Dahmer famously murdered seventeen people in his 13 year reign of terror. If you are killing people for food in this game, you will need to kill that many in less than six months. One vampire, anywhere in the world, who is regularly feeding by draining human victims dry is a murder spree of international notoriety that strains the Masquerade to the breaking point. Vampire: the Masquerade implies that a significant fraction of vampires do this – indeed that they have no other choice. But consider what this means even for keeping the secret among vampires who don't kill their prey. They are sinking their fangs into hundreds of people, six or seven times a year for each person. Vampires get orgasmic bites and can heal up the puncture wounds from their fangs, but this is obviously way too big a circle to possibly keep a secret if there isn't any magic preventing them from blabbing. JFK couldn't get his dick wet in Marilyn Monroe without that eventually becoming public knowledge. Two people can only keep a secret if one of them is dead and we're talking about hundreds of people for every vampire.
Now, magical compulsions to not go blabbing exist. You could make ghouls, or use the Dominate power. Now, Ghouls don't help in the slightest. They need to drink one of your blood points every month, and they are still regular humans so you can only take one pint of their blood every 8 weeks. So keeping each ghoul maintained is only a small strain on your herd size, it's still a net negative so that's just a failure to launch. The Dominate power is more interesting. With three dots of it, you can rewrite peoples' memories for short periods of time. So you can drink blood from people and make them think something else happened – no knowledge, no blabbing. The Masquerade is secure, for people who have three dots of Dominate. You can also feed off animals (well, some vampires can). You make animals freak the fuck out unless you have the Animalism power. So broadly speaking, anyone who has access to Animalism or Dominate could plausibly keep the Masquerade even while drinking blood every night. Presence would allow you to get people to agree to be drunk from, which is enough to keep the Masquerade going for a few nights – but obviously and laughably insufficient to keep things going year after year without your shenanigans becoming public knowledge.
Of the 13 basic clans, four and a half of them have Dominate (Malkavians either get Dominate or Dementation, and if they get the latter they have no means to feed); four of them have Animalism; three of them have Presence only, and the Assamites (and Dementor Malkavians) can go die in a fire. Later on they produced a bunch more bloodlines like City Gangrel and Samedi who, like the Assamites, have no means in their clan powers to feed in secret.
But remember, having a magic power available to your clan is not the same thing as having a magic power available to you. Each clan has three disciplines and each starting vampire gets three dots to distribute between those disciplines. The only power which convincingly allows vampires to drink human blood without having everyone in the whole damn world know that they are doing it requires all three dots to be placed in Dominate. And that's only an option for four and a half of the clans. Even laying aside the clans and bloodlines that have no access to feeding abilities, even most vampires in the clans which provide access to those powers won't actually have them. What you have is a situation where a super majority of vampires won't be able to successfully cover up their own feeding for years if ever.
Just for starters, the amount of blood you get out of people is ridiculous. Vampires should be taking considerably less than a pint of blood. Also, in the real world, the loss of 10% of your blood is a non-issue while the loss of 40% of your blood is life threatening. Draining someone to death could be the taking of 10 blood traits, but they'd still have ten more blood traits to drain. That wouldn't solve the serial killer issues, but it would be less completely fucking ridiculous. But it would certainly help a lot if you could get two traits from one human or feed off them once a month without getting them really sick. For one thing, it would mean that you could could stay even on drinking from and feeding your ghouls.
But the real bottom line is that vampires who don't have the ability to feed themselves in secret can't exist if they are supposed to feed themselves and be secret. Means of feeding night to night really do need to come free with your Cheerios. It's OK, good even, if different kinds of vampires have different means of securing their breakfast, but they all need to have one. It's not negotiable.
Demographics
White Wolf never really put any thought into how many vampires there really were or how many vampires were in any of their factions. And there are a lot of factions. And each of those factions have a lot of ranks.
When actual numbers get spouted off, they are invariably laughable. Like how in Exalted there is a “Silver Faction” of Sidereals who are defined as being a minority of a 10% of a group of 100 (meaning: four or less people in the “faction”). But for Vampire in particular they couldn't be anything but laughable one way or the other. Vampires are apex predators, so their numbers have to be very small (remember that the world contains only 2,500 Bengal Tigers). But the game has multiple sects, thirteen official clans, dozens of bloodlines, conspiracies, inner circles, Multiple generations, and so on and so forth.
To consider how this works, imagine for the moment that there is a character who is an elite 8th Generation Ravnos Sabbat member in the Black Hand. We will for the moment pretend that the True Hand and all its accompanying levels of secrecy aren't a real thing. Now first of all, this character is represented on a Venn diagram as the intersection of four different circles (8th Generation, Sabbat, Ravnos, and Black Hand). And all four of those descriptors are supposed to represent a tiny minority of the comparative whole while still being larger than other things. The 8th generation is smaller than the 9th generation which is smaller than the 10th, which is smaller than the 11th, which is smaller than the 12th, which is smaller than the 13th;but still larger than the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th generations. The Sabbat is smaller than the Camarilla and the Independents, but still larger than the Anarch Movement or the Inconnu. The Ravnos clan is smaller than any of the seven main clans, but larger than any of the numerous minor lines like the Baali and Osirians. The Black Hand is a tiny faction inside the Sabbat, but it is still more numerous and powerful than the traitor Infernalists that they hunt. Within the Sabbat, the Ravnos are an under-represented clan, where considerably more Sabbat members subscribe to major Sabbat clans like Tzimisce and Lasombra, but the Sabbat Ravnos are still more of a thing than obscure crap like the Blood Brothers and Serpents of the Light.
Our 8th generation Sabbat Black Hand Ravnos is thus a minority of a minority of a minority of a minority, and in each case we are asked to believe that he is a minority by a degree of more than 10:1. And despite this fact, we are still given to understand that there are others several orders of magnitude more obscure than that. For there to be even one 5th generation Old Clan Tzimisce Inconnu, how many millions of 13th generation Camarilla Brujah must there be to accommodate that many “more common than” statements?
Basically, supernatural demographics can have two problems. Either there aren't enough people for your secret conspiracies to be more than just the anime club at your high school, or there are so many supernaturals under every rock that it strains credibility that society functions at all. Vampire: the Masquerade has so many nested groupings that it manages to achieve both problems. Each conspiracy doesn't have enough manpower to be more than the ravings of a couple amigos who meet for game night of Tuesdays, but there are so many of these things ranked in numbers that by the time you scroll up to the big picture you have more than half of America in on the vampire conspiracy all pretending to all the other ghouls that they don't know.
Special snowflakism takes the demographics problems that Vampires necessarily have and turns them up to 11. Vampires already have to be pretty rare, or the secret part doesn't really work. So you can't really have more than a level or two of rarity inside that. Vampire: the Masquerade has eleven. Seriously, eleven layers of increasing rarity and specialness. It's completely ridiculous. Every demographic you introduce that's “rare” actually increases the minimum total population by a lot. Remember that if one group is a minority, the total (minority + majority) must be more than twice their numbers.
Now it should be said that nWoD started with a decent idea about nipping this particular kind of proliferation. Since anyone could found a bloodline of their own and we didn't have to trace back ten generations to one of the 13 founders or any of that shit, each of special groups could just be eight dudes terrorizing a town in Wales or some damn thing. That's a defensible design decision. Of course, such groups are politically meaningless by definition. It's not a demographic or an interest group, it's just those eight dudes terrorizing a town in Wales. And nWoD is on record as having ballzed it all up by making book after book of shovelware filled with descriptions of bloodlines. It wasn't that such a thing necessarily implied millions of vampires far in excess of what the Masquerade could possibly contain – it's just that the setting lost focus and became shitty and incomprehensible. Which is of course the other problem with content bloat of this kind.
Creatures of Darkness
Vampires in Vampire have a big problem with sunlight and fire. That's defensible from a folklore standpoint, but it's obviously problematic. Very notably, Dracula wasn't unable to handle sunlight, he was just weaker during the day. If he had been literally unable to take a blast of sunlight to the face, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere with his evil schemes. In a modern setting, this works at all, but only just. A lot of shit only happens when the sun is up, and while you can do things with electric lights, it's very limited indeed. But if you scale things back to any kind of past at all, things don't work at all. You can't interact with people as anything but a whispered voice from under the bed if there isn't any light, and before 1880, literally all of the light was generated by fire or the sun. All of it. So you can't have any vampire counts or vampires in posh clothes having their portraits taken or any of that shit.
Remember, Toreador are supposed to hang out with artists doing art wanky salon shit. Ventrue are supposed to have evil business meetings. Vampires need to hang out where people are doing people things. They can do it at night (or at least, mostly at night), but people have to fucking be around. And if vampires have to spend all their time hermetically sealed from all light sources, they can't do that. Because humans do all their interactions except fucking in the light. Even when they do things at night they still bring light with them. To add insult to retardedness, the vampires in Masquerade don't even have any special ability to navigate in darkness. So they are not only incapable of hanging out with historical figures, their history is one of stumbling around in the dark like a radio comedy.
What this means is that the limitations on vampires are way too big, and it ends up requiring a whole lot of mind caulk to keep the setting moving at all. Sunlight actually setting vampires on fire is a cool device, but it doesn't work. If you're going to have a cooperative storytelling setting with the vampires as anything other than cave dwelling beasts, they need to be able to stand fire and sunlight. They can find it distasteful or even uncomfortable, but they have to be able to be in its fucking presence.
An Unliving Heart
Why do vampires bleed if you cut them?
That seems like a weird question, because all living creatures bleed when you cut them. But that's just it – living creatures bleed. They bleed because their blood is pressurized by their hearts. We call arteries arteries because the ancients thought they were filled with air. When a creature dies and their heart stops pumping, the arteries empty and the blood starts collecting in the veins of whatever part of the body is hanging down.
What this means is that if you go with the metaphor of the heart not beating, then vampires wouldn't bleed from their necks. If there is any blood in them, you'd get it out by cutting their feet and leaving them to drain. Or by stringing them up by their feet and cutting the throat. Either way, it would be a slow process, because when the heart isn't beating it's all unpressurized and you're basically just waiting for the whole body to drip dry. Like if you had a really wet carpet and you couldn't unroll it.
This would all be fine if the general rule was that drinking from a vampire was pretty much impossible because their hearts don't work. But Vampire: the Masquerade doesn't want that. It wants vampires doing all kinds of kinky blood drinking games, which requires the blood to be pressurized. And that, in turn, means that they need to not have that WoD bullshit about having a dead heart and stagnant veins.
Similarly, Vampire: the Masquerade can't get its shit together on whether vampires should count as living creatures for poison and disease. If vampires don't rot and are room temperature they shouldn't be able to carry or spread most diseases. Real disease causing organisms usually live in live humans, which are 37 degrees, they don't generally live that long outside the human body, which is what a sterile room temperature vampire basically would be. Similarly, if you fill a corpse's belly or veins with formaldehyde or arsenic, nothing happens to it.
The basic degree to which a vampire in Vampire: the Masquerade is basically a person or basically inanimate is in no way consistent book to book or even page to page. It's all poetry, with the vampire being as life like or corpselike as each author requires for whatever rant they are making at the time. Which makes it incredibly hard to tell a cooperative story. Obviously, I'm of the opinion that vampires should get their dicks wet and drink wine and bleed copiously when stabbed. Because stories about sumptuous vampires are way more fun to whack off to than stories about frigid vampires. They can and should cry tears of blood and such, but being actually corpselike in almost any specific is simply not fun to talk about. You can get plenty mopey and wear stockings on your arms and whatever else you want and still get an erection.
Physical Disciplines
Being “super strong” is a kinda weird power. We get that there are characters who are super strong and there are characters that are super strong. Dracula had the strength of twenty men, which is pretty impressive, but the Hekatonkheires picked up fucking mountains and beat Cronus with them, and that's a different scale of strength altogether. Unsurprisingly, we get our most easily accessible depictions of super strength from our current media: TV shows, movies, and comic books. And our media being what it is, that means that to talk about super strength in a way that is at all intelligible, we have to talk about super heroes. Now White Wolf got a fucking dick rash whenever they talked about super heroes, so it probably won't surprise you that they never did that. So rather than answering the question of how much Potence you needed to be TV Hulk and how much Potence you needed to be Movie Hulk they just... didn't do that. I really have no idea how super strong you're supposed to be with any level of Potence, and because of that I have no way to tell you if it's any good as a problem solving tool. The rules for how much damage you did when you hit people with a tire iron were as defined as anything in the system, but that wasn't terribly impressive. But as we've mentioned earlier, the mechanics were a tire fire, so I can't tell if that is because the strength is supposed to be kinda crap or if the mechanics are just failing to perform to expectations.
The presentation of it being used was wildly schizophrenic. Sometimes they'd talk about ripping cars to pieces with your bare hands or hurling them around like a jobber. And sometimes, they'd freak the fuck out about how you were a “Vampions” player if you even contemplated such actions.
I could get behind that level of super strength, but clearly some of the authors could not.
Now, regardless of how strong the super strength made you, it's a fairly difficult to sell all the punching, lifting, jumping, and throwing in the world as being much the equal of, say, mind control. You'd have to be really very strong to compete at the level of even the most trivial mentalists in the game. But to ramp up the obnoxiousness, Potence didn't do one of the things that super strength does in every piece of source material you've ever seen or heard about: it didn't make you supertough. There are characters who are invulnerable without being super strong of course, but there is not now and never has been a character with super strength who wasn't also tougher than normal. However, in Vampire: the Masquerade, super toughness was 100% mediated by Fortitude, which wasn't normally even available to the same vampires. Even with maxxed out super strength, you would still go down when some completely normal person hit you in the face with a shovel.
Super strength or no, your vampire lacks the superior resilience of a muppet.
But perhaps the biggest sin of Potence was that Ghouls had it, and the vampires who made ghouls honestly might not. If you were a vampire, and you gave your blood to a human to drink, that human got Potence. You didn't need to have Potence or come from a clan that gave Potence. So if you were a Settite, and all your vampire powers were about clouding the minds of men, and your whole vampire shtick was that you were physically basically just a guy, your ghouls still got potence. And if they stayed ghouls for a long time, they could get a bunch of Potence. And if you subsequently embraced them as a Setite, they still had Potence. Even though Setites do not in fact have Potence. And this would be a totally important way to get around clan restrictions on Potence, if hypothetically Potence wasn't shit. But of course it was, and no one gave a rat's ass about finding a workaround for the clan restrictions on Potence.
Fortitude had a big problem as well. All it did was make you take less damage (the nWoD version manages to do even less, which is insanity). But you only take damage when you interact with White Wolf die rolling mechanics. And that is something you do not want to do. Fortitude mathematically didn't really work, and like with Potence I have no idea if that's intentional or not. But it's just really problematic as a power. You take less damage from stuff, that's it. Invulnerability is a pretty sweet super hero power, but it's hard to think about it in terms of levels. Do you honestly care whether Hulk or The Thing are more invulnerable? It matters in comic book fights, but not in any kind of street level engagement. If you can bounce bullets off your manly chest, it's not really important what the upper limits are most of the time. I have difficulty articulating what five (let alone ten) sequential dots of progressive invulnerability would mean in words, so it's no surprise that White Wolf never bothered even trying, and the mechanical increments were all crap.
And finally, there's Celerity. Celerity bogs the game down horribly and people who have Celerity completely dominate combat over people who don't (and nonetheless try to compete in the area of hitting other people with weapons rather than using “save or lose” mind magic). This caused a lot of people to believe that Celerity was “over powered.” But the reality was that combat was simply bad, and the only thing you could do to meaningfully impact the flow of combat was to take more actions. So having a posse of dudes or Celerity was really the only way to do noticeably better than any random dude with a shotgun in the arena of combat. It was so much worse in nWoD, but even in Vampire it was just demonstrably true that (in part because Potence and Fortitude were so bullshit) hitting three times was so drastically better than hitting once that anyone without a crew or Celerity could fuck right off. And combats bogged down so hard when you brought extra dudes that people mostly just didn't let you do it even though having a modest gang was very cheap. Which basically left combat as the Celerity show. But again and still: not because Celerity produced effects that were overpowered (by the book, Celerity 5 was less impressive than 3 background points worth of allies), but simply because everything else you'd do in the narrow arena of people hitting each other in an actual arena was so terribly, terribly bad.
What this all meant was that physical disciplines were dead space in clan power lists. A “combat” character only wanted or needed Celerity because everything else was a waste of space. And of the basic clans, the ones sold to us as “combat” clans didn't mesh up all that well with which ones had Celerity. We were presented various fighter style archetypes for Gangrel and Nosferatu, but that was a joke. The only halfway decent combat clan in the basic book was Toreador. Flavor fail.
Not worthwhile as a warrior. I'm totally positive this was not intentional.
Best combatant in the game. I'm totally positive this was not intentional either.
Basically the physical disciplines didn't do anything right. They should have given distinct powers, but also they shouldn't have belonged to any of the clans at all. You should have gotten a Potence power, a Celerity power, and a Fortitude power just for showing up as a vampire. And you should have been able to buy more of them regardless of what clan you were a member of. So the Ghoul shtick of just getting physical powers and starting with only one of them would be a thing that would actually make sense for all the clans. Also, it would leave the door open for all the clans to get disciplines that actually did things.
This essay is going on a bit long, so I'm gonna post it in sections.
