The Gaming Den

Bloodlines is definitely in the top ten of my favorite games of all time, and I love the atmosphere and chunks of lore of an interesting game universe. Something struck me about it recently, though. Mechanically, it barely feels like I'm playing a vampire at all. I'm wondering if that's a gameplay decision for translation into a vidya game, or if playing as a Vampire in the WoD is actually so... not vampirey. I have considerable experience with Dungeons and Dragons, and am quite familiar with VtM lore, but have never played any WoD games.

In Bloodlines, your character can be tough or strong or smart, but that doesn't seem to be different from most any other protagonist. The in-game text makes it sound like as a vampire your existence revolves mostly about being a blood junkie and, but you're just sucking on people instead of potions to restore your mana bar. You

Your vampire gets better at stuff by assigning experience points until he's the baddest dude on the block, like most other RPG characters, and I don't see anything particularly vampiric about being really good at picking locks and hitting people with axes. You get some disciplines that could be but are not called Bull's Strength, Charm Person, Invisibility, and Confusion. Protean is straight up the wrong kind of monster, with the ultimate power turning you into the world's shittiest lycanthrope, a sort of bat chimp hybrid.

The very notable exception was thaumaturgy. Throwing bloodsucking spears that were also made of blood at people and then making other people explode by boiling their blood made me feel like an awesome vampire wizard. That's an important life goal of mine. But apart from that and some animalism powers, the only thing that seemed actually related to vampires is the ability to make yourself literally fucking glow and sparkle, which is not the kind of vampire I want to be playing as.

There's a whole lot of stuff missing. You can't fly, or turn into mist or a bat or a wolf or a swarm of rats. Very notably you cannot create more vampires. Sunlight can't kill you because there is no sunlight in this game (thank god for that). The games mentions that vampires are vulnerable to fire, but as you may or may not know it is also possible to kill a regular human by setting him on fire. The vampire protagonist of Bloodlines barely even needs to be a vampire for the gameplay to make sense.

But most notably of all is the total impossibility of a single character being able to do more than three of these things, ever. And if you want to do them well, good luck getting enough experience to do even two at once without sucking at everything else. I can't think of any fictional vampire ever who...

1) Has super speed
But also
2) Does not have super strength
3) Does not have mind influencing powers
4) Does not have flight
5) Cannot summon animals
6) Cannot control weather
7) Cannot do anything that Sonic the Hedgehog cannot also do

Combined with the few stories I've heard about actual Vampire tabletop games, I'm starting to get suspicious. The stories sounded as though a session of Vampire was not about roleplaying a group of vampires, but rather was about roleplaying a group of people who were themselves roleplaying a group of vampires.

In the tabletop, are vampires mechanically the same as the ultra-lite flavors I've played as in Bloodlines and heard about from my friends? Or are they a bit more vampirey in practice?

(P.S. - I'm now posting under the name "Unity", because I decided to start posting instead of just browsing OSSRs)

As far as powers are concerned, Vampire: The Mascarade (the only one I have experience with) is a low-tier superhero game with each PC having his own power.

As far as the stories... Some part of the books say it's about playing brooding emo-goth characters who can't enjoy life and cling to the remnant of their humanity (without being very specific about what, why or how). Some part say it's about playing seductive emo-goth characters who have weird vampire sex. Some part say it's about complicated plots and politics, without having any good rules to back it up. Some part say it's about being a pawn in a game played by overpowered NPCs who'd have little reasons to use you and little reasons to do what they're doing anyway...

And in practice, people play low-tier superheroes (with optional weird vampire sex and/or brooding over their loss of humanity)

Hello there. *waves*

There's quite a few discussions of VTM here, and in most of them it will be pointed out that while the various bloodlines were obviously influenced by certain vampire archetypes, they don't let you actually play as that archetype very well, because they don't get the correct powers (or enough power).

Or, to put it another way, if you were to ask "Hey, can I play a cool vampire like-", they don't have to wait to find out who you meant before answering "no".

As to why they set things up this way....yeah, does seem odd. I guess they got things badly wrong at first, and then inertia (or perhaps nostalgia) kept things going the same.

Though, IMHO, it's not the vampires that make the vampires, it's what the vampires are doing.

I am currently watching a movie which has a vampire being fused with a steampunk robot, and both personalities are too polite to take control. Yes, there is a vampire there, but it's not a traditionally vampirey thing to do.

Remember The Lost Boys? Once Bitten? Vamps?

There are actually lots of movies that depict fledgling vampires who only have like one or two vampire powers and have to make do. Vampire: the Masquerade is like that. Except that instead of ever "getting good" the characters in Masquerade are expected to just stay fledgling vampires for like one hundred actual fucking years. And since it takes place in the modern era, one hundred years of time passing is never going to happen and the player characters are just going to be one trick pony "new and inexperienced vampires who can't really use their powers" for the entire campaign.

The entire campaign is just the part of The Lost Boys where Michael tells his brother to stay away from him. If you collected every single power from the basic book and maxed them all out, you'd have a character who was still a pretty pale imitation of Dracula from the book of the same name (because Masquerade vampires have much harsher vampiric weaknesses than Dracula did).

To be honest, there's certainly some appeal of being a Vampire X-Man, where you're a vampire but you also have a super power that's yours. That's basically the set up in Twilight for example, and that series was so popular that B&D fanfiction of that series is itself a best seller. Masquerade was far too timid and doesn't actually let you play what you want.

-Username17

Ahh, I see. Thanks for all the Masquerade info. I once played a... well, let's call it a fake D&D game as a D&D vampire, and it was quite a different experience. Good to know a better idea of what the level of similarity between D&D, Masquerade, Bloodlines, and other types of vampires is.