Vampire 5e

[ArmorClassZero]

"Removal of blood pools led to a very stupid terminology. For example, certain Tremere rituals require "one Rouse Check's worth of blood", as does ghouling people. But a "Rouse Check" isn't actually a defined quantity of blood, nor is it even definable.

You see, you make Rouse Checks when in the old VtM you'd spend blood. When activating disciplines for example. If you pass the Rouse Check - nothing happens. If you fail, your Hunger increases. So hypothetically a very lucky vampire can bum around at Hunger 0 for decades if he just passes all his Rouse Checks and never drinks any blood. Or you can be unlucky and go to Hunger 5 in five actions."

"Vampires in 5e don't need to drink blood. You can go around with 5 hunger dice constantly and the only penalties will be a statistically significant chance to screw something up due to hunger. But it isn't actually a biological need anymore. It's a psychological addiction. It's a massive change to the setting, but it's not a bad one. Because the question of how much blood a vampire needs to drink is now answered none, as long as he's willing to suffer the hunger and the risks that come with it."

"But you still have blood magic that still uses blood. So when you announce that the amount of blood needed is "none, it's all in your mind" everything is stupid and fucked."

-Username17

It seems like they got really close to just having the cost to use vampire powers be 'you get hungrier' which would've been fine with me but they didn't go with that. And they could have just specified an amount of blood required in the details of said blood magic ritual but they didn't go with that either. A swing and a miss...

As an aside, I actually quite like the idea of it being a psychological addiction, but I would like to see WW make the leap to 'vampires don't literally drink blood.' Wasn't the aspect of 'vampires drink blood' suppose to be a metaphor in all the old stories? The 'blood drinking' was analogous to the theft of wealth, death of loved ones, and/or loss of virginity, no?

[Omegonthesane]

Pretty sure that while as allegory the blood drinking is meant to represent some other social problem, within the text itself vampires are meant to literally drink actual blood.

Which of course isn't the same thing as the blood drinking definitely being the actual source of nutrition and not being a magic ritual that doesn't really correlate to the actual number of red blood cells ingested.

I take it that "the mechanical requirement is the dealing 1 unit of damage to the donor not the amount of blood this represents" is a somewhat satisfactory answer since it's what After Sundown did, and crosses out solutions involving blood bags if doing that is what you want.

If vampires have a way to convert their already digested blood into tokens they can later re-digest more conveniently than drinking a human is that genre breaking? 'cause my Malkavian "Tremere" Thaumaturgist apprentice of Aleister Crowley relied a lot on that ritual. (Uninteresting off topic campaign details in spoiler)

The setting was London, starting with the death of Mithras. The GM decided to go with the theory that since Mithras never really got on with the Tremere he had a Malkavian turn Aleister Crowley and had him taught Thaumaturgy and legally considered to be Tremere within London as an elaborate practical joke.

Which would have had consequences if we had sat on our asses until 2000; the campaign had a system where we could spend a year doing downtime actions, gain a portion of XP that way, but that would mean The Bad Guys also got a year to perform downtime actions every time we did this, and there were various doom countdowns in the background. So we started in the 80s and finished in the 90s.

(And since we pre-dated the canon invention of Technomancy, the party's actual Tremere got there first and influenced internet slang due to vampires having the internet before humans did)

[Longes]

It'd be perfectly fine if they went for a narrative approach a-la FATE and said that Rouse Checks bring closer the narrative moment when your vampire has to actively feed on-screen. That your vampires have schroedinger's blood pools and passively replenish it until you fail enough Rouse Checks to need to feed dramatically.

But:

1. In that case you still need to define actual quantities of blood used in various rituals. A "rouse check" is a cliff note in the script, you need to know if ghouling people involves a drop in the glass of wine or if you need to bring a funnel.
2. They don't actually do that. They don't go for the FATE's narrativism, they just replace blood pool with a Hunger meter.

[Mord]

Vampire has always tried to have it both ways when it comes to discouraging "vampions" gameplay and providing non-harmful ways to feed on mortals.

If feeding were declared as an absolute fact to require hurting or killing someone, I'm pretty sure the vampion gameplay style would evaporate, but WW very consistently continued to add alternate means of feeding that kept pushing their vampires further and further from actually draining the lifeblood from random schmucks.

I think the reason for this is that WW has always been too chickenshit to push any narrative that would be legitimately upsetting to people. Even in their earliest, punk-est, least shovelware-ey days, they were too scared to tell a story that would upset their mom.

After the original VTM blew up, profit motive became a factor - and I'm pretty sure WW realized that an RPG framework for telling stories about a group of people who are basically magical serial killers/sexual predators won't sell.

So you get vampions and various WW cowards mumbling unconvincingly about how that's the wrong way to play. Fuckers.

[Username17]

It seems like they got really close to just having the cost to use vampire powers be 'you get hungrier' which would've been fine with me but they didn't go with that. And they could have just specified an amount of blood required in the details of said blood magic ritual but they didn't go with that either. A swing and a miss...

Yeah, it would be totally alright if they decided that Vampires didn't spend blood as such to power their abilities and the "cost" to using your vampire powers was just that it upped your frenzy bar. And then once you actually went frenzy, your powers were just on. But of course, a lot of specific powers from various disciplines written up in previous editions would have to be radically rethought if you were to go in that direction. Obviously, they didn't do that second part. Actually scrapping and rethinking what the disciplines were about was off the table. Which is a shame, because radically rethinking the powers of vampires is fucking necessary.

One of the big problems of Vampire: the Masquerade is that the packages of powers and limitations that the different clans offer don't let you play any of the source material vampires that you'd want to play as. The core conceit of splitting up all the shit that Dracula did in the book between ten disciplines and then giving every faction three of them is fucked up. That means that at best you have 30% of your design specs covered on your very first design goal.

And then on top of that, the drawbacks on vampires are extremely harsh and they never actually put a lot of thought into how any of the vampires were remotely playable. If you decide that you want to make "feeding" a big part of the game, don't you think you should make your game in a way where all the characters can plausibly feed? Because that's a fairly important detail that Vampire: the Masquerade forgot to address. There is flat no wayfor most starting characters to actually feed on humans in a remotely safe or effective fashion.

Like, if your first statement about your vampires is "Our vampires drink blood" the first question you should ask yourself is "Can our vampires drink blood?" And the answer in Masquerade is basically no. They fucking can't.

-Username17

[Longes]

And then on top of that, the drawbacks on vampires are extremely harsh and they never actually put a lot of thought into how any of the vampires were remotely playable. If you decide that you want to make "feeding" a big part of the game, don't you think you should make your game in a way where all the characters can plausibly feed? Because that's a fairly important detail that Vampire: the Masquerade forgot to address. There is flat no wayfor most starting characters to actually feed on humans in a remotely safe or effective fashion.

Like, if your first statement about your vampires is "Our vampires drink blood" the first question you should ask yourself is "Can our vampires drink blood?" And the answer in Masquerade is basically no. They fucking can't.

-Username17

V5 took half a step in that direction. Kinda.

During chargen you have to pick your "Predator Type", i.e. the method by which you feed. All of them come with the set of benefits and flaws related to your feeding. For example, "Bagger" feeds from blood bags so you get a merit that lets you drink from blood bags, a dot of Obfuscate and a Larceny specialty. Osiris has a blood cult so you get a dot of Presence and three dots between Fame and Herd.

So V5 skips the "you can't feed reliably as a fledgeling" issue by saying that you already solved that issue before the game started.

Of course, the problem is that most of these archetypes still can't feed reliably. "Consensualist" only feeds from willing victims, but what they get are a dot of Auspex or Fortitude, a dot of Humanity and a Medicine or Persuasion specialty. The only thing on that list that helps you feed is the Persuasion specialty, and that doesn't help at all. "Farmer" feeds exclusively on animals and gets a dot of Animalism or Protean. But Protean doesn't help you feed on animals. At all. And Farmer doesn't get any dots of Resources to just buy cats.

Worst of all is "Blood Leech", who feeds exclusively from Vampires. They even get "Prey Exclusion (Mortals)" flaw. And I have no idea how you are supposed to in any way reliably feed on vampires as a neonate. I sure hope you buy "Unbondable" merit though.

Really looking at the list, it's only Osiris who really can reliably sustain themselves with the benefits they get from their Predator Type.

[ArmorClassZero]

"Pretty sure that while as allegory the blood drinking is meant to represent some other social problem, within the text itself vampires are meant to literally drink actual blood.

Which of course isn't the same thing as the blood drinking definitely being the actual source of nutrition and not being a magic ritual that doesn't really correlate to the actual number of red blood cells ingested."

I can get behind the act of literally drinking blood if the in-universe and out-of-universe explanation and understanding (by Players, PCs, and NPCs) was that the act of drinking blood doesn't correlate to the amount of red blood cells ingested - that blood is not a biological requirement. Until recently though, the in-universe and out-of-universe explanation and understanding (that of the Players, PCs, and NPCs) was that vampires were physically and literally required to have blood in VTM, no? Just as vampires physically and literally needed to consume X pints of blood, vampires physically and literally revert to corpses whenever the sun rose, and physically and literally burst into flames whenever sunlight hit them.

"[...]Actually scrapping and rethinking what the disciplines were about was off the table. Which is a shame, because radically rethinking the powers of vampires is fucking necessary.

One of the big problems of Vampire: the Masquerade is that the packages of powers and limitations that the different clans offer don't let you play any of the source material vampires that you'd want to play as. The core conceit of splitting up all the shit that Dracula did in the book between ten disciplines and then giving every faction three of them is fucked up. That means that at best you have 30% of your design specs covered on your very first design goal.

[...]There is flat no wayfor most starting characters to actually feed on humans in a remotely safe or effective fashion.

Like, if your first statement about your vampires is "Our vampires drink blood" the first question you should ask yourself is "Can our vampires drink blood?" And the answer in Masquerade is basically no. They fucking can't."

-Username17

I've been kicking around the idea that, assuming a new vampire reboot or w/e, each of the core clans should get a unique power, each of their powers should be related to their weakness and form of feeding. Then you could have all the non-clan-specific Disciplines be mostly universal across vampires (but not present to the same degree in some clans vs others, or even individual members within the same clan.)

• Brujah (It means 'witch' in Spanish): Witchy Sorcery Vampires. Unique Discipline: Thaumaturgy. Feeding: They perform blood magic rituals to make themselves immortal. Weakness: Whenever they're emotions get riled up (frenzy), they lose control of their magic. Their magic is closely linked to fire, ice, and weather.
• Toreador/Daeva-style Vamps: Sexy Vampires. Unique Discipline: Seduction. Feeding: They steal sexual energy / vitality through intercourse. Weakness: Sex addicts? They need to feed more than any other vamps?
• Gangrel: Werewolf-esque Vampires Unique Discipline: None. (Protean and Animalism is more common among them than other vampires, and almost all Gangrel have the 3 bodily Disciplines (Celerity, Potence, Fortitude) at a higher rating than other vamps. Feeding: They must eat some amount of flesh? Weakness: When they lose control (frenzy) they take on bestial physical features and even more blood-lust. Think werewolves.
• Malkavian: Psychic Insane Vampires. Unique Discipline: Dementation. Feeding: They feed by draining the sanity of those around them (This can be both passive and active.) Weakness: They're all insane / suffer from derangements.
• Nosferatu: Diseased/Deformed Vampires. Unique Discipline: Cachexsis(?) Feeding: They steal the breath(?) of the diseased and dying. They can also drink blood and munch on corpses.(?) Weakness: Their victims must be sick, diseased, dying, or recently dead.
• Ventrue: Shadowy Overlord Vamps. Unique Discipline: Obtenebration. Feeding: They passively absorb the life-force of anyone dying in a huge AoE around them (anywhere from hundreds of meters to hundreds of miles, depending on age and blood potency.) This can be active. Weakness: Super vulnerable to light? Are phantom-like?
• Tzimisce/Body-Horror Vamps: Zdzisław Beksiński/H.R. Giger/John C.'s The Thing/Parasyte Vamps. Unique Discipline: Vicissitude. Feeding: They literally assimilate / absorb the flesh and tissue of those they kill. Weakness: Hardest time feeding(?), they are the most Masquerade-breaking in terms of looks(?), the slowest feeding process(?)

@FrankTrollman & Co.: How retarded is this?

[deaddmwalking]

My take: you have to explain why someone that has been embraced is taken into a clan. Like, what does clan even mean? If vampires 'recruit' and they target the kind of people they think would 'fit in' with their sorority, you're going to have a different feel than if some people turn into a vampire of they weren't killed in a feeding.

You could have physical characteristics determined by your sire (like if a gangel turns you you get wolf powers) but that wouldn't necessarily imply any type of common background. You could even hate animals!

[Mord]

I've been kicking around the idea that, assuming a new vampire reboot or w/e, each of the core clans should get a unique power, each of their powers should be related to their weakness and form of feeding. Then you could have all the non-clan-specific Disciplines be mostly universal across vampires (but not present to the same degree in some clans vs others, or even individual members within the same clan.)

• Brujah (It means 'witch' in Spanish): Witchy Sorcery Vampires. Unique Discipline: Thaumaturgy. Feeding: They perform blood magic rituals to make themselves immortal. Weakness: Whenever they're emotions get riled up (frenzy), they lose control of their magic. Their magic is closely linked to fire, ice, and weather.
• Toreador/Daeva-style Vamps: Sexy Vampires. Unique Discipline: Seduction. Feeding: They steal sexual energy / vitality through intercourse. Weakness: Sex addicts? They need to feed more than any other vamps?
• Gangrel: Werewolf-esque Vampires Unique Discipline: None. (Protean and Animalism is more common among them than other vampires, and almost all Gangrel have the 3 bodily Disciplines (Celerity, Potence, Fortitude) at a higher rating than other vamps. Feeding: They must eat some amount of flesh? Weakness: When they lose control (frenzy) they take on bestial physical features and even more blood-lust. Think werewolves.
• Malkavian: Psychic Insane Vampires. Unique Discipline: Dementation. Feeding: They feed by draining the sanity of those around them (This can be both passive and active.) Weakness: They're all insane / suffer from derangements.
• Nosferatu: Diseased/Deformed Vampires. Unique Discipline: Cachexsis(?) Feeding: They steal the breath(?) of the diseased and dying. They can also drink blood and munch on corpses.(?) Weakness: Their victims must be sick, diseased, dying, or recently dead.
• Ventrue: Shadowy Overlord Vamps. Unique Discipline: Obtenebration. Feeding: They passively absorb the life-force of anyone dying in a huge AoE around them (anywhere from hundreds of meters to hundreds of miles, depending on age and blood potency.) This can be active. Weakness: Super vulnerable to light? Are phantom-like?
• Tzimisce/Body-Horror Vamps: Zdzisław Beksiński/H.R. Giger/John C.'s The Thing/Parasyte Vamps. Unique Discipline: Vicissitude. Feeding: They literally assimilate / absorb the flesh and tissue of those they kill. Weakness: Hardest time feeding(?), they are the most Masquerade-breaking in terms of looks(?), the slowest feeding process(?)

@FrankTrollman & Co.: How retarded is this?

There are some pretty obvious bad spots. Gangrel and Tzimisce are just proper fucked from the get-go and neither of them are sufficiently Masquerade friendly to survive in the modern nights.

Regarding feeding methods, Nosferatu appears to be a straight-up worse version of Ventrue. Generally Malkavian and Ventrue appear to be leet haxxors of feeding and without any drawbacks to make up for that. The Brujah feeding method is completely undefined. What the hell does a blood magic ritual do to keep them topped up on blood?

Your description of Malkavians doesn't do anything to address fishmalking. "They're all insane" is so vague as to be uninteresting and potentially disruptive to play.

And the poor Gangrel don't get a real unique Discipline, even though it was your #1 stated design goal. :'(

I wouldn't call this retarded, but I would ask what exactly it is you're trying to accomplish with your take on "a new vampire reboot or w/e." Are you just trying to swap a new clan roster in and otherwise leave the existing assumptions of VTM alone, or are you shooting for something a little more fundamental in terms of rewriting the themes of the game? Or do you just think it's cool for Tzimisce to feed by going The Thing on people? Depending on what it is you want to get out of fucking around with the clans, this might or might not be a step in the right direction.

[Username17]

The design goal of vampire clans is to portray a number of different vampire "types" such that players who are attracted to different types of vampires can play the kinds of vampires they want to play in a manner that clearly signifies to the other players (especially the MC) what kind of vampire they are playing. All vampire stories have different vampires in them which have powers and limitations according to the needs of the story, and different people have different favorite vampire stories and thus have different packages of abilities and weaknesses that they want to have.

The Clans in Vampire: the Masquerade do not fill that design criteria. It's been more than a quarter century, and vampire protagonists have been a lot more popular than they were in the quarter century prior. Further, the clans are no longer graded on the curve of "this is the only game where you can play a vampire at all." For fuck's sake, you can play a shitty vampire in 4th edition D&D. And that game sucks. The seven clans represented all the vampires that the original authors could think of, but they obviously weren't that familiar with gothic fiction to begin with, and there has been a fucktonne of genre products since then that have reached very wide audiences. You have to have been living under a fucking rock to not at least be aware of Twilight and True Blood, and there were also books. So many books. Urban Fantasy is a pretty big genre that had a bit of a renaissance in the late 90s and early 2000s. And while White Wolf people liked to give themselves hand jobs for having been on the leading edge of that, they never bothered to incorporate any of it into their work - which meant that the seven original Clans felt more and more like a tiny sliver of the conceptual space. And the expansion clans were all "some dude's character" - with every one of them being extremely weirdly specific rather than addressing the yawning gulf between what the genre entailed and what the clans actually allowed you to play as.

But over and above such questions as "Why in the seven fucks isn't there a clan that lets you play the Vampire Academy vampires? That series had six books in it and they were all bestsellers." or "Who thought it was remotely OK to allow True Blood to get a highly praised 7 season television adaptation with millions of viewers and still never make a clan that let you play the vampires from that series?" there's the issue that clans themselves need a backstory for why and how they propagate themselves. Vampire: the Masquerade was always kind of vague on that point. In the LARP, all the Ventrue hung out together because they were people who liked to come to the Vampire LARP in ascots. But in world and most importantly in the table-top game what was the selling point for a character to "act" like a Ventrue or care what the "Ventrue position" was on any issue? Cricket sounds!

Rebooting Vampire requires more than just spinning the wheels on the disciplines and making sure every clan has a unique discipline. I mean, Requiem did that and it didn't help anything. You have make sure your clans actually have a reason to be clans at the group level and also the individual level. But you also have to support mixed-clan coteries, because that is going to be almost 100% of the table-top play experience.

The Toreador were basically obsolete in 1992. Wheeling them out as-is in 2018 is fucking embarrassing.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Far as gangrel and brujah go I always figured I'd roll them into one clan and give them no weakness aside from not getting a feeding power by default and fluffing it so that urban types either explicitly go learn a social power or mooch off of a vampire that does. Everyone else is a drifter or raises animals to feed off of. Their unique discipline would be Riot, a set of infectious anger themed abilities that explicitly works on animals as well as people and includes a controlled frenzy self-buff that makes you look bestial.

[PrometheanVigil]

My take: you have to explain why someone that has been embraced is taken into a clan. Like, what does clan even mean? If vampires 'recruit' and they target the kind of people they think would 'fit in' with their sorority, you're going to have a different feel than if some people turn into a vampire of they weren't killed in a feeding.

You could have physical characteristics determined by your sire (like if a gangel turns you you get wolf powers) but that wouldn't necessarily imply any type of common background. You could even hate animals!

Clan is Ethnicity. Simple as. You can't choose your ethnicity (unless supernatural means exist to do so -- for the sake of argument, let's eschew that concept) but that doesn't mean you have to inhabit stereotypes about them. You're all vamps at end of the day, just have slightly different features.

This is where Requiem shinned: Clan is just the above. Bloodlines is where you drill-down into a stereotype because they are specific lineage of vampires to which you've been sired who have a "family business" as it were.

The same reason Drew Barrymore ended up being a fantastic, highly successful actress despite her horrific upbringing by her family -- that same family she descends from has a strong acting, directing and generally creative bent, so she's very likely genetically predisposed at some level to that natural ability but the double-whammy is she's brought up inside it too and yet she did not succumb to the bullshit that the rest of her family did (white, bohemian family -- two strikes against her already to get the "abuse, drugs and alcohol" pick from the birth lottery).

This is why when hosted VTR, I made sure to make Bloodlines the highlight of vampiric legacies and interactions. No-one really cared about your clan, but if you were a Giacconi, you were considered cunning, quiet and ruthless because that's what other vampires knew this mafia Mekhet bloodline as (they played into one of the stereotypes). Contrast to the second of the three mafia families in the game: the Angelinis, who were violent, traditional but yet relatively chill (again, playing to one of the stereotypes but otherwise completely different).

To reiterate: you can still hate animals, it's just REALLY unlikely you will by that point if you have a family legacy of being pet people.

[deaddmwalking]

So you're saying that clan in a social unit - you're a Toreador if you say you are and more importantly the others say so, too? Ie, it's possible to be adopted into a clan and equally possible to be without a clan?

[Koumei]

Sidenote: one RIFTER (TM) magazine had rules for a vampirism disease amongst psi-stalkers (to make them more playable) that also split into "we're not calling them clans but they're clans". You could really tell the person submitting it liked Vampire, and that Kev had not heard about this newfangled Vampire game. In something like 2005.

Anyway, if you decide your clans are basically "The vampires (or most prominent ones) from X source of fiction", how well are you going to do on the "characters feel about equally useful and interesting" front? For instance, let's say you go for:
1. Dracula (Dracula)
2. Dracula (Castlevaaaaaaaania)
3. Alucard (Hellsing)
4. Demitri (Darkstalkers, including turning everyone into girls)
5. Eliza? (Tekken)
6. Eddie (Twilight)
7. Angel/Spike (Buffy)

Then you probably have 2-3 other classic pieces of fiction about vampires you should include that aren't specifically about Dracula, and maybe a couple more video games and anime and modern teen fiction pieces and whatever.

Are any of these going to straight-up have to be given extra powers or a boost to their existing ones or flat-out shown the door? Are any going to have to have some powers filed off or toned down or be shown the other door?

[ArmorClassZero]

There are some pretty obvious bad spots. [...] I wouldn't call this retarded, but I would ask what exactly it is you're trying to accomplish with your take on "a new vampire reboot or w/e." Are you just trying to swap a new clan roster in and otherwise leave the existing assumptions of VTM alone, or are you shooting for something a little more fundamental in terms of rewriting the themes of the game? Or do you just think it's cool for Tzimisce to feed by going The Thing on people? Depending on what it is you want to get out of fucking around with the clans, this might or might not be a step in the right direction.

@Mord: I'm operating under the assumption that a game about Vampires should ultimately be a tragedy. There are no winners, everything that can go wrong does, PCs must constantly choose between a lesser evil and a larger one, etc. Call it Vampire: The Lament or something. Completely start over but use the last 25+ years of VTM and VTR as guideposts and fix what those did wrong. Certain elements like the Masquerade, Elders vs Young, Ancient Conspiracies are present but aren't the focus. Things are more local and personal (something Requiem got right IMO) and there are fewer vampires in the world and no other supernatural elements (i.e. what a mortal would call a 'werewolf' is a Gangrel who hulked out; a mortal who thought they saw a 'ghost' was actually them seeing a Ventrue or Malkavian.) Try to fix the problems that Frank outlines in his Anatomy of Failure VTM & VTR posts.

This ties into:

My take: you have to explain why someone that has been embraced is taken into a clan. Like, what does clan even mean? If vampires 'recruit' and they target the kind of people they think would 'fit in' with their sorority, you're going to have a different feel than if some people turn into a vampire of they weren't killed in a feeding.

You could have physical characteristics determined by your sire (like if a gangel turns you you get wolf powers) but that wouldn't necessarily imply any type of common background. You could even hate animals!

Rebooting Vampire requires more than just spinning the wheels on the disciplines and making sure every clan has a unique discipline. I mean, Requiem did that and it didn't help anything. You have make sure your clans actually have a reason to be clans at the group level and also the individual level. But you also have to support mixed-clan coteries, because that is going to be almost 100% of the table-top play experience.

Clan is Ethnicity. Simple as. You can't choose your ethnicity (unless supernatural means exist to do so -- for the sake of argument, let's eschew that concept) but that doesn't mean you have to inhabit stereotypes about them. You're all vamps at end of the day, just have slightly different features.

This is where Requiem shinned: Clan is just the above. Bloodlines is where you drill-down into a stereotype because they are specific lineage of vampires to which you've been sired who have a "family business" as it were.
[...]
This is why when hosted VTR, I made sure to make Bloodlines the highlight of vampiric legacies and interactions. No-one really cared about your clan, but if you were a Giacconi, you were considered cunning, quiet and ruthless because that's what other vampires knew this mafia Mekhet bloodline as (they played into one of the stereotypes). Contrast to the second of the three mafia families in the game: the Angelinis, who were violent, traditional but yet relatively chill (again, playing to one of the stereotypes but otherwise completely different)

My thinking is that the clans are like different species . They're ultimately all vampires - carnivores after a fashion, but they each have different patterns of hunting, different prey, different creation rites, and have different peer2peer relations within their social groups, and that all of these are based in part around their form of feeding and their unique weakness.

• The Brujah need other Brujah because their magic is a property of being Brujah. It can't be 'learned' by another type of vampire. So in order to perform their magic blood ritual to maintain their immortality they must meet up with other Brujah. Hence the idea of the witches' coven and Black Mass and all that jazz.
• The Daeva benefit from working together to maintain their 'herds' and have the easiest time blending into human society. So they practice nepotism to have easy access to the largest number of kine possible. This is why they own clubs and strip-joints and such. They also have an implicit conflict of interest with the Nosferatu because the Nosferatu make people sick and diseased - the Daeva need people alive and healthy (they steal energy/vitality/youth, remember?)
• The Gangrel live out in the rural areas where they can dump bodies in the woods where no one will ever find them, and can get by hunting deer and other animals as a substitute for humans. They're super territorial to outside vamps and kine.
• The Malkavians drive the kine around them insane. They provoke a human's insecurities and fears, and engender feelings of depression and suicidal thoughts, create lapses in judgement and homicidal tendencies. Basically, whenever you see someone who's just committed a mass shooting but "he was a family man" and "he seemed perfectly normal" it was a Malk who pushed him over the edge. Malks can't congregate together a lot or frequently because their psychic vampirism stacks with each other, so they'll often wander from town to town and coterie to coterie.
• The Nosferatu have their information network thing going, because they have to keep tabs on the sick, dead, and dying, and they have to maintain the Masquerade to keep from being killed. That's one reason they're found in slums, ghettos, gutters, morgues, sewers, and abandoned parts of town and why they're associated with the homeless.
• The Ventrue are the 'ruling' vampires because their form of feeding means that they benefit from any death around them, regardless of the cause. This lets them devote more time to playing the human society games than the other vamps. It also gives them a reason to be 'prince' of any given city - because of their AoE death absorption, they have to 'share' with other Ventrue in their vicinity, providing incentive for them to spread out and move to different cities. But that's also why they're entrenched in the banking, military, and government sectors: they're the best at manipulating the kine into killing each other - it's a lucrative feeding method. And because they are connected to shadows and darkness, they have reach (literally and metaphorically) far beyond the other vamps.
• The Tzimisce are reclusive and the most Masquerade breaking, so perhaps they can detach a part of themselves to parasitically inhabit a host (either as a long-time puppet or soon to be prey.) Luring it back to their location so they can absorb it. (Because going The Thing on people is pretty cool.) And because they're so Masquerade breaking, they have to rely on others to help them feed, which means that other vampires can rely on them for mutual exchange of favors. Maybe the Tzimisce have a reason to look out for one another by grafting a small part of themselves to one of their peers that they can 'regrow' from should they be destroyed. Maybe the Tzimisce are valued as a clan is in part due to their ability to change the looks of another vampire: e.g. Daeva, being in the spotlight all the time, would eventually need to disappear from the public eye because they don't age, get a 'face-lift' from the local Tzimisce, and the reappear as the latest new rising star.

I'm just tossing ideas around, but my thinking is that a vampire's clan is not the same as ethnicity or beliefs or political affiliation. This is why 'Egyption god worshipping snake-handlers' is not a clan IMO, nor is 'necrophilic inbred Italians.' It's also why I would drop the whole 'Tzimisce are Eastern European landed gentry from centuries ago'.

Vampires could defy taxonomic classification in the traditional sense in this way, and because of their nature as immortals they can recognize kinship in each other despite ethnic/racial differences. (A lion can recognize other lions (their kin) and also recognize crocodiles and hyenas when they see them (kindred)). Similarly, a Brujah is a Brujah is a Brujah, and knows a Brujah when he sees one, and can distinguish between a Brujah, Daeva, and Ventrue and all the rest. Lions and crocodiles and hyenas are all carnivorous predators at the end of the day but they differ in X, Y, and Z ways. X, Y, and Z, in terms of vampires is: unique discipline, unique form of feeding, and unique weakness. Maybe a poor analogy but I hope it gets the point across.

[virgil]

I thought playing politics was what Vampire was about. That would mean setting up the proper setting/environment would be the first priority. This means you need clear roles and renewable goals to either promote or maintain your position, along with clear benefits for staying in the game.

[Username17]

So there are levels of design that you have to hit. I'll put them in rough order:

• Every Vampire has to have the ability to drink blood.
• Every Vampire has to be able to go a whole year without breaking the masquerade.
• Every type of Vampire has to be able to be in a coterie with every other type of Vampire.
• Every type of Vampire has to create incentives for player characters to actually be recognizable as members of those types.
• The available Vampire types should allow people to play as recognizable expies of actually popular fictional vampires.

Now obviously every edition of Vampire, very much including V5 has stumbled on even the first design criteria. And that's not acceptable any more, because Vampire is no longer being graded on the curve of "it's the only game you've heard of that will let you play a vampire at all."

But before you get into questions like "What does it mean for Vampires to participate in Vampire Politics?" or "How can a Setite and a Lasombra be in the same coterie if there are ascribable and distinct political goals for Setites and Lasombrae?" you have to answer the really basic questions. "If we're going to have Malkavians at all, how do they survive night to night? How do they manage to persist year after year without attracting a torch wielding mob?" And Vampire hasn't been able to answer even those most basic of questions.

So yes, your types of vampries should be inspired by things like "We think that we should support playing vampires from the Anita Blake books" or "We think that we should support playing vampires from Twilight" because those are reasonable marketable goals to have. But the actual design process goes the other way, with requiring that they are playable and not setting destroying before getting to the nitty gritty of making them recognizable as the source material that inspires them.

Similarly, your vampire social system has to be constructed in a way where first and foremost it allows players to play teams of characters from the different vampire types and pursue group goals together. That is absolutely fucking basleine minimum, because you can't even have a tabletop RPG session if that isn't true. Every other part of creating conflicts and goals and story hooks is subordinate to the question "Can we start playing this game at all?"

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

If I were doing something like this, I'd create organizations and I'd have them recruit vampires. PCs would have a choice about the alliance that they join, and each alliance would have different goals. Some groups might be entirely based around a single bloodline (ie, you could have analog white supremacist groups that want to genocide every other bloodline), but most alliances would want vampires of every bloodline.

I think that having the vampire organizations need the PCs would be a helpful dynamic. Organizations would provide benefits (how they recruit) and members would provide services. If the organization makes unreasonable demands, the PCs could walk (or join a rival organization). The politics would emerge from the interplay of groups.

Saying 'I'm a Gangrel' would explain the bloodline powers you get for free (Feral Fury abilities) and Alliance would explain what your goals are. With a little customization you could quickly describe your character:

I'm a Gangrel that developed mind-control powers and I'm part of a group that is trying to create positive portrayals of vampires in popular media to create plausbile deniability for the masquerade. Twilight - we did that!

[ArmorClassZero]

"The politics would emerge from the interplay of groups."

This^. But we actually need there to be a sufficient number of groups with identifiable goals that overlap and exclude other goals. Having the Sabbat and Camarilla be 'at war' with each other is a terrible idea. Having Clans with no set agendas is one of Masquerades biggest flaws.

I suggested a while back that rather than just Clan and Sect, each Vampire should have (something analogous to) a Clan, (something analogous to) a set of religious Beliefs, and a political Party in place of Sect (with the assumption being that there was only one vampire govt.)

That gets us into the goals of Vampire and what players should actually be doing. I think the activity of Vampire (the gameplay) should revolve around what it means to be a Vampire (ground-breaking innovation, I know.)

If Clan determines your Unique Discipline, Unique Weakness, and Unique Feeding Form, then players have a reason to be Clan-conscious. Your Clan helps you feed, can teach you about your discipline, and help you work around your weakness. Because each Clan has a unique feeding form, it can overlap (positively and negatively) with other clans' feeding forms. Your unique discipline is gives you unique value to your play group, since you have powers and techniques not available to them. Your unique weakness can give others a chance to shine, or let you shine when their weaknesses are at play. These aspects of what it means to belong to a particular Clan create interplay between the different Clans and are definable differences.

A PC's Beliefs (think Covenants from Requiem, but actually... y'know... religious?) determine how they view the Vampiric condition - is it a blessing or a curse? How were Vampires created? What origin story do you subscribe to? How do you believe you should live this 2nd chance at 'life'? What do you do now that you're immortal? Or, as Twilight's tag-line put it, when you can live forever, what do you live for? (I do hate that such a dope tag-line was wasted on that movie.) A PCs Beliefs create interpersonal relations and tensions with other PCs and NPCs. It also means you have allies who share your beliefs that may be of different Clans and Parties. Benefits would primarily be safety (sanctuaries and havens) and NPCs willing to fight with you. I can think of 5 or 6 different 'religious' archetypes Vampires would probably believe off the top of my head.

Party affiliation is mostly concerned with control over the kine. Basically, how do we maintain the Masquerade? How do we keep the kine in line? Do we keep them happy and pacified with TV and drugs? Do we get them to turn on each other via conflicts? Do we keep them scared and confused? Do we educate them to mould them so they're more easy to control? Do we practice eugenics and breed the desirable traits and weed out what we don't like out? How are these policies going to benefit us in the short term? Long term? ust like with Clans and Beliefs, we can have different political Parties operating with slightly different goals in mind. Benefits are who gets to drive the company car, of course. The services you perform are related to maintaining the Masquerade.

This is how I've been thinking about doing things at least. Give players a three-axis system like this and let the interplay between their Clan, Beliefs, and Party push and pull them individually and collectively apart and see where their loyalties lie.

So you can say, "I'm a Gangrel (shape-shifting powers, control over animals, and all three bodily disciplines) that thinks vampires are the apex predators and highest form of evolution, and that we exist to keep the kine in check but we need to stop them from killing off their best - the worthy prey (this is their Belief/Covenant.) I oppose X political Party that wants to create wars between the kine, and support Y political Party that wants to practice eugenics on them."

What's the excuse for any given coterie to work together? More or less, they all work for the same (the only) vampire govt to maintain the Masquerade. It is also likely that given the triple-axis of loyalties, any two given players will share one or more Clan/Belief/Party. Then you can have each PC rope another character in by virtue of their shared identity trait. Like calling in favors and whatnot.

[nockermensch]

So yes, your types of vampries should be inspired by things like "We think that we should support playing vampires from the Anita Blake books" or "We think that we should support playing vampires from Twilight" because those are reasonable marketable goals to have. But the actual design process goes the other way, with requiring that they are playable and not setting destroying before getting to the nitty gritty of making them recognizable as the source material that inspires them.

Similarly, your vampire social system has to be constructed in a way where first and foremost it allows players to play teams of characters from the different vampire types and pursue group goals together. That is absolutely fucking basleine minimum, because you can't even have a tabletop RPG session if that isn't true. Every other part of creating conflicts and goals and story hooks is subordinate to the question "Can we start playing this game at all?"

-Username17

And what happens if the fictional vampire species/settings you want to emulate AREN'T internally consistent and survive only by author fiat?

The design goals you listed are commendable, but I have the feeling that a lot of popular fiction simply can't survive the kind of logic you want to apply to a role playing game. Or maybe they are consistent, but with severely conflicting restraints: Setting A works if there are 15 vampires in the world, tops. Setting B works if vampires are accepted by humanity. What do?

[Username17]

And what happens if the fictional vampire species/settings you want to emulate AREN'T internally consistent and survive only by author fiat?

That's almost invariably the case. That's why it's important to realize that you aren't making a book or a movie, you're making a cooperative storytelling game. And that means that things have to have an internally consistent logic as to why they happen that isn't needed in media with single authors where things can be declared to happen by fiat regardless of probability or plausibility.

The design of the Twilight homage vampires isn't complete when they precisely follow whatever stupid fucking rules that vampires follow in Twilight. It isn't even when they get as functionally close as its possible to be without getting sued. The design is complete when they are fully playable and functional in the campaign world and still excite the imaginations of potential players who like the idea of playing the vampires in Twilight.

You're making a game that has to be playable and a campaign world that has to survive the destructive testing of people actually playing campaigns set in it. The literary references are secondary to that. And more than that, they are references, no direct transplants.

-Username17

[PrometheanVigil]

So you're saying that clan in a social unit - you're a Toreador if you say you are and more importantly the others say so, too? Ie, it's possible to be adopted into a clan and equally possible to be without a clan?

No, I'm saying exactly what I said: you are part of one ethnicity (let's say, Haitian) which you cannot change and you may be part of a prominent lineage (your familiy are successful restaurants or music moguls) -- both of which may and will color peoples' perception of you from the outset -- but when it comes down to it, what you do as an individual is what defines you.

This is the design philosophy of VTR -- albeit does a poor job of highlighting this (they were overly worried about min-max builds to detriment of its wider inclusion in the gamebook).

There are some pretty obvious bad spots. [...] I wouldn't call this retarded, but I would ask what exactly it is you're trying to accomplish with your take on "a new vampire reboot or w/e." Are you just trying to swap a new clan roster in and otherwise leave the existing assumptions of VTM alone, or are you shooting for something a little more fundamental in terms of rewriting the themes of the game? Or do you just think it's cool for Tzimisce to feed by going The Thing on people? Depending on what it is you want to get out of fucking around with the clans, this might or might not be a step in the right direction.

I'm just tossing ideas around, but my thinking is that a vampire's clan is not the same as ethnicity or beliefs or political affiliation. This is why 'Egyption god worshipping snake-handlers' is not a clan IMO, nor is 'necrophilic inbred Italians.' It's also why I would drop the whole 'Tzimisce are Eastern European landed gentry from centuries ago'.

You're conflating "we need a clan for X concept!" syndrome that VTM collapsed under with what VTR did. The Giovanni would be considered a Bloodline in VTR, under either the Mekhet or Ventrue (in fact, the Sangiovanni are the expy rehash of the Giovanni with a focus on the necromantic aspect of the concept).

You need to completely reframe your entire thinking around the concept of a "vampire clan" -- and then you'll get it. Anything you consider oddly specific, remove it from the "clan" and then insert into a "sub-clan" underneath the parent clan. That's pretty much what they did in VTR -- vampires -> clans -> bloodlines.

--------------------------------

The only other successful usage of clan that I have seen in fiction is, funnily enough, in TES:Morrowind. You have the Quarra, the Aundae and the Berne: each one focuses on a fundamental aspect of the RPG system in the game -- combat, magic and stealth, respectively. These clans are superficially similar: they feed off blood, sunlight burns, they look vampiric, everybody hates them.

Functionally, they're very different. Berne are the skulking, manipulative infiltrators with the strongest ties in non-vampiric society. Aundae are a bunch of disparate, loosely affiliated sorcerers who are just as likely to fight each other as much as they would a rival clan. Quarra are neo-darwinianist with a strong warrior culture and the lore hints that they are biggest threat to Morrowind outside of Dagoth-Ur himself (and the Imperials, if you feel that way). They all hate each other, as well. However, the Quarra and Berne will put aside their war where it benefits both clans and each individual Aundae are pretty much free to do as there's no central authority they report to and so a party of them could plausibly exist.

(To be fair, the vampire lineages of the Necrach, Lahmian and Strigoi from Warhammer also use this approach, although that setting suffers from serious cross-vision issues of how vampires should work and be implemented -- compare Vampire Wars Trilogy with Witch Hunter Trilogy, it's pretty bad).

This works because the subcultures of the clan are clearly defined, do not readily cross-over and they can be counted on one hand. In real-life, clans as a real thing work the same way too. The four dominant clans of Nigeria -- Igbo, Yourba, Hausa, Fulani -- are a great example of this.

[ArmorClassZero]

PrometheanVigil Said: You're conflating "we need a clan for X concept!" syndrome that VTM collapsed under with what VTR did. The Giovanni would be considered a Bloodline in VTR, under either the Mekhet or Ventrue (in fact, the Sangiovanni are the expy rehash of the Giovanni with a focus on the necromantic aspect of the concept). [...] You need to completely reframe your entire thinking around the concept of a "vampire clan" -- and then you'll get it. Anything you consider oddly specific, remove it from the "clan" and then insert into a "sub-clan" underneath the parent clan. That's pretty much what they did in VTR -- vampires -> clans -> bloodlines.

@PrometheanVigil: I think you misunderstand me. I get that Bloodlines are a sub-classification of Clans in both VTM and VTR. My thinking is that that 'bloodlines' should not exist at all in any legitimate formal capacity in whatever Vampire: The Vampening that follows VTM and VTR. My thinking is that a Vampire's 'Clan' is more akin to a Species of Vampire. This is why I laid out the pseudo-taxonomic criteria of Unique Discipline, Unique Weakness, Unique Feeding Form.

I've been trying to reframe people's thinking around the idea that vampires do not need to 'suck' blood from their prey's neck with their mouth and oversized incisors. I also wouldn't have vamps be literal corpses, or literally burst into flames when hit by sunlight. I would rework the idea of creating vamps so that it were not a guaranteed thing - there would be a significant chance of failure. Not every person can become a vampire. Not every vampire that is 'born' is as a result of another vampire dripping blood in their mouth or whatever. I've also said that I wouldn't have the other mythical fantastical creatures like werewolves or wraiths or mummies or changelings because all of those can be played within the context of being various Vampire archetypes. All the ideas about special snowflake bloodlines can be done within the context of specific Vampire archetypes.

[PrometheanVigil]

@PrometheanVigil: I think you misunderstand me. I get that Bloodlines are a sub-classification of Clans in both VTM and VTR. My thinking is that that 'bloodlines' should not exist at all in any legitimate formal capacity in whatever Vampire: The Vampening that follows VTM and VTR. My thinking is that a Vampire's 'Clan' is more akin to a Species of Vampire. This is why I laid out the pseudo-taxonomic criteria of Unique Discipline, Unique Weakness, Unique Feeding Form.

I've been trying to reframe people's thinking around the idea that vampires do not need to 'suck' blood from their prey's neck with their mouth and oversized incisors. I also wouldn't have vamps be literal corpses, or literally burst into flames when hit by sunlight. I would rework the idea of creating vamps so that it were not a guaranteed thing - there would be a significant chance of failure. Not every person can become a vampire. Not every vampire that is 'born' is as a result of another vampire dripping blood in their mouth or whatever. I've also said that I wouldn't have the other mythical fantastical creatures like werewolves or wraiths or mummies or changelings because all of those can be played within the context of being various Vampire archetypes. All the ideas about special snowflake bloodlines can be done within the context of specific Vampire archetypes.

You're saying you want different "species"... and yet you're not comfortable with psi-vampires and other 90's/00's alternate takes. You can't pick and choose like that -- it's fucking awkward. Additionally, Bloodlines as conceptulized cannot work within pick 'n' mix systems... because they're just another pick 'n' mix. You'll just alienate every single demographic that might even check out your product (or who hear about it from someone else).

On top of the above, you're now heartpouring because the supernatural elements in the setting and the approach taken to the game's mechanics aren't what you would have write had you been there in Georgia in 1990 in the garage-den with Rein-Hagen and the Wieck bros. If that's what you want to do, that's fine but it's really another thread.

Look, I think you'd be better off with something like HERO because what you're describing here, that level of granularity, that system handles pretty competently -- although it is "heavy system" embodied.

[Chamomile]

The design of the Twilight homage vampires isn't complete when they precisely follow whatever stupid fucking rules that vampires follow in Twilight. It isn't even when they get as functionally close as its possible to be without getting sued. The design is complete when they are fully playable and functional in the campaign world and still excite the imaginations of potential players who like the idea of playing the vampires in Twilight.

The two key elements of the vampires in Twilight is that 1) they are better than you, and 2) they think you are special and will elevate you into the aristocracy with them. I mean, yeah, they also have impenetrable skin that sparkles in sunlight and random X-Men superpowers, but the actual central appeal is not really something you can mimic with a specific vampire type, because the central element of Twilight vampires that sets them apart from other vampires is that they consider a mortal protagonist to be special and are going to take her away from all her mortal problems to marry and ultimately become a vampire.

I also question whether or not appealing to Twilight fans is a particularly good move for a vampire game made in 2018. The last movie came out in 2012 and the franchise was already seriously waning in relevance by then, people who like vampires in general are not generally fans of that series, so there's a significant chance you will alienate more potential players than you will engage with an option that makes clear callbacks to that franchise.