Discipline Chop Shop
Another change I'm lukewarm about is the Disciplines.
On the face of it, V5 has an interesting new change: instead of a linear incremental line from one set power at level 1 to another set power at level 5, which every vampire who develops the Discipline will gain exactly like the next vampire, Disciplines now offer multiple different powers placed at the same level.
When you gain a level of a Discipline, you choose which power to learn. Thus, the book smugly surmises, every vampire is truly unique! (here comes that exclamation mark again!
Ready for the robot uprising!?)
This probably sounds cool! (oh fuck, I'm doing it too, here comes the vapid smile…)
...Aaaaand then they fucked it up.
Instead of offering more (like what Requiem 2nd Edition Disciplines now do), V5 opts to offer
less.
How'd they manage such a feat? By taking a hacksaw to the previous Disciplines, dumbing them down to the level bordering a board game and hacking them up into two parts.
Once upon a time, the very first dot of Auspex gave you the ability to heighten your senses and opened up the possibility of psychic effects (flashes of premonition and the ability to perceive unseen things like the Obfuscated Nosferatu or ghosts or various mystical things under the surface).
V5 Auspex effectively grabs both your hands and asks you which one you'd like to keep, as in V5 at the first dot you can have
either Heightened Senses (which only heightens your natural perception)
or Sense the Unseen (which only gives you the ability to try to counter effects like Obfuscate and maybe see some Blood Sorcery at work) – but not both.
The same goes for Dominate, once the bastion of both Kilgraving your path in the world as well as hypno-rewrite memories – now it's either or.
Most V5 Disciplines offer you only two choices at each level with some levels only offering a single one still.
It's possible to attain higher levels and simply learn lower level powers later on, thus you might pick up both Compel and Cloud Memory for Dominate, for example – but that would require you to pass on another (presumably better) power at a higher level, and you can only have as many powers as you have Discipline dots (capped at 5).
So all Disciplines are now much narrower in focus than ever before. It's possible to develop your Dominate in such a way that you'll eventually pick up the ability to rewrite memories as well as mind control people with commands – but you'll have to choose whether you have more options for one of those things or the other and not all choice schemes necessarily make sense.
For example, you might be able to pick up Cloud Memory, Mesmerize and the Forgetful Mind, giving you the ability to make people instantly forget the last few moments in a quick one word gesture as well as take your time to re-write memories more thoroughly and have the ability to issue
complex commands
but not simple commands.
As a result, Disciplines are now more narrow in focus and more specialized rather than more flexible, which is great for balancing groups with a D&D-ish mindset (you're
The Wizard, I'm
The Warrior, he's
The Thief, she's
The Priestess, etc.) but not so great for individual vampire customization and severely hurting anyone trying to play it in one-on-one with a more personal focus.
Not all such focusing and narrowing and limiting makes sense, either.
Potence, for example, gives you Super-Strength, which you might imagine should probably give you the ability to both punch through armor (and punch mortals harder in general) and make Buffy-like leaps above tall fences and the like.
V5 Potence begs to differ and tells you to pick one or the other: either you hit like a truck (and at the first dot, only mortals specifically)
or you can Steve Austin it to the fire escape in a single bound.
There are a couple of positive balance changes – fuck off Celerity being the broken god-Discipline that it was in previous editions, it is now just as sucky as any other Discipline.
As you may have realized, as well, Potence, Celerity and Fortitude are now unique power-per-level Disciplines like any other Discipline instead of just the same incremental power.
No more do you just automatically add Potence to anything Strength or just count extra actions or soak dice – you get a different power effect every level.
Too bad that power effect basically comes down to things like "do you want to be able to run very fast to smack someone on the forehead who was further away than you
or do you want to be able to run up walls and over stuff?"
So just to recap, V5 Discipline design sets out to:
- * Offer more options.
* Provide more customization and variety between vampires with the same Discipline.
* Streamline Disciplines.
V5 Disciplines actually managed to achieve:
- * Cut down the usefulness of Disciplines.
* Offering more of the same, as there's usually only two options to choose from, if that.
* Dividing the same option into multiple options nerfs the Disciplines and what players get out of picking them.
* Dumbed down most Disciplines into board game level.
It almost feels like whoever wrote this section in the book
just fucking hated Vampire players and had it in for them…
