V5's Failure isn't surprising

[hyzmarca]

Isn't rat higher on the list than uh.... surely wolf, although possibly Lamprey and Spider, depending on where you are in the world.

Dracula's two animal forms are Bat and Wolf. The Vampires in Lost Boys have hell hounds to guard their suburban house during the day. It's a really common connection actually.

But yes, Vampires aren't normally primarily Wolf themed. Their wolf themes are usually secondary things. But if you didn't have Werewolve, the "Vampire with a Wolf Companion" or "Vampire with a Wolf-form" would be a clearly redundant character.

Meanwhile, while rats often appear in Vampire films, it's normally just to show that things are run down and decaying. The only vampire with a specific rat-association I can think of is when Sex Machine turns in Dusk Till Dawn and then his body explodes into a rat monster second life mini-boss fight "for no reason." But even then, most of the Dusk Till Dawn vampires are snake themed.

-Username17

Book Dracula could control rats. Keanu Reeves movie Drcula could transform into a swarm of rats.

So basically, you're confirming there's no such game as "Wereshark: the Buffet"?

Street Sharks: The Buffet would be a great game.



The problem is that you cannot play Street Sharks in cWoD, because every Wereshark that knows what pants are is marked for death and hunted by NPCs that that are simply better than you in every way.
Also, Rokea can't swim through asphalt, which is an unforgivable oversight.

[Username17]

My fucking god, what is this bullshit?

I like the idea! I like the Hunger mechanics at least in concept!

I would submit that in fact the Hunger mechanics aren't merely bad in implementation, but in fact impossible to not be bad. I take it as given that whatever system of blood drinking, hunger, and satiation is - and regardless of whether it counts up or down - it should do the following:

• Give you the "oh shit" moment when the big villain eats a baby or pours a goblet of blood into their mouth while making the gothic equivalent of the Popeye them.
• Give you the thirst that makes it gradually harder to hold back your urges. Such that you might be tempted to stay away from your little brother for fear of hurting him.
• Have character backstories that include drinking blood as a key fact of their existence, thus clearly separating them out as a vampires rather than regular humans.
• Be compatible with there being enough vampires in the conspiracy and also there being a masquerade for more than five minutes.

That's basically it, and the hunger and feeding ideas of V5 hit precisely zero of those.

If a significant number of your vampires are trying to feed by smacking people with bricks in alleyways, the Masquerade essentially can't happen. If using your powers randomly makes you hungry, then there's no rush of strength from visibly drinking.

It isn't just that the feeding patterns are too weirdly restrictive (although obviously they are), or that vampires can't do enough before - on average - running out of satiation (although that is also true). It's that that entire method of trying to get people to drink and hunt and shit is inherently futile. It didn't work not only because the people writing it were lazy hacks phoning in a laughably limited vision - but also because the entire model is inherently unsalvageable.

-Username17

[Username17]

When you gain a level of a Discipline, you choose which power to learn. Thus, the book smugly surmises, every vampire is truly unique!

I did something similar with my own Vampire hack, and it's important to recall that Mind's Eye Theater also did something similar with the live action rules back in 1993. Each discipline got specific powers that were in three levels, and you could take them in whatever order within the tier and even skip some. This is a much better system than V5 came up with, and it's important to remember that Mind's Eye was literally 25 years old when V5 was published. When V5 came out, there were already people with master's degrees who were conceived during or after a Live Action Vampire session.

It's really not OK to come out in 2018 with something that's "pretty similar to the Live Action rules, but clunkier." Especially when this whole "You can take more lower level abilities instead of buying higher level abilities, but it makes your total ability cost higher as if you'd bought a high tier ability instead" deal had been trotted out in nWoD with the Ordo Dracul and everyone fucking hated it.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

My fucking god, what is this bullshit?

I like the idea! I like the Hunger mechanics at least in concept!

I would submit that in fact the Hunger mechanics aren't merely bad in implementation, but in fact impossible to not be bad. I take it as given that whatever system of blood drinking, hunger, and satiation is - and regardless of whether it counts up or down - it should do the following:

• Give you the "oh shit" moment when the big villain eats a baby or pours a goblet of blood into their mouth while making the gothic equivalent of the Popeye them.
• Give you the thirst that makes it gradually harder to hold back your urges. Such that you might be tempted to stay away from your little brother for fear of hurting him.
• Have character backstories that include drinking blood as a key fact of their existence, thus clearly separating them out as a vampires rather than regular humans.
• Be compatible with there being enough vampires in the conspiracy and also there being a masquerade for more than five minutes.

That's basically it, and the hunger and feeding ideas of V5 hit precisely zero of those.

If a significant number of your vampires are trying to feed by smacking people with bricks in alleyways, the Masquerade essentially can't happen. If using your powers randomly makes you hungry, then there's no rush of strength from visibly drinking.

It isn't just that the feeding patterns are too weirdly restrictive (although obviously they are), or that vampires can't do enough before - on average - running out of satiation (although that is also true). It's that that entire method of trying to get people to drink and hunt and shit is inherently futile. It didn't work not only because the people writing it were lazy hacks phoning in a laughably limited vision - but also because the entire model is inherently unsalvageable.

-Username17

I like the idea of the hunger mechanics. Getting rid of blood points means that vampires have an incentive to spam their best combat powers when cornered without holding anything back. Because they're not going to run out of superpowers. They will, at worst, Frenzy and kill the people they're trying to kill.

I think a rush of strength from drinking would be better handled by feeding bonuses rather than fungible blood points.

[Whipstitch]

Frankly, unless you've got werewolves squatting on this territory already I tend to favor a paradigm where it's the regular abuse of powers that is most addictive rather than the feeding itself, since unlike feeding the use of powers is something that people actually want happening at the table. I mean, look, I get it: this is a post Dracula world and vampires as a metaphor for destructive lusts and addictions is definitely a thing. But it's 2019 and the sort of feeding session that WW wants to pretend is the Best RP Ever frankly reads like Vampire: The Date Rape and basically just makes me feel bad rather than something I want to start every session with regardless of whether my character was naughty or nice. It's what the kids today like to call "cringe" and since I'm not actually an addict it's tough to envision that as what makes day to day unlife as a vampire tempting as opposed to the magical fucking powers or the chance to spit in the eye of mortality.

So, imagine a setup where instead of doing blood accounting all the time you ignore that shit unless you're doing serious business kung fu fighting or mighty rituals and redlining too hard saddles you with monstrous penalties that don't go away until you've calmed down and fed or had your buddies find you a sacrificial lamb. That way you can emphasize that powers are cool but come at the cost of being a total creep who victimizes people. You can then at least theoretically tempt otherwise reasonable people with moral questions like "How much of a monster am I willing to become in order to have the power to sneak past the guards and punch Trump in the dick?" Personally, I'd still rather just play Vampions, but if you're really wedded to a game about moral degeneration than I do suspect that giving people powers answerable to their rage is the better bet.

[WiserOdin032402]

Now that'd be a kickass setup that brings about the moral ambiguity the game wants to have. Too bad nobody competent enough is ever going to get access to the rights to Vampire.

[deaddmwalking]

Vampires exist in the public domain. The Vampire IP has nothing you'd want.

[WiserOdin032402]

At this point the only thing I'd want is the title itself. Vampire: The Masquerade. Has sentimental value and it's rather to the point. I don't recall how prevalent 'This is a clone of X' or 'this is just copying off of Y' is in the world of tabletop gaming.

Granted there's some to be said about the need to just ram an IP into the ground and grind it into dust until it's nothing but a long-forgotten memory.

[Whipstitch]

Vampires exist in the public domain. The Vampire IP has nothing you'd want.

Indeed, the fact that my li'l rant doesn't even map better to vampires than it does to many other random splats should give people who value the franchise pause. Because being willing to sacrifice anyone to get what is basically just a cliche you can ascribe to anything from pokemon trainers to politicians. Western comics and shonen manga are packed to the gills with mentally damaged supers whose ideologies and sacrifices make no sense if you don't account for the fact that they're clearly high off their own fumes. In the setup I'm talking about vampire Magneto is basically just regular Magneto having a really bad day.

[Username17]

At this point the only thing I'd want is the title itself. Vampire: The Masquerade. Has sentimental value and it's rather to the point. I don't recall how prevalent 'This is a clone of X' or 'this is just copying off of Y' is in the world of tabletop gaming.

Pathfinder was the biggest name in RPGs for a time because they were "basically a clone of 3rd Edition D&D" at a time when 4th edition D&D was messily shitting the bed. That's basically a sample size of one though, because the entire "OSR" movement is people making 1st edition AD&D hacks, and those are all so obscure you probably can't name any of them. The only example we have of a clone game doing well is where the game being cloned was currently the most popular game and the current license holder had chosen to shit all over themselves and refuse to produce any more content for the game in question in lieu of making a new game no one liked.

So the closest Masquerade example would be: if you made the reboot that Masquerade should have had in 2003, could you have taken all the disaffected people that were bitterly disappointed with nWoD? The answer is probably yes. But importantly, it's not actually 2003 anymore. So making a Masquerade reboot now might be more akin to Lamenttations of the Flame Princess than Pathfinder.

Indeed, the fact that my li'l rant doesn't even map better to vampires than it does to many other random splats should give people who value the franchise pause.

Your rant in particular, no. I would point out however that there is a reason that people keep making Vampire Horror, Vampire Action, and Vampire Romance works. Vampires do still map strongly into tropes that are highly popular.

What should make the franchise holders pause however is that Anne Rice is no longer culturally relevant. Queen of the Damned was released seventeen years ago to generally poor reviews. The only Vampire work of the last ten years of any note that fits into the Masquerade Anne Rice groove is What We Do in the Shadows, which is specifically parodying that genre as old and played out.

-Username17

[Nath]

Vampire's biggest failing was not letting the players start as princes. Giving ownership of the city from the start solves all engagement problems. Why should you investigate the weird rumors about the old mill? Because it's your city and if something is about to blow your sweet gig you want to stop it. Why do you care about politics? Because it's your city and no upstarts are going to unseat you if you have anything to say about it.

There's also the fact that a game about being the people who run the conspiracy is a lot more fun and a lot more interesting than being the mooks who just have to participate. Your exp going towards city management perks would be an interesting mechanic.

VtM failed in so many spots, I'm not sure this one would reach the playoffs. Before even addressing if PC should start or become princes, the problem starts with the position itself.

The President-of-the-anime-club joke is barely one. A Prince practical duties are to choose where the Elyseum is, draw the borders for hunting territories, allow or not the creation of new vampires, and punish violators. Choosing the Elyseum decoration is about as relevant to the anime club as one could imagine. Creating new vampires is outside the scope of the game as introducing new characters is either the realm of the gamemaster (in TTRPG) or new players (in LARP). For the latter 1) the laws do not let much to interpretation and thus power wielding, 2) for a supposedly established society, violations happen at an alarming rate, and 3) effective punishment ultimately relies on fighting capabilities (or delegating that particular task).

The office of princehood is whether solely about whipping ass and handed to a powerful vampire for that very reason, or a totally empty ribbon given to a powerful vampire anyway, because the character has to be somehow significant to be worthy of mention. While the title could have had some use to make the PC accept standing orders to go on quest and start playing, it obviously stops working once the players realize that the character was either made arbitrarily better than them or is weak enough to beat him into submission.

To me, one problem is that VtM focuses so much on punishing people for violating rules. Everything is about a NPC violating one rule or another, from breaking the Masquerade to Diablerie, until the PC understand they should as well. I guess it's the point of the source material that there is no room for rewards in this setting, only punishments, because the characters start as immortal and cursed for eternity. But as pointed out, VtM would work so much better as a game if it focused on PC enforcing the Masquerade, and probably admitting that it's the natural state (at least in the modern times) for the Masquerade to be threatened, rather than some occasional misdeed that requires someone to be punished. That would also help define a number of roles within a team, and allow to punish or remove a Prince when the Masquerade is not properly defended against those "natural threats".

I actually wonder if someone thought about this at some point early in development, considering they called the game "The Masquerade", made the Camarilla the PC faction and the Sabbat the bad guys (then hold it for about five minutes, before people wanted to play Sabbat, LARPers obviously had to focus on vampires-on-vampires plot, and the writers throwing in dick NPC).

Roleplaying out a "first hunt" or something might be OK. Once. But there's a fucking reason that actual vampire books and stories gloss over almost all (or even literally all) of the nightly feeding activities. The novelty wears off super fast, and then it's basically like narrating a character putting on pants or toasting their bagels or any other mundane activity they do every single fucking day of their entire fucking lives. The fact that the V5 people thought this should be a central tent pole of the franchise indicates that everyone involved had no concept of what this would look like as an actually playable game.

For a game that prizes itself in being about storytelling, I'm still bemused by how they introduce a rule that goes so blatantly against proper pacing of storytelling.

[Guts]

For a game that prizes itself in being about storytelling, I'm still bemused by how they introduce a rule that goes so blatantly against proper pacing of storytelling.

What does storytelling in the context of Vampire even mean? A game focused on the characters personal stories? A game with a pre-made story by the GM taking in consideration things like pace, climax, etc?Both? None of those?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm somewhat relieved. I got a few people irl that want me to run a V:tM game but I wasn't going to do it "right", because I thought certain things sounded dumb. Glad to see experienced people bringing up the same issues.

[saithorthepyro]

For a game that prizes itself in being about storytelling, I'm still bemused by how they introduce a rule that goes so blatantly against proper pacing of storytelling.

What does storytelling in the context of Vampire even mean? A game focused on the characters personal stories? A game with a pre-made story by the GM taking in consideration things like pace, climax, etc?Both? None of those?

None of the above. Literally nothing in all likelihood. Others have said it better, but Vampire doesn't really have central threat, premise, or reason for players to group together, or even really a goal to work towards. There is the idea of curing vampirism, but that was never really taken anywhere within the game. And the intent of the game is to be Anne Rice style vampires doing Anne Rice style things...hence why it's best suited for a LARP.

Bloodlines essentially invented reasons for why the player was doing missions and so on, because they were an unauthorized embraced vampire who essentially still existed on keeping La Croix happy, because the game didn't have a core concept they could use for "Why am I doing this?"

[deaddmwalking]

In the last 24 hours, I was thinking that if I wanted to reboot Vampire, I might opt to go with a Puck style fairy.

You have a lot of the key elements (fairy court, interaction with mortals, magical powers). Doing so would easily allow you to avoid any potential confusion with Vampire. The aesthetic wouldn't be as dark, so that might be a problem for some people, but I think having 'dark fairies' would cover that decently well. It wouldn't be hard to incorporate a Morrigan type archetype to appeal to any of the required seductive appeal.

Giving fairies the ability to make mortals remember things that happened as though they were a dream not only would allow individuals to conceal their presence more effectively than Vampire traditionally does, it offers a way to connect the world persistently to our own. If fairies have lived with us for thousands of years, why didn't we notice? We did, and there are folk stories, and most people don't believe them but they're mostly real.

In terms of giving the game direction, it wouldn't be hard to both set up fairies as 'protectors of humanity' against extra-dimensional magical threats but they still have conflicts with humans. I think it deserves an explanation for why fairies don't WANT to be KNOWN TO EXIST. I'd probably brainstorm that a little more, but off-hand, one thought is that fairies are a little like genies - they're subject to command by mortals. Keeping their existence secret would be a way to protect themselves from that... I could see having 'ultimate cosmic power' and an exploitable weakness being a way to maintain some of the 'power with a cost' dynamic that Vampire seems to strive for.

[Username17]

In the last 24 hours, I was thinking that if I wanted to reboot Vampire, I might opt to go with a Puck style fairy.

That wouldn't be a reboot of Vampire, that would be a different Urban Fantasy thing.

Urban Fantasy as a genre has stuff where the supernaturals are generally "fairies" rather than "werewolves" or "vampires" or "whatever," and that's fine. But then you're making Lost Girl fanfic instead of Underworld fanfic. There's room for that, obviously. But there's a reason that Vampire Diaries was a bigger deal than Lost Girl even though Lost Girl was a better show than Vampire Diaries.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

That wouldn't be a reboot of Vampire, that would be a different Urban Fantasy thing.

Couldn't you squish the two together? Take the most vampire like parts of fairies and the most fairy like parts of vampires.

Creepy supernatural things that come out when it's dark and prey (in various senses) on mortals using mind control powers. Only they have both fangs and Irish accents.

Having been thinking of vampires (or vampire like persons) as fairies (or as a subset of fairies) myself, I think if you squint it'd sorta work.

EDIT: Oh, right, could do something, but wouldn't be a reboot, misread you there.

[FiveBlinkNurse]

In the last 24 hours, I was thinking that if I wanted to reboot Vampire, I might opt to go with a Puck style fairy.

...Ahhhhhhhhhh, how is that a Vampire reboot and not just a completely new game, though?

A "reboot" is still a thing that follows certain rules and focuses on certain things.
For example, a Spiderman reboot still has to be about Spiderman and whether or not it will be the 1000th (re-)telling of Spiderman's radioactive-bite-into-superpowers-into-Uncle-Ben's-Great-Responsibility-speech - it still has to be about Spiderman.

You cannot have a Vampire reboot that is about anything other than playing as vampires as the game's focus.

Imagine going to see a Spiderman reboot and finding out it's actually a Saw sequel.

Now, you can reboot it by changing elements of it - Clans, Disciplines, or even the entire mechanic of Clans or Disciplines as a thing - but you cannot have it be a game that is anything other than a game about playing as vampires.

[deaddmwalking]

I think squinting, vampires and fairies can be swapped, but sure, more accurate to say 'world of darkness' reboot.

[Username17]

Now, you can reboot it by changing elements of it - Clans, Disciplines, or even the entire mechanic of Clans or Disciplines as a thing - but you cannot have it be a game that is anything other than a game about playing as vampires.

This is exactly right.

Further, we already know what it looks like when someone regurgitates Vampire: the Masquerade with all of its clans and disciplines and shit but crosses out the word "vampire" and writes in "fairy" or "wizard" or "mummy" or fucking whatever. We know this because White Wolf actually did that over and over again trying vainly to recapture the lightning strike that made Vampire: the Masquerade popular in the first place. It's literally every single thing White Wolf published between 1992 and 2001.

And that's instructive. Changeling isn't a reboot of Vampire. It's its own thing, and people don't like it very much. It probably wouldn't be very popular even if it didn't have that creepy pedophilia angle in it. Which very clearly shows us that the trappings and structure of Masquerade are not the point.

People don't want "basically Masquerade with the vampires replaced with aliens" they want "the thing Masquerade actually promised in the first place." And that was being able to play whatever kind of vampire that tickled your fancy. And there's been almost thirty years of popular vampire media in the interim, so the number of vampires that tickle peoples' fancies has increased substantially.

You want clans for a vampire reboot? Here they are:

Plus of course, you want some vampires from non-American media, because this is the 20th fucking century and you have Penanggalans and shit.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

So for such a modern vampire setting is there a common origin of vampires, or is that just a term for distinct man eating man monsters

Demon blood, ancient Magics, what brought vampires to be?

And within one ‘bloodline’ can you have a large variety, like how demons and dragons tend to have a lot of divergence in a setting

[maglag]

So if there's a dozens of vampires clans but they all get along together so that any party combination is possible...

Why can't vampires get along humans as well? Or just take over the world openly? Why bother to keep hiding in the shadows?

What if that's the game's objective? Maybe the Masquerade is just a means to an end, and that end is full world domination. The party are a group of elite vampires tasked with taking the last steps in changing the world to allow the vampires to come out. Since vampires don't die of old age they plan long term, they've been doing this for centuries. And now with the new technologies emerging the vampires can't delay anymore, the Masquerade cannot survive the Internet for long. But the players must still keep the masquerade going for as long as possible, otherwise if the humies find out too soon they may be able to provide meaningful resistance.

Multiple paths to make it happen, seduce/threaten/assassinate the right humies at the right times.

That provides a clear and glorious goal for the campaign end, the PCs as rulers/ministers of the new vampiric world order.

[Thaluikhain]

So for such a modern vampire setting is there a common origin of vampires, or is that just a term for distinct man eating man monsters

Could do it either way, IMHO, but an important thing to work out.

A common origin seems desirable to me, but then you are likely to want to have vampires (or something similar) from other mythologies.

You are unlikely to want to pick a common origin for all vampires, realise later that that is a bit Euro-centric and then tack on exactly the same, but different, vampires with their own origins from outside Europe as an afterthought.

And within one ‘bloodline’ can you have a large variety, like how demons and dragons tend to have a lot of divergence in a setting

To add to that, how much does your bloodline say about you? If you are a warrior or a hunter, do you need to be from the warrior or the hunter bloodlines? Or can you just get tooled up and go warring and hunting, whatever type of vampire you are?

[Username17]

So for such a modern vampire setting is there a common origin of vampires, or is that just a term for distinct man eating man monsters

This is a consequential choice, but it is an arbitrary one. You can simply decide whether you have seven vampire origins or only one. A common origin uses less conceptual space - at least at first. But a common origin also puts constraints on what you can add to the setting without convoluted retcons and narrative epicycles (that would then make the whole thing use more conceptual space).

The classic example is of course the idea of starting Vampirism in Sumeria or Egypt like Masquerade did. Because large amounts of humanity were factually totally out of contact with people who ever got in contact with classical civilization of the Fertile Crescent until quite recently, the whole thing just writes out the possibility of having vampires in Teotihuacan or Easter Island. And the backstories required for Aztec vampires are convoluted and retarded.

You can of course set the common source for vampires much earlier and if you set it back a few tens of thousands of years there are land bridges to Alaska and you don't have to explain shit to have Incan vampires and Aboriginal vampires. But putting your major story events in pre-history makes them rootless. Pre-history is literally before any history, that's what it fucking means. Which means your "very ancient origins" model doesn't interact positively or negatively with any historical events. It might as well happen on another world.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Pre-history is literally before any history, that's what it fucking means. Which means your "very ancient origins" model doesn't interact positively or negatively with any historical events. It might as well happen on another world.

That works. The first vampires are space aliens who landed on Earth 20,000 years ago, fed off of human blood as a substitute for their normal food source, which is unavailable. And because there wasn't enough alien survivors to produce a stable breeding population, they decided to reproduce by converting humans.