V5's Failure isn't surprising

[Username17]

Do vampires/vampire powers/vampire concepts need to be balanced?

Yes.

At various points people have tried to make RPGs with the dodge "It's not supposed to be balanced!" or some other such nonsense, and it's just nonsense. RPGs are games, and gross imbalances are obvious and hurt the experience for everyone.

Basically, each player is going to look at your vampire types and think of various vampire movies and books that they are reminded of and they are going to pick a vampire clan based on those external associations. They aren't picking one of the Vagabonds because they think the group is "powerful" they are picking it because they thought Byzantium was a really good movie and they wanted to roleplay a character like Clara. They aren't picking The Sexy Ones because they've minmaxed what social bonuses they can get, but because they liked True Blood and the idea of roleplaying a character like Jessica appeals to them.

This means that if you tell the Vagabond player that they've chosen a tier three vampire concept so they get a tier one human concept, or you tell the Sexy Vamp player that they've chosen a tier two vampire concept and have to have a tier two human concept, they are going to look at you like your hair is on fire. That isn't what they came for. They came for the vampire references and hitting on goth chicks. It's not that you couldn't imagine a system in which it was balanced to pick a vampire concept and a human concept that added up to the same number of points - it's that doing that kind of thing would necessarily mean that you were showing people character concepts and then taking them away. If you have things in Column A and Column B, people should be able to select anything from Column A and anything from Column B. Otherwise it looks like you can play a Vagabond Highschool Student but actually you can't because they are both Tier 3 or some fucking thing.

Now this doesn't mean all powers have to be the same "level." You can have as many columns as you want. You can let people select one thing from Column G if you really want to. What's important is that options that are presented as being equivalent are at least roughly actually equivalent. And that very much includes your vampire clans, because those are definitely going into the same lists and presented one after another with equivalent page spreads with art and poetry interspersed with the writeups. That is definitely going to happen.

And that means that your monster face vampires are going to be interpreted by the reader as being on equal footing with your bad ass vampires whether you intend that or not. So you'd better work your ass off to make sure that they are at least arguably co-equal in an actual game.

-Username17

[Nath]

While each of those vampire archetype require a minimum set of powers to be spot on, I think there are very few powers whose addition would break the concept (by the virtue of being fantasy stoies). If, with enough investment at chargen/experience points, your Blade expy learns to practice magic or Count von Count acquires Super Strength, I think no one would bat an eye as long as they fullfill the other thematical requirements of their kind ("You may be a sorcerer, but you'll be a sorcerer dressed in leather!! ...and the appropriate levels of Super Strength and Super Speed").

There is nonetheless a need to balance the different powers and balance specialist vs. jack-of-all-trades. But at least that would leave some options open for the most underpowered concept to be on par with the rest of the team.

[Libertad]

I'd honestly put V5 below McWoD.

[Nath]

As food for thought (and because I'm on holidays with a lot of time on my hands), I started putting together a list of team roles and specializations for a vampire team. I build it on the premise that a typical adventure would involve searching a person/item/place, defeating opponents and suppress evidence and testimonies that threaten the masquerade.

The Fighters use their vampiric powers to overpower, maim and kill their opponents and preys. When they have to gather (or suppress) information, they use intimidation and torture, counting on their street knowledge, from shoddy bars to police patrol routes, to find someone who might know.
- The Brawler fights unarmed, being strong and fast enough for his bare hands and feets to be deadly.
- The Beast has claws and/or fangs it uses as weapons, whether he looks like still vaguely human or fully shapechange into a wolf or a similar predator.
- The Master of arms does not relinquish weapons such as swords and machineguns (while still being strong enough to hunt unarmed to feed himself).

The Prowlers use their powers to move undetected and enter the place they need to. They're patient hunter, watching the city either from above, below or from a shadowy corner to gather information, ambush their preys when they expect it least, and retrieve items even from the most secured places.
- The Shadow walks on wall, jump or fly, while invisible, turn into mist, or simply step in and out the shadows.
- The Shapeshifter pass unnoticed by turning into bat, raven, rat, wolf...
- The Dismembered stays in his lair, while his eyes, hands or mouth fly accross the city.

The Lords' powers allow them to control minions serving their wishes, gathering information, striking their enemies and enforcing the masquerade from within human society.
- The Seducer blends into human society - they may run their own organization, or seduce and discard new servants as needed.
- The Tamer controls packs and flights of animals to spy and attack. And when it comes to enforcing the masquerade, the proverbial scapegoat often happens to rather be a rabid dog coming out of nowhere...
- The Master of Death does not trust mere humans and favor the undead : ghouls, zombies or animated skeletons (the latter being obviously less efficient to enforce the masquerade).

The Occultists make little use of their vampiric powers, save their kin affinity for magic. They can achieve as much as other vampires through the use of occult powers.
- The Summoner has access to centuries of occult knowledge, casting spells that allow him to locate or vanquish his target.
- The Seer hears the spirits whispering since he became a vampire. They give him many information. But if he talks back to them, they can also curse his enemy and leave them powerless, or drive them mad.

Obviously, I could just have called them fighters, thieves, faces and mages. I'm still not sure if it's a bug or a feature that some of those spes end up thematically very close (especially Beast/Shapeshifter/Tamer) and that some spec have an obvious synergy (Brawler or Master of arms + Shadow).

Comparing this to Frank's six thematical clans, the Bad Asses and the Monter Faces would gravitate toward the Fighter role because of their baseline powers. Sexy Ones, Aristocrats and Kids Version are quite jack-of-all-trades - I'd say story-wise most Sexy characters act as Shadow or Seducer, Dracula specifically would be a Shapeshifter/Master of death, and Kids Version are Shapeshifters. The Vagabonds do little more than "being a vampire" so it's hard to set how they ought to contribute to plot resolution.

[deaddmwalking]

It seems clear to me that in the pursuit phase, the Fighter has to go hang out at a bunch of dive bars while the Prowler is perched on a tall building looking for unusual things.

Any time you have stealthy people and non-stealthy people working together, you have a potential problem.

As far as thematic powers, you'd probably want a Shapeshifter to also be a Tamer.

Heck, you'd probably do fine to have your vampires pick one class from each category. What's wrong with being a Brawler AND a Master of Death?

[Username17]

I'd honestly put V5 below McWoD.

That is a tough call. McWoD was so terrible we did an OSSR of it. It had and achieved zero design goals.


V5 is a different kind of failure altogether. It clearly wants to be the reboot that brings Masquerade back to cultural relevance, it just isn't and cannot be that.

-Username17

[Korwin]

I'd just break down Disciplines into a grab-bag of point buy individual powers that scale off of a universal power stat instead of set of 5-tier tracks. Then I'd give each Clan a set of powers that they get for free, which is thematically appropriate, and let players pick more powers on top of that.

So you'd attempt to escape the stigma of being a game designed in 1991 by making a game that looked like it was designed in 1988?

-Username17

What? You are arguing now Point buy is bad in every way?
SR should change to an class based system, is what you are saying?

You did seem to go in that direction with AT, but sadly it never got to Character Generation (as far as I could find) ...

[Thaluikhain]

And that means that your monster face vampires are going to be interpreted by the reader as being on equal footing with your bad ass vampires whether you intend that or not.

Ah, right, good point, I'd overlooked that.

- The Beast has claws and/or fangs it uses as weapons, whether he looks like still vaguely human or fully shapechange into a wolf or a similar predator.
- The Master of arms does not relinquish weapons such as swords and machineguns (while still being strong enough to hunt unarmed to feed himself).

While this might just be me, "The Beast" is something that a vampire is, while "The Master of Arms" is more something a vampire does, it's not inherent to their bloodline or anything, while presumably The Beast's powers are (unless they learnt shapeshifting and could have learnt something else). Not sure if that matters, but it seems wrong to me to equate those.

- The Dismembered stays in his lair, while his eyes, hands or mouth fly accross the city.

While that's not a bad idea for a vampire, wouldn't it make for a boring PC compared to ones that go do stuff themselves?

[Nath]

McWoD was so terrible we did an OSSR of it.

Technically, Monte Cook's World of Darkness came out in 2007, which makes it dubiously acceptable as an OSSR in 2015. But it's an unholy mashup of World of Darkness and WotC's Open Gaming License. And both of those things come from the Clinton Administration. And if you're reading this in the future, I mean the first Clinton administration.

Ouch.

Heck, you'd probably do fine to have your vampires pick one class from each category. What's wrong with being a Brawler AND a Master of Death?

There's nothing inherently wrong with allowing that. But you have to take it into account during game design. If you want to leave some room for character progression with their powers and/or multiclassing, you will have to set if and how much advantage a character should get by focusing on a particular role, rather than divesting, as players may want to do one or the other.

The way I made that list, there is little overlap between the powers used (except for fighters, who would all benefit from Super-speed, and though some synergy are nonetheless possible, as I pointed out).

FIGHTER
Brawler: Super-strength, Super-speed
Beast: Super-strength, Super-speed, Shapeshifting (combat form)
Master of arms: Super-speed

PROWLER
Shadow: Slow Fall, Climb/Jump/Fly, Invisibility, Mist Form
Shapeshifter: Shapeshifting (realitic animal form)
Dismembered: Seaparate Limb

LORD
Seducer: Hypnotize/Mindcontrol (human)
Tamer: Hypnotize/Mindcontrol (animal)
Master of Death: Raise the Dead, Create Ghoul

OCCULTIST
Summoner: Spellcasting
Seer: Spiritism, Curse

[Nath]

While this might just be me, "The Beast" is something that a vampire is, while "The Master of Arms" is more something a vampire does, it's not inherent to their bloodline or anything, while presumably The Beast's powers are (unless they learnt shapeshifting and could have learnt something else). Not sure if that matters, but it seems wrong to me to equate those.

My point was that what the characters will effectively do in-game must be looked at first. Whether the capabilities are the result of training or exclusive to a given bloodline should be decided later.

You can use bloodlines to define the character team role (ie character class), and that's fine. One way to do that is to have each bloodline have only access to the powers associated to that team role. VtM sorta did that, except for the part where it did not define what the team role were in the first place, let alone what powers would be useful to those roles. So Tremere are all magicians because they have Thaumaturgy, Ventrue are all faces because they have Dominate and Presence, the clans with Celerity are all fighters, and everyone else can go fuck themselves. Basically, there are clans that define your team role, and clans that makes you a useless slob with a background.

The fact that TTRPG involves a group of playe makes palatable, if not desirable, some level of specialization. On the other hand, Frank's point is, AFAIU, that none of the litterary and cinematographic references has characters' powers in a subset as narrow as VtM did. With specializations as narrow or ill-defined as VtM, the characters are not up to vampiric standards (and may even be unable to simply feed themselves...).

For vampires to fullfil a role with a specialization, 1) they need powers useful to that team role, and 2) powers that are useless to the spec will be seldom used. To put it another way, if a player wants his vampire to fight with dual axes, the fact that he may belong to a bloodline that has a combat monster form becomes meaningless. Furthermore, his combat monster form will just not apear in-game. The obvious answer is that players who want dual axe wielding should not take the combat monster bloodline in the first place because 1) he would pay at chargen for a power that he doesn't want and 2) his character won't match the other players' expectations for a member of that bloodline.

It's just a matter of designing bloodlines so that a large majority of players can create characters that suit them and whose performances are up to the expectations. But that requires some thinking ahead.

I think having a one-on-one basis for clan and team role greatly limits the other elements that you can use to build a clan's identity, if people might want to play, say, a vampire face that is not an aristocrat. Creating dozens of different bloodlines to fill up he entire conceptual space of role/style combination would prevent having politically meaningful clans.

A theoritical solution would be to allow each clan to perform if not all, at least a sizeable number of different roles, while having access to their theme-appropriate powers (so, a Bad Ass Occultist could still have Super-speed if the need occasionnally arise, like to feed himself, and an Aristocrat Fighter still has Hypnosis power). If you establish fixed cost for powers, that would result in a number of suboptimal builds (the Bad Ass for instance having all his prerequisite powers linked to fighter role, while the aristocrat has hypnosis and mist form).

One solution I considered was to have the clan powers be lesser versions of those the specialists will take. For instance, while a Bad Ass Fighter will take and pay for the full version of Super-strength and Super-speed that Aristocrat and Vagabonds Fighter also use, a Bad Ass occultist dressed in leather will have for free Limited Super-strength and Limited Super-speed, that requires him to spend a Blood Point or whatever. Thus the Bad Ass will still be able to be on-par with his cinematographic reference when he has to, even though the choice he made regarding his specialization makes it rare during play.

The Dismembered stays in his lair, while his eyes, hands or mouth fly accross the city.

While that's not a bad idea for a vampire, wouldn't it make for a boring PC compared to ones that go do stuff themselves?

I included the separate limbs because it appears to be a common vampiric power in African and Asian lore. But to have a significant value as a power, I think it must contribute to a team role. Since separate limbs would be used without shapeshifting, fly and/or invisibility, it made sense to make it a distinct specialization, even if an exotic one (moreover considering many players will still find it bizarre on not fitting into their desired character concept).

I should amend the description to say the vampire send his limb "from a distance" rather than never moving out of his lairs (even if he could do it, at least if powerful enough). I can even picture such vampires fighting with his hands detached to graple or strangle his oppponents while in line of sight.

[Username17]

The fact that TTRPG involves a group of playe makes palatable, if not desirable, some level of specialization. On the other hand, Frank's point is, AFAIU, that none of the literary and cinematographic references has characters' powers in a subset as narrow as VtM did. With specializations as narrow or ill-defined as VtM, the characters are not up to vampiric standards (and may even be unable to simply feed themselves...).

That's the core problem with all of the Masquerade clans. Even before we get to issues like how the Giovanni are way too specific and the Assamites are genuinely offensive, we have the overarching problem that a starting Masquerade character does not get enough powers to be an effective literary reference for practically any of the source material. Even choosing new source material and making a new clan from scratch, the clan template itself doesn't provide enough levers to make any of the ideas you might have work.

And yes, even the masquerade setting doesn't work with vampires being as weak as they are in masquerade. The ability to perform basic functions of night to night existence requires actually quite a few more discipline dots than characters actually get. Most vampire clans don't have an in-clan means of feeding themselves. Most clans don't even have an in-clan means of seeing in the dark, which is a very big deal for the game's fictional history considering that vampires in masquerade aren't allowed to use sunlight or firelight and before 1879 there was no option 3.

The weaknesses in Masquerade are too extreme, and the powers are too weak and too small in number. It's a big problem.

What? You are arguing now Point buy is bad in every way?
SR should change to an class based system, is what you are saying?

Shadowrun's best point system was 2nd edition, when you got 100 points. Going to 120 points in SR3 was a mistake, and going to 400 points in SR4 was a bigger mistake. Eclipse Phase fucking around with over a thousand points is bluntly unplayable.

Point buy has various advantages, but it creates emergent archetypes based on what you can afford. If you're trying to get people into your game by saying "You can play basically Edward Cullen" then people should be able to do that. Point buy is a terrible fit for a game where you're trying to entice people in with archetypes. Also, the more points people have to spend the more it is like balancing a check book.

The way I made that list, there is little overlap between the powers used (except for fighters, who would all benefit from Super-speed, and though some synergy are nonetheless possible, as I pointed out).

I don't think that's a fruitful means of approaching things. The goal is to have different archetypes and roles carry their weight, and that means that the thing that needs to be finely assessed is what the weights actually are. The roles fall out naturally once the challenge space is defined.

-Username17

[jt]

The Bad Asses, The Sexy Ones, The Monster Faces, The Vagabonds, The Aristocrats!, The Kid's Version

Something that strikes me about this list is that the same three powers show up a lot - super strength, mental domination, and turning into a bat. And far from an arbitrary list of powers, this is actually a very solid problem solving kit. You can solve things with violence, you can solve things by mind whammying the relevant authority figures, you can solve things by flying away, you can solve things by snooping around as a small animal.

If you set those three as the baseline that everything else (clans and other options) adds to, you can:
[*] Assume competence. Even if you screw up and some option is underpowered, the player will always be able to contribute using core vampire powers. When you design encounters, you know some abilities will always be present.
[*] Safely hand out some pretty gnarly powers. Flight is one of those scary abilities that can warp a game, but it's redundant with turning into a bat so it's not that big of a deal. You can just give it to the Sexy Vampires for free if they're too cool to be bats. If someone wants to turn into a wolf monster, that's redundant with vampire strength, so you get to make their monster form even stronger so it's an actual upgrade. Everyone already has a save-or-lose mental domination ability so it's no problem to give sorcerous vampires some more.

[Chamomile]

Super durability doesn't always come up because having your vampire shot through the gut makes them less sexy and less intimidating (unless they're so super-durable that they're barely even harmed), but the majority of vampire sub-types expect to be only mildly injured by extreme blood loss and critical damage to what is normally a vital organ, with sometimes some exceptions for specific organs. Even the least durable vampires can treat evisceration and impalement by anything not a wooden stake as about as incapacitating as a broken arm. You are probably done fighting for today, but you are not in serious danger of death and the long term consequences last a couple of weeks.

[Username17]

Something that strikes me about this list is that the same three powers show up a lot - super strength, mental domination, and turning into a bat.

Unsurprisingly, as those are the classic Dracula movie powers. There are of course vampires who don't seem to have all of those, but it's pretty rare for any vampire in any modern media to not have at least one. If they didn't, how would you even know they were a vampire?

Now super strength mostly just lies in a continuum. Some vampires are "as strong as a pretty strong person" while other vampires are "lifting and throwing cars" strong. But transformation and mental domination could plausibly be divided up into multiple different powers and rationed that way. Dracula's ability to command respect from those around him, his ability to command obedience from humans of weak will, and his ability to command obedience from animals of weak will are all pretty much the same power as described by Bram Stoker - but in Masquerade that's Presence when he impresses Johnathan Harker, Dominate when he controls Renfield, and Animalism when he sends rats into the church. And that's a fine thing for an rpg to do.

The point is that you could make a game where literally all of the vampires had super strength, mental domination, and bat form, and still be able to divide that into enough different game abilities to present meaningful differences between characters. Being able to hypnotize someone with a calm conversation and being able to impress a visceral emotion on a crowd of people are different enough in game story application that they could just be different things.

Even the least durable vampires can treat evisceration and impalement by anything not a wooden stake as about as incapacitating as a broken arm.

Certainly one of the weird things is that very frequently people present a Vampire weakness as "when you shove a chunk of wood into their heart, they don't die." Or "when held under water for more than twenty minutes, they don't die." It's simply accepted that being inconvenienced by things that would obviously kill a normal person is a weakness. Like an amount of super durability that you'd think would be importantly notable is simply taken for granted.

-Username17

[jt]

The point is that you could make a game where literally all of the vampires had super strength, mental domination, and bat form, and still be able to divide that into enough different game abilities to present meaningful differences between characters.

Yes, you certainly could. But I don't think it's necessary to try to turn that into a checklist that each character option covers a different way. You can give every vampire the same super strength, mental domination, and bat form just for showing up. And rather than restricting design space, this actually gives you a lot more room, because it allows you to casually hand out some really cool powers without worrying as much about balance.

Say for example that the default version of mental domination makes the victim stare at you and do nothing for a few minutes. You can give out a variant that lets you make people forget things, or another that makes the victim follow a simple command. These are really nutty abilities that'll make people feel powerful to use, but they're unlikely to destroy the game balance because they're only mild upgrades over the mental domination ability that everyone has.

[OgreBattle]

Horn about mortal opposition, the effect of mundane cop bullets, being hit by a car and so on

Super soakers are probably out

[Username17]

You can give every vampire the same super strength, mental domination, and bat form just for showing up.

But you factually don't want to. Not only are some vampires "spider themed" or "snake themed" and just don't want to have a bat form, but some vampires don't transform at all or don't transform as starting characters. Our "sci fi" vampires (Blade, Underworld, Ultraviolet) do get transformation powers, but in those stories it tends to be the shtick of individual powerful named characters. However, it is also factually true that turning into a bat or mist is a ground floor ability.

The Masquerade idea of giving different vampire types access to different disciplines and thus having different ground floor abilities for different vampires remains a good idea. A brand new Deathdealer probably can't turn into a flying rodent, but a brand new Blood Accountant probably can. That kind of differentiation is good for the IP, and it's good for the game.

Masquerade's big problem wasn't that they gave different vampire powers to different vampires, it's that they didn't give enough powers to any vampires. And also that the packages they did make weren't double checked for being able to meaningfully contribute - or even for being able to survive night to night.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

You can give every vampire the same super strength, mental domination, and bat form just for showing up.

But you factually don't want to.

I don't think you've made a strong case for this point.

IF you start every vampire with those abilities, you can also offer trade-outs without having characters who can't contribute.

It wouldn't even be weird to offer a 'snake themed package' that required sacrificing your bat form. It also wouldn't be weird to offer the snake (or wolf) package as something you could buy with character advancement.

A high level vampire might have snake powers and bat powers, but a low level might have only one.

[Nath]

For the record, Vampire: the Masquerade has 17 Disciplines (leaving out the more exotic bloodlines).

Auspex (Super-perception + Mind probe)
Animalism (Animal mind control)
Celerity (Super-speed)
Chimerstry (Illusion magic)
Dementation (Emotion control + Madness)
Dominate (Human mind control)
Fortitude (Super-resistance)
Obfuscate (Super-stealth + Invisibility + Disguise)
Obtenebration (Shadow control)
Necromancy (Death magic)
Quietus (Combat magic)
Potence (Super-strength, including Super-jump)
Presence (Super-charisma)
Protean (Shapechange + Mist form)
Serpentis (Magic)
Thaumaturgy (Magic)
Vicissitude (Shapechange)

So, basically, the problems were : 1) each clan only has access to three displines max (which resulted among other things in some vampires not being able to feed themselves) ; 2) the Discipline can have up to five levels to unlock before getting the cool things ; 3) only one clan (Gangrel with the Protean Discipline) had access to animal shapechange and mist form, a number of other Disciplines had similarly limited access ; 4) slow fall, wall walk and fly are not available to anyone in this game (not the most thematicall-sound powers, I agree).

[Thaluikhain]

IF you start every vampire with those abilities, you can also offer trade-outs without having characters who can't contribute.

It wouldn't even be weird to offer a 'snake themed package' that required sacrificing your bat form.

Aren't you saying much the same thing, just using the word "start" differently? You still don't all "start playing the game" with bat-form, even if you "start the character generation process" with it.

[Username17]

IF you start every vampire with those abilities, you can also offer trade-outs without having characters who can't contribute.

If you have trade-outs, you haven't started every character with those powers. I mean, fucking obviously.

I think it's reasonable to consider Lucy / Blufer Lady as the gold standard of starting vampire characters, with other packages nominally balanced to that. But obviously not all the vampire types want to have the same starting powers. Both because there are conceptual differences with the different literary allusions, and because the players themselves want their characters to be able to do things the other player characters can't do.

And the framing "everyone starts with disciplines A, B, and C, except you can trade A out for D..." is extremely confusing and also the first part is a lie.

So, basically, the problems were : 1) each clan only has access to three displines max (which resulted among other things in some vampires not being able to feed themselves) ; 2) the Discipline can have up to five levels to unlock before getting the cool things ; 3) only one clan (Gangrel with the Protean Discipline) had access to animal shapechange and mist form, a number of other Disciplines had similarly limited access ; 4) slow fall, wall walk and fly are not available to anyone in this game (not the most thematically-sound powers, I agree).

I would add the problems that 5) some of the abilities that actually existed were pretty deep in the "why the fuck does this exist?" The worst offender being Dementation, being as it's thematically weirdly specific and mechanically pretty much useless. And 6) the magic disciplines didn't have any internal logic to why they did and did not give access to various stuff. If I showed you ten "edlder" abilities of Quietus and Obtenebration without the power names, I doubt you'd guess which was which more than 6 or 7 times. And 7) the abilities in grab bag disciplines like Protean and Serpentis come in a fixed order, but there's very little effort made to ensure that order is thematically or mechanically justifiable. In Protean the highly thematic animal form comes after the weirdly specific earth meld. In Sepentis the incredibly powerful hypno-vision comes before the weirdly shitty self-surgery.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

In regards to bat form, you could turn into a bat sized bat, turned into a human sized bat, or turn into a group of bat sized bats that together are human sized.

Those seem equal valid choices, but would you want to have 3 different bat form abilities? My first thought was no, but you might want to turn into a giant bat monster for eating people purposes. Maybe you could have that as an upgrade to turning into a normal bat, and miss the bat swarm together.

Also, is turning into mist equal to turning into a bat? I'd have said it was better, though maybe not if you had the option of monster bat.

[Mistborn]

Given the how much overlap the types of vampires listed have, it seems like the easy thing to give every starting vampire super strength, a mental domination power from menu A, and one pick from menu B misc vampire powers. That does a good job for covering most of what Frank outlined and if you write 4 options for menu A and 5 menu B that's already 20 kinds of vampire to pick from.

[Nath]

In regards to bat form, you could turn into a bat sized bat, turned into a human sized bat, or turn into a group of bat sized bats that together are human sized.

Those seem equal valid choices, but would you want to have 3 different bat form abilities? My first thought was no, but you might want to turn into a giant bat monster for eating people purposes. Maybe you could have that as an upgrade to turning into a normal bat, and miss the bat swarm together.

Also, is turning into mist equal to turning into a bat? I'd have said it was better, though maybe not if you had the option of monster bat.

A mist form ought to make you immune to some type of attacks (grappling, stake, crossbow bolt...) and allow you to sneak under doors. You can possibly balance bat and mist forms by making the former fly faster, but overall Mist Form seems better outside of long-range travel situation.

Turning into a flight of bats (or any other swarms) may count as a defensive ability, but having to deal with attacks that may or not affect all or a majority of bats may not be worth the hassle game-wise. So on one hand, "there is that 1958 movie where Dracula turns into a flight of bats" and on the other hand, "you play one character so you turn into one bat" seems reasonable rule-lawyering.

Regarding giant bat, giant wolf and the likes, you can make it a separate power, or yo can make it a combination of Super-Strength and Shapechange (since it's probably a good idea to prevent a normal-sized bat from having Super-Strength).

[Nath]

Still as food for thought, I tried to make a more detailed list of vampiric powers, based on what I posted earlier. VtM-like discipline ranks appear to be a good solution to deal with powers that overlap with other while being obviously better, like Wallwalk versus Fly, or Bat Form versus Mist Form (the alternative would be to set different costs, but then that would create gaps between characters who took the lesser powers at chargen and upgrade later, and those who waited to directly pick the better ones during play). I ended up with (only) four different ranks for each category, but the major lesson here is that it may difficult to fill up ranks with significant power progression without getting into minutia regarding cost, duration or dicepools. Considering players should be able to copy some rather powerful vampires at chargen, this setup leaves little room for character progression.

Immortality
Level 1 (given): do not age
Level 2: regenerate flesh wounds (speed to be determined)
Level 3: withstand sunlight for a small duration (like one or two turns)
Level 4: regenerate entire body (only for "mundane" damages)

Blood drinking
Level 1 (given): drinking human blood
Level 2: drinking vampire blood
Level 3: drinking animal blood
Level 4: drinking storred blood

Domination (human or animal, with possibly specific traits to specialize in one or the other)
Level 1: Mesmerize (paralyze and force to listen)
Level 2: Hypnotize (plant one idea)
Level 3: Mind reading
Level 4: Mind control

Gravity mastery
Level 1: Slow fall
Level 2: Wall walk
Level 3: Fly
Level 4: Telekinesis (make other people and thing fly)

Supernatural Strength
Per level: Damage and lift modifier

Supernatural Speed
Per level: Initiative and Movement modifier

Supernatural Perception
Per level: Detection modifier

Stealth mastery
Level 1: Silent Step
Level 2: Shadow Step (disappear in shadow)
Level 3: Invisibility to mortal
Level 4: Invisibility to machine

Shapechange
Level 1: Animal form (Super-Strength not usable under that form)
Level 2: Combat form (demon or animal-looking, human-sized)
Level 3: Mist Form
Level 4: Separate body parts

Mastery of Death
Level 1: Create ghoul
Level 2: Create zombie
Level 3: Animate skeleton
Level 4: Summon wraith

Occultism
Per level: unlocking different tier of spells to be purchased separately