V5's Failure isn't surprising

[Mord]

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.

Castlevania shows us the way, as usual:

Bat form is for getting places you can't normally get to (usually vertically). Your upgraded bat form also lets you move really quickly through the air in short bursts. I don't know if you want to keep the Wing Smash attack specifically, but hey maybe that's a splatbook filler power.

Why you would want a Bat Form over regular flight is that it's way more discreet in urban settings. Unless you can fly and turn invisible, which should probably cost extra mojo as compared to just turning into a bat.


Mist form is for getting through tight spaces you couldn't normally squeeze through; grates, keyholes, closed windows that aren't well-sealed. Mist just kind of drifts slowly around, though, so you don't really want to use it for transport. On the plus side, you also can't meaningfully harm mist without something like a portable compressor. The Ghostbusters could probably deal with a vampire in mist form.

As for the Wolf Form... I guess they can run faster and longer than a human, but that only really matters if you don't have access to a car. Also I guess wolves can swim, whereas Alcuard cannot. Plus wolves have an unintentionally cute MIDI bark.

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.

Lest we forget, Gary Oldcula also transforms into a swarm of rats.

[Username17]

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.

We don't want 20 kinds of vampire to choose from. We want the kinds of vampire people want to be well supported.

If you throw a bunch of broken legos at the floor, there are people who will want to play with them. They will make their own fun, or whatever the fuck. And giving people a pile of disconnected "vampire powers" is basically that. But if people are making their own fun, they aren't all going to make vampires. Some disruptive asshole is going to make a dinosaur riding astronaut or something.

The important interaction is the interested player says "I want to play Edward Cullen, what do I get?" and then the player who owns the book opens the page up to where the sexy vampires are and you get a clear starting package. You don't want the person who owns the book to look blankly at the interested player and open the book to the powers section and say "You can play whatever you like" because that isn't providing anything to the interested player. I mean, you can show them a cardboard box and tell them they can pretend it's whatever they like, and that's true, but it's not helpful.

The thing that would make a Masquerade reboot provide value over playing cops and robbers is for it to provide prompts, to provide shortcuts, to provide a way to start telling stories and stop contemplating the fucking infinite. Feed you character concepts, and then let you play them.

It is in essence not very important whether your Masquerade reboot supports four kinds of vampire or twenty four. It just has to be that all of the presented options:

• Actually presented to the players and not hidden out of the way somewhere.
• Reasonably playable out of the box.
• Do a decent a job of fulfilling the player's expectation of what they would be able to do based on the implied media references.

That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is. It means that fucking none of the clans in original Masquerade actually cut the mustard.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I'm still not getting the negativity.

One option: You start everyone with a standard character. You let people play as is, or spend additional time customizing the character. This allows people to dive right into play because if they don't choose to customize, they're ready to play immediately.

Another option: You require character generation. You have players pick options from a few columns and they put the options together to form a character. You include a few 'archetypes' that show how these can be put together, but people can tinker a lot more.

The second one is what Shadowrun does.


You can turn the dials on how complex character creation is, but the more options you provide, the more 'trap options' begin to exist. Giving everyone a 'standard starting package' and then letting them add extra options (either at the start or as they gain experience through play).

Reading through this, I'm pretty convinced that everyone should have Super Strength/Toughness, something that happens when you drink blood, an alternate form, and a mind-clouding power to start. Whether those have pre-selected 'default' options that you trade out or you pick from a list of options in each column has an impact on how default character creation works, but either way it works out to having starting characters that are relatively quick to create and are functional from the beginning.

[Thaluikhain]

Couldn't you let people pick whatever starting powers they want, but also include pre-made sample characters using those rules that are clearly various popular types of vampire?

Admittedly, then you'd have to make sure your vampire power combinations don't just cover cool stuff, but come together in specific ways (in addition to being useful party members), which is more work.

[Username17]

I'm still not getting the negativity.

Because your argument is a liar's paradox. If not all of the player characters start with batform, they don't all start with batform. That is a tautology. Whether that happens because batform is on a list that the player chose not to select, or because batform comes up as an option for some but not all clan choices or because every player got offered batform with an additional offer to trade it for other things off a different list is not relevant. No matter how it's presented, it's simply factually true that not all the characters start with batform, and claiming otherwise makes you tautologically wrong.

Remember, you're the person who specifically objected to the statement:

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.

If you concede that in fact not all of the vampires will have "the same super strength, mental domination, and bat form" then you need to eat your fucking crow and sit down. Bill Compton doesn't turn into a bat at all, and people who want to be Bill Compton don't need to turn into a bat to do that. Therefore not all of the characters will have the same powers off that list. Done. The argument is over, and your objection is heard and scoffed at.

The Moroi in Vampire Academy don't have super strength. It's a plot point that they don't. In Wir Sind Die Nacht and Daybreakers, the vampires don't have mind control and it's a plot point that they don't. No vampire power is universal, even though powers like mental domination and super strength are very common.

-Username17

[jt]

Since I was the person suggesting giving everyone the same starting powers in the first place - I also don't see why you'd start with a fixed set and allow trades out. It's the same as offering options in the first place, but more convoluted.

What I was suggesting was starting with a base power set that ensures everyone is capable of participating in vampire stuff, then giving them more stuff on top of it to distinguish them. Some of that extra stuff might be better versions of your base stuff, which means you'll rarely use that part of your base kit. Doing it this way gives you interesting game design levers that you don't normally get to play with, because usually games are "zero to hero" and not starting people off as powerful monsters. (And my motivation in all these discussions is to explore interesting game design ideas.)


Some concessions to game design are necessary, and I don't think it's necessary to slavishly follow each bit of source material that might inspire players to try a vampire game. Edward Cullen doesn't need flight to seduce teenage girls, but if we expect him to team up with Dracula and Count Chocula then he'll need to fly to keep up. Obviously he'd prefer to fly around in vampire form rather than turning into a bat, because being sexy while flying is more helpful to his core mission of seducing teenage girls. So when a player joins the game and wants to be Edward, you point them at the sexy vampire chapter and they see a bunch of stuff they expect plus flight. And that's fine because you're expecting them to team up with other vampires, not recreate Twilight. But it wouldn't be fine at all if you failed to have a sexy vampire chapter in the first place.

[Iduno]

Since I was the person suggesting giving everyone the same starting powers in the first place - I also don't see why you'd start with a fixed set and allow trades out. It's the same as offering options in the first place, but more convoluted.

The one benefit with doing a trade-out instead of not having a "normal" base set of powers is the player would have to see that they're actively choosing not to be able to keep up with everyone else in that way, and that they have better be prepared for it.

Is that enough reason to choose to do it? Probably not, but it is better than nothing.

[Thaluikhain]

Actually, while it's a automatic fail to not give vampires the powers they need to be an archetype, is it an automatic fail to give them additional ones the player isn't interested in as well?

From FrankTrollman's example above, if you had a PC who worked like Bill Compton, but who could turn into a bat as well, would that ruin their Bill Compton-ness? Obviously, you'd want to avoid that sort of thing, but if you didn't for some reason, how much of a big deal is it?

Also, should vampires burn in sunlight (especially UV for some reason)? I've always thought that was really stupid myself, but it seems to be popular. Being weakened by sunlight, not getting your magic powers during the day, or having really good night vision that humans can't compete with during low light levels would all encourage nocturnalness without demanding it.

[jt]

If you wanted to reduce the weakness to sunlight, I'd suggest making the first light at dawn still be fatal. That lets you keep the time limit aspect, which is where most of the drama comes from.

[Username17]

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

Masquerade had the polar opposites right next to each other because of the alphabet. Potence is highly and obviously linear with "Potence 3" being exactly "Potence 2" with an additional +1; and right next to it Protean is an unordered list of random stuff that is not arranged by power or theme. It is essentially impossible to even imagine a character with Potence 3 and not Potence 2, but I can't actually think of a fictional character who has all five dots of Protean and yet the OG book Dracula has a newly made vampire using mist form which is the fifth fucking dot in Masquerade. And that well underlines the issue: grab bag disciplines desperately want to be unordered, and linear disciplines desperately want to be in fixed linear order. And then you got disciplines like Dominate and Obfuscate that have clear core power increments but also have things that feel like optional extras that might be appropriate to have or not have at several different levels of power.

It is an interesting point that White Wolf did have various disciplines that bought their powers in different ways. Cruac had you buy a level and that level entitled you to buy spells and powers of that level, for example. That was a clearly superior means of buying powers because it let you skip bullshit powers you didn't want - but it could well be a way forward. That kind of imbalance was extremely low on the list of imbalances (Level 1 Serpentis makes you automatically win any one on one engagement versus any mortal with no save allowed, any level of the nWoD version of Resilience is literally disadvantageous to use in most circumstances), and in any case seems like the kind of thing you could imagine balancing.

If you wanted to reduce the weakness to sunlight, I'd suggest making the first light at dawn still be fatal. That lets you keep the time limit aspect, which is where most of the drama comes from.

No. That's a terrible idea. Sunlight death is completely corrosive to cooperative storytelling at all levels. Watch Blade II. Sunlight death is the worst. It's not fun to watch, it's not fun to talk about. It either happens or it doesn't and everything people do about it is fucking terrible. The correct course of action to sunlight death is to go around in some SPF 100 space suit that is the actual opposite of how every player wants their vampire character to look.

For fuck's sake, sunlight death was created in Nosferatue because they didn't have the budget to film the final fight. That's it. It's a bad narrative decision driven by budgetary concerns. You get literally everything that's remotely valuable about any kind of sunlight weakness from simply having characters have less power during daylight hours. That is 100% sufficient to get players to want to get out of dangerous situations before the sun rises and doesn't take a giant dump on your ability to have road trips, adventure at all during the summer, or interact with banks and libraries.

I talk mad smack about Twilight, but I would seriously rather have vampires that sparkle than vampires that die at first dawn.

Castlevania shows us the way, as usual

In the stories it's actually from, Mistform is basically never used as a combat or transport power. Lucy mistforms when next to the door and demists immediately on the other side. Mistform is a power that is normally used to get through cracks and bypass locks for journeys that are like one meter or less.

Combat deathmist form might plausibly be some kind of high level power, but the basic mistform is short duration and doesn't move you very far. It's still pretty cool, but it doesn't obviously replace the need for batform and there's no reason you can't hand that power out to starting characters.

-Username17

[Mord]

Would it make sense for a vampire based game to treat each of the various transformations with any enhancements as separate power chains? Something like this:

Mist Power

• Basic: Mist Form As a Complex Action, spend 1 power point to turn into a cloud of fine mist occupying roughly 5x the volume of your normal body for up to 5 mins and drift up to 1m/s in any direction. Your perceptions are much worse as mist, being limited to the area within your gaseous form and the surrounding area within a few meters. Mist is immune to most physical attacks for obvious reasons and any magic requiring eye contact, line of sight, or a corporeal target.
• Advanced: Quick Mist As a reaction, you may spend 1 power point to instantly transform into mist for the duration of one action.
• Advanced: Choking Mist You can attack breathing creatures while in Mist Form by forcing yourself into their lungs and suffocating them.
• Advanced: A Vile Wind While in Mist Form you can summon winds to blow you at speeds of up to 100m/s.
• Elder: Cloud of Darkness While in Mist Form, you can choose to expand your gaseous body into a fog bank that covers an area of much greater size than usual, up to a city block. You may reform yourself from any point within the cloud. Once you reform, the remaining fog will persist for a few hours, or you can dismiss it, in which case it dissipates within minutes. While the fog persists, if you resume mist form, you may elect to merge with the existing fog cloud and resume control of it.

Bat Power

• Basic: Bat Form Turn into bat. You lose any soak pool from armor, your Body stat is set to 1, but you keep any soak bonus from magic. Don't get hit. Bites from vampires in bat form do not put humans in the feeding daze, unlike bites from vampires in vampire form.
• Advanced: Man-Bat When you assume bat form you may elect to transform into a man-sized chiropteran monster that can sort of fly or glide and has giant claws and fangs and shit.
• Advanced: Wing Smash Your bat form gains a magical charge attack for 5 damage.
• Advanced: Hungry Bat Your bat form's bites put humans in the feeding daze.
• Elder: Swarm You can transform into a swarm of bats instead of a single bat. Each bat is part of your consciousness. The swarm is represented as a single actor and target in combat. The threshold to hit the swarm is reduced by 1 but your soak pool is increased by 2 to represent that it's easy to hit something in the swarm, but you have to stamp out a lot of bats at once to actually deal meaningful damage. It is assumed that inflicting any boxes of damage on you while in Swarm form kills several bats. Using Wing Smash as a Swarm gives +3 to your attack pool. You must reform your body from all surviving bats in the swarm. The swarm doesn't need to keep tightly clustered together, but any members of the swarm who get too far from its center cease to be part of the swarm and act like normal bats until the next sunrise, at which point they turn to smoke and evaporate. Each individual bat in the swarm can bite.

That didn't really take very long to come up with, but both chains are reasonably fleshed out and stay on message: this is a bat power, this is a mist power. Is there any reason you wouldn't want to play it like this?

[Username17]

That didn't really take very long to come up with, but both chains are reasonably fleshed out and stay on message: this is a bat power, this is a mist power. Is there any reason you wouldn't want to play it like this?

From a balance point of view, symmetry is often the enemy.

Think about levels in Dungeons & Dragons for the moment. It's entirely possible to subdivide any concept into five levels. Or ten levels. Or twenty levels. Or however many levels you want. But in doing so, you might well have the Defiler turning into a dragon god while the fighter gets three hit points.

The question that White Wolf asked of its powers was "How can we divide this into five arbitrary levels?" And that's the wrong question. Firstly because it's so easy that it's scarcely worth asking in the first place - you just named two sets of five powers in the time it took you to take a dump. But more importantly because naming concepts is much easier than balancing them. And if you divide two concepts that aren't equal into the same number of levels you've just made a bunch of unequal levels.

There are some very important powers like "superhuman strength" that really honestly don't scale up to where other powers like mind control and invisibility go to. I mean, how hard would you have to be able to punch before that was nearly as impressive as being invisible and owning a gun? Or mind controlling some rednecks to point guns at people on your behalf?

Now there are a couple of things you could do about that. You could make super strength be a prerequisite for other kinds of powers because in your arbitrary magic system "blood strength" leads naturally to "blood lasers" or whatever. Or you could just give super strength less levels than Domination.

But regardless, the question you're looking for is "how good is it supposed to be to put three power selections into a pile?" And following that, to ask if various power concepts need buffing up or nerfing down to meet that utility threshold at the three dots stage. And then repeat for all the other numbers of power selections.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Some concessions to game design are necessary, and I don't think it's necessary to slavishly follow each bit of source material that might inspire players to try a vampire game. Edward Cullen doesn't need flight to seduce teenage girls, but if we expect him to team up with Dracula and Count Chocula then he'll need to fly to keep up. Obviously he'd prefer to fly around in vampire form rather than turning into a bat, because being sexy while flying is more helpful to his core mission of seducing teenage girls. So when a player joins the game and wants to be Edward, you point them at the sexy vampire chapter and they see a bunch of stuff they expect plus flight. And that's fine because you're expecting them to team up with other vampires, not recreate Twilight. But it wouldn't be fine at all if you failed to have a sexy vampire chapter in the first place.

Not really. Flash can keep up with Superman just using his Run Very Very Fast power, even though Superman has a Fly Very Fast power. At a certain point, there is no practical difference between flying and running as transportation methods, because any terrain obstacle that can be flown over can also be ignored if you're running fast enough. So when you turn on your super speed water is as solid as concrete and lava floors can't transfer heat fast enough to burn you. The only exception is if you're Vampires In Space! in which case being able to maneuver without a surface to react off of is a huge advantage.

[Username17]

Flash can keep up with Superman just using his Run Very Very Fast power, even though Superman has a Fly Very Fast power.

This is broadly true. All the characters need to be able to get to the adventures and keep up with the adventures, but that doesn't mean they all need the same mobility powers. Indeed, most adventure locations can be reached on foot or by car, and mobility powers can often be used within an adventure location. A character who can mist through a door can often open the door from the inside and allow other characters to pass. A character who can turn into a bat can take out security cameras and allow the rest of the characters to come in undetected. And so on.

Where it gets nasty is mobility limitations. Some interpretations of "can't cross running water" make you essentially incapable of moving around any city large enough to have storm sewers. A character who dies at first light is going to head home like two hours before the sun rises and during the summer will only be able to participate in like 5 hours of interaction each day and won't be able to attend any parties that take place after bars close. A character who is too hideous or obviously magical to attend social functions won't be able to participate in well, most of the game.

Where mobility powers get problematic is where they let you get to adventure locations without taking the rest of the team along. So the ability to teleport to other cities, swim to Atlantis, or shift into another plane of existence alone is pretty bad for the game. The big problem one is Invisibility, since of course the default use is to bypass guards in a way that does not allow visible allies to follow much of the time. However, unlike personal hell portals, personal invisibility is a very important urban fantasy power. I find it actually strange if you got five players together to play a Masquerade reboot and none of them wanted invisibility as their primary shtick. So unlike personal teleportation, I think you do actually have to make invisibility work - it's just a giant ball ache to do so because its normal use frequently splits the party.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

There are some very important powers like "superhuman strength" that really honestly don't scale up to where other powers like mind control and invisibility go to. I mean, how hard would you have to be able to punch before that was nearly as impressive as being invisible and owning a gun? Or mind controlling some rednecks to point guns at people on your behalf?

Pretty high, but not impossibly so. In fact, Invisibility stops scaling at a certain point. You can't be more invisible than completely invisible. Mind control scaling stops on an individual level after a certain point, and can only increase by increasing the number of people who can be controlled at once.

But punching harder can always scale higher. Lifting heavy objects can always scale higher. Hulk is more impressive than the Invisible Man. He can lift mountains, literally. At the higher end, he can walk hard enough to shatter continental plates.

Strength can easily scale to the point where you just punch people so hard that they explode into gore and high velocity bone shrapnel which kills everyone in a 30 meter radius. It seems like a power that doesn't scale well, but that's because RPGs rarely scale it to the extremes that physical force can scale.

[Username17]

Actually, while it's a automatic fail to not give vampires the powers they need to be an archetype, is it an automatic fail to give them additional ones the player isn't interested in as well?

From FrankTrollman's example above, if you had a PC who worked like Bill Compton, but who could turn into a bat as well, would that ruin their Bill Compton-ness? Obviously, you'd want to avoid that sort of thing, but if you didn't for some reason, how much of a big deal is it?

The answer to this is "it depends." There are certainly examples that spring to mind where actually not having a particular superpower is integral to the concept. This normally is because the character type exists in a world where some other group does have the power in question and that's important for some reason. So for example in Vampire Academy the Moroi have no super strength and small breasts while the Dhampir have super strength and large breasts, and that's important in-world to differentiate the Moroi and the Dhampir.

But obviously for most character concepts, if a power is available to your clan and you aren't interested in it you can just not take it and invest in other powers instead. Still, there is in fact room for powers to be reserved for or from one kind of vampire or another. However you set up your vampire types, the ability to say "They used Power Y, they must be a Supernatural Type X" is certainly valuable. You obviously can't have individual clans camping on the exclusive right to feed at all like in fucking nWoD, but having some kinds of powers that are exclusive or excluded is something you do want.

Strength can easily scale to the point where you just punch people so hard that they explode into gore and high velocity bone shrapnel which kills everyone in a 30 meter radius.

That's exactly the point though. You just wrote something ridiculous and hyperbolic to describe strength well outside the scale of what people would normally accept as being in-genre. And it's still just the rough equivalent of having some explosives that no one would bat an eye at the idea that you could smuggle places with even minimal illusion or invisibility magic.

In the modern world, the ability to devastate a 30 meter area is actually not terribly impressive or unique. It's more than you normally want, but also not more than people can just randomly have with illusion and mind control abilities if they simply reach over and grab some of the horrendously destructive tools that modern society has lying around.

Which is the core of the whole "20th level Commoner" issue. Yes, it's easy to imagine some amount of strength and adding a number to it. Lifting capacity is measured in kilograms, punching force is measured in pounds, thrown object speed is measured in fractions of C. Fucking whatever. You can use real units to really measure strength, but who cares? After you hit hard enough to kill a dude, additional strength isn't really helpful. And the ability to punch hard enough to kill a dude isn't actually all that impressive because people can use illusion magic to smuggle guns into adventure locations and use mind control magic to have more warm bodies holding those guns.

The Hulk being able to punch enemies who are so tough they bounce bullets of their manly chests only matters if those enemies exist.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Which is the core of the whole "20th level Commoner" issue. Yes, it's easy to imagine some amount of strength and adding a number to it. Lifting capacity is measured in kilograms, punching force is measured in pounds, thrown object speed is measured in fractions of C. Fucking whatever. You can use real units to really measure strength, but who cares? After you hit hard enough to kill a dude, additional strength isn't really helpful. And the ability to punch hard enough to kill a dude isn't actually all that impressive because people can use illusion magic to smuggle guns into adventure locations and use mind control magic to have more warm bodies holding those guns.

That only matters if you're using strength purely as a combat stat, rather than for utility (Lift and carry very heavy thing, open a jar of pickles) or transport (Hulk Jump). But utility uses for super strength are far more comon than combat uses.

The Hulk being able to punch enemies who are so tough they bounce bullets of their manly chests only matters if those enemies exist.

-Username17

Whether those enemies should exist is an open design question. Certainly, they did exist in Vampire, though it suffered from White Wolf telling you that you can never, ever play on that level yourself and you should just sit back and watch the cool plot that they wrote unfold without your input.

It's not even out of genre to have enemies on that level. High end Anne Rice vampires are basically invincible to anything that humans could throw up them, with only vampires of the same tier providing a challenge to them.

[Nath]

It's not even out of genre to have enemies on that level. High end Anne Rice vampires are basically invincible to anything that humans could throw up them, with only vampires of the same tier providing a challenge to them.

It depends whether you want to have the need for a masquerade or not.

[ArmorClassZero]

Critique this idea:

Players describe their vampires' actions by always referring back to their powers, which act as narrative inspiration, event seeds, potential angles or hooks for story-telling, plot devices if need be, etc.

[Lokey]

We can actually have fun if we don't play VtM

I'd think you'd still want mundane action rules then you slather your discipline bonus on top. Do you see spending blood for such?

The kinds of problems that develop are your explanation for x can be used for everything similar to x--you pound every problem with your move fast hammer. But that can be the point of the game too.

[Username17]

I think you need rules for mundane actions for supernatural actions to be meaningfully different. The rules have to say what regularly strong people can do for the fact that my character is super strong to matter.

-Username17

[Nath]

Auspex conceptually can include everything from heightened senses to the very acts of reading, spying, investigating, as well as clairvoyance and precognition and other "intelligence" checks.
Animalism conceptually can include Animal Ken everything from the ability to feed on animals, "speak" to animals, include animal companions in your party, control insects, and avoid or lull guard dogs.
Ferocity, which conceptually occupies the super-strength space of Potence also includes desire, passion, intensity, anger, as well as "Brawl" and "Melee" and "Strength" and "Athletics" - a "how badly do you want it" device.
Protean conceptually can include everything from contortion to shape shifting, self-replication / duplication, regeneration, to "Biology" and "Science" to how quick witted one is and how socially flexible one can be.
Presence conceptually can include stunning them with beauty, striking fear or terror into them, an overwhelming force of personality or charisma, to influence in "Media" and "Finance".
Dominate conceptually can include mind-control and psychic possesion but ALSO physical possession, physical chains, AND coercion, threats, intimidation, AND self-control, composure,
Obfuscate conceptually can include stealth, hiding, lying, subterfuge, blackmail, cover-ups, and data-scrubbing to operating secretly and going about one's business discretely and quietly.
Celerity conceptually can include running super fast, rapid-thought, lightning reflexes, and dexterity, balance, and agility more generally.

I would expect endless arguments between GM and players about whether a given action can be performed through stricly mundane means or if it will involve obviously supernatural abilities that may break the Masquerade.

[Username17]

The basic issue is that to be a game you need expected challenges and you need ways for the different expected character types to be able to contribute towards completing those challenges. Now very frequently and reasonably we castigate Masquerade for not having established what the character types were supposed to do or what they were supposed to contribute. But I would argue that the failure to really define what the characters were supposed to be contributing to is the more fundamental problem.

So consider Masquerade combat rules. I mean, those are a shit show, right? Everyone knows that. But how can they be made better? Before you can even articulate an answer to that question, you have to decide what the hell they are supposed to accomplish. How long is "combat" supposed to take? How many characters are supposed to contribute to combat at all? These are choices, and once made, they inform what kind of combat system is acceptable and what kinds of combat abilities characters can have.

Imagine for the moment that combats were really short and you could reasonably expect one character to carry the combat situation. Like how you might have one character pick a lock or one character translate a Bulgarian manuscript. The combat could be just a few rolls. In that case, characters could have abilities that made them ridiculously good at combat or even bypass many combats automagically - just like you might hand out the ability to unlock doors or drift through them in mist form without freaking out. Similarly, you could present characters like "creepy vampire girl who plays with dolls" that can't contribute much of anything to a combat situation in the same way that you might not care that one or more characters don't have any special ability to pick locks.

On the other hand, imagine that a major combat is like a Pathfinder setpiece conflict and it takes like 90 minutes to resolve and all the players take a lot of actions and roll dice a fuck tonne of times. In this case, obviously playing characters who are "accountants" or "painters" or whatever who can't participate meaningfully in combat is unacceptable, and so too is the idea of the "combat monster" character who dominates combat above their peers. If combat is 90 minutes long, it's not acceptable for one of the players to hog the spotlight the entire time, nor is it acceptable for one of the players to relinquish the spotlight for that entire period.


Now, in neither case is it acceptable for combat to have a bunch of fucking math choice maneuvers like Call of fucking Cthulhu. Nor is it acceptable to model Celerity as having the player take four times as long to resolve their turn. Masquerade had a number of design choices which were necessarily wrong no matter how combat was supposed to work. But unless and until you made real decisions about what combat was supposed to look like and what place it was supposed to have in the story and the game it is impossible to label any of the choices as acceptable or even salvageable.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

The fact that undead characters are conceptually about as resilient as the plot demands hits me as a big untapped resource. After all, one of the reasons people treat combat differently from other mini-games is because it is not always player initiated and because it's intuitive that even victory may come with casualties depending on the circumstances. E.g., in Shadowrun there's a long and colorful history of non-combatant players getting understandably annoyed when they catch a bullet due to the Samurai being aggro all the time. With vampires you have a lot of wiggle room for handing out recovery powers like candy and making wimpier vampires builds relatively easy to incapacitate but also relatively easy to revive. The cost of including combat monsters in a game of Vampire should theoretically be a lot easier to manage if taking an unlucky axe to the face just means that you have to wait for the team heavy to win the fight and then rez you by cutting his wrist.