Vampire 5th Edition is Bad: The Movie

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Getting into the spirit of White Wolf, we'll start this rant off with a pretentious title and some song lyrics that have nothing to do with anything.

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Book I: The Accursed Cycle of Failure

Oh yeah
Fishfuck baby
I'm gonna fuck you with a fish
I'm gonna take a river carp
and ram it up your butt
You slut! You whore!
Why are you my mom?
Why are you my mo-om?
Why are you my mom why are you my mooooooom
Fish fuck!

-GWAR, "Fishfuck"

V5's mechanics are at least as bad as V:tM Revised. Go actually read the V5 combat system (either the basic or the "Advanced" one) side by side with the Revised one. Revised's combat engine is bad and all, but it can at least answer basic questions like "what do I roll to shoot the guy". V5's "Conflict" engine can't even make up its mind about that.


Basic "Conflict" Engine

It starts off everyone rolls one die pool per round based on their chosen offensive action, and the higher roll damages the lower. What happens if there are three people and you're the middle guy? Unclear. It's worth noting that there's a specific example here for what to do if you're shooting at someone (Composure + Firearms... more on this weird choice later) which makes it clear that firearms uses the same "one roll for attack and defense" rule as everything else.

Then, on the very next page, it claims that there's a separate roll for defending against firearms, which happens to be the same roll as someone opting to go full defense. So, if I'm trying to stab a guy who's trying to shoot me, do I just make my attack roll, or a separate Dex + Athletics, or what? Nobody knows.

The basic combat engine also encourages the ST to waffle on what stat you even roll to hit. "Might be" Composure + Firearms. White Wolf has always had a problem with this weaselly shit where the ST arbitrarily changes the stat + skill you use depending on the needs of the railroad, but at least before it was confined to the more freeform non-combat parts of the game.

So so far the core of the game is a rough draft, written by someone either too lazy to read back over what he wrote or too dumb to notice the contradictions. But there's an optional "Advanced" engine later in the book, so... maybe this half-assed ball of nothing is just for the rules-lite people and we'll get the real rules in a later chapter. Maybe?


"Advanced" "Conflict" Engine (Because One Set of Douchey Irony Quotes Wasn't Enough)

This starts off with a bunch of vague thoughts and musings, so it takes a few pages of skimming to get to any actual rules. The lulziest part here is the bold new rule to automatically end combat after three rounds so it doesn't drag on and get boring. I'm starting to realize these guys were probably collectors of WoD books who never actually played. I'm also starting to realize these guys spent a lot of time reading the Forge, so they have to fill a quota for vague directives with patronizing monosyllabic titles. I'm surprised I haven't seen "Say Yes or Roll Dice" yet, but maybe I just missed it. If it's not there they better put out a Revised Edition quick before the ghost of Ron Edwards locks all their threads.

Titling this "Advanced" is weird, but because there's nothing here that would be overwhelming or off-putting to new players. Several pages in and they haven't really laid out any mechanics, just listed some basic things that might happen in a game that you might want to arbitrarily pick die pools for. This section really seems like it's aimed at RPG newbies.

Anyway, we're still on our hunt for the real combat rules, so finally we scroll down to...


Advanced Conflict: Physical Combat

This is their attempt at a traditional White Wolf combat engine.

Ok, we have an actual initiative roll, so we're maybe off to a good start. It's... Composure + Awareness. I'm going to come back to this weird fixation with Composure in a future installment or something, but it's also a standard die-pool roll which reverts a system improvement from Revised. 2nd Edition used a Wits + Alertness pool for initiative, which made initiative follow a geometric curve like everything else in a die pool game and usually resulted in everyone colliding on counts 2 and 3. Trinity had the idea to change it to 1d10+Dex+Wits, which gives a bigger range and a nice linear distribution for a lot fewer collisions, and that change made it into oWoD Revised. I bag on the oWoD rules writers a lot and even they could see that this was in improvement. V5 reverted it for no clear reason.

Surprise Attacks. If they can't see you they don't get to defend, "allowing for devastating strikes" as the PDF says. It's not clear quite what that means yet, but it's a big buff that's on average worth 2 or 3 extra damage (out of about 6 HP). If you want to win fights through some means other than mind control, you're probably some kind of assassin. I'm willing to bet these guys absolutely hated Obfuscate + Celerity cheese builds in oWoD so it's kind of funny that they're re-creating the same problem. Base physical combat can't compete with mind control, so you'd better drop the mind control guy from stealth before he gets an action.


Close Combat. Ok, Dex + Melee for one-handed weapons, Str + Melee for two-handed weapons. Um, this isn't dungeon fantasy, I'm not making loadout decisions about whether I need a shield in my offhand slot. There's no Gary Gygax weapon chart to tell me whether a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire is inherently "one-handed" or "two-handed". I can't harp on them too much for that though because it's pretty harmless in practice. You'll just roll Str or Dex whichever is higher.

What I can harp on them for is the pointless extra rule that if two people are both attacking each other, they make a single contested roll. Which isn't just pointless extra complexity, it's not clear how this rule would even work. These dipshits never noticed that they don't have a rule for action declaration. If someone declares an attack against me, do I decide right then whether I'm attacking him back? Do I hit him on his count or mine? Does his attack get delayed until my initiative?

But at least they gave everyone passive defenses, right? They tried, they seem to have pooped themselves a little in the process, but they did manage to do that one thing that somehow 10+ years of oWoD writers never managed.


Ranged Combat. I'm just going to copypaste this shit.

In a standard guns blazing battle, combatants test Composure + Firearms, but a sniper shot might instead use Resolve, and a “high midnight" showdown tests Dexterity + Firearms, at least for the first shot.

Game, what the fuck is my die pool? I'm trying to make a character here, what fucking stats do I need? If you say "might" or "could be" again you're losing some teeth. Look, I can tell you what things "might" be all on my own, I don't need your fucking overpriced^H^H^H^Hpirated PDF for that. It might be Appearance + Heavy Weapons! It might be Comeliness + Computer Hacking! It might be Fairy Dust + Unicorn Farts! Fuck you. I hope whichever Swedish piece of shit wrote this spends eternity in hell assembling plywood furniture while a smurf packs pickled herring into his asshole.

Oh, and... there's nothing about what the defender rolls. From that example with the Dexterity + Firearms Wild West Duel it looks like we're back to that opposed attack roll thing again? We've flipflopped from the "Basic Conflict" engine where melee uses opposed attack rolls and firearms might or might not use a Dex + Athletics dodge roll, to melee definitely having dodge rolls in most cases and firearms having... I don't even know. Opposed Firearms checks? What happens if the other guy isn't shooting back? This book is trash.

To further support this opposed attack rolls thing there's this optional rule. In what is supposed to be an entire chapter of optional rules, so I guess it's double-optional? These dipshits really don't want to be pinned down about how their game actually works, almost like they know they're in over their heads and trying to pass the buck to the GM. Anyway, the opponent with superior firepower (per the weapon's rate of fire, which I guess you're supposed to figure out from Wikipedia) or willing to expend more ammunition gets an extra die. On the next page we'll find out that ammunition isn't tracked. Which would be fine, if you couldn't get bonus dice for being willing to expend infinity plus one ammunitions. This is just sad.


Sample Weapon Ratings. Weapons add bonuses to damage. I actually missed this on my first read through. In the "Basic Conflict" engine your damage is just your margin of success meaning you have to get very lucky to deal damage that matters. The most significant difference between basic and advanced is that attacks with firearms and big swords are about on par with heavy pistols and katanas in oWoD. You'll probably about two-shot vampires (and one-shot mortals because vampire damage resistance is a bigger deal). That's all you can do, but I don't want to start talking about Disciplines here.


And we're done with the "Advanced" physical combat engine. One big step up, but a bunch of bafflingly stupid steps down.


Advanced Conflict: Social Combat

Writing social combat systems is hard. Some people, people like me, ok this is just me saying this, would even say it's impossible. People want a system that produces authentic seeming human interactions - in other words, they want a system that passes the Turing Test. And they want it simple enough that they can run it with pen and paper. If someone actually wrote the thing gamers want from social combat it would be so far beyond modern artificial intelligence that it'd be like someone building a time machine in their garage. Your options are to keep hoping Doc Brown posts the social combat system of your dreams on DriveThruRPG, or you can settle for a system where you roll dice for the sake of rolling dice and then make up the results yourself.

But, these guys who can't even write a coherent To-Hit Roll mechanic want to take a crack at it, so let's see how they did!

As in One-Roll Conflict, it’s important to set the stakes ahead of time; what happens to the winner of the social conflict and what happens to the loser?

This bit, which they paraphrased from Burning Wheel because they're good little Forge cultists, is them admitting failure from the start. Roll a bunch of dice and make up what they mean. We could already do that. I can already hear fanboys shitting themselves with excitement about how great it is that "the new Vampire has social combat!" but... there's nothing to it. It's just a series of opposed checks with no defined results. The only difference between having this Social Combat System and not having it is a section heading and an empty promise.

I can't fault them too much for failing at an impossible thing that fanboys say they want, or even for pretending to have it just to get the fanboys to spread their cheeks. I just want to make sure these guys don't get credit for having a social combat system.


In Conclusion

V5's mechanics are shit. I mean, we didn't expect them to be good, it's a World of Darkness game after all, but it's still embarrassing that someone is actually selling this for money. It's not even math failure at this point, it's just intellectual laziness and lack of editing. Was "give your rough draft to a friend and ask him if it makes sense" just not a thing that occurred to them? Preferably a friend who has never been exposed to the World of Darkness so he has reasonable expectations like "rules shouldn't directly contradict other rules from two paragraphs up"? Fuck.

Is it better or worse than V:tM Revised mechanics? I don't know. I don't care. What kind of turd do you want in your sandwich? It definitely isn't coherent enough to use as written. I don't know how you would even attempt that because I can't tell what the rules even are. You're still going to be playing "Steve's Informal House Rules: the Masquerade". Yes, your name is Steve now. Is anything here worth incorporating into the Steve's Informal House Rules Combat^H^H^H^H^HConflict Engine? Passive defenses, sure, but you could have just done that anyway and your version probably wouldn't have come with the weird nonfunctional single-opposed-check thing. Everything here that you wouldn't have thought of yourself, like sometimes-but-not-always using the social defense stat for firearms attack just to fuck with the "powergamer" who made a guns character, will make your game worse.

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Well, I raged about how a game is bad and I picked a fight with someone. Am I doing TGD right? Tune in next time, if I have time and I feel like writing it, where I'll rant about the Discipline and world changes aimed at minimizing every part of the setting that doesn't revolve around the clans they like. I may talk about Vampire's "themes" unironically. There will definitely be impotent rage and gratuitous similes involving buttholes.

[Thaluikhain]

The lulziest part here is the bold new rule to automatically end combat after three rounds so it doesn't drag on and get boring.

Wait, what? That is indeed rather bold.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

This starts off with a bunch of vague thoughts and musings, so it takes a few pages of skimming to get to any actual rules. The lulziest part here is the bold new rule to automatically end combat after three rounds so it doesn't drag on and get boring.

Bullshit, cocksucker! Post pics or I will refuse to believe you!

[WalkTheDin0saur]

I'm not gonna screenshot it and maybe get this board a DMCA notice, but it's on page 295 in a section called "Three, Two, Done".

[Lord Charlemagne]

This starts off with a bunch of vague thoughts and musings, so it takes a few pages of skimming to get to any actual rules. The lulziest part here is the bold new rule to automatically end combat after three rounds so it doesn't drag on and get boring.

I'd also like to see a picture of that rule if at all possible, because I'm really interested in the context around it if possible.

I don't actually think such a rule is an inherently bad one, as I can imagine some systems where it could be a good idea.

It could be interesting in a scooby-doo-like RPG, because when you stumble across the monster, you have either three rounds to catch & defeat it or you simply have to run away & not get snagged for three rounds. That way, you have the basis for both doing the hallway running away gag of the shows (just have to not get caught [HP = 0 or whatever] for three rounds) & also the basis for luring it into a trap to catch it (you personally need a way to stop it from running away & getting it's HP = 0 or whatever so you win.)

I don't know too much about Vampire, but I don't imagine that is the kind of scenario they are trying to set up.

[Lord Charlemagne]

Decided to look into it, and it isn't so much a set in stone rule as much as it is a strongly encouraged guideline, to the point that it is carries a condescending tone towards people who wouldn't mind if combat goes past 3 rounds.

Three Turns and Out
We strongly recommend ending conflicts after roughly three turns, unless everyone is still having fun.
Too much dice rolling slows down the drama and becomes harder and harder to describe creatively.
If the Storyteller and players want the old-school feeling of fighting down to the last Health box, they’re welcome to do so, of course.
But for the rest of us, here’s a few ways to decide who won if you’ve gone three rounds and both sides are still standing...

It then precedes to list several ways to roll more dice to make it so you don't roll more dice, the ability for the enemies to simply escape, give the players the offer to escape, or simply move the scene somewhere else & continue on with what you were doing [Seemingly just a fight scene transition].

Don't know enough about the system (nor care to know) to provide context to the numbers of anything.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Yeah, I didn't get the impression it was a hard and fast rule. What I was pointing and laughing at was the complete misunderstanding of how combat works in the game they were supposed to be building on.

Old Vampire is rocket tag as fuck. The two "good" combat strategies are instakill stealth attacks and SoLs that almost always hit, and that still looks to be true in V5. Nobody complains about long grindy combats in Vampire. They complain about getting turned into tomato paste before they even get an action.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Is there any way to maintain the batshit insanity of mid to high level powers in the World of Darkness without ending up with rocket tag?

[WalkTheDin0saur]

That's a fair point. Maybe a more tactically deep initiative system, so just rolling initiative provides players some options and feels like a contest itself, not just "stack Wits, interrupt and be a dick if the GM starts narrating an NPC doing something hostile". Players don't like 1-shot combat but they're generally ok with 2-shot. If winning initiative feels like the first "shot" they'd feel better about mind control and Celerity bombs.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I can see the three round Scooby Doo thing adding a bit of depth by having conditions based around how well you did during the three rounds? Trap Phase ends and monster still has full HP... you start Escape Phase with one HP. Trap Phase ends and monster only has one HP... You start Escape Phase with full HP and if you make it to the Mystery Machine in one round you can immediately start Trap Phase again.

That immediately sounds too complicated for the MC to make up on the fly but I could see it being a template that is either filled out already in a Module, or that the MC can populate based on the PC's trap plan.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Well, two weeks and an international flight later, I'm back. Bitching about RPGs seems like a decent source of normalcy after moving to a place where I barely speak the language, and I haven't yet figured out how to meet people who are interested in something other than (1) whether I would like to buy some cocaine, and (2) whether I will share it with them. It's beautiful here though. My new friends will be hermit crabs.

Book II: Crimson Darkness of the Soul

Oh, baby, look at you
Don't you look like Siouxsie Sioux
How long'd it take to get that way?
What a terrible waste of energy

You'll dance to anything by The Communards
You'll dance to anything by Book of Love
You'll dance to anything by The Smiths
You'll dance to anything by Depeche Commode
You'll dance to anything by Public Image Limited
You'll dance to anything by Naked Truth
You'll dance to anything by any bunch of stupid Europeans

-The Dead Milkmen, "You'll Dance to Anything"


There are two reasons to put out a new edition of Vampire. One is to give it a decent system that doesn't rely on a pile of house rules and unstated assumptions to be playable. V5 is very much not that. But maybe you don't care, because you'd already given up on White Wolf games having good rules. Or you're one of the people who likes the rules terrible because it helps them get away with shit, not that those kinds of people ever admit that's their motive. Maybe you just want to see the setting you remember with rosy nostalgia updated into the 21st century. You probably weren't even going to read the combat engine, you flipped straight to chargen to see a fresh-but-familiar take on your favorite clan.

Well, if your favorite clan was one of the "high social status" ones, Toreador Tremere or Ventrue, you're in luck, because that's the only part of the setting the new writers are interested in supporting.

These guys *really obviously* only like one part of the Vampire setting. They like vampires putting on designer clothes and hanging out at Elysium sipping blood out of fluted glasses. Any sect, clan, discipline, or character concept that doesn't fit that, they don't know what to do with it and don't really care. Anything part of the setting that provides contrast to that, the outwardly bestial and violent parts, they actively don't want to be playable.

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In Which I Get Pretentious about Vampire's "Themes"

Ok, I don't care about mopey internal conflicts any more than any other RPG nerd does, and I always rolled my eyes at the pages every White Wolf book has to waste on themes and symbolism and all that other high-school-English crap. But I do care about the game's themes. Not the ones the "Storyteller" is encouraged to ham-fist into the game, the basic ones that create the setting's atmosphere and attitude. That baroque gothic more-streetwise-than-D&D horror setting is the one thing Vampire actually does well and most of the reason anyone cares about it.

Gothic horror, and especially the Gothic Punk thing Vampire prides itself on, is about juxtaposing pretentious refinement with ugly savagery. I hate myself for writing that sentence but it's true. Dracula is cool because he's a cultured aristocrat who is also a blood drinking undead cannibal. That contrast fits perfectly with the punks-vs-suits generational conflict Vampire loves so much. The older aristocrats are the "pretentious refinement" side, and the younger more modern vampires are the more brutish and honest side. Those contrasts are everywhere in Vampire:

• Older Vampires vs Younger
  Snooty Clan (Ventrue, Toreador) vs Smelly Clan (Gangrel, Nosferatu)
  Camarilla vs Sabbat
  Mind Control vs Combat
  Humanity vs the Beast

The setting needs both sides of the coin to work. Most people have a preference for their personal characters and all, but each side is cooler and more interesting because of the other. You can't be a punk if there's no hypocritical establishment assholes to rail against. Choosing to play a sexy vampire vixen is more meaningful as a choice if you could have been a deformed sewer monster instead.

So if you're a Vampire writer and have a preference for writing sophistication over savagery, you still need the visceral and violent elements of the setting. Let someone else write them, that's fine. What you can't do is go all fucking ascended fanboy and try to force out every element of the setting that doesn't work to the advantage of your personal Toreador fashion model wish fulfillment character.

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Mailing the Sabbat to Abu Dhabi



I guess the writers are waffling on this on Twitter, but in the actual PDF the Sabbat have all left for the Middle East. If it sounds cool to play a shovelhead gank squad getting smuggled into Jerusalem to do biblical archaeology and kill any biblical figures who turn out to be ancient vampires, while trying to navigate the agendas of their own elders who see them as expendable catspaws... well, that does sound cool, but this book isn't interested in helping you run it. If we were meant to use this information to expand the setting and run Sabbat games with a new twist there'd be more information. Like "WHERE in the Middle East", it's a big place, or "what are we actually doing there". That's not what the writers intended at all. Shipping all the Sabbat to the Middle East is just a convenient way for them to be "not here". The authors might as well have sent them to Mars.

Nobody expected V5 core to have a full writeup on the present day Sabbat. The Sabbat is a much more fleshed out and complex organization than the Camarilla that would take a lot of text to explain, and Sabbat campaigns aren't really the Vampire's "core offer". If they'd just briefly mentioned the Sabbat in the core book with a vague promise to work on it later if there's enough Kickstarter money, that would be the best we could expect. But these guys are actively committing to NOT writing the Sabbat and declaring that it doesn't really exist in the form you remember and maybe liked. That right there is a huge part of the setting that V5 wants to retcon out of existence.

The central conflict of V5 is supposed to be about establishment vampires vs anarchs. That idea never got much traction in the 90s but let's just keep trying to force it I guess. It's even less interesting this time around. Without being caught between Camarilla sheriffs and Sabbat recruiters there's not much to do as an anarch. You're a de facto Camarilla vampire, you go along on Camarilla vampire adventures you don't have any stake in because what else are you gonna do, but you don't show up to court because you're too cool for school.

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The Clans

...and disciplines, because it's hard to talk about one without the other.


Brujah



I didn't realize till I hit Submit that with the fancy font and slightly gothy clothes, this could pass for something related to Vampire. It's not.

The Brujah are the "punk vampires". It's never been much deeper than that. Whenever the old Vampire books tried to explain what older brujah did or how their clan structure worked it was a self-contradictory mess of different authors trying to retcon each other, so I'm not gonna overthink it. It's hard to be punk in 2021. Being into old-school punk now is like being into barbershop quartets in punk's heyday. V5 has examples of things the brujah kids might be into these days, one of which is neo-nazi concern trolling. Fair enough but I hate the 21st century.

In V5 the clan portraits are replaced with literal fashion plates of four women and four men dressed up as representatives of the clan. Apparently Brujah look like rich Eurotrash on their way to retro night at the gay bar.

The brujah discipline package is Potence, Celerity, and Presence. That's 2 physical disciplines and V5 doesn't want you playing a combat character, so let's see how bad they got nerfed. Potence and Celerity aren't COMPLETELY useless, but you need 4-5 dots to do anything that matters. Potence dots add to your damage value (which only exists in the optional Advanced Conflict Engine: Physical Combat) but it's unarmed only so it doesn't stack with the damage value you could have gotten just for using a melee weapon. And it's halved against vampires unless you have a source of unarmed aggravated damage from another discipline. So as far as your combat power goes, all your first three dots do is put you on par with a mortal with a weeb katana. There are a bunch of other powers for special attacks like we're playing 4e D&D but they're not good.

For Celerity, you can get an undefendable melee attack with Celerity 5 or an undefendable ranged attack with Celerity 4 + Auspex 2, which is enough to drop an enemy on an above average roll. Other than that you get a bunch of ways to interact with a tactical positioning system this game doesn't fucking have.

You might be tempted to say, "well these writers like aristocratic social vampires, I'll just take Presence" and you would be correct. Presence 2 isn't enough anymore (other vampires can Willpower through it now) but Presence 3 will SoL an enemy out of the fight and Presence 5 will make most of the room sit down and shut up. No mention of burning Willpower to stop it even. Winning fights isn't even Presence's primary purpose, you get all that in addition to mind control, with no generation limits so you can freely use it on vampires.

Speaking of Presence, here's something the new writers sort of did right. Vampire players used to love to bitch about Celerity because it was what all those immature munchkin powergamers had and why don't they go play D&D which is so lame not like Vampire which is edgy and cool, but the king of all broken oWoD powers is Summon. With Presence 4 you could summon anyone, mortal or vampire, anywhere in the world, and the books painstakingly spelled out how Summon had no cost and spending Willpower to resist it was a waste because the summoner could just cast it again the next round. And again, it works on *anyone*. Want to force the Prince to walk in the front door of your New Jack City gank fortress? Just summon him! GM gives you a mystery plot where you track down the long-forgotten resting place of an ancient vampire? Fuck that, just summon him!
V5 nerfed Summon into uselessness which is better than letting it be setting-destroyingly broken. The new version only works on people you've previously tagged with your Presence aura. No more summoning "the Maeljin Incarna" or "JonBenet Ramsey's Real Killer". It also requires a "critical win" to force the subject to do anything, which is the most awkward possible verbiage for a game term but it means most attempts won't work. And every attempt costs blood now.


Gangrel



Three things to know about the oWoD Gangrel:

(1) They were the only clan popular enough to have a pro wrestler use their name
(2) They used to have an association with gypsies because Dracula, which was offensive and has caused a lot of self-righteous swaying and fainting from certain sectors of the internet
(3) Their discipline list was dogshit.

The oWoD gangrel were supposed to be fighty guys, but they didn't get any of the disciplines that made you better at fighting. It was so bad the Player's Guide to the Sabbat had to divide the gangrel into two barely fluffed bloodlines as an excuse to let them pick better disciplines. You could be a Town Mouse Gangrel and use Obfuscate and Celerity to blender fools from stealth, or you could be a Country Mouse Gangrel and suck just as much as your non-Sabbat counterparts. In V5 the Sabbat are busy terraforming Mars and they took their cheesy bloodlines with them, so we're working with the Country Mouse Gangrel. Your disciplines are Animalism, Fortitude, and Protean.

Fortitude was a trap in oWoD. The new version isn't as bad but PCs still don't get enough discipline dots to want to spend them on better defenses. Some of the fortitude powers interact with the combat system in crunchy ways, which is a problem because this game doesn't even have a set combat system much less one that actually works. One of the Fortitude 5 powers negates wound penalties which aren't even a fucking thing in this edition. Were they supposed to be? Did the writers just forget?

Protean: Ok, credit where credit's due, I think Wolf Claws is actually decent this time. It bypasses vampires' innate half-damage-from-everything defense and it's called out as "unarmed" so unlike melee weapons it stacks with Potence. Well probably. Here's that problem where the game doesn't actually have a combat engine so the combat disciplines can't have coherent rules either. Wolf Claws give bonus damage which isn't even a thing outside of "advanced" combat. Seriously guys, we're gonna charge points for abilities that don't do anything in the default rules?
The rest of Protean actually got nerfed. Seriously. The most notoriously shitty discipline in oWoD and these guys couldn't resist finding ways to make it worse. Instead of getting both your alternate forms at Protean 4, wolf form is now one of two options at Protean 3. It competes with the Backstory Tax power you have to take because you said your character lives in the woods. And even if you did take it, wolf form now is now what I think TGD calls Full Replacement Polymorph. You turn your character sheet over for the duration and just play a Wolf Minion from the back of the book. Wolf Minion has fewer dice than you probably do.

Just as an extra fuck you, there's only one level four power, bat form, and you can't take it unless you took wolf form at level three. They not only split shapechanging into two powers, they made it so taking Earth Meld costs you *both* of them. What, was it "overpowered" that gangrel could sleep outside? Was it not enough to pay all your starting discipline dots and an extra blood point every night for the privilege of living in the woods?
Small silver lining though, you can replace the traditional shitty Level 1 power ("see in the dark", a small part of what Auspex 1 can do) with an ability to not trigger pressure plate traps. Which might come in handy if you fall through a portal to the Forgotten Realms.

Animalism still has the old problem that there aren't many modern problems you can solve by possessing a dog. It also lost the level 3 power that could stop an attacker in a fight. I mean it's still here, but other vampires can trivially ignore it now. Why? There are two Camarilla clans that get Animalism, Gangrel and Nosferatu. If you think these writers don't care much for the Gangrel, wait till you see what they did to the Nosferatu.

Gangrel might be better than they were or they might be completely nonfunctional depending which combat system you use. If you want to play a gangrel who fights with claws, and you can get your GM to agree that you're always using the Advanced Combat Engine, your build is going to be 2 dots in Protean, third clan dot wherever, and then pick up out of clan Potence for bonus damage and/or Obfuscate for undefended sneak attacks.

Oh and we've got another set of fashion plates here. Gangrel women look like Scandinavian folk rock singers in faux-traditional stage costume. Two of the dudes are in overdesigned fake outdoorwear they never let get dirty, a short dude in a fucking cloak trying way too hard to look like an evil wizard (OK FAIR ENOUGH THEY KNOW THEIR AUDIENCE LOL), and, um, Captain Jack Sparrow. So our eight brujah who've never been in a fight are joined by eight gangrel who've never slept outside.

Malkavian


Remember this guy from 1e/2e? Google Translate says this is "tie me up" in Portuguese. Interesting that they replaced the English text and didn't translate it.

Another fashion plate here. One of the women is carrying a teddy bear possibly just to troll Justin Achilli. Apparently Malkavians look like Eurotrash clubkids, except the dude on the right with the straitjacket and the goony stare. 24 attempts so far and is this is the first one where this amateur fashion designer stopped metaphorically jerking off and remembered what he was supposed to be doing, but the one is a good picture at least. The last guy looks like he just escaped from somewhere.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the Malkavian image anywhere. I'm cribbing all these from Image Search and gaming blog reviews. Most reviewers seem to use the Brujah one.

Why do I keep harping on these fashion plates? There's lots of art in this book that's unintentionally funny, but I don't bring it up. Some of it's even *endearingly* bad, like all the photographs of alty art-school kids in studs and leather trying to look tough. This fashion plate shit isn't bad in that way though. They're technically skilled drawings of model-lookin people in fancy clothes. They just completely miss the fucking mark almost every time. These aren't just pictures of random people in the World of Darkness, they're here to communicate what it means to be a Brujah or a Malkavian or whatever. Three clans so far, most of whose members are supposed to look like lowlifes, and the artist wasn't willing to draw that. The defining trait of every V5 clan is "rich kids desperate to look more interesting than they are". This is part of what I mean about V5 refusing to engage with the important parts of the setting that are ugly or savage.

I said before that White Wolf games were written by art school dropouts, and I think we know what at least one of the authors' major was. It feels like Vampire has been hijacked into one person's fantasy world where they made it as a fashion designer.

On to disciplines. I'm skipping Obfuscate until the Nosferatu section because while Malkavians can use Obfuscate, Nosferatu are utterly dependent on it.

Malkavians get Dominate again. Revised and 2e Sabbat Malkavians had a clan discipline called Dementation, which was flavorful but sucked ass. Giving enemies die penalties wasn't worth a combat action and you were better off playing the "bloodline" that hadn't lost their Dominate.

Dementation is now a single alternate Dominate power. You give up the most iconic Dominate power - Mesmerize - to get it, and it sucks even more than oWoD Dementation. Roll dice to drain part of the target's willpower, who cares. If you're using the optional "advanced" rules for Social Combat you can do exactly the same thing for fucking free.

The rest of Dominate is just as baller as ever, except that there's no Generation background so you can't buy yourself down to the point where you can reliably use it on other vampires. Auspex is also still good. The one big nerf to Auspex is completely necessary. oWoD Aura Perception could detect deception, which can't be a thing if vampires are supposed to do intrigues and shit. Trying to have NPCs with hidden agendas was like trying to do murder mysteries in D&D with a paladin, except that D&D never purported itself to be an engine for running murder mysteries. V5 Aura Perception doesn't mention anything about lies.


Nosferatu


Not this guy anymore.

If you were getting bored because this review seems resignedly mixed, don't worry, it's rage time.

Fashion plates first. Fucking what? Ok they're all wearing the Derelicte collection from Zoolander, but there's not a single goddamn Nosferatu on this page. These vampires aren't even *ugly* unless you go by fashion model standards. I came here to see sewer monsters. The defining trait of this clan is looking like Count Orlok or Bat Boy if they're one of the lucky ones. There supposed to be the brutally honest take on what a vampire is that counterbalances the effete overdressed Toreador and Ventrue. The twats who wrote this book basically cut an entire clan, at least narratively, just because they weren't personally interested in playing it.

And just to make sure *nobody* played this watered-down bullshit, the Nosferatu curse is unplayable now. Nosferatu don't look human according to the rules. Could have fooled me, but whatever, by RAW they're still walking Masquerade breaches. So even though they lost the thing that makes them cool or unique they're still dependent on Obfuscate to stay with the party.

Obfuscate costs blood now. One "rouse check" per scene (on average one oWoD blood point plus increased chance of Ass*world bear attacks). You can't sustain that. It's not sustainable. It's not designed to be sustainable. The writers narratively gutted the clan and *also* nerfed them into unplayability just to be sure. The old Nosferatu clan books talk about them trolling the Toreador and fucking up the vibe at Elysium, and in this bullshit take on Vampire built around one fashion student's delusional Mary Sue wish fulfillment we can't have *that*.

Just to rub it in V5 nerfed Mask of 1000 Faces. All it does now, besides costing blood, is make you look a generic person who belongs where you are and isn't worth paying attention to. How that's different than using Unseen Presence to make people not pay attention to you isn't super clear. I could come up with a few cases but I'm not paying a whole nother discipline dot for it. But again, this only matters if you skipped here from the Malkavian section, because once again the Nosferatu are unplayable by design now.


Which brings us to the specialest of all specials, the...

Toreador



Almost certainly the authors' favorite clan. The fashion plates are even less distinctive this time. They look like high fashion Eurotrash clubkids just like every other clan. Or, more like the Brujah, Gangrel, Malkavians, and Nosferatu all look like Toreador. You're supposed to play a Toreador, get it?

Just kidding, that's the Brujah again! I'd link the Toreador if I could find it.

We've covered the Toreador's jack of all trades discipline list - Auspex (still good), Presence (the best combat discipline and not even primarily a combat discipline), and Celerity (useless unless you want to sink all your points into it). There's not much to talk about here because Toreador seems to be the default in this edition. There's barely anything that makes this clan distinct anymore.


Tremere



Tremere are kind of like Toreador in the authors' minds because they're rich and can wear expensive clothes, so they still get to be one of the "good" clans.

The fashion plates are dumb in a different way than I expected though. Elaborate renfaire costumes for the ladies, overdesigned coats and pants tucked into boots for the dudes. Yeah, they look wealthy, like every fucking clan does, but I thought the Tremere were supposed to dress like high status members of human society and save the Hogwart's getups for club meetings. The oWoD Tremere were serious people, "suits", successful types, pointedly *not* your dipshit friend who won't shut up about Alistair Crowley. There's a whole other World of Darkness game that's basically that guy's Chick tract, he doesn't need to take up even more space.

(I can't find this image either. I'll save you a click this time.)

I can't tell how good Thaumaturgy Blood Sorcery is in this edition, because its strength was always about splatsplosion and expansion material. Cauldron of Blood isn't worth using (nothing new there). The level 3 thing doesn't combo with Dominate anymore, because for some jagoff reason this game has both oWoD Generation AND nWoD Blood Potency. Blood Sorcery raises your Blood Potency, Dominate is gated by Generation. This core book has the full core ritual list though, including the Player's Guide ones so all your old Ward exploits still work.


Ventrue



Wait, shouldn't he be a Tzimisce?

This fashion designer I've been shitting on actually nailed the Ventrue. This is the one set of fashion plates you wouldn't mistake for a Toreador. They look like Cruella DeVille types and dudes with five-figure-a-night coke habits. These authors definitely favor the high society vampires.

Couldn't find the ladies, but hopefully you get the idea. Why do these reviewers only use the dude half of the picture?

And now we've covered all the disciplines so once again there's not much new to say here. Ventrue get Presence and Dominate. And Fortitude but you don't care. You probably want Presence 3 to defend yourself against vampires and then either stay the course up to 5 or start buying Dominate.

---

The Weird Obsession with Composure

White Wolf has always had a problem with too many fucking attributes and too much overlap. The two biggest offenders in the 90s were Appearance and Wits. Wits was a generic Cool Guy Good At Stuff stat you arbitrarily had to roll for things that could have just as easily been Dex, Charisma, Perception, or Intelligence. It everything from parrying (but not dodging), to computer hacking (but not using a computer in a way that didn't qualify as "hacking", whatever White Wolf thought that meant), to telling jokes at parties, to initiative. Yeah, initiative. You pretty much had to stack Wits unless you thought you could start every combat invisible.

At some point after White Wolf stopped being relevant, Appearance and Wits were replaced with Resolve and Composure. "Mental stamina" and "social stamina". This is in a game that already has a Willpower stat, and a regular Stamina stat it barely knows what to do with. So it's... different? But not better.

V5 reeeeally likes the Composure stat. It won't actually commit to what you roll to shoot a gun, but it's *usually* Composure. If you're using a version of the combat rules where there's such a thing as initiative, you use Composure for initiative. It's even more of a generic Cool Guy Good At Stuff stat than Wits was.

I can see an in-world excuse for this - people who are cool and collected in social situations might also be cool and collected in a firefight - but I could just as easily see Dexterity which is the thing people expect. Specifically people who didn't carefully read the new book and then badger the GM about which part of the rules he was planning to use. The goal of this change is just to fuck with people who want to be good at fighting and put points in physical attributes. Lol surprise, Dex sucks now, my Toreador fashion designer is the best at guns too! I picked a Social Primary which is the best type of character so I should be better than you at everything!

---

All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go

Every change to the world and every balance decision this game tried to make seems to be about picking a side in in-world conflicts. These authors really like the snooty clans. Rather than realizing that actually *playing* those clans requires conflict and contrast to make them interesting, the authors decided to ride in on their white horse and remove or nerfhammer every part of the setting that opposed their favorite type of characters.

Most of the sources of conflict, the things you'd, you know, run games about, are gone from this book. Sabbat? Gone. Scheming elders? Gone. Nosferatu who wouldn't be popular enough to invite to your party? Unplayable. Angry brujah who might start a fight at the party? Just as pretentious and overdressed as you are now. All these guys are interested in is describing the fancy clothes their characters wear to sit around bored in an art museum after hours. Maybe that does something for them, but it's not much of a game for anyone else.

[Thaluikhain]

In V5 the clan portraits are replaced with literal fashion plates of four women and four men dressed up as representatives of the clan. Apparently Brujah look like rich Eurotrash on their way to retro night at the gay bar.

Top left is an Avril Lavigne cosplayer, top right used to work for Kate Lambert/Kato (steampunk is sorta, punk, right?), and at least one of the bottom row was a background extra in that dodgy bar in the Riverdale TV show, but I can't pick which.

Next thought, you might just about be able to make a decent game about vampires being whiny rich cosplayers pretending to be oppressed, and the conflict is about what type of cosplay is better. I might have been watching too much rubbish TV about teenagers again, though.

Next next thought, so the assumption is you want to be a rich, popular, mainstream vampires, the ones that most opposed this are now banished to the middle east, and the ones that remain are privileged vampires playing at being outsiders? Opposition to the status quo has become safely redesigned as a commodity? I might have been reading too much Marxist analysis of Doctor Who again, though.

[JigokuBosatsu]

25ish years ago our local Vampire LARP spun off into a 24/7 Larp, a monumentally stupid idea where you and your Sabbat buddies could go to the mall kiosk where Billy worked, get out your character sheets and go to town. You couldn't permanently kill people like that unless you were in a designated place.

But... when I nabbed Presence 4 and decided to do some Summon shenanigans the game completely broke. At first I think we tried the caulk of an "AI" version of their character being there if the player couldn't. That of course didn't work even once, so I think the house rule was "please don't do this". Oh, good ol' oWoD. Well, even nWoD someimes, but honestly for every funny A WINNER IS YOU exploit, there were probably 10 that nerfed your character or gave the Storyteller gray hair, right?

[Whipstitch]

This fashion designer I've been shitting on actually nailed the Ventrue. This is the one set of fashion plates you wouldn't mistake for a Toreador. They look like Cruella DeVille types and dudes with five-figure-a-night coke habits. These authors definitely favor the high society vampires.

I ended up as a Ventrue fanboy virtually by default, but hear me out.

In fairness to the authors the Ventrue are hard to screw up because traditionally they have been about the only fuckers in the setting where everyone can quickly agree to what the clan concept even is or why anyone would even sign up. Hell, in real life the American dream has already been reduced to working for a soulless bloodsucker in a nice suit and you don't even get immortality out of the deal. At their best the Ventrue walk the halls of power because they actually are organized enough to get shit done despite being a pack of empty suits. At their worst-which, in fairness to other clans, is basically all the time--they're patronizing dipshits who outlived their usefulness decades if not centuries ago, which is probably why they jerk off to conformity so feverishly. They sort of work when presented as aristocrats but vampires and unvarnished greed is an easy pairing and with America being what it is the real juice is in the boardrooms and country clubs. That makes Ventrue easy to dress.

Or, to put it another way, Patrick Bateman is a Ventrue because obviously.

[Longes2]

Dementation is now a single alternate Dominate power. You give up the most iconic Dominate power - Mesmerize - to get it, and it sucks even more than oWoD Dementation. Roll dice to drain part of the target's willpower, who cares.

Swing and a miss.
Dementation is arguably one of the most powerful disciplines. Why? Because Willpower is a health track. People get wound penalties from having low willpower, and get knocked out by having no willpower. Dementation bypasses all armor, vampires don't halve damage from it, and it's stealthy. Talking your enemies to death is the way to fight as a Malkavian.

You also get to saddle enemies with a Compulsion, which you can make up, so that's pretty baller.

I can't tell how good Thaumaturgy Blood Sorcery is in this edition, because its strength was always about splatsplosion and expansion material. Cauldron of Blood isn't worth using (nothing new there). The level 3 thing doesn't combo with Dominate anymore, because for some jagoff reason this game has both oWoD Generation AND nWoD Blood Potency. Blood Sorcery raises your Blood Potency, Dominate is gated by Generation. This core book has the full core ritual list though, including the Player's Guide ones so all your old Ward exploits still work.

It's ass. It is absolutely ass. L1-L3 disciplines are incredibly niche, Theft of Vitae no longer works on vampires, and using L5 is a humanity violation.
Rituals are neat, but you get 1 level 1 ritual and the rest costs xp and in-game time on top of the xp and in-game time you need to level up Blood Sorcery itself.


Corrosive Vitae gets the honor of being the worst Discipline power in the game.

I don't know what your "Ward exploits" are, but Ward versus Kindred is level 4.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Swing and a miss.
Dementation is arguably one of the most powerful disciplines. Why? Because Willpower is a health track. People get wound penalties from having low willpower, and get knocked out by having no willpower. Dementation bypasses all armor, vampires don't halve damage from it, and it's stealthy. Talking your enemies to death is the way to fight as a Malkavian.

I read it again, and you're right about it being explicitly stealthy. It's still not good for anything in a fight or actual "social combat" but being able to SoL through casual socially appropriate conversation is worth 2 discipline dots for sure.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

WoW, Corrosive Vitae can go hang out with that 4e D&D ritual that lets you go without food for a day at the cost of enough gold to eat steak for a fuckin year. Bleed your mechanically tracked blood all over something to deal non-mechanically-tracked object damage roughly equivalent to a strongish mortal hitting it with a hammer. Fuck.

[Mord]

Wow, I sure would have egg on my face right about now if I had made a thread about how 5e is actually a huge step up or something crazy like that.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I seriously cannot get over the fashion school dropout art. I laugh at each and every Gangrel for different reasons. I cannot fathom why they decided to go with the Druid Queen look for the chicks and the Kanye Fashion Show for guys.

[Whipstitch]

Kanye dipped into weird urban survivalist shtick often enough that people also dragged out the Derelicte joke for his Adidas lookbook. It's dumb but it makes sense to me that out of touch people trying to update an dead property would end up emulating a rapper that's been washed for a decade. I think the druid queens are much worse, overall.

[themadimp]

I got a good look at the Nosferatu art; they all, even the guys, look like they're just auditioning for the role of Lucy Barker in the most recent off-Broadway production of Sweeney Todd.