Vampire 5th Edition is Bad: The Movie
Posted: Fri May 07, 2021 5:27 am
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.
Book I: The Accursed Cycle of Failure
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.
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!
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.
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.
Book I: The Accursed Cycle of Failure
-GWAR, "Fishfuck"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!
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.
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.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.
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!
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.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?
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.
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.