Vampire: What am I getting into?

Irish · Post by **Irish** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:22 pm

So I've been invited to join in to a Vampire game over the next couple of weeks using the NWoD rules. Having 0 experience with the setting or the rules of both NWoD and OWoD, what am I getting myself into, and what kind of pitholes can I expect to avoid at character creation and in play?

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 1:02 pm

Well, this here thread demonstrates the systemic issues you will run into.

On the assumption that you are committed to actually playing, tl;dr do not try to make a combat monster, all combat disciplines are made of suck due to Justin Achilli's hatred of combat. Make a Dominate monkey instead.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:03 pm

Don't buy physical disciplines - buy Thaumaturgy, Koldunism or Obtenebration.
Firearms 3+ and a shotgun.
Dexterity is the god-stat.
Always wear some body armor.
Max out Generation in chargen.
Remember that costs are linear in chargen and exponential afterwards, so you buy either 1 dot or 3+ dots. Never 2 dots.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:09 pm

Overall, your best power bet is to get Thaumaturgy. This means you are playing one of three clans: Tremere, Assamite, Setite.

I have a personal fondness for Voodoo-style setite magicians, but Tremere is the easiest one to get away with. Even if you want to be a socialite, take Path of Corruption instead of Dominate.

Irish · Post by **Irish** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:32 pm

Wait, I'm a little confused. I read through Franks assessment thread that was linked by Omegonthesane and a lot of the comments mentioned that Dominate was like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Is this path thing you're talking about different to that particular Dominate?

Ferret · Post by **Ferret** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:07 pm

You can basically win the game if you get access to Thaumaturgy, Dominate, and Presence.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:27 pm

Be prepared for a lot of house ruling.

WoD in general but nWOD in specific basically is a house-ruled game.

But yes Longes sums up things nicely.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 6:22 pm

Irish wrote:Wait, I'm a little confused. I read through Franks assessment thread that was linked by Omegonthesane and a lot of the comments mentioned that Dominate was like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Is this path thing you're talking about different to that particular Dominate?

Dominate is really good. It lets you control people without killing them. However, it has two important downsides:
a) You must look someone in the eyes
b) You can't use Dominate on vampires with generation higher than yours

The thing that makes Thaumaturgy great is the fact that new paths are much cheaper than new disciplines. Path of Corruption is a Thaumaturgy path, and it is almost as good (and sometimes is better) than Dominate. But it is cheaper than Dominate.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 8:02 pm

Thaumaturgy, Koldunic Sorcery, and Presence are all wonderful disciplines, but they are also oWoD disciplines and do not exist as such in nWoD. Also, generations aren't exactly a thing in nWoD. So the very first thing you're going to want to do is ignore literally 100% of the words that came from Longes and Ferret.

Dominate is looked down upon by many oWoD players because you spend a lot of time caring about what powerful vampires think about things and those guys all have arbitrarium immunity to Dominate in that version. In nWoD Vampire, there is literally nothing a vampire elder can bring to the table that you can't smack down with a car full of thralls. So you wouldn't really care if Vampire elders were immune to Dominate and they aren't immune to it anyway.

Anyway, the big thing to realize about nWoD Vampire is that the rules are not going to be played with as-is. The core rules are a fixed TN dicepool system, but there isn't a success table. The entire rules don't tell you what the difference between rolling 2 successes and 3 successes is. Ever. What this means is that individual tables are going to pretty much make up their own core resolution mechanic. And since people who are good at statistics do not play nWoD Vampire, you are probably going to see a lot of success inflation and have to min/max like crazy to ever really succeed at any tasks in your core competencies (which in turn will just reinforce your Storyteller's bizarre misconceptions about what is an appropriate number of successes to have to roll to accomplish tasks, but them's the breaks).

The next thing you should realize about nWoD is that everything is really, really small. You do not get to play Dracula. You do not get to play Lucy. Alicia Silverstone's character from Vamps qualifies as a very powerful Vampire in nWoD Vampire. Also she's a munchkin player. I'm not even joking, Goody from Vamps has exactly the powergamer's suite of powers and stat assignments. From being completely worthless in combat right down to having joined the self help group led by Vlad the Impaler that allows and encourages her to get by drinking rat blood. That's actually a thing in nWoD Vampire, and it's cheezy and she did it. But you'll note that she wasn't the fourth most powerful vampire in that movie, but she's still the high end of what can be achieved in Requiem.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 8:20 pm

Thaumaturgy, Koldunic Sorcery, and Presence are all wonderful disciplines, but they are also oWoD disciplines and do not exist as such in nWoD. Also, generations aren't exactly a thing in nWoD. So the very first thing you're going to want to do is ignore literally 100% of the words that came from Longes and Ferret.

I merely assumed that they are using the translation guide from oWoD to nWoD, which is a thing that really exists, in which case all those disciplines also exist.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 11:03 pm

Unless you have a very good reason not to, you are going to play either a Mekhet or a Ventrue, because these are the two clans that have actually good in-clan disciplines. Which one you pick depends on whether you want to annoy the piss out of MC by ruining mysteries, or annoy the piss out of him by mind-controlling antagonists.

If you're a Mekhet, you might consider the Agonistes or Libitinarius bloodlines, since these are effective ways to gain access to Dominate, which, as previously mentioned, is made of win. The Agonistes have a weakness that makes them more likely to enter torpor and stay there for longer, which is either negligible (if MC doesn't want to fuck up the group) or character-destroying (if MC is a hardass). The Libitinarius get Dominate and a further discipline that you frankly don't care about because it's not Dominate but which can be used to bribe other players with since any Mekhet can learn it, and their only weakness is not being so good at acting during the day. And the odds that you're going to be doing a lot of shit during the day are fairly low, so unless you really don't want to be in Ordo Dracul, I'd suggest going with that one.

If you're a Ventrue, you're going to be a Melissid unless MC steps on the idea, since they get to use Dominate and Animalism on groups.

After you've maxed out your Save-or-Lose powers, consider spending some XP on specializing in knives, so you can buy up the Spetsnaz Knife Fighting style from Armory. Unlike Fencing, it doesn't cost Willpower to use the two attacks per round technique, so you can do it all night long and save your Willpower for more useful things. Get a bunch of knives made out of obsidian, which give you an extra +2 to attack and thus turn your Bowie knife into the equivalent of a Greatsword. It's no Dominate, but it's a neat party trick for when you run into people with arbitrarium immunities.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 7:03 pm

You have to have a talk with your Storyteller about what is and is not happening. For example, while a conversion document for oWoD material into nWoD exists, if someone is playing Requiem it is almost certainly not a thing that is going to be used. Again and still: begin by ignoring literally everything Longes and Ferret posted, and then if your Storyteller is doing some weird Masquerade/Requiem hybrid game, revisit those posts with the extreme skepticism born of the fact that probably it's still at least 50% inapplicable to whatever your game is trying to do.

Anyway, actual exploits of nWoD include things like spending one of your starting discipline dots on the first dot of a bloodline discipline from an obscure bloodline of another clan. The rules to Requiem unambiguously say that you can do that (and even continue to buy more dots of it later with experience if you are so inclined), but most Storytellers I've spoken with have felt that it was somehow "obvious" that you shouldn't be able to do that (and the reference to spending your free dot on a bloodline discipline must surely therefore be an error).

No matter what the rules your Storyteller is running around with, you want to be a Mekhet or a Ventrue. All the other clans are "terrible." Most Storytellers seem to feel that combat styles are "cheesy," especially the ones from Armory (even the ones that are quite horrible). But of course, none of them are even dirt in the fingernails on social advantages like retainer and allies.

If you actually want to roleplay feeding and shit, remember that literally only the Ventrue have the ability to feed safely. Everyone else is basically just a guy who needs to rape someone every night to survive. Most games gloss over this fact, but it's actually a pretty big deal if the raw mechanics of Vampirism ever come up. As talozin points out, if you are a Ventrue, you want to activate your Melissidae bloodline as soon as possible because it is infinity times better than all the other bloodlines available to all the clans. They don't have a bloodline discipline, so even if you're using the bloodline discipline dumpster diver "trick" you still can only get their power by actually being one. And their power is very, very good.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 7:45 pm

Okay. I see. I misread the original post.

Well, if you are playing pure Requiem, then Melissidae is really good. Also good is Spina, which allows you to fight with your social attributes at 2rd discipline dot and kill with words at 5th. If you want to be a cool guy, but don't want to have Melissidae's "kill on sight" status hanging over your head, I'd recommend being a Daeva with a dot of Courtoisie and En bloodline. En gives you Dominate, and the extra curse is that you take -3 penalty on untrained social skills. Oh noes.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 10:23 pm

Also playing En qualifies you for roleplaying Gilgamesh.

Irish · Post by **Irish** » Fri Dec 19, 2014 12:40 am

My Storyteller invited me to a group chat on Facebook with the other players to discuss what's going on with the group.

Essentially, I am not going to play with this Storyteller and his group.

The first warning was when he mentioned in his introductory post that " (The name of his game) is my Vampire: The Requiem epic. This campaign is important to me and quite a few other people too, so to be worthy of its legacy, you need to make someone worthy of the setting.

The second warning sign came when I asked about character creation, and he mentioned that both Covenant and Clan are not really important, what would be important is your Sire- of which he has a list of 60, of which he has yet to actually give us, and I'm starting to think he's going to just pick the Sire for us. Also, we're starting as mortals, which is whatever, but combined with the last thing is making me think he's basically going to pick all the interesting things about being a vampire for us.

And thirdly, because my follow up question was if we were playing with the Predators Taint rules- I assumed the answer would be no. His answer was "Absolutely, what gave you the idea that I wouldn't?" This is after I explained Predators Taint to two of the other new players when they asked what it was and both mentioned it sounded really unpleasant to deal with.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Fri Dec 19, 2014 2:40 am

FrankTrollman wrote: If you actually want to roleplay feeding and shit, remember that literally only the Ventrue have the ability to feed safely. Everyone else is basically just a guy who needs to rape someone every night to survive.
Most games gloss over this fact, but it's actually a pretty big deal if the raw mechanics of Vampirism ever come up.

What if you're coterie hangs out with faddish vampire groupies who would literally pay you money to bite them?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Dec 19, 2014 9:13 am

Irish wrote:Essentially, I am not going to play with this Storyteller and his group.

The kind of weird possessiveness you report is sadly typical of nWoD storytellers. Essentially the nWoD world doesn't have any metaplot or any real levers for players to work with to interact with the setting. This in turn leaves it up to the storyteller to create a plot and a world together, which pretty much leaves the players out in the cold. The books provide the players nothing that could meaningfully interact with the story, so the storyteller often turns things into a railroad the likes of which are hard to even wrap your mind around. You should expect such a storyteller to attempt to decide who your characters' friends and enemies are, where they go, what they want, and what they do along the way. nWoD doesn't lend itself much to "cooperative storytelling" and so this in turn either goes towards the extremes of players doing ad hoc soap opera or storytellers going mad with power and basically writing single author fiction whilst trying to drag the players along with their vision.

Getting out early is probably the best choice. You've identified some pretty scary warning signs. You'll note that when it came to actually interesting abilities, people were talking about bloodlines, which are not a thing that newly made vampires even get to have. nWoD origin stories are more weak sauce even than normal Requiem. A good general question for nWoD is "how much starting xp can we get to customize our character?" and in this case the storyteller seems to be offering a negative number, which is fucked up.

hyzmarca wrote:What if you're coterie hangs out with faddish vampire groupies who would literally pay you money to bite them?

That would be a relatively safe way to feed. You know, subject to clique drama causing members of the groups to leave and turn state's evidence or something. But again, only the Ventrue have any actual ability to make that happen or to defuse drama bombs in the groupies when they threaten the system. The other clans can only do parlor tricks to impress people and then try to use mundane persuasion to convince people to submit to a bite.

And depending on how you spent your discipline dots (starting characters only get three), your demonstrable magic parlor tricks are quite likely to be less good at convincing onlookers that you are magic than actual stage magic tricks.

A Daeva or Nosferatu that goes all in on Vigor can spend a blood to raise their strength for a scene up to a level that is high but still entirely physically possible for a human to have. A Gangrel who is big into Fortitude can't demonstrate anything at all.

-Username17