Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

[Longes]

The Tremere pretty much have to go. One you strip the bullshit from them they're just a bunch of assholes running a conspiracy. You know, just like everyone else in the fuckin' game.

I'd disagree. Tremere have the most interesting clan structure in the game, because they actually have a clan structure. All Tremere are blood bound to the clan, and so all Tremere are going to provide other Tremere bare minimum of hospitality and cooperation. You can set up goals for the clan to follow, and then the clan would do that.

Of course the problem is that the writers immediately forgot that the clan structure is a Tremere shtick enforced by blood magic, and talk about every other clan as if it was a united and coherent political entity rather than a bunch of assholes spread all over the world sharing vaguely common ancestry.

[Username17]

If the ratio is 100,000:1 in 1991 (as described in the original Masquerade), obviously it had to have been lower than that even in 1091. The Vampire Dark Ages books are poorly researched for White Wolf books, and the declarations they have about demographics and such are complete fucking gibberish. Over and above the fact that White Wolf vampires can't have a society at all in torch-lit periods.

The simple realities of feeding mean that no vampire can have a domain of less than 500 people, and the scattered rural villages of the period basically can't support vampires at all. The idea that there were any Scandinavian vampires is patently absurd. White Wolf vampires can't go a week and a half without feeding, so while the total yearly killings of a Viking raider might be sufficient, they couldn't survive the boat journeys to targets.

-Username17

[Prak]

I also think the Tremere origin is really interesting. I mean, getting bitten and turned is cool and all, but I'm there way more for the clan that said "being a vampire looks awesome, how do we get in on it?" than I am the clans that are basically victims of Cyclical Rape.

[Longes]

I also think the Tremere origin is really interesting. I mean, getting bitten and turned is cool and all, but I'm there way more for the clan that said "being a vampire looks awesome, how do we get in on it?" than I am the clans that are basically victims of Cyclical Rape.

And then they stole the backstory for the Nagaraja, and made Nagaraja 'the original' mage to vampire clan.

[Prak]

Huh, I know nothing about them.

Now I wonder if(/how much) there's room for multiple origins in a game about vampires. You can have different clans trace their history back to different figures who became vampires different ways. So you have the mage clan who went out and magiced themselves into vampires, and you have Clan Bathory, who trace their lineage to Elizabeth Bathory who became a vampire through bathing in blood, and you have Clan Dracul who say the origin of vampirism was as a divine punishment for murdering a lot of people, or something, and so on. You can have a clan that came about from a guy making a deal with the Devil, and another clan that came about from a guy stabbing a cross, and so on.

Obviously, you want all of these people to be forced to drink (or possibly bath in) blood, otherwise it's hard to justify calling them vampires, but it would be interesting to basically have lots of points of origin for vampires instead of a single pyramid scheme that started at one of the first four people to ever exist.

Another matter that needs a definite answer for a vampire game- is blood only good to vampires when it comes straight from a body, or can it be stored? Does it have to be fresh? Whether vampires can store blood, and whether they can take nourishment from a three day old corpse that hasn't bled out, greatly impact the sort of stories you can tell.

[Username17]

The Tremere clan structure is absurd. It's a modality 7 pyramid. So Tremere is served by a Council of Seven. Each of the Seven gets 7 Pontifices, each Pontifex gets 7 Lords, each Lord gets 7 Regents and each Regent gets 7 apprentices. That's over 19 thousand vampires before we get to Ghouls and Gargoyles and shit. The entire global population of all vampires is like 70,000.

But the biggest sin isn't even the claim that nearly a third of the world's vampires are Tremere. The biggest problem is that the Chantry size is 8 vampires. You have one Regent and 7 Apprentices per Chantry. That's too many Tremere for almost every city and too few for the mega cities. It's just a shitty number that is hard to work in anywhere. It's also not conveniently similar to the number of players in a table top group, so it's a poor fit even for the "everyone play Tremere because they are the best" game.

-Username17

[Longes]

The Tremere clan structure is absurd. It's a modality 7 pyramid. So Tremere is served by a Council of Seven. Each of the Seven gets 7 Pontifices, each Pontifex gets 7 Lords, each Lord gets 7 Regents and each Regent gets 7 apprentices. That's over 19 thousand vampires before we get to Ghouls and Gargoyles and shit. The entire global population of all vampires is like 70,000.

But the biggest sin isn't even the claim that nearly a third of the world's vampires are Tremere. The biggest problem is that the Chantry size is 8 vampires. You have one Regent and 7 Apprentices per Chantry. That's too many Tremere for almost every city and too few for the mega cities. It's just a shitty number that is hard to work in anywhere. It's also not conveniently similar to the number of players in a table top group, so it's a poor fit even for the "everyone play Tremere because they are the best" game.

-Username17

Ok, I didn't mean that everything about the Tremere is good - just that the general idea of clan being tightly bound and following a unified agenda is good.

Clanbook: Tremere, in a rare fit of clarity, admits that the pyramid is mostly empty and that only the largest cities have full Regent + 7 apprentices. Mostly it's just Regent and his lab assistant, or, like in Bloodlines, just Regent.

[Longes]

But actually the pyramid structure is way fucking worse than you think it is. you see, each of the seven levels of Tremere hierarchy also has seven sub levels in it. So you can be Apprentice of 5th level or Regent of 2nd level. And still be the only fucking apprentice in the city.

[Ancient History]

The simple realities of feeding mean that no vampire can have a domain of less than 500 people, and the scattered rural villages of the period basically can't support vampires at all. The idea that there were any Scandinavian vampires is patently absurd. White Wolf vampires can't go a week and a half without feeding, so while the total yearly killings of a Viking raider might be sufficient, they couldn't survive the boat journeys to targets.

-Username17

The canon explanation for Scandinavian vampires is the Blood-Horn.

[ScottS]

Cheap hack: assume that vampires are getting weaker over time, i.e. not the Generation mechanic but that "the magic is dying" for all of them a la Earthdawn/LOTR. In the past they were more powerful (able to function in sunlight etc.) and had to feed less.

[Username17]

Cheap hack: assume that vampires are getting weaker over time, i.e. not the Generation mechanic but that "the magic is dying" for all of them a la Earthdawn/LOTR. In the past they were more powerful (able to function in sunlight etc.) and had to feed less.

That is terrible. The standard White Wolf thing about how the magic was juicier in the past is completely unworkable. Because the mortal society was smaller and individually weaker. If history was to look remotely similar to what we know and read about, then you need to not have small groups of vampires who could openly rule over cities of 20,000 people in the year 1,000. Because in the year 1,000, fucking Paris and London were only 20,000 people. If that's small enough for a couple of super vampires to kick over and declare themselves the Witch Kings of Paris, then history is fucking unrecognizable and we can't play the game at all.

White Wolf's "shit was more powerful back then" conceit is fucking insane and totally incompatible with actually being able to talk about history at all. The correct claim would be that "the vampires of then are powerful now because they are now old" not that they were powerful back when they were young.

-Username17

[ScottS]

Yes I was going to add "the Masquerade is completely modern and a last-ditch survival strategy" to that hack but didn't know if it was worth it. (I'm totally not a WoD fan, and if part of the acceptance filter is "WoD history has to line up almost entirely with Earth history" then I'm even less of a fan.) You'd probably have to assume that there was a massive vamp die-off that humans know about (or maybe even caused), and that the Masq is about the remaining few survivors trying to convince everyone that the extermination was complete.

[Username17]

Yes I was going to add "the Masquerade is completely modern and a last-ditch survival strategy" to that hack but didn't know if it was worth it. (I'm totally not a WoD fan, and if part of the acceptance filter is "WoD history has to line up almost entirely with Earth history" then I'm even less of a fan.) You'd probably have to assume that there was a massive vamp die-off that humans know about (or maybe even caused), and that the Masq is about the remaining few survivors trying to convince everyone that the extermination was complete.

The World of Darkness isn't Middle Earth or the Forgotten Realms. There aren't maps made for different time periods or exhaustive chronologies of when various elf marriages went down. If you want to play events in an earlier time period or figure out what a character was doing in their prologue, you're pretty much stuck with reading a history book. There is a loose framework of secret history events, but for the most part you need to extrapolate from real history.

So the events and powers of the past can't be world shaking and map redrawing, because if it was you wouldn't have a usable setting at all.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

The funny thing is, the dramatic expansion of the human population, and the vampire population along with it in the 19th and 20th centuries provides a series of good game hooks. It really can be the Time of Thin blood - but that doesn't have to be because of generational dilution, it can be simply because the age of the average vampire just dropped by a couple of centuries. Global population was fairly stable from about 0 CE to 1500-ish, there was growth, but it was really, really slow and there were regional declines.

The average vampire could have been like Dracula - assuming he's actually Vlad the Impaler given immortality - a lord in a section of the countryside with a large herd consisting of a whole freaking province, a small number of vampiric children (his wives) and doesn't really have any contact with other vampires.

You could still have a vampiric society with a long pedigree. There are a handful of cities that had very large populations stretching to antiquity - Rome, Constantinople, a number of places in India and China, the centers of various South America empires - and you just set it up so those rules spread out across the globe during the Industrial revolution as city populations start to explode. That even gives a real reason for conflict with the elders: the majority are from the countryside so there's a divide between the young urban vampire society and the old rural one.

Using actual historical conditions as a baseline would benefit Vampire, but inevitably White-Wolf tried to go the opposite direction.

[Lokey]

The hand-wavium isn't that hard.

Ok it's harder because the rules and setting assumptions are so bad, if that weren't the case historical wouldn't be too bad to play or run a story around (except that you'd be humanity -90 in 10 seconds around real history). But since they're modern weak vamps that probably can't feed themselves and frenzy walking down the street and get their faces ripped off by horses...

The pint of blood as a complaint needs to go without a book ref. It still doesn't work anyway unless they break out 100lb people having 8 blood points and 220lb people 12.

[hyzmarca]

The Tremere clan structure is absurd. It's a modality 7 pyramid. So Tremere is served by a Council of Seven. Each of the Seven gets 7 Pontifices, each Pontifex gets 7 Lords, each Lord gets 7 Regents and each Regent gets 7 apprentices. That's over 19 thousand vampires before we get to Ghouls and Gargoyles and shit. The entire global population of all vampires is like 70,000.

It would probably be more reasonable to say that there are around one million vampires worldwide. That's more vampires than Icelanders, but fewer than Basques. It's also enough to sustain massive global conspiracies and a degree of ethnic and ege diversity. This would make Tremere small and exclusive, as it was meant to be, instead of one of the largest clans.

With a million vampires, there would be room for clan politics to be meaningful, and for all the bullshit tiny factions and bloodlines to actually do things.

[talozin]

The pint of blood as a complaint needs to go without a book ref. It still doesn't work anyway unless they break out 100lb people having 8 blood points and 220lb people 12.

VtM Revised, p.138, "Blood Pool", first paragraph, third sentence, states that "Each blood point corresponds roughly to one-tenth of the blood in an average adult mortal." And, according to both the American Red Cross and the person in this thread with an actual medical degree, the average adult has about 10 pints of blood, so there we are. That seems like reasonable grounds for complaint.

The game does nod to reality by stating that the "average" human has 10 blood points, so Peter Dinklage presumably has fewer and Andre the Giant has more. But there don't seem to be any hard and fast rules for this, at least in the corebook, except that children are called out as having 5 blood points. Which is ironically the same as a cow.

[Tannhäuser]

With a million vampires, there would be room for clan politics to be meaningful, and for all the bullshit tiny factions and bloodlines to actually do things.

It would also require like one in every dozen or so people to be being fed on by vampires several times a year.

[Longes]

except that children are called out as having 5 blood points. Which is ironically the same as a cow.

The irony is that animal blood points count as half a blood point, so the cow actually has 10 - same as an adult human.

[Lokey]

Alright, blood pool is dumber than I thought even considering I started thinking it was pretty dumb.

Glanced at hunting for blood, oh my. If you have less than 7-self control blood points, hello frenzy check. Other than that hunting is a pretty simple check, provided you have the hour + travel time needed to do it (you need a certain number of successes depending on type of area then roll a die to see how many blood points you chugged). Granted there's probably different rules and so different ways to become an npc in one missed die roll in different books.

[Username17]

The virtues are terrible. Even a min/max Courage character is still going to fail a normal bravery check one in ten times and more than half of those failures are also going to be botches. The entire system of Self Control/Conscience/Courage is unusable. What actually happens is that people roll those dice a couple of times, drop their fucking mouths when they realize how shit it all is, and then use those numbers as vague roleplaying prompts.

But I figure that all goes handwavingly under "the system is a tire fire" and didn't need to be addressed in a specific post. I think the next post is going to be about the four major groups.

-Username17

[Longes]

What, Inconu and Tal'Mahe'Ra?

[Nath]

If going for a change to the setting, isn't the fundamental key issue the feed requirements?

Reducing it to, say, once per week would give much more leeway to set vampires population at an appropriate level (at least if they avoid getting hurt and using their powers too often). I do not feel that would utterly change the setting. And some half-random mechanic would allow for the "I need to feed NOW" plot element the storyteller might occasionally need.

[Tannhäuser]

Red blood cells live about 120 days, right? Feeding three times a year would be more managable, but not at all cool. The full moon is associated with another iconic monster, but feeding every month or so would be less bodycount inducing and at least might be cool.

[Schleiermacher]

Once per month is too rarely.

Once per week would probably work. (Especially if you could somehow work out some sort of demi-blood point system without having it be a huge accounting headache, so vampires could take a sip here and a sip there from their ghouls as long as it added up to 1 pint per week.)

Then rework the details of how spending blood to heal and fuel vampire powers work (but you'd have to do that anyway) and you can keep the dynamic of frugal vampires needing to drink blood quite rarely while more profligate ones have to go on killing sprees -which is also all the mechanic you need for "Have to feed NOW"- situations. Vampires get hungry when they burn too much of their blood and when they've burned too much of their blood it's usually becuase they've just been through some serious shit. Tie it into Willpower and the Frenzy rules if you want feeding frenzies and variations in indviduals' self-control to be a thing. That's 100% of what you need "vampire hunger" to do as a plot device.