Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

[hyzmarca]

Getting rid of clans entirely would be better. Clans can't function as meaningful political structures because there are too many of them and not enough vampires to go around. And also because you have no reason to be loyal to someone just because they're the same ethnicity as the guy who bit you.

The Sects work better, being broad voluntary structures. You just have to get rid of the thing where the Camarilla and the Sabbat kill each other of sight, and it's all good.

[Schleiermacher]

I disagree with both of you. It's better to have clans as actual different monster manual entries than to make every vampire a Steve. There should be different strains of vampire and there should be some structure to what strains exist.

It is true that these strains don't make sense as political structures though, and in my games they aren't. Instead, they are the different strains of vampirism that emerged in different parts of the world, and remain largely geographically distributed. (Although naturally there is some overlap, and all the more so in modern times when a Jiangshi from Hong Kong and a Vrykolak from Stockholm can just hop on airplanes and go visit the Strigoi in Rome.

[Username17]

Personally, I think it's a good idea to just have build-a-vampire constructor, and have clans exclusively as political structures rather than expressions of vampirism.

That was the kind of thing people thought was a good idea in 1989, but there's a reason that HERO and GURPS lost to Masquerade despite both being much better systems that were also able to handle many more kinds of vampires than Vampire was. It's simply factually true that people preferred a game where being a particular kind of vampire meant something over one in which it did not.

A build-your-own vampire system would obviously let your game nominally support more different kinds of vampires, but only at the cost of not actually supporting any of them. If your personal character concept can be tended to



Having to compromise your Lair of the White Worm character concept by having your serpent vampire be Conanesque Egyptianish instead of a pre-Celtic druid groupie is certainly a cost of not having a build-your-own vampire system. But having to play a Steve that has no real connection to any part of the backstory or politics is a much bigger cost.


Meh. Close enough.

Getting rid of clans entirely would be better. Clans can't function as meaningful political structures because there are too many of them and not enough vampires to go around. And also because you have no reason to be loyal to someone just because they're the same ethnicity as the guy who bit you.

The Sects work better, being broad voluntary structures. You just have to get rid of the thing where the Camarilla and the Sabbat kill each other of sight, and it's all good.

The Clans had severe problems. As you note, there isn't actually any reason for a Malkavian character to support the Malkavian faction. And since the entire point of having Malkavians and Nosferatu is that some players want to play crazy vampires and other players want to play hideous vampires - the existence of clan factions at all undermines cooperation between characters because obviously most players choose different clans. But you still want players to be able to say "I'll play a Toreador" in the same way that people say "I'll play a Rogue" in D&D-land. You just also want that to not mean that they have any particular difficulty explaining why they are adventuring with the other player characters.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

You can quibble about whether characters came out of chargen with too many or too few powers but overall I think Frank already did a pretty good job of threading this particular needle with After Sundown. In that game supernatural type is still a reasonably useful descriptor but it does not dictate political affiliation and you still get to choose a couple signature tricks unrelated to your type. Plus, it's a lot easier to have characters like nosferatu with genuine disadvantages in the game if they're prepackaged with mitigating powers. You don't want that situation where newbies make a nossy that can't meddle with minds or go invisible and is thus stuck hiding in the Mystery Machine for entire sessions.

[Username17]

You can quibble about whether characters came out of chargen with too many or too few powers but overall I think Frank already did a pretty good job of threading this particular needle with After Sundown. In that game supernatural type is still a reasonably useful descriptor but it does not dictate political affiliation and you still get to choose a couple signature tricks unrelated to your type. Plus, it's a lot easier to have characters like nosferatu with genuine disadvantages in the game if they're prepackaged with mitigating powers. You don't want that situation where newbies make a nossy that can't meddle with minds or go invisible and is thus stuck hiding in the Mystery Machine for entire sessions.

I think I probably should have done something better with the Cults. People want to have little character backgrounds that give them special powers and in that sense joining the Storm Lords in order to get weather magic is a thing that works. But like Masquerade bloodlines, there is very little expectation that all of the characters are going to be Stellar Oracles. Indeed, the incentives run the other way. And that means that the Stellar Oracles and the Storm Lords present opposing sources of missions that different characters won't all be interested in.

Now I think with a little bit of different presentation that they could end up like the Yakuza in Shadowrun - a useful source of contacts such that different player characters having relations with different cults was a net positive for playability. But I don't think I really got there in AS1.

But yes, being a Werewolf is a useful way to differentiate your character's flavor and abilities vs another character's Frankenstein. That is, as long as the social groups your characters travel in allow Frankensteins and Werewolves to be best buds and not expect them to fight to the death. Which seems obvious when you say it out loud, but it's not something the White Wolf authors ever wrapped their heads around.

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

[deleted]

[Username17]

What bothers me is that WW had the brilliant idea to give each of the vampire clans a particular physical difference from the others - the Gangrel were bestial, the Toreador / Daeva were beautiful and sexy, the Malkavians were insane, the Nosferatu deformed and diseased - except they dropped the ball and then made certain clans that were personality types / ethnic stereo types, as Frank noted. Why is a punk / anarchist / rebel a breed a vampire unto itself, and not just personality traits or beliefs that some vampires have? Why is being wealthy and aristocratic its own race of vampires (other than the obvious answer, 'some people wanting to play "Dracula" style vampires'?)

The issue is that you want the benefits of "character classes." You want to be able to make a single declaration about your character and have that convey archetypal information about your character's role in the story and the team. This gives other players a first idea of what your character can do and is generally about. And it also gives you a stable reference point to rebel against if you want to play against type.

That last bit cannot be stressed enough. While there are lots of players who would like to play "Generic Ventrue 3.1" or whatever and thus having a complete set of stereotypes for Ventrue characters is valuable, there is a really significant number of Vampire players who want to be a special snowflake that's different from all the others, and they need to have a complete set of stereotypes so that they can subvert one. If every vampire is a Steve, you can't be "atypical" for your "type," which means that one of the most important traits people want to have actually cannot be given in a system that lacks specific restricted types.

Now I'm not going to defend the specific setup of clans. The fact that they were character classes and birth ethnicities and political affiliations and in some cases even kill-on-sight designations all at the same time made little sense and also made it hard to run the game. But saying "I'm playing a Ventrue" and people being able to assume your character had a nice looking suit and bureaucratic contacts and abilities was every bit as useful as being able to say "I'm playing a Cleric" in D&D to let everyone know your character wore armor and had access to healing spells.

Requiem somewhat addressed this when it reduced the number of clans down to five, and tried to make each of them particular species of vampire, and then added the idea of covenants which is great but they didn't take that idea far enough. Why are some covenants clearly the equivalent of political parties, and others are religious / spiritual organizations?

Requiem had many problems. And certainly the fact that only two of the covenants even had a political agenda was a big one.

It would've made more sense if they clearly delineated a vampires clan from a vampires faith from a vampires party. The same way you can have a White Christian Republicans and Black Muslim Democrats, you could have Gangrel Noddist Camarilla vampires.

The problem with the religious stuff is that it was too middling in detail. My experience is that when it comes to Christian heresies there are basically two groups of players: people who don't want to talk about Christianity in their blood drinking sexy time game at all, and people who want to nerd out about Nestorians and Waldensians and their subtly different takes on Christology and the nature of individual choice and sin. Fucking nobody in the entire world is happy with the sketchy Christianity of the various Sabbat factions in Masquerade or the Thebans/Ordo Dracul in Requiem. It's too Christian for the people who don't give a shit and not fleshed out enough for people who actually want to have theological and/or anthropological discussions.

They could've given us this triple axis of allegiances where our loyalties are always being contested, giving us that whole "Game of Fangs: Red Wedding II" style game with court intrigue and subterfuge, as well as the whole "Vampions" game when shit finally did break down and the fighting "choosing sides" started, and solved a lot of problems like having 100+ different bloodlines.

You are definitely going to want to have Game of Fangs and Vampions game play sorted and supported. I just don't think that asking people to choose sides on the discussion of whether Pelagius was right that a person could choose to not perform acts of evil without the intervention of the divine hand is a particularly good way to do that. Most people, even most Christian people, do not understand the differences in various schools of Christian thought. Original Sin is extremely weird and technical and not terribly compatible with the default humanist morality popular in the modern day. It isn't just that most people do not want to sit around having a theological discussion about the nature of sin with respect to The Beast, it's that most people do not have the vocabulary to even have such a discussion. Even, nay especially the people who are brought up within modern day cultural Christianity.

And furthermore, they could've solved the entire "how much blood do vampires drink" if they made it so that certain families / breeds / races of vampire didn't literally need to drink blood. What if the Malkavians were psychic vampires, and their whole "feeding" was the sanity eroding effects that they inflicted on their prey?

That doesn't solve the blood drinking problems, that just creates more problems. Very generally, you cannot solve any problems except "I'd rather do something else" with any power refresh system by making another optional power refresh system. In D&D, wizards having spells per day does not solve any problems with Warlocks getting at-will invocations or War Blades refreshing their maneuver options by disengaging for a round. And War Blades and Warlocks existing does not solve any problems with a Wizard's prepared spells.

If Ventrue get power by drinking physical blood and Malkavians get power by torturing people then Ventrue have all the problems with blood bag beer helmets and Malkavians have all the problems with owning their own 50 person sweat shop and then you have two systems that enterprising players will immediately break into a gazillion pieces.


Who needs to improve generation? I got yer extra blood capacity right here.

The way you solve the problems with blood drinking is to decide exactly what you want player characters to actually do, and then write rules for blood drinking that actually support doing those things. It's entirely reasonable to have some character types that do other things instead (like, presumably the Werewolves are doing something something with the moon rather than drinking blood), and then you have to write a new set of rules that cover those people such that they also do the things you want them to be doing.

Clans are a cool idea, they don't need to be discarded but refined. VTR at least had that right, even if the execution wasn't ideal. Vampire needs over-arching physical differentiation between one kind or another, with the option to cherry pick an array of different powers as they progress (within some limits, i.e. not everyone has the affinity for Protean that the Gangrel have, thus while than can pick from a wide variety of Protean powers just like the Gangrel can, they are limited in how many they can get.)

It isn't just that they need physical differences. Obviously, you want to have Snake Vampires and Spider Vampires and Ugly Vampires and (especially) Bat Vampires. But equally, you want that declaration to actually mean something in the setting and in the game such that people feel they are contributing information about what their character is about. Being a Snake Vampire or an Ugly Vampire should have implications such that people can stereotype your character.

Maybe the Bat Vampires are aristocratic and have financial resources and shit. So like you say "I'm a Bat Vampire" and people assume you have a skirt suit and contacts in banks. Maybe the Snake Vampires are seductive super spies and when you say "I'm a Snake Vampire" they can assume you have leather pants and stealth skills. These have value.

They even especially have value when you want to play something "different." You can say "I'm a Bat Vampire, but I am a rebel that has a motorcycle" and then people can create a hybrid image of their Bat Vampire stereotype and the exceptions you've mentioned for your character specifically.


-Username17

[mlangsdorf]

The D&D model of race and class has never worked really well as a two word identifier, because the class part completely overpowered the race part. Knowing that your character is a dwarf doesn't tell me much, but knowing that your character is a thief or ranger tells me a fair bit.

That said, it seems like it would be possible and desirable for a vampire system to have two or three keywords that are equally valid for describing your character. So if you say "I'm a Dracul aristocrat", people know that you have mind control and damage resistance powers, and you wear a nice suit and have social skills and political contacts. While if you say "I'm a Dracul warrior", people know that you have mind control and damage resistance powers, and you wear body armor and have combat skills and a large armory.

Obviously, some keywords are going to work better together, so Draculs are more likely to be aristocrats or powerbrokers and Sencans are more likely to be spies or rumormongers. But then it's easier to play against type by being a Dracul spy or Sencan aristocrat, and you're still conveying useful information when you say that you're a Dracul spy.

[Username17]

The D&D model of race and class has never worked really well as a two word identifier, because the class part completely overpowered the race part. Knowing that your character is a dwarf doesn't tell me much, but knowing that your character is a thief or ranger tells me a fair bit.

The two-term identification worked alright at low level. Race tells what your character looks like and class tells what your character does. The first gives us a shorthand to imagine this character in the world, and the second lets us predict what they might be able to contribute towards accomplishing the team's goals. With many of the characters being "A Dwarf" or "A Halfling" or something, we got a good window into what characters might look and sound like, and thus had a solid starting point for casting them in our minds.

Such a thing never quite took off for Vampire, because other than the Nosferatu none of the groups particularly looked like anything.

That said, it seems like it would be possible and desirable for a vampire system to have two or three keywords that are equally valid for describing your character. So if you say "I'm a Dracul aristocrat", people know that you have mind control and damage resistance powers, and you wear a nice suit and have social skills and political contacts. While if you say "I'm a Dracul warrior", people know that you have mind control and damage resistance powers, and you wear body armor and have combat skills and a large armory.

That sort of archetyping is important and useful. And something that Vampire never really wrapped its head around. There were "concepts" and "natures" and "templates" to help you make a character - and some of them were in fact quite inspiring - but they didn't have any persistent meaning, and because of that they couldn't be used to make any assumptions about what other characters could do. You'd pick a concept like "Ingénue" or "Architect" and like... what the actual fuck?

Now Vampire is a Skill-based system rather than a Level-based system. And that is reasonable because in a modern setting you definitely want to completely divorce people being good at one thing from them being good at another thing. Like, it's OK if some master chef is also a world-class sniper, but we're basically in a comedy game if all master chefs are also expert marksmen. That puts a snare in the path since obviously that means that whatever archetypes you claim to support are going to be merely advisory. Nothing is stopping you from having a "Soldier" concept and having genuinely shit combat dicepools or whatever. But the fact that they are advisory doesn't mean they don't have value - just look at Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020. You can make a Street Samurai with shitty weapon skills, but at the end of the day it still has value that a player tells you their character is a Rigger or a Solo.

Obviously, some keywords are going to work better together, so Draculs are more likely to be aristocrats or powerbrokers and Sencans are more likely to be spies or rumormongers. But then it's easier to play against type by being a Dracul spy or Sencan aristocrat, and you're still conveying useful Information when you say that you're a Dracul spy.

Certainly Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun didn't have fully fleshed out ideas for what some of the archetypes even did. I mean, what exactly does the Rocker do? How is a Cop different from a Corporate or a Solo? And that's a thing you're going to have to wrap your head around and really address. You're going to need to decide how many basic character types you're going to support, and then you're going to have to make sure you actually support all of them.

For Vampire specifically, it would actually be totally reasonable and helpful for these "character classes" to be in-character concepts. Vampires are made, and it's entirely reasonable that the vampire conspiracy would have job profiles for their prospective hires. Coteries could literally be created by having the vampire conspiracy creating multidisciplinary task forces based on perceived needs. So like "We need a Warrior, an Infiltrator, and an Administrator for this region, have some of the local vampire leadership scout out some mortal talent that we can turn." That would be totally reasonable and a good explanation for why your vampire coteries look the way they do.

Seriously, how can that not be the result of conscious selection of a diverse talent pool?

And yeah, I fell on my face with this exact issue doing After Sundown. And skill set archetypes is 100% something I think needs to be done.

[hyzmarca]

I mean, what exactly does the Rocker do?

He rocks.

I thought that was self-explanatory.

[kzt]

He rocks.

I thought that was self-explanatory.

Ha Ha.

But what is his function in an actual game? What does he bring to the game other than a hangover and removing the need for the targeted corp to have to do any detective work to find the characters after the job?

It's like an archetype of "architect" or "dishwasher", but worse.

In theory you could do a lot with it, but unless all the players and GM want to run "Josie and the Pussycats" it's pretty hard to just fit one in.

[phlapjackage]

Just my 2c, but the rocker to me was sort of the original "face" archetype, before the face became an archetype. He was the frontman, the seducer, the negotiator. He could get you in to places otherwise un-gettable, either with his fame or his charm or his fast-talking skills. He gave a plausible excuse to having a large "team" around him and having a large vehicle nearby.
*edit*
So SR is supposed to be a class-less system. I think this is where the Rocker fell down, when SR tried to introduce special rules only for rockers. Music equipment rules and performance rules and...those were a) lame and b) weirdly class-specific in a class-less system. If the Rocker were left as more of a concept (character specializing in social areas), I think it would have stayed around longer.

Sorry for the SR sidetrack

[Username17]

Just my 2c, but the rocker to me was sort of the original "face" archetype, before the face became an archetype. He was the frontman, the seducer, the negotiator. He could get you in to places otherwise un-gettable, either with his fame or his charm or his fast-talking skills. He gave a plausible excuse to having a large "team" around him and having a large vehicle nearby.
*edit*
So SR is supposed to be a class-less system. I think this is where the Rocker fell down, when SR tried to introduce special rules only for rockers. Music equipment rules and performance rules and...those were a) lame and b) weirdly class-specific in a class-less system. If the Rocker were left as more of a concept (character specializing in social areas), I think it would have stayed around longer.

Sorry for the SR sidetrack

I think it's important to remember that the Decker and the Mage had their own special equipment and rules from the get go, and those archetypes had staying power even though the rules for Deckers were never actually functional. The relative success of the Decker in SR and the Netrunner in Cyberpunk 2020 needs to be contrasted with the Rocker (SR & CP), Reporter (SR), and Media (CP). The former archetypes didn't have functional rules in any edition of either game, but were nonetheless a core archetype that people expected someone to "play" (usually with stripped down ad-hoc rules), because they had a solid concept of what the archetype should be doing.

So I think that it's fairly clear that having weird special rules is no impediment for an archetype to take off. On the flip side, the relative success of the Street Samurai (SR) / Solo (CP) shows that not having weird special rules isn't a big problem either. Being very good at a task that nominally anyone can do is enough to sustain an archetype so long as that task is important and frequently encountered enough.

Still, the fact that the Nomad, Media, Rocker, Corporate, and Cop were pretty much never fucking seen in Cyberpunk games despite all of those having immediately envisionable looks and feels means that conveying information about what a character looks like and can do is not enough. Those archetypes failed because they didn't have any obvious abilities to contribute to the mission. The Rocker Rocks and the Media Reports, but so fucking what? How does that interact with the mission lengthwise or widdershins? If you're going to have a singer archetype, it has to have direct effects on the mission in a predictable way. That doesn't even have to make any sense, it can be like the D&D Bard where they have strength enhancement and illusion spells for no damn reason. But it has to be consistent in the game. Saying "I'm playing a Rocker" has to mean that the other players can rely on your character for some set of mission critical skills, whether those things are stuff Mick Jagger could plausibly do or not.


The mission-critical skill of the Rocker can plausibly be "best at robot suit combat." It genuinely doesn't matter as long as there is something and all the players know what it is.

Now the problems of getting this worked into Vampire are multiple. First of all, Vampire went the full Call of Cthulhu with archetypes like Historian and Zookeeper that had no obvious mission critical skills - but the game also refused to commit to what missions even looked like. Many of the Vampire authors explicitly said they were too cool for dungeon crawls (not that a bunch of early adventures were anything but), and they didn't have any solid replacements available.

Basically, Vampire needed a whole mission and skill archetype infrastructure built from the ground up. Figure out a list of 6 to 10 "standard missions" and then figure out a list of 4 to 10 "standard archetypes" that have skills that obviously and meaningfully interact with those missions.

Examples:

• Bug Hunt - there are monsters in a place. Your team has to root them out without getting on the news.
• Anomaly - there is evidence that there's a supernatural creature or object. Investigate it, and then make it join the conspiracy or destroy it.
• Heist - there is a thing, steal it. Don't get caught and don't make it obvious it was stolen by wizards.
• Cover Up - a bad thing has happened and there are witnesses. Make all the evidence vanish and convince all the witnesses to give the kinds of testimony you want.
• Recruitment - there's someone who isn't part of the conspiracy and you really want them to be part of the conspiracy.
• Infiltrate - there is an organization (cops, corporation, hospital, whatever) that the conspiracy would like to gain influence over.

And then you make sure that all the main archetypes have obvious means of interacting with those main mission archetypes. And since it's a skill based system, people can have specific concepts like "Magazine Heriess" and "Master Chef" and shit that give them specific things that they can do that may or may not have any particular relevance to main missions - but so long as your Heiress is a "Spy" archetype and your Chef is a "Warrior" archetype, that's all fine.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

The relative uselessness of musical skills in a cyberpunk crime game was enough to kill the rocker archetype dead on its own but I will say that the attempt at formalizing the rules definitely helped shovel some dirt onto the grave. You don't get anything for free just by leveling up in Shadowrun so by making performance arts into separate skills that cost the same as being sneaky or shooting straight they actually made it less likely that people would list "can play the ukelele" as one of their character's hobbies even just as a bit of pure NERPS.

[nockermensch]

This may seem obvious in hindsight, but you cannot add a "rocker" to a game without also adding problems that can be solved by rocking at them.

[hyzmarca]

The Rocker would probably be best as riling up crowds of angry anarchists into revolutionary mobs that inevitably got slaughtered by corporate security goons.

The Reporter, likewise, functions as an outlet to air the corporations dirty laundry so that the public can be outraged by it.

In other words, both play to the punk aspect, social upheval and whatnot.

[nockermensch]

The Rocker would probably be best as riling up crowds of angry anarchists into revolutionary mobs that inevitably got slaughtered by corporate security goons.

The Reporter, likewise, functions as an outlet to air the corporations dirty laundry so that the public can be outraged by it.

In other words, both play to the punk aspect, social upheval and whatnot.

The reporter is a role that really could be more used, even if it's just because there should be more Spider JerusalemHunter S. Thompson expies in games. But a game that actually wants to support this role needs to have a "information and public opinion" chapter as robust as the ones for the matrix or magic. Also, it needs to relate to the shooting people in the face aspect of the game.

Maybe a reporter embeded on a team of shadowrunners can bypass entire combat encounters or at least downgrade their threat by livestreaming runs in clandestine labs and the like: If the megacorp that secretly owns the lab shows their security forces there, they can't deny involvement afterwards. Then part of the mission's legwork could be finding which other groups the megacorp is hiring for defense, or maybe doxxing their security operatives, so that when they show up without the badges anyway the reporter can immediately point to that.

Meanwhile, the rocker is inherently problematic for any game with "shadowrun" in the name, because if he's doing his job right, his image should be instantly recognizable. If the game is about playing SINless mercenaries, a rocker would probably work better as a NPC that you contact and ask for favors (providing distraction, good or bad PR and the like). In a game not so focused on doing clandestine shit, rockers could be legit PCs.

[Username17]

So I went through the clan books and pulled out all the archetypes that White Wolf wheeled out for people to supposedly use for their characters. Here we go:

• Assamite: Bogeyman, Circuit Rider, Tactical Coordinator, Contract Lawyer, Character Assassin, Archaeologist, Pariah Dog, Witch Hunter, Prophet of Caine, Cleaner
  Brujah: The Confederate, The Harpy-to-Be, The Paladin, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Anachronism, Net Kindred, The Small-Town Sheriff, The Digital Musician, The Pugilist, The Anarch Ringleader
  Gangrel: Intrepid Explorer, Country Musician, Hacker, Field Biologist, Drilling Rig Technician, Eco Terrorist, Industry Lobbyist, New Age Viking, Provincial Scourge, Chupacabra
  Giovanni: Single-Blood Prodigy, Hurried Embrace, Bitter Matron, Diplomat Provacateur, Dunsirn Bully, Aide-De-Camp, Pisanob Grave Robber, The Degenerate, Fiduciary Wizard, Failure
  Lasombra: The Accuser, The Angry Young Man, The Baleful Avenger, The Successful Mass-Embrace, The Pirate, The Revolutionary, Broker For The Damned, The Crusader Out of Time, The Harpy, The Student of the Abyss
  Malkavian: Art Dealer, Collector, Composer, EMT, Methuselah's Pawn, Mortifier of the Flesh, Occult Savant, Sensei, Talk Radio Host, Third Shift Prison Guard
  Nosferatu: Cleopatra, Advisor, Leatherface, Initiate Loremaster, Research Specialist, Hive Master, Skin, Brood Hen, Dark Crusader, Leper Messiah
  Ravnos: Cleaner, Courier, Devil Slayer, Gun Runner, Immigrant Smuggler, Inside Trader, Prince's Advisor, Psychological Warfare Specialist, Sabbat Heretic, Thuggee
  Setite: Psychiatrist, Mystic Artist, Super Spy, Entrepeneur, Schoolmaster of Sin, Transhumanist, Gladiator, Voodoo Queen, Debunking Scientist, Native Rights Activist
  Toreador: The Folk Artist, The Reclusive Author, Thespian Spy, Embraced Restauranteur, Beautiful Monster, Liaison to the Anarchs, Pack Priest, Graffiti Vandal, Queen of the Damned, Head
  Tremere: Security Consultant, Diplomat, Labor Union Leader, Crowley, Anarch Thamaturge, Pyramid Fanatic, Cloistered Researcher, Nightclub Owner, Medical Examiner, Refugee-Turned-Scourge
  Tzimisce: Lord of the Ghetto, The Siamese Twin, Most Eugenic Baby of 1929, Child of the Dragon, Koldun Nuevo, Kennel Master, Star Fucker, Modern Prmitive, The New Prometheus, Oprichniki Man Friday
  Ventrue: Gambler, Preaccher, Generalissimo, Silicon Success Story, Eyes of the Ephors, Domain Raider, Remover, Historian, Vitaephile, Diablerist

Now that's 129 different archetypes (would be 130, but there's one repeat), but what the fuck? Some of those are backgrounds, some of those are skill sets, some of those are positions in vampire society, some are callbacks to specific fictional characters, some of those are just significant events in a character's past. They don't occupy the same conceptual space: you could easily be a Confederate by political inclination, an Oil Rig Technician by trade, a Gambler by hobby, a Hurried Embrace into vampirism, a Student of the Abyss now that you're a vampire and have shadow magic, and a Liaison to the Anarchs as your job in vampire society. There's nothing contradictory there, it just happens to be 6 different nominally exclusive archetypes at once.

These archetypes are best thought of as the text that appears under a character's name when the movie freeze frames while introducing a character. Like if this was a Scott Pilgrim movie or something made by Guy Ritchie. So a character shows up and the screen freezes and has her name and underneath it is written "Sabbat Heretic" or something similarly pithy.


So like, the movie does this with all the vampire characters.

I should point out that if you picked these concepts at random there's a significant chance that the characters would be forced to fight to the death, since some of those character concepts are specifically Sabbat and some are specifically Camarilla. But that is of course a more general problem with all of Masquerade.

Anyway, that's way too many archetypes, but also oddly has almost no coverage because so many of those archetypes are so bizarrely tiny that you didn't even think they described one character until they wrote it down. Seriously one of them is "Grave Robber named Pisanob" which sounds like I'm making fun of this list but it is actually in there.

The Archetypes need to be much higher level. A lot of the archetypes in Cyberpunk or Shadowrun didn't work, but they were at about the right conceptual level. 6-16 is the right range of total number of archetypes. And they need to describe skill sets in general ways rather than specific ways. A Warrior could be a gang member or a pirate and fight with a baseball bat or crossbow, for example.

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

So this is just what I came up with after 15 minutes of thinking:

The Leader: The well-rounded character; like a jack-of-all-trades but better, with emphasis on charisma and Leadership skills.

The Brains: The character with the focus on Mental stats and high scores in the Knowledges department.

The Actor: AKA 'The Face'. The PC with high Diplomacy, Intimidation, Subterfuge, Seduction, etc. The one who talks to NPCs obviously.

The Doctor: As in PhD. The Lawyer, Historian, Surgeon, Chemist, etc. Has primarily non-social, non-combat skills. A utility 'mage'.

The Fence: The burglar, thief, under-world connections PC. Prob has decent FireArms, Larceny, StreetWise, and Stealth rating.

The Muscle: Your standard fighter, he's got likely got high Brawl, Melee, FireArms, Strength, and Stamina scores.

The Hacker: Whether its computers, machinery, or just MacGyver'ing his way out of a situation with arts and crafts, this is that guy.

The Ace: The one with the super min-maxed stat(s). He's god-like at one very specific thing, and prob amazing at one other specific thing.

The Eyes: The PC with high Alertness, Perception, Investigation, Wits, Empathy, etc. The guy who gets info from environment clues for the party.

The Runner: The character with excellent Dodge, Athletics, & Stealth ratings. Give him some Survival and FireArms and he'll be good.

[ArmorClassZero]

[deleted]

[Whipstitch]

Not making the Vampires types more visually identifiable is baffling to me. They kinda got that right with hinting at the Toreador / Daeva being super sexy vampires, the Nosferatu being ugly, and the Gangrel having animalistic features, but they really should've turned it up to 11. Make the Toreador practically angelic in appearance, make the Nosferatu hideously deformed and diseased, make the Gangrel more like the werewolves they practically already represent with fangs and extra hair and wolf-eyes that quadrupled whenever they Hulk out, so that people who wanted to play werewolves in your game about vampires basically could (oh, wait, then we wouldn't be able to market and sell a game about just being werewolves...)

I'm all for having nossies and shapechangers in the game but I'd argue that going too far would actually be kinda fucking stupid in a game that's explicitly about hiding in plain sight. I know this pains the transformation fetish set, but there's actually a very, very large number of potential players out there who see being non-human as a straight up drawback and only agree to play a vampire precisely because it's the least monstrous creatures that could plausibly appear in a Hammer horror production. Back in the '90s I had a much easier time getting randos into the hobby with Vampire rather than Shadowrun or D&D in large part because you don't have to identify as elf or any of that other weird shit. It's just a historical fact that Vampire was bigger than the rest of the WOD line combined and that's in part because normies don't want pointy ears.

[ArmorClassZero]

I'm all for having nossies and shapechangers in the game but I'd argue that going too far would actually be kinda fucking stupid in a game that's explicitly about hiding in plain sight.

I find your comment funny since this entire thread has been about how WoD doesn't hold up under its own internal logic. We've already jumped the shark and nuked the fridge.

The oWoD was too complicated and had too much bullshit supernatural crap in it. I mean, did you know that it had dragons, manticores, and harpies in it? Secret manticores. I don't know how that works.

I guess emphasizing the Gangrel's inherent weakness is the final straw that breaks the camel's back?

Back in the '90s I had a much easier time getting randos into the hobby with Vampire rather than Shadowrun or D&D in large part because you don't have to identify as elf or any of that other weird shit. It's just a historical fact that Vampire was bigger than the rest of the WOD line combined and that's in part because normies don't want pointy ears.

The '90s was a different time. 'Nerd culture' has evolved and gone (somewhat more) mainstream. Being into dwarves and elves and star trek and star wars and shit isn't as looked down on. In the 90s role-playing was this esoteric activity that nerds gathered in a basement to do. Now we've got 3 different shows about girls and their vampire boyfriends and Vin Diesel making a movie about his DnD character. Go figure.



Edit: And a show whose premise is "like LotR / WoT / the Belgariad, but with more fucking, swearing, and the MC's dying when you least expect it!"

[Whipstitch]

That things have become more gentrified now doesn't hit me as a great justification for doing things differently back when Bush Sr. was president. Make up your mind about whether you're criticizing what they did then or are talking about what you would do now and I'll consider getting back to you.

[ArmorClassZero]

[deleted]

[Dogbert]

For all the concept's failings, however, it's too late to try to change the concept of clans. Not only V5 is a direct sequel, also vampire's target demo treats clans as something beyond "class" or "powers"... to them, clans have a unique sense of identity, like your football team or WoW faction.

This is a reason why I'm uneasy about the uncertain state of Nozzies and Tremere (and the Sabbat for that matter) in V5, killing them off (or making them "ev0l NPCs") would defacto fire a non-zero percentage of the player base (including me).

...and sadly, the people in charge seems so clueless as to the reasons people actually cared for the game that they might do just that.