What would it take to make VTM 5e not garbage?

[ArmorClassZero]

And no, please don't link to or quote FrankTrollman's Anatomy of Failure: Vampire: The Masquerade; or Anatomy of Failure: Vampire: The Requiem. Those threads are great, but at the risk of redundancy, let's discuss what nuWW would have to do to not implode their company (again?)

[Iduno]

They would need to realize they are making a game where a group of vampires from different bloodlines work together to do adventures.

They need to have a reason they are working together, so the bloodlines can't hate each other more than they hate whatever they're fighting. The bloodlines also have to be different enough that they would work together (like classes in other games).

There also has to be something the players can accomplish. That means it has to be important enough that they players are willing to put in the effort to do, and they have to be able to succeed (which can change things, shock/horror).

That leads into the "they need to realize they are making a game." If there is no player agency, there is no reason to have players, and the storyteller should go back to writing terrible stories on myspace while cutting themselves or whatever it is teenage goths do these days. It also means there needs to be game mechanics that support the game being played, and they should be playtested by people who didn't write them to find out if they work.

[Username17]

Masquerade players pretty much universally acknowledged that there needed to be a reboot of the franchise back in 2003. They were Not Wrong. The simple truths that the crunch was clunky and shitty while the fluff was bloated and confusing was self evident fifteen years ago. This argument has not gotten any less persuasive in the intervening time; indeed the addition of 10 years of semi-canon Onyx Path shit has just made everything even more confusing. I genuinely don't even know if the Tremere Antitribu or Ravnos or whatever would be "all dead" or not if someone were to try to continue Masquerade at this point with a new edition, and I don't think there's any part of me left that would care enough to check.

Similarly, nWoD was a pile of shit that was on fire. The only thing that can be done with it is to pretend it never happened and move on. But moving on, as previously discussed, still has to mean rebooting Vampire. There isn't some other option where you keep Masquerade continuity and make a new edition and it isn't a shopping cart full of expired fireworks. Similarly there is no way to pretend that Requiem was ever the reboot the franchise needed and try to expand from there. Your only option is to go back to the drawing board and make your new edition the reboot that nWoD should have delivered in 2004. Any company that takes the Vampire license and does not acknowledge this reality is fundamentally unserious and unworthy of discussion except in the form of mockery.

As to the system end of it, the absolute number one issue is that it needs to have a difficulty chart right at the beginning. If the designers can't show me that they know what the outputs of their random number generator actually are, I just don't fucking care what their game system is. I am an adult now, and I am not going to buy their edition just to rewrite the core mechanic for them on the fly.

On the setting side, I need to hear a cogent explanation of why there are coteries of different clan backgrounds. As Iduno said, the writers need to show that they understand that they are writing a game. If the basic pitch for why the player characters work together isn't complete, I'm putting the fucking book down.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

And no, please don't link to or quote FrankTrollman's Anatomy of Failure: Vampire: The Masquerade; or Anatomy of Failure: Vampire: The Requiem. Those threads are great, but at the risk of redundancy, let's discuss what nuWW would have to do to not implode their company (again?)

IMO, they need to reboot Vampire (again). Let VTM and VTR rest in peace, let the oWoD and nWoD go. If we look at the PopCulture LandScape, we can see that reboots are pretty common, and that they identify the 'core' of their IP and then rework and tweak the rest. The Marvel SuperHero comics seem to have done this regularly every decade or so for the past 50ish years (for better or worse). Maybe this is what Vampire needs?

Also, nuWW needs to work on visually physically distinguishing their vampires from one another. If the primary identifying factor of telling a Brujah apart from a Ventrue is that one wears a T-shirt with a capital anarchy 'A' on it, while the other wears a suit and tie, I would consider that a failure of design.

Oh, nooooooo, not again!

I'm not going to say that you're wrong so I'm just going to say that you're wrong.

I mean, you're really not looking at the big picture of the Masquarade. This means that physcial traits that let you say "this person is a vampire" are right out, much less traits that let you immediately know at a glance what kind of vampire they are.

So you have to keep your distinguishing traits within the normal human range, so that they won't look odd walking down the street. This can be extremely offensive very fast. Like, WoD Gypises offensive. Because you're basically left with making different types of vampires look like different human ethnic groups. Real human ethnic groups. That's not going to fly at all.

I mean, while I hink it would be interesting to play around with stereotypes and say that all Ventrue are black just because I like the idea of suave black aristocrats playing against sterotype, that's not going to fly in a game where white people might like to play a Venture, you know. It's going to be seen as racist now matter what you do, if Vampire clans are tied to real world ethnic features.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm going to agree with hyzmarca that unless you have some type of 'transformation' you can't have physical characteristics. If vampirism is contagious (ie, you are embraced) then the person creating the vampire gets to pick what they'll look like. Individual vampires could have a strong preference so among certain schools there might be a common 'look' (like sorority girls), but there's also going to be individuals that straight-up don't have the look but still belong.

[nockermensch]

I think he was talking more of stuff like "some vampires have bat wings, others have slit pupils."

[Username17]

I think he was talking more of stuff like "some vampires have bat wings, others have slit pupils."

Doesn't really matter. The entire concept is The Masquerade. Every Vampire has to be able to pass for a normal human. It's completely non-negotiable. So if you want to distinguish types of vampires visually, your only choice is what kind of humans you want them to be disguised as.

If you reject the types of humans as those defined by clothing and cultural affect, your only remaining choice is skin color and ethnicity. If you don't have Brujah are punks and Gangrel are hobos your only other option is Assassmites are Arabs and Ventrue are Whites.

The "vampire types should be visually distinct" concept is completely incompatible with Masquerade as a concept. It literally cannot end well, and "your product is uncomfortably racist" is probably an inevitable end result from pursuing that line of thought.

-Username17

[Voss]

And no, please don't link to or quote FrankTrollman's Anatomy of Failure: Vampire: The Masquerade; or Anatomy of Failure: Vampire: The Requiem. Those threads are great, but at the risk of redundancy, let's discuss what nuWW would have to do to not implode their company (again?)

IMO, they need to reboot Vampire (again). Let VTM and VTR rest in peace, let the oWoD and nWoD go. If we look at the PopCulture LandScape, we can see that reboots are pretty common, and that they identify the 'core' of their IP and then rework and tweak the rest. The Marvel SuperHero comics seem to have done this regularly every decade or so for the past 50ish years (for better or worse). Maybe this is what Vampire needs?

Also, nuWW needs to work on visually physically distinguishing their vampires from one another. If the primary identifying factor of telling a Brujah apart from a Ventrue is that one wears a T-shirt with a capital anarchy 'A' on it, while the other wears a suit and tie, I would consider that a failure of design.

Well, your design principles apparently suck ass, so, that isn't a barrier to an actual game.

The big thing is they need to not be a bunch of transgressive edgelords exploiting current culture problems for a cheap thrill, nor be a bunch of fuckwits who thing player agency is a secondary to creepy stories with fake blood and ha-ha childfucking. Unfortunately they've posted a lot of screeds and a demo product and they're totally doing that.

The other big thing they need is a functional game. Having seen people try to play with the 'system' that they decided to demo, they've opted not to do that. Instead its a comedy of failure ruleset that accumulates bad dice for the players by pure statistics if they take any actions at all, with an end result of the players can go fuck themselves and their agency.

It might be functional for a reboot of Paranoia, but I'm honestly not convinced of that.



So they basically need to scrap the system they have and start over from scratch. Specifically one where taking mundane actions doesn't statistically reduce to generating hunger/blood tokens that make you vamp out and murder people because you were driving in the rain or succeeding in talking someone into to taking your shift at BurgerWorld.

[Grek]

If you reject the types of humans as those defined by clothing and cultural affect, your only remaining choice is skin color and ethnicity. If you don't have Brujah are punks and Gangrel are hobos your only other option is Assassmites are Arabs and Ventrue are Whites.

Why are we rejecting types of humans defined by clothing again? It would be an interesting setting conceit if vampires have clan-specific clothing and rituals which get brought out only when meeting with other vampires in the secret vampire meetings. I mean, the thing where Sabbat vampires do crazy blood rituals in priestly attire is pretty cool, why not extend that to individual bloodlines as well? Like maybe the Ventrue all wearing a certain style of ring on a certain finger in order to indicate to everyone in the know exactly what rank you are in the Ventrue hierarchy, while Brujah loyalists all get matching arm sleeve tattoos and shit.

Alternatively, we could go with a non-visual distinguishing feature. Vampires have a superior sense of smell in various mythologies, so why not give each clan a distinctive scent which is distinguishable by vampires and bloodhounds, but not by regular humans?

[Prak]

You could have vampire clans distinguishable by non-human physical manifestations and keep the masquerade if you restrict these manifestations to things that can be covered up. So, Ventrue all have golden eyes, and they wear sunglasses all the time they're around humans, and all Giovanni have exposed bone somewhere on their body and if it's their hand, they just wear gloves all the time.

Like, if we're keeping the VtM clans (and I'm not saying we should, just spitballing)-

• Assamite- ???
• Brujah- ???
• Settites-Retractable snake fangs
• Gangrel- Retractable claws
• Giovanni- Exposed bone somewhere on body
• Lasombra- Shifting, "alive" shadow (honestly, most people would ignore it)
• Malkavians- Short arthropod legs sprout from their scalp ("Head full of spiders")
• Nosferatu- non-human mouth behind their lips (proboscis, shark teeth, leech tongue, whatever)
• Ravnos- ???
• Toreador- A painting on their flesh somewhere that moves and shifts
• Tremere- Clan symbol "tattooed" on their left shoulder, obviously magical (it glows or something)
• Tzimisce- Subdermal bone plating, like that thing in the first episode or two of Penny Dreadful
• Ventrue- Golden eyes

[Trill]

Why are we rejecting types of humans defined by clothing again?

If the primary identifying factor of telling a Brujah apart from a Ventrue is that one wears a T-shirt with a capital anarchy 'A' on it, while the other wears a suit and tie, I would consider that a failure of design.

[Voss]

You could have vampire clans distinguishable by non-human physical manifestations and keep the masquerade if you restrict these manifestations to things that can be covered up. So, Ventrue all have golden eyes, and they wear sunglasses all the time they're around humans, and all Giovanni have exposed bone somewhere on their body and if it's their hand, they just wear gloves all the time.

Like, if we're keeping the VtM clans (and I'm not saying we should, just spitballing)-

• Assamite- ???
• Brujah- ???
• Settites-Retractable snake fangs
• Gangrel- Retractable claws
• Giovanni- Exposed bone somewhere on body
• Lasombra- Shifting, "alive" shadow (honestly, most people would ignore it)
• Malkavians- Short arthropod legs sprout from their scalp ("Head full of spiders")
• Nosferatu- non-human mouth behind their lips (proboscis, shark teeth, leech tongue, whatever)
• Ravnos- ???
• Toreador- A painting on their flesh somewhere that moves and shifts
• Tremere- Clan symbol "tattooed" on their left shoulder, obviously magical (it glows or something)
• Tzimisce- Subdermal bone plating, like that thing in the first episode or two of Penny Dreadful
• Ventrue- Golden eyes

Most of those aren't things that can be covered up. They're things that are statistically inevitably going to be caught on camera, and any vampire on a mortuary slab is a dead giveaway.

It's all wacky bullshit that makes Masquerade failure inevitable.
Particularly the gangrel. Unless you mean a magically growing/reducing nail, there isn't any way to do retractable claws and have human style fingers. There are muscle and physical space requirements involved that force something a lot more like a paw or super jacking the thickness of the fingers, but using doors, keyboards and especially phones are going to be a super challenge or outright impossible.

[Prak]

So make it magical. And honestly, most people who play the game aren't going to think about that.

Settites have fangs that can only be found if someone's got them in a dentist's chair, or otherwise at their mercy, Giovanni keep their bone covered, Lasombra have plausible deniability and the fact that people don't pay attention to other peoples' shadows, Malkavians have hair or hats, Nosferatu keep their mouths closed, Toreador and Tremere keep their clothes on, Tzimisce keep their skin on, and Ventrue wear sunglasses.

[nockermensch]

If your vampire setting doesn't have the coroner doing a necropsy on a dead vampire at very least muttering "this person... this person has been dead for HOW LONG?" in disbelief, then it's a bad vampire setting and I don't care about it.

The fact is that vampires break the masquerade when they die. Even if you go all old school and have them not becoming ashes under the sunlight, there's the undeniable fact that most of them have been born decades or centuries ago and look nothing like they properly should, had they spent all that time alive and aging. And most vampires born in the western world during the 20th century will have photo IDs, fingerprints, dental records and stuff, so a vampire setting with a working Masquerade already have vampire agents at ready to disappear with inconvenient corpses before humanity can examine them, because of course.

So I don't really care if they have snake eyes, a stinger in their tongues to draw blood (like the actual vampire species has in The Hunger) or whatever. The masquerade is breached anyway in the moment somebody who's not into it gets to examine a dead vampire. And I'll posit that this is good for the setting because the clean up is the kind of urgent mission that the Prince can assign to the PCs: "Get in that morgue and clear the situation for us. Do not fail."

[Longes]

I'm going to posit that making a game about Urban Fantasy and/or Horror is a way better starting point than making a game strictly about vampires. Some people want to play Harry Dresden, some people want to play a Werewolf, and some people will want to play an elf or a demon. And ideally you'd want to cater to all those people.

WoD approach where you can't play as a mix of those is deeply unsatisfactory. It creates dead splats and badly suffers from prestige class problem, where big books are full of content that will be used by 1% of the tables. If you want to play, for example, Geist, or Promethean, your best option is to go fuck yourself. In nWoD the splat that suffers most from this is Hunter, because Hunter is made of billion subsplats and none of them play nice with each other, so if you specifically like Lucifuge or Knights of Saint George - you are never going to play them. In oWoD the contender would be Werewolf, because there is shit like "Breedbook - Anansi", and you are never ever going to be allowed to actually play an Anansi ever, because none of the shapeshifters like each other.

[Prak]

Yeah, honestly, as far as setting goes, you want a setting where the csi has a detective come over to look at the literal snake fangs on a dead guy, leading to the detective falling into the world of vampires and needing to be taken in or taken out before the FBI is called to deal with "a weird murderous blood cult"

[Longes]

Yeah, honestly, as far as setting goes, you want a setting where the csi has a detective come over to look at the literal snake fangs on a dead guy, leading to the detective falling into the world of vampires and needing to be taken in or taken out before the FBI is called to deal with "a weird murderous blood cult"

The best of nWoD Hunter subsplats, VASCU, is a group of by-the-book FBI psychics whose main challenge as hunters are things like getting warrants and being mindful that werewolves and vampires are still US citizens with rights that stop you from just shooting them.

[Voss]

Yeah, honestly, as far as setting goes, you want a setting where the csi has a detective come over to look at the literal snake fangs on a dead guy, leading to the detective falling into the world of vampires and needing to be taken in or taken out before the FBI is called to deal with "a weird murderous blood cult"

The best of nWoD Hunter subsplats, VASCU, is a group of by-the-book FBI psychics whose main challenge as hunters are things like getting warrants and being mindful that werewolves and vampires are still US citizens with rights that stop you from just shooting them.

Just when I think I've heard everything mind-bogglingly stupid from nWoD...
There truly isn't any end

[Longes]

Yeah, honestly, as far as setting goes, you want a setting where the csi has a detective come over to look at the literal snake fangs on a dead guy, leading to the detective falling into the world of vampires and needing to be taken in or taken out before the FBI is called to deal with "a weird murderous blood cult"

The best of nWoD Hunter subsplats, VASCU, is a group of by-the-book FBI psychics whose main challenge as hunters are things like getting warrants and being mindful that werewolves and vampires are still US citizens with rights that stop you from just shooting them.

Just when I think I've heard everything mind-bogglingly stupid from nWoD...
There truly isn't any end

Hunter covers a truly diverse range of potential monster hunters going from "office workers whose boss is a literal blood sucker" to "demon-hunting bikers with magical tattoos" to "muslim alchemists" to "evil biotech corporation that sometimes grafts a magical arm that shoots bees to their janior by mistake". The last one is an actual character for the Cheiron Group.

VASCU are the best because their story is just a police procedural, except the murderer of the week also happens to be undead.

[Prak]

That actually sounds genuinely interesting, story wise

[hyzmarca]

If your vampire setting doesn't have the coroner doing a necropsy on a dead vampire at very least muttering "this person... this person has been dead for HOW LONG?" in disbelief, then it's a bad vampire setting and I don't care about it.

That litterally happened in the pilot of the Aaron Spelling Vampire the Masquerade television series. Getting the body back and killing the coroner was a mission for the Nosfaratu spymaster/troubleshooter.

I'm going to posit that making a game about Urban Fantasy and/or Horror is a way better starting point than making a game strictly about vampires. Some people want to play Harry Dresden, some people want to play a Werewolf, and some people will want to play an elf or a demon. And ideally you'd want to cater to all those people.

WoD approach where you can't play as a mix of those is deeply unsatisfactory.

A Kitchen Sink urban fantasy doesn't even give you a setting, much less a game.

If you want to make a Demon book or a Werewolf book, then you damned sure need to be able to play as these, but you don't need to make these books and starting with that promise is probably detrimental to the core. Better to start with a solid premise and build on it than the start with a broad but weak premise.

[Dogbert]

If you ask me... you CAN keep the premise of "this game is a PvP, cloak-and-dagger version of RISK" (i.e clans hating each others' guts) since both Paranoia and the large amount of toxic players plaguing tables with crap GMs everywhere have shown for decades there is a market for that. Granted, it's a niche market... for roleplaying games, so a niche within a niche, but marketable nonetheless.

Also, if you are to do that, you better be upfront about it and don't pretend the game is anything other than that (granted, asking an RPG writer to actually be upfront about their premise has always been asking for the moon, but I still want it).

[Username17]

Obviously you're going to need to be rebooting the setting. If you reboot the setting as one with 13 clans, 7 clans, or 5 clans, that could work. If you reboot the setting as one where everyone plays a vampire or as one where everyone plays a monster (vampire, werewolf, promethean, mage, etc.), that could work.

There isn't a specific number of clans or number of types of playable monsters that the game has to be. The game is going to be different and go into more detail about vampires if it's all about vampires than if it has vampires and werewolves. The game is going to be different and go into more detail about each of its clans if there are 5 than if there are 13. But the choice to make narrow clans or broad clans is not inherently wrong. The choice to make a game about vampire conspiracies or monster teamups is not inherently wrong.

So however many subgroups the supernatural characters are divided up into, and however broad or narrow the covered concepts are, it's not a sticking point for me. If it were up to me, obviously I'd make a game where one player could be the Amphibian Man from Shape of Water, another player could be a Vampire from Lost Boys, and still another player could be the murderous sex robot from Ex Machina. But if someone instead made a game where every character is one of the Vampires from Blade, that's not a wrong choice, just a different one. Actual lines in the sand include:

• Whatever groups there are, they have to be able to play nicely together. At least, all of the presented player character options need to play nicely together. If Werewolves and Vampires or Lasombra and Malkavians are both playable options, those character types can't be expected to fight to the death if they see each other. It's OK if there's some NPC antagonist groups obviously, but if two different players bring normal character sheets to a game, there has to be a non-contrived reason why they are then going to do the adventure together rather than beating each other to death with weighted socks.
• None of the groups can be embarrassingly racist. I can't believes it's 2018 and I still have to say that, but obviously I do. If you roll out your groups and one of them is "Vampires, but Romany Vampires who have deception powers" or "Werewolves who are Native Americans and are deeply spiritual" or some shit, I am putting the book down. That shit was bad in the 90s, and in the last quarter century you have to at least have learned that that shit isn't OK.
• None of the groups can explode the setting in zero time. If one of the groups wants to destroy the Masquerade, obviously they are just going to hold a press conference tonight where they reveal that Vampires exist and then the Masquerade is over. Shit like that (see: Sabbat, Mage Traditions) is completely unacceptable.

-Username17

[CapnTthePirateG]

I guess my question is what modern vampire stories can we link to? Buffy is cool and all but that shit was in the 90s and predates a lot of the younger crowd we need to keep this running.

The last big vampire movie was fucking Twilight, and I guarantee you if you have vampires that sparkle in the sun nobody will play that shit.

You have to answer the question "what's so cool about vampires" in an age where 90s goth chicks aren't - to my limited knowledge - running around as much anymore.

[ArmorClassZero]

Obviously all the vampires types should have ways of maintaining the Masquerade, since that's a core conceit of the WoD.