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

[Trill]

You can tell the Tau from the Elves from the Orks from the Imperium by how they dress, yes, but also because there are massive physical differences in each group. Or maybe and even better example, the Warp Demons. You can tell which demons are allied to Nurgle, and Tzeneetch, and Slanessh, and Khorne by their appearance alone, partially thanks to color, and partially because they all have different physical attributes. They're all demons, but there is no confusion about who belongs to what club.
[...]
As it stands, in VTM, just about anyone can join anyone else's club without the folks in that club even realizing they're not "one of us". To paraphrase Frank, that guy you want to pick a fight with could be a 12th gen Brujah punk, or they could be a 5th gen Toreador, who the fuck knows. That's cool in some sense, but that also makes showing any sort of fan affiliation limited to symbols and clothing. I really shouldn't have to explain this.

Problem with that is, that this is Vampire: the Masquerade. Demons don't have to be stealthy because they don't have to live amongst humans and keep themselves hidden. They can just appear openly and not give a crap

In order for the vampires to do any work where people can see them they should be hard to distinguish from normal people.
So they need some power to hide their true forms (with or without access to their full powers), which means you still can't tell if it's a 3rd gen, a 8th gen, or a punk that was turned yesterday.

[Voss]

@PrometheanVigil: I wasn't even talking about individual characters, Christ. I said make each vampire race / species / clan visually distinct, as in the collective whole of X clan have identifiable physical markers and traits that go beyond clothing. Sure, recognizing affiliation by clothing is easy and practical, and it's what many fandoms actually do. When kids dress up as House Gryfindor or House Ravenclaw, or House Stark or House Lannister, we can immediately tell which is which by their clothing. But having vampires who look like punks, vampires who look like hobos, and vampires who look like lawyers is less cool and conducive to a fandom IMO than having vamps who look like were-animals, vamps who look like demons, and vamps who look like ugly as sin people or as beautiful as angels. Maybe a WH40K example would be good: You can tell the Tau from the Elves from the Orks from the Imperium by how they dress, yes, but also because there are massive physical differences in each group. Or maybe and even better example, the Warp Demons. You can tell which demons are allied to Nurgle, and Tzeneetch, and Slanessh, and Khorne by their appearance alone, partially thanks to color, and partially because they all have different physical attributes. They're all demons, but there is no confusion about who belongs to what club.

As it stands, in VTM, just about anyone can join anyone else's club without the folks in that club even realizing they're not "one of us". To paraphrase Frank, that guy you want to pick a fight with could be a 12th gen Brujah punk, or they could be a 5th gen Toreador, who the fuck knows. That's cool in some sense, but that also makes showing any sort of fan affiliation limited to symbols and clothing. I really shouldn't have to explain this.

You should, actually. One is social roleplaying game about people (that happen to vampires). The other is a wargame setting about being at war all the time so the player base has a reason to fight anybody that happens to show up at the other side of the table. In fact one of the big critiques of 40k is that too many factions are Imperium factions that explicitly don't have any reason to fight each other, and given a new edition and a massive baffling setting change that involved cracking the galaxy in half, a time skip, and all sorts of momentous religious events in a setting about all religious iconoclasm and distrust of anyone who even vaguely qualifies as 'other,' they didn't bother to fix that.

Do you grasp why a social rpg and a wargame might have different needs?
And how 'you're all thirty-one flavors of mutant' serves exactly none of the needs of an rpg about (usually recently made) vampires living in the shadows of humanity?

[Username17]

I said make each vampire race / species / clan visually distinct, as in the collective whole of X clan have identifiable physical markers and traits that go beyond clothing.

I think we get that this is your position. It's just a very bad position to take. Everyone disagrees with you because that's obviously a terrible idea, not because people are in some way confused what your position is.

-Username17

[Cervantes]

sometimes he goes back and is like "no, it's just for marketing purposes" as if anyone here gives a shit abt that