Vampire 5e

[Fucks]

Who cares about the quality of Modiphius' own games (which include the new Star Trek RPG and Conan RPG), as long as they're only the publisher/ distributor? Afaik the company employs several people in offices, which are based in Lodon, which is imo much better than OPP modus operandi.

[Thaluikhain]

The origins of all these groups are written post-hoc. The idea that the founder of the Malkavians was named "Malkav" was simply the best explanation anyone could come up with because it defied linguistic classification. Fans and authors spent a lot of mental effort trying to come up with historical "fits" for the various vampire groups, and it all could have been avoided if the original writers had spent a few hours with some history books and spitballed some vague secret history back in 1990.

Now obviously this would have been a lot more work in the days before the internet. You couldn't just pull up a Wikipedia page on Romanian history back in 1986 when 22 year old Rein-Hagen was formalizing the writing in Ars Magica. It would have required some actual library time and reading actual dusty historical texts that might not have even been available in a small liberal arts college in Minnesota.

Not terribly relevant now, but couldn't they have just gotten an atlas and named their groups after various places? The Hamburg Pact vampires got together to resist the Conspiracy of Aquitaine.

So why make your next Vampire game literally take place in the World of Darkness? What do you actually get from doing that? A majority of the Vampire fanbase thought the setting needed a hard reboot back in 2003, and they weren't wrong. The specific reboot they did was fucking awful and crashed and burned financially, but the underlying logic of doing a reboot in the first place has not changed and fifteen years passing hasn't made the old embarrassing shit any less so.

Brand loyalty? Ok, can't really say, as I've no idea how well they've alienated the fans, but I still want Age of Sigmar not to be rubbish, because it's sorta kinda WHFB and I liked that once. Same as how people bought DVDs of the original and prequels to Star Wars, but only watch 3 of those films.

Seems a shame to let a once popular franchise bleed to death, even if it'd be better to walk by.

[Username17]

Who cares about the quality of Modiphius' own games (which include the new Star Trek RPG and Conan RPG), as long as they're only the publisher/ distributor? Afaik the company employs several people in offices, which are based in Lodon, which is imo much better than OPP modus operandi.

If the comparison point is Onyx Path, then obviously Modiphius represents a step up. But we're talking a step up from "some dude on the internet's pdf house rules" to "a third tier art house RPG producer." Which means White Wolf has now come full circle, becoming a fringe RPG producer with surprisingly high production values attached to garbage fire rules systems that makes books that aren't even carried in all the local gaming stores. White Wolf is promising that in 2018 they are going right back to the econiche they existed in back in 1991. Which since the rest of the world has kind of moved the fuck on, means that we're at a point where I don't see any pressing reason to read these books in any immediate time frame.

They have given me no reason to pick these books up and look through them - not even for the purpose of mockery.

Not terribly relevant now, but couldn't they have just gotten an atlas and named their groups after various places? The Hamburg Pact vampires got together to resist the Conspiracy of Aquitaine.

They definitely did do some of that. White Wolf has gotten surprisingly large amounts of story content based solely on the fact that there is a place in Europe called "Thorns" and another place in Europe called "Worms." Which did and does make for some cool sounding events (eg.: "The Convention of Thorns") but ends up requiring all kinds of mind caulk later on, because those are real places that have real characteristics and real histories and people are going to want to incorporate those real-world characteristics and histories into their own content.

As it happens, Thorns is a bullshit village with like six people and a dog, which means that you apparently had a major event in the secret history where locally vampires outnumbered humans by like thirty to one. Which people then had to retcon into the story once people figured out what was actually at that particular spot on the map.

That sort of shit is basically inevitable once you start naming your shit after stuff you don't know anything about. There pretty much isn't any real replacement for doing a little bit of research and world building for your campaign world. The advantage of setting your game on "Earth" is that you don't have to color in the whole map or write the whole history, but the flip side of that is that the whole map is factually colored in and the tapestry of history does not want for threads. If you talk completely out of your ass, people are going to know. Some will know right away, but also people are going to fucking read a book and eventually find out.

-Username17

[ArmorClassZero]

In other news, VTES is also trying to get back in print to coincide with the release of VTM5E. https://www.blackchantry.com/

This bit from their vision statement really struck me:"We are to attract many new players, but any actions taken to further this end will be made with the current player base in mind."

So much like VTM5E hopes to capitalize directly on the nostalgia of a their past fans - a now 30 to 40+ year-olds demographic - VTES wants to move forward in a way that appeals to the remaining 500 people who still play VTES (worldwide), and if they get some new blood along the way... cool deal, I guess?

[Miniature Colossus]

So... I tried to figure out who the Free League were and I couldn't. Apparently they helped organize a kickstarter for Simon Stålenhag's "Tales From The Loop," which is an art-book about an alternate timeline where 1980s Sweden has a bunch of robots. I have no evidence whatsoever that they are in any way qualified to make an RPG. It's very strange.

-Username17

Well as it says on their website they have made Mutant: Year Zero, Coriolis - The Third Horizon and Tales from the Loop, the the last one also being a full roleplaying game in addition to the art book. Those are only the games released in english though, in Swedish they also have Svavelvinter, Spelet om Morwhayle and Oktoberlandet. The Swedish wikipedia has a full list i think (under Rollspel).

Thats not to say I think they're all that qualified to design games though. I have played M:YZ and Coriolis, and while M:YZ was alright, if a bit barebones in some areas, Coriolis was basically unplayable at launch if I remember correctly. It's been a while but IIRC among other things the combat system had a weird stun lock feature making going first an almost guaranteed win rendering anything but initiative moot. We gave up playing it very quickly so I didn't get a chance to decide if it was a complete garbage fire or not.

They also have a podcast in Swedish which I listed to once or twice some time ago. From what I remember they mentioned having a single dude who was their 'rules guy' who they trusted with all rules technicalities and he didn't seem very rules savvy at all.

TL;DR: I wouldn't expect anything from this.

[Finkin]

So now that this is actually out, has anyone looked over the mechanics yet? Trying to decide if I want to take a peek at the PDF or not.

[hyzmarca]

So now that this is actually out, has anyone looked over the mechanics yet? Trying to decide if I want to take a peek at the PDF or not.

Mechanically, it's the best edition of Vampire. This isn't really saying much, but there's not much to say. They recognized some of the game's biggest problems and fixed them. And the math sucks less than it did in previous editions.

[Jefepato]

So now that this is actually out, has anyone looked over the mechanics yet? Trying to decide if I want to take a peek at the PDF or not.

Things that seem actually kinda good:
- Target numbers are always 6, with difficulty based on how many successes you need. I mean, that alone is objectively a huge improvement over all of oWoD.
- Rather than each Discipline being a set of five powers that everyone learns in order, there are a few different options you can choose. (Sadly, it appears that you can't learn any more powers from a given Discipline once you've got five of them. There are nine Animalism powers in the core book, and once you've got Animalism 5, there doesn't appear to be any way to learn the four you didn't choose.)

I fucking hate Hunger dice, though.

[Ignimortis]

So now that this is actually out, has anyone looked over the mechanics yet? Trying to decide if I want to take a peek at the PDF or not.

Mechanically, it's the best edition of Vampire. This isn't really saying much, but there's not much to say. They recognized some of the game's biggest problems and fixed them. And the math sucks less than it did in previous editions.

I might've agreed with you, but Hunger dice are BS and so is Hunger as a whole. I understand the appeal behind "make vampires more than mana-hungry mages", even if I don't share it, but it's implemented poorly, because it punishes you for both successes and failures, turning them "bloody".

In short, a "bloody" success is still a success but done so violently that you're probably breaking the Masquerade and/or maiming the target.

And you can't get rid of Hunger without killing people for food. And you can randomly get more hungry because the storyteller feels like it or the dice fell that way at the start of a night.

It's unpredictable, annoying and I don't see how to work around it. At least in the old editions I could just have Self-Control 5 and keep a few bloodpoints as a buffer so that I wouldn't go and murder a bunch of civilians after any significant blood expenses.

[Username17]

The best description I've seen on hunger dice is that the people making the new edition recognized that Masquerade's blood economy was a major failure point of the game with no easy solutions - so they tried to do a ground-up fix and failed.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Hunger dice are functional unless your GM is actively trying to screw you over. Messy successes should be minor complications, not game-destroying, character ruining gotchas. And if they are, then the problem is with your GM.

It's a functional replacement for the critical failure rules, since it doesn't make crit failure more likely if you have higher dice pools.

It's not the best rule, but it's still more functional than the old blood economy.

[Ignimortis]

Hunger dice are functional unless your GM is actively trying to screw you over. Messy successes should be minor complications, not game-destroying, character ruining gotchas. And if they are, then the problem is with your GM.

It's a functional replacement for the critical failure rules, since it doesn't make crit failure more likely if you have higher dice pools.

It's not the best rule, but it's still more functional than the old blood economy.

Not sure why you'd call the old blood mechanics non-functional. The fluff behind them is very dodgy and has a lot of impact on how vampires work (and why they logically can't uphold the Masquerade at all), but at its' core as a mechanic, blood is just MP which can be spent in certain amounts for certain spells, clearly defined in quantity you have right now and can have at all. Blood in Revised/V20 was something that could be gamed, there was no randomness to it by itself.

[Longes]

Removal of blood pools led to a very stupid terminology. For example, certain Tremere rituals require "one Rouse Check's worth of blood", as does ghouling people. But a "Rouse Check" isn't actually a defined quantity of blood, nor is it even definable.

You see, you make Rouse Checks when in the old VtM you'd spend blood. When activating disciplines for example. If you pass the Rouse Check - nothing happens. If you fail, your Hunger increases. So hypothetically a very lucky vampire can bum around at Hunger 0 for decades if he just passes all his Rouse Checks and never drinks any blood. Or you can be unlucky and go to Hunger 5 in five actions.

Mechanics are still a mess in V5. Some disciplines are clear winners, some are clear losers. For example, Blood Magic 1:

Altering the properties of some of their own Blood, the user can make it highly corrosive to dead substances, able to corrode most items down to steaming sludge, given enough time and Blood shed.

Cost: One or more Rouse Checks

System: No additional skill roll is required. The user concentrates for a turn and forces Blood through an open, usually self-inflicted, wound. The user then spills their Blood on a nonliving object (except unliving flesh such as that of the Kindred) to corrode and decompose it. Each Rouse Check corrodes approximately 35 cm of matter in all directions from the splash; this takes approximately five minutes (longer on soft metals like copper or cast iron). Harder metals such as alloys and steel merely scar and pit; whether they meaningfully weaken remains at the Storyteller’s discretion. (This power might corrode through handcuff chains given enough time and vitae.)

An acid blood that does literally nothing to anything alive and does almost nothing to most metals. Sign me up for being a Tremere boyo!

Or Silence of Death (now an Obfuscate power rather than Quietus) which silences absolute nothing of what you'd want to be silenced. Also Assamites are called "Banu Haqim" now.

Popular among the Banu Haqim, this power completely silences the user, nullifying all sound made by them. As with other Obfuscate powers, this only works on people within earshot and does not fool microphones or other electronic sound detectors. Unlike Obfuscate in general, this power works only on the sense of hearing, but in exchange operates more robustly. A vampire needs to make a whole lot of noise to break this silence.

Cost: Free

System: The user silences their footsteps, clothing, minor collisions, and other sounds of their person. This makes the vampire undetectable if an observer could only notice them by sound, such as when on a different floor of a house.

This power does not eliminate sounds the user makes outside their personal space (throwing or dropping objects, or slamming doors, for example). Failing that, only Sense of the Unseen (Auspex 1) can detect the user.

Duration: One scene

So, a silencing power that doesn't silence gunshots (it's a short range illusion and only minor sounds) or your victims (it only affects you). It also does mechanically nothing. Compared to the other Obfuscate 1 power which makes you invisible while you stand still, Silence of Death is useless.



Setting changes are also rather unexciting. V5 is very clumsily pushing the game to a gutter vamp level. The Vormann Sisters from VtM: Bloodlines are what counts as the big players now (though they are canonically a 5th generation). Most of the Elders fucked off to the Middle East to fight an open war. So did the entire Sabbat. Tremere Pyramid fell apart and now big Tremere leaders are Carna (who?) and Karl Shrek. Giovanni and Ravnos have gone extinct. Lasombra and Tzimisce are all in the Middle East fighting blood war with the ancient blood gods. Assamites (now Banu Haqim) and Setites (now Setite Ministry) technically exist.

Really all the fun stuff in VtM is currently happening in the Middle East, which is explicitly the place you are not playing in.

On the upside - Golconda is actually playable now. It's a five dot merit, and Golconda was an evil scheme to make daywalker vampires all along. At five dots you can be a daywalker, but go into hunger frenzy after every time you daywalk.

[Dogbert]

Shameless plug: I've been dedicating a month's worth of comics to V5 (still one to go, pretty much everything I could say about the game is in the pages and the comments). Contrary to many people here, though, I do like it pretty much.

[Longes]

Contrary to many people here, though, I do like it pretty much.

Wouldn't have guessed it from your comic.

[Guts]

Hunger dice are functional unless your GM is actively trying to screw you over. Messy successes should be minor complications, not game-destroying, character ruining gotchas. And if they are, then the problem is with your GM.

It's a functional replacement for the critical failure rules, since it doesn't make crit failure more likely if you have higher dice pools.

It's not the best rule, but it's still more functional than the old blood economy.

Yep, Hunger is less abuseable by players than the old mechanics. And the "succeed at a cost" nature of it guarantees constant risk of breaching the masquerade.

This may be good or bad depending what you want of Vampire. It's good if you want a street level personal horror game with flimsy characters. It's bad if you want Supers by Night and urban crawls (which, frankly, seems to be what most fans want, which explains the reaction to this new edition).

[Username17]

The blood trait system of V:tM is a huge strain on the immersion of the narrative. Pretty much any logical reaction to blood power working that way is extremely out of genre. Whether it's wearing a ten liter blood camelback or cannulating a werewolf or buying industrial quantities of abattoir runoff, fucking all of it is Tippyverse bullshit that neither supports nor allows gothic horror wangsting.

But the Hunger Checks system doesn't really fix that. Yes, making everything abstract and vague and unknowable makes the answer to "Can my character [Fill In Genre Destroying Yet Totally Obvious Action Here]?" to be "Ask your storyteller, so probably not." but that doesn't solve things. Or rather, it takes away the inevitable farce of people calculating how rapidly the setting is destroyed by the blood system to people being simply unable to make declarative statements about how the blood economy works at all. Which means you aren't even playing a cooperative storytelling game.

The Hunger Check replaces the problem of not having a functional blood economy that supports the setting with the problem of not having a definable blood economy that you could tell cooperative stories with. It's babies and bathwater.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

The blood trait system of V:tM is a huge strain on the immersion of the narrative. Pretty much any logical reaction to blood power working that way is extremely out of genre. Whether it's wearing a ten liter blood camelback or cannulating a werewolf or buying industrial quantities of abattoir runoff, fucking all of it is Tippyverse bullshit that neither supports nor allows gothic horror wangsting.

But the Hunger Checks system doesn't really fix that. Yes, making everything abstract and vague and unknowable makes the answer to "Can my character [Fill In Genre Destroying Yet Totally Obvious Action Here]?" to be "Ask your storyteller, so probably not." but that doesn't solve things. Or rather, it takes away the inevitable farce of people calculating how rapidly the setting is destroyed by the blood system to people being simply unable to make declarative statements about how the blood economy works at all. Which means you aren't even playing a cooperative storytelling game.

The Hunger Check replaces the problem of not having a functional blood economy that supports the setting with the problem of not having a definable blood economy that you could tell cooperative stories with. It's babies and bathwater.

-Username17

That's really not what the change means. Vampires in 5e don't need to drink blood. You can go around with 5 hunger dice constantly and the only penalties will be a statistically significant chance to screw something up due to hunger. But it isn't actually a biological need anymore. It's a psychological addiction. It's a massive change to the setting, but it's not a bad one. Because the question of how much blood a vampire needs to drink is now answered none, as long as he's willing to suffer the hunger and the risks that come with it.

[Username17]

But you still have blood magic that still uses blood. So when you announce that the amount of blood needed is "none, it's all in your mind" everything is stupid and fucked.

-Username17

[Korwin]

So is there and Hardcover book of this or only an pdf?

Edit: I did try to Google it, but only found old Editions...

[Finkin]

So is there and Hardcover book of this or only an pdf?

Edit: I did try to Google it, but only found old Editions...

Looks like you can get the PDF (and lulz errata already) from the https://www.worldofdarkness.com/v5 site.

And if you really want the hardcover you can order it at https://www.modiphius.net/collections/v ... masquerade

Thanks for some insight, I think I might grab it and give it a whirl, and tinker with the parts I find problematic. Looks like a better baseline to start with than the older editions, at least.

[Username17]

Looks like a better baseline to start with than the older editions, at least.

Is it?

Obviously Vampire: the Masquerade has been badly in need of a major reboot since the late 90s. Which is to say that the clear need to reboot Vampire: the Masquerade is now old enough to legally purchase alcohol in the United States. In that time, various people who owned the White Wolf brand have given us the following attempts at rebooting things to one degree or another:

• Revised Vampire
• Vampire: the Requiem
• Vampire: 20th Anniversay
• Vampire: 5th Edition

And yes, the fact that there were two editions prior to that, plus simultaneous alt-history editions like Dark Ages and Victorian Age means that the numbering system that gets us to 5 is every bit as hilariously suspect as the numbering system that got us to 5 in Dungeons & Dragons. But the point is that each of these was an attempt to address one or more parts of the things that are and have been fundamentally wrong with Vampire from the beginning as well as put the individual stamp of the seemingly random personal bugbears of whichever person happened to be lead developer at the time for whatever company had the license at the time.

Now, let's talk about the problems that are universal all editions and versions and reboots of Vampire whether made by the team from Lion Rampant, White Wolf, CCP, Onyx Path, or Paradox:

• The game mechanics are hot garbage. Vampire's mechanics have always been worse than the contemporaneous edition of Shadowrun even when the contemporaneous edition of Shadowrun was a step backwards like 5th edition was.
• The setting's demographics and vampire blood economies do not hold up to any kind of scrutiny, which severely damages the ability to tell shared world stories.
• The setting is filled with a bunch of extraneous bullshit nobody likes, while simultaneously having big holes when talking about people of color or non-European cultures. It's never been much of a world of Darkness, more of a "mostly white suburbs of Darkness".
• The player characters are actually given really bullshit weak sets of powers and limitations, which is extremely disempowering and simultaneously deeply out of genre. You can't play any of the new vampires from any of the vampire fictions except possibly the comic relief ones from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• The world is also cluttered up with a bunch of fuck-off powerful super NPCs that are also extremely disempowering to the players on the other end.
• Vampire society is filled with a bunch of contradictory bullshit that requires huge amounts of mind caulk to work with.

That pretty much covers it, right? And while various editions have taken concrete steps to adress all of those problems, it is nonetheless factually true that all of those problems have remained large, potentially deal breaking problems in every edition and reboot.

Which means that at this point putting together a Vampire game you'd actually want to play pretty much involves writing a new game. There have been so many editions and revisions and shit that no one has solid preconceptions of what the fuck you even mean when you say "I'm going to start a Vampire game!" so it's down to long world building discussions regardless. And none of the editions of Vampire are current or popular enough to have any inertia at the moment.

I'm just not really convinced that the work of completely rebooting and reworking V5 or V20 is somehow easier or better than painting on the relatively blank canvas that is Requiem. All three games are shit, but Blood Potency is fundamentally better than Generations.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

Wouldn't have guessed it from your comic.

The full impression is always in the comments. Also, there's only so many punchlines I can do about praising things when my thing is satire.

[Longes]

V5 combined Blood Potency and generations. Your true power stat is now Blood Potency which goes 0 (thin-blood) to 10 (Antediluvians) and it increases as you grow older spend XP on it. But you also have your Generation which acts as the minimum Blood Potency. Various 4th-5th gens can't ever be below Blood Potency 5 for example.

[Username17]

V5 combined Blood Potency and generations. Your true power stat is now Blood Potency which goes 0 (thin-blood) to 10 (Antediluvians) and it increases as you grow older spend XP on it. But you also have your Generation which acts as the minimum Blood Potency. Various 4th-5th gens can't ever be below Blood Potency 5 for example.

That's a good example of the "never throw anything away, even if it's terrible" attitude that keeps Vampire from actually being advanced or improved. Blood Potency is better than Generations in every way. It's better narratively, it's better mechanically. It raises less stupid questions and it undermines less conceits of the setting. It fucking explains the generational "Jyhad" in a way that the original Generations mechanic never did. It's a better approximation of the original Riceian source material and it's easier to explain. It makes the secret history of vampires make more sense instead of less and it's just better all around. Every single way that Blood Potency is different than Generations it is superior to Generations.

So splitting the difference and making Generations be more like Blood Potency is still just worse than using Blood Potency. Every concession you make to the way Generations worked in 1st edition the worse your game is. Because that was a bad mechanic that the game would be substantially improved by simply removing altogether. Blood Potency, by contrast, was a perfectly fine mechanic that accomplished several design goals. I could imagine having different goals and not wanting to use Blood Potency, but assuming you had those goals Blood Potency was totally serviceable.

-Username17