V5's Failure isn't surprising

[DrPraetor]

A core group of fans want VtM to be Seinfeld - an RPG about nothing. So, yes, a group of vampires come together and vampire, that's the whole thing.

The thing is, you can take any game and setting, chuck the missions and the metaplot and just hang out. Shadowrun campaigns would often follow the William Gibson arc - you start out thwarting complicated revenge schemes by rogue AI, but later on you're deconstructing modern society by just going to parties with other magical cyborg spies.

So VtM needs a "shadowrunners go on shadowruns" premise to start the ball rolling, and you can always choose to ignore it once your coterie of vampires have a shared bonding experience of having done missions together. If Nigel the Nosferatu Anarch and Solomon the Serpent of Light were back to back against a zombie uprising in part 1 of your saga, then of course they can be on the same side if you just want to roleplay disputes over the flower arranging at vampire garden parties for the rest of your sessions.

That said, I don't have a satisfying answer so I'm going to brainstorm a bit.

Item #1 - why is our ragtag band a coterie?
[*] There is a political reason. This is actually easy - the vampire conspiracy itself is diverse, so the higher-ups are assigning new vampires to diverse coteries in order to assure friendship between the different constituent tribes of vampires. Solved.
[*] There is a magical reason ALSO. Redundancy is strength. Your coterie gets a rite mastery bonus or a pack totem or something that gives a bigger pile of dice or more/better picks off a list of qualitative bonuses or spells, the more different flavors of vampires you have in your unit. This is harder because it needs to not be lame, and to mesh thematically with the answers to alter questions, including...

Item #2 - why do we live in a society?
[*] Seriously, hipsters disappear to Portland all the time. Why can't vampires?
[*] This actually happens in Interview with the Vampire, so you really can't ignore this. Problems arise when the other vampires catch him.
[*] There is a political carrot. That is, vampire society can do things for you, which are desirable to the player because you can write them on your character sheet and do things with them.
[*] There is a supernatural carrot. That is, vampire society can do things for you, which are desirable to the player because you can write them on your character sheet and cast spells.
[*] Sticks are optional. Probably vampire society has both mundane and mystical routes to hunt down non-participants; for example, agents in police agencies who push reports of exsanguinated corpses up the chain of command, and rituals that straight up locate you if they have blood from your sire, etc.

Item #3 - why is our society giving us missions?
[*] There are mundane missions, such as the obvious "cover up a masquerade breach", but you also need to manage agents of the vampire conspiracy, and do various mob enforcer stuff on behalf of the Camarilla. The mundane premise is pretty easy, actually - it's like a feudalism thing, you owe service to the Camarilla in exchange for continuing to exist as a vampire.
[*] There is also a magical premise, which needs another post. One thing that's non-negotiable - I think you need both a mundane and magical reason why neither the Camarilla nor her supernatural advisors want to be exposed.

Item #4 - ask not what your coterie can do you for you, but what you can do for your coterie?

we also need to talk about disadvantages.

[OgreBattle]

Didn't VtM start with a big sex larping community?

[FiveBlinkNurse]

I don't have time to put up a proper reply here, but as a Vampire player/storyteller myself and a long-time fan of Vampire I definitely want to - mostly because I'm hurting over what's been happening with Vampire and what the franchise became (or, rather, failed to become).

For now, there is just one thing I want to point out:

he Nosferatu had the conceptual space nailed down. If someone rolled up with a Nosferatu character, I knew they intended to play a warrior or spy. But their actual ability set did not support that concept. Nosferatu were crap at combat and crap at sneaking around learning secrets. Everything that players wanted them to do was something you'd be better off as a Setite or some fucking thing.

So, you're not wrong, exactly. This is just an inaccurate statement. The problem is actually worse than this.

Vampire sets up fluff descriptions of all kinds of things - Nosferatu are the "masters of stealth" in the book's fluff, for example.

The problem is that "Nosferatu" is just a word you write in the "Clan" line in your character sheet and while, yes, your character now looks like a Nosferatu because they have an actual mechanic that says "if you are of this Clan it affects your Appearance thusly..." and it also determines what Disciplines you will have what Experience Cost for.................. BUT THAT'S IT.

Nosferatu don't actually have any specific bonuses or special traits related to "Being Stealthy" or "Mastering Stealth" or even "Succeeding at Stealth Better Than Non-Nosferatu".
They have the Obfuscate Discipline as an In-Clan Discipline, which just means that this is one of the three Disciplines where your Disciplines dots can go into at character creation - but unless you specifically buy Stealth dots just like anyone else, you are just as stealthy as literally any other character (of any other clan or even a plain mortal) with the same stats.

If you have Dexterity 3 and Stealth 3, you are rolling the same dice as the next person (Nosferatu or no, vampire or no) with the same Dexterity and Stealth ratings, and you are both rolling at the same difficulty.

That's why statements like "Nosferatu are shit at X" are on the same meaningless weight as the book's "Nosferatu are the masters of X" - because without referring to a specific character with a specific build, you are just talking about a nebulous concept that doesn't actually exist and isn't supported or hindered by the system in any way.

Clans have fluff descriptions and some of it tries to tell you that "Clan X is a clan of These Kind of People, some of them Tend to Be Like This or That" but "Clan" in Vampire is more like Race than Class is in D&D.
Being "Nosferatu" isn't like being "The Rogue" in the group - it's more like being "The Halfling".
Now, you might say "Halflings are more likely to be Rogues than anything else", but when you're creating a Halfling character in D&D you are not obliged to create a Rogue.

Actually, the D&D analogy doesn't even hold up here because you can still say that D&D encourages you to build things a certain way and "Halfling" is a template that comes with mechanical bonuses, traits and penalties, whereas "Nosferatu" is not actually a template at all.

You can still argue about Nosferatu specifically, just because they actually have that Clan Weakness - but if you look at Brujah, Toreador, Ventrue or any of the other Clans, you can see it more clearly.

You can make Brujah corporate raiders in an 80's chronicle. You can make Ventrue street thugs in the same chronicle. You can make a Toreador assassin a Nosferatu artist.

You can make a Gangrel florist without a single dot in Protean and who never dons a trenchcoat or tongues a Toreador ghoul in cybersex scenes.

None of those Clans have any built-in bonuses or penalties to any of these things.
Brujah get Celerity and Potence as In-Clan Disciplines, but unless you specifically buy combat traits just like anyone else, you're no better for it in combat.

So, it's worse than Clans not functioning as Class distinctions - just saying "my character is a Toreador" actually means nothing by itself.

[FatR]

Vampire romance has sucked dick since the beginning, though, because the writers couldn't decide where you are on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is playing a magically animated corpse who derives no pleasure from anything but bloodsucking, and 10 is an actual person who has to drink blood and sometimes makes themselves fully alive, and can fully enjoy the range of human activities. Sometimes it's 8, where you can't eat or drink, but everything else is good, and sometimes it's 2 where sex is purely mechanical, you have no payoff or are actively disgusted, and you cum blood.

Not like you can't have both in the same settings for groups of different preferences. Black Court vamps in Dresden Files are superpowered
walking corpses, and White Court are shiny literal sex fiends, and vampires aren't even the main focus of the books.

[Guts]

The thing is that What we do in the shadows exists as a parody of what the current license holders think Vampire should be. I don't see any future where VtM trends towards that instead of the other direction.

What other direction do you mean? Because until now there wasn't any directions. Only a resolution mechanic with cool powers and fluff attached. If anything 5e seems the first edition of VtM that actually has a direction.

VtM has always had a direction of being an edgy game you were supposed to take very seriously, and there was a definite movement from the developers towards drama and a serious game about being a bloodsucking monster. They didn't want people playing Vampions, or political power games (lesser extent there) and I'm pretty sure they made it clear several times.

But that direction of being "edgy and serious" is exactly the fluff part of my comment. It was always pure fluff. The actual game never did enough to back that fluff up, never presented a clear, unambiguous structure or method of play, never presented the "dungeon" of Vampire.

I haven't read the new edition yet, but from all reviews and play reports, it tries to give that first step into a direction by providing some structure to personal horror. Of course, taking a step in any given direction would make the fans of other directions disappointed, which apparently is exactly what hapenned. The reviews I see are divided into the "the game is GREAT because it finally makes personal horror central to the game" or "the game is SHIT because it makes personal horror central to the game".

[Ignimortis]

Not like you can't have both in the same settings for groups of different preferences. Black Court vamps in Dresden Files are superpowered
walking corpses, and White Court are shiny literal sex fiends, and vampires aren't even the main focus of the books.

I know, right? So we could've had the "almost human" Toreador and the ghastly Nosferatu who would be different kinds of vampire altogether, instead of just being reskins with different disciplines at the start.

[Foxwarrior]

vampires aren't even the main focus of the books.

That's barely more true than saying that vampires aren't the focus of the wod books because there are books devoted to werewolves and mages instead. There are Dresden Files books devoted to werewolves and mages, but there's also at least one devoted to vampires.

[DrPraetor]

You want to write your book of challenges before you write your PHB.

So Nosferatu might be the character generation equivalent of a 3rd-edition race, or class, or meaningless nationality, but the answer could be different in a game of flower-arranging and vote-buying than in a game of night-duels with magic chainsaws.

So your mundane enemies are vampire hunters, and you have to foil them without breaking the masquerade - that's the challenge there. You also have supernatural enemies, and the only requirement here is that they don't want to expose you and you don't want to expose them. I further propose: there are mundane reasons for this (both teams are monsters who would be hunted), and also supernatural reasons for this (you should lose some of your powers if exposed). Again, redundancy is strength. So you are part of the vampire conspiracy, and you are fighting a secret war against another conspiracy which may be rival vampires or may be some other supernatural type. If another type, they shouldn't be something you can reasonably play; we're trying to write a game in which everyone is vampires, so if the enemy team are lensmen or mutant telepaths or something, you will have to write rules for playing one of those instead and your setting isn't filling the needs of the game you are trying to play.

Beyond that, it's just brainstorming and you decide what sticks. Here I have three examples that range from low concept to high concept:

[*] Low concept: Your enemies are other vampires - probably, their leadership is older than your leadership and wants to eat you. This was the premise of VtM but it kept shitting it's own punch-bowl; the oldest vampires can have a rival team of age-matched vampires for mirror matches. The big weakness here is that "other vampires" don't do a good job of generating monsters of the week, unless team even-eviller vampires gets the power to make abominations or whatever out of human victims, which they very well might.

[*] Medium concept: Your enemies are demons, who have witches and vampires as minions. Under this setup, a vampire is simply how demons grant immortality to witches, and the Camarilla overthrew the demons who want to rule you. Demons have a range of powers and so can supply monsters of the week - people possessed by demons maybe turn into monsters, which would basically be werewolves to fight, for example.

[*] High concept: Your enemies are elder things who are also vampires. The elder things are extinct as a living species, so the elder thing vampires are all metaphysically malnourished. They created human vampires in an effort to alter humanity to provide the nourishment they used to get from feeding on their own kind. Most of them are sleeping. As with demons, elder things have a range of powers and also do other experiments on humans to create a wider diversity of monsters of the week.

Those three examples provide the elements to support a secret war with various parameters, and each also has a track to generate monsters of the week which vary in quality and reusability. Those are the needed elements.

[Username17]

None of those Clans have any built-in bonuses or penalties to any of these things.
Brujah get Celerity and Potence as In-Clan Disciplines, but unless you specifically buy combat traits just like anyone else, you're no better for it in combat.

So, it's worse than Clans not functioning as Class distinctions - just saying "my character is a Toreador" actually means nothing by itself.

I agree that it's a big problem that the clan choices don't make you good at anything, but merely offer you the ability to buy things such that being a member of a clan that is "super strong" does not make you super strong. But I would say that the problem goes well beyond that. That it isn't just that writing "Nosferatu" doesn't put any Stealth dots on your character sheet, it's that even if you buy all the Stealth dots and the Obfuscation and shit, players from other clans can still out-spy your Nosferatu character. The clan disadvantage that Nosferatu leave easily identifiable camera evidence if they pass through CCTVs is quite significant for a stealth character, and being inherently bad at talking is actually a big problem for people who want to sneak and spy. But beyond that, Obfuscation does synergize with Auspex, Serpentis, and Quietus in various ways for determining how successful you are at spying and infiltrating and shit. Which means that even if you intend to be a silent rooftop ninja spy, Malkavians, Setites and Assassmites are better at this than you are.

It's a Russian doll of a problem. Let's take it apart in layers:

• Defined roles do not exist.
• The high level chargen options don't give you the tools to be good at a role, but merely the option to buy archetype tools.
• The archetypal tools available for purchase within the chargen options do not actually make you good at the tasks you'd think those archetypes should be good at.

So it's a problem that there isn't a defined "Spy" role for a Nosferatu to have. It's also a problem that being a Nosferatu doesn't inherently mean that you have any "Spy" related abilities. It's also a problem that if you choose to be a Nosferatu and you select all the "Spy" abilities that opens up, that you would still be pretty bad at being a "Spy" when compared to characters of other clans who were built towards filling the "Spy" role.

Now when we talk about clans like Toreador, we get to another perhaps even higher level problem where it isn't even clear what roles aren't defined for them to fail to fill. With the Nosferatu we know that they are supposed to be Warriors and Spies, and thus the failure of the system to define those roles and the failure of the Nosferatu package to allow for characters who are acceptably good at filling those roles is easy to describe. For the Toreador, no one knows what the heck they are even supposed to be doing. We don't even get to the point where we decide that they suck at their role of "Fixer" or whatever because we aren't even sure whether that's supposed to be a supported role and we aren't even sure if the Toreador are supposed to be good at that role if it exists.

-Username17

[WiserOdin032402]

I thought the role of Toreador was socialite/combat blender. Everyone who I've encountered who play Toreador play that way due to their power setup.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I thought toreador was for people who wanted to be sexy twilight/interview with the vampire characters.

[violence in the media]

I thought the Nosferatu spymaster thing was partially supposed to be from extensive use of Animalism to have eyes and ears everywhere, rather than personally overhearing every illicit conversation. You'd send out your army of rats, pigeons, squirrels, or whatever and they'd somehow bring back useful information. That said, almost every Nosferatu player in LARPs around here grabbed Auspex as the first out of clan discipline.

Toreador was the clan for the people who sort of just wanted to hang around, feel pretty, and not do much. It always struck me as the clan that appealed to people that wanted to play Dracula's brides, or the layabouts at Armand's place in Interview. In D&D terms, these probably should have been more akin to Vampire Spawn than full blooded Vampires.

[Username17]

I thought toreador was for people who wanted to be sexy twilight/interview with the vampire characters.

Broadly speaking you are going to want sexy vampires. True Blood, Twilight, the entire Vampire Romance Genre, and so on. The folk process has now moved on however - people who want sexy vampires are going to be referencing material that came out in the last twenty fucking years. For fuck's sake, Interview With The Vampire came out in 1976.

And yes, the people who made Vampire are correct that Masquerade influenced all the later vampire fiction. Of course it did. But it wasn't the only influence. While it's obvious that Twilight was influenced by Masquerade (you don't have to be a genius to figure out Volturi == Ventrue), we also know that Twilight's author never actually played or read any White Wolf games before writing her book. Everything she knew about World of Darkness came second and third hand from friends talking about games involving other friends. She didn't rename the Ventrue to Volturi in order to IP scrub things, she named them that because she couldn't remember what the aristocratic vampires were called in the stories her friends told her.

A reboot of Masquerade needs to accept that a lot of the vampires people want to pay homage to are only indirectly influenced by Masquerade and that the original Masquerade factions are not inherently relevant to modern people's interests.

You need sexy vampires, but they probably shouldn't be named Toreador and certainly shouldn't be very much like the Toreador as described in the 1990s.

-Username17

[Libertad]

One of the things I like about Requiem was that most of its splat lines increased the amount of playable factions beyond two.

Camarilla was the "default" Masquerade group, although the Anarchs had some support and anti-authority appeal. The Sabbat are more or less the baddie faction in the way they're set up, and the novelty of that can wear off unless you used one of those alternate humanity path things to avoid becoming a monstrous NPC.

Adding more factions or even subfactions who all have their own vampiric ideals, but nuanced enough to not all be crazed monsters is something that can improve Masquerade.

Another thing is that many gaming groups hate the idea of being bossed around by a high-level NPC, which was touched earlier on in the thread. A lot of Masquerade's social structure is tied into that with Princes and Sheriffs and such. The appeal of uprooting LaCroix in Bloodlines had a great payoff because it was a video game and you came up with more and more reasons to hate the guy over time.

But not all gaming groups are long-term or have storytellers as good as said games' writers. It's not exactly the Elminster problem as vampires in power are generally bad guys, but I've seen the worst gaming groups turn the Princes and Camarilla into social railroads with the neonate PCs as effective slaves. Which is in tune with Kindred society, but not exactly fun to play.

Starting at a "higher" power level, or making it so that just cuz you're a Primogen/Prince doesn't necessarily mean you're low-Gen max Discipline can go a long way to rectifying this problem.

Or just play Anarchs.

[Thaluikhain]

You need sexy vampires, but they probably shouldn't be named Toreador and certainly shouldn't be very much like the Toreador as described in the 1990s.

I second not using the name "Toreador", or any other name that's a real word with a totally different meaning for which no justification is given. And swapping "i" for "y" doesn't make something a new word, even if it does help when googling, I guess.

[Grek]

I would like to state my preference for making hideous gross vampires be a non-default playable option. Even a single clan/bloodline of vampire freak monsters is enough.

[Usamimi]

Certainly one of the issues is that when you say something like "I'm playing an Elvish Ranger" in D&D or "I'm playing a Street Samurai" in Shadowrun, that tells the other players what your character can contribute and also it tells the other players a good deal about how you intend for your character to contribute. In Masquerade, the clans don't generally give you that information. What the actual fuck is a Malkavian or a Toreador supposed to contribute to the mission or the narrative?.

-Username17

Party roles define the game. A game in which characters are fighters, magic users, thieves and clerics will play differently to a game in which the players are masterminds, spies, financiers and faces. The latter set would fit a politics focus conspiracy game, such as Vampire.

[Whipstitch]

It's a Russian doll of a problem. Let's take it apart in layers:

• Defined roles do not exist.
  -Username17

I think part of the issue with Nosferatu in particular is that so much of Vampire is ostensibly about misery and for every compliment paid to nossies by the books there's at least one reminder of how pitiful they are viewed as by just about everyone. As written the Nosferatu overachieve if the goal is to be believable as disadvantaged second class citizens and hilariously underachieve if the goal is to satisfy players who expect to function as equal partners. It's the classic rpg underdog problem writ large-- the fantasy of being a character that perseveres despite having an outsized cross to bear is only really workable if the GM understands what the payoff for gimmick is supposed to be and the mechanics throw you some bones now and again. What evidence do we have that White Wolf understood that at all? If anything, I wouldn't be surprised to find that they'd pat themselves on the back when finding out your nossy just degenerated a bit because even basic feeding can an absolute chore with that power set.

[Username17]

If anything, I wouldn't be surprised to find that they'd pat themselves on the back when finding out your nossy just degenerated a bit because even basic feeding can an absolute chore with that power set.

Judging by the steaming pile they actually made of V5, they seemed to think that the fact that a majority of vampire power sets were useless or even detrimental for simple nightly feeding requirements was totally cool.

Narrator Voice: "It was not cool."

Roleplaying out a "first hunt" or something might be OK. Once. But there's a fucking reason that actual vampire books and stories gloss over almost all (or even literally all) of the nightly feeding activities. The novelty wears off super fast, and then it's basically like narrating a character putting on pants or toasting their bagels or any other mundane activity they do every single fucking day of their entire fucking lives. The fact that the V5 people thought this should be a central tent pole of the franchise indicates that everyone involved had no concept of what this would look like as an actually playable game.

Party roles define the game. A game in which characters are fighters, magic users, thieves and clerics will play differently to a game in which the players are masterminds, spies, financiers and faces. The latter set would fit a politics focus conspiracy game, such as Vampire.

As DrPraetor said, you gotta define your challenges first. We scarcely think about this in Dungeons & Dragons because the challenges are conceptualized in the name of the game. But if you intend to go in another direction where the player characters aren't delving into dungeons to fight dragons, the defined challenge space of the stories you actually are telling is going to define what roles can possibly be made to work.

That doesn't mean that you can't have some roles in mind when you define your challenge space, but you may have to scrap roles you spit ball if they don't have anything to contribute against the challenges you define.

-Username17

[Usamimi]

To define some example challenges:

Covering up a masquerade breach
Deposing the Prince of Atlanta
Fighting Sabbat shovelheads
Negotiating with vampires from a neighbouring city

These are typical tasks for a vampire conspiracy, which is the mode of play I would design the game around.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

*Babysit an elder coming out of a 200 year torpor.
*Take elder shopping to update his wardrobe, convincing him to not do so at Hot Topic.
*Cover up the inevitable frenzy because some kiosk dickhead ran up and smeared lotion on him without asking.
*Introduce elder to the internet, convince him not to greet the dawn after his first visit to 8chan.

[Ancient History]

These are all adventure seeds, not primary character roles and motivations. Vampire has no strong reason for a group of diverse vampires to come together as a coterie and...go vampiring together.

Partially, this is because they didn't have a lot of narrative examples to work with.

Dracula had his brides, but the brides mostly stayed back in the castle and sexually assaulted any interlopers. When he gets to London, he recruits a ghoul (Renfield) and converts Lucy Westenra to help him out, but he's still pretty much a one-vampire operation, and Lucy in particular doesn't contribute much.

In Interview With A Vampire, Lestat turns Louis so he can get access to his wealth and position in society to...be a baller, basically. They live like rock stars off the money and do whatever the fuck they please. That's their whole goal, and it leads to Louis' ennui and their falling-out. The Paris vampires at least have some word religious masochism cult angle where they think they're supposed to suffer for eternity, but even that gets old after a while.

You don't get a lot of proper vampire-with-vampire interaction until The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned, and even that is pretty antagonistic where a lot of the main players are only brought together when there's a genuine crisis brought on by the super-methuselah that just woke up.

Compare that with Lost Boys - where you do have a group of vampires, but they're basically a kid youth gang that's immortal and likes to fuck with people. Or compare with Near Dark, where a much more low-powered group of vampires basically do the same thing but with a bit of a survival/redneck aspect.

And that's your problem with vampire in the nutshell: most of the stories we tell about them are gothic romances or survival horror narratives, but that only applies from the human point of view. Vampires themselves just want blood and to get laid. There aren't any huge ancient conspiracies or organizations to be a part of. It's just you, on your own or in a group, picking off teenagers.

It's a game where you have the power and set the rules.

Which could be fun as an RPG...if you're a sociopath.

At least in Underworld, Selene is straight up given the job of hunting werewolves and shit. That's her role. She can do other things to, but that job allows and requires her to go investigate werewolf sightings and things, and the plot thin as it is supports the idea that the American coven is in perpetual war with the werewolf packs and this is what the setting is all about.

Vampire: the Masquerade never had that level of awareness of what the vampires were supposed to do besides...be vampires.

Keep in mind, this is part of the reason why unlife in the WoD sucks. You're made a vampire, and you're immediately little better than a human for most respects, plus you have some added supernatural weaknesses and you're somebody's bitch. A lot of people's bitches, honestly. The Camarilla is designed as a pyramid where the asshole on the bottom is you and will be forever, because there aren't many legal ways to increase your generation and generation = power in nearly every important respect. You can be smart and clever and skilled and still be told to fist your own asshole if an Elder doesn't like your facial hair, and you might well be supernaturally required to do that.

And it gets worse. Because there are sectarian politics (Clans, Camarilla vs. Sabbat, etc.), and religious politics (Roads/Paths), and other flavors of supernatural that don't fit well into the whole undead-and-lovin' it approach.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm only just now reading on the setting, but isn't the law against diablerie more along the lines of "don't get caught"? Because pretty much every powerful NPC had done that, often multiple times. I can see why the upper ranks don't want their souls sucked out, but it seems once you've done it no one seems to give much of a shit.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I can already tell I'm reading things in ways that make sense to me, and not as written.

[Orca]

IIRC aura reading via auspex could pick up if you'd committed diablerie, though not who you'd offed that way. With the guy who liked GMing Vampire that I knew diablerie was a pretty firm no for PCs. Not sure about NPCs, I didn't read those books.

& yes we mostly played Vampions.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I know both the Tremere and the Giovanni ate the Salubri and the Cappadocians, respectively. The last remaining Salubri have their childer eat them for... reasons, I don't know why. The Nosferatu gained animalism because they ate the Manitou when they first arrived in North America. Of course the entire Assamite clan bases their entire clan path on eating other vampires, but no one likes them. Not to mention the clans books I read is full of vampires eating each other constantly.

I can see narrators not letting their players do so (the Vampire group at my high school contained the biggest assholes I knew), but despite it being a huge deal, well to paraphrase Order of the Stick they don't object to diablerie in general, they just don't want you to do it to them.