V5's Failure isn't surprising

[Nath]

WoD vampires' historical roots in the Fertile Crescent were merely a by-product of their Biblical origin story with Cain.

On the other hand, the eurocentrism is really lazy writing by white people who never bothered with non-white History. They shifted their entire setting from the Biblical Middle East to the Mediterranean Sea/Europe. Starting in the Fertile Crescent with Biblical references is no excuse for completely overlooking Persia in History for instance.

The easiest thing to do is probably to set the origin of vampirism in Africa early enough, so it could follow or catch up human expansion. The bloodline/clan origines should take place much later (and must, if you want to integrate into clan identity cultural elements that obviously require the related culture to appear in the first place).

Besides the fact that Generations as a game mechanism sucks, you may still keep the idea that clan founders are one generation removed from the mythical Patient Zero, because the First or Second generation vampires may have roamed the Earth for thousands of years before embracing the founders, and the founders themselves may have established their clan after having adopted a new culture.

[SeekritLurker]

WoD vampires' historical roots in the Fertile Crescent were merely a by-product of their Biblical origin story with Cain.

On the other hand, the eurocentrism is really lazy writing by white people who never bothered with non-white History. They shifted their entire setting from the Biblical Middle East to the Mediterranean Sea/Europe. Starting in the Fertile Crescent with Biblical references is no excuse for completely overlooking Persia in History for instance.

The easiest thing to do is probably to set the origin of vampirism in Africa early enough, so it could follow or catch up human expansion. The bloodline/clan origines should take place much later (and must, if you want to integrate into clan identity cultural elements that obviously require the related culture to appear in the first place).

Besides the fact that Generations as a game mechanism sucks, you may still keep the idea that clan founders are one generation removed from the mythical Patient Zero, because the First or Second generation vampires may have roamed the Earth for thousands of years before embracing the founders, and the founders themselves may have established their clan after having adopted a new culture.

This also has the advantage of removing Young Earth Creationism from the canon.

[Username17]

The more ancient your secret history events are, the less relevant they are. If your "common vampire origin" takes place in pre-historic Africa, it is so irrelevant that it does not matter if it is true. A six thousand, a sixteen thousand, or a sixty thousand year old vampire all have fairly interchangeable qualities in the sense that their native language is no longer spoken, their native people not only do not exist but their name is no longer remembered. If the past is another country, the ancient past is another country you've never heard of. And having your vampire origins set there really undermines the advantages of having your setting be "basically Earth" in the first place.

Any vampire bloodline that traces its origin to a point before the last couple thousand years basically traces itself to a big question mark where none of the players including the MC have any real understanding of the context or cultural implications. Prehistory does not have any Russians or Aztecs or Chinese people in it, and its legends are not recorded.

Which is not to say that there isn't room for "truly ancient evils." There obviously totally is. But the "this guy has been around since prehistory and his native language was lost to the ages before the rise of empires whose names have themselves been lost to the ages" is a shtick that doesn't get much better with repetition. For obvious reasons, you want villains and ancients who are from various different countries, and "the ancient past" is only a single country from the standpoint of being a narrative building block. Prehistorical Uganda isn't different from prehistorical France, because you don't know anything about the food, language, political systems, religion, clothing, or even skin color of the people living in either of those times and places.

I guess I'm firmly in the "multiple origins" camp, or which "unspeakably ancient" is just one of them. Any common origin ancient enough to have Onaqui menacing the Olmecs and Jiangshi menacing the Han would have to be so ancient that it ceases to be grounded or relevant. At that point, you should probably just have a separate origin for the Jiangshi and Onaqui in China and North America respectively. And then you can if you want have some additional legend that both of those origins might be tied to some unspeakably ancient ur-vampire, but it does not really matter if that legend is true or not. It doesn't even matter in an out of character sense, because any creature who speaks Three Sovereigns era Chinese might as well speak fucking Neanderthal.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Could you sorta have it both ways and say that there were multiple origins of vampire bloodlines springing up, from the same source?

Say, every X years there's a magic conjunction or a comet passes close to the Earth or something and someone, somewhere becomes a vampire. Although those would happen at predictable periods, which you might not want (OTOH, it means that you can have one coming up soonish that people know about).

Vampires all across the world can revere/fear the magic comet, while being otherwise totally independent of other vampires elsewhere doing the same.

[SeekritLurker]

The more ancient your secret history events are, the less relevant they are. If your "common vampire origin" takes place in pre-historic Africa, it is so irrelevant that it does not matter if it is true. A six thousand, a sixteen thousand, or a sixty thousand year old vampire all have fairly interchangeable qualities in the sense that their native language is no longer spoken, their native people not only do not exist but their name is no longer remembered. If the past is another country, the ancient past is another country you've never heard of. And having your vampire origins set there really undermines the advantages of having your setting be "basically Earth" in the first place.

Any vampire bloodline that traces its origin to a point before the last couple thousand years basically traces itself to a big question mark where none of the players including the MC have any real understanding of the context or cultural implications. Prehistory does not have any Russians or Aztecs or Chinese people in it, and its legends are not recorded.

Which is not to say that there isn't room for "truly ancient evils." There obviously totally is. But the "this guy has been around since prehistory and his native language was lost to the ages before the rise of empires whose names have themselves been lost to the ages" is a shtick that doesn't get much better with repetition. For obvious reasons, you want villains and ancients who are from various different countries, and "the ancient past" is only a single country from the standpoint of being a narrative building block. Prehistorical Uganda isn't different from prehistorical France, because you don't know anything about the food, language, political systems, religion, clothing, or even skin color of the people living in either of those times and places.

I guess I'm firmly in the "multiple origins" camp, or which "unspeakably ancient" is just one of them. Any common origin ancient enough to have Onaqui menacing the Olmecs and Jiangshi menacing the Han would have to be so ancient that it ceases to be grounded or relevant. At that point, you should probably just have a separate origin for the Jiangshi and Onaqui in China and North America respectively. And then you can if you want have some additional legend that both of those origins might be tied to some unspeakably ancient ur-vampire, but it does not really matter if that legend is true or not. It doesn't even matter in an out of character sense, because any creature who speaks Three Sovereigns era Chinese might as well speak fucking Neanderthal.

-Username17

So, what you do is you define that into the DNA of your story bible. "The origins of vampires are unknown, but are generally believed to have existed as long as humanity." "The only truism the vampires know is this: there is always an older evil." "These alien creatures that predate Jericho rise rarely, and when they do, they spread terror in their wake. No one can communicate with them, and determining what can appease them is an exercise in futility. These terrors of deep history can only be killed or driven away."

It gives more flexibility, means you don't have to fuck about with a common ancestor, and is literally agnostic. You can still have Vampires believing in the literal biblical Cain being their progenitor - but you don't have to make God, Lucifer and Lillith actual factual characters in the backstory. You can even have vampires making policy decisions as the Sabbat based on a literal understanding of the story, while ignoring and denying any evidence that Egyptian vampires were active in the Upper Kingdom a couple thousand years prior to the date of your creation story.

[Nath]

If you keep in mind the ultimate goal is to play adventures involving a group of vampires (the thing the authors of Vampire: the Masquerade forgot), there is practically no case where the statement "Caine was the first and most powerful vampire" has any added value over "Caine was one very powerful vampire". That is, if you happen to play an adventure where Caine shows up (or at least, characters fear he might does), the difference is quite limited between the absolute certainty that no other single vampire in History is powerful enough to defeat him and only extreme likehood that no other single vampire that may be active during the adventure is powerful to defeat him.

Now, to be fair, stating that Caine was the first vampire is very evocative and contributes to build a compelling common origin story for all the characters and the groups they belong to. But I think that, if you introduce clans and sects and so on, there are plenty of other opportunities to establish an evocative origin story that don't prevent you from having Confucian or Olmec vampires.

Basically, for each detail you introduce in your setting, there are two directions you can take: either you provide closures (things as they are), or you provide options (things that might be) - obviously, there is a third "direction" which is going nowhere with pointless stuff.

Options are not inherently better than closures. Game rules, up to defining the RNG, are all about closures (which is why some authors see the need to write down the GM is allowed to ignore them - to go the opposite way and provide options). Writing an adventure is mostly about closure (because you have to decide once and for good who the opposition is, what's their plan, where and when it will take place, and what are their capabilities, to actually play the thing). So you need both closures and options in a game.

But Vampire: The Masquerade might be a textbook example about making bad closures. It's not just that they rarely if ever provided closures at what might actually happen in an adventure. They kept on closing things that need not be. They closed the number of vampire generations. They closed the number of Disciplines a clan may use. They closed the historical culture the clans related to. They closed how clanmember were supposed to behave/look/act. VtM setting is like a list of characters ideas the players and the gamemasters are not allowed to create.

In a way, this makes the setting somewhat "compact", making it easier for players and gamemasters to remember a limited number of groups and their defining traits. But obviously, as the authors themselves wanted, well, to write more things, they kept on moving past their own closures to explain how the Assamite clan actually had three different curses and that actually they shouldn't be called the Assamites.

[OgreBattle]

So what do a bunch of vampires in New York City or Beijing have as motivation to party up and... do something together?

[Username17]

So, what you do is you define that into the DNA of your story bible. "The origins of vampires are unknown, but are generally believed to have existed as long as humanity." "The only truism the vampires know is this: there is always an older evil." "These alien creatures that predate Jericho rise rarely, and when they do, they spread terror in their wake. No one can communicate with them, and determining what can appease them is an exercise in futility. These terrors of deep history can only be killed or driven away."

That's not a bad pitch, but it's basically "We don't have an origin story for our vampires." That's fine. Underworld has an origin story for vampires and that is fine, while Blade does not attempt to explain where vampires come from and that is also fine.

But I think it's instructive that Blade is a movie that would probably make for a better role playing game, because if someone wanted to play a Nigerian vampire or a Japanese vampire that would require a complicated backstory in Underworld and in Blade you'd just fucking do it. Underworld is a story that is very firmly rooted in Eastern Europe, and even the illusionist Viking lesbians from the last movie were kind of a stretch. Blade uses a fucking katana, and if it turns out there are samurai vampires that he took it from, no one would even be surprised.

Basically, for each detail you introduce in your setting, there are two directions you can take: either you provide closures (things as they are), or you provide options (things that might be) - obviously, there is a third "direction" which is going nowhere with pointless stuff.

A vampire origin story will pretty much always both open and close doors. It is a thing players can interact with, but it also freezes out potential character concepts and storylines that are incompatible with your origin story. I would say it's a slider, where the farther back and less detailed your origin story is the less there is for players to interact with and the less there is to contradict player input. An older and vaguer origin story both opens and closes fewer doors. But I think there's also a big chunk of history where setting your origin there closes doors but does not open any. Caine being literally 6000 years old and born in Mesopotamia is long enough ago that I can't really incorporate any cultural details into my stories - I don't know what Early Urukian sounds like, but it's still recent enough that it precludes there being any Olmec or Tahitian vampires.

But Vampire: The Masquerade might be a textbook example about making bad closures. It's not just that they rarely if ever provided closures at what might actually happen in an adventure. They kept on closing things that need not be. They closed the number of vampire generations. They closed the number of Disciplines a clan may use. They closed the historical culture the clans related to. They closed how clanmember were supposed to behave/look/act. VtM setting is like a list of characters ideas the players and the gamemasters are not allowed to create.

I'm not sure what the sweet spot for the kind of game Masquerade wanted to be actually was, but it certainly wasn't very much like what they ended up with. You could have maybe gotten decent vampire archetype coverage with 13 clans, but for fuck's sake they made each clan so restrictive in what they could do in terms of powers and concept that they ended up rewriting the Gangrel three fucking times just to try to wedge in some space to make the kinds of characters people were inspired to make when they read the first edition description.

That's not even a joke: the Tzimisce, Ravnos, and City Gangrel are all just reworkings of the Gangrel premise, emphasizing different parts of the original pitch and shuffling the powers around to try to make the concept work in-game. And all of them fail, because 3 discipline dots really isn't enough to do fucking anything that a vampire character concept might plausibly include. Even "brand new vampires exploring their powers" do more than 3 dots worth of stuff. For fuck's sake, Michael from Lost Boys can walk on the ceiling.

Anyway, if you were going to do 13 clans, you'd want them to be much broader than the ones in Masquerade.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

I'd just break down Disciplines into a grab-bag of point buy individual powers that scale off of a universal power stat instead of set of 5-tier tracks. Then I'd give each Clan a set of powers that they get for free, which is thematically appropriate, and let players pick more powers on top of that.

I'd also further differentiate Clans with Clan Passives. Vampire has Clan Curses, but it wasn't have Clan Bonuses.

For example, if I wanted to cement the Ventrue as aristocratic leaders, I'd just give Ventrue an innate +2 on leadership tests.

[Username17]

I'd just break down Disciplines into a grab-bag of point buy individual powers that scale off of a universal power stat instead of set of 5-tier tracks. Then I'd give each Clan a set of powers that they get for free, which is thematically appropriate, and let players pick more powers on top of that.

So you'd attempt to escape the stigma of being a game designed in 1991 by making a game that looked like it was designed in 1988?

There are certainly arguments to be made for big lists and point-buy. But people made those arguments for twenty actual years and there's very little to show for it. Point buy is a pain in the ass, and tweaking the costs so that they are balanced, or even just more balanced than selecting a set number of powers off a list, is a provably NPHard problem. How much better is Second Sight than Poison Spit? Razor Claws aren't even good unless you have super strength or super speed or both, do you cost them for the character who is comboing them or for the character who is not? And so on.

There is of course a sense in which "select five powers from this list" is equivalent to giving someone "fifty points" and setting the cost of each power to 10 or whatever. But actually deviating from that so that some powers cost 8 or 9 and others cost 11 or 12 creates a whole lot accounting for no obvious benefit. If you tell me that Blur of Shadows is worth 11 points and Icy Grasp is worth 12, that's actually a pretty bold declaration. Those abilities are classic "incomparables" in the sense that they are used during different mini-games within the game and depending on the narrative either or both could be crucial or worthless. But also, both of those are abilities that are not real; no one has shadow or cold manipulation powers because shadow and cold aren't even physically real things to manipulate but merely the poetic description of the notable absence of light or heat. You can't even allude to the real world costs of items or specialist services that provide similar benefits because there aren't any.

And then there's the issue of getting the points to actually add up for individual characters. 9 and 11 add up to 20 and so do 12 and 8, but 8 and 11 add up to only 19 and 9 and 12 add up to 21. This means that if you give someone twenty points to spend and you have abilities that cost 8, 9, 11, and 12, that there are only two combinations that spend all your points out of the 6 combinations possible. And when you're talking about fifty or a hundred points and dozens of powers you're talking about hundreds of millions of combinations of which the vast majority will not add up properly. A trial and error selection method could take years or even centuries to come up with a character that spends all their points.

If your actual goal is to get people to take some powers you consider less impactful and some powers you consider more impactful, why hide that in arcane point accounting? I mean, you could just say "You get three selections from Column A and two selections from Column B." That would get you to the same place except that players would have an instant and intuitive rasp of what combinations of options were possible.

-Username17

[FiveBlinkNurse]

For example, if I wanted to cement the Ventrue as aristocratic leaders, I'd just give Ventrue an innate +2 on leadership tests

You'd also be cementing a "Clan = Role/Class" mechanic, which is not what the Vampire Clans are supposed to be.

In Vampire, you can make a Ventrue character as a loner hitman who doesn't lead anything (other than a blade into a cranium, that is).
You feel like something about the character is intrinsically Ventrue, but the thing that makes the character a Ventrue is simply that they were Embraced by a Ventrue vampire.

This also allows a group to create characters who all belong to the same Clan but are all different from one another, all have different roles in the coterie (=party) and all are built differently.

You can have a Nosferatu brood composed of a Face, a Sneak, a Hacker/TechWizard, a Beastmaster, a Brawler and a Leader - all of whom are Nosferatu.

Forcing a specific Bonus/Penalty based on Clan and Stereotype lessens what players can do with Clans, not helps them.

[Omegonthesane]

Nosferatu Face... is less hard than it sounds in the world of Obfuscate 3 pre-V20.

(V20 stipulated that you needed to spend 1 blood per scene per point of Appearance by which Obfuscate 3 made you look prettier than your starting Apperance 1. Which has some sort of impact on the ability to do talky things that I don't care enough to research right now.)

Even with your example though, only the Sneak, Beastmaster, and Brawler get any bonus to their party role from clan disciplines compared to a mundane human. The Hacker and Leader don't have any real use for super strength, invisibility, or control of animals, while the Face is at a massive disadvantage and has to go all in on "invisibility" to be able to be a Face at all.

Which I guess is to say it probably depends what the bonuses are, but if you're arguing that clan bonuses inherently amount to clans-as-class, then the Clan Disciplines model comes closer to that while still falling short.

[Nath]

So what do a bunch of vampires in New York City or Beijing have as motivation to party up and... do something together?

As said previously, the best pick is probably to task your teams of Camarilla vampires with protecting the masquerade: killing or capturing vampires and other supernatural entities who aren't stealthy enough, recovering magical items whose effects may be noticed by humans, destroying evidence and killing or convincing witness to stop telling their stories (or at least tell a different one). Team roles should be related to different/complementary ways to identify and locate people and object, overpower opposition, and get rid of evidence and testimonies.

[hyzmarca]

I'd just break down Disciplines into a grab-bag of point buy individual powers that scale off of a universal power stat instead of set of 5-tier tracks. Then I'd give each Clan a set of powers that they get for free, which is thematically appropriate, and let players pick more powers on top of that.

So you'd attempt to escape the stigma of being a game designed in 1991 by making a game that looked like it was designed in 1988?

There are certainly arguments to be made for big lists and point-buy. But people made those arguments for twenty actual years and there's very little to show for it. Point buy is a pain in the ass, and tweaking the costs so that they are balanced, or even just more balanced than selecting a set number of powers off a list, is a provably NPHard problem. How much better is Second Sight than Poison Spit? Razor Claws aren't even good unless you have super strength or super speed or both, do you cost them for the character who is comboing them or for the character who is not? And so on.

There is of course a sense in which "select five powers from this list" is equivalent to giving someone "fifty points" and setting the cost of each power to 10 or whatever. But actually deviating from that so that some powers cost 8 or 9 and others cost 11 or 12 creates a whole lot accounting for no obvious benefit. If you tell me that Blur of Shadows is worth 11 points and Icy Grasp is worth 12, that's actually a pretty bold declaration. Those abilities are classic "incomparables" in the sense that they are used during different mini-games within the game and depending on the narrative either or both could be crucial or worthless. But also, both of those are abilities that are not real; no one has shadow or cold manipulation powers because shadow and cold aren't even physically real things to manipulate but merely the poetic description of the notable absence of light or heat. You can't even allude to the real world costs of items or specialist services that provide similar benefits because there aren't any.

And then there's the issue of getting the points to actually add up for individual characters. 9 and 11 add up to 20 and so do 12 and 8, but 8 and 11 add up to only 19 and 9 and 12 add up to 21. This means that if you give someone twenty points to spend and you have abilities that cost 8, 9, 11, and 12, that there are only two combinations that spend all your points out of the 6 combinations possible. And when you're talking about fifty or a hundred points and dozens of powers you're talking about hundreds of millions of combinations of which the vast majority will not add up properly. A trial and error selection method could take years or even centuries to come up with a character that spends all their points.

If your actual goal is to get people to take some powers you consider less impactful and some powers you consider more impactful, why hide that in arcane point accounting? I mean, you could just say "You get three selections from Column A and two selections from Column B." That would get you to the same place except that players would have an instant and intuitive rasp of what combinations of options were possible.

-Username17

My goal is to let people make the characters they want to make. And I wouldn't do something so silly as to make point costs like 11 or 8. Just 1, 2, 3 is good enough for me. It's exactly the same as throwing powers into three column of minor, major, and really really major, but it doesn't rigidly trap players in a 3/2/1 distribution, or whatever. Instead of telling players that they have to take 3/2/1, you tell them that they should take some combination that adds up to 10, but 3/2/1 is recommended.

[Username17]

So what do a bunch of vampires in New York City or Beijing have as motivation to party up and... do something together?

This is probably the single greatest failing of Masquerade, and certainly the greatest failing of Requiem. The pitch of why the player characters get together at all, and what they do once they are together is painfully underdeveloped in Masquerade. And with everyone knowing that this was the literal number one cause of attempted vampire campaigns unraveling, Requiem decided to double done on that and made the problem a billion times worse with their Predator's Taint bullshit.

But yes, if you were rebooting Masquerade, the first fucking thing you have to do is commit yourself to a default team arrangement and a standard explanation for why the player characters would interact with the presented adventures. Like, if you have a prepackaged adventure, the player characters should by default be characters who would interact with that adventure in some way. Motivation was not handled particularly well in Masquerade and as such there isn't a real equivalent of D&D's Against The Giants or Shadowrun's Universal Brotherhood nor could there be.

This is not actually a difficult problem to tackle, but it does require recognizing this is a problem and them committing yourself to tackling it. You need a default "monster of the week" style adventure similar to how D&D has "monsters threaten the village" and Shadowrun has "Mr. Johnson will hire you to steal data from a secret lab." And then you also need a default campaign motivation like how D&D has underground fortresses to lay siege to and Shadowrun has corporate power struggles.

Like many of the people here, I favor a model where the player characters are assumed to be "The Man" in their particular area, which means that they by default have to investigate threats to the Masquerade and can also pursue power and influence by doing crime boss stuff. So you both are a Scooby Gang where you investigate reports of potential occult activity and take down rogue monsters and also you are a Scooby Doo villain where you do stuff to take over the old mill and shit. But if you wanted to make the player characters hunted vampires where your standard mission was fighting the government anti-vampire hit squads from Ultraviolet, that would also be an option.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

In order to function, every RPG needs at least one basic adventure premise like "monsters threaten the village" or "Mr. Johnson wants you to steal a thing." If you happen to have two that are equally workable, so much the better, and I don't see any reason why Vampire can't contain both "you are troubleshooters investigating a threat to the regime" and "you are rebels exploiting an opportunity to strike at the regime." They don't even have to be opposed goals, since "you are upholding the current regime as cover while secretly undermining the current regime" is a perfectly usable default motivation and comes with the obvious and engaging goal of "become prince."

[Username17]

In order to function, every RPG needs at least one basic adventure premise like "monsters threaten the village" or "Mr. Johnson wants you to steal a thing." If you happen to have two that are equally workable, so much the better, and I don't see any reason why Vampire can't contain both "you are troubleshooters investigating a threat to the regime" and "you are rebels exploiting an opportunity to strike at the regime." They don't even have to be opposed goals, since "you are upholding the current regime as cover while secretly undermining the current regime" is a perfectly usable default motivation and comes with the obvious and engaging goal of "become prince."

I would agree with that.

The default relationship between the PCs and vampire society can be complicated, but it does have to be defined. Given the information "Anarchs are moving against the Prince." it's fine if the expected course of action is "help the Anarchs against the Prince" or "help the Prince against the Anarchs" or even "let the Anarchs and Prince weaken each other and seize power and territory at the expense of both." But it can't be "ignore politics and pursue my career in engineering." Like, there has to be something there by which a basic adventure hook actually hooks player characters who aren't being deliberately obstructive.

Certainly one problem Masquerade had was that the original projected campaign goal was to stop being a vampire. And while I can see how you could read Dracula and watch The Lost Boys and conclude that that was the "happy ending" the reality is that no one plays an RPG with the goal of not playing that RPG. You can do that by just not playing. It wasn't that the presentation was bad or that the lack of mechanics meant it was hard to sink your teeth into it, they tried doing this again in Promethtean and it's just not a campaign goal that motivates the players. The character might want to stop being different and special, but the player is never going to be on board with this goal. The player can stop being different and special just by walking away from the game table.

On the flip side, you also don't want players to be tasked with a goal that is too easily achieved. In Mage, the goal was to get a majority of people to believe in magic. But a majority of people already believe in magic, so your job is literally already done. In a broader sense,your goal can't simply be to "tear down the system" because maintaining systems is a lot of work. If you didn't care about the United States continuing to exist, destroying the entire government wouldn't be particularly hard - the whole main three branches of the federal government is just a few hundred people. Destroying secret organizations is even easier, because they don't have 24/7 law enforcement protection. A goal like "destroy the masquerade" could be achieved before lunch by posting some shit to Youtube and barging in to a broadcast of Fox and Friends.

This also goes for the opposition. If you have enemies like "vampire hunters" there has to be a reason they haven't already gone public. It doesn't have to be a good reason, but it has to be something that they say in-character. So if you're going to have vampire hunters, it's best for them to also be a secret agency or secret society or something such that they are also keeping the masquerade. Like, maybe they are a government agency that doesn't come clean about vampires to avoid panic or maybe they are a religious cult that doesn't come clean about vampires because something something secret armaggedon plans. Fucking whatever, you just need at least a one sentence explanation for why the villains don't expose you on minute 3 of night one of the campaign.

-Username17

[Nath]

In order to function, every RPG needs at least one basic adventure premise like "monsters threaten the village" or "Mr. Johnson wants you to steal a thing." If you happen to have two that are equally workable, so much the better, and I don't see any reason why Vampire can't contain both "you are troubleshooters investigating a threat to the regime" and "you are rebels exploiting an opportunity to strike at the regime." They don't even have to be opposed goals, since "you are upholding the current regime as cover while secretly undermining the current regime" is a perfectly usable default motivation and comes with the obvious and engaging goal of "become prince."

A key issue here is the definition of "workable". The premises must be at least compatible with the formation of a team of player-characters and the existing team roles, if not the reason they're based on.

Prince being an individual position, it is inherently difficult to use as a goal for a team. Moreover, Vampire: the Masquerade made clan rivalries way to strong for a coterie to easily establish itself as a political faction (actually, a lot of Vampire LARP enforced clans rather than coteries as the political factions). The gamemaster should avoid having fellow clan members offering PC incentives to betray their coterie.

[hyzmarca]

This also goes for the opposition. If you have enemies like "vampire hunters" there has to be a reason they haven't already gone public. It doesn't have to be a good reason, but it has to be something that they say in-character. So if you're going to have vampire hunters, it's best for them to also be a secret agency or secret society or something such that they are also keeping the masquerade. Like, maybe they are a government agency that doesn't come clean about vampires to avoid panic or maybe they are a religious cult that doesn't come clean about vampires because something something secret armaggedon plans. Fucking whatever, you just need at least a one sentence explanation for why the villains don't expose you on minute 3 of night one of the campaign.

-Username17

"Why don't we tell the world? Cancer... William Van Helsing was the the greatest vampire hunter of his generation. He was my mentor and my friend. He also smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and when the cells of his lungs decided that they wanted to kill him... he wanted to see his grandchildren grow up.,.. so for 30 years I have hunted him. And now that I cannot stand without something to hold on to, a very large part of my wants to hunt him again. That temptation sits in front of me every day. Do you actually think that telling the public would result in fewer vampires? How many people are dying right now? How many of them want to live another day, no matter the cost? "

[Username17]

You'd also be cementing a "Clan = Role/Class" mechanic, which is not what the Vampire Clans are supposed to be.

The question of what a vampire clan was supposed to be was not especially well answered in the original game. Very roughly, each clan of vampires was supposed to be the vampires from a specific piece of source material, but they didn't get nearly enough powers to actually make that stick. You could make a strong case that Dracula had the presented maximum of five dots of all ten disciplines described in the original book. That's ridiculous. Like, maybe you should make actual Dracula an advanced character where starting characters get to be the Blufer Lady, but it's unacceptable for none of the clans to get "Dracula Powers." That's just obviously not acceptable.

In Vampire, you can make a Ventrue character as a loner hitman who doesn't lead anything (other than a blade into a cranium, that is).
You feel like something about the character is intrinsically Ventrue, but the thing that makes the character a Ventrue is simply that they were Embraced by a Ventrue vampire.

See this is something that would be acceptable if the Ventrue actually got enough to fill a party role or character concept. Like, any role or character concept.

From a role standpoint, what do Ventrue powers do that helps our swordsman? How is the fact that he's a Ventrue or even a Vampire even meaningful? He could be "Italian" or "Puerto Rican" and it would have as much relevance to his role skill set.

From a character concept standpoint, let's say that you wanted to have some kind of "Aristocrat Vampire," which seems pretty reasonable. I mean, being descended from Eurotrash nobility is the shtick of a lot of vampire properties, from Sesame Street to Underworld and very much including Dracula himself. Hell, there's even literally a Magic: the Gathering card called "Vampire Aristocrat" that shows a vampire with a sword. There's even a group of vampire aristocrats in Twilight who are named "The Volturi" literally because the author heard about the Ventrue third hand and couldn't remember what hey were called. But writing "Ventrue" on your character sheet doesn't unlock the powers of Dracula. It doesn't even unlock the powers of Selene or Count von Count. Hell, it doesn't even let you do a functional impersonation of the Vampire Aristocrat in MtG, and that card is just a tribal reskin of a Nantuko Husk.

Forcing a specific Bonus/Penalty based on Clan and Stereotype lessens what players can do with Clans, not helps them.

That is a thing that can be true. If writing "Ventrue" on your character sheet gave you enough bonuses to social abilities that no one else could realistically compete in the realm of Face activities, then you would risk going into a situation where everyone who wrote Ventrue on their character sheet would be a Face role and no one who went into the Face role would write anything other than Vantrue on their sheet. See: 4th edition D&D for how fucking awful that can get.

But Masquerade hadn't got nearly that far. Indeed, the abilities and relevancies for being a Ventrue - or any clan - were so bullshit that really no roles or concepts were supported. If our vampire aristocrat doesn't have the option of having a bat form, I have already lost interest. Because the vampire girl in fucking Monster High can turn into a fucking bat, and if you tell me that's beyond the ken of a starting character your game is bullshit.

-Username17

[Nath]

Choosing a clan should be meaningful to define a character: how he behave, how he looks like, and/or what he is capable of.

For all its limitations, that's what D&D manage to do when you say you play a lawful-neutral elf bard. But VtM clans are widely inconsistent. Being a Tremere or a Gangrel define your capabilities, being a Toreador your behavior, a Nosferatu your look...

If you intend to use clans to define looks,it should specifically be the vampiric traits (lividity, fangs, colored eyes...). For everything else, by using the real world as a reference, ethnicity and a modicum of modern or historical fashion should allow the characters to be described easily enough.

If you intend to use clans to define behavior, then you may give them clan-specific weakness, that will push the roleplaying in the appropriate direction.

If you intend to use clans to define capabilities, then you may give them significant clan-specific abilities. So either each clan is going to have a specific team role it's best at, or you must give each clan as many specific abilities as there are team roles, and balance them all. For seven clans in the Camarilla and a minimum of, say, three different roles, we're talking about over 20 clan-specific abilities, all balanced and thematicall-relevant. I'm not saying this can't be done, but this certainly shouldn't be handwaved as easy (moreover if you intend on having more than three team roles and/or cover more clans).

[Nath]

But Masquerade hadn't got nearly that far. Indeed, the abilities and relevancies for being a Ventrue - or any clan - were so bullshit that really no roles or concepts were supported. If our vampire aristocrat doesn't have the option of having a bat form, I have already lost interest. Because the vampire girl in fucking Monster High can turn into a fucking bat, and if you tell me that's beyond the ken of a starting character your game is bullshit.

Out of curiosity, what would you consider in the range of starting powers for a vampire. From the top of my head, the list of powers I'd consider would be the following:

- be immortal (with possible upgrade to regeneration)
- drink blood (with possible upgrade to drink animal blood, vampire blood, blood storred in vial/bag/...)
- mesmerize/hypnotize/mind control/mind-reading
- slow fall/wall walk/fly
- supernatural perception/strength/speed
- supernatural stealth (with possible upgrade to mist form and complete invisibility)
- shapechange into animal (with possible upgrade to have supernatural strength/speed under animal form)
- separate limbs (more common in African and Asian legends AFAIK)
- control undead servants (from ghouls to skeletons)
- practice magic (I mean, reading grimoires and lobbing fireballs)

[Username17]

Choosing a clan should be meaningful to define a character: how he behave, how he looks like, and/or what he is capable of.

For all its limitations, that's what D&D manage to do when you say you play a lawful-neutral elf bard. But VtM clans are widely inconsistent. Being a Tremere or a Gangrel define your capabilities, being a Toreador your behavior, a Nosferatu your look...

Well the concept is that the clan defines your pitch. That is, you say "Clan X is like the vampires in movie Y" and people would want to play Clan X because the idea of playing vampires similar to the vampires in that particular movie appealed to them. This fell down in actual practice because none of the presented clans were actually able to deliver on their appropriate concepts, but it's a reasonable way to draw things up.

The fact that vampires in different media are metaphors for different kinds of things and thus the salient details about them are different aspects of characterization is something you're going to have to accept and work around. The Nosferatu are salient because of their look. The Volturi are salient because of their social position, the Death Dealers are salient because of their ability set, and so on. When you make clans, you're creating IP, and you can make declarations about the clans that are distinct from the inspiring source material. The vampires in blade don't really seem to have any magic at all other than their basic enhanced physical characteristics (obviously I'm talking about movie Blade, as comic book Blade vampires are sorcery cornucopias), but your "Blade inspired" clan can have signature magic powers and a signature tell and so on and so forth.

Balance questions do need to be asked. Some vampire concepts are simply more powerful than others. The vampires in Hellsing are obviously much more powerful than the vampire in Buffy. The vampires in Lost Boys are more powerful than the vampires in Forever Knight. And what that means is that you're going to end up letting people play either "juiced up" versions of vampires from various source materials where the vampires aren't all that or "cut back" versions of vampires from source material where the vampires are somewhat over the top. And what kinds of powers are too good or not good enough will depend somewhat on what the expected adventure frameworks are like. Quite a lot of super strength could still be considered a fairly trivial ability if combat happens rarely or illusion magic can reliably smuggle firearms into secure facilities.

Out of curiosity, what would you consider in the range of starting powers for a vampire?

There is a significant range I would accept. As mentioned, starting vampires in Buffy are specifically weaksauce, while starting vampire sin Hellsing are pretty fucking badass. But regardless of where you're targeting on the spectrum, I would say that the starting vampires in Dracula, Vamps, or The Lost Boys are an absolute minimum. This means that abilities like Form of Mist and Flight have to be ground floor abilities. That doesn't mean every vampire has to have those in particular, or even that every clan has to offer those specific examples as starting character choices. But it means that starting characters should be balanced with the idea that some of the options will have mind control, mist form, flying, bat form, wall walking, super strength, and so on.

-Username17

[Username17]

So let's talk about different kinds of vampires that might appeal to the modern crowd:

• The Bad Asses However you do your clan assignments, the vampires in Underworld and the vampires in Blade are obviously the same ones. They dress in leather and/or PVC and have flowing trench coats and are just generically "super" enough that they can be bad asses in action scenes. They are important and lots of people want to play one of these, but it's important to remember that Justin Achilli lost his shit and flipped the table over when people suggested this character concept. In any case, a starting vampire in this setup only really needs super strength, super toughness, super speed, and super senses and abilities like "complete weapon immunity" (Frost, Reapers) or "giant bat monster form" (Viktor), can obviously be abilities that characters get later.
• The Sexy Ones True Blood and Twilight vampires are basically the same thing. And both have major plotlines about new vampires, so we actually see what starter level vampires can do. Super speed, super strength, super senses, and mental domination. Powers like flight (Erik), voice manipulation (Bill Compton), and astral projection (Lilith) are all clearly reservable for advanced vampires. It's important also to note that vampires in Twilight all get a special X-Men power, and for Bella Swan it's transferable mental protection.
• The Monster Faces Vampires in Buffy and Dusk till Dawn are probably the same thing. They have a human form, and then they "vamp out" and get monster faces to go with their super strength. But it's important to note that while some of these newly created vampires have weird abilities like getting a boss monster second life as a rat monster (Sex Machine), most of them seem to just be randos who are "pretty strong" when monstered out. The human form thing could be construed as a power, however.
• The Vagabonds Movies like Byzantium and Let The Right One In aren't really about the powers of the vampires, so much as the feeling of social isolation. It's not clear what powers a newly created vampire has in these stories (or indeed, what powers any vampire has in these stories because the powers are not front and center for the stories), and as such a game centered on them could plausibly give or not give pretty much any powers you wanted.
• The Aristocrats! Probably the default assumption of a vampire story is that the vampires are "basically Dracula." If you don't plant your flag somewhere and declare "our vampires are different" then pretty much everyone assumes your vampires are these vampires. Eurotrash accents, bat forms, hypnotism, whole thing. And actual Dracula has an actual character become a new vampire: Lucy Westenra. And she has mental domination, super strength, and form of mist.
• The Kids Version Vampirina, Draculaura, Count von Count, Count Chocula, Lily Munster, and so on. these vampires aren't serious, but they are definitely real in the sense that people will in fact want to play these guys. Notable for not apparently having super strength, they do all definitely have hypnotism, bat forms, and various sorcery.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

I find it interesting how GW went for (broadly) the same approach as VTM (including borrowing the bloodlines things more or less as is, but getting it to work better, IMHO). One old WD has them mention all the vampire archetypes they'd considered, with a list very reminiscent of FrankTrollman's, though 15-20 years older and vampires have moved on since then, and of little relevance in context. "The fat guy who sits at home and gets other people to do things", "the undead avenging hero", "the eastern martial artist".

Anyway, while Warhammer vampires originally had a list of powers for each bloodline, later on they went and just gave related lists of powers and let each vampire choose from any of them. With the understanding in fluff that various types of vampires would tend to gravitate certain ways, but no restriction that you'd have to.

Or, if you don't want to go that far, couldn't you, for example, say that you pick a type of power as your major, another one or two as your minor and another one or two as restricted, and say that Bloodline X picks A for major, B and C for minor and D and E for restricted, but that you can make a vampire from your own random Bloodline that goes C, B and D, A and E?

Limits the relevance of established bloodlines, and might be difficult for balance, but you aren't restricted by a finite number of archetypes, if someone wants to model their vampire after a movie nobody has heard of, or that came out after the RPG did, not so much a problem.

Balance questions do need to be asked. Some vampire concepts are simply more powerful than others. The vampires in Hellsing are obviously much more powerful than the vampire in Buffy. The vampires in Lost Boys are more powerful than the vampires in Forever Knight. And what that means is that you're going to end up letting people play either "juiced up" versions of vampires from various source materials where the vampires aren't all that or "cut back" versions of vampires from source material where the vampires are somewhat over the top. And what kinds of powers are too good or not good enough will depend somewhat on what the expected adventure frameworks are like. Quite a lot of super strength could still be considered a fairly trivial ability if combat happens rarely or illusion magic can reliably smuggle firearms into secure facilities.

Do vampires/vampire powers/vampire concepts need to be balanced? Vampire PCs, sure, but can't you make up for a deficiency in vampire power with something else? Extensive military/paramilitary training for example.

You could justify your PC from a lesser bloodline being exceptional if you've got a team put together to investigate old mills, everyone was chosen because they are assets, but not so powerful/important they should be doing something else. And keep normal members of that bloodline as low level mooks.

(That wouldn't work with the idea above the quote though. Oh, and someone is going to pedantically point out that it was Marcus that turned into a bat monster, not Viktor, might as well be me)