Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

[Username17]

Anatomy of Failed Design
Vampire: the Masquerade



The Clans

Yes. It's time to look at the individual clans, of which there are a lot.

Brujah


Hey Beavis... he said 'butt.'”

First of all, Rein*Hegen wants you to know that despite “Brujah” being a real word that is pronounced “Brew Ha” that in-world the clan is supposed to be pronounced “Brew Jaw.” That breaks my fucking brain. This is like the original author having a temper tantrum after someone pointed out that he was pronouncing a bunch of obscure words wrong. It's not really unusual for people who have more intellectual pretensions than the people around them to know a bunch of words only in written form and to embarrass themselves in educated company when they first utter “fuh-cade,” “seh-goo,” or “hyper-bowl.” Generally when this happens, the person in question eats their fucking crow, moves on with their life, and takes part in the gentle ribbing the next time someone else says “epi-tome.” The thing where Rein*Hegen went off the rails and wrote glossaries that claimed that various words are too! pronounced whatever dumb hick way he thought the first time he read them is nothing short of madness. Almost everyone I have met pronounces this clan the “wrong” way like the actual fucking word, because it's an actual fucking word and what the actual fuck?

However you pronounce it, the Brujah clan are rebels, upstarts, and troublemakers. This is a popular vampire archetype and goes straight for the leather jackets and motorcycles vampires of Lost Boys. As we mentioned earlier there is something fundamentally off about this because Brujah actually come at the same ages, generations, and power levels as any other clan of vampires. But the elevator pitch certainly has traction. Obviously, a fair number of people want to play rebellious youth vampires. Indeed, with the standard character generation rules it's pretty much the only character concept that's really supported.


A Brujah Justicar is “The Man” in every way it is possible to be. And the clan didn't really have a clear concept for what the clan was supposed to mean or represent when the members were not the underdog.

Getting angry easier is a serious disadvantage, but it's a reasonable one. The powers are chintzy as hell. First of all, as noted earlier, Potence is not a real power. Presence is a real power, and Celerity is the only combat power that's worth anything, but Toreador get both of those and also Auspex. So from a magical powers standpoint, the Brujah were basically just “Like the Toreador, but shitty.” You might think that the “Lost Boys Vampires” would have signature magic powers from Lost Boys like making people perceive rice as crawling maggots or flying around. You'd be wrong. For some reason those powers just aren't here and we keep to the “like a Toreador, but shitty” theme instead.

As discussed earlier, having Presence as your only means of feeding is pretty bad. It means that you have to keep a huge number of girlfriends happy with no special means to cover your tracks or compel loyalty. You can get blood night to night, but I have no idea how the masquerade isn't supposed to collapse like a scheme in a situation comedy. A lot of new players gravitate towards the Brujah because of their strong introduction and bad boy image. The second shoe is bad no matter what direction you try to take them. So we're looking at a clan that is poorly done but sufficiently desirable that it should be saved rather than scrapped.

Gangrel


Rugged forest vampires. Vampires who hobo around or stroll around in the woods and hunt like feral beasts. Certainly there's support for that sort of thing. When you say you want to play vampires, it's not unusual for one of the players to want to play a werewolf, and the Gangrel are the next best thing. At least, that's what they are conceptually, which is one of the reasons that they were a popular clan.

From a magic powers standpoint, the Gangrel are bad. I've gone over how Fortitude is garbage and Protean is an incoherent pile of disjointed fuckoff that doesn't make anyone happy. Animalism is powerful, and it's a means to feed. But even that's bad in the sense that then we have to talk about the drinking from animals rules and how they involve our vampires gallon challenging blood several times a night. Gangrel are feral wilderness vampires, but at the end of the evening none of their powers make them as vicious in a fight as like having a knife. It's really pretty sad. On top of being shit, they also end up shitting on the setting by hogging a lot of iconic vampire powers. Basically no one is allowed to turn into a fucking Bat in a game about Vampires, because Protean is an exclusive discipline in addition to being a shitty one.

And honestly, the game takes place in cities. Not just cities but big cities. As mentioned before there really isn't a place in this game for vampire society even in small towns, let alone actual rural areas. It's a cooperative storytelling game, and the other characters are vampires and they all live in the big city. So the Gangrel had a big thematic problem even being in the same frame as the other player characters.

Despite their relative popularity, I could easily see chucking these assholes from the setting. If you let players play actual werewolves, a majority of the Gangrel fans disappear (assuming for the moment that werewolves aren't required to be dog rapists). While depending on your werewolves it may be difficult to set up player character groups that contain various flavors of vampires and a werewolf – that problem is already had by the Gangrel and you have to solve it before the game can even start. The ability to turn into a bat is a minor power that should be available to starting characters and not reserved for any one clan, so eliminating a clan that had squatter's rights on the poorly designed Protean would be a net benefit. That being said, feral vampires are a popular concept over and above the werewolf thing, so rehabilitating them as creatures that were actually good in the wilderness and good at tearing enemies up with their claws and didn't have an unplayable clan disadvantage where they lost social skills over time could be a thing.

Malkavian
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[/img]

The idea of insane vampires has a lot of traction. It's a creature of nightmares that is itself mentally disturbed. How cool is that?

Well... the answer is that it is a highly variable amount of cool depending on how you handle mental illness. White Wolf tried various schema for insanity from kooky fish-kissing vampires to crippled lampshade-phobic vampires. Eventually they decided that they should probably go for more of a tribal shaman type feel where they were blessed/cursed with special insight and tormented by the demons of madness and shit. This goes over reasonably well in like the Bloodlines computer game, where a Malkavian protagonist gets auditory hallucinations of angry whispered voices, some of which are merely creepy or distracting and some of which are helpful. You could honestly work with that.

But the actual game doesn't. Malkavians don't have any special mad insight. They are just Tremere who trade phenomenal sorcerous power for the ability to turn invisible and get an extra derangement off the menu. The menu is filled in piecemeal by different authors in different books, but is mostly shit like “Bulimia” an “Masochism” that some author or another read in a pop-psyche list or cribbed from another RPG that was doing the same shit. The whole thing about how their madness gave them special insight into shit was just a lost plot thread. That was never actually implemented in-game.


The Joker is one of the world's best villains, but it's easy for Joker knockoffs to be “dumb.”

As long as we're doing vampires as comic book supers, having vampires who are “crazy” or even “crazy clowns” is totally fine. But they all needed to be unhinged in a Joker-like way. Having them select off the menu and get fear of birds or some fucking thing is a whole world of bullshit. The Brujah disadvantage, when we remember to think of it as such is exactly that – Brujah fly off the handle easier and that is a kind of madness that is easy to roleplay and incorporate into stories.

The more difficult problem is that Malkavians are physically inept. They are literally just random crazy dudes. No super speed, no claws, no nothing. If you use the later works where they got Dominate taken away and replaced with Dementation, they can't do dick diddly because that Discipline doesn't do shit. Original Malkavians can feed night to night if they take Dominate, and their other disciplines are vaguely decent. But Obfuscation and Auspex very notably aren't rare and also aren't all that impressive. Malkavians really lack a role.

Definitely a hard choice to ditch or fix. A game of Vampions really does want Harley Quinn as one of the team members. But Malkavians as actual presented were really fucking annoying and it's difficult to imagine them having a role in the group that wasn't just “Like the Tremere, but shitty.”

Nosferatu


The Nosferatu were hideous. By default they looked like the vampire in Nosferatu, hence the name. But they could potentially be hideous in other ways if you cared. Instant traction. A small portion of the player base wanted to be them, but they had gravitas and a shtick.

From a mechanics standpoint, they were weak like a pirate. For starters, this is a game where one ninth of your attributes are “appearance” so being hideous has severe game mechanics issues even when you had illusion magic and good gods the mechanics for White Wolf games are war crimes. They had this whole “living in the sewers, spying with rats” thing going, which was awesome, but perhaps unsurprisingly the mechanics didn't really support that either. Nosferatu had no special magical powers that made them good at being spies. They didn't have enhanced senses, so whether they could skulk in the rafters of the opera house or not, they still couldn't get any information by doing that.

This is a clan that definitely seems fixable. And it has a clear enough role and dedicated enough fanbase that fixing it seems desirable.

Toreador


We've kind of gone over the clan in parts before. It's the vampire from Interview With The Vampire. You space out when you see paintings that remind you of lost loves, you start a rock band. You have artistic pretentions and that's all fine. A perfectly reasonable shtick for vampires to have.

The magic powers have problems of course, Presence-Only is not much of a means to feed in any long term scenario. But it's strictly easier to rehabilitate these wankers than it is the Brujah.

Ventrue


The Ventrue certainly have a shtick going. Well dressed vampires who treat this shit like a corporation or peerage. They run shit and have magic mind control powers to do it with. It's a shtick which is inherently better suited to high powered NPCs than it is player characters, because structurally they are the old guard who are in power already, and it's hard to make a new vampire character with that. But there is some room, you could play like a corporate toady with dreams of advancement or a recently mortal lawyer embraced for her encyclopedic knowledge of admiralty law. Shit like that.

The clan disadvantage is that they need to feed off some arbitrary demographic like virgins or redheads or something. This is fucking bullshit and has to go. As the vampire moves through time and space those demographics will resort themselves and you're going to fucking starve to death when something that was exclusive in one place is just fucking non-existent somewhere else. But beyond that, vampires need potential herds of like hundreds of people, if you whittle the population as a whole down to some fragment of the population that are potentially appropriate you're going to need a huge population just to get through the year. Like one in twenty Americans is a soulless ginger, so if you need to drink from them specifically you're going to need to comb through a herd of like 10,000 people. That's stupid.


Not a lot of green eyed girls in China...

So they need a new disadvantage that isn't retarded, but the shtick works well enough. They otherwise have a successful feeding plan, can do their role as leaders (and have a valuable role that teams might want), and are generally better designed than the other clans. Except for the drawback thing, which is just demographics fail.

Tremere

I can't talk about this clan without talking about the Paths Of Thaumaturgy. I think that'll be the next page.

[hyzmarca]

You know, I'd be really tempted to make the Nosfaratu the Death Metal clan instead of the skulking in shadows clan. I know that art is the Toreador specialty, but art isn't the same thing as rocking out. Rocking out is superior to art.




These guys could all be Nosfaratu and no one would know or care.

[Prak]

The comment about the Brujah weakness being a sort of madness that is easy to roleplay and incorporate into stories makes me think about disadvantages as a whole and the fact that rather a lot of vampire stories paint the vampire as mad in one way or another- obsessive compulsion to count things, inability to relate to normal people outside of a predator/prey context, easily disoriented by crossroads, etc- what if the disadvantages were madnesses? Then maybe the Insane Vamps get the ones that are more obviously madnesses, or they get to just pick one from the list of vampire specific madnesses?

[Longes]

Definitely. Though I did like the main protagonist demon (the guy who was shot in the head). But then I was also 18, so maybe if I read them again I'd hate him.

The main thing I didn't like about the Demon novels is that:
a) They were nothing like the actual game.
b) Close approximation of protagonist's abilities would require hundreds of XP.

[Prak]

Yeah... that's... ok, I haven't read any of the other WW novels (I've read the in-world books, but no other novels), but I'd bet that was common in them.

[Longes]

I'm hoping you'll include the Sabbat clans and maybe even the obscure clans in the discussion.

[Longes]

Yeah... that's... ok, I haven't read any of the other WW novels (I've read the in-world books, but no other novels), but I'd bet that was common in them.

Probably. But the only reason I tried reading the Demon novels was because I was invited into a Demon game and wanted a quick explanation on what is up and how a new Demon would work. And the novel was entirely unhelpful in that regard, despite being about a fresh Demon.

[Prak]

The actual in-rulebook fiction was actually pretty good about "here's what it's like being a demon" I think. Also the demon doing the talking was pretty sympathetic, even though he was talking to the father of his vessel.

I'm tempted to review DtF...

[Longes]

Do eeet.

For starters, this is a game where one ninth of your attributes are “appearance” so being hideous has severe game mechanics issues even when you had illusion magic and good gods the mechanics for White Wolf games are war crimes.

This is why I don't like Nosferatu. Their weakness is completely binary: either you have Obfuscate 3 because you want to go to the same places other players go, or you don't. If you have Obfuscate 3, then your weakness is never ever going to come up ever again. You won't be able to seduce other vampires in an Elysium, big woop. You can have Appearance 5 at will all the other time. But if you don't have Obfuscate 3, then you are a fucking Masquerade breach and have to stand outside and smoke every time the party goes into a night club.

[Mechalich]

Vampire the Masquerade gave no thought at all to what colonizing a city as a group of vampires would be like. And similarly gave no thought to what vampire society would look like in the rural and micropolitan areas where you could count the number of vampires on the fingers of your hand if there was more one or even any at all.

Time of Thin Blood kinda talks about this in reference to 'caitiff princes' who've set themselves up as effective god-kings of small towns by ghouling/blood bonding every single authority figure around, and the Nosferatu and Gangrel books also make some oblique references to isolated vampires living in small cities/towns telling the rest of the world to leave them alone. Insofar as VtM talks about Vampires in anything but the biggest of cities though they strongly imply that these are loner vampires living by themselves maintaining the masquerade more or less by default and no playing politics at all. You can't actually use them in games in any significant way.

Which is an additional problem because the population of solitary (or perhaps sire and childe duos) in small metros and the occasional concentrated semi rural area (like the North Dakota oil patch) would actually be a really high proportion of the global vampiric population as a whole, but VtM totally ignores them.

[Mord]

The New White Wolf was asked which Time of Judgement scenarios were going to be canon moving forward (since the premise is that the Apocalypse/Gehenna actually did happen during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). And they said "None of them."

To which the only sane response is "thank god."

[Omegonthesane]

The clan disadvantage is that they need to feed off some arbitrary demographic like virgins or redheads or something. This is fucking bullshit and has to go. As the vampire moves through time and space those demographics will resort themselves and you're going to fucking starve to death when something that was exclusive in one place is just fucking non-existent somewhere else. But beyond that, vampires need potential herds of like hundreds of people, if you whittle the population as a whole down to some fragment of the population that are potentially appropriate you're going to need a huge population just to get through the year. Like one in twenty Americans is a soulless ginger, so if you need to drink from them specifically you're going to need to comb through a herd of like 10,000 people. That's stupid.

It seems relevant to mention here that Bloodlines ignored the strict requirement for a strict subclass of humans - you "just" couldn't drink from animals and had a chance of vomiting back up any blood you drank from "lowlifes", here defined as bums and hookers.

Of course, even that was only a weakness because Bloodlines required you to actually play through the scenes where you find someone to feed from instead of that shit being offscreen like it probably will be in an actual VTM tabletop game.

[OgreBattle]

Vampires drink blood. It's a thing they do. Vampires need to be drinking blood from people to assert their dominance. If drinking blood from someone is a submissive gesture, then we are severely unmoored. What are vampires supposed to be doing to normal people then? Using their magic powers and vampiric sexiness to run around submitting to everyone in town? What the fuck?

This is where Chinese alchemy vampires make more sense than just drinking blood. It also gives younger vampires a strong reason to run away/fight elders.

vampire clans

Never actually read what makes each clan unique, now I know. The nosferatu and gangrel seem like they can be rolled into one concept. Like "They used to live in the woods but in modern day they live in sewers"

I figure you could just make vampire clans based off of the 5 MTG colors and call it a day.

White vampires: Like heirarchy and making people follow their rules. Deals with (mostly spirit) undead and charming people. Has a pet white cat or hunchback. They are crazy with logic that crushes others in the heirarchy.

Black vampires: Like heirarchy and making people follow their rules. Deals (mostly corporeal) undead and tricking people. Has a pet black cat or crow. They are crazy with logic to move up the heirarchy.

Red vampires: Loves blood and stone, get angry easily and good at fighting with a knife or bike chain. Deals with nature (mostly elements). Wears black leather and rides motorcycles. Has a pet bird or snake. They are crazy with selfish anger.

Green vampires: Loves blood and foliage, loose organization and good at fighting by using shapeshifting to claw and/or bite. Deals with nature (mostly animals). Wears brown leather and rides motorcycles. Has a pet snake or cat. They are crazy with collective anger.

Blue vampires: They do science stuff, maybe they turn into mist too. Has a pet hunchback. They are crazy with experimentation.

All of them have the power to give mortals boners and host orgies (so LARPers have a reason to play anyone).

[Username17]

Anatomy of Failed Design
Vampire: the Masquerade



The Tremere

Why do The Tremere get a whole page when the other six vampire clans got one and six expansion clans and several bloodlines get one as well? Because The Tremere were the original author's favorite clan, and they get way more stuff than any other clan. They get more stuff than all the other clans combined. There are entire power creep books that are nothing but “more weird Tremere options.”


Welcome to the Clan.

Vampire the Masquerade started its development life as Ars Magica 1999, a book about playing secret clans of Wizards in the grim future of 1999. It was switched to be about vampires because vampires were more popular. In the switchover, all the distinctive “vampire powers” were made into disciplines and vampire clans got to have three each – which is way too few, a newly made vampire in most modern media rapidly learns four or more distinct powers. Jessica from True Blood is specifically a shitty vampire and she still has Potence, Celerity, Auspex, and Dominate before she first has sex. Michael from Lost Boys hadn't even completed his transformation and he had Potence, Celerity, Protean, and Flight. Fortitude is impossible to judge, because White Wolf Fortitude does so little. The only vampires who explicitly don't have it are Dusk Til Dawn vampires.


These vampires have soft bodies.

And of course, more established vampires in stories have a metric shit tonne more vampire powers than just 3. Max from Lost Boys has Potence, Celerity, Flight, Dominate, Animalism, Chimerstry, and some kind of electricity control thing that Masquerade never implemented. Anyway, The Tremere were a clan of wizards in Ars Magica that gave Rein*Hegen such a stiffy that instead of scrapping them when he replaced all the mage clans with vampire clans he just... didn't do that. So instead we get the Tremere ported in wholesale and they get a whole separate magic system that was probably the paths and rituals deal that the entire game of Ars Magica 1999 was supposed to split between the various types of characters. So all the other clans are slinking around at the bottom getting 3 disciplines each, but the Tremere get two disciplines and “Thaumaturgy” which is no shit like 8 other disciplines worth of powers in the original book alone, and was expandable in a way other disciplines were not and just gradually became more and more ridiculously larger than every other discipline combined.


This 140 page book was literally nothing but stuff you could do with Thaumaturgy. No one ever wrote “Go Faster: Secrets of Celerity.”

Paths of Magic

In order to kinda look like they were using the same rules as everyone else, Thaumaturgy was divided into paths that had five dots each with sequential spells or improvements in your spells at each dot. So in that respect, having Thaumaturgy is pretty much exactly like having one of your clan disciplines actually be like half a dozen clan disciplines. Needless to say, you are probably not going to get enough XPs to meaningfully pursue half a dozen disciplines, in-clan or no, unless you're in one of those decade long LARP games where you show up almost every Friday because that is how you get laid. But Thaumaturgy had a workaround for that! Buying a dot of path magic was cheaper than buying a discipline dot even though the power scale between a good and bad path dot is pretty much the same as the power scale between a good and bad.

And then when it came time to write more levels of, say Protean, they wrote dots 6 through 10. Those are more expensive than dots 1 to 5, and on top of that you can't buy them at all unless your generation is sufficiently low. So you can't have them ever in addition to the game ending before you'll be able to afford them. And they wrote different versions of level 6 because every NPC that you'll never be allowed to be nearly as good as is also a special snowflake with their own secret powers. But when it came time to expand Thaumaturgy, you got new paths that are ranked 1-5 so you can actually get the expansion powers.

Some of the paths aren't very good. The ability to set your hand on fire when being in close proximity to flames makes you have to make a frenzy check or have a seizure is not very good. People routinely mind caulk that path into being mentally safe for the user, and it still isn't very good. And the variance on the expansion paths is more intense, so the bottom is hilarious. One dot of the path of Alchemy lets you boil water. That is not a joke. You spend an hour in a lab and at the end of it you convert liquid water into gaseous water.

But some of the paths are pretty darn nice. And more importantly, some of them duplicate other disciplines fairly exactly. With four dots of Focused Mind you get a big bonus to initiative and act twice a turn (which is both better and worse than Celerity, but basically the same idea). With Spirit Thaumaturgy you can fuck around with ghosts just like you were a Necromancer. For anything that any clan who aren't Tremere do, there exists some obscure Thaumaturgy workaround that lets Tremere do it cheaper. And sometimes also better.

Ritual Magic

In addition to paths, there are also stand alone rituals. These are powers that do not come in ranks. A three dot ritual requires that you have some path out to three dots, but no specific requirements of what 2 dot ritual you have to learn earlier or what 4 dot ritual you get to learn next. The big list is big. According to an online index, there are forty two one dot Thaumatury rituals. Well, it says 43, but it also gives a separate entry for “Rite of Introduction” from Secrets of Blood Magic and “The Rite of Introduction” from the Player's Guide. I strongly suspect that those are actually the same thing. But they might not be, and there's no fucking way I'm going to hunt down these two and compare. As you can probably imagine, a bunch of those are pretty much useless. But a bunch more of them are basically the kind of thing you'd get for a one dot in an average discipline. And as a Tremere you get 42 of them to choose from, and they are way cheaper to buy than a discipline.

To put this in perspective: remember that there are no dot-by-dot powers for Celerity, Potence, or Fortitude. So in the basic book, there are a total of 5 enumerated dot powers for 6 disciplines that aren't Thaumaturgy: Animalism, Auspex, Dominate, Obfuscation, Presence, and Protean. That's 30 enumerated powers that the non-Tremere clans get to play with between them. Thaumaturgy gives you a choice of 42 ritual powers at level 1 to hang off of whatever fucking path you chose to wrap around your dick. That is the level of chocie disparity between Tremere and not-Tremere. And the law of randomly unplaytested bullshit means that having more unbalanced crap to dumpster dive through means that if you want to be you are massively more powerful than anyone else. It's not even remotely close.

The Salubri and the Baali


Wait... what?

One of the core conceits of Vampire the Masquerade is that there are 13 Clans. Those are... Assamite, Baali, Brujah, Children of Osiris, Follower of Set, Gangrel, Giovanni, Lasombra, Malkavian, Nosferatu, Ravnos, Salubri, Samedi, Toreador, Tremere, Tzimisce, Ventrue. Now, if that seems like a fuck tonne more than 13 to you, you win a prize. Yes, that's a lot more than 13, because the original spiel was that there were 13 clans but they only wrote up 7 in the first book. That let subsequent authors add whatever clans they wanted, which they promptly did and overshot the requisite 13 by like whoa.

What came next was a massive retconning where a bunch of clans were re-imagined as the leftovers from someone having eaten the progenitor of a clan and started a new clan. So the Samedi were the left over folks from when the leader of the Giovanni ate the primarch of the Capadoceans, and the Salubri and Baali were the various leftovers from when the leader of the Tremere ate the original Salubri. And the Children of Osiris lacked a good explanation and they were quietly retconned away in Revised Edition to be never spoken of again. And that's how we get to 13!

The Tremere backstory of murder hoboing the Salubri and Baali was of course needlessly complicated. If you went to some of the weird places of obscure books, it went off on rants on how Tremere were entitled to discounts on the special disciplines of Salubri, Baali, and even Tzimisce. Because we're already powergaming like a motherfucker, so why the fuck not?

The Salubri were “good guy vampires” who wandered around trying to achieve Golconda and keeping their numbers and generations low by having new vampires diablerize their parents. Golconda was a deprecated concept because as previously noted it was unplayable, and the Salubri's signature healing discipline involved them growing a glowing third eye in the middle of the head. The Baali, meanwhile, were gratuitous devil worshippers who were so eeeevil that they weren't even allowed in the Sabbat. They set fire to shit and ran around murder raping children with vaginas full of bugs. In any case, neither of these clans were in the slightest bit compatible with the game and it's difficult to imagine either of them going a week without dropping a shit that shatters the masquerade.

So it's possibly not that surprising that the two clans that they retconned into being the ones that the Tremere (always present in every player character group because someone is going to want to play the “best” clan) are required to hunt down and exterminate.

Where can I get my hands on that sweet sweet Thaumaturgy?

Um... everywhere?

Thaumaturgy was so dramatically better than everything else in the setting and also the only way to effectively give players more options that just about every group ended up with their own little corner of Thaumaturgy to play with. There's Assamite Sorcery and also Sihr, which is a kind of sorcery for Muslim vampires to use but it's different because it came in a different book and go fuck yourself. There's Setite Akhu and Tzimisce Koldunic Sorcery. There's Dark Thaumaturgy that's satanic, but also Voudoun Thaumaturgy and at least two flavors of Japanese stuff and a couple Chinese paradigms, and I can't read anymore because my eyes are bleeding.


Why did I read all those Vampire variant blood magic schools!?

What this all came down to was that if you wanted to give some magic powers to, say, the Lasombra, you couldn't really add any more to their shadow magic. Obtenebration had a stupid name but it also had all five dots filled in. But you could make up a branch of Thaumaturgy and call it Abyssal Mysticism or some fucking thing and write up more magical shit for Lasombra to do. This was repeated for I think every single major non-Camarilla faction and even some stupid ones you don't remember like the Nagaraja.

What this came down to was that the magic power paradigm of the disciplines and dots was way too limited in its structure, and to expand basically Thaumaturgy metastasized into everything. The obvious conclusion is that normal disciplines needed to be more like Thaumaturgy and also that “magic” really couldn't be a protected shtick for any clan. Everyone needed the option to learn “magic” just as every vampire should come with a little bit of super strength just for getting up in the evening.

The Tremere were simply a terrible clan and their shtick needed to be folded into literally every other clan.

[Longes]

Interestingly, despite being the mechanical powerhouses of the game, Tremere got absolutely shat on whenever it came to the narrative. Tremere hunted down and ate Vampire Jesus Saulot? Well fuck you, it was all part of the plan for Saulot to possess Tremere's body. In Fair is Foul Tremere is making a ritual to mind control everyone on the planet? Well fuck you, the original immortality elixir had Tzimisce bits in it, so Tremere counts as a childe of [Tzimisce], who chestbusts out of him and takes over. The signature discipline of Thaumaturgy? Well fuck you, Assamites and Settites did it first, and the most powerful Thaumaturgist in the world is Mekhet (an Assamite), not the Tremere.

The ability to set your hand on fire when being in close proximity to flames makes you have to make a frenzy check or have a seizure is not very good. People routinely mind caulk that path into being mentally safe for the user, and it still isn't very good.

This was implied by the Revised write up, and got explicitly codified in V20. The path is good as a weapon, since vampires can't soak fire at all if they don't have Fortitude, but fighting is the only thing you can ever do with it. So it's kinda like Potence+.

With Spirit Thaumaturgy you can fuck around with ghosts just like you were a Necromancer.

It's... complicated. Spirit Thaumaturgy implies (and its V20 rewrite makes it explicit) that "spirits" and "ghosts" are not the same. Spirits are the animism stuff where you talk to spirits of chairs and dry turds. The problem is that the spirit world is never described in VtM, the spirits have no stats, and what a "fetish" is is not explained, so what you can do with this path is completely up to the MC.

So the Samedi were the left over folks from when the leader of the Giovanni ate the primarch of the Capadoceans

That would be Harbingers of Skulls. Somewhere in the Dark Ages Cappadocius imprisoned most of his clan in the Underworld and then got eaten by the Giovanni. The cappadocians who were imprisoned diablerised each other until only 50 were left, and then in the 20th century they popped back into the real world and want to eat the Giovanni.
Meanwhile, Samedi are a result of a turkish Giovanni necromancer trying to use necromancy to make vampires. And succeeding. Samedi are easy to mistake for Harbingers, because they have the same weakness - looking like an old zombie. But Harbingers get Necromancy and Samedi get a shitty discipline based around rotting, and you are never playing either of them anyway.

[hyzmarca]

Of course, even that was only a weakness because Bloodlines required you to actually play through the scenes where you find someone to feed from instead of that shit being offscreen like it probably will be in an actual VTM tabletop game.

Well, I wouldn't say that Bloodlines required you to play through those scenes. Bloodlines treated humans like walking blood packs, so in most missions you'd just grab and feed from whomever is convenient in order to refill your blood pool.

This is, in fact, one of the things that made Bloodlines fun.

[Chamomile]

Feeding in Bloodlines was quick and easy, but it still had to be done, so being a Ventrue and having to feed slightly differently helped make playing as a Ventrue feel different from other clans in a way that doesn't and can't come up in a tabletop game.

[name_here]

Bloodlines went with the rule that if you drain someone they become groggy and disoriented and forget you bit them, which seems a remarkably straightforward solution to masquerade issues and meant you just had to get someone alone briefly. It also let you bite people while making out without witnesses noticing.

[Lokey]

How did thaumaturgy interact with diablerie?

It may have been an awful discipline in the card game (or at least they couldn't survive to the second round of combat to use the good thaumaturgy cards), but at least it really put out in the weird card art category:


Note: we had a lot of extra rules for the card game. The Presence/Dom combat enders counted as presses, you could only play the same card title once per turn, something else... As written the winning strategy was to play as much solitaire as possible.

[Longes]

How did thaumaturgy interact with diablerie?

What do you mean? Thaumaturgy, much like any other discipline, doesn't interact with diablerie at all.

[Lokey]

Ah, confused with card game (can add a disc when diablerizing there).

Note: you lose a humanity point with diablerie. That's the real reason you can't do it.

[Schleiermacher]

I think he means, if you Diablerize someone you usually gain dots in some of their Disciplines temporarily or permanently (depending on what references you were using for diablerie rules) and how does that interact with learning thaumaturgic Paths and rituals? Does it just increase your rating like you were raising Thaum past 5 or can you get new paths from it? If you have Thaum yourself, but not as many dots or all the paths your victim had, does it go up or do you learn more paths or both?

And of course, the answer to all of these questions is "nobody knows, the ST makes up whatever answer he likes".

[Longes]

I think he means, if you Diablerize someone you usually gain dots in some of their Disciplines temporarily or permanently (depending on what references you were using for diablerie rules) and how does that interact with learning thaumaturgic Paths and rituals? Does it just increase your rating like you were raising Thaum past 5 or can you get new paths from it? If you have Thaum yourself, but not as many dots or all the paths your victim had, does it go up or do you learn more paths or both?

And of course, the answer to all of these questions is "nobody knows, the ST makes up whatever answer he likes".

The answer is that in 146% of the circumstances because getting any Disciplines after diablery is entirely up to ST. There are no rules for it.

[Milkmaid79]

There was a ritual that let a group all benefit from diablerizing a vampire instead of just one character.

Thaumaturgy could tell the user the clan/bloodline and generation of the target, so if your generation got more powerful anyone who had used it on you would know what you had been up to. I recall reading fluff about how the black marks would leave your aura after a time but Thaumaturgy could always tell if you had committed diablerie.

[Nath]

Never actually read what makes each clan unique, now I know. The nosferatu and gangrel seem like they can be rolled into one concept. Like "They used to live in the woods but in modern day they live in sewers"

I figure you could just make vampire clans based off of the 5 MTG colors and call it a day.

White vampires: Like heirarchy and making people follow their rules. Deals with (mostly spirit) undead and charming people. Has a pet white cat or hunchback. They are crazy with logic that crushes others in the heirarchy.

Black vampires: Like heirarchy and making people follow their rules. Deals (mostly corporeal) undead and tricking people. Has a pet black cat or crow. They are crazy with logic to move up the heirarchy.

Red vampires: Loves blood and stone, get angry easily and good at fighting with a knife or bike chain. Deals with nature (mostly elements). Wears black leather and rides motorcycles. Has a pet bird or snake. They are crazy with selfish anger.

Green vampires: Loves blood and foliage, loose organization and good at fighting by using shapeshifting to claw and/or bite. Deals with nature (mostly animals). Wears brown leather and rides motorcycles. Has a pet snake or cat. They are crazy with collective anger.

Blue vampires: They do science stuff, maybe they turn into mist too. Has a pet hunchback. They are crazy with experimentation.

All of them have the power to give mortals boners and host orgies (so LARPers have a reason to play anyone).

One problem of V:TM is how clans lump together lineage, geographical origins, traditions, personal interests, appearances, powers and methods into a single package. You're supposed to fill stories with about fifteen to twenty character concepts (player characters included), with the setting somehow requiring lengthy justification whenever you want to escape those limitations (while the authors would simply introduce yet another clan for that purpose).

I admit it makes sense for vampires to embrace and thus induce into their clan companions whose interests are similar to theirs. And it's a feature of the game that clan affiliation makes your character a part of the secret history the game is about. But I think I would try to separate those two issues, by simply introducing the idea that one vampire's interests and even personality may change over the decades and centuries. One embraced as an art lover my turn into a biker after being dumped by his sire, then go feral in the woodlands for a few years, and return a mystic. This way each clans could include artists, brutes, control freaks and any other character concept. Character would get to pick regular powers in the open list, and one exclusive power that would also define who their ancestor is, which lineage they belong to ad what traditions they're supposed to abide to (at least, when the elders are watching), so as to tie them to the ancient times.