Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

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Post by nockermensch »

Vampires look a lot less like monsters and a lot more like dark-themed superheroes if they can feed safely forever.

The idea of keeping a stable of people you feed from and rotate among them is sane enough to be talked in-character in vampire society. Vampires that like to keep the status-quo should absolutely go for this method and teach it to their children (it needs to work right from character creation).


But this scenario needs two things:

a) the smallest possible feeding from a human can't absolutely be as trivial as blood sampling. If the vampire gets to feel nourished afterwards then at very least the victim should be left with what amounts to mild anemia. The mechanics of the feeding can even be mystical, in that the vampire physically drains just a few ml of blood in a darkly erotic scene, but there has to be an effect afterwards where a part of the victim's blood disappears, or stops working as supposed, or whatever. Being drained by a vampire should feel like being drained for the victims. This much is a given.


b) Feeding is "safe" only if the vampire is in a stable, non-stressful sitution. A wounded, frightened, weakened or otherwise afflicted vampire should absolutely have to roll some kind of willpower test to resist draining all the blood and killing the victim.

Now, this test could (and probably should) be the equivalent of a DC 5 Will Save: A trivial check that the PCs can optimize right at chargen, and that even non-optimized PCs are expected to pass almost all the time after some advancent. But vampires need some real element of danger in their feeding if they are to be rightfully feared.

I don't even mind that PCs who take extra precautions to avoid killing people when feeding just do that and end with a tally of zero fatal feeding accidents. But the "typical vampire" that feeds every night and is occasionally under stress should absolutely kill people sometimes. Tweak the test numbers so that a typical vampire will cause about 2 to 4 deaths per year just from feeding and they're back to being monsters that people don't want living near them.


Finally, "safe feeding" (say, from blood-banks, or from animals, or buying cattle blood from slaughterhouses) should at very least feel horrible to the vampire. Again, I don't mind if PCs who pay for this in chargen can just survive from these methods forever, or if there's a clan whose thing is specifically "we drain animals (or cadavers) and like it!", but the "baseline vampire" should quickly go crazy if they're forced to subsist like this.

TL;DR: For vampires to work in a game with "terror" or "horror" anywhere near the taglines, they need to be a hazard to people.
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Post by hyzmarca »

ArmorClassZero wrote: I'm going to go out on a limb and blame WW for the reason we have Twilight , True Blood, and Vampire Diaries, and all these other female wish-fulfillment books and shows.
You'd be wrong. Vampire was the most popular tabletop RPG of the 90s hands down. But being the most popular tabletop RPG of the decade is to the cultural zeitgeist as being the class president of your middle school is to global geopolitics. At its height Vampire got a watered down Fox series that was canceled after half a season and didn't even carry White Wolf branding. Most people didn't even know what it was. If you were a nerdy high school kid who wanted to bang rebellious fundamentalist girls who thought they were goths, then you might have known about it. Otherwise not.

The real source of the popular sexy vampires is Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. I would blame Anne Rice for writing a damn good book, but without the homoerotic chemistry between Cruise and Pitt, it wouldn't have meant anything long term.

White Wolf was heavily inspired by Interview, not the other way around.


It is no wonder that vampires lost their terror aspect. No wonder WW struggles with selling the whole "horror" angle.
Vampire is all about the "personal horror". Personal horror isn't the scary monster stalking you. It's the slow dawning realization that are are a terrible person and the best thing you can possibly do for the world is to commit suicide. Personal horror ends in either physical death, or in spiritual death. Either you accept that you are a monster and bring yourself to an end, or you accept that you are a monster and choose to be the best monster that you can be. The latter is represented by falling off the Humanity scale and becoming an unplayable NPC.

The problem here is that it's a very different sort of horror. The dawning realization that your friends and family really would be better off if you just killed yourself is the sort of horror that relies on close personal emotional ties. It's about realizing that your grilfriend doesn't really care about you and only stays with you because you give her recreational drugs that she's hopelessly addicted and those drugs are slowly killing her and the only reason that she's so messed up is that you're a selfish ass who strings her along in this abusive parasitic relationship instead of walking away and letting her have an actual life.

It's wish fulfillment for people who don't have enough to feel guilty about.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Vampires with a society complex enough to have political infighting and realistic murder rates are two things that can't coexist, but in this case I actually prefer vampire fiction happening in a bleaker version of Earth where Brazil's murder rate is the baseline and people just accept it (Brazilians just accept it, so it can be done). A world with supernatural monsters simply has to be a lot more violent and hopeless than you first worlders are used to -- A "World of Darkness", if you will.
There are two issues as regards fatalities. The first is the number of vampires a city can have at one time, and the second is just how long a vampire can stay in one place without having things become ridiculous. I submit that if you kill one person per night you would have beaten the record of La Bestia in one fucking year and that is completely ridiculous.

There are just a lot of nights in a year. Three hundred and sixty five. And serial killers of the world tend to top out at around three hundred bodies. And even those people tend to take like a decade of activity to get there. The most prolific serial killer ever was one of the Thuggee dudes, and even he would be eclipsed in just three fucking years if you bumped someone off every night.
It depends on the setting you want. Brazil's murder rate is obviously way too optimistic. But lets say you create a setting where homicide is the leading cause of death for all people. To the point where trauma surgeons are in extremely high demand and geriatric doctors can't find work. I'm talking about a world where everyone lives in the middle of a Tarantino film or a Frank Miller comic and being decapitated by a ninja-prostitute is an objectively more likely cause of death for an overweight middle-aged male than having a heart attack is.

Lets say in this alternate reality the homicide rate is 95,000 per 100,000. That's insanely high. In real life, you don't get that in an actual war zone. But it works for a pulp reality where people are expected solve workplace disputes by pulling out katanas and dueling to the death and where law enforcement amounts to "It's Chinatown."

This, of course, is not the world that White Wolf wants you to play in. This is the world where your PC is almost certainly a True Bruja in Golconda who wears a long coat in order to conceal his magic katana.
It's also possible, perhaps even likely, that you are a 2000 year old Methuselah who was crucified by the Romans for preaching against the religious orthodoxy in Jerusalem. Because why the fuck not. This is the game that White Wolf doesn't want you to play.

Now, of course, having a people being killed by other people rate that is six in a half times higher than what Nagasaki had in 1945 is patently ridiculous and would cause a rapid collapse of civilization. But the idea that corpses could move on their own and consume the blood of the living is no less ridiculous. The premise doesn't have to be plausible, just consistent enough to buy into. It's ultimately no worse than the idea that airplane seats all have built in katana holders, so that passengers have a place to rest their swords during the flight.

Image
A man was arrested for trying to carry nail clippers onto this plane.
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Post by Username17 »

Nockermensch wrote:For vampires to work in a game with "terror" or "horror" anywhere near the taglines, they need to be a hazard to people.
I don't understand this point of view. A person who keeps a plantation of fifty slaves who rapes one of them every night is certainly a hazard to people, even though they presumably don't murder people very often.

Consider the Gothic Horror genre classics. In Frankenstein there are only a couple of deaths and the story takes place over several years. In The Telltale Heart there is one murder. And so on. It's entirely reasonable for there to be murders, but regular or frequent murders is not only implausible, it's not even particularly genre appropriate. Even gore-fest horror like Texas Chainsaw Massacre involves a villain that kills a total of 35 people over his multi-year reign of terror.

Vampires can jolly well get a bonus from murder-feeding. That would be plenty incentive for plenty of murder. There's no reason for murder to be part of their nightly needs.
saithorthepyro wrote:Well, the thing is does a vampire have to feed/kill once a night? Dracula from both the books and movies didn't drink every single night, and times when he mass drank/killed was when he was trying to collect power.
I think it's intuitively obvious that Vampires don't turn to dust after one night of failing to drink blood. Shit happens. You end up lost in the woods or trapped under a fallen mill or whatever.

But I believe that vampires should average drinking every night. With vampires becoming increasingly insane and desperate if they don't get blood nightly.

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Post by saithorthepyro »

That's a good baseline to go with, and it does make sense, but one question I have is do you think murdering as part of feeding should be voluntary or involuntary? Should it be completely up the to the player/vampire, or a willpower check every time they feed, based on how hungry they are and maybe some other factors? Blood drinking is described as addictive in some of the vampire fiction I've read, so it would make sense that vampires always have to deal with being compelled to drink more blood than they need.
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Post by nockermensch »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Nockermensch wrote:For vampires to work in a game with "terror" or "horror" anywhere near the taglines, they need to be a hazard to people.
I don't understand this point of view. A person who keeps a plantation of fifty slaves who rapes one of them every night is certainly a hazard to people, even though they presumably don't murder people very often.
Because the monster that's historically a hazard to people because it drains and violates them is the incubus/succubus. Meanwhile, the vampire is the one that wasted and killed entire families in unnervingly short time spans, even for the bleak standards of the time.

Real Life vampire panics (at least in Europe, not sure about the rest of the world) were always tied to people mysteriously dying so I think that having vampires in fiction without a real and constant threat of people dying around them is a disservice to the original mythos.

I'll give that for game-making and world-building purposes, the death rate around vampires can be toned down a lot, but I really think it's a mistake to dissociate "being a vampire" from "a casual risk of killing people".
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Post by hyzmarca »

One thing that White Wolf did right is recognizing that you want to have villain vampires for your hero vampires to fight. The Sabbat is pretty crap as written, but the basic concept is probably necessary. Having evil vampires who kill people and good vampires who don't is pretty much central to every vampire as protagonist story ever. Including Interview. Twilight got that right, as well.
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Post by DrPraetor »

If it is really important to you, you could have a conceit where, once a vampire feeds from someone, that person is doomed - they will die or turn into a vampire sooner or later, but the vampire can feed off of a single victim for months or years while they degenerate.

Thus vampires have to kill people, and have to feed frequently (whether it's every night or only at the club on weekends notwithstanding), but don't have to kill someone every night.

This isn't my idea - I recall this was a favored conceit back when people vampires = AIDS was clearly the metaphor of the night.
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Post by K »

Its important to remember that this is the World of Darkness. It's pretty fair to assume that a probably a third of the human population should be off the grid and living in abandoned factories and burnt-out cars.

Honestly, the whole vampire conspiracy should just come with a salary in blood from blood banks. It would explain why most vampires listen to the local Prince at all instead of just having their ghouls set his house on fire during the day.
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nockermensch wrote: Because the monster that's historically a hazard to people because it drains and violates them is the incubus/succubus. Meanwhile, the vampire is the one that wasted and killed entire families in unnervingly short time spans, even for the bleak standards of the time.

Real Life vampire panics (at least in Europe, not sure about the rest of the world) were always tied to people mysteriously dying so I think that having vampires in fiction without a real and constant threat of people dying around them is a disservice to the original mythos.

I'll give that for game-making and world-building purposes, the death rate around vampires can be toned down a lot, but I really think it's a mistake to dissociate "being a vampire" from "a casual risk of killing people".
This is 100% false and is at best a D&D Monster Manual inspired misunderstanding of folklore. In the real world, hard lines between monsters never existed until Gary Fucking Gygax wrote a book that had Basilisk and Cockatrice as separate entries with different amounts of hit dice. Vampires, Succubi, Ghosts, and Demons are overlapping terms which are used interchangeably in the source material until people made game mechanics that required them to be defined into specific categories.

The entire reason that Vampire: the Masquerade has all those clans is that the portrayal of Vampires in source material is all over the fucking place. That's not a new thing, it's been going on the entire time. The Vampire Encyclopedia has over 2000 entries and doesn't cover several stories I personally know.

The Vampire is a metaphor for all kinds of different things, and is often a stand-in for multiple things at once. There are Vampire stories whose moral is "If you don't eat all the squash and melons in a timely manner the whole village will get sick." Yes, there are Vampires who come into being and start draining the health of people in town if vine-fruits are allowed to go off before being eaten. There are also Vampire stories about how if you allow tools to become dull and rusty you can become injured. Vampire shovels. Yes, really.

The ones we think of as Vampires specifically are generally stories about Aristocracy (they drain your blood and rule over you and sometimes they steal your womenfolk and the next time you see them they are draining your blood and ruling over you), the dangers of sexuality and intimacy (either disease, exploitation, domestic violence, or the spread of "sin"), the ability of rapists and murderers to pass as normal people, or the spread of disease generally (the inability to cross running water is about hepatitis more than it is about syphilis). But in addition to that being a really big set of stories with different properties ascribed to the Vampires that have them being anything from unthinking monsters to tragic anti-heroes, that's also the tip of the iceberg as far as actual Vampire stories before the modern zeitgeist fixated on a couple of vampire stories from gothic 19th century Gothic Fiction and then started the Gygaxification process in the 1970s.

Even vampires as blood drinking, sword wielding superheroes who fight demons is completely folkloric, because there are some Yugoslavian vampire stories where the vampires are exactly that. Got that? The trench-coat and katana "Vampions" set has historical precedent in Serbian mythology.

To say that Vampires have to be one way or another is to fundamentally misunderstand basically everything about Vampire mythology. The whole Clan system exists because there are a shit tonne of different kinds of Vampires that people might want to play, and they had to create about six hundred kajillion bloodlines because it turns out that they didn't even remotely scratch the surface with the original 7 clans. You could get much better coverage by making the clans less specifically describing one story (or often, as is the case with the Toreador, one character in one story), and you probably don't need to have players be able to play the melon vampires or the rusty ax head vampires. But you are still going to want to allow people to play a bunch of different kinds of Vampires. That's the entire point of the Vampire game.

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Post by OgreBattle »

Where can I find or more about Serbian vampire heroes
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OgreBattle wrote:Where can I find or more about Serbian vampire heroes
My suggestion would be Blade comics or Vampire Hunter D, because both of those play the South Slavic born-vampire monster hunter fairly straight. Neither one is particularly exaggerated from original source material.

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Post by maglag »

FrankTrollman wrote: This is 100% false and is at best a D&D Monster Manual inspired misunderstanding of folklore. In the real world, hard lines between monsters never existed until Gary Fucking Gygax wrote a book that had Basilisk and Cockatrice as separate entries with different amounts of hit dice. Vampires, Succubi, Ghosts, and Demons are overlapping terms which are used interchangeably in the source material until people made game mechanics that required them to be defined into specific categories.
Nitpick, but even in D&D (and most games really) Succubi are just a specific type of demon.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
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Post by Voss »

maglag wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: This is 100% false and is at best a D&D Monster Manual inspired misunderstanding of folklore. In the real world, hard lines between monsters never existed until Gary Fucking Gygax wrote a book that had Basilisk and Cockatrice as separate entries with different amounts of hit dice. Vampires, Succubi, Ghosts, and Demons are overlapping terms which are used interchangeably in the source material until people made game mechanics that required them to be defined into specific categories.
Nitpick, but even in D&D (and most games really) Succubi are just a specific type of demon.
That's his point. Succubi are variously ghosts, witches, night terrors, demons, vampires or almost literally whatever. (lately they've been aliens- seriously look up sleep paralysis and the 'classic' causes assigned to it) By contrast, in D&D everything is neatly classified and (generally) has a strictly defined power set.

In folklore, this is bullshit. Not only for the sheer quantity and various origins of folklore, but what cautionary tale it is being used for (don't go into the woods because you'll fucking die, don't neglect your tools or they'll break and injure you, we think disease works like X, etc, etc)
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Post by nockermensch »

FrankTrollman wrote:In the real world, hard lines between monsters never existed until Gary Fucking Gygax wrote a book that had Basilisk and Cockatrice as separate entries with different amounts of hit dice. Vampires, Succubi, Ghosts, and Demons are overlapping terms which are used interchangeably in the source material until people made game mechanics that required them to be defined into specific categories.
Vampires (like goblins, demons, God and other things that don't exist) readily take on any attributes required for the stories people want to tell. This much is a fact.

ALSO A FACT: Since this discussion is about a game, the vague traits of fantasy beings is a moot point and you cannot escape the Gygaxification. You're right when you say that limiting the vampire role is wrong because vampire watermelons, man. But in a fucking RPG there needs to be some value on assigning the word "vampire" to a character, instead of "witch" or "demon" or "werewolf". And in the moment you as the game designer do that, you're at very fucking least writing a Vampire Traits subheader for them, and this obviously hardens the fucking lines between the monsters.

So in the end, the discussion falls on what it should be written in the Vampire Traits subheader that makes them feel unique and different from other supernatural monsters. I'd go with the Hunger, and I'd make it dangerous and hardcore enough to make sane people fear the fucking vampires.
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ArmorClassZero wrote:Here are a bunch of heretical thoughts about VTM:

What if the characters were metaphorical vampires? I.E. they don't literally drink blood, but their actions are, symbolically, blood drinking, youth stealing, man eating, life taking, etc.?

Lets look at an example:
Dexter Morgan the titular character of the show Dexter (and the books that the show is based on) is a metaphorical vampire. Why? Because he 1) feels a physical / psychological urge to kill people ("the Beast" symbolism); 2) acts on those urges; 3) conceals his actions and "true self" from friends and coworkers; 4) is very much a night owl, does most of his hunting after dark; 5) ambushes his victims (uses stealth and speed), and stabs them in the neck with a tranquilizer (hey, look, "going for the throat" symbolism!); 6) kills them, and racks up 30+ kills over the course of the show, presumably a 6-7 year time span; 7) in the process of "doing his thing" he (!spoilers!) gets most of his close friends and family and loved ones killed, leaving him feeling empty and loathing himself, which causes him to eventually off himself. 8) Except he didn't actually killed himself, he faked his own death so he could start anew, assuming a new identity in a new location (woah, he "died" and "came back to life"! Symbolism!) 9) Bonus!~ He collects the blood of his victims as trophies of his hunt, and frequently talks about his victims in terms of the predator-prey relationship.

If the PCs of Vampire were metaphorical vampires, then the entire "how much blood do they take" / "how many people do they kill" kind of becomes a non-issue.

"But AC0," you say, "if they're not literally drinking blood, then they aren't really vampires!"

Except consider that people IRL LITERALLY drink blood and yet aren't vampiric in the slightest, whilst people like Jeffery Dalmer and Ted Bundy LITERALLY murdered and (in the former's case) ate people, and are rarely (in my experience) referred to as vampires. This goes back to the vampires being metaphorical in first place. Certain behaviors and actions are, by their very nature, 'vampiric' - they take life, steal youth, spiritually drain, corrupt people, etc.

IMO, being a "true" vampire (in the context of VTM as opposed to just a regular shitty person like an abusive father, infanticidal mother, or gang-banger thug, etc) can be defined by 3 things: 1) Immortality; 2) the disciplines / supernatural powers / vampire magic; and 3) a particular set of self-destructive and anti-social behaviors including, but not limited to, the 'Dark Triad': Narcissism, Psychopathy, Machiavellianism. Dexter had all three to some extent, but the story of Dexter is unique in that his adoptive father recognized these, and put a 'code' in place to help Dexter cope, which is to say, gave his killing a direction and a positive(?) outlet (Dexter kills killers and rapists).

When the violent, subversive, devious, or cruel actions of the PCs are, metaphorically, 'blood drinking', then we're left with the other two 'core' vampire traits: immortality and the magic vampire powers. These tie into each other. If the Masquerade is less about "convincing the kine that monsters are not real and literally drinking their blood night to night" because, in some parallel universe, Vampire doesn't require literally drinking blood, then the Masquerade becomes more about "convincing the masses of mortals that there isn't a secret one-world government cabal of immortals ruling over them" i.e. a global conspiracy, then the player characters need / want to use their powers to maintain the Masquerade, resulting in the violent, subversive, devious, cruel actions that make them 'vampires'.
That really sounds like shit. If you told me that we are going to play a game about vampires and then revealed that "vampires" really just means D&D Adventurers and/or bad people, I'd probably get up and leave. Aesthetics absolutely matter and a game about vampires can't exist without vampire aesthetics, except as a post-modern art piece.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Longes wrote:
ArmorClassZero wrote:Here are a bunch of heretical thoughts about VTM:

What if the characters were metaphorical vampires? I.E. they don't literally drink blood, but their actions are, symbolically, blood drinking, youth stealing, man eating, life taking, etc.?

Lets look at an example:
Dexter Morgan the titular character of the show Dexter (and the books that the show is based on) is a metaphorical vampire. Why? Because he 1) feels a physical / psychological urge to kill people ("the Beast" symbolism); 2) acts on those urges; 3) conceals his actions and "true self" from friends and coworkers; 4) is very much a night owl, does most of his hunting after dark; 5) ambushes his victims (uses stealth and speed), and stabs them in the neck with a tranquilizer (hey, look, "going for the throat" symbolism!); 6) kills them, and racks up 30+ kills over the course of the show, presumably a 6-7 year time span; 7) in the process of "doing his thing" he (!spoilers!) gets most of his close friends and family and loved ones killed, leaving him feeling empty and loathing himself, which causes him to eventually off himself. 8) Except he didn't actually killed himself, he faked his own death so he could start anew, assuming a new identity in a new location (woah, he "died" and "came back to life"! Symbolism!) 9) Bonus!~ He collects the blood of his victims as trophies of his hunt, and frequently talks about his victims in terms of the predator-prey relationship.

If the PCs of Vampire were metaphorical vampires, then the entire "how much blood do they take" / "how many people do they kill" kind of becomes a non-issue.

"But AC0," you say, "if they're not literally drinking blood, then they aren't really vampires!"

Except consider that people IRL LITERALLY drink blood and yet aren't vampiric in the slightest, whilst people like Jeffery Dalmer and Ted Bundy LITERALLY murdered and (in the former's case) ate people, and are rarely (in my experience) referred to as vampires. This goes back to the vampires being metaphorical in first place. Certain behaviors and actions are, by their very nature, 'vampiric' - they take life, steal youth, spiritually drain, corrupt people, etc.

IMO, being a "true" vampire (in the context of VTM as opposed to just a regular shitty person like an abusive father, infanticidal mother, or gang-banger thug, etc) can be defined by 3 things: 1) Immortality; 2) the disciplines / supernatural powers / vampire magic; and 3) a particular set of self-destructive and anti-social behaviors including, but not limited to, the 'Dark Triad': Narcissism, Psychopathy, Machiavellianism. Dexter had all three to some extent, but the story of Dexter is unique in that his adoptive father recognized these, and put a 'code' in place to help Dexter cope, which is to say, gave his killing a direction and a positive(?) outlet (Dexter kills killers and rapists).

When the violent, subversive, devious, or cruel actions of the PCs are, metaphorically, 'blood drinking', then we're left with the other two 'core' vampire traits: immortality and the magic vampire powers. These tie into each other. If the Masquerade is less about "convincing the kine that monsters are not real and literally drinking their blood night to night" because, in some parallel universe, Vampire doesn't require literally drinking blood, then the Masquerade becomes more about "convincing the masses of mortals that there isn't a secret one-world government cabal of immortals ruling over them" i.e. a global conspiracy, then the player characters need / want to use their powers to maintain the Masquerade, resulting in the violent, subversive, devious, cruel actions that make them 'vampires'.
That really sounds like shit. If you told me that we are going to play a game about vampires and then revealed that "vampires" really just means D&D Adventurers and/or bad people, I'd probably get up and leave. Aesthetics absolutely matter and a game about vampires can't exist without vampire aesthetics, except as a post-modern art piece.
Indeed the whole idea of a V:tM game is that you're using vampires as a metaphor for serial killers, rapists, abusers, and secret conspirators so that you can lure people in with the aesthetics.
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Post by hyzmarca »

I had actually considered writing a story with heroic government-sponsored vampires working for NASA because certain types of vampire magic make space travel easier, and I was toying with a few different ideas for rules to give us this ecoomically and military necessary but otherwise quite horrible and yet also seductive option that strongly benefits the morally bankrupt and doesn't go much for good people.


It was really based on a three simple premises.
1)Becoming a vampire is not something that can be inflicted upon you. It's something you must willingly and knowing choose.
2)Becoming a vampire requires commuting a horrible and unmitigated crime. Extenuating circumstances and willing victims invalidate the ritual.
3)Continuing to commit horrible crimes makes a vampire stronger. The most moral vampires are also the weakest.


So you've got this kid who grew up watching Star Trek and wants to be Captain Kirk. And when he tries to follow his dream he's told that Uncle Sam wants him to become a vampire. And Uncle Sam wants him to become a vampire because the Russians have vampires and if they don't make vampires then there will be a vampire gap, and they can't be on the wrong side of a vampire gap. And then someone hands him an Atheme and tells him if he wants to be an astronaut he has a stab a virgin to death.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

nockermensch wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:In the real world, hard lines between monsters never existed until Gary Fucking Gygax wrote a book that had Basilisk and Cockatrice as separate entries with different amounts of hit dice. Vampires, Succubi, Ghosts, and Demons are overlapping terms which are used interchangeably in the source material until people made game mechanics that required them to be defined into specific categories.
Vampires (like goblins, demons, God and other things that don't exist) readily take on any attributes required for the stories people want to tell. This much is a fact.

ALSO A FACT: Since this discussion is about a game, the vague traits of fantasy beings is a moot point and you cannot escape the Gygaxification. You're right when you say that limiting the vampire role is wrong because vampire watermelons, man. But in a fucking RPG there needs to be some value on assigning the word "vampire" to a character, instead of "witch" or "demon" or "werewolf". And in the moment you as the game designer do that, you're at very fucking least writing a Vampire Traits subheader for them, and this obviously hardens the fucking lines between the monsters.

So in the end, the discussion falls on what it should be written in the Vampire Traits subheader that makes them feel unique and different from other supernatural monsters. I'd go with the Hunger, and I'd make it dangerous and hardcore enough to make sane people fear the fucking vampires.
Dude, part of the reason Vampire sucks so bad is because they force multiple strains of vampire myth to kowtow to the same concept of "personal horror" you seem to be stuck on. I get you're a White Wolf Stan, but this is a thread about how the flagship game fails, so "we should do X because that's what White Wolf did" is a patently absurd position.

If you want Gygaxification, there are hundreds upon hundreds of ways to classify the Gygaxian archetypes, which is the point. If you want hunger to be a theme, it doesn't have to be in a way that violates suspension of belief because (one would hope) that with time and medical professional advice, we could strive to not be as dumb as early WW writers. If it is a fact that the beings can be adapted to the story, why are you stuck on story inputs we know produce bad outputs?

Personally, not having to kill someone to feed, but doing it anyway for the rush or for brief vertical power advancement is more monstrous than having to kill every night. Humans kill animals for food and since we haven't committed mass suicide, it's sublimated as a necessary act. But motherfuckers who kill animals for fun, especially as kids, are flagged as psychos.
Last edited by Mask_De_H on Mon Jan 15, 2018 6:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
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Post by Username17 »

nockermensch wrote: So in the end, the discussion falls on what it should be written in the Vampire Traits subheader that makes them feel unique and different from other supernatural monsters. I'd go with the Hunger, and I'd make it dangerous and hardcore enough to make sane people fear the fucking vampires.
The whole point of Vampire: The Masquerade was that everyone played a different sort of vampire. One of the key problems with Masquerade was that the vampire types on offer weren't different enough. Yeah, you probably want them to all have a few traits in common so they are all recognizable as vampires in that particular story. But you're still going to want to leave open some pretty big differences.
Image
Penanggalan are vampires. They dismember themselves and have their viscera fly around.

Image
Tlahuelpuchi are also vampires, but they rip their legs off in order to transform into turkeys.

Image
Vetala are another kind of vampire that is a gas that jumps into corpses in order to fly them around and eat blood before jumping out and taking a different body.
So yeah, the Dotmeister was on the right track when he noticed that some people wanted to play the vampires from Lost Boys and some people wanted to play the vampires from Interview With The Vampire and made Brujah and Toreador to cover those two things. But he didn't go far enough with this line of reasoning in two key ways.
  • People who want to play as the Lost Boys vampires want to actually fucking play as the Lost Boys vampires. Flight. Illusions. Really cool jackets. That oily saxophone player. The whole fucking package. Not a paragraph rant about attitude and "slightly enhanced strength" or some shit.
  • People also want to play the Dryder vampires from Journey to the West, or the Batwinged vampires from Dark Stalkers.Or the Serpent vampires from Lair of the White Worm. Or Breathstealing Vampires or fucking whatever.
And getting your panties in a knot about how you have some specific red line about what vampires have to mean to you particularly is completely missing the entire point. By about as far as it's possible to miss the point. I don't give a shit about what kind of vampires you want to play. The importance is how many different kinds of vampires you can work into the setting in such a manner that the world doesn't explode and different players who have different kinds of vampires that appeal to them can play the same game.

-Username17
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Post by RobbyPants »

FrankTrollman wrote:... or the spread of disease generally (the inability to cross running water is about hepatitis more than it is about syphilis)...
Side note, but what's the tie-in with not crossing water and hepatitis?
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Post by nockermensch »

>----point----->


Your Heads



I chimed in originally because the suggestion that vampires drinking blood could be something as harmless to the victim as taking blood-samples. I wasn't thinking about non-eastern-european vampires when I wrote that and it doesn't even matter because I'm pretty sure nobody started to look for the Penanggalan because they awoke feeling kind of sad, but because there were enough stillbirths in the village to freak out people who were already used to pre-modern infant mortality rates. Likewise, reading this gets us "The typical sign that a victim was killed by the tlahuelpuchi are bruises on their upper body. The Tlahuelpuchi largely feeds on children, though it can kill others."

The point stands: "Vampires" (both the creatures with names etymologically linked to the word "vampire" and every other bogeyman that made people stop and deduce "oh, these are the local vampire beliefs") were originally feared because they killed people fucking dead by draining them (because they were supernatural explanations for diseases or for Elizabeth fucking Bathory). If some time later storytellers used the existing folklore to weave kickass monster-mash tales with swashbuckling dhampirs, or if even later romantic authors used vampires for the dark erotic / decadent nobility undertones is secondary. Or at least should be secondary, because if you take the inherent risk to people out of a vampire, you're let with with a superhero. Which, again, is actually fine if you're running an action game. (See Table A, below)


Also, I'm not a "White Wolf Stan". I played some OWoD back when Nirvana and Pearl Jam were popular, then went to play mostly AD&D. My group ignored NWoD, and sorting the OWoD games we played by time spent on them gives the following order: Mage > D&DWerewolf> Changeling > Vampire > Wraith (1 game, and my character was Beetlejuice)

So, I don't have a stake in WW vampires and I don't particularly want to play them, and yet it irks me when you want to sanitize a folkloric monster to a degree that it stops being a monster and it becomes some kind of awesome transhuman creature. In a horror game.

Finally, here's a helpful table to hopefully settle this issue:
Vampires risk killing people when feedingGame
Genre
Jimmies
YESNOT HORRORnot rustled
NONOT HORRORnot rustled
YESHORRORnot rustled
NOHORRORrustled

Table A: Incidence of rustled jimmies regarding vampires in RPGs (sample size: 1)
@ @ Nockermensch
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Post by Username17 »

K wrote:Its important to remember that this is the World of Darkness. It's pretty fair to assume that a probably a third of the human population should be off the grid and living in abandoned factories and burnt-out cars.

Honestly, the whole vampire conspiracy should just come with a salary in blood from blood banks. It would explain why most vampires listen to the local Prince at all instead of just having their ghouls set his house on fire during the day.
The degree to which the world is horrible is highly variable in World of Darkness products. The core problem is that the entire reason we are using "basically Earth" in the first place is because of easy buy-in and easy world building. Which is another way of saying that we are doing things low fantasy because the alternative is having to do a lot of work in world building and requiring players to read a lot of shit before they can play the game.

Or to put it another way, unless otherwise specified, all facts about the world default to "present day, present time, Ah ha ha." Which means that any changes to the world have to have a concrete narrative-advancing justification and be relatively self contained such that they don't unduly shit all over peoples' understanding of the world while reading about other stuff. Or to put it another another way, that thing they did in Niughtlife where part of New York has subsided into an alien worm kingdom and another section of the city is called the "Dead Light District" because it's been walled off because it's full of zombies is fucking insane and completely undoes all the advantages of using New York as a setting in the first place.

Image
You heard me. Alien worm kingdom.

I mean, yes you could have a world where death and mayhem were a constant drumbeat of life like heavy rain on a metal roof. And that would excuse players being able to chalk up extremely ridiculous kill counts without that being out of the ordinary. But the cost would be that this world would look very little like the world we live in and you wouldn't be able to meaningfully use area knowledge or Wikipedia pages in lieu of setting books. Your entire game would basically be taking place in Eberron rather than Oregon, and you'd have to fill in maps and city descriptions accordingly.

But honestly, you don't really have to go that far. You can trim down the background murder rate to something vaguely plausible and fit it into a world that has only slightly more violent death than ours does. In the real world, seven percent of people in the United States will ultimately die of some form of injury (mostly falls and car crashes). That's 472 injury-related deaths every day, of which 44 are murders and 93 are gun deaths (most gun deaths are accidents or suicides rather than muders). You could imagine a world where 8% of deaths in the US were injury deaths and that extra 1% was all stabbings, shootings, and bear attacks. That extra 67 violent deaths per day could be swallowed by the statistics and honestly most people in America believe that they live in a world like that anyway. The fact that murder accounts for less than two thirds of one percent of the deaths in the United States is something that people find genuinely surprising.

However, while you could have 67 supernatural related murders every day in the US and have the statistics swallow that and have a still reasonably recognizable Earth, that still doesn't leave room for vampires that kill a dude every day. The 67th largest city in the US is apparently Henderson, Nevada, and it has nearly three hundred thousand people in it. If you have one vampire in every city with more than 290,000 people in it, that's your whole allotment of magic murders, and that's obviously way too few vampires to have a meaningful vampire society.

67 supernatural murders every day is plenty of room to have supernatural gang wars and the occasional supernatural serial killer and a few zombie outbreak mass casualty incidents. It is, in short, enough to have something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the 13th getting resolved in two places around the country every day. But it's nowhere close to being able to support vampires who have to eat humans on any regular basis.
Robby wrote:Side note, but what's the tie-in with not crossing water and hepatitis?
In the days before water treatment, any stagnant water had fecal contamination in it. No exceptions. On the other hand, running water probably did not. So if you drank from the lake you were going to get E Coli and Hep A if you were lucky. And if you drank from a spring or stream you were probably OK.

Hence vampires who represent contagion can't cross running water. They would probably also vanish if you boiled them.

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