Anatomy of Failed Design
Vampire: the Masquerade
Grek wrote:Someone explain to me what stops a vampire from just eating a non-cooperative animal.
That's a good time to lead in to the Humanity discussion. Short answer is that you aren't going to be feeding from resisting
anything. Animal blood is worth less than human blood by some inconsistent amount, so you
really can't get ahead in feeding if you have to spend any blood on your powers. Further, drinking from resisting
anything basically makes you unplayable...
Humanity
Vampire: the Masquerade had a major theme of moral degeneration. The beast within you struggled to make you lose control, and with every loss of control you risked becoming less human in a permanent fashion. Also a
visible fashion if you were a Gangrel, which was yet another reason that clan was essentially unplayable. Now it's importantly true that moping about how being a vampire is slowly turning you into an inhuman monster and you have to do whatever you can to hold on to what humanity you have left is certainly
in genre, but the way Masquerade handled it was a dumpster fire. Pretty much everyone just went out and ignored most or all of it because it was unplayable.
First of all, what Humanity
did was go down. And when it went down, it penalized you in a couple of ways. There was a vague admonition that you were just generally less life like in appearance and attitude, which goes back to the issue that the writers couldn't decide whether they were writing about sexy vampires or scary vampires. And you got saddled with “more crazy” which was bad because the game handled crazy poorly (more on that later). And your Humanity was an absolute cap on all your dicepools during the day (wether you were in the sun or not), which didn't work even a little bit for much the same reason that SR5 Limits are horseshit. But the big issues were that with a lower Humanity you spent longer in torpor and woke later each evening. That's right, having a lower Humanity took you out of the game for various amounts of time.
In Chicago in June, the night between civil twilights of evening and morning is 8 and a half hours long. That's not a lot of time to wake up, dress up, meet up with the other characters, go do some adventuring, and then go home to a light tight secure facility. If you take extra time off that for having a Humanity less than 10 (all characters have a Humanity less than 10), there's basically no game. Having a low Humanity costs you an hour or two every night! And the torpor time is basically the amount of time you are out of the game whenever you get dropped in combat. At Humanity 5, that is a
fucking year. A character being out of action
for a year in an RPG is basically the end of the campaign. What. The. Fuck?
Meanwhile, what you actually lose Humanity for is... pretty much anything? The lower your Humanity gets, the less things there are for the Storyteller to force degeneration checks on you. But while the higher ends of Humanity might ding you for esoterica like “selfish thoughts,” you can still lose Humanity when your Humanity is 5 (which we'll recall is already below the playability cutoff) for “intentional property damage.” And you can lose Humanity at 4 or above for doing bad things
while frenzied. Yes, the game can penalize you for the “moral failure” of having the Storyteller take control of your character and do something bad. Wrap your mind around that. In any case, it's very difficult to feed using these rules. Humanity for normals is generally 7, but you can degenerate at Humanity 7 if you take something that belongs to someone else (like, say,
feeding at all). It's unclear if there is
any Humanity you can have where feeding from an unwilling target won't cause degeneration. Better hope you got that mind control ready (and hope that your Storyteller agrees with the interpretation that mind controlling a victim into wanting you to feed from them doesn't count as violating them).
It makes me weirdly happy that if you image search “low humanity” you get page after page of women in jeans and belly shirts.
But the bottom line is that Humanity is something that the players are encouraged to downplay as much as possible. There is no advantage to playing up your humanity or interacting with it in any way. It's a
negative incentive. Bringing up your humanity in any way is just an opportunity for the Storyteller to decide that something you did counts as an “accidental violation” (whatever the fuck that means to your storyteller). Quite aside from the fact that the entire hierarchy of sins is crazy bullshit and the mechanical effects of losing Humanity are incompatible with playing the game, the underlying concept of how the subsystem works is the opposite of a roleplaying prompt. It's a periodic penalty for roleplaying your character. The exact opposite of what you'd want in a cooperative storytelling game. All incentives should be to encourage players to interact with the story. Passivity incentives are the bane of roleplaying, and in Vampire: the Masquerade, they got one front and center.
Madness!
Sigh. Vampire: the Masquerade has a very 1980s set of madness mechanics. You have specific named insanities and you got bonus points to spend on other stuff for writing them down. As you can probably imagine, the treatment of mental illness is neither particularly playable nor particularly politically correct. Crazy people in Masquerade are played up for comedy quite a bit, and then various authors throw temper tantrums because funny crazy people are ruining the mood.
It's bad in pretty much every way it's possible to be bad. Kinda like Call of Cthulhu, and my complaints are very similar. You acquire new dementations during play because you degenerate, so like maybe you kill a dude while frenzied and now you're... afraid of fish? I don't know.
But the real bottom line here is that insanity is supposed to be mostly a roleplaying prompt, but there's not a lot of reason to interact with it. Especially for Malkavians, whose insanity isn't even worth any points or anything. They write claustrophobia or some damn thing on their character sheet, and then there's not really any incentive for the player to bring that up ever again.
What it ends up being used for is as mental domination insurance. Because mind control gets thrown around heavy and often, players end up having to follow orders against their will kind of a lot. So character insanity serves as a source of excuses to willfully misinterpret orders. Which just makes the insane more frustrating to deal with. Because not only are they being Fishmalks and just generally disruptive, they are
also performing mental gymnastics to explain how their character's masochism lets them attack people who have mind controlled them or some damn thing. So it's not just that the characters are performing actions that are disruptive of the mood, the
players are getting into arguments about the meaning of the word “is” in light of non-standard epistemology that hold up the
game itself.
I actually think there's room for crazy in stories about vampires. Fuck, Renfield is the prototypical Ghoul character, and he was
nuts. But I can't really think of a way that Masquerade interacted with mental illness that wasn't bad for the game and also kind of offensive.
Five Dots!
There are five dots!
Disciplines in Vampire: the Masquerade were all divided into five sequential abilities. Now, you can divide
anything into five distinct stages. I could list five waypoints on my way to the grocery store and I could list five waypoints on my way to San Francisco. One of them would be waypoints measured in meters and the other measured in
thousands of miles, but divided into fifths both journeys would be. And that's basically where we stand with the progressions of Masquerade disciplines.
The concept was to divide up all the Draculesque stuff into a category, and with five dots in that category you get to be Dracula. At least, in that category. However, as should be fucking obvious to absolutely everyone, Dracula's different powers are not equally important. Different depictions of Dracula leave out a whole lot of that stuff. Basically, he clouds people's minds and that's awesome, and then also in various other depictions he also does other stuff. So a lot of the disciplines are weak powers or powers that are less crucial to the vampire concept, and those are divided into five parts too.
Dracula will hypnotize your bitches!
And things got... weirder with the grab bag disciplines. Protean is the discipline of transforming yourself, and it's just five transformations in a completely arbitrary order. You get glowing red eyes (a reference to a line in Dracula), you get claws, you get to morph into the dirt (an Anne Rice thing IIRC), you get to turn into a bat (a movieverse thing), and you get to turn into mist. Obviously, some of those don't belong for most vampire depictions. While many specific vampires did several of those things, I can't think of any vampires who did
all of those things. But because of the dot system, if you want to turn into mist like Dracula in Buffy, you have to do all four of the other things even though he pretty blatantly doesn't do several of them.
The five dot system failed coming and going. It failed to create balanced characters or powers in the sense that there's absolutely no editorial concept of what a 3rd dot worth of power
means. And it failed to create the kind of customized vampires that “our vampires are different” thinking demands. Every vampire was on rails for the powers they were getting, which really doesn't fit the “multiple vampire lore sources” feel of the rest of the game.
It also left relatively little room for expansion. What if you had a transformation that you wanted to add based on a vampire movie you saw or comic book you read? Well,
tough fucking shit. Because the five dots of Protean were already “full.” This meant that people had to come up with extremely clumsy shit like Devotions and Variant Disciplines and shit to fit in stuff that should be very easy – vampires with slightly different powers.
What this comes down to is that disciplines shouldn't be linear, the powers you get at different levels should be roughly balanced against one another
at those levels, and you should be able to buy different powers at different levels. Two or three levels seems basically fine because there has never been a coherent idea of what it would mean for a power to be level 4 instead of level 5 or level level 2 instead of level 3. The granularity simply isn't there.
Koumei wrote:I don't deal in funny British measurements or know much about male workings, how many cocks would you have to suck to get a tenth of a pint and thus enough for one Blood Trait?
A pint is 454 ml. A man's ejaculate is generally 5 ml or less. So you'd have to suck about ten to twenty cocks to get one deci-pint of semen. Less if you find people who produce copious porn star quantities of semen.
maglag wrote:But in the modern world, millions of people go missing every year.
This is off by three orders of magnitude. In the modern world there are millions of missing persons cases filed, but the vast majority are resolved within 48 hours. In the United States there are more than half a million missing persons cases filed, but only about 2000 missing persons cases per year that aren't quickly resolved. At any given time there are about 90,000 missing people in the US, which includes a rolling count of about 5000 people who are missing today but are going to be found within the next day or two. There's room for a few successful serial killers or Cleveland slavers or whatever, but at one person a week, it would take less than 40 of them to account for every unsolved missing person case in the United States for the last fifty years. That's totally unworkable.