Vampions

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Tue May 17, 2016 11:38 pm

So, as someone who missed the heyday of V:tM, I'd like some explanation of the Vampions meme/playstyle. As far as I've heard, it was playing Vampire as a brooding action thriller and was considered badwrongfun even though the books backed it up?

Would a game that embraced that playstyle be something sussessful not that it's not the 90s anymore? What would you need to do to capture and improve said playstyle?

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Wed May 18, 2016 12:30 am

You'd need a combat system that was actually tuned towards the idea of supervamps whoopin' and a whoppin' on each other (and on werewolves, mumias, nuckelavees, Methodists..)

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Wed May 18, 2016 2:29 am

Vampions basically meant playing Underworld (the first movie) as a game.

The actual books, insofar as they coherently backed up anything, didn't really support it, because a single serious action sequence worth of violence could potentially depopulate an entire city of vampires and because none of the superpowers available to PCs actually made a character able to take on a biker gang - but the mind control powers made it very easy to acquire a biker gang (or a SWAT team, or in the absence of Technocratic interference an armored division) to do your bidding.

I do think the playstyle has a viable niche today. Vampions are operating in the same power level and thematic space as Daredevil and the Punisher are while running around Netflix.

What you need is a combat system for low-level superheroics, a viable excuse for your masquerade to work in the context of a world infested by blood-sucking ninja hordes (because that's what your vampions population becomes), and you need to avoid dropping in a whole other power suite that totally ganks the low-level superheroic combat you're trying to support.

It could totally work, but you'd need to build it essentially from scratch, trying to incorporate stuff from the oWoD doesn't help.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Wed May 18, 2016 4:01 am

That's a pity, because I'd totally want to play a vampire vigilante.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed May 18, 2016 5:57 am

Mechalic wrote:
It could totally work, but you'd need to build it essentially from scratch, trying to incorporate stuff from the oWoD doesn't help.

I see it as a heavy hack of Feng Shui.

You have various flavors of the following archetypes:
* Vampire (Old World Nobility, Teenage Rebel, Forever a Child, Souless Ginger, Daywalker with a Katana)
* Werewolf ( or bear or panther)
* Mystery Man (masked avenger, six gun mojo, street shaman, mystic fist)
* Men in Black Agent (Mulder-esque magic cop, Bond-esque spy)
* Steve (you select like a half dozen critter powers and call yourself a Gargoyle or a Succubus or a Golem )

Where you showcase creature powers, but also have a bunch of schticks for guns, fists, and sorcerous divinations.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Wed May 18, 2016 11:45 am

I ran a con game of Feng Shui once which was almost exactly that - a high-action parody of various overwrought Vampire tropes. It was called Dracula Must Die (which was also the plot -kill Dracula before he Takes Over The World!) and it opened with a fight against a small army of ninja vampires in a Hong Kong penthouse. Only thing I really had to hack was to make the starting characters myself rather than using the archetypes straight (and even then most of them didn't need a lot of modification). Good times.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu May 19, 2016 5:21 am

Josh_Kablack wrote:
Mechalic wrote:
It could totally work, but you'd need to build it essentially from scratch, trying to incorporate stuff from the oWoD doesn't help.
I see it as a heavy hack of Feng Shui.

You have various flavors of the following archetypes:
* Vampire (Old World Nobility, Teenage Rebel, Forever a Child, Souless Ginger, Daywalker with a Katana)
* Werewolf ( or bear or panther)
* Mystery Man (masked avenger, six gun mojo, street shaman, mystic fist)
* Men in Black Agent (Mulder-esque magic cop, Bond-esque spy)
* Steve (you select like a half dozen critter powers and call yourself a Gargoyle or a Succubus or a Golem )

Where you showcase creature powers, but also have a bunch of schticks for guns, fists, and sorcerous divinations.

I forgot Feng Shui 2 came out and reread your drunken Preview for it: you talk about the RNG being tight and AVs being all over the place; a heavy hack would bring those in line, right? So each archetype would be decent at Ranged/Melee/Magic/Monstrosity, with masters in one being one up on the average (at the expense of something else) and the hybrids being average or one below average at two things?

Would creature features just be core/splat specific shticks? Also, would you just use broad archetypes and let people customize them or use a bunch of narrow-ish classes?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 19, 2016 5:32 am

Most of Feng Shui is the character archetypes. The core rules and setting are quite light. Other than bad editing, it's hard to understand how FS2 got so long.

-Username17

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu May 19, 2016 6:05 am

How heavy a hack depends on my motivation level and time availability at the time I wrote it.

Given a year or three and real incentives, I would end up with a whole new system that is kinda to Feng Shui what After Sundown is to Shadowrun. But seeing as I never even actually finished ranting about the final chapters in p/review, such seems unlikely.

Given something that I might actually complete, I'd just use Feng Shui 2 with the most obvious of the obvious stupid cut out and limiting players to a custom list of Archetypes that used the {Big Bruiser, Bounty Hunter, Drifter, Ex-Special Forces, Exorcist Monk, Ghost, Magic Cop, Masked Avenger, Maverick Cop, Ninja, Supernatural Creature } as is and then added a handful of additional flavorful Vampire (Old World Noble, Rebel without a Pause, Immortal Child, Daywalker with Katana) and Lycanthrope ( Lon Cheney, Team Jacob, Beorn) archetypes which would be a lot like pre-picked Supernatural Creatures with slightly tweaked stats (and possibly pulling in Mutant and Tranimal Schticks) and a nod or two towards the most common vulnerabilities of the types.

Feng Shui brings the following things to the table for running Vampire Vigilantes:

1. Just Barely Superhuman power level. The typical PC can take a hordes of unnammed mooks and pull stunts like leaping from one speeding car into another speeding car. Yet no PC is going to be juggling tanks and anyone can go down to standard weapons wielded by skilled opponents or even just to enough lucky shots from mooks.

2. A system where critter powahs, sorcery, guns and wild martial arts are all expected to interact with each other and have rules to back them up. As my rant in the other thread shows, those rules are not always good, but you have them and the resource schedules are fairly uniform. None of the OWoD stuff where each type of supernatural has a different type of power and nothing is actually compatible and you have to mind caulk in the parts where different splats interact.

3. A game with combat-centered plotting, where solving problems through violence is expected and the MC advice in the book includes having options for how the PCs progress after each loss.

Feng Shui has the following limitations for the Vampire Vigilantes Genre:

1. It's really not vampire centric. It's not even focused on magic or supernatural creatures. Even if you write up four new all different Vampire archetypes plus a number of Werewhats, you still are going to end up having a substantial portion of the PCs be non-vampiric butt kickers.

2. There is no expectation nor mechanics for any sort of Masquerade. You need to invent one wholecloth.

3. No angst. The game cannot work with anything like a Humanity stat, I personally see such as a bonus, but many fans of WoD miss the moping.

4. No real investigative minigame. If your vigilantes have to investigate crimes instead of just punching them, they will be rolling some dice, justifying arbitrary skills and the MC is making up the clues they find on the fly. To be fair, this complaint would stand for the vast majority of RPGs systems.

5. The chase rules are broken as all get out. If your vigilantes have to run down a fleeing perp, things get wonky fast. Again, far from a unique complaint.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu May 19, 2016 7:14 am

Couldn't you thread the "mostly human asskicker" needle by just swapping out shticks with specific supernatural creature shticks if the vampire/werewolf player wants to? Also, isn't White Wolf angst essentially melodrama, which could be dealt with via the Melodramatic Hook and a variant on buy-in?

The Masquerade being a thing can be handwaived either with Factions doing the cover ups or (if you wanted to divorce from V:tM) a True Blood recent Masquerade break.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat May 21, 2016 7:35 pm

Mask_De_H wrote:Couldn't you thread the "mostly human asskicker" needle by just swapping out shticks with specific supernatural creature shticks if the vampire/werewolf player wants to?

I'm having trouble parsing this, but either the answer is

"Yes, that's what I was trying to suggest - you totally could say that the Big Bruiser gets his Strength and Toughness due to having been unknowingly infused with Werewolf blood and suchlike"

or

"My prior point was that unlike V:tM you are not going to be able to assume a party of { Vampire (buff), Vampire (artsy), Vampire(crazy), Vampire (magical), That One Guy (trying to import another Splat } and are going to have a party more like { Vampire, Werewolf, Dirty Harry, The Shadow, Fox Mulder, and Steve from the Black Lagoon }. This difference in party composition isn't necessarily a problem, but it does limit how much *vampire* you have in your "vampire vigilantes" campaign.

Also, isn't White Wolf angst essentially melodrama, which could be dealt with via the Melodramatic Hook and a variant on buy-in?

Yes and no.

There certainly is overlap, but they are not entirely the same thing. It's easier for Melodrama to veer into Camp or all the way to Comedy and end up striking tones which are in opposition to much of the assumed oWoD angst. Personally I like games with more lighthearted tones, so I see this as a feature -- but I have gamed with those who would feel that such levity is ruining the gothiness they need in their vampire game.

The Masquerade being a thing can be handwaived either with Factions doing the cover ups or (if you wanted to divorce from V:tM) a True Blood recent Masquerade break.

Definitely. My point is that when writing up this game, you need to write up the specific handwavium for your Masquerade set up - because PCs have free will and will want to interact with it.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun May 22, 2016 4:28 pm

Yeah, Vampire has this problem where the single biggest literary influence is Anne Rice style melodrama but the single biggest aesthetic influence is the goth/post punk music scene. I don't even know what to do with the idea of a completely earnest Andrew Eldritch. The music video for "Dominion" looks like some kind of Assamite recruitment video but that's because we're talking about someone whose factory settings default to "camp."

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Mon May 23, 2016 10:28 pm

Josh, what I was trying to say was you'd use the standard archetypes in FS2, but open up the ability to bolt on a supernatural template by swapping some of the original Shtick Picks for specific supernatural ones.

So in your second example, my version of the party would be Pure Vampire, Pure Werewolf, Vampire Dirty Harry, Harry Dresden, A Ratfolk Ninja from Kamigawa block and Steve from the Black Lagoon.

On angst and camp, I feel that a jaded, ironic sense of humor would allow for the mopey motherfuckers to get their brood on, while still playing with the assumptions of the setting as a (cruel) joke. Worst comes to worst, you could always port in Nature/Demeanor.