V5's Failure isn't surprising

[Username17]

So Vampire 5th Edition sputtered and died. And it's obviously very tempting to blame the astoundingly poor judgement of going all edge-lordy in discussing Neo-Nazis and child rape, or in the very poor human resources decisions that were made that involved people who had been tied to online harassment or overt support for hardline racist groups being given prominent writing gigs. Those were bad things of course, and certainly did not help matters anywhere, but by the time anyone really noticed, V5 had already been released with a whimper and a fizzle.

The first and most obvious signal that V5 was going nowhere was the decision to "deboot" the New World of Darkness in the first place. The fact that Masquerade was in need of a reboot was pretty much universally acknowledged by fans before the Time of Judgement books even came out. And while we all realize that the Requiem Reboot was bad, that doesn't in any way alter the fact that a reboot was and is still needed. The Andrew Garfield Spiderman reboot was hot garbage, but the correct choice was to try again with a new reboot, not to try to undo the reboot and wallow in nostalgia for the Sam Raimi movies. Once a reboot is needed, it's still needed even if you fuck a reboot up.

The next signal that they had no idea what they were doing was the declaration that they were rereleasing Werewolf and Mage. Now obviously those properties are bad, but they also present a fundamental lack of focus. The Gangrel and Tremere are in the original setting for players who'd rather be playing a Werewolf or Wizard respectively, which means that the makeup of necessary or even justifiable Vampire archetypes changes dramatically if also have non-Vampire playables in your game.

It isn't that you can't make a game with monster characters of non-Vampire types. I would say that it's perfectly reasonable as a goal to do "Blade" where all the supernatural characters are some flavor of Vampire, but it's also reasonable to do "Underworld" where there are both Vampires and Werewolves; and it's even reasonable to do "Nightwatch" where there are a load of different supernatural creatures that are collectively known as Others. But the archetype coverage can and should be done differently depending on which of those you are doing: like in True Blood you don't need Vampires who change into wolves if you're going to have Werewolves who do that.

So it was clear even before launch that not only were they not doing the reboot the setting desperately required, but that they hadn't done any thought whatsoever as to what parts of the setting "worked" or not in any context. V5 was a structural, financial, and artistic failure, but no one was actually surprised by this fact. How could it have been anything else?

-Username17

[Username17]

In Shadowrun, you play shadowrunners, and you go on shadowruns. In Dungeon's & Dragons, you play adventurers, and you go on adventures. In Call of Cthulhu, you play investigators, and you go on investigations. In Masquerade, you play vampires, and you... go on vampires?

There is a fundamental lack of purpose to a Masquerade coterie. Other than living to see the moon rise tomorrow night, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason for the player characters to be motivated to do or not do any particular thing. A plot hook like "there's rumors of something weird going on at the old mill" would easily get a Call of Cthulhu investigator or a Dungeons & Dragons adventurer to go check it out, but why should a Vampire in Masquerade go there? Why should they interact with it in any way?

This is not a difficult problem to solve. Many RPGs have managed to sell the basic character as one who interacts with the plot by default. Hell, the first RPG had this problem licked before we even understood that it existed as a problem to be solved. The player characters could have trouble shooting as a job (like Paranoia), or there could be some demonic or ancient vampire over-villain that the player characters are tasked with investigating and combatting.

But the fact that the Swedish edgelords who got the IP didn't think it was worth even talking about solving this very fundamental problem meant that they obviously weren't going to. And then why should anyone give a shit?

-Username17

[Username17]

What roles are supposed to exist in Masquerade? I don't mean "art wank or leather jacket wearing rebel" I mean what structural roles? From the standpoint of either the omniscient writer or the standpoint of the in-game coterie, these roles are undefined and largely unaddressed.

For all its pretensions of being a "storyteller" game, none of the World of Darkness stuff has ever particularly dipped its toes into literary theory. Characters are not defined in terms of Campbellian archetypes or stock characters of stage and screen. Nor are characters given any particular direction or ability to contribute to the group goals. Partially because as previously noted those group goals are undefined, but also because the means by which the player characters are expected to work together to accomplish any goals has been left as an exercise for the reader. And it's nearly thirty years later and that shit isn't remotely acceptable.

-Username17

[FatR]

Eh, those all are secondary problems. Deciding what character types you need and how you're intending to structure the typical game session come after you decide what your game is supposed to be about. Or at least they're supposed to, in practice, insofar as I can see, a lot of RPG writers just start writing rules without setting any high-level goals for themselves, with predictably dismal results.

And there is a big problem with deciding what Vampire is about: Vampire/WoD, like many things nowadays, is stuck in a self-referential loop. This is particularly detrimental for relatively minor properties like a TTRPG product line, which generally must piggyback on some bigger segment of the pop culture. VtM, back in the day, was primarily Anne Rice's Vampires: The RPG, before anything else.

The thing is, to remain relevant it needed to become Twilight Vampires: The RPG more than a decade ago. And maybe something else's Vampires by now, don't know. It even already had most things needed for that, to my knowledge your typical long-running VtM LARP was all about relationship drama anyway, they just needed to replace the thinly-veiled substitutes for incest and rape with actual vampire sex and sparkle up their vampire archetypes.

But they didn't. The property owners have kept and still keep acting as if ther property was a big deal in itself. Which is not true, and is not going to become true unless Bloodlines 2 become super successful and suddenly make their obscure franchise world-famous, like Witcher games did (doubt).

[Guts]

In Shadowrun, you play shadowrunners, and you go on shadowruns. In Dungeon's & Dragons, you play adventurers, and you go on adventures. In Call of Cthulhu, you play investigators, and you go on investigations. In Masquerade, you play vampires, and you...

...feed on the prey, fight fellow predators, and hide from the general populace?

Never saw that premise as particularly hard to grasp, personally. The problem was the lack of structure/tools to make that into a clear game, at least in older editions. The books never decided if the intended mode of play was to follow the "GM railroad-chronicle of the month", or letting the PCs loose in some city "by night" or something else entirely and thus players ended up making it Shadowrun but with Mr. Johnson as the Prince and evil Corps the Sabbat. Fight!

I've read that 5e edition improved on that somehow, but by much, or if at all, I don't really know.

[shinimasu]

Vampire's biggest failing was not letting the players start as princes. Giving ownership of the city from the start solves all engagement problems. Why should you investigate the weird rumors about the old mill? Because it's your city and if something is about to blow your sweet gig you want to stop it. Why do you care about politics? Because it's your city and no upstarts are going to unseat you if you have anything to say about it.

There's also the fact that a game about being the people who run the conspiracy is a lot more fun and a lot more interesting than being the mooks who just have to participate. Your exp going towards city management perks would be an interesting mechanic.

[Guts]

Vampire's biggest failing was not letting the players start as princes. Giving ownership of the city from the start solves all engagement problems. Why should you investigate the weird rumors about the old mill? Because it's your city and if something is about to blow your sweet gig you want to stop it. Why do you care about politics? Because it's your city and no upstarts are going to unseat you if you have anything to say about it.

There's also the fact that a game about being the people who run the conspiracy is a lot more fun and a lot more interesting than being the mooks who just have to participate. Your exp going towards city management perks would be an interesting mechanic.

Makes sense. Undying (a vampire-themed PbtA) goes in that direction, giving each PC a "Hunting Ground" to manage & upgrade, and an explicit "Status" ladder to climb (up to Princeps). But then the game is all about politics & scheming, dropping other goals (like personal horror) entirely. Maybe the problem of VtM is wanting to be so many things at the same time.

[shinimasu]

VTM wanted to be about politics and scheming but it never had the mechanics to support that. 13th gen vampires were too weak to meaningfully influence anything. There's always a bigger dick NPC waiting in the wings to slap you for getting too uppity.

[Thaluikhain]

There is a fundamental lack of purpose to a Masquerade coterie. Other than living to see the moon rise tomorrow night, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason for the player characters to be motivated to do or not do any particular thing. A plot hook like "there's rumors of something weird going on at the old mill" would easily get a Call of Cthulhu investigator or a Dungeons & Dragons adventurer to go check it out, but why should a Vampire in Masquerade go there? Why should they interact with it in any way?

That seems rather odd to me. The PCs presumably agree that the Masquerade is important, and while I don't buy the Masquerade working at all, presumably if it did work, lots of monsters, lots of different types of monsters would have to work together to keep it working.

So, the PCs have to work together to preserve the Masquerade out of self-interest, even if they are different types of monster. Either as an ad-hoc thing in between doing other things, or as their full time job. You're only a few steps away from playing Vampire: The 40k Deathwatch Kill-Team...ing. If you want to be more political, you can say that the reason the team is made up of people from multiple groups is so they can keep tabs on what each other is doing and not allow on group to dominate.

Not saying the game has to be that way (but then someone has to preserve the Masquerade), but surely it's a really obvious option?

[brized]

So, the PCs have to work together to preserve the Masquerade out of self-interest, even if they are different types of monster. Either as an ad-hoc thing in between doing other things, or as their full time job. You're only a few steps away from playing Vampire: The 40k Deathwatch Kill-Team...ing. If you want to be more political, you can say that the reason the team is made up of people from multiple groups is so they can keep tabs on what each other is doing and not allow on group to dominate.

Not saying the game has to be that way (but then someone has to preserve the Masquerade), but surely it's a really obvious option?

That's basically my starter adventure for a setting where supernaturals influence/control society under a masquerade. Monsters who let their humanity be consumed by their instincts become a very powerful, psychopathic embodiment of their worst impulse(s). The PCs are on a kill team to take down such a creature who fled to a rural town outside the city. What they find reveals the trail of a larger conspiracy to subvert/destroy the masquerade itself, with the team framed as participants.

[Username17]

But they didn't. The property owners have kept and still keep acting as if their property was a big deal in itself.

This is probably the heart of the fail right here. The people who own the Masquerade IP seem to think it's an important IP in its own right, rather than a marketable vehicle to rip off contemporary vampire fiction. Obviously, in reality it is the latter at best.

When they were trying to rev up the hype engine for reviving the franchise, they let us know they'd done a survey that showed the two most popular clans were Tremere and Malkavian. Now personally, if I saw that and I was relaunching Masquerade, I would fucking shit myself. Because that's just "the most powerful clan" and "the clan that doesn't have to engage with the game's backstory at all." In short, the top two votes in their poll were both proxies for people ignoring the brand altogether and just doing their own thing. Indeed, people writing down "Tremere" or "Malkavian" for their favorite clan might seriously mean that your setting provides negative real value to people who like your setting.

But the bottom line of course is that Masquerade exists for people to play as vampires. And that means that it needs:

• A place for the kinds of vampires people actually want.
• Delivering a game experience where the kind of vampire you've been sold on is recognizable in-game.
• A playable game where the above two are true.

Vampire: the Masquerade has always tripped on its own dick on 2 and 3, but over time it has fallen farther and farther away from #1 as vampires in popular culture march on and the World of Darkness continuously fails to keep up.

The fact that the V5 people seemed to have not even bothered asking what types of vampires people wanted to play in the 2010s meant that even before we got to minor details like "Vampires don't get enough starting powers to realize basic character concepts" we were getting a relaunch that would have looked painfully out of date if it had been released fourteen years earlier.

-Username17

[FatR]

Also, the three standard playstyles for VtM were defined by players no later than the times of Revised:

- Shotguns and katanas.
- Bloodsuckers in the boardroom/Sim City by Night.
- Vampire romance.

The problem was, however, than no latter than these times the design team pretty much started actively fighting against all of those, because they were fixated on "woe is me" drama and treating the game as a vehicle for their artisitic expression.

[Username17]

So, the PCs have to work together to preserve the Masquerade out of self-interest, even if they are different types of monster. Either as an ad-hoc thing in between doing other things, or as their full time job.

As shinimasu mentioned, the starting players were not empowered in the conspiracy hierarchy, and this was a big problem. So there were people whose job it was to sort out threats to the masquerade, but they were several levels higher than the PCs.

So not only did the player characters not have any personal stake in investigating strange goings-on, but they were also aware that it was someone else's job to look into it.

Also, the three standard playstyles for VtM were defined by players no later than the times of Revised:

- Shotguns and katanas.
- Bloodsuckers in the boardroom/Sim City by Night.
- Vampire romance.

The problem was, however, than no latter than these times the design team pretty much started actively fighting against all of those, because they were fixated on "woe is me" drama and treating the game as a vehicle for their artisitic expression.

The overt hostility from the people writing the game to the way people actually wanted to play the game was weird and bad in the late 90s. You can make a strong case that this attitude is what ultimately made nWoD such a fucking disaster.

Rebooting the property should obviously involve crawling and asking for forgiveness and demonstrating a solid commitment to reaching out to those players. Because those players are a majority of the potential fanbase, and they already knew that twenty years ago.

-Username17

[SeekritLurker]

The shame of it is, they even had a ready-made set-up for a reboot, in the form of Gehenna.

Let's say Gehenna wasn't the end of all things vampire, but it sure as hell blew shit up. Let's say that it meant that 90% of vampires older than a century died out unless they were in torpor. And that means that 90% of any vampire lore older than a century has almost no bearing on the modern nights.

The Camarilla kind of sticks around, but the Sabbat implodes by throwing wave after wave at the Antediluvians. The Camarilla doesn't have the influence or the vampire-power to keep their Masquerade running the way it used to, so the PCs get a Camarilla shovel party, and are drafted as "you have the skills and knowledge to keep up the Masquerade, so that is what you are going to do or you get dead."

And if they succeed, because the ranks of the elders have been decimated, there's room for upward mobility and fewer big-dick NPCs to slap them around.

Instead of massively overpowered elders as your enemies, you have conspiracies of vampires, and/or cults. Your troubleshooting team stakes Masquerade breakers and cleans up messes, and they get concrete status and funds and favors for doing so. You make a template for a couple of successful Masquerade teams, with the kinds of challenges you want - persuasion, investigation, blackmail.

As you move up, you start blackmailing and investigating other vampires in your city for status, while also tracking down secrets about where there are sleeping elders, so that they can be destroyed before they wake up frenzying and take down the Masquerade.

That's literally a ten-minute thought experiment that gives you a reason to team up a Lasombra mystic, a Ventrue face and a Giovanni detective to try and hold together enough of a vampire society that they can continue to feed and live. They do well, being Primogen or Prince isn't out of the question, because Duck-On-A-Rock, Wisconsin isn't being ruled by a thousand year old Toreador of the 5th generation, but by a 10th generation Gangrel who is holding shit together with a bunch of deals and politicking.

(The trick is lore-hammering the deal the New World Order has made with the remnants of Kindred society - you keep the lid on shit the best you can in the real world, so there's fewer videos and pictures, while the Technocracy basically has its hands full keeping vampires off Facebook and Youtube.)

I've been listening to a podcast with a couple of WW apologists reviewing the oWOD, but even they find themselves hard pressed to defend the worst bits of V5 - the Chechnya atrocities being the worst of it, but there's so much more. WW had a chance to rethink what their central metaphor for a vampire was, and they settled on "We are better and more special, and are persecuted by those weaker than us who are using the government as a tool to destroy our society," which is basically tailor-made for white supremacists.

The edgelords blew it. They thought they could get away with "no such thing as bad publicity" as a way to try to get in on some of that sweet DnD publicity. After all, the news stories about how edgy and transgressive V:tM was helped back in the 90s. But the media landscape today is very, very different than it was in the 1990s, and they just didn't account for how appealing to those white supremacists might turn off the LGBT and friends who were also way into WW products back in the day.

...I think this post got away from me. I had a point when I started, honest.

[Dean]

That's solid. It's a pretty good hook to say that the old guard are falling, the Masquerade has to be kept, and there's lots of power to be gained if you and your crew can prove you're the ones who can get the job done. It could let you reconcile saying things like "Traditionally the Tremere and Gangrels despised each other" with a Gangrel and Tremere being on the same team and having no problems because it's gold rush season right now and the people holding those "traditions" are dying as we speak.

[OgreBattle]

What we do in the shadows is cool

[jt]

Maintaining the masquerade sounds like a solid default structure, though I think it'd slide into "Scooby Doo but you're all vampires," pretty quickly. Let me gang up with the other Hammer Horror monsters and I'm sold on that, but I don't know if it's what people who actually liked Vampire are looking for.

If you're going for angst, I'd structure your monsters as needing to maintain certain boundaries and rituals to maintain their humanity instead of backsliding, and then every session is a threat to one of those. The blood bank got better security, how will you feed without biting down on a human?

If you're going for politics, I assume you're earning favors from other movers and shakers of the night, which means getting entangled in their affairs and dealing with their complications needs to have as much support as building a dungeon does in D&D. "This vampire prince's spawn eloped with a werewolf, sort it out for him" is your dungeon, the werewolf is protected by a pastor who is good honest man, which is a CR 4 relationship you found in the monster manual, and you're going to need to find another few you like to round out this adventure.

[Guts]

f you're going for angst, I'd structure your monsters as needing to maintain certain boundaries and rituals to maintain their humanity instead of backsliding, and then every session is a threat to one of those. The blood bank got better security, how will you feed without biting down on a human?

I've read this is what 5e goes for.

[saithorthepyro]

What we do in the shadows is cool

The thing is that What we do in the shadows exists as a parody of what the current license holders think Vampire should be. I don't see any future where VtM trends towards that instead of the other direction.

[Guts]

The thing is that What we do in the shadows exists as a parody of what the current license holders think Vampire should be. I don't see any future where VtM trends towards that instead of the other direction.

What other direction do you mean? Because until now there wasn't any directions. Only a resolution mechanic with cool powers and fluff attached. If anything 5e seems the first edition of VtM that actually has a direction.

[Whipstitch]

Re: clans and goals.

I usually played Tremere because as Frank pointed out they are obviously the most powerful, but my other top picks were the Ventrue and the Lasombra. I am the furthest thing from a conservative IRL, but maintaining the status quo is at least an identifiable goal and to the first approximation most other clans just seem to be fucking around rather than offering much in the way of adventure hooks. Basically, Vampire is the only franchise goofy enough to effectively turn me into an admirer of Big Brother. I mean, seriously, what have any of these dipshits done to show that they don't need parental supervision? Whenever I ran Vampire games the coterie were assigned to be the Vampires in Black and a lot of politics essentially boiled down to the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" bit from the Life of Brian.

[saithorthepyro]

The thing is that What we do in the shadows exists as a parody of what the current license holders think Vampire should be. I don't see any future where VtM trends towards that instead of the other direction.

What other direction do you mean? Because until now there wasn't any directions. Only a resolution mechanic with cool powers and fluff attached. If anything 5e seems the first edition of VtM that actually has a direction.

VtM has always had a direction of being an edgy game you were supposed to take very seriously, and there was a definite movement from the developers towards drama and a serious game about being a bloodsucking monster. They didn't want people playing Vampions, or political power games (lesser extent there) and I'm pretty sure they made it clear several times.

As for 5e, it's own direction can be considered aimless and even rudderless. It's less a direction and more of a cargo cult design based around old editions. It's direction is nostalgia, and even then they had so little control over the direction it got hijacked into becoming alt-right propaganda.

[Ignimortis]

Also, the three standard playstyles for VtM were defined by players no later than the times of Revised:

- Shotguns and katanas.
- Bloodsuckers in the boardroom/Sim City by Night.
- Vampire romance.

The problem was, however, than no latter than these times the design team pretty much started actively fighting against all of those, because they were fixated on "woe is me" drama and treating the game as a vehicle for their artisitic expression.

I figure the actual V5 problem is this. The developers somehow thought that all of these things are less important than wangst about being a monster, and also making a game about vampires where vampires aren't the top dog. And thus they actually removed mechanics that allowed you to do these things, for the most part. Blood Pool is gone, replaced by abstract non-gameable Hunger, which hurts combat-focused vampires, Disciplines have less impact, which hurts pretty much everyone, and hunger mechanics are now integrated into everything, which means that you're playing a ravenous monster first and your character second.

Seriously, V5 has "the hunters hunted" as a metaplot basis. The Inquisition is out in arms, the Masquerade is pretty much dead for anyone who's not general populace - the intelligence agencies are keenly aware of vampires, hunters are very aware, and now there are actual killsquads with incendiary rounds who are better fighters than your starting vampire is (or can be in 50 sessions). Camarilla is dead too - it's "elders hiding in separated enclaves" now, Sabbat is dead (everyone reasonable is off to war in the Middle East or smth, everyone else is a raving lunatic), and the Anarchs are "the good guys" now who you have to support and presumably play as, because FIGHT THE POWAH, amirite?

Classic OWoD had some of this shit too, but it generally supported both Trenchcoats & Katanas and Dominate: Rule the World.

Vampire romance has sucked dick since the beginning, though, because the writers couldn't decide where you are on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is playing a magically animated corpse who derives no pleasure from anything but bloodsucking, and 10 is an actual person who has to drink blood and sometimes makes themselves fully alive, and can fully enjoy the range of human activities. Sometimes it's 8, where you can't eat or drink, but everything else is good, and sometimes it's 2 where sex is purely mechanical, you have no payoff or are actively disgusted, and you cum blood.

[Username17]

I usually played Tremere because as Frank pointed out they are obviously the most powerful, but my other top picks were the Ventrue and the Lasombra. I am the furthest thing from a conservative IRL, but maintaining the status quo is at least an identifiable goal and to the first approximation most other clans just seem to be fucking around rather than offering much in the way of adventure hooks. Basically, Vampire is the only franchise goofy enough to effectively turn me into an admirer of Big Brother.

Certainly one of the issues is that when you say something like "I'm playing an Elvish Ranger" in D&D or "I'm playing a Street Samurai" in Shadowrun, that tells the other players what your character can contribute and also it tells the other players a good deal about how you intend for your character to contribute. In Masquerade, the clans don't generally give you that information. What the actual fuck is a Malkavian or a Toreador supposed to contribute to the mission or the narrative?

The Nosferatu had the conceptual space nailed down. If someone rolled up with a Nosferatu character, I knew they intended to play a warrior or spy. But their actual ability set did not support that concept. Nosferatu were crap at combat and crap at sneaking around learning secrets. Everything that players wanted them to do was something you'd be better off as a Setite or some fucking thing.

Really only the Ventrue actually delivered on their presumed character concept. People said "Ventrue" and you assumed they wanted to play some kind of bureaucrat or mastermind, and they could actually be decent at doing that. Mostly because pushing papers and giving people orders after paying them doesn't require magical powers at all, but the few magical powers a player character gets in Masquerade do actually help with that if they happen to be Presence and Dominate.

A Vampire Reboot obviously needs to have a deep think about what kinds of Vampire they are trying to support - but it also needs to figure out what roles it is trying to support and make sure the character generation choices actually make you good at performing those roles. People who select "Nosferatu" should be good as warriors or rogues. Whatever other clans you decide on including should be good at whatever the fuck they are supposed to be doing as well.

-Username17

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Side question, is there any good character build info for OWOD? I'm just now looking into it and I literally did assume the Nosferatu were sneaky, glass-cannon style characters, with animal powers. Kind of like a vampire sewer ranger.