Highmoon's Ponderings

In Vampire: The Masquerade, vampires can enter a state called “torpor,” an extremely deep slumber basically comparable with stasis. This word entered my household’s regular use years ago and is one we sometimes whip out in front of “normals” without noticing except for when we see the confused faces wondering, what language are these two speaking? That’s two very long sentences merely to get to my point that I feel like I’ve fallen into torpor regarding development of the vampire game.

It’s not that my interest has waned in any way, but that the forced breaks during classes have cooled my writing engine and now I’m finding it very hard to get it restarted. Obviously I’m trying – this post, which really doesn’t say much – is me turning the key in the ignition, letting the car sputter, hoping the car will finally turn on.

Ok, enough of the car analogy.

My point is, to have stepped away from this project for months (and the occasional short post I threw in there was merely a way for me to keep the topic current in both my mind and yours, but not really a full-fledged effort at actual on-the-fly game design) makes it really hard now that I have time to go back to it with the same level of enthusiasm as in the beginning. Not impossible, just hard.

I’m not saying anything that doesn’t apply to any writer, I know. I’m just working through my own awakening from torpor.

I continue to hold Gen Con as a deadline for a playable-with-me first draft (this being a draft that is playable only if I’m running it, that is, one full of mnemonics, short phrases completed in my head, references that I’ll understand), which leaves me about a month’s time to work through the parts I know are still missing and put the entire thing together into some semblance of order.

I’m also fighting an innate tendency in my own personality: the close-enough-you-can-see-the-finish-line drop in interest on a project. By nature, I’m far more efficient on the early stages of any project; I have energy, ideas, desire to get the thing going, motivation. I’m a starter, one who gets fires burning. But I have a problem in the long term, as I lose steam or get distracted by other new projects. It’s simply a reality, and unfortunately I have not had the fortune of partnering up with others who can complement my early-in-the-game fire with the endurance needed for the long haul. Given how writing this game has been such a solitary endeavor, it means it is up to me primarily to work through the lethargy and find the inner reserves needed to see this project to its end. Which I desperately want to do.

So, one month left, and perhaps about 25% more of the game to get designed enough for a first playtest draft. I can do it. I just have to shake off this torpor and get designing again. By Dracula’s teeth, I will finish my first full-fledged game.

I love when little things like this fly by my Twitter feed. This is a parody song about Twilight sung by what looks to be Count Dracula. It’s awesome. And beyond the comedy, it does hold certain truths I happen to agree with about the interpretations of the vampire myth in the last couple of years. You could say my vampire game-in-progress is all about growing a pair…

Thanks to summer classes and a Jewish holiday I’ve had to take a small break from the game, though it’s come in handy, as I needed time to ponder all the feedback I received on my post about the dice mechanics for the game. It also allowed me time to think about what I had set down already and what I still needed to address. Let’s make a list, shall we?

1. The Hunger – Perhaps the singlemost obvious vampire trope I have not dealt with yet is the hunger for blood. I am very torn on this issue as I do not want the game to be about having a life meter like in videogames, yet if there is no mechanical weight behind the need for blood then I have failed in my design.
2. Immortality – Or rather long-lived-ness. One of the biggest boons of vampirism is the ability to be nigh-immortal, yet at least in my experience, most vampire characters tend to be fairly young, if not downright newborns-to-darkness. Yeah, there’s a story to be told from that angle, but I want the angst that comes from centuries walking the night. I’ve an idea on how to incorporate this already.
3. The Name – And by this I mean finding a name for the game. Seriously, I need to call this game something and I have not had any ideas! Not true, a name keeps floating around in my head, but I don’t know if it is right. I may crowdsource this, who knows.
4. Weaknesses – This item was brought up to me in the comments by JJ Lanza. What about the traditional vampire weaknesses, like sunlight, crucifixes, garlic, etc? Quite simply, I’m not touching that with a 10-foot pole. There’s a reason: for this game, I am not locking down the particular expression of the vampire beyond “a creature that feeds on blood, has some powers derived from it, is immortal and has a Beast that wants to consume it.” I want this game to be able to handle different expressions of the vampire, from the classic Nosferatu, to Dracula and its derivates (including the Anne Rice vampires and those of Vampire: The Masquerade/Requiem) as well as the new breed of sunlight-immune vamps like in Twilight or True Blood. I know how I’ll handle this, but I’ll write more about it later.

A tentative items #5 would be figuring out a role a bit more active for Humanity to parallel the way that there are minimum Beast dice that need to be used for some actions, as well as finding out what is the down side to Humanity (even if remaining Human is the goal of the game, being Human is not all days of wine and roses.

Likewise, an item #6 would be the revised dice mechanics. The feedback I received was fantastic and invaluable, and though I won’t be using all of it, it did make me think hard about what I wanted the dice to say about the game, about the conflict, about the choices to be made. I’m sure revisions will still come afterward, but it will be nice to have a basic system down to start playtesting.

But these are more an elaboration of existing concepts rather than something that still needs to be tackled, which is why I did not list them outright, though include them here.

My goal is to have a playable draft by Gen Con (Aug 5-8) and maybe even playtest it while in Indy, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Because I’ve been writing about this game as I go along in a very piecemeal process, a lot of the systems have evolved as I set them down to “paper” from whatever I’ve been brainstorming in my head. The good thing about this approach is that it has let me focus on the different aspects of the game, making the process less daunting; the drawback is that there is a certain disconnect between the parts, and especially between things that are still in my head but not written down yet. Dice mechanics is the biggest item falling into that category at the moment; without knowing how the dice move during the game, a lot of the things I have already described just float in mid-air above the game. It’s time to bring them down to earth and tie them together. Let’s talk dice.

At the risk of this sounding like a preemptive apology, the dice mechanics is the one area where I am very unsure of how efficient the system is. Visualizing the complex interactions of dice probabilities is not something that my mind can do without considerable effort (I’m just right-brained, what can I say). The dice mechanics I settled on for this game are a mishmash of a couple of games whose dice mechanics I like and admire. Enough game designer angst, let’s go.

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Auspex, Celerity, Obfuscate, Animalism, Obteneration, Melpomine, Chimerstry, Protean, Dominate, Cachexy. Those are just 10 vampiric powers (Disciplines) from VtM/VtR that came immediately to mind, without pulling out either book, out of what must be a couple dozen total, spread over the entire oeuvre of these two games. The point is simple: vampires have awesome powers, and White Wolf has made a huge point of statting up the classical ones from lore as well as creating a host of new supernatural abilities for the blood drinkers. People like the powers of a vampire; besides immortality (and really, that’s just power #1), it is all these nifty tricks that folks attracted to roleplaying creatures of the night find appealing. It’s what makes the trade-off of subsisting on blood acceptable: you gain in return a number of powers that truly set you above the mundane humans!

I won’t deny it, when I played Vampire, it was the powers that I found most appealing. I played a Ravnos vampire just because their Discipline of Chimerstry, the ability to create illusions. My players spent about 90% of their Experience Points on improving Disciplines, on becoming stronger, more powerful, in those dark gifts bestowed them by the Beast. Vampiric powers are an essential part of the vampire myth, and as such, something I need to include in my rebuild of the game.

But how?

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If (as always, in my experience) Vampire had another underutilized game mechanic in addition to Humanity, this was Willpower. Yes, we used it to boost up rolls and such, but it just never had the oomph that it seems that it should have. I take some of that responsibility myself as the Storyteller; I rarely, if ever, pushed my characters to the brink of having to use their Willpower, nor did I force the scenes that I should have in order for them to recover spent points. It just sort of existed there.

In rereading the section on Willpower in VtM, I realize that it was mostly me; the advice is there on how to use it, I just didn’t quite heed it. Willpower is even better explained in VtR, I have to say, though I still feels like it doesn’t delve deep enough into what Willpower can truly mean for a vampire story (this, when it comes to VtR, seems to be a side-effect of the main book + monster setting book approach; the former has to keep it fairly generic, the latter can’t change it so much as to invalidate the core book).

Willpower, to me, is a driving force, and a very limited force at that. It’s what gives you the inner gumption to push back the darkness, but there’s only so much of it to go around, so much you can take before that reserve is depleted. That’s what the beast wants. That’s what I, as game designer, want as well.

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