As I have already mentioned, at the crux of the tragic story of the vampire is the fact that they are on a downward spiral towards damnation, destined to destroy all that they held dear. If you read through the comments on the previous two posts in this series you will find that over and over we keep going back to the simple, and very important, idea of why should one care about the vampire’s journey on the road of dwindling Humanity. Or put another way, why should I (the player of the vampire character) care about the loss of Humanity? Why stall it? Why not give in to the beast?
There are traits in the two Vampire games that sort of deal with this. In VtM we have the traits of Nature and Demeanor, which basically sum up what your behavioral essence is on the inside and how you project yourself to the world. These are good to help shape how you want to play your character, but they really don’t say much about who your character is, which ultimately is what we’re driving at when looking for the reasons to cling to Humanity. VtR uses Virtue and Vice to replace Nature/Demeanor. I like the contrast of these two traits because, while they can help you shape how you play the character, they now say something about who this character is, if maybe a bit indirectly. The Virtue/Vice split also hearkens back to classical philosophical thought, something I can totally dig. Both of these sets of traits, however, have the same drawback for me: they are too vague. This is great for the games in which they are used, as a limited number of combinations can be used to represent virtually endless characterizations across a number of games sharing the same basic system, but for what I’m seeking to do, I want something that’s a hell of a lot more focused.
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Something came up in the comments to my previous post, Rebuilding Vampire: Humanity, brought up by Mick Bradley about whether there should be the glimmer of hope/redemption for a vampire. He made this point after I had stated that, in my view of the vampire myth/game, the story of the vampire is one of an inevitable downward spiral towards transformation into a beast that will destroy all that he used to love, with the dramatic caveat being how long can that be staved off. Considering his feedback led me to consider the vampire myth and ask for other people’s opinions on Twitter (and I got good replies – see the comments for links).
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In thinking of what would I do to re-arrange Vampire’s mechanics to reflect the type of game I believe is intended (as opposed to presented), it always has been obvious that Humanity is the one central stat around which everything else must orbit. After all, the game is about the loss of this essential trait and the descent into the unbridled bestiality of the vampire (which, of course, presupposes that you want to stave this loss off as much as possible; otherwise you’d be an NPC).
So we have our main trait, Humanity. I’ll keep this on a 1-10 scale because it provides for a good amount of gradation in the middle, with 10 being fully Human, and 1 being inhuman (inhumane?). This stat determines how Human you are, serves as the fuel for your vampire powers, and determines how many dice you roll to avoid losing/regaining Humanity. When Humanity reaches 1, you have lost all connection to what it means to be a human, and your character is removed from the game.
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In my post about Vampire and My Humanity, I stated categorically that whenever I play this re-visiting of Vampire, it *has* to be Vampire: The Masquerade, as opposed to the newer Vampire: The Requiem. But why be so fastidious? In the end, aren’t they just about the same, i.e. games in which you take the role of a vampire, using a game system engine that’s about 95% similar? Just play whichever, right? Well, no.
This is all subjective, obviously, but to me, Vampire: The Masquerade (VtM) has a few qualities that set it apart from its newer counterpart and, while I surely would play Vampire: The Requiem if given the chance, if I’m calling the shots or have any influence on the matter, it’s VtM that I’m gonna go for always.
Before we move on, let me make this very clear: this is not a slight against Vampire: The Requiem *at all.* I like the new game, I like what they did with it and the new World of Darkness, and I want White Wolf to continue to have great success with the game line. This isn’t about dissing Requiem, but about extolling Masquerade.
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Something has been made clear to me from the discussions we’ve had here in the past month or so due to my posts on the Lady Blackbird game and now on the post about Vampire: people want to hurt my characters, “beat the living snot” out of them, as was put by both Mick and Rich. The reason for this is that they both feel that the characters they have seen of mine in a game have been Machiavellian double-crossers playing both sides of the game. And they are absolutely right.
I’d never really stopped to think about it until Mick pointed it out in an in-character comment on his blog in which he called my character, Kale Arkam, a “manipulative loudmouth prick who thinks he knows more than everyone else in the Blue.” That got me thinking, as I wasn’t actively trying to play Kale as manipulative, though he certainly was playing both sides of the equation. This is also the case with my character in the Star Wars Primetime Adventures game we’ve played at Gen Con, Obi-Wan Skywalker, who has been revealed to be both aiding the Rebellion and be in league with the evil Sith lord, Dark Ackbar, at the same time.
So I started thinking back to other characters I have played in the past, and though it isn’t an universal constant, I came up with other characters cut from the same cloth, including an ex-Imperial Scout Trooper who had defected to the Rebellion in a game of Star Wars D6 back in the early 90s. I guess to this I can add all the NPCs I played in our late-90s Vampire chronicle, as well as my main NPC character in the Changeling chronicle, and even my D&D character from the legendary campaign we played while in high school. All these characters have one thing in common: they all walk the line between good and evil.
Cue Alien Sex Fiend here.
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Yesterday I was supposed to be studying for a Psychology test but I could not concentrate. In letting my mind empty for a few moments to see if I could get in the study zone, it instead wandered over to my past, to the late 90s, to Vampire: The Masquerade. This isn’t out of nowhere; recently I’ve been talking to Rich Rogers of the Canon Puncture Show (the GM in my recent Lady Blackbird game) about Vampire: The Masquerade. He was also a huge fan of the game and ran a long chronicle around the same time I did. I told him it would be fun to revisit that game with the tools and techniques we have learned since for more story-driven style of play and he agreed. We’re kicking it around and maybe we’ll do something with that in the future (maybe Megacon, if I manage to go?).
Vampire. That game still has a hold on me even though I haven’t played in about a decade. It was my first foray into personal stakes in a roleplaying game, even if I was crude about achieving that, if I ever did. Read more…
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