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Ferrinus posted:If we're going to take the setting seriously, we can't actually make that assumption, but need to ask ourselves what would actually happen in a world with vampires in it. There would probably be a lot of really, really bad stuff, much worse than what we have in real life. Super problematic to boot, and covered up with human scapegoats. Why would vampires (or any of these other literal monsters) care about we care about?
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Apr 22, 2024 01:15
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CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:There would probably be a lot of really, really bad stuff, much worse than what we have in real life. Super problematic to boot, and covered up with human scapegoats. Why would vampires (or any of these other literal monsters) care about we care about? Because vampires are just people. There's nothing else TO care about but the same bullshit on everyone else's mind.
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Apr 22, 2024 01:53
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I still wanna play a mage inspired by fate's take on Avicebron.
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Apr 22, 2024 03:10
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Cool Spanish golem maker wants to create life?
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Apr 22, 2024 03:32
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:Cool Spanish golem maker wants to create life? Yeah!
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Apr 22, 2024 04:17
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Ferrinus posted:Now they hate stasis and love change, which incidentally makes them act like whiny, petulant children periodically but of course looks a lot fancier and more respectable on paper. Ferrinus posted:But my question is this: why would we prefer any version of this to not having a clan compulsion, which is how Clan Brujah worked in V20, Revised, etc? Why is it better to plug a microchip into the back of every Brujah's head to make sure they act out their clan stereotype a minimum percentage of the time? It's a roleplaying hook not a compulsion. The only mechanical effect is the increased frenzy chance, which you can't change no matter what you do. Hell, I'd try to have my cake and eat it to by adding a sidebar with a "Yeah but is this actually true?" paragraph, which I almost added to that writeup and would suggest that maybe Brujah just like embracing people with similar mindsets to themselves and everything else is just an excuse. My attempt is more like "Here is the Brujah stereotype, here is the mechanical flaw, here is some explanation for why one might lead to the other and how you could use that to build a character and give them something to do".
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Apr 22, 2024 11:56
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Ferrinus is proposing divesting Clan from Sire, e.g. if you were a triggered rebel you become Brujah, crypto bros become Ventrue etc. You still have lineages of selection (Anarchs prefer to embrace Brujahlikes etc) and embraces of passion etc that lead to drama vs structure. Could be fun as a house rule. Edit: this also needs also better self written clanbooks if you don't want the bad stereotypes obv
Goa Tse-tung fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 12:40
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Goa Tse-tung posted:Ferrinus is proposing divesting Clan from Sire, e.g. if you were a triggered rebel you become Brujah, crypto bros become Ventrue etc. You still have lineages of selection (Anarchs prefer to embrace Brujahlikes etc) and embraces of passion etc that lead to drama vs structure. Could be fun as a house rule. Edit: this also needs also better self written clanbooks if you don't want the bad stereotypes obv I dislike this for the reason that a conflict of who you are before the Embrace vs. the curse + culture of your Clan allows for much more complex characters. Obviously there's a lot of self-selection in most Clans, but sometimes there just..isn't.
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Apr 22, 2024 13:00
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Only if the player wants to interpret it that way. You might be missing an important detail here. To be clear: in every edition of Masquerade, the Brujah have had an increased chance to enter anger frenzy. Obviously, you can enter anger frenzy for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the Prince talks down to you, and you flip your lid. But maybe you're the Prince, and someone disrespects you, and it makes you loving lose it. Whether your Brujah fury actually corresponds to rebelliousness and insubordination depends on your character's history, personality, and social standing. However, in in V5 specifically, what you and I reference up above is your "clan bane". There is a second, separate mechanic called the "clan compulsion", which your character is randomly afflicted by in proportion to how high their Hunger is. And the clan compulsion of the Brujah is to be whiny and petulant about receiving orders, no matter whose orders they are, what those orders say, or what you're doing at the moment. It's much more specific, and much more a top-level personality trait than the underlying weakness to anger frenzy that we all know and love. I like the weakness to anger frenzy for pretty much exactly the reason you say: it's up to the player (and, more broadly, the setting's fans and writers as a whole) to interpret it and think out how it may or may not play into a given Brujah's political allegiances, vampiric career, etc. It's the compulsion that I'm criticizing. Goa Tse-tung posted:Ferrinus is proposing divesting Clan from Sire, e.g. if you were a triggered rebel you become Brujah, crypto bros become Ventrue etc. You still have lineages of selection (Anarchs prefer to embrace Brujahlikes etc) and embraces of passion etc that lead to drama vs structure. Could be fun as a house rule. Edit: this also needs also better self written clanbooks if you don't want the bad stereotypes obv Exactly the opposite, actually. I'm assuming a version of Vampire in which clan is passed down by the embrace, which means our rules and setting information need to account that anyone can potentially become a Brujah, whether they're a crustpunk or an investment banker. Exploring what happens when various mortal and vampiric origins are mixed and matched is like half the fun of the game. It's Nepthys who is like, look, Brujah is the oppositional defiant disorder clan, all Brujah are hand-picked from people who already hate being told that they have to brush their teeth because it's time for bed, why would a Brujah even embrace someone who didn't already have a leather jacket and a mohawk? So it must be true that in his version of the setting, someone's clan spontaneously generates itself from their personality and politics upon embrace, such that only rich people are transfigured into Ventrue, only annoying people become Malkavians, etc.
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Apr 22, 2024 17:46
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Ferrinus posted:However, in in V5 specifically, what you and I reference up above is your "clan bane". There is a second, separate mechanic called the "clan compulsion", which your character is randomly afflicted by in proportion to how high their Hunger is. And the clan compulsion of the Brujah is to be whiny and petulant about receiving orders, no matter whose orders they are, what those orders say, or what you're doing at the moment. It's much more specific, and much more a top-level personality trait than the underlying weakness to anger frenzy that we all know and love. Oh yeah, gently caress having actual mechanical Clan compulsions, I was just trying to work out a way where the bane/flaw can lead naturally into that kind of behaviour without being prescriptive, and provides roleplaying hooks rather than forcing players into a single expression.
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Apr 22, 2024 20:26
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"Your clan is your personality, and vice versa" has always been the worst possible interpretation of the relationship between character and clan in Vampire, and I'm honestly surprised that there's anyone in this thread sincerely arguing that any given clan ought to be a monoculture where everyone in Clan X has Personality Trait Y. It's also a reading that's outright contradicted by the source material, given how many characters are written up in every edition from 1e to 5e that subvert or simply ignore their clan stereotypes.
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Apr 22, 2024 21:06
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Some of the old weaknesses are pretty wonky, but Ferrinus is right that having mystical curses is more interesting than forced personality traits.
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Apr 23, 2024 00:42
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So I just found out that some mad lad is remaking Vampire The Masquerade: Redemption using Skyrim of all things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRh-AyolCD4 The project is called "Vampire The Masquerade: Redemption Reawakened" and it's going to be first person and the mod author is going to reimplement cut content and they own new content.
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Apr 23, 2024 01:46
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Oh yeah, gently caress having actual mechanical Clan compulsions, I was just trying to work out a way where the bane/flaw can lead naturally into that kind of behaviour without being prescriptive, and provides roleplaying hooks rather than forcing players into a single expression. Oh yeah on that front I'm right with you. In particular you can see how vampires that are inclined to snap and go berserk when frustrated or disrespected and who happen to be politically on the outs because of the vicissitudes (heh) of history could rapidly develop a reputation for being unstable, irrational firebrands. It's just... it could have gone different, and sometimes it does! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 01:48
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Madmen love to put Skyrim as the base for anything. I guess at some point there’s so much code out there publicly available that it might be easier than starring from scratch.
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Apr 23, 2024 01:49
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Over in FnF I did a little write-up on why Juliet Parr is a particularly good monster, but I think there's a relevancy to the present dispute. Basically, she's a Malkavian played perfectly to type: she is a dangerous, violent lunatic. The catch is that her specific derangement is a type of OCD that manifests with neurotic fact seeking and stability seeking, which makes her a perfect Sheriff. Essentially, she's crazy in a way that is frighteningly sane for the role she's adapted to. And this brings me to the question of 'supernatural flaw or forced personality', where the 'right' answer is, well... both. Parr's simultaneously being played perfectly to and against type in a way that you can foresee a slide into the classical 'Malkavian elder with an asylum lair, utterly detached from reality' in the centuries to come, but where her actions in the here-and-now are terrifyingly rational. Part of the horror of Vampire is losing who you are to a slow, steady decline into inhumanity, punctuated here and there by extreme traumas that force you to recognize you are no longer the same kind of animal you once were. This is mediated through the clan curses and the newfangled compulsions - but what's missing is, I think, a balancing act. I don't think it'd be so disagreeable if as your Humanity/etc drops and your Blood Potency (one of the things I think VtR did so right its a near-essential backport, with some hacks to play nicely with Generation) the mechanic activates. Your baseline 'turned two years ago and just now getting the hang of this' Vampire only has the basest form of the Curse and no compulsions. Your hoary Elder has become the archetypal monster of the Clan unless they've kept up a struggle against it with real conscious effort, so their personality is increasingly not their own but simply the same beast that burns in the hearts of all their Clan. Your Brujah Elder is more inclined to compulsive acts of violent opposition than a Brujah neonate (which even sits nicely with the old dichotomy - 'impulsive ancillae, sophisticated philosoper elders' - because the only Brujah who are surviving a suicide-spiral of bad decisions in their mid-200s are the ones who sit down and hack together a way to bypass their instinctive urge to rip the Primogen apart for being so goddamn pretentious. Combine that with a laundry list of compulsions rather than just one so that there's a little extra variety and choice involved, have more than one accrue as you transform into the monster, and boom - you've got a system that does both. Throw in scaling mechanical benefits and you've even got a choice: do you want that extra die of damage, or do you want to fight the monster you are becoming?
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Apr 23, 2024 02:11
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Ghost Armor 1337 posted:So I just found out that some mad lad is remaking Vampire The Masquerade: Redemption using Skyrim of all things. I cannot imagine it makes out to people in a finished state. Honestly it feels like announcing projects like this is basically code for "I'm tired of working on this, please C&D me so I can stop."
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Apr 23, 2024 03:44
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:Madmen love to put Skyrim as the base for anything. I guess at some point there’s so much code out there publicly available that it might be easier than starring from scratch. Honestly I hope that if the project is successful, It would actually inspire people to remaster Bloodlines using that game if not going full black mesa.
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Apr 23, 2024 04:01
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Loomer posted:Over in FnF I did a little write-up on why Juliet Parr is a particularly good monster, but I think there's a relevancy to the present dispute. Basically, she's a Malkavian played perfectly to type: she is a dangerous, violent lunatic. The catch is that her specific derangement is a type of OCD that manifests with neurotic fact seeking and stability seeking, which makes her a perfect Sheriff. Essentially, she's crazy in a way that is frighteningly sane for the role she's adapted to. And this brings me to the question of 'supernatural flaw or forced personality', where the 'right' answer is, well... both. Parr's simultaneously being played perfectly to and against type in a way that you can foresee a slide into the classical 'Malkavian elder with an asylum lair, utterly detached from reality' in the centuries to come, but where her actions in the here-and-now are terrifyingly rational. You know, I didn't bring up Malkavians because it felt like it'd make my job too easy, but now that we're here: holy poo poo is it telling that even the Malkavians people cite as The Right Way To Do It read like someone read through the DSM as though it were a list of Fighter bonus feats. quote:Part of the horror of Vampire is losing who you are to a slow, steady decline into inhumanity, punctuated here and there by extreme traumas that force you to recognize you are no longer the same kind of animal you once were. This is mediated through the clan curses and the newfangled compulsions - but what's missing is, I think, a balancing act. I don't think it'd be so disagreeable if as your Humanity/etc drops and your Blood Potency (one of the things I think VtR did so right its a near-essential backport, with some hacks to play nicely with Generation) the mechanic activates. Your baseline 'turned two years ago and just now getting the hang of this' Vampire only has the basest form of the Curse and no compulsions. Your hoary Elder has become the archetypal monster of the Clan unless they've kept up a struggle against it with real conscious effort, so their personality is increasingly not their own but simply the same beast that burns in the hearts of all their Clan. Your Brujah Elder is more inclined to compulsive acts of violent opposition than a Brujah neonate (which even sits nicely with the old dichotomy - 'impulsive ancillae, sophisticated philosoper elders' - because the only Brujah who are surviving a suicide-spiral of bad decisions in their mid-200s are the ones who sit down and hack together a way to bypass their instinctive urge to rip the Primogen apart for being so goddamn pretentious. Combine that with a laundry list of compulsions rather than just one so that there's a little extra variety and choice involved, have more than one accrue as you transform into the monster, and boom - you've got a system that does both. Throw in scaling mechanical benefits and you've even got a choice: do you want that extra die of damage, or do you want to fight the monster you are becoming? First, I think having clan weaknesses or banes or whatever you call them scale directly with Blood Potency (or its equivalent) is a good move and IIRC there are elements of either Requiem 2E, V5, or both that do just that. That said, making an as-written or even as-loosely-conceived clan compulsion scale with BP such that all members of a given clan just converge over time into the same guy would be really bad. First, it's just less interesting on a basic level than having vampires tend to evolve and diverge in weird ways, but second, it tricks you into doing this goofy biblical evo-psych where you have to backsolve for why Troile themself was a rowdy, rebellious punk and wow, that's why all Toreador love art so much, it's because their antedeluvian needed to be able to quickly distinguish which berries were safe to feed to their blood dolls! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 06:25
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Respectfully, Ferrinus, there's a lot more going on with Parr than 'reading through the DSM as though it were a list of fighter bonus feats'. If you'd like to see what I mean you can go and take a look at my posts in FnF. Your argument around biblical evopsych is so fundamentally silly it doesn't merit a reply.
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Apr 23, 2024 09:25
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I'm not sure this is fully relevant, as it's something I'm considering for a house rules version of a fan game, but I've been working on a storypath conversion for exalted and exalted vs World of Darkness, and I'm just getting along to the modern supernaturals. Some are easier than others, but vampires are one where I haven't made a choice about how to proceed yet, in part because of the reasoning behind the clan curses. One idea I'm considering is 'changelings are right, and vampires are just a weird fae thing,' taken sort of from Tim Powers books - the embrace makes an individual part of a bigger whole (which would be some sort of unshaped fair folk, I think?), and that's what the curse is, it's the border between who you are and who the thing in your blood is. Or it's the illusion that you are still you draped over the thing in your blood.
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Apr 23, 2024 10:26
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A Brujah walks like thiiiiis And a Ventrue walks like this!
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Apr 23, 2024 14:40
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Toreador be shoppin'
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Apr 23, 2024 15:03
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Loomer posted:Respectfully, Ferrinus, there's a lot more going on with Parr than 'reading through the DSM as though it were a list of fighter bonus feats'. If you'd like to see what I mean you can go and take a look at my posts in FnF. Whatever you've built rests on a rotten foundation because of the sheer amount of corrosive ideology wrapped up in the rules mandate to pick one (1) "derangement" that your character suffers permanently. Deciding to designate an official Crazy Clan is much, much worse than designating a Rich Clan and a Rebellious Clan, and those are already awful ideas. quote:Your argument around biblical evopsych is so fundamentally silly it doesn't merit a reply. I think your problem is that it's just too succinct. You're like, okay, every Brujah is just growing into an ancient, immortal monster from the old days of Nod... and that ancient, immortal monster hates being told it's bedtime! Why? Well, because the original Troile did, apparently. Presumably Troile also hated pretention, which is why an elder Brujah might physically attack and kill pretentious people even though this maps on to neither the classic Brujah clan flaw or the compulsion V5 tacks on. You're making up stories about cavemen to explain why Toreador take so long to get ready to go out.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:27
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Ferrinus posted:Whatever you've built rests on a rotten foundation because of the sheer amount of corrosive ideology wrapped up in the rules mandate to pick one (1) "derangement" that your character suffers permanently. Deciding to designate an official Crazy Clan is much, much worse than designating a Rich Clan and a Rebellious Clan, and those are already awful ideas. I have generally agreed with Ferrinus's position for this discussion, but especially this point. I continue to maintain that the very pigeonholing of "the clan of madness" is a bad foundation, whether one attempts to execute it as a gimmicky comic madness, a serious exploration of real world mental illness and personality disorders, or a Cassandra complex of a character overwhelmed by prophetic insight beyond clear understanding. Even the good Malkavians are characters who would have been done better justice if they were simply fleshed out characters of another clan whose "madness" was not intrinsic to the blood.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:33
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:A Brujah walks like thiiiiis
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Apr 23, 2024 17:37
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I don't necessarily hate the idea of "you're cursed to slowly become a caricature of an actual specific person" as a source of horror, like in the Tzimisce "you're all just branches of a single hideous flesh-monster with delusions of being individual people" style, but it seems like an entirely different conceit than, like, vampirism generally.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:42
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I Am Just a Box posted:I have generally agreed with Ferrinus's position for this discussion, but especially this point. I continue to maintain that the very pigeonholing of "the clan of madness" is a bad foundation, whether one attempts to execute it as a gimmicky comic madness, a serious exploration of real world mental illness and personality disorders, or a Cassandra complex of a character overwhelmed by prophetic insight beyond clear understanding. Even the good Malkavians are characters who would have been done better justice if they were simply fleshed out characters of another clan whose "madness" was not intrinsic to the blood. Funnily enough, the clan compulsion that V5 lays out for the Malkavians is probably their best mechanization in any Masquerade property precisely because it moves them closest to the "Malkavia" from the VtR Ventrue clanbook or the nonspecifically weird "mad prophet" archetype you play as in VtM: Bloodlines. Why? Because it's not a compulsion at all; the rules are just that your ESP becomes overwhelming for you, and you take a penalty on a series of rolls involved with perception or fear frenzy resistance. Of course, the Malkavian clan bane is still "pick a derangement (and abstract its effects as a dice penalty)", so they're strictly as bad as they've always been, but if you could jettison the bane and only use the compulsion to represent a lineage of vampires that often come off as crazy because they have incomplete control over their own powers of prophecy, that'd maybe get you somewhere good. This is, of course, homologous to what we've been talking about all along. It's just like Brujah are often understood to be rebellious (mostly by the assholes trying to give them orders), but that's very different from having the command to reflexively and pointlessly rebel against things inscribed onto the inside of your skull. Tuxedo Catfish posted:I don't necessarily hate the idea of "you're cursed to slowly become a caricature of an actual specific person" as a source of horror, like in the Tzimisce "you're all just branches of a single hideous flesh-monster with delusions of being individual people" style, but it seems like an entirely different conceit than, like, vampirism generally. And especially different from Vampire, either tM or tR, which has just never worked like that or tried to! What is there to gain by so heavy-handedly forcing every character to abide by things that were understood to be externally-held stereotypes from the very beginning?? Augh!! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 17:47
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Prophecy overload plus persistent clan culture seems like it would be more than enough to explain all the madman poo poo, yeah.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:52
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it's kind of funny to me that even if you streamline Malkavians down to "they perceive things other people don't, but perceive so intensely that sometimes it overwhelms them, and consequently they come off as really weird and struggle to communicate clearly" you've basically just gone from The Mental Illness Clan to the Autistic Clan
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Apr 23, 2024 17:52
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Dementation was a mistake, Malkavians should have kept Dominate, and instead gotten an extremely funky version of Auspex.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:52
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gtrmp posted:"Your clan is your personality, and vice versa" has always been the worst possible interpretation of the relationship between character and clan in Vampire, and I'm honestly surprised that there's anyone in this thread sincerely arguing that any given clan ought to be a monoculture where everyone in Clan X has Personality Trait Y. It's also a reading that's outright contradicted by the source material, given how many characters are written up in every edition from 1e to 5e that subvert or simply ignore their clan stereotypes. It isn't, it's stated in every edition that each Clan will prefer to select candidates that already match their clans ideals. It isn't that all Ventrue are rich and influential, it's that Ventrue will look for individuals that are already wealthy, influential or otherwise impressive in some way when deciding to embrace someone. The fact that there are subversions only enhances this, there has to already be a archetype to subvert with those characters for that to work. A Brujah that is deliberately deciding not to rebel is only interesting because the expection of rebellion already exists etc. This doesn't limit player freedom, but allows them to select an archetype that appeals to them and then craft a character that conforms to or subverts said archetype. That is the reason Clans exist as a game mechanic. No player is forced to play a clan that doesn't appeal to them, you select one that you are interested in. You don't have to define your character from this, your clan can merely accentuate the character you're going for. I am however still genuinely curious on what dissenting opinions think Clans should be and if it would be better than what they are currently. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 18:07
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Nephthys posted:I am however still genuinely curious on what dissenting opinions think Clans should be. Requiem's clanbooks. Requiem's clans are much more archetypal, focused on a relatively simple and broad clan bane (analogous in this case to the Brujah's difficulty resisting frenzy - as a matter of fact I believe that's the Requiem Gangrel bane in 2e) and an extrapolation of what having faculty with their clan Disciplines encourages. The clans do have cultures shared across dynasties, but they are the kind of cultures that emerge from putting several people in a room together who are all good at Dominate or at Auspex or at Majesty. Ventrue Lords aren't ambitious manipulators because of the imprint of their progenitors on their blood or because of the passed down teachings of lineages of past Ventrue, organized and collected and maintained across generations. They're ambitious manipulators because they can effortlessly mesmerize people, they don't have the offensive Disciplines that other clans use to enforce their will, and their clan bane is a detached tendency towards losing perspective. They might be Old World snobs with pedigrees in penthouses, but they're just as often running meth labs in ailing poor communities. And if that feels like what you're already saying Masquerade clans are, I think the argument is simply that the books are less consistent on that point and don't do the best job putting that forth. It stretches my disbelief to say that Ventrue select for wealthy, accomplished, revered people regularly enough that a firm stereotype takes hold, even if it's not universal. That's not how populations of people work on a long enough scale of history, and vampires are still people. It's going to be a lot messier and influenced by changing conditions on the ground in the moment. You're not going to get a selective breed of vampires like that. "A Brujah that is deliberately deciding not to rebel" is similarly reductive: it's still assuming that there is a Brujah norm of conduct that one must choose to go against. They're people. They're making decisions based on what makes sense to them at the moment. That Brujah neonate doesn't give a poo poo what her new clan elders expect her to be like. She's not rebelling against rebellion. She's just being the person she already was.
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Apr 23, 2024 18:28
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Ferrinus posted:I think your problem is that it's just too succinct. You're like, okay, every Brujah is just growing into an ancient, immortal monster from the old days of Nod... and that ancient, immortal monster hates being told it's bedtime! Completely unrelated, but just a few weeks ago I was browsing a used book store that had a record section and chanced upon one of the most amazing album title and covers I have seen: Y&T's Down for the Count. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9DhnDuEHGc Incredible disappointment. How are you gonna put Dracula sucking blood from robo-Maria from Metropolis on your cover and then sing about being mad at your algebra teacher and having to dress nice at your cousin's wedding?
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Apr 23, 2024 19:00
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:it's kind of funny to me that even if you streamline Malkavians down to "they perceive things other people don't, but perceive so intensely that sometimes it overwhelms them, and consequently they come off as really weird and struggle to communicate clearly" you've basically just gone from The Mental Illness Clan to the Autistic Clan Welllll, sorta, but I think at that point you've gotten into the same territory in which you'd refer to Vampire as "the landlord game". Not everyone experiences autism like that, and on the other hand the wild-eyed scientist in a disaster movie who everyone ignores until it's too late draws on that territory without really being an autism parable, and on the other hand more clear-cut autism parables like the experiences of young Clark in Man of Steel are just on the whole less ham-fistedly normative and mean-spirited than saddling people with much cruder and starker descriptors like "crazy" or "punk". Basically, starting with an immediate physical or sensory experience like "thirsting for blood" or "experiencing precognitive flashes" and building fiction out from that will often end up echoing or invoking a lot real-world material that may or may not get people's hackles up, but it at least can have good results in a way that starting with your desired stereotype and backsolving for it won't. Schwarzwald posted:Down for the Count. lmao Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 19:57
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Dementation was a mistake, Malkavians should have kept Dominate, and instead gotten an extremely funky version of Auspex. Always been saying this.
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Apr 23, 2024 20:18
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Dementation was a mistake, Malkavians should have kept Dominate, and instead gotten an extremely funky version of Auspex. This is literally how they work in V5. They're also specifically archetyped as seers and oracles, with a heavy downplaying of the madman crap.
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Apr 23, 2024 20:34
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Fuzz posted:This is literally how they work in V5. They're also specifically archetyped as seers and oracles, with a heavy downplaying of the madman crap. V5 emphasizes the seer and oracle thing on top of the madman crap, which never went away, because keeping it in the game was the whole point of returning to Masquerade rather than building off Requiem or making a new setting. Like I said, that's the irony of V5's particular implementation of the Malkavians; the clan compulsion is not actually a compulsion at all, and therefore pretty good, but then the clan bane is completely unchanged and continues to imply that if other people have been enculturated to find your mannerisms weird it basically means you're a member of a different species. (It's probably also more mechanically punishing, since your bane activates on any bestial failure and just debuffs a full third of your character sheet)
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Apr 23, 2024 20:47
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I Am Just a Box posted:Requiem's clanbooks. Not sure if I found the right thing but it seems just as stereotyped at Masquerade. Gangral are savages that hang out in the woods, Ventrue are bluebloods and Brujah are hotheads. It looks like each clan actually has a "Backgrounds" section that notes where each clan will recruit from. For example, "The Ventrue most often seek childer among the ranks of professionals or the cream of high society. Some Lords prefer childer from “old money” families or political dynasties, as the closest the modern world comes to feudal nobility. Other Lords prefer self-made leaders such as millionaire entrepreneurs, politicians, military officers or even crime bosses. As new professions and new forms of power arise, the Ventrue bring them into the clan. The rise of the computer industry, for instance, has prompted a wave of tech-sector childer." And that's pretty much what I would expect, a guideline of who makes up most of the clan and what kind of characters you could generate as a member. Also amusingly enough, it seems that in this game Bruja are entirely a biker gang started in the 40's which is even more stereotypical than in VtM. Less amusingly, is this little number: "No self-respecting Bruja would ride anything but a burly, growling American bike — no rice rockets — or keep it in anything less than prime running condition." Good ol WoD, never dodging the allegations. I Am Just a Box posted:And if that feels like what you're already saying Masquerade clans are, I think the argument is simply that the books are less consistent on that point and don't do the best job putting that forth. As noted above, the rulebooks will typically state outright that Ventrue select from wealthy, accomplished and revered people. The core problem you're having is that they are not a "population" of people. Nobody is born a Ventrue, you have to be intentionally turned into one. In the real world, anyone from any background can be anything. But this is a game about a secret society that has to be incredibly strict about who they induct into vampirism. They don't just turn anyone on a whim. That Brujah neonate would have been selected because she was already the kind of person the clan elders would expect her to be like.
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Apr 23, 2024 21:13
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Nephthys posted:
This is a bloodline, not a clan, akin to a D&D prestige class if you squint a bit. Bloodlines are typically a few dozen members at most and usually all in the same place.
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Apr 23, 2024 21:19
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