The Forge Archives

Inspired from a thread in Actual Play:
So you want to make a Vampire game.

Start with some design goals.  You've said you want it Narratiavist, which I'll define here as focusing on story creation via character interaction with the premise.  Important aspects of this will be mechanics which facilitate character-as-protagonist and which also make the game's overall premise a part of character mechanics.

Now to premise: What do you want to explore here?  What is the central emotional issue that grabs the players?

Arguably, the basic premise of VtM is: "How does your character deal with inevitable moral decay?"  If you want to go this way, I'd suggest stealing the basic Humanity mechanics from Sorcerer.

A variation on this might be "the Temptation of Power."  You're strong, immortal, and have snazzy magic powers.  What do you do with it?  Champion a cause?  Acquire power?  Sink into an endless, sybaritic party?  And how do you deal with that irritating need to drink blood?

Or, you could go with the "Politics of the Night" premise – Machiavellian intrigue where the characters' vampirism is really just a gimmick, and the threat of discovery/destruction is used as a "push" to get things going when they bog down.  No need for a Humanity score here.  Instead, detail is spent on motivations and social stuff.

How about "Vamps vs. Hunters?"  More focus on combat and vampiric powers.  Humanity might be a nice sideline, but you wouldn't want to push it too hard.

You get the idea.

A few lines up, I wrote "detail is spent."  Let me expand on this.  Think of detail as a game-design currency.  You have a finite amount of it to use in your game, so you want to spend more detail on the important stuff and less on the less important stuff.  The bits where you, the designer, spend the most detail cue your readers in to what you think are the most important parts of the system.

So where to spend this detail?  Obviously, premise will dictate this to some extent.  Lots of detail should be spent on the mechanics and information which promote/facilitate the premise.  But what about other stuff, like vampiric powers?

Is the way various groups/bloodlines/individual vampires differ from each other going to be important to the premise?  If not, don't worry about possible differences.  If you spend lots of detail on the various cool things vamps can do, your readers are going to assume that this is a main focus of the game.  If you don't want it to be, give all vamps the same basic powers.  This shifts the weight away from differences in power to differences in personality.  Keep in mind that most modern vampire fiction says little about differences in the kind of powers vampires have, except when such differences highlight differences in character.  In Anne Rice's work, Louis' inability to read minds is a reflection of his disconnection from both humans and vampires, not a major point in itself.

Just something to think about.

Lon

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Arguably, the basic premise of VtM is: “How does your character deal with inevitable moral decay?”  If you want to go this way, I’d suggest stealing the basic Humanity mechanics from Sorcerer.

Forget stealing just the mechanic.  Steal the whole damn game.  Doing Vampire with Sorcerer mechanics is as easy as pie.  Just treat the players as if they all have possessor demons with a Need to drink blood and that lack the Hop ability.  This is very similar to the 'Buffy' version of vampires anyway.

Or, if you want to go the Blade route where vamprism is basically some kind of weird blood disease make them Parasite demons.

Jesse

I'd go the parasite route myself, but I was trying to allow for the possibility that someone might want to write their own mechanics.  You know how many system monkeys we have on the Forge.

Lon

I'll take a shot at it.

You have three human attributes:

Vitality:  Physical stuff
Awareness:  Mental stuff
Resolution:  Force of motivation, will, and will to live (forever).

Further, you have three vampire Aspects:

Power:  How physicaly supernatural you are; strength, speed, degree of immortality.  

Dominance:  How mentaly powerful you are; mind powers, animal control, control, predatory instincts

Occult: How magicaly potent you are; all the other assoretd vampire stuff.  Each point is a specific power the vamp can use with a successful Attribute roll (based on the actual occult ability); stuff like weather control, shape shifting, shadow form, flight, fire creation... anything you can think of.


Rate attributes with d6's roll and add, margine of success is degree of success.

Each attribute gets a Description (part background, part ability).  for activities within the description, roll all dice, in all others, roll half dice.



Vampire aspects are different.  They represent plateus of power, and are fairly absolute.  A vamp with Vitality 2 but a Power of 1 is stronger, faster, tougher, and more graceful than any mortal no matter how many dice they have.  Roll Power, and this is the level of success against a lesser oponent.  

Vamp to Vamp, power cancels out 1 to 1.  So two Power 3 vamps go at it with their raw Vitality, but if one had 4, he would get a single die of automatic success instead.

The older the Vamp. the more Aspects he accumulates.


Points of an Aspect can be Burned temporarily to briefly boost that aspect to higher levels.  This is with apropriate vampire eye-buldging, hissing, and vampin-out FX.  Such a burn lasts for a scene max, and can leave a vamp depleted for days.


Aspects also represent a Vamp's supernatural weaknesses, and as they grow in power, their vulnerabilities also get worse.

Power inflicts Hunger, and a Resolution vs Hunger check is required to resist feeding or to go for long periods wihtou feeding.

Dominaince inflicts Fury, and it is resisted with Awareness when challanged or threatened.

Occult inflicts Banes, each point adding a new specific Bane with a potency based on the level of Occult.  Sunlight, silver, mirror, herbs, home soil, running water, stake in the heart, poppy seeds, wild rose garland, holy symbols etc.   Banes circumvent the protection conveyed by Power (the fact that no one with a lesser power can lay a damn hand on you, for example), and can allow a mortal to slay a vamp.





There you have it.  A ten mintute vamp game, with power ballancing disadvantage internaly.

Nice B.

But what's the Premise, and how do the stats relate to it? Sounds lie you might get wrapped up in the terrible "machinations of the elder vamps" plots. Where is the conflict?

Mike

Good point.  I'm not sure where the politics thing came from.  I've read a lot of vampire fiction, and while some of it has something like prince/coven/pack sort of thing, the only place I've seen the massive political games is in White Wolf, not in fiction (movies, books, TV).  All the other ideas sounded great: redemption, power (you live forever, can do cool things, what are you going to do w/ it), hunter/hunted.

On the mechanics side, I love the comment that where you spend your time = game focus.  In most of the source material, Vamps are pretty much the same with age being the factor that differentiates how strong they are.

Ah Mike!  So hard to please... ok. let me reread...


Premise...


Hmmmmm



Ok.... I'll try and hit it with some bullet points...

"Humanity" doesn't enter into it.  What is at issue here is change, evolution, devolution, transformation.  These vamps arn't human anymore... they remember being human... but after they've lived more years as undead than as mortal... well, weigh it.

Are you still a squalling infant?  Do you even remember what that was like?  Even if you did, weigh the squalling and pissing against every other experience you're accumulated.  Hardly matters after a point.

Simply put, this isn't a game about loosing your humanity... that insignificant thing is gone.  You're something different now.  undead who bitch about their loss of humanity are rightly mocked and humiliated by the VERY catty undead community.  Vampires treat each other like house cats; occasionaly forming very tight bonds which last forever, but generaly varying the tension from staring and pissing contests to outright savage slash and kill.  These vamps all have the same social instincts as hunting creatures.  To one degree or another, they are feral.

At best they can get together into pack-like covens with complex internal dynamics to ballance out the instincts of the blood drinkers.  Such units when healthy are very powerful and interrelated.  Out ov ballance, it can degenerate into a bloodbath.  Covens are lead by a linked pair of alpha personalities; typicaly male and female, but this varies with culture.  Watch the discovery channel for the Wolf shows.  Vampire pack.  This makes a great easy-to-run palyer group too.  Already, interpersonaly dynamic becomes more importiant than actual powers and abilities.

Physicaly, even the weakest vamp is so superior to the strongest human that direct contest is impossible.  Vamp graps human, it's pretzle time.  Same goes for vamps with higher Power to lower power vamps (unless the weak ones Burn)... so physicaly, vamps avoid confrontation with each other, and only fear humans who know their Banes, but they keep a fairly low profile (to avoid supernatural enemies or whatever) and use their mental powers to wipe out memory of their exestence.


They party in war zones, collect the bricabrac of ages, and further their perosnal vendetas... just to pass the time.  You have to do SOMETHING forever.  Sometimes, high minded vamps go on world-spanning mytho-archeological raids looking for the species origins... other times, they go looking for a good time.  Sometimes they get tangled up in local crime, politics, or buisness... sometimes, they just pass through like ghosts.  There are highly territorial covens who guard their little patch of earth (and humanity) like junkyard dogs, and there are constant wanderers who never sit still.


What there is not is any kind of Big Explination.  No creation myth, no 'mythic otherworld' filled with spiritual manifestions of great warring forces.  It's just like this world, except there are monsters in it... and no one really notices.


So....




Premise-  The Predatory Social Dynamic played throught the traditionaly familiar medium of the Vampire.  No big politics, no kooky inquisition, no winging on about lost humanity.  Just a bunch of egos cramed in a room, forced to find the ballance between them or die trying.

Quote from: Bailywolf
Simply put, this isn't a game about loosing your humanity... that insignificant thing is gone.  You're something different now.  undead who bitch about their loss of humanity are rightly mocked and humiliated by the VERY catty undead community.  Vampires treat each other like house cats; occasionaly forming very tight bonds which last forever, but generaly varying the tension from staring and pissing contests to outright savage slash and kill.  These vamps all have the same social instincts as hunting creatures.  To one degree or another, they are feral.[/b]

I know you hate when I do this, but have you seen my Vampires LARP rules? I came to the same conclusion (the game as played has fuck-all to do with humanity and more to do with sinking your teeth & claws into stuff). It's on my site, natch.

The Predatory Social Dynamic...

I see a R-map of elder vampires, carrying on arcane vendettas so old that even they don't know how it all started.  Creatures both pathetic and powerful, clinging to vain and pointless grudges as their only touchstones in minds chaotic with the debris of centuries.

Against this background, a pack of relatively young vampires trying to work their own wills without running afoul of their elders...

Lon

P.S.
Anybody ever read the Sonja Blue novels?  Vampires much like this.

What I worry about it...

- without a suitable origin myth, there is no mechanism by which to understand your own nature; this makes introspection hard.

- without the political element, your tone may go berserk and end up with vampire rockstars openly strutting the world stage.  This may or may not be cool depending on your tastes.

- frankly, a bunch of predatory lunatics are not a very interesting group; this would appear to me to strongly encourage the wallow-in-orgy-of-wish-fulfillment-bloodbath pattern.

Thus, it seems to me, in the name of freeing up the vampire premise from the "burdens" imposed upon it, this has reduced the concept to what appears to me to be the very form of play that people wanted to get away from.  There appears to me to be nothing about these characters which would would be interesting or catchy, apart from their vampiric status which is really just a wish-fulfillment hook.  The vampiric status itself has no value, no, well, bite.  IOW it seems to me to be the re-invention of the Dungeon Crawl.

Ah jeepers, now I have to use my brain (and before my first cup-o-joe too!  Heartless, heartless world).

Quote from: contracycle
What I worry about it...

Cripes... ok, breathe deep.... and now....

Quote from: contracycle
- without a suitable origin myth, there is no mechanism by which to understand your own nature; this makes introspection hard.

Where did humanity come from?  How many thousands of possible origin stories have been postulated for our species?  Every culture, religion, cult, and even science all seek to explain it... but rarely agree.  Who's right?  Who do you believe?  There is no "Big Answer" for these vampires either.  So what you're left with is trying to make some sense of a world that pretty much ignores 'sense'.  In this, vampires still labor away just like anyone, trying to come to terms with their lives in the face of an indifferent universe... so... all you have to depend on at all are the answers drawn from introspection.  And Faith.

Quote from: contracycle
- without the political element, your tone may go berserk and end up with vampire rockstars openly strutting the world stage.  This may or may not be cool depending on your tastes.

You can have an assload of politics with this scheme.  If you come from a large family, you know just what I mean.  The jockying for position, the one-upsmanship, the back biting... it's not the dry, cold 'game of ages' seen in major vamp games, it's sibling rivalry, it's the Politics of Wolves (hey, good section title there...).  This hinges off the premise- predatory social dynamic.  Gang politics, family politis, the politics of love and hate.  

Quote from: contracycle
- frankly, a bunch of predatory lunatics are not a very interesting group; this would appear to me to strongly encourage the wallow-in-orgy-of-wish-fulfillment-bloodbath pattern.

This is the danger- pack imbalance and self destruction.  Vampire hunters rarely get the chance to kill off rogue undead; they generaly manage to piss off enough other vamps to get wacked 'in house'.  Just watch the movies.  Which kind of vampire lives for a long time?  The crazy, seriel killer, blood-splattered loony or the fairly level headed bloke with a measure of caution and healthy relatioships with other vamps?  The crazies generaly get wasted fairly fast (Lost Boys, Near Dark etc) while the smart ones love a long time (The Preacher [cassidy], Blade, Dracula, UltraViolet etc.).

Quote from: contracycle
Thus, it seems to me, in the name of freeing up the vampire premise from the "burdens" imposed upon it, this has reduced the concept to what appears to me to be the very form of play that people wanted to get away from.  There appears to me to be nothing about these characters which would would be interesting or catchy, apart from their vampiric status which is really just a wish-fulfillment hook.  The vampiric status itself has no value, no, well, bite.  IOW it seems to me to be the re-invention of the Dungeon Crawl.

As you say, the vampire itself has been done to death.  It hardly carries any weight as metaphore anymore.  In my mind making the PC's vamps instead of some breed of being serve only to provide some key benifits-

>Predatory Social Dynamic- the premise.  Could just as easily be supported with werewolves, demons, hungry ghosts, or whatever.  

>Personal Stakes- not a game about warring political organizations with florid names... but about the personal grudges, rivalries, and attractions between beings who both love and hate each other; are both attracted and repelled by each other; who are inherently and powerfuly social, but very high strung.  Conflict is ALWAYS personal, even it it drags out across a thousand years.

>The Curse of Relativism-  when you've been freed from morality, from material concern, and even death... how do you find meaning?  The descent into mindless boredom alone keeps vamps moving.  This is why there is a Resolve attribute.  As your Resolve wanes, you have more and more trouble giving a shit about reality and acting decisively.  It gets easier and easier to sit on your ass for a day, a year, a decade.  Sometimes, The Hunger is all that saves you.  At least it never gets old.  

>Kewlness-  come on, is wish fulfilment so bad?  In the basic mechanics, I wanted to drop a pile of raw power in the player's laps.  "here!  now you can twist the arm Jet Lee!"  These guys are top of the food chain.  They don't much worry about humanity; but the predator always stays downwind from the prey... unless hearding them into a kill zone.  


Some Major thematic conflicts:

Vitality vs Stagnation (can also play out as Old vs Young or Action vs Boredom)

Us vs Them (rival packs, gangs, crime families, mosters etc).

Me vs Him (pure, interpersonal vendeta).

Ignorance vs Knowledge (no easy answers, remember?  Trying to figure out the 'why' makes for a good game conflict).





So... what's next?

I think that Gareth has some points. While I agree that the Humanity thing has been done to death, the Predatory Social Dynamic would probably lead to simple wish-fulfilment. In which case the original vampire game does pretty well. Not that this is bad, as Jared points out, but it might not be what a lot of players want. And in both of these cases the player fulfilment has the potential to be dampened by more powerful vampires keeping them in check. Heck, to this day the term neonate makes my skin crawl with feelings of inadequacy, impotence, and lack of control. Certainly won't work as a Narrativist premise, FWIW.

What would I like to see? Glad you asked.

What if we got rid of the whole elder vampire problem. It's an interesting concept, I'll grant you. So I'd suggest either a game that had the players as the elder vampires, or "all vampires are created equal". Let's look at each.

For the first we have a situation where there is a "community" of vampires of some size, and the players represent the top of the hierarchy. Their most important resources, then, are their relationships and controls that they have over other vampires. Which I'd think would be the way you'd generate your character, a list of these resources. At the "bottom" of your power pyramid you'd have yor newbie vampires, relatively powerless, but disposable, and renewable. At the next level would be your operative vampires, each with a primary skill. Then there would be your lieutenant vampires who would be more fleshed out like characters, with great power and whose loss would be devastating. Something like Jared's concept for Insecterotic.

Attempts to do things would be to strike from afar, and communicate through intermediaries. Resolution would be based on resources committed, and would risk loss of those resources, and exposure. Send a low level vamp and have a lesser chance of succeeding, higher chance of losing that vamp, and lower chance of exposure. Too much exposure, and even a player's elder vampire can be lost.

The premise would be "How do class and power affect your relationships?" or something like that, and I envision relationship lines (ala Isolation) that determine just how tied you are to the other top vampires by hatred and trust, etc.

Second, the all vampires are equal thing would need another angle. Let's see, humanity out, wish-fulfilment out, angst out (I'm assuming, as it has really gone out of vogue). Hmmm. How about we make the players amongst a handful of vampires in the world, and make the premise "The temptation of Power vs the Risk of exposure?" Allow vampires basic bonuses to any task they like (or give them specific powers if you like the splatty stuff), but have all resolutions have a chance of causing humans do detect oddities which may lead to the vamp (very metagame, probably). The more the power used, the more likely the exposure, and problems caused. All the GM has to do is introduce situations where the vampire wants to use power, and the plot drives itself then. As the vampire gets into trouble with humans he has to think of ways to get out. Blatant uses of power will only exacerbate the problem. Sure, kill a roomful of people who know, but then the police find lots of clues that lead back to you.

Just some ideas off the top,

Mike

Quote from: Bailywolf
Where did humanity come from?  How many

Algae

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thousands of possible origin stories have been postulated for our species?  Every culture, religion, cult, and even science all seek to explain it... but rarely agree.  Who's right?  Who do you believe?  

Totally agree.  My point is - everyone has one.  The origin myth does not have to be True, but it does have to be there.  So what I am worried about here is that be leaving this vague, you are not opening options, but contracting them.

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all you have to depend on at all are the answers drawn from introspection.  And Faith.

Introspection about what?  Faith in What?

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hinges off the premise- predatory social dynamic.  Gang politics, family politis, the politics of love and hate.  

The problem is that it is precisely these issues which develop into formal Politics.  Politics develops to mediate these sorts of conflicts between groups with disparate loyalties, rather than leaving them to be settled by open conflict.  I feel that you cannot escape addressing this question.  What is the Camarilla in WW's Vamp but a predatory social dynamic modified by the fear of even greater predation?

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wacked 'in house'.  Just watch the movies.  Which kind of vampire lives for a long time?  The crazy, seriel killer, blood-splattered loony or the fairly level headed bloke with a measure of caution and healthy relatioships with other vamps?  The

Yes I agree.  My concern is that if the game is to be as setting- and context-less as it appears, there is no in-game reason to draw this conclusion.  This is, in short, a property of the backstory and feeds in to the origin and politics question.  How are you going to convey this concept to the players?

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Predatory Social Dynamic- the premise.  Could just as easily be supported with werewolves, demons, hungry ghosts, or whatever.  

Indeed.  Although I would submit that human beings are such a comprehensively succesful predator that "predator politics" is indistinguishable from human politics.

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Personal Stakes- not a game about warring political organizations with florid names... but about the personal grudges, rivalries, and attractions between beings who both love and hate each other; are both attracted and repelled

Sure, but that sounds an awful lot like classic dynastic/feudal politics, which were heavily framed by the personal grudges of the various empowered social actors.

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The Curse of Relativism-  when you've been freed  from morality, from material concern, and even death... how do you find meaning?  The descent

Indeed.  More importantly, how do the PLAYERS find meaning?  The "being a vampire" has no special draw, the "hidden world" does not exist, there are no secret inights and illumination, in fact the world is as dull, and makes even less sense than, the real world (because real world people do have origin-conceptions and base all sorts of decisions - including political decisions - on those understandings).

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Kewlness-  come on, is wish fulfilment so bad?  In the basic mechanics, I wanted to drop a pile of raw power in the player's laps.  "here!  now you

Oh no, its not BAD, but just a bit formless when there is nothing to resist the fulfilment of your wishes.  If there is nothing to struggle against, to resist your wishes, their fulfilment provides little satisfaction as an act.

Anyway, I don't think thats theres anything much wrong with this mechanical structure and so on, but I feel some concern about the lack of conetxt - setting and situation - from which, I feel, so much drama and character motivation is derived.

QuoteThe more the power used, the more likely the exposure, and problems caused. All the GM has to do is introduce situations where the vampire wants to use power, and the plot drives itself then. As the vampire gets into trouble with humans he has to think of ways to get out. Blatant uses of power will only exacerbate the problem. Sure, kill a roomful of people who know, but then the police find lots of clues that lead back to you.

Now this is very cool... the more mojo you sling around, the more "expopsure" you accumulate.  This makes you subject to mortal attention and makes it easier for your fellow blood-suckers to screw up your life (just imagine getting audited by the IRS after using your mind powers to acquire a huge palatial estate... then discovering that bastard Monjoy is responsible for it...).

I could see a Machianation mechanic... you can use your enemy's Exposure points to build Devious Plots....


say....

Marcus Flavius (and onld Roman vamp) comes under attack by a yong upsart, Victor Montjoy.  

Marcus has accumuulated 12 points of Exposure recently (he looks after the descendents of his mortal family... it's something to do wiht the time, but has been forced to use his powers fairly brazenly to get trouble off their backs).  

Montjoy makes the requisite rolls (what ever those are), and gets (say) 3 successes from this.  Added to the 12 points of Exposure, this gives him 15 points to play with.  He decides to afflict Flavius with the attentions of the US government.

Attention
1 Intrest
2 Investigation
4 Punative
6 Hostile

Duration
1 Brief
2 Persistent
4 Life Time
6 Forever

Reach
1 Minute
2 Local
3 Regional
4 National
6 Global

Reasoures
1 Minimal
2 Personal
3 corporate/departmental
4 1st World GNP
6 Nigh Unlimited


So, the IRS has National reach and departmental resources (4 points, and 3 points).  He wants the duration to be Persitent (2 points) and the attention to be Punitave.  

**********************

How about this for a micro-setting and thematic conflict:

Revolution


Vampires are born, they grow in power (and in the power of their arrogance, hunger, and ambition); eventualy they can't maintain their pack relationships anymore; their hunger and fury drives them to destroy their covens or simply abandon them.  They begin to engage in manipulation, predation, and active hostilities against other, younger vampires, until they piss off enough of them to cause Revolution.

The young vampires rise up, slaughter the elders, and swear blood-oaths never to become like them.  Oaths they almost always break.

As a vampire's Resolve crumbles, his instincts and urges take over, until he can't work with others anymore.  He may be powerful, but he lacks drive and friends, and it's only a matter of time before a pack of hungry young undead come knocking at his door.


This keeps undead society vital, with a constant influx of 'new blood'.  There may be a few solid old vamps who've carefuly maintained their Resolve, but this lot stays active with the young pups to keep them from getting ideas... lots of 'hand shaking and baby kissing' visits... just don't let the yound bastards smell any weakness.




As for Faith...


I intended to clarify; there is no ONE Bit Reason for vampires (or anything else).  Some believe they are descended from Cain, some think they represent the actions of a virus, others see themselves as an evolutionary offshoot, as possessed by blood demons, as risen from the grave because of bad karma, as cursed by Voodoo magic.  Frankly, it doesn't matter.  This is all a part of character back story and description.  I don't believe in God, but I do believe in evolution.  The Faith I speak of is entirely an aspect of character.  


I tend to shy away from heavly out-of-character metagamy stuff... I find it difficult to get into games in which the characters don't directly interact with each other... personal bias.






[/quote]

Again, Gareth has a point. In fact it's a pet peeve of mine.

(rant on)

I too often see games that fail to include important facts about the game universe under the pretext of "allowing" the GM to come up with the relevant fact, or for mood's sake. I think that these are often excuses for an unwillingness for whatever reason on the part of the designer to come up with the information. Perhaps he's not iterested enough, perhaps he can't think of anything good. Whatever. The problem is that I obtained the game for those details.

The worst example of this is statements like, "The origins of vampirism are lost in the mists of time." Yes, very nice. And I can tell my players that. But as the GM, I want to know. Why? Because it may become important at some point, and I don't want to have to make it up. If I had wanted to make something up, I would have just made my own game. What the designer is giving me is incomplete. How does not having that information improve the game? The freedom argument is silly. If I don't like what you have in the game, I'll make that decision and change it. Just becasue you have something written down as cosmology of history in the text doesn't mean that I don't have the freedom to change it. And as for the mood argument, I prefer texts to have information over trying to evoke a mood somehow. If you must evoke a mood, do it some other way, please.

In fact, in the particular case, I'd like to see not only the real reason for how vampirism got started, but the myths as well. This way the players can have access to ideas that can acctually serve to drive the game, even if they are just myths. For example, it might be interesting to have a myth about the "first vampire" being a creature that proved his mettle time and again by killing other vampires thus "proving" that vampires should be all about survival of the fittest. Only to later learn that this vampire never existed, and that vampirism is simply a complicated blood disease.

(/rant)

As Gareth said, essentially, (and I've heard Ron say frequently) setting can really drive a premise if designed to do so.

Mike