#st advice

[avantguardbitch]

My Storyteller Advice

(based on what I learnt STing some games recently)

Always give The Drunk plausible information!

(I.e giving different empath numbers without neighbor changes.)

Not doing this signals to the player that they are Certainly drunk, which effectively solves their puzzle for them. They no longer have the joy of deducing whether they are drunk or not! Make it a meaty puzzle for the player that's worth solving! (Hints like librarian pings are part of the puzzle of course but be sparing with them. Consider what the player would enjoy.)

2. Trust your players with a difficult puzzle

Even new players can be drawn into a meaty mystery if you deliver one!

3. Create as many plausible scenarios as possible

You and the evil team are (at least at the start) aligned in that you want to create as wide of a possibility space as possible for the good team to try and narrow down and for the evil team to exist within. Beware choices that are exciting & explosive but don't leave a lot of ambiguity about the current game state. The best ST choices is often leaning towards keeping more worlds alive than closing them.

Ultimately these are my opinions, feel free to tell me if this advice rings true or not!

[relleytrots]

On Hunger and skittishness

OP reads: I have been DMing for a group of DnD-players, and we plan on trying out VtM V5. I've previously done a one-shot with some of these and a problem we noticed was that even with just one hunger, doing test felt punishing since it always risked triggering the Beast, either through a messy crit or a bestial failure. Coming from DnD, my players love doing lots of rolls for all sorts of things and I feel like heavily reducing the amount of rolling will be less fun for them, but I also feel that rolling as much as we're used to and their characters are gonna lose control all too quick. How can I keep the high amount of dice rolls that my party likes while mitigating the impact of hunger dice and the Beast?

Part of me - the oldschool second ed. Vampire enthusiast - says "this isn't Dungeons and Dragons, get used to it, adapt to what a new system does."

That's not helpful, so the rest of me says you should read - closely - the list of consequences for Messy Criticals and Bestial Failures. Either the Companion or the Player's Guide or both advise that you can consider these lists interchangeable.

You'll observe that none of these are "immediately wig out and make a frenzy check". Hunger, a Stain or Aggravated damage all create opportunities for trouble later on in the game, but none of them force a loss of control. Yes, it'll happen sooner or later, but you don't have to have your characters Hulk out the moment you see a red die with fangs on it.

The only shitty one in my opinion is "fail test" - it's boring, and it overrules the dice so what was the point of rolling in the first place? Masquerade Breach is also one to be careful with as it'll have consequences in later scenes, and can easily take over the session if you use it carelessly.

(I have a character who's still working off the Masquerade breach they accidentally racked up seven sessions ago. Bestial Failure when you're in a church and there's a reliquary radiating True Faith - not a good time. Great story fodder, but your players might see that as an unfair punishment for one bad roll two months back.)

I personally like Compulsions. They feel meaty - the Beast is making you behave in a particular way, guiding your roleplay in a direction you might not have planned on it taking, but not forcing your character to do anything you don't want them to.

Compulsions don't forbid actions, they just impose penalties to deter players from ignoring them. Hunger, Dominance, Harm and Paranoia are the bedrock of the Kindred experience, and one of them should fit whatever's going on. You also have the Clan specific ones in your back pocket if you need something special.

The main thing to remember is that a Messy Crit is a success with consequences. The player still gets what they want out of the roll, but it happens... vampirically. You can, and should, ask the player what this looks like: how the Beast within peeks out.

There is a much-discussed example of "but I'm rolling to research in a book how does that happen vampirically I am very smart" - easy, character gains one Hunger and goes on about their night. As Storytellers, we can always kick the consequences down the trail to when they'll have a better impact. Extra Hunger dice are a great way to do this.

The next most important thing is that a Bestial Failure is very unlikely. The character needs to fail the test in addition to showing that one-in-ten skull on a Hunger die, and V5 has so many built in ways to manage the prospect of failure.

Blood Surge for extra dice? Willpower damage to reroll up to three non-Hunger dice? And, if all else fails, we as Storytellers can steeple our fingers, lean in with a smile, and offer the ol' devil's bargain of Success At A Cost.

TL;DR - V5 gives you, the Storyteller, a lot of tools to interpret the outcome of a roll and adjust its impact beyond merely succeeding or failing at the task in hand. You need to become familiar with those tools, and experiment with medium-term consequences that don't hit until later in the session, or even later in the story.

Read, try, fail, reflect, learn. That's how it goes. You'll get there.

[relleytrots]

Hiya! I'm looking to be Storyteller for the first time, and am trying to psych myself up.

Do you have any playlist/album recs to get myself in the right headspace?

All right. In my experience, this goes as deep as you're willing to let it.

V5 may be leaning into "gothic not goth" (and to be honest, leaning away from gothic on the face of things), but it's still Vampire: the Masquerade: a game that has at least one of its roots in the goth scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This first playlist isn't even mine, but it does a neat slice through that whole moment.

When V5 came out, I made a conscious effort to update my vibe, get away from the goth night floor-fillers that I was into when I started Vampiring, about 25 years ago, but keep a connection to that original sound. This one has a couple of covers, a couple of big names, a timely "the past is dead" opener, and some very on-the-nose lyrical choices, but nothing that's actually in the Revised edition recommended listens list. Some of these regularly pop up on my individual chronicle playlists 'cause I think they resonate that well with being a vampire.

However! Vampire ain't just about the vibe in the book. You bring something to your chronicle: choices that reshape and filter what's going on. It helps to locate your chronicle, decide where and when your story is happening, and then pull some era-appropriate tunes that tie to moments/vibes you want to curate.

This is one I did for a chronicle that started in 1954, moved to 1969, and was planned to roll on until the start of Vampire's original moment-in-time. There's a mix here of "banger, y'all know this" and "the algorithm threw this up, it fitted, the date was about right" and something I always like to throw in: the mildly anachronistic title track.

This is probably the best one I've done. I put a lot of thought into the soundtrack for my first V5 game, because I was overthinking everything at the time, coming back to the seat of power after a few years away and not really knowing the new system yet. I knew these characters were all going to be Toreador Anarchs; I knew they were sharing a house near their art school, which had recently burned down; and I had an idea of who the major players in the city were going to be, I'd put together their names and clans and agendas.

I'm gonna break this one down in detail, actually, and hopefully that'll show what I think peak performance looks like. I started out with the first eight tracks and added the rest either as the coterie met particular characters, or in response to the coterie's choices. Listening to this before a session was an emotional recap, and emotional continuity is very important to me, more so than exact factual adherence to what may or may not have happened four weeks ago. In track order:

Vibe for the first session - our Kindred have technically graduated, but they've also been Embraced, and they're staying in their student house in the weeks after the ceremony they couldn't show up for, and summer isn't a great time to be a vampire anyway.

This is the political vibe the characters are starting out with: they want things to be better, but they're not super riled up about it yet.

This is the threat: the aggressive, unseen, unknown agenda behind the destruction of the art college and the sudden intrusion of Alistair Fucking Dunsirn into their world.

This is the player characters activated: twenty-first century spin on a classic of young outrage.

This is player character Callum's song, suggested by @stained-glass-sphinx.

This is player character Cali's song, suggested by @pathogenic.

This is player character Frankie's song, and I don't recall if I suggested it or @mxviatrix did.

There was one other Kindred active on the coterie's patch: Jamie, the Tremere who ran the Third Eye arthouse nearby. Jamie existed because I wanted to give them an early rival or ally, and have access to someone with an Intelligence + Investigation pool that existed and could succeed at things. He had a crush on Frankie, everyone else thought he was a pillock. This is his song.

Baroness Kilkennie! Malkavian, anachronism, gunrunner, ran the north side of town. Ally? Threat? Loose cannon? This track was perfect for her, and also set up the idea that she'd killed the previous Prince.

The split between run-down East and gentrified, collegial West Ends was part of the theming in this game. As well as being the theme song for Prince-in-name-only Alexandra, this song riffs off that tension and gives some late twentieth century energy reminiscent of prior conflicts.

Another Nineties banger, suggesting that prior hostilities are about to bubble over again, and this whole art school thing is both a continuation and only the beginning. By this time the coterie were lining up the Nosferatu primogen Barry Ross as the guilty party, and he was starting to flex in their direction too.

Enter @sorchamidnite! I needed a couple of weeks' vamping to prepare the finale of the first act, so Sorcha came along with a guest player and a theme tune. This was the start of the obsessive "new playlist for Sorcha" tendency that haunts me to this day - this one is just a clubland riff on her terrible pun username that sort of conveys her drug dealer/pays for everything energy. She's got you covered, babe.

Frankie hooked up with the detective constable who'd been investigating the coterie. DC Flynn, under the influence of Lingering Kiss, would turn out to be a real slow burn of a threat, and also a slightly pathetic figure who was passed from Kindred to Kindred, fed on and controlled, before the end. Under Your Spell indeed.

Cali stole a revolver belonging to Baroness Kilkennie, which he was going to hand over to the Camarilla to set her up as the BBEG, trying to create a power vacuum into which the coterie had decided to propel Alistair Fucking Dunsirn - and Cali was going to ride that old man's coattails to the top. All about personal responsibility, personal responsibility, that riff just going and going.

Frankie and Jamie hooked up for dinner. She brought him a police detective, he brought her a beautiful drugged-out-of-her-wits girl, there was a warehouse apartment, it was very tentatively sweet and schemey. I'd end up using this song as a leitmotif for this couple.

The first act ended with the coterie hosting an open-air rant in their domain. Everyone who was everyone in the Anarch Movement showed up with their bro up. This was the moment of articulacy - why were the Roses doing what they did? Because it's artful. Because they're beautiful. Because they owe it to themselves.

Title track. I just looked up "Wild Roses" once we'd named the coterie that, and the lyrics here - in the month of May, I think I wrote my own pain - fit really well, while the tune itself is a palate cleanser for the end of each session.

I hope all that provides... some sort of insight into how I use music in and around my chronicles? You don't have to go this hard, straight out of the gate, but I can say it was really rewarding to do in the first place, and to revisit now. Even if my notes make next to no sense five years down the line.

[relleytrots]

Gehenna War

It's pretty neat, yo.

Like Blood-Stained Love, it transforms the core "personal and political" horror of Vampire into another subgenre. Unlike Blood-Stained Love, it has a lot of concrete advice for Storytellers on structuring scenes, assembling pools, building characters to interact with, and making that subgenre work at the table.

An effort has been made, here. There's a little chart in the introduction claiming that Chapters 2 and 3, and the Appendices, will be of use to any action chronicle, be it more high concept or street level, and having read the durn things I think that claim's borne out. I'm gonna talk about those sections first, and later loop back around to the specifically Gehenna War stuff.

Chapter 2 has neat archetypes for characters in various armed conflict roles - generals, spies, intelligencers, recruits, veterans - with recommendations for priority stats rather than statblocks, so these can be flipped for player or Storyteller use. Suggestions for bonus XP amounts if you want more powerful starting characters, and focused specialisations that advise you to focus particular areas of your character sheet - almost like soft classes, or playbooks. A handful of new Merits and Flaws (one of which is getting slammed onto Penny), and a mixed bag of Discipline powers. Bloodform is back? Woo! There are "reroll Rouse checks for raising this one Attribute or using this one Discipline" openers for the Physical Disciplines? Swing and a miss, more filler. There's two incredible new high-end Blood Sorcery rituals (I shall be using both of them very soon), and some funky Thin-Blood Alchemy if you want your Duskborn to join a Methuselah cult.

Then: advice on running Basic Combat, and explicit guidance on the modularity of the Advanced Combat rules, and a few new ones. This is brilliant stuff for new Storytellers, reflective of the demand for the Combat Primer, and it's given me some ideas I didn't have before, and ALSO. VINDICATION. OBSERVE.

One of the things that waters down play over time is if the characters need to build the same dice pool every time for the same task. To avoid this, Storytellers should vary the traits involved according to the situation, to keep things interesting and to curb players trying to optimize their pools.

Leaving aside that awful syntax at the start - "Play becomes predictable if the characters need to build the same dice pool every time they attempt a task" - activate your voice, and dismiss "is" clauses, you cowards! - anyway, leaving that aside, this is how I've been doing things all along and I love that a book explicitly says "do it and don't get hung up on the exact RAW every time."

Car chase mechanics, cute new gear (I like the Scourge Blades, nasty-ass duelling swords that delay vampiric healing). Then it's on to story advice!

Chapter Three does something I wish Blood-Stained Love had done for romance: getting into the structure of action stories, how action interacts with other genre qualifiers (crime, horror, survival, thriller etc.), the escalating role of villains - like, actual formalist thinking about how stories work. We then get some mechanical advice on how to shift the mode of play, how to approach things like Hunger and Frenzy to make them more or less of a factor. It's short, but it's fuckin' GOOD.

Appendix I is all about dice. When you should and shouldn't roll, as opposed to taking half. Grouping those moments into broad types by what they do to the emergent story. How to add variation with tracker rolls or unusual dice pools. How to manage failures on tests and what to offer players to keep the story moving. And, most important of all, how to deal with the Beast, going through each Skill and showing how the Beast impacts a Messy Critical (still a success, remember!) or a Bestial Failure.

You need this Appendix. The corebook needed this appendix. Maybe it took six years of best practice and sharing ideas to get these ideas fully understood. Maybe if there'd been one dev team since the start we might have had this sooner. At least we have it now.

I'll talk about the Gehenna War itself in a follow-up post. That's Chapters One, Four, Five and Six, and Appendix II.

[relleytrots]

the world is a vampire (vtm city meta 1/?)

playing the world

So, you ended up as a Storyteller. Maybe you happen to own the rulebooks. Maybe you had the idea. Maybe nobody else in your group will put on their big gender pants and step up. The point is: you've got the 'sponserbilities. Now what?

The charm of being the Storyteller, for me, is getting to build wide rather than deep. Rather than inhabiting one character you get to occupy an entire world, moving it in response to the other players' actions but - and this is one of the big Storyteller Secrets - also in spite of them, and without anything to do with them.

In my experience a real good city and story are dynamic environments. SPCs want things that aren't necessarily anything to do with the PCs; they have Ambitions that they will advance whether the PCs are interfering or not, even whether the PCs are paying attention or not.

That's the secret to playing the world. What the players are interested in is the primary plot - there's no point in dragging them to Your Story - but you still get to do everything. Things can happen that the players only discover later, when their attention turns and they realise there was always something else going on.

choosing your location

There are two wolves inside me.

One abhors the very words "lore" and "canon" and has no interest in living any deeper in the shadows of the "IP holders" than necessary to play. One is obsessed with the World of Darkness and has years of fond memories attached to published material, and is also kinda lazy.

One of the wolves gets to pick my cities, but it's not always the same one. If it's the first wolf, I pick a city that doesn't have a By Night book and might only have one or two lines of attention paid to it. If it's the second, I pick a city that has a good By Night book, or a writeup in one of the gazetteer chapters/books. Glasgow was a first wolf pick; Prague was a second wolf pick.

why did I pick Glasgow?

I wanted to set a story in Scotland, for the Dunsirn connection, and I wasn't going to use Edinburgh because I didn't fancy tangling with The Gentleman's adopted OC. (I can be quite a brat about this, sometimes - it's why I've never run a game in Manchester despite knowing and loving the city.)

Vampire as a game turns on sectarian violence, the conflicts between conspiracies. Vampire as a mode exaggerates real history, setting up the Kindred as influential parasites and predators, moving it but being moved by it. Generally, when I pick a city off its own merits, it's because I've looked at it and gone "oh, that could be vampires."

Glasgow's history is, forgive me, full of lines drawn. Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Independence, Rangers and Celtic. It's really easy to wire and crosswire vampires into those conflicts, and to set up tensions within a clan or sect's power bloc by having its members on different sides of them. Divided loyalties aplenty.

I also have a literary point of reference. I'm a big Iain Banks fan, have been since I read The Wasp Factory at school, and his novels Espedair Street and The Crow Road are mostly and partly set in Glasgow. That helps - if the city isn't somewhere I've ever been I like having a sense of it informed by fiction, a vibe that I can draw down and inflect with Vampire's core concerns.

why did I pick Prague?

Partly, I had Redemption on the brain. (I've always had Redemption on the brain, it's how I came in, it's my Bloodlines.) Statting Christof Romauld for a Reddit thread got me started on the rest of his coterie, then reading Transylvania By Night and seeing how it didn't align with the PC game kept me going. And... OK, I'm not going to lie, the anachronisms were getting to me.

Sometimes, the desire to reach in and do a different job to the authors - not an objectively better one, but one more aligned to my priorities, subjectively better, for me - is too strong. There's a lot of that at work here. The buildings that shouldn't exist yet, the Discipline choice that doesn't make sense in V5, the desire to see if I can make this work - that's it, really, that's why I pick cities with more published material. The urge toward transformative work expresses itself as it will.

other reasons

In the past I've often seen advice to the extent that you should pick a city you know well, maybe the city that YOU live in. I don't think you have to do this, but there's one way in which it undeniably helps: grounding, through little details, through street names and cultural cues that you just know in your bones and don't have to fake. That can be really helpful if you don't want the cognitive load of pretending you're multiple different people and having to sell the sense of a different culture and do that respectfully.

Also, we need to talk about history. Some places are better for vampires at this point or that in their real history - Glasgow of the twentieth century was definitely an easier place to tell a kind of grotty, gangland vampire story than the twenty-first. Since I wanted to use it for V5, and I was bridging through from Revised, I made that part of the story, part of the theme. The city was cleaning up its act, gentrifying even, and the controlling ancillae were being left behind.

I could very easily do a Nineties Camarilla game, or a Victorian Age thing, showing the city in its glory days (for a given value of glory), but if I wanted to do a Dark Ages game, it would be more of a frontier thing, with the PCs the only Cainites in town: the city is too small and too new for much else to work.

[relleytrots]

Join VtM Storytellers Clinic | helping you run your best game - Discord - Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition | StartPlaying Games

This isn't a game. Well, it's not a game session. It's a session about a game. Over the years I've answered a great many FAQs about Vampire:

So StartPlaying is doing a thing, end of June/beginning of July. Dungeon MasterClass is an experimental event for GMs who want to pass on the secrets of the trade, and since this is kind of my bag, I am doing... some workshops.

These 1:1 "help you run the best possible version of your game" troubleshooters are the first idea I've had, but let me turn it around and ask YOU (yes, you) what YOU (still you) find onerous, ornery or on...toppaspaghetti about Vampire: the Masquerade and the Storytelling thereof.

And if it's something I can help with, I'll set up a session.

Dungeon MasterClass runs from 26th June to 10th July.