#vtm v6

[prophcassandra]

White Wolf seemed continually shocked that, no matter how many times times they wrote “vampires have no sex drive” or “the vampire sex drive is re-wired to center on feeding as a replacement for sex” across the first two editions of VtM, most players or writers just ignored them because the amount of players that want vampire smut is pretty much always going to be higher than those that want to subvert expectations around sex and intimacy with vampires.

So then in Revised they changed approach from saying “vampires have no sex drive” to “well if you have sex as a vampire it’s actually really icky.” They added details like vampires having all their bodily fluids replaced by blood and were not shy about saying "yes that means you cum blood and all sex is period sex." They were trying to gross out the fandom and make people stop playing horny vampires, but were again, shocked when players either ignored this, or were into it. Then when they finally acted like they had acquiesced to fans and made an honest to gods VtM smut novel it was filled with incest, necrophilia, and more SA than a late-stage L. Ron Hubbard book.

Yet they still were baffled by the amount of vampire smut being produced, realizing that, if anything, they had only encouraged the player base. Then when V20 came out they were line "fine, fuck you, vampires can have sex now and it's normal, the Blush makes all your bodily fluids normal and stuff, you win." Dark Ages V20 even leaned into this and is I think the only VtM gameline that took what I would describe as a "normal" attitude towards romance, sex, and intimacy within a TTRPG. For a moment, I thought maybe they'd finally gotten over themselves. Aaaaaand then V5 came out and we got Bloodstained Love and had to experience the lovely drama around the "Here's how much Humanity you need to fuck" rules and the "Bleed is always good and you should always strive for it" lines they put in. So like, any thoughts on V6? What weird drama is VtM going to get into around portrayals of sex and romance at the table? I wonder what strange and unique controversy they'll give us this time

[staubilein]

It seems like White Wolf is gonna announce V6 at GenCon. User Elegias on the WoD server made a transcript of the pre-alpha presentation which I found on reddit

VtM-Presentation at Darkness Emergent - Rough transcript

Presentation starts with a short team introduction that I didn’t transcribe. Then we have some project presentations that we already have

[prophcassandra]

Hopes and Fears for V6 #6 I hope we get: A fixed Sabbat. Please, please, please fix the Sabbat. The version we got in V5 was unplayable, and even if it was playable you wouldn't want to. No paths of enlightenment, they apparently don't care about Clan now (???), and it just wasn't fun. I want the Sabbat back. I'm really hoping that White Wolf realizes that a lot of us consider the Sabbat our favorite faction, and just because it doesn't lean heavily into that "personal horror" aspect the writers really fetishize doesn't mean it's an irrelevant part of the game experience. I hope we get Sabbat characters that have interesting philosophies on vampirism, I hope we get the dark spirituality that made the Sabbat what they are. I hope we get Paths of Enlightenment back for playing Sabbat characters, and I hope we get back the interesting clan identities with the Antitribu. I want Toreador Antitribu performing flesh art with Vicissitude, I want Serpents of the Light revolting against Set's tyranny, I want free Panders reveling in the status that they won as Caitiffs and never could have in the Camarilla. Give me back scheming Lasombra and the Courts of Blood, you can keep the Antitribu in the Camarilla but let us have back the dark aristocracy of the Sabbat. Give us ritae! Let us perform vaulderies and fire dances and games of instinct with our groups! These things are tailor made for VtM play, why did you take them from us? What I think we'll actually get: I think we'll get a playable Sabbat but they'll get cold feet about it and try to keep a lot of the hideously bad Sabbat lore from V5, like them forsaking Clan identities, the Lasombra leaving the Sect to go beg the Camarilla for mercy, abandoning all their strongholds to go run off to fight the Gehenna War, and etc. We might actually get some Paths of Enlightenment but they'll be written badly like they were in V20 and Revised and pigeonhole you into playing a baby eating monster and we'll get some snide sidebars in the book about how playing a Sabbat character makes you inherently evil and monstrous and want to kill everyone you see. We'll probably get some good Sabbat Loresheets at least. Maybe Black Hand membership will be a Loresheet, since it basically functioned as a proto-Loresheet in V20 anyhow. We'll probably get a Ritae Loresheet, maybe even get some Loresheets for the various factions like the Loyalists, Orthodox, Ultra-Conservatives, and etc, though that might be a pipe dream. We'll probably at least get the Vaulderie back, I hope. I think they'll throw Sabbat players a few bones at least but it'll be on homebrewers to hack the Sect into something playable since White Wolf has always regarded the Sabbat with open, barely-restrained contempt.

[prophcassandra]

Hopes and Fears for V6 #4 I hope that we get: As good of a system for Blood Sorcery as we had in V20. V20 had one of the most satisfying magic systems I've ever had the pleasure of playing with in a TTRPG, and playing a blood mage with 5 dots in her primary Path is legitimately the most fun I've ever had with a PC I've gotten to play. Dozens of different Paths, hundreds of rituals, it really made you feel like a real warlock whether you were a Tremere, Banu Haqim Sorcerer, or an Anarch using stolen magick. The more you read into the list of rituals the more chance you'd have of remembering some hyper-specific solution to a problem your GM laid out. It rewarded you for being bookish and delving into forbidden tomes. V5 did away with the myriad Paths entirely and heavily cut the number of blood rituals. I know some people thought the blood magick system pre-V5 was too complicated but, hot take, it should be complicated, it's magick, a difficult, literally arcane discipline that required study and understanding and that's why only a few Clans used it. It was so rewarding when you put in the work to understand What I think we'll actually get: A similar magick system to V5, where Blood Sorcery, Necromancy and so on are treated as a single discipline, but with more power options per dot level so that you can kind of mix and match a custom magic style that's a bit like the Paths from V20. We'll get more rituals, and we'll probably get a return of Abyss Mysticism, and maybe even some faith-specific rituals or Blood Sorcery dot options, like choices for specifically Bahari, Noddist, Settite adherents, and the followers of other vampire cults. While this isn't exactly what I want, I'm actually kind of hopeful that they'll take steps towards making things right with V6 and having a more engaging magick system. If I get a chance to play a Tremere at that GenCon playtest I'm totally doing it.

[prophcassandra]

Hopes and Fears for V6 #2 I hope that: We get a game that's backwards compatible with V20 and before. For all of my opinions about V5, there's really only one reason I haven't played it, and it's that it stands on its own. When I play V20, I can use material not just from V20, but from 1st, 2nd, and Revised edition too. As a Storyteller, that's a lot of fun. They forgot my favorite Clan or fucked them up in the current edition? No problem, let me just grab this stuff from an earlier book and tell my players that the Nosferatu in this city are from a different lineage. I'd love to see a V6 that had its rules tweaked just enough to keep the things people like about V5 but make it compatible with earlier editions I think that we'll probably get: Maybe backwards comparability with V5, to the point that it feels more like V5.5 than a full new editions on its own, or just a complete standalone new edition. I think they'll be some kind of sidebar in the core rulebook that tries to explain ways to use older material in the newer edition, but not in any way that really makes sense and it'll be up to homebrewers to finish that work.

[prophcassandra]

Hopes and Fears for V6 #5 I hope we get: More material for ghouls and Revenants. Ghouls have always been one of the most interesting parts of vampire as a setting. Being able to make an immortal helper, to save someone's life if they're injured or sick by turning them into one, being able to ghoul a mortal friend or lover from your past life, but they become part of your world, addicted to you, losing their own independence and humanity, it's all stuff that makes for wonderful pathos within a story. But I also think being able to play as a ghoul or Revenant is extremely fun, and one of my favorite ways to run the game as a Storyteller is to start my players out as ghouls or Revenants, and then have them each Embraced at some point in the story, going through both the drama of being a lesser member of vampire society at the mercy of powerful monsters, and then the shock of becoming one of them and having to navigate vampire society as a newly turned fledgling. V5 did support playing as a ghoul, but Revenants were barely in the edition, and imo, Revenant Families made for some of the most interesting drama. Being born into the blood, your family being owned by a powerful monster that you were born to serve from a young age, potentially even choosing you to die from your birth, it was a lot of fun and made for some interesting stories when you were playing a ghoul-focused game.

What I think we'll actually get: I'm actually kind of hopeful on this one? They've made it sound like they're going to give us a playable Sabbat in V6. Fingers crossed for that. I think if we get playable Sabbat, it's likely we'll get a return of most of the Revenant Families since aside from the Ducheski and the Black Hand Families, most Revenants are part of the Sabbat. I think we very well could see a return of the Sabbat families, and new rules for playing ghouls, maybe doing some interesting things with hunger dice mechanics that could be used to give you a risk of doing something crazy for your next hit of vampire juice. Considering the focus on personal horror that's been a trend in recent development for vampire, I'm hopeful that they'll through ghoul lovers some ideas that could be fun to play with. I've actually never been a huge fan of hunger dice when it comes to vampires, mainly due to the artificial difficulty of never being able to reduce your hunger to 0 without killing someone, which was never a thing before V5. I think hunger dice could be a lot more interesting for ghouls who've always been characterized as having an addiction to blood that they're willing to do dangerous or degrading things for just to keep up their fix.

[prophcassandra]

Since it's all but confirmed that playtest at GenCon is V6 at this point, I'm going to write some things I hope will be in V6, and things I think will actually be in V6 Hopes and fears for V6 #1 I hope we get: All 13 Clans in a single core rulebook from the start, preferably with a handful of the most popular bloodlines like V20 did. So we get all 13 Clans, along with the Salubri, Daughters of Cacophony, Lamia, etc. I hope the Clans have their original, unique Disciplines un-Amalgam'd, so we have a full Dementation, Obtenebration, Serpentis, and etc. Disciplines with the Clans. What I think we'll actually get is: The classic Camarilla 7 plus the Lasombra and maybe Settites/Ministry so they can say there's more than there was in V5. It's hard to have faith that Paradox won't want to parcel out Clans and bloodlines in as many books as they can get away with. I think some Disciplines will get un-Amalgam'd, with Dementation and Obtenebration being the most likely, but Quietus will stay awkwardly rolled into Blood Sorcery, Serpentis awkwardly rolled into Protean, Chimerstry with Obfuscate, and etc.

[prophcassandra]

Pipe dream for V6 When 1st edition VtM was released, the default assumed Sect was the Anarchs. The Camarilla were meant to be the stuck up, snooty vampires who didn't want you. The nickname Ivory Tower was made for a reason. It was assumed you were some random Embrace done without permission, just some fanged rabble the "proper" vampires didn't want, and the Anarchs were the only one that could take you. When the Sabbat made an appearance, they were intended to mainly just be monsters who would attack you openly as opposed to sneering at you and throwing you out of their building. 2nd edition came and started to assume that the Camarilla would be the default option though still included a lot of content for the Anarchs. More emphasis on personal and political horror and the grinding oppression of the Ivory Tower is very good for wearing down your morals and making you incapable of trusting anyone. 3rd edition pretty much exclusively assumed the Camarilla as the default mode of playing, in line with Revised's very gritty, street level approach to VtM V20 is pretty much Sect-agnostic and included material for any of them including the Sabbat, but there's still an undertone of the Camarilla being the "default" way to play the game, with Anarchs and Sabbat and even the Black Hand being further fleshed out in splat books. V5 came back and we're back to assuming the Camarilla is the default Sect. They're even more oppressive and horrible now to the point that it's hard to distinguish them from the Sabbat except that they wear nicer clothes but... I digress V6 coming in a couple weeks, at least in playtests, and I'm going to make a wish now. Trying to manifest. Let''s see the Sabbat as the default Sect. All the political horror of the modern Camarilla, all the anger and animalistic degeneration of the Anarchs, and with a heavy dose of nihilism and apocalyptic ideology. The new default assumed start is a shovelhead grabbed off the street and thrown into a Pack with a handful of other neonates, given marching orders by the local Bishop, and have to balance the threat of their own superiors with dodging hunters and Camarilla Hounds, while watching their own Humanity slip away. Since it seems likely V6 is keeping the hunger dice mechanic, making every vampire into a hair trigger psychopath constantly on the edge of snapping and frenzying, I think a Sabbat default makes the most sense. Constantly Frenzying and having messy criticals doesn't fit the prim and proper Camarilla vibe much, but it fits the Sabbat great. You want a gritty game about losing your humanity and morals and feeling hunted by the enemy? The Sabbat will give you that! V6, Sabbat Edition, let's see it!