urizenic @urizenic - Tumblr Blog

Thank you for awnser my ask about games to try out, that was fantastic! Can I ask, what did you mean by "Vampire: the Masquerade the System had a completely different idea of what kind of story it wanted to tell than the text implied."? The only ttrpgs I've tried out so far are dnd 5e, call of cthulhu, and vampire the masquerade v5, so maybe I'm just missing the context, but it felt like the mechanics of vampire were pretty good at making you feel like a vampire?

Oh right, gotcha! So, I can't speak of newer editions of Vampire (although I do think V5 actually does a better job at this due to being much more focused in its design, at least based on my reading), but one issue with the original Vampire: the Masquerade was that it very much set itself up as a game that was supposed to be about the melodrama and politicking and angst of being a vampire, but what it as a system ended up being mostly about was combat and action. It also had an unfortunate tendency to patch over the fact that many of its actual systems were kind of haphazardly designed by going "remember, if the rules don't work you can ignore and change them," which is just asking the Storyteller to do design work for the designers.

And yeah that's pretty much it: Vampire: the Masquerade was set up as a game of gothic vampire melodrama; what it ended up being was a game where most of the rules weight was put towards playing The Avengers, but everyone is Blade.

Now a lot of that critique isn't of course unique to Vampire, because even these days pretty major RPG releases get away with telling their players "if you don't like these rules don't use them and actually good GMs know when not to use them, you're a good GM right? :)" and that sort of attitude was very much the norm at the time of the game's release, but it was also one of the critiques people at the Forge had for the game: if the game's rules need to be changed on the fly to get it to output the kind of story it's supposed to output, then the rules are bad at producing that type of story.

cavegirlpoems

So, as a huge Vampire fan, I think the problem vamp hit was that it was really several games in a trench coat and didn't explain this properly. Like you had maybe four playstyles of Vampire coexisting:

Personal Melodrama, as supported by mechanics like the Humanity tracker, blood bonding, and use of Backgrounds to tie your vampire to human NPCs.

Cut-throat Political Drama, which is supported by the systems of boons and status and titles within the camarilla, and which some disciplines (auspex, obfuscate, etc) could give you tools for.

Pulpy Superheroes With Fangs and/or Violent Splatterpunk Horror, with its crunchy combat system and wide variety of combat powers (which of these you end up with is basically just which side your PCs are on).

Occult Conspiracy Thriller, which is what you end up with if you read the whole setting and try to put all of it into one game, and which again your disciplines give you some good tools to interact with.

And to make these different playstyles work, you need to go into it consciously. If you want the personal melodrama, you play as neonates and fledgelings, with high humanity scores. You play clans like Toreador and Brujah with looser politics and less occult weirdness going on, strip the rules back more, and focus on the interpersonal elements. The VtM system *did* work well for this style of play, if you took the right approach. But if you're shooting for a low-key personal melodrama game, and somebody shows up with a 700 year old Tzimisce sorcerer who believes the Sabbat is lying about the nature of Gehenna, then even if that's a perfectly legal character in the system, your focus is totally out the window.

Likewise, say you wanted to play a tense political drama in a camarilla court. You need to focus on the elements of that which matter - status, boons, etc - and bring characters that work. Somebody showing up with a scared angsty fledgeling or a blood-soaked combat monster will derail that immediately.

That's the thing, the setting had a lot of different types of story happening to a lot of different characters, and if you want the game to work you have to limit your scope to a narrow slice of that.

That's the thing. A lot of those rules that the ST was expected to know to ignore were there because some styles of play needed them. If you were playing Superheroes With Fangs, those combat rules were vital (and did their job pretty well). But those same combat rules were wildly too complicated for a gritty political drama game, so the books just went 'and if you're not playing a combat game, don't bother with those mechanics'. You had to already be familiar with the game, and which elements supported which style of play, to make it work. Otherwise you risk wasting hours of your session on a tedious combat that doesn't matter in a game that's supposed to be about scheming politicians.

But, the books didn't tell you this. WW consistently presented the game as obviously and exclusively about either the personal angst or the occult conspiracies (depending on the era). Despite the fact that the game and its community were infamous for arguing about the right way to play it, WW never really signposted which elements of the game were designed for which styles of playing.

V5 Solves this problem, by the by, by declaring that there is One True Way to play the game - melodramatic personal angst - and making a game that only supports that, going as far as gutting the game of a lot of elements. Various types of character - sabbat members, path followers, elders, weirder bloodlines, and the secret sects - are either unilaterally declared Unplayable (and given no mechanics), or else inexplicably absent from the game. Likewise, the mechanics skew hard towards a very particular night-by-night street-level style of play, becoming wildly disruptive in other types of game, and being really quite hard to gloss over if they aren't helping. You will play v5 the way the designers think is correct, dammit, or not at all.

Which, like, yeah it solves the "vampire is four games in a trench coat" problem, but kinda sucks if your favourite way of playing is one of the three that the designers didn't favour.

pronounstheclown

Apple Intelligence summaries of your recent emails:

↪️ Cave spiders on the loose.

↪️ A quick update from Roz about cave sp…

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itisisunbeam

WHY EATING SEASONALLY IS IMPORTANT

•save money - food is at it’s highest supply

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mxmoonwitch

lemon--glow

@minimalistgrufti

minimalistgrufti

oh you’re a blessing omg thank you

theculturedmarxist

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

monitor-offist-deactivated20250

fastest reblog in the west