D&D 5E Nananananananaaaa BATMAN! (about vampires in D&D and in general, Ravenloft/Curse of Strahd etc.)

[Ralif Redhammer]

I think there’s room for both the tragic and the pure monster vampire archetypes. I have less tolerance for whining vampires, though. As a goth of old, I got more than my fill of angsty undead in the 90s.

As far as the disconnection between Ravenloft’s setting then and now, as much as I enjoyed the setting, I get why they didn’t introduce an entire campaign setting when the Realms don’t even have a full campaign sourcebook yet.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

A thing that should be pointed out is that Strahd was never a hero or a good person. Even before Curse of Strahd in stuff that focused on him like I, Strahd. He was always a ruthless and merciless warlord. Who became bitter about how he spent his youth as one.

He's an interesting character but he is not sympathetic. Even the book which focuses the most on his character it's pretty clear that he was never a good person and became worse overtime from his bitterness, before becoming a vampire out of selfish desire.

 

[flametitan]

As I've never played the original Ravenloft setting, I have no personal attachment to the old way they handled it.

Vampires are evil; they pretend to be good, courteous and with an air of nobility, even, but they're fundamentally monsters that hunt in the night.

And again, I rather like the plot point of "no true sunlight." It's a nod to folkloric vampires, who weren't weakened by sunlight in the slightest, while still justifying it to anyone who only knows of the modern conception of the vampire.

 

[Imaculata]

In my setting, the vampires form an aristocracy in a specific country of the world. They can sometimes live peacefully alongside normal humans, but that is because they rule through fear. They also fight a war with demonic forces of the Demon Queen. They are not what you commonly think of as vampires. Instead, they are an ancient group of people who have discovered the secret to eternal life through ghastly blood experiments.

 

[PMárk]

As for me, i like both kind of vampires, the monstrous ones and the ones who struggle with their curse too. I like those kind of stories, but I also like characters and stories which got as far from humanity as possible. And i like every shade and nuance between the two and moral grays. Above all, I prefer if even the adversaries are persons, not just pure evil monsters. Pure evil, IMO is boring and i maintain that for demons and the most depraved.

I don't say vampires in general should be redeemable, but I love Masquerade, so I prefer when vampires have nuanced personalities, and emotions beyond evil for evil's sake.

I think Strahd's story in the prior editions was wastly better than it is in CoS, because it told a tale about a person, who might have been a ruthless warlord, but ultimately fought for something that could be considered as a good fight. He sacrificed his youth and innocence for his family and people. Then he succumbed to his lust, envy and fear from death and yes, even love. These fears and emotions transformed him and he did something terrible and became a monster, but he wasn't the only monster and bad guy in that story. It is a tragic tale. I never approved what he did, but I could understand it and I can relate to it. And this, IMO was the brilliance of his story and the old RL setting in general. He wasn't just an evil vampire, he was a person, whom story induced thoughts and questions in the reader and player and I loved that.

I agree with @doctorbadwolf about Dracula. While i love the original book and re-read it countless times, i think Lee's version is more interesting as a story and as a villain. I think it is much interesting when you see a person, see his every step into the darkness and weep for him, but could understand him, yet still, he was needed to be destroyed, because in the end, he became a monster, who spread misery and death everywhere.

I don't like how vampires became cute guys with superpowers in recent times* and I agree, that started with Rice, with the portrayal of vampires as persons with emotions, with Masquerade and even with Strahd. Although, I don't think discarding how all of these made them more interesting as villains, as monsters and as characters and returning to the old days, when they were nothing else, but blood sucking, purely evil monsters is the right solutions. I think we need both, we need Strahd who is a villain but with a tragic backstory, we need Jander and Louis who struggle with their condition and don't want to succumb to the beast and we also need vampires who truly forsaken humanity and became the beast, with the manure of nobility and culture, or not. I think we even need Lestat-like characters, who are arguably evil, or at least revel in their vampiric condition, but also has good sides and could be a sympapthetic character.

So i get the point the Hickmans wanted to make, but i think the execution wasn't the right one. As I wrote in the other thread, Strahd was never a cute vampion guy, he was ever a villain, but an understandable villain and i feel taking away that and making him evil from the get-go is just reduced him into an uninteresting adversary.

*Ok, there comes the cynical part: I think people in general, and geeks in particular hates, as a knee-jerk reaction every type of character trope which is portrayed as a highly romanticized and idealized person, who gets all the girls/guys, because he/she is just soooo perfect in everything. I think that's the same reason why a lot of people hate elves and bards and so on. We all wanted to be the rockstar and we hate we couldn't. Said all that, I still hate the cute-teenage-guy-with-superpowers-who-happened-to-have-fangs, but ultimately doesn't have any of the struggles and monstrous abilities and inhuman personality traits that Rice's vampires have and characters in Masquerade too. I hate that because it takes away just as much from the complexity of the vampire theme as dragging it back to the "just monsters/kill on first sight" days. Both are oversimplification.

 

[PMárk]

I think there’s room for both the tragic and the pure monster vampire archetypes. I have less tolerance for whining vampires, though. As a goth of old, I got more than my fill of angsty undead in the 90s.

Oh, Lestat's evergreen quote from the end of Interview! Freckin' love it.

As far as the disconnection between Ravenloft’s setting then and now, as much as I enjoyed the setting, I get why they didn’t introduce an entire campaign setting when the Realms don’t even have a full campaign sourcebook yet.

I understand why they didn't do the setting, instead the retelling of the original module. WotC now has making nothing else, but the safest, most sure decisions and catering to nostalgy. Sadly it seems to be the trend about all of the upper echelons of the entertainment industry (I know, i know, these are old news).

However, I still think it would be better to:

1. Since they brought back the world axis cosmology and Sigil and everything, I don't like they kept the 4e version of the Domains. I liked the full setting better.

2. They could make the modul just as great without retconning and re-writing much of the setting and the backstory and IMO not for the better. All they should've done is just acknowledging the setting and all that came before in a paragraph, or appendix and just basically keep everything, the faiths, the trading and visitors from the other countries of the Core and just say in the time of the adventure the borders are closed, period. The same results, but with more story hooks and it would kept open the gates for future material and, above all it wouldn't have thrown out the window the whole setting with a lot of fans.

You don't need to eradicate the setting just to make the adventure a confined thing. RL even has a mechanic for that. It's like saying, for PotA, or OotA, you would need to erase FR.

And why they felt the need to define the Dark Powers? Why????

 

[flametitan]

I'm going to be the contrarian and disagree that a tragic backstory makes a character more interesting. A character lives and dies by their onscreen performance. A villain whose backstory is just "One day I decided to be evil," can be a more interesting character than one whose backstory has a long arc about their fall from grace. The trick is that the "flat" character has a more memorable personality when they're being shown. If your character with a long backstory has no personality when being shown, your players are going to forget about them soon enough.

Now, this isn't necessarily a problem with Strahd, as regardless of whether it's the new version or the old, he's presented as being fairly interesting to play, even if his new background seems a bore to read.

As to why the other planes were cut out: They're just not relevant to the story. Curse of Strahd doesn't need details on the fact that "normally there's places outside the mists, but today Strahd felt like locking them down," because its story doesn't care about the fact the other places exist. It's not like cutting the Realms out of OoTA; It's more like if they added a line about how "Normally there'd be this section of the underdark that's lead to Cormyr, but today it's blocked off," when the adventure doesn't even make the fact that there's a way to Cormyr relevant. It's just wasted page space. The players will never be able to interact with it, there's not enough detail for the DM to run with it, the adventure wouldn't touch on it beyond that. Why should it bother with it being there?

 

[Yunru]

I like them to be immoral and indifferent. If a vampire is maintaining peace and security for the village, it's probably in the same way a shepherd would tend the flock: to keep it alive and healthy for when it's time for the slaughter. Some might develop a more symbiotic relationship, but make no mistake, it would be self-serving.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I'm going to be the contrarian and disagree that a tragic backstory makes a character more interesting. A character lives and dies by their onscreen performance. A villain whose backstory is just "One day I decided to be evil," can be a more interesting character than one whose backstory has a long arc about their fall from grace. The trick is that the "flat" character has a more memorable personality when they're being shown. If your character with a long backstory has no personality when being shown, your players are going to forget about them soon enough.

Case in point: Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch vs. Mila Kunis' Wicked Witch.

 

[happyhermit]

I agree that a tragic backstory is not necessarily more interesting, especially for a non-protagonist. For example, a group of beings that are fundamentally inhuman/alien/monstrous masquerading as humans can be quite interesting without humanizing them, a lot of stories to back this up in sci-fi, folklore, and even fantasy. The idea that something very unhuman could trick us into believing it has humanity can be interesting and emotional, particularly when any sort of intimacy is involved. With a protagonist some degree of humanity is essential to form that connection, but some very interesting stories can and have be told without that on the other side.

...
*Ok, there comes the cynical part: I think people in general, and geeks in particular hates, as a knee-jerk reaction every type of character trope which is portrayed as a highly romanticized and idealized person, who gets all the girls/guys, because he/she is just soooo perfect in everything. I think that's the same reason why a lot of people hate elves and bards and so on. We all wanted to be the rockstar and we hate we couldn't. Said all that, I still hate the cute-teenage-guy-with-superpowers-who-happened-to-have-fangs, but ultimately doesn't have any of the struggles and monstrous abilities and inhuman personality traits that Rice's vampires have and characters in Masquerade too. I hate that because it takes away just as much from the complexity of the vampire theme as dragging it back to the "just monsters/kill on first sight" days. Both are oversimplification.

I get where you are coming from entirely, many gamers (male and female) reject romantic or idealized characters (good and bad) out of hand. That being said, the problem is often that the characters and their interactions with others are just not all that believable. Too often IMO they come across Mary/Marty Stu-like and relatively flat. I have zero issues with the rogue-ish character who gets all the ladies, or conversely the femme fatale type, in general. We all know that girls being attracted to "bad guys" exists and so with men, but it is WAY more complicated than that and it is rarely portrayed believably. It often comes across as awkward wish-fulfillment type fan-fic.