[OT] Vampire: the Dungeon Crawl?

[shadow]

A while back I started thinking about the whole "does the system encourages role-play, or is role-playing independent of the system" debate that has been raging on these boards. All the sudden I came up with a twisted idea to test this theory. Play Vampire: the Masquerade (or Vampire: the Dark Ages) as a dungeon crawl!
I've heard that D&D promotes hack and slash, yet I have known groups that really get into heavy role playing when playing D&D. Heck, I've even played in a D&D session once without any combat (or even the option of combat.) So the question is, if people can make a D&D session into deep immersiom storytelling, can people likewise turn a session of Vampire (long thought to be the paradigm of roleplaying) into hack and slash and dungeon crawl?
In many ways Vampire lends itself well to hack and slash. Vampires have "levels" (represented by their age) and races (clans) just like in D&D. I could imagine an adventure where a the PCs are ordered by their clan to raid a rival clans comound. However, my current group doesn't want to have anything to do with Vampire, and most Vampire players that I know refuse to play hack and slash. Has anyone tried playing a dungeon crawl/ hack and slash Vampire adventure? If so, I would like to know the results.

 

[bondetamp]

I took some players through Grimtooth's Dungeon of Doom once.

Vampire doesn't really lend itself well to traditional Dungeon Crawling unless you have characters made specifically for it. V:tM has so many abilities for the characters that has little or no use in a dungeon environment. It is rather unfair to run the players through a dungeon based campaign when they've made characters for a city based one. As long as you tell them beforehand, though, there shouldn't really be a problem.

 

[mirzabah]

I don't know about Vampire, but I think that it would be very difficult, if not impossible to write a dungeon crawl scenario for this system.

 

[Skarp Hedin]

I don't know about Vampire, but I think that it would be very difficult, if not impossible to write a dungeon crawl scenario for this system.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Oh god was that funny. So true, so true. I hated Wuthering Heights. The only characters I liked were the vicious dogs. I kept hoping they'd rend Heathcliff. I even wrote a paper about them.

 

[Umbran]

Actually, yes, I've played Vampire as a basic dungeon crawl. Okay, it was more a corporate-labcrawl, but that's about the same thing. Enclosed space comprised of corridors and rooms, filled with nasty things to fight (or otherwise deal with), hazardous situations (effectively traps) and so on. It was actually a lot of fun, and it worked pretty darned well.

Sure, there are some Vampire powers that don't seem well adapted to dungeon crawls, but more are applicable than you might think, especially in the hands of a creative player. Of the ten basic Disciplines in the core rulebook I have handy, 6 of them clearly have dungeon crawl utility, and a couple of the others only need a little imagination.

 

[mirzabah]

Actually, I take that back. You could write a dungeon crawl for WHRP. However, half the party would collapse in a dead faint on the way to the dungeon, while the rest would get locked in a heated argument over whose job it was to hold the torch. The sole survivor of the ensuing duels would be so troubled that he would have to go home for a lie down.

 

[Mouseferatu]

There's already a mindless, endlessly repetitive, unutterably dull, poorly done dungeon crawl out there for Vampire.

It's the computer game called Vampire: Redemption...

 

[sotmh]

IIRC, the Diablerie adventure for Vampire was an official module which was essentially a dungeon crawl. A really nasty one too. I seem to remember one trap that stuck the victim into a pit where carefully arranged mirrors and reflective stone was used to cause sunlight to fill the pit every day. Hope you have ranks in Protean.

There's some other stuff, but it seemed to me the whole point of the adventure was for the Storyteller to be really mean to players who insisted on hunting vulnerable elders to feast upon.

sotmh

 

[TBoarder]

There's already a mindless, endlessly repetitive, unutterably dull, poorly done dungeon crawl out there for Vampire.

It's the computer game called Vampire: Redemption...

Oh god, I'm glad I wasn't the only one who suffered through that... Hope nobody minds a shameless plug here, but here's a review I wrote for the Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption computer game.

http://www.vgonetwork.com/review/review86.htm

Feel free to browse the site and check out my reviews for Wizardry 8, The Sims, Icewind Dale, and Dungeon Keeper as well (And visit our severely underused forums as well ).

Tracy Boarder
www.VGONetwork.com

 

[Voadam]

In the VtM game I play in we went through both diablerie modules and chaos factor and there is dungeon crawling in all 3. It went fine, things that stretch the bounds of believability for a living human can work well for a vamp with supernatural powers. for instance in one of the crawls, I was lead guy, I stepped on a floor trigger and a massive 3 spear trap shot out of the wall and multiply impaled me (missed the heart) I took some damage, but after snapping them out we could just go on with me cursing volubly.

Many of the vampire abilities are designed for interaction, emotion control, mind control, hiding, etc., but many are combat oriented or info gathering or just neat powers. the interaction powers are no more useless than a bards diplomacy in a dungeon crawl, and a party easily can have a mix of powers. Besides, if the vamps are not combat, dungeon skilled, then it is more like Call of Cthulhu where they can survive more.

We have used the VtM 1e and 2e engines for lots of hack and slash combat succesfully (I play a diabolist and I war against the sabbat, lupine, and demons pretty regularly) and had a great time doing so, although the storyteller feels it breaks down at higher power levels and is checking out d20 coversions.