[possibly controversial]What is wrong with Vampire the Masquerade 5E?

[DarkCrisis]

Mechanics wise, VtM5E is the best version of the game. Hunger system is way better than a blood point/magic points system.

 

[teitan]

Everything wrong with "Vampire" is how they failed to capture the deep essence of being a person trapped in darkness and being a slave to the warm blood of the world. I fell in love with Anne Rice's vampires then ............. they gave me this sh*t rpg to DO THAT. I'm still waiting for SOMEONE to design a real vampire rpg that feels like Rice with MORE. Vampires can sense the emotions of people nearby. They play with that psychic interaction the way wolves circle prey.

It’s not the Anne Rice rpg. It’s a vampire game that taps into multiple archetypes of the vampire including aspects of Rice through the Toreador. It’s not a bad game because it fails to be Anne Rice. Rein•Hagen and company didn’t pay for the rights to make Anne Rice RPG. They made their own which is just as deep and powerful as Rice and resonates with people in similar ways. If you want the Anne Rice RPG make one. VtM isn’t it and never was meant to be any more than it was meant to be the FW Murnau, Bram Stoker or Joel Schumacher rpg. Anne might have introduced an idea of anarch like vampires like LeStat but she was hardly unique in her approach.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Despite the quantity of effort and words I’ve put into VtM, I largely agree.

I owned all the oWoD core books and many of the supplements and really enjoyed much of it.

But I think taking another crack at the lines with nWoD was a great idea, and it especially worked for Vampire and mortals. I also really like Geist.

 

[Blue Orange]

It’s not the Anne Rice rpg. It’s a vampire game that taps into multiple archetypes of the vampire including aspects of Rice through the Toreador. It’s not a bad game because it fails to be Anne Rice. Rein•Hagen and company didn’t pay for the rights to make Anne Rice RPG. They made their own which is just as deep and powerful as Rice and resonates with people in similar ways. If you want the Anne Rice RPG make one. VtM isn’t it and never was meant to be any more than it was meant to be the FW Murnau, Bram Stoker or Joel Schumacher rpg. Anne might have introduced an idea of anarch like vampires like LeStat but she was hardly unique in her approach.

From what I read they tried to avoid reading Anne Rice because it was too on-point and were more inspired by the movies she had watched. But they came out at the same time and you can definitely see a lot of the same themes. I read Interview with the Vampire a while ago and immediately thought 'this is what White Wolf was inspired by!'. But apparently, not so?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

From what I read they tried to avoid reading Anne Rice because it was too on-point and were more inspired by the movies she had watched. But they came out at the same time and you can definitely see a lot of the same themes. I read Interview with the Vampire a while ago and immediately thought 'this is what White Wolf was inspired by!'. But apparently, not so?

I would take their denials with an enormous grain of salt. It would be extremely hard to find people in the early 1990s who were pumped about vampires who hadn't read Anne Rice. But it would be legally dangerous to say so.

That said, VtM also gets a lot of its DNA from the excellent (and largely forgotten!) Near Dark.

 

[Staffan]

Mechanics wise, VtM5E is the best version of the game. Hunger system is way better than a blood point/magic points system.

I maintain that it would be awesome if they could just release a Mage version using the same mechanic for Paradox.

From what I read they tried to avoid reading Anne Rice because it was too on-point and were more inspired by the movies she had watched. But they came out at the same time and you can definitely see a lot of the same themes. I read Interview with the Vampire a while ago and immediately thought 'this is what White Wolf was inspired by!'. But apparently, not so?

There are lots of different types of vampires in various stories. The Vampire clans are an attempt at having all of them in the same world. Vampires can command beasts, go invisible, turn into bats/wolves/mist, mind control people, have hyper senses, be supernaturally strong/fast/tough. It's just that they're not the same vampires. You have Lost Boys vampires (Brujah), movers-and-shakers vampires (Ventrue), ugly and sneaky vampires (Nosferatu), and pretty vampires (Toreador). Lestat is clearly in there, primarily as Toreador, but he's not the only influence.

 

[Autumnal]

There are lots of different types of vampires in various stories. The Vampire clans are an attempt at having all of them in the same world.

This. And I think it’s the foundation of the game’s success. You could like any combo of Rice and/or Murnau and/or Stoker and/or Near Dark and/or Lost Boys and/or Lumley and/or The Delicate Dependency and/or Sonja Blue and/or P.N. Elrod and/or Hammer and/or Ars Magica (random self-indulgence is a key principle of rpg development) and/or the Hunger and/or a zillion other things and find something to grab hold of of in VTM. Very few RPGs have ever done so good a job of sweeping up so many overlapping but distinct concepts into one viable package - one of our field’s real “caught that lightning in this here bottle” moments.

 

[Reynard]

From what I read they tried to avoid reading Anne Rice because it was too on-point and were more inspired by the movies she had watched. But they came out at the same time and you can definitely see a lot of the same themes. I read Interview with the Vampire a while ago and immediately thought 'this is what White Wolf was inspired by!'. But apparently, not so?

Interview came out as a novel in 1978 and the movie came out in 1994.

 

[teitan]

From what I read they tried to avoid reading Anne Rice because it was too on-point and were more inspired by the movies she had watched. But they came out at the same time and you can definitely see a lot of the same themes. I read Interview with the Vampire a while ago and immediately thought 'this is what White Wolf was inspired by!'. But apparently, not so?

Yeah grain of salt that. The Vampire Chronicles started in the late 70s and were huge by the time VtM came out. They probably did avoid reading Rice but more because she was popular and White Wolf are the original PBR Micro-Brew hipsters, the goth came after lol

 

[MGibster]

From what I read they tried to avoid reading Anne Rice because it was too on-point and were more inspired by the movies she had watched. But they came out at the same time and you can definitely see a lot of the same themes. I read Interview with the Vampire a while ago and immediately thought 'this is what White Wolf was inspired by!'. But apparently, not so?

It's one of those zeitgeist things. Rice was such a pivotal figure in vampire fiction that it was nigh impossible to escape her influence. Even if you didn't read anything by Rice, it's tough to get entirely out of her shadow as she certainly influenced many of other authors. But then sometimes people come up with similar material around the same time because they're produced by people wallowing in the same mileau. I usually describe Delta Green as The X-Files meets Call of Cthulhu, but the first DG publication was in a magazine that came out a few months before the television show debuted.