Tell me about VtM when it started

[Alas]

I ran a Vampire campaign for 4 or 5 semesters between '93 and '96. During that time our group grew from about 5 to nearly a dozen on big nights. We were a mix of our original D&D group plus a bunch of our goth friends who previously hadn't been very interested in RPGs. Why did they join now? Because the game integrated references to a lot of music and movies they were already interested in. Dungeon looting hadn't caught their imagination, but undead punks trashing clubs in DC sure did.

Post-grad, in the mid to late 90s, there were a bunch of LARP groups in the greater Beltway area, with monthly meet-ups that could easily be a couple dozen people each. Down in Atlanta for Dragon*Con, there was a huge White Wolf LARP with hundreds of players: vampires, werewolves, changelings... and exactly one mummy. I was part of a sizable Wraith contingent. We were operating on a multi-track story arc that lasted 5 years. And the gender ratio among players was nearly even, as far as I could tell. At the convention level, a lot of people got into Vampire (and its subsidiaries) because it was an extra layer of dress-up: not just costume, but attitude and interaction. Like being in a free-roaming Rocky Horror Picture Show revue. It was so much fun.

 

[Desdichado]

I was out of the country from 1991-1993, so I'm not sure, but when I came back, got back into gaming and stuff, World of Darkness was obviously pretty big. I was a bit more interested at the time in Werewolf than Vampire, but you couldn't miss it. I don't remember thinking that it brought more women and girls, although maybe it did, but it certainly brought more theater kids and goths. Like the original play cultures blog post says, it was "tradder than trad" and probably was the prototype for the OC playstyle too, which obviously appealed to a totally different crowd than D&D was drawing.

 

[Deset Gled]

This is basically my take as well. Literal theater kids, goths, fans of vampires, Anne Rice readers, etc.

Early on there was a clear split between those who were gamers before and those who started gaming with VtM. The gamers played it as superheroes with fangs and those new to the hobby played it as high drama and what we'd call OC-style play now. Over time some of the gamers started shifting to the high drama, OC-style play. But there was little, if any, of the reverse.

I agree with this as well.

My POV is that VtM had a very "not your parent's game of D&D" feel surrounding it. It was a very 90s vibe, consistent with all the "for you, not them" stuff at the time.

Also, it's critical to note where vampires as a monster were culturally at the time. It was post-Anne Rice but pre-Buffy the Vampire Slayer*. Vampires were still "Evil", but the attractive and sexual aspects were on the rise. "Good" vampires were still rare enough be notable as playing against type. Goth was a much more minor subculture as well.

*Technically predating the movie by just a little and the show by a lot. And you also need to remember how different the movie was from the show.

 

[TheHand]

I remember being introduced to the game by a friend of a friend. She was one of the first female gamers I had ever met. I think Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Gary Oldman and Keanu had just come out. We didn’t play it (sadly) but she loaned me her first edition soft cover book and I found it utterly fascinating, so different from the D&D world I was used to.

Later our group entered world of darkness but via Werewolf the Apocalypse, which we definitely played as gruesome furry superheroes.

I did get to play in a V5 game online during the Covid times that took me back to that first softcover book and its themes of intrigue and political machinations.

 

[Marc17]

I was a punk rocker in college at the time and had seen VtM appear in the stores and even looked at it briefly. It wasn't till I was at the club with some friends and a trio of goth girls that were friends of ours walked up and flat out said "You play D&D, right? Well, we don't want to play D&D, but we have this game we want to play (has the VtM book in hand), but we don't know how to run these games. So we've decided to let you run it for us. Be at our house at 2 on Sunday." Then they hand David the book. We read it, make characters, show up and the room we are playing in is all candle lit, pillows, dead roses, and wine. We get our characters introduced and turned into vampires and we go hunting. It was a good game.

I was taken in by the backstory/mythology. That drew me in and made me want to play. I even took the rule book to my D&D game (2 women out of 8), was asked about it, explained it, and boom, we had a new VtM game on a different night then. I also ended up playing at my house with all my friends and roommates. Lots of them were not role players. If we were bored, we'd just make characters and play the game in my shared world. I'd present it as wish fulfilment and vampires were in at the time, so they'd often just play as themselves with the powers they wanted. The backstory continued to build with each new book. There was nothing really meta about it at that time. Very little changed anything that was said before but aded to it, and when it did, all of 1E was presented as very unreliable narrator where vampires kept secrets from and lied to each other. After all, all the original clan books presented Rasputin as one of their own IIRC.

ETA: Mechanically, it was a big change to current games also. That the separated things into fluff and System in the rules was somthing I loved. They mechanically encouraged role play several different ways oppose to most games. I was excited because it was a game that actually encouraged the interaction heavy style game that I ran D&D as. It also introduced LARPing to a lot of role players. My DM, who ran a series of small cons, also started Masquerade games due to his introduction to VtM.

 

[kigmatzomat]

It sounds like I was kind of unique in that my 1990 high school gaming group was 2 girls, 4 boys (none dating) and my college games were frequently about the same 1/3rd women. Its probably stayed about that same ratio even now 3 decades later.

VtM hit big in my area when the Ad&d 2e was over-saturated with splat books. We played a game more vicious than Camarilla, more stealthy than Sabbat. Our anti-heroes fed on human traffickers, upper echelon drug dealers, and the occassional corporate raider while keeping Black Spiral Dancers out of area.

I'll say more of the women took up GMing with VtM than other games, but that might honestly have been the first really new game to show up in quite a while, which is what draws in a lot of long term players to GMing.

I remember LARP being a thing but it was a couple steps too far for us.

 

[Alas]

Looking back, I think part of Vampire's appeal to our newer gamers was the low cost of entry at the time. The players and the storyteller/GM just needed the one core rule book and enough d10s. We could invest in the clan books and lore stuff (I sure did), but so much of our campaign depended on what the players made up that the splats weren't required. We didn't need miniatures and dungeon tiles-- we used a map of the DC Metro system. Beyond a couple sentences about Cain and the bloodlines, the characters didn't have to learn setting history-- it was just the contemporary world, plus us monsters. And because even the veteran D&D players among us were new to this game, there was little "gamer seniority" at play.

I preferred the table-top game to the LARP, but even the table-top experience was pretty free wheeling and dramatic. We were more likely to stand on the table than sit at it, and usually spent most of the evening out of our chairs acting out what was going on. On at least a couple occasions, dice were rolled on the sidewalk outside during a clove cigarette break. (Don't worry-- we've all since quit smoking.)

 

[Mannahnin]

I was 15 when the 1st edition of VtM was released which was a long, long time ago and my perspective is only my own. Vampire felt like something very different when it was released in 1991. Like I said, my perspective was my own, but everything about the game seemed sophisticated and adult when compared to D&D, Star Wars, or most of the other games I played.

The black and white artwork was evocative, bloody, and sexy, there was diversity of nationalities, religions, gender, and even sexuality at a time when that wasn't a big concern by mainstream society, and the setting itself included elements of Christian beliefs. That last thing was kind of a big deal because we were still at the tail end of the Satanic Panic era.

In my experience, a lot of young women who wouldn't be caught undead playing AD&D, (especially) GURPS, or Shadowrun were more than happy to play Vampire. From what I observed men still outnumbered women, but it was the only game I saw with anything approaching parity between the sexes. Especially when it came to LARPing, but I wasn't involved in that scene.

Pretty much all of this, except I did LARP.

I first dipped my toe in it in Seattle (including attending the convention Mark Rein-Hagen and Stewart Wieck flew out for in Spring of '93 to make the Camarilla the official WW fan club) just before moving back East as a teenager. Once I got to New England I made friends who were also interested in WW LARPing, we made a local chapter in NH and started attending events at MIT in Boston, then Northeastern, then BU. During the same period in the mid 90s my tabletop gaming circle had substantial overlap with my LARP and clubbing friends, so we played an absolute ton of WW games (though Vampire more than the others), and it superseded AD&D for us for several years. Though we still had some AD&D, GURPS and other games in the mix.

 

[GM Lent]

I first heard of VtM when I was 16. I had been accepted into a "Gifted & Talented" high school located in the corner of a college campus about 2 hours from where I'd lived prior to then and several of my new friends had the WoD books. I never played in a strictly VtM game, but in several general WoD games that had Vampire characters.

I was never a huge fan, tbh, but I played in a bunch of diffferent games and even LARPed a bit. I was frustrated that none of the character options really matched my character concepts (this was true regardless of the WoD variant, but I mostly played Mage characters) and how it was so difficult to actually DO anything. My favorite of those games eventually was Changeling; for some reason I had an easier time with the super low power level in that game.

My friend group had a bunch of girls in it; I estimate that our gaming groups were generally 40-60% girls. A couple of them ran games, but only one ran WoD games IIRC. I don't remember the WoD groups being a higher percentage of girls than, say, our D&D or Toon games were, but again we had what I came to realize later was an unusually large proportion of female players anyway.

It's also worth noting that there were several all-girl groups (and all-boy groups), due mostly to the fact that the dormitories were separate and we would want to keep playing in the evenings and nights after we were chased upstairs by the residence staff.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I meant, why did they start playing

Because it was cool, it was edgy, it felt transgressive.