Is Anyone Still Playing Vampire 5th Edition?

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Not yet. Salubri have along with the 13 Clans. Clan Hecate incorporates Giovanni and Cappadocian.

I really shouldn't be posting this, but I need to get it off my chest.

Fuck Clan Hecate. It's a bullshit clan and I honestly prefer the Giovanni to that goth Wiccan bullshit and it's bad enough what they did to the Ravnos and the other clans.

Seriously, I really do feel like V5 is a disgrace to Vampire and is a pseudo-intellectual and smugly pretentious mockery that's trying to wear the skin of V1 and is failing badly. Like a pretentious and hipster-ishcargo cult affectation of Vampire 1st Edition
 
I thought they brought the Ravnos back? What did they do to them?
 
So how do you play Sabbat in V5, who have no interest in keeping their Humanity?
I don't know how it is in V5 but in the old school rules most Sabbat Vampires hover around 2-4 Humanity. It takes tremendous willpower and conviction to adhere to one of the Paths. The Sabbat talk a big game but only an extraordinary person can flense away their humanity and adopt one of those paths without going crazy or succumbing to The Beast..
 
I don't know how it is in V5 but in the old school rules most Sabbat Vampires hover around 2-4 Humanity. It takes tremendous willpower and conviction to adhere to one of the Paths. The Sabbat talk a big game but only an extraordinary person can flense away their humanity and adopt one of those paths without going crazy or succumbing to The Beast..
The Humanity of detailed PCs for the Lasombra at least, as we haven’t seen any Tzmisce statted out yet, has been low.
 
I really shouldn't be posting this, but I need to get it off my chest.

Fuck Clan Hecate. It's a bullshit clan and I honestly prefer the Giovanni to that goth Wiccan bullshit and it's bad enough what they did to the Ravnos and the other clans.

Seriously, I really do feel like V5 is a disgrace to Vampire and is a pseudo-intellectual and smugly pretentious mockery that's trying to wear the skin of V1 and is failing badly. Like a pretentious and hipster-ishcargo cult affectation of Vampire 1st Edition

Wait, so you've read it now? :grin:
 
Wait, so you've read it now? :grin:
I mean the thing about Clan Hecata is that, unless you were a Kickstarter backer for Cults of the Blood Gods, it hasn’t actually been released yet.

So either, Doc Sammy has gone out of his way to have backed Cults of the Blood Gods against all odds (and perhaps even read it, which would outline how Giovanni are still detailed in there, for example), or he is making it up in his head. Place your bets.

Oh, and on the matter, I think Cults of the Blood Gods gets general release this week I think.
 
So either, Doc Sammy has gone out of his way to have backed Cults of the Blood Gods against all odds (and perhaps even read it, which would outline how Giovanni are still detailed in there, for example), or he is making it up in his head. Place your bets.

The impression I get is that Doc just doesn't want any changes to 1st edition. So he doesn't have to actually read the changes, to know it's a change...
 
The impression I get is that Doc just doesn't want any changes to 1st edition. So he doesn't have to actually read the changes, to know it's a change...
Well, I don’t think he’s really a fan of 1st edition either - and hadn’t really read that either, until he was goaded into it after criticisms about his own take on the history of the game.

Most people I have seen who continuously complain about V5, just from personal encounters, seem to be younger Vampire fans who were brought up on later editions of the game - Vampire Revised or V20 - which were more broadchurch and less focussed on particular themes.

It’s not exclusively the case, necessarily, but the usual issue is that V5 actually creates a game about politics and personal horror, rather than being a means towards playing an action-adventure modern fantasy. While you can always play it that way, I do think there are better games for that sort of thing and V5 is only delivering on what the game has always described itself about being about in a really well designed way.

Having said that, I also think that Doc Sammy and others are so entrenched in their antagonism that complaining about parts of the game they haven’t read is just part of the course.
 
Having said that, I also think that Doc Sammy and others are so entrenched in their antagonism that complaining about parts of the game they haven’t read is just part of the course.

Yeah, at this stage I think it's just best to see Sammy's views on Vampire as a claim of religious rather than literal truth.
 
I believe at one point it cae out that, in regards to Vampire, Doc's opinions weren't formed by the game itself, but his negative experiences with Vampire LARPers in the mythical land of Roanoke, Virginia.

I'd still be curious to see what Doc's ultimate version of Vampire would be, if he could somehow resist inserting a bunch of Sailor Moon and Green Army Men into it. But I think his design approach would be something akin to "how can I most piss off vampire fans?"

Anyways, Doc's going to Doc.
 
I believe at one point it cae out that, in regards to Vampire, Doc's opinions weren't formed by the game itself, but his negative experiences with Vampire LARPers in the mythical land of Roanoke, Virginia.

I'd still be curious to see what Doc's ultimate version of Vampire would be, if he could somehow resist inserting a bunch of Sailor Moon and Green Army Men into it. But I think his design approach would be something akin to "how can I most piss off vampire fans?"

Anyways, Doc's going to Doc.
I actually thought Doc's idea for 1950's Vampire sounded really interest. Beatniks and Teddy Boys battling it out.
 
I actually thought Doc's idea for 1950's Vampire sounded really interest. Beatniks and Teddy Boys battling it out.


Vampire with clans based on 50's counterculture stereotypes rather than early 90s high school cliques could potentially be quite interesting, especially if the game got the aesthetics right.
 
Vampire with clans based on 50's counterculture stereotypes rather than early 90s high school cliques could potentially be quite interesting, especially if the game got the aesthetics right.
Yeah, it's the time of the rise of the teenager, which could lead to some really interesting dynamics between ancient teenage vampires and recently embraced teenage neonates.
 
I really don't think I could go back to the 90's aesthetic of the V1E, even if it is my favorite edition. High School in the 90's sucked, I don't need to relive it via a deathless avatar.
 
Do you know what you get when Captain Sensible tries to move on from The Damned? This is what happens when you try to escape from the Goth crowd.

 
I need a deep fake of this, stat.

afoeeee.jpg
 
The impression I get is that Doc just doesn't want any changes to 1st edition. So he doesn't have to actually read the changes, to know it's a change...

Well, I also like 2nd Edition as well

V20 is good because it's thematically and metaplot neutral

Well, I don’t think he’s really a fan of 1st edition either - and hadn’t really read that either, until he was goaded into it after criticisms about his own take on the history of the game.

Most people I have seen who continuously complain about V5, just from personal encounters, seem to be younger Vampire fans who were brought up on later editions of the game - Vampire Revised or V20 - which were more broadchurch and less focussed on particular themes.

It’s not exclusively the case, necessarily, but the usual issue is that V5 actually creates a game about politics and personal horror, rather than being a means towards playing an action-adventure modern fantasy. While you can always play it that way, I do think there are better games for that sort of thing and V5 is only delivering on what the game has always described itself about being about in a really well designed way.

Having said that, I also think that Doc Sammy and others are so entrenched in their antagonism that complaining about parts of the game they haven’t read is just part of the course.

I've actually read V1 and I find it to be a lot closer to the "trenchcoats and katanas" than the shitty pretentious mess of V5.

The difference is that V1 paid lip service to "personal horror" and smug pretentious pseudo-intellectualism while rocking the black trenchcoats and sunglasses.

Revised Edition sucked and was full of metaplot and Justin Achilli's snobby attempts at forcing personal horror down everyone's throats while also trying to make good on the promise of an apocalyptic setting.

Seriously, I think V5 is a lot closer to Revised thematically than 1st Edition.

V5 is basically "Revised but on a street level as opposed to a global level"

It just happened to be that V5 focused more on the "snooty personal horror" aspect of Revised as opposed to the "Gehenna's coming!" aspect
 
That can't be true, I thought Justin Achilli was the WoD antichrist

Justin Achilli worked on Third Edition/Revised Edition for the most part. He hated Second Edition and First Edition and used the metaplot in Revised to wreck all the shit he didn't like.

Achilli's only real major contribution for 2nd Edition was Clanbook Giovanni, which was unusually decent for an Achilli work.

Requiem 1E was also good despite his involvement, but I suspect it's due to the fact that the flop of Gehenna made him eat a lot of crow and he had to walk back some of his stances. Most of the bad parts of Requiem 1E like "Vampires are emotionally dead" can be traced to him specifically though, so I wonder how much of early Requiem's good traits were actually his ideas.
 
Well, to be fair, Vampire is tonally, um, lets say delicate. I like it, a lot, but its delicate. It doesn't take much in the way of fuckery to mess it up in a big way.
 
I don't know how it is in V5 but in the old school rules most Sabbat Vampires hover around 2-4 Humanity. It takes tremendous willpower and conviction to adhere to one of the Paths. The Sabbat talk a big game but only an extraordinary person can flense away their humanity and adopt one of those paths without going crazy or succumbing to The Beast..


I ran a Dark Ages campaign that ran for quite a long time. The point of the game was to let the player play low-gen Vampires set smack dab in the middle of the Anarch uprising, where they were powerful enough to be reckoned with, but since it was the 'back in the day', they were in the shadows of real giants. The fun of it was the fact they came to know many of the modern-day luminaries "back when" - and so they go really deep into a lot of the politics. I let them chart their own course through history - chilling with Thomas Aquinas heh, among many others.

It turned out due to circumstances, they went rogue and were among the earliest members of the Sabbat... and it was **brutal**. We ran that campaign with some time-jumps from the dark ages, all the way until modern day. Their pack was the oldest contiguous pack (and believe me, I held nothing back, PC's would drop but they avoided TPK's) in the history of the Sabbat. And dark deeds were done. None of them had humanity, but it was largely because one of my players was a Lasombra pack priest that effectively saved them all by getting them in line with Power and the Inner Voice. Had they stayed on Humanity, they'd have succumbed to the Beast long ago.

Anyone that's run Vampire for any clip of time knows it's *hard* to go below 3 Humanity. 4-5 is usually where most players bottom out... but this game was very dark. They did led crusades against the Baali, and all kinds of heinous shit that most vampires would pray to Caine they'd never have to face, largely because of their circumstances, but they took their oath to the Sabbat deadly seriously.

What was really fun was when we got to the modern age, they were loaded with secrets. Locations of elders (former friends/enemies) in torpor, caches of forbidden knowledge and lore (Baali, Tremere, Assamite havens long gone dark). And friends they cherished in the old days - some had become powerhouses in the Camarilla (Tyler, Siegfried, Dekker of Milwaukee. Others ended up in the Sabbat). So roleplaying was always interesting because sometimes the "politics of faction" ran afoul the memories of "I knew you when." and even the Power and the Inner Voice could find uses for "old friends in sin."

I'll admit I don't think I could have run that campaign with just any group. Especially these days, not without a lot of discussion. Ironically I wanted to run a Sabbat game for V5... but the system didn't stick or click with me or my group.
 
I just read Vampire V5.

It's not a bad game, and it may even be a good game for a new generation of gamers.

Interestingly, for a game about playing immortal undead (yeah - such an oxymore), I find each edition of Vampire intimately tied to the time of its publication.

Vampire V1 is all about being young in the Nineties - when despair began seeping in the Western society, but/so it was cool to be a (young) cynic ; or rather it was cool to pretend to be a bad bass borderline cynic : your'e a vampire, man, and the world sucks but you're the greatest (mother)sucker of them all - so all will be all right !

Ha, to be 25 again ;-) (but not really) !

Vampire V5 is a strange beast (he !) to this Gen X dude.

The game seems polished and more clever - less 90s naïve - in tone and mechanics than its first edition. It feels very 2020ish, too. Meaning, in 20 years from now, it will be hopelessly behind the times, I think .

But it clearly is not in accordance with the Zeitgeist as its ancestor was. Vampires are still bad asses, but in the current Zeitgeist, the time of bad asses has passed. It is now a time of the sentimental*, and of despair fulfilled - two trends who go hand in hand, I think.

I won't play Vampire again, but I found Vampire V5 charming to read, in a clunky and quaint way.

* I know it is unsolicited, and comes out of the blue, but every episode of the 3rd season of Star Trek Discovery makes me want to vomit with saccharine overdose. Stop slobbering with love, you fucking Millenials ! It's so unbecoming (grow a pair of balls already, for fuck's sake !).
 
Sammy has his 50s Vampires. What I really want is a sort of setting neutral Anne Rice game with random tables for city content. I like V5 for the rules, but I'm not very into the setting.

I just want to be a moody Edwardian vampire :cry:
 
The fun of it was the fact they came to know many of the modern-day luminaries "back when" - and so they go really deep into a lot of the politics. I let them chart their own course through history - chilling with Thomas Aquinas heh, among many others.

Ironic, considering Dominicans hunt vampires.

(Off-topic? Maybe. But as the board's resident Thomist, I couldn't resist. :smile: )
 
Ironic, considering Dominicans hunt vampires.

(Off-topic? Maybe. But as the board's resident Thomist, I couldn't resist. :smile: )
Sure!! that was part of the fun. Their tenure with Aquinas was actually when he was very young (i.e. before he ends up with True Faith). Several of the PC's were very much involved with the Church.
 
The worst thing about Vampire, in any edition, is having to read eccentric views on what the history of the game supposedly was.

True, and that cuts both ways.

Especially with all the revisionism on the part of later iterations of White Wolf and Onyx Path
 
True, and that cuts both ways.

Especially with all the revisionism on the part of later iterations of White Wolf and Onyx Path
Yeah, but it doesn't cut both ways equally.

Put it like this. That LARP scene in Roanoke? Your view on that is much more likely to be right than mine because you were there and I wasn't. How early 90's Vampire was played? The opposite is true.

(And I'll be inclined to take your view with more gravitas if you actually get a campaign off the ground. Your interest is whether you like what you read in it, which is fine. But I'd say most people on here are primarily interested in how RPGs play rather than whether we like them as prose).
 
The worst thing about Vampire, in any edition, is having to read eccentric views on what the history of the game supposedly was.
I apply this notion to literally every single game I run. I never let the writers of a game decide what is fact in or out of the game.

My Forgotten Realms is MINE. I pick and choose the aspects of canon (which at this point is very little) are true. It may even be ahistorical internally to what NPC's/PC's believe is true.

My Marvel games are my What If's/Elseworlds. My players even refer to our seperate campaigns as such. We've even had games where our different campaigns have crossed.

Same is true about WoD. Especially WoD where the assumptions of history itself are completely ahistorical within the context of the game itself. No one knows "The Truth". So it will be exactly what I as the GM and the players do that define it.
 
True, and that cuts both ways.

Especially with all the revisionism on the part of later iterations of White Wolf and Onyx Path
No it doesn’t. I mean, we have already had the thread that established you weren’t actually born when the original Vampire game came out, that Justin Achilli had nothing to do with the design of V5 and that your own peculiar take on Vampire led you to fall out with a bunch of LARPers at some point.

When you talk about revisionism, your own facts take precedent in establishing what you know about the history of the game or not.
 
I apply this notion to literally every single game I run. I never let the writers of a game decide what is fact in or out of the game.

My Forgotten Realms is MINE. I pick and choose the aspects of canon (which at this point is very little) are true. It may even be ahistorical internally to what NPC's/PC's believe is true.

My Marvel games are my What If's/Elseworlds. My players even refer to our seperate campaigns as such. We've even had games where our different campaigns have crossed.

Same is true about WoD. Especially WoD where the assumptions of history itself are completely ahistorical within the context of the game itself. No one knows "The Truth". So it will be exactly what I as the GM and the players do that define it.
Not the point I am making. It is a given that, around your own game table, you can interpret a game however you like and play it your own way. It isn’t a given, however, to ascribe motivations to particular game designers you don’t know, or tell everybody who has known the game since its inception that everything you know about its history is ‘revisionism’.
 
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