I've got a lot of thoughts on VtM 5th ed that I want to ventilate. Before I get to the topic proper I think some background is in order to let you all see where I am coming from: I got into Vampire: the Masquerade (VtM) back in the early 00's, like '01 or '02, when I was in my early teens. Back then me and my friends had mostly played D&D but were feeling very adult and the cool/weird goth kids played VtM, so one of us got VtM 2nd edition and we started our first attempts at playing Gothic Punk. The short of it is that we liked the premise a lot, but those of us who really bought in quickly felt the metaplot was just a wee bit silly and stifling and when NWoD rolled around we jumped on it instead and never looked back. Then in '07-'08 some of us were briefly involved with a VtM LARP, which to me cemented all the bad stuff about VtM. But with the announcement of Bloodlines 2 my sister has been pestering me to start a Vampire campaign for our RP group, so we recently got VtM 5th ed.
I'll divide this post into three broad categories; Rules, Setting and Other Stuff as to try and keep things somewhat coherent. Without further ado...
Rules
I hated the old VtM rules. The fact that your average attack required four rolls to work out (attack roll, dodge/parry roll, damage roll, soak roll) made sure that combat made the flow of the game grind to a screeching halt. I hated the way that Generation was the absolute best stat to invest in bar none and that lower generation pretty much meant invulnerability against higher gen vampires. On the other hand, I absolutely loved the much simpler and fast system of NWoD and Vampire the Requiem and how the rules found a way to bypass the problem of Elders being demi-gods if you played the game as intended. In general, I like rule systems that are quick and easy to use, as to avoid killing the pace because someone wanted to throw a punch or try to hack a computer.
In that sense I think that 5th ed sort of delivers. The system is quick. Probably, and I never thought I'd say this, too quick. I am still undecided on how I like the idea that a fight is resolved by one roll (say brawl+strength opposed by melee+dexterity), which means that the person with the higher dice pool will often curb stomp the opposition without taking a scratch and that the time tested WoD build of being a generalist with lots of 2 or 3 dot skills is suddenly far from viable, because you won't be able to hold your own in serious combat. On the other hand, it keeps things moving and it makes combat more then just a damage race to fill the other guys health bar first.
More problematic is the fact that I'll probably need to house rule the difficulty levels. The normal difficulty in 5th ed is 2, requiring 2 d10 to show 6 or higher, and the average dice pool for an average amateur would be 4 (2 for attribute, 2 for skill). This means that your average amateur would only be able to fix a common car engine problem half of the time, a decent parkour artist would routinely fail to scale a 3m wall and someone experienced in hobby modelling would fail to assemble a modelling kit half the time. It gets even worse when you realize that the average hunting difficulty (to find someone to steal blood form) in a starting domain is likely to be 4 or 5, requiring pretty much a perfect dice pool of a maxed out attribute and skill to stand a 50/50 chance to feed for the night. Picking an ordinary door lock is difficulty 3, so you'd need to be a gifted professional burglar to do it with any consistency and the rules are explicit in not allowing re-tries unless circumstances change or the dice pool improves somehow.
Before I go on about this, I'll make a brief de-tour to one of the coolest ideas the game has: The hunger mechanic. Gone are the days of bloodpools being like a gastank that you had to refill occasionally. 5th Ed measures hunger on a scale of 0 to 5 (sated to ravenous, basically) and every time you use a power that requires you "use the blood" you make a Rouse check, usually one or two unmodded die. If you fail the Rouse check your hunger level increases by one and if you'd go above 5 you enter hunger frenzy. The genius of this system is that the only way to reach 0 hunger is to actively kill a person while feeding, so most vampires will always be in some state of hunger. What hunger does is that it replaces a number of dice in all your dice pools with "hunger dice", these function like normal but if you fail a roll and have a hunger dice showing 1 you get a bestial failure, which has the Beast somehow make you mess up. On the other hand, if you succeed but the hunger dice shows a 10 and any other dice is also a 10 you get a Messy Critical, which means you succeed but something bad happens. Maybe you rip the door of the hinges instead of picking the lock or you rip the throat out of the mugger that was trying to stick you up instead of just punching him. All in all, the hunger system is great. It makes hunger an actual problem for vampires and means that even a few discipline uses or temporary stat increases can put you dangerously close to losing control due to hunger.
However, hunger combined with the punishing difficulty levels and the miserly way the game hands out xp (suggested rates are 1 to 2 xp per session, with all costs increasing exponentially, the first dot in a skill costs 3xp, the second 6, the third 9 etc.) means that unless the GM is nice or the players are twinking like mad, the average chronicle seems like it'll be a long road of failing forward, because the players can very rarely count on actually succeeding even with basic tasks. This is bad in itself, but is made worse by the way the game keeps waffling on whether the system should even be used at all. You read that right, the game itself advocates freeform roleplay as a totally legit alternative to its somewhat unbalanced rules system. Now, I'm not one to tell others what's right or wrong in their roleplaying and if people wants to do freeform that's cool (I personally adore Fiasco and its essentially freeform nature), but I absolutely expect the game I paid good money for to actually provide me with a functional system and not wiffing out on me by asking me to solve its mechanical issues by improvising. This is just on top of the fact that the game itself mentions modifications to both difficulty and dice pools and roughly what the difference is (change difficulty when circumstance changes, alter dice pool when the user's ability changes) but doesn't provide any decent examples of what might be changed circumstances or ability changes. Does designer clothes increase your seduction pool when clubbing? Does a fully equipped professional garage provide bonuses to craft rolls for repairing cars? The game doesn't even bother to tell you. For me, a GM of almost 2 decades it is easy to figure out, but new GMs absolutely need aids like that.
On to more positive parts: The fact that Generation and Blood Potency now are two different things. You can be low generation and not be particularly potent or high generation and fairly potent (though harshly capped). That Generation is no longer total immunity to discipline rolls made against you by someone of higher generation. The fact that the game takes some time to talk about the length of combat encounters and provides multiple ways to resolve encounters that might drag on but will absolutely end a certain way (ie. players slaughtering the opposition). The way that character generation forces you to make choices based on your character (predator type) and the Amalgam disciplines. These are all nice additions, but not necessarily earth shattering.
All in all, the rules system for 5th ed is functional. It is quite clear though that the designers all considered the rules pretty optional, both in their stated suggestions to simply not use them and the fact that some rules simply aren't very well thought out.
Setting
I mentioned that I hated VtM. The reason for this is because I find the metaplot stifling and the way the setting was set up, with untouchable century old elders running the show and the players being measly pawns, meant that the players very rarely could do anything to affect the actual political game that was meant to be front and center of VtM. Way too often VtM chronicles devolved into NPCs doing stuff that the PCs reacted to (or was forced to do for the NPCs) and occasionally a single, long lived player character getting to do something cool. The political game, which required older vampire PCs, clashed badly with the gothic horror idea of being turned into a monster and coming to terms with that, which required newly embraced PCs. With that said, I love the changes that 5th ed does. Gone are the cartoonishly evil Sabbath, gone are rigid, unchanging power structures in the Camarilla and in their stead you get an actual political conflict between Anarchs and Camarilla and power structures that are a lot more fluid.
The idea that all Elders above a certain generation and age are called to the Middle East for some reason, probably connected to why all the Sabbath is there, is a great way to shake up the setting while still keeping it. Suddenly younger vampires are in positions of power that they are not quite equipped to handle and the dichotomy between the Anarch's freedom and the Camarilla's safety and order actually works. With the introduction of the Second Inquisition as an actual threat that forces vampires to play it safer and more cautious and you've got a setting where Elders can no longer summon all of the Police in a city at will. This was exactly what I never knew I wanted for VtM and it makes running a neonate campaign that much better, because these new vampires can actually pose a threat if they play it smart instead of being instantly curb stomped by a 2 millenia old 6th Gen Gangrel Sheriff that murders them all in the first round of combat.
Other Stuff
I'm aware of the controversies surrounding 5th ed. In particular the pedophile PC for the alpha test scenario, the repeat references to Neo-Nazis and the use of the Chechnyan persectuion of GLBTQ individuals. After having read the entire core book and the Camarilla book (second print, so no Chechnya stuff for me) I can honestly say that I doubt any of it was malicious. What I think it was, and what probably bothers me most about 5th ed, is extremely edgy. The books absolutely love to be as edgy as it could possibly be, making repeat references to sex, rape, drugs, violence, incest and whatever else you can think of. Most of the time this edge misses its mark and just becomes cringe inducing, because it doesn't serve to establish a dark mood. It repeatedly crosses the line from setting a dark and grim mood to just being edgy for the sake of reminding us that you're reading a mature roleplaying game now and that means it can use vampires as a metaphor for incest (no really, that's one of the predator types). It all works to make you think that you're sitting in a dimly lit room with that LARP guy with no social skills that constantly creeps on the women in the game and excuses it with "my character is like this" and he's telling you all the cool ideas (most of which are creepy and cringy) he has for RP, if only you'll let him grope you in character.
Another way to put that is that I can totally see why the Lead Storyteller of White Wolf was let go and all game development passed of to Modiphius instead. Because there are some cool stuff in there, but most of it is so desperate to appear edgy, mature and dark that I kept questioning whether that guy was really 40-something and not 15.
Final, random thoughts: The drawn art in the books is all pretty much awesome and mood setting. The multitude of actual photographs are less so. Some of them sort of works, but for the most part they are a little too posed and fail to really set a mood or theme. This is especially true for several pictures in the Camarilla book which seems like random house party pictures, with added Vampire-related text that utterly fails to make it seem like anything but someone's drunken 2 am party pictures. I do like the overall aesthetic, however, and the inclusion of several concept art characters for each of the clans makes it easier to get a visual reference to them.
All in all, I think I can do something cool with 5th. At least I can do something that's much better then a 2nd or 20th Anniversary game with rules and setting used as written. With development being passed of to Modiphius and some of it outsourced to Onyx Path (who still do NWoD, Exalted and most of WW's other old portfolio), I can see 5th ed shaping up to be a really good RPG in a few years time. For now, I think it is an ambitious reboot of a legendary game that brings some much needed changes but ultimately fails to stick the landing. It is not bad, at least if you can look past the Edgelord Cringe (and if you can't, I can't blame you), but it lacks the relevance and fingerspitzgef?hl that made the original VtM so great and the finesse and cleverness that makes VtR a much better RP system.
If you've gotten this far, thank you for reading and please share your own thoughts.
I'll divide this post into three broad categories; Rules, Setting and Other Stuff as to try and keep things somewhat coherent. Without further ado...
Rules
I hated the old VtM rules. The fact that your average attack required four rolls to work out (attack roll, dodge/parry roll, damage roll, soak roll) made sure that combat made the flow of the game grind to a screeching halt. I hated the way that Generation was the absolute best stat to invest in bar none and that lower generation pretty much meant invulnerability against higher gen vampires. On the other hand, I absolutely loved the much simpler and fast system of NWoD and Vampire the Requiem and how the rules found a way to bypass the problem of Elders being demi-gods if you played the game as intended. In general, I like rule systems that are quick and easy to use, as to avoid killing the pace because someone wanted to throw a punch or try to hack a computer.
In that sense I think that 5th ed sort of delivers. The system is quick. Probably, and I never thought I'd say this, too quick. I am still undecided on how I like the idea that a fight is resolved by one roll (say brawl+strength opposed by melee+dexterity), which means that the person with the higher dice pool will often curb stomp the opposition without taking a scratch and that the time tested WoD build of being a generalist with lots of 2 or 3 dot skills is suddenly far from viable, because you won't be able to hold your own in serious combat. On the other hand, it keeps things moving and it makes combat more then just a damage race to fill the other guys health bar first.
More problematic is the fact that I'll probably need to house rule the difficulty levels. The normal difficulty in 5th ed is 2, requiring 2 d10 to show 6 or higher, and the average dice pool for an average amateur would be 4 (2 for attribute, 2 for skill). This means that your average amateur would only be able to fix a common car engine problem half of the time, a decent parkour artist would routinely fail to scale a 3m wall and someone experienced in hobby modelling would fail to assemble a modelling kit half the time. It gets even worse when you realize that the average hunting difficulty (to find someone to steal blood form) in a starting domain is likely to be 4 or 5, requiring pretty much a perfect dice pool of a maxed out attribute and skill to stand a 50/50 chance to feed for the night. Picking an ordinary door lock is difficulty 3, so you'd need to be a gifted professional burglar to do it with any consistency and the rules are explicit in not allowing re-tries unless circumstances change or the dice pool improves somehow.
Before I go on about this, I'll make a brief de-tour to one of the coolest ideas the game has: The hunger mechanic. Gone are the days of bloodpools being like a gastank that you had to refill occasionally. 5th Ed measures hunger on a scale of 0 to 5 (sated to ravenous, basically) and every time you use a power that requires you "use the blood" you make a Rouse check, usually one or two unmodded die. If you fail the Rouse check your hunger level increases by one and if you'd go above 5 you enter hunger frenzy. The genius of this system is that the only way to reach 0 hunger is to actively kill a person while feeding, so most vampires will always be in some state of hunger. What hunger does is that it replaces a number of dice in all your dice pools with "hunger dice", these function like normal but if you fail a roll and have a hunger dice showing 1 you get a bestial failure, which has the Beast somehow make you mess up. On the other hand, if you succeed but the hunger dice shows a 10 and any other dice is also a 10 you get a Messy Critical, which means you succeed but something bad happens. Maybe you rip the door of the hinges instead of picking the lock or you rip the throat out of the mugger that was trying to stick you up instead of just punching him. All in all, the hunger system is great. It makes hunger an actual problem for vampires and means that even a few discipline uses or temporary stat increases can put you dangerously close to losing control due to hunger.
However, hunger combined with the punishing difficulty levels and the miserly way the game hands out xp (suggested rates are 1 to 2 xp per session, with all costs increasing exponentially, the first dot in a skill costs 3xp, the second 6, the third 9 etc.) means that unless the GM is nice or the players are twinking like mad, the average chronicle seems like it'll be a long road of failing forward, because the players can very rarely count on actually succeeding even with basic tasks. This is bad in itself, but is made worse by the way the game keeps waffling on whether the system should even be used at all. You read that right, the game itself advocates freeform roleplay as a totally legit alternative to its somewhat unbalanced rules system. Now, I'm not one to tell others what's right or wrong in their roleplaying and if people wants to do freeform that's cool (I personally adore Fiasco and its essentially freeform nature), but I absolutely expect the game I paid good money for to actually provide me with a functional system and not wiffing out on me by asking me to solve its mechanical issues by improvising. This is just on top of the fact that the game itself mentions modifications to both difficulty and dice pools and roughly what the difference is (change difficulty when circumstance changes, alter dice pool when the user's ability changes) but doesn't provide any decent examples of what might be changed circumstances or ability changes. Does designer clothes increase your seduction pool when clubbing? Does a fully equipped professional garage provide bonuses to craft rolls for repairing cars? The game doesn't even bother to tell you. For me, a GM of almost 2 decades it is easy to figure out, but new GMs absolutely need aids like that.
On to more positive parts: The fact that Generation and Blood Potency now are two different things. You can be low generation and not be particularly potent or high generation and fairly potent (though harshly capped). That Generation is no longer total immunity to discipline rolls made against you by someone of higher generation. The fact that the game takes some time to talk about the length of combat encounters and provides multiple ways to resolve encounters that might drag on but will absolutely end a certain way (ie. players slaughtering the opposition). The way that character generation forces you to make choices based on your character (predator type) and the Amalgam disciplines. These are all nice additions, but not necessarily earth shattering.
All in all, the rules system for 5th ed is functional. It is quite clear though that the designers all considered the rules pretty optional, both in their stated suggestions to simply not use them and the fact that some rules simply aren't very well thought out.
Setting
I mentioned that I hated VtM. The reason for this is because I find the metaplot stifling and the way the setting was set up, with untouchable century old elders running the show and the players being measly pawns, meant that the players very rarely could do anything to affect the actual political game that was meant to be front and center of VtM. Way too often VtM chronicles devolved into NPCs doing stuff that the PCs reacted to (or was forced to do for the NPCs) and occasionally a single, long lived player character getting to do something cool. The political game, which required older vampire PCs, clashed badly with the gothic horror idea of being turned into a monster and coming to terms with that, which required newly embraced PCs. With that said, I love the changes that 5th ed does. Gone are the cartoonishly evil Sabbath, gone are rigid, unchanging power structures in the Camarilla and in their stead you get an actual political conflict between Anarchs and Camarilla and power structures that are a lot more fluid.
The idea that all Elders above a certain generation and age are called to the Middle East for some reason, probably connected to why all the Sabbath is there, is a great way to shake up the setting while still keeping it. Suddenly younger vampires are in positions of power that they are not quite equipped to handle and the dichotomy between the Anarch's freedom and the Camarilla's safety and order actually works. With the introduction of the Second Inquisition as an actual threat that forces vampires to play it safer and more cautious and you've got a setting where Elders can no longer summon all of the Police in a city at will. This was exactly what I never knew I wanted for VtM and it makes running a neonate campaign that much better, because these new vampires can actually pose a threat if they play it smart instead of being instantly curb stomped by a 2 millenia old 6th Gen Gangrel Sheriff that murders them all in the first round of combat.
Other Stuff
I'm aware of the controversies surrounding 5th ed. In particular the pedophile PC for the alpha test scenario, the repeat references to Neo-Nazis and the use of the Chechnyan persectuion of GLBTQ individuals. After having read the entire core book and the Camarilla book (second print, so no Chechnya stuff for me) I can honestly say that I doubt any of it was malicious. What I think it was, and what probably bothers me most about 5th ed, is extremely edgy. The books absolutely love to be as edgy as it could possibly be, making repeat references to sex, rape, drugs, violence, incest and whatever else you can think of. Most of the time this edge misses its mark and just becomes cringe inducing, because it doesn't serve to establish a dark mood. It repeatedly crosses the line from setting a dark and grim mood to just being edgy for the sake of reminding us that you're reading a mature roleplaying game now and that means it can use vampires as a metaphor for incest (no really, that's one of the predator types). It all works to make you think that you're sitting in a dimly lit room with that LARP guy with no social skills that constantly creeps on the women in the game and excuses it with "my character is like this" and he's telling you all the cool ideas (most of which are creepy and cringy) he has for RP, if only you'll let him grope you in character.
Another way to put that is that I can totally see why the Lead Storyteller of White Wolf was let go and all game development passed of to Modiphius instead. Because there are some cool stuff in there, but most of it is so desperate to appear edgy, mature and dark that I kept questioning whether that guy was really 40-something and not 15.
Final, random thoughts: The drawn art in the books is all pretty much awesome and mood setting. The multitude of actual photographs are less so. Some of them sort of works, but for the most part they are a little too posed and fail to really set a mood or theme. This is especially true for several pictures in the Camarilla book which seems like random house party pictures, with added Vampire-related text that utterly fails to make it seem like anything but someone's drunken 2 am party pictures. I do like the overall aesthetic, however, and the inclusion of several concept art characters for each of the clans makes it easier to get a visual reference to them.
All in all, I think I can do something cool with 5th. At least I can do something that's much better then a 2nd or 20th Anniversary game with rules and setting used as written. With development being passed of to Modiphius and some of it outsourced to Onyx Path (who still do NWoD, Exalted and most of WW's other old portfolio), I can see 5th ed shaping up to be a really good RPG in a few years time. For now, I think it is an ambitious reboot of a legendary game that brings some much needed changes but ultimately fails to stick the landing. It is not bad, at least if you can look past the Edgelord Cringe (and if you can't, I can't blame you), but it lacks the relevance and fingerspitzgef?hl that made the original VtM so great and the finesse and cleverness that makes VtR a much better RP system.
If you've gotten this far, thank you for reading and please share your own thoughts.
