Vampire: The Masquerade. The game that turned roleplaying from the ultimate way to ensure you never got a date at my high school to a new hobby for more than a few theater girls. When V:TM hit the shelves in 1991, it made waves. At that point, roleplaying games were, in our circles, pretty combat-heavy affairs. We played D&D, Marvel Superheroes, Robotech, Mechwarrior, Twilight:2000... yeah. We liked to stick swords in things and blow things up. It wasn't until Vampire hit that we really started thinking about the kind of RPG sessions that are common today- where hours may go by without a die rolling. Story, character development, etc.
I got my hands on Nightlife before I got my copy of Vampire, but Nightlife called itself "Splatterpunk" and focused more on a traditional roleplaying paradigm. It was almost with fangs. And that was freakin' awesome. But Vampire hit us upside our teenage heads with the psychological baggage that come with immortality. "A beast I am lest a beast I become." The Humanity stat, that tracks how far a character has slipped into bestiality. It was extremely mind-blowing at the time.
So, Vampire has a variation on Shadowrun's dice pools, but with d10s. Roll a number of d10s, count the number that match or exceed a target number. The system is fairly simple, only uses one type of die, and the characters are rated in "dots" that make the creation, advancement, and use of characters extremely easy. This game was perfect for luring in people who wouldn't otherwise find roleplaying appealing. There has always been a subculture of Goth that has a fetish for the sexy, seductive Vampire. This game tapped into that interest through hitting like an Anne Rice novel and having mechanics that were unobtrusive and straightforward for non-gamers. It actually spawned a TV series, Kindred: The Embraced that has a cult following as well.
The Vampires in Vampire belong to Clans. Each Clan is an expression of a different Vampire stereotype. The Nosferatu are much like the appearance of the creature from the classic film of the same name. The Ventrue are close to the Dracula mold, noble in bearing, strong, and mesmerizing. The Gangrel are able to shapeshift, and are combative and bestial. The Toreador are the Lestat-like vampires with magnetic personalities and charisma. There are other Clans, and more are introduced in other books as well.
Time to put quill to parchment and create a Vampire.
Character Creation
In many of our other examples of character creation, the first thing we do is usually related to the basic stats of the character, Ability Scores, etc. In VtM, the first part of character creation is Character Concept. So the story part begins right off the bat. I've recently been listening to a bunch of Postmodern Jukebox, so I'm going to create a character who was an entertainer in the 1920s, performing in speakeasies throughout Prohibition. So we'll Entertainer as our Concept. Next, we choose Clan- and the Clan that screams performer is Toreador. Now, we have the option to choose a Nature and Demeanor. Nature being who the character really is inside, and Demeanor being how the character presents themselves to the world. This character's nature is Conniver, she started out poor and clawed her way into society with her voice and her body. She's willing to do quite a bit to move up in the world. Her Demeanor, however, is something quite different, Bon Vivant. She enjoyed life in life, and enjoys life in death. Being the unlife of the party is how she gets along.
Now we go to Step 2) Choosing Attributes. There are three groups of Attributes, Physical, Mental and Social. Each of them is broken into three Attributes. Physical has Strength, Dexterity, and Stamina. Social has Charisma, Manipulation, and Appearance. Mental has Perception, Intelligence, and Wits. A character begins with one "dot" in each of these, and can have up to five. Two dots is human average. Now, we choose a primary, secondary, and tertiary group for points. She's definitely Social, then Mental, then Physical. So that gives us 7, 5, and 3 dots to place in the individual attributes.
- Strength: **
- Dexterity: **
- Stamina: **
- Charisma: ****
- Manipulation: ***
- Appearance: ***
- Perception: ***
- Intelligence: **
- Wits: ***
Step 3) Choosing Abilities gives us the same sort of deal, with Talents, Skills, and Knowledges being the three categories to prioritize. These lists are longer, do not have a free dot, and will get 13/9/5 dots to spend. We're going to put her Knowledges as third priority, as she knows little about most of those things, having grown up poor and rural, and spend the intervening years as a Vampire not keeping up with things like computers and science. Skills will be next, as she will be good at music and etiquette, but not many other things on that list. So her top priority will be Talents.
We put points into Acting, Alertness, Empathy, Streetwise, Subterfuge, Etiquette, Music, Stealth, Law, Occult and Politics.
Step 4 is Advantages. 3 dots in Disciplines, the mystical abilities Vampires have. These are dependent on Clan, certain clans have certain Disciplines as "Clan Disciplines" and outside that cost for gaining Disciplines is increased. Then we choose 5 dots of Backgrounds, which are things the Vampire has accumulated over their unlife. Follow that with Virtues, 7 dots worth, and you're golden.
So, Disciplines. The Toreador Clan has Presence, Celerity, and Auspex as Clan Disciplines. Presence is a definite for this character, Celerity... well, that's supernatural speed. She's not a combat character, but even with average Human physical stats, supernatural speed might be the edge she needs to avoid getting killed. Auspex is a supernatural awareness of one's surroundings. Also very in keeping with the way this character has been created so far, so, let's go with two dots in Presence and one in Auspex.
Backgrounds - these are cool things like Allies, Contacts, a place to sleep, a herd of willing humans to feed from, etc. We take Herd, for some reliable sustenance, Resources, as she's got some money and a place to live from decades of moving in Vampire society, and Status, as she's been around a while and is a known factor in local Vampire politics.
Virtues- Conscience, Self-Control and Courage. 7 dots. She's pretty even-keeled on these, but you can't divide 7 by 3 evenly, so we'll short Conscience, since she is stated to do whatever is necessary to survive and get ahead. Humanity is Conscience+Self-Control. Willpower is equal to Courage. Now we get to spend "freebie" points, with costs given in a table on Page 50. We'll raise Presence to 3, get two dots in Finance, 2 more in Resources, another dot in Herd, and raise Willpower 1 point. We've spent all our stuff, the character is now ready to play.
The Character
Nellie Louise Lawrence was the child of immigrants who moved to Detroit, Michigan from their native Germany. Her father changed the family name and insisted everyone spoke English at home, while he threw himself into his work in the very German community of brewers, securing a modest job working at the Stroh's brewery. The family was beginning to prosper when the disaster that was the 18th Amendment brought the brewing industry crashing down. Nellie and her family followed her father from job to job, adapting as the brewing industry had. Her father made medicinal alcohol, ice cream, near-beer, and then got a quiet offer to come to Chicago, Illinois to put his true talents back to work.
Nellie loved Chicago and found that church was not the only place her singing would be appreciated. As both Nellie and the century entered their 20s, she found she could earn the family some extra money by performing in the clandestine (and not so clandestine) drinking establishments that typified the era. Her girl-next-door good looks and a voice that could touch the audience's soul got her the notice of gangsters, politicians, and... something else. Nellie embraced the flapper aesthetic, including a rather loose attitude toward physical liaisons, and found she enjoyed both the act and the benefits she could reap in the process. She was paying half the family's bills on her club performances alone when she showed up.
She spoke with a foreign accent, called herself Lorraine, and was the most beautiful, exotic thing Nellie had ever seen. They became fast friends, spending their time after dark drinking their way through various speakeasies in search of a good time, and every time Nellie performed, Lorraine was there drinking in every note. One night, Lorraine told Nellie she was far too talented to keep singing in Chicago's smokey gin joints, she was destined for something much more. That evening, Nellie Lawrence died.
That was 1926, and Nellie hasn't aged a day. A century later she is still singing, but this time for the Prince of Chicago at his exclusive parties. She is respected among Chicago's kindred, a woman of wealth accumulated over five human generations. Ten decades among vampire kind has honed her sense of politics, and she has been smart enough to remain a fixture in Court, but avoid being seen as a player. She would much rather use subtle manipulations to get what she wants, so as not to make herself a target. She sings, dances, and seduces her way through Kindred and human societies alike to get what she wants, always flitting in and out of various social circles so as not to draw permanent attention.
For a hundred years, Nellie has been content to build up the money her family never had, and enjoy her place among the court. But soon, perhaps tonight, she imagines it may be time to stop her cautious plans, and make a bit more ambitious moves. Lorraine had said she was destined for more, hadn't she?
My Thoughts
Oh, this game. The deep roleplay. The personal horror. The pretension. We have no Game Master, we have a Storyteller. I mean, the game quotes Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Bacon, modern musicians, and former Czech statesman Vaclav Havel. It just drips with how superior its players are to players of those other games. Makes me want to change my handle the The Old*Dragoon.
In all fairness, though, this was sort of where the deep roleplay began for me. I was never 100% hacky-slashy, but most of the games I played in did lean that way. We were all teenagers, after all. But by '91, we started to mature both in our gaming, with story being more important than bodycount, and in a fervent desire to engage in other activities that didn't require dice... or clothing. And boy, howdy did Vampire kinda help, in a strange way. I remember my mom commenting that I needed to find a girlfriend who knew how to give a "normal" hickey when she spotted the teethmarks my vampire-obsessed girlfriend had left in my neck. I still have the copy of the 1988 Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine with Brian Stableford's "The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady" that she'd given me, yellow highlighting the steamy parts.
Years later there would be another V:TM game where there was some thinly veiled, um, flirting. Yeah, that's the word. Flirting. Going on in the interactions between several of the characters. Like, cold-shower-inducing flirting. Among other things. And I couldn't even blame it on teenage hormones that time.
Which I suppose means we owe Vampire: The Masquerade a bit of a debt. Not for gamer sex, though that has been a common side effect, but for the focus on everything but combat. It really forced all of us murder hobo teenagers to realize there was more to our hobby than "Kill it, take it's stuff." There was getting into the headspace of your character, interacting in character with other players and the GM, putting the story up front and making it the goal of the game rather than amassing wealth and experience points. Vampire was the first time I realized what was missing from all my other RPGs as far as a satisfying story. Sure, we had story in our other games, but sometimes, especially early on, it was just a framing device for a dungeon crawl or a superhero brawl or a space war. But here was a game that made us consider motivations outside those of gold and XP.
So... thanks, Vampire.
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