11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg

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Posted by u/tiedyedvortex 1 year ago 

Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition

Background

Vampire myths are very, very old. How old is difficult to say precisely, as the definition of "vampire"
changes with every retelling, but folkloric beliefs around nocturnal demons or undead who drink
blood stretch back at least to the dawn of recorded history. The publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula
embedded this monstrous archetype in the public mind permanently; and, in 1976, Anne Vice's
Vampire Chronicles (beginning with Interview with a Vampire) cast a look on vampires as
sympathetic beings, more cursed than damned.

In 1991, White Wolf Publishing tapped into this rich mythological tradition to create Vampire: the
Masquerade. This game did a number of new (or at least uncommon) things with its design, that
captured the imagination of players. The game's writing encouraged narrative and drama over
combat and challenge. It was strongly themed to be dark, moody, gothic, a game of personal horror
instead of heroism. The game's history was long, and deep, and rich, and ever-expanding through
supplements building on what was called "the metaplot", the plot of the world rather than any
individual campaign within it.

However, this last point seems to have been the root of White Wolf's troubles. The world's lore
eventually became more and more bloated and unwieldy, as did any hope of balancing the game.
Eventually, White Wolf decided to wipe the slate clean, and start fresh. In 2004 they published
Vampire: the Requiem. VtR shared a lot of its DNA with VtM, but removed Masquerade's metaplot
wholesale, in an attempt to shift the focus away from world-shaking events and ancient feuds
towards smaller, personal dramatic stories.

Vampire: the Requiem was not generally well received. The drastic reduction in lore complexity
made the game more accessible, but also cut out much that fans loved about Masquerade. For
many, the neutered Requiem felt too small, too limited, and ultimately just too different compared
to what they knew.

That was just the first of White Wolf's troubles, though. In 2006, video game company CCP (makers
of EVE Online) purchased White Wolf, with the intent of making a World of Darkness MMO that was
scrapped before release. In 2011, tacitly admitting the failure of Requiem, White Wolf published a
fourth edition of Masquerade as the "20th anniversary edition". In 2012, White Wolf said they would
stop publishing tabletop RPGs entirely; however, they licensed out the World of Darkness IP (both
classic and new) to another company, Onyx Path. In 2015, White Wolf was sold by CCP and bought
by Paradox Interactive. And, finally, in 2018, White Wolf worked with distributor Mophidius to
publish Vampire: the Masquerade, fifth edition, the topic of this review.

As a disclaimer: this reviewer was only born in 1992. I was introduced to the New World of Darkness
in 2012, and never had a reason to pick up a book from the classic game line until now. As such, I

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cannot give precise details on what has changed from VtM:20th to VtM:5e; but, I can give a
Search r/rpg does differently from the most recent edition of Requiem, and
perspective on what Masquerade
whether or not that works.

Lore, Worldbuilding, and Art

So, how does V5 approach the daunting task of creating a second fresh start? It appears to have
taken a hybrid approach between older Masquerade's deep lore approach and Requiem's rejection
of all metaplot. The corebook name-drops a lot of things that I'm sure are deeply resonant with long-
time gamers. Gehenna is approaching, and the Antediluvians are Beckoning the Elders to the Middle
East to fight the forces of the Sabbat, at the same time that the Second Inquisition isolates and picks
off "blankbodies". Characters can be built with "loresheets", which are hyper-detailed powerups that
connect them to some deep element of the world from older editions.

But, you can also just as easily ignore all of that. The world is constructed so that each play group, or
even individual players within each group in some cases, can decide how much lore they want in
their story. Don't want to deal with Camarilla rules? Play in an Anarch city. Don't care about the
difference between a Malkavian and a Toreador? Play a Caitiff, its fine. I really like that flexibility.
Metaplot lore is treated like a spice, used to amplify the flavor of the core experience, without
becoming the core experience itself.

But I'm gonna be honest, I don't really like the look of this book. Unlike a lot of RPG rulebooks, which
rely primarily on hand-drawn art, this book uses an eclectic mix of hand-drawn art, shadow-
emphasis photography, and found-material style scrapbooking. The result, to me, is this really
chaotic and confusing vision of what the book is supposed to be. That might be intentional, since a
lot of the rules do have a lot of "play it your way" flexibility, but I found it more distracting than
helpful. I also don't like the switching between black-on-white and white-on-black printing it uses. In
some places, the white-on-black layout is used to indicate sidebars, but in other places that layout is
used for core rules or lore.

Core Mechanic, Hunger, and Humanity

The core resolution mechanic is very simple. You take an attribute rated 1-5 and a skill rated 0-5, and
roll a number of d10s equal to the total. Any die that rolls 6-10 is a success; a pair of 10s is a critical
and adds two bonus successes; and 3 successes is usually enough to get what you want. This is a
simple, straightforward bell-curve distribution, satisfying and effective.

At least, it would be, if it weren't for Hunger. See, you also have a Hunger value from 1-5 (rarely, 0,
more on that later). A number of your dice equal to your Hunger are turned red on every roll. These
dice act perfectly normally, except in two cases. If you roll a critical, and a 0 appears on any red die, it
is a "messy" critical; if you fail and there is a 1 on any red die, it is a "bestial" failure. In either case,
your critical or failure is augmented by a loss of control, as your vampire nature reveals itself.

That's bad, so you ideally want to keep your Hunger low. Problem is, you're a vampire; you need to
drink blood to feed yourself. While it's easy enough to slake one Hunger, through a blood bag, or
killing a dog, or taking a gentle sip from a human. But once every night, and every time you do a
cool vampire thing, you have to make a "Rouse check", essentially a coin flip of increasing your
Hunger by 1. Eventually, the pressure of nightlife means you're going to need to drink more; and
when you do, people get hurt. The only way to hit Hunger 0, and blessedly roll zero red dice...is to
murder a person and drink them dry.

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And that's when you bump

Searchinto Humanity, the other pillar of the game. Humanity is a morality
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meter, and losing Humanity means you start to be more vulnerable to vampire weaknesses. Doing
bad things gives you Stains; every session where you get a Stain carries up to a 50% chance of
dropping your Humanity by one.

What counts as a "bad thing", though? One of the eternal problems with morality meters in games is
that ethics is like, really hard, and is frustrating if players don't agree with the moral rules being
enforced. Fortunately, V5 addresses that through its system of Tenets and Convictions. Each
campaign of V5, the group chooses a set of three shared Tenets to guide their game. These can be
the simple Humanist tenets of "don't kill, don't torture, don't hurt the innocent" or something more
thematic, like the Street Code of "don't snitch, demand and give respect, don't hurt outsiders".
Additionally, each character has a set of Convictions, which are character-specific beliefs that reduce
penalties for breaking Tenets; however, each Conviction has a Touchstone, a human connection your
vampire draws strength from, and you have to defend your Touchstones or risk losing the
Conviction.

I adore this set of systems. Seeing that creeping Hunger with every roll you make really reinforces
the sense of thirst, and drives players to do terrible things that will erode their morality. And yet its
all so simple that you can keep it in your head or on an index card in the middle of the table. I'm
honestly blown away by how elegant and thematic these rules are--even the Touchstones, the
weakest part of this mechanics set, still serves to anchor and connect a character, and forces PCs to
fight for their Convictions and evaluate what really matters to them.

V5 conflict systems are, by default, extremely streamlined. By default, you don't even have initiative;
everyone just declares an action, rolls simultaneously, and the higher roll does damage. Damage in
combat hurts your health, as you would expect. The good news is that vampires can heal near-
instantly...the bad news is that doing so makes you very hungry very quickly. As a result, getting in a
fight is really expensive, even if you win. In social conflict, damage is dealt to Willpower instead of
health, with the audience acting as the "weapon", and because vampires can't regenerate Willpower
any better than a human, this cost feels real too.

The system of "superficial" and "aggravated" damage is a simple way to show how tough vampires
are relative to human, but the rule about how superficial damage gets halved before actually being
marked down is terrible. It's just ripe for miscommunication, whether the GM communicates the
damage before or after halving, and if the player remembers that rule.

Personally, I like the de-emphasis of combat, and the social conflict rules are also so simple they can
be ignored whenever irrelevant (which is probably most of the time). And in the cases where a
knock-down, drag-out fight is warranted, there is a section in the back of the book for advanced
combat options if that's more your speed.

Character creation and advancement

Vampires in V5 are built, primarily, around their Clan, their Predator Type, an array of Attributes and
Skills, and then a number of Advantages and a couple Flaws.

While your Clan is the most recognizable aspect of your character, it also contributes relatively little
to a build mechanically. Your Clan gives you three points of Disciplines, which are cool vampire
powers, and gives you your clan Bane, a weakness specific to your vampire family. The book
mentions that there were 13 clans, but only 7 are listed in the core book, with them releasing the
other 6 one-at-a-time in future sourcebooks. These clans range from the hideously deformed

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Nosferatu to the beautiful Toreador to the animalistic Gangrel. One special "clan" is the Thin-
Blooded, people only Search r/rpg who only get fewer cool vampire abilities, but can avoid some of
half-cursed,
the costs (like being able to walk around in broad daylight, or eat food without barfing).

Of more importance than your Clan is your Predator Type, the way you hunt. Do you attack
homeless people in an alley? Do you subsist on cold bagged blood? Do you seduce and lure
strangers into dive bar bathrooms? Whichever option you choose, it gives you a list of powerups and
flaws based on what you do. Some lists (like the Sandman) offer low rewards but low drawbacks;
others (like the Blood Leech) are min-maxed as fuck.

The skill list is a bit longer than necessary and has some bizarrely pointless entries (Finance? Really?)
but it's easy enough to ignore those, and the skill distribution is enough for a character to be
capable at enough things to feel fun.

Also significant is your set of Advantages and Flaws. You have 7 points of advantages, and have to
take two points in flaws. The lists available for both are pretty short; however, most of the
interesting ones are things like Allies and Enemies, Fame and Infamy, social relationships that keep
your character tied into the world around them, which is good. You can also donate your advantage
point to the coterie if you want to be a team player.

Experience points are supposed to be 1 point per session per player, plus a bonus at the end of a
"story" (with no guidance on how long that is). However, when you consider that the cost to increase
each ability is a multiple of the new level, this essentially means that characters improve only
extremely rarely. For example, starting with Celerity 3, and trying to upgrade to Celerity 4 (a 20-point
purchase) is probably going to take close to three months of weekly games.

This is kind of irritating. I'm okay with having a flatter power curve than D&D, but this is absurd; it
essentially means that the higher-level Discipline abilities are NPC-only, because nobody is going to
sit around gaining nothing for 20 sessions for a single powerup. Some of the lower-level Discipline
abilities are neat, but they mostly feel like minor enhancements. There are very few attainable
abilities that feel inspiring enough to build a character around. This is fixable through a simple XP
rate boost, but it does still feel like a design flaw, and personally I would overhaul the XP grind
entirely.

Lastly, you also have a coterie type. This is analogous to your Predator type, except that it answers
the question of "why is your group of vampires working together". I appreciate this, since it avoids
the awkward "we meet in an inn" scenario, I just think that groups should choose their coterie type
before building individual PCs, to avoid incompatible character groups.

Conclusions and Critique

As someone who has never played Vampire: the Masquerade and enjoys the New World of Darkness
(now rebranded as Chronicles of Darkness), I came into this expecting little. I don't care about the
deeper Masquerade lore, and that's all I thought would be materially different compared to
Requiem.

But I was, indeed, quite impressed. I don't think I can ever go back to the "gas tank" approach of
using blood as mana, when the Hunger mechanic is so much more immediately appealing. The use
of group-defined Tenets instead of designer-dictated sins feels freeing, and opens up the game to a
wider variety of styles without losing that core focus on the price of Hunger.

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I wish the book weren't as hard

Search to look at, and that the experience system wasn't so punishingly
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slow for anyone looking to improve their strengths rather than diversify. But I will gladly accept the
eyestrain and the effort of hacking together my own XP system if it means seeing my players groan
as I hand them another red Hunger die.

My final caveat, though, is actually the first thing in the book. This game is dark, by intention and by
design. But, the level of darkness in your game is something you have to very carefully calibrate;
what is thrilling for one player might be either boring, or overwhelming for another. This game isn't
mechanically too difficult, but thematically you can get into hot water real fast. For example, maybe
you don't know that one of your players was a victim of sexual assault in real life, and then you have
their character's vampire sire start acting in a way that reminds them of that trauma. This is a game
about pushing boundaries, not steamrolling over them, so you need to calibrate your expectations
beforehand.

TL;DR: Elegant dice mechanics reinforce the battle between Hunger and Humanity, with
flexible, specific design options to let you play the game in a way that fits your table.

 58 Comments  Give Award  Share  94% Upvoted

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 jaundicemanatee under the sea 25 points · 1 year ago

 Nice review. I'm a long-time fan of VTM, but had been going back and forth on picking up
V5. The Hunger system seemed clunky at first, but your explanation of it along with the
morality systems (which I didn't even know about) got me on board.
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 Belgand 28 points · 1 year ago · edited 1 year ago

 A big part of the problem is that Vampire came along at precisely the right time. The goth
subculture was finally starting to break into the mainstream along numerous vectors, post-
modernism was becoming more popular in media, a general trend of dark, grim, and gritty
was pervading the culture; conspiracy and distrust were replacing clear-cut enemies, and in
the gaming world the crunch of the '80s was starting to give way to a newer interest in
narrativist games. It's 1994 and you're listening to The Downward Spiral and reading
Sandman before going to see The Crow later that evening... that's the environment that it
came out in. And even though elements of that remain, they're not quite the same as they
were back then.

It can still be a great game, but the advances it made have been expanded on. As a cultural
force it no longer fits into the current zeitgeist to the same degree. This means that it was
likely to die out over time and that any resurgence is going to be a harder sell.

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 mathcow 4 points · 1 year ago


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11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg

That's exactly how I feel about it. What made Vampire the Masquerade great was that it
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perfectly encapsulated the time that it was released in. I was a huge fan and bought
pretty much every book available (White wolf and black dog) back in the day.

But it didn't age well. I'm reading through V:tm 5e right now, and I REALLY want to like
it. I really want to get some of the magic back that I felt in the 90s and early aughts, but
there isn't enough here to bring it into 2018 for me.

If someone I know to be a good GM wants to run it, I'd definitely play it but it just
doesn't seem as exciting as many other modern games.
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 MrWelldone Apostle of the Demon Lord 2 points · 1 year ago

 CAKE!
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 anon_adderlan 3 points · 1 year ago

 It's 1994 and you're listening to The Downward Spiral and reading Sandman before
going to see The Crow later that evening...

I miss those days.

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 KittyCatOmaniac 14 points · 1 year ago

 THANK YOU! I see so many people on here and the Onyx Path forums bitching about the
new Hunger system, while I gave a loud exclamation of "Oh thank god" when I first read up
on it in the alpha release of V5. While in my first game of VtM, our storyteller was very
adamant about making us roleplay almost every time our characters had to feed, the
system made it feel slow, clunky and needlessly disruptive. It was far too easy to just have
the ST ask the players for a survival or streetwise role to see how well they managed to
feed, which is what that game eventually devolved into. And if you didn't feed, the
consequences were incredible extreme. With this new system, you don't HAVE to go out
and feed no matter how hungry you are, and while the consequences CAN be dire, it's not a
quaranteed frenzy just because you've passed an arbitrary threshold of blood-usage. Every
time you go out to feed or decide not to feed, it feels like a calculated choice, rather than
something that's being forced upon you, which lessens the risk of the ST simply caving in
and just ask everyone to roll for feeding.
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 SwiftOneSpeaks 36 points · 1 year ago

 > Vampire: the Requiem was not generally well received
I definitely prefer Masquerade over Requiem, but I'm not sure this is a fair statement.
Requiem never had the impact that Masquerade did...but then, none of the updates to
Masquerade since it's heyday have either. There was a mix of good games, NEW game
systems (The StoryTeller system was one of the first popular games to emphasize narrative
over rolls), and cultural zeitgeist that is very hard to do intentionally.

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While Requiem never enjoyed

Search the success of the original WOD trilogy, and while NWOD
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(and later OWOD versions) never again challenged D&D as the most common "first game",
I know of plenty of gamers that were introduced to the NWOD (or CofD) and received it very
well.
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 Anivair 9 points · 1 year ago

 Yeah, it would be fair to say that vampire players were sort of split. Some liked requiem,
some were indifferent and a very loud minority hated it. At least IME. And it only makes
sense that some portion of masquerade players were going to hate anything that wasn't
masquerade

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 tiedyedvortex  3 points · 1 year ago

 That's fair. Like I mentioned in the review, I never touched Masquerade before this, and I
enjoyed Requiem enough to not feel like I needed to, especially after the 2nd edition
fixed some of my complaints about the 1st edition (even though it introduced new ones
too). And the ongoing Kickstarter successes of Onyx Path shows that they've adapted to
that publishing paradigm well and people are enjoying it. I was mostly speaking of my
perception that most people who played both Masquerade and Requiem preferred the
former...but, my perception is biased because the people who liked Requiem tend to be
quieter about it.
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ghostfacedcoder -14 points · 1 year ago (7 children)



 voidgazing 8 points · 1 year ago

 Mod the XP to match the original game- that is, give it out for good roleplaying moments
too. Making staying in character and furthering the story where the candy comes from
works reeeeaaal good.

As for the skills, this game is best when you make the sheet match the person. Don't
minmax- this ain't a thing where you slay the dragon and get a castle. It's more... Harry
Dresden. Some of the coolest characters will be the least powerful, or have some 'useless'
specialty that turns into a story arc.

The power of the vamps is really only story spice too. There are always scarier things out
there than the PCs, so if people want to start out with more Kewl Moves then let 'em- once
they've played a few games as desperate, terrified, newly made fiends, I mean. Pay ya dues.

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 TheKindDictator 20 points · 1 year ago

 I haven't seen the book, but I suspect what skills are considered 'pointless' varies heavily by
play style. Skills like "finance" have been incredibly useful in past games, and I think it
would be important in the type of game I would want to play in this setting. What attracts
me to this setting is being one of the puppet masters controlling the world from the
shadows. I would be much more interested in my character being able to execute or
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unravel plots involving financial markets than having a more physical power like being able
to move really fast. Search r/rpg
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 Viatos 7 points · 1 year ago

 I feel like this is the kind of thing that looks interesting from a long ways off, but the
practical play experience devours it more or less immediately.

Like, literally every player needs to be on board for "financial market scale" and the
system to do that best is definitely not V5. Realistically, you're going to build your
mastermind and four other players are going to show up with a one-man deathsquad, a
monster-making occultist, a soul-stealing socialite, and a genius billionaire playboy
philanthropist who will offer to buy you a military gunship as consolation for them
having started with "financial markets" marked in the "basic equipment" section of their
sheet.

Puppet-mastering the world from the shadows is slow, procedural, and relies on the
world retaining more or less the same shape night to night. Actual play tends to involve
a lot of violent chaos boiling through the setting every second the PCs are in motion.
There are settings and systems for Machiavelli, but personal-scale RPGs are usually not
among them.
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 nat_r 13 points · 1 year ago

 There's a not insignificant number of WoD players who love nothing more than
spinning deep plots and machinations, playing the long game to slowly build power
through acquisition and subversion of existing power structures.

In games I've participated in where these interests have been in play it's generally
not done at the table during a session in real time. Instead the player(s) directly
involved might communicate thier actions between sessions directly to the ST or set
aside time before the formal play session starts to go over things.

So, it's possible within all the incarnations of the World of Darkness rules, and
players do it, but it does require buy in from the ST and the rest of the group to
engage in that type of play.
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 Plushzombie Small but vicious Rabbit 4 points · 1 year ago

 Yeah, i know many groups who are like this. Especially Vampire Larps are liek this.
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 OrdoExterminatus 6 points · 1 year ago

 Great review. Definitely evokes some nostalgia for me; it was the system that introduced
me to the concept of TTRPGs, but I never got a chance to play until much later in life, so it
was a setting I missed out on. I used to love reading the books for all the lore and the
amazing artwork. Nowadays though, I am much more interested in gameplay mechanics

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that can reinforce a general feeling that I want the game to evoke, so I love the "personal
Searchvsr/rpg
horror" aspect of Hunger Humanity.

Thanks for the review!

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 tribalgeek 6 points · 1 year ago

 Nice review covered a lot of questions I had about the system.
As someone who has played WoD games since 2nd/Revised (I put it like that as some
systems never made it past 2nd) the xp thing has been that way since forever. Discipline
costs sound about the same, and mage was even worse with it being 7 * new rating instead
of current. These games at least to me have always felt like the ones that should run for a
long time. You can do one shots and things like that with them, but they should be long
term stories where you do slowly amass power so the xp curve has never bothered me to
much.
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 Viatos 3 points · 1 year ago

 Have you tried the Chronicles of Darkness? Among other innovations, they flattened all
the XP costs and instituted an aggressive action-based XP system - nothing has a scaling
price, and you need to keep engaging with the game all the time rather than "grinding"
your way to a high XP total.
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 tribalgeek 1 point · 1 year ago

 I've only tried a bit of the new generation of stuff. I'm not out right opposed to it as
some people are, because let's just be honest RPG players are some of the most
resistant to change people you will ever meet.

Like I said in the post the xp curve in OWoD stuff never bothered me too much, out
of all the games we played back when I was really playing it, that was the one where
we had a long running story we played one story for years so the xp just didn't
bother me too much. This was also when my gaming group was 18-25 and we could
get away with gaming twice a week. Now that I am fully an adult with a wife and a
job I may think twice about that xp curve if I ever get the chance to get back to
playing those sorts of games.
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 ziddersroofurry 5 points · 1 year ago

 If I remember right White Wolf's issues had a lot more to do with mismanagement rather
than low sales. I remember both 1st and 2nd edition being popular and selling well in my
friends shop...when books and materials showed up. Delivery was always sporadic,
communication with customer service was very hit or miss and there was always a ton of
drama between freelance authors and people running the show.

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 penitentialarts 6 points · 1 year ago

 If I remember right White Wolf's issues had a lot more to do with mismanagement
rather than low sales.

They hampered themselves with the overarching metaplot stuff, too, particularly when
they decided to start releasing products that dealt with Gehenna. They sort of wrote
themselves into a corner, then decided to simply reboot everything and make a lot of
changes for no other reason than to justify re-releasing all the books.
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 CornfishPie 3 points · 1 year ago

 Thanks very much for your detailed review! I am a regular RPG gamer (in the middle of the
FFG SWRPG now) but enjoyed VtM when we played a year long campaign. We used, I think,
the original 1992 rules set which were great on atmosphere but clunky in places and
seemed wildly unbalanced. Certain Disciplines (Celerity was one) were nearly game-
breakingly powerful.

This new version looks really interesting - particularly the constant demands of that Hunger
mechanic.

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 DarkGamer 3 points · 1 year ago

 I don't mind the XP grind for these kinds of games (at least in previous editions) because
when you do get the high level skills they tend to be so OP that they are worth the delayed
gratification.

Thanks for laying out what the new mechanics are, this will be helpful for deciding if I want
to try it. The rule changes seem mostly positive. I think I might pick this up if/when they
release a new mage book and core rulebook.
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 TelperionST 3 points · 1 year ago

 It obviously depends on how many Rouse checks you do per session, but for my group
going above two hunger dice hasn't really been an issue. I much prefer the simplicity and
tactile feel of holding Hunger Dice in my hand over having to manage a Vitae pool on a
character sheet. Whether Masquerade or Requiem it never felt like the Vitae pool was a
huge deal - except in a few rare instances. IMO, the game is much better for having the
Hunger Dice and associated Humanity mechanics. It makes for a messier game, but I think
that's for the better. It's not an uncontrollable system that force you to do stuff. It feels
much more like a satisfying risk-reward system with some high costs associated with it, if
you push your luck too far, too often.
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11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg
 drekstorm 3 points · 1 year ago · edited 1 year ago
 The only things I didn'tSearch
like r/rpg
about 5th ed was the focus on current hot button political
issues that I fear are going to date this edition in a few years. Some of the in game fiction I
felt was of a much lower quality more than the stuff in previous editions. Granted that is
going to be very subjective. I felt most of the photography didn't seem to work for me. The
game also seems to have lost most of its goth feel for better or worse. All in all I think that
it is good, but just fell short in a few areas that are gonna be highly subjective for your
group. Mechanics are really solid and in my opinion the best edition to get new players to
get a fresh start in.
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 kangareagle 2 points · 1 year ago

 Just a quick correction: “Anne Vice” should be “Anne Rice.”
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 cthonctic 2 points · 1 year ago

 Very nice and interesting write-up - even though it definitely shows that OP didn't grow into
the original World of Darkness. Not their fault, obviously, and I could see players preferring
the cleaner and less awkward newer editions to the clunky and incredibly flavorful older
offering.

To me it sounds like WW tried their hardest to touch both the messy quirkiness of the
original as well as carefully introduce a couple changes that make an update worthwhile,
both in terms of game mechanics and play experience.

As someone who started with VtM first edition and has a whole bookshelf full of OWoD
material, there is a delicate balance necessary for a new edition to be of interest to me - if it
is too similar to the stuff I already own then why bother, but if it is too divergent and throws
out everything in order to modernize and streamline (which is what the NWoD, now CoD,
felt like for me) then... I don't know. If it is a different game altogether I might as well get
into something really different like Unknown Armies or Blades in the Dark.

Especially now that we have a huge wealth of cool niche RPG systems to choose from and
WW doesn't match the zeitgeist quite as much as it did in the 90s (that other comment
namedropping NIN, Sandman and The Crow resonated deeply with me) I never thought
WoD games might catch my fancy significantly anymore.

But, I really like the way this new game line sounds. Especially the weirdness and feeling of
disorientation as you try to absorb the variety of systems and themes is something I
wouldn't mind reliving again if for nothing but nostalgia.

In any case, thanks to OP for the review. I'm going to take a look at the new books and even
if I never manage to get a game going (very likely) I will certainly enjoy myself reading the
material.
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Arxhon 2 points · 1 year ago

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11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg

What does running low on Humanity do in this edition?

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 tiedyedvortex  2 points · 1 year ago

 There is a table of effects of what happens at each level, but the main areas it affects
are:

How difficult it is to appear human

Your ability to eat food
Your ability to have sex
Penalties to nonhostile social interaction with humans
Your ability to resist frenzy

And, of course, if you hit Humanity 0, you flip out in an impressive and destructive final
frenzy and then your character is an NPC.

It is worth pointing out, however, that even though the book describes it as "a
downward spiral" the Stains mechanic actually makes it easier to avoid Humanity loss as
you go lower, since your "health track" for how many Stains you can incur gets longer as
your Humanity decreases. At humanity 8 or above, even a single Stain takes you to a
50% chance of losing Humanity that session; but at humanity 3, you can take three
Stains in a session and still have a 94% chance of being fine.

Which actually does have an interesting effect; high-Humanity characters will be super
careful about breaking Tenets, but lower-Humanity characters will break those rules
more freely, which reinforces the idea that they just don't care any more.
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 UwasaWaya Tampa, FL 2 points · 1 year ago

 Thank you for that review! You have a knack for these.
If you haven't, you should check out Don't Rest Your Head... It's a horror rpg where you play
insomniacs with super powers. The hunger system here reminds me of the madness
system there, where your core dice for doing everything can be changed into red dice one
by one, and having them win rolls for you will bite you in the ass. I love that mechanic, since
it's so prevalent and impossible to ignore.
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 tiedyedvortex  2 points · 1 year ago

 That is a good point, there is a similarity there. The emphasis is a bit different, since
DRYH is supposed to be this panicked fight to stay awake and lucid, while Vampire is a
slower meditation on what it means to lose your sense of self. But in the sense that you
have a source of power that ultimately demands more than it gives and assumes control
of you? Yeah, I can see that.
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Mishmoo 2 points · 1 year ago

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11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg

 Not a big fan of it, personally. As a long time Vampire player, I feel like it's very much
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alienated the playstyles I enjoy, particularly since it demands such a focus on feedings and
such. On top of that, the massive lore changes and paradigm shift with design compared to
V20 suggest that this is more of a soft reboot rather than a continuation of what was being
built before.

It's not bad, but I don't enjoy it being called Vampire 5th Edition when they've essentially
reworked everything that there was to play with Vampire.
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 IdlePigeon 2 points · 1 year ago

 In practice it really doesn't demand a focus on feedings. It certainly supports a focus on
the night to night activity of being a vampire more than previous editions, but the rules
for resolving feeding as a single quick roll are in the book, and the herd merit lets you
skip rolling entirely.
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 CitizenCAN_mapleleaf 1 point · 1 year ago

 I am in!!!
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 beetnemesis 1 point · 1 year ago

 Nice review- thanks.
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 Former_Sea 1 point · 1 year ago

 I agree with you like 95%
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 Charlie24601 1 point · 1 year ago

 Haven't played in like 20 years. Now I feel the need to pick up a copy!
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 LadyElm 1 point · 1 year ago

 Thank you for the review I have been interested in this game for quiet some time.
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 Vortex_D 1 point · 1 year ago

 Newbie here. What does the "messy critical" mean when you hit a ten/zero on a hunger
die? I couldn't find a passage in your review where you explained it. You did the "bestial"
one tho.

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11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg

Anyway,.. amazing review.

SearchProbably
r/rpg going to buy it within this year
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 tiedyedvortex  2 points · 1 year ago

 A "messy critical" means that you succeed at what you were trying to do, but you lose
control somehow and your predatory nature exerts itself. This is mostly a narrative
option for the GM, but it gives suggestions such as:

The character crosses a moral boundary and gets a Stain against their Humanity
The character does something that would risk the Masquerade
The character loses a point from an Advantage such as Status or Allies temporarily
as people are afraid to work with them
If all else fails, the critical is turned into a failed roll

A "bestial failure" is similar, with options such as:

Temporary Advantage loss (as above)

Take a point of Aggravated damage
Hit with a Compulsion, forcing you to act in pursuit of Hunger, Dominance, Harm,
Paranoia, or a clan-specific compulsion (such as the Toreador's obsession with
beauty or the Brujah's need to rebel)
If all else fails, increase Hunger by one

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 anon_adderlan 2 points · 1 year ago

 This is the only part of the system I absolutely cannot get on board with. I get that
Hunger should drive behavior, but these guidelines are silly, random, and
inconsistent.
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 Lord_Locke 1 point · 1 year ago

 I love them, the create chaos and it's fun having to fear the monster within.
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 I8Superman 1 point · 9 months ago

 I wonder if you could use the more streamlined mechanics of 5th ed. and just play in
lore/world of the older versions? Would it take a lot of convertings stats of NPCs?
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 Kawonkuku 1 point · 9 months ago

 The sense of design I get from this version is that "leveling up" just isn't part of the game
design beyond long term, slow growth. Also the slow growth mechanic is what fuels the
desire for vampires to commit Amaranth, or Diablorie, which is when a vampire drinks
another vampire down to the last drop and then consumes their soul. This carries a huge
boost in skills, abilities and even disciplines.
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11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg

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 RogueModron 0 points · 1 year ago

 I think the Hunger die mechanic is cool, but the fact that it dispenses with all of Requiem
2nd edition's good XP design for facilitating and rewarding characterful play means this
game is of little interest to me.

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 domogrue 4 points · 1 year ago

 Question: Is 2nd edition's XP design hackable into 5e (or 5e's Hunger mechanics into
2nd ed), or are the two systems too reliant on each other for that not to work?
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 dr_jiang 2 points · 1 year ago

 They work pretty well, you just need to decide what kind of power curve you're
looking for. I'm keeping my players at around 2-3xp per session, with some
downtime requirements for learning new skills so they can't cash in three dots of a
thing in the span of a week.

The hunger system is way less portable, but they could probably be mucked around
given enough time.
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 tiedyedvortex  2 points · 1 year ago

 I would agree with this assessment. Porting Beats into V5 is only tricky because
the idea of a "resolving a Condition" isn't mechanically meaningful in V5. You
could easily define a number of other XP triggers though and calibrate to your
desired rate of XP gain.

Putting Hunger in Requiem is harder because the way you read the d10s is
different in the core mechanic. The interaction between red Hunger dice and
explosions is not defined and would need both playtesting and statistical analysis
to get to a comfortable place. It could be done, though.
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 RogueModron -2 points · 1 year ago

 I dunno! I'm not interested enough to read the tome that is M5 to find out, though!
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 dr_jiang 1 point · 1 year ago

 For what it's worth, I'm running a v5 Chronicle with the beats system ported in. Just call
beats experience points instead and adjust the costs to fit your preferred power curve.
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penitentialarts 1 point · 1 year ago


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11/1/2020 Review of Vampire the Masquerade: 5th Edition : rpg

I have never really seen any reason to move past the original versions of the White Wolf
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games. I liked the general feel of them, the specific types of vampires, the original
conception of Changeling, the way magic worked in Mage, the original way the
human/demon thing worked in Demon, etc. I always ignored the metaplot stuff. Though I
like the Promethean stuff that was added later, in general I haven't liked the general feel,
mythos changes, etc. of any of the later editions of any of the games.
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