r/vtm

The Camarilla, the Sabbat and the Anarch Free States are all bad guys as far as I can tell. Their politics and philosophy are pure delusion just like the Sabbat and the Camarilla. So why do soo many people seem to think that they're the heroes here to save and liberate humanity from the other two "evil" sects?

The World of Darkness and its many sects and factions can't really be reduced to a simple Autobot and Decepticon type good versus evil binary, there are "anti-heroes" and "villains" on all sides of all three sects. In my opinion the whole point of VtM is that you're damned, the minute you drink, whoever's Vitae and pledge your loyalty to whichever Clan, sect or faction your basically fucked for eternity only you don't know until it's way to late.

In my opinion, DAMNATION, is the whole point of the game, after you've become a "sexy badass vampire" you don't really realize that looking "pretty" forever is the only real perk of being Kindred/Cainite. The rest of your existence is going to be spent trying to survive for as long as you can, there really is no way to win in the WoD, everything you think you know about the world may actually be an artificial construct created by ancient monsters long ago, everything you think you know about yourself is some kind of delusion or cognitive dissonance. In my opinion the WoD is a Gothic/Extreme Horror game about the dismal fringe aspects of human existence.

I'm curious how other players see this. Do you think the Anarchs genuinely represent a morally superior alternative to the Camarilla and the Sabbat, or do you think all three sects ultimately embody different expressions of the same underlying vampiric condition? And, more broadly, do you think VtM is fundamentally a game about political liberation, or is its deeper purpose to explore the horror of becoming something you can never entirely understand, escape, or redeem?

I know Clan Tzimisce is very close knit and don't really allow their members to go off and do their own thing, but all Kindred are extremely opportunistic and I could certainly see some Tzimisce using Vicissitude upon request for others, albeit at an extremely steep price. Is there any record of Kindred capable of Vicissitude ever doing something like this in the lore?

I could think of a million reasons why beings cursed to be exactly the same for centuries would give ANYTHING at a chance to change. Deformed Nosferatu, Kindred wanting to disguise oneself or assume a new identity, people who were embraced early on in weight loss/self improvement journeys now cursed to be stagnant forever, dysphoric transsexual Kindred, vain Toreador who just want to become even more beautiful, or just any old elder who is being driven mad by their own stagnation. I shudder to imagine the cost of such a favour considering there really is no goodwill among Kindred, but I'm curious if this has ever been explored given how massive the cosmetic surgery industry is for mortals.

As an amateur mortician, I couldn't help but notice a lot of vampires have pretty intense daddy issues. Either you're desperately trying to impress wizened elders or you're joining a political movement just to spite them. So I'm curious: what exactly was your upbringing like? Did your sire act like a decent parental figure or were they just another petty-tyrant with fangs? Asking for the Garou Nation. Bonus points if you explain what your "embrace" was like.

So I seen some speculation that VtM 6e is intended by White wolf to be a edition that could support a wide verity of playstlyes from personal horror to ginzo action.

This is presumably the reason for V6 to aggressively stream line the game mechanics and totally reset most of the changes that V5 made to the setting. All in service of making V6 into a blank palette that allows a ST to paint they own vision of VtM onto it.

Now Besides the obvious question on weather or not V6 is actually successful in this goal I wonder what this "mass appeal" approach is going to mean for the other potential 6e lines. Especially the two lines that already got a 5E boos.

Like giving H6 a wider audience is relatively easy since Whit Wold could just give players the option to choose to play either independent and SI (assuming they aren't completely drowned by AI slop) Hunter and they can even bring back the Imbued as a small favor for the legacy players.

W6 by contrast is much more difficult since W5 arguably deviated the fandom harder than V5 because it's core premise is to be a different game from WtA legacy. I generally don't know how a W6 could appeal to both W5 and WtA legacy fans without becoming a confusing mess.

Which is probably the reason why White Wolf has no plan to make Werewolf & Hunter 6e and are instead focusing on Mage & Changeling 6e.

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Hi! I'm pretty new to VtM, so I'm still trying to understand how some of the lore works.

I'm currently thinking about playing a VERY devout Catholic nun in the 19th century. Her faith would be a really important part of her character. But what I'm struggling with isn't really the logic of Catholicism itself, but how her faith would interact with the fact that she's a vampire.

Would this clash with VtM lore in some way? For example, would carrying a Bible or rosary have any particular implications for a vampire? Would a vampire who genuinely believes in God and practices her faith be unusual in the setting, or is this something that can work perfectly well? And I'm also wondering how much the vampire side of the character would conflict with her understanding of herself as a Catholic nun. Would she necessarily see herself as damned/a monster, or are there established ways that religious vampires rationalize their condition?

Thanks!

They'd just essentially be blood gods right?

Say one snapped the curses out of existence thanos style one day. They can eat, have children, the sun won't hurt them anymore they are essentially alive again etc but they DID still die and still drink blood(food does provide sustenance). And yes this includes the clan curses caine shoved on em. No clan curses either.

How would this potentially look?

Who were they? How did they feel about being Caitiff? What weird-ass adventures did they go on? I wanna know!

Furcus, vena terrae, the blood serpent, whatever you call it.

It is a place of magical power and weird stuff happens around it, cool.

But what does it look like? The description in blood sigil is a bit vague. Is there a literal stream of blood under the gravel?

Here is the next part about my thoughts and complicated feelings toward the V6 plattest. This time it’s humanity, which, for some reason, is talked about a lot recently.

To make it short it’s… it’s… damned, I can’t make it short and I have more feelings about that than I have a clear cut opinion. In my overview I mentioned that I am not the biggest fan of this version of humanity and like many other reviewers I said, that it does not feel like VtM to me. But to me there is a bit more to it, because I think they missed something and therefore walked in a weird direction with it.

First of all, I’m not entirely against the concept of a scale and the effects of balance or unbalance between two extrem poles. This would be silly, because this concept was actually already done in multiple WhiteWolf Games (Werewolf the Forsaken’s Harmony for example) and even VtM did it at least twice. But that is also what makes me spiral due to the way this is presented.

The concept of balancing between a monstrous and a rational part was a huge aspect of Kindred of the East. There characters have to deal with their animalistic P’o and their rational Hun. Balance is an option but leaning hard in to either of the sides and accepting the advantages and disadvantages that comes with this are all states of being for an eastern vampire. This of cause leans heavily in to the orientalist stereotype of a philosophy build around the concept of balance, but it shifted the downward spiral of falling to the beast in to kind of a decision you can make and even change, since you were allowed to change your Darma (or path of enlightenment for a lag of a better word) and your cardinal virtue with it. You were rational, or a beast or something in between, because it was what made the most sense to you in this specific stage of your unlife and you basically just had to keep it up.

Some may argue, that kindred of the east, while a VtM supplement, contrary to the name, does not present kindred and therefore you can’t compare their virtues with those of Caine‘s children. So well then, let’s look at the other example I mentioned, which probably most people haven’t even red: Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom. Other than KotE‘s Kui-Jin, KotEK‘s Laibon are actually considered to be related to the western kindred. Some are 1:1 VtM Clans with just different names and others are Bloodline variants with a twist, but which you could, for the most part, clearly identify. That means functionally they are Kindred in any meaningful way, even though they call the first vampire Cagn instead of Caine. There is one thing, though, the Laibon are different to other Kindred, and that is their philosophy. Instead of a regular humanity tracker they use two opposed sets of rules simultaneously (kind of like having two paths of enlightenment at the same time: Orun and Aye.

Orun (haven) represents their relationship to spirituality and spirits and the divine, Aye (earth) their relationship to the physical world. Interestingly Laibon could not only prefer one over the other, they can also level up both or loose levels in both. So you can end up with being low in one and high in the other or low or high in both which determined a bunch of effects and how others perceived you.

But here is the important part: it is heavily implied, that this concept is the actual metaphysical truth behind humanity and the beast and that western vampires are just to superficial and ignorant to understand it. If I would assume that the developers of V6 have actually paid attention to this, I would wonder if the story behind the new humanity system is, that suddenly all kindred had some kind of revelation and suddenly understood the duality between their animalistic and high rational side and therefore the struggle is over. This would be a big deal, because suddenly the Sabbat would make almost no sense anymore and had to rebuild itself from the ground. The Camarilla would need to become more accepting towards diverging philosophies, Anarchs could wildly grow in all directions…

But of cause, this will not happen because it is not like that.

For starters, Aye and Orun are not entirely comparable with V6’s beast and “mortal“ nature. For example, frenzy and other monstrous aspects are for Laibon connected to their Aye, their worldly part, not to the Orun, which is for the most part associated with the supernatural which therefore isn’t compatible with “mortal” nature either.

If we go back to KotE, we also find an equivalent to V6’s Nature. Tthere the Beast can have other personalities than the animalistic predator, but again, that’s not what V6 is doing. Because in KotE the Nature is connected to the monstrous P’o, not the humane and rational Hun.the closest equivalent we have in V6 for that are actually the different ways clans frenzy. Yet this is bound to the blood and not to the vampires individual personality, so it is’t that either.

So, where I am going with this? I think this is, like many other things in this edition a missed opportunity. If they would have looked a little bit deeper in their own material, they would have found stuff to use and to create something very interesting. But instead they went with the concept of balance between supernatural and mortal, that was already done pretty similarly by a bunch of other games.

My guess is, that the goal is to repeat the pattern of “mortal” nature vs “insert Splats supernatural aspect here” mechanic across all the 6th edition games. I assume that they want to strengthen the cross over ability between the splats. Issue is, though, while we all always wanted better cross over-ability for WoD games, it is kind of too late for that. It would turn the WoD in basically a copy of a copy of itself. Because the trope of a group of several different supernatural creatures was so missed by WoD fans that it has been done so many times by other games, like the Chronicles of Darkness, Curse Borne, Monster Heart, City of Mist… that nothing interesting would come out of that anymore.

WoD, however, had this thing where every game line was telling a different story. And this story was by no small amount shaped by the “morality” or “psychological” mechanics of any given splat. So here comes my question: what story is this system supposed to tell? Balance good, but being unbalanced also good due to the bonuses you get, just overdoing it is bad…?!? Also, overdoing is bad in both directions. Even being a saint can now cost you your character. There is nothing special or even desirable anymore about fighting your urges and try to stay straight. From the perspective of the player being too human is just as bad as being too monstrous, only a little bit out of balance is good.

KotEK gets away with this, because the most rare and desirable condition is to have it both high, your monster and your spirit. And maintains both is hard and you will often face situations in which the two concepts contradict each other and you have to make hard decisions,

KotE gets away with it, because which side you prefer is a decision you make and you can willingly change and you are even expected to do so, if you get old enough. Your struggle is with the teachings of the philosophy that has your virtues as side effect.

The problem seems to be, that the once again, the developers approached this to focused on game design. They seem to have brainstormed about how you can emulate the vampiric nature with a fun game mechanic, without thinking about,what statement they actually want to make with this or what story they want to tell here first. And the result was a mechanic that is very similarly already implemented in games they know (as you can tell if you look which TTRPGs they ask about in the feedback quarry) and probably liked.

But one more thing: I find the implementation is quite weird, because, on one hand it says explicitly, that humanity has nothing to do with morals (as VtR 2nd edition already did and V5 partially repeated). A beast leaning character can be a total good person and a mortal nature leaning character can be an absolute monster… but if that is the case, why is killing and feeding to extensively one of the main reasons you can get in trouble?

Other ways are waking up, which is agitating and gives you a dot in beast and mortal. But what does that actually mean in the actual play? It means that you have to release the pressure somehow or after five nights you will freak out one way or another… wait, where do I know this from? It almost reminds me on a certain system in a certain edition where, if you don’t due something to “slag your hunger” the likelihood to freak out becomes bigger and bigger until it is unavoidable… wait, this is just another version of hunger again. But since hunger is already part of the vitae scale and can cause issues through the entire quickening and drama system, we have another case of t another issue I see in the V6 system: Redundancy! This system just can’t stay focused, it does every aspect in multiple ways that exist side by side or interconnected. I don’t know if this is the intention but this is one of the things that causes this terrible “eat your cake and have it too”-feeling, I get from the V6 rules.

And then we have chronicle themes which is kind of like chronicle tenets for dummies. I agree that the tenet system needed experience or better advice how to use it, because, while the enormous freedom to shape what counts as “sin” is a great way to incorporate many plays tiles (to the contrary of what V5 is often accused of) it is also not exactly beginner friendly and I think it needs a lot of experience to implement tenets that matter. However, the shift to themes changes the entire humanity system from a custom made cautionary tale to basically a trope parade. It feels like that you are not supposed to have inner conflicts but to just interact with the theme of the chronicle… or not… and you get either punished or rewarded if you do, but if you don’t, it’s just there and doesn’t do much. There also are no convictions anymore to individualize your characters relation to the tenets. I kind of sonde how they want to deal with paths of enlightenment when it comes to this (remember, the Sabbat is supposed to be a supported option again), since there is nothing that stops you from just being a monster and getting away with it, so, what are paths for, then?

So, here the TL;DR and maybe some advice for the Devs:

Okay idea but not thought through. To detached from what being a kindred in
WoD means. Old WoD could have offered a smooth way to make this system more acceptable but obviously no one looked there. My main issue: this feels like a mechanic that is just there to be there and no one thought through what it is actually supposed to do in the game or for the game. My advice would be, do this step first, think about what the overarching story of vampires as a whole in this edition is supposed to be and then create a mechanic for that and not the other way around!

The other Posts I made about this topic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vtm/s/5Y3FXg2BwX

https://www.reddit.com/r/vtm/s/WEjQ9cDFvR