RustyYamate

OK OK, I know that everyone is rejoicing over Occam coming in clutch (rock on ya solar flare flexing bastard) but that took a massive backseat to me compared to how badly Door put his foot in it without even realising.

Let’s just recap real quick:

Reblog with a bit of details, add a picture, and tell me their preferences*! And I will play matchmaker between my OCs and yours.

*note most of my OCs are women, so please drop your OC’s that are attracted to women.

Renée/Rene Rosemary - Thinblood (They/Them/Any)

I've been thinking recently about Vampire the Masquerade in regards to the other World of Darkness games, with this post by ProphetCassandra being the main catalyst for it.

In my opinion, one of core concepts of Vampire the Masquerade is the struggle of maintaining one's humanity as an immortal monster. As a player you are expected to lose it over the course of play, either as a result of failed dice rolls or decisions the players make within the story of their chronicle. There is however a gameplay issue within all editions of the game which I believe hampers this concept.

There is no mechanical incentive for characters to risk losing their humanity. It's either the result of players choosing to do so, a bad dice roll or decided by the ST as a result of a character's actions. Losing humanity is a punishment in all versions of the game, either willing or arbitrary. In my opinion, this makes most players less inclined to have their characters act in ways that would put their humanity at risk, which I think hinders the core concept mentioned earlier. 

Previous editions had the Paths of Enlightenment as an alternative to the Humanity system, I do not personally think it is a sufficient solution to this problem, in addition to being hard to wrap your head around and portray convincingly by players and ST alike.

V5 does Humanity Tracking and Degeneration far better than previous editions with the Touchstone, Stains and Remorse systems in my opinion. Yet they all are built on the same premise that losing humanity is a failure state to be avoided or is inevitable. 

Perhaps that is the point of the game design, and I just don’t get it or enjoy it. 

That being said, I do believe there to be more varied story potential in giving low-humanity gameplay benefits that tempt players to consider indulging their Beast and letting their humanity degrade. Expanding on the reasons why so many vampires choose to abandon or refuse to maintain their personhood by having mechanical incentives for it. 

Perhaps becoming less human means the vampire can more easily direct what violent actions they do in a frenzy as the line between their personhood and the Beast becomes thinner.

Or that social dice rolls or discipline powers that manipulate a low-humanity kindred mind are made harder as their ability to be sympathetic or feel emotions has grown more numb. 

In W20, rage I think fills the role you're describing, the mechanic you want. Interestingly, you aren't really concerned with maintaining your humanity because as a garou, while you may have thought so, you were never really human. And more rage means more utility- you can go faster, take more turns. You want more rage. But that makes you more of a monster. More likely to frenzy to disastrous consequences. If you lose control, you could kill your entire party.

But because of how WtA operates from a plot perspective, you find yourself excusing the wanton murder far more easily. It starts with evil spirits or vampires, but pretty soon, you are eventually faced with a human who maybe did nothing wrong, but is in the wrong place at the wrong time- and because you can't have them sounding the alarm because you *can't* fail your task and them going free means they will summon worse things, or whatever the reason, you're going to mow them down. The anger and the cause consumes you. Heads are gonna pop, and it's *so* easy. And you justify it, because you have to. Even if you don't use Thrall of the Wyrm rules to punish high rage further (and you shouldn't imo) this still generally sustains as a system, I think.

W5 does different things a little and manages the rage state with the dead end given up state, and I think does a little better by offering a trade off to going towards one of your dead end states, but because it's very difficult to remove those as well, in my more limited experience, it made a similar issue by encouraging players to use rage but not encouraging them to go all out- you always want some but never max, and in my, again more limited, experience, tends to similarly discourage as much risk taking.

Interestingly, on the other side of this is KotE. (Everyone boos, I know, I know.) But KotE actually encourages your character to more or less walk a path of humanity and succeed. The ideal winstate of one of the Hungry Dead is to reach a peak understanding of themselves, their struggles, their path, whether that involves causing suffering and becoming more demonic themselves- which it often does. And ideally you want to embrace what you are- being very much a monster as much as you are enlightened. But that requires more introspection and roleplay and more deliberate decisions on the part of the player.

I've been thinking recently about Vampire the Masquerade in regards to the other World of Darkness games, with this post by ProphetCassandra being the main catalyst for it.

In my opinion, one of core concepts of Vampire the Masquerade is the struggle of maintaining one's humanity as an immortal monster. As a player you are expected to lose it over the course of play, either as a result of failed dice rolls or decisions the players make within the story of their chronicle. There is however a gameplay issue within all editions of the game which I believe hampers this concept.

There is no mechanical incentive for characters to risk losing their humanity. It's either the result of players choosing to do so, a bad dice roll or decided by the ST as a result of a character's actions. Losing humanity is a punishment in all versions of the game, either willing or arbitrary. In my opinion, this makes most players less inclined to have their characters act in ways that would put their humanity at risk, which I think hinders the core concept mentioned earlier. 

Previous editions had the Paths of Enlightenment as an alternative to the Humanity system, I do not personally think it is a sufficient solution to this problem, in addition to being hard to wrap your head around and portray convincingly by players and ST alike.

V5 does Humanity Tracking and Degeneration far better than previous editions with the Touchstone, Stains and Remorse systems in my opinion. Yet they all are built on the same premise that losing humanity is a failure state to be avoided or is inevitable. 

Perhaps that is the point of the game design, and I just don’t get it or enjoy it. 

That being said, I do believe there to be more varied story potential in giving low-humanity gameplay benefits that tempt players to consider indulging their Beast and letting their humanity degrade. Expanding on the reasons why so many vampires choose to abandon or refuse to maintain their personhood by having mechanical incentives for it. 

Perhaps becoming less human means the vampire can more easily direct what violent actions they do in a frenzy as the line between their personhood and the Beast becomes thinner.

Or that social dice rolls or discipline powers that manipulate a low-humanity kindred mind are made harder as their ability to be sympathetic or feel emotions has grown more numb. 

In W20, rage I think fills the role you're describing, the mechanic you want. Interestingly, you aren't really concerned with maintaining your humanity because as a garou, while you may have thought so, you were never really human. And more rage means more utility- you can go faster, take more turns. You want more rage. But that makes you more of a monster. More likely to frenzy to disastrous consequences. If you lose control, you could kill your entire party.

But because of how WtA operates from a plot perspective, you find yourself excusing the wanton murder far more easily. It starts with evil spirits or vampires, but pretty soon, you are eventually faced with a human who maybe did nothing wrong, but is in the wrong place at the wrong time- and because you can't have them sounding the alarm because you *can't* fail your task and them going free means they will summon worse things, or whatever the reason, you're going to mow them down. The anger and the cause consumes you. Heads are gonna pop, and it's *so* easy. And you justify it, because you have to. Even if you don't use Thrall of the Wyrm rules to punish high rage further (and you shouldn't imo) this still generally sustains as a system, I think.

W5 does different things a little and manages the rage state with the dead end given up state, and I think does a little better by offering a trade off to going towards one of your dead end states, but because it's very difficult to remove those as well, in my more limited experience, it made a similar issue by encouraging players to use rage but not encouraging them to go all out- you always want some but never max, and in my, again more limited, experience, tends to similarly discourage as much risk taking.

Interestingly, on the other side of this is KotE. (Everyone boos, I know, I know.) But KotE actually encourages your character to more or less walk a path of humanity and succeed. The ideal winstate of one of the Hungry Dead is to reach a peak understanding of themselves, their struggles, their path, whether that involves causing suffering and becoming more demonic themselves- which it often does. And ideally you want to embrace what you are- being very much a monster as much as you are enlightened. But that requires more introspection and roleplay and more deliberate decisions on the part of the player.