THIRST: What do you do?

[Bailywolf]

I see a vampire version of "Friends" were eveyone bums around, dates each other, and has the occasional zany adventure.  Only instead of 7 seasons, it covers like 7 hundred years.



One thing I did in Blood Oaths is to tie a vampire's personal Resolve into his will to continue living... Resolve represented the things which tied a vampire to life, what kept him going, intrested, and motivated.  When you were all out of Resolve, you just couldn't give a crap to do much of anything- no motivation.

Esentialy, a character does what ever they want to with the power they grab... motivation should be an intigral part of the character.  Loose it, and you get a case of the Lestat mopes.

[lumpley]

Yeah, I'm sorry about the tone.  'Duh' is funnier when I say it in real life.

For my vampire game (uh let's see: Hungry Desperate and Alone), I said: vampirism means violence in relationships.  What would you hurt your lover for?  And all the reasons I could come up with were bad, which suited me.

Like Chris said, vampires are people writ large.  What does vampirism mean to you?  Is it um murder?  Is it rape?  Is it drug addiction?  Unsafe sex?  Blasphemy?  Mugging people in an alley and taking their wallets?  Eating meat?

Why would people do those things?

-Vincent

[Bankuei]

Hmm.   It seems that a lot of the focus is getting shifted onto the "I've got cool powers but we need game balance" issue.  

I don't know how far you'd be willing to go with this, Jake, but it seems the issue is less about what cool powers someone has, or what they can do with them, but what would they use it for.  I'd say skip making detailed powers rules and do something along the lines of Panels or Trollbabe, where what the powers are and what they do is less important, and what you're using them for is the focus.

I mean, the point of a vampire is that you have to drink blood, so who would you decide to take?  Crooks, scum, abusers?  Losers and people without any future?  The terminally ill?  The spoiled pretty people who think they're immortal?  

Who and why?

Chris

[Shreyas Sampat]

Regarding Lumpley's point about blood being a source of self-control, stillness, peace:

I can see this as a really interesting centre for a game, but with the replacement of atrocity for blood.

Basically, the blood-drinking is only a highly ritualized way of appeasing something else - the vampire's terrible, insatiable hunger for horror.  Whenever the vampire does something that horrifies and disgusts (as the drinking of blood should) the rational, human part of him, it calms the beast within.

Perhaps as the beast gets hungrier, it gives the vampire access to less controllable powers: inhuman strength, weird stamina, rapid healing...
...but when the beast is controlled, the vampire has access to difficult, contemplative abilities: the shifting of forms, invisibility, clairvoyance, and the like.

Then, the game have this undercurrent of balancing mind and beast for maximum effectiveness, which may or may not be toward your goal.

[Bailywolf]

four willows weeping


That scheme is neeto.  Quite cool.

[lumpley]

I think it would be possible to make a pretty good, interesting Christian-religious vampire game, where vampirism is a metaphor for 'all fall short in the eyes of God.'  One prob you'd run into is, can vampires be redeemed?  Do the mechanics redeem?  Does the GM?  I haven't been thinking about it for very long, but it seems like a mean prob to take on.

Jake, your Regret stat hooks right into that problem.  What good is regret if redemption is impossible?

Vampires are tough to make into protagonists.  Because they've already made their bed, if you see.  You have to work hard to find meaningful choices for them to make.

-Vincent

[Walt Freitag]

There's one element of some vampire mythology that's kind of in the background, never stated outright as a rule, but that's often adhered to for dramatic or thematic reasons. Put it in the game system, and the whole dynamic changes.

Only blood given willingly sustains a vampire.

Clears the whole run of the mill hunt-by-night routine right off the table. (And why not? Here's our vampire: night vision, superhuman strength, stealth, mind control, and centuries of experience. Good thing he has all those powers, because by night he must stalk and kill... what? A prostitute? A rent-a-cop night watchman? Some kid strung out on Ecstasy who wandered out of a rave?)

What's missing in a lot of Vampire scenarios is the evil. In V:tM you can lose your Humanity and become a beast. But beasts out for blood aren't evil; they're just dangerous, like mosquitos or sharks. And the balance to fend off beast-ness isn't particularly difficult except when the game system starts dictating your behavior with frenzies and such. (Involuntary violence: dangerous, not evil.) Otherwise it's easy: you do some harm, you do some good. Why not just get used to it, especially if you're planning to live forever?

Vampires who must seduce, deceive, or bargain for their meals face a distinctly different, and possibly sharper, moral dilemma simply because they cannot fall into the role of mere predators. Especially if the feeding must kill. Think about what it might take to get a person to accept an offer that includes taking his life.

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

I think we're getting there.

First, people should quit atacking Jake's mechanics. They're not at issue. Once the real issue (why does a vampire drink blood?) is resolved, then we can look at whether or not the mechanics work.

So, to address that, Jake did you read Vincent's game (HDA)? He has one reasonable answer to the question. Even if you do not agree with Vincent's interperetation, it may give you an inspiration.

The biggest problem of all is simply protagonization. Why does WW go the way it does? Because supernatural superheroes are cool. If you make the game solely about the nastiness of being a vampire, then aren't the characters either antagonists, or just depressing? Whatever you decide, the action that the game is about must be something that makes the characters into people that the players can like in some way. usually the only likable thing about vampires is their power. What else can we put in?

An obvious choice is to make it posssible for a vampire to redeem himself. Then play becomes about the GM providing obstacles to the character achieving that redemption. Temptations to slide back away from humanity.

The other obvious choice is one that I think that you reject already. That is the Vampire Good Guy ala Angel or Knight. But you can see how this automatically provides protagonizing conflict for a vampire character.

I think most other options are some sort of more subtle versions of these. They all look at what humanity the vampire has left, and whether he can cling to it. Or whether he falls into beastial action. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the stated Narrativist Premise of Vampire:TM has it exaclty right. The mechanics simply do not back it up. Imagine Vampire if the rules were stripped down to just the Humanity rules, and the Blood pool. Character with more blood wins against the one with less in any conflict, and Vampires always beat mortals. Suddenly it all works. More or less.

Is that the sort of thing you want?

The fact of the matter is that the source material only gives you a little to work with. Vampires kill people for blood, they fall for them, and they are subject to the limitations and advantages of their state. All else is soap opera. You may have to invent something for them to be in conflict with. Space Vampires from Mars trying to take over? It's possible that there's no satisfactory solution to the problem. Why do you want to play vampires?

You mention certain other things that are problematic, Jake. First, the vampires wander. This is, of course at odds with their interplay. One way to deal with this is to say that all play is a representation of the times that vampires meet. This would be very Anne Rice. As soon as a vampire is by himslef, his narration ends, and the next thing the players do is figure out when the next time is that they will meet.

Idea: the players represent all the vampires that exist. Or they think they are. This gives them a very strong reason to come together. Who else to comiserate with? Who else will understand what they are going through? Who else is worth impressing? Make mortal characters relatively faint.

Just brainstorming.

Mike

[Le Joueur]

Okay, so you guys are anti-blood points....

...You've got to take it from someone. As to "is blood needed for survival?" Yeah, sure, but not much and not often. I'm fine with that, because the game is about people either (1) trying to live in a vampire's world without crossing that line, or (2) about people that are addicted to power and cross the line to feed that addiction.

Blood points as I'm using them do this. I'm willing to drop them IF I see a viable reason other than "its too much like WW."

Hey!  No fair!  I'm on the 'pro-blood points' side, sort of.

I once wrote a sketch for a role-playing game where it wasn't really the blood, but the taking that gave the power; shoulda finished it, I know.  It went along the lines of 'where does the blood go during a blood sacrifice?'  They don't use blood bank blood for a blood sacrifice, do they?  That's because it's the sacrifice not the nutritional content of the blood, that counts.

So what I'm saying is use the 'taking of blood' as opposed to the volume consumed; what would that be?  'Taking Points?'  Is that a valid point?

Fang Langford

[Jake Norwood]

First off,

Mike-
Thanks for re-directing things there. I was starting to feel like instead of "lets help Jake create the game he wants" it became "lets make Jake's game like the one we want," which is fair as criticism from an audience, but wasn't helping my dilemma (not that the discussion didn't give me lots to chew on and think about, because it did). And yes, I read Vincent's game. There were some excellent ideas in there.

Fang-
The taking of life is really the issue here. Blood Points aren't actual volumes of blood, but rather quality of blood, because the person you took it from has more "life" in them than another person. You're a theif, and to fuel your addiction to power you steal life, which is the currency with which you buy your power.

So to me the questin "why does a vampire drink blood" is an issue of paying for their addiction--just as a game about junkies might feature a section on stealing to pay for the smack.

Redemption is a big issue for the game. Let me explain the Regret mechanic a bit. I'm still working this one out (all I know is that when it's done, it'll rock the house...but I'm not there yet). Basically when you go against your pre-set patterns (as exemplified in the "Passions," those Pendragon-esque trait pairs) you accrue Regret (and you come closer to the other side of the scale). Thus greedy individual who is always greedy will not incur any Regret (although consequences may arise through actions regardless); alternately, if you're a Temperate individual and you lose control, you incur Regret. Regret causes problems. That's as far as I know solidly.

Not so solidly I've got a few approaches, but am satisfied with none.
1) Regret is accumulated in points which somehow hinder your character in other ways. The only way to remove these points is through Atonement.
2) Regret causes an event or backlash to you action that would act much like a kicker. If resolved well then you atone. If not, then...I dunno.
3) Regret leads directly to your destruction, leading up to an endgame of sorts unless atoned for. Thus in order to keep your vampire from perishing you must resist incurring or continually atone for your Regret, which is probably a collection of points. Thus the only way a vampire really dies is by being the author of its own death via Regret.

The Regret mechanic--and the following Atonement--might really be the thing I'm looking for to bail me out, here.  I think the struggle to repair what you've done and try to save your soul can be the greatest of stories... Harnessing that is hard, though.

I'm not against a vampire trying to fix his sordid past like Angel or (ack) Blade. However I wouldn't want the game to make that decision for a player. The player is presented with the issue of "do I amass power and regret until I am burned up by my own decisions?" or "can I repair what I've done allready?" But making these things apparent the the players, and having them want to make such a decision, is very difficult (which may be why all the consipracies in WW--it's easier).

Jake

[Unsane]

On the whole "wanting to drink the blood of people you love more than others" note, the reason for this could be that the more you love the person in question, the closer you want to get to them.  When you drink their blood, their memories could infuse you for a period of time, or perhaps that person's personality would live on inside you for a while (or forever, I dunno).  Obviously, that's just one example.  The idea is that the more you love them, the closer you want to get to them, and the closest you can get to them is to kill them by drinking their blood.  Indeed, I think that one of the major reasons people have sex is so they can get close to someone they love.  Of course, I'm just rambling here, so listen to me at your own peril (a bit of a late warning, oh well).

[Blake Hutchins]

Jake,

On my end, I agree with the folks who ask "What do vampires represent?"  Most monsters in folklore are a perversion of some human behavior or an embodiment of some evil, much as the bogey-hag Jenny Greenteeth gave a name and identity to the tragedy of children drowning in ponds or creeks.  I think once you decide what facet of human behavior you want to explore using vampires as a metaphor, you'll find the rest comes together easily.

WW's position is that the Vampire as a trope represents sex, passion, and sensuality, that monsters are dark reflections of ourselves.  Symbolically, the Vampire blends seduction and rape.  Of course, there's also the immortality idea, in which case Vampires are basically blood-drinking nocturnal immortals with cool powers.

If I were you, I'd lean toward trying to do something new, something other than the Night Life Vampire Illuminati Goth trip.

That.  Has.  Been.  Done.

That's my feeling with Blood Points, too.  Mechanically it may be sound, but it's too evocative of the Other Game, and (here's my other reason), Blood Points thematically reinforces Blood as a resource rather than a Need.  At least make it a variable stat, not an expendable Pool.  You might also consider that the emotions of the victim at the time the vampire takes the blood limits what supernatural abilities are available to the vampire, not unlike Vincent's suggestion.  Alternatively, consider inverting it to a Hunger Pool that ingestion of Blood lowers.

But all this is useless without knowing more about what you want Vampires to do.

Wanna explore Hunger?  Make Hunger a living trait.  Aspect it so you get more Sustenance out of people you love.  Give your friends and family some kind of game important rating so that you're torn between satisfying Hunger and keeping your Friends and Lovers and Family alive.  Maybe pit Hunger v. Satiety as opposed traits.  Or if you want the Humanity riff, have your Loved Ones represent your Humanity directly.

Wanna explore Immortality?  Set up flashback sequences and check-offs a la Trollbabe.  Create precious Memories that Hunger threatens.  Try era-specific skills and experiences a la Nephilim.  Make Ennui the real "Health Level" stat, except that the more Ennui you accumulate, the closer you are to taking the final stroll in the sunlight.

Wanna explore the Hunt?  Inject a Notoriety rating.  The higher your Notoriety, the more hunters know about you, as it acts as a bonus to their lore rolls, investigation, fervor, etc.  You may have to lie low for a few decades to lower Notoriety.  Then set things up with a Passion Need the vampire must fulfill, something like a spiritual attribute that will risk raising Notoriety.  Include Minions the Vampire players can run.

Working title is "Thirst," eh?  Thirst for what?  (And I don't mean Blood).  However, that minds me of another reason why I wouldn't use Blood Points.  You want your Vampires to want something more metaphysical than mere blood, right?  They want passion, violence, terror, something more.  That's why human blood is so much more satisfying than animal blood, right?  Hard to get much passion out of guzzling a cow.  Figure out what Blood represents in your game.  What does it stand in for?  THAT is what Thirst aims at, in my opinion.

Just some ideas, but there have been several vampire or vampire-ish games, none of them particularly innovative after the first Masquerade.  SAs are such a great, great element.  Don't drop them into a Storyteller clone.

Best,

Blake

[Jake Norwood]

Um, okay, if I'm not being clear, tell me, but:

Thirst is the addiction to power. That's what's going on here. You guys are ignoring that largely. I'm not asking for "what is a vampire" or anything else. I came to the table telling you what I was trying to do, and that's being passed over. The vampire to me represents people that are addicted to something and push forward this addiction at the cost of others. They are theives.

As to a "storyteller clone..." I.don't.give.a.crap.about.Storyteller.anymore.
I WANT blood to be a rescource. If you don't, that's fine, but do it that way in your game.

I have gotten tons of fantastic feedback from this thread, but it's starting to beat a dead horse, and I don't think anyone is really reading my posts beyond "I have a vampire game and it has Blood Points" anymore.

Make sense?

Jake

ps Sorry if my tone came across harshly. I'm in a hurry and I cranked this post out really fast.

[Brian Leybourne]

I WANT blood to be a rescource.

Just to clarify before I start, I like blood as a resource as well. So what if it's been done before - just because D&D has a strength stat we don't all avoid that, do we? :-)

But I REALLY liked Blakes idea of standing that resource on it's head. Instead of tracking blood points, which go up with feeding and down with powers, track your Thirst, which is exactly the same mechanic but counts down instead of up (feeding lowers it and using powers extends it).

Sorry, I didn't have that much to contribute, and I don't really feel like telling you what to do in your own game, that's not for me to do. I just liked the coolness factor of having the central stat called "thirst" instead of blood points; seems to gel nicely into the game as you've described it so far and it matches the cool name.

And hey - coolness is as important as anything else in game design! :-)

Brian.

[Blake Hutchins]

Jake,

Coolness.  Run with it.  Sorry to have been slow on the uptake.

Best,

Blake