• RandyLahey [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      one of the main factions is the anarchs, though you could have a big struggle session about whether theyre actually anarchist cos theyre just about freedom for vampires without acknowledging the hierarchy of vampires literally feeding on human blood to survive etc (im sure plenty of people even nerdier than me have gone into this)

      but yeah one of them (damsel) is pretty heavily coded as an angry ml, dont think she is romanceable though

      also anarch ending is one of the best endings in any game

      • Mardoniush [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Yeah the Brujah, who are split between the current Brujah which are anarchists, and the True Brujah (who the current Brujah diablerised) who are kind of Utopian Philosophers who may or may not be deeply involved with evil. There's also the Grendel who hang around and are the "I want to play a werewolf but the DM says they're overpowered" faction.

        • Owl [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          “I want to play a werewolf but the DM says they’re overpowered”

          Funneling all the monsters off into their own franchises with incompatible rules/cosmologies/vibes always struck me as a missed opportunity. A team of mixed universal monsters playing reverse Scooby Doo seems like a fantastic premise for an RPG.

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            I think the remake of the series tried to address that and create a standardized form of rules to allow a mixed party, with the obvious caveat that tonally and power-wise that still doesn't really work.

            Ironically Shadowrun does it better, because there at least the normal humans can load up with fancy cyberware, advanced weapons, and weaponized drones although things like shapeshifters and vampires are still mechanically broken in a lot of ways (and that's before you get to how completely and utterly broken a mage that knows how to completely break the system gets, since they can spam absurdly deadly summoned spirits or just vaporize a 28 meter diameter sphere of basically anything for about as much as a single anti-tank missile would cost, and then there's the fact that you can do that with a shapeshifter so suddenly you're vaporizing huge chunks of the world multiple times a turn and also you instantly heal any wound you take...).

            • AcidSmiley [she/her]
              ·
              3 years ago

              you can do that with a shapeshifter so suddenly you’re vaporizing huge chunks of the world multiple times a turn and also you instantly heal any wound you take…

              I can't speak for any edition of Shadowrun, but at least in 4th, Regeneration doesn't work on magical damage, which explicitly includes Drain from spellcasting. In 4th, regeneration also requires that you roll for how many boxes of damage you heal, so it was no longer "i'm completely fine by the end of the turn", but "only" that average vampires and shapeshifters heal major wounds from assault cannons within a few minutes.

              Back then, the standard powergamer way to ignore Drain was to get one of these medical drones that are basically walking robot hospital beds with a built-in medkit, put the mage in that bad boi, overcast everything so that the drain causes Physical damage and then have the drone immediately heal that off.

              • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
                ·
                edit-2
                3 years ago

                One of the 5e splatbooks included improved reagent variants that can be consumed to reduce drain by a flat amount per reagent used. So as long as you're stocked on those you basically get to fire off miniature nukes as much as you like, and shifters get innate bonus initiative for the potential for IIRC 3+ action passes per turn. IIRC the math works out to something like 2000 nuyen per force 14 (assuming you took exceptional attribute: magic and a 7 in magic at chargen) fireball to completely negate the drain, which IIRC is about on par with what a dumbfired rocket costs (guided missiles being more expensive) but without being outright illegal or requiring heavy barter checks to acquire. In fact, I think I built a character based around exploiting exactly that combo, though I never played it. A mystic adept with improved reflexes can accomplish functionally the same thing too.

                Otherwise you're right that regeneration doesn't help with drain, though I can't remember if it's rolled or a flat recovery amount per turn in 5e.

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]
            ·
            3 years ago

            A team of mixed universal monsters playing reverse Scooby Doo seems like a fantastic premise for an RPG.

            After Sundown does just that and it's free: https://github.com/thegamingden/after-sundown

          • Socialcreditscorr [they/them,she/her]
            ·
            3 years ago

            "The Brujah Council was another, arguably more daring, and ultimately more frightening experiment. In the early twentieth century, the Brujah pitched in with the Soviet Revolution, eventually forming a separate council which managed the entire USSR's vampiric affairs. This Brujah Council was destroyed overnight, however, when Baba Yaga rose from torpor and mystically separated Russia from the rest of the world."

            :deeper-sadness: https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Brujah

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        one of the main factions is the anarchs, though you could have a big struggle session about whether theyre actually anarchist cos theyre just about freedom for vampires without acknowledging the hierarchy of vampires literally feeding on human blood to survive etc (im sure plenty of people even nerdier than me have gone into this)

        It's basically carnism except that the cows are humans. Vampires in this setting literally refer to the human population of their territory as "the herd". The default position for vampires who want to feed ethically is to only take small amounts of blood with each feeding and to stick to voluntary donors, but that has its dilemmas as well. What can even qualify as voluntary when being fed on is highly addictive for the donor? People get off on having their blood sucked out this way, it gets them high. And the people who allow vampires to feed on them are usually ... well, people who idolize and fetishize vampires. Who then end up in a relationship with an ancient apex predator with mind control superpowers. It's bound to be extremely asymetrical.

        The more i think about it, the more i come to the conclusion that being a vampire is inseperable from being exploitative and that the only ethical way out of this is either to sit outside and wait for the sunrise to seek final death or to go full diablerist and exclusively hunt down and feed on other vampires to destroy their power structures and lessen predation pressure on the human populace.

        • FidelCashflow [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          You are missing the tankie option. Plenty of assholes to eat. It'd piss off the local ventrue but a few measures of auspex and you can turn elon musk into a legless flesh hound. Could you honestly say that sounds like such a bad plan?

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]
            ·
            3 years ago

            That would be the point, ending the exploitation of humanity as a vampiric food source. I mean, realistically, you'd just get killed by an elder vampire or the Vampire CIA at some point, and if they wouldn't succeed, you'd fall into torpor because all the diablerizing has raised your blood potency so much that moderately old vampires are the only viable source of sustenance for you.

        • Azarova [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The more i think about it, the more i come to the conclusion that being a vampire is inseperable from being exploitative and that the only ethical way out of this is either to sit outside and wait for the sunrise to seek final death or to go full diablerist and exclusively hunt down and feed on other vampires to destroy their power structures and lessen predation pressure on the human populace.

          MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR LA BY NIGHT SEASON 5

          One of the main characters of LA by Night ends up coming to this conclusion and ends up killing a few vampires and then watching the sunrise. It was pretty sad, honestly.

        • NoYouLogOff [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I never actually set up a game of the table top because of that, even though I really liked the setting and the linked game.

    • RandyLahey [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      yeah agreed, i played it again recently and the story and characters and worldbuilding are just absolutely top notch (with a few weird dated exceptions) and i loved it (and omg the music), although the actual in-mission gameplay is even more fucking terrible than i remembered

      i was looking forward to the sequel :doomer:

      • Azarova [they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        VtMB 2 will still happen, takes a hit of copium :deeper-sadness:

        • RandyLahey [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          it will be so hard to choose which to play first: vtmb 2, system shock 3, or deus ex mankind divided 2 :yea:

        • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I feel like now that they fired everyone who had worked on the original game it’s probably best they just let it die

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
            ·
            3 years ago

            For unclear reasons, Paradox took the project away from the studio that was working on it and now it's being worked on by a different, unnamed studio.

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It's Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

      I legitimately don't know why I know that, I've never played any of the Vampire games or even watched a playthrough.

  • Mrtryfe [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Good to know that no one in this thread is asking how young this "scrumptious young plaything" and "little boy" and "duckling" really is

    • budoguytenkaichi [he/him,they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Maybe because they know the context? As in the player character is an adult and she's calling him that cuz he's newly vampiric?

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Probably because it's a game about vampires where "young" means "hasn't been undead for more than a century".

    • Sklorp [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      About college aged at least. And when I played dressed as a stripper babbling about how the stop signs are out to get them.