To extend the metaphor: For me D&D is all about leaving High School and the Small Town in which it sits. As George Bailey puts it "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world." So is Traveller for that matter.

It's quite hard to represent "adult life" properly. I find simple things like having players handle "lifestyle" stuff like making enough bread to pay their rent and shit like that helps. Also, actually punishing stupid shit in game like blatant use of disciplines in public with heavy taxes (often espoused, rarely practised). When the costs start getting high, my players start getting pissed off with those who keep fucking around. It's funny how quickly everyone turns "professional", even if in real-life they're not there yet. Something I've found is that, as a rule, people are as mature as when they left education (and the intensity of and drive for that that education also plays a large factor). It's why when I do characters like vampires, the older they were sired, the more likely they will actually survive and even thrive (to a certain point, it's a balancing act -- mid 20's-early 30's 'tis the sweet spot) because though intellectually they may grow, they'll always stay emotionally where they were when they were made.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1041057To extend the metaphor: For me D&D is all about leaving High School and the Small Town in which it sits. As George Bailey puts it "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world." So is Traveller for that matter.

Sounds like a Werewolf game to me. Or Sabbat.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1041047When I ran WW games, I specifically invoked high school. The petty egos, the forced obedience to often clueless masters, the seeking freedom while needing resources from above, the prom, the clubs, the need to develop skills faster than your peers, and all the various nonsense. Also, it works for players because....we all went to high school and many never left, or deal with those who never left.

I look at it like high-school politics with fangs within a huge house of cards. For me, a big thing to keep players in the spirit of the game is simple: existential threat. I would say high-school is relevant as a metaphor if by high-school you mean Battle Royale. Vampires in WoD for me, are on an island. I populate that island with knobs and levers that keep the status-quo at a certain level for reasons to be discovered by the noobs.

And every single one of those reasons ends with "Existential Threat". It's always a house of cards waiting to topple. That's half the fun. Most games are a game of Jenga where the high-school politics, almost without fail, cause the house to come tumbling down. The question is "Have the PC's put themselves in a position to support the House of Cards or Benefit from its fall?". That is the game. I think a lot of GM's for WoD don't think enough about external threats to the perceived sandbox for their players.

If your city is the perceived sandbox. Then the next big city over is the cross-town rivals. Nothing stokes new shifts in alliances like external threats to the normal order. Werewolves are also quite useful for this. One of my favorite double-takes on this is threatening werewolves on the city - which after a couple of encounters I had the players crapping in their pants... only to find out wasn't normal werewolves, but Black Spirals.... and the players had the balls to work with a local pack of garou to help deal with them. (Of course this led to other political issues).

That's what I like about WoD. If you like gang-related drama, everything is a never-ending loop of issues.

So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer wouldn't have been the cultural touchstone it was if there wasn't some truth to the idea of "High School is Hell."

Truthfully, it's more the point in developing from child to adult happening to coincide with High School than High School itself, but the stereotype persists.

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

I deeply suspect that there's nothing specific about US High Schools. Being a teenager (/being a parent or teacher of teenagers) is rough. We take a lot of the basic restrictions of childhood off of them, and expect them to take the social guidelines they're just now mastering and use them consistently. They screw up. Their peers take the brunt of it. My brother started coaching for high schoolers and his response when we asked how it was going was, "I had forgotten how absolutely awful we all were to each other... often with literally no reason."

I think the US just has a well-established narrative  about how that plays out--jocks/cheerleaders on top, 'nerds'/band geeks/ AV club guys on the bottom, drama club/heavy metal guys/skateboarders/other stereotypes in the messy middle. Not sure anyone's actual HS experience mapped to it that well, but the narrative continues.

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

Yes. The movies are 100% real. (Well, OK, perhaps only 90% of it )

Yeah... WoD doesn't do it for me.

What I would be interested in is some combination of Warhammer's vampire counts, Shadowbane's nightborn, Legacy of Kain's vampires, and Rift's vampire kingdoms.

Here's the rundown of their emblematic characteristics:

• Shadowbane: vampires are created by black magic, with no memory of their former lives, and their intended purpose is to enforce the cycling of souls into the void
  
• Warhammer: vampires have awesome Eastern European-themed armies of undead
  
• Legacy of Kain: all vampire clans have characteristic mutations which grow more pronounced over time
  
• Rifts: vampires may be divided into head/master, bride/groom/servant, and feral/wild types
  

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1041261I deeply suspect that there's nothing specific about US High Schools. Being a teenager (/being a parent or teacher of teenagers) is rough. We take a lot of the basic restrictions of childhood off of them, and expect them to take the social guidelines they're just now mastering and use them consistently. They screw up. Their peers take the brunt of it. My brother started coaching for high schoolers and his response when we asked how it was going was, "I had forgotten how absolutely awful we all were to each other... often with literally no reason."

I think the US just has a well-established narrative  about how that plays out--jocks/cheerleaders on top, 'nerds'/band geeks/ AV club guys on the bottom, drama club/heavy metal guys/skateboarders/other stereotypes in the messy middle. Not sure anyone's actual HS experience mapped to it that well, but the narrative continues.

The O.C captured the dichotomy pretty well, I think. There's a lot more socially mixed groups of friends than the movies portray (because, of course, you have to have an easily digestible number of cliques). It only gets more mixed as you get older -- groups break up, they get back together, new people show up, old people leave etc... Here in the UK, it kind of retains into post-16/further education and is all but completely eliminated once you hit undergrad. It doesn't last longer than freshers week -- beyond that, cliques form based on courses taken, the programme you're on and then your study groups and just who's plain good at coursework (it's actually quite utilitarian when you think about it).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041312Yeah... WoD doesn't do it for me.

What I would be interested in is some combination of Warhammer's vampire counts, Shadowbane's nightborn, Legacy of Kain's vampires, and Rift's vampire kingdoms.

Here's the rundown of their emblematic characteristics:

• Shadowbane: vampires are created by black magic, with no memory of their former lives, and their intended purpose is to enforce the cycling of souls into the void
  
• Warhammer: vampires have awesome Eastern European-themed armies of undead
  
• Legacy of Kain: all vampire clans have characteristic mutations which grow more pronounced over time
  
• Rifts: vampires may be divided into head/master, bride/groom/servant, and feral/wild types
  

Warhammer vampires are shit. And this is coming from someone who enjoyed the Vampire Wars trilogy (Genevieve was... ok. And Witch Hunter was sick) There's only a handful of vampires that exist in proportion to WOD. And they took the bloodlines thing from WOD 'cause shit like Strigoi, Lahmaian and Necran (forgot the name of the sorcerer vampires -- been awhile) doesn't make sense in the Warhammer-verse given the homongenuity of everything for each faction. The Vampire Counts faction is just that: a few vampire commanders, the rest are zombies, skeletons, ghouls etc...

LOK is also shite in comparison. Dude, I liked Soul Reaver too, classic PS gaming, but no no and no.

Now, this said, the only interpretation I can think of that'd be legit would be the way vampires were handled in Morrowind. It fit the system, the setting and they didn't try to ingratiate themselves within mortal society but yet maintained a surprisingly large population, particularly the Quarra. The Aundae clan were the weakest and most disparate but were just a bunch of Ireancuses essentially. Quarra were warriors, were actually a huge threat to Vvardenfell after the Blight. Berne was weakest but most organised and actually had some serious influence in mortal affairs. Mix was roughly 60/40 clan vamps and "feral" vamps, worked well.

Vampires just don't make sense as one single, small bloodline. And they need to have a strong central feeling, they can't just be random grabs from other vampire fiction and lore. There has to be an actual reason they'd be split up into different groups and/or have different strengths and weaknesses. Had White Wolf done Clan + Bloodline from the start, OWOD would have siiicckk. All that metaplot without it being retro'd all the bloody time or stuff written in out of nowhere because the line designers were shit at getting the writers to communicate...

Quote from: Luca;1041201So, you got me curious here; are all US high-schools actually nazi-led social darwinist death camps?
Because the way you're describing them, it sure sounds like it...

In my school system, that was middle school (6th through 8th grade). That was when cliquish pettiness and immaturity was at its height. Middle schools are on the smaller side, and you are stuck with the same people all day long, so there is plenty of room for bad relationships to fester.

My high school was significantly larger with 3000 students, and I rarely had the same people from one class to another unless we coordinated. It still had lots of cliques, but there was so much space between them that there really wasn't much friction.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1041323Warhammer vampires are shit. And this is coming from someone who enjoyed the Vampire Wars trilogy (Genevieve was... ok. And Witch Hunter was sick) There's only a handful of vampires that exist in proportion to WOD. And they took the bloodlines thing from WOD 'cause shit like Strigoi, Lahmaian and Necran (forgot the name of the sorcerer vampires -- been awhile) doesn't make sense in the Warhammer-verse given the homongenuity of everything for each faction. The Vampire Counts faction is just that: a few vampire commanders, the rest are zombies, skeletons, ghouls etc...

LOK is also shite in comparison. Dude, I liked Soul Reaver too, classic PS gaming, but no no and no.

Now, this said, the only interpretation I can think of that'd be legit would be the way vampires were handled in Morrowind. It fit the system, the setting and they didn't try to ingratiate themselves within mortal society but yet maintained a surprisingly large population, particularly the Quarra. The Aundae clan were the weakest and most disparate but were just a bunch of Ireancuses essentially. Quarra were warriors, were actually a huge threat to Vvardenfell after the Blight. Berne was weakest but most organised and actually had some serious influence in mortal affairs. Mix was roughly 60/40 clan vamps and "feral" vamps, worked well.

Vampires just don't make sense as one single, small bloodline. And they need to have a strong central feeling, they can't just be random grabs from other vampire fiction and lore. There has to be an actual reason they'd be split up into different groups and/or have different strengths and weaknesses. Had White Wolf done Clan + Bloodline from the start, OWOD would have siiicckk. All that metaplot without it being retro'd all the bloody time or stuff written in out of nowhere because the line designers were shit at getting the writers to communicate...

What is your malfunction? I was just cherry-picking elements I liked for my own world building. Can you go even one second without shitting on every vampire story for not being WoD or whatever? God, this insane elitism over fictional characters is half the reason I quit WoD all those years ago. (The other half was WoD being shit.)

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1041327Here's the rundown of their emblematic characteristics:
*Shadowbane: vampires are created by black magic, with no memory of their former lives, and their intended purpose is to enforce the cycling of souls into the void
*Warhammer: vampires have awesome Eastern European-themed armies of undead
*Legacy of Kain: all vampire clans have characteristic mutations which grow more pronounced over time
*Rifts: vampires may be divided into head/master, bride/groom/servant, and feral/wild types

....God, this insane elitism over fictional characters is half the reason I quit WoD all those years ago. (The other half was WoD being shit.)

I know you're not talking to me (or if you are, I'm not trying to bomb on you). But since you listed elements that you like about Vampires in general...


Shadowbane - I think it's workable, but it would assume that whomever created vampires are "overseeing" them? Needs more context, but it's a start.

Warhammer - No comment. I'm still a Warhammer noob.

Legacy of Kain - this IS an element of WoD vampires. In fact, when I first played LoK I thought - "nice they lifted this idea from WoD and did their own spin."

Rifts - Structurally this element is massively part of WoD too. Clan elders are monstrous creatures that have this exact relationship. Maybe it's a setting thing for you?

The gist of what makes WoD vampires in particular popular is it gave a fairly solid context that originally was very flexible to play a vampire within the modern context. It had a taxonomy of social structure, an "origin" that was potentially very expansive (or if you wanted an outright lie). As a narrative construct it even works brilliantly in other games. I've ported the whole concept into my Marvel game where Dracula, a longtime Marvel character of considerable power, was one of the most powerful overlords of this secret conspiracy called the Sabbat. And of course there was the counter conspiracy of the Camarilla. My players loved it! Especially the player whose PC had Light and Radiation control and could blast vampires into ashes... but proved to be wonderfully susceptible to mind-control (Kindred love nothing more than having a thrall they can unleash on their own foes!)

So I think all these premises are fine. I just want all of it. Not a few pieces of it.

QuoteVampires just don't make sense as one single, small bloodline. And they need to have a strong central feeling, they can't just be random grabs from other vampire fiction and lore. There has to be an actual reason they'd be split up into different groups and/or have different strengths and weaknesses. Had White Wolf done Clan + Bloodline from the start, OWOD would have siiicckk. All that metaplot without it being retro'd all the bloody time or stuff written in out of nowhere because the line designers were shit at getting the writers to communicate...

Presuming you mean Clan + Bloodline in the sense of "Social Organization + Common Sire Line" then WoD did actually have that. The Clans are the "common sire line" part while Camarilla/Sabbat/Anarch/Inconnu/Tal'Maha'Re/Minor Factions/Independents are the "social organization part." (Ex. There are members of Clan Bruhah among the Camerilla, the Sabbat, the Anarchs, etc.).

I think they also did a pretty good job linking vampirism to a strong central element via the Caine mythology... vampires as the children of the First Murderer cursed by the Biblical God. Throw in their superhuman abilities as blood magic learned from Lilith after Caine fled and you've got a pretty solid foundation for why vampires exist. Let the SJW types whine about the fact that the setting makes the Biblical God into a real force within it, but every time they've tried to muddy the waters about vampiric origins the less compelling and coherent the setting gets (which is why the ONLY scenario in the Gehenna book that made a lick of sense was Wormwood).

Quote from: tenbones;1041338Shadowbane - I think it's workable, but it would assume that whomever created vampires are "overseeing" them? Needs more context, but it's a start.

Shadowbane is a dark fantasy setting where the PCs are morally ambiguous at best. The vampires serve the Null, who are described as hive minds for the undead. Unlike in typical D&D, the undead are an effect of interruptions in the cycle of souls rather than a cause. Although vampires can join guilds with other races unless the guild's charter is racist.

Quote from: tenbones;1041338Legacy of Kain - this IS an element of WoD vampires. In fact, when I first played LoK I thought - "nice they lifted this idea from WoD and did their own spin."

I thought the progressive distinctive mutation (which provided functional benefits like armor or sonar) was a much more interesting way to distinguish the clans than "hit really bad by the ugly stick" or "paralyzed by images of [strike]Judy Garland[/strike] beauty." I could say a lot about how the WoD weaknesses are more silly than evocative.

Take the Toreador weakness, in either Masquerade or Requiem (I don't care about edition differences). They are paralyzed by images of [strike]Judy Garland[/strike] beauty, like a parody of the typical repulsion from crosses. What would be more evocative would be if they were obsessed with acquiring pretty things (art, cars, lovers, etc), then immediately lose interest in their newest possession to seek out another. If you're willing to abandon preconceptions, this could replace the traditional hunger for blood.

Quote from: tenbones;1041338Rifts - Structurally this element is massively part of WoD too. Clan elders are monstrous creatures that have this exact relationship. Maybe it's a setting thing for you?

The distinction in Rifts is one of taxonomy, and I believe similar distinctions are present in a number of other vampire fiction like D&D 3rd edition (and beyond), Stephen King's work and Syfy's Van Helsing show. Master/head vampires were created by pacts with a demon lord or vampire god (or is itself some kind of demon), brides/grooms/servants by infection, and feral/wild by flawed infection or starvation. The concept is obviously based on Dracula and his brides.

In fact, the concept of vampires turning feral/wild through starvation shows up fairly often. In many cases starvation causes mental (and less commonly physical) deterioration that may or may not be restored by receiving sustenance. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires can't die of starvation but if they starve too long they will suffer permanent brain damage. In Syfy's Van Helsing vampires need blood to survive, but they need human blood to retain their sanity; animal blood causes them to turn feral (and stop caring about their hygiene). In Warhammer Fantasy vampires that starve (or give into their hunger completely) turn into bat-like monsters with far greater physical prowess at the cost of their sanity.

Quote from: tenbones;1041338The gist of what makes WoD vampires in particular popular is it gave a fairly solid context that originally was very flexible to play a vampire within the modern context. It had a taxonomy of social structure, an "origin" that was potentially very expansive (or if you wanted an outright lie). As a narrative construct it even works brilliantly in other games. I've ported the whole concept into my Marvel game where Dracula, a longtime Marvel character of considerable power, was one of the most powerful overlords of this secret conspiracy called the Sabbat. And of course there was the counter conspiracy of the Camarilla. My players loved it! Especially the player whose PC had Light and Radiation control and could blast vampires into ashes... but proved to be wonderfully susceptible to mind-control (Kindred love nothing more than having a thrall they can unleash on their own foes!)

Forgive me, but I understand the meaning of sabbat (holy day, Sunday, etc) so I find a society of vampire supremacists calling themselves that silly. I can say the same about lots of the bizarre names in WoD. Bruja is Spanish for "witch", la sombra is Spanish for "the shadow," Tzimiskes was a Byzantine emperor, toreador is Spanish for "bullfighter," gangrel and ragabash are British/Scottish English for "vagabond," tremere is Latin for "to tremble" (the present infinitive of a verb, and thus nonsensical as a name), etc.