It was a revelation.

A RPG about TALKING versus shooting!

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;916230What was playing Vampire: The Masquerade like in the earliest days of the game?

Basically around the time of its first release and rise in popularity, when it was all raw and fresh, before splatbooks and the ballooning of the world of darkness, before the 90s had fully asserted themselves and the likely shape of the 2000s was perceptible. What did people make of it coming off of other games?

Can you elaborate more on what you mean by this statement about the 90s and before they had fully asserted themselves? (And for reference, how old would you have been in 1990?). Is this a reference to what the 90s were really like*, what gaming was like in the early 90s?

In the early 90s, gaming was in a bit of a funk. 2nd edition AD&D was out, the splatbooks were coming left and right, as were the different setting boxed sets. BECMI was also expanding into the Gazetteers. Lots of effort, but nothing was reaching the heights of the A/D&D fad of the early 80s. RIFTS and CyberPunk and Shadowrun and Megatraveller and Gurps 3e and Battletech and most of the RPGs you think of as 20th century RPGs had already come out in one form or another. Nothing in particular was catching on as THE next RPG, and some significantly more accessible CRPGs like Final Fantasy and such (and just computer games in general, and just the slow movement away from people having complex hobbies) were eating into the RPG pie.

Then Vampire came out.

It certainly wasn't overnight. At first it was something of a novelty. "Oh, interesting, you get to play as the monster." "Oh, interesting, it's set in modern times." Slowly but surely, it did start to change things. Some of the band T-shirts worn at the FLGS changed from Metallica to NIN, and some of the people wearing them were also wearing eyeliner (and some of them were even female!!!). Anne Rice had already peaked, so you did see people reading her paperbacks, but now people started actively talking about them (and those of us already on Usenets or BBSes started seeing members with handles like "Lestat").  Local News teams started doing filler pieces on this new type of RPGs--including the requisite uninformed scare tactic/rating getter ("this new vampire game has a Self Control check, where if the character fails, they are supposed to act out flying into a rage, committing acts of violence or property destruction" -- actually saw on local news). There was definitely the I'm-a-goth-that's-new-to-role-playing stereotype person, and the I'm-trying-to-be-a-pretentious-twit sack of crap who probably would have been so without the vampire game, but there was also still a majority of the players who were either I'm-a-gamer-and-this-is-the-next-thing-to-try types or I'm-12-and-this-is-my-first-RPG,-but-if-I'd-turned-12-in-1983-I'd-be-doing-this-with-AD&D type.

As to the game itself, well first of all, just like there was no one single "old school" for D&D, there was no one way that people played V:tM back in the day either. I do think that a lot of people tried to play it just like the next D&D or shadowrun, just with vampires in 1990s America (or elsewhere, as the game spread), which quickly morphed into trenchcoat-katana and the ruleset made certain player options obviously better than others. I think some other people tried to do the whole social and talking and politics and all that, and they made it work (better than it did later. See next paragraph).

What I don't remember about the early days was anyone caring one wit about the metaplot or where White Wolf thought the story of their games was going. It wasn't until someone had read 5-6 supplements and gotten a bead on how the designers thought that the game was supposed to go.



*Cause if you weren't there or were a baby, boy did you missed out. It was amazing when the clock struck midnight, ringing in Jan.1, 1990. Our Flock of Seagulls feathered haircuts all grew out into long grunge ponytails, and our canary yellow Sony walkman cassette players crumbled to dust, along with out Michael Jackson tapes, so we had to pull these brand new compact disc players out of our new flannel shirts and start listening to Pearl Jam and Marilyn Manson. It was a magical time. :-D

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;916246In terms of the 90s being in full swing, where i was living by 91, when it came out, they already pretty much were in full swing. Maybe it came to me a bit later, like in early 92, but all the stuff that was in the air (particularly around horror) was well underway by the time I checked out the book.

Agreed.

Quote from: CTPhipps;916556It was a revelation.

A RPG about TALKING versus shooting!

And looking so very cool (or our 1991 idea of what cool looked like) doing so. :-P

Quote from: IskandarKebab;916525The core problem between VTM as designed and VTM as played is that RPGs are fundamentally about player freedom (kill the monster, take its shit), while the entire focus of VTM is about the restrictive structure of Vampire society. Older vampires are simply better than you, and are supposed to be a goal players are striving for. The core horror of the game is about balancing the consequences of the power that the players gain. But in most RPGs, power instead frees players to do what they want (which is why Dark Suns is so interesting as an exception). Right there is a fundamental clash between what the players want and what the GM is supposed to be doing. To fit within the basic power balancing mechanics of the game (blood acquisition, humanity, vampire politics and power growth measured in centuries, not months of training) a GM is basically going to be forced to frustrate the players, instead of accentuating their fun like in most RPGs. There just aren't that many ways around this, barring having a party who are completely committed to the mentality required.

What makes this even worse is that Vampires as created are fundamentally loners. This means that players are already placed in a connectionless murder hobo mindset. The solution, in my view, is what the new Delta Green did. You build relationships through character creation and are then forced to burn them over time as the stress saps away at your will to live. Build a family for the fledgling. Have them be supportive and caring as their loved one is forced to undergo this sudden shock. And then slowly rip it away from them.

In general, horror RPGs fail because its too easy to crack jokes. In addition, horror is about isolation, while RPGs are about groups. As John Wick quite rightly said, the way to scare your players is not by killer GMing them. Instead, you give them what they want. Turn them into Strahd, bit by bit, and let the fear sink in as they realize the costs for their power. That high ranking noble they mocked? He just killed their sister. Their fun resulted in their sorrow and there's nothing they can do about it. That friend they had that stood by them? You drained him when the beast took over. The bomb you used to kill that elder? Citizens were caught in the crossfire. That's where the best RPG horror, in my view lies. It's when your players get what they want, and now need to live with the costs.

In this, indie rpg Feed succeeded where VtM failed. It was a pretty simple yet vital difference: humanity as a descriptor of traits rather than a trait of its own and rewarding players for losing it. As characters become more vampiric, vampire traits replace human traits (e.g. your girlfriend dumps you and you replace her with a renfield) and it becomes progressively more difficult to engage in normal life. (Vampirism is explicitly an addiction metaphor.) The problem is that the players need to care about resisting their addiction or it will degenerate into fantasy drug lords.

Quote from: Necrozius;916553I was contemplating making a retroclone of 1st ed Vampire but with a different focus and tweaked rules inspired by later editions. The biggest change from the original game is century play: the scale of time that passes for the vampire characters. Basically each "session" is a single series of events of importance between decades of nothing. Their powers grow more through getting older, not gunning down mobsters with uzis and katanas in old warehouses.

So each session would be at a different "age". Like, the very first might be 18th century (powdered wigs and all), the next Victorian, after that Edwardian, World War II etc... Unfortunately the detail needed to support that style of play would be huge. So maybe it would be scaled down to within one century? Anyway the idea is that I like it that the Vampires have to deal with, amongst other sources of angst, a changing world around them. Also the viability of simply outliving their mortal enemies (vampire hunters, police, etc...).

There are a number of vampire clones already. Off the top of my head: Undying, Vampire City, Urban Shadows, Bloodsucker... What makes another stand out?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;916592Can you elaborate more on what you mean by this statement about the 90s and before they had fully asserted themselves? (And for reference, how old would you have been in 1990?). Is this a reference to what the 90s were really like*, what gaming was like in the early 90s?

I was born in 1982, and I'm asking about the transition from the 80s to the 90s, when the 90s still felt like the 80s, especially socially and technologically. Vampire always seemed (to me) very sensitive to the cultural context around it, much more than D&D for instance.

Now, I didn't get into White Wolf until 2010, during my junior year of high school. But I always preferred the much-derided "Trenchcoats and Katanas" playstyle over the whiny and pretentious "Personal Horror" style from the moment I first read Vampire: The Requiem and later, Vampire: The Masquerade. But as I grew older, I started to appreciate the political angle as well. So for me, the perfect Vampire game would have little to no metaplot whatsoever, and be an even blend of katanas and politics.

Based on what I heard from other people in my area who were there in the 90s, most of the 1e and early 2e Masquerade games were played this way, at least in my area. Personal Horror and heavy metaplots didn't become the dominating norm until Revised, which amped up the metaplot and had Justin Achilli ramming personal horror down everyone's throats and shaming anyone who played differently from the party line.

The White Wolf fandom has never recovered since. And I feel as if Martin Ericsson and his "One World of Darkness" is only going to make things worse.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;916595The problem is that the players need to care about resisting their addiction or it will degenerate into fantasy drug lords.

Ironically enough, this is a perfect thing to slot into a trenchcoat and katanas style game. Players want to be the heroes, but in order to face the challenges posed to them they are forced to increasingly take on villainous traits. Great way to play into the real issues faced by anti-cartel forces, for example.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;916595(Vampirism is explicitly an addiction metaphor.)

Unless it's about sex.

Or HIV.

Or being gay.

Quote from: daniel_ream;916615Unless it's about sex.

Or HIV.

Or being gay.

So that would mean:

Vampires == Sex : Bram Stoker
Vampires == HIV : Anne Rice
Vampires == Gay : Twilight?

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;916596I was born in 1982, and I'm asking about the transition from the 80s to the 90s, when the 90s still felt like the 80s, especially socially and technologically. Vampire always seemed (to me) very sensitive to the cultural context around it, much more than D&D for instance.

Amazingly, I was just thinking of this (decade transitions, not WW games). With Gene Wilder's death, I just watched Stir Crazy (1980) and thought "This is such a 70s movie."

Yes, Vampire to me feels very much locked in 1990 (where as Mage feels very much more "the 90s").

Here goes. I'm going to do the American version of the 90s. Anyone else can help fill in the rest. This will be fairly stream-of-conscious, and in no way complete

Socially, the early 90s were very similar to the 80s. MTV wasn't a hot new thing, but it was still a big deal. The musical trends which we now consider the music of the 90s either hadn't started or were only known to the early adopters. The Goth trend had formulated in the late 80 much like punk had in the 70s. By 1990 goth had matured enough that people outside the trend knew what it was (and much like by 1980 if someone had walked down the street with a purple Mohawk, people would say, "oh look, a punk" the same thing would have happened in 1990 for a goth). Anne Rice wasn't 'popular' like Steven King or Oprah or something, but she was "I've heard of that author" level popular. The mixing of rice novels on bed stands next to Dragonlance novels is a good explanation for how the idea of V:tM might have gotten started.

Technologically, is was a transition time. Pretty much everyone knew what cell phones were--those car phones weren't in a car and real life doctors/lawyers and TV private investigators from your favorite crime drama (or X-files in a few years) might have, but why would a normal person need one? Actually, doctors had pagers, and even then, in 1990 there were plenty that didn't. A cellphone was seen as a symbol of narcissistic self-importance in the same way that having a blackberry was in 2000. People were debating in 1990 whether they wanted to get a CD player or not ("what am I going to do, buy a new copy of all my albums?" "no man, you just get a stereo that has both. You already have both cassettes and old records, right?)". Home computers really changed between late 80s and early-mid 90s in that they went from something you might have to something you probably had if you were a middle class family. The internet--yes, I know someone will bring up Darpanet or some such. But in reality the internet was more theory than actual practice. The DNS system was invented in
'85, IP connections in '88 and WWW in '90. Honestly, if you weren't CERN, defense, or maybe academia, you weren't on the information superhighway (which I still a term we used). You might have had email through a gopher server, and you might have connected through dialup to CompuServe or local BBSes, but then only if you were a tech geek. I'm trying to think of other broad brushstroke things. It's not like the early 20th century where you can say "that's the decade that telephones firs became a thing." We already had those, even portable ones (just not commonly). And microwaves, personal computers, answering machines, television recorders--oh!, at 1982 I know you are familiar with VCRs and how VHS format beat out a different format called Beta. But in 1990 you could probably still find a Betamax section at the local video store (which might not yet be a blockbuster)? Also, your grandpa probably had a black and white tv in the garage or basement, because those weren't still being made, but hadn't aged out yet.

Politically, Bush Sr. wasn't Reagan (and Reagan wasn't who he has become in retrospect), but he was a continuation of the same political culture. I cannot explain how big a deal the end of the Cold War was. We were in a global struggle with Russia and we thought we were going to destroy each other and everyone else with us and nope, just kidding, it's all over, we won (or at least they conceded defeat or something something). Women wanting to be both mothers and have successful careers was still a big political deal. We had a different conception of what terrorism really meant. Although the highjackings of the 1970s had gotten security lines in airports, we still didn't take the whole thing very seriously (serial killers were more the crime of fascination).
 
Anything else that specifically jumps out as a question?

When I ran it, I just told my players it was a modern game, gave them a questionnaire with like 25-30 questions on it that they could put as much detail into as they wanted, then I made up the mortal version of their characters for them.  Then I ran each of them individually through the events that made them a Vampire.

It wasn't Trenchcoat and Katana (although they did enjoy their new abilities once they got used to them), we didn't need any OOC metagame structure to keep us focused on "Personal Horror", they just roleplayed Neonates in a strange new deadly world.

Werewolf was much more crazyass, but then again, it kind of has to be.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;916618So that would mean:
Vampires == Gay : Twilight?

True Blood, actually.

I was born in 1993, so I only really remember 1998 and 1999, and some parts of 1996 and 1997, and even then only through the memories of a small child. I guess you could count 2000 and early 2001 as culturally part of the 1990's (much as how 1990 and 1991 are culturally more like the 80's), since in all honesty, the society and culture of the 2000's decade really didn't start until 9/11, which acted as a cultural reset button in America.

However, I would've loved to have actually been part of the early days of White Wolf gaming back in the 90's before Revised Edition came along and ruined everything.

It would have been awesome to have seen what the gaming scene was actually like with Vampire 1e and 2e, along with early Werewolf and Mage, as well as Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, an unsung and underrated White Wolf game that ended way too soon.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;916643Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, an unsung and underrated White Wolf game that ended way too soon.

I don't know, I think it's rated exactly right, actually.  There's the core of a good system there, but the line developers really, really did not understand the fighting game genre and the supplements were just...off.  I remember reading the description of Ninjutsu and thinking "WTF, this is realistic.  Where the balls are my Shadow Jumps and kuji-kiri and dragon summoning maneuvers??"

If you liked SF:tRPG, have a look at Fight! The Fighting Game RPG[1], which covers the same ground much better.



[1] Alternate Title: Our Marketing Team Was Out Sick That Day

Quote from: daniel_ream;916647I don't know, I think it's rated exactly right, actually.  There's the core of a good system there, but the line developers really, really did not understand the fighting game genre and the supplements were just...off.  I remember reading the description of Ninjutsu and thinking "WTF, this is realistic.  Where the balls are my Shadow Jumps and kuji-kiri and dragon summoning maneuvers??"

If you liked SF:tRPG, have a look at Fight! The Fighting Game RPG[1], which covers the same ground much better.



[1] Alternate Title: Our Marketing Team Was Out Sick That Day

Well, I personally loved Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, and I think most of the hatred it gets nowadays comes from the stuck-up Goths and Punks who only play Personal Horror games and believe everything must be dark and serious all the fucking time. The kind of assholes who like metaplot railroading their games (and telling other people who don't like metaplot to play "Some Other Game"), who voluntarily listen to shitty bands like Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, and Type O Negative, and hold onto the words of Justin Achilli and Martin Ericsson as if they were holy canon. The kind of snobs who want the World of Darkness to be a World of Pointless Nihilism. Those kind of snobs.

(Rant Over)

Seriously, World of Darkness is a great setting when you chop out the metaplot and the themes of personal horror. Eat the chicken and throw away the bone, so to speak. That's why I prefer 1e and 2e over Revised.

And I don't think you are a snob, I just wanted to get that rant off my chest.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;916649... who voluntarily listen to shitty bands like Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, and Type O Negative

I was listening to Sisters of Mercy the other day (I like 'em) and my friend came in and asked, "What the fuck is that? Some crappy David Bowie cover band?"... and that right there ruined it. Kind of hilarious... but also like when same friend pointed out that all tropical fruit has a vomit-like sub-flavor.

More on topic: When people say 2e Vampire is that the same as NWoD?

I bought the game when it first came out. I liked the sound of it, but it quickly got a funky reputation here locally because of the antics of some of its fans.