Quote from: Doc Sammy;924773So, for Halloween, I am planning a 1E Vampire: The Masquerade campaign that is sandbox in style and explicitly rejects and condemns personal horror as a theme. I think I might run it here as a play-by-post game if there is enough interest.

It's certainly easy to reject personal horror, but at that point why play by those rules? Personal horror can be done well. I mentioned it before, but FEED by Whistlepunk is an example. (It is free to download on DriveThruRPG/RPGNow if you're interested.)

Rather than arbitrary punishment, Humanity vs Vampirism works as a continuum that affects how the PCs statistics are qualified. PCs have a limited number of attributes for interacting with the game world and have to balance between human and vampiric traits. Human traits let you do human things like socializing, financing and so forth. Vampiric traits let you do vampire things like change shape, command renfields and so forth. Losing humanity and becoming increasingly vampiric damages the PCs' ability to act normal. Furthermore, how humanity is lost plays into this theme: PCs lose human traits by alienating those traits through role play. The humanity system is so integral that an entire chapter is dedicated to explaining how it works and how to role play it effectively.

The other fun part of FEED is that it provides a toolbox for making your own vampirism rules, called strains (and sub-strains thereof). The only requirement to be a vampire strain is to have an internal instinct/rationality conflict and an overwhelming need to feed, so it is easily adapted for anything from Nightlife to Night Horrors: Wicked Dead.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;924562I think that's a pretty good summation of everything else in this thread, to be honest.

The benefit of being there, I suppose.

Quote from: daniel_ream;924864I think that's a spurious connection, personally.  We had tons of trenchcoat-and-katana types, but it was entirely due to the fact that katanas were (IIRC) strictly mechanically superior to every other melee weapon and you needed a trenchcoat to hide them.

The nonsense idea that a trenchcoat could hide them most definitely came from Highlander.

Quote from: daniel_ream;924864I think that's a spurious connection, personally.  We had tons of trenchcoat-and-katana types, but it was entirely due to the fact that katanas were (IIRC) strictly mechanically superior to every other melee weapon and you needed a trenchcoat to hide them.  I don't recall anyone ever linking their character choices to Highlander and we were certainly all aware of it.

Heh I never even *heard* or considered the idea of hiding a katana in a trenchcoat prior to 1986 (when Highlander dropped). I'll even put my chip down and give you another "spurious" claim - I'll say that Highlander kicked off the popular katana-fetishism to the heights of nerd-jackery we're all familiar with. It existed in some degree prior... but Highlander took it to a new level.

Quote from: RPGPundit;924542I remember quite vividly when Vampire first came out.  It certainly got a lot of buzz very quickly.  The very earliest games I saw (or tried) initially attempted to play it "straight" as Rein*Hagen intended: the players as haunted souls trying to hold onto their humanity.  But relatively very quickly, I can't say how quickly but not more than a few months after release, the vast majority of people said "fuck that" and it started to be all trenchcoats-and-uzis-and-katanas.
I seem to recall thinking that Highlander ended up having a serious influence in that.  For a lot of people (in this time before the Interview With the Vampire movie came out), particularly the non-goth types, the game was in many ways more about playing an Immortal than about playing a Vampire as such. After the Interview movie came out, things changed again, and then everyone wanted to be Lestat.

The "woe is me" stuff gets old really fast. It might be fun for the rare one off game, but I don't think you can have a prolonged campaign where all of the players are primarily focused on that. At least, I have never seen that.

Dark superheroes has more potential for prolonged activity, as it kind of starts to resemble a more traditional role playing game with different kinds of vampires instead of a mage, warrior, priest, rogue, etc.

My favorite way to play Vampire was always a scheming political game - basically where you are playing the vampire equivalent of the Godfather, Little Finger, Baron Harkonnen, etc. Though, also from my experience, that sort of game is really hard to pull off and works better as a LARP or even an online game than in person table top.

Quote from: tenbones;925326Heh I never even *heard* or considered the idea of hiding a katana in a trenchcoat prior to 1986 (when Highlander dropped). I'll even put my chip down and give you another "spurious" claim - I'll say that Highlander kicked off the popular katana-fetishism to the heights of nerd-jackery we're all familiar with. It existed in some degree prior... but Highlander took it to a new level.

Eh? Barely took notice of Highlander here, because just a movie... What really did stoke our Katana nerdery here (much earlier) was of course, the Fantasy Games Unlimited version of Bushido, which was an RPG set in feudal Japan.  There were lots of Toshiro Mifune Samurai movies already out in black and white, and those old splendid Kurosawa films we continually mined for new RPG ideas, and experiences. We started playing this in 1978.

Japan was kind of mysterious and a bit exotic, ...all the old WWII GI's talked about in the 70's was suicidal crazy-a$$Ed gook warriors who would charge on moonless nights out of the jungles of the Solomon Islandsand try to kill them using only a sword screaming at them the entire time. Freaked the American GI's right the hell out, and but good. Then there was Vietnam, and it was still very fresh in the American psyche because it was the first series of battles in over two hundred years where us, the Americans, had ended up retreating from a fight.

We ...of course were already playing Bushido often, and had spent extraordinary amounts of time reading books about the history of the Samurai, and about their warrior code of honor where all the commoners simply worshipped the warriors. Of course in 1980, NBC produced what I consider one of the best mini-series of all time, with the release of Shogun, which was based on a series of historical based Samurai novels set in Japan that had been published by James Clavell. It also starred Toshiro Mifune, but was based in the time that the westerners first came to Japan, and Richard Chamberlain did a splendid job of portraying a Jesuit priest, who unexpectedly washed up on the shore after a shipwreck and became an advisor to the Daimyo that would one day become Shogun. We, of course already knew everything about how the super strong, super sharp, samurai swords were being produced, and were well versed in the Samurai lore when that miniseries came out.

For the Vampire crowd, their generation of Katana Nerdery truly began much later than Highlander with the release of Kill Bill in 2003, in which there were many splendid and gory Katana fights, and one of the best choreographed Katana fight scenes I have ever seen in the House of the Blue Leaves. If you ever travel to Tokyo, a visit to the Gonpachi is in order, ...just because.

Gonpachi
権八 西麻布
1 Chome-13-11 Nishiazabu
Minato-ku, Tōkyō-to

http://thecitylane.com/tokyo-gonpachi-aka-kill-bill-restaurant/

https://tokyofox.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/tokyo-filming-locations-pt-iii-kill-bill-updated/

P.S. For some reason I think the original Highlander blade was a Scottish Claymore.

Chamberlain was a priest, in the Thornbirds...
In Shogun, he was a Protestant English Pilot, pretty much a mortal enemy to the Portuguese and the Jesuits.

Kill Bill is way too late to have anything to do with the genesis of Trenchcoat and Katana.  You'd be better off looking to Blade 5 years earlier, but even then, T&K was already very much a thing, based on Highlander's 86 movie and 92 series.

Quote from: tenbones;925326Heh I never even *heard* or considered the idea of hiding a katana in a trenchcoat prior to 1986 (when Highlander dropped). I'll even put my chip down and give you another "spurious" claim - I'll say that Highlander kicked off the popular katana-fetishism to the heights of nerd-jackery we're all familiar with. It existed in some degree prior... but Highlander took it to a new level.

Sword folded 300 times...chopped half a foot into a concrete support...yeah.

Quote from: GameDaddy;925416Eh? Barely took notice of Highlander here, because just a movie... What really did stoke our Katana nerdery here (much earlier) was of course, the Fantasy Games Unlimited version of Bushido, which was an RPG set in feudal Japan.  There were lots of Toshiro Mifune Samurai movies already out in black and white, and those old splendid Kurosawa films we continually mined for new RPG ideas, and experiences. We started playing this in 1978.

Okay so first of all... heh I find this side-track hilariously silly, so take this all with a big block of salt. This thread has long since died.

So that said - How many people in America was playing Bushido circa 1978 (other than YOU AND ME and maybe a few hundred other players?) And this is where I specifically contextualized my answer with "It existed in some degree prior..." <--- see that? That's you.

As a Japanese guy I have zero interest in talking about American fetishism over Japanese culture. I'm not saying this in a negative - I get it. It just tends to get a little masturbatory after a while. Where you have those people that want to believe in the myths and those that crusade against those myths with their unique fetish of anti-fetishism. And it just get silly to me.

Quote from: GameDaddy;925416For the Vampire crowd, their generation of Katana Nerdery truly began much later than Highlander with the release of Kill Bill in 2003, in which there were many splendid and gory Katana fights, and one of the best choreographed Katana fight scenes I have ever seen in the House of the Blue Leaves. If you ever travel to Tokyo, a visit to the Gonpachi is in order, ...just because.

By 2003 - Vampire was past its hey-day for my crowd. A casual perusal of katana-jackoffery was well ensconced in geekdom by then. Messageboards and forums were a graveyard of dead threads littered with the bodies of rants and anti-rants *long* before then. But your neck of the woods might be its own unique place, just like all the others.

Having lived in Japan, I find Tokyo, like New York, a little "too busy" (but hey, who doesn't like shopping there?). But then again I haven't been back in years.

Quote from: GameDaddy;925416P.S. For some reason I think the original Highlander blade was a Scottish Claymore.

Well that was his original sword... until he discovered the impossible awesomesauce of the... KATANA!!!! KYAAAAAI!!!!!!

Quote from: CRKrueger;925435Kill Bill is way too late to have anything to do with the genesis of Trenchcoat and Katana.  You'd be better off looking to Blade 5 years earlier, but even then, T&K was already very much a thing, based on Highlander's 86 movie and 92 series.

Plus, I don't even think she wore a trench coat at any point in Kill Bill (though maybe there is a scene I am not remembering clearly). I think she just wore the game of death uniform in part 1 and then a leather jacket in part II.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;925511Plus, I don't even think she wore a trench coat at any point in Kill Bill (though maybe there is a scene I am not remembering clearly). I think she just wore the game of death uniform in part 1 and then a leather jacket in part II.

In the scene in the airpport (part 1) where she is landing to Tokyo to confront O-Ren Ishii, you can see that multiple passengers have katanas they are carrying openly around the airport. It's 'Martial Arts Assassin World'; they are very open about it.

Vampire: The Masquerade is only good if you remove the metaplot entirely.

There, I said it.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;925562Vampire: The Masquerade is only good if you remove the metaplot entirely.

There, I said it.

And yet oddly... I rather find that not true. Metaplot is a gun. Use it wisely.

Quote from: tenbones;925574And yet oddly... I rather find that not true. Metaplot is a gun. Use it wisely.

*Throws gun into cement mixer and watches it disappear as part of a new parking lot support pillar, then walks into the windy night, trench coat billowing dramatically.*

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;925576*Throws gun into cement mixer and watches it disappear as part of a new parking lot support pillar, then walks into the windy night, trench coat billowing dramatically.*

Just like Menelaus wanted you to...