So, I haven’t dabbled in the Word of Darkness (“WoD”) or the Vampire games since I was an early teen. I only played like 2 sessions, so I am not worried about rules for other editions coming into my head. That being said, what rules am I going to get wrong when running a game of the newest edition of Vampire the Masquerade (“V5”)?
Any decent house-rules out there? Any advice?
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I have a hard time remembering what about the Beast is from the original rules and what is Jason Carl’s personal interpretation, in L.A. By Night. He highly personifies the Beast to provide players something definitive to roleplay against that might otherwise have just been an entirely internal struggle.
If you haven’t already, I’d recommend watching LA By Night. It’s basically the “Critical Role” of VtM, replete with actors playing the characters and extremely high production value. But most importantly, Carl is an excellent storyteller, and I think this one particular tip is the easiest concrete thing to take and apply at your own game.
I know a lot of people like actual plays, but because they are often full of GM/ST interpretation and house rules, I generally avoid them. I also don’t plan on using splat books, which based on the title alone, I assume that the actual play uses at least 1.
Yeah I get it. In this case it’s being STed by the product lead. It’s like if you saw a D&D 5e game DMed by Jeremy Crawford, except that Jason Carl also has a level of charisma closer to Matt Mercer than the painfully dull Crawford. So because you’re going to the official designer, I suspect you’ll get something much closer to the official rules than a typical actual play.
That said, the reason I brought it up was actually to point to one specific thing that he does which I know is a house rule, because I’ve seen him say as much in interviews, and it suggest that this is a good house rule. I don’t remember what exactly the boundary is between the official rules and Carl’s interpretation; it’s been a while since I watched that interview (and couldn’t easily track it down when I looked yesterday), and even longer since I read the actual rulebook or watched the actual play. If you were to watch just a few episodes of the show with an eye specifically to how Jason Carl runs the Beast (and treat the rest of it as though it were entirely scripted content and ignore the actual gameplay), you’d come away with something useful and easily actionable in your own games.
As far as splatbooks, I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. LA By Night was essentially a launch title for V5 itself, commencing in November 2018 after an August release of the Core Rulebook. Camarilla and Anarch sourcebooks had also been published earlier that same month, but as far as I can tell (I own neither) the only actual mechanics in both are two and one clans respectively, and those clans were not used by the core cast.
These are just things I learned running it and they worked for me but might not be the case for everybody
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Focus on just the core book. WoD has always suffered from bloat and an early game I ran got out of hand pretty quick bc I let PCs pick from anything
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Start small. 5e I think does a balance of horror great, but don’t worry about shit going on in the far corners of the world with millennia-old vampires; let your PCs carve their niche out first
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Lorebooks at your own risk. I didn’t like them but again, IDGAF about the metaplot
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Don’t forget hunger is always there and should affect rolls but also you should always be challenging that hunger. I’m not a combative dm/st/gm whatever but like … I think that’s the whole point. Kindred existence is just a constant war of controlling the Beast.
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Ask lots of questions and use those answers against the players especially during character creation and extra especially with Advantages and Flaws
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Watch having thin-bloods in with your genned kindred. I felt like there was a huge power gap, or at least make players aware it might get weird
Idk the rules went fine but I’m used to WoD dice pool weirdness. I never house-ruled any of the 5e rules myself other than the mixed-gen coterie thing
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Make everyone wear a cape.
