Vampire: The Masquerade 5E

I'm considering buying the 5e books and running a game in my city. How big of a jump is it from what's come before?

For context, my last, and longest, experience with Vampire was through Requiem, where I played and ST'd for several months. I stopped playing just as Blood and Smoke redesign was coming out.

I might just buy a copy to read the specifics on how the Time of Judgement ended, but mostly I'm curious about how much I'd have to learn/unlearn.

V20 and V5 both ignore the Time of Judgement happening because, well, the world ended.

Beckett's Jyhad Diary effectively updates and resolves all of the metaplot for Classic V1-V20. However, that book is incredibly dense with lore for Vampire: The Masquerade super-fans.

V5 is a soft reboot reintroducing the Clans, Disciplines, and sects for the 21st century.

Requiem takes place in an Alternate Continuity.

I made this page a long time ago and some people say it's very informative for changes and what's the current state of the world:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/VampireTheMasqueradeFifthEdition

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 17th 2020 at 1:06:34 AM

Thanks, it was pretty informative. I went ahead and ordered the book, I'll probably come back with questions once I get a chance to go through it.

"Aborted Arc: Most of the plot points set in Beckett's Jyhad Diary like the discovery of a 2nd Generation Vampire, Marcus Vitel's new sect, the Tremere worm, and the upcoming Sabbat Civil War get ignored or rendered moot by 5th Edition's changes. "

Is this a bad thing or a good thing? how good this plot were?.

I'd say bad given what we got out of 5th Ed at launch. Also given how a big deal was made about how Nu White Wolf was using it to build into 5th ed only to throw so much of it away.

The Second Inquisition and other plots were easier to understand I think in V5. BJD was a bit of a Kudzu Plot.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 24th 2020 at 4:07:30 AM

If nothing else it shows what the biggest reason Chronicles of Darklness doesnt have a metaplot.

Because if you have an end of the world baked into the plot. then if you wanna keep making the game you need all new reasons to keep averting it

I wouldn't go that far. There is a middle ground between "no metaplot" and "constant end of the world is nigh". The easiest solution is to simply have the apocalypse come and go, which is what V5/W5 are doing.

Which it result into the apocalipse being wasted, this is not the case in world of darkness because the world did ended in time of judgment but when you put and end of the world scenario, ether you do or get out.

Wasn't there a set of Gehenna scenarios you could pick from? While I loved the high-powered operatic ones where you run around fighting 3rd gens, my favorite was the "trapped in a church with moral dilemmas" one.

We could always mix and match when running it, and say the Apocalypse might have come and gone, and only cut off the figurative "head" of the vampire world that was the most dangerous, leaving humanity a fighting chance to sort out the rest.

Then again, lack of meta plot complications is one of the reasons I love Requiem.

Sure, but the point is when end of the world come, they deliver it, rather than putting always foward until it lost is meaning, kinda like it happen to warhammer 40.000 for nearly 20 decades.

Point, there's an Ending Fatigue element to that. (And 20 decades? 40K has been going on for 200 years?! )

To be charitable, I imagine they want to imply a Gehenna scenario just happened in the middle east that decimated elders and antes, giving players a lot more upward mobility. It'd be cool if it was just phase 1, and something like the Vt R Strix or a new variety of vampire-killing vampire sweeps out from there to finish off the younger generations.

well, is warhammer 40.000 so who knows

(Yeah a huge bulder from me).

Granted 40k didnt throw away the end of the world scenario, just move sightly toward it by doing hige changes to the background.

Mortal kombat kinda sorta did the same thing: it forwshow a end of the world that eventually deliver with armaggedon and while the game was lackuster, they move them after that.

I'm almost through the V5 corebook, and I gotta say, it's very visually stunning. Almost wish they included a book stand though, it was physically difficult to read, and it made me wish they'd gone the nWoD route of splitting core mechanics for mortals and setting into its own book to literally lighten the main gamelines.

Griping aside, the material was good. Lots of interesting narrative twists and turns with the rise of the Anarchs. I really enjoyed the addition of loresheets and streamlining of the vampiric sorceries into one system with multiple clan centric rituals and spells.

The multiple powers per dot level and salad bar approach was fun, nice to see that also made the transition, though I wasn't too happy with a potential "fall through the cracks" dilemma in Obfuscate. Level 4 has only one power 'Vanish', and if you didn't pick the correct one at level 1 "Cloak of Shadows" you essentially get stuck picking either that or an alternate level 3 power (or if you're a really lucky Malkavian, the Amalgam level 4 power).

On that note, it's nice that the previous Devotions from VTR made the transition in as Amalgam powers, I'm guessing there's more of those in the Cam and Anarch books?

I was also intrigued by the Thinblood sorcery, and the whole concept behind 'dots of disciplines depending on who you eat'. Though I don't think I'll try that on a first play.

The one thing that'S gotten me a bit confused is how to assemble the actual dice pools for a Discipline power while taking into account Hunger dice. As I understood it, you get a bonus from Blood Potency if it's 2 or above, you add another 1 or 2 if you fed on someone with a resonance to that discipline, and finally the Attribute Skill. And from that, a number of dice equal to your current Hunger are replaced by Hunger dice, correct? If there's a section that explains this, I either missed or skipped it, sorry.

Well THE CHICAGO FOLIO is out as a supplement to CHICAGO BY NIGHT and I really enjoyed both of them. However, I'm more excited about the release of LET THE STREETS RUN RED. That just arrived for Kickstarter backers of Chicago by Night in PDF form and should be out for sale in a couple of weeks.

LTSRR is a collection of four adventure modules/a campaign book set around Chicago that updates Milwaukee by Night, Gary, and adds a new city in Indianapolis. It also has a bunch of NP Cs. I think it may be my all time favorite VTM supplement.

There's also a new comic book by Vault comics called Winter's Teeth that is set in the Twin Cities. It's got three issues out so far and is written by Tim Seeley (Hack/Slash). The back of the book has NPC write-ups and Loresheets.

You know... The more time passes, the more I find myself loving V5e.

As a massive Tremere fanboy, I still dislike how they continued the previous versions' evolution of Thaumaturgy from something that only the Tremere, with their origin as Mages who voluntarily became Kindred in their search for immortality, could have developed (1st edition) through something that the Tremere stole and modified from the very rare and secretive Tzimisce Kolduns whose Vitae they used as the basis for their potion (2nd Edition) and then something that separate bloodlines of several Clans explicitly and openly had as a In-Clan Discipline well before the Tremere existed (revised) to ultimately the Discipline that all Assamites/Banu Haqim had always had as their unique and exclusive In-Clan Discipline before the Tremere made themselves Vampires and copied it (5th Edition).

And I dislike that more for lore than mechanical reasons. Since, you know, the whole reason in lore why the Tremere weren't immediately exterminated the moment they entered Kindred society was that their Thaumaturgy Discipline was new, powerful and completely unknown and the Elders and even Methuselah of the Dark Ages Europe had no way to counter it. And that makes no goddamn sense when you realize that the Tremere first popped up in exactly the region where the local European Elders and Methuselah would be most familiar with Blood Sorcery, having alternately butted heads and cooperated with the Banu Haqim and Tzimisce for influence there for centuries already.

That said:

As a Tremere fanboy I also love the breaking of the Pyramid. I always felt that the control of the Council was a little too strong, too easy to enforce and too difficult to avoid to allow for some interesting Tremere characters outside of the traditional mold. My own Tremere character in the LARP I play in (who eventually made it to Regent of the local Chantry and Seneschal of the City before I retired him) was an attempt to skirt the edges of the mold and I would have had much more freedom to take him in interesting directions if not for the strict control of the Pyramid. (Which is why the way I retired him was him low-key defecting to the Ashirra, which the Storytellers had recently introduced as existing in our setting, by convincing his Lord to let him go to Israel as the Clan's ambassador to the Camarilla's sister sect and then having him drop off the radar).

And in general I love many of the new and modified mechanics. I feel using Rouse checks works a lot better than having discrete Blood Points as a resource. Hunger Dice make the Beast a much more clear and present danger and having to kill to sate hunger completely makes for an interesting conundrum.

After all, killing someone while feeding is definitely a stain on your humanity... But it also decreases the chance of the Beast taking over and making you do something even worse. How much of who you were in life do you sacrifice to the monster you've become in order to hold on to (the illusion of) your remaining humanity?

All in all, I like V5e more than any previous version of Vampire (and I've always loved VtM and even liked Requiem well enough).

Justin Achilli put up an interesting developer's blog.

https://www.worldofdarkness.com/news/development-blog-vampire-stories-part-i

I will said that at times it feel the tremere are just a sect dress as clan rathern a than clan proper, the same can be said of giovanni and maybe the assamites, it seen the translation guide from mascarate ro requiem agree with me.

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2021/04/50-mundane-details-for-vampire.html

I think fans might like these 75 Mundane Details for Running V:TM.

So, a few weeks back started playing in a 5e game again with a Storyteller who actually read up on how the changes in the setting work (rather than one game I played in previously which was just a continuation of a Revised game we played in years ago with the new rules).

I'm playing a Thin Blood and I really like their special little twists on the Kindred formula. My Thin Blood can do special Thin Blood alchemy, walk around in daylight and still heals like a vampire, but he was also magically branded by the Camarilla so that any vampire recognizes him as a Thin Blood, has to ingest vitae from another vampire to be able to use disciplines and he suffers from the Malkavian clan Bane.

I also like, a lot, how with the Sabbat mostly out of the picture as the main antagonist, the Camarilla vs. Anarch conflict can get as hot or as cold as it needs to be for the story. Previously it didn't make sense for those two to really attempt to weaken each other, because doing so was a surefire way to make sure the Sabbat would exploit that weakness and try to move in.

It was due to a mixture of the Sabbat not being an immediate threat everywhere so that the odds of them moving into a city far away from their other holdings were low (and when the Sabbat did get serious about taking cities the Anarchs and Cam did get their shit together and work together), and that "we shouldn't try weakening the other side in case the Sabbat takes advantage" is only a good option if the status quo favours you. From a Anarch underdog perspective that mindset is amounts to "our cause is impossible, so why are we fighting it if we're never going to actually fight it", and in a Camarilla underdog perspective letting the Anarchs get away with having power weakens the Cam's image and only encourages the Anarchs in other domains, you have to set an example here or else you'll get replaced by someone who will.

Or to sumarise it, your perspective here is the Appeal to Worse Problems fallacy; that because the Sabbat could take advantage of any change in the status quo the Anarchs and Camarilla's own goals and how those goals relate to the other faction are meaningless. Imagine if the response to any attempt to fix America's problems was met with "but China will exploit our attention being drawn to this issue and take advantage", that wouldn't be the most persuasive argument to someone suffering due to said problems.

Plus, people in general don't make 100% perfect decisions 100% of the time, making a decision to try and gain short term power despite the risks of longer term harm is something that happens every day in situations where the negatives are far more apparent.

Thin Blood did seem like a fun albeit a little complicated character. Which alchemy type did you end up picking?

I forget the name at the moment, but the ability to cosmetically change people to the point of regrowing like of changing gender seemed like si much potential to play a Salubri in all but name or a creepy underground doctor that the city kindred desire but can't get enough of our ignore.

The Sabbat PDF book is out now.

I'd love to read it but fuck I don't wanna spend $45 on a physical copy I don't need.