If, like me, your introduction to RPGs was through Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade felt like it had come from another world. Where the focus of D&D was on adventure broadly defined, Vampire was about mood, metaphor, and personal horror. It didn’t merely offer a new set of rules, but a fundamentally different vision of what roleplaying games could be. It was brash, stylish, and theatrical in a way that felt almost confrontational to the sensibilities of "traditional" roleplaying games – and I suspect that was intentional.
Even if you didn’t play Vampire – and I didn't and still haven't – you couldn’t ignore it. By the mid-1990s, Vampire was everywhere: at conventions, in hobby shops, and in the imaginations of a younger generation of gamers for whom roleplaying didn’t begin with The Keep on the Borderlands, but in the nightclubs and dark alleys of White Wolf's "gothic punk" setting. Whatever else you might say about it, Vampire captured the Zeitgeist with almost supernatural precision. The Cold War was over, cyberpunk had gone corporate, and angsty antiheroes were ascendant in pop culture. Vampire gave roleplayers a way to inhabit that mood and make it their own.
Looking back, the game’s presentation probably played a big part in its success. The rulebook looked very different from those of other games on the market. It was filled with fiction, quotes from Schopenhauer and the Indigo Girls, brooding black-and-white artwork, and a relentless focus on theme. Its mechanics, such as they were, often took a backseat to emotion, identity, and esthetic. Character creation prioritized personality, inner conflict, and one’s place within a secretive, decaying society. The World of Darkness, as it came to be known, was more than just a setting. It was a tone, a posture, and a subculture, for good and for ill.
For players of old school D&D or Traveller, used to thinking of characters as problem-solvers and adventurers, Vampire was jarring. Here, the emphasis wasn’t so much on overcoming external challenges, but internal ones. What mattered wasn’t what your character could do, but who he was, what he felt, and how far he’d fall into monstrosity. The oft-parodied “angsty vampire with a katana" stereotype, while real, obscures just how radical this idea was at the time. Vampire: The Masquerade was – or at least aspired to be – a roleplaying game where introspection and tragedy weren’t just permissible but central.
From a mechanical standpoint, Vampire was a bit of a mess. Its Storyteller system was vague, inconsistent, and sometimes begged the question of whether mechanics mattered at all. Of course, it wasn’t designed to support dungeon delving or tactical combat. Instead, it aimed instead to foster collaborative storytelling, character drama, and social intrigue. For many players of the game, it more than succeeded in this aim and its approach to roleplaying soon became not only widespread but, I would argue, the norm.
The game also changed who played RPGs. Vampire brought in a lot of people who'd never played a roleplaying game of any kind, thereby changing the face of the wider hobby. Its gothic, romantic esthetic was attractive to these newcomers in a way that dragons, starships, and mutants never could be. Beyond that, Vampire inspired live-action roleplaying on a scale previously unseen and encouraged a style of play that emphasized character, emotion, and interpersonal drama over puzzles and tactical challenges. Like it or not, Vampire's impact was immense – to the point where the game was once a serious challenger to D&D's hegemony.
From the perspective of old school play, Vampire remains, in most respects, an alien creature. It’s driven more by narrative intention than by exploration or open-ended play. The referee – sorry, Storyteller – is often expected to have a plot and characters are meant to fit into it. That almost certainly rankles those of us for whom the oracular power of dice and emergent play are the acme of roleplaying. Even so, it’s impossible to deny what Vampire accomplished. It dared to be something different and, by doing so, it opened doors. Whether or not you liked what was on the other side, you had to admit it was impressive that someone found a key.
Played Vampire for a while in the early '90s. I quickly discovered that the game was able to unreveal the hidden depressions of all my friends. While D&D was fun and fresh air from our daily routine, Vampire was a way to show what, as a young teenagers were feeling, a portrait of what we would have done to society. The other big difference with D&D is that in Vampire you are alone, even within your group. The game is built to bring suspect to your friends, and the campaign in most cases ends with a confrontation between characters, instead of the final boss. All in all, not my cup of tea.
ReplyDeleteIn the last few years I worked with vtm material pretty much. I had worked to an osr version of that kind of cool-oriented game. What you say about oracular dice idols obviously true. Also, the whole thing is packed with good setting cdesign ideas.
ReplyDeleteI find it quite striking that, as far as I know, there were no adventures printed for Vampire--only 'splatbooks' (whose name comes from the wax seal-like graphic used for Vampire's sourcebooks).
ReplyDeleteThere were quite a lot. They struggled with the problem of telling meaningful stories with character quirks the designer, of course, had no way to know beforehand.
Delete"Splatbook" comes from the similar titles of the books, as in clanbook, tribebook, traditionbook, (i.e., *book) -- the asterisk being used as a wild card for computer stuff and sometimes referred to as a "splat". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatbook
DeleteI think I saw this somewhere as a kid ... and avoided it. Didn't like the look of it. Now that I know something about it, still not interested. Thanks for the review.
ReplyDeleteNever been much of a fan of WOD, let alone Vampire.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I had a couple of friends who loved it to pieces I think I played VTM exactly once and I didn't particularly care for it.
Now Mage (and to a lesser degree Wraith) had more charm in my eyes but nobody I knew was able to actually run a game.
I’ve always been kind of curious about Vampire, but it’s hard to find players now, and the one time I picked up a vampire book it looked like I might have to do a tone of lore reading to play. Still, it’s clearly a very different game, so it seems like it might be a good change of pace
ReplyDeleteI began playing D&D with the Holmes edition in 1977 and was still playing in the 90's when Vampire became popular. I had already tried and enjoyed WHFRP, by then, so trying out Vampire didn't seem like that big of a stretch from some of the Super Hero and Spy games of the past. At first, it enabled us to create stories/adventures similar to the Ann Rice novels. It provided a great deal of depth with the various clans, their powers, and their specific aspirations and lifestyles. We even went on to play Vampire the CCG and preferred it over Magic, at the time. After a few years, the allure of classic Fantasy and Sci-Fi brought me back into Warhammer and then cycled to D&D, again. Now I find some of the new games like Mothership, interesting.
ReplyDelete"a game considered by some fans of old school RPGs to represent a major point at which the hobby took a seriously wrong turn." I wouldn't go that far, but this sort of game is not for me.
ReplyDeleteVampire and its cousins might be role playing games but they are not Fantasy Adventure Games like TSR era D&D. I think therein lies the difference.
ReplyDelete“ The use of the term “fantasy adventure game” over the more often used “role-playing game” is intentional. Strikingly, the term “role-playing” appears nowhere in the original 1974 texts. Ideally, we who like this sort of game are interested in adventure—cooperatively exploring a fantastical world of strange terrors and fabulous treasures—not perfectly simulating the attitude and behavior of some grumpy dwarf, or whatever. Indeed, too much “role-playing” should be discouraged. “We don’t explore characters; we explore dungeons,” someone once said. Or as C.S. Lewis explained, making a point
about good science fiction that could apply equally well here, “To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much; he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange.” From the Introduction to Seven Voyages of Zylarthen by Oakes Spalding
Agreed. This style of gaming, as exemplified by Vampire, was far too feminine for me, exploring "feelings and identity". LOL. No thanks.
DeleteGlad I missed it.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think a game like this would have been right up my ally at the time: angsty, young guy in his 20s. Listens to new wave, grunge, punk. Brooding and introspective.
ReplyDeleteNOPE.
When I saw how the game is run, I said "nope". It was too artsy-fartsy for me. You resolve things with the LARP version with rock-paper-scissors?
Never got into this or any of the WoD stuff.
HARD PASS.
Agreed. This one was a hard pass for me as well, for obvious reasons.
DeleteYMMV. Played in multiple groups, all of which were by composition gamers who started in the (A)D&D fold, and played VtM (and Werewolf) absent drama classes, theatrics or baring-my-soul-angst. And also not as "superheroes that only come out at night". Very satisfying games that mixed mystery and intrigue (and of course politics) in a way (A)D&D or our other favorite FRPGs never could approach.
DeleteIn short, that "artsy-fartsy" perception was never the majority reality...and the LARP side of the coin is no different than the fantasy game LARP methods. And if you don't LARP (like we didn't LARP) it has no impact on the base game.
My one and only encounter with the game was in 1998, when I came across a LARPing group in an unlocked campus building I was passing through on my way home from grading papers as a TA. The Storyteller kindly and briefly explained to me what they were doing, invited me to join them sometime, and then returned to the game. People were wandering about, separate, on at least two floors, interacting briefly, returning to the Storyteller, and then seeking someone else. I observed it for a few minutes, and realized it was improvisational theater with a director, but never once did I suspect that this game was in any way an rpg. I thought it was more of an SCA kind of thing, but with vampires.
ReplyDeleteOf course, in reality, it is almost the ideal "California-style" game, maybe what D&D would have been had it originated with the psychedelics and been modded by the midwest wargamers, rather than vice-versa.
Funny thing is (one of) the driving forces behind White Wolf was a hugely invested AD&D player from tiny-town Minnesota with some of the most intricate and complete hand-drawn city maps and settings I have, to this day, ever seen. He came from the same cloth as any of us that started play in the late 70s/early 80s with a red or blue box (or maybe a white one, but not very often!) and did it as well or better than most everyone else in a way that would make the "traditionalists" wish they got to play in his games.
DeleteYou're dead-bang right about the LARP though...that *is* SCA with fangs, not the RPG.
Vampire, and indeed the entirety of WOD, are to me the core examples of "theoretical-only games". I simply cannot imagine them at play. Every time I peeked at a campaign of it, it was a powergaming ego trip on a scale even beyond the bent image of TSR that sometimes White Wolf casted as a straw man. That might not be the intent of game, but it shows how klutzy and contrived translating it into actual play is.
ReplyDeleteAll the stuff on WOD works much better as high concept on paper, as "movie script sales pitch" rather than as final product. The execution tends to be much, much more inchoate. A game to be read (perhap even with some gain), but not played.
That's the danger of dry-labbing. Yeah, there was certainly power fantasy in it...but is that remotely different from my name level Cavalier and your Archmagus?
DeleteIt also apparently directly inspired the factions and politics of Planescape.
ReplyDeleteI recall reading a very positive review of Planescape in, I think, White Wolf magazine.
DeleteAnother thing that I really didn't care for.
DeleteInteresting how non-controversial this comment section is, particularly with regard to some other recent ones. Apparently the position that games with girl cooties are bad is unanimous!
ReplyDeleteNowhere do I see anything resembling "girl cooties are bad" in this thread. You're delusional.
DeleteOne guy up there did say it was too feminine for him, but it's true that was just the one guy.
DeleteAddendum: And then a guy two comments down from us refers to "more manly forms of gaming." So the weird association of Vampire with concepts that are both girly and negative is definitely there in these comments, though not universal.
DeleteI suspect that a lot of that glut of media we saw in the early 2010s or so where broody vampires live in clans and have complex, hidden societies - "Twilight," "Vampire Diaries," etc. - can trace its origins back to seeds planted by V:TM. In that regard it's had an interesting impact on pop culture, although not to the degree D&D has.
ReplyDeleteAssiduously avoided this game like the plague. It exemplified the move to narrating and storytelling vs. the more manly forms of gaming that came before. A wonderful example of how "inclusivity" can be poisonous and destructive, consuming everything in its wake until we are left with the lowest common denominator, namely, a bland mush.
ReplyDeleteWhat, exactly, did it destroy? Besides sales records of most any non-D&D branded game before it? Giant swing and miss.
DeleteCheck your eyesight, Mordar. He at least had a foul ball there, if not a solid double or single. Truth is, he's at least partially correct.
DeleteMuch like Dragonlance represented and encouraged the shift to story-gaming and railroading in the 80s, Vampire encouraged the shift to emo, feeling- and identity-based, rules light if nonexistent roleplaying in the 90s.
In both cases, they could certainly be considered to have contributed to the "destruction" of a style of gaming that came before and to have encouraged new styles of gaming. In the case of Vampire, the style of gaming it encouraged definitely was more stereotypically feminine, with its focus on feelings and emotions.
Whether any of this change was good or bad of course is a matter for debate.
I had a group of friends who wrote for White Wolf, originally VTM. All of them were old hands at D&D going back at least a decade. In addition, they all had heavy personal issues that took on a darker tone and I think they found a sort of release in VTM. It was not for me, especially the tone. I had a knee jerk aversion to goth, grunge, and the general melancholy of 1990s culture, but VTM captured it perfectly. However, by the end of the decade I was playing Werewolf with a 17th century pirate backdrop, and looked back at D&D as a very bland game for the younger crowd. I was also playing Legend of the Five Rings with the same group of friends. None of us wanted to go back to D&D. We were looking for new experiences. Not Vampire, which was wallowed in the
ReplyDeletemorose , but settings and rules that challenged us with something new very different. The fantasy novelist Tom Deitz did some writing for White Wolf but continued playing D&D with what would now be called the Grognards. The stories he told me of those gaming sessions sounded like a great deal of fun, but I could not bring myself to switch back. In hindsight they would have been playing at something more akin to the OSR with a dash of Pendragon.
In teh late 80's and early 90's I was really into online text based virtual realities: MUDs, MUSHes, MUSE, etc, etc. The PernMUSH people were bad enough but the Masquerade games were insufferable.
ReplyDeleteAh. Good old fashioned MUD's. And let's not forget the 'text-based adventure' of early home systems (PC's, most likely, but not limited to).
Delete> you are in a large room, in which at the center stands a large table upon which stands a lamp.
$ get lamp
> you can't do that lamp
$ take lamp
> you can't do that lamp
$ pick up lamp
> you can't do that lamp
[ slightly frustrated ]
$ kick lamp
> you kick the lamp, which falls over, setting the room and yourself on fire.
> you have died. press 'n' to start over.
Fast forward time, and we got: '13th Age', 'Blades in the Dark', 'Fate Core System', and last but not least: 'Daggerheart'.
ReplyDelete13th Age is a D&D derivative. Literally co-designed by the 3rd edition mechanics guy and the 4th edition mechanics guy. So not necessarily Old School, but a weird thing to include in the list of what I presume are supposed to be squishy Vampire descendants.
DeleteAs far as I know, they are all (Vampire and 13th age included) primarily focused on 'telling a story' (aka the narrative), instead of the mechanics focused method of D&D.
DeleteThis game honestly just looks like something made for late 80s and early 90s Goth Kids. The 2nd wave of "real goth" kids before turning into Hot Topic Mall Goth that doesn't resemble the culture much. The ones that actually wore capes around your school, thought they were vampiric, and looked like Robert Smith from the Cure. And were very benign.
ReplyDeleteAdd to it that the Crow was ultra popular at this time for more normal "alternative" and metal head teens and early 20 year olds to add into the popularity.
If this is a turning point in RPG's... I have to mention one of the major turning points for me with the Hobby was Magic the Gathering.
I was at the GENCON when it came out and it seriously tore a massive rift between the people there. Anecdotally, it felt like over 50% of the people there were sitting and looking over cards now. People playing pick up role playing games in the Halls like previous years diminished massively and you could feel RPG's losing their footing.
I wouldn't be surprised if TSR lost a good chunk of revenue in the space because of both of these things... leading to the eventual sale to Magic the Gathering's parent company a few years later.
You'd have a hard time finding a more obsessive Vampire: The Masquerade fan than I was in 1991 (I was, not coincidentally, in college); it restarted my roleplaying habit with a vengeance after my high school years, during which I was more interested in theater and girls.
ReplyDeleteI mention this not for bragging rights (believe me, there is no bragging possible with regard to twenty-year-old chowderheaded me), but to establish that Vampire was, is, and always will be Important to Me, even though I no longer play it regularly.
With those bona fides under my belt, let me say what I came here to say: this is (for me, anyway) a gracious, well-balanced, and noncontroversial presentation of a game that is clearly not for you, James. I read it with my hackles up a bit, expecting to be offended, and I was not. I bristled a bit at your swipe at the Storyteller title, but I can't pretend you don't have a point about pretension; indeed, for college-age me, the pretension was very much the point.
In other words, if you do indeed wind up fomenting contentious dispute here, I don't think it will be your fault.
The truth is I genuinely like many aspects of the "old school" (ha!) World of Darkness. Mage was the game that got me to reconsider my instinctual dislike of the whole thing and then Wraith cemented my appreciation of it. As I've explained elsewhere, some of my earliest published credits as a professional writer are for White Wolf, so I'm actually quite fond of some of these games.
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