General thoughts on Vampire

I've been interested in rpg's for quite a while, and one of those is Vampire.  I nostalgically look back at first edition Vampire from time to time, always reminded that I just liked the flavor of it better than all its successors.  Obviously, its systems were lacking something, as it was the first essay into the World of Darkness.  There are a few things I think I liked about it better than later editions.  I like that it focused on personal horror, rather than politics, and that it had a sort of pure and almost innocent mystery to it.  To be sure, I also liked a lot of developments in later editions, particularly revised, and in some of the dark ages stuff.

However, I like things to be systematic.  One thing that has occasionally aggravated me about various incarnations of Masquerade is its lack of systematic expression, a feature relatively endemic to OWOD.  One thing I like in my systems is that things follow a causal or developmental chain, that big things develop from small things, that similar things stem from the same root, and that there not be too much redundancy.  Oh how it irritated me to see five or ten powers with the same conceptual basis and all completely different origins and effects.  I was thus delighted to see the use of Combo Disciplines in Revised, and their expansion into a full on system of Devotions in Requiem.  In fact, I liked a whole LOT of systematization that occurred in Requiem and NWOD generally, but there were a few things I didn't, and there were a lot of things lost.

In particular, the grandeur and mystery was lost, along with the general capacity of elders to be elders, and the reduction of clans to 5.  While I thought some of the previous clans were overblown bloodlines, they were still significant in various ways, and more so once the "meta-plot" had been explored.  I guess the biggest thing that irritated me about the new system was how bloodlines were handled.

In Masquerade, bloodlines were essentially smaller clans.  Though there were no mechanics for creating bloodlines or transforming clans into bloodlines, it was pretty evident that various bloodlines extended from various clans and had generally switched weaknesses and one or two disciplines.  Further, though there were quite a few bloodlines in Masquerade, each one related in some way to the larger story.  In Requiem, Bloodlines have stuff added on, which I didn't like, and there are an arbitrarily large number of them, making each of them a relatively meaningless niche feature.  Also, a large majority of canon produced bloodlines have new disciplines.  Generally, most of those disciplines seemed like they could have been devotions or something.  At any rate, the handling of Bloodlines represented the primary vector of non-systematic expansion of the new system, which I find aesthetically displeasing.

Some things I did like about Requiem were the covenants, which provided more political dynamics and some of the general differences in how vampires generally, blood ties, blood bonds, etc. worked.

Comparing Masquerade and Requiem, I generally liken the former to being modernistic, with its central themes, monolithic hierarchies and epic scale.  Requiem I consider to be postmodern, with its buffet style of character development.

So that covers my general take on what's been done.  Next post, I talk about what I want to change and the thought processes I went through in arriving there.