The 1st Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade was supposed to be “a storytelling game of personal horror.” That was literally the entire back cover text, except for a quote from Günter Dorn‘s Das Ungeheuer Darin (a fictional work). Early in the book, Mark Rein*Hagen writes:
This storytelling game provides a way to experience a terror of an all too immediate nature, for it allows you to experience the horror from the other side of the mirror. The horror of Vampire is the curse of what it is like to be half-beast and half-angel, trapped in a world of no absolutes, where morality is chosen, not ordained. The horror of Vampire is the stirrings of the Beast within and the cravings for warm blood. Perhaps the greatest risk of playing Vampire is seeing yourself in the mirror. To play this game, you must bear witness to the madness within you, that which you strive to master and overcome, that which you cannot bear to face.
Why, then, in actual practice did the game so often manifest as “katanas & trenchcoats” — a style of play that others have described as “superheroes with fangs”?
This shift in focus seemed to happen despite the best intentions: Vampire players were all about the “personal horror” and “it’s an immersive storytelling experience, not a combat simulator” selling points of the game. They strongly self-identified with those values. And yet their games would somehow still often end up being katanas & trenchcoats.
In some cases, of course, this style of escapism was simply more appealing to the players; the vampire as a cool and enigmatic avatar was more fun than the vampire as a form of self-reflection on the nihilism of morality and the fragility of humanity. But if this were the fundamental issue — that the appeal of escapism will necessarily override an RPG’s intended style of play — then you would expect to see this be more or less universally true.
And it isn’t.
Take, for example, Call of Cthulhu. Here is another popular, widely played horror game which emphasizes a shift away from the D&D-style “combat simulator,” featuring characters whose humanity and sense of identity is steadily eroded by their exposure to cosmic, uncaring, inhuman truths. But even in the case of Pulp Cthulhu, which deliberately seeks to blend that style of play with a sort of Indiana Jones savoir-faire, it still appears to be passingly rare for “shotguns vs. Cthulhu” gameplay to emerge.
Why?
Well, there are a number of factors that probably contribute. But the title of this essay probably gives away the fact that I think it largely boils down to the game structures (or lack of those structures) supporting the desired style of play in both Vampire and Call of Cthulhu. Because, as I’ve noted in the past, players gravitate towards structure.
It’s easy to simplify this down to, “Call of Cthulhu has a Sanity mechanic!” And then people say, “But Vampire had a Humanity mechanic!” But this is, in fact, an over-simplification because it fails to look at the game structures that were built around those core mechanics.
HUMANITY vs. SANITY
At first glance, Humanity and Sanity seem similar: Both are numerical meters. Over time, characters lose them. When the meter runs out, the character is permanently “broken” in a way compatible with the overriding theme of horror in each game and can no longer be played as a PC.
In the case of Vampire, however, although a small grab bag of mechanics were based on the character’s current Humanity score, virtually no structures were built around the loss of Humanity. The Degeneration mechanic (which didn’t even have a name in 1st Edition) was something that the GM was supposed to trigger more or less by fiat when the PCs took certain types of actions.
Superficially, this once again appears identical to Call of Cthulhu‘s Sanity mechanic. Here, too, the GM is supposed to trigger a sanity roll whenever a certain condition is met during play. So what’s the difference?
Look at all the game structures in Call of Cthulhu built around the Sanity mechanic: Every creature you face triggers a Sanity check. Virtually every grimoire of forbidden knowledge you read triggers a Sanity check. And the game also has a very specific default scenario hook which is, “Go investigate strange creatures and grimoires of forbidden knowledge.”
So basically everything in Call of Cthulhu is built around the Sanity mechanic. By contrast, Humanity is just off in a corner twiddling its thumbs.
Furthermore, as you lose Sanity in Call of Cthulhu you become more likely to fail your sanity tests. It’s a path of accelerating decay that ends in madness. Vampire, on the other hand, utilized a “hierarchy of sin”:
- Humanity 10: accidental wrongdoing
- Humanity 9: any sort of purposeful wrongdoing
- Humanity 8: shoplifting
- Humanity 7: theft and robbery
- Humanity 6: unintentional killing
- Humanity 5: wanton destruction
- Humanity 4: causing injury and personal harm
- Humanity 3: sadism and perversion
- Humanity 2: murder
- Humanity 1: the most heinous and demented acts
If your Humanity has already fallen below the point where a particular type of act is considered a “sin,” then you no longer have to make checks for it. The system is literally designed to plateau your character at a Humanity score equivalent to whatever style of play you prefer and then stop calling for Degeneration checks.
So not only was the system not supported by structures that would make it a central pillar of play, it was actually structurally designed to remove itself from play entirely.
And that’s why Call of Cthulhu remains focused on its existential horror and Vampire… doesn’t. It’s not designed to.
I would be curious to hear your take on the role of Honor scores in RPGs.
While I hear what you’re saying, and I acknowledge that there are gamers who require mechanisms that force a certain play style, there are plenty of gamers who are there to role-play, and a designer’s comments are enough for them to at least consider playing a game “as intended.” When V:tM came out, I proposed a campaign of bleak despair, in which painted corpses struggled with existential bloodlust while vainly acting out empty mockeries of the human existence that had been ripped from them. That was the campaign they signed up for, and we played it with such virisimilitude that I finally had to end it — it was just too disturbing.
You are forgetting something important. Upon falling down to humanity 4 you need to make willpower rolls,(or something along those lines), to avoid degenerating further
CoC characters are also much more soft and squishy their entire careers. WoD characters typically are much more cappable than all but the most demanding of competition.
The squishiness of CoC characters points out a thing that’s very relevant for me: many players (including myself) are much better at playing *fear* than *horror*. You the player can be scared at the table, and playing the reaction “no sir, I don’t want to go in there” is much less of a reach than “I am a monster gradually succumbing to worse temptation.” I don’t generally enjoy playing characters I don’t sympathize with, and e.g. Shelby above gave it what sounds like a good go and still decided they didn’t like it either.
Having more mechanics that actually push that storyline to the forefront might succeed only in making the game less popular.
@Adrian: That optional rule wasn’t actually added to the game until the Revised Edition in ’98.
Great as always! I see a lot of rpg designers (especially in the indie sphere) shift their mentality towards making game structures that enable, encourage and support the desired style/genre of play. We can all agree that an able group of people can turn almost any rpg into a make-believe game of their choice (yay for homebrewing!), but it takes an awesome game design to turn any group of player towards the game experience intended by the creators of the game. That is why we need good, explicit game structures designed specifically to address the indented styles and genres of play.
I’d be interested to know whether you think the most recent version of Vampire: the Masquerade, or either edition of Vampire: the Requiem, succeeds in this regard. (For the record, I haven’t played any of these games myself.)
This post is extremely timely for my purposes. I’ve been working on a story-game Wraith-alike, i.e. an adaptation of WW’s Wraith: the Oblivion, using a hodge-podge of rules stolen from FATE, Apocalypse World, Sorcerer, a bunch of OSR sources, and quite centrally the plot map mechanics from TechNoir and related discussion thereof from this blog. Some observations apropos of your comments above:
1. Justin’s old posts here on game structures and plot mapping have been my lodestar in approaching this design. If you read a half-dozen discussion posts on the web about WW’s various World of Darkness games, you’ll see the same discussions crop up again and again: great world, exciting character conception process, crap mechanics, “but it’s great if you have the right GM and the right group” etc etc. I agree with Justin that, even more fatal than the crappy overall mechanics, the lack of a default game structure and the mis-calibrated Sanity mechanics (Humanity, Angst, Banality/Bedlam, Paradox, whatever) are what really sinks those games.
2. The more time I’ve poured into designing something like Wraith but with a strong default game structure and sanity mechanics that drive that structure forward, the more I’ve come to appreciate some of the design choices from the original game. I’ve come to believe that the world and the mechanics provided by the designers actually lend themselves to a really thematically consistent and compelling set of play experiences if you have a GM and co-players who really grok them on a deep level. But as Justin has pointed out in his discussion on game structures: a game design that only works for experts is not a great game design.
3. I think that the WoD games would have benefited tremendously from the innovations that came in their wake, from both the story games movement and the OSR: tight, explicit mechanics and procedures that define the core gameplay loop. If your game is about intrigue, you need to have structured “intrigue” rules. If your game is about balancing your sanity against your need to feed and your need to rise within the ranks of a social hierarchy, you need explicit gameplay structures that allow these thins to be traded against on another in a way that results in meaningful choices made by the player. You can’t count on the player and GM to just “role-play” their way into these situations; you need game structures that set the situations up naturally and provide consistent, understandable mechanisms for resolving them. Most importantly of all, if you provide 50 pages of mechanics for resolving combat and a few sentences on resolving intrigue (e.g., “you can roll Persuade to Persuade people”), you’re going to get combat-centric gameplay.
I know this is all pretty trite and has been said many times before. But I’ve been confronting the nuts and bolts of this problem and this setting and trying to figure out how to provide a play structure that resonates with the themes of the setting while giving play groups a set of default actions, default resolution mechanisms etc, and it’s really been an eye-opener for me. I can’t overstate how much Justin’s writing on these subjects has influenced my thinking.
One tip: if you want to take a look at a really well-done story-game Vampire-alike, find a copy of Undying from Magpie Games. Really good job of boiling down the themes of the setting (status, loss of humanity) into a very tight set of mechanics.
I grew up reading WoD books, and everytime I finished reading the storyteller section of any corebook, I always thought “what kind of games I am supossed to run?” Now I know it’s because the games don’t have a structure at all (other than the suggestion of a three act ‘story’ structure… ugh!). I have bittersweet feelings about WoD (old and new). I have some books in my shelf, but only as cool coffee table art books that remind me of my teenage years. To finish my gratuitous WoD rant, I always found cynical of the designers to put a huge load of cool powers, and to expect a mature style of play.
Very recently I discovered that RPGs are not the best vehicles for telling traditional stories out there (contrary of what I thought, growing in a environment of roleplayers that put a coat of WoD practices in every game that they played).
Great content anyway!!
@ 10 Seguramente
Yes, that has been my experience as well. There’s a lot of stuff I love about the CoD books: great world-building, well-designed mechanics, lots of good stuff. But even after reading a bunch of those books, I still have no clue what kind of game or scenario structures the system is built for:, what the PCs are supposed to be doing, how they are supposed to go about doing it, or what is expected to interfere with them.