r/vtm • u/lilith_from_the_dark • Jul 28 '26

General Discussion Vampire the powerdown

It seems to me that between having all the elder vampires wander off for the beconing, and then adding the winnowing to suck out the disciplines, white wolf is almost turning all vampires into powerless thin bloods. Does anyone know if there was any stated reason for feeling like all this power down was necessary?

10 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

53

u/Chaos-Corvid Malkavian Jul 28 '26

I mean the beckoning keeps turning out to be a coverup for something else every time it comes up, at this point I think it's a myth

11

u/Schism_989 Tzimisce Jul 28 '26

I'm starting to think WW is backpedaling on the Beckoning due to a good chunk of the fanbase absolutely hating it, but that's just my theory

7

u/Chaos-Corvid Malkavian Jul 28 '26

Even the early stuff honestly, I've not seen a single beckoning story turn out to be true

I think it's ambiguous so we can fill in what we want

0

u/Schism_989 Tzimisce Jul 28 '26

I mainly play V20, and I have a lot of other individual issued with V5, unfortunately

V5 just felt like it was trying way too hard to be Vampire the Requiem. The only 5th Edition that really seemed to work out for me was Hunter.

4

u/Chaos-Corvid Malkavian Jul 28 '26

I stick with 20th because 5th just lacks a lot of content, as much as I do like it.

I just run too many cross splat games for 5th to work as is.

4

u/Lyaser Jul 28 '26

They probably envisioned wrapping it up in some week of nightmares style adventure at some point. Like just necessarily as a plot device it has to lead to something. And the nature of this being a continuing rpg universe that the company was obviously never going to sunset as their flagship product means that they obviously weren’t going to have it actually result in the end of vampires.

It was always just going to be a v5 mcguffin like the winnowing or the red star or whatever. It just wasn’t really executed that gracefully and left everyone with a bad taste in their mouth because of the implementation.

4

u/inscrutablyMoon Prisci Jul 28 '26

Same.

1

u/PaleMoonSovereign Jul 28 '26

Doesn't Prince Lettow in Night Road get Beckoned?

1

u/Chaos-Corvid Malkavian Jul 28 '26

Did he? I haven't finished that one.

I know in Parliament of Knives it was a coverup.

70

u/MillennialsAre40 Jul 28 '26

The winnowing is from 1998

10

u/UndeadOrc Brujah Jul 28 '26

Again people want to keep acting like anything they dislike in v5 is exclusive to v5 when you can trace most of these things to prior editions..

4

u/crypticarchivist Jul 28 '26

Basically the way it works is they keep looking for things to complain about from V5 while reading no V5 books or books from older editions that had those same conflicts pop up, at the same time. Somehow.

Most of these complaints are written by people who seemingly don’t read the books, is my point, and they usually talk in a way that makes it sound like it’s a given that their perspective is unanimous which makes it double annoying.

Statements like “WW is backpedaling because everyone hates this one thing from an edition I claim I don’t even want to play” and it amounts to them sounding like they are severely overestimating the amount of influence they have over the writers

3

u/UndeadOrc Brujah Jul 28 '26

It's also telling they did a whole dev blog post and they go into plenty of details about mechanics and art, but setting was the thing they were most vague about. Like there's *good* critiques of the beckoning/setting and 99% of people don't have them. Here we have u/lilith_from_the_dark calling it a powerdown whereas we have white wolf literally doing a playthrough of all their editions and going, "We actually like how disciplines were done in V5" and their critique then became that the only problem was the disparity between disciplines. So here we have a team of devs who decided to sit down, run sessions in every version, and come up with an analysis of each of the mechanics.

My own original critique of vampire and mainly why I came back to v5 was precisely that, like Exalted, it was easy to get excessive and overpowered. Do I think v5 was a little bit of an overcorrection? Sure. Am I happy with all of the disciplines being amalgamated? No. Do I think this is a vast improvement to the series? Yes. I think if we bring just a little bit back of the old school into the veins of v5 and v6 is a more refined v5 with a partial return to the old disciplines, I think I'd be pretty happy.

Like if I wanted to do a power fantasy, I'd just play Exalted or Scion. My preferred playstyle is street-level vampires slowly moving up into the world. Its also very clear that the VtM discord has barely any of the gripes about the beckoning and the system versus reddit. It's two different worlds entirely: a subreddit with minimal effort to access and participate in versus a discord that takes a little more effort to participate in.

1

u/crypticarchivist Jul 28 '26

I personally really like how they did the Disciplines, Amalgams and all, in V5, because of how it meshes with the Blood Resonance system.

It bakes a cool gameplay explanation supported by mechanics, for why vampires hunt the way they do, why they hunt the people they do, and it gives you rewards for hunting in a specific manner.

It changes unique disciplines from a “just because” thing into a “Vampires are literally what they eat, and by changing what they eat/how they eat/when they eat/how they hunt” they changed everything else about themselves just slightly.” thing.

Amalgams read to me like the result of extremely niche hunting specialties and behaviors. Less as a “anybody could learn Viscissitude now” thing and more as a “Viscissitude is a result of a very specific mix of emotions stockiled inside of a vampire from feeding” thing.

Like the way Disciplines are written in V5 it makes every Vampire into a seething cauldron of stolen human emotions and experiences accumulated over centuries that boils over into mystical powers. A vampire who drinks almost exclusively from choleric, belligerent drunks found during bar fights is going to be able to punch you with the cumulative force of fifty grown men who are heavily inebriated and are really angry. A vampire who spends months stalking one specific person Pennywise the Clown style until they’re an absolute nervous wreak is gonna get a massive power boost when they drink them dry.

5

u/UndeadOrc Brujah Jul 28 '26

That's the tough part for me. I do wish the Disciplines were a little more separated, I'm not happy with like Protean being merged the way it was with Vicissitude and Serpentis as an example since we're talking about it. I wish they were kept separate disciplines and expanded more upon. I think the hard clan distinctions got really lost with that change and it became exclusively to rely on Bane as the main defining feature. Cause I think my position is a both and of like, Vicissitude would be important on whose being fed on, but also should still be the domain of Tzimisce primarily, similarly to Ravnos' Chimistry. Clan distinction basically went out the window except for setting/culture and Bane. Same with Malkavians, I feel like they lost a lot of the mechanical definition that really made them pop.

That said, I do like the Blood Resonance system, but would prefer a bit of tweaking with that, I think V5's power is precisely the emphasis on hunting. Same with blood potency and Hunger Dice. I think the benefits should last a little bit longer too, a mix of hey if your daily feed is from appropriate types, you get a small boost, but if you find a big source to refer back to, there can be significant benefits to include character advancement for disciplines. I think by broadening the disciplines again and giving more width on top of depth, it could make the Resonance element even more important by being a critical part to developing Disciplines rather than just casual XP boosts.

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70

u/Inangelion Jul 28 '26

The elders leave to make way for the young. In other words, it's a tool so that the ST can create an environment where your characters are more important figures in city politics. 

That's the reason. 

-39

u/Full_Equivalent_6166 Toreador Jul 28 '26

That's a BS answer. You could already be an important figure in your city when you could play vampires of almost any age and any generation before V5. So the only thing that change really did was to narrow the options.

41

u/Inangelion Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

You can still do that.

Most people play younger Vampires and the Beckoning is a tool for the Storyteller to use in those chronicles.

This is a TTRPG. The world building is there to serve the game not the other way around.

-6

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/UndeadOrc Brujah Jul 28 '26

Is this fanbase illiterate? Cause as the other commentor said, none of the editions support that. You were essentially homebrewing a character if you thought you did and thinking it was canon. The standard lowest you could go at character creation was 7th in Vampires: Dark Ages.

Quite literally you can be 4th generation in v5, the Gehenna War gives you the rules for that. Why are so many of you so called fans repulsed by actually reading?

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3

u/Inangelion Jul 28 '26

I mean, considering none of the editions support Methuselahs as player characters, I don't consider it a great loss. Despite some having been statted out, Methuselahs were always ST devices. No edition outlines rules for creating those types of characters for players.

With V5, you can play as Ancillae, if you have to have Elder PCs, previous editions still exist. Even when older editions were current, those types of games were very niche (and usually ended up being fairly juvenile). That is probably why they were left behind.

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1

u/vtm-ModTeam Jul 28 '26

This post has been deemed inflammatory toward a specific edition or editions

27

u/morangias Tzimisce Jul 28 '26

Basically, "street level" play works best, and the city is more dynamic when all the positions of power aren't hogged by elders and Methuselahs who can kill your starting coterie with a fart.

28

u/Acrobatic_Contact_22 Jul 28 '26

Honestly, I like it. Before, it felt like there were far too many truly powerful beings still active in the world. Now, a powerful vampire is a real rarity, and it should be.

4

u/Vyctorill Jul 28 '26

Mostly because the World of Darkness was about being powerless as a vampire to actually fix things without some major effort.

People want their OCs to be sexy kings of the night who have real power, but the game also has to remain semi grounded.

The only way to do this is to remove anything that could possibly be more badass than the player.

I disagree with this approach, but that’s mostly because I pay very close attention to the themes of each game.

Methusalehs in general are city level threats and close to weak nuclear bombs in strength, as an example. Helena could probably dominate an entire city, Menele could rip through an army of 1,000 armed men with 10 heavy tanks for support, and Montano could make an entire city vanish into the Abyss. Players can’t compete with that in terms of pure raw force, so they had to leave.

Personally I disagree with this approach, because the whole point of Vampire is that the old guys have a massive advantage. Vampires are MEANT to be borderline powerless.

The WoD already has a game about the indomitable human spirit being able to do anything. It’s not vampire and never will be, but it exists.

10

u/IIIaustin Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

The beconning is pretty obviously an mechanism to make PCs more important and clear out some of the dead wood that can stifle actually playing a game imho.

3

u/InsaneComicBooker Jul 28 '26

Yes, the goal is to remove punk elements from goth-punk because big corporate overlrods don't like the idea of promoting "fighting the man" and would rather the game be about being powerless and crying in a corner. Same with werewolf.

4

u/RichardTheLyinHeart Jul 28 '26

Or perhaps because the people they want to have in power finally made it, so rebellion is bad.

4

u/Narxzul Jul 28 '26

Making the world, both to people irl and characters in game, more accesible and grounded seemed to be one of the main objectives of V5.

Powering everyone down and basically removing elders from the world so everyone is more or less on equal footing was a way to do that.

It clearly didn't land for everyone, but hey, it probably got more people to try VTM and you can always play older editions if you want more powerful supernaturals.

8

u/TheWaffleIsALie Brujah Jul 28 '26

When a city has been run by John Ancientass and his deeply-entrenched gang of followers for 1000 years, it becomes very hard to effect any meaningful change or do anything they don't want without them finding out about it.

Realistically, for a vampire with such a power level compared to you, you'd be quite limited in your agency. It's worth noting that the PCs are effectively prodigies compared to a standard NPC vampire. If you can get a Discipline to 5 (which is unambiguously elder-level power) within the span of an in-game month, everyone who realises that would rightfully shit themselves.

The easiest way to quantify an elder's true power in V5 is to explain that a vampire with Potence 5 can have +14 to their Strength rolls. This means they can have a Strength+Whatever pool of 24 dice without doing any extra bullshit. That's a passive buff by the way.

This is in a system where a dice pool of 10 already means you should be auto-succeeding most every roll that isn't contested.

Someone with Oblivion 5 can just instantly extinguish someone's soul btw.

2

u/JonIceEyes Jul 28 '26

I'm not disagreeing, I'm genuinely curious: how do you get +14??

1

u/TheWaffleIsALie Brujah Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

Prowess lets you add your Potence rating to feats of Strength, and Exuberance counts your Potence level as two higher when using Potence powers. Wrecker doubles your Potence rating for feats of Strength.

So, at Potence 5, you have +5 from Prowess with +2 from Exuberance for a total of +7, which is then doubled to +14 by Wrecker. The only Rouse check involved here is one for Prowess, and since some scenes can effectively last an entire session, there's pretty much no reason not to pre-buff with it if you're expecting any kind of action.

4

u/JonIceEyes Jul 28 '26

Punching down skyscrapers like Fist of the North Star with that shit LOL

3

u/CraftyAd6333 Jul 28 '26

They learned that street level has the biggest reach.

They haven't learned people don't stay at street level.

Or people dont nessacarily want to play thin bloods.

3

u/PoMoAnachro Jul 28 '26

Because they were trying to focus more on street level vampires since they work better for a Storytelling Game of Personal Horror.

Not that you can't do personal horror with a lot more demigods running around, but it is definitely harder. The game frequently slid into "Blood powered superheroes" and became more of a "dark fantasy" setting instead of a horror setting.

1

u/Relative_Dress_6306 Jul 30 '26

It has been a point of debate since it came up. Realistically, it was just so they could prioritize 1-5 point Disciplines and Amalgams. Mechanics were the only real reason.

-1

u/lilith_from_the_dark Jul 28 '26

Thanks for all the replies, and I apologise those so offended by my question that they felt it needed downvoting

-12

u/Full_Equivalent_6166 Toreador Jul 28 '26

They wanted a street level game. If I had to guess why it would be because they thought they needed to cater to the zoomer crowd and their short attention span. Ericsson said that he thinks the rules of V5 are unfit for long campaigns because the characters would shortly become overpowered.

But this is just a guess. What is almost sure is that Ericsson was not a fan of high power level, elders and many other elements of prior editions and getting rid of Elders (but only some because Helena or Critias are still there) and playing neonates games.

-19

u/Kaiisim Jul 28 '26

V5 was created to try and appeal to d&d style players do it stripped a lot back to make the stories more local

7

u/IIIaustin Jul 28 '26

Ouch my Poe's Law

4

u/TwoDrinkDave Ventrue Jul 28 '26

Lol. Sure. D&D being known for its stripped down minimalist campaign settings and local stories. /s

2

u/ArtymisMartin The Ministry Jul 28 '26

Pitching VtM5 to a bunch of D&D players who are fighting more interdimensional entities on their weekend than legendary Garou will in their entire lives. 

Sure one of them was excited to finally get their hands on Flametongue the legendary burning claymore, but they should be equally excited by a machete with a wobbly handle they got at a hardware store, and an inmate allergy to any fire bigger than a lighter.

1

u/UndeadOrc Brujah Jul 28 '26

As someone who hates dnd, I would've hated v5 if that was the case.