Post by Mercury "Merc" Miller on Nov 15, 2012 15:47:58 GMT -8
One Summons Angels, the other rides a BMX
So I've been thinking a lot about Tremere and magic-using Kindred, and I think it has to be put out there because it bugs me. The basic idea is "I had fun with a Tremere, so who cares about any so-called design flaws? You can't tell me I didn't have fun!"
Well, in one way that is true. On the other hand, you're a fucking moron because liking something doesn't mean it's good.
Vampire: The Masquerade is fundamentally broken in several ways.
Bad Design
1) Caster advantages far outweigh noncaster advantages. The only advantage a caster has over a noncaster is, obviously, spells. But the thing with spells is that spells can literally do anything you can think of, and they can also do it better than anyone else. Invisibility, Silence, and Knock outdo anything a Dextrous vampire can do with his skills. Fireballs outdo anything Pierce can do with his sword. In addition, spells let you do things that you cannot do any other way. You can't teleport or travel to other planes or fly or create walls instantly without spells. Unfortunately, this idea of "magic can do anything, but better" seems to be alive and well in V20 as well as VtM.
2) Supposed noncaster advantages don't exist. Fighters are supposed to be the guys who are the toughest, lay down the most damage, and last the longest. However, they are easily surpassed by casters in their own field. Spells can give casters the ability to beat the fighter in his own niche. You can be tougher, hit harder, and fight longer through spells and rituals than you can without them.
Masquerade is poorly designed, at least in terms of caster/noncaster disparity. Now, I am not saying that Requiem doesn't have it's own problems, because it does. However, these problems are much more limited in scope so I'm skipping them for now.
Having Fun
So, now the argument becomes "I don't care! Just because you say there's problems doesn't mean I'm not having fun! Masquerade is a good game because I'm having fun!" WRONG
People can have fun doing almost anything. Some people enjoy removing their genitals - this does not make removing your genitals a good idea. Many people have enjoyed Monopoly, which as commonly played is a terrible game that was designed to be terrible! Someone in some strange land may even have enjoyed a game of FATAL somehow.
Poor design doesn't force you to not have fun, but it inhibits it.
The major problem with magic-use in a Vampire-sphere game is inherent imbalance in a cooperative format. The core idea in a LARP is that a group of disparate characters have a goal and resolve said goal through a combination of their individual gameplay powers and roleplaying. The first part is where game design comes into play, and where Masquerade fails. This is the caster/noncaster divide as explained above. It is perfectly possible to have fun in a game where some players are just inherently stronger than others (Ars Magica and Dresden Files are examples of games that do this, by the method of A) swapping the spotlight of having the strongest character swap between players, or B)giving the less powerful characters their own methods of entering into the spotlight). In Masquerade the noncasters are just less important in every way that is affected by the rules. The noncaster is less powerful in combat, and is less able to affect the narrative through gameplay actions. Now, this has nothing to do with how they roleplay - a Brujah and a Tremere can be equally effective and able to hold the spotlight through roleplaying or supposed "old school" style player skill.
This is where the fallacy comes in. You can try to make up for gameplay weakness with roleplaying strength - but you shouldn't have to. A great roleplayer is a great roleplayer whether he's playing Cardano, Prince of Boston or Smudge the Ignored. Roleplaying has nothing to do with your ability to affect gameplay at all! (at least in Vampire - other games like FATE have methods to combine the two) That said, the context of your roleplaying can be effected. You can roleplay as a powerful Brujah, equally as capable as your Tremere and Assamite allies in any home game. However, in a LARP, this roleplaying claim is completely at odds with your actual capabilities when it comes to gameplay. The broken gameplay inhibits your ability to believably display what you try to roleplay as.
Fun is a strange thing. You can have fun with a poorly designed system - but you can also have fun with a good system. The problem is that the poorly designed system has traps in it. If I want to play a cool Gangrel who can slaughter his way through a pack of enemies, and is tough, smart and capable, easily as useful and broadly competent as any Tremere, I can do that in a well-designed system. In a poorly-designed systems (specifically Masquerade), that's not a character concept that exists. If I try to force it, the system itself holds me back - it doesn't allow me to be as good as my buddy who decided to write Tremere on his sheet instead of Malkavian.
So why is this relevant at all? Can't you just play like you've played since the 90s and not run into these problems?
Well not really. System Matters. System matters because it defines how the system will expand, how people will approach problem solving with the system, and how the system reacts to unexpected play.
In terms of expansion the Masquerade model is bad because it establishes a precedent right from the first book. "Thamaturgy and two other disciplines are balanced against another clan with 3 common disciplines." These are considerations that designers took into account when designing every facet of the expansions. And as a result shit gets really goddamn ridiculous. Rituals replicate (or obviate) entire class features and the combat system draws no value distinction between weakness to magic and weakness to being hit with pointy things, when it should. It gets even worse when you remember that designers designed antagonists around the assumption that you have access to certain disciplines.
The overemphasis on Rituals also changes the focus of the game. Skills are in part to blame as well for this, but when confronted with a difficult problem in Masquerade the first place people turn is the Chantry. Rituals and Auspex come together to bypass entire parts of the game. There are even rituals allowing Tremere to bypass her own weaknesses. Even when they are forced to interact with the systems everyone else has to use, THEY ARE BETTER AT IT. Glibness rituals reduce social skills to nothing, Detect and Discern and Scry reduce searching and investigation skills to meaninglessness, even hand to hand combat comes into the casters wheelhouse when you consider the various buffs. As a result of this, instead of turning to your character sheet or your brain for improv, you turn to Rituals.
Finally the overemphasis on rituals fucks up how the system reacts to unexpected play. A storyteller can never plan for everything, but high end magic makes it downright impossible to plan for anything. A Tremere with enough blood and a small amount of time can render ANY challenge prepared moot, short of straight combat with Caine.
All these foibles of the system fundamentally change how the game is played. Even in a group that is trying to play in a gothic horror style, the way that rules interact will trickle in the imbalance and the errors that people here especially detest. You can still have fun, but eventually you end up having fun despite the game, not because of it.
In many ways, designing (or continuing to play in) a bad RPG with little thought given to the mechanics is the easiest and laziest kind of game design you can get. You have large word counts to fill (good when you're paid by the word, especially in an industry as stingy as this one) and a fairly large portion of the playerbase is ready to make excuses for you! It's not balanced, you say? Well you're just being a rollplayer.
The impetus for this giant wall of text that none of you will read, least of all magic-using player, was a comment Paul had at Post Mortem last week - "I had a great time running these scenes, because all the people who could instantly solve it were out of town, and I got to see you guys get creative."
That it was taken as a joke by the players should horrify anyone who wants to have cool stories all the time everywhere.
And I get it, Vampire isn't D&D, it isn't supposed to be 'fair' and the players aren't always working to each other's benefit as the Big Damn Heroes. But when one team has an infinite and uncrossable gulf of power over the others, it isn't fun. It will never be "fun" to be fundamentally inferior in every conceivable way to a magic-using clan. Seriously. When I ask why Magic-users get a ritual creation system, and an entire "time before game" subsystem just so they can jack off to more dots on their sheet showing how much better they are, and am told, "Well, there's a crafting system, too!" when the Tremere can also utilize that crafting system, that is - frankly - bullshit.
How would the game react if only Ventrue could use the investment/finance subsystems? Or only Toreador could use the Craft system?
And there is lore and flavor to support a multitude of solutions, from forced retirements (what are some of the most powerful Tremere ever to drink a drop of blood doing in a backwater frontier town like Seattle, anyway?) to adjusting the feeding system so that the Tremere players can't just have 10 rituals guarding each of their three havens up 30 nights a month, plus combat blood (which this staff has admirably done), to faaaar more draconic Clan caps that would restore them to the outcasts and freakshows they are.
Just my 2¢. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your downvotes and explaining how wrong I am, that magic doesn't totally break the game or - and this is my favorite canard - it does, but that's a feature not a bug, and we should do nothing about it.
