Paths, and other Sabbat related shenanigans

[Taggie]

Vampires in V5 are more powerful than any vampires up until 7th generation or below. Far more powerful in fact.

Given 7th generatiuon or below are rare, I'm not sure what this complaint is about.

They really, really do not feel that way. Sorry. Maybe it's mechanics that does it, but 2e and Revised vampires feel way more powerful and versatile.

[MyWifeIsScary]

Vampires in V5 are more powerful than any vampires up until 7th generation or below. Far more powerful in fact.

Given 7th generatiuon or below are rare, I'm not sure what this complaint is about.

That's your opinion, and your opinion is close to objectively wrong.

Vampires with Blood potency 5 and upward are unplayable starving catastrophies at the complete mercy of their Beast.
Thin bloods do not have normal disciplines (outside of resonance shenanigans) and thus cannot hunt effectively.

Animalism is about the same, Fortitude is about the same. Protean is about the same. Presence is a little stronger.
Auspex, Dominate, Celerity, Potence, Obfuscate, Oblivion and 'Sorcery' have been tanked.

Vampires are far, far, far more at the mercy of their beasts in this edition, and have lesser tools to deal with their increased problems. And that's not going into how a lot of backgrounds are now considerably worse or overpriced, or how armour magically does nothing for vampires.

[CTPhipps]

That's your opinion, and your opinion is close to objectively wrong.

Vampires with Blood potency 5 and upward are unplayable starving catastrophies at the complete mercy of their Beast.
Thin bloods do not have normal disciplines (outside of resonance shenanigans) and thus cannot hunt effectively.

Animalism is about the same, Fortitude is about the same. Protean is about the same. Presence is a little stronger.
Auspex, Dominate, Celerity, Potence, Obfuscate, Oblivion and 'Sorcery' have been tanked.

Vampires are far, far, far more at the mercy of their beasts in this edition, and have lesser tools to deal with their increased problems. And that's not going into how a lot of backgrounds are now considerably worse or overpriced, or how armour magically does nothing for vampires.

Frankly, I think that you were ignoring the rules regarding Self-Control and frenzy in previous editions because vampires have a lot of benefits from the new Hunger system. If you DON'T fail your Hunger dice checks you can use your powers without losing Blood Points.

Similarly, there's a lot of powers that don't require Hunger checks and some that are even automatic like Dominate on mortals is now free unless they know to resist.

[Taggie]

Frankly, I think that you were ignoring the rules regarding Self-Control and frenzy in previous editions because vampires have a lot of benefits from the new Hunger system. If you DON'T fail your Hunger dice checks you can use your powers without losing Blood Points.

Similarly, there's a lot of powers that don't require Hunger checks and some that are even automatic like Dominate on mortals is now free unless they know to resist.

I wasn't ignoring frenzy rules, and Hunger feels a lot worse than they did, with frenzy it was on me, how I built the character, how strong their self control and conviction was, yes it was a dice roll, but I had input, Hunger I don't, it's always their, and breaks scenes when it flares, because even a success involving it is a threat to the masquerade, involving cover up, evidence disposal etc, taking away from the story...and that's a success, failures are worse, and I have no input, apart from never, ever getting in a situation that risks hunger dice appearing.

As to Dominate, since what you can do is so much more limited, it auto working (which it pretty much used to anyway, again depending on the character) is.pretty meh. But this is off topic.

[Shakanaka]

And can we just even hone-in how ridiculous Blood Potency in VTM even is? ...The whole reason Requiem came up with it was an alternative system to the Generation system found in oWoD... Running Generation AND Blood Potency both parallel to eachother as if its supposed to work.. is completely gonzo, practically with little sense whatsoever. I supposed to people who worked on V5 wanted a way for Neonates to be more hefty in competing against Elders(?); (never mind the fact that they've been completely shafted); but VTM doesn't work like that. I don't know about Requiem where they got the mechanic from, but if you wanted to overcome the Elders you had to make the choice of diablerizing them; if we're completely talking about supernatural power alone.

The short-cut of just simply waiting for Blood Potency to tick up is a lazy game mechanic. Sure, Vampires are immortal completely barring direct destruction from another party and can get stronger in development of their Disciplines or assort Blood Magic, but if you wanted to break further ceilings and was that ambitious, you had to commit to taking on someone lower Generation than you- work toward it and plot it for a very long time. Very risky and could easily end up in loss, but the award is extremely bountiful when accomplished. There was never any reason for Generation and Blood Potency to work together, it makes little sense.

EDIT:

I think that you were ignoring the rules regarding Self-Control and frenzy in previous editions because vampires have a lot of benefits from the new Hunger system.

The old frenzy system was less convoluted and more narrative than V5. It was simple; when the ST felt in a certain situation that your PC was going to frenzy over something they'd ask for a Self-Control or Instinct roll at a variable difficulty determined by the ST. You'd roll for a couple turns, maybe 2-3 top in some cases or once. If you failed the check, then you frenzied. This system is MUCH more simple, MUCH more in-character, MUCH more narrative than V5 that has you frenzy from hard mechanics.

[MyWifeIsScary]

Frankly, I think that you were ignoring the rules regarding Self-Control and frenzy in previous editions because vampires have a lot of benefits from the new Hunger system. If you DON'T fail your Hunger dice checks you can use your powers without losing Blood Points.

Similarly, there's a lot of powers that don't require Hunger checks and some that are even automatic like Dominate on mortals is now free unless they know to resist.

We've danced this dance before.
If you played a character that actually used Dominate (You say your favourite clan is Malkavian, so you should know this, unless you were a Dementator) you would have five-eight dice to roll at a difficulty of 2-6 for the vast majority of mortals. It would be extremely unlikely that you wouldn't get a ton of successes. Having Dominate -Auto work- on mortals 'Unless they resist' is like painting a fast car red. Furthermore, the fact that mortals can resist, rather than just have a really high difficulty, is not in the favour of the vampire.
And of course, The new inability to have victims do tasks that require cognition is a monumental downgrade, as is the need to make implanted directives a power you can maybe learn at dominate 3 or 4 or 5 rather than an ability you just get with Dominate 2. It doesn't matter that you think the cognition arbitration is a good thing for balance or level design, it's a spear through the heart when it comes to Dominate's power, and it's an absurd restriction for people who want to play with a rich and detailed world.

Oh yeah, and the vast majority of Disciplines did not any expenditure at all. Obfuscate? Completely free, Nosferatu can rejoin the real world. Dominate? Free. Auspex? Free. Potence? Free unless unless you want to push it. These powers where powers you used to help you hunt, and they were optimal for that. They were an extension of your vampire, not a collection of maybe-fun gimmicks.

Also, do you think I wasn't paying to self control and frenzy rules in previous editions, honestly? I feel like a cartoon villain mocking the 'hero' for being pitiful. Put some weight into your arguments.

[archderd]

this thread turned into a shitshow really fucking fast.

but to get back on topic: if i had to guess paths will be part of loresheets that give alternatives to human touchstones (iirc in cults of the blood gods on of the loresheets gave you the ability to take corpses as touchstones)

[Taggie]

this thread turned into a shitshow really fucking fast.

but to get back on topic: if i had to guess paths will be part of loresheets that give alternatives to human touchstones (iirc in cults of the blood gods on of the loresheets gave you the ability to take corpses as touchstones)

I hope not, tried doing the Paths as Convictions without Touchstones (they didn't matter for a test of concept) and that playtest is the reason I say Convictions don't really do Paths well, the system doesn't do that level of required complexity, and Tenets don't sit well with systems of morality that have characters who don't share Sins, what is anathema to Honorable Accord is moral imperative to Power and the Inner Voice.

[Aleph]

this thread turned into a shitshow really fucking fast.

but to get back on topic: if i had to guess paths will be part of loresheets that give alternatives to human touchstones (iirc in cults of the blood gods on of the loresheets gave you the ability to take corpses as touchstones)

That could be a start, but not enough.

1.
Obviously Touchstones don't work for Paths, but the Tenets themselves are an equally important factor that doesn't work well with Path system.

I really like Tenets - I like that they're flexible, I think that allows for a much more "human" morality, because human morality it's relative to a lot of social factors (the classic example being that a soldier under the old system would have abysmal humanity values, comparable to that of psycho serial killers)... And that allows to play more variety of campaigns (if only more aspects of V5 had been built with this idea in mind !)

...however, for that very reason, they're an integral part of V5 Humanity system - and it's one that's very much assuming everyone it's more or less on the same page (with Convictions to represent small deviations of the norm) Chronicle Tenets are universal in a way the old system never was.

You may say: well, since I can choose any Tenets, I can make monstrous tenets to play with theSabbat. But that's not the problem, the problem it's that not all Paths are equally monstrous, and they're often inhuman in very different ways - and because of that, no matter how humane or how monstrous your Tenets are, you will always have Paths that would be more aligned with the tenets, and others that would be less aligned and thus would be constantly figthing against the Tenets to *exist*.

You would have to either be very clever and convince me that a given set of Tenets it's transversal to all Paths, affecting all of them equally. Or find me some way to partition this universal morality in a way that's manageable.

2.
You would also need to alter how high/low levels of Humanity affects the vampire. Rigth now what you gain and what you loose with Humanity it's very ... "humanity!". It's very aesthetically jarring to have Paths with *that* humanity (but at least this problem it's easy to fix)

3.
If Paths are to be Loresheets then I would expect them (from a game design perspective) to offer some clear mechanical advantages over Humanity - because I have to pay for Loresheets. They're "backgrounds"

It would be a dick move to do so otherwise: Oh you want your paths? , take your stinking paths but you're now behind in the learning curve compared with other vampires. Hey, it's the price to ignore the system and do whatever you want (of course, THAT was the reason we wanted paths all along - all those talks about inhuman vampires, all excuses from us dirty powergamers)

Bottom line: I think I'm far more moderate compared with the people that's always trashing gainst V5 in general, and think it's "broken by design" ... but, still, to meet even my relatively low standards, you would need somewhat of an overhaul. More than what I have seen current Loresheets do

[Haquim]

The answer to the OP's question depends on the definition of what can be considered "succesful implementation" of paths in V5. My take is it means giving players a chance to follow tenets that are usually outside the purview of humanity but I know fully well that some people will never accept this because what thewy want is not just Paths but the way out paths provided them in previous editions to disregard morality rules justifying any kind of heinous act and even growing in power gbecause of it.

Let's start with general rules:

Unlike Humanity Paths have a fixed set of Convictions to show how they are more rigid and artificial compared to Humanity. You start with 3 Convictions that are always the same tied to the same number of Touchstones. Those Touchstones can be humans but, subject to ST approval, they can also be items of specific importace to the PC. In this case Storytellers and Players should work together to create Touchstones that work in the context of the Chronicle and whose destruction can pose a realistic threat to the PC's morality.

That said, let's try to translate a Path to V5.

The Path of Blood, was generally considered one of the most problematic paths because of its internal justification of diablerie.

Here's an example of Convictions of the Path of Blood in V5 then:

• Follow the edicts of Haqim → Meaning: Enforce the traditions, keep in mind even those in power should not abuse their subjects, judge and punish the unworthy.
• Always be in control of yourself → Meaning: Resist frenzy and lapses in control at all costs.
• Do not abuse mortals, punish those who do so → Meaning: playing with mortals out of cruelty and boredom is not acceptable.

Of course, Chronicle Tenets should also be adjusted to accomodate the presence of such characters, but that's doable with stuff like the "Creed of Justice" from the CRB.

As a side note: notice how I avoided including the tenet about fighting all vampires that are not Followers of the Path of Blood, as I don't want the Path to become impratical in play.

This, I believe, could be an adequate set of tenets for a Camarilla Banu Haqim who still wants to follow Haqim but refuses the extremist views expoused by Ur-Shulgi.

So my answer to the OP is yes, Paths can work inside V5 morality Framework and judging from CotBG and what's being said I think that is what's going to happen.

That as long as you don't just expect the old "path of what I was going to do anyway" to be reinstated as your condition for considering Paths "successfully implemented" in V5. In that case there's very little that can be done for you.

[Aleph]

My take is it means giving players a chance to follow tenets that are usually outside the purview of humanity but I know fully well that some people will never accept this because what thewy want is not just Paths but the way out paths provided them in previous editions to disregard morality rules justifying any kind of heinous act and even growing in power gbecause of it.

...


That as long as you don't just expect the old "path of what I was going to do anyway" to be reinstated as your condition for considering Paths "successfully implemented" in V5. In that case there's very little that can be done for you.

Oh, so people who don't accept "your take" are bad and should feel ashamed.

Nice.

I think that your take it's simplifying what's being asked. Paths were more than a dip outside human values, they were moral codes and philosophies about the role of being a vampire that were often in conflict. The Path system included even Humanity as yet another Path, not better nor worse. This is what allowed the Sabbat to be an awesomely complex mockery of religion filled with mystery cults and heresies

Unlike Humanity Paths have a fixed set of Convictions to show how they are more rigid and artificial compared to Humanity.

For the above, I think this isn't necessary. But you do you.

I hope that doesn't mean I'm a powergamer and should be ashamed.

Of course, Chronicle Tenets should also be adjusted to accomodate the presence of such characters, but that's doable with stuff like the "Creed of Justice" from the CRB.

I think that's the hardest problem: to have Tenets not to catter for A path, but fo Paths in plural. Sadly, I have no idea of what you mean by CRB. Care to give me more intel, so I can contemplate and meditate in that set of tenets?

I don't care much about converting one Path to V5, because I think that was never really *that* troublesome. I'm more interested in translating a plurality of conflicting Paths. If that resource helps, great, but your post by itself doesn't allow me to solve this conundrum.

[CTPhipps]

I gave some suggested Sabbat Rules for 5th Edition:

* Sabbat Humanity is replaced with Path
* Sabbat do not have Human Touchstones but Vampire Touchstones
* Sabbat do not lose Path for diablerie, making vampires, or the Vinculum
* Sabbat gain stains for cowardice, betrayal of pack mates, betrayal of the sect, and betrayal of personal tenets
* The Sabbat has a dozen individual Blood Cults, at least one for each of the old Paths

[Taggie]

The answer to the OP's question depends on the definition of what can be considered "succesful implementation" of paths in V5. My take is it means giving players a chance to follow tenets that are usually outside the purview of humanity but I know fully well that some people will never accept this because what thewy want is not just Paths but the way out paths provided them in previous editions to disregard morality rules justifying any kind of heinous act and even growing in power gbecause of it.

Let's start with general rules:

Unlike Humanity Paths have a fixed set of Convictions to show how they are more rigid and artificial compared to Humanity. You start with 3 Convictions that are always the same tied to the same number of Touchstones. Those Touchstones can be humans but, subject to ST approval, they can also be items of specific importace to the PC. In this case Storytellers and Players should work together to create Touchstones that work in the context of the Chronicle and whose destruction can pose a realistic threat to the PC's morality.

That said, let's try to translate a Path to V5.

The Path of Blood, was generally considered one of the most problematic paths because of its internal justification of diablerie.

Here's an example of Convictions of the Path of Blood in V5 then:

• Follow the edicts of Haqim → Meaning: Enforce the traditions, keep in mind even those in power should not abuse their subjects, judge and punish the unworthy.
• Always be in control of yourself → Meaning: Resist frenzy and lapses in control at all costs.
• Do not abuse mortals, punish those who do so → Meaning: playing with mortals out of cruelty and boredom is not acceptable.

Of course, Chronicle Tenets should also be adjusted to accomodate the presence of such characters, but that's doable with stuff like the "Creed of Justice" from the CRB.

As a side note: notice how I avoided including the tenet about fighting all vampires that are not Followers of the Path of Blood, as I don't want the Path to become impratical in play.

This, I believe, could be an adequate set of tenets for a Camarilla Banu Haqim who still wants to follow Haqim but refuses the extremist views expoused by Ur-Shulgi.

So my answer to the OP is yes, Paths can work inside V5 morality Framework and judging from CotBG and what's being said I think that is what's going to happen.

That as long as you don't just expect the old "path of what I was going to do anyway" to be reinstated as your condition for considering Paths "successfully implemented" in V5. In that case there's very little that can be done for you.

Where is the rest of the Path? It's ethics and sins? You just made a token gesture to let you do.what ever you want, where is the Path in what you posted? It's nowhere near adequate, its the path of whatever I want, you edition.

[Taggie]

I gave some suggested Sabbat Rules for 5th Edition:

* Sabbat Humanity is replaced with Path
* Sabbat do not have Human Touchstones but Vampire Touchstones
* Sabbat do not lose Path for diablerie, making vampires, or the Vinculum
1)* Sabbat gain stains for cowardice, betrayal of pack mates, betrayal of the sect, and betrayal of personal tenets
* The Sabbat has a dozen individual Blood Cults, at least one for each of the old Paths

1) Power and the Inner Voice is the most obvious one that doesn't function with this restriction...in fact I think only Honorable Accord cares about that one at all

As to touchstones, they are a failed idea, the sooner discarded the better. This is not supposed to be a domestic violence and child abuse simulator, and that is their only purpose.

[Shakanaka]

As to touchstones, they are a failed idea, the sooner discarded the better. This is not supposed to be a domestic violence and child abuse simulator, and that is their only purpose.

Exactly. I really don't know why they brought it in VTM for whatever reason. I don't even know why or how its even viable in VTR where it even came from. Who thought this mechanic was a good idea? Why are the players forced to be baby-sitters? What is this? I've said this previously ages ago but the only time this mechanic was ever relevant or fun was in Wraith, where you get either be Fettered to a person, place, thing, or area. It was compelling because you were actually a ghost (or spectre if you got that far to get Shadow-Eaten) it adequately represented the roleplay of being stuck to something you can't let go, even in death. Not only that you could gain energy from your Fetter if it also was your Passion, which gave Pathos- the aforementioned energy.

In Vampire however Touchstones are plain stupid. Sure, if you're a Neonate you MIGHT be attached to some schmuck if they were a friend, sibling, parents, liked co-worker, crush, etc. However I'm in the belief it shouldn't be hardwired to a point where it LITERALLY is the stop-gap for how this morality system functions. The Beast is supposed to be an internal matter wrapped by your mental morality, whether still inline with Humanity or on a Path; it makes no sense to have these Touchstones. Not only that Vampires by fiat of their characterization have no purpose of having these Touchstones considering how long they live.

Maybe for the first few decades it can work, but once your Touchstone dies of old age or dies from other causes, its stupid that immediately after you HAVE to get a new Touchstone metawise or else your character is in the ramshackles. This also essentially breaks Elders because there is no way they should have Touchstones, at all. Gangrel are broken because they are nomadic or generally don't care about humans. Noseferatu are broken because them have a Touchstone is idiotic. I don't see the deal of why people find this feature interesting.