Why are Elder Powers so... awful?

[pang4]

Can't speak to the individual powers, but here's my two cents on why Elder powers are often situational as all hell:

Because they were created by Elders. People who experimented with their blood powers, tried to bend them in new ways as best they could, and had very specific needs. That weird Vicissitude power that insta-impales someone on their own spine seems useless, until you realize it was made by a Tzimisce who really wanted a fence of bodies around his creepy castle. It wasn't made for you, it was made for him, by him.

The way I've always run elder powers is that you can't buy specific powers. They are there as examples, or things that a specific elder can teach you. Otherwise, you develop your own. At that level of blood potency, you bend its powers to your will. Develop an elder power with your ST to call your very own, and reflects your own character's specific needs.

[monteparnas]

IRL armour is usually all or nothing for the occupant.

IRL a wound can kill you days later of complications and being directly hit with a weapon usually doesn't just "cause X damage" and a generic penalty.

Hit Points aren't a realistic mechanic, neither is damage, and WoD's take on it doesn't make more sense, just reinforces other themes for the story and strategies for the game.

This is a game, and the health rules are a take on a game design problem. I think it is in general a horrible rule precisely because it tries more to be a simulation than to deliver either a good game experience or improve on the themes and mood of the game, and it sucks at being a simulation.

[Aahz]

A short Question to the Auspex Power Mirror Reflex, to me (who is not native speaker) is the wording not really clear, do you get the bonus die to every action on the next turn, or do you get a pool of dice that you can distribute as bonus dice between the actions you take on the next turn?

Btw. the DC of "Manipulation + combat skill" could make this power also pretty useless against any opponent that is remotely challanging to a character with such a low gen.

[Aahz]

The core... yes.

Ah OK, looking over them only the Level 9 ones seem not that use full for players, but players are anyway not likely to get to them...

The 7th level power for Presence (Cooperation) seems also pretty situational to me...

[MyWifeIsScary]

Are you talking just about V20?

The core... yes.
Supplements often scrape the bottom of the barrel

[Aahz]

Bar Animalism they're actually pretty great.

Animalism: Shared soul sucks but the other two 6's are great. Everything else isn't worth it.
Auspex: Everything is fantastic. Also upping Auspex in general offers benefits (Heigtened senses, premonitions, detecting people during the day, seeing the unseen)
Dominate: Everything is between good and fantastic.
Obfuscate: Everything is fantastic. Also like Auspex you benefit from taking your obfuscate level up in general. Truly, (Dominate) Malkavians are the god-tier clan.
Presence: Everything's fantastic.

Are you talking just about V20?

[11twiggins]

I've always run Fortitude as granting bonus Wounded health levels. RAW a Vampire with Stamina 5 and Fortitude 5 can, it's very unlikely, but can, wind up just as hurt by a machine gun as a regular vampire.

Celerity guarantees bonus actions with expenditure.
Potence guarantees you can perform greater feats of strength; a mid-to-high exp Brujah, Lasombra and Nosferatu can get through walls without checks.
Fortitude in V20 doesn't guarantee anything at all, and I'm not a big fan of the 'fix' in DAV20.

[blailton]

Bar Animalism they're actually pretty great.

Animalism: Shared soul sucks but the other two 6's are great. Everything else isn't worth it.

Eye of the Szlachta is a worse version of Dominate 5. If you have infinite xp, by all means, buy it, ortherwise I feel its a waste.

Auspex: Everything is fantastic. Also upping Auspex in general offers benefits (Heigtened senses, premonitions, detecting people during the day, seeing the unseen)

My problem with the advanced levels of Auspex is that sometimes it's better to use technology instead of using auspex. If the chronicle is taking place in the dark ages or using technology is not possible, OK, otherwise I think a bit of a waste. You won't find vampires with Obfuscate or Chimestry 6+ all that often, and the passive effects of auspex are sometimes kind of overlooked by ST. Anyway, "Prediction" (Auspex 6) is pretty bad, unless your character's whole point is trolling others with "Hnmm, actually" arguments.
"Telepathic Communication" (auspex 6) isn't bad, but what's to stop characters from buying a linguistics point instead to make phone calls and converse in the other language, or even converse using sign language? They can even use points in the ear instead. There is even a Sabbat ritual that allows characters to speak, and only members of the Coterie can hear.

"The Heart's Desire" (Auspex 6) re-enters the price issue. Is it worth spending 35 xp points to buy this instead of spending 31 to buy three levels of Presence (outside the clan)? (10 + 7 + 14)

"Soul Bond" can be good, but wouldn't it be better to install an internal circuit in your refuge, and access the camera's content through your cell phone? If you put a delay of 1 second, you get a bonus to break obfuscation. You can just put a GPS on someone's tooth. But anyway.

I just realized that there are many elder disciplines and I was too lazy to analyze them all, but one that I can't forget is "Psychic Assault" (auspex 8). Initially it seems strong, but only if the power user has a very large dice pool. Otherwise, it's pretty weak, mainly because the Interrogation maneuver has the same effect (draining willpower points), and the effect of removing permanent willpower only happens by getting a lot of successes.

Obfuscate: Everything is fantastic. Also like Auspex you benefit from taking your obfuscate level up in general. Truly, (Dominate) Malkavians are the god-tier clan.

I remember a power whose only practical use is to regain willpower points. It pays more to spend precious xp upgrading the meditation skill.

[Bluecho]

I don't know. I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of Fortitude just giving the vampire one extra health level per dot.

Is it balanced? Thematically appropriate? No idea. But I'm open to the idea of it.

I will say that it would make particularly old vampires appropriately sturdy. If you spent centuries honing your vampiric body, it makes a certain kind of sense that you'd just have more health to chew through.

I don't know if you'd do that instead of getting soak dice, or in addition to it. The former seems like a nerf, whereas the latter seems overpowered.

Maybe this is where Elder Disciplines come into play. Once you hit Fortitude 6, you can start taking Elder Powers that let you start stacking more health levels on. So you're not only regular hard to kill from having Elder levels of soak dice, but enemies need to go through more health in general to get anywhere.


As an aside, I like how Hellsing approached vampire health, at least when it came to Alucard. Other vampires in that series seemed more "normal", in the sense they were hard to damage (except via silver/holy weapons), but when they got hurt it took a bit to regenerate their wounds. Alucard was functionally unkillable, because he had literal armies worth of stolen life to burn through to heal himself. A kind of "Critical Flesh" (to use a term I learned from a really obscure/defunct webcomic from years ago), that acted as reserves of health made up of everyone he'd ever eaten.

Indeed, it was a plot point that summoning all those lives to fight as an army is how he could potentially be killed.

I don't know how you'd implement something like that into VtM. Least of all in a way that's not wildly unbalanced. Only someone like Caine should be that tanky, and he's already a "You Lose" proposition in a fight.

But maybe a vastly toned down version could work? Like, an Elder Power that let you, if you've drained a mortal or vampire dry, retain those stolen lives as a resource. One that could be summoned in battle, with the right Discipline powers/Combos, or burned as emergency healing.

Sounds like some kind of Fortitude + Vicissitude/Thaumaturgy combo Discipline.

[MyWifeIsScary]

Another problem with soak is that it is a terrible mechanic for representing vampire novels/movies. Soak is a pretty decent mechanic for representing armor. If the game where about a bunch of human knights in armor, soak would be fairly decent at representing the random chance that a sword will hit a spot that is thickly armored one time, and hit an unarmored joint another time.

But vampire stories aren't like stories about humans in heavy armor at all. In vampire novels/movies, vampires tend to be almost completely invulnerable to some attacks, and nearly as vulnerable as humans to others. Their abilities are better represented by massive health-levels, massive healing, and vulnerability to certain called-shots, such as a called shot to the head with a sword, that bypasses that massive health-level and healing. Soak is an absolutely miserable mechanic for representing this.

I beg to disagree.

IRL armour is usually all or nothing for the occupant. DnD's armour class is a better expression of armour than soak die. There's certainly some middle ground where you get a nasty impact from something that would've done worse, or when you get a couple inches of stab, but for the most part armour deflects/absorbes everything or whatever you're wearing counts for nothing as it's punched through. Your skull shatters or it's fine, the middle ground is kinda narrow.


Vampire health levels don't really work when they're still subjects to anatomy, even if most of their organs are dead. They have bones, a heart... But they're also inhumanly tough.
Going more the way of the health bar is a little silly. Having a guy who can take a hammer to the face and still stand is more frightening than having a guy who is rather easy to hurt but needs to be hurt a lot to be taken down.

[MyWifeIsScary]

Bar Animalism they're actually pretty great.

Animalism: Shared soul sucks but the other two 6's are great. Everything else isn't worth it.
Auspex: Everything is fantastic. Also upping Auspex in general offers benefits (Heigtened senses, premonitions, detecting people during the day, seeing the unseen)
Dominate: Everything is between good and fantastic.
Obfuscate: Everything is fantastic. Also like Auspex you benefit from taking your obfuscate level up in general. Truly, (Dominate) Malkavians are the god-tier clan.
Presence: Everything's fantastic.


The shit comes more from clan specifics, off-branch physical powers (just take the default power most of the time)

[blailton]

Which elder discipline powers for Auspex, Dominate, Presence, Obfluscate and Animalism are in your opinion worth taking?

...I can only think Ironclad Command right now, and only if you have Willpower 9 or 10.

[CajunKhan]

The overall problem with Fortitude is the problem with Soak rules. Soak is an extremely hard to adapt mechanic because it is a normal opposed roll for traits that simply aren't equivalent.

Your soak pool naturally tends to be lower, because it would be impossible to work with if it was really equal to damage pools. They have a similar starting points, but wildly distinct ways to increase. As it is an opposed roll, it gets compared to other rolls and simply can't catch up with them, and as it opposes damage, if it does catch up it creates a problem with bogging fights down with more and more meaningless rolls.

So, bottom line, it will never be balanced. It will be underwhelming until it suddenly becomes too good to be used.

Another problem with soak is that it is a terrible mechanic for representing vampire novels/movies. Soak is a pretty decent mechanic for representing armor. If the game where about a bunch of human knights in armor, soak would be fairly decent at representing the random chance that a sword will hit a spot that is thickly armored one time, and hit an unarmored joint another time.

But vampire stories aren't like stories about humans in heavy armor at all. In vampire novels/movies, vampires tend to be almost completely invulnerable to some attacks, and nearly as vulnerable as humans to others. Their abilities are better represented by massive health-levels, massive healing, and vulnerability to certain called-shots, such as a called shot to the head with a sword, that bypasses that massive health-level and healing. Soak is an absolutely miserable mechanic for representing this.

[Aahz]

Which elder discipline powers for Auspex, Dominate, Presence, Obfluscate and Animalism are in your opinion worth taking?

[Herr Meister]

That wasn't created in V5, it was created in 2nd Edition. But it was a sixth dot Protean power rather than Fortitude. V5 (rightly) ported it over to Fortitude instead and changed the mechanics up somewhat.

No, man, lol! I know full well that there's a protean power called Skin of Marble(in fact there's basically no power in the WoD that I'm not aware of...), but I mean the mechanic and the fact that they finally made it into a Fortitude power instead of a Protean power. The first variation of Skin of Marble was a passive level 6 Protean power that reduced the damage the vampire took by half, then Revised made it cost blood, instead of being passive. The system of the new Skin of Marble (that is now a Fortitude power) is very interesting and new and is something that should have been created long time ago. I mean Fortitude should have powers to ignore damage and/or create resistance to certain kinds of damage or whatever, instead they never created anything interesting, even though one might argue that Knight's Bane is a somewhat good power, it doesn't improve the resistance to damage, only make the weapons shatter if they cause no damage. The new Skin of Marble does something interesting and something that should be a thing long time ago.