The Masquerade is Mechanicaly unsustainable

[Leandro16]

Mechanicaly the masquerade is unsustainable in all editions becuase of Two Factors

1. The Overpopulation of vampires (Seriusly they are almost in every city , some of them has to fuck up)
2. The vampires have no realiable way of camuflating feeding from his victims (Orgasmic Bite is great to portray the sensuality of the vampire and stop the victim resisting but doesnt erase the memories of the moment).

Some Ideas to Fix it:
Replace Generations with AGE:Blood Potency is the best power mechanic that a vampire game could desire for the simple reason that with it the vampires get powerful becuase they are OLD not becuase they were lucky to be embraced by a fourth gen and if you want elders to have powerful progeny you can do that by saying that the sire can buff them making them have half their blood potency expending a willpower point.Also not having generations means that to have a vampire of BP 1 (13th Gen equivalent) you don´t need to have at minimun of another 10 vampires for the linaje and this solves a lot of the overbloting of the setting.

Blood Potency	Minimun Age	Max Attibutes	Vitae/Vitae x turn	You Can Feed From:
0	Thin Blood	5	5/1	Animals+
1	0	5	10/1	Animals+
2	50	5	12/1	Animals+
3	100	5	14/2	Human Blood
4	200	5	16/2	Human Blood
5	300	5	18/3	Human Blood
6	500	6	20/4	Human Blood
7	1000	7	25/5	Human Blood
8	1500	8	30/6	Human Blood
9	2000	9	40/8	Vitae
10	3000	10	50/10	Vitae

"This also makes people doubt if antediluvian tales are for realsies instead of confirmating their existence mechanicaly"

Embrace Mechanic:Population control is imposible if mechanically your characters can start zombie apocalipsis , you need the embrace to cost permanent willpower/humanity or be limited to only be able to sire up to your blood potency each century.You also need to make that only vampires of certain blood potency can embrace (Above 2 for example) becuase if not the machanic is easily ignored by ordering your newly childe to embrace.

Edit Alternate Embrace mechanic:Instead of WP now embracing cost 5XP + 5 x each dot in generation background you want the children to have with the limit being obviusly in your generation -1.This is done becuase it would be unfair for High WP character to pay more when embracing than when not and also becuase the XP requirement helps to justify why some characters have more progeny than others Example Lodin.

Kiss Mechanic:The vampire Kiss should produce two minutes amnnesia like in blood lines to non supernatural beings of willpower below 7 kinda like what happens with the werewolf lunacy.You can still be cath by a witness or have a bad roll to get a high WP victim or even worse a supernatural victim.

Distortion Mechanic:Unless are aware and desire to appear natural is a image the faces of vampires are distorted in photos , videos and mirror to non supernaturals making recognition difficult this helps so much to kept being anonimous.Note:The body still appears.

Improved blush of Life:With thermal cameras existing vampires have it bad if they cannot emulate human biological activity for this I have decided to extend the blush of life duration becuase a scene can be anything from 2 minutes to a 2 hours.Now the blush of life last for 1 hour per point in humanity.

Pd:Also neonates drinking animal blood should be encouraged , it is too masquerade friendly not to do and it also helps preserve the humanity (The counter part could be that it cannot fill your blood reserves above 5 so vegan vampires aren´t fully and need to suplement their feeding with an ocasional hunt a week if they don´t want to be at the border of a frenzy).

[blailton]

The game you want already exist: VtR. Please let Requiem be Requiem, and Masquerade be Masquerade. I want Gen. I want Antes. I want Cain. I don't want deux ex machina amnesia bite neither deux ex machina glitch on cameras/mirror.

[jamiemalk]

Distortion Mechanic:Unless they are using the Blush of Life the faces of vampires are distorted in photos , videos and mirror to non supernaturals making recognition difficult this helps so much to kept being anonimous.Note:The body still appears.

This mechanic would have shattered the masquerade around the time phone cameras became standard. Removing the fact they can recognise Bob the Brujah doesn't help when suddenly everyone with a phone can spot Mr Obvious Supernatural. Lasombra have a horrible time with camera/refections in the modern nights, all Kindred having it would be bonkers.

[CTPhipps]

My response is:

1. Yeah, that's a theme of the game.

2. The game implies you don't remember stuff after and before the feeding.

As for the rest of it being unbelievable....

"Do you want to play the game or not?"

[Leandro16]

This mechanic would have shattered the masquerade around the time phone cameras became standard. Removing the fact they can recognise Bob the Brujah doesn't help when suddenly everyone with a phone can spot Mr Obvious Supernatural. Lasombra have a horrible time with camera/refections in the modern nights, all Kindred having it would be bonkers.

Yeah that is why Blush of life solves it

[Leandro16]

My response is:

1. Yeah, that's a theme of the game.

2. The game implies you don't remember stuff after and before the feeding.

As for the rest of it being unbelievable....

"Do you want to play the game or not?"

You can have vampire overpopulation due centuries of non-population control and It would make sense , but the moment in wich that already overpopulation can quintuply in a night becuase the embrace only cost 1 BP the setting stops being realistic due the menace of a zombie outbreak

The game doesnt imply non remembering about feeding in any momen there is even Kiss Adicts becuase THEY REMEMBER and Dominate 3/1 exist for something.

[Leandro16]

The game you want already exist: VtR. Please let Requiem be Requiem, and Masquerade be Masquerade. I want Gen. I want Antes. I want Cain. I don't want deux ex machina amnesia bite neither deux ex machina glitch on cameras/mirror.

The setting and the mechanics are a completly different stuff this is why you can still play masquerade with other rules and the general result will be better becuase masquerade is loved for his characters and sect conflic but berated for his mechanics and for a good reason (They aren´t coherent)

PD:You can still have Antediluvians and Blood Potency in fact it makes more sense becuase it justifies their power boost to kaijus way better than generations.

[CTPhipps]

You can have vampire overpopulation due centuries of non-population control and It would make sense , but the moment in wich that already overpopulation can quintuply in a night becuase the embrace only cost 1 BP the setting stops being realistic due the menace of a zombie outbreak

The game doesnt imply non remembering about feeding in any momen there is even Kiss Adicts becuase THEY REMEMBER and Dominate 3/1 exist for something.

In my novel, STRAIGHT OUTTA FANGTON, we have a broken masquerade but before that happened the vampire establishment was always trying to kill any younger vampire it could for the flimisest of reasons.

This, of course, was the heart of the Anarch movement because the Elders really DID want them dead.

They were all competing predators in the minds of the Old Ones.

[blailton]

The setting and the mechanics are a completly different stuff this is why you can still play masquerade with other rules and the general result will be better becuase masquerade is loved for his characters and sect conflic but berated for his mechanics and for a good reason (They aren´t coherent)

PD:You can still have Antediluvians and Blood Potency in fact it makes more sense becuase it justifies their power boost to kaijus way better than generations.

You literally described V5 attempt.

[Nosimplehiway]

Leandro16

You know I really enjoy your offerings. Your posts are well-written, well thought-out, and entertaining. Many of them have ideas which can be very useful in a Vampire: the Masquerade game. When I see you have posted, I always look forward to reading it!

One very teeny-tiny issue, though. They seem to share a common theme.

Now, I like VtR, especially VtR2. It's a fun game. So is VtM. They are, however, separate and distinct games with separate and distinct mechanical systems which lead to two very different game settings. Oh, both have elements of the other, but both have things they do better. One is a game of close-up, personal horror in isolated cities. The other is a game of epic, world-spanning nocturnal warfare.

While it is sometimes useful to port ideas back and forth between the two, at some point so many things get ported from VtR (which you clearly prefer) into VtM that it ceases to be VtM. Now, I'm not certain at what point that happens, but if this is the case, wouldn't it make more sense for you to play VtR2 and port the parts of VtM you like into that system?

Which parts of VtM are there which keep bringing you back to it, and that you would port into a VtR game which do not have a similar mechanic in VtR?

[Leandro16]

Nosimplehiway O yeah I make a lot of references to requiem 2ED but aur contraire of what my comments may suggest I prefer VTM by Far becuase of the Setting is just the Mechanical aspect what I don´t like.

VTR has without any doubt superior mechanics but the setting is kinda bland for my tastes compared to the 90s epic of masquerade , his characters that I have come to love and to be honest I don´t like Isolation as a theme becuase I have a not so hidden fetish over conspiracy theories so when I heard about "world spanning nocturnal warfare" I knew that VtM was what i was looking for.

About what I would Change from Requiem the answer are tons of things: the Ventrue weakness of the masquerade is way better and the same happens with nosferatu weakness , I would port thaumaturgy paths as a rituals and change some mechacnic departments like combat or the ube , make all rolls contested not to mention that i would tweak blood potency making it not decrease during torpor and grow more slow to mimic generations Etc....In the end it makes more sense to me to tweak the masquerade becuase it alredy has the themes that i like.

[Legendre]

AGE:

The game you want already exist: VtR. Please let Requiem be Requiem, and Masquerade be Masquerade. I want Gen. I want Antes. I want Cain. I don't want deux ex machina amnesia bite neither deux ex machina glitch on cameras/mirror.

Actually, the game he wants existed before VtR. The Los Angeles: A House Divided MUSH started development in 2000 and went online in early 2002 -- over two years earlier. (I ain't saying VtR stole our mechanics... I mean, maybe they did but I also think that there is an intuitive way to think about some of this stuff based on some assumptions implicit in the original VtM materials and, let us be *totally* honest here -- Van Richten's Guide to Vampires, an AD&D supplement from 1992. So "independent" invention is far, far more likely.)

We developed something like Blood Potency -- it's called "Sanguinis." It works just like generation, but it advances (mostly) with age and diablerie. (If you've read my homebrew rules, you've seen the chart, which should look familiar but which I'm not posting here because the BBS system is being persnickety.)

EMBRACE MECHANIC:
We also had a different embrace mechanic that implemented several new features:

• Embraces DID NOT automatically work; they could very easily fail. If a random neonate just grabbed someone off the street and tried to vamp them on a whim, the chances of success are only 10-15%.
• Success could be bolstered by spending permanent willpower, and higher Sanguinis increased the chance of success
• Regular embraces (which produce a Sanguinis 1 childe) cost 2WP, while "True Childe" embraces, which create a "minus 1" Sanguinis Childe cost 2 PERMANENT Willpower
• The number of recent embraces negatively affected survival chances as well.

KISS MECHANIC:
I *REALLY* like the idea of "Kiss amnesia." In fact, I like it so much that until I read Leandro's post above, I *DID NOT REALIZE* that it wasn't part of the normal mechanics of VtM (much like what CT Phipps describes). I had always figured that the "ecstasy" bit carried with it a certain amount of cloudiness. I think it's an excellent change/clarification to the rules.

EDIT: One of the things that makes the Sabbat what they are in my homebrew WoD is that they actually came up with a much more effective (but still not 100%) form of Embrace, involving various rituals and something like the Vinculum. The ability to embrace more effectively is probably one of their greatest weapons against the Camarilla.

[Cifer]

You can have vampire overpopulation due centuries of non-population control and It would make sense , but the moment in wich that already overpopulation can quintuply in a night becuase the embrace only cost 1 BP the setting stops being realistic due the menace of a zombie outbreak

Sure, but who has the motive to do something like that? Every additional vampire is a potential masquerade risk, a rival for territory and food sources. And of course, as soon as other people get wind of a madman who is up to something like that, pretty much every faction would be willing to pull out all the stops to put an end to them.

The game doesnt imply non remembering about feeding in any momen there is even Kiss Adicts becuase THEY REMEMBER and Dominate 3/1 exist for something.

Blood dolls can still work without every single victim remembering what happened. Some people simply know how great they felt when... something... happened and seek out the experience over and over again by going to the same places and interacting with the same people before finally putting together 2 and 2. And Dominate 3 is useful for Masquerade breaches, however they occur - most simply when discipline use gets observed or when there are witnesses to the feeding.

And finally, to quote the book (page 211 f.):

It takes time to drink blood and care to do it prop-
erly. The bite of a vampire can seem downright euphoric
to the victim; vampire fangs produce a supernatural
intoxicating effect while opening up a blood vessel. As-
suming the vampire takes the time to hit a vein or artery
correctly and licks the wound closed afterward, the
victim may only remember the encounter as a drug trip,
an interlude of weird rough sex, or just a delirious fog
of drunken intimacy. Even a closed
wound and happy hallucination for
the victim might still leave behind
an air embolism, to say nothing of
long-term anemia.
As a general rule, attempting
to preserve the victim’s life, health,
or blissed-out screen memory (all
of which of course also preserve
the Masquerade) takes longer than
simply ripping open an artery and
slurping down the red stuff. On
the other hand, a victim who fights
back slows things down and endan-
gers the Masquerade. A vampire can
drain and kill a helpless or other-
wise unresisting human in roughly
five turns.

[blailton]

Sure, but who has the motive to do something like that? Every additional vampire is a potential masquerade risk, a rival for territory and food sources. And of course, as soon as other people get wind of a madman who is up to something like that, pretty much every faction would be willing to pull out all the stops to put an end to them.

Blood dolls can still work without every single victim remembering what happened. Some people simply know how great they felt when... something... happened and seek out the experience over and over again by going to the same places and interacting with the same people before finally putting together 2 and 2. And Dominate 3 is useful for Masquerade breaches, however they occur - most simply when discipline use gets observed or when there are witnesses to the feeding.

And finally, to quote the book (page 211 f.):

Don't see any amnesia here.

[Cifer]

the
victim may only remember the encounter as a drug trip,
an interlude of weird rough sex, or just a delirious fog
of drunken intimacy. Even a closed
wound and happy hallucination
[...]
blissed-out screen memory

Bolded the important parts for convenience.