(V5) Do we really miss high-level Disciplines?

[Taggie]

1)Nah, V5's doing fine. Your 'mess' is their 'working as intended,' especially with Paths and Sabbat not being playable. It's like you have ignored everything that the devs and WoD employees have said about the game, its themes, their goals with it and all of that. This, on top of comparing a company whose sole moneymaker was the tabletop RPG, versus PDX whose moneymaker is not a supplement treadmill.



2)There are plenty of showy and flashy powers. And many Elder powers have been integrated into level 4 and 5 powers like Mass Manipulation. The scale is just different overall.

1) you can play a mockery of the civil rights movement, were you have to recreate domestic abuse on your Touchstones...that is all you can play. That's it, no other stories allowed, at all, everything else is bad wrong fun and the devs WILL mock you for wanting it.

2) no, no their aren't, Elders just aren't scary anymore, Methusalehs are a joke 'blood gods?' they are 2 rounds tops for a decent coeterie, Like it's really not the same WoD as previous editions, but then it's their own IP to do with as they will,

[CTPhipps]

Nah, that's just you and your V5 dislike because they didn't write it Exactly As You Wanted It. They're writing it the way they want, and need to, in order for it to do what PDX wants it to do. It's that simple.

Don't make these kind of statements. Take a warning.

[Kakost]

So, to end it up, I always hated the lvl 6-10 disciplines, but I guess the reason for this is more due to implementation than to concept. For example, I like the idea of Archmages that can do stuff with the Spheres that are beyond the "mere" Masters. But the book "Masters of the Art" was absolutely atrocious. Thus, I have the lvl 6 of any Sphere to be Archmastery and encompass everything that goes beyond and above the "regular" limits of the Spheres. Much more clean.

For Vampire, I never really liked the idea of the "vampire Gods" all too much. I prefer to have them as pure myth - and even better, I prefer to have SEVERAL conflicting myths about those. Anything from 5th gen bellow to me is best served as coffin stories to scary young vampires in their day dreaming.

[adambeyoncelowe]

If we're talking just V5, I think you can do two things to help regain the "Elder Discipline" space:

1) While a lot of people just dump the cap on powers per Discipline completely, you can alter it to help gives Elders more oomph by having access to more powers (esp. some of the synergistic ones). If you want to uncap the powers, you could just do that for the standard powers, while the number of Amalgams a character can learn is capped on Blood Potency in some fashion. This would help cover a lot of the 6 and 7 dot Elder Disciplines that are more "unique and quirky power this Elder developed," than powers that are in a radically different tier of power.

2) As has been brought up before, working in a standard way to increase the power/scope of Discipline powers rather than entirely new powers is another way to help here. You can have it naturally favor Elders by linking it to trade offs to things like Blood Potency bonuses. For example, if you can trade bonus dice for more damage when using Potence, and sacrifice free rouses for additional targets, you get a lot of Elder Potence that makes someone like Mithras so scary: the ability to TPK a bunch of neonates if pushed to expend his reserves. This would take more work to keep it simple in use, but should be a functional design mode to approach the problem from.

I like these suggestions. They're a good way to handle it.

[Manfr]

Ok, so thread necromancy has inspired me to crunch some very basic numbers and see how a V5 elder would fare against various kind of characters.
Let’s take 4 basic characters (BP 0, 1, 2, and 3), and 4 elder SPCs (BP 5, 6, 7, 8).

I will place the highest attribute at 4 for basic characters, and at 5 for SPCs.

The highest discipline will be 1 for BP 0, 3 for BP 1 and 2, 4 for BP 3, and 5 for BP 5+.

I will consider that each opposing side will use Blood Surge (+1 for BP 0, +2 for BP 1-2, +3 for BP 3, +4 for BP 5-6, +5 for BP 7-8), and then add BP dice bonuses to disciplines (none for BP 0-1, +1 for BP 2-3, +2 for BP 5, +3 for BP 6-7, +4 for BP 8).

Characters dice pool at their best for disciplines (average of successes: 60% of dice pool ):

BP 0: 8 (5)
BP 1: 9 (5)
BP 2: 10 (6)
BP 3: 12 (7)
BP 5: 16 (10)
BP 6: 17 (10)
BP 7: 18 (11)
BP 8: 19 (11)

So, if I’ve counted well, optimised characters can get a very good pool and huge number of successes already at starting levels: however, the gulf between them and a powerful elder it’s not just a handful of dice, but on average it can be as large as a whole “optimised” dice pool, even when we take into consideration a low-tier elder and a Ancilla starting character. As it should be.

This gulf becomes higher and more dangerous if we move to Fighting rolls, for instance: here, dice pools become higher and higher, thanks to Specializations, Weapons etc., and the gulf between characters who have high fighting disciplines and those who are weaker in terms of power becomes even greater. An optimized combat Elder could probably send into Torpor a single character in a couple of rounds.

Of course, the situation is different when we take into consideration a whole Coterie, but at that point an Elder should also bring in his resources, like Ghouls buffed with draughts etc. If I were an Elder pressed into combat, I would exhaust the enemies with minions to make them reach high Hunger, and then exploit my huge advantage in terms of Hunger re-rolls and my probably higher Willpower tracker.

Then, these are very rough comparisons, with all the relevant dice pools buffed to the maximum: it’s not a guarantee that PCs will face Elders with their best Attributes and Powers.

We should also consider the narrative meaning of successes: rolling over 5 successes means achieving epic feats, and a fearsome Elder could just choose, instead of chomping single PCs bare-handed, to use its huge Strenght roll to make the building collapse on its enemies, or throw a car, or something as big and heavy, over them.

Of course, Elders can also activate more powers and use more Blood Surges, than regular characters. Also, the bigger gets the dice pool, the bigger chance you have of rolling exploding 10s and Messy Criticals, so your chances of getting even better rolls are higher: Messy Criticals also have as a normal result “to succeed in your action by putting the Masquerade in danger” which fits the narrative of Elders doing amazing things that enslave whole crowds or creating horrible collateral damage as they deploy their unoholy powers on the surroundings.


So, all in all: Elders and “by-the-book” Methuselas are certainly far more approachable as enemies in V5 than before. But despite not having 6+ Powers anymore, I would say they are still very fearsome even capped at level 5. It would surely be better if we had a bit more guidance on these dynamics, and how to purposefully manage and narrate them at the table.

[adambeyoncelowe]

Ok, so thread necromancy has inspired me to crunch some very basic numbers and see how a V5 elder would fare against various kind of characters.
Let’s take 4 basic characters (BP 0, 1, 2, and 3), and 4 elder SPCs (BP 5, 6, 7, 8).

I will place the highest attribute at 4 for basic characters, and at 5 for SPCs.

The highest discipline will be 1 for BP 0, 3 for BP 1 and 2, 4 for BP 3, and 5 for BP 5+.

I will consider that each opposing side will use Blood Surge (+1 for BP 0, +2 for BP 1-2, +3 for BP 3, +4 for BP 5-6, +5 for BP 7-8), and then add BP dice bonuses to disciplines (none for BP 0-1, +1 for BP 2-3, +2 for BP 5, +3 for BP 6-7, +4 for BP 8).

Characters dice pool at their best for disciplines (average of successes: 60% of dice pool ):

BP 0: 8 (5)
BP 1: 9 (5)
BP 2: 10 (6)
BP 3: 12 (7)
BP 5: 16 (10)
BP 6: 17 (10)
BP 7: 18 (11)
BP 8: 19 (11)

So, if I’ve counted well, optimised characters can get a very good pool and huge number of successes already at starting levels: however, the gulf between them and a powerful elder it’s not just a handful of dice, but on average it can be as large as a whole “optimised” dice pool, even when we take into consideration a low-tier elder and a Ancilla starting character. As it should be.

This gulf becomes higher and more dangerous if we move to Fighting rolls, for instance: here, dice pools become higher and higher, thanks to Specializations, Weapons etc., and the gulf between characters who have high fighting disciplines and those who are weaker in terms of power becomes even greater. An optimized combat Elder could probably send into Torpor a single character in a couple of rounds.

Of course, the situation is different when we take into consideration a whole Coterie, but at that point an Elder should also bring in his resources, like Ghouls buffed with draughts etc. If I were an Elder pressed into combat, I would exhaust the enemies with minions to make them reach high Hunger, and then exploit my huge advantage in terms of Hunger re-rolls and my probably higher Willpower tracker.

Then, these are very rough comparisons, with all the relevant dice pools buffed to the maximum: it’s not a guarantee that PCs will face Elders with their best Attributes and Powers.

We should also consider the narrative meaning of successes: rolling over 5 successes means achieving epic feats, and a fearsome Elder could just choose, instead of chomping single PCs bare-handed, to use its huge Strenght roll to make the building collapse on its enemies, or throw a car, or something as big and heavy, over them.

Of course, Elders can also activate more powers and use more Blood Surges, than regular characters. Also, the bigger gets the dice pool, the bigger chance you have of rolling exploding 10s and Messy Criticals, so your chances of getting even better rolls are higher: Messy Criticals also have as a normal result “to succeed in your action by putting the Masquerade in danger” which fits the narrative of Elders doing amazing things that enslave whole crowds or creating horrible collateral damage as they deploy their unoholy powers on the surroundings.


So, all in all: Elders and “by-the-book” Methuselas are certainly far more approachable as enemies in V5 than before. But despite not having 6+ Powers anymore, I would say they are still very fearsome even capped at level 5. It would surely be better if we had a bit more guidance on these dynamics, and how to purposefully manage and narrate them at the table.

So, I'm terrible at maths, but where does the 60% come from? Chances of success should be ~50% in V5 (6-10 on a d10).

The doubling of 10s only occurs with pairs, so that only adds a few percent when you're rolling 2+ dice, but it's not usually that much.

Anyway, 5+ successes is epic in V20, but with Difficulties being what they are in V5, it's not that big of a deal. Difficulty 3 is supposed to be average-ish, but a lot of powers are Difficulty 4. Some are even higher.

Really, though, if a BP 8 elder is still rolling 19 dice, then the dice caps aren't really capping as much as they could. Ideally, you'd cap the dice pool at 10 or something. Extra dice could be halved and taken as automatic successes.

Hypothetically, if one wanted to play up the power of elders, it might make more sense to use something like StoryPath's Scale. I could see elder Disciplines doing that. So maybe instead of 6+ dots, you have a system where elder mastery simply means you don't have to bother with lesser beings at all.

[Heavy Arms]

The odds asymptotically approach 60% as dice-pool size increases towards infinity.

Or, in simpler terms, the bigger your dice pool, the double-10s crit thing moves it closer to 60% from 50% as crits get more and more likely.

For me the math above misses out on a lot by ignoring things like Hunger and Bane Severity that come with high Blood Potency. That BP 8 Elder is going to be sitting around at Hunger 3 unless they've recently murdered a few people, and is going to messy crit a ton in roll-heavy situations between having at least Hunger 3 and that massive dice-pool. It also means they run into hitting Hunger 5 a lot faster if they're going full power to take out a group of neonates. A Bane Severity of 5 is not something to scoff at. A cheap LED flashlight would knock 5 dice off of a Ministry Elder's dice-pools at that level.

The issue at hand wasn't that V5 elders can be given huge stat blocks that will let them steam roll on-one-on fights against starting level characters. It's that without some of the old Elder level powers, there's a few really basic tactics that the can't really defend themselves against that will even out those odds when fighting against a group of younger vampires.

[Lysander]

As I posted before in this thread that you can come up with cool amalgam perks that mimic high level elder disciplines and in many ways I prefer it to the old system that we had on closer reflection. Since I play a 10th generation Brujah and a 11th generation Malkavian respectively. Such high level powers don't come into focus all that often and the most potent elder we encountered was of the 8th and 9th generations.

[MrDrika]

Yes, thanks for asking. And I can be wrong, but players are encouraged to come with their own powers, respecting the levels. Nowadays I keep the books more as a guide, because some disciplines, as stated before, are a hot mess.

[Psicose]

Honestly, most of the time I even forget that they exist, but one thing that always made me quite slightly bothered is that there are some skills that I can't explain why they are level 6-9 like Kraken's Kiss or Lethal Weapons of Vicissitude . I want to say at the fifth level you become a walking blood body, but you can't turn tentacles into the body that is still made of flesh, maybe I'm thinking too much.

[Leandro16]

My view comes from someone coming into V5, currently playing Requiem 2^e, and someone who remember vaguely the older edition of masquerade, as i used to be pretty young back then and we mostly played VtM as LARP.

I personally don’t miss the 6+ level powers. It always felt like something unattainable for a player to me, a bit like all those 9th level spells in D&D that are theoretically achievable, but no one really gets to use except once in a blue moon.

In VTM specifically i think disciplines of 6th level and higher suffer from the fact that they got added after the discipline has been added to the game after the original 1-5 level powers of each discipline. Which means they either had to design the higher-level disciplines to be vastly superior, or to cover some niche the original power couldn’t technically do. Or worse, like in the case of relentless pursuit, which allows the user to do something a storyteller might have already allowed a character to do with high potence but now becomes restricted because it's a high-level power.

However, while i don’t personally miss them, i think they did serve a purpose in Masquarade. Given that elders are supposed to be much more powerful than neonates and fledgeling having some restricted power helps to enforce that aspect of the lore mechanicaly. Which is harder to do without true limitations. Sure V5 has generation and blood potency to help, but i’m not sure it does quite enough in that regard. It generally won’t give more than a few dice, unless you go to very high Blood Potency.

In my current Requiem Campaign, which has been going on for a little more than a year, the Ventrue neonate character just got access to Dominate 5 a few games ago, which is higher than a few elder Ventrue have access to in my campaign. I’m not too bothered by it, since the character is still pretty low BP, and Elders have other means of showing they are the bigger fish in the pond, but it’s still something to keep in mind if you care for that particular aspect of the setting.

If someone were to care about restricting higher-level powers in v5, or requiem, to elders, the way i would do it would be to restrict discipline level to 2+Blood potency. That way a vampire would need to reach blood potency 3 to have access to the fifth dot in any discipline. I would make an exception for Thin Blood alchemy, however.

Requiem 2ED discipline powers are way stronger and versatile than those of any edition of masquerade.

Devotions can be absurdly broken, for example Zagreus has a combo of majesty (presence) + dominate that makes a bunch of people behave in a certain way so his wishes become true.He does not even need to plan, the power activates by him saying "I wish this could happen" or this "will happen". The range of this power is at least a city but by the way it is worded it seems to work around the whole globe.

[Lysander]

Zagreus devotion was a cool idea and fit his lazy personality to a tee.

[JezMiller]

Personally, no. Unstoppable horrors whose power defy human comprehension have their place, but to me, that place is a Call of Cthulhu game, not a VtM one.

The "only one power per Discipline level" rule does annoy me. You could make elders more formidable by making them more versatile rather than making them supervillains with fangs, a much better approach IMO. I don't share the antipathy that many here seem to feel towards the V5 Disciplines themselves.

[Heavy Arms]

The "one power per Discipline level" is a huge part of the antipathy towards the V5 setup though. Take that away, and it wouldn't mean everyone would love it, but a lot of the current negativity would be easier to treat as a matter of taste, with a few Disciplines that aren't well adapted to the new scheme.

Even so, there's a pretty solid case to make that if you want more diversity in how the Disciplines manifest, making the Disciplines inherently more variable instead of having more powers to pick from is a more fun approach. I find Auspex in VtR 2e way more fun because the "ask questions the ST has to answer truthfully" approach to many of the powers means the different ways Auspex feels depends on how the player expresses their character's focus and interests; not by having different packages of powers to express how your vampire gets supernatural insights.

[Rhywbeth]

It's more that I miss the first five dots. But 6+ powers are a concept I like for what they represent, though the actual powers have always been lackluster and all over the place. Of course, the entire point of them is that you can invent your own, so I use them to modify the powers of the first five dots - removing limitations, adding little personal quirks, buffing duration, area of affect or strength of their effects and such.

I don't like having elder capabilities being placed within reach of the higher generations by putting them into the first five dots; that defeats the whole point of the generational gap in my eyes. It's not a gap that one should be able to cross without resorting to diablerie, regardless of how hard you work or how much older and/or more experienced you are than your lower generation peers. It isn't fair and that's the point. Blood potency doesn't provide that feel of unfairness in a way that satisfies me.

Elder powers are cheat codes, essentially. The rules do not apply to the elite. You have to follow the rules maintain eye contact to use dominate, lowly 16th-8th generation peon, not them. And no, they don't pay a mechanical price for their greater power. All morals they sacrificed in the name of power, they did willingly, not because the strength of their blood imposed it upon them. Play dirty, with high stakes and sell out your integrity to carve a spot for yourself among them, or deal with the limitations. That's how I like it, and why I miss elder powers and dislike blood potency.

That said, I do like V5's "blood buff" system, which I largely prefer to having 6+ dots in non-discipline parts of the character sheet