Future generations?

[Muad'Dib]

One of the Dark Ages rulebooks said "many of those of the 12th generation have failed to Embrace". By the 1990s it had become "many of those of the 13th generation". My theory is that the Blood gradually strengthens over time so that the theoretical maximum generation increases.

The changes or tendencies in Embracing (and possibly Ghouling and creating Revenant Families) might only apply to particular Bloodlines or under very particular circumstances. It might very well be that Vampires of the 13th Generation can reliably Embrace, though it might be that such Childe tend to be Duskborn / Thin-Blood Vampires.

It would be nice if there would be a whole V:tM book explaining the matters of Generation, and detailing out overall details in regard to Bloodlines. Such a book could also elaborate and expand on the basic and standard qualities a Vampiress starts out with.

[adambeyoncelowe]

You have the link to the conversion? I'd like to read it again.

Here it is: http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/m...203#post285203

I use a variant of these rules where you can't increase your Generation at chargen at all (the ST decides), but you can take Flaws to raise your Generation.

[VAMPIRES SUCK!!!!!]

Yeah, it was quite good, and in some ways better than how V5 did it.

IIRC, it relied on XP being spent on Blood Potency, but the costs were reduced below a certain threshold for each Generation lower than 13th. So a 10th Generation vampire would get an XP break on each dot up to BP3 or so. Once at BP3, the costs would return to normal.

Rather than balancing it with Bane Severities and Feeding Penalties, like in V5, it was balanced against how appealing you were to diablerists. That was it. BP was mostly all carrot and not so much stick, and that fit the themes of VTM better (in my view).

Personally, I think mixing Generation and Blood Potency probably was adding a level of granularity that the game didn't really need. They do very different things, and mixing them up looks appealing, but in practice overcomplicates things for very little payoff.

E.g., most PCs won't reach the highest BP levels, and trying to balance BPs means any character that does becomes unplayable anyway.

After much trial and error, I have personally settled on the following rules to "fix" the issue of Generation being too cheap and too essential:

1. The ST picks the *starting* Generation available for all PCs, based on the power level of the game (13 for low powered neonates, 10 for social manipulations between ancillae, 8 for young elder games, you can go lower for truly bonkers games if you wish).
2. No one can lower their Generation at chargen. You can only increase your starting Generation by taking Flaws. So if you're playing a neonate, you can take a Flaw that makes you 14th, 15th or 16th Generation, instead of starting as a 13th Gen like everyone else. This turns the decision from one of "Shall I be more powerful for 2xp?" ("Well duh!&quot to one of "Is it interesting to be weaker than everyone else at the start?" ("Maybe, for this character, it is.&quot
3. The rule about Celerity allowing you to spend more blood per turn than your usual limit now applies to all Disciplines. (If you want to be really generous, you can say that vampires can activate one Discipline with any blood point cost, and then use their full per-turn limit on any combination of healing and buffing in addition to that.)

The main issues, I found, were blood per turn in combat and inter-party balance issues. When you remove those two problems, most of the issues vanish.

Yes, most vampires won't ever hold more vitae this way, but they can still activate their cool new powers.

You have the link to the conversion? I'd like to read it again.

[Iguazu]

I always assumed future-generations would just be too thin-blooded to be vampires.
I never liked the whole, Cainites etc. I thought it was too much of a coincidence that vampires are rooted in the most popular religion of the time; so in ought-four, when Requiem came out, I secretly switched to Blood-Potency and didn't tell my players letting still believe their blood-powers was how far they were removed from Cain. The feeding-requirements were awesome and the Seven-Generation Vampire was in for a surprise.

[adambeyoncelowe]

I once thought read a masquerade/requiem mashup sonewhere which stated, that, while due to Blood Potency, every vampire could theoretically reach the heights of power.
But due to Generation, the time taken to reach said height becomes longer the further you are from the first vamp.
I think it's a cool solution.

Yeah, it was quite good, and in some ways better than how V5 did it.

IIRC, it relied on XP being spent on Blood Potency, but the costs were reduced below a certain threshold for each Generation lower than 13th. So a 10th Generation vampire would get an XP break on each dot up to BP3 or so. Once at BP3, the costs would return to normal.

Rather than balancing it with Bane Severities and Feeding Penalties, like in V5, it was balanced against how appealing you were to diablerists. That was it. BP was mostly all carrot and not so much stick, and that fit the themes of VTM better (in my view).

Personally, I think mixing Generation and Blood Potency probably was adding a level of granularity that the game didn't really need. They do very different things, and mixing them up looks appealing, but in practice overcomplicates things for very little payoff.

E.g., most PCs won't reach the highest BP levels, and trying to balance BPs means any character that does becomes unplayable anyway.

After much trial and error, I have personally settled on the following rules to "fix" the issue of Generation being too cheap and too essential:

1. The ST picks the *starting* Generation available for all PCs, based on the power level of the game (13 for low powered neonates, 10 for social manipulations between ancillae, 8 for young elder games, you can go lower for truly bonkers games if you wish).
2. No one can lower their Generation at chargen. You can only increase your starting Generation by taking Flaws. So if you're playing a neonate, you can take a Flaw that makes you 14th, 15th or 16th Generation, instead of starting as a 13th Gen like everyone else. This turns the decision from one of "Shall I be more powerful for 2xp?" ("Well duh!") to one of "Is it interesting to be weaker than everyone else at the start?" ("Maybe, for this character, it is.")
3. The rule about Celerity allowing you to spend more blood per turn than your usual limit now applies to all Disciplines. (If you want to be really generous, you can say that vampires can activate one Discipline with any blood point cost, and then use their full per-turn limit on any combination of healing and buffing in addition to that.)

The main issues, I found, were blood per turn in combat and inter-party balance issues. When you remove those two problems, most of the issues vanish.

Yes, most vampires won't ever hold more vitae this way, but they can still activate their cool new powers.

[TwoDSix]

At the end of the day it comes down to the original writers likely focusing on theme over mechanics. 13 is a more unsettling number than 60 so that's the default starting generation. Elders just have more power than you and there's nothing you can do about it*. Elders either don't embrace because their power makes them inhuman or hoard the right to embrace. The Sabbat were literal monsters with power you can't dream of. But if you run the numbers on the setting things get weird, like the 'baseline' generation dropping only every ~800 years.

A lot of Requiem 1e feels like taking Masquerade 1e and changing things until the numbers and everything make sense. Blood Potency was clearly a big part of that, as it cleanly allows for thousands of generations (and with the changes in Requiem 2e Methuselahs can be truly terrifying even at BP1). Masquerade is just never going to make as much sense, but it might not have to. Refocus on the themes and make the Caine myth less monolithic and it could all work.

* And if you try success likely means one of death, social isolation, or going into hiding for years.

[Prometheas]

We're basically supposed to accept...

No we aren't. WoD is very liberal with unreliable narrator and vampires straight up lying to cover up passed events(ventrue seems to be pretty active about embracing childer considering he's Dead for example). Elders lying to cover up the fact that they're younger/older than they say they are or that they diablerized their predecessor and stole their identity or hide some other politically charged propaganda is rather common.

It's just as likely that Methusela and Ante's Do breed just as often as higher gens, but their childer would be near impossible to tell apart from the average neonate(and low gen neonates living long enough to reach elder status could be where "thickening of the blood" rumors come from as those new elders hide their tracks until they're strong enough to claim their birthright more openly).

[CajunKhan]

The thing, these purges aren't the only time the young die. The young through elders die constantly, and even the Meths get picked off here and there. The math on this really doesn't add up, especially since the Meths aren't presented as constantly breeding, and thereby keeping generation from simply bleeding out. We're basically supposed to accept that most Antes haven't bred in in millennia, the Meths rarely breed and are slowly getting picked off, the Elders through Neonates are a constant bloodbath, but somehow vampiredom simply running out of generation is only slowly becoming an issue.

And diablerie isn't a good explanation for why this isn't happening. Diablerie is hard. It often fails. It's also often impossible to even attempt, because you enemy's defenses require you to kill him in some way that doesn't lend itself to diablerie, like a bomb, or even plain old chopping his head off.

[Prometheas]

Honestly, I don't think gens are a problem as monteparnas pointed out, the thin-blood flaw canonically changes from gen-to-gen allowing the blood to exist thinner and weaker over time.

Another think, Kindred society regularly purges its member en masse. Ever notice that most methusela we get stats for were only embraced on post-christ/common era time-scales? Then we get an example of an Actually ancient methusela with Ur-Shulgi, who's first move upon awakening is to purge the assamites of heretics on mass. Another note: Most stated methusela have only a handful of disciplines that they took to an impressive level, Ur-shulgi doesn't have stats and is treated in all cases almost like an Antedeluvian himself.

Finally, there's the fact that despite being openly reviled, Diablerie is pretty much expected and the only way to advance in vampire society(that's not a bug, it's a feature). The Jyhad itself serves to purge low gen vampires too weak or incompetent to hold on to their position and elevates young high-gens who have the creativity and drive to rise through the ranks.

[TwoDSix]

Most suggestions for switching Masquerade to Blood Potency tended to do what V5 does, have Generation set minimums and maximums for Blood Potency. Which due to feeding restrictions can get uncomfortably restrictive at the lower generations.

What makes more sense to me is to have everybody begin at the level of 13th gen, and have them continually lower until they reach their actual generation. Generation instead shortening that time period is interesting, but in practice means that many elders are either in torpor to reduce it or sitting at BP10.

The reason why Masquerade uses Generation while Requiem uses Blood Potency doesn't seem arbitrary to me. Masquerade was designed as a war of the generations, the Elders have set things up so they have all the power, both political and mystical, and your choices are either sucking up to them or tearing the whole system down. Generation being mostly static supports that, it's just another advantage the Elders have given themselves, sometimes by outlawing the very acts they've benefitted from.

Requiem is more of a cold gang war, where power can be a lot more fluid. Blood Potency means that most Elders have to abandon their political power every hundred years or so, and none of the methods to work around the feeding restrictions are certain forever. Pick the right faction, play the political game, and even a neonate might have actual authority.

Yes the number of generations in Masquerade can seem weird, but who knows when the Antediluvians last rose up to devour their progeny? That Methuselah might claim to be 5,000 years old, but do you actually believe she is, and with the power she holds does it matter? Honestly a quiet Gehenna within recorded history isn't out of the question.

[VAMPIRES SUCK!!!!!]

I once read a masquerade/requiem mashup sonewhere which stated, that, while due to Blood Potency, every vampire could theoretically reach the heights of power.
BUT... due to Generation, the time taken to reach said height becomes longer the further you are from the first vamp.
I think it's a cool solution.

[adambeyoncelowe]

V5 also gave 8th Generation vamps the ability to reach six dots, while removing the double costs for blood expenditure for 14-16th Generations. One could argue that the in-game reason for that is that the blood has thickened (even if the IRL reason was mostly for mechanical balance).

[TwoDSix]

I'm personally not a fan of how V5 changed Generation, if I wanted Blood Potency I'd play Requiem, but aside from that.

I've tended to assume it was a mixture of regular purges, there just not being the population to support many generations, and diablerie being significantly more common before the formation of the Camarilla. To me most low generation vampires were probably sired in the 1900s, before then they were the ones purged when the Prince decided the Masquerade was a little bit thin. The average generation dropped by one every five hundred years or so as more low gems died and more high gens escaped the Scourge as a result.

[JezMiller]

One of the Dark Ages rulebooks said "many of those of the 12th generation have failed to Embrace". By the 1990s it had become "many of those of the 13th generation". My theory is that the Blood gradually strengthens over time so that the theoretical maximum generation increases.

[Baaldam]

It’s pretty clear that the roll of generations hasn’t been linear throughout history. Punctuated catastrophes and periodic culls have cleared a lot of the younger generations every few centuries. We don’t know how far back this cycle goes, if it’s always been that way, or whether the ones known as the Antediluvians created the status quo for their own purposes.

We don’t know for certain that there is an end to the generations, just that after 13 or so the blood is thin and unreliable, and a couple of generations after that a lot of Embraces just don’t work.

We don’t know that any of the mythology is actually true. It could be a narrative designed to serve the eldest by getting their progeny to regard them as untouchable gods while attacking each other. Even the numbered generations could be bullshit on a long enough timeline. At any rate, the garden of Eden and Noah’s flood are not things that literally happened. Caine is a myth wrapped around a question: who was the first? There may not have been a single first. It’s really just the extrapolation of observations about generation in the present.

All very true and i like very much to occasionally highlight how patently unreliable a lot of lore and outright mythology a number of kindred take for actual fact overall is.

Also, on a little aside, just remembered a little something (from another game) relating to kindred and the not-quite kindred that offers some interesting creative fodder for players and STs to tinker with.