V5 Players Guide is out

[Ragged Robin]

It reads to me like the same writer who had this weirdly aggressive take on Loresheets in this book. That writer really doesn't seem to like the notion of anyone wanting to play with old lore or play VtM in the same way it was played in past editions.

To be fair that's been implicit since at least Sabbat.

[Technoma]

• Says all thin-blood-chronicles are good for new players because “the characters don’t know any more about the world than you do!” and this “also allows players of older editions to painlessly reset their expectations”

Yeah no. I can get the same experience but much better by just playing in a full Fledgeling chronicle. Thin bloods were a joke when they first introduced and they still are.

That tone alone makes be disinclined to play thinblood at all.

[AnubisXy]

Knightingale did her take already, but I feel I'd add my own couple of cents here. As I have the book myself, I went back to it.

In my mind, the whole theme of Followers of Set/Ministry is that they are master corrupters and glorious bastards at exploiting other people's weaknesses. After exploitation they turn their victims into their own product, hands on the street, herds or even new members - giving them a chance to rebuild themselves into a exploiter rather than a victim. But the only way a Setite can be weak and easily lead astray by the vices they provide is if they are unsuitable to the life of a Setite, and as such should not mar the bloodline of a God. I'm not a big fan of their stepping away from the core Set Cult, but the whole concept of the Ministry as taking the structures of Institutions and then perverting them from within towards their goals is brilliant, and totally in tune with what the Setites are about.

Now, my personal feelings aside, the writing is bad. It's a rambling statement about how the Setites are as likely to be users as they are to be the abusers. And then proceeds to claim alternately that they are awesome manipulators yet prone to failing to their own product. And then again cycle the descriptions. It's using a lot of words that provide little substance or actually analyse this dichotomy into something usable in a playable state.

For me, it really depends on what direction they're taking the Ministry in 5e, and it's still a bit fuzzy. Ostensibly the Ministry is composed of vampires who generally chafed against the rules, laws and beliefs held by the Followers of Set. So the members of the Ministry are the ones who basically said, "Screw you guys, I'm gonna go make my own religion with even more blackjack and hookers." And it seems reasonable that some of that chafing might have been against the rules punishing people who give in to their own vices. As such, I imagine that the Ministry is more accepting of members who are users than the Followers of Set are.

That's not to say that everyone in the Ministry does drugs or whatever, but you're much more likely to see vampires doing them in the Ministry than you would among the Followers. Ultimately the faith of the Followers of Set is largely monolithic, whereas among the Ministry they are much more open to worshipping different beings and have a much wider set of beliefs.

[Rhywbeth]

So it looks like out of entire book, thus far there is one single thing I liked in a sea of "no thanks". The Nuit Mode merit caught my interest and has inspired me to steal it back to 20th and do some tweaking to generations 13-11.

“Allows players of older editions to painlessly reset their expectations” If the setting of V5 is so different that people who've been playing VtM all along need to wipe our brains into a clean slate does that mean V5 is a "reset" now? (This is going to be a continuous sticking point with me until its officially clarified. V5 is a continuation, except that H5 and W5 are reboots and V5 is so changed it requires a "reset." Am I supposed to be judging this by its merits as an instalment of a continuous setting, or on its own merits as the start of a reset that places a new spin on it? Which is it??)

[Ragged Robin]

So it looks like out of entire book, thus far there is one single thing I liked in a sea of "no thanks". The Nuit Mode merit caught my interest and has inspired me to steal it back to 20th and do some tweaking to generations 13-11.

“Allows players of older editions to painlessly reset their expectations” If the setting of V5 is so different that people who've been playing VtM all along need to wipe our brains into a clean slate does that mean V5 is a "reset" now? (This is going to be a continuous sticking point with me until its officially clarified. V5 is a continuation, except that H5 and W5 are reboots and V5 is so changed it requires a "reset." Am I supposed to be judging this by its merits as an instalment of a continuous setting, or on its own merits as the start of a reset that places a new spin on it? Which is it??)

I think the problem is they'd like a reboot but their are two issues

1) reboots go down like a fart in an elevator. W5 is getting absolutely belted in the fandom and it isn't even out yet.

2) cofd was effectively a reboot anyway.

so they've settled for soft reboot which imo is the worst option. Personally I'd have simply re integrated the alternative play styles in supplementary material while expanding and consolidating on their current preffered style in other works (which keeps everyone happy and makes money). while keeping the setting genrally simular. Implement some changes but don't try and re invent the wheel with the lore because someone likes lasombra carmarilla but you (personally) dont like unique disciplines or whatnot.

[Knightingale]

The Coterie-Chapter:

• After a general introduction, „betrayal“ is mentioned:

Take care when players welcome the concept of betrayal. It can be tempting to play a backstabbing vampire, but it’s usually more rewarding to play a group who play the long game, realizing their agendas and making something of lasting value […].

• “Coterie as Cloud” succinctly talks about Coteries changing during the game and ultimately the Coterie-dots and what Coterie-Type the group plays change to accommodate the story of the game and not the other way around.
• We get the overview-graphic for Coterie-Types and it demonstrates how three or four short phrases are way better as first-impression-summaries for the various types.
• Like: Cerberus: “Guard or protect a significant location, learn its secrets, trade access for power” or Plumaires: “Socialize, pursue your communal art or interest, outshine rival plumaires, spot new talent, unlive well” (this is way more accessible than just using verbs)
• Then all the Coteries are listed again with new write-ups and possible extras and common Coterie Advantages include the new stuff from this book.
• What makes the new write-ups a good addition to what the corebook had to offer is it focuses on what specific Coterie-types do and a lot list three or four example-tasks/missions. Or it includes example narrative milestones for resolving the Coterie-type Fugitive.
• It even suggests that the Questari-Coterie-type is good for those people who want to delve into the old lore of VtM to connect the Coterie to Loresheets (which shows a very different attitude by this writer compared to other sections in this book)
• Coterie-Systems are discussed next
• Changing Coteries during the game gets discussed as well as optional rules for starting out with a stronger Coterie.

“Standard coteries begin with one free dot per player character. Any more dots need to come from player Advantage dots, or from coterie Flaws. This creates lean and hungry coteries, as befits lean and hungry player characters. But in chronicles featuring older legacy coteries, or just to play with a slightly richer dot economy, the Storyteller may allow Coterie Bonuses…”

• Giving options for additional modes of play is always a good addition. This is an instance where giving Storytellers (together with the other people at the table) power to make their own decisions isn’t a burden but rather gives them room to adjust the game as they see fit.
• Things like “What if a vampire who invested a lot in the Coterie gets killed?”, “What happens when characters want to dissolve the Coterie?” get discussed as well as a sidebar on “Coterie vs Personal Backgrounds” (all just solid advice for new STs and players)
• New Coterie Merits and Flaws come next and compared to previous examples of this kind, it’s surprising how… they’re actually okay.
• Take “Under Siege (2 Dot Flaw)”
• The Coterie’s Domain is under attack and the higher-ups aren’t willing to help the Coterie in defending the Domain and this is what it does:

Once per story the storyteller can reduce one of your coterie’s domain traits to one dot or deny the usage of one of your coterie Merits or Backgrounds as your rivals attempt to chisel your territory out from under you.

• “Once per story” makes it more like a mechanic fittingly accompanying a story-event the ST can slot into wherever it makes most sense.

Expanded Domain-Creation

• Normally a Coterie’s Domain was represented by three types of Traits with 1 to 5 dots: Chasse (quality of the Domain as hunting ground plus its physical size), Lien (shows how well integrated the Domain is into the wider power-structure of the city), Portillon (quality of the security and defenses of the Domain)
• What gets expanded here is that rather than just buying dots in these three Traits, you buy locations/settings within the city’s geography.
• The city gets broken up into five categories of setting: Outskirts (regions outside the city), The Borders (suburbs or the edge of a city), The Rack (downtown, centers of nightlife), The Prestige (social and cultural institutions like museums, universities), The Heart (economic and political centers of power in the city)
• And with each Coterie-types are listed that would be suitable for that setting.
• Domain-Merits are what you buy instead of just buying dots in the three Coterie-Traits. The Domain-Merits are associated with one of these three Traits and it looks like this (in this case it’s a Chasse-Merit):

•• BACK ALLEYS (PHLEGMATIC): A good place to do business out of the sight of the authorities and the overly curious, providing quick access to sewers, coal tunnels, cellar networks, and other city infrastructure. Vampires with the Alley Cat or Montero Predator Types get one extra die on their hunting pools here. The rat population adds one die to the Animalism pool of any Kindred spying on your domain.

• You get a dot-value (in this case the Merit represents two dots in Chasse), you get a Blood-Resonance and the Merits usually have one good effect and one bad effect. Also, occasionally, like in this example, Predator-Types are mentioned that would use these locations for their hunt.
• Clans and Coteries
• The section not only lists a specific Coterie-Merit for each Clan but all the Clans get short write-ups about what roles specific Clan-members play in a Coterie usually.
• Most Coterie-Merits are “Once per session”-abilities (and again way more balanced than what you get in the first half of the book).
• My favorite is the Malkavian one: Everything Is Connected (Three dot Merit)

Once per session, the Malkavian has the ability to let another member of their coterie substitute one Skill pool for another of their choice (that they possess) in a test involving the gathering of information. The Oracle is then able to interpret the results, gaining the same information as the original pool would have yielded, depending on the margin of success as usual.

• And then you get a clean Coterie-creation-summary (plus a list of Coteries that are typically associated with either Camarilla or Anarchs).
• I think this is so far the best part of the book: You get an introduction to Coterie-types and Domain with expanded rules and new options. And it all gets linked to Clans and Predator-types which shows how all these elements can work together in the game.
• I think Predator-type could've used a chapter like this as well that delves into questions like predator-types changing during the game, offering Clan-specific Predator-types or vampires developing new Predator-types because they hunt in pairs or bigger groups instead of each vampire having his own individual Predator-type. Stuff that keeps Predator-type interesting and gives more options for how STs and players might approach the whole thing. Just listing all the Predator-types from other books didn't add that much compared to what this chapter did for Coterie-types.

[Knightingale]

The Chronicles-Chapter is this grabbag of both storyteller/player-advice and meta-takes on playing VtM.

• It starts with “Alternative forms of play” – except there’s this tiny paragraph about “Once per session”-abilities and having some reminder ready for when it gets used and it just sort-of floats there on the first page of this chapter unconnected to anything. It looks weird.
• The One-shot-Play-section is chockful of assertions of what players do or what happens in horror-games.
• Like here:

By strictly limiting the number of sessions available to the players to explore their characters and the story, it frees them from their natural inclinations to bide their time or wait for the most opportune scenario to reveal their character’s true nature.

• Or:

Possibly the most important thing to consider when running or playing in a one-shot though is planning for character death. While this style of play isn’t an excuse to be ruthless, cruel or careless, as a player you should be aware that death may be more likely when the drama of the game is turned up to maximum volume.

• Instead of giving advice to Storytellers to run One-shots, it’s just this constant litany of “Well, of course this and that happens and players are like this and that.”.
• There are a lot of variables to how likely character-death is in a one-shot, for example. There’s no natural law saying character-death has to be more likely because it’s a one-shot.
• The whole section feels more like someone’s indirectly talking about a very specific one-shot and not one-shots in general.
• The One-on-One-Play is okay but at the end the suggested example sounds more like things are switching to yet another form of play:

As the two players build trust, through check-ins or mutual excitement at the results, they can even begin to alternate roles as the story progresses, perhaps giving the tale a Rashomon-like quality of overlapping perspectives that never quite unite into a single narrative.

• That sounds more like a story-building game than One-on-One-play.
• The Breakouts-section is good, though.
• The Troupe-Style play-section starts okay but the Benefits and Challenges subsection seems a bit weird.
• Like this:

Similarly, players have more license to “play to lose” as they can afford to dramatically sacrifice a secondary character — or even their main vampire! — without completely losing their tether to the ongoing chronicle.

• This section is truly arguing that the benefit of Trope-style play is that player-characters can be considered "expendable" (That's the exact word used here). The section reads more like it’s written by a Storyteller who desperately wants to kill player-characters.
• Next comes a section on Solo Roleplaying. In these games you play alone without a GM and these games usually have all these various tables and rules to resolve conflicts as you play through a narrative. There are dedicated solo-games like Ironsworn out there but some games also have optional modes of play that allow solo-play (like Rangers of the Shadow Deep).
• The reason I wrote this is that the writer of this section clearly doesn’t know this. Here’s what the section in the book talks about instead:

Composing playlists of what your Minister listens to, solving online quizzes from the perspective of your Hecata, or running an Instagram account as your Toreador are all viable methods of solo roleplay, and may be combined with more traditional means of telling a Vampire: The Masquerade story.

• This section is on “Alternative forms of play” and so talking about solo-roleplaying makes sense but I don’t know why nobody told this writer that a specific form of roleplay-gaming is meant with “solo-play”.

Online Forms of Play

• A good overview on all these different aspects of playing online (Actual Plays, VTT, Virtual LARPing)
• What is especially helpful are listed examples for programs and online-services.
• The whole section runs the risk, though, of becoming outdated pretty fast.
• Although, I’m not sure how necessary it was to really dedicate entire pages to things like streaming or Play-By-Post.

Conviction

• So, the section starts:

Although they seem similar to Chronicle Tenets, the character’s Convictions have a different purpose narratively, mechanically, and philosophically. The Tenets deny (“Thou shalt not kill”) while Convictions permit (“Protect the marginalized”), creating drama from the conflict.

• Interesting idea, sure. Hang on, let me check what the first example of Conviction is in the V5 corebook on page 172: “Thou shalt not kill.” How about that…
• Really strange to come out so confident with what really is a new approach to Conviction that isn’t shared by the corebook.
• The new approach is better at differentiating Tenets and Convictions, though.

Touchstones

• The main-issue of the section is how much of it just feels… banal. Touchstones are normal people your vampire-player-character feels connected to (because they’re linked to a Conviction). It isn’t as complicated as the write-up here seems to believe it is.
• The “Losing Your Touchstone”-bit is a perfect example: It’s essentially just saying “You can lose your Touchstone and getting a new one is hard.”. For having half a page dedicated to this, there’s surprisingly little substance to find here.
• Interesting that there’s a tiny bit on “No Touchstones?” and warns how such vampires would lose Humanity faster. Of course, it has to be mentioned here that refusing to look beyond “normal humans as Touchstones” really limits this concept/mechanic.

Memoriam

• The separate sections on how Humanity and Hunger color a Memoriam are saying the same thing.
• The One-Roll Memorian seems… very harsh.

Sample One-Roll Memoriam difficulties:
One-dot Goal: Difficulty 2
Two-dot Goal: Difficulty 4
Three-dot Goal: Difficulty 6
Memoriam modifiers adjust the conflict dice pools as usual and each player character takes Willpower damage equal to the difference between their successes and twice the Difficulty of the One-Roll Memoriam. This damage cannot be mitigated by armor or supernatural means.

• The optional rule for “Badly Failed Memoriams” just makes things even harsher by saying Willpower-damage can “spill over” and affect the rest of the Coterie by creating Coterie-Flaws (like Enemy or Haunted).

Next come Projects...

[CajunKhan]

The implication I take from that is that the Settites are basically composed of a handful of devoted religious ancilae and elders who are almost ascetic in their devotion to corruption, but the bulk of the clan are a bunch of neonates who pay lip-service to the teachings of their elders, while actually being mostly junkies and perverts.

[Knightingale]

The implication I take from that is that the Settites are basically composed of a handful of devoted religious ancilae and elders who are almost ascetic in their devotion to corruption, but the bulk of the clan are a bunch of neonates who pay lip-service to the teachings of their elders, while actually being mostly junkies and perverts.

The write-up at the beginning where the Clan is described stands out because this is the only place where you get this "frequently - very frequently" tidbit in the description of the struggle between constantly tempting people to give into vices and sin while not giving in yourself. The way Ministry-vampires are described in the Coterie-section of this book is also more in line with the write-up in the V5 Anarch book. It's only the new write-up for the Ministry at the beginning of this book where things go off-the-rails a bit. And it has to be mentioned that the person who wrote that bit at the beginning and the one who wrote the bit in the Coterie-section are two different people.

[Lysander]

The implication I take from that is that the Settites are basically composed of a handful of devoted religious ancilae and elders who are almost ascetic in their devotion to corruption, but the bulk of the clan are a bunch of neonates who pay lip-service to the teachings of their elders, while actually being mostly junkies and perverts.

I'm not shocked that this would happen that more and more Followers of Set would drift away from the clan's ideals and be more selfish. After all Set has been missing in action for 2,000 years and he doesn't have many of his direct childer or grand childer left anymore to direct the clan.

[Ragged Robin]

I'm not shocked that this would happen that more and more Followers of Set would drift away from the clan's ideals and be more selfish. After all Set has been missing in action for 2,000 years and he doesn't have many of his direct childer or grand childer left anymore to direct the clan.

Oddly i tend to find it unlikely, messiac religions tend to be quite robust one with some actual tangible evidence, moreso. Heresies and sects should emerge but it actually stretches credability to have a walk out on this scale.


Personally I just chalked it down to v5s dislike of clan as culture and wishes to treat them more as character classes.

[Lysander]

You could be right on that score Ragged Robin. But I could still see the Followers Of Set change more and more as time progress and I always saw them as a clan who could adapt to the times and thrive.

[Knightingale]

You could be right on that score Ragged Robin. But I could still see the Followers Of Set change more and more as time progress and I always saw them as a clan who could adapt to the times and thrive.

And they have. That's the whole point of having the Followers of Set become "The Ministry" in V5. The actual issue is less that the conflict of "tempting other people vs. giving into temptation yourself" isn't there, it's just that the write-up for the Ministry at the beginning of the V5 Players Guide isn't very good. The "frequently - very frequently"-bit is the epitome of the bad writing and that messy style comes up multiple times in the book. And you notice it immediately. There are these paragraphs in those sections where this writer agonizes over a really simple point and for one, two, sometimes three paragraphs the same idea is being addressed multiple times. It's like the person is indirectly revisiting an argument with somebody and you're just along for the ride as the reader.

Whoever that was, that person certainly was my least favorite writer.

[MyWifeIsScary]

I always had the idea that high level settites looked like ascetics but actually they're at best really desensitized and at worst it's a fetish.


But IMO the personal struggle of Setites is really more to do with the vestiges of their humanity. Should I really be on these drugs, traumatizing these children, and convincing the governor to privatize water? Oh shit, with these thoughts I have betrayed Set.

[Knightingale]

Beyond the problems Setites themselves face, another weird bit of the Ministry-writeup at the beginning of the V5 Players Guide is the notion that they're actually altruistic. That all these schemes and temptations actually are good things.

Much as the Kindred indulge the riddle “A Beast I am, lest a Beast I become,” so do these Ministers tempt and degrade those beholden to them to protect them from greater damnations. Better to while away one’s deathless nights in the VIP section of a nightclub, numbed by the drugs provided by the Serpent purveyor than to serve forever, losing oneself to the Eternal Struggle.

I think that's certainly a new approach to the goal of Setites. I would buy it as an in-character justification for a Setite but it's written like that's what Ministry-vampries are supposed to be like according to the writer.