Does anyone miss Virtue and Vice for splats?

[moonwhisper]

I feel like I kinda miss having Virtue and Vice for supernatural creatures.

The splat-specific Anchors introduced in 2nd Edition (Mask and Dirge, Blood and Bone, Needle and Thread, Root and Bloom etc.) do a good job to flesh out a character and provide roleplay guidelines, and are of course more tailored to the themes of each game line. However, Virtue and Vice IMHO are better suited in making a character feel well-rounded: the idea that no-one is perfect, everyone has some flaws, and, on the other hand, even the worst villains have some positive aspects.

To me they're also more intuitive to come up with, especially if I need to flesh out an NPC. If, as the ST, I have to roleplay, say, a Changeling NPC, I may have no idea what kind of Thread motivated her to escape Arcadia. Instead, playing her according to a Vice, like in a Lazy or Proud way for instance, is much more straightforward (at least for me).

Most importantly perhaps, I feel like there's a lot of interesting opportunities that are being missed. I was reading some 1st Edition supplements, like Inferno or Goblin Markets (some of them relied a lot on the 7 virtues/vices, perhaps too much sometimes) and I found really interesting, from a storytelling perspective, the notion of having a Whisperer demon or a Goblin shopkeep tempting a PC's dark side. Supernatural PCs don't have vices anymore, at least not explicitly and not mechanically (even if it can be still be roleplayed, of course). Some PCs may not seem to have a dark side at all.
You could try tempting their alternate Anchors, but some of them are really not as straightforward. Having a "Devil-in-disguise" type of creature tempting a Werewolf with a "community organizer" Bone or a Sin-Eater with an "advocate" Root doesn't have the same ring to it.

What if supernaturals had four Anchors (both Virtue/Vice and new ones)? Or three?
Does anyone else feels like splat-specific Anchors shouldn't replace Virtue and Vice, but complement them?

[Guest]

Noooo lol. Not me. Trying to shoehorn the moralities of beings like the Uratha, the Lost and geists into a Judeo-Christian Virtue-Vice dichotomy was not a good idea. As a god of ancient Egypt, Khonshu the Moon-Whisperer would not approve 😊.

[Lashet]

I feel like I kinda miss having Virtue and Vice for supernatural creatures.

The splat-specific Anchors introduced in 2nd Edition (Mask and Dirge, Blood and Bone, Needle and Thread, Root and Bloom etc.) do a good job to flesh out a character and provide roleplay guidelines, and are of course more tailored to the themes of each game line. However, Virtue and Vice IMHO are better suited in making a character feel well-rounded: the idea that no-one is perfect, everyone has some flaws, and, on the other hand, even the worst villains have some positive aspects.


What if supernaturals had four Anchors (both Virtue/Vice and new ones)? Or three?
Does anyone else feels like splat-specific Anchors shouldn't replace Virtue and Vice, but complement them?

Better to simplify this mechanic for NPCs rather than just cut it completly, imo.
After all, just say you changeling NPC Thread is his pride

[Michael]

What if supernaturals had four Anchors (both Virtue/Vice and new ones)?

I think that's broadly the way to go.

[JesterTheMad]

Noooo lol. Not me. Trying to shoehorn the moralities of beings like the Uratha, the Lost and geists into a Judeo-Christian Virtue-Vice dichotomy was not a good idea. As a god of ancient Egypt, Khonshu the Moon-Whisperer would not approve 😊.

Virtue and Vice don't have to be based on the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues in 2e. They can be any positive/negative aspects of your character

[Stupid Loserman]

While I was not a strong fan of the Seven Deadlies and Seven Cardinals of First Edition Virtue and Vice, I love the simplicity and accessibility of the Second Edition freeform Virtue and Vice. Custom Anchors like Mask and Dirge simply don't deliver that for me. They don't add any particular flavor to my experience and I usually find it harder to shoehorn them into character concepts and into events in play. They just get in the way. (Deviant's Loyalty and Conviction are an exception: they succeed in coloring the flavor of the game more clearly, and present clear reasons why chances to uphold them would come up in play. I think an argument could also be made for Promethean's Elpidos and Torment Anchors, but I haven't gotten the chance to play Prom 2e.)

Stacking Virtue and Vice on top of the custom Anchors would be a bad idea. Too much to keep track of and look out for, for not enough impact on the game.

[proindrakenzol]

Noooo lol. Not me. Trying to shoehorn the moralities of beings like the Uratha, the Lost and geists into a Judeo-Christian Virtue-Vice dichotomy was not a good idea. As a god of ancient Egypt, Khonshu the Moon-Whisperer would not approve 😊.

The "Seven Heavenly Virtues/Seven Deadly Sins" was an entirely Christian construct, that has no support in Judaism.

I do wish they'd ditched the names "Virtue" and "Vice" entirely, and replaced them with something like "Id" and "Superego" or anything less tied to an external morality.

[Guest]

The "Seven Heavenly Virtues/Seven Deadly Sins" was an entirely Christian construct, that has no support in Judaism.

I do wish they'd ditched the names "Virtue" and "Vice" entirely, and replaced them with something like "Id" and "Superego" or anything less tied to an external morality.

Your first paragraph is 100% correct and I apologize for the error. My bad. I knew that, I just wasn’t thinking. But I don’t like your second paragraph because id and superego are tied to Freudianism, which is inherently sexist and assumes that sexuality is an inherently bad thing and has since been discredited by a lot of famous psychologists and psychiatrists.

My 3000th post! Yay!!!

[LostLight]

Like, if you want it to be as neutral as possible, you could replace "Vice" with "Flaw" (or "Desire" if you wish to remove negative connotation) and "Virtue" with "Ideal" or something like that. Basically, Vice is meant to represent some "lower nature" of the character which provides an "easy fix" while Virtue is some kind of a "higher nature" which requires some hard work. In theater class we used similar concepts in order to describe the characters you play, even though that "Will" and "Obstacle" are the more common ones in this field, where the character's "integrity" is less of an issue, and all that matters is what the character desires and what stops them from gaining it. You could think about Virtue and Vice in the same terms, with Will representing the character's "ideal version" (hence Virtue) and Obstacle the "characteristic which stops them from becoming that person" (being Vice). On the other hand, I am perfectly fine with Virtue and Vice as they are.

On the subject of this thread, while I did like having Virtue and Vice for all templates, the truth is that the new Anchors allow us to define the alien mentality of monsters- vampires, werewolves, changelings and others don't think like human beings, and as such don't need to obey the same system of values as human being. It helps to define them as monsters, which Virtue and Vice do not provide. However, you could make an homebrew Merit which gives a certain character which lacks one of those Anchors access to it- call it "Human Regression" (00 - 000), where at 2 dots version allows the monster to "remember" their Vice and the 3 dots version reminds them their "Virtue". I would personally have it that you can access only one of those, to remind them that they are still monsters, but having it as a merit could be a nice solution for your issue, IMO.

[Sith_Happens]

The one time a friend trying to run Changeling told me to have a Virtue and Vice instead of Needle and Thread, I could not for the life of me think of a Virtue and Vice that really fit my character whereas I knew exactly what his Needle and Thread would have been.

[helel]

I do wish they'd ditched the names "Virtue" and "Vice" entirely, and replaced them with something like "Id" and "Superego" or anything less tied to an external morality.

I kinda like "Ideal" and "Indulgence" to keep alliteration in the pair.

[proindrakenzol]

I kinda like "Ideal" and "Indulgence" to keep alliteration in the pair.

I like Ideal and Indulgence a lot.

[Stupid Loserman]

The one time a friend trying to run Changeling told me to have a Virtue and Vice instead of Needle and Thread, I could not for the life of me think of a Virtue and Vice that really fit my character whereas I knew exactly what his Needle and Thread would have been.

That's interesting, it didn't occur to me that folks would have this problem. (That might read sarcastic but it absolutely isn't, it's a legitimate consideration that I hadn't envisioned.)

I've had the opposite problem playing Vampire: whenever I make a character I never have a comfortable fit for Mask or Dirge, and even self-made custom Masks or Dirges end up feeling ill-fit and poorly representative of the character, whereas I've never gotten stuck on deciding on a Virtue or Vice for a character.

I mostly disagree with the view that new Anchors help model alien mentalities. They've always felt reductive to me, like being a monster narrows possibilities within constraints rather than expands them into different spaces. I'd note that most unique Anchors don't differ mechanically from Virtue and Vice much, except for the fact that instead of one "frequent-small" payoff and one "rare-big" payoff, each Anchor offers both types of payoff. Deviant, again, does better in this regard: the unique Anchors work very differently, being effectively inextricable from specific Touchstones in a way that I do think does better to model a mentality that is not quite the natural human state.

That's where I'm coming from, anyway.

Re: renaming Virtue and Vice, I'd try to maintain not the idea that one is held in esteem and the other is a guilty pleasure or weakness, but rather that one is compulsive and a quick fix, and the other is a drive towards a heroic effort. Pattern and disruption. Comfort and crusade.

[moonwhisper]

The way I see it, Virtue and Vice are not tied to any concept of morality (and are not meant to be shoehorned Christian values). I simply see them as a character's Ideal and Weakness, or Indulgence, which is what I miss most, and what I would probably use as new terms. It's true that monsters should have an alien mentality, but they still can have ideals and weaknesses that make them feel more realistic, more well-rounded, more immersive.

I think that alien mentality should be represented by other traits like the Integrity-like ones (Humanity, Harmony, Wisdom etc.). Most of them have already a set of breaking point trigger examples that set them apart from mortal behavior, and in many cases you can customize your own breaking points.

When you think about it, many of the splat-specific Anchors are actually archetypes for character concepts. Some of the Mask/Dirge examples are like "scholar", "rebel" etc. which could be just what you wrote under "Character concept" on your sheet.

While I personally prefer to stick with the Ideal/Indulgence pair, the concepts of Will/Obstacle and Comfort/Crusade are really cool.

[Guest]

I like Ideal and Indulgence a lot.

That totally works. That’s universal enough to apply to almost any supernatural being with at least some connection to humanity.