From MadCap's Couch - Kindred: The Embraced: "The Original Saga"

Alrighty! New series! Don't worry, I highly doubt I'll be touching on this particular one at any time other than October, so it won't be getting in the way of the regular series reviews like Doctor Who, Supernatural, or Sliders. Plus, with only eight episodes of this series existing, this won't take long.

MadCap's Table Top Tales - Vampire: The Masquerade Companion (New Clans and Rules for V5!)

Well, it's been a while since we were here, hasn't it? Last time, I was trying to make a Mary Sue concept work in D&D. This time, however, I'm happy to say I'm here for something far more passionate and pure - corporate shilling!

Just kidding. I'm not actually affiliated with either White Wolf or Paradox Interactive, I'm just a fan of Vampire: The Masquerade. 

As if that wasn't something comically obvious.

MadCap's Trailer Reactions - "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2"

Good night to you, childer of Caine!

Those of you that follow my blog around the month of October know that I'm a horror fan. To tie that into my absolutely nerdiness, I'm also a big fan of tabletop RPGs, and thus we come to Vampire: The Masquerade. A tabletop RPG system made for, instead of gearing up, hunting down monsters, and taking their treasure, has you going around dealing with your tortured existence as a creature of the damned while either giving into or trying to rise above your beastly nature.

So, basically, a very effective political simulator.

MadCap's Tabletop Tales - "Promote Synergy, You Jerk!"

One of the biggest problems you can have in playing just about any tabletop game is conflicts within the party. This is probably the biggest problem in Dungeons & Dragons, what with alignments conflicting and all.  Generally, a house rule is that nobody plays an evil character - largely because all of one of the evil alignments (Lawful Evil) can even work with good or neutral characters with any success.  But even those of good and neutral alignments can, and often do, conflict in their methods and ideology. To me, that's one of the great things about certain tabletop games, particularly D&D itself.

However...

It can be a real pain in the butt to both DM and Player alike.  What's one to do?  In D&D, this can be solved by setting limits on which alignments characters can play. In my experience, this generally doesn't cause a great deal of problems with players. Most I play with will happy make a character within the confines given them by the DM.  Ripley, as a DM, generally doesn't make any restrictions on alignment, but is rather cautious about accepting evil characters, particularly after she allowed them for one campaign and it went...well, less than wonderful (a tale for another time).

But then you have games like Vampire The Masquerade and Shadowrun, that don't really have a system of alignments. Sure, they have Humanity and Essence, but there's nothing that really restricts the player to a single moral code.  In fact, particularly in Masquerade, you have a game where not only is disruption between the players allowed...but is sometimes encouraged depending on the situation.  So again, the question is, what's one to do?

As a DM...I have no idea, because I've rarely been the man behind the shield.  As a player, work with the others in your group.  Try to work on having a mix that won't be clashing on every single issue. Don't make a character that is there to be your expy of the badass that you want to be. That doesn't mean you can't be a badass, but you're not that one anime character. You know the one. The one with the deep and intricate backstory who's lived forever and become the greatest warrior alive, etc. etc. all those clichés.

And again, that's not to say that you can't be a complete badass. But don't be that complete badass who's going to be that way for the sake of being that way. Don't be the guy who's going to keep things from the party simply because "it's in character" for you to do so. For the first couple of adventures, I could see this being the case. But after that...why are you with this group still if you don't trust them? Why do you stick around if you don't want to work together as a team?

Granted, of course, things like that are house rules - there's not a rule that says the players have to work together (even in D&D), just that it's a great idea if you do. And it is, because that's how the game should be played. There is literally no reason for you to go around not working together as a team, because if you're all working against each other then there's literally no reason for the team to trust you or work with you and, if you go so far as betraying the team, there's no reason for them to not just kill you and hang you in a tree.

So yes, summation. Work with other PCs, not against them, regardless of the game. And if you're just itching for PvP, go play an MMO.

For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.

MadCap's Game Reviews - "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines"

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is a game based on White Wolf's Classic World of Darkness RPG setting...most specifically Vampire: The Masquerade.  This requires a little background, both on the RPG itself and this game that was spawned from it.  So, for the TL;DR crowd - you play a vampire, in a society of vampires, and you are in a unique position to shape the world before you based on your decisions. Now scroll down a paragraph or two.

For those that aren't of that caliber: Vampire: The Masquerade is an RPG in which you play...a vampire. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, where the objective is killing monsters and getting loot, Vampire is more about the introspection on the nature of the feral side of vampires, known as "the Beast" and trying not to succumb to it.  And while there is more to it than that, that's the basic roleplaying reason by it. The emphasis here is on the roleplaying, developing the character and, again, trying to stave off the Beast.

...unless you're playing the other side of it, but that's a whole other can of worms.  But luckily, you can get a crash course in the lore of the setting, including the separate factions and the legends of Caine and the Antediluvians (read: really, really old vampires)...right, I said Caine, as in Cain and Abel, with the former being the original vampire cursed by God.

...unless you're one of the vampires that come from Asia, but again...another can of worms.

Perhaps it'd be better to just skip the background on the RPG (it's not really that important anyway, and you do get the cliff notes), and get to the game itself.  Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was released by Troika Games and Activision back in 2004. It was an unplayable, buggy mess of a game, largely because Troika had a very truncated development cycle and a deadline from Activision that saw it sent out basically unfinished by the development team, who were already using an engine they were unfamiliar with.

However, like in many endeavors, the desire of gamers to enjoy a game has seen them go to astoundingly insane lengths before and Bloodlines has gotten better than most thanks to fan efforts. Even to this day, there are still mods out there being made for it, as well as patches and fixes being done up.  The one in particular I was told to get was the "official" patch, currently in version 9 when I got a hold of it.  Otherwise, the game is, as I said, a buggy and unplayable mess.  So, thanks a bunch, internet!

As for the game itself, you can begin by picking one of several different clans of vampires - each with their own abilities and drawbacks - and set your stats, or you can do a questionnaire and have the game pick for you based on your answers.  Having some familiarity with the Old World of Darkness, thanks to my gaming group, I decided to go for two different characters for "serious" playthroughs - a low-Conscience Ventrue with a fondness for being all silver-tongued and using a bat when that didn't work, and a Brujah who didn't care much for politics and preferred to hit, stab, or shoot her way out of situations.

Needless to say, given that I was working on shifting to a computer interface from console, I died quite a few times with that playstyle before I got the hang of it.  Still, having gone through a few different characters to check out the disciplines, I found them (mostly) to be rather workable and mostly balanced, given that the player has to give up blood in order to use them...which dries up quick if you're not paying attention...which can often happen in intense combat situations, which leads to a Frenzy mode where the player loses control as their avatar goes on a killing rampage.

Which leads into the Humanity and the Masquerade ratings. Humanity is how much the player is resisting the Beast, holding on to their humanity. If your Humanity drops to zero, it's game over. Same goes the the Masquerade - the rules of Camarilla society that try to keep humans from learning about vampires (in Camarilla lands, anyway). If your Masquerade rating drops to zero, the game is also over. Simply put, you have to be just human enough and just hidden enough in order to keep things going.

...which is funny when very visible events like blowing up a warehouse are directly caused by you in the plot...but whatever.

Speaking of the plot, it goes as follows. Your character has been seduced by a member of your future clan and Embraced - that is, turned into a vampire.  Unfortunately, the laws of the Camarilla state that a vampire has to seek permission from the Prince (the ruler of the city) to sire anybody and it seems that your sire didn't do that in the least.  You witness the Final Death of your sire before you are nearly put to death yourself...saved at the last minute by the Prince's "generosity". From there, you're given a mission to go find a man named Mercurio and given a craphole safehouse in an apartment building to work from.

From there, you're given Los Angeles to travel around performing various quests.  You can join in on the Main Quest or you can delve into several hours of side questing, which is all pretty in-depth and rather enjoyable all on its own, which several enjoyable characters (voice acting aside), including a jive-talking weapons dealer, a ghoul med tech, and a Japanese demon hunter (that is a demon hunter who is Japanese, not a Japanese demon who hunts).

But the Main Quest involves your sudden throwing into vampirism at the time near Gehenna - the destined vampire apocalypse where Caine and the Antediluvians will rise up and kill off all of vampire kind in a bloody...well, apocalypse. It's the whole metaplot that was running through the Classic World of Darkness's Vampire setting and is one of the main reasons why Masquerade is superior to its follow up Requiem, but that's neither here nor there.

Over the course of the quest, the player learns about a mysterious McGuffin with possible deep significance to Kindred society that has been brought to Los Angeles by parties and for reasons unknown.  As several factions vie for control of it, the player is in an optimal position to help or harm others depending on their choices.  The Camarilla, the Anarchs (a group of anarchist vampires if the name didn't tip you off), the Kuei-Jin (those Eastern vampires I mentioned that aren't vampires at all...sort of), and the Sabbat (the really, really bad and scary vampires) are all valid and workable options depending on both actions and dialogue choices within the game.

Granted, some of them are better than others, but I'm not going to spoil which ones are which.

And, of course, there's the option to just flip everyone off and walk away after the fan has been hit...which is what my Brujah did after what was essentially her worst and most confusing night ever.

Oh, right, nights, sorry...because this totally doesn't all take place on the same night or something...nevermind there's no rest period or anything.  I joke, and I know that it has been mentioned by other reviewers, but how exactly do they justify this taking place over several nights when you never have periods where you must return to your domain to rest from the punishing light of the sun? It rather bugs me, but not enough that it cuts out my enjoyment of the game.

Really, I'm not joking.  The only other complaints I have are the lack of customization of the player character (in appearance, there are other outfits as my Ventrue was glad to find out) and the fact that you can't learn other vampire disciplines (they're all based on clan, which can be a pain in certain sections - like, say, the Elizabeth Dane). Other than that, there's the combat, which is more me adjusting to computer controls versus console so I'm not going to knock the game for that. I like the story, I like the crash course in how the Vampire game works and some of the lore without getting insanely intrusive.

You can go in with the basic understanding of "Oooh, vampires!" and just roll with it without losing too much in the process. After all, nobody needs a glossary when first stepping into a new world, they want to be immersed, and it's true to the RPG as many vampire characters can come and go without ever really knowing the whole truth of the Final Nights.

Mind you, it's not true in one respect - it's too combat-heavy. But a game where you go around doing nothing but contemplating existential dread and learning to quell the raging Beast that dwells inside of you would just get boring...so they pepper in a few combats and blowing up a warehouse (like one does in such a game).  Though it is true in that it's not like D&D where you get experienced based on the bodies you've piled up, but strictly for completing quests and finding unique(ish) solutions to objectives...which carries its own issues, but for the game it works fine.

Not much to say other than, after playing it, I know why it's so beloved. It's got a few flaws that can't be worked out with patches (or can, given some of the mods I've seen), but I'm not going to knock it for that.  Troika was trying to make an awesome game and it really does show, there was a lot of love in the room for what they were doing.  The setting is good, the designs are pretty excellent all around, and it has more than a few healthy doses of humor sprinkled around (such as a call-in radio show of hilarious proportions and the chance for a Malkavian to get into an argument with a Stop Sign). And for a game like this, I can't really think of much more to ask for.

Oh, and a final note - Don't. Open. IT!

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is now available from Troika Games and Activision for Microsoft Windows.

For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter@MadCapMunchkin.

MadCap's Tabletop Tales - "...Comes Many Bullet Wounds"

I was recently pulled into the world of White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade by my RP group. We were winding down from our D&D 3.5 game - "Marks of Destiny" - for a bit and were still going on with our Pathfinder game "The Age of Scared Worms" - when good ol' Ripley (who you might remember from last time) sent us all PDFs for Masquerade and thought it would be an enjoyable experience for us.

So far, she's not wrong. I've been enjoying it very much, but then I'm one of those weird players who actually likes to roleplay in a role playing game.

Because we were starting out with a new system (all but one of us had never played it before), Ripley took the time and effort to make us demo characters and run us through a quick adventure to get us into the mood and learn the rules we'd be using. It was definitely an interesting change from all the swords, maiming, and killing of D&D.  Being creatures of the night! The living dead! Horrors and abominations so dark and evil that humanity did not dare dream of it in the darkest of their nightmares!

.,.except we're not so much playing a Dracula or Angel character type as we are...the people on the bottom rung of vampire society's totem pole.  Which seems boring to the munchkining type and...pretty much anyone who doesn't care for a deep role play experience. Don't get me wrong, however, when I say that I totally get the people who wouldn't be into it.  In fact, there are problems that I have it, such as how advancement works...which is technically what this story is about, but that's not what I'm hear to discuss.

This is basically a story about using your power responsibly when you do get it - which I suppose could be applied to any RPG - and making sure to have a little common sense (which is actually a Trait in Masquerade, I'd suggest picking it up, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned veteran) and do you best to get rid of your naivete at the door, because a good Storyteller (the Dungeon Master of Masquerade) will twist it and leave you royally, royally screwed.

Yes, they will. Don't give me that look.

So, to set the scene, we started playing a campaign under Ripley's Storyteller-ing. Set in the distant land of...Canada! Returning from the last campaign was Keith, freshly recovered from his brain aneurysm, and our new player and current Pathfinder GM Cassie. Thus beginning, we were all given our demo characters and the one that I received was an Irish Ventrue by the name of Sean O'Malley.  Yes, I immediately started with the cracks about how many stereotypes I could manipulate, and indeed made him repeatedly cry "Jesus, Mary, and Joesph!" at every exasperation.

Basically, through no fault of my own, I grew to like the rascally Irishman with a silver tongue...even though it had been revealed to me that the guy was a cocaine dealer for an international drug cartel who was not only hooked on it himself, but also had hooked on several others - among them a cop in Winnipeg - on the stuff, and had manipulated several others to his own ends.

Needless to say, not a nice guy.

But still, a Ventrue through and through.  For those unfamiliar with Masquerade, there are several different clans to choose from, one of which is the Ventrue - essentially the upper class merchant kind of vampire.  And Sean was indeed quite the capitalist, always looking to get something for something...but to make a profit off of it as well.  He owned a bar in the city of Winnipeg, O'Malley's (where we'll make our escape) and was a generally respected businessman.  But after some time, simply running a bar wasn't doing it for him.  He needed more.

In the game, vampires have special abilities based on their clan called Disciplines.  The Ventrue in particular have Dominate as one which...does exactly what it says on the tin, truth be told.  Put enough dots in it, and you can even advance to a point of being able to rewrite people's memories, which Sean had after a few sessions.  So he decided, rather than go through the long waiting game of buying his way through other businesses in Winnipeg...he would just mindscrew someone into handing over the keys.

He'd found a man by the name of Randall Taub, a prominent owner of several businesses in Winnipeg and - as it turned out - a devoted member of the German mafia. Between sessions, we played out some business negotiation between the two, eventually working out a deal that Taub would send a man to Sean's business and see how he operated things. But because Sean got a little greedy and forget that he basically had forever to wait this guy out, he decided to put to use his Dominate skills that he had acquired over his relatively short career.

...it actually went off without a hitch. Sean's rolls went insanely well with no botches.  Taub was ready to hand over the keys to Sean and head off to start a new business in the Bahamas and well out of the way of Sean's power grabbing. Unfortunately, because Sean does not have Common Sense, Ripley could not tip me off to the fact that a man whose office was guarded by men with very obviously not street legal sub-machine guns might be a bad idea when Taub suddenly rushed out and told them he planned to hand over all operations to him.

Sean fought valiantly, but isn't a fighter in the least, so he was quickly gunned down.  In Vampire, the rules work a little differently.  Bullets can't kill vampires...or, at least, a bullet can't. It's a long and complicated process, but it basically ended with Sean going into torpor - the vampiric equivalent of a coma.  Believed to be very, very dead, he was eventually buried in Winnipeg while still in torpor and it seemed that Sean would be lost forever, trapped in a steel-reinforced box in the bottom of a grave.

Talk about living hell, am I right?

It would have been a fitting end, but Sean thankfully had some connections with his cartel.  One of them particular, a childhood friend, was his superior and arrangements had been made to dig up his grave and take the casket back to their homeland of Ireland. Due to some hilarious hijinks - including the wrong casket being taken all the way to Ireland, being held up at customs, and more - Sean finally woke up from his torpor and was forced to explain himself...afterwards getting a new identity and hiding out in Ireland with the whole world thinking he was still in that grave in Winnipeg.

So yeah, it's a story about "just because you can doesn't mean you should".  Sean's retired for the time being, though he may potentially come back and hopefully a little wiser for his near Final Death experience.  Vampires are tough, but...bullets fired by four men from high-grade illegal weaponry are tougher, it's best to always remember. No matter how big you get, the Storyteller or the GM always has something bigger.

That's not to say you shouldn't take risks, that is part of the game after all, but go into it cautiously. Otherwise, you'll be filled with enough holes to whistle as you hit the ground...

Oh, and if you're playing Masquerade, always spent the Freebie Point to get Common Sense! Always, always, always!

For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.