On the heels of this semi-comedic exchange with @jachilli, a thought for #Vampire Storytellers out there:
Fiction frequently presents vampires as highly competent and often highly intelligent and organized. Even the less-intelligent ones are dangerous due to their strength.
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Fiction frequently presents vampires as highly competent and often highly intelligent and organized. Even the less-intelligent ones are dangerous due to their strength.
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https://twitter.com/JesseHeinig/status/1482466907588481025
You can get some interesting mileage out of tweaking that expectation. Introduce vampires who aren't hyper-competent, whose successes are the result of structural advantages or assistance from other parties.
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The incompetent Prince who's convinced of their own superiority, propped up by a small group of elders simply because they're easy to manipulate. The Primogen who received a political appointment, but has terrible plans. The bumbling, lazy sheriff.
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Players sometimes object to certain plots because "that would never happen, nobody would be that foolish," but you can definitely have characters live down to that expectation. This can create interesting second-order problems for the players:
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The Prince may be overbearing, arrogant, and supremely overconfident, but they're still the Prince. And if they're that much of a nincompoop, how do they stay in power? Who's keeping 'em propped up? If you pop the bubble, who's going to come out of the woodwork at you?
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Maybe you've earned a smidgen of recognition and even though you aren't part of the rarefied elite of the Camarilla yet, the one of the local primogen has taken a liking to you. But this one is constantly being run in circles by other Kindred.
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You don't have the *protection* of this primogen—their "favor" winds up being more of a problem than a boon, because now you're roped into their ridiculous plots and you're one of the "expendable" tools of that primogen.
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Meanwhile the other primogen conspire to keep this one around because they're easy to manipulate and their plans are transparent. How are you going to out-maneuver other Kindred when your "allies" are causing you more problems than they are helping?
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Perhaps the local "loremaster" turns out to be a not-so-secret Gehenna cultist who has wild conspiracy theories about everything. Vampirism is an alien virus. Heightened senses channel information retrieved by tiny demons. Werewolves are a gov't experiment from the '40s.
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But this doof has the best occult library in town, so if you want to look something up, you have to appease 'em somehow. And of course their wild conspiracy theories influence their responses to your otherwise mundane stuff.
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"You can't come into my library wearing those shoes! Everyone knows they are secretly stuffed with orgone-vibrating dust from the hollow earth, which makes them receptors for the dero!"
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As we've seen in the world around us, being in charge is no measure of competence. The same is true for Kindred society.
How frightening is the World of Darkness if the players' characters are the only competent people in it?
~Fin~
How frightening is the World of Darkness if the players' characters are the only competent people in it?
~Fin~
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