Vampire the Masquerade 6e, announced a few weeks back at Gen Con, has all the clans of Kindred astir. The alpha playtest looks markedly different from past generations of the game - and that's been pretty damn divisive among players online. Me, though? I actually quite liked playing it.
Most of the controversy around V6 has been around how different it feels. It's still based on your dots and D10s, but so much has been streamlined.
Blood and body are combined in your Vitae track, meaning you fuel your powers with your own health. Similarly, Willpower can be spent to activate abilities, or you can lose it by taking 'damage' in social conflicts. Skills have been amalgamated so the list is less bulky. Disciplines and Merits are still recognizable, but there's been some serious trims and rewrites.
I'm a fan of the older World of Darkness systems, but mechanically, they get pretty clunky. Anything is possible in WoD, but only if you've done the heavy homework first. By contrast, the system I tested felt sleeker. Wargamer editor Alex, a complete Vampire virgin, got to grips with it quickly thanks to this simplicity.
Like it or not, mortal attention spans are shortening in this modern age. In the age of Tiktok trends and actual plays, games must prioritze accessibility if they want to grow their clans. Welcoming new fans into the fold is a top priority for White Wolf head Jess Lanzillo.
Lanzillo, former vice president of Dungeons and Dragons, is a diehard Vampire player who wants a new generation "to have the lifelong affair with it I've had". She was also the Storyteller in my demo, so I was in pretty experienced hands.
For a few hours, I became a haughty Ventrue with a chronic case of perfectionism. It's a trait I share with my blood-sucking self, though she sometimes gets stuck rolling failed skill checks on repeat.
That only happens when she has an Outburst after indulging her human nature too much. On the other end of the spectrum, if she takes too much heed of The Beast, she ends up in a frenzy of Arrogance, forcing others to obey her orders.
Here we see another tracker that represents the push and pull of our vampire's inner turmoil. As well as deciding whether to spend or conserve Vitae and Willpower, we must also contend with Nature versus the Beast. The humanity scale tracks which side of our selves we indulge in most, with lethal consequences for leaning too hard on either.
I've seen a lot of players online talking about how easy it is to optimize these two trackers. 'Why would anyone ever spend HP on an ability?', one forum dweller would write. Another quipped: 'it's far too easy to act like a human and resist the pull of The Beast entirely'.
Perhaps these statements are true, but I think they ignore the ethos at the heart of V6. This is a system that wants you to fail in service of storytelling. That's one of the things I love most about it. These tracks, to me, succeed because there's so much narrative charge behind the binaries. Every decision has a consequence, and it's not usually good for your character.
Lanzillo tells me "anxiety is a feature and not a bug" in Vampire: The Masquerade. The new system prioritizes "choices and consequences, with the weight pretty heavy on the consequences side". "It's not a heroic fantasy", she adds. "They can build a character that wants to be morally upstanding, but at the end of the day, they always have the hunger inside."
Lead designer Diogo Nogueira echoes this philosophy. "In the fiction that inspires the game, vampires have this internal conflict about who they think they should be and what they're turning into", he tells me. "A lot of the time, this has been addressed externally in the game." "Now, we want to capture that internal struggle, so we built a mechanic that symbolizes which of those voices in the struggle is louder right now."
"It's about taking control of failures", he adds. "Vampire plays differently from D&D, where it's about winning and being the best at something". "Here, there is a lot of suffering and wanting to see bad things happen - because it's a horror game! We wanted to offer players a chance to contribute to the story's complicated situations."
These ideas mainly manifest through Painful Failures, where you roll a 1 and no successes. Doing so prompts you to Choose Your Pain. That failure might drain your Willpower or Vitae by three points, or it might put a mark on the Beast side of your tracker. Alternatively, you can choose to lose all points in a metacurrency known as Quickening - or to give your Storyteller a pip in their own metacurrency, Drama.
I love the idea of Choose Your Pain. It gives you some flexibility if you want to play optimally, but it also encourages you to choose the most narratively appropriate consequence for your colossal fuck-up. I'm less enthused about those two metacurrencies it's tied to. They're one of the more controversial suggestions in the playtest, and for once, I agree with the internet.
Drama was introduced to continue that idea of narrative consequences. This currency also makes up for the fact that players do almost all of the rolling in V6. Mechanically, Storytellers only really influence these rolls by setting difficulty levels (and reducing the number of dice players have in their pool for that check). Oh, and through Drama. Basically, it's a chip the Storyteller can cash in to add complications to a scene, whether that be crappy weather or unexpected extra combatants.
The problem is that Storytellers never needed a mechanic to up the stakes (pun intended). Their own judgement serves well enough, and having to break it down in such a granular way actually hampers the flow of Storytelling. This has been remarked by many playtesters, and Lanzillo has now herself echoed the opinion in an update. I don't expect Drama will survive the winter.
Quickening has better chances, though I hope it gets refined. This player resource is gained after you roll a 10 or your Vitae reaches a new threshold (basically, when your blood-sucker gets hungry).
Quickening can be spent to up your chances of succeeding a roll or, if you spend enough, turn a failure into a safe success. There's a ceiling on how much you can have, though, with consequences for hoarding - so you'll want to deplete your pool regularly.
I understand why Quickening exists. V6 sets up so much potential for failure that you need ways for characters to earn the occasional win. My problem is that it's far too powerful. During my Gen Con demo, most of our Coterie maxed out their Quickening extremely quickly. And, because it needed spending to avoid consequences, we used it constantly - making checks feel trivial, even when the Storyteller amped up the difficulty.
I'd prefer Quickening to function more like Willpower in V20. You can spend it to increase your chances of success, but it's not a guarantee. Plus, it's far harder to earn, so you'll save it for when you need it most.
These hitches didn't hamper my fun too much, however. I can forgive V6 for being in its first draft stages, because the sum of those parts was genuinely entertaining. I can see myself slipping into this new edition of Vampire as easily as a Kindred feeds.
Want to share your own thoughts on the playtest? I'd be keen to hear from kindred spirits in the Wargamer Discord.