QUOTE (hermit @ Aug 12 2008, 09:16 PM)
Kinky sex games is all Vampires are about anyway, right?
Or at least for the crowd that absolutly needs to paly vampires in any game they play ...
Vampirism always had strong sexual connotations, and given how their feeding habits usually turn out in examples from Stoker and Murnau to Rice and Whedon, highly problematic ones.
Presenting a playable vampire always confronts the problem of either trivializing the ethic problems their predatory and abusive nature entails, in the way action and adventure movies trivialize physical conflict and make it acceptable for a mass audience by channeling it into accepted, codified modes of operation, or by turning the oh-so-desperate struggle for humanity into the whiny, patchouli-scathed centre of the game.
I'm not going to dicuss the latter aproach, everybody in their right minds knows how trite and pubescent that is.
The former one might work, but will remain superficial and burdened with a shallow aftertaste, unless you happen to play in Sunnydale, CA and turn it into something witty and entertaining.
SR, however, offers a third approach- and one that is not a retrofitted way to adapt to a demand for an even newer WoD, but one that was inherent to the setting since first edition.
SR, to me, was always about deconstructing the clichés carried over from traditional renditions of fantasy tropes.
Breaking up genre norms.
Presenting a postmodern approach towards the fantastic.
All of a sudden, orks, the sword-fodder of fantasy RPGs, where claimed to be people, too.
Where turned from inhuman dungeon denizens, from the evil, doubly-fascistoid servant race of tolkienesque fantasy, into a discriminated subspecies of humanity struggling for public recognition and freedom from racist persecution, trying to come to terms with a society that took -and still takes- fantasy conventions for granted.
And vampires where no longer the mythical sexual predators of legend, but humans with a viral infection.
Ghoul rights have been an issue since Neo-Anarchist's Guide To North America, which shouldn't surprise anyone, given the tendencies of the game i have mentioned above.
And it shouldn't surprise anyone either that the devs have finally decided to fully pursue that approach by letting some jurisdictions grant civil rights to the infected.
It is not only fitting for SR-
not having such a development in the game world would be against the core of what SR always was about.
The way to incorporate this into your game is easy.
Vamp PCs, stop your whining.
Get to accept that you are totally screwed, but get cool superpowers.
They might or might not make up for the downsides of being a vampire, but hey, that's live.
You can't do a fuck about it anyway, so any whitewolfy brooding is a waste of time.
Just act like a grown-up person and accept the inevitable.
Then find a way of feeding that is actually justifiable to yourself (if you can't, you probably should have spent Edge on that infection test to just die instead of bothering anyone with any emo crap) and do something about the humanis goons trying to stake you.
That's SR vampirism in a nutshell.
It's not an emotional issue anymore, this time it's political.