A Gangrel without claws, is just...just...*twitches*...that's like a Street Samurai without a Smartlink, man!

But yeah, they're solely for asskicking time, in the video game. Not so great for hauling butt, but terrific for making big slashy tears in people you don't like. Toss in a decent Brawl skill and a little Blood Buff, and you're golden.

Another thing worth mentioning that isn't obvious is that claws do aggravated damage. The soak pools of monsters also determine how much damage they take, and everything have a much lower aggravated damage soak pool. That's why the sword that does agg damage is usually a better choice than the bushhook (which has a higher base damage) but only does lethal damage. That's also why the knife is a step above your hands when it comes to the killin' it changes the damage you do to lethal, while your hands only do bashing damage.

end result is that the owod system had 3 damage tracks, but stacked into one.

iirc, bashing could be overwritten by lethal while aggravated overwrite bashing and pushed lethal ahead of it.

bashing and lethal goes byebye with a bit of blood for a vampire, even aggravated goes away for a werewolf, while anything but bashing was a death sentence for a careless mage...

Eh? It was vampires that had trouble with aggravated damage, as they couldn't soak it normally, and could only heal 1/level a night (iirc). A mage that takes aggravated damage just slaps some life magic on and is fine. If you don't have life then any sort of damage is bad, as you don't heal any faster than a normal guy. From what I remember, mages soaks aggravated damage as normal, and most of the interesting combat effects tended to produce aggravated damage by default

note the careless part

btw, i did a bit of checking, and magical healing of aggravated damage was vulgar, inviting all kinds of additional problems...

Post mage 1st ed, mages couldn't soak aggro or even lethal without using magic to give them the ability to do so, ie grow armor with life. As mortals, they can only soak bashing without using magic or armor. Since pretty much everything in the game is lethal or aggro, combat could get really deadly. Mages are just about the only supernatural that is worse off than a vamp (the other big one being hunters). Of course, any group of mages would include a couple of life capable casters who could just buff the whole group, unlike vamps who would each have to invest in fortitude (or one of the other disciplines that allowed aggro soaking at higher levels).

The changes to how damage was tracked was one of the biggest difference between the earlier white wolf games and the later 2nd/3rd (ok, revised) ones. It was an attempt to try and shore up a completely unrealistic damage system, where average people could shrug off small arms fire with minimal injuries. So they shifted from normal/aggro for damage to bashing/lethal/aggro. They then "fixed" combat by taking the soak test away from mortals for lethal damage, and rolled mages into the category of mortals. This made them very squishy, because, as you pointed out, pretty much everything magical is aggro or at least the also unsoakable lethal.

On the other hand it didn't really fix all that much because the problem really tended to crop up because a poor shot couldn't really boost up the low base damage all that much, especially for firearms. If a bad shot was coupled with a low damage roll people could literally take no damage before soaking. It was even worse in dark ages games where ranged weapons were even weaker. In dark ages vampire I've seen arrows bounce off of peasants far too often for my taste (damage 2 from a short bow, so a 25% no damage unless you had net successes to hit!). The group I played with were RAW up until then but we quickly adopted the GM's house rules after a few incidents like that.

So when I play bloodlines I pick a single discipline to upgrade first then I spend 1/2 my XP on that and 1/2 on everything else. I also save my everything else XP until I need it for some reason. Always go for the cheapest route to get your +1. Once my one discipline is at 5 then I pick a second one to start upgrading. You may want to try this method if you decide to play through it again, I find it works really well. There are 5 endings to go through, plus about 4 game types though some can be combined (malk, nos, phys, social). Personally after playing the gangrel I would go for a social character next, that would be someone with dominate or presence. Then play the malk and lastly the nos. The nos I find is a VERY different game just by being soo limited on the social.

In a (fairly) recent Vampire game, my Anarch-turned-Scourge Brujah got into a scrap with five Sabbat. At once. By himself (but that's okay, the rest of the coterie wouldn't have been much help). I should point out, by the way, that this guy was a Social then Physical sort of character -- despite being an Anarch Brujah Biker type, he was the sort that was a charismatic, would-be-freedom-fighter, sort, with more points in Empathy and Leadership than Brawl and Dodge. He had respectable combat stats, but he wasn't your min/maxed combat monkey.

Luckily -- for me, not the Sabbat -- our ST wasn't really "up" on the damage system. We played by the Rule of Cool quite a bit in that short-lived campaign, and it carried over into fighting. My character drew his WWII veteran father's lucky old Ka-Bar, and commenced to slaughtering. Two Sabbies unloaded Uzis at him, one grew Black Talons, one (in a velvet suit) came at him with a rapier, and their resident Brujah Anti snarled and tore the fender off a nearby truck to start swinging at me like a bat.

I boosted Stamina, and then didn't bother to dodge or parry a damned thing except the one with the claws, because frankly he was the only one I was scared of.

Bullets do "bashing" damage to Vampires, which means Licks not only get to soak it, but it gets cut in half after the soak. Likewise, a fender -- even one wielded by a character with a little Potence -- is obviously bashing damage. They nickled and dimed me a bit with all the guns and such, and the whip-thin Toreador Anti with his rapier stung a little, but every hit I landed with my knife (lethal damage, with Potence to back it up), they were feeling (compared to his own rapier, which I was able to soak away to nothing thanks to spending blood heavily on Stamina).

Ah, good times, good times. The rest of the Coterie rounded the corner on about Round 4 or 5 of my aborted recon stealth mission, to find Elijah the Scourge battered and bloody, with a headless Toreador Anti on the ground, a blood-slick knife next to the corpse, and with my mouth latched onto the neck of the Sabbat Gangrel, who I grappled and drank dry (in the opposed Str vs. Str tests that ensue), with the rest of the Sabbat pack high-tailing it out of there.

Damage type, in other words, is VERY important in determining the outcome of a combat.

I don't like what the revised damage system did to mage. It leads too much to mages having the adventure from teh safety of their couches (which mages are mostly capable of doing)

I don't like what the revised damage system did to mage. It leads too much to mages having the adventure from teh safety of their couches (which mages are mostly capable of doing)

Personally, I don't like the revised damage rules period. The distinction between bashing and lethal is counter intuitive at best. Why can mortals suddenly not soak anything other than fists and clubs? A weedy 100 pound teenager was suddenly just as tough against a knife as a pro boxer. Really? Aggro and lethal were exactly the same for soaking for fae, mages, shapeshifters, and mortals. They could either soak everything or nothing at all. You could be killed just as easily by bashing/lethal/aggro. For fae and shapeshifters all three types of damage were exactly the same when it came to soaking. You rolled the exact same number of dice against the same difficulty. Once your damage track filled up you were just as helpless and just as dead. It was just a silly way to make mages and mortals stupidly weak in combat.

The distinction between the three only really made a difference for vampires, who took half damage from bashing and couldn't soak aggro without using disciplines (fortitude was the easiest, but not the only way). For some reason, they decided guns were bashing against vamps. I guess they wanted melee to be better. So much better that you stood to do more damage with a knife (STR+1 lethal) than most firearms (3-8 bashing). Especially since you could use blood and potence to massively raise HTH damage anyways. Things were skewed enough already, and now guns did half damage on top. The best part was that arrows did lethal. You were actually better off with weapons that were several hundred years out of date.

i suspect this shows that vampire was the focus of owod fully, with the other branches a nice account filler, but nothing really important to the company.

While Vampire was a big portion (especially of the LARP community). Werewolf and Mage were very successful lines.

Yeah, the big damage change pretty much made Mages into glass cannons.

I also noticed and was amused by how in the video game the hunters tended to run around with crossbows.

So crossbows, which do the same thing as rifles in terms of piercing flesh with a pointy high velocity object, somehow do a lot more damage...because the bolt doesn't spin? Because the velocity is lower?

By that logic I should be able to cold-load some .45 ACP cartridges and slow them down enough to make them do crossbow bolt damage, or maybe cold load some shotgun slugs and fire them out of a short-barrelled shotgun. Or maybe I should use a 50 caliber blackpowder flintlock pistol for uber damage because it'd be slow and large.

I imagine that the logic behind that is in the fact that arrowheads are usually sharp and sharp things do lethal damage. Though I could be wrong.

also, there is the wood issue

So, wait, in WOD, werewolves are, like, immune to everything?

So, skipping over reading all the stuff about WOD games in general and getting to the OP:

I've played the game before (Got it two or three years ago Halloween from steam at like 75% off) and very much suggest getting the unofficial patches. It's been so long that I very much don't remember what the changes where, but I remember that I liked them.

Malkavian is definitely worth a playthrough. Maybe not the first time (Because you won't know what the options mean sometimes), but definitely before you start skipping through all the chat, because actually reading the options and getting all the jokes and such is great.

Nosforatu is also cool to go through and see all the things they've actually gone through the trouble to change, but it can get somewhat confusing as to when letting people see you does or doesn't count as an infraction.

Say hi to Cain for me.

How can you apply unofficial patches to a Steam version? Also, are there any mods or patches you'd recommend over the others? There seem to be a few out there.

Not necessarily. They just tend to always be wolfed out and sporting huge soak pools, plus they regenerate in a few of their forms (one health level a turn is pretty awesome on a seven-health-level scale). Silver will fuck their shit up, though, being impossible for them to soak AND hard for 'em to heal.

As I recall you have to go into your C:\program files\Steam\steamapps\vampire folder and just run or unzip or whatever the patch there and it should work fine. You might have to change a .ini file slightly, but I don't recall it being a particularly difficult process. Remember that there are steam forums for all the different games, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has posted instructions.

I haven't tried any mods beyond the unofficial patches, so no idea on any of them. Oh, and I do remember that the patch changes something in the hotel and possibly the hospital as well... maybe in the castle, where some items are and such. Mostly just makes the game more stable as I remember a couple of crashes and glitches before patching and no troubles afterwards.

Like I said, got it.. guess it would be two and a half years ago almost now and haven't played it in a while. Very good game though, as I still remember large chunks of it.

Let's be clear here. Fire arms were lethal damage to everyone except vampires. For some reason vampires took bashing damage, which was halved after soaking, from guns. No justifiable explanation was ever given. They just seemed to want to slant things even more in the favor of melee. The best explanation I've heard was that it helped to make vampires more competitive in a mixed modern WOD game. They are, hands down, the weakest of the big three (vamp/werewolf/mage).



Definatly icing on the cake. Get enough extra success and you got to stake (paralyze) the vamp.






Sort of. They could soak silver while in their breed form. So werewolves born as humans were ok in human form, those as wolves in wolf form. The nasty thing was that the metis (born as a werewolf) could shrug it off in werewolf form (they suffered over flaws to compensate). Oh, and there was a merit that let you soak silver in any form.

They healed 1 level of lethal or bashing per round. Aggro took longer to heal. They soaked both the same. They could also use rage to heal several levels at once, even from silver but were limited to how often they could do it (once/scene IIRC). Keep in mind though that basically anything that could stand up to a werewolf for more than a round was probably also able to inflict aggro and could soak aggro themselves.

In the PnP it doesnt actually do more damage (not entirely true as a bow with the right arrow tip does lethal rather than bashing like guns) you just have a chance of staking the vampire thus paralyzing it. I can't recall if the video game reflects this or not.

The reasoning (if you want one) is guns do a lot of trama to organs through kinetics. Vampires are dead thus the only thing that matter is the brain and the heart, the rest of the organs don't do anything. Blades rip through muscle (they assume you are slashing) and sometimes bone, thus destroying the ability to manipulate the body part. Your claws are "mystical" which means they do agro for being "mystical".

I'm not saying it is great reasoning but it is the reasoning.



Think D&D Troll, they regen like they weren't even hit unless the damage is the right type (aggravated).

The patch adds some stuff with your ghoul, changes where you get the agg damage sword, and changes around the hospital quests a little, iirc.

But yes, the malk dialogue is great, since you can say things that are true, but you don't know in character. For example, (iirc) when you first meet Jack in the alley, one of your dialogue choices is "and here's the plot of the game!"

http://www.patches-scrolls.de/vampire_bloodlines.php

This is the definitive unofficial patch and it restores a great deal of content that was removed from the game late in development, including the dragonbreath shotgun (which is less useful than you'd think).


As for the mods, there can be issues of compatibility. The Cammirilla mod on the page I just linked to makes huge game changes and isn't compatible with the unofficial patch. The Companion Mod is based around an older version of the unofficial patch and thus possibly not compatible with newer versions. The Heather Live mod is based around an extremely old version of the patch.

I haven't tried the Clan Quest Mod, but I understand it is based around the unofficial patch version 6.5 (relatively recent) and can is compatible with the Arsenal Mod (which adds some new guns). There are also a few mods that just improve the graphics and thus shouldn't interfere with other mods.

The unofficial patch has an automated installer. Some others do, too. For those that don't it's a simple matter of unziping them in the correct folder.

Well, I finished the game yesterday evening in a final five or so hour marathon stretch. I guess this whole post is going to be full of spoilers...



It seems like the game would be tough to play through as either a melee-only or firearms-only character. There's a LOT more enemies than bullets up until the very end of the game and enemies tend to require multiple headshots to bring down. The Steyr AUG's zoomed headshots I squeezed off one at a time were probably less effective in dropping people than a .22LR to the face would be in real life. In that way, Vampire definitely stays true to its roots as a pen and paper game because your l33t FPS skills really can only take you so far. Uh, I also felt that the two end bosses pretty much required firearms to be able to beat...



I enjoyed most of the game and thought the characters and the quests on the whole were quite good, as was the atmosphere. I felt like the quests were better and a bit more complex towards the beginning of the game than the end, but I actually feel that way about a lot of RPGs.

As a big FPS gamer and recreational shooter, I did take issue with some of the firearms. Why does the uzi do more damage per shot than the Steyr AUG? Shouldn't the "Jamie Sue" do more damage, seeing as it's the only 30 caliber rifle in the game? Is a "saturday night special" a .38, and if so, why is the LAPD walking around with "saturday night specials"?

Honestly, the interface for selecting firearms was absolutely HORRIBLE. A lot of times when I died it was because I'd spent the whole battle fumbling around with the F2 key and the mouse wheel trying to select the right firearm and pulling out the wrong one. Doom made it easier to pick the right firearm than this game.

I felt stealth and sneaking was kind of shoddily implemented. As it so happened my character had a high stealth score and during a lot of the game he could just crouchwalk everywhere and be hilariously unnoticed by everyone. It looked surreal, was uber IMO, and I felt that stealth had some real rough edges in terms of implementation.

I actually felt that a lot of the boss battles were quite challenging, especially when played in first person mode. The key to avoiding attacks seems to be to jump away at the right moment but it's not always clear when the attack animation is done doing damage, so timing it right can be pretty tough.

On the whole a very good RPG, and I'm planning to do all the recommended play-throughs and check out the community patches. I guess just a few rough edges.

Well, I just started my second playthough. I figured I should do a social playthrough now as that's what people recommended. So I'm doing a female vampire named "Social" and I'm basically going to load up all the social stuff. I guess I can't neglect some of the combat stuff, though, because I presumably still need to get through the boss fights.

Overall, it really is a pretty good game (my kvetching about the core RPG aside). The various endings can be a lot of fun, playthroughs can feel very different based on your character choice, and while you never quite get the "woah" feeling from some of the scenes on second and subsequent viewings, it remains a solid video game that's aged fairly well. It's one I wish we'd get a follow-up for, even if it'd be set in their new WoD which I'm not nearly as familiar with.

The Sheriff is a puzzle boss for melee characters. There is a way to beat him but it's convoluted.

As for the endings

I've applied the Aliens Vs. Predator trinity to WoD. I reckon that werewolves are predators, vampires are aliens, and mages are like the space marines.



Friggin trolls, the bane of any low level PC.

Many Disciplines (like Thalmaturgy, Dominate, etc) are range attacks. The trick is blood management. When going into combat with a social character I use weapons as a last resort when I'm low on blood. Taking 2 dots in firearms and melee is cheap but brawl you will need to keep raising in order to feed.

[edit] example with dominate is blowing up the Sabbat at the begining. You sneak in then drop down in an area and use trance on shotgun boy then suicided everyone else, then feed on shogun boy. Rinse wash repeat.

Just so I don't have to worry about what is and isn't spoiler:

The Clan are the "Tremere," for the record. Big ol' pains in the butt, in a tabletop game (they've just got some weird abilities, and can be a handful for an ST to keep track of)!

I always loved the Tremere, though some of their powers in the pnp game are very difficult to find a situation to use. Its one of the few clans were being lower gen wasnt as big of an advantage. (it was still an advantage just not as big of one)

I'd say that depended -- almost entirely, in this case -- on how heavily you invested in Dominate instead of Thaumaturgy.

I mean that there are some specific Thalmaturgy powers that are VERY specific situations. Especially when not just looking at Blood. And they were less lower gen = win than say Gangrel, Brujah or some of the other clans (Its still there just not as much).

I am noticing that whenever I hit a segment with scripted NPC movement and dialogue my game seems to get stuck now. The game doesn't crash, but it's like the scripting isn't working properly anymore. I had gone ahead and installed the community patch, which I had been enjoying, but somehow maybe it broke the scripting? What should I do, re-install it through Steam?

Never had that problem that I recall. I suggest deleting your local content, reinstalling via steam, and they re-applying the patch. Maybe do a local backup before you do the patch so if it keeps messing up you don't have to re-download again.

Yeah, when I have a little more time I'll have to attempt a re-install.

Thread necromancy go!

I bought Bloodlines yesterday when Steam had it for 75% off ($4.99). Started off playing a female Brujah, got to the confrontation with Jeanette and Therese, realized I'd made the wrong choices to be able to save them both (or at least Jeanette; yes, it's because I want to save the slutty vampire in a schoolgirl outfit), and restarted as a female Tremere. Her name is Raven, for maximum angsty-Goth ridiculosity.

I played the game long ago and quit it in disgust before the cargo ship mission. Mostly because I was being served shovel after shovel of bullshit sprinkled with nonsense and utter disregard for the system.
First, no ghoul is going to scream "HEY YOU'RE A VAMPIRE!" in the middle of the fucking street, at least not to a Brujah who is going to feed him a knuckle sandwich for that (sadly, it's not an option here). Second, no stealth unless you got Obfuscate - that's a joke. Third, what the fuck is a Nagaraja doing in LA? All that and absolutely horrid graphics (take a look up close at the dancers in red at the Asylum club. They're so horribly off-model it's not even funny. That and the person responsible for shaders on the characters' eyes fucked the job BADLY).
That and then there's a WERESHARK in one of the side missions. Wereshark. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Tried a Mage game once as a player... I was the only Mage. Everyone else was from a different WoD game.

It was interesting, kind of like a dysfunctional "Cheers" at a Heavy Metal bar my character owned. And then there was the illegal street racing.

You mean a Rokea? Yes, weresharks are canon in oWoD. Dunno about nWoD.

BUT OF COURSE they were canon! It was just that the writers apparently got their hands on every "each new one gets more stupid" splatbooks and shoved so much shit into the game it became unplayable!

Seriously, Mike?

Yeah, pretty much. It's a pretty popular opinion that splatbooks for oWoD were sometimes adding unbelievable amounts of bullshit (example: Samuel Haight). As I said, I quit in disgust - they were selective about canon, and badly selective at that. I haven't played as a Toreador, though, but I do believe that then I'd quit even faster (during the gallery mission) - bullshit blood spirits pouring out of the paintings are one thing, going blatantly against Toreador's clan weakness while being unable to just deny the mission would be much more serious.
Also, loading times. Jesus Christ, loading times. Have a level load for five minutes on a powerful machine, walk through it in a minute, have another level load for five minutes, only to have a conversation I skip halfway through every quote because I read subtitles faster than the voice actor plays his part.

My only real experience with playing Vampire was a Dark Ages LARP, where the guy running it was a good friend who told me, "Hey, I need some guys I trust to play the high powered NPCs". I agreed and got handed a character sheet labeled "Lancelot".

Yes. THAT Lancelot. The NPCs were all Arthurian Legend characters, all like 5th or 6th generation vampires. Setting was the War of the Roses historical period.

The players were given 9th and 10th gen vampire templates they could tweak. Most that showed up were used to standard Masquerade LARPs. Soon after we started, one group began with the stereotypical prissy angsty mincing political maneuvering. They were pretty shocked that when they annoyed King Arthur, he unlimbered a greatsword and cut one of them in half.



And, oh, gods, when a 5th Gen uses Presence...



-k

Every Vampire game I've ever heard of was a LARP. Didn't anyone play it around a freaking table?

We did. Which resulted in a couple of epic scenes involving property damage.