Date: 2019-01-19 08:14 am (UTC)From: [personal profile] propergoffick
propergoffick: an elegant little cup full of blood (vampire tea)
Do you want to know a secret?

I really liked 1e Requiem. If the group I'd had before uni had been willing to move with me I'd never have looked back. Missed the boat on Requiem 2e: it came out during a very... un-together... time of my life and I kind of wrote it off out of edition warrior stupid-headery. I bought in last year and I really like it.

You're spot on about the differences. I think it's down to Requiem being a self-consciously literary game, which draws on fictional archetypes for vampires' powers and weaknesses and makes a toolkit for vampire fiction, rather than a more traditionally gamery world-building exercise where each clan is designed to fulfil a role in society and has a corresponding stereotype. (There's a whole paper on this; the short version was presented last year and hopefully is still at bit.ly/RG18VAMP) It's an evolution, and it took 2e coming along with a dev team who hadn't worked on Masquerade to get in there and do things like make Humanity grow up.

Anyway. Requiem is my favourite but Masquerade is an easier sell. More people have heard of it, there's a video game, it's actually available in shops, and it's easier to knock a chronicle together because it provides its own plot and conflicts and the troupe just puts a spin on them.

I always thought Requiem was the one you played if you had your own vampire story you wanted to tell, and Masquerade was the one for when you weren't feeling super creative and just wanted to do some roleplaying.

Bite Me works, for me, because Rose Bailey is up front about there being more to it than that. I like dev notes in general, if they're substantive and not arty-farty puff pieces, and the little book clarified a lot of things about the big ones in a convenient, citeable-in-papers kind of way. Requiem has a broader sense of "darkness" in which there's room for compassion and decency. Masquerade goes harder on the grimdark: you're bad people and the world is shit. V5 in particular really latches on to that, with the Hunger being an unpredictable but constant thing and the Predator Types all being some flavour of, well, predatory bastard. I have no deep objection to that but I'm coming to realise it's not my jam.
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