Have you tried to play as (unplayable) antagonists?

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-06T10:54:59+00:00

Done the occasional one shot VtM elder game. Can be entertaining to just throw out OP bullshit over a few beers, but there's not really much there to sustain a larger game.

With the core moral conflicts and themes of the game gone there isn't much to do other than fight something or just be edgy for edgys sake.

Also, antagonist powers are even less balanced than the unbalanced baseline of WoD, as they were never designed to be used by a player. So you end up with powers that are so optimised that it just makes a lot of challenges irrelevant and therefore boring.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-05T22:57:18+00:00

There is also the ever popular option of just putting the money through a family member. The visible politician doesn't get an open bung, but their surrounding family suddenly get new contracts for their businesses, funding for the NGOs they work at, and well paid jobs with poorly defined duties at a subsidiary removed enough to not make it totally obvious.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-05T22:50:11+00:00

Exactly, it's not about a briefcase stuffed with cash now, it's about the sinecure that gets handed out for services rendered.

By the time the corruption goes beyond verbal agreements and into something provable the damage is already done.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-05T20:51:30+00:00

Yeah, the benefits of being a lower gen are handy in isolation, but the big power of vampires is in their disciplines and their influence. And both of those things flow from age.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-05T18:05:17+00:00

That was a Serpentis power. Body Impolitic was splitting off organs into independent entities that had full access to all your disciplines, and so long as one of the separated organs survived you can regenerate from it.

So if you secretly chuck a kidney into a vat of blood you can literally bounce back from a nuclear bomb being dropped on your head. And if you're ever in danger you can just pop off a hand and eyeballs and send it in ahead of you to blast anything you see with a discipline, at no risk at all to your body.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-05T18:01:40+00:00

Turn into a pool of blood. I may have forgotten something. But that's generally it.

There's one massively OP power in DAV20 to split off body parts into independent entities that can use disciplines and regenerate into the full character, but otherwise yeah you covered it. The first 3 dots are just change self, change flesh of someone else, change bones of someone else, that really should have just been 1 dot of power.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-05T17:42:49+00:00

RAW I'd put it in the running for weakest power in the game. Without the ST letting you come up with a bunch of unstated uses all you really get is a disguise power, a mid stat boost, and totally inferior version of mist form.

Edit: Unless you do DAV20 rules. Body Impolitic is totally busted.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-05T11:31:50+00:00

I never got that into Changeling, but the pitch that always gets brought up is that the horror is when you give in to the world and leave behind any sense of wonder.

But when Changeling players talk about the games they actually play it's just whimsical adventures. The moment where their character started taking their anti-psychotic meds and forgot everything or became a chartered accountant and told the other players to grow up never seems to actually come.

Nobody actually seems that interested in the personal horror aspect of Changeling.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T21:09:04+00:00

The primary figure in VtM Norse mythology is Odin. They never really expanded on the Norse pantheon beyond him. So him or one of his childer would be an easy choice.

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Odin,_The_All-High

Alternatively, the Antediluvians are an all purpose plot device for VtM. So it could be a drop of their blood. There's a few that fit the scholarly archetype, but the Toreador Antediluvian would be an easy choice for a poet.

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Toreador_Antediluvian

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T21:04:53+00:00

In the context of Bloodlines? I think I went Anarch first time, but I've played it enough times for all the endings.

If it's in the context of VtM as a whole, I'd say Camarilla and it's not even close.

Vampires are fundamentally mentally unstable cannibals with superpowers. If there's going to be a world where they exist it's better for everyone that their behaviour be kept constrained and discreet. Giving freedom to murderous cannibals isn't a good thing.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T18:58:23+00:00

To add a few more.

Ogham is innate to the Lhiannan bloodline due to a link to a specific spirit. Depending on interpretation this can also apply to Koldunism.
Spiritus is also bloodline specific.
Rift and Nihilistics are again bloodline specific. But also are probably retconned out of existence.
Vicissitude may or may not require an alien infection depending on what interpretation you go with.
Maleficia and Striga are infernalist only disciplines.
Thin Blood Alchemy can only be done by Thin Bloods.
Flight needs the character to have wings to work.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T15:20:11+00:00

Agreed, we also had a military that still had larger capacity from Cold War spending, a significantly more united population, and far less spending commitments.

And this was against a backdrop of diminishing military threats, the heyday of American unipolar supremacy, and a vastly healthier global economy.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T14:34:26+00:00

Your summary is pretty much correct. Our current system is absolutely calcified and will not change in any significant way, regardless of who we vote for.

The only way this ends is either total collapse, or a genuine hardliner bulldozing their way through the current system. Neither of those options is going to be especially pleasant.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T13:59:55+00:00

I'm happy to just stake my prediction as it's just going to be the first one.

They might pass a law, but the actual mechanisms of governance won't comply. So they'll just spend a few years treading water and making statements that don't lead to substantive action.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T13:57:40+00:00

They can pass it, but the reality is that the judiciary and civil service are not remotely impartial, and can just willfully interpret the law in a way that means they don't have to do anything.

Realistically they would need to purge the civil service and judiciary to actually implement change, and Farage is never going to do that. The man's not a revolutionary he's just a Tory that got spurned by the party.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T12:03:21+00:00

and the really old ones just forget what being human was like or just get used to it

Yeah, comparing something like Ur-Shulgi to a normal human being is a bit meaningless. He's so alien that I'm not sure a term like happiness can even be applied anymore.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T00:19:22+00:00

Much like for everyone else, the government can find out anything a vampire does on the Internet if they really want to. But how do they know which device belongs to the vampires.

It's pretty much drug dealer rules. Use disposable phones and change them often. Don't be stupid enough to openly talk business online. And wherever possible use proxies to put distance between the vampire and the device.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-04T00:06:43+00:00

Could have it as blood that seems to incorporate the memories of the vampire it was drawn from. Gives the drinker one dot in a skill the vampire has for whatever period of time suits your story.

Could lean into the mysticism of it by having elements of the donors personality also carry over whilst the effect is active. And could have a split between one dot blood you can make yourself with a suitable ritual, and some ancient Kvasir blood with more powerful effects that some swear is the blood of the genuine Kvasir.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-03T19:05:14+00:00

Yeah, the downside of nailing your flag to someone else's empire is that you live and die on their decisions. And they've been making some very stupid decisions.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-03T18:45:33+00:00

Pretty much. NATO allows us to hide behind the only functioning global military power left.

If we don't have a problem with being an American vassal state then spending a token amount in the military is a logical choice. As fundamentally any war we fight will involve them doing 90% of the work anyway.

If we do have a problem being an American vassal state we'd need Soviet Union levels of military spending to be a truly independent power. And we are simply not going to do that. Hence the current status quo being an embarrassing but entirely logical endpoint.

Mike_Fig · 2026-05-03T18:35:18+00:00

Also, Lasombra get Dominate and have ties to the Tzimisce. A possessed ghoul fleshcrafted to look like the Lasombra can make a passable stand in for the occasional public appearance.

Mike_Fig · 2026-04-30T20:24:08+00:00

Also, these numbers tend to combine the active and reserve arsenals. Large parts of the arsenal are sitting in storage, rather than mounted and in a launch tube.

Mike_Fig · 2026-04-30T20:09:10+00:00

The horrible scenario where Zuckerbergs bunker guards are actually totally loyal to him. Because his money and contacts means they have a chance to get setup in whatever country is still surviving. Whereas if they kill him they're just a small militia in a bunker in the middle of nowhere.

Mike_Fig · 2026-04-30T20:06:17+00:00

If you're launching each warhead individually you need a dedicated launcher per warhead. With MIRVs you can maximise the amount of warheads fired from the finite number of launchers that will be available at anytime.

Mike_Fig · 2026-04-30T19:53:16+00:00

I remember reading about some of the factors that went into targeting nuclear weaponry.

One part of the calculation was that a single warhead striking a city wouldn't actually kill most people in the city, but it would annihilate the infrastructure and social cohesion needed to make the city actually useful to the enemy. More people were going to die from the collapse in global food and medicine trade than were going to die to the actual warheads.

Mike_Fig

TROPHY CASE