Hey folks,

Jess, Creative Director here. As you may have heard, on July 30th we went live with our Alpha playtest for Vampire both at Gen Con and publicly! Thank you to everyone who came to play with us at Gen Con and/or who has checked out the Alpha playtest online and given feedback through our feedback forms. If you haven’t gotten to it yet, you can still test it live on Demiplane, download the PDF from DriveThruRPG, and feel free to check out the announcement panel video. 

Extra big shout-outs to our friends at Demiplane for getting this up and running for us day and date of the announcement so that everyone could get it in their hands right away, and to our Gen Con Storytellers, whose enthusiasm to road test this bad boy really made the playtests both entertaining and super useful to the devs right away.

One of the goals for doing such an early Alpha was to try a bunch of new stuff out to see what people bounce off of and what has some real meat to it. Some of these elements are early winners, and some are “ok, that isn’t working, let’s move on.” And it’s no secret that there is no universal take on what different players and storytellers want from Vampire, and without a big open playtest, we would just be doing this based on the vibes from our own bubbles. This public playtest exists because we wanted to make this in conjunction with the whole community. An Alpha is the earliest and most raw/experimental iteration, and there will be more to come.

We will be closing down the feedback forms for this Alpha phase to do the data pull this Friday, August 28 (if you are sitting on your feedback forms, get them in this week), and it will take us a few weeks to process that data, but we have been iterating on options in the meantime. I did want to give a quick personal hit-and-miss example from running tables at Gen Con as the team begins to return from their summer holiday and starts their big deep dive into the next phase of the playtest.

Hit: [Maturing] Disciplines

These feel really good, and the combination of them with Blood Surge to overextend your abilities to the next level of the power at a cost introduces a great dynamic sense of choice and consequence. It also lessens some cognitive load by allowing the more “build” oriented player to make an investment early in something they want later while still getting mileage out of the power in the meantime. Still not in love with the name, so make sure to give us some suggestions in the feedback form, as placeholder names tend to stick if deprioritized.

Miss: [Drama]

In games of heroic fiction, metacurrencies like Drama can work really well to generate a sense of shared narrative because heroes are generally competent people who win. The currency can introduce friction that the story doesn’t naturally generate on its own without seeming punitive or punishing to the players, since the players chose to generate the consequences. But what about when your player characters are not heroes and your genre is not heroic fiction? 

While I was running my tables at Gen Con, [Drama] felt counterproductive to the shared narrative goal, and I found myself mostly deploying it for pacing corrections and NPC Difficulty adjustments, which were things I could just… already do as a Storyteller. I also struggled with it breaking my immersion, as it was something that wasn’t being narrated from inside the world. I kept thinking, “Why am I so prickly about this? Am I just an old-school ST/GM that can’t get with the modern times? Why am I having such a strong reaction when I’ve played plenty of systems that use this kind of stuff and enjoyed them?” And my theory is that it’s two-fold:

• Horror tends to work on a ratchet, not a budget (think: the candles in Ten Candles only burn down, etc). The best part of Drama was the anxiety of the players increasing as the pile increased. But for me, as a Storyteller, it performed more like bookkeeping without a diegetic anchor. There are already a number of ways for the Storyteller to push this looming sense of dread on the players (Humanity, Masquerade ‘levels’, etc), so it's a bit duplicative while also not providing the sense of play that similar approaches do in other systems.

• In VTM, most of the power already lives with the player to create their own complications. The thing complicating your night is RIGHT THERE ON YOUR CHARACTER SHEET. If the Storyteller has to “spend points” to make something “worse,” it implies “worse” may be scarce. But it’s right there with you, the Beast riding shotgun in your cold flesh, the eternal tension between power and its costs, etc.

Of course, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg (of blood? bloodberg?) when it comes to how we are thinking about iterating on the Alpha. The biggest pillar we are tackling prior to the big feedback pull is on the Storyteller side, as partially illustrated in the above pondering about Drama. (A huge shoutout to our Gen Con Storytellers for letting us sit there and stare at you while you ran games, then flood you with a million questions afterwards!). Then, once the feedback pull is in and we have a plan on iteration, we will update you all with when we think the next version (Alpha 2.0) will be ready for you all to play around with. Expect some more on this sometime in September. 

Remember, this is an Alpha, the very beginning of this journey together. We look forward to sharing lots more in the future dev diaries. In the meantime, the team will continue to iterate on what we’ve already seen, and begin the review of your submitted feedback (make yourself heard on this phase of the Alpha before the forms close on Friday, August 28; our short and long forms are for just that!) We are incredibly grateful for the time and energy you’ve already given to this process, and can’t wait to hear more from you.

(From left to right: Diogo (Lead Game Designer), Huddy (Community Manager), Crystal (Playtest ST), Marty (Associate Creative Director), Steph (Editor), Jess (Creative Director), Matteo (Product Art Director), Meagan (Editor/Rules Manager).