It's the second day of the Month of Darkness, and we're bringing in the weekend with our third dev diary from Creative Director Jess!

So crawl out of the shadows to discover what we've learnt during the 1.0 Alpha playtest and our plans moving into 2.0.

Dev Diary #3 - What We Heard: Alpha 1.0 Feedback Recap  

Hey folks, Jess here with another dev diary from the White Wolf Team! This dev diary will focus on getting a little more in-depth on learnings from the first round of Alpha playtesting for Vampire (this will be referred to as “Alpha 1.0” moving forward), and give you all an idea of where we will be taking the next round of playtesting (this will be referred to as “Alpha 2.0”)

First off, thanks again to everyone who participated in the Alpha 1.0 playtest! Over 10k characters were created on Demiplane alone, and we had an unexpectedly high engagement level on the feedback forms. Nearly all of the feedback was thoughtful, highly engaged, and incredibly valuable to us, and we know that takes time, so again, thank you.

Something of note is that we realized, not long after the playtest launched, that most of the players and storytellers who were engaging had never participated in a public playtest before, let alone one in such an early Alpha state, and we didn’t do the best job of setting that up for everyone. 

So, first, WHY a public Alpha in the first place? A few reasons. First, to be honest, the V:TM player community has been edition-fragmented for some time, so it’s been very challenging to get a read on what the prevailing desires and play styles are. Why not just throw everyone in the same sandbox and see what comes out? Second, the beauty of an Alpha is that we can test a number of hypotheses before they are fully baked so that we don’t end up too far down the sunk-cost fallacy path of game development. Nothing is printed in a book yet, so we don’t have to errata it out later. Getting all of you into the mix right away means we are killing our darlings while they are still cheap to kill, before art is commissioned, layout locks, and we compromise ourselves out of making hard choices because they are too expensive to make.

So, before we get into the nitty-gritty of where things are headed with Alpha 2.0, here are some fun and enlightening data points from the forms:

• You collectively wrote us about 432,000 words of feedback.

• 15 of you hit Google Forms’ 1,000-character limit on an answer.

• Our single most prolific respondent wrote 1,718 words across their answers.

• Just over a quarter of all responses (about 27%) were submitted between midnight and 5 AM local form time. Congrats on being extremely on brand!

• Long-form respondents split almost perfectly evenly between players, Storytellers, and people who did both.

• Paper character sheets are alive and well: in-person-with-paper was the single most common way to play, narrowly beating online-without-a-VTT.

• Lasombra was the most played clan by a wide margin, with Brujah a distant second.

• Okay, so "Tussle" got your attention! Sadly, we can’t track how many respondents were singularly driven to respond by their need to eradicate this terminology immediately.

Now, for the real meat of this dev diary: we have been folding this feedback into our next round of playtesting (Alpha 2.0), which we are targeting for an October release (subject to change). This will come with new shiny feedback forms that a real data-type person is helping us to design (yes, we got your feedback on your experience with the form).

I’d like to first go over some of the learnings from Alpha 1.0, then square those up with a little peek into how those learnings are informing where we are taking Alpha 2.0. Note: We will not be going into too many specifics of 2.0’s design evolutions here, as one of our learnings is that players can only extrapolate from what they are given, and there’s a finite amount of information that we can give right now since everything is still in development. Expect a much more in depth dev diary upon Alpha 2.0’s release.

Things We Learned

Blood is at the core of the Vampire experience… and you had a lot of feelings about needing to spend it. The relationship between Vitae, Willpower, and using your powers generated more feedback than any other single topic in the playtest. A lot of love for the tension of blood as a precious resource, but that cost made a lot of you hesitant to use your cool vampire powers. Hunger getting baked in as a threshold on Vitae wasn’t clear enough for a lot of players to interact with, either. Generally, bookkeeping and upkeep stuff with the thresholds was too fiddly. 

Metacurrencies have to earn being Vampire-appropriate. Drama and Quickening drew the highest skepticism of anything we tested. Groups who liked Quickening really liked it, but it also was the only element in the playtest where “does this make you feel like a Vampire” came back largely negative. Drama was a non-starter (see our last dev diary for more), but feedback also suggested that it may still have real value as an optional support structure for newer storytellers. Vampire has had metacurrencies (V5’s Willpower as the most recent example), and Quickening played well, but we are going to hold anything we might explore in this space in the future to a strong narrative standard. 

Storytellers want to do stuff. The throughline from STs was a feeling of reduced agency, from not rolling dice to a perception that mechanics were taking the place of your artful choices. Choose Your Pain and Devil's Bargain both being set up for players to drive both added too much pressure to the players and took away Storyteller toys. By increasing player agency and attempting to reduce ST load, we made an overcorrection. 

Failure should be scary. A recurring critique of Choose Your Pain was that letting players pick their consequences took the teeth out of failing. We vampires like our failure with fangs. 

Structure helps some tables, and suffocates others. Social conflict rules split the room: groups with shy or newer players genuinely valued having a framework to lean on, while veteran roleplayers found it interrupted the conversation they were already having. Finding the balance between accessibility and flow is now one of our core design tenets.

The most mentioned Discipline was one not in the playtest. Protean was the most mentioned discipline in all the feedback, and it wasn’t even in the packet. Impressive! It was not great of us to only show you where part of it went (Animalism), rather than the full picture. As part of the audit of Discipline powers, Protean powers were sorted a couple of ways, and you will see the other parts of it in Alpha 2.0.

Alpha 2.0 Stuff

(Deliberately not exhaustive or detailed!!!)

• Choose Your Pain: Gone as a mechanic, but its spirit survives in a reworked approach to failure with more narrative weight and fewer menus.

• Diablerie: Yes, this is updated, definitely some unintentional word choices made in the last minutes to get the playtest out the door. Though if you play at my table and really bring the dramatic roleplay, I may allow for diablerie by titty twister to celebrate this accidental meme. 

• Disciplines: Rebalancing costs and uses across the board. Also, the lineup grows somewhat in 2.0 (but not completely). More on the whole Discipline review and design process in a future diary.

• Dice are back, baby: Everyone wants to roll a big pile of dice!!!

• Drama: Out of the core game, but we’re keeping it warm for a possible option for new STs.

• Expanded Options: Lifepaths, Merits, and Sires are getting more choices.

• Humanity: Getting streamlined, no longer a resource engine, and Natures are being reworked into something that older players may find familiar. 

• NPCs: Working on additional guidance and examples for more fleshed-out NPCs than the simple quick builds that were in 1.0.

• Social Conflict: Working on a more streamlined set of skill tests with a lot more narrative guidance and freedom.

• Vitae/Willpower: We will be testing a new version of this that we hope will help to resolve the martial/social balance and “feels bad to use my disciplines” challenges.

So that’s what we’ve got for you today. To reiterate, this is NOT the whole picture of Alpha 2.0, there’s a lot more getting Tussled with (sorry), lots of other fun stuff we’re not ready to spoil just yet. We’re targeting October for Alpha 2.0 to go live, though, as always, it's written in pencil, not blood. What matters most to us is giving it the right amount of time to take in the 432,000 words you sent us without taking so much time that the next round of playtesting is a moot point. Thank you so much for playtesting this unfinished game with us: typos, titty-twister diablerie, and all. Can’t wait to do this all over again with you.

(NOTE FROM THE MONTH OF DARKNESS TEAM: We will be back with more Month of Darkness updates on Monday, the 5th of October.)