The Seventh Tradition: Panic

A few days ago, Vampire: The Masquerade Sixth Edition was announced (player pack here, storyteller pack here)  and, judging by the internet, someone had accidentally started a global frenzy check. Social media transformed into one giant Elysium where everyone was passionately explaining why V6 would either save Vampire forever or personally set fire to their favourite clan. I downloaded the alpha playtest the moment it became available.

My feelings can best be described as 50% excitement and 50% existential dread.

I remember V5 receiving a similarly divided reception. The Hunger Dice, the Beckoning, the fall of the Tremere Pyramid, the Second Inquisition: many of those ideas felt controversial at first. Over time, though, they became some of my favourite parts of the game. Our tabletop group still alternates between V20 and V5 depending on the kind of story we want to tell, so I promised myself I wouldn't judge V6 too quickly.

Then I started reading.

Tabletop changes

Mechanically, V6 isn't trying to be "V5 with a few tweaks." It's a much more fundamental redesign.

The biggest headline is that Vitae and Health are effectively merged into one resource, meaning almost everything your vampire does now draws from the same pool. On paper, I actually like the idea. It reinforces the constant struggle between power and survival. Every Discipline activation becomes another little negotiation with your Beast: "Do I really need to survive this fight, or would I rather cast one more ritual?" That feels very VTM. In reality spending life to use a supernatural ability feels bad. I do not think this will be great, but we shall see.

There are some nice quality-of-life improvements though. Character creation now revolves around lifepaths, relationships and your sire's influence, which immediately caught my attention. The idea that your sire's personality shapes your starting resources and even your disciplines feels incredibly thematic. A Ventrue elder should raise a very different fledgling than a Toreador diva or an absent-minded Tremere Regent. That's exactly the sort of flavour I enjoy seeing in a roleplaying game.

Unfortunately, not every mechanical change landed quite as well with me.

The new dice system replaces V5's Hunger Dice entirely. Instead of replacing dice with Hunger, the Storyteller now subtracts dice from your pool based on difficulty, and successes only occur on 8, 9 and 10.

This worries me.

One of the reasons I loved Hunger Dice was that they constantly reminded you that the Beast was present. Success always came with a price lurking in the background. The new system feels much more mathematical than thematic. It also appears to reward larger dice pools even more heavily than before. Watching the demonstration game, the vampires often felt surprisingly ineffective. Of course, this is only an alpha, but my first impression wasn't particularly encouraging.

The discipline earthquake

Now let's talk about the part that immediately made my VTES brain start calculating future decklists. The Discipline changes. Some clans escaped untouched. My beloved Ventrue continue being sensible adults with Dominate, Fortitude and Presence, while Banu Haqim, Brujah, Nosferatu and Toreador also remain comfortably familiar.

Everyone else? Well... Someone clearly walked into the Discipline cabinet with a blender. The biggest casualty is Protean. Gone. Just... gone.

Gangrel now receive Animalism, Celerity and Fortitude, while the Ministry lose Protean as well in favour of the new Corruption Discipline. Protean powers are now merged into Animalism. As someone who has recently spent a great deal of time building Gangrel decks around Protean tricks like Earth Meld and Form of Mist, this feels like a particularly strange decision. Those powers are almost synonymous with the clan. Removing Protean from Gangrel feels a little like removing fangs from vampires because they're "too iconic." On the other hand, Nossies will be happy with their new tools I guess. 

Meanwhile Lasombra now choose between Corruption and Oblivion, Tzimisce can apparently choose between Tellurgy and Vicissitude, and Tremere gain access to either Blood Sorcery or Necromancy.

Which brings me to my favourite undead necromancers.

Spare a thought for the Hecata...

Or the Giovanni. Or both. When V5 introduced the Hecata, I had mixed feelings. I always loved the Giovanni, and initially I wasn't thrilled about them merging into one giant necromantic family reunion. Eventually, though, they won me over. So much so that I stopped chasing old Giovanni cards and instead invested heavily in Hecata because I assumed that was where the future of Vampire was heading. Now V6 quietly brings the Giovanni back. Part of me is delighted. The other part is staring at my Hecata deck wondering whether we've all just been through a very expensive identity crisis.

The Giovanni now use Auspex, Potence and Necromancy instead of the classic Dominate combination. On the tabletop I can certainly appreciate Auspex. In VTES... let's just say if someone offered me Dominate back, I wouldn't spend very long negotiating. There is one encouraging detail, however. Lasombra retaining Oblivion means Black Chantry could theoretically continue expanding Oblivion-based archetypes even if Hecata receive fewer new releases (if any). As someone who has recently become suspiciously fond of summoning zombies, I choose to interpret this as good news until someone tells me otherwise.

What about the Sabbat?

One thing noticeably absent from the current alpha is meaningful discussion of the Sabbat. No real mention of the sect. No discussion of the Paths. Readers of this blog already know where my loyalties lie. I absolutely love Path of Power and Path of Death. One lets me manipulate the table through politics, while the other lets me recruit zombies and generally behave like an enthusiastic undertaker. Between those two archetypes, they cover an alarming percentage of everything I enjoy doing in VTES.

Hopefully they're simply outside the scope of the current playtest rather than quietly disappearing into the night.

And then there's Black Chantry...

One group of people I don't envy at all is the Black Chantry design team.

Every major tabletop edition brings changes to lore, clans, Disciplines and identities. Meanwhile, they somehow have to keep VTES coherent while respecting both decades of existing cards and whatever new direction the roleplaying game decides to take. That cannot be an easy balancing act.

Looking back over the years, they've had to adapt to the rise of the Hecata, changing sects, changing Disciplines, and now potentially another significant shake-up. Whatever your opinion on V6, that's an enormous design challenge.

Final thoughts

At the moment, my feelings toward V6 are probably best described as cautious optimism wrapped in healthy scepticism. I genuinely like some of the narrative ideas. I genuinely dislike several of the mechanical ones. Thankfully, this is still an alpha playtest. That's precisely what playtests are for: to identify what works, what doesn't, and hopefully improve the final product.

So for now, I'll do what every good Tremere researcher should do. I'll read. I'll test. I'll provide feedback.

And then, like every Ventrue pretending to remain perfectly composed while the world changes around them, I'll quietly hope someone at White Wolf decides that perhaps upsetting every clan at once wasn't the wisest political strategy. I'm really curious where everyone else stands. Which V6 ideas have you enjoyed so far, and which ones leave you reaching for an older rulebook?

The game never ends, only pauses. I'll see you at the next move.

Custodian Hargrave