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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome RPG, Great Book, August 20, 2003
Vampire: the Masquerade is an amazing game to play with your friends. In stark contrast to RPGs like AD&D and Shadowrun, where your player attempts to be the coolest (and you live out a dream of, "if only I were my character"), V:tM dooms your character from the beginning. You are a vampire, cursed to prey upon the living, cursed to lose your friends, living out a solitary existence. Vampire emphasizes true drama--either comic or tragic, the game MOVES you.If you have read this far, DO NOT TAKE THE SOFTCOVER VERSION. The softcover edition that Amazon.com advertises is a GURPS adaptation (GURPS stands for Generic Universal RolePlaying System). It tells you how to turn Vampire characters into GURPS characters, and how to run a GURPS campaign with Vampires engaged in the Masquerade. It is loosely a rulebook for the game, but its rules make much less sense if youve never played GURPS. Now, on to the rest of the game The storyteller has the best time with the game. She runs the chronicle with the pride of a playwright, knowing that she touches her audience. She has all the power; she also has all he responsibility. The storyteller has to invent the chronicle, plotting out each weeks saga for the rest of you to endure. While the most rewarding, its also the hardest job in V:tM. And somebody has to do it. Youll probably notice the oddness of the feminine pronoun (She runs, she has, etc.). The writers of this manual have distributed the pronouns in the book to be roughly 51% female and 49% male, to accompany the national division of the sexes. If youre a male, its a reminder of the alienation that female scholastics must endure. This book pulls that off flawlessly. I have two complaints. The first is dice. Most pen-and-paper roleplaying games use dice, with the exception of Amber. AD&D uses seven different types of dice, and three to five of each. Shadowrun and V:tM are each more forgiving; they just use one. This is nice. Shadowrun dice are your normal 6-sided dice, which is awesome. In Vampire, the die is ten-sided, which is much harder to come by. This means no buying in bulk; Ive simply found it impossible to get a package of 10-sided dice without extra AD&D dice added on. My second complaint is that the book has almost no structure. Id recommend putting post-its in as tabs for the sections that you want to have quick reference to; character generation alone involves swapping between different parts of the book 5-6 times. God forbid you have a rule conflict in a game; my group partitioned the book into sections to skim through whenever people were uncertain about a rule. Once youve read the rulebook, though, you dont need it in the game. The most Ive ever done is have the lexicon open so that I have my terms straight; you get a feel for what each level of each vampiric power does, and you dont have to look up Natures and Demeanors all the time. (Natures and Demeanors are personalities that youre required to take. There is a list of 30 and you take different ones for nature or demeanor). Overall, this game is splendid. It has advanced over other RPGs to give true entertainment. Focused, fast-paced, and fantastically horrid, some gaming might give you nightmares, depending on who your storyteller is. Some gaming will be a lot of jokes and mudslinging at authority. Either way, youll scare yourself with how casually you say, I suck down all the humans blood and kill him. At some level, the horror of catching yourself saying that phrase is what the game is all about.
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by Andrew Greenberg
by Richard Dansky
by Jennifer Hartshorn
by White Wolf Publishing
