Part 2
Hey Game Fans we’re back for another look at building a
Vampire: the Masquerade character for the new 5th edition rules
set. If you read last week’s article,
then you know we’ve built a science focused Ventrue with a penchant for hopeful
idealism and a strong belief that science is a universal cure-all. We still haven’t named our precious vampire
child yet, but we’re about to. If you
want to check back on the character so far, check out the example sheet
here. Also you can go read the article
from last week here. So picking up where
we left off, we need to fill in some details and move forward in character
creation.
Beliefs
Every character has a combination of core values and
strongly held ideas that help you as a player understand who your character is
and what motivates them to do what they do.
These take two primary forms in Vampire 5th edition,
Convictions and Touchstones. Convictions
are the ideas and beliefs that a character holds, whereas Touchstones are the
people in a character’s life that represent them as their best possible self. Now keep in mind that these are
characteristics that defined you character when they were alive. There are other traits we’ll talk about after
you were Embraced in a few.
Convictions
Convictions are the core concepts or ideological principles that
shape how your character viewed the world before they were embraced. At creation, your character can have up to
three of these but has to take at least one.
Most of these statements take the form of an Always or Never followed by
the idea the character holds dear. A
famous one from comic books would be “I never use guns.” You have to get approval on all of these by
the Storyteller, and depending on the Chronicle you are playing, you may have
to run it past the other players as well.
So, what do we think are convictions that our Idealistic
Dreamer would have? Well, the first one
that jumps out is “I always know that if we look hard enough, dig deep enough,
science will provide the solution to the problem in front of us.” Another solid one for this character, (we
should really give him or her a name, shouldn’t we?) is “I never break a
promise to a friend.”
Those two convictions help us look at the character with the
perspective that they genuinely believe that science is the cure for the modern
world, if we are willing to do the work.
It also shows us that this character considers their promises to be
sacrosanct, especially towards their friends.
I don’t think this is the kind of character that makes a lot of friends
and they hold the ones they do have in high esteem.
Touchstones
Now we get to select a couple of Touchstones. You get to pick one Touchstone for every
conviction your character has. These
represent the people that your character sees as exemplars of humanity for your
character and help to keep your character grounded in a world that has taken a
severely dark turn.
Now because Kirby (yes, we have a name now) spent a lot of
time in academia, both of his touchstones come from that world. The first one is Dr. Kurt Harrison, a pure
scientist who helped instill the belief that science is the cure for the modern
world. Dr. Harris was also there to help
Kirby pick up the pieces of his life after his relationship with Dr. Fitzgerald
exploded in his face.
The other touchstone is a friend of Kirby’s he met as an
undergrad. George Henry Hines is also a
gifted researcher and scientist who ended up working for a civilian research
think tank when Kirby went to work for the company he works for. They were largely inseparable as students,
and Kirby would do just about anything in his power to help his friend.
Ambition
So what was it that your character aspired to in life? Ambitions are a wonderful driving force for a
character and understanding what your character wanted out of life can help
your get in their head. Kirby has a fairly
straightforward ambition, he wants to leave the world better than he found
it.
Embrace and Aftermath
Now there’s a few details we need to iron out for
Kirby. First things first, he’s still
Kirby, with his social security number, bank information and all the other
details. He’s a fairly newborn vampire
and doesn’t need a mask as a cover identity.
He still has the same job working the late shift at an R & D lab for
his shady defense contractor, so he’s got a job and a bunch of other details.
Some mechanical things first, we record Blood Potency of 1
(given that Kirby is a 12th generation vampire) and his starting
humanity is 7. Kirby is still mostly
human in both aspects of his life.
Disciplines
Every character has access to the magical disciplines
related to their clan of origin.
Caitiff, being clanless get to cheat a little, but your clan does a
pretty good job of defining your character’s supernatural powers. Every character picks two of the three disciplines
associated with their clan. One of those
disciplines gets two dots, the other one selected gets one dot.
As a Ventrue, Kirby has access to Dominate, Fortitude, and
Presence. Looking these over, Kirby ends
up with Fortitude and Presence. Kirby is
not a dominating person, and that discipline just doesn’t feel right for
him. So we put one dot in Fortitude and
two dots in Presence.
Predator
Every vampire is a hunter, and determining how your
character hunts for food is an important decision. Now this is a tricky one for us, because Kirby
is not really an aggressive hunter, and with his prey exclusion (science folks)
he has some issues finding a meal. The best
choice out of the ones available is probably Scene Queen. Kirby is relatively well known at the university
he graduated from and has established himself in that social scene.
This gives us a few more mechanical benefits. First we have Leadership (science community),
since we don’t have that skill, we gain a dot in Leadership instead. Second we get a dot of either Potence or Dominate,
and this time we end up with Dominate.
It’s not his ideal method of interacting with people, but he’s more
likely to use Dominate than to physically take what he wants. We also get a dot in both Fame and Contacts. Finally he gets the Influence Flaw: Disliked
outside of his subculture. He’s not well
liked by people outside his social circle, and he’s okay with that.
Advantages
This is a tricky one for us because Kirby seems like he
could go a lot of different directions.
We’re going to end up going with a lot of points in Haven and Resources
and seeing what kind of trouble that can get us into. Let’s start with Haven.
Haven is an important part of Kirby’s sense of security and
he spends a great deal of his time in his haven when he hasn’t been dragged out
for a social event. We immediately sink
three points into it. The abandoned
subway station seems like a good fit for Kirby.
We give it the Creepy Flaw and the Haunted Flaw. It has a major image problem since it was the
site of a horrible subway disaster years prior.
At least one of the ghosts from that disaster still haunts the place. We
give it the Hidden Armory, Laboratory x2, and Postern merits.
We also take the Adversary flaw at 1 point, and Enemies at 1
point. We’ll flesh out the details of
thes two interactions next week.
Finally, we spend our last three points on Resources. This represents our income/investments from
the Defense contractor we work for.
The character sheet (Here) has been updated with all of this
information and we should probably take a break for today. We’ve only got a few more details to work
out, but they are important enough to keep track of later. So that’s what we’ve got for today. We’ll be back next week to hopefully finish
up the character and see what he looks like when he is complete.
Game On, Game Fans.
No comments:
Post a Comment