The Culture: Yes, Even Your Pretentious Parlor Play Is Really A Wargame

"But this wargame paradigm can't work in my Gothic Punk dystopia full of vampires, werewolves, and so on. Your Clubhouse can't handle it."

Anon, if you insist that Vampire: The Masquerade is not rooted in wargaming you (a) never played in the LARP scene (where this is obvious to see) and (b) don't know shit about how World of Darkness games actually get played.

Summarized: A World of Darkness campaign is, in fact, playing Diplomacy with Oh So Edgy set dressing and some poseur-grade Goth aesthetic right out of Hot Topic- complete with the tags still attached.

The Pretentious Parlor Play

For all of Mark Hagan's claims of "Stoytelling", what the game actually is in practice is an ongoing Braunstein with Faction Play hardcoded via Clans and faction-specific social hierarchies. That's not a recipe for fulfilling the wishes of frustrated novelists. That's a recipe for the mixture of Courtier Intrigue and Criminal Violence that, when mixed together, becomes Gangland Paradise straight out of The Godfather.

You are not engagin in Narrative. You are hardcore old-school wargaming; you play a man, who has Objectives and Resources, and has to collaborate with some to oppose others- and whom to ally with shifts as events occur and circumstances change.

That's Diplomacy with extra steps people. Competent diplomatic corps pay you to learn how to do this for real, which is why a lot of the better players I knew 20+ years ago are now doing well as politicians, diplomats, field or flag-level military officers, lawyers, or in upper corporate management.

No one claims that Diplomacy is not a wargame. The lack of dice and widgets does not mean it is not a wargame.

What is interesting is that (a) it is LARP, not tabletop, that drives this Brand and (b) no one observing (nevermind participating) such LARPs would fail to see the resemblence.

I have first-hand experience, having co-run a VTM LARP about 20 years ago, that this is how the game actually works.

A Perfect Clubhouse Game

Running a proper VTM campaign is easy. Use one of the first two editions for a ruleset. Dump all of the metaplot.

Each Referee focuses on one city, as was implied by the game's initial publications. Preferably, focus on his city. He'll have plenty of territory to work with between the metropolitan core and the surrounding area. Additional Referees control other cities.

Your first players are the city Elders, the members of the city's Establishment, preferably one for each Clan. They are Faction Leaders, and most of the lesser vampires will be those converted into vampires by one of them.

Other players are lesser vampires, mortals of note, or vampires from a hostile external faction (i.e. Sabbat in a Camarilla city).

You start with a Braunstein session. The Elders have to be there; everyone else is optional. What comes out of that session is what drives regular play for months as Elders use their juniors (who have their own agendas) to execute various plans.

Scaling Up

As noted above, each Referee handles a different city. Ideally, these are in the same region (i.e. Twin Cities, Duluth, Rochester, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary) to allow for another level of Faction Play (City v. City). Now you are cooking with gas, and man does it pay to go hard on watching Gangster films as that is the obvious way that play is going to turn out.

Sure, there's a horror (and thus supernatural) element. Sure, there's some Noir and Hard Boiled potential. Sure, you have plenty of court (and courtier) intrigue going on. But the core of this style of game is Gangland and that's just Diplomacy with extra steps. The really ambitious will delve into Italian history to see how the various pre-unification city-states warred and traded with each other (including the Vatican) because Gangland is that after Modernity set in.

The endgame is always the same: Uncontested Power.

Whomever gets to that Win Condition first wins. "Everyone loses" means a Masquerade breech so bad that Normies Rise Up and you're worried about getting speared through a wall and dragged out of your Haven on a winch into the sunlight to burn.

And this is why Theater Kids lose to Diplomacy Chads.