In A Vampire State of Mind

[RPG Post]

In A Vampire State of Mind

Wizards has decided to make Vampire a class. Their reasons seem valid, yet ... I don't know. It's true that one could be an elven vampire, a human one, even Zoltan, Hound of Dracula. But class seemed to imply both choice and training. Vampires do not always choose to be vampires. And Vampire does not seem to imply any specific type of training. But vampires used to be able to be classes, such as a Strahd, whom I seem to remember, if not explicitly defined as such, was a spellcaster and a warrior. Then WotC created a whole new name for a vampire race, Vryloka, seemingly just to make up for the fact they co-opted the vampire name for the class. Does the name come from the Bava short film the Wurdalak, part of Black Sabbath? Or maybe from Vrlika Croatia?

The Wizards article also mentions "sparkly" vampires. Maybe there is nothing wrong with a 40 year old game bringing in a flash in the pan pop culture reference to a rules that used to treat legends and mythology with ... respect, I suppose. But it feels off kilter to me. If it were an April Fools' Day article, like "Midgets in the Earth" in Dragon 60, which contained Idi "Little Daddy" Snitman and Morc The Orc as characters, I could understand, but Twilight, really? Do the two audiences overlap? I haven't been to an RPG convention lately, but none of the Cosplay photos I have seen on-line indicate a heavy Twilight presence. And out of curiosity, how many roleplayers knew who Idi Amin was in 1982? Maybe all of us. Does he count as a pop cultural reference in '82? Mork does, but Idi Amin?

Anyway, what think you of Vampire as a class? The article mentions the possibility of lycanthrope being treated the same way. Maybe there's something else, neither race nor class, that handles the state of being better.

[SalmonMax]

D&D has always had issues with abilities and advantages that aren't granted by class levels. In 1st Edition, elves were both a race AND a class...spellcasting fighters all of them. 2nd Edition separated classes and races, but 'demihumans' were balanced by having level limitations and forbidden classes. So yeah, elves had powers humans didn't...but if you were an elf wizard you capped out at level 16. You'd never get 9th level spells. Ever. Meanwhile humans would be tottering around hurling Meteor Swarms until the orogs came home.

Then came 3rd Edition, which tried to balance all the core races against each other, thus removing the problem...AT FIRST. But inevitably people wanted to play races from the Monster Manual, and suddnly the system had to have a way to balance a Medusa, with bonuses to stats, AC, and special powers that no class or PC race would eve get...against kobolds, who had pathetic stats, no real racial powers, and even with PC levels were behind the power curve. Their answer? Level-adjustments.

It was a wonky system from the start. The idea was that any race (or for powers that came from nonracial sources, any template) would have a level adjustment made to it based on he powers it offered. Thus, you'd be trading class levels, and class level powers, for racial or template powers and advantages. Kind of like level caps, only instead of limiting you only at the END of your career, they took effect immediately.

The issues were many, but mostly orbited around the fact that no 'official' means of determining a level adjustment was ever made. Designers just eyeballed each monster and made a judgment. And it wasn't easy. Monster abilities were not designed with the same guiding philosophies as PC abilities. Many monsters could fly whenever they wanted...an ability that was very hard for a PC to get normally. These differences often were hard to quantify in terms of a level adjustment. Especially because too great a level difference between PC's made even a powerful monster virtally unplayable. Level impacts almost every stat in the game, and a 1st level character simply could not compare to a group of 9th level characters, even if that level 1 guy was also a mind flayer (+8 level adjustment). The situation is even worse for spellcasters, who may well gain the most per level of any class.

4rth Ed, like 3rd, at first tackled the problem by rebalancing the equation. In this case, by limiting the 'legal' races for PCs to a short list, which was added to in various supplements. They've had races that have powers you can swap for class powers, but this is the first time I've sen that they actually confuse a class with a "race."

I wonder what will come next.

[Justin OOC]

Dragon Class!

[Charlotte]

Class does not always imply choice or intent. The sorcerer, famously, is born with his or her magical abilities, as much a part of them as bloodlust is for a vampire, and I know Max & I have done a lot with the notion of sorcery as an "involuntary class." So I don't think that's a problem.

I don't think of vampirism as a race, either - in D&D it's best defined as a template, something that has happened to or is part of a particular subset of a race, much like how 'ghost' can apply to human or elf alike. Ideally, in a build-from-scratch system like GURPS, you'd take a normal person and slap the Vampire Template on them, then go from there - and that might work for someone who is a fighter first and a vampire second. But in D&D, your class is 90% of what you do, and if you want to do vampire-stuff, then class is the way to go.

Treating vampire as a class, then, strikes me as the best of many imperfect treatments. Picking your powers off the vampire list in D&D is really no different than picking them off the vampire list in Vampire, after all, though there's fewer dots involved. The proof of the pudding is in its eating, and if it fits well with the rest of the D&D 4E milieu yet still is unquestionably "vampiric" then I'll call it a successful experiment.

[Mr Fox]

I don't know... rp'ing a vamp in d&d sounds interesting. Other than doing it as a class I can't see how else you could make it work. Sure it sucks, but at least you can justify the getting of new powers by the fact that you are getting stronger the more you feed/adventure.