When a Vampire is turned, though the likely hood of having a lower generation sire is increased the longer in the past it was, is not directly related to the time period they were turned, rather the generation of the sire.
If a seventh generation fang turns you tomorrow, you are 8th generation - era doesn’t matter. Anyone know why they tied it so closely to the age and then removed Generation from backgrounds? Always liked that one it added some neat additional factors to play.
It is to stop min maxing.
In previous editions freebie points would be dumped into upping Generation. Now it is more “What fits the tone of the game you want to run” and “To stop power disparity between characters”.
Blood potency != Age, but it does increase with age. It also starts a bit higher if a vampire is embraced at a lower generation, representing the fact that that should have stronger blood right off the bat.
Generation was a bizarre background in previous editions - if you bought it at character creation your PC was strangely weaker or less sociable, but had the potential to greatly overpower other characters later in the story. V5 aims to fix this by simply allowing you and the storyteller to choose the coterie’s approximate Generation (basically, anything in the same Blood Potency bracket) prior to making characters.
But it forces all the players into the same bracket - that’s my issue.
Can’t the storyteller just adjust each character’s gen individually?
It really is just up to the ST what generation characters are allowed to be. If there is a good narrative reason why such a range of generations are allowed in the the game, then so be it.
Of course - GM fiat is always true, but I wonder why they portray it thus.
@Darq it’s power level balance between starting characters.
DM Fiat exists to let one D&D character start at level 3 while everyone else is level 1, and that’s similar to a ST starting a character at BP2 (Gen 10) while everyone else starts at BP1 (Gen 13). In both cases that’s not a great idea, unless you have a very specific game concept.
Its not the same at all - the way it opriginally worked, for a character to start at level 10, would require him applying his background points to generation, where other characters might use those points in another area, though they were free to take the points in generation themselves - they had the exact same opportunity.
In the example you gave one character had benefits the others didn’t vs an equivilant amount of benefits spread into different areas (variety). Also in a DND example, the level impacts the character across the board. A Level 3 character is better than a level 1 character.
We always called it the “generation tax”, because EVERYONE we played with dumped 5 background points into generation. The only time this didn’t happen was during a Sabbat campaign (and the groups thought diablerie was okay to do) or during campaigns where the ST didn’t inflict grievous repercussions on the diablerist.
In a Camarilla campaign, diablerie was a no go, you’ll greet the sun, action. The only time it was okay was during a declared blood hunt. You definitely don’t want a Harpy exposing you. Or worse, holding it over your head.
It finally got so bad that the ST just said, “you all start at 8th gen, put your backgrounds into something else”.
So I think the new way is better. Just my opinion. No statistical facts or math supporting it.
I find that extremely odd - in the groups I played with we only had one player who put any points into Generation.
I second this - few of my vict- I mean, players, went the Gen route.
In my groups. . . I was pretty much the only player that ever bothered with generation.
That said I really liked taking generation, and preferred playing low generation characters. It seemed like a no-brainer purchase to me, but it still ultimately depended on my character concept, I would say I have played as many thin bloods as 8th gens.
So I was disappointed to see generation missing from the background section, well devastated was probably more accurate, after my first read through. It didn’t take long to figure out how I might go about adding it back in for games I may run, so I’m fine now, I’m good.
We never had that problem with Generation, either. The emphasis in VTM was always on story rather than fighting, so min-maxing wasn’t really an issue. As such, the game didn’t need ‘balance’. Whereas those exact same players in D&D would make sure they had perfectly formed characters, in VTM they intentionally created flawed and vulnerable characters.
I’ve never been a fan of Blood Potency, so we just use the old rules.
In my campaign, one player wanted to play a 9th generation vampire just because she had a fantastic cool idea by being the childe of a signature character, while the others got to pick and choose their generation. All of them choose to play between 13th and 11th generation as it was not that important.
They are a nomad coterie and the 9th generation is starting to feel that it is hard to be on the move as it takes so much time for her to hunt and while the others managed to steal a lot of blood bags from a Yugoslavian hospital, she does not want to use them as she will use up twice as many, and now that they are in Siberia, humans are hard to feed from.
The others have managed to hunt from the few villages they pass as well as animals. But the 9th gen, she feels as it is quite hard to g below Hunger 3 every night
The PCs can be of whatever generation makes sense, but it’s recommnded that they be the same generation or maybe within one generation of each other, to avoid the problems that come with too big a disparity in blood potency.
In any case, it’s a big improvement over making people spend points on it, but it does require that the players come to an agreement about what sort of game they want.
As for the age categories and their correlated generations, that’s just a guideline. Feel free to deviate from it, as long as you can come to a consensus.
I think the new generation rules in V5 handle this really well, because having a super high generation/blood potency is a pretty huge pain in the butt. They have more raw power, but the lower blood potency have less side effects and can be more flexible in their night to night lives. A theoretical Blood Potency 10 PC will be at a minimum of three hunger almost all the time, and will need a ton of mortal victims or start kindred hunting.
Yeah - I’ve got to agree with Dr Ether - it was really becoming a case of min-max ing to the utmost.
Of course, quite a few games have that problem.
However, I generally had a solution.
If a player went out of their way to Min-Max a PC, I’ll automatically create a NPC with higher stats and lower generation. Let’s see a Min-Maxer beat an Antedeluvian…
Bruce
I think it’s important to keep the idea of Age and Blood Potency separate when thinking about Generation. Per the rulebook (“Blood Potency” pg. 215) a Vampire increases in Blood Potency every 100 years while active and loses Blood Potency every 50 years while in Torpor. This means that you can have 10th-13th generation Vampires with older histories (Embraced in Rome, Carthage, Napoleonic Era, Civil War, etc) without having to have the whole group at that Age or Blood Potency by using Torpor as a background device. Likewise, you can have 8th and 9th generation Vampires start in an Ancillae chronicle by again using Torpor to lower their Blood Potency to their minimum of 2.
In this way, all the Characters start out on a level playing field, and the Storyteller has a lot of control over the structure and power level of the game. While the maximum Blood Potency of the lower Elders is higher than the other players, what is required to achieve that Blood Potency is controlled by the story and the Storyteller, and so power level variance can be kept to a minimum (or none at all).
In the three groups I ran VTM or VDA for, no one took generation. Everyone but one was focused upon survivability - herd, resources. That last focused upon trying to turn horror into humor… Killed two of the three games.