Despite that some feel that V:TM is one of the greatest expression of pretentious swineishness that exists, it occured to me that V:TM is an awesome candidate for sandbox gaming.

In the supplement book Damnation City for Vampire: The Requiem, it gives some rather detailed rules for mapping out sample locations within urban areas that players may wish to take control of, locations that grant resources and bonuses to their actions in their nightly struggles.  Any of these places can be an adventure location.  The implicit game model implied here seems to be extremely Trad, where locations have an independent existence in an immersive setting.  The local Vampires, controlling locations and battling for resources, also seems to be a location based thing.  "We have to go meet with Mariella of the Toreador, she controls the University and it's grounds as part her domain holdings.  If we want access to the labs, we need to deal with her."


Game play can emerge based on character actions, with fiction rising immersively from the setting, instead of being based on a pre-determined GM story.  The principles that we see in Hex Crawls can be applied for great effect in the city-based settings used for Vampire: The Masquerade.

What do y'all think?

I have gm'd and played a ton of Vampire M and a few R games, and I don't do storygame stuff at all. I tend to run it as a political intrigue game.

Benoist has posted about this quite a bit, but having trouble finding links. I think it would work fine.

I never really ran vampire but played it in the 90s. My GM at the time pretty much just let us loose on the setting. So there was never a sense when I pplayed it that we were just acting out his story. It was always about what we wanted to do, how npcs reacted to what we did and where we went from there.

Welcome into the club.

The "By Night" supplements were explicitly sandboxy ("here's a city with a bunch of NPCs and locations for your vampires to interact with"), as was the original, first edition World of Darkness gazetteer. That's how we played it, and still do. We stat out a bunch of key NPCs, and ascribe them areas of influence within the city, then everyone generated their PCs and we were off to do our things.

I never even knew there was a different way of playing Vampire until I got the horribly railroady Giovanni Chronicles (I and II suck hard, but III is good and IV is better).

The Damnation City book is for Vampire the Requeim, which is sort of a new Edition for the game (the closest equivalent in D&D terms).

Warning: Requeim Talk

Requeim changed the rules and the setting while keeping many of the aesthetics.  In fact, it's very sandbox friendly in comparison to the metaplot-driven Masquerade.

PCs have more freedom to do stuff.  Instead of the Camarilla and Sabbat, you've got 5 major factions who can alternatively ally and fight each other.  Kindred politics are more localized, and the factions have less global pull.  Meaning that if you piss off the Prince of Los Angeles you can flee to Mexico City without worrying about being hunted across the globe.  Being unaligned is a viable option; you might not get the perks of organization membership, but you won't be screwed out of gaining power.  In some of the sourcebooks, some influential Kindred can afford to be unaligned due to their political status and/or valuable skill sets.

Vampires don't really know how they were created, although supernatural powers and blood-powered sorcery exist, leaving room for plenty of interpretations, from Biblical to Pagan to "we're just a part of the world."  With the exception of the Virtue and Vice system, Christian allegory is much less blatant than in Masquerade.  It's entirely possible that the Abrahamic God might not even exist in the game, and this won't break canon at all.

Instead of uber-powerful elders who can eclipse PC vampires, the overall power level of Requeim is a lot lower.  An elder is quite powerful, but they can still get hurt easily if they're ambushed by ghouls and/or vampire hunters.  In fact, in the new system, numbers really matter.  The combat system is rather lackluster, and it's too easy for experienced vamps to die against inexperienced gangbangers and cops.  This is either a strength or a weakness, depending on who you talk to.

One of the great things I love about Requiem is that provision is made both in the game mechanics and the setting so that PC's can eventually take power.  It compressed the power scale remarkably, and made it so that your PC can be the Prince, not some special GM snowflake.

Which is why Requiem, and indeed most if not all of the nWoD lines, are generally a better vehicle for sandbox gaming than their oWoD counterparts. To further torture the sandbox analogy, there are less big kids in the sandbox, allowing your toddler (neonate, disciple or whatever) PCs to have a real shot at rocking the setting as they grow up (acquire experience, influence and supernatural power).

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;621876Despite that some feel that V:TM is one of the greatest expression of pretentious swineishness that exists, it occured to me that V:TM is an awesome candidate for sandbox gaming.

That's very old news. The scenario included in the VtM corebook (the one with Sullivan Dane) is a sandbox.

A sandbox doesn't have to be a hexcrawl map or any type of location based map. It can be a group of NPCs and the adventure is found by interacting with NPCs figuring out the connections between them, and exploiting them for the individuals or party's gain.

My original (mis)perception of the Vampire and Werewolf games were that they were meant to be just that sort of sandboxy thing... 'here's a big world full of monsters, you're one of them, go have creepy fun'... vs. whatever soap opera nonsense eventually got ladled over the top of it (and the fact that it turned out the various monsters weren't meant to be played together). So if I were to run such a game that would still be the way I'd approach it.

That's how I always run my games, and still run them.

I've played a lot of Vampire, and it usually is us getting into big fights with other supernaturals. Very little politics or other BS ever happened. We all had a blast.

Quote from: danbuter;622020I've played a lot of Vampire, and it usually is us getting into big fights with other supernaturals. Very little politics or other BS ever happened. We all had a blast.

I have never GMed Vampire and the one session I played was a combination of a detective novel finishing in a burst of mega-violence at the very end.  I think the party would have been annihilated if I was not playing a Gangrel with maxed out generation.  Even then it was down to inches.  

No story game features at all.

I would venture so far as to say that Vampire players better as a sandbox.  

Political intrigue and power struggle is better served by a sandbox.

We threw out the meta-plot even back in the oWoD days.
WW's system has always been clunky in regards to combat, IMO, but it was serviceable.