‘Vampire: the Masquerade’ Alpha 2.0 Playtest Undoes Controversial Changes

Vampire: the Masquerade, the tabletop role-playing game first published in 1991 by White Wolf, got a big update at Gen Con earlier this year. White Wolf announced it was working on the sixth edition of the game, and the Alpha 1.0 playtest was open to the public. Fans dove into the new ruleset, which hadn’t been updated since 2018’s fifth edition. And it was a big change: in many ways, Alpha 1.0 felt more like the narrative-focused Daggerheart than the crunchy, bloody, mechanics-heavy TTRPG fans had grown to love over the past thirty years. Metacurrencies like Quickening rewarded players for good dice rolls and mechanics like Devil’s Bargain allowed players to negotiate what failure would look like instead of the Storyteller making that decision, while Drama added… well, drama, sometimes to an unfair degree. Perhaps the biggest point of contention, though, was the coupling of the health and vitae resources. In practice, that made the combined resource so precious that players were reticent to use their powers. The new Alpha 2.0 playtest, released on Monday, corrects many of those issues and reverses course on many of 1.0’s most controversial mechanics. Health and vitae have been split back up; Drama and Quickening are gone; and the Devil’s Bargain has been replaced with the Beast’s Bargain, which puts the negotiating power back in the Storyteller’s hands. In a blog post announcing the update, Diogo Nogueira, the lead game designer of Vampire: the Masquerade, wrote, “Losing Vitae to both damage and powers made using your Disciplines feel like hurting yourself, so a lot of you simply stopped using them. With Health and Vitae split, you can spend blood on your powers without feeling like you’re bleeding out.” The Alpha 2.0 update is good news for Storytellers, too, once again allowing them to make dice rolls for NPCs. Overall, the update is a pretty big overhaul, and it’s clear that White Wolf took all the feedback from the first playtest seriously. You can read about all the changes in Vampire: the Masquerade Alpha 2.0, and access the new playtest, on the Paradox Interactive blog. Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.