Poll: Favourite Clan in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

[Chicago Ted]

I honestly don't think there is much to say here, so I'll just post this.

Seriously once you go malk you can't play anything else.

That said, it is a shame how fun Malks are in the game but in LARP people play them terribly.

Depends on the LARP. At mine we had a Malk ruling on Path of the Tyrant for over a year. He was absolutely fucking terrifying. The worst moments were when you were having a conversation, and he'd just loom in from out of nowhere in the middle of Gather, sit down, and join in. You could just feel the tension at the table spike as it happened.

On topic though, I'm going to pick not my favourite clan from the game, since they all feeled pretty interchangeable (though if I had to pick, my experience with Tremere was most enjoyable), but rather my favourite clan in general, the Ventrue. Been playing as one for almost two years at my LARP, and I've been through almost every position with him (Still my first LARP character, so I had more of the intention of wanting to go and try everything once at least, and then figure out what I'd want from a new character, but I'm still getting a lot of fun out of him). I love it as well since I have pretty much moved into the position of having a lot of Status with little responsibility. That and the disciplines are also really enjoyable. Majesty for crowd control, Dominate for one on one, and Fortitude for everything else. The best part was when I bought my final dot of Fortitude, we had a Praxis seizure that night, and all the supporters of the previous Prince (that included me), were taking refuge in a facility that was suddenly frozen. Well over a dozen kindred were frozen into torpor. The only ones left standing was the Ventrue and Tremere Primogens who had taken shelter in a wall of flames that the Tremere had placed up, one other under the Tremere's accounting, and myself, who simply stood in the middle of it and soaked all the damage and won almost all the tests for it. Since then, half of the Brujah in the city have begun to call me Warren 'The Tank' Voorhees.

How much I love VTM...

 

[Remag]

Gotta go with Malks. I enjoyed playing Malks in the OWoD table top and I did the best I could to incorporate their madness in gloomy or terrifying ways, rather than just being chaotic and random.

Their discipline set is quite nice, both in Bloodlines and in the table top. A well used level 5 Dementation in table-top will completely obliterate any PC or NPC's hopes and dreams in one scene.

 

[Gottesstrafe]

Gotta say, I love playing a Malk. Dialogue and final armor aside, I just find something so deliciously tragic in their characters. They're privy to a network of information of events past, present, and future as well as a person's most hidden secrets thanks to their Malkavian insight, and can warp another's own perception of reality thanks to their Dementation. Yet, because of their debilitating insanity and paranoia they can rarely act upon it by themselves. The other kindred distrust them and consider them a liability because their erratic behavior makes them more likely to expose themselves to human society, yet their oracle abilities make them so damn useful that they're kept around as a sort of necessary evil (much like the Tremere and their Thaumaturgy). Speaking of Tremere, another thing I like about the Malks are that they're also the only clan among the kindred that can rival them intellectually, a more social alternative to the mystery-clad Illuminati like Tremere.

Looking at their discipline line up, they're also the one of the only clans who can emulate a rogue class without having to drastically rearrange their stats. They have Obfuscate for sneaking around, their Dementation allows them to create distractions and kill from a distance without drawing attention to themselves, and their Auspex allows them to see the auras of other beings as well as penetrate illusions. Because they're not hideously deformed like the Nosferatu, they can walk freely in human society and chat up other kindred to charm information out of them (or just have it whispered to them thanks to their Malk insight).

 

[Gottesstrafe]

Attention people - Bloodlines is now 5 bucks on Steam. If you don't have it - now is a good time to fix that mistake.

Is it known whether the Steam version includes the community patching that makes the game actually work?

OT: I favored a Brujah celerity brawler but I'm happy to see Malkavians dominating the poll, I love those crazy bastards.

You can install the unoffical patch, instructions are provided as follows:

Spoiler

With Steam run Steam as Administrator, then the unpatched game once, then disable "steam community in game" and "automatic update" before installing to \steamapps\common\vampire the masquerade - bloodlines.

 

[NeutralDrow]

In the PC game itself...yeah, probably the Malkavians. I can't really speak for the tabletop game (I was a Werewolf player, not Vampire), but the instant my Malk PC called Ming Xiao out on her Cathayan cultural posturing horseshit, he forever won my love.

Nothing is ever superficially silly or funny in WoD, unless it is the blackest of humor. The Malkavians are no exception. A Malkavian would be a Vampire who dies in the sun, but is cripplingly afraid of the dark. Not some "wacky" clown who talks to inanimate objects "for teh lulz".

As you can see, I have strong opinions on this matter. It's the one big element of the game that I consider to be badly written.

The strong impression I got was that the Malkavian player character wasn't actually a wacky fishmalk character (stop sign incident being a weird outlier), but that (s)he knows the reputation of the clan and their own insanity. Malks can have any derangement, after all, from manic-depression, to crippling phobias, to paranoid delusions, to narcissism; the other two Malkavian characters in the game are textbook cases of dissociative identity disorder and antisocial disorder.

Since the Malk PC's derangement (schizophrenia, characterized by stilted speech patterns) isn't really a dangerous lunatic stereotype, they play up their weird lunatic behavior, not for the lulz, but per Malkavian tradition of breaking others of their so-called "sanity." They're actually pretty good at making others respond and understand their strange speech, and along with the fact that they genuinely know most of what's going on, are legitimately unnerving. They're trying to make others crazier, to see the world how it actually is.

Besides, they might also have a genuine sense of humor. Maybe it's just my inner Ragabash objecting, but overwhelmingly black humor is for Wraith: The Oblivion.

...

Not to say I don't have a purist streak, myself. When the friend who recommended the game to me told me what's supposed to be the secret of the cab driver (that <color=aliceblue>he's Caine), I immediately refused to believe it, on grounds of it being really stupid.

 

[DoPo]

Not to say I don't have a purist streak, myself. When the friend who recommended the game to me told me what's supposed to be the secret of the cab driver (that <color=aliceblue>he's Caine), I immediately refused to believe it, on grounds of it being really stupid.

I agree. It is stupid. From lore point of view it makes no sense and that's before even throwing in the Gehenna - the Final Night novel.

 

[Absimilliard]

You can add me to that list. I do like playing Malkavian while role-playing, but I wouldn't say they're my absolute favourite (I think I've narrowed it down to Gangrel and Nosferatu, but then again; it's all about how you play the character). However, in bloodlines, there's no doubt that Malkavian is my favourite, both for hilarity and the added element of the insight. (I.e. the cab driver...)

 

[Altorin]

I think I'm going to have to go out on a limb here, and go the route least traveled, and choose Tzimisce.

You haven't experienced fear until a Tzimisce War Ghoul is rushing at you with a whole bunch of arms, each tipped with a razor sharp bone spike.

 

[Fat Hippo]

I really like the Ventrue Dominate ability, both in and out of combat. Making people commit mass suicide on your very whim, without even breaking the masquerade, is pretty fun. And simply commanding people to do your shit is a good feeling too.

Malkavian is hilarious, but you DO have to read your dialogue choices a lot more carefully.

 

[Lost In The Void]

So I'm playing VTMB for the umpteenth time, as I'm sure many of you will now that I've mentioned it.

And for the life of me, I just can't bring myself to play anything other than a Malkavian. Their dialogue is humorous, eccentric and obsurd that all the other clans just seem boring by comparison. It also offers a really unique roleplay perspective, because by their very definition, they're chaotic.

If Deadpool was a vampire, he's be a Malk, that's pretty much my best argument for trying to get people to play as them.

My Malk is a ninja who wears assless cowboy chaps. She argues with street signs and refuses to use guns because they are anathema to her code of the silent killer.

Ducks too.

Ducks are anathema too.

Also, this picture is obligatory.

Looks like you've now returned the favour of making me reinstall the game after my review made you reinstall it. Well played.

OT Malkavian is all I play these days

 

[Daystar Clarion]

So I'm playing VTMB for the umpteenth time, as I'm sure many of you will now that I've mentioned it.

And for the life of me, I just can't bring myself to play anything other than a Malkavian. Their dialogue is humorous, eccentric and obsurd that all the other clans just seem boring by comparison. It also offers a really unique roleplay perspective, because by their very definition, they're chaotic.

If Deadpool was a vampire, he's be a Malk, that's pretty much my best argument for trying to get people to play as them.

My Malk is a ninja who wears assless cowboy chaps. She argues with street signs and refuses to use guns because they are anathema to her code of the silent killer.

Ducks too.

Ducks are anathema too.

Also, this picture is obligatory.

Looks like you've now returned the favour of making me reinstall the game after my review made you reinstall it. Well played.

OT Malkavian is all I play these days

I think that's pretty much what VTMB fans consist of.

Players constantly reminding other players how awesome it is

 

[Wereduck]

Attention people - Bloodlines is now 5 bucks on Steam. If you don't have it - now is a good time to fix that mistake.

Is it known whether the Steam version includes the community patching that makes the game actually work?

OT: I favored a Brujah celerity brawler but I'm happy to see Malkavians dominating the poll, I love those crazy bastards.

You can install the unoffical patch, instructions are provided as follows:

Spoiler

With Steam run Steam as Administrator, then the unpatched game once, then disable "steam community in game" and "automatic update" before installing to \steamapps\common\vampire the masquerade - bloodlines.

Excellent - I'd hate to think Steam users were locked out of the non-fubar version.

 

[bluepotatosack]

I wonder if you could play a nosferatu as the cliche' super hacker from spy movies. Have a campaign around robbing some prestigious all vampire staffed bloodbank, Sort of like a vampiric oceans 11.

Malks can make good hacker's, too. Like that Dev/Null character from redemption.

I don't know about having a campaign with the characters as hacker's, though.

 

[Maleval]

Malkavian, is this really a question? I mean what could be better than having an argument with inanimate objects and losing?

 

[DoPo]

I wonder if you could play a nosferatu as the cliche' super hacker from spy movies. Have a campaign around robbing some prestigious all vampire staffed bloodbank, Sort of like a vampiric oceans 11.

Malks can make good hacker's, too. Like that Dev/Null character from redemption.

Spoiler: *Dev/Null uses Obfuscates*

cat Dev/Null > /dev/null
-to make scrolling past him easier-

I don't know about having a campaign with the characters as hacker's, though.

I absolutely loved Dev/Null! He was my first brush with the Malks and that's how I came to like them so much.

Also - a campaign of hackers -why not, you've seen Hackers, right? In addition, you can try a campaign where the group is solely composed of Virtual Adepts. That would be fun.

 

[bluepotatosack]

Dev/Null was great. And I love that his line about grits was a direct nod to the community.

And yeah, you make a good point. Super stylized hacking and making the bulk of it on site could definitely work. Virtual Adepts, eh? Mage is one of the few WW games I've never delved into.

No idea why.

 

[DoPo]

Well, the VAs are like the hackers from Hackers on crack. Sometimes literally. Think The Matrix - that's how they view the world. Instead of creating fire, scrying through a crystal ball, creating portals or traversing the spirit world, they instead manipulate electricity (usually straight from the sockets), watch you through cameras and satellites, teleport through the network or literally enter the Internet. Some of them practice mind hacking and those guys like to hold conventions in unsuspecting people's dreams, for example. Others search for the cheat codes to the real world. Others still want to build the biggest MMO of all and transfer humanity there...so they want to create a benign Matrix.

The VAs are a fun bunch, all in all. Combine that with their penchant of causing some mayhem and trouble for what could be called the agent Smiths of the real world (the Technocracy)...who have fucking Terminators (a.k.a. HIT Marks) at their disposal and you can never go wrong.

Playing a group of VAs would be like every Hollywood hacker ever vs the men in black. Also, sometimes supernatural horrors that live in the Internet.

 

[RuralGamer]

Attention people - Bloodlines is now 5 bucks on Steam. If you don't have it - now is a good time to fix that mistake.

I noticed that and bought it; thanks for the heads up.

 

[DoPo]

Attention people - Bloodlines is now 5 bucks on Steam. If you don't have it - now is a good time to fix that mistake.

I noticed that and bought it; thanks for the heads up.

No probs Have fun playing it. Just install one of the community patches before you start playing[footnote] But NOT after. Bad things tend to happen. As a rule of the thumb - always start a new game after installing something on top of Bloodlines. That includes new versions of patches/mods.[/footnote] - either the True Patch or the Unofficial Patch. I personally use the UP.

And when playing remember - Don't open it.