Justin Achilli

Implicit to vampires is a sense of history. Whether your flavor of vampires is damned to suffer the vagaries of the world for all time (as White Wolf’s vampires have been) or bears a less florid immortality, the idea is often that a given vampire might well have been around a lot longer than your modern mortal era, which is when a mortal discovers them and learns about this ancient (or at least annuated) evil.

In fiction, that’s easy as pie. Throw in some kind of historical flashback as a prelude, fast-forward to you anachronistic blood-drinker lamenting about how it was easier to be a vampire before information traveled so quickly, and boo-yah, you’re done. 

Suggested lapses in history need not be comical. They can be a point of conflict or a source of understanding.It’s harder to accomplish in a game, however. In a traditional tabletop environment, coteries often have pretty tenuous relationships keeping their individual vampires together. Here’s my Nosferatu vagrant, for some reason rubbing elbows with your Gangrel hell-raiser, and we’re hanging out in the back of the Ventrue character’s Maibach as his driver shuttles us to some damned charade the Prince demanded we attend. Now add to that some of the implied history that’s available to us — I’m a Roman plebe, you’re a WWI doughboy Embraced in the trenches, and the Ventrue is a young turk from the heyday of American Psycho. With nothing in common, from clans to history, what’s supposed to unite us when we go about robbing banks, attending Princely demands, or doing whatever it is that we vampires do every night? 

I think of that as a challenge, not a problem. It’s an opportunity to make something completely unique. Our coterie, with our weird and disparate historical backgrounds, is now unique. It’s more than a stock completion of the MMO trinity of tank-healer-DPS. It’s more than just a from-the-book assembly of clan archetypes. Heck, the way we built the rules, our hypothetical coterie doesn’t even have to be any different in power level. We can all be neonates with no experience affecting our Traits, with a few allowances made for our histories. My plebe starved into torpor when his patrician sire sealed us both into his crypt to wait out the Vandals. Your doughboy’s last memory is of the machine-guns mowing him down before waking in the 21st century with a powerful thirst. Patrick Bateman over there has never known torpor or the fog of ages. And we’re good to go. We can skip the anachronisms, if we want, by assuming we’ve all had a few weeks or months to come to grips with this modern world, or we can take advantage of our implied historical gap and do the stranger in a strange land thing. It all depends on how we want to play it and how deeply. 

A modern perspective contrasted with history or speculation equals content.On a level other than the narrative, as players, we enjoy the ability to create something called a theory of mind. We can understand the factors that make other people’s outlooks different than our own. While this has an obvious applicability to game narrative — different roles are important to a roleplaying game — where this really takes shape is in the realm of community. Your vampire and my vampire might not get along, but at least we understand that each other is there and we can potentially project a hypothetical response that each other might have to a given situation. If those don’t mesh well, fine; we avoid each other. If they’re somewhat in accordance, that’s a gold mine. That’s a point of commonality. That’s a thing we want to do… potentially together, so, hey, next time you’ve got an evening free or you’re online, let me know. We can play a game of vampire together. And maybe your doughboy, my plebe, and Joe’s yuppie can finally give that glittering 100-year-old sissy Kindred who dates high school girls what he deserves.

http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://jachilli.squarespace.com/journal/2010/8/23/vampires-and-history-and-my-amateur-psychology.html