Justin Achilli

I have long maintained that Vampire is a proactive game, as opposed to a reactive game. In a reactive game, the GM pits the players against a specific situation. The old man comes to the tavern, gives the PCs a map, and off they go to plumb its depths. In a proactive game, however, the players’ characters have their own goals, and much of the game tale revolves around their seeking to accomplish their agenda. Certainly, there’s room (and some would argue necessity) for a Storyteller to interject defining thematic moments and events, but much of the play is directed by the wiles of the character. It’s reasonable, in Vampire, to say, “The Prince wants to know who strangled his ghouls during the Michaelmas riots? I don’t care. My Brujah union delegate would rather continue undermining the Ventrue power-grab happening at Tammany Hall.”

That’s a great recipe for creativity, especially for those troupes that understand that gameplay is a shared creative experience. When the players and the Storyteller work together to create a compelling chronicle, the results are engaging for both sides of the ST screen.

In practice, though, I’ve observed that sometimes a player needs a bit of a “push” in order to start forming an agenda for her character. Many games tout a wholly open-ended experience. “You can do whatever you want!” seems like a great pitch, but in reality, it often confounds the player with the paradox of choice. If I can really do anything I want, how do I narrow down my options to refine my character concept?

(The other side of the paradox of choice, of course, is the illusion of choice. I still have a dismissive opinion of Aion, for example, because I watched one of their web videos that told me I could do whatever I wanted in the world and then promptly couched my opportunity in the terms of the DPS-Tank-Healer paradigm used by every other MMO. And you can’t change any of the world through your actions, so provided your definition of “do whatever you want!” is do what you can already do in every other game and have none of it result in anything of significance, well, you’re golden.)

Gaining control of an abstracted resource — becoming Prince or Primogen or acquiring Influence in Vampire — is a game objective that becomes more valuable as the context of the game and story develops.

This is where I think the roles of the clans has been one of Vampire’s greatest assets. This past weekend at the Grand Masquerade, my table at the Antediluvian dinner spoke a bit about this very concept. The clans are like social classes: They help define what I’ll be doing in the game, but they’re defined by the Kindred who constitute them, not their role in a gamist party dynamic. They’re families, not occupations. I can play them to type or against type and always use them as a sort of template, but I never have to be defined by the template. They’re character shorthand, and I can play my entire unlife as a clan member in the terms they present, or I can individualize and characterize beyond them if I choose.

Compare this to, say, the first edition of Wraith, which didn’t provide a role or concept for characters to adopt. It did so very broadly: You can belong to the Hierarchy, Renegades, or Heretics, but those are purely social constructs and more setting elements than direct objectives. When Rich Dansky did his revision work for the second edition of Wraith, he turned up the importance of the guilds, which provided a much-needed sense of direction for the players. It helped define what the game was about. It provided and extremely important context and a statement of the game’s essential experience.

Big score is an easily understood reactive model, since the players are in direct competition. Each reacts to the other's degree of success by trying to trump it.

In the transition to video games, this is still a critical piece of gameplay. In many games, it’s absent because the player’s role is wholly defined. You don’t need a guild or clan in Words With Friends, for example, because that’s not what the game’s about. The choice is moot in World of Warcraft, by comparison. Whether Alliance or Horde, you can still be a warlock or rogue and you’re only picking avatar options as a subset of team. WoW defines the gameplay experience by class, however, and likewise doesn’t allow actions to affect the world, which makes the essential experience how you’re killing the monsters, not whether you’re killing the monsters or to what end. WoW and Words with Friends and D&D are reactive — here’s what you’re going to do. Here are your letters or your quest, now hop to it! It’s a directed gameplay in which the essential experience is immediately available to the player, and “figuring out the world” isn’t part of the loop.

When you play Vampire, though, “figuring out the world” is part of the game, as is figuring out how to leave your character’s signature mark on it. It’s a good dovetail of gameplay and setting, since there’s a lot the player doesn’t know at the beginning of a chronicle and horror as a genre thrives on the unknown.

It’s also interesting to note there that the reactive games mentioned above are industry leaders in their comparative segments. By comparison, Vampire has always represented itself as an alternative to the mainstream type of game in its medium — and it maintained an impressive second-place position based on that variant in the essential tabletop roleplaying game experience.

In contrast, casual and social games thrive on reactive designs, because by not forcing the player to make those decisions, they can get directly into the objective-driven play. Play a round, take your turn, have a ten-minute session and you’re done until you choose to return. It’s the play transaction that partially defines the success of the model.