Originally posted by Justin on the V20 Blog.
I was monkeying with the Tremere writeup this weekend and I knew I was looking down the barrel of the inevitable when I started. One particular trouble spot for the Tremere has always been their weakness. It’s too easy to avoid, and it’s incomplete as of a chronicle’s start.
Compare that to the Nosferatu: You’re ugly all the time. Or the Ventrue: You need blood right now, but the vessels around you won’t do. Malkavians have no respite at all from their weakness. Hell, the Brujah LIKE their weakness, even though it causes them trouble.
But the Tremere could, for all practical game intents, just walk away from their weakness. The blood bond was only a partial one, and all you really had to do was steer clear of the Council of Seven to avoid the other two steps. Unless the chronicle was focused on Tremere shenanigans — and with other characters of other clans in most player troupes, devoting too much time to the pyramid hierarchy might not be what they signed on for — it would come up only rarely.
In the revised edition, we stepped up the weakness by adding a suceptibility to Dominate from clan elders. That’s still pretty thin, though, too isolated a situation and likewise too easily avoided. Again, all of the other clan Disciplines have something integral to the vampire condition in them, some heightened aspect of what it means to be a vampire.
The root of that is there in the Tremere weakness. It deals in blood bonds, which are inherent — endemic, even — to being a vampire. That I like. So, for V20, I’m considering turning that element up to max for the Tremere. They’ll keep the Dominate susceptibility, but they’ll also be fully blood bound to either the clan or their sire directly. No more of this “one step” toe-in-the-pool business. You’re a Tremere? Welcome to servitude.
Giving the player a choice as to whether he’s bound to the Council or his sire lets the player weigh in on the sort of story he’d like to see, too. If he chooses his sire, he’s interested in the immediate dynamic between sire and childe, so the hierarchy becomes a more personal, immediate thing. (As well, why would the sire have chosen to bond her childe to herself instead of the clan, as is proper procedure for the pyramid? Zounds! A rogue in the hierarchy!) If he chooses to be bound to the clan as a whole, he’s expressing an interest more in the large-scale entity of Clan Tremere, with probable political ambitions.
Of course, if the player tries to subvert the weakness and cheat around it by picking the opposite, well, then, he’s playing into the function of the blood bond itself. If you’re picking the thing you don’t want to have happen, well, you’ve got it coming to you.
Which is why it seems so more suitably Tremere to me.
Now, it’s still effectively a social drawback and not as immediately existential as the weaknesses of the other clans, but I think that’s made up somewhat in the severity. That is, the Tremere clan weakness might not manifest frequently, but when it does, trouble is waiting in the wings. That’s the sort of effect a good weakness should have.
By acknowledgement, this puts a lot of the weakness “enforcement” into the Storyteller’s hands. With the other, more systemic weaknesses, the Storyteller controls primarily the frequency of occurrence, as the rules do the rest. Here, the Storyteller controls both frequency and outcome. It’s a bit more hands-on, but who ever heard of a laissez-faire Storyteller?
Update: There’s some dissatisfaction with the proposed weakness rewrite.
Here’s the Tremere clan weakness as it currently exists.
Here’s where I think most of us take issue with the weakness, as marked in orange.
And I think our commonly accepted reasons for dissatisfaction with the weakness are:
- The general unlikelihood that the partial bond is ever going to be completed
- That, even if completed, the blood bond is easy enough to circumvent via ritual or the creation of another blood bond
- That the nature of the weakness is social, and one a player can engineer ways around, rendering its weight as a weakness minor compared to that of other clans
Where I think the weakness is on the right track is that
- It involves blood as a qualitative and quantitative “magical ingredient,” which is appropriate to the clan
- It involves an inherent facet of the Kindred condition
So how can we change the orange-marked sections to better address the first three points, raised above?