What We Do in the Shadows

The final episode of What We Do in the Shadows was marvelous, although we're so glad we failed utterly to check the runtime before we started it, because instead of the usual 20-minute episode, it went on...considerably longer than that. This was great because every time you thought the episode was ending, it wasn't; you still had more hilarity ahead of you.

From the jump of watching this show, we couldn't avoid comparing it to the way the Vampire: The Masquerade chronicles we had played in were actually like. The game was heavily influenced by Interview with a Vampire (and Anne Rice more generally), which portrayed vampires as sexy and mysterious and tragic and oh-so-serious. That worked great in film and fiction, and ostensibly some of the early LARPs had that vibe to them, but you can't give TTRPGers any gift without at least a small majority of them turning it into a joke at least some of the time.

I say that with love and as a serious offender in this regard.

I've played V:tM only very little. The vampires were never the main draw to the World/Chronicles of Darkness, for me. The first time I played it, I went into it with a deadly serious, socially adept Tremere (and some hope that maybe I'd find out just what the appeal of playing a vampire was) and soon found myself surrounded by a coterie that approached every situation they encountered with an eye towards how they could use violence to "improve" it. The Storyteller had some elaborate plot in mind that involved getting information about the Prince defecting to the Sabbat and giving them the whole city on a silver platter. He expected us to get hints of this by talking to the people the Prince had ordered us to rough up (because we were unwittingly helping him keep those who suspected the truth from talking to anyone who could organize a resistance), leading to a growing realization.

Instead, they'd send me in to open negotiations as a ploy to keep the target from leaving until the rest of the coterie could get into position to ambush him more effectively. Just as I'd get past the preliminaries of convincing our prey that he could trust me because I meant him no harm, there would be a hail of gunfire and we'd learn nothing. My coterie also had a habit of venal Masquerade breaches that in one case caused them to encounter a just-imbued Hunter (Reckoning was brand new at the time), who proceeded to beat the hell out of them with a fork. It was an absolute fiasco.

The only other time someone convinced me to play a chronicle, I went into it knowing I'd be moving 1,000+ miles after about six sessions, so I decided to mess with the system a bit. We were playing a chronicle set in Victorian London, so I made a Ventrue with orphaned children as his favored prey who owned a factory where said children could both make him richer and serve as his herd - real mustache-twirling absurdity. I also maxed Courage and dump-statted Conscience and Self-Control, so that he could smoke cigars but had a terrible starting Humanity. I then proceeded to spend my brief time in the chronicle playing "the Humanity loss drinking game", as I called it. The Storyteller knew what I was up to, but for once, instead of being the moral center in a group, I played the worst person (well, vampire) in it by a mile. Alas, I only got to Humanity 2 before moving day arrived, so I never did get to lock the doors of my factory with my workers in it and burn it to the ground just to prove I could bootstrap my way back using a new factory and new orphans.

Beth's experiences were less extreme but no less absurd. There was an incident involving a horse-drawn carriage on the autobahn. Another involving making a dress so beautiful that it came to life. And another where a character told some corpses "follow me" and was unable to give them any other orders, so the zombies followed him around for the rest of the chronicle? That game was also the origin of "Stuttgart!", which has long become our shorthand for the players' characters leaving whatever setting the Storyteller had planned the chronicle around and relocating to a random place where no plot currently exists. Presented with an ultimatum from the Prince to leave the city in 24 hours or be killed for the crime they had been framed for, the coterie decided that just...doing that was a lot less fuss (and a lot less likely to end in their grisly final deaths) than trying to clear their names, and Stuttgart was their chosen-from-the-air destination.

You can see how one could make the comparison between that and the ridiculous scenarios in What We Do in the Shadows, can't you?