Making WoD Vampires in BRP?

[TheNPC]

How would you do it?

[Joerg]

Create the clans like you create RuneQuest cults and redefine Rune Magic as Blood Magic.

[Raleel]

Well, I might look at Mythras' After the Vampire Wars for some design cues. It's already an urban fantasy environment. Then I'd probably look at Legend's Arcania of Legend: Blood Magic and import some of that into sorcery. Then I'd walk down the clans as cults and build out their power sets. I might take some notes from psionics in several of the Mythras books and build powers that looked like that - single skill,  mid level powerful. This would leave full sorcery to Mages

[AndreJarosch]

4 hours ago, Raleel said:

Well, I might look at Mythras' After the Vampire Wars for some design cues. It's already an urban fantasy environment. Then I'd probably look at Legend's Arcania of Legend: Blood Magic and import some of that into sorcery. Then I'd walk down the clans as cults and build out their power sets. I might take some notes from psionics in several of the Mythras books and build powers that looked like that - single skill,  mid level powerful. This would leave full sorcery to Mages

Or you could hunt down one of the rare copies of the BRP version of "After the Vampire Wars". 🙂

[Atgxtg]

If I were to do it from the ground up:

1) Treat Blood Points like/as Magic Points to power spells and keep the vampire mobile. Vampires can drain magic points/blood points from their victims.

2) Treat each disciplines as a  Spirit Magic spell, powered by blood points. So Potency would be Strength, and so on. Some disciplines, such as Protean would need to be written up. It wouldn't be quite straightforward as most disciplines have a greater effect on ability that a few points of attributes. 

3) Allow Vampires to train up their stats per the generation. A rough cap of that would be 3 points per dot+3. So 5 dots = max 18, 6 = max 21, 7= max 24, etc.

4) Add a humanity stat and track it. Port over the humanity rules. Change them to work on a percentile roll. The SANity mechanics might be a good place to start.

5) Port over any other Vampire abilities, such as spending blood points to heal, and weaknesses such as Frenzy and vulnerability to sunlight.

6) Use BRP values for weapon damages. Something like 3 points per dot seems about right for converting other, unspecified damages. So an attack that did 4 damage in Vampire would do about 2d6 in BRP.

7) Skills seem to work out at around at about +20% to the base per dot.

From there it would depend on what sort of world I was going to run. If it was a typical Vampire type campaign with just vampires then I wouldn't need to do much more. If it were to incorporate Werewolves, Magi and such then I'd need to port over their mechanics to BRP as well (tricky). Worse still, if I were to mix this in with a standard BRP setting with BRP magic, I'd have to do more work on the disciplines to differentiate them from the other magic systems. 

 

All that is a very rough, "How I would do it." But once I got started I'd probably try to fine tune and refine the adaptation to try and be truer to the source and to try and simplify the mechanics as much as possible. Unforeseen difficulties would arise somewhere, and I'd have to adjust things to get around any problems.  I'd also peek at GURPS Vampire as it would show how it had been adapted to another system before. 

 

But the above is work, and I'd need a good reason to try and adapt WoD Vampires to BRP in the first place. Not that there aren't good reasons to do so, just that whatever the reason that made me do so would influence the choices I would make while adapting it.  For instance, if I adapted it because I like BRP's open ended skill scores I would drop the cap on skills that exists in WoD. If I liked the cap then I'd limit skill scores in BRP (typically 100%).  Past BRP games have done both approaches, so it would come down to what I felt worked best for my game.

[hix]

Allegiance on a percentile scale between Humanity and The Beast. Rotschreck/holy fear is SAN.

[Mugen]

I think I'd try to define Disciplines as skills, and use either Psionics, Magic (from the BGB/BRUGE) or any variant of RuneQuest/Legend/OpenQuest Sorcery as an inspiration to make powers work.

Skill % could give access to different powers, like in the WoD original game. It would also limit the number of points one can spend when he activates a power.

I'd also take inspiration from Chronicle of Darkness rather than old WoD and use a unified "power" stat scale for all supernatural being. Vampires Blood Potency, Werewolves Rage, Mages Arete would all work the same.

Edit: note that attributes in Storyteller/ing system have much more impact on tasks related to skills than in BRP.

If you add 10 points to DEX, you'd have excellent initiative, but you'll rarely gain more than 10% in related skills, and only if you use a BRP variant were skills are affected by characteristics.

The equivalent in WoD would be a gain of 2 or 3 dots in Dexterity, which impacts a lot of actions, and gives much more than +10% chance of succes.

Edited April 14 by Mugen