Buffy the Vampire Slayer vs. Vampire the Masquerade

"Vampires are a sub-variety of demon... not angsty, tormented creatures. Anne Rice fans are bound to be disappointed." 
 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game, p.185

I sunk $25 into the Vampire: The Masquerade 5^th-Ed. Humble Bundle with the express intention of using it to beef-up my Buffy game. I already have a nice collection of VtM 1^st-Ed. books, but I always forget about them because I am no Anne Rice fan. I like the system, and I have nothing against the mechanics, but the lore is overwhelming and suffocates everything else. And the way it is written kills the whole, and I hate to use this word, vibe.

Shadowrun is like this, too. Both of them read like a bad website: Just endless hype, jargon, and buzzwords strung together into semi-coherent sentences. When you. Use broken sentences. To increase. The impact of the wording. Doing it a lot. Lessens. The impact! And? It's hard to read. Just stop doing it.

Anyone who's seen the TV show knows that Buffyspeak can be hard to parse, too. However, it is not as omnipresent in the Buffy RPG as it is in VtM. In fact, Eden did a good job of keeping the mechanics cleanly written and free of Buffyspeak, or any other conceit. What Buffyspeak there is is smoothly incorporated into the mechanics - such as with the Qualities, Jock and Nerd. VtM hails from an era when mechanics and lore were kept separate, and I can't fault it that. I still tend to prefer games that are like this.

You can see this design in many TTRPG from the era, including Call of Cthulhu. Games like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk broke that mold by incorporating their lore into their core mechanics, intertwining them in the writing, and other games followed suit. In most of these other instances, the system mechanics are presented upfront, and the campaign materials are deeper in the book. VtM set the standard for this when they started releasing their sourcebooks: The corebook contained the mechanics and the sourcebooks were the campaign materials that rarely contained any mechanics, and everybody was happy (especially White Wolf).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game premiered in 2002, when VtM's first-run was still going pretty strong, but I'll always associate both Vampire and Shadowrun with the 1990s. More than anything, it's the "in-your-face" writing, but both of those games did premiere in or around 1990. I have a lot of criticisms of Buffy RPG - the most important one being that it's not really a game without the Angel RPG - but the writing is pretty good. The only problem I have with it is that it buries mechanics in the text, so finding rules can be challenging (though it has a really good index), but the overall competency and tone of the text is fine.

Vampire constantly interrupts itself with "testimonials" from NPCs you don't know and don't give a shit about. And I can say it like that, because VtM 5e is in love with curse words. That makes it very "adult" (using swear words tells children that you are Old Enough). On another note, using an NPC for lore dumps is twice as boring in print as it is at the table. But, at least they lost that Timothy Bradstreet projector art - that shit used to drive me up a wall! Between the two, and all the sentence fragments, Vampire 1e is so overwrought that it's literally laughable, and basically unintelligible in parts. 

But the real reason I forget that Vampire was ever a thing is because it's 100% fashion over function: All style. The reason I don't fault it the way I do Shadowrun is because Vampire does have some substance - like I say, I like the system. It was one of the first dice pool systems (along with the aforementioned), but their system actually works. Not a fan of dice pools, Vampire handles them about as well as I've ever seen. The system for 1e and 5e are the same if not very similar, at least from what I recall of 1e.

So, despite the fact that it was a good deal, I thought it a decent investment. I can't publish anything I come up with for Buffy, but I guess I could feasibly publish it under Vampire. I can publish my Buffy content here, but it doesn't do it justice because of the limitations of a blog. It screws-up tables, smushes charts, and completely destroys the formatting. But, more than anything, I feel that Buffy the Vampire Slayer's vampires are wan and hollow, and I'd love a little more detail and organization that VtM may provide, so it's an investment in my gaming if nothing else.

I plan on sharing at least some of what I come up with here, but my purpose is to develop the vampire population of Sunnydale into something more than a faceless mob. I don't want moody Goth vamps ennuiing up the place, and I realize that Buffy vamps don't get along well enough to organize and coordinate so they're unlikely to form clans, but they have to be more than just Act One cannon fodder. 

I also realize that Buffy, the TV show, was more Monster-of-the-Week than vampire slaying, and Cinematic UniSystem supports that to the hilt, but with more Fae and Spirit critters than horror beasts. Angel provides all the vampire building information you'll ever need for Cinematic UniSystem, but I'm not making a full-fledged vampire NPC for every encounter. And the books detail how vampires in the Buffyverse operate mechanically, just not much about how they behave. I want less YA angst and a lot more scares.

I mean, the name of the game is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I want my vamps to really have some teeth! So, I'm thinking that the majority of the vampires in and around the Hellmouth are analogous to the Anarchs, while the elders are more akin to the Camarilla - although neither is a 1:1 comparison. Both Anarch and Camarilla came with the Humble Bundle, so I have access to both.

I also answered the biggest question: Does the population know that vampires exist? Buffy was awarded a trophy by the school for saving them so many times, and the Scooby Gang openly discusses vampires as though they're just a feature of the landscape, but it's terribly inconsistent.

Anyway, I haven't gotten that far into the VtM 5e materials because they're difficult to read, but I think I can lift a few ideas from the materials I got from the Humble Bundle and make my Buffy vamps real, unliving entities in my campaign. It's still a WIP, but I'll publish more on vampires in Sunnydale later this month.

© The Weirding, 2025