I Ran the Vampire Pre-Alpha Playtest

  and Vampire: The Masquerade is basically Desperate Living, at least this adventure is.

The PCs

The characters are over the top and ridiculous. They are allowed to do horrible things and are written so they come into conflict with each other. Then ridiculous things happen to them and they are placed in ridiculous situations.

This is from Polyester but you get the idea

The whole adventure careens back and forth between the absurd and the grotesque. The adventure starts in a 24-hour slot machine place, where the players have all gathered to discuss a bunch of stuff they players would only know about if the had been to some LARP or something. Then they find out they are all banging or “blood bonded” to the same guy. They wind up in a nightclub that is on fire because some vampire gang bombed it.  As one person wrote:

Then they get chased by cops and anarchist vampires who look like club kids (I imagine the cast of the movie Hackers).

The German Police

Anarchist Vampires

There is a part of the adventure where they risked being attacked by a group of gay clubbers dressed like the spartans from 300. This is actually potentially a deadly encounter for the players.

That’s the adventure. I don’t understand how it could be played any other way than as joke. The more serious you take it the more ridiculous it becomes. Do people that play Vampire really take themselves and the game so seriously that … I don’t even know. I am confused. It would be one thing if the criticism online was, “ I wanted a serious horror vampire game and what we got was some game designers laughing at us.” Instead the Criticism was more like this:

Is this guy right? Is this not a joke?

Am I the only one laughing? Everyone I played with thought the game was hilarious.