If each generation of vampire's child is a higher generation...

Yeah, I never understood that, if it was just a matter of how many vamps you are removed from Caine I can easily envision 14th and 15th gen vamps cropping up while Caine was still actively ruling.

>Also, how did humans with way shittier weapons in the medieval ages almost defeat way more powerful vampires?

Mage supremacy.

Past 13th generation, your blood is too thin to embrace anyone.

Cut it out with that crossover shit.

You do realize vampires have different priorities and perspectives on time than humans right? They don't have a biological clock or social pressure pushing them to have children in their 20s-30s, so a vampire could go a looooooong fucking time before siring the next generation. There is no reason for vamps to embrace someone every two, four, or twenty decades.

>how did humans with way shittier weapons in the medieval ages almost defeat way more powerful vampires
It's actually easy to kill a vampire during the day. He can't run, and he is most likely sleeping in his coffin.

Also, number of generations depends on a lot of factors; vampires don't normally go around turning people left and right, and those who do don't "live" long.

No but they do like having weaker vampires around to bully.

>Also, how did humans with way shittier weapons in the medieval ages almost defeat way more powerful vampires?
True faith and open fire were a lot more common.

>Embracing a random unworthy peasant just to have a servant.
>Not just ghoul-ing them.
I understand that eventually they're likely to sire someone, what with immortality lasting as long as it does; I just don't think it's a frequent occurrence or done willy-nilly (especially in the Camarilla).

To be fair, the fluff was written during the 1e of the game when elder vampires were WAY less powerful.

Why would it be a random peasant? Every vampire was human once and had a family and friends they might seriously want to keep around with them for the now centuries they have to exist.

Most vampires of older generation have little reason to make new vampires. When they do, the individual must have proven to be worth it. And making new vampires create potential rivals. Sure, the childe is weaker but even weaklings get lucky.

As for servant to bully around, you have ghouls.

Mass embrace might be more useful if you need a lot of shock troops really fast and don't expect them to survive for long. Like the Sabbat does.

Enjoy watching as your loved ones, one by one succumb to wassail...

>watching as your loved ones, one by one succumb to wassail...
>Wassail is a beverage of hot mulled cider, traditionally drunk as an integral part of wassailing, a Medieval English drinking ritual intended to ensure a good cider
que?

Is it not part of the Siring process that the Sire separates their Childe from their old life? I thought that was done specifically to keep everyone from turning Uncle Bob into a fangboy too.

whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Wassail

It doesn't seem that bad.

Sure, that's the modern day tradition. I'm kind of curious what kind of massive shit show must have happened in the old days for that to become a tradition though.

It's sad only a handful of people will get this.
>sounds like an old sheep shearing song!

Why should I condem my family and friends to an un-life? If I want to make them long-term targets for my rivals, victims to my semi-random frenzies and/or bloodlound helpers of mine, why not making ghouls?
A child will betray you and can't protect you at night. It needs blood and can shame you with it deeds. A bound ghoul is loyal, a watcher a day, to low to embarance you, a way to stay in contact with the world of the living, and it will always listen and agree with everything you say.

It's true though. In Dark Ages it's clear that the other supernaturals are way more established and dangerous, and part of that is because the Consensus/Technocracy bullshit wasn't happening so people genuinely believed in magic.

you also had more people with True Faith that could send you running for hills by saying ave marias, so there is an additional complication

The earliest vampires wouldn't know all that though, they'd legitimately think they were passing on a gift to their loved ones.

Why would I want to turn my family into slavish cringing creatures that only exist to serve me? It's the kind of power fantasy a 15-year-old has.

1. Every time an Embrace happens, the Childe is one generation lower than the Sire. The 3rd generation Sire will always create 4th generation Childer.

2. For most of human history, our cities were small and most people lived in small villages. A vampire would have to live either in a large city, of which there are not many or travel through the countryside. It's not that a Vampire has a hard time feeding, but that they need to also cover it up.

3. Fire was the only way to have light until the invention of electricity. Vampires have a low chance to be frightened off even by burning cigarettes. A torch has a 50/50 chance to put the average vampire into a Fear Frenzy, where he has to flee.
Breaking a Vampire's bones or cutting off it's limb is actually far more efficient than shooting it. Similarly, more people were physically strong and adept at combat.

4. There is a shared universe, but it's not often mentioned, and vampires are the closest to mortals in terms of power ratings. I've actually had vanilla humans who were good at punching kill a Gangrel, due to luck.
Silver was hard as fuck to get a hold of until fairly recently. And Werewolves can *still* fuck up vampires today. Mages are on a whole new level.

5. Awareness of the Supernatural was much higher in the past. People knew to look out for the signs and to be wary of strangers. In a city of 2000 people, something weird is going to be noticed within a week at most.

>Also, how did humans with way shittier weapons in the medieval ages almost defeat way more powerful vampires?
Vampires, even high level Gangrel, are utter shit in the wild and 90% of the world was rural or wilderness during the middle ages.

>Similarly, more people were physically strong and adept at combat.

More likely to be trained in close combat, maybe, but not physically stronger or more fit. You'd be amazed what a few generations of abundant, nutritional food and avoidance of crippling diseases will do for a physique.

This always hit me about ghouls. A mindlessly loyal servant has its uses, but there are going to be times (like when its a lover or someone you respect or even just someone you need to be impartial) where you'd want a ghoul without that.

I know theres the vinculum (spelling?) where multiple vampires mix their blood and drink it to create low level blood bonds between multiple members without the 'Loving Servant' thing. I wonder if that would work on Ghouls.

Weren't back then more people with True Faith?

>shouldn't there be way more than thirteen generations
You need to know the actual lore.

Anyone beyond 13 generations possesses a bloodline so weak they can't sire childer, making 13th effectively the end.

There are plenty of 6th, 7th, and 8th gen vampires around even towards the Final Nights, though. If they made childer things would probably work out.

So many stories are about wayward just embraced vampire children mooning over their recent mortal life because that's were all the interesting drama is.

But if you imagine the WoD world to exist in irl then it should stand to reason there are a lot more people that just listened to their sire and took the elder controlled right of embrace very seriously. Elders are a big deal in WoD and they don't want every neonate jackass making 20 vampires. Until recently the population growth rate was very small so vampire overpopulation is a very serious concern.

Also you shouldn't project the modern world into the ancient. You can't just disappear into the anonymous masses like you can today to get away from your sire and clan elders. Medieval towns would have like 300 people. Medium cities, what, 2,000? You're gonna be noticed.

Elders in the old days probably had pretty tight control of their communities when they were awake.

>This always hit me about ghouls. A mindlessly loyal servant has its uses, but there are going to be times (like when its a lover or someone you respect or even just someone you need to be impartial) where you'd want a ghoul without that.
I suppose that's one of those situations where the temptation to break the rules and Embrace another person is supposed to come up. Important to have those around.

Probably about the same proportion. I don't think the actual amount of nonbelievers has risen; just the ability of nonbelievers to be open about it. In a religious society, nonbelievers get with the program to survive or to get ahead socially. That doesn't mean more people have True Faith.

Good point user.

>I don't think the actual amount of nonbelievers has risen; just the ability of nonbelievers to be open about it.

t. guy who thinks that all cultures are his culture with different paint.

I don't know if this is the place to say this or start shit, but I don't think this is true at all. It's easy to see people took their religion way more seriously 200 years ago.

I think people underestimate how much science has challenged the base metaphysics of religion and allowed people to conceive of a world independent from God in a way that isn't unsatisfactorily vague and devoid of key explanations. If you're a medieval peasant and you have questions like "where did we come from? Why am I here?" and you don't have religion or a theory of evolution then the atheist answer is "who fucking knows" and is a lot less compelling.

>shouldn't there be way more than thirteen generations
IIRC for much of the known history vampire population had relatively low generation. It dropped fast after Dark Ages.

>15th Gen couldn't sire vampires at all
What bullshit
t.16th Generation

Faith, especially the authentic kind that would keep vampires away, isn't just accepting the most popular/the only explanation for something as the best one. It's being dead certain, not just of the general framework of your belief system, but of your particular interpretation of it. Even in times and places with no scientific method, people were generally still practicing the adage of "trust in God, but tie your camel."

Say there's something bad coming at a person. It could be a vampire, or it could be a hurricane or a plague or what have you. An ordinary, nominally religious person, one who does not have True Faith, would accept that the danger is real. After all, death is a universal part of life, and God doesn't prevent bad things like these from happening to good people. The bad thing killing this person (or at least sending you to the afterlife or whatever) is compatible with the general framework of this person's religion.

On the other hand, a person with True Faith would be totally certain that God will step in and miraculously save him. It'd still make sense if God didn't do that, because He clearly doesn't do that for everyone who believes in Him, but faith is something other than sense.

They can make Dhampirs. Which is basically just a revenant in mechanics.

True Faith isn't about expecting God to save you. It's about expecting God to do what God does, and you love Him and serve Him. I invite you to read Peter Leeson's work on trials by ordeal - people believed in a just and knowing God who would intervene as He saw right, not a God who was on their side, and Leeson's research highlights just how deep that belief ran at all levels of society.

That's such a vague definition that it could describe anyone even nominally theist. In any case, believing in the efficacy of trial by ordeal is clearly just another case of accepting the loudest explanation in the room due to lack.of evidence, but instead of the big questions of life and death it's the smaller, more particular questions of what happened when there's shit for records and no forensic science.

Hey, before protection from double jeopardy was a legal right, how did they explain it when the same guy had different results in two trials for the same offense? And why was there an effort to even the odds in trials by combat (like putting a man in a hip-deep pit if he was fighting a woman)? If their faith was so true, they should believe that God will let the weaker party prevail if she's in the right.

The official nu-lore is that the power of a generation depends on its age. In the Dark Ages, 13th was thinblooded, 14th couldn't sire children at all. By the Modern Nights, 13th is normal and 14th is thin, with 15 not being able to sire. Presumably this is how all the generations worked, i.e. in 100 A.D. 12th or 11th would be thinblooded and so on, all the way down.

I thought generations were measured by your distance from Cain, not from your actual historical age you were embraced at. Is there some set time between being Embraced and being able to Sire yourself?

>I thought generations were measured by your distance from Cain, not from your actual historical age you were embraced at. Is there some set time between being Embraced and being able to Sire yourself?
Generation is distance from Cain, but the nulore (which was already hinted at anyways) is that a generation's potency goes up with time to a certain extent. So 13th Generation was normalized over a ~800 year period, and 14th became strong enough to sire in the same period.

For an individual vampire though, they can sire as soon as they've been sired, provided their generation is potent enough to do it.

There was that one thing where some 90's yuppie held out his credit card in surrender to a vampire and it burned the kindred because this guy's belief in the power of money was so unshakable that it counted as True Faith.
Basically as far as I can tell, True Faith is faith in something that's so total and unwavering and solid in it's consistency that many modern people might even genuinely classify it as a minor mental illness due to just how SURE you are of it without any doubts at all.

The clans were having a civil war at the top and a long revolt at the bottom. Their network of influence, communication, and trust broke apart. On the human side of things the war was being waged by the church, which was very powerful at the time. Also holy shit as well.

But what does it mean if a generation's potency goes up? If a 10th generation vamp goes out and sires someone tomorrow, are they as powerful as all the other 11s? How does it work that generations are actual distinct constructs, and not just socio-political layers that are used to refer to the relative amount of Cain's blood in your veins?

Wizards also were more powerful, and werewolf territory was much bigger.

It just is. Asking for complex ,era physical answers to the in game mechanics of a game where angsty teens pretend to be vampires is a bad hobby.

>But what does it mean if a generation's potency goes up? If a 10th generation vamp goes out and sires someone tomorrow, are they as powerful as all the other 11s?
Yes.

Rather, they have the POTENTIAL to be just as powerful, as they age. But they start out the same as any other neonate, with basically human Attributes and Abilities.

Do the overall above-average attributes of player-controlled vampires at character creation represent,to greater or lesser degree, enhancements conferred by vampirism, or are player characters simply assumed to have been exceptional humans before being embraced?

Could be either.

As said, it could be either, although I think the lore generally leans towards the idea that average human beings are not typically Embraced by the Camarilla, since the right to Sire is rarely bequeathed by a Prince. Once you've obtained it, why waste it on Joe Schmoe?

The Sabbat obviously does go in for mass-embracing, but on the other hand it can be argued that only those who are exceptional to begin with are likely to survive being a Shovelhead for more than a few nights.

Yup, but note that there’s a little practical difference in powerlevel between 10th and 11th.

It only starts to be noticeable between 9th and 10th (which is why you only buy generation background when ST is dumb enough to allow 9th and 8th)

There were also far fewer humans, and thus much less food.

When a plague hits and wipes out your entire town, there goes your whole food supply.

Lowering your generation a bit makes you immune to Dominate by pesky upstart Ventrue which is already a huge boon. Having a larger blood pool can also be useful even if you can't spend more blood per turn.

I always figured that campaign blood as a whole grows more potent, so your sure may be 8 fend off of Caine, but it's had more time to absorb the curse, or if it's a new 8th, his sire, and so forth. So it has less to do with your gen, and more to do with your vampiric lineage and how old they were.

1. ancient traditions on creating progeny caused the gap between generations to be generally long. (e.g. you could have a 100 year old 5th generation created, or have a 3 thousand year old 13th.

2. vampires a vulnerable during the day. And in VTM, they were not always as powerful as their movie and pop culture kindred. They could be ganged up on and killed by regular mortals. VTM is about intelligent play and not "I boost my str score to 20".

Werewolves were even more disgusting than you're mentioning. Sure, that vampire is hanging out in his sanctum, comfortable and well defended..

but that Werewolf just phased out of the spirit realms right next to him in a frenzy and dropped 5 attacks in a single combat turn onto said vampire as agg damage. Nasty shit.

Werewolves are, additionally, much stronger out of the gate than vampires are. Even a fresh-faced werewolf just days after his or her first turning, is a significant physical threat to a 500-year-old elder vampire.

Im pretty sure the purpose behind this lore change is to explain the time gap between generations that OP was asking about.

This is the problem with establishing an order of society and then constantly shitting on it in stories and lore. The Camarilla look like total chumps to most people, because they come across as chumps most of the time. In actuality, just doing whatever would lead you to getting fucked very quickly and the first three or four hundred years of your unlife are spent in shiteating servitude anyway, but nobody wants to play that.

I always played it that way. Never liked the "you must play angsty neonates" angle, especially in a game about immortals. Why do you play immortal beings if you don't want to experience history and its changes?

>a society of like 100 people stretched across massive cities is expected to police itself
Realistically, there would be no consequence for anything not mortal-based when it comes to vampires.

There’s some obtenebration exploit that lets you hide in werewolf’s buttcrack and then destroy tzhe wolfman form inside.

But other than that, elder is fucked.

Depends, there are loophones.

A vampire with 5 dots in potence an grapple a werewolf to death with ease, if he manages to land the initial grapple.

Vampire does not need to breathe.

A wise elder builds his lair deep under the waves.

Can be dangerous

Lake is fine too.

What clan and path of enlightement would these two fit?

Caitiff, Humanity 5

It's not a universal tradition. The Giovanni are all natural blood relatives in addition to vamp bloodline relatives. Even their ghouls and ghosts are mostly relatives. If necroincest orgies are your kinda events, there's no one comfier than the Giovanni. They're also the most secure group, since they're tight knit and have non-aggression pacts with all major factions.

That's more because grappling is broken than because the vampire is better at it than the werewolf.

Rokea like lakes too

All this, plus werewolves used to keep the numbers down and limit how high a generation you can have and still be viable in a lupine rich environment.

Also, every few centuries there's a regional catastrophe. Weaker vampires die, many but not all powerful ones too. (Sack of Constantinople, for example)

Every millennium or so there's a GLOBAL (or at least known world) conflagration, like the Inquisition. Again, the weak blooded are the most likely to be destroyed.

It’s not a sheep shearing song, you bonehead!

There's a few marine and aquatic gangrel mentioned in books - Lake Victoria in Africa apparently has a really old gangrel in it, the great lakes region has a few aquatic gangrel groups.

then there's the gangrels who swim the oceans with huge ghouled whales as their protection....

>then there's the gangrels who swim the oceans with huge ghouled whales as their protection....

Wat