For what it’s worth, I ran D&D in a fantasy version of Revolution-era North America and it went swimmingly. D&D was not built for it, but since I did it with elves and dwarves and halflings and all that noise, of course a lot of the work was done for me. I don’t give D&D all the credit for that campaign, but when I tell people about it I do tell them that it was “a D&D campaign.”

GMs can control their games, per Jason’s comments above. However– to say ‘the GM is the only one, ever ever ever to make decisions about a game’ is denying the designer any credit at all. I’ve played plenty of “what world do you want to do a pickup in” games, and run them using homebrew rules. In those cases? Yeah, the GM is solely responsible for what the players can get into.

But for RPGs that are published and have an established, playtested system? Give me a break. Compelling backgrounds are written, tested, and balanced by people who think about collaborative storytelling -for a living-. To act like the design of a game doesn’t effect the stories told is asinine. What the clans, bloodlines, etc. can do is what defines them. Altering those abilities alters the viability of play.

The system, and the core game, matter. It’s what compels chronicles and characters. Maybe it’s only tenuous connection– maybe you’re setting Exalted in Revolution-era North America– but there’s balance between classes, threats, and system mechanics that let the game work.

Say that a certain amount of flexibility is desirable, sure, but say without reservation that flexibility in any quantity is never undesirable in any game so long as there’s a GM? That’s crazytalk, and I think it undermines your point that flexibility is highly desirable. Too much flexibility eventually overwhelms the point of having a defined game in the first place. It also makes a larger community of players hard to build, or support, because none of them are playing the same game. What’s good for the play group and what’s good for the larger community aren’t always the same, granted.

The spirit of the game, as put forth by the books, still does some work. Otherwise the entry on Malkavia would like this:

Go ahead and put Malkavians back in play. We thought it might be cool if they caught crazy like an infection, but you can get the old Malk clanbook on Ebay if you just want to do that.

Many players view flexibility as a charitable pardon for those players who want to play it weird, I think, than as a broadening of the definition of what Vampire actually is.

(What is a game’s identity anyway? Is it a description of what’s on the page? Of play as viewed through the campaign? Through the session? Through the combat turn?)

Requiem’s focus on local power is one of the first things people use to separate it from Masquerade, even though individual GMs had the freedom to just chuck that idea away. Yet it persists as an important descriptor for the edition, even though we espoused flexibility at the same time. People want a game to have an identity.

Still, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong about Vampire. You wouldn’t be the first to say so.

But boiling my essay down to “flexibility is bad” pretty well misses the point. There is conflict between the public perceptions of what Vampire is as a brand, as a product, as a design statement, and as an instance of play, but that conflict also gave Vampire incredible life.

But that just makes the essay double super baffling. I mean, the game says “Hey, this could be katanas and blood-driven superpowers, or we could all hang around and have haircuts, you should decide and talk about it”, if a game group has problems because one person has katanas and another person has hair gel, that’s not the game’s problem, and changing the game won’t ever change that problem. I figured you knew that but maybe forgot or something? I don’t know.

1. If you think the post above boils down to “flexibility is bad in Vampire,” then perhaps I am a terrible writer.

2. You know that I was the developer of V:TR for three years, right?

Flexibility is never a bug in any game where there’s a GM. Not ever, never ever, not once. It has never happened. It never will. Flexibility gives the GM the tools to make the campaign what they want it to be. If a game goes off the rails it is because the players didn’t buy into the GM’s vision of the campaign – either the GM didn’t explain it right, or a player didn’t get it, or the GM changed it halfway through, or someone is up to mischief, not because the designer made some mistake boo hoo hoo. Or if a game stays pleasingly within the sweet spot of what the group desires, it is not because the designer made some brilliant move, it is because the group has communicated well and support each other. Fuck the designer, the GM is the one responsible for virtually all of what’s identified in this essay as the content of Vampire.

This is particularly not an issue when the flexibility is pointed out by the game itself, over and over, as it has with every edition of Vampire since the very first. Those “pick a theme for your game” sections aren’t optional ya know! Those essays in the back about how to run it – you know, the contradictory ones? – those are a giant 100 foot tall sign saying “this game can be run in many different ways”. Requiem is even better at this than previous editions. Ever run an all-one-clan game? Did ya do it before Requiem? I did, but I felt like a rebel when I was doing it. In Requiem, it feels like a well-supported design decision. That’s flexibility. It is never, ever wrong, period, if you have a game with a GM.