Vampire: The Masquerade Chapters a Engaging, Trouble Experience

Last time we wrote about Vampire: The Masquerade Chapters we mentioned that while there were a few issues we encountered, the overall experience was really solid. I loved the story telling, love how you interacted with the world, and appreciated how much love and dedication went into bringing this franchise to life in Montreal. All of those feelings still exist after passing the games first Interlude, but I have a few more thoughts on the production of the game.

It is worth noting that the overall tone of this article may sound negative. Vampire: The Masquerade Chapters is still a fantastic experience – I just want you to go in prepared.

This game is very ambitious, and the more ambitious you get with a project, the more likely it will have problems both in design and printing. This definitely is the case for this vampire experience. The ever growing Errata on the FLYOS website continues to push out updates and changes that need to be implemented to play the game properly, and you really need to be in the mood to work through some of the issues.

Part of our struggles are actually self-inflicted. We know the Errata exists, and sometimes it isn’t necessary at all as a specific chapter has no print errors what-so-ever. The issue we found is that when a chapter unfolds smoothly and without rule confusions or broken sequences, we generally jump into the next chapter WITHOUT checking the Errata for that. Thankfully, we had this issue only twice, and in both situations the changes we SHOULD have made likely wouldn’t have impacted how we played that specific chapter.

In one situation, for example, we knew we had finished the chapter WAY too quickly, and then we instantly thought, “I wonder if there were any Errata entries for this one?” There were, and they would have extended the experience a little longer, putting pressure on our choices as the round tracker slowly counted down. Still, the outcome we got was probably the outcome we would have had anyways (regardless of the round tracker forcing our moves), and therefore we opted to NOT replay the chapter and just continued to move on.

This won’t work  every time – it is very possible we got lucky in our two instances. When we did check the Errata before playing, it sometimes broke our immersion in the experience. Instead of just using the rulebook to set up a map, we have to check our phones first, make any changes, then double check, triple check to make sure it’s all set up right. It was a bit frustrating and did cause us to just throw in the towel one evening. We got right back on the horse a few days later, but it did suck in the moment.

There were other instances where we found the card wording didn’t make a ton of sense, and there didn’t seem to be any logical explanation for how to handle said cards. We first encountered this with the Werewolf fight, but it has come up a few times since. Common sense and logic seemed to have won out, but thankfully there is an option to email in your questions to get a response. It’s pretty handy.

As we said off the top, this is a very ambitious title, with over 500,000 words, dozens of chapters, and over 100 characters. There are a ton of errors, probably more than I would be comfortable shipping the game with. However, if you go in with the right attitude, there is a fantastic story and compelling gameplay to make you forget these problems, at least for a while.

I still recommend picking up Vampire: The Masquerade Chapters but just remember two things: 1) there are a lot of printing errors, so keep that Errata handy at all times; and 2) there are going to be times where you read cards / abilities etc. and have questions. If you won’t let these two things get you down, you are in for one of the best table top narrative experiences ever.