These minor complaints about a few weird Prompts in the excellent solitaire journaling RPG Thousand-Year-Old Vampire didn't quite fit into my previous posts about the game. Thousand-Year-Old Vampire is a ton of fun, and these don't really break anything, but they are... minor rough spots that aren't quite up to the slick artistry of the rest of the project.
I noticed that I do sometimes have trouble with prompts that imply a large passage of time. Prompts where an explicit passage of time exists are less troubling for
me. If you tell me the story advances 200 years, I can roll with that,
and cross out mortals. If instead you just imply maybe it's further into
the future now, I'm left wondering if I need to scrap my current plot
thread or not. The one that vexed me the most was Prompt #42, which asks about a piece of contemporary technology that gives you trouble
since it's beyond what existed in your mortal life. If your timeline has
advanced to the Industrial Revolution during play, then this is a great prompt, but if
your character started in the 12th century and you've now moved to the
early 14th century, it is really hard to come up with a good answer to
that. You're either going to want to jump ahead much further in time, or
settle in for a lot of research. There's nothing specific to 12th and 14th C there, feel free to pick any two other centuries about which you know just enough to run a
low-pressure one-shot solo game in, but not enough to really differentiate between the tech-levels thereof. Prompt 42 trips me up every time.
Prompt #54 also gave me headaches, but largely because it's mechanically vague. It says to "convert an old Memory to a new Skill for blending in." I'm just really not sure if that means "add a new Skill to your sheet, and base it on some sort of thematic link to one of your Memories", or if it means you're supposed to erase an entire Memory (including up to 3 Experiences) as well. I don't think 'convert' is defined anywhere in the rules. Zapping an entire Memory will have a major impact on your character an narrative, so I wish the instructions were a little clearer. But like I said, the game is super fun, so in the end I'm okay with having to put on my "GM-as-rules-arbiter Hat" once or twice per game.
I wish the 136 alternate prompts were laid-out in the same format as the original 71 prompts: three linked prompts per page, numbered by the page. There would definitely be value in having an entire second roster (or 3rd roster) of prompts like that. Then you could choose if you were going to play Prompt Roster A, B, or C at the start of the game, or you could swap from one roster to the other if you rolled the same thing too often. Instead, if you feel you've seen a particular page too often and want to use the alternate prompts, you have to roll a d135, and if you then end up on the same page/number in a later turn, there's often no obvious follow-up that builds on the random redirect you used. It feels like a missed opportunity... like they did 85% of the work necessary to make the alternate prompts actually organically usable, and just didn't quite get it across the finish line. If I played the game just a little more often, I'd be tempted to take that project on myself.
Overall a great game, despite my fussing.
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