I love Vampire: The Masquerade. I love the setting, I love the storytelling, and I love the click-clack of the dice. What I do not love is how the Fifth Edition of the game (hereafter referred to as V5) treats new players the way babies treat diapers. I can't think of a single less-intuitive example of a tabletop RPG handbook when it comes to presentation and character creation than this book. And that sucks because making a new vampire is relatively straightforward. With proper guidance from the Storyteller, even a neophyte player can have a solid, fun, and interesting first character worked out on their sheet in under an hour.
The thing is, you'd never know that just by opening up the V5 Core Rules.
A lot of people avoid picking up RPGs because they see a multi-hundred page colossus of a hardcover like that and think, "Yeah, no, that's not for me." But most core rule sets are written in such a way as to be relatively player-friendly. Taking D&D as an example, the first several chapters are all about character creation, and they proceed in pretty much direct order: here are all the races/species, note the benefits and drawbacks, and pick one you like; here are the individual sections for each class, note the benefits and drawbacks, and pick one you like; if you selected a spell-caster class or a race/species that has built-in magical abilities, here's the list of spells you can pick from at level one, so check them out and pick the one or ones that seem most interesting. There's some page flipping involved, but you basically start on page 1 and work your way forward.
V5 said, "Nah, we ain't having that," and scattered the character creation rules all over the book. Heck, the first thirty-two pages are nothing but flavor text. The next thirty are devoted to an overview of the World of Darkness and what it entails, and by the end of it you'll have either quit in frustration because you just want to know how to play, or you'll have developed an entirely new vocabulary of words like 'Kindred', 'diablerie', 'Camarilla', 'generation', and 'Thin-Blood' but with nothing to actually tie those terms to, since you've not even looked at a freaking character sheet yet.
I've been playing tabletop RPGs for forty years, and this is, by far, the most poorly put-together rulebook I've ever encountered. Older editions of Vampire went a bit heavier on the lore than was maybe normal. V5 reads like a group of people trying to convince someone they don't slap their own ass while masturbating. Not the ideal way to introduce a new player to the game, IMO.
This isn't going to be a tutorial, going over the rules and such. I might do one of those later if I feel up to it, but right now, I want to offer up some suggestions of things players can consider before arriving at the table.
Paradox Interactive (publishers of the World of Darkness games) offers a quick and simple quiz right on their homepage - Which Vampire: the Masquerade clan are you?
I know, I know. These things are usually really dumb. Trust me just this once. One of the easiest ways to get into roleplaying is to personate a character similar to yourself. Clans in Vampire function similarly to how races/species work in fantasy RPGs. Each bloodline has advantages, drawbacks, and a slate of potential powers unique to that Clan, and once chosen, it becomes an immutable aspect of your new un-life. There are a total of fourteen Clans, along with two offshoots (clanless Caitiff and the not-quite-full-vampire Thin-Bloods), which present a colossal array of possibilities to the new player. Taking the quiz helps you narrow your focus to one particular Clan that most closely embodies your own personality, and can cut down on analysis paralysis.
The quiz is short, so you'll finish it in a matter of minutes. Once it's done with, you'll be presented with the Clan that most closely aligns with that style of play, and a short description of what it means to be a vampire of that Clan. This gives you a jumping off point, which you can expand upon by looking up that Clan in the core rules, or on Paradox Interactive's website, which offers a rundown of the different clans to peruse.
You don't need to abide by the results of the quiz, of course, and I'd always recommend working with your Storyteller to ensure the type of character you're thinking about playing will fit in well with the group. The quiz is just there as a jumping-off point, a way for a new player to quickly narrow down a full buffet of options to a single dish that (hopefully) fits their tastes without needing to spend an hour playing compare-and-contrast between sixteen different choices.
In many tabletop RPGs, backstory is little more than fluff that no one except the player and (hopefully) the Game Master actually cares about. After all, in D&D, there's very little in-game reason to care that your first level Fighter used to be a farmer, or your Sorcerer disowned by her parents because she kept doing magic things without any formal training. Your backstory is just what happened to you in the past, and what's important is the present.
Vampire: the Masquerade almost entirely inverts this. It's impossible to really know who your character is as a person without delving into their backstory, because in the World of Darkness, vampires don't come about by accident, and you don't get to decide to just become one. Vamps are deliberately made via a process known as The Embrace. Most vampires take this very seriously, because adding new neonates into the mix means one more chance for the rest of society to catch on to the fact vampires exist, and humanity learning about them is agreed to be a Very Bad Thing(tm).
So the first thing you need to figure out as a player is, "Who was the character I'm playing before she became a vampire?". In the rules, this is known as your Concept. It doesn't have to be particularly detailed or deep, but it is a distillation of your character's profession and their feelings about humanity and the world in general. What your character did for a living before they were Embraced might not be something they can continue doing once they've been dragged into the Zero-Daylight Time zone, but it does influence what kind of skills they had picked up prior to becoming a creature of the night. And that will help you when it comes time to fill out the character sheet: you're no longer picking randomly from a list of stuff that might be useful for the group, you're identifying things your character spent months or even years developing and training just to exist in mortal society.
Once you've worked that out, the second thing you need to decide is, "For what reason did another vampire choose to Embrace me?". As stated before, vampires don't turn mortals by accident. The decision is usually made after careful consideration. Think about it this way: there are several billion humans on the planet, but something about your character stood out and made a vampire take notice. Not only did this make an immortal creature take notice, but something about you made that vampire believe they were too good to waste on simple mortality. So ask yourself, what was the spark, the skill set, the thing that stuck out that made a vampire go, "This should belong to eternity."?
That's not to say you have to have a reason, or that if there was one, that your Sire (the one who Embraced you) told you what it was or explained it to you. Not every vampire has good intentions: you could have been Embraced because some vampire thought it would cause trouble for someone else, or because a vampire from one Clan found out you caught the eye of one from another Clan and didn't want you to wind up on "the wrong side", or because a vampire thought, "I wonder what it's like to create a Childe of my own?" and you were the most convenient way to act upon that urge.
But the most interesting characters tend to be the ones who have a reason beyond "no reason at all" to have joined the ranks of the undead. Vampire is a storytelling game, so your character should come with a story to tell as well as a few chapters that have already been told.
Vampire is nowhere near as restrictive as a lot of other tabletop RPGs when it comes to character creation. After all, there's no class system at play, and while each Clan has a trio of Disciplines that it is easiest for you to learn from, you're rarely barred from learning other Disciplines outside of those as long as you can present your Storyteller with a good, in-game reason why your character is studying that Discipline, and you're willing to pay the extra Experience Points.
Likewise, each Clan has certain drawbacks that will limit a few ways in which you can play your character: Brujah tend to have more fiery tempers, Ventrue have specific requirements their prey needs to meet in order for them to successfully feed, and so forth. But there's nothing that says you have to lean into these traits and play to a particular Clan's stereotypes. Not every Brujah has to be a leather-clad biker, not every Toreador has to be a tortured artist, and not every Nosferatu has to be a miserable, sewer-dwelling recluse.
In fact, one of the most enjoyable experiences you can have as a player is deliberately playing a character against type. Not in a disruptive way, but just in a way that most players (and thus most other vampires) would not expect. One role-playing school of thought is that if other characters instantly intuit what Clan you're in based solely on your behavior, you aren't playing a terribly interesting character. Don't feel like you have to play your Brujah as a hot-headed, street-smart punk. Sure, that hot-headedness is a Clan trait, and a lot of Brujah might be drawn to a life that lets them routinely go all Break Stuff on society...
...but then again, maybe that's not who your character was in their previous life, and now they've sought out a way to make quiet living where they no longer need to worry about their (non-existent) blood pressure often.
The Toreador clan tends to Embrace people with an artistic soul, but the older a vampire gets, the less-engaged and more out-of-touch they become. How much would it suck to be Embraced into a clan of artistic dreamers simply because you were really good at composing ChatGPT prompts, and a 90-year old vampire had no understanding of the concept of 'AI slop'? What happens to you when/if you Sire or someone else in the Clan discovers your real drawing skill is shit?
The Gangrel tend to feel more comfortable outside of society's urban areas, preferring the countryside or even the wilderness to the hustle-and-bustle of a city, but what if you only caught your Sire's attention because every year for five years, your paths crossed during your two-week vacation where you went backpacking in the mountains to decompress from your corporate job you spend the other 50 weeks of the year working at, and he got the wrong idea?
Vampires are (if you'll pardon the expression) only human, after all. They're prone to mistakes based on assumptions just like the rest of us are. If you do anything for a long enough period of time, you'll get good at it. What if you're working a job you hate because it's something that pays well and you don't have to think about it too hard, not because it's a personal calling or anything. You've got dreams, stuff you want to do instead, and you're counting down the days until retirement. Then all of a sudden, someone comes along who says, "I noticed how good you are at accounting for this firm, so I made you immortal. Now you never have to stop doing what you love!"
When this happens to someone else, it's comedy. When it happens to you personally, it's tragedy. When Clan drawbacks turn you into the opposite of who you are in real life, this is an amazing opportunity to role-play a character who is three-dimensional, who has quirks, and who struggles to overcome their new deficiencies (and maybe get revenge on their Sire for making their un-life miserable).
There's nothing wrong with playing to the type. It's a lot easier, especially for a beginning player, to lean heavily into the Clan which best represents the kind of character they want to play. The leather-clad Brujah biker is so common because the Clan's structure, advantages, disciplines, and drawbacks make it very easy to play that type of character. It's an aesthetic for a reason.
Just remember, you never have to stick to the standards if you don't want to.
