Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. As in many western RPGs, there is a Haggle skill that can get you better prices in stores. But what use is haggling in modern-day America, where prices are fixed? It seems silly until you realise that every single "store" in the game is one where haggling would logically be permitted. You buy things from a pawn shop and out of the back of a truck. Even the petrol station's gear is being sold "unofficially" by one of the employees.
• A fine example is examplified by the Voerman sisters. Therese, who claims to have sired Jeanette, is acting in a manner completely different from her sister and childe, acting in a typical Ventrue manner and personality while her sister is anything but. Then it is revealed that the two are actually two distinct personalities of the same person, who turns out to be Malkavian. This also justifies how the two personalities fit into the stereotypes of two completely different clans in spite of the fact that one sired the other, in that she obviously has a few screws loose to connect the two personalities under the same bloodline.
• While the were-shark quest may seem to come out of nowhere, by the book canon, it is surprisingly through and plausible. The wereshark is a Same-Bito, a hengeyokai variant of the Rokea (weresharks). Same-Bito,unlike regulr rokea, have taken time to try and adapt to the life on the surfance. Hengeyokai also are far more likely to deal with Kuei-Jin on neutral terms, unlike western shifters and kindred.
• Play Sheryl Crow's All I wanna do while playing this game. Now imagine Jack or your taxi driver playing this on an iPod throughout the events of the game.
• The validity of LaCroix's ability to use Dominate on you aside, there's some clever subtlety to it. Dominate requires eye contact, and is often reinforced with verbal commands like "you will" or "do this," watch the opening cutscenes where LaCroix is talking to the player character very closely, and pay careful attention to the dialog when you tell him you saw Nines Rodriguez at Grout's mansion. "Look at me..."
• The entire Malkavian route is full of Fridge Brilliance, because a good part of the story is hidden away in the twisted conversations before anything happens. In theory, you could know the outcome very early just by paying careful attention to the dialogue. Also, the weird "tuna-joke" the newscaster tells a Malkavian player? It's exactly what is happening, and might yet happen. Even the chess-motif is similar to the mail you get.
• Why are VV's poems so terrible? Because, even though she's a Toreador who appreciates beauty more than other vampires, she's still undead, and most of them have lost the creative spark in the Embrace; then again, she's a dancer, not a poet...
• Why does Grout take so long to develop the madness of his clan? Answer, he doesn't. Later mentions of hearing voices are separate to his true insanity, which is his "infatuation with reason" as he puts it.
• So, there are Werewolves, notorious for their hatred of vampires, that are hanging out in Griffith park? Why haven't they attacked the city before now? Especially when an Antediluvian is about to rise? Answer: the sarcophagus contains only explosives, and the werewolves, with their spiritual powers know that. Hence, they have more important things to do then mess with a few vampires in a city.
• The game makes a huge deal out of maintaining the Masquerade, to the point that when you accrue enough violations your game is immediately over. How, then, does that explain the Sheriff's Chiropteran form on top of Venture Tower? That's clearly a MASSIVE Masquerade violation, well in the view of several hundred people in adjacent buildings at least. But think about it. Who punishes Masquerade violations? Prince LaCroix. Who has been trying to kill you the entire game? Prince LaCroix. Whose office are you a few steps away from? Prince LaCroix. With the Ventrue being one of the weakest clans in combat and you being a certifiable Badass, he's so frightened of you that he's willing to sanction this enormous violation rather than risk having to face you in person since he knows he'll die if that happens.
• According to the tabletop Guide to the Anarchs sourcebook, published a couple years before Bloodlines, "Nines" is the name of a popular Anarch game that resembles paintball + tag + live ammunition.

Fridge Logic:

• So, LaCroix can Dominate you into advancing the plot if you refuse his orders, but at the end, his attempt to Dominate you falls completely flat. While the game certainly doesn't make a point of following PnP rules to the letter and this is usually a good thing, thinking about this one too hard makes it a little messy; the only way for Dominate to fail without any effort on the victim's part is if the "victim" is a lower generation, so how does he do it early in the game? Simple; he doesn't. Regardless of attitude, the player character finds it in their best interest to do his dirty work, so his attempt to Dominate you looks like it works fine.
  • Another possibility: the player diablerised the Cathayan/the Chang Brothers/Andrei the Tzimisce, lowering the generation enough to the point where LaCroix is not powerful enough to dominate them.
    • Yet another possibility: in tabletop Dominate requires a dice roll versus victim's Willpower. If Willpower is high, Dominate can fail. You see, Willpower wasn't used in Bloodlines, so we can assume, that after all those adventures the player's Willpower became stronger, and LaCroix simply failed the dice roll.
    • Or maybe Gehenna has already started, and LaCroix is simply one of the first Kindred to be afflicted by the Withering.
      • The Withering explanation moves this whole Dominate debacle from Fridge Logic to Fridge Brilliance.
    • A couple of dialogues suggest Caine himself has been cheating by effectively raising the generation of the player via his godlike powers. This also explains how the player characters goes from weak whelp to destroying creatures that should be able to insta-dust him.
    • Throughout the game, you get a hold of plenty of extremely powerful artifacts, vampire and Elder blood packs, and plenty of other things that could arguably raise your generation or give you some other defense.
    • Why not go with the obvious? Throughout the game, LaCroix has basically sent your character on multiple suicide-missions and yet has seen them come out on top every time. He's a newly-instated Prince, and a rather disliked one, so his powerbase isn't exactly as strong as it could be had he been in the position longer (It's even implied that the Sherriff is his only truly loyal servant and the big brute's intimidation factor is the main reason LaCroix is still "on the throne"). The endgame attempt at Dominate fails because LaCroix has slowly realized you are a very big threat to him and his role as Prince, and despite not showing it outwardly, he's too damn scared by this revelation to concentrate enough to make it work!
  • Also, in the first bounty hunter quest, if Gimble had already captured McGee and cut his arms and legs off, why was he still trying to reach him at the tattoo parlor?
    • It's likely he'd bugged the parlor and wanted to drag in more victims (like people looking for McGee) by using the phone to contact them.
• Wouldn't the Sheriff turning into an enormous bat and flying around the tower constitute an equally enormous breach of the Masquerade?

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