What is a good character for this game?

That's probably the first question every player asks himself when dealing with a chronicle. Beside personal preferences that certainly make an impact a good player starts by understanding what the game is about: is it political? combat oriented? aventure? psicological thriller?; and then searches in his own repertory of options for a good character to partake in it.

This game is esentially a psychological thriller game, sure will have some combats and even some politics could be involved in the equation but in essense character will be involved in a inner jorney to the monstruos reallity of vampirism. Vampire society is a sub culture, not exactly gothic or punk but something in between, with their own rituals and cultural icons to follow. Keep an open mind about your character pre conceptions, its paradigm is about to change as the character develop from his initial naive state to a more aware state of conciousness about the darkness surrounding him.

Of course the character sheet is another important thing. The must-do-or-not-play-thing you have to follow is that your character needs a clear concept, your character sheet must reflect a profile attuned to your concept. For this I've designed a small table that I hope would help you:

To know a little more about what a trait level implies for the game, check out the following link:
ABILITIES AND ATTRIBUTES LEVELS

Define what is your character good at (Primary ability): being really good at something takes at least 10 years of training (Trait level Three); Especialists meaning people with Olimpic level (Trait level 4) requiere 15 years of hard training unless some special regime like every day professional training is involved; and Masters are a new whole deal, some people spend their lives trying to be masters at something (Trait level 5) and even after 20 years don't succeed.

Rule wise your character may only have one attribute and one ability at level 5

How does your character do what he or she does?: A good medic for example, master level, not only develop medicine as a trait. He requires Investigation to diagnost his patients, Languages to understand different books and academics to get a degree. Your second task is to highlight those abilities, some to level Four when they're crucial for your character to do what he does, other to a professional level of Three and the rest to support his job, level two or less.

The rule is your character can't have more than two attributes in Level Four and maximum two abilities. Also he can't have more than four abilities in Level 3.

Merits and Flaw: the idea of these traits is to flavour your character, make him unique and interesting to play. Logically you want your merits to give you an edge and your flaws to annoy you the least possible but nevertheless you must use them as landmarks that define your character and not as useful tools to max/min his abilities.

No more than 7 points in flaws and must come from something that actually happended to your character. Also from the two XP points possible for roleplaying good, one is for concept interpretation and the other for interpreting your flaws.

Your Merits should help you yes but remember is about the concept of your character not the ability you gain for having them.

As you can see making a character is more than just setting points in a character sheet to have a powerful colection of abilities. Think about it, if everyone thinks like you the game wouldn't be different from any computer game no one cares about. Your character must be important in the storyline of the chronicle and as player you should be comfortable to become the character inside of it.

Therefore character with minimun wage of interpretation like icy demeanor character that doesn't even care about his past of future are just an excuse to use your abilities since they don't demand more than a few lines of interpretation and a whole lot of dice to make the world do what you want.