Weapons to kill a Vampire

Defiantly a flare gun, flamethrower, molotov cocktails, gasoline/lighter/match, lighter/aerosol can, torch would kill a vampire...

Hit em with a semi.  Then back up.

Then ignite the body and grab the marshmallows.

The "Holy Hand Grenade" is what one guy I played with invented in a Hunter game...

A Flashbang charge to disorient, attached to shrapnel grenades, but the shrapnel is shards of blessed oak.

Even if it didn't kill outright, it dealt enough damage that it wasn't hard to finish the job afterwards.

ChaosWolf:

The "Holy Hand Grenade" is what one guy I played with invented in a Hunter game...

Actually, my choice IRL would be a White Phosphorus grenade; check the Armory book for details. All the Agg goodness and smoke to conceal exits!!!

I'm kinda disappointed in the write-up for the Thermite grenade; I used to be in the U.S. Army and saw one used once, don't recall them having a blast area. What I witnessed was a Thermite grenade placed on an old engine block and set off; eventually it burned right through with the help of gravity. Maybe they've changed them, oh well...

Blunt Vorpal:

Shaila:

? I mean besides a wooden stake, which is pretty obvious,

Actually, its hard as hell to stake a vampire.   -3 and requiring 5 successes?   Good luck, mate.    Hunters have it a bit easier- they can risk a point of willpower to reduce the required successes to 3.

This page caused me to reflect on... I guess it's a dirty trick I pulled on one of my players.

The player was the kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan who'd probably call himself a "Whedonite" He's altered his sense of style and fashion to ensure that he has access to a knee length brown coat. I like the series- he took it to some of the more extreme levels, bidding on props from the show on ebay and so forth.

In a Requiem game, I used Joss Whedon and many of the actors who had worked on his shows as NPCs. I made Rupert Murdoch and some Warner Brothers executives vampires and ghouls and wrote Whedon and the actors up as a sort of amateur vampire hunting group... because of the way the shows were sort of dicked around with by the television networks (dicked from the perspective of those who wanted a forty season run for Buffy and a thirty seven season run for angel)...

It was a fairly involved mystery style plot for the player characters to become involved with. Identify these vampiric influences in the entertainment industry and do something about it.

To that end, after Whedon and the actors were removed from the equation (having passed on what they knew and falling prey to those vampires who had so cruelly manipulated the television series) and either turned, ghouled or killed... the players were rummaging through the Whedon-Cave for information before going off to their final showdown. Among the addresses, names and so on, they ran across items which had been used on the show.

Among the overhead projector slides from Hush and bits of makeup and weapons from both series, they came across the Axe of Dekeron (the axe from season seven of the show, ancient slayer mumbo-jumbo)... the hardcore fan player, upon seeing the picture I had printed, leapt to the conclusion that it was the key to the whole shebang and would win them the final confrontation. He seized upon the idea, which wasn't remotely in-character, and ran with it, without even taking the time to ask for a more detailed description of the axe. As far as he knew, it was just sitting in with a pile of other props, all of which I had printed pictures of.

The final showdown scene occurs, the players know this is it- it's a defining moment for the game, it's the fight against the biggest, baddest enemy they have run across up to that point. The fan's character takes the axe and attempts to use it to murder vampire Rupert Murdoch...

Where is just snaps into pieces. 'cause it was a prop from a television show and he was using it to hit a ventrue over the head.

So... while it doesn't address the original topic of weapons to kill a vampire, it at least eliminates one possibility. Don't use a piece of tin stuck to a PVC tube that has been spray painted red.

Blunt Vorpal:

Shaila:

? I mean besides a wooden stake, which is pretty obvious,

Actually, its hard as hell to stake a vampire.   -3 and requiring 5 successes?   Good luck, mate.    Hunters have it a bit easier- they can risk a point of willpower to reduce the required successes to 3.

Is this actually the case? The hunter book says "This benefit cannot be used on any roll in which successes are counted as damage, or iinflict any other loss to the target."

I assumed this includes damage rolls and staking?

Loxosceles:

So... while it doesn't address the original topic of weapons to kill a vampire, it at least eliminates one possibility. Don't use a piece of tin stuck to a PVC tube that has been spray painted red.

Sound advice if ever I heard any. ;-)

Good stunt you pulled there. Had I been ST, and would I have had the guts to put in Whedon et al. I think I'd have been inclined to put in a real artifact among the props. After all, just 'cause it was used to portray an ancient demonslaying weapon doesn't mean that it isn't... ;-)
Maybe not the axe though, that would've been a bit too obvious. Perhaps Mr. Pointy, or the Dagon Sphere, or...

Okay, maybe it's just the Buffy fan in me talking....

There sort of was, although it wasn't a weapon.

Had any of them taken the time to go through the prop book from the first episode- the fat, archaic, bound in wrinkled leather or human skin with the woodcarving "Vampyre" across the front which Giles regularly referenced- they'd have gotten a crash course of useful information on V:tR vampirism. Kind of an in-game encyclopedia version of the WoD and VtR core rule books.

I sometimes take a fairly passive approach to certain aspects of the game which could be said to be shortcuts, easy answers or the best tactics. I'll describe a scene, sometimes there are illustrations if I can manage them to help set the tone of it all- but I won't always go into greater detail over aspects which I consider to be optional solutions. Sometimes there are more mandatory solutions, then I'll call for a set of rolls to see if anyone notices it, or just give a far more detailed and enticing description to draw the players in the direction I want to lead them. Optional easy buttons, I leave it up to them to explore their environment more thoroughly, to think things through a little more and to actively ask for more detail or to declare that their character focuses it's attention. If they take the time to do so, they get rewarded. If they skip optional stuff, then they skip optional stuff. If I tell them that the axe feels unnaturally light to be a weapon and that the light gleams off it's edge as if it had been polished to a mirrored surface so it would glint for the cameras- and they don't decide to test it before it was life-or-death... really their own fault.