Humanity. The struggle to maintain the thin seperation between the Man and the Beast. This is perhaps the core element of roleplay in Vampire: The Masquerade. It is what gives the game its tragedy. Without the struggle to maintain a sense of self throughout the long centuries, vampires are simply young, fun, and beautiful forever. Humanity is what gives the game, pun intended, its bite.

So, what IS Humanity? It may be easier to approach this question by first defining what Humanity is NOT. It is NOT a measure of how "good" or "evil" your character is. It is not even a measure of how moral or ethical your character is, apart from any idea of Universal Good or Evil. It is NOT a measure of how other mortals and supernatural creatures react to you - that is a byproduct of Humanity, not the meaning itself.

Humanity is really a measure of the unconscious emotional and logical response a character has to any given stimulus. It is the governing factor for the uncontrollable responses all creatures have to things. However, again, it is NOT instinct. It is the measure of how much social conditioning and overt pattern reinforcement have changed someone's natural bestial instincts. For example: the natural animalistic response to seeing a burning building is to stay away from the flames. Yet, for some people the natural response, dictated by their social conditioning, is to rush inside to save those still trapped by the flames. Above all, though it may be a conscious choice the part of a character to try and raise or lower Humanity, the reactions that Humanity governs are NOT conscious choices. It is simply how a character feels about a situation. And, as in real life, much of the time how we FEEL about a situation makes little logical sense. It's perfectly natural for someone to see another human being do something foolish and feel guilty about it themselves. We don't function as emotional beings according to cold and hard logic.

When we see Humanity through the light of it representing social conditioning, rather than a sense of morality or an alignment system, it is easier to understand the system of Humanity checks, and what they mean for your character. A Humanity check is made anytime a situation arises that challenges that social conditioning inside your character. When you witness something awful, do you feel bad? When you do something awful, do you cry about it afterwards?

Humanity checks are confusing in the WoD, because it is one of the few times that succeeding in a check is potentially "bad" for your character. When you are asked to make a Humanity check and succeed, it means that your character is plagued with grief, guilt, and other emotional reactions that reinforce the set of societal guidelines that he or she unconsciously follows. In terms of roleplay, this is huge. Passing a Humanity check is not an excuse to simply go about your business as usual, like a normal sort of "obstacle" test. It means that your character is seriously questioning the actions he/she has been witness to or commited. It is a crisis of faith, questioning the system and your place in it. Overall, it is the feeling that whatever it is that has caused the Humanity check is simply WRONG. Though your character may mask these feelings to others, they are impossible to quash internally. Passing a Humanity check means that you feel BAD, and should be roleplayed accordingly.

On the other hand, losing a Humanity check means that you don't feel bad, or really have ANY non-psychotic or sociopathic emotional response. It doesn't mean you feel GOOD about it (though it can at lower levels, being closer to the Beast), it just means you don't have a normal human response. When you lose a Humanity check, another set of social rules falls away inside your character and reveals the universe as ultimately uncaring and meaningless. Something terrible has happened in front of you, and you simply feel nothing about it. This can come as a shock, or even go completely unrealized.

Humanity checks, because they are simply responses to situations, not necessarily actions, can come from INACTION as well as ACTION. If you stand there and do nothing while watching someone tortured or murdered, that calls for a Humanity check in most cases (depending on the current level of Humanity of course). A quick check of the Humanity table shows that impassioned murder is a Humanity 4 check. This means that at Humanity 5, you'd feel terrible for frenzying and killing someone. Equivalently, standing there and watching someone be murdered would definitely require a Humanity check, to see if you are able to preserve the "Why didn't I try harder to save them?" human response.

Given the nature of the Curse, vampires have a much easier time losing Humanity than regaining it. The Beast is constantly digging away at the psyche of all Kindred. Losing Humanity is SUPPOSED to be arbitrary and accidental sometimes. That is part of the theme of the game. You're not human anymore, so your Humanity slips away no matter how hard you grasp at it. The characters that maintain Humanity are the characters that shield themselves from the outside world and practice absolute moral and ethical restraint. Regaining Humanity in the WoD is a small miracle in and of itself. Losing it is common place.

Humanity being a measure of how your normal human psychological reactions protect you from the Beast, imagine this scenario:

Gary Gangrel is walking down the street. Suddenly in front of him a mortal is horribly run down by a speeding bus. Gary, being newly Embraced, is still at mortal levels of Humanity: 7. A normal human would feel awful if they saw someone splattered by a bus 10 feet in front of them. Gary makes a Humanity check. If he succeeds, he feels terrible, and his empathy for the person killed squishes his Beast down into the dark place it belongs. If he fails, he says "Ah well, I didn't know them." and keeps going about his business. His Beast exults and is now a little closer to the surface, because Gary doesn't care that some poor dude just got wasted by a bus.

Now, a hundred years later, Gary has fallen to a sad state of 3 Humanity. He feels the Beast stirring in him all the time, and wants to fight it and regain his lost Humanity, but he has a very hard time figuring out how. He just can't bring himself to care anymore. His only hope is to start emulating normal human behavior, and behave as if he does care, in the hopes that it will stir long atrophied human reaction within him. To that end, he starts caring for a runaway girl he finds on the street. He feeds her, but still doesn't feel anything - his Beast knows he's just keeping his food alive. He saves her from her pimp - his Beast knows he's just protecting what is HIS. He avoids feeding her his Blood to let her have free will - his Beast knows he just enjoys the hunt more that way. Finally one night the runaway walks in front of a speeding bus, and in a flash Gary remembers this is the exact same way he saw someone die horribly one hundred years ago. Gary remembers how awful that felt at the time, and the spark of Humanity stirs in him. Gary jumps out and throws the girl out of the way of the bus and is hit himself - his sacrifice pushes the Beast down in his chest a little further, letting him raise his Humanity back to 4. Gary now understands again why he should feel bad about callous murder.

Humanity is ONLY raised through effort, not through accidental encounters. Those encounters can stir the embers of Humanity and start someone out on the journey to recover it, but they won't do the trick themselves. It takes conscious effort for a vampire to relearn the social coding that humans pick up unconsciously during their mortal life. The reason for this is twofold: First and foremost - vampires are creatures of stasis. Night after night they return to the appearance they had at their Embrace, never changing. Stasis is the core of their being, and as such, they have great difficulty changing. Second, the Beast is always whispering to you and showing you how easy it is to strip away those tiny little psychological barriers against existing as an uncaring and efficient killing machine.

Similarly, trying to deliberately erode your own Humanity is a difficult process, filled with the twisting ravages of guilt and remorse. This is most often done in order to switch to a Path. Paths of Morality are specifically learned and strictly enforced codes of behavior that are designed to occupy the same role in the psyche as the Path of Humanity. Because they are inhuman ways of approaching the world, it is necessary to first rid oneself of the preconceived notions of social acceptability that are built in. Thus, you must rid yourself of nearly all of your Humanity before attempting to truly absorb the methods and behaviors of your new Path. Because the process of eroding Humanity will usually involve many successful Humanity checks, it is VERY difficult to truly dedicate oneself to pursing another Path. Every time you commit an attrocity in order to move closer to a new morality, and succeed in your Humanity check, your old morality asserts itself, and you filled with the KNOWING that what you have done is wrong, and what you WANT to do is wrong. Moving to another Path is not as easy as twirling your waxed moustache and cackling evilly. It is a logical, emotional, and philosophical journey that takes your character to the darkest depths of his/her soul. You are deliberately challenging your own internal mechanisms by defying them, and you suffer the according torment. While these other Paths can keep you from the Beast through their rigid codes of behavior, they are truly alien to every fiber of your being as a human.

As a sidenote it is important to remember that acting HONORABLY is not the same as acting HUMANELY. While honourable behaviour can sometimes help preserve or even raise Humanity, it is by itself not enough. Often honour gets in the way of acting in an absolutely Humane fashion - which is why there is another way of fighting the Beast based on that set of beliefs, the Path of Honourable Accord.

Because Humanity is based the idea of an implicit social code, and everyone has a different understanding in real life of this code, Humanity is a very subjective matter. Storytellers do their best to be fair and consistant with the way they call for Humanity checks, but in the end, they are also ironically human. Attempting to institute any stricter guidelines on the Humanity system than are already in place would be self-defeating, as the system is MEANT to be arbitrary. This is what gives it its edge - vampires exist in the constantly shifting and confusing space between man and monster. Please work with the Storytellers as they attempt to arbitrate a very difficult system, and help them assist you in using Humanity to tell your story, rather than regarding it as an oppositional tool that Storytellers use to punish your character. Humanity is what makes Vampire a roleplaying game, rather than a rollplaying game. Give it the respect and care it deserves, and it will add the impact that turns a good game into a great game.

Storyteller essay written by:

Former Assistant Storyteller Nick B.