Characters I could almost play

Some of the SPCs in my current Vampire: The Masquerade chronicle Nocturne could work as PCs in the right series, like Alice the Thin-blood runaway, Mae the gunslinger Sheriff and Stohler the nervy Seneschal, but I have quite a few who wouldn’t really work in a night-to-night game, and I’ve deliberately pressed it in this case.

Ligeia the blind medium is a fun NPC to portray but her blindness would bring in a lot of difficulties for the kinds of things PCs do regularly. Colette the harpy is, I think, a good example of a just-about playable Malkavian (an extreme rarity for me) but would be difficult in a night-to-night game as is because her powers take a heavy toll on her. Mason the Nosferatu spymaster can’t really pass for human, unlike more readily playable versions of the same archetype I’ve featured in previous games. (He connects to the first batch of Vampire characters I imagined playing and the giant Nosferatu being the one I never actually have.)

They’re all fun in small doses but would need adjustment to put on centre stage and take part in a majority of the conflicts the game’s PCs get into.

Making any of them PCs would require working out which regular PC type activities they can and can’t do. When creating Vampire PCs I feel that they should be able to do at least half of having interesting hunting scenes, interacting with Touchstones and other aspects of human society, going to Elysium, hanging out in clubs, solving mysteries and getting in fights.

Ligeia procures blood through safe and reliable methods which would make for boring hunting scenes, wouldn’t be much help in a fight and doesn’t seem like she’d be big on clubbing - she can solve mysteries but really requires ghosts to be a feature of the chronicle to work as intended, so that mostly leaves going to Elysium, which would make her a viable character in a lot of LARPs but not for me personally. Mason gets more ticks on the list, but some things are right out. Colette comes closer, but would probably have to be reworked to be briefly badly debilitated by her visions like Doyle in Angel instead of being laid up for a couple of nights by them.

Some of this is me leaning in deliberately, creating characters who could exist in the setting but be hard to fit in a PC group, but having fun playing Ligeia and Colette, and describing Mason rather than playing him as such, made me think about it. Which NPCs of yours could you almost play?