For disciplines, our game will have 19 different disciplines. For our game, we learned that using the amalgam format was not going to work for us, so we split certain disciplines back into their own category. (For instance, Lasombra Obtenebration, and Hecata Necromancy both fall under "Oblivion" in V5. For the sake of the game however, they will both be listed as Obtenebration, and Necromancy.) Of these 19 different disciplines, your thin-blood can only have ONE discipline affinity, meaning you will have to choose only one at the beginning. You really have to pick your favorite Discipline
Each Discipline will have 5 total levels. Like you mentioned, you will be given the ability to use specific skills in a discipline, instead of a general usage. For example, level 1 Animalism will be Bond Famulus, while level 2 will be Animal Messenger.
Here is the more complicated part. As a thin-blood, your character can only use disciplines up to level three, despite our game having a total of five levels for each discipline. There are two ways to solve this gap, one is to use Thin-blood alchemy to boost your abilities. The other, is to simply stop being a thin-blood. Obviously, easier said than done! However, if you manage to stop being a thin-blood, you will go from having ONE discipline that maxed out at level 3, to having THREE Disciplines to choose from, all of which can perform up to level 5.
This is, of course, a late game option, and it won't be easy. We do however, hope people have a lot of fun trying to reach for it!
Apologies for the lengthy explanation, as we know this is a bit complicated, but we decided that this would be the best way to make these powers feel unique, and to also bring thin-blood alchemy to relevance, should people be willing to use it!
Thank you for the very detailed explanation! The design choice you have made makes perfect sense to me, and now I'm even more excited for this game. I didn't think that was possible. I'm all for the separated disciplines route. Does that mean Tzimisce will go back to having Vicissitude?!
Perhaps for your next dev video, you can focus on disciplines and how they function in-game? I mean, I understand now how it works based on your explanation, but it would be awesome to have a video showcase, and I imagine it will hook even more fans into the game.
You'd be correct! Vicissitude will be available for the Tzimisce thin-blood. We are hoping to implement systems to make these feel unique. We do still have some work to do on making these more visually complex, but I do agree a Discipline video would be a good idea! Where we are right now, we're working on preparing the demo of the game to the best of our abilities, I do think after that, we can give some effort to showing off how it works. Thank you again for the comments!