Monday Mashup: This is Spinal Tap

I haven't participated in the Monday Mashup very much, but last week's was based on one of my all-time favourite films, This Is Spinal Tap

To recap what Monday Mashup is about:

Every Monday, I pick a piece of popular media -- a book, a movie, a TV show, or even an album. You pick a roleplaying world and talk about how you'd combine the two. Post on your blog or LiveJournal, and stick a pointer to your post in the comments here; if you don't have a blog, then go ahead and abuse my comments section for your own pleasure.

There are two big themes in This is Spïnal Tap. The first is a band in decline, playing a style that's gone out of fashion, and falling apart in the process. The second is a parody of every cliché in the book.

So let's take a party of angst-ridden and stereotypically pretentious Vampire the Masquerade characters, and drop them into the first level a 3rd edition D&D dungeon. So they try and indulge in undead social climbing, when what they end up having to do is kill kobolds and take their stuff. Just like the film, it should end up in inter-party bickering.

If you want to really send things up, use a barely playable homebrew game system that parodies all the unplayable or pretentious game mechanics that were fashionable in the 1990s. Rename every commonly recognised game term, including 'character' and 'player'. Use an impenetrably baroque die mechanic where character's skill level has no bearing whatsoever on the chance of success. Make sure that the chance of a critical failure increases dramatically the higher the skill (like 1st edition VtM, but turned up to eleven). As well as several different types of dice, use playing cards, Tarot cards, poker chips and two full sets of chess pieces in ways that don't really make any sense. And finally, credit the system to "S Gareth Wick", an egotistical game designer notorious for flamewars on internet forums.