Eyeball said:
First playthrough? Toreador. Got good social skills so you'll get most dialogue options, they're straightforward to play in combat and look human enough to not get shit from random strangers.
Second playthrough: Nosferatu. Interesting stealth gameplay and a lot of fucking hilarious lines from people around you, my favourite being Fat Larry calling you a goddamn S&M gremlin.
Third playthrough: Tremere. Additional lines from Strauss and others and the most pure mage gameplay around.
Fourth playthrough: Malkavian, for the lolz factor.
This is the key to understanding the Codex.
Anyway, ultimately your dialogue Skills are vastly more important than Disciplines, which have considerably less checks and usually don't get the best results. In fact, disregard every other dialogue skill than Persuasion while you're at it, unless you want to sex Jeanette. Persuasion is the most important skill, followed by Computer, Scholarship and Security. Stealth is utterly useless, don't waste points on it, as is Brawl. Subterfuge, Intimidate and Seduction are of limited use in my opinion, since Persuasion seems to overlap with ALL of them and usually gets the better results, usually the other three are just for lulz and larping (and fucking Jeanette). Finance is pretty pointless, I recall it only being used to give you extra money when you get quest rewards, and you'll probably end up with a load of money anyway if you remember to sell weapons you find and don't use. Melee is your first and foremost combat skill most of the game, with Firearms only coming alongside it later when guns get more devastating. Dodge is something you raise when you can't think of anything smart to save for.
When you create your character, the thing you'll want to do the most is to focus all the points available in each category to a single stat, due to how XP costs work. A single Attribute at 3 nets you more savings in XP than two at 2, for example.
Back on the topic though, I'd recommend a clan with Celerity. The combat is piss-easy for the most part anyway (only some exceptions, like the Downtown parking hall with the gang-bangers and Tongs), with most of the game being melee-heavy, and lategame switching to guns occasionally. But if you're having trouble with combat somewhere, just activate Celerity and breeze through, and there's a certain boss that you may or may not face but most likely will face that will be considerably easier with Celerity. In fact, saying your Clan affects your dialogue skills considerably is a load of shit, since it really only alters your starting skills which you aren't going to leave at that for a long time. The most important things your choice of Clan does is the Discipline selection and unique features/dialogue of the Clan, most notable ones being Nosferatu and Malkavian. With the exception of the slight alterations Tremere have, everyone else is largely interchangeable.
It should also be noted that playing as either Nosferatu or Malkavian is the actual easy mode of the game, due to the fact Obfuscate is the king of the mountain when it comes to disciplines (pro-tip: You never need to raise it above 2, since you can stealth kill at that point, the description lies to you about Silent Killer level being necessary).
But yes, play as Malkavian AFTER you've completed the game with at least one other Clan, since you can catch a lot of the hidden spoilers in Malk dialogue choices then.
Tzimisce 
