Having elder vampires eat more people or chew on younger vampires is not really an answer to the core demographic issues. It's a satisfactory answer to why master vampires spend long periods sleeping the ages away and a good answer to why you'd want to kill elder vampires despite them being so much more powerful than younger ones - but those are wholly separate issues.maglag wrote:How about greater vampires needing exponentially more blood than lesser vampires? So you can have relatively large number of vampire mooks to fill vampire society without needing to drain that many humies but the seniors in charge do need a steady supply of fresh blood.
The core demographic issue is that if you aren't careful things are going to go all Top 10 or Astro City on you. Every Vampire has demands on the setting in terms of Retainers, Victims, Bodies, and Peers.
- Retainers So being a Vampire makes you some sort of boss. You got what WoD calls Ghouls or Blade calls Familiars - your basic Igors and Renfields. You gotta have butlers and maids around if you're going to cosplay as an aristocrat - the fact that Dracula was seen setting his own table was a plot point and a source of personal shame in the original novel. People gotta keep the grounds at vampire mansions and shit, but also having human servants around produces things to aspire to and fight over.
- Victims If you aren't meaningfully preying on people, you are not a vampire. They don't all have to die (and indeed the world building is virtually impossible unless almost all of your victims survive), and it's OK for you to have memory clouding abilities and/or drain blood from Retainers and shit. But the fact remains that you're going to have some collection of people that you victimize.
- Bodies Vampires kill people. Even "good" vampires need to kill people from time to time for the drama and the looming threat of how bad it could get if you lost control or gave in to the dark side or whatever the fuck.
- Peers As a vampire, you need people to talk to. Rival vampires to struggle against, but also werewolves and wizards and badass dudes who are in on your secret and you can have conversations with.
But here's the other thing: the total number of Retainers and Victims and Bodies is multiplied by the number of vampires in the setting, and the number of vampires in setting is recruited entirely from the potential peers. So if you have six adventures that each have a rival vampire in them, and you have 5 retainers, that's six more vampires who also have 5 retainers and so on and so forth.
So the impact on the setting of the vampire conspiracy is going to be considerably larger than just the number of vampires. If the number of bodies being called upon to be being left around becomes unfeasible, the setting of course collapses. But the size of the vampire conspiracy is also going to get unmanageably large fairly easily if the number of vampires and/or the impact of any particular vampire is too large. But it's also easy for vampire society to feel totally bullshit if there aren't enough vampires or the impact of any particular vampire isn't high enough. The needs of conspiracies to be tiny so that they don't shit all over suspension of disbelief is very much at odds with the needs of story characters to have people that they interact with and the needs of aristocrats to have servants and the needs of predators to have prey.
-Username17