K wrote:
I'm saying that there isn't a missing person's case. People vanish all the time and no one is looking for them, or filing reports with the police, or making a fuss because they are people who society at large doesn't, and maybe cannot, track.
The world is full of uncounted people who live in the margins alone and have few if any social connections. In the goth dystopia of a White Wolf-style game, the assumption is that there are a lot more people camping in squats where only one or two other squat-dwellers would notice if they don't make it back from the methadone clinic one night, and those guys don't talk to the police.
You can just be estranged from your family and not talk to them for years. I'e done it. No one filed a missing person's case for me. There have literally been times when only one or two people would have even noticed if I went missing, and I can only hope that they'd file a missing person's report.
Lonely deaths are more common than you think.
That being said, basing your vampire game on the brutal truth of social isolation and dehumanization may be too dark for a gothpunk game.
I'm quite aware of how many lonely deaths there are. I mean, I end up certifying the deaths of people with no family from time to time because I work at a hospital. The issue isn't that these kinds of untraced deaths don't exist or that there isn't room for a few prolific serial killers to hide in the statistics. The issue is that there
isn't room for serial killers in significant numbers to operate for extended periods of time and still hide in the statistics.
Real serial killers tend to operate for only a short period of time and there aren't very many of them operating at the same time. Real deaths sometimes go unnoticed for weeks, months, or even years. But that's not enough.
Let's take the guy who died in his apartment without any human contacts and just had his rent and utilities paid by direct debit for 3 years without anyone realizing that he was dead. That's a disturbing story, but the broader point is that this sort of thing doesn't help
vampires very much, because the system did in fact notice he was dead
eventually. It took three fucking years, and that's obviously enough time to get away with murder as an individual, but it's not enough to keep your murders from ever showing up in statistics. Vampires are immortal, and having their crimes escape detection for 3 years is plenty of time for them to move to Chicago or something, but it's not enough time to hide the fact that there are serial killers operating over time. If all your crimes escape detection for 3 years, the number of reported crimes is going to be the same as if they were reported right away if you're continually operating for more than 3 years.
The number of murders you have to hide is the number of murders per year per vampire for
two hundred fucking years. It becomes a very large number if the number of vampires is large enough to support social cliques and political factions
and the number of murders per vampire per year is significant.
There's plenty of people to prey upon. The world has over thirty million
slaves in it, and if every Vampire kept three human beings in literal chains they would be a rounding error on the human slave trade even if there were seven hundred thousand Vampires world wide. And that kind hide because the Vampire's slaves don't die and get replaced every year. Maybe the Vampire loses interest and leaves one of their slaves mind wiped and anemic at a bus stop and captures a new slave, but they probably don't do that every year and even if they do there isn't any trail of bodies from that.
The world has a lot of heroin addicts and homeless people and runaways and stuff that can easily be captured and abused for extended periods without anyone noticing or caring. And if you have magic powers that keep them from ever talking about it, you can pick up these people and feed on them to your heart's content - as long as they don't actually die. A catch and release program doesn't impact demographics and can be maintained indefinitely. A catch and kill program depopulates the pool almost immediately.
The reality is that if your equation is X*Y*Z that your number is going to get stupidly titanic if any two of those numbers are large and the third one is anything other than a tiny fraction. And since one your terms is
time, and your vampires are
fucking immortal, that term is always going to be real big. Like,
thousands of months. The other term is number of vampires, which is going to be a big number as well if you want to have political factions of vampires, which you do. So the final term, the "murders per month" term
has to be a tiny fraction for the total to not be ridiculously unmanageably large.
32000 vampires for 2000 months at 1 murder per vampire per month is 64 million murders. That's like five holocausts for the United States alone. You
can't do that and have a remotely plausible Earth-state. You just obviously can't.
Again and still, you can pick 2 of the following three:
- Vampires are numerous enough that they can have meaningful internal social divisions.
- Vampires individually kill people at any significant rate.
- The world is remotely recognizable as Earth.
You can't have all three. You just can't.
-Username17