The Gaming Den

angelfromanotherpin wrote:That would be ~50 mL (or 0.1 pint) per blood point, which would be about 108 BP/person.

Well, that's obviously untenable. And one whole pint is eight weeks?

There's not much room to thread that needle. But I figure it should at least be possible to feed from the same person once every week. And at the other extreme, going from famished to full on one person should kill that unlucky fellow no questions asked. If both of those aren't true, I don't think you can tell the sort of stories that VtM wants to be able to tell.

You replace plasma much faster than that and blood cells much slower.

It also takes you 3 seconds to suck the tablespoon of blood out of a rat too (half a blood point according to table?) Anyway I think it's a weird thing to get hung up on considering say weapon damages and the amount of realism there.

The problem with failing any frenzy/humanity roll is that subsequent ones are going to get a lot harder and make you become an npc faster once you run out of will points.

I forget if most animal damage is bash or lethal. Maybe the herd of cows/pigs is survivable if you blow a ton of blood on healing (vamps take 1/2 bashing--though the 7 dice a horse does is still going to sting).

virgil wrote:

Zaranthan wrote:IIRC, the book says if you drain 10 blood points from a mortal, they die, do not pass go, do not roll system shock. How much blood does a person have to lose in order to die from blood loss? Would 10% of that be a reasonable measure for 1 blood point? Could you lose and regenerate that every day like the system says?

A typical human needs to lose about 4 pints of blood to reach Class 4 hemorrhage. If you do it that, it's a bit less than half a pint per blood point. That's still a month to recover that much blood.

Unless you create an Essence-like stat with blood as a volumetrically independent carrier, you need make like two teaspoons equal to a blood point.

VtM Revised says that "taking half of a vessel's blood necessitates hospitalization", which I would interpret as meaning that that's the level at which they *will* die unless they get medical attention, but maybe not right away.

But yeah. The VtM blood rules cannot realistically be translated into actual biological fact, it doesn't work and even trying is silly. I'm not sure I could drink a pint in three seconds, much less 11 liters. Blood points could be some kind of mystical life force thing that you happen to extract by drinking blood, and there are hints in Vampire that some of the authors thought about it this way -- part of the vampire aging process is that eventually you can't gain blood points from animals, and then eventually you can't get them from humans and have to get them from vampires instead, and then if you go far enough down the line you can't get them from just any vampire and have to get them from super old and/or low generation vampires. Unfortunately, the actual rules explicitly state that a blood point is 1/10 the blood in an adult human, and that rule is flat unsalvageable in a world where people can be drained of one point per day and not be permanently harmed.

If you wanted to make blood drinking make any kind of sense while still working on the same blood points : power scale as VTM uses, you need to declare that there is no volumetric relationship between blood and vitae. Not "different creatures have different concentrations of vitae in their blood", but something like 1 blood point for the first sip and then 9 more for the last drop with no vitae gain in between. The blood doesn't nourish you at all, it's just that the process of taking it lets you also take their vitality as well.

Longes wrote:

Lokey wrote:Longes, as said, there's a couple ways to check on lying in general (which is part of Auspex), although if something trumps it Obtenebration is a good bet. Maybe it was the Ventrue clanbook of silly lies I read it in...I know I saw something recently that told you generation which is weird enough to remember (unless it's one of the horrible sorta like X disciplines with weird names).

...

Auspex 2 doesn't see lies - it sees emotions. Auspex 4 (telepathy) straigth up doesn't work on vampires. To my knowledge the only way to learn clan and generation is the Thaumaturgy (Path of Blood) 1.

The way for Vampires to detect lies is to kidnap a garou philodox with Scent of Truth and just keep him chained up in the basement. The potent blood of werewolves also helps with the feeding thing a bit.

Prak wrote:

Longes wrote:

Lokey wrote:Longes, as said, there's a couple ways to check on lying in general (which is part of Auspex), although if something trumps it Obtenebration is a good bet. Maybe it was the Ventrue clanbook of silly lies I read it in...I know I saw something recently that told you generation which is weird enough to remember (unless it's one of the horrible sorta like X disciplines with weird names).

...

Auspex 2 doesn't see lies - it sees emotions. Auspex 4 (telepathy) straigth up doesn't work on vampires. To my knowledge the only way to learn clan and generation is the Thaumaturgy (Path of Blood) 1.

The way for Vampires to detect lies is to kidnap a garou philodox with Scent of Truth and just keep him chained up in the basement. The potent blood of werewolves also helps with the feeding thing a bit.

You can also have a Kyasid advisor with Mytherceria 2 or have a magic lie-detecting amulet that also transforms you into a tiger. But lets keep the super rare edge cases out of the discussion, ok?

Why? I like the idea of princes just kidnapping young philodoxes to hold in the basement as living lie detectors

Because fuck Werewolf, that's why.

That'll cost you a blood point, and might require a merit.

Masquerade won

Having a kidnapped werewolf isn't really too unreasonable. Truth of Gaia* is a rank one gift. It's not particularly unreasonable for a prince to send some experienced vampires after a rank one pack and kill all but one. Doing so really just requires knowing about this stuff, which has a knowledge dedicated to it (Lycan lore, or something) but is also supposed to be covered by the basic knowledge Occult.

Hell, take a few dots of contacts and say "It's a Black Spiral Dancer." Get him to give you info about newly first-changed werewolves in the area, kidnap one they say is a philodox.

*I double-checked the gift name, I was conflating Scent of True Form and Truth of Gaia, the latter is the lie-detecting one.

Doesn't VtM specify that drinking werewolf blood makes you trip serious balls or something?

koz wrote:Doesn't VtM specify that drinking werewolf blood makes you trip serious balls or something?

That's Changeling blood that makes you trip balls.

Yeah. Werewolf blood gives you rabies instead.

Out of curiosity, what does Mage blood give?

It may. I know it's more potent, and I seem to recall that is has psychological effects of some kind, but more specifically than that, I don't know.

---

So, lets say you wanted to run a game of Vampire the Masquerade because the person you're going out with is interested in it. And because you don't want to come off as a condescending jackass by effectively saying "no, no, I know a much better game, we'll use that instead" you want to give running the actual WW VtM game a go. It also will act as a bit of an object example for the failed design stuff you've told them about, and let them decide for themselves whether it's a game they want to put up with or port the interesting bits of into a better system.

So, obviously there needs to be some kind of goal to hang characters around. The latest Girl Genius and a bit from AS has me thinking about setting up the game such that the players get enlisted by a small group that lives in the metaphysical after image of the Library of Alexandria and have taken as their purpose maintaining that library with copies of every new book that is written. Most books are acquired very simply by just ordering them from publishers, but this allows you to send the coterie off on quests to acquire particularly special books.

But, other than that quick premise that works for a single group (or as the conceit for a whole new game...), or the Vampire Homesteading thing, what would be workable default motivations for a game about vampires that could be sort of house-fluffed into a VtM game?

vagrant wrote:Out of curiosity, what does Mage blood give?

Knowing WW, herpes.

Grek wrote:If you wanted to make blood drinking make any kind of sense while still working on the same blood points : power scale as VTM uses, you need to declare that there is no volumetric relationship between blood and vitae. Not "different creatures have different concentrations of vitae in their blood", but something like 1 blood point for the first sip and then 9 more for the last drop with no vitae gain in between. The blood doesn't nourish you at all, it's just that the process of taking it lets you also take their vitality as well.

That sort of thing would be reasonable. Except that White Wolf also wanted to tell stories about hitting up blood banks and drinking from corpses out of the morgue and shit. There's an entire clan whose disadvantage is that they can't take little fang sips from people at all, so they drink out of bottles (the Giovanni).

So they genuinely wanted to have certain vampires taking home jugs of blood from the butcher's shop like they were Dark Others from the Nightwatch series. They just never did the math to figure out that they were literally talking about people drinking three gallons of fucking cow blood.

The animal blood issue is a relatively difficult needle to thread. If you make feeding on animals too difficult, it's really hard to have hero protagonist vampires. On the other hand, if it's too easy the curse doesn't mean shit. White Wolf's depositions on the subject are basically gibberish. Contradictory musings that are illinformed and unmoored by any real concept of how the vampirism thing was supposed to actually work on a night by night logistical basis.

-Username17

vagrant wrote:Out of curiosity, what does Mage blood give?

Nothing. Mages are baseline humans for most purposes.

In terms of demographics, the way I'd do it is to say that vampires, like humans, are social creatures. They tend to seek out each others company. So instead of having vampires spread out evenly according to population, you have a few places with extremely dense vampire populations and the vast majority of the world has none.

This means that a big city like New York might have thousands, and you're average spooky castle in poduk village with less than a hundred people might have 4-12 vampires (Dracula and his three brides + any guests who might drop by for tea), but most places have 0 vamps.

That gives you incentives for staying in big cities. That's where the other vampires are, and you want to do things.

Having Camarilla and Sabbat cities, though, is problematic, because it means that there are entire settings were your entire group is kill on sight. This isn't terrible, infiltrating a hostile city is a good mission, but it makes certain types of stories very difficult.

That being said, getting rid of global factions is a bad idea, too, for the high school anime club issue. You want global factions. You want them to be opposed to each other. But you also want them to be able to talk without murdering each other, and to be able to ride a train between Toronto to Montreal without being set on fire.

Prak wrote: So, lets say you wanted to run a game of Vampire the Masquerade because the person you're going out with is interested in it. And because you don't want to come off as a condescending jackass by effectively saying "no, no, I know a much better game, we'll use that instead" you want to give running the actual WW VtM game a go. It also will act as a bit of an object example for the failed design stuff you've told them about, and let them decide for themselves whether it's a game they want to put up with or port the interesting bits of into a better system.

My thoughts? Sabbat pack with everyone on Paths. At least then you have group cohesion (if forced), and some very interesting roleplay (some of the Paths are weird in terms of the thought processes involved, leading to interesting characters), and while the Sabbat are played for hurr-durr evil, this is WW; it's not like anyone else is any better.

Sabbat Pack could work. I'd need to read up on the whole antitribu thing.

As far as Camarilla v. Sabbat- I know it's not what the books posit, but what about a refluff where the Sabbat and Cam. were in a kill on sight feud centuries ago, but have since cooled things to a detached civility. Maybe they basically say "As long as you don't go Grand Hunt in our city/As long as you don't try to enforce your rules in our territory, we don't much care about you" That would at least make politics slightly more interesting than "Sorry, just saw a Brujah/Follower of Set, gotta go kill that guy, then we can get back to discussing feeding rights," make mixed coteries possible, and allow for interesting "Now, my Camarilla friend here isn't allowed to [whatever], happily, I'm from the Sabbat, and he's turned his back, so maybe you'd like to cooperate?"

FrankTrollman wrote:

Grek wrote:If you wanted to make blood drinking make any kind of sense while still working on the same blood points : power scale as VTM uses, you need to declare that there is no volumetric relationship between blood and vitae. Not "different creatures have different concentrations of vitae in their blood", but something like 1 blood point for the first sip and then 9 more for the last drop with no vitae gain in between. The blood doesn't nourish you at all, it's just that the process of taking it lets you also take their vitality as well.

That sort of thing would be reasonable. Except that White Wolf also wanted to tell stories about hitting up blood banks and drinking from corpses out of the morgue and shit. There's an entire clan whose disadvantage is that they can't take little fang sips from people at all, so they drink out of bottles (the Giovanni).

So they genuinely wanted to have certain vampires taking home jugs of blood from the butcher's shop like they were Dark Others from the Nightwatch series. They just never did the math to figure out that they were literally talking about people drinking three gallons of fucking cow blood.

The animal blood issue is a relatively difficult needle to thread. If you make feeding on animals too difficult, it's really hard to have hero protagonist vampires. On the other hand, if it's too easy the curse doesn't mean shit. White Wolf's depositions on the subject are basically gibberish. Contradictory musings that are illinformed and unmoored by any real concept of how the vampirism thing was supposed to actually work on a night by night logistical basis.

-Username17

Giovanni can take little fang sips from people. Their disadvantage is either:
a) They don't have a Kiss at all and the feeding is painful.
b) They have effects of the Kiss but it's painful instead of orgasmic.
The writing is unclear as to which it is. Either way, you either Dominate people and take sips (Giovanni have Dominate), take the sips out of blood bound slaves, or use something that doesn't snitch on you for breaking the Masquerade, like cats or blood bottles.

For the record, in Night Watch vampires still need human blood, but can extend the periods between feeding using animal blood. They also need to kill people to level up (though that eventually gets subverted with science).

Prak wrote:As far as Camarilla v. Sabbat- I know it's not what the books posit, but what about a refluff where the Sabbat and Cam. were in a kill on sight feud centuries ago, but have since cooled things to a detached civility. Maybe they basically say "As long as you don't go Grand Hunt in our city/As long as you don't try to enforce your rules in our territory, we don't much care about you" That would at least make politics slightly more interesting than "Sorry, just saw a Brujah/Follower of Set, gotta go kill that guy, then we can get back to discussing feeding rights," make mixed coteries possible, and allow for interesting "Now, my Camarilla friend here isn't allowed to [whatever], happily, I'm from the Sabbat, and he's turned his back, so maybe you'd like to cooperate?"

So basically, you postulate a Vampire Cold War between the sects? It could work - it certainly makes a lot more sense in many ways. This is especially true given that the top-end (generation-wise) of both sects have probably more in common with each other than they'd like to admit. Chaining the Beast even mentions that some Camarilla elders follow Paths other than Humanity - I can imagine them having more in common with Sabbat elders who follow the same Paths than with Camarilla Humanitarians, which would probably keep the war fairly cold, with only local 'heat-ups' every once in a while to keep the fundamentalists on both sides happy.

Prak wrote:Sabbat Pack could work. I'd need to read up on the whole antitribu thing.

As far as Camarilla v. Sabbat- I know it's not what the books posit, but what about a refluff where the Sabbat and Cam. were in a kill on sight feud centuries ago, but have since cooled things to a detached civility. Maybe they basically say "As long as you don't go Grand Hunt in our city/As long as you don't try to enforce your rules in our territory, we don't much care about you" That would at least make politics slightly more interesting than "Sorry, just saw a Brujah/Follower of Set, gotta go kill that guy, then we can get back to discussing feeding rights," make mixed coteries possible, and allow for interesting "Now, my Camarilla friend here isn't allowed to [whatever], happily, I'm from the Sabbat, and he's turned his back, so maybe you'd like to cooperate?"

As written, the factions are defined by Camarilla being the vampire pyramid scheme and Sabbat being the "fuck the Camarilla" faction. You have to come up with some actual goals and ideologies for the sects, because if the sects aren't fighting each other, then I don't know what the fuck they doing and what the difference between being a member of each would be.