General WoD Discussion #1: Assemble

[The Reverend]

Sorry bookworm should have been killed a vampire "for" the prince, did not kill the prince himself. It was pretty freak that I killed him, I rolled about as well as I could and he blew his rolls hard. I was actually just trying to set him up for another rote as the main attack, but it worked so well it wasn't necessary. Its was an NPC so no players were directly affected.

As far as numbers go I always understood the vampire numbers to be something like 10-30 for a city of 300,000 it varies of course, Boise would probably have a pretty low pop while old cities like New Orleans or Buenas Aires would be higher. Mage numbers I have always understood to be a matter of circumstance and birth numbers, something like 1 mage will develop out of every 300000 odd births. With a global population of something like 30,000. every GM I had always stated that vampires outnumbered us by quite a lot. But frankly none of my characters were interested in hunting vampires, nephandi are so much more dangerous and its the one bad guy you could get just about any party to agree to taking out. They're just not good for anyones business.

[Ted_Stryker]

What about the third source? Hunt a mortal who isn't in your herd, don't kill them, use your vampire powers to make sure they don't realize that you fed from them (or alternately, pick drug-addled people who can't differentiate between a drug-fueled nightmare and you, or just get them super-drunk first).

I do think that one vampire per thousand people is pretty high, but it's not as dire as you're presenting it to be.

Well, let's count this out, too. I'm assuming "use one, lose one" for each vampire per night, and 1 vamp per 1,000 mortals. In that case, you've got to get 730 BP from 1,000 mortals each year.

Let's assume no herd and no killing from feeding at first. Then all that blood is coming from people who don't know vampires exist. How much are you taking when you feed, on average? 2 BP? 5 BP? If you're taking less than three-quarters of your vessels' blood when you feed, you have to feed from strangers at least 100 times a year. Probably more like 200-250 times a year, if you want to avoid accidental death of the vessel reliably. That's 20-25% of the population assigned to you if you spread out your feeding so you don't repeat vessels in a given calendar year. You can make repeat vessels, sure, but that's sort of a backdoor herd if you rely on that technique regularly. And since the vamp/mortal ratio is 1-to-1,000, then *every* vampire is faced with this.

So let's say we spot everyone three dots in Herd (15 vessels) who can supply 1 BP a month, and let's also say each vamp kills 5 vessels per year. The blood donation rate is a bit high, but it's the Gothic-Punk world, so maybe hypovolemia is fashionable. And the feeding-related mortality rate is 0.5%, but we can twiddle the overall mortality rate knob up to somewhere around 5%, which is really high for industrialized nations of the present day, but whatever, life is even cheaper in the WoD. This gets you 230 BP per year, leaving a 500 BP shortfall to be made up by feeding off strangers who don't know about vamps. 500 isn't all that different from 730, really. You're still looking at feeding off strangers at least 100 times a year. Or you can double herd size and feeding mortality rate, and then these numbers basically flip, but now the vamps are also killing 1% of the population each year just from feeding, and everyone has four dots in Herd, too.

Now, let's assume the 0.5% feeding kill rate/three-dot Herd scenario and say we're in a city with a population of a million people. If there are 1,000 Kindred in that city, that means the city's Kindred are feeding off strangers at least 100K times per year, assuming each such feeding takes no more than half of a vessel's blood on average. How effective are vamps at hiding their tracks? 99.9% effective? That's something like 100-250 potential Masquerade violations each year. I'd be horrified if I were a Prince faced with those kind of statistics, that's 2-5 potential breaches each week. This is another knob you can twiddle, but once you start talking about vamps being like 99.99% effective in hiding their tracks when they feed, I'm not sure how well that's borne out by the fluff of the vampire as a creature of poor impulse control, especially when feeding is supposed to be like gourmet dining and hot sex rolled into the same experience.

Having gone through all this, I will say it's perfectly fair for anyone to dispense with these considerations in any way they desire for their games, and I don't want to suggest that anyone who does so is enjoying wrongbadfun. But if you do try to tie things to somewhat realistic physiological and mortality-rate constraints, this is what the stats tell you would happen.

[Selrahc]

Let's say you want to be ultra-safe and do this feeding entirely through your herd, and do so in a way that isn't damaging to any of those vessels. If you want to be really safe, that's 1 BP every other month from each vessel (think blood donation rate rules).

Let's not make that assumption.

A point of lethal damage heals in 2 weeks. That's the "safe" delay between feeding. Assuming that the Vampire keeps to the recommended blood donor wait seems kind of naive, considering these are literally bloodsucking monsters. I can readily believe that the herd of most vampires are a little sickly, anaemic and weak compared to what they should be, but as long as they stay alive and functional that is all the vampire really needs to care about. And that immediately quadruples the value of the herd merit.

As well, I think you're ignoring a big source of subsistence feeding: Animal Blood. In an area that had an unusually high proportion of vampires that would probably be the most common feeding source for the kindred. Let's say that takes 1/5 of the blood burden, being a common feeding source for down on their luck kindred everywhere.

As well, random feeding is going to be incredibly easy for vampires with certain disciplines. Dominate or Majesty make feeding from willing mortals easy, and since the bite of a vampire causes hazy memories, and the vampire can remove any physical injury... it becomes hard to imagine these leading to serious masquerade breaches.

So, let's go through the numbers. Assuming a herd of 15 people, and 1/5 of blood coming from animals, the vampire can get 445 blood per year without having to rely on random feeding at all, enough to handle subsistence and a little bit of additional for use. So vampire goes out hunting if they've just spent a lot of blood, or they need a lot of blood for something upcoming. (Or indeed, if they don't have herd 3)

1 in 1000 is a crazy high figure though.

[The Reverend]

Also assuming you dont have body farms setup collecting blood from braindead humans feed thru tubes and blood harvested at the natural accumulation rate.

If you are looking for vamps its not that hard. Our mage team developed three etherically tuned magick tracking fungi we deposited into the sewers. We used them as the locator for a divination ritual looking for concentrations of the of where the three concentrated together. Took about a week to locate every major vampire hotspot in the city. Of course you could just use a camera, thermal imager, heart beat sensor, and a small network of scentsors to record likely vampires faces. Check them out later then pass on their info to the techies, hunters, choiristers, entropy mages, and Arcanum. aaaaah fond memories

[The Glyphstone]

You can't record vampire faces on film/camera anymore in NWoD, if you could do it in OWoD.

[TheCountAlucard]

Yep; in nWoD, vampires only appear on camera in a blurred fashion, enough such to completely prevent one from identifying them, unless they spend a Willpower point to appear normal, and even then it's temporary - if they want their image to stick around afterward, they have to spend a Willpower dot.

Contrariwise, in oWoD, a vampire could just take a Merit to be able to affect cameras with their Obfuscate.

[The Reverend]

ether crystalography cameras, use a combination of prime, matter, and forces to negate the obfuscate. If i wanted to get really nasty I'd just use mind, spirit, and time to take a picture of them at a time when he didn't have obfuscate on. Every group of mages i've played with have all invested pretty heavily in dots of quintessence since it makes it easier to make rotes that will run on their own.

[Wings of Peace]

ether crystalography cameras, use a combination of prime, matter, and forces to negate the obfuscate. If i wanted to get really nasty I'd just use mind, spirit, and time to take a picture of them at a time when he didn't have obfuscate on. Every group of mages i've played with have all invested pretty heavily in dots of quintessence since it makes it easier to make rotes that will run on their own.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just use Death/Spirit to have a legion of Ghosts/Spirits that keep watch over various areas for you? Toss in Mind and the Mage should be able to telepathically view what his Spirits see. Ghosts are debatable for networking though since I want to say that somewhere in the fluff for Mage's I read that ghosts are just complex series of responses instead of sentient beings (sentience being a requirement for the Telepathy spell).

[Yuki Akuma]

Ghosts are sentient beings, but they don't think like living creatures do. Most of them are stuck in patterns of behaviour.

I don't see why a conjunctional Death + Mind spell couldn't communicate telepathically with them.

[TheCountAlucard]

So, a few thoughts have risen as I read Inferno.

• Certain demons can increase in Rank just by hanging around people who lose dots of Morality. Bet they just love PCs, now don't they?
• Demons have a lot to offer - they can directly, permanently increase stats, in exchange for a sacrifice that fits that demon's nature. For supernatural splats, you can choose to permanently tie off some Vitae/Essence/Glamour in lieu of a usual sacrifice, but seeing how you're going to have to make a degeneration roll anyway, why not just kill someone?
• It specifically mentions the ability of demons to grant Gifts on page 90, but then states that demons cannot grant werewolves Gifts or Renown - what's up with that?
• Why is it that vampires automatically lose a dot of Humanity for making a demonic pact, but Prometheans get to make a roll to avoid Humanity loss for doing the same thing?
• Malapraxis sounds less like a trait inherent to demons, and more like something you should sue the surgeon for if he leaves his cell phone in you during your appendectomy.

Haven't finished reading yet, so I'll probably post more concerns later.

[Mr.Bookworm]

Demons have a lot to offer - they can directly, permanently increase stats, in exchange for a sacrifice that fits that demon's nature. For supernatural splats, you can choose to permanently tie off some Vitae/Essence/Glamour in lieu of a usual sacrifice, but seeing how you're going to have to make a degeneration roll anyway, why not just kill someone?

Wait, is this a concern? Because if murder is on the table as a price, a there's sure as hell going to be something more than just random violence behind it. Not to mention that the ST is ultimately the arbiter of what the demon is offering, so murder isn't an option unless you want it to be.

It specifically mentions the ability of demons to grant Gifts on page 90, but then states that demons cannot grant werewolves Gifts or Renown - what's up with that?

On page 90 it's saying you could adapt Gifts into Benefits. A demon can't directly grant a Werewolf a Gift, though.

Why is it that vampires automatically lose a dot of Humanity for making a demonic pact, but Prometheans get to make a roll to avoid Humanity loss for doing the same thing?

Makes thematic sense to me. In Vampire, you already have the Beast inside of you, and making a pact with a demon can be seen as a sort of surrender to it. Prometheans are a lot closer to humans, so they get a check.

Malapraxis sounds less like a trait inherent to demons, and more like something you should sue the surgeon for if he leaves his cell phone in you during your appendectomy.

Ouch.

Hm. Wonder what surgeries are like in the World of Darkness? Never thought about it before. There could be some good material there.

[TheCountAlucard]

Because if murder is on the table as a price, a there's sure as hell going to be something more than just random violence behind it.

I never said "random violence." However, if you want examples, the book has them. "If I Die, You Are Forgiven," "No Will to Live," "Helpless," and "Free Will." Note that those are actually one grade higher a Sacrifice than permanently signing away the 3 Vitae/Essence/Whatever you'd normally have to give up for the dot in Blood Potency/Primal Urge/Whatever.

Not to mention that the ST is ultimately the arbiter of what the demon is offering, so murder isn't an option unless you want it to be.

While that's true, note that out of the seven Vices, four of their examples of Deadly Sacrifices involved killing people under laughably-easy conditions - even "Free Will" and "No Will to Live" could be easily engineered... and the way it's laid out, killing someone as part of your sacrifice is generally considered to be a very valuable transaction indeed.

Just saying, those "guidelines" are fairly centered on murder... >.>

On page 90 it's saying you could adapt Gifts into Benefits. A demon can't directly grant a Werewolf a Gift, though.

Ah, that'd explain it. My mistake.

Makes thematic sense to me. In Vampire, you already have the Beast inside of you, and making a pact with a demon can be seen as a sort of surrender to it. Prometheans are a lot closer to humans, so they get a check.

They both start at Humanity 7, don't they?

Eh, I'm just not seeing it.

Hm. Wonder what surgeries are like in the World of Darkness? Never thought about it before. There could be some good material there.

On an unrelated note, when I made mention of supernatural traits above in this post, I contemplated "Vitae/Essence/Stars" and "Blood Potency/Primal Urge/Film Critic."

[Shadowknight12]

They both start at Humanity 7, don't they?

Eh, I'm just not seeing it.

Prometheans don't really understand what they're doing. If they succeed on the degeneration roll, they understand that they've just done a terrible thing and taken measures to avoid letting the act taint their morality. If they fail, they carry on thinking nothing's wrong about dealing with demons.

Vampires already know exactly what they're doing when they're making that deal.

Or, from a meta point of view, VAMPIRES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ANGSTY, GEDDIT? NOW GO BACK TO YOUR COFFIN AND PUT ON MORE MASCARA.

[Yuki Akuma]

Prometheans are meant to be angsty, too.

(Also, derangements are meant to be a subconscious acceptance that what they did was wrong, so the 'losing Humanity means they don't understand what they're doing is wrong' thing doesn't add up.)

[Shadowknight12]

Prometheans are meant to be angsty, too.

Not with that light at the end of the tunnel.

(Also, derangements are meant to be a subconscious acceptance that what they did was wrong, so the 'losing Humanity means they don't understand what they're doing is wrong' thing doesn't add up.)

Um, no. Derangements are meant to symbolise how deviating from whatever passes for the character's Morality system makes their minds deviate from what we all regard as "sanity." Not realising that a sin is wrong is in fact a way to explain a Morality drop. A person with Morality 1 doesn't think that killing is wrong, so they feel absolutely nothing when they do so. Rationalising a wrongful act as "I did nothing wrong" is a telltale sign of Morality loss. "I know what I did was wrong and I will make amends" or "I know what I did was wrong, but there were attenuating circumstances" or even "I know what I did was wrong and I am sorry" are all ways to explain having succeeded on the Morality check.

[Chambers]

Yeah, characters get Derangements when they don't realize that what they did was wrong. Well...in some ways I could see the Derangement as an unconscious acceptance of realizing it was wrong, their psyche adjusting badly to the act because they consciously didn't object to it.

The 'losing Humanity means they don't understand what they're doing is wrong' isn't right though. A character can lose Humanity regardless of whether they understand it's wrong or not. The Humanity loss comes first, and then the derangement check (to see if they recognize it as wrong).

[Yuki Akuma]

It says specifically in the Promethean write up for Humanity... here, I'll quote it.

When a Promethean loses Humanity, he doesn’t really feel anything, at least not deep down on a gut level that affects a human. Any derangement comes more from his unconscious acknowledgement that he should feel something, that he should suffer some sort of reciprocity for the action. This acknowledgement translates into a genuine imbalance in his humours, making the derangement quite real, not just an illusion caused by his intellectual grasp of ethics.

So... yeah. Promethean Humanity is a bit odd.

[Shadowknight12]

Yeah, characters get Derangements when they don't realize that what they did was wrong. Well...in some ways I could see the Derangement as an unconscious acceptance of realizing it was wrong, their psyche adjusting badly to the act because they consciously didn't object to it.

The 'losing Humanity means they don't understand what they're doing is wrong' isn't right though. A character can lose Humanity regardless of whether they understand it's wrong or not. The Humanity loss comes first, and then the derangement check (to see if they recognize it as wrong).

I never said that the reasoning was the only valid one. I said that it was a possibility, a way to explain the Humanity drop.

It says specifically in the Promethean write up for Humanity... here, I'll quote it.

So... yeah. Promethean Humanity is a bit odd.

Huh, interesting.

[Chambers]

Weird. Haven't read that book, though it seems interesting.

Also, imbalanced humours. Lol.

[The Reverend]

Im such a hermetic. The first time I heard about Prometheans humors I thought "now how do I study that without killing it."


I like the spirit thing/mind that's handy, if I were anything but a SoEther I would do it that way. Could also do correspondence/prime to scan for quintessence spikes since Vamps are Q reservoirs.

[Yuki Akuma]

Weird. Haven't read that book, though it seems interesting.

Also, imbalanced humours. Lol.

Promethean focuses on the five (yes, five) humours quite a lot. It's just the same as all the other gamelines focusing on all that other total nonsense.

[Wings of Peace]

I like the spirit thing/mind that's handy, if I were anything but a SoEther I would do it that way.

Gotcha. The biggest perk of Mind/Spirit imo is that you also get access to goetic magic which can be extremely powerful.

[Fouredged Sword]

Back to the vampire feeding stuff.

Interesting enough, a vampire with medical skill can treat the wound of his feeding bag to reduce them from lethal to bashing, or better yet get a blood bag that knows medicine himself so he can treat himself while you run off and do other stuff.

It would probably be very hard on the body of the bag, but you could feed of a person every day for multiple points and keep him alive for an extended period.

[Shadowknight12]

Back to the vampire feeding stuff.

Interesting enough, a vampire with medical skill can treat the wound of his feeding bag to reduce them from lethal to bashing, or better yet get a blood bag that knows medicine himself so he can treat himself while you run off and do other stuff.

It would probably be very hard on the body of the bag, but you could feed of a person every day for multiple points and keep him alive for an extended period.

Nice use of the word "bag" to refer to actual human beings. Just when I was forgetting why I vowed never to play a vampire game...

[Selrahc]

Nice use of the word "bag" to refer to actual human beings.

And by "actual" we of course mean "hypothetical" and "fictional".

[Shadowknight12]

And by "actual" we of course mean "hypothetical" and "fictional".

And what else would they be? Your sentence makes no sense.

[Fouredged Sword]

And I bet you have talked about various DnD creatures as mobs before. The system itself refers to them as a herd. The game is deliberatly dehumaniseing to them to encourage the players to explore the dark and darker morality inherent to the system. Do your players bother to know the names of their herd? How much does the character think of them as human, and how much as easy food?

Part of the point is to explore these concepts.

If one enters the game expecting to not think is likely to be disappointed.

[The Glyphstone]

I don't name my french fries. Sometimes I name my Goldfish crackers, but only to savor the extra pathos as I bite their heads off.

[Shadowknight12]

And I bet you have talked about various DnD creatures as mobs before.

Never.

The system itself refers to them as a herd.

Correct, and I'm one of the forefront refluffers when it comes to nWoD.

The game is deliberatly dehumaniseing to them to encourage the players to explore the dark and darker morality inherent to the system.

Just like gorn movies deliberately show explicit violence to explore the dark and darker morality inherent in the story. Yeah, right. No, it actually does that to sell the game to the "darker and edgier" audience who get off on playing sociopathic characters.

Do your players bother to know the names of their herd? How much does the character think of them as human, and how much as easy food?

Oh, you mean the kind of stuff that has been done to death in practically every vampire story ever? You'd think there isn't anything else to explore when it comes to vampires.

Part of the point is to explore these concepts.

No, part of the point is to enable players to play out their socially unacceptable fantasies under the guise of a "mature" game.

If one enters the game expecting to not think is likely to be disappointed.

In that, we are in complete agreement.

[ToySoldierCPlus]

Oh, you mean the kind of stuff that has been done to death in practically every vampire story ever? You'd think there isn't anything else to explore when it comes to vampires.

What else is there for vampires? They're undead monstrosities that require the blood of the living to survive. They're hunters, predators designed to prey upon the very humans they once were. Vampires are monsters, plain and simple, there's not much else to do with them. Sure, there have been stories vampires in other roles, but all of the best have at least some mention of the thirst for human blood. Forsaken World has the Kindred, a race of immortals created when a goddess poured her own blood into the veins of her human lover to stave off his death. They thirst for blood, and have some inherent blood magic abilities, but their society forbids them from actually drinking blood, and they don't need it to survive, being perfectly capable of living off of regular food and drink. "Vampire" is a class unique to the race, which focuses on their blood magic abilities. That's refreshing, but the Kindred are only sort of vampires. For a look at what happens when you try to go into lighter and softer, "we don't hunt humans because we're not predators," territory, see Twilight, where all vampires have been replaced with sparkle fairies.

No, part of the point is to enable players to play out their socially unacceptable fantasies under the guise of a "mature" game.

Better there than in the real world. Besides, don't you have any "socially unacceptable fantasies" you've tried to live out in games? Surely you've killed something intelligent in one game or another.