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## Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

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Mask_De_H
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Post by Mask_De_H » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:07 pm

So a combo discipline from an alternate setting splat that is essentially it's own game set a thousand years ago is the main way to do it?
The fuck outta here, man.

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TheFlatline
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Post by TheFlatline » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:27 pm

> Grek wrote:Someone explain to me what stops a vampire from just eating a non-cooperative animal.

An entire cow has like... 2 blood points in them since they're not human.
If you think that a vampire leaves a pile of corpses behind, wait until you have to start eating animals.
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Milkmaid79
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Post by Milkmaid79 » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:43 pm

Cows are 5-6 blood points (depending on which edition). Still not great since you have to drain the whole cow. Talk about feeling bloated...
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Lokathor
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Post by Lokathor » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:53 pm

Speaking of roles within a group and expected challenges, that's something After Sundown 2e needs to work on.
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Stahlseele
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Post by Stahlseele » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:53 pm

i guess that's the vampire way of lazy.
lie in your coffin all day/night and just suck on a cow.
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> > TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
> > Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.

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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sat Jan 30, 2016 12:40 am

> Lokathor wrote:Speaking of roles within a group and expected challenges, that's something After Sundown 2e needs to work on.

It very much is. Looking at these issues, I didn't do nearly enough in this area for first edition.
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Maxus
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Post by Maxus » Sat Jan 30, 2016 12:48 am

> Milkmaid79 wrote:Cows are 5-6 blood points (depending on which edition). Still not great since you have to drain the whole cow. Talk about feeling bloated...

So you're a vampire dairy farmer. Buy up some acreage in a red state, put up a "trespassers will be shot" sign, and then spend your time goofing around when you're not feeding the cows or feeding from them.
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maglag
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### Re: Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

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Post by maglag » Sat Jan 30, 2016 2:35 am

> virgil wrote:

> > talozin wrote:Either blood points aren't supposed to represent exact percentages of the blood in someone's body; or no one involved in the writing of the game had a medical degree or access to someone who did; or they just plain didn't give even a single fuck about the feasibility of their numbers in the real world. I'm guessing it's a combination of all three.

> My vote is that the last one takes up the lion's share of the reason, with the first one being the go-to response for people who try to defend the system and will undoubtedly call all of us gamist poopy-pants.
> It would be amusing if you changed the blood point ratio such that a single guy has like 560 blood points potentially in him.

Well, plenty of anime and games do depict humies as being sacks full of pressurized blood.
But if the rules say that each humie in V:tm regens 1 blood point per day, then a humie in V:tm regens one blood point per day. To try to bring real-world medicine into the discussion at that point is like trying to bring real-world physics to D&D- Pure. Madness.

> FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.

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Zaranthan
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### Re: Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

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Post by Zaranthan » Sat Jan 30, 2016 3:12 am

> maglag wrote:To try to bring real-world medicine into the discussion at that point is like trying to bring real-world physics to D&D- Pure. Madness.

Also, god kills a catgirl every time you do it. Won't someone think of the furries?
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? Given the mysticism that's supposed to be behind vitae, I could see an argument for the blood of somebody who's already dead (or about to die from exanguination) being non-nutritious for a vampire.

> Koumei wrote:...is the dead guy posthumously at fault for his own death and, due to the felony murder law, his own murderer?

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virgil
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### Re: Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

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Post by virgil » Sat Jan 30, 2016 3:28 am

> 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.
Last edited by virgil on Sat Jan 30, 2016 3:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Lokey
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Post by Lokey » Sat Jan 30, 2016 4:02 am

I didn't see stats for cows, so that might be ok. Pigs will slaughter you if you don't have animalism (3str/2dex/3vit/6wounds/3damagedice). If cows are near horse stats, one will splat you if you don't win init.
I saw a mention that half your blood drained = needs medical attention for normals. That this roughly corresponds to us is purely coincidence.
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Grek
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Post by Grek » Sat Jan 30, 2016 4:08 am

The fact that vampires in VTM mechanically couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag is an artifact of White Wolf being bad at mechanics, not an intentional part of the setting. Storywise, a vampire should be able to kill a domestic animal fairly easily, if they're not completely stupid about it.

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koz
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### Re: Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

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Post by koz » Sat Jan 30, 2016 8:25 am

> virgil wrote: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.

> OgreBattle wrote:In Chinese alchemy, one drop of semen is equal to ten drops of blood.

> virgil, earlier wrote:Amateur internet research says that the average volume of emission is about 3/4 of a teaspoon, which adds up to about 13 orgasms for one blood point. We're talking serious blowbang territory.

OK, then if two teaspoons of blood = 1 Blood Point, then it means you need about a fifth of a teaspoon of semen or less for the same effect. That seems a lot more efficient than blood use then - it means that one swallow recovers a pretty good chunk of your Blood Points.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sat Jan 30, 2016 8:40 am

> Maxus wrote:

> > Milkmaid79 wrote:Cows are 5-6 blood points (depending on which edition). Still not great since you have to drain the whole cow. Talk about feeling bloated...

> So you're a vampire dairy farmer. Buy up some acreage in a red state, put up a "trespassers will be shot" sign, and then spend your time goofing around when you're not feeding the cows or feeding from them.

Cows cost near to a thousand dollars each. Drinking all the blood in six cows a month will keep you alive, but that's really expensive. There are people who can spend close to two hundred thousand dollars a year on food, but not many. You can of course get some money back or even make a profit by doing actual ranching and slaughtering and selling beef. But now we're talking about a pretty major operation.

> Grek wrote:The fact that vampires in VTM mechanically couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag is an artifact of White Wolf being bad at mechanics, not an intentional part of the setting. Storywise, a vampire should be able to kill a domestic animal fairly easily, if they're not completely stupid about it.

I'm not sure that's true at all. Malkavians have literally no combat powers and the authors often state that characters engaging in and being good at combat is playing the game wrong. And the enmity of animals is supposed to be a moderately serious disadvantage when they remember it.
I mean, obviously they forget about the animals thing all the time and, for example, have Setites chillax with actual snakes despite them not having Animalism and Serpentis not doing that. But the fact that dogs and pigs want to kill you is presented as being one of the main reasons that vampires stay in cities and avoid rural areas. I mean, when they aren't forgetting about the uraban areas thing too, and talking about vampire manors ruling over 30 person villages and similar shit.
White Wolf couldn't keep their stories straight and wrote such heavy handed disadvantages onto their vampires that they ended up having to ignore the ramifications of all of them at one point or another to tell the stories they wanted to tell. But one of the drawbacks really was supposed to make keeping domestic animals pretty much impossible in a bunch of writeups.

> Koz wrote:OK, then if two teaspoons of blood = 1 Blood Point

Nah. It's closer to 9 teaspoons. It's like 10-20 ejaculations as previously noted. You have to suck a lot of cock to get a blood point.
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Last edited by Username17 on Sat Jan 30, 2016 8:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Rasumichin
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Post by Rasumichin » Sat Jan 30, 2016 11:08 am

> FrankTrollman wrote:But the fact that dogs and pigs want to kill you is presented as being one of the main reasons that vampires stay in cities and avoid rural areas.

Problem with that being that cities aren't animal free at all. You have people walking their frequently fuckhuge dogs after sunset, there's plenty of feral dogs in a lot of places, there's cats and crows and a gazillion rats and pigeons and a lot of cities have sizeable populations of owls, foxes, raccoons, parrots, boars and whatnot.
And if you play in Victorian London, you're causing traffic accidents left and right because you're freaking out the horses of every carriage that you pass by on the street. Now, i don't know how many carriages you could actually expect on a nightly street in historical Victorian London, but pop culture Victorian London works under the assumption that these things are about as common as taxis are in modern nights.
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Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich » Sat Jan 30, 2016 12:17 pm

Ultimately, the fact that people and animals don't have enough blood to go around is the lesser problem. That's something that could theoretically be fixed fairly easily by altering the numbers or simply implementing a flat scale (ex. non-damaging drink restores one blood point, putting someone in the hospital restores four, killing fills blood pool, 2+ drinks a month puts someone in the hospital).
The inability to cover it up and the fact that animals hate you are bigger problems. The ability to feed discreetly is something all vampires need - at least if there's enough of them to form a society. Dracula wasn't exactly the most discrete of feeders, but his crew wasn't very big either. At the same time, basic feeding ability should be tied to something a lot less powerful than what Dominate 3 gives you.
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hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca » Sat Jan 30, 2016 12:52 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote: Cows cost near to a thousand dollars each. Drinking all the blood in six cows a month will keep you alive, but that's really expensive. There are people who can spend close to two hundred thousand dollars a year on food, but not many. You can of course get some money back or even make a profit by doing actual ranching and slaughtering and selling beef. But now we're talking about a pretty major operation.

Spike just went to the butcher shop and bought blood by the gallon. You can do that. It comes in plastic milk jugs.

> Rasumichin wrote:
> And if you play in Victorian London, you're causing traffic accidents left and right because you're freaking out the horses of every carriage that you pass by on the street. Now, i don't know how many carriages you could actually expect on a nightly street in historical Victorian London, but pop culture Victorian London works under the assumption that these things are about as common as taxis are in modern nights.

You're also freaking out because of all of the gas lights.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Sat Jan 30, 2016 1:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Longes
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Post by Longes » Sat Jan 30, 2016 1:14 pm

A cow has 5 blood points, so you can keep up your night to night living on a single ghouled cow, if you don't go discipline crazy. Dogs have 2 BP, cats and blood packs have 1.
Last edited by Longes on Sat Jan 30, 2016 1:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Rasumichin
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Post by Rasumichin » Sat Jan 30, 2016 1:21 pm

> hyzmarca wrote:

> > Rasumichin wrote:
> > And if you play in Victorian London, you're causing traffic accidents left and right because you're freaking out the horses of every carriage that you pass by on the street. Now, i don't know how many carriages you could actually expect on a nightly street in historical Victorian London, but pop culture Victorian London works under the assumption that these things are about as common as taxis are in modern nights.

> You're also freaking out because of all of the gas lights.

WoD Victorian London is basically a chain reaction of Rötschreck and stampeding draft horses.
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Longes
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Post by Longes » Sat Jan 30, 2016 1:32 pm

> hyzmarca wrote:You're also freaking out because of all of the gas lights.

Eh, not quite.

> Rotschrek wrote:Relatively innocuous stimuli, or stimuli directly under the character's control, are unlikely to induce Rötschreck. For example, a character who sees a lit cigarette in a nightclub, or a screened-in fireplace in an ally's home, might grow uneasy, but is unlikely to succumb to the Red Fear. If that same cigarette is pointed threateningly at the vampire, though, or the fireplace suddenly flares up.

In general a covered gas light won't provoke you. An open one might, but most likely would be difficulty 3-5 to resist frenzy. Still bad, but theoretically playable.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sat Jan 30, 2016 2:02 pm

> Longes wrote:A cow has 5 blood points, so you can keep up your night to night living on a single ghouled cow, if you don't go discipline crazy. Dogs have 2 BP, cats and blood packs have 1.

No. A cow only having 5 blood traits means that you have to drink 11 liters of its blood to get one blood point. That means that you can't get anywhere feeding off a cow without seriously injuring or killing the cow. Dogs and cats you can't feed on without killing them outright.
Also it means that drinking cow blood means that you have to down three gallons of blood every night just to keep from starving.
Drink up. You gotta gallon challenge three times a night. Every night. Forever.
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Longes
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Post by Longes » Sat Jan 30, 2016 2:24 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:

> > Longes wrote:A cow has 5 blood points, so you can keep up your night to night living on a single ghouled cow, if you don't go discipline crazy. Dogs have 2 BP, cats and blood packs have 1.

> No. A cow only having 5 blood traits means that you have to drink 11 liters of its blood to get one blood point. That means that you can't get anywhere feeding off a cow without seriously injuring or killing the cow. Dogs and cats you can't feed on without killing them outright.
> Also it means that drinking cow blood means that you have to down three gallons of blood every night just to keep from starving.
> -Username17

"Safe" feeding means taking no more than 20% of the victim's blood points. So in case of a cow you can drink one blood point per night without injuring the cow. Which is the same amount of blood you can take safely from a child, since a child also has 5BP. Dogs will need hospitalization after 1BP, and cats die outright. Blood Points don't map to quantities directly, they are abstract. Drinking all blood from a cow would take less time than drinking all blood from an adult human because an adult human has more blood points (10) and drinking speed is measured in blood points, rather than liters or teaspoons. And once you've drunk the blood, it transforms into "vitae", which is its own magical substance each point of which can count as 1, 2 or 42 blood points despite being the same physical quantity.
Last edited by Longes on Sat Jan 30, 2016 3:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Sat Jan 30, 2016 3:21 pm

> Longes wrote:"Safe" feeding means taking no more than 20% of the victim's blood points. So in case of a cow you can drink one blood point per night without injuring the cow. Which is the same amount of blood you can take safely from a child, since a child also has 5BP. Dogs will need hospitalization after 1BP, and cats die outright. Blood Points don't map to quantities directly, they are abstract. Drinking all blood from a cow would take less time than drinking all blood from an adult human because an adult human has more blood points (10) and drinking speed is measured in blood points, rather than liters or teaspoons. And once you've drunk the blood, it transforms into "vitae", which is each own magical substance each point of which can count as 1, 2 or 42 blood points despite being the same physical quantity.

This is so retarded that I can't even engage with it as an argument. If the rules seem to imply that your character can drink 11 liters of fluid in 3 seconds, then the correct response is to say "Oh, that rule is completely retarded." If the rules seem to imply that a cow can be safely milked of 11 liters of blood every day, then all we've found is that the rules for healing are unworkably bad when applied to cows.
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Schleiermacher
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Post by Schleiermacher » Sat Jan 30, 2016 4:34 pm

So... if we worked off the assumption that vampires generally can't feed from animals at all, and that 1 blood point actually is the amount of blood that a human can replace overnight with no ill effects assuming a hearty diet (and accepting that it will cause long-term health risks if you do it every night), how large a volume of fluid is that and how many blood points are then "in" an average human?
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin » Sat Jan 30, 2016 4:59 pm

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