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## After the Masquarade

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violence in the media
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Post by violence in the media » Mon Feb 15, 2016 4:29 am

> Shrieking Banshee wrote:Never mentions it has to be pure blood. Give people energy drink samples. Every sip is a drink.

"Clever" bullshit like this (and blood brownies, and blood chewing gum, getting enough blood off a knife blade for a ritual, etc and so on) is why most LARPs I played in house-ruled that you needed at least a full pint, given or taken all at once, for your particular voodoo to have any effect.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle » Mon Feb 15, 2016 5:15 am

Blood sausage and blood cake dishes, would that work?
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Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich » Mon Feb 15, 2016 6:16 am

There are indeed a variety of ways to blood bond large numbers of people in VtM, how the overall utility of that is somewhat varied.
Firstly, the game isn't very clear on what happens when you randomly blood bond someone who doesn't know you in the slightest or you met once at a party. Congrats you're fantastically in love with a vague sensation in your head, um, yay? The way blood bonding was written was clearly not intended for mass use.
Second, inducing fanatical unconditional love in a person you don't know is risky. You have no idea how they will react, especially if they learn you've spread that love to other people. Your bonded thralls may start trying to murder each other, they may go on a weird rampage, who knows. Massively distorting the mentality of large numbers of people in ways you cannot predict or wholly control is not exactly a great long-term approach.
Finally, if you blood bond the world, the world stops turning. A society consisting of nothing but fanatical love-slaves is not a society that works. So yes, maybe Tremere can work some ritual to transmute some tiny fraction of all the fresh water on the planet into his blood and thereby blood bond the entire human species, but all that's going to do is make him ruler of a post-apocalyptic hell hole. That's a pretty lousy victory scenario.
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violence in the media
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Post by violence in the media » Mon Feb 15, 2016 12:40 pm

> OgreBattle wrote:Blood sausage and blood cake dishes, would that work?

Part of the reasoning behind rulings like that was the layered reality going on in a LARP. Vampires, by and large, don't eat and drink. The players in attendance do. So you'd periodically have people that would try to argue that by giving Tim the player a brownie or soda a couple of times, that they'd actually successfully blood-bonded his vampire character Timoclese. Or, you'd have people argue that they blood-bonded the entire police force because they catered the annual picnic or whatever.
So most STs would have some rule that boiled down to a variant of "you can't accidentally or surreptitiously blood bond somebody; you can't CSI someone's blood to get enough for a ritual."
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Occluded Sun
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Post by Occluded Sun » Mon Feb 15, 2016 11:14 pm

I'd argue that the human needs to consume as much blood as constitutes the minimum acceptable amount for a vampire to consume and benefit: the basic unit of vampirism.
A pint sounds reasonable.
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
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hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca » Mon Feb 15, 2016 11:17 pm

A pint is pretty unreasonable. People aren't chugging blood. Heck, vampires aren't chugging blood in the source material. In the source material, chugging that much vampire blood is going to give you an erection lasting more than 48 hours. And then you'll have to go to a doctor who will drain it with a hypodermic needle to prevent it from falling off. I it doesn't just make you upchuck.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Mon Feb 15, 2016 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Schleiermacher
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Post by Schleiermacher » Mon Feb 15, 2016 11:36 pm

Yeah, as we've seen in the Anatomy of Failed Design thread, 1 pint for 1 blood point is just plain too much.
On the other hand, you still want the idea and the visual of ruthless vampires draining victims completely... but it looks kind of ridiculous when you consider that they chug down more than a gallon of blood when they do so.
Last edited by Schleiermacher on Mon Feb 15, 2016 11:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Tue Feb 16, 2016 2:09 am

> Schleiermacher wrote:Yeah, as we've seen in the Anatomy of Failed Design thread, 1 pint for 1 blood point is just plain too much.
> On the other hand, you still want the idea and the visual of ruthless vampires draining victims completely... but it looks kind of ridiculous when you consider that they chug down more than a gallon of blood when they do so.

This thread is originally about vampires coming out of the coffin in general rather than VtM specifically. But yes, blood bonding in VtM is incoherent and many of the principles are dumb. The size of the blood traits are way too big, the blood bonding is totally ill-defined, and so on and so forth. But perhaps the biggest problem of the whole thing is the fact that in vampirism terms the vampires should be dominating people by drinking their blood, not the other way around. Vampires shouldn't be coming up with dumb ways to sneak their own blood into other peoples' food, they should be NTRing people and only letting people drink their blood after they've been so dominated that they willingly accept being collared in front of their own wives and children.
Regardless, most vampires have some sort of ability to dominate humans. Whether it's mental hypnotism or just forcing their feeding victims to become addicted and submissive. The exact hows and whys of those powers are going to be a big portion, probably the biggest portion, of what vampires are able to do once they become public knowledge.
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hyzmarca
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Post by hyzmarca » Tue Feb 16, 2016 2:26 am

Blood Bonding also interacts quite terribly with the blood potency rules in Vampire the Requiem. In that the only way that an Elder can avoid becoming a slave to countless neonates is to kill everyone he eats the very first time he feeds from them. Since blood bonding doesn't work if the donor is dead. Which means that their humanity is going to drop like a stone.
Though, I suppose, some might consider that a feature rather than a bug. Though the suggestion that the vampire population can withstand every Elder murdering around 52 vampires a year isn't exactly born out by the rules.
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Lokey
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Post by Lokey » Tue Feb 16, 2016 4:49 am

Humanity: Paging quickly through whitewolf wikia, I find a 6th gen toreador with 7, a 7th Ventrue with 0 (but 10 will), a 5th with another 7 and a Nos 6th or whatever with 9... Remember white wolf NPCs (which any powerful thing is) have to have their pants specially made.
Also, glancing at http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Blood_bond_%28VTM%29 it seems they weren't really thinking of your pc using it on a vamp that can actually do something (or at least the article writers didn't)
Last edited by Lokey on Tue Feb 16, 2016 4:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Omegonthesane
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Post by Omegonthesane » Tue Feb 16, 2016 8:51 am

> hyzmarca wrote:Blood Bonding also interacts quite terribly with the blood potency rules in Vampire the Requiem. In that the only way that an Elder can avoid becoming a slave to countless neonates is to kill everyone he eats the very first time he feeds from them. Since blood bonding doesn't work if the donor is dead. Which means that their humanity is going to drop like a stone.
> Though, I suppose, some might consider that a feature rather than a bug. Though the suggestion that the vampire population can withstand every Elder murdering around 52 vampires a year isn't exactly born out by the rules.

This does, by accident, give Elders a motive to go into torpor and lose Blood Potency - so that they can snack on humans again.
That or try to bring about the dominance of that one bullshit bloodline whose weakness was that they didn't cause blood bonds. Or cut a deal with a fellow Elder that they each blood bond the other, since IIRC you can only be fully blood bound to one person at a time and an existing one isn't shunted by drinking from new vampires.

> Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
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Occluded Sun
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Post by Occluded Sun » Wed Feb 17, 2016 4:01 pm

What about a rule that the number of people you blood bond is inversely proportional to your rank?
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
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