I sat down to crunch a few numbers one day about feeding. According to the books, a vampire uses one blood point each day to wake. You can take 3 blood points from a mortal without endangering their lives. This seems like a fact that vampires would have quickly figured out and passed down from sire to childer over the ages. So we arrive at least 10 feedings a month. More if the vampire is using blood to power disciplines, heal injuries, impersonate mortals, etc. Less if you murder, obviously.
Apply the same philosophy to the Herd rules, and you see each dot of Herd can be added to each feeding. This means that if you have a herd of 5, you can get away with feeding only 4 times a month instead of 10. This assumes each feeding attempt is successful. Domain reduces the difficulty of the feeding check, meaning you actually successfully get those 10 feedings per month more easily: you're not making 12-20 tries. The idea here, is that feeding bonuses ultimately free up a vampire's time for more important things. With that in mind, here's what I'm thinking of for feeding rules.
BLOOD AND FEEDING
As a vampire, you must spend a significant amount of time each turn hunting and feeding. Those who spend less time on these endeavors, however, may receive bonus actions on occasion to represent their success at feeding and more free time because of it. Each turn a player banks points towards Feeding. You can add to your pool in a number of ways:
On the turn after you reach 15 points (excess banked points are lost) the ST will inform you that you are eligible for a bonus person action. (Note, this means you would need 5 dots of Herd and Domain to gain a reliable bonus action every turn, or a regular campaign of murder).
Occasionally fortune or the schemes of your rivals will lower your feeding pool. This may happen because of natural disasters like plague, vampire hunters moving into the area, a suspicious population, etc. These result in a loss to your feeding pool. If your feeding pool is negative, you may need to feed as a personal action. Successes at the feeding personal action add directly to your Feeding pool, and may make up for negative results.
If your feeding pool is ever negative for a second turn in a row, you will lose one personal action because you must hunt and you may enter a blood frenzy. The ST will roll based on your character’s stats to regain a positive feeding pool. If the roll proves poorly, you may lose additional personal actions. Intelligent vampires will always do their utmost to feed whenever their pool is negative.
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What this is lacking thus far, is a notion of regular feeding grounds. Presumably if you have them, that's your Domain. I have an idea that, other than Influence (which is nebulous; also maybe Contacts), backgrounds should all be concrete things. So a feeding ground or Domain is situated within a particular influence, and represents a specific part of the city. This makes backgrounds like Domain vulnerable to attack, but also helps make them concrete parts of the story, like Retainers or other backgrounds.
Apply the same philosophy to the Herd rules, and you see each dot of Herd can be added to each feeding. This means that if you have a herd of 5, you can get away with feeding only 4 times a month instead of 10. This assumes each feeding attempt is successful. Domain reduces the difficulty of the feeding check, meaning you actually successfully get those 10 feedings per month more easily: you're not making 12-20 tries. The idea here, is that feeding bonuses ultimately free up a vampire's time for more important things. With that in mind, here's what I'm thinking of for feeding rules.
BLOOD AND FEEDING
As a vampire, you must spend a significant amount of time each turn hunting and feeding. Those who spend less time on these endeavors, however, may receive bonus actions on occasion to represent their success at feeding and more free time because of it. Each turn a player banks points towards Feeding. You can add to your pool in a number of ways:
- Assign an ability to augment your feeding (it cannot be used for an influence in this case)
- Assign dots of a discipline to augment your feeding (it cannot be used for influence)
- Each dot of Herd is worth two points
- Each dot of Domain (not Domain Security) is worth one point.
- Successful Gain Blood actions from the Health Influence also count as one point per level of Health influence successfully used.
- A Feeding personal action adds points based on your successful die roll.
- If you opt to murder a mortal while feeding (or are somehow tricked or lose control), you gain a bonus of about 7 points (determined by the ST), but may suffer moral consequences.
On the turn after you reach 15 points (excess banked points are lost) the ST will inform you that you are eligible for a bonus person action. (Note, this means you would need 5 dots of Herd and Domain to gain a reliable bonus action every turn, or a regular campaign of murder).
Occasionally fortune or the schemes of your rivals will lower your feeding pool. This may happen because of natural disasters like plague, vampire hunters moving into the area, a suspicious population, etc. These result in a loss to your feeding pool. If your feeding pool is negative, you may need to feed as a personal action. Successes at the feeding personal action add directly to your Feeding pool, and may make up for negative results.
If your feeding pool is ever negative for a second turn in a row, you will lose one personal action because you must hunt and you may enter a blood frenzy. The ST will roll based on your character’s stats to regain a positive feeding pool. If the roll proves poorly, you may lose additional personal actions. Intelligent vampires will always do their utmost to feed whenever their pool is negative.
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What this is lacking thus far, is a notion of regular feeding grounds. Presumably if you have them, that's your Domain. I have an idea that, other than Influence (which is nebulous; also maybe Contacts), backgrounds should all be concrete things. So a feeding ground or Domain is situated within a particular influence, and represents a specific part of the city. This makes backgrounds like Domain vulnerable to attack, but also helps make them concrete parts of the story, like Retainers or other backgrounds.
I think my biggest worry for feeding rules, and part of why I never implemented them in Toulouse, aside from sheer laziness, was that they would be too complex laid out with influence rules.
ReplyDeleteIf feeding rules become nearly as complex as the influence rules will they cause player frustration and confusion? I think with the feeding rules they need to have a simple option (other than herd/domain) for the players who may not want to have to spend 10 minutes calculating out their hunting/feeding strategy for the turn.
Of course, much of this could be made moot by a reasonable website support which would track how many feeding points you had banked and how much extra blood you might need to complete the actions you wanted to make.
Yeah, if the website can calculate your regular feeding, then you really just care when you'll get a bonus personal action or if someone is hampering your feeding when you need to spend personal actions to feed.
ReplyDeleteIt is definitely one of the most complex things I'm contemplating adding to the game which is already fairly complex. I don't want to add much more than what is sketched out here though, so if there are ways to make it a bit simpler, I'm all ears.