So, How Do Your Vampires Attack?

[Shaira]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

It would be much, much more interesting if a dead PC could come back as a vampire. Maybe the player wouldn't want the character anymore and just abandon them, but then maybe they would want to keep playing them, and all the new challenges they'd have to adapt to could make for a really good story.

I think it has story potential, but also some severe limitations. Becoming a vampire isn't a career choice; it's a totally existential transformation, something that's totally overwhelming and changes literally everything. To do that justice runs the risk of vampirism dominating your game to the exclusion of much else.

That could be cool for a while, though. The main problem would be avoiding cliché - most of us have seen a bunch of movies which tread this same ground, and the trick would be to make it interesting, and not just a plod through the age-old "heck I'm a vampire, oh woe!" tropes we know and love. And of course there's the moral ickiness of being, well, a bloodsucking murderous predator... ;-)

I did a bit of ballpark vampire math for my TFT campaign and rapidly discovered there's a huge instability when vampires infest an area - basically, vampires have to kill their victims to avoid spawning so many vampires they rapidly run out of victims. And by killing their victims, they start to run out of victims too... It's tricky to reach equilibrium - my math suggested a population of 7000-8000 could support maybe a dozen vampires or so in a sustainable manner, as long as those vampires worked together, shared victims, prevented spawning, etc.

Cheers,

Sarah

[hcobb]

How do vampires die? In his golden hour of dying a vampire is going to regenerate a mere 720 hits of damage. No physicker needed.
You're gonna have to mutilate the "corpse" if you didn't bring silver.

[Shaira]

Originally Posted by hcobb

How do vampires die?

Stake through the heart.

[Skarg]

The PCs encountered a vampire once in my original TFT campaign. I wrote him using ITL rules as written, and so he used his high ST to wield a nice large weapon - a greatsword or pikeaxe, I think. He may have also known a spell or two. I'd have to check the low end of the lengthy Dead File for that campaign world. I expected it might end badly for them. The vampire stalked them by night. But the PC on night watch noticed the vampire and woke up the party, who ganged up on the vampire, noticed he looked weird like maybe a vampire, and so chopped him into pieces and burned the pieces.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Shaira

I think it has story potential, but also some severe limitations. Becoming a vampire isn't a career choice; it's a totally existential transformation, something that's totally overwhelming and changes literally everything. To do that justice runs the risk of vampirism dominating your game to the exclusion of much else.

Precisely why I gave up on the whole idea years ago. The devil is in all those details.