Should vampires have traditional weaknesses, or has that gone out of style?

Should vampires have traditional weaknesses, or has that gone out of style?

Other urls found in this thread:

smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic-36482878/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I think it is the part what makes them intriguing. Sure, bloodsucking, charming fellows, but really restricted by their weaknesses.

But you have to remember that severity of those weaknesses tends to fluctuate over time.

In Bram Stoker's Dracula, the count only lost his powers in sunlight and got stabbed dead.
Then you have the other plethora of weaknesses, like getting ill from of sight/smell of garlic, having to count small things like rice ( eastern vampires and some from Carpathians ), not being allowed to enter residence without being invited, not being able to cross running water, having strong distaste for organized religion...

> has that gone out of style

Who gives a shit?

Make vampires how you want to make them.

Why is her dress getting incinerated? Is it a vampire too?

>Expect Kryptonite, like its for "normal vampires"
>Get Supervampire literally walking trough its mortal weakness, because it only slightly slows it down

Alucard?

In a Discworld novel it was the vampire with the traditional weakness that ended being the most powerful one. While the noveau vampires that tried to get rid themselves of all weakness ended being wimps.

>Vampire gets incinerated by sunlight
>All it does is light it on fire and make it angry
>When it turns into ash the vampire regenerates and pops out of someone who inhaled it

>Use vacuum cleaner.

I like their normal weaknesses to be there with some possible mitigators.

>Sunscreen
>Gas masks
>Freeze ray so they can cross moving water
>Minions to cover their weakness.
>Weakness only apply in their true form, not while turned to wolf or bat, there they just have said creature weakness.

That's what makes them a vampire. Without the weaknesses, you just have a blood sucking sparkly weirdo.

I had an idea for one of my settings, but I don't know if I'll ever get to use it.

> Due to the vampire's curse, they must complete any puzzle set before them before they can do anything else regarding whatever the puzzle is behind (Counting rice, solving riddles, etc) as long as the puzzle is solvable, and they know it is solvable
> You can save your ass if a vamp attacks you and you know a really good riddle or are great at making it sound like a good riddle
> Grand vampires are put in miles-deep dungeons filled to the brim with puzzles and layer after layer in sand or rice (That they have to count) in case they escape their silver-lined caskets or whatever
> Basically unkillable otherwise, you can only disable them for a certain amount of time

Vampires with Umbrellas should be immune to sunlight damage, due to the umbrella confusing their bodies.

>Foolish adventurers break into a Grand Vampires tomb, thinking it holds treasure, solving every riddle and puzzle along the way, believing them to be to protect the treasure in the silver chest at the end.

Vampires aren't real. You can kill them however the fuck you want.

Didn't Dracula also need to sleep in dirt from his home country? Or is that something that someone else made up? I only read the Great Ilustrated Classics version as a kid which was, obviously, abridged and even then I don't remember much (other than the MC's wife was cute and I wanted her to stop being a vamp).

Dracula basically had almost none of the weaknesses, and he's the most well-known vampire.

Why do people like you even come to this board?

Don't feed the trolls, nuke the bridge and use a fly spell like a pro.

Because I enjoy RPGs and think people should think creatively instead of being bound by arbitrary rules about fictional things?

I think one problem some vampires these days have is people trying to stack every single weakness vampires all over the world have had. Just, shit man, calm down, most individual regions' vampires only had one or two of those.

>having to count small things like rice ( eastern vampires and some from Carpathians ),

Pic related?

Well, traditionally, sunlight just weakens them, and/or robs them of their powers.
I do not know where bursting into flames came from, but it's just kryptonite conventionally.

I think that may have been one of the things added for Nosferatu, but I could be wrong.
That was Nosferatu. Somewhere along the line someone decided it would by more dramatic than stabbing him in the heart.

Looked it up, it was Dracula (soil thing). Well as much as you can use a site called vampires.com as a source.

Well, that was very clever.

No, it's from Dracula, one of the things the book is spent on finding the secret hiding spots of his soil.

Thank you, John Landis as portrayed by Simon Pegg.

Suppose you'd like to have staking just tickle a few ribs too. Vampires are defined by their weaknesses just as much as by their powers.

!!!
That's some Legends of the Hidden Temple level dungeon crawling. Even better if it's acolytes have been subtly leading them to this tomb, making them think that something in it can stop thier master from coming back.

God, now I just want to force vampires to solve computer science issues like P=NP and other unfinished theorems. Vampires can be the magical equivalent of quantum computers.

How?

Not really, they almost won.

And if that where the case the black ribboners would be weaker than normal vampires but they aren't

I think it's good to have some weaknesses. Some like garlic and counting rice might just be silly depending on the setting. The important thing is that the vampire is clearly stronger than most humans when the circumstances favor them, but most circumstances do not. This is why you don't have massive vampire kingdoms without powerful black magic or so forth. Invitee issues, rivers, sunlight, etc hamper them.

He was just a badass motherfucker.

New guys also shot themselves in the foot - they needed strong willpower to resist the weaknesses, most notably religious symbols. In the process of training they familiarised themselves with the symbols of all the metric shitton of religions on the world. So when their concentration slipped, they started seeing symbols of /something/ pretty much everywhere.

Old count meanwhile didn't. He just had the usual sunlight and crosses, but none were present on the scene.

>New guys also shot themselves in the foot
Technically correct, but also entirely wrong.

The new vampires were very clever and very powerful, but fucked up because they tried to do this shit when Granny Weatherwax was in town. They even nearly won, but fucked up by trying to turn her into a subordinate instead of just killing her, and Granny's willpower was more than theirs.

The old count was a badass motherfucker, yes, but he ALSO knows it's the monster's job to be a monster, and then get defeated by the hero.

Granny and people like her thinks that a few people dying or whatever is fine for monsters, so he gets to come back, but the wholesale people farming that the new count was going to do was trying to be too much like humans, so she rendered them powerless and basically said
"if you don't act like monsters and get put down like monsters humanity will just go hardcore on your ass and throw your bottled ashes over the side of the world to be stuck floating through space in the sunlight forever"

Granny Weatherwax doesn't fuck around.

It's not so much that the one with weaknesses was stronger or weaker - it's that he was known to be less of a threat.

The Count played a fair game. He does his thing, the town has enough of it after a while and hires vampire hunters, they come and hunt him using weaknesses. He COULD, if he chose to, resist these, but he doesn't, because if he ignored these then that just makes people hunt for something he CAN'T shrug off. So he falls, and because the weaknesses don't destroy him, just knock him out for a while (a hundred years is a while, right?), he comes back later and the cycle repeats.

The new vamps sought to rule by nullifying their weaknesses. This made them a threat, one that couldn't be dealt with normally, but one that HAD to be dealt with somehow. And since Discworld runs on stories, a more dangerous threat gets a more permanent destruction.

No individual human beats a vampire. But there's always more humans than vampires, and they just need to be lucky once. Rules like garlic and invitation and such, I'd think, could be seen as more for the vampire's benefit than for the humans'.

>Because I enjoy RPGs and think people should think creatively instead of being bound by arbitrary rules about fictional things?

>but not so creative that they invent a new name instead of using an old one that no longer applies and only causes confusion

OK faggot

i find vampires funner if they adhere to all their traditional weaknesses,only the strongest most clever vampires capable of working around their weaknesses will be left

also trivia:
vampires hate garlic, because garlic was believed to have curative properties that repulsed evil

vampires have no reflection because silver (used in mirrors) is a holy metal that cant catch a vampires evil photons

vampires are weak to running water, since running water was associated with purity and cleansing, and thus would be anathema to the evil vampire

vampires needed to staked, since it was believed that you would literally stake a vampire to his coffin, preventing it from rising, it was wooden because wood was the most common material, a silver knife was considered superior due to silvers holy properties

>Sunlight is a weakness.
>Garlic is only mildly annoying due to heightened senses.
>no one knows where the running water thing came from, it's weird and is still a mystery to the vampire community.
>They aren't incapable of getting into a home uninvited, they just were raised better than that.
>Of course one would die when you shove a stake in their heart, a human would die from that!
>Religion doesn't exactly matter, most are Atheist or Buddhist.

God this anime/manga was shit but at the same time that break-down of the weaknesses was hilarious to watch.

The Japanese are bad at western mythology.

One very stupid thing in that show is that one of then actually survives the stake in the heart in a deus ex machina around the end.

The "mythology" was always all over the place. It's not like a stake through the heart was always the preferred method. Ever heard of the New England Vampire Panic? Good times, good times.

Consumption, i.e. tuberculosis, was kicking the shit out of the area:

>By the 1800s, when the scares were at their height, the disease was the leading cause of mortality throughout the Northeast, responsible for almost a quarter of all deaths. It was a terrible end, often drawn out over years: a skyrocketing fever, a hacking, bloody cough and a visible wasting away of the body. “The emaciated figure strikes one with terror,” reads one 18th-century description, “the forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk...the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.” Indeed, Bell says, symptoms “progressed in such a way that it seemed like something was draining the life and blood out of somebody.”

So of course they blamed vampires. Dug up some bodies, played jigsaw puzzles with the bones, try to burn the heart. Fun times.

smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic-36482878/

So Deep Rot but with more evening dress and Eastern-European accents?

You know, I really would have liked to know more about the painting that was just an indication of a hooded shape with something that may have been a beak.

Vampires have always had one very specific weakness that for some reason often goes overlooked.

Lesbomancy best mancy

An angry man with a sabre and a magnificent moustache?

That ane was pretty dumb, but I loved the "raised better than that" part.

As it should be. The clue was in the filename.

But why protect when he can partake? Not just two titties but FOUR TITTAYS

Because vampires are greedy and don't share. Samuel Clemens is a wise man who knows the rewards of heroism are greatly under-exaggerated. The grateful maiden will suck you harder than the vampire ever could.

Vampires must have to have big inherent weaknesses that generally make them weak to humanity

If vampires were like super strong humans, they would've enslaved or killed us off a long time ago. That's just how survival of the fittest works.

Vampires can't form an army and fight humans outright because they can only fight at night time and meager shit like garlic and crosses keep them at bay. They have to be crafty fucks just to survive.

He should kill the vampire and do some necrophilia once's he's done banging the other chick

Just got to play your favorite game: Stand in the tree's shadow.

I like weaknesses that reward research and preparation and knowing the rules. Being able to stay safe from vampires by following the rules makes them more interesting and gives them more license to be overwhelmingly powerful without it feeling unfair or breaking the story.

For ultimate horror have your players fight Twilight vampires.

They're completely bullshit.

Survival of the fittest isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes an advantageous trait doesn't have enough evolution pressure to ensure it properly propagates. Life doesn't care about who is better or more deserving. A superior specimen who succumbs to illness or injury (accident or otherwise) without passing on its traits is certainly not enjoying survival of the fittest. Stronger and more fit species are often lost due to various circumstances: change in environmental conditions, plague, or just outbred by a less physically superior competitor.

Besides how does that even work with vampires? Are we talking standard undead or do they manage to breed amongst themselves? How do they maintain their population? They'd have to careful not to become too numerous or they'd risk a Daybreakers situation. At the very least it's not exactly like they have a perfect situation. They can be physically superior but their primary prey, us, tend to be numerous and with an amazing propensity for creative violence. I'd imagine Masquerade rules would need to be enacted or we'd eventually find a way to wipe them out.

Perhaps all vampires could have their own set of personalized weaknesses.
For example, sunlight and then the plethora of different ones, like being compelled to use coasters and sending christmas cards to everyone in nearby village.

>sending christmas cards to nearby villages
>Still a stereotypical evil vampire, just a really jolly one
>Invites people to his castle for christmas, everyone believes it's a trap, it's actually not.

Can't see that on mobile.

prod your finger on the bit which says 259 kb and it should show up unless it's spoilered.

It's how I enjoy most filename threads while on mobile.

T. Hanks!
I guess that was the olden days' version of "To catch a predator."

>Vampires
>Western mythology

Kek

>sunlight

Hollywood isn't "traditional"

Hollywood is western and that's where the sunlight weakness comes from, so... yeah.

>most are Atheist
explains why Crucifix is so effective against them

i feel like "burning up in sunlight" (and most vampire weaknesses) only really works in a traditional fantasy setting and doesn't really work as well in and modern day setting

that said I'm ok with vampires losing their powers in sunlight

I mean they probably don't have the same problems with crossing moving water, as in a city they'd be completely buggered.

You should have a healthy seasoning of weaknesses classic or otherwise, just enough variation to catch players off their guard once or twice.

My favourite twist is that yes counting is a big thing that they are all compelled to do, that said be careful they're awfully good at counting.

It the legends it was naturally occurring running water - rivers, lakes, oceans, etc. Aqueducts and piped water were fine.

Very much so. You don't have to add every single one, but without the weakness it really ceases to be a vampire in my opinion.

I also prefer to include the effect being a vampire has on a person's mind, that they no longer feel as they did or enjoy as they did, and seek endlessly to fill that void. being a vampire is a curse, and it annoys me when I see them written as good looking people with fangs and little else.

Dracula was in the "Kryptonite slows him down" tier.
With a few additional rules to keep his power level.

Depends on what is "moving water".
If its pipes, or if its the River Volga/Thames.
Or even how big the river has to be.

>Weaknesses
Get over it. You'll find a way around them sooner or later.

Dracula had weaknesses, but they were exactly that: they made him weaker.

He didn't burst into flames on contact with sunlight, but it still sapped his power.

Now you are making me wonder if that was intentional.

Nosgoth vampires are just different.

For example water just burns them like acid, not acts as an invisible wall.

Are there many stories that involves vampire conception?
I know twilight had it (and in all seriousness the vampires breeding with mortals being possible but deathly to the mother and unborn child was a neat rule), but every other vamp story I've come across had infertility as a technical weakness.

The issue in a lot of formats or settings is that there are other ways to get super amazing powers without having weaknesses tacked on
To compensate for having pretty obnoxious constant weaknesses you have to give them some pretty unique and amazing powers. That or have it understood from the get go that vampirism is a challenge and shouldn't be viewed as something that will help.

I.E. Why be a vampire to be able to use certain magics when you can just be a wizard who can do all of the same magics and more?

Dracula is the most well known vampire, yes, but by in large he's misremembered as a vampire caricature of having common weaknesses like garlic/no reflection/weak to crosses/etc.

Everyone knows Dracula, barely anyone has read Bram Stoker's "Dracula"

>and they know it is solvable
No one can know that a puzzle is solvable until it has been solved.

Holy shit...

Practically every vampire character from the 21st century really. There are very few vampires in modern media that are actually killed or crippled by sunlight unless they have an easy work around.

>wizards cannot be uncertain their demon summoning circle or teleportation ritual is perfect, as it isn't hard to imagine death being the cause of missing a line of chalk.
>sorcerers constantly unable to do anything precision based
>druids either are obliged to attend every circle meeting or have become guardians of some primordial secret that could destroy civilization
>holy paths to power speak for themselves
>unholy paths to power is no different to vampirism
>obtaining enchanted equipment that could put you on the same footing as a vampire would risk your life

All of those things vs the instant gratification of one bite + immortality? Keep in mind that while the others grant immortality sometimes, a lot of the time you're so fucking old anyway

missing a line of chalk being the cause of death rather

depends on the setting

I really like the way Shiki did vampires.
They had a crapload of weaknesses and not many powers so they had to take control of the village gradually and subtly.

His coffin was filled with consecrated soil (soil from a Catholic graveyard). He needed it to cross the ocean, as I recall.

>not being able to cross running water
I think if anything it should be drinking (i.e. life-giving) water that hurts vampires, and they should have nothing to fear from water you can drown in.

>Wanting shitty postmodern vampires

Teej you're always full of tasty ideas.

>Freeze ray so they can cross moving water
I love the idea of a vampire superscientist.

I like Bakemonogatari's take on it, wherein sunlight is the standard weakness but that's about it, and it can be overcome, but the few times it is overcome either nature itself tries to erase that vampire or they instantly regret it because now there's nothing that can kill them.

Well what's not drinking water to us is drinking water to someone.Plenty of fish in the seas and all that, though that might also be stretching the concept of "drinking".

Ha, depending on the era the water in a city might not be the most conducive to life, unless you count the microscopic swimming things in it.

Reminds me of the River Ahnk from Discworld. They never said if vampires could cross it, especially given it has a crust that light enough people can walk over even outside of winter. Come to think of it their vampires were interesting. Most of the old school ones love to play fair, leading plenty of easily ripped curtains and easily broken wooden furniture for making stakes. Then there is the question of whether they had any true weaknesses or whether it was all in their minds. Then of course there are the Black Ribboners who swear off drinking blood. I can't recall if this alters their weaknesses but I recall it was said to dampen some of their abilities.

How far below them can running water be before a vampire can cross it?

>nature itself tries to erase that vampire
Nah, I can't stand that shit from WotD, It's a neat gimmick for all of a couple of hours.

I prefer them being normal looking people, that have to eat other humans to sustain themselves (not just blood, but the whole body), and that go full eldritch abomination-mode in combat (like all sorts of wierd and fucked up looking shit). They don't have traditional weaknesses (as in burning in the sun/garlic), but they can be taken down by normal means (killing it hard enough that they can't pull themselves back together, multiple times).

I would have figured surface water but then that still raises the question of wether they can fly over if they achieve a sufficient altitude.