There are about 1600000 vampires in the united states

Look like humans. "Sort of" werewolves who have to drink blood. Are weakened by the sun. Weak to gold.

And yes, I'm unsure whether vampire is still the right word.

Masquerade is slightly broken. We know they exist but we believe they are almost extinct. Were extremely hunted in the past.

If they have such hard to hide traits you have 2 options

1. Vampires run the media and that's why we don't know about this shit

2. Drop that number down to 100,000-200,000

I generally think Vamps should be like, 10 or less per large metropolitan area, so with 253 cities in the US with over 100,000 people in them there would be around 2,530 vamps total. They wouldn't have an even population spread across the country since they wouldn't be able to stay under the radar among a small population and they need to be rare enough that most humans will never encounter one.

Depends, if your running a full on urban fantasy with out a masquerade, then no, but if the vamps are supposed to be a secret, then it's way too high, i'd say even too high for global numbers.

Just to say, A guy ate someones face and the media said 'High on bath salts' and that was the end of it.
So don't think the media is all pervasive and would oust vampires.

1.6 million in the US is indeed 1 in 200.
It's the same thing.

>Vampires run the media and that's why we don't know about this shit

This is a good one, watch What We Do in the Shadows if you run with this idea

>Also Vampires are all Jews, so control the media.

This is actually exactly how it works in WoD.

...

That's more vampires than there are transgender people.

There was a thread a little while ago about vampire nobility where some anons did the math of how many humans you need per vampire depending on different factors of feeding mechanics.

They could be slavic vampires and kill in indirect ways yet feed off the death-energy.
Also not showing up in pictures/video.

How often do they have to feed, and is it automatically lethal?

Because one a day, lethal, means that the vampires have killed off literally everyone else in a year or so, even if they create literally no vampires while doing so. If they create a vampire each time they drain someone, it's literally just one week from the end of the world as the vampires hunt down all humans and then starve.

You MIGHT be able to do this if they drink once a week and the victim lives, let's say two pints or less, but that's still a stretch. Once a month is easier. And creating a new vampire would have to be a deliberate, rarely undertaken act. Any significant population growth pretty much requires them to take over the world, as everyone still human has to be put on the menu.

If they have an artificial blood source, or can drink from animals, it's a lot less of a problem. It's still a fuck ton of vampires. Seriously- there are only four million Jews in the US, we're talking for each Jewish person there are FOUR vampires.

>A guy ate someones face and the media said 'High on bath salts' and that was the end of it.
News media was calling them zombies for the longest time.

People in real life will desperately cling to even the flimsiest evidence of the supernatural (Pic related). Anything to break them out of the stressful boring nightmare they face every day. Not to mention that real vampires would be ratings gold for the news media. Credible vampire contact, interviews, etc would take over headlines and enrapture the world for months at least.

>1600000

That's a lot of jews

>I should reduce the number

Oy!

This.
I've been running some math in my head a bit, and it's like:

Death rate in the USofA is 8 per 1000 a year.
So vampires can 'eat' like 1 (maybe 2) per 1000 per year - tops - and get away with it.
If a vamp 'eats' every day, there needs to be about 365,000 people to 1 vamp ratio for this to work out.

1 vamp on 200 people is gonna starve real fucking quick.

I wish.

Unless you're playing Buffy and plan to kill them every game, or it's like Daybreakers or something, or you have those lame vegan vampires who don't kill people, there should logically be far less. In order for them to remain unnoticed, they would have to be pretty rare. They are essentially serial killers, but they kill people far faster than any human killer would. You wouldn't have more than a couple dozen in a city like New York without drawing tons of attention. In any other city in the US, under 10 I'd say.

>You wouldn't have more than a couple dozen in a city like New York
I'm sure the wealthy big city vampires could just import blood if needed. They could probably just pay off some corrections officer to get them blood-slaves from Riker's Island, or even just pick it up reasonably fresh near a blood drive. In NYC there are most likely weird kink-groups relating to vampires that would happily be feasted upon. Worst case they could make some homeless people disappear and use them for it.

>if you can prey on mortals here, you can do it anywhere!

Assuming they work like classic vampires, that means at least 160,000 people are killed every week for their blood. Over 52 weeks that's 8 million, 320 thousand people per year. That's noticeable.

>1 in 300 people are vampires.
Yeah, that's too many. Bump it down to something like 50,000, at least.

So to summarize the above: 1 in 200 is a fine ratio of predator-to-prey (say, wolves to deer). But if you want tge predator a secret it sould be more like one in a million. A thousand vampires in the entire USA, twenty thousand worldwide seems a reasonable upper limit.

Depends if they're killy vampires though, doesn't it? If they have the powers of hypnotism and seduction they have in lore, and don't need to drain their victim dry, could they not sustain a larger population?

Why do you need a number?

I suppose it comes down to just how much the vampires need to drink in the setting. One non-fatal drink per month is a lot different than draining a person every week or so.

The real problem is that there's no way you're going to keep 1.6 million American vampires a secret in this day and age. I don't care how much they try to cover it up that will just never work.

Yeah, 1.6 mil is an insane number, I agree with you there. 20,000 max worldwide though seems too low as well though, unless your setting's vampires need to drain a man dry nightly.

...

That's what he said. He just made a rough estimate. And was right.

Well, we did offer to calculate the 'sipping' rate of one pint a day, but looks like that's too 'tame' for some people here ...

"after donating a unit of whole blood, the average person will replenish the lost VOLUME within 24-48 hours", where a unit is usually about 500 ml.

You just need to be careful not to kill your herd, and feed them enough water.

Yeah - that's plasma.

Red Blood cells, however, are a different story:
according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_donation#Recovery_and_time_between_donations it takes 2 (men) and 3 (women) months to recover from 'donation'.
More than that and you risk Anemia.

So, about 60 'willing' men or 90 women per vamp. (assuming they keep their mouths shut about it)

>I should reduce the number?
YES
MANUALLY

First figure out the role you want vampires to serve in your world, are there thriving communities in virtually ever city in America with singular vampires and small covens residing in every small town? That is what 160k vampires would look like.

Also, ask yourself what you want to accomplish by even quantifying their numbers in the first place? who benefits? You can likely find another way to flesh out and narrate your world without prescribing a hard number to it.

thats assuming a vampire is able to consume

A) just a single unit of blood from a person and for killing in the act of feeding to be a rarity.

B) somehow vampires have incredibly low appetites and can thrive on only occasional feedings.

3. No masquerade

Much as they have no reflections, they are undetectable by electronic interfaces, such as CCDs and touchscreens. Maybe even microphones, but unlikely, as they're part-mechanical

>alien invaders: "marry and reproduce"
>liberal politicians: "smash patriarchy and import foreigners"

thats 1 vampire for every 200 people

masquerade has them at 1 per every 10,000, i think. That would be about 30,000 vampires in the US, but its also stated that they are overpopulated.

thats more vampires than there are doctors in India

assuming 1 pint per day, around 350 pints of blood a year, times, say, 30k vampires, is like 1,000,000 pints of blood every year.

but you know they consume more during periods of peak activity, and that they are overpopulated, so its more like 400 pints per year and 50k vampires for around 2 million pints a year.

Thats a fucking ocean of blood.

and considering they are not just taking your blood, but your mystical vitae, that's a whole lot of suffering and human misery.

A werewolf might kill you for littering in a parking lot, but at least they let you keep your lifeforce.

250,000 gallons
jeebus, like a fucking slurpy machine

You might justify it by saying, "well, they don't often kill, and when they do, its the elderly, sick, and disabled", but the real human cost is our lifeforce.

More like 7,282,000.

in WoD, vampires would logically control the technocracy from the inside out, with methesulas exerting unnatural influence over the minds of technocratic mages due to how sexually repressed they are.

Which is I suppose why many arch mages tend to retreat to the safety of horizon realms.

Under what circumstances in any gameplay would you, or any player, ever have to know or care about that number?

>Vampires work as prison guards or nurses in mental hospitals because no one will care or listen
I'd steal this. What is the prison population in the US ? A few vampires with a little hypnosis skills could even not need to hunt or kill other than just for pleasure.

Relative proportion does matter, I mean, if any town has a coven of the things and cities are infested with them, that demands different tactics than there only being four or five in existence. More vampires means that it's easier to encounter one, they can be used as expendable footsoldiers, they can overwhelm the PCs through numbers, and so on.

16 million vampires is an impossibly huge number for a small group to directly handle even if they're incredibly weak, whereas a thousand in the entire US is doable if they're territorial. The first case is a campaign about breaching the masquerade and raising an army, the second could potentially be a series of direct combats.

>What is the prison population in the US ?
>HereWeGo.jpg
Just under 2.3 million people incarcerated if you count federal and state prisons as well as local jails.

It's great news for any bloodsuckers looking to abuse our correctional system (well, more than us mortals already abuse it): Our great nation has the highest incarceration rate in the world! Even with falling crime rates, we have 4.4% of the world's population and 22% of the world's prisoners.

Judges are paid off by the prison industry (yes, we have privately-run, for-profit prisons which are exactly as bad as you'd think) to put teenagers behind bars for most of their adult lives, especially if they're unable to afford real legal defense. If they can't pay for a real lawyer, the free public defenders have little choice but to pressure even innocent defendants into accepting jail time. Even if you haven't had your trial yet, if you can't pay bail you might end up sitting behind bars for months or even years. Big pharma has used prisons for unethical experiments, paying poorer inmates pocket change in exchange for conducting dangerous life-changing experiments on them. And correctional officers can likewise get away with anything, and that could absolutely include drinking prisoners' blood if they set their minds to it.

Really the whole corrections and criminal justice systems are rife with opportunities for horror, both fictional and otherwise.

Just use ratios like a normal human bean, you s p e r g.

>A werewolf might kill you for littering in a parking lot, but at least they let you keep your lifeforce.

>kill you
>let you keep your lifeforce

Cool, but why would you need an actual number instead of just going with 'too many to exterminate easily' and 'small enough to try to exterminate'? Are your players interested in for real rolling dice for killing all 1000 vampires across the states? Like, they can be, I'm just curious if this is a thing people actually do, if it adds anything to their game experience, or if its more of a world builder's disease thing.

Not OP, and I was literally talking about using ratios. If you have a ratio, and the total population, you also have the number. I feel real bad for you if you think basic math literacy is impossible without autism.

Why have an actual number of gold coins in a treasure horde?

I don't think that you absolutely have to have a number, you can absolutely just pull it out of your ass, but IMO it's way better to let your players come to the conclusion of whether they can handle the problem than just straight up telling them whether they can handle it.

That also allows you to, if the players want to do epidemiology and shit, give them a real number that you've thought through the consequences of, rather one like '16 million' that ends up being completely outside the rules you've set.

>Why have an actual number of gold coins in a treasure horde?
I don't. Abstracting treasure works really well for our group. No one's interested in keeping that much track, doesn't add much to our experience. ymmv tho, seems like a thing you/they like doing.

>you have a wagon full of coins!
>Yay!
>I wanna buy a sword!
>Now you have fewer coins
>I wanna buy a horse!
>Sure, your wagon is looking smaller though
>uhh...
>I want to buy a hut!
>No more coins!

Thanks but no thanks. Not him, but I'll keep bean-counting. I have a calculator and excel, I'll be fine.

I get that. I like noodling with numbers on my own, but its not a thing I'm going to force my friends to do with me for fun. I tend to play video for when I want that.

Yes, because coins will be used the same way as people in a city, right?

Great analogy, dude.

Not OP, and I was literally talking about using ratios.
You were defending the 1.6million number, or at least that's what I got from your post.

I didn't think there were THAT many CEOs in the U.S.

>Vampires cannot be caught on camera, corrupting any data that tries to capture their image.
>they are undetectable by electronic interfaces, such as CCDs and touchscreens
But that makes them even EASIER to spot!

That actually brings up an interesting point: how does the "vampires have no reflection" thing work?

Since mirrors work by simply reflecting light, vampires not showing up clearly has some sort of mystical cause.

Is it that you can't have an image of them (in which case, how does that work with paintings or drawings? Can you draw vampires but not specific ones? Do they need to be at a certain level of vagueness?), or perhaps it's just mirrors/photos/etc that work based on photons hitting something?

If they can't be photographed or video recorded, due to problems with taking the picture (but the light still goes into the lens), is it possible for someone to invent some software or a special camera or something that will be able to take pictures of them (or can at least detect their presence)?

Depending on the particulars, you may or may not be able to get an image of them by shoving their face in some plaster or something and letting it dry.

If they can't be photographed/whatever, why would you be able to record their voices? It could work that way, since sound waves are not light, but I'd figure anything that blocks photographs would also block audio recordings.

Either way, not showing up on video/screens/whatever would make it trivially easy for high security places to detect them trying to walk in with regular people: have a guy watching both the people coming in and a screen with a live video feed of the same view. If he sees someone directly who doesn't show up in the video feed, they're a vampire.

Silvered mirrors cannot reflect the sight of a vampire because of their weakness to silver itself.
The very image of the vampire itself is being burnt away and vampires would feel uncomfortable trying to look at themselves in such a mirror.