Is there any set of "rules" for vampires in any RPG or fictional setting wherein the optimal strategy is not just to...

Is there any set of "rules" for vampires in any RPG or fictional setting wherein the optimal strategy is not just to convince three or four people to be your regular supply of blood from night to night?

No.

>Is there any set of "rules" for vampires in any RPG or fictional setting wherein the optimal strategy is not just to convince three or four people to be your regular supply of blood from night to night?
I can homebrew some easily if you want. When vampires feed, they need to make an ever-increasingly difficult willpower check to not drain all the blood from their bodies, which kills them and raises them as a vampire spawn in 1d4 days.

Eventually the vampire will snap and eat them all up.


Another example is shadowrun, where vampires are infected with the HMVV virus which does weird things to them and drinking blood involves magic stuff that tends go bad for other people.

>there's a chance to infect the victim with vampirism when you drink their blood
>in most cases the victim will then die in agony and rise as a mindless ghoul
>if a well-fed vampire lends the dying victim a large portion of their blood, the victim becomes a vampire
>but if a vampire drains all blood from the victim, the victim dies no matter what

Every time you bite a human they turn into a vampire, unless you drain all their blood in which case they die and don't come back.

I'll link my PayPal in the next post.

How much blood does the vampire take?
I'm guessing just a few people would not be enough, since they don't recover fast enough.
The human body can only produce blood at a certain rate.

Feeding can leave the humans weakened.
If you have a herd of people that you feed on, you might need to take care of them.

Something might go wrong in feeding, and you can lose your edge and hurt the vessel.
Don't feed on your herd when super hungry and stressed, just don't take that chance with something you need to maintain.

Why are they letting you feed on them?
Are they worshiping you?
Do you view them just as blood dolls. Things can get emotionally messy real quick.
Blood dolls be clingy yo.

>I prefer to have a herd for backup or special occasions
>feed on random prey as well

what if instead of biting, you just take a little blood with some relatively safe blood-letting method?

What if instead of chewing your food and savoring the taste, you you mush it all together in a cold paste.
Sure, the 'food' paste has all the same ingredients, but I'd rather sink my teeth into a fresh steak than eat cold paste for every meal.

How do you think it is for vamps?
Do they all just want to stay alive, or do some actually enjoy the meal as well?

Still blood, but it doesn't sustain you unless you drink it straight from the tap after opening it yourself.

Even a second vampire can't use the first victim. Only the premier biter can benefit.

Vampires only need to feed every other week, but after the first taste of blood they literally cannot stop until they've drained every single drop.

You can try to store blood into a recipient, but once the vampire drinks it, it automatically gains preternatural knowledge of the location of every single source of the blood contained in there, and will feel compelled to find, kill and drain the target.

If there are blood from multiple sources, the vampire will seek out all of them, but rather than feeding, it will prioritize killing every single one first, and drinking the blood later. Even if it means letting excess blood go to waste in the meanwhile. (it will just drink enough of the slain "donors" to keep itself sustained while hunting for the remaining ones)

Oh yes, and vampires in this state of bloodlust become way stronger than they are in their usual selfs, at the cost of being significantly less sane.
This leads to a few situations:
a) The greatest danger in fighting a vampire is if it manages to wound you and get a taste of your blood. It will stop at nothing until you die or it's killed with extreme prejudice.
b) Vampires are excellent assassins and trackers. Albeit very messy ones.
c) The reason for this behavior depends on the setting.

Take VAMPIRE
>All vampires have Golconda benefits.

>All players must pick a derangement and it becomes severe.

Boom. Less about blood. More about the beast driving the vampire mad, and them having to live with madness and cope for it as long as they wish to rise.

Immortality sucks...

Cattle and people aren't comparable.

An afterthought I've had
>Vampire bites shut down regeneration. Which means, a humanoid that would otherwise be able to supply an infinite amount of blood due to exceptional regeneration will still die of blood loss if a vampire feeds on it.

they are to vampires

This is actually my problem with VtM and VtR; the developers basically sat down and thought of all the simple ways that a Vampire could just not be an abject piece of shit and added supernatural penalties for doing so.

But yeah, if a setting doesn't let me feed an imperceptibly small amount of blood from multiple people in a night for some supernatural reason the it's contrarian, tone-forcing dogshit.

Depends on the setting.

>it's a vampire thread with 43e20b9385aaf57777631479c800164e.jpg as the OP image
These are always fun.

>"convince"

>this game about playing progressively more inhuman monsters forces me to be an inhuman monster!

go play GURPS or something

The blood is a mere conduit through which they feed on your soul, so the victim is riddled with various stat penalties that take time to heal. Frequent feedings on the same guy actually shaves years, if not decades off their lifespans.

This. A fantasy setting vampire could possibly just roam around killing people in different towns in their region. In a modern setting they could simply vacation in warzones or 3rd world countries which would be like smorgasbords to them.

Because in both versions, the appeal comes from being the monster and in the original vampirism is literally a divine punishment that God looked through for loopholes.
I'm an oWoD forever-ST, and I can't tell you how fucking obnoxious it is to have one of those players who can't deal with not getting dealt a perfect hand and have to play heroes who never fail.
They've ruined more games for me than even autism and SJWs, which considering I play oWoD is admittedly a lot - they refuse to accept that the game is based on a specific concept and is oriented towards telling a specific kind of story.
They don't see narrative tools that deepen the setting and make sure you can make use of the specific game instead of turning it into a generic modern fantasy vigilante justice simulator - they have a video-game mindset where every obstacle is a bad thing, and they contrive absurd plans to break the rules of the setting for little reason and then get mad personally when they don't succeed at breaking the game.
If you sit down and play Vampire with your group, the understanding is that you're trying to play a vampire game where the focus is the fact that the characters are vampires. If this does not result in conflict and does not bring out the characteristic elements of the vampire concept that the group is obviously seeking, something is wrong and it's likely the fault of the player who's persistently feeding only off animals in the passive-aggressively desperate hope that the GM is going to take mercy on him, then gets mad when he frenzies thrice in a session and the other PCs have to kill him to not get blood-hunted.

In a multitude of settings, a single bite may kill or goulify the individual; either rendering them unsuitable as a food source. In many the deciding factor as to whether or not the bit person becomes a vampire isn't strictly within the vampire's control either; like the individual automatically becoming a vampire if they're a virgin, or something.

I dare say settings where the victims are unaffected by the bite are rarer.

To the OP: The way it works in Vampire is both the above - accepting that the constraints are necessary to make use of the fluff and distinguishing the game from a generic simulator framework - and the fact that the oWoD tends to pay attention to realism.
You try keeping four people from different walks of life who all freely give their blood to you, don't pry into your private life (with the superior who'll kill them and you if he finds out), don't get busted by anyone else ever, don't ever start disliking you and still keep up a lifestyle where they're healthy, sane and regularly available to you.
This is exactly as hard as it sounds when you're likely legally dead and have to keep your very nature a secret, as well as being awake only at night. In fact, it's pretty near impossible to do it over a longer period of time, which is the reason why a lot of plot hooks in Vampire involve blood dolls and herd members flaking out or getting heat.
Older vampires who've been around since before modern scientific thinking might have entire families blood-bonded to them and Dominated their way into multiple influential people's favor, but a new vampire has little to no hope of doing this because of two main themes of the game - the suspicion of society itself and the hostility of a group of superiors that never die and are willing to kill to remain in power.
Vampire is about the struggle of making it as a flawed and fucked-up person with supernatural abilities that are more a curse than a blessing, in a battle that's rigged against them from the beginning. It lends scope and nuance to even the tiniest victory, whereas in a D&D game, people can kill a god and feel no satisfaction because the stakes were never high enough, the characters' motivations weren't detailed enough, there were too few obstacles and you start taking success for granted in a world where success is literally overturning the world order itself.

>this game about playing progressively more inhuman monsters forces me to be a neutered caricature of 1990's goth subculture
Oh boy, the WoD defenders are here.

>If this does not result in conflict and does not bring out the characteristic elements of the vampire concept that the group is obviously seeking, something is wrong and it's likely the fault of the player
What a complete crock of shit.
You think VtM "brings out the characteristic elements of the vampire concept"?
The game where vampires are literally hollow tubes filled with blood like they're a fucking Stretch Armstrong brings out the characteristic elements of the vampire concept?
In short; no. You've played WoD so long that you apparently seem to think that Blade II is the progenitor of all vampire mythology.

Now, I'm not saying that that isn't what VtM is about; I'm just saying that VtM is shit.

Are you actually taking an issue with the portrayal of vampires because it's not realistic? What the everloving fuck.

>ctrl+f
>Dresden Files
In Dresden Files, Black Court vampires always kill those they feed from.

>actually engaging oWoD grognards

Reminder that in VtR a BP6 Vampire can feed on a BP1-3 Vampire who feeds on livestock they raise; and in 2nd edition they retconned Kindred society to find this abominable and you get blood hunted for doing it.

No? There's literally nothing in that post that implies that?

I mean, there are still a lot of unrealistic things in WoD that DO make it shitty; for example it would be pretty unrealistic for someone to wake up, realize that they're now pasty humans who fill a convenient niche in the meat byproduct industry, and decide that they're just going to subject themselves to the whims to a newly discovered secret society of Halloween cosplayers.

why not just polymorph a rock into a souless humanoid fleshgolem? can drain it and poly it back into a rock and toss it. infinite bloods?