#And then my players will ask “couldn't we just have played Vampire: the Masquerade - the ttrpg that was built for this?”

[y-rhywbeth2]

Guess who found more vampire lore that would've been helpful earlier! (This is what happens when you skim the mechanics pages too fast...) Turns out there are concrete rules about how much blood vampires need.

Vampires require 12 hit points worth of blood every 24 hours (the amount of blood you'll get from draining 2-3 people or 12 rats dry, mechanically. The designers maybe didn't think this through...) The source is immaterial, and may come from people, corpses or animals. They're all just as good, though fluff wise they won't feel good subsisting on animal and dead blood (there are no mechanical penalties). The blood doesn't have to be fresh or taken directly from the vein, you can keep it stored in a fridge or whatever equivalent.

Vampires lose the power boosts they gain with age if they don't get enough blood, but cannot regress below the level of a newborn vampire. Age categories aren't present in later editions, so basically: vampires and spawn can't get any weaker than the base stat block given for them in the monster manual. They do lose a hit dice per day without sufficient blood (blood is required to maintain the physical body, their bodies will slowly revert into corpses without it.) They will, however, eventually lose control of themselves if they wear down to a single HD and revert to a state of mindless animal hunger and go on a bloodthirsty rampage draining the blood out of any source they can get their hands on. (Failure to get any blood at this stage causes the hibernation state as they become trapped in their own withered corpse unable to move until somebody feeds them blood.)

HD recover rapidly with sufficient nutrition; regaining 1 per every day of full feeding.

[townofcrosshollow]

Not to be too SCREE on main but I just got a frankly magical opportunity! Guy on Reddit invited me to a Vampire the Masquerade game that he was forming with a pre-existing group, I guess somebody probably couldn't play in their new campaign, so they invited me. I was nervous because Vampire is a more complicated system than I'm used to, but the GM actually took the time to hop on a call with me ahead of time to discuss the game and the rules, and gave me some one-on-one time in session 0 to help me fill out my character sheet, and even planned the group's backstory around my character (so the other players' first goals are going to be to teach my character some of the mechanics in-game).

Since it's a pre-existing group of people he's already played with, I already knew going in that the players would be cool, and ofc they were! They were all really nice and made sure I felt welcome, even though I couldn't contribute much since I don't know all the rules and lore. Everybody made a point to ask me what I thought about the ideas they had.

In one of my previous games I tried joining I was happy to see people talking in the discord a lot but then a lot of the players turned out to be very... terminally online? Y'know? Like in a bad way? So I was a little worried about joining a group that might be the same! It's so uncomfortable to get out of it once you realize you don't vibe with them. But I think I'm going to vibe with all these folks! They're all very funny, a lot of them are also queer, they seem to have similar interests re: roleplaying and what kind of game we like to play. I didn't get much chance to speak with them since it was a lot of rules talk, but once we get into gameplay, I'm really excited to start roleplaying with them and getting to know them better.

And the rules of Vampire are really cool now that I've gotten the chance to learn them! I'm always scared about more complicated games like that, but I love the mechanics, they're all really interesting and well crafted. It feels like... a bunch of super simple games mashed up together. All the mechanics are recognizable from rules-light games I've played, so it's way less confusing when they're all put together.

And I'm excited for my character, he's a combination of a bunch of ideas and aesthetics I love and he's going to be so much fun to play.

Basically we're feeling JOY in this Wendy's tonight!!!!