Right. It's just that every month for vampires (and their ilk) and every 6 months for Nosferatu they automatically lose one point of Essence, which they can drain back in less than an hour.


I was going to go off on you for a bit there but then the second half of your statement exactly counters the first. Apparently in your groups Infected are the R4 Power Focus.

As many as you want. As long as you drained Essence in the last hour you can spend it as per the rules. It's a bit wacky like that.

Yes, I said that, but I was saying that having a magic of 5 and using the temporary boost to increase your magic to 11 is different from having a magic of 11. I just wanted to clarify that he was talking about the boost, and not running on some kind of assumption that it was an automatic improvement.

Fair enough, but my Infected always eat their "breakfast" and "dinner."

@Neraph
Where would you contradict?
That the rules for infected are broken and do not fit into the rest of the rules? (For crying out loud they have their own rules for Magic loss)

Or that human society would react violently "things" which consider them "prey"?

Just like the zombie/ghoul apocalypse.... Human rights for walking, cannibal plague carriers? Ya right.

I don't know what you're asking me. Your sentences don't make sense.

1) What?

2) They have their own rules for Magic loss because their Essence is not fixed. That causes problems so they have to have their own rules. AIs have their own rules for jumping in to drones and drakes are immune to HMHVV, but you're not complaining about them. And heck - there's Free Spirit PCs. That's a massive can-o-worms.

3) I never claimed they wouldn't be reacted to violently so this sentence really doesn't make sense to me.

I'm pretty sure that's not right Neraph.
I seem to remember (AFB) that only half the essence drained can be used for the boost and that only essence drained in the last hour can be used in such a way. This created a big issue for me in that vampires woud get full up pretty quickly and be sat around for months and months before they could achieve another boost.

It was discussed in the 'Sated vampires' topic (sorry, haven't figured out DS-linking yet) and Muspellsheimr divulged a really good house rule for the power.

Aerospider is correct. Once again Neraph, you're ignoring crucial bits of the actual rules, then telling other people they're not reading the book:





So, even if your GM allows you to start your game with you inexplicably assaulting and dumping a half-dozen prostitutes in a Z-Zone, you're using all six of those points to increase your Magic by 3. Except you LOSE those extra Essence points, and there's nothing here that says this boost contradicts the usual Essence > Magic rules. So, okay, you drain 6 Essence, boost it up to 12, then use all 6 drained points to go back to Essence 6, unless you're starting at Magic 3, you're not boosting nothin'. So if you're starting with Essence 6, Magic 6, 6 points of drained essence (each point taking 1-2 minutes on average to drain from a probably-unwilling, uncooperative victim) you could boost up to Essence 12, use 4 points to increase your Magic to 8, keeping Essence at 8. Still a pretty powerful buff, but it comes with consequences.

If you want to keep this Ess 8/Mag 8 thing up for very long, you run into a problem. 12 hours later you're back needing more victims. I don't care how deep you are in the Z-Zones, leave a trail of that many messed-up prostitutes or blood-drained corpses for a two-die bump and you've got the Star on your tail. Not to mention it's unprofessional; most runner groups are going to leave you in front of a precinct house with a bullet in your head and a "you're welcome" sign on your chest before you lead the authorities to the rest of them.

Im not sure if Neraph right about his point, but your severly missunderstanding the rules.
You drain 6(12 if your nostrefatu) essence, then you can use those 6(12) points to boost your magic by 3(6) for 12h afterwhich half of that essence is lost.

I did miss the "half" part, my bad - so you can use 6 essence to boost by 3, keeping 3 extra Essence and going up to 9 rather than 8. Understood. The "half the Essence points are lost" thing doesn't look 12 hours delayed to me, though - to my reading that Essence loss is immediate at the time of the boost, and THEN the boost is lost 12 hours later. The nosferatu thing - I had missed the triple-Essence exception they get. I tell ya, anyone playing one of those in my game would be held pretty sharply to their megalomanical tendencies to balance out how ridiculously powerful they can get.

Yes, but it doesn't sound as if you can start at Essence 11, drain 1, and then spend 6. Interpreting that way seems like a deliberate 'err on the side of power' issue. As always, the language is not unambiguous, but "a critter that has drained Essence within the past hour can siphon the stolen life force into other attributes," seems more likely to be talking about the same batch of Essence: the fresh stuff.

It makes less sense that you can carry around a bunch of 'old' Essence that you can't use, until draining a tiny bit unlocks all of it. It's not impossible, but it's more complicated and less direct.

well the entire essence drain/use thing makes no sense.
It also makes no sense that if you haven't freshly fed, then you're 'stuck' for a while. And eventually you get stuck for a long time.

Eventually your vampire is at 12 essence, and has to wait 2 months before he has lost 2 essence, just to spend it.
He would basically be active for a couple of weeks every year or two.

Yeah, we were talking about that last time. It's almost as if they evolved to *not* burn through all their Essence all the time. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) I'm fine with the setup that the main function is to keep you alive, and there's a secondary ability to 'burn' fresh Essence only. It's supposed to be a little buff, not your primary mode of operation.

If this were a Vampire game (WOD), there'd obvious be a lot more 'Essence economy' options, probably special Adept powers, some metamagics, etc. Could be a fun variant to play with.

....

Please read my signature.

Now, understand that what I said ("As long as you drained Essence in the last hour you can spend it as per the rules.") is exactly what you quoted from the rulebooks.

Can you show me where it states you need to completely drain the target of all blood in order to drain Essence? Can you show me where it says you have to "mess-up" people? Have you read the Dresden Files? White Court, man.

EDIT: And on the Essence Drain stuff - everything but your starting 5 Essence is "stolen" essence, so you can spend as much as you want as long as you have drained at least 1 point of Essence in the last hour and you never drop yourself down below 5 Essence.

Well, for chargen Infected at least.

I guess your definition of 'messed-up' doesn't include 'at least 16% of life-force stolen'. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Again, it's not clear that's the case, Neraph. It could easily mean only the 'fresh' Essence.

It's actually not that hard. "Stolen life force" means any life force (apparently Essence) that was not yours to begin with. So that means any Essence that isn't yours is stolen life force. Which means, if you start as an Infected, everything but your starting 5 Essence qualifies as "stolen life force."

It's a very literal interpretation, but it's certainly a valid one. And definately the most literal one.

It's an interpretation, yes. As I said. It's equally 'literal', at best, so I wouldn't tout that. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) It's also the sillier of the two option, because it requires a system in which you have to 'unlock' stored Essence by Draining a little more.

Actually, as a vampire, all of your essence beyond 1 is stolen. Read the rules, you wake up with 1 essence and must 'immediately feed'. This seems to indicate that even that 1 essence is about to go away, so in fact, all of your essence is likely stolen, but at the very least, everything after the 1st essence is stolen.

I'm not a grammar wonder-boy, but "stolen life force" is not the same as "the stolen life force". If I'm not mistaken, the use of the word "the" acts as a pointer in this case, refering to a specific case of "stolen life force" rather then all stolen life force. If read as just "stolen life force" what prevents one from using someone else's stolen life force? It's stolen life force isn't it? No, the word "the" defines "stolen life force" as a specific instance, and context of it's use is typically the most recently used example, in this case the points just taken within the past hour.

I may be wrong, but that's what it says to me.

If you start as a chargen Infected you start with an Essence of 5. That's why I specified.

Right, but that doesn't mean that the other 4 aren't stolen, it just means you start with it. Kind of like just because you start with a 6 magic doesn't mean you're born with a 6 magic.

As for the boosting thing, I've always done it as being able to burn as much essence as you want, so long as you've fed recently. Otherwise you run into, as others have pointed out, a point where you can't use the boost for several months, which is counterintuitive for something that is a self defense mechanism. Unless of course you allow a vampire to temporarily overload their essence for the express purpose of burning.

I think the point there, Karoline, is that *neither* interpretation is a good fix for that. You either have stored Essence you can't use at all, or you have stored Essence you can't use except if you happen to have fed in the last hour? Equally stupid. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) If we want to solve *that* problem, we need a house rule that lets you burn your Essence when you want.

That's what I'd use personally. Much more Dresden-Files-esque.