Why not? I am certainly capable of drinking my own blood. Unfortunately, humans were not designed to exist entirely on the ingestion of blood.

That would be "taking energy out of the system and put it back in". Oh and...call me what ever you want, but I would have a vampire needing more blood if he he had lost larger amounts of it, due to wounds or such.

You won't actually obtain any nutrition from it, however, and will, in fact, loose nutrition and hydration. And your body will spend even more nutrients and even more fluids trying to replenish the lost blood. And lets not even get into the negative effects caused by the reduction in blood pressure that accompanies such severe blood loss. You're better off just going hungry and letting your body's natural survival mechanisms break down your fat while searching for something to eat.

to the original question, i would say that no, type O doesn't help vampires, purely because of the reason they need to have deltaware. basically, the cyber counts as deltaware because they have to do all kinds of custom treatments to get around the regeneration and shapeshifting abilities. so imo, it's not a matter of the bioware needing to match their immune system as it is that the process has to be designed specifically for them.

now, perhaps another 10 years down the road, if the infected become common enough that research is made into developing generic implants for vampires (or wendigos, or banshee, etc) then at that point type O would come into play imo.

Irrelevant. Fluff to a crunch fight.



Which would lead to the most awesome Whedon ripoff EVER.

"Everyone knows about Delivery Day."

Actually, on second thoughts, how many Chemical Glands may be necessary to produce all the components of metahuman blood that are necessary to fulfill a Dietary Requirement ? Logic tells they are going to be a finite, limited number.

Or we could just take metahuman bone marrow, stick it in a plastic bag, figure out how to keep it alive(and producing) and connect a tube to vampire stomach.

Oh wait I think that counts as cyberware, not teh bioware (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I readily agree it wouldn't work on its own, because of the thermodynamic issues involved, but I can certainly see it to work in combination with a deltaware Digestive Expansion implant. The implant to digest normal food and derive energy and proteins from it, one's own blood to fuflill the paranormal component of the Dietary Requirement.

Crunch vs. Fluff fight eh? While it's a crunch and fluff question to me, never forget:

Style over substance! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

in this case, the fluff is driving the crunch.

that is, the fluff in question is the reason the crunch in question exists in the first place. separating the two is not desireable. assuming you don't operate under the assumption that said fluff, not being anywhere called out as being fluff only, may also be crunch.

however, if you want to get technical about it, then

so, if you want to get technical about it, it is not deltaware for the purposes of interacting with the regeneration critter power. just with the body.

as such, you can tape a chunk of wood to yourself, get the 'ware in question, and as long as you don't ever stop being affected by your allergy you won't just regenerate and reject the implant(s). the implants will in fact cost less essence, but should you ever use the regeneration power, you can kiss those implants goodbye, and it won't be pleasant for either the vampire or any people watching i'm sure.

Heh, I never intend to play an infected, I just like poking around, creating characters....

My personal opinion is that the Type O thing can go either way. I guess it's a matter of wording (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Hopefully this could be something officially addressed or errated so this kind of goofy crap won't happen (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)


The Chemical gland is a weird piece of ware to me....I never really know what it can produce. I thought they could produce anything that occurs in anythings body, like snake venom, insulin, maybe blood? It's not really that useful for the cost, since most characters are gonna be feeding all the time for essence to burn, but the concept struck me as funny.

Requiring Delta is is not a question of how it is implanted, but rather the gene-matching being good enough that Regeneration does not reject the implant as foreign material.

Only if the Infected isn't a high-level Magician or (Mystic) Adept. Otherwise, because of the way Essence and Magic interplay, they will hoard Essence like gold.

True.

That happens to be a non-issue many times. Assuming they always max out their magic before initiating again, they still must only maintain 6 essence to avoid magic loss. If they happen to be a Grade 5 Initiate with Magic 7, they only loose magic once they drop to 1 essence. Because of this, I would expect most Essence Loss characters to maintain a high Initiate grade in comparison to their Magic.

it's a little bit of both. the materials are important, but so are the special drugs and the special surgery (the former presumably being used during the latter).

The special surgery requirements increase the availability time intervals. Deltaware is to avoid bio-rejection. They are two separate issues. You could have obtained a deltaware implant, but cannot find anyone to install it because of the difficulties involved. Or you can know numerous people capable of installing such ware, but not have access to delta.

Delta from what I recall is also quality work and not a massproduct. It works more effectively in matters of how and howmuch energy it actually drains out of your biomagnetic field and so ond and so on. It is supposed to be less inversive on every level.

heh, makes me think of the leap of logic marvel made when wolverine hitched a ride across the pasific with a cargo ship as a stow away and eating his own arm muscles to not die from hunger...

but then thats comics. if someone tried something similar in SR, i guess it would time to dust of that old orbital bovine thingy (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Here's another reason why vamps must drink blood: they have "Dietary Requirement: Metahuman Blood". Above and beyond the fact that it's arguable that blood can be considered "metahuman" if created by a vampire's chemical gland... or the problem with the law of conservation of energy (somehow the vampire is producing blood without intaking anything...?) there's still one other reason they're up shit creek.

It's a dietary requirement. They must eat it. It doesn't say WHY vampires must drink blood. It doesn't say if it's because they have to biologically digest it, or because they have a magical parasite that needs it, or because they absorb chemicals through their teeth to keep said teeth strong and shiny. But the fact is that having a gland produce a substance and put it directly in your body ain't exactly the same as consuming it. What are you gonna do, line the vampire's mouth with chemical glands that constantly secret blood into their mouth?

Don't believe me? Assume you HAVE to drink milk. And then imagine what'd happen if you had "chemical gland: milk" that dumped it into you.

Eew.

Well, the gland can be placed anywhere, and can bypass that problem pretty easily (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Just because it is in the mouth doesn't mean it is always oozing, I think it can have a trigger in a muscle.

The Infected are still metahumans. Quoting RC, p. 77.



This is effectively dealt with if the Infected can feed on normal food (as a vampire or banshee can do with a Digestive Expansion). This feeds the body with the building materials that the Chemical Gland can use to produce metahuman blood.



Actually, it says why. Cfr. the Dietary Requirements sidebar. It's a combination of biological reasons (their digestive trait has specialized for blood) and magical ones (the virus needs to feed on something with the "metahuman blood/flesh" aura on it). Digestive Expansion deals with the first issue, chemical-gland-produced blood deals with the latter issue. Of course, the virus's parabiological sustenance also needs periodic Essence intakes, and nothing short of feeding on a clone will fulfill it.



Actually, that is exactly the same thing. Here the chemical gland works just like RL enteral or parenteral nutrition. LAso notice that nothing bars from setting up a chamical gland to release blood in the vampire's digestive trait, instead of the bloostream, if need be.



Constantly is wild exaggeration. It would boil down to releasing half a liter of blood a day. The equivalent of gulping down a couple Pepsi. Hardly an hassle, espeically if the gland can tell the host's nervous system when it's about to release, so he can be ready to swallow.

First:


Having an umbilicus-like connection to a chemical gland and calling it the same as 'consuming blood' is a hell of a stretch, even for cyberware. If I have "Dietary Requirement: Mustard", having mustard injected into me with a gland is probably not the best way to fill my terrible need for condiments. The umbilicus delivers blood to the child's bloodstream and liver, which definitely bypasses any sort of "consumption via stomach" argument. You're correct, however, that the chemical gland can release into the stomach. It cannot, however, pump into the bloodstream and be considered to have provided nourishment via consumption.

Second:


No, it's really not. Since a chemical gland can produce 3 doses, of say, ricin and can do so every couple of hours. One lethal 'dose' of Ricin is 40mg of it. Let's up that and assume 100mg, because we wanna kill trolls and elephants. Actually, scratch that - assume it's one GRAM, because behemoths have to go. A half liter of blood is about 500 grams. To produce a half a liter of blood per day, you'd need to have about 166 chemical glands going full tilt all the time, which assuming you wanted to make constant, would be a fairly constant oozing of blood from the mouth, OR a very swollen face.

The 'dose' size that chemical glands produce is grossly smaller than anything that would be required by any adult vampire.

I agree that the difference between the size of a typical c.g. dose output and the amount of the dietary needs for a typical Infected is the main difficulty to make the c.g. substitution strategy work. It critically depends on how much you can adjust the maximum output of the gland upwards.

Does it ever specifically state how much it makes per day, besides calling it a "dose"? I don't think so, so we can't really get too crazy on listing off specific volumes.