Ghouls don't spit out cyberware. Vampires spit out cyberware unless the incisions are made with wood or sunlight. Cyberware already present in the vampire's human body when he is created isn't spit out.

Probably and sort of. In SR4 the average person has stats of 2 or 3 instead of 3s across the board like they had in SR3, so there's ample reason for stat bonuses to be larger. However, most of the magic critters appear to be "mildly exceptional" and be designed from the standpoint of 3s across the board.

That being said, this is SR4 and there aren't "ability bonuses" any more. Now adays, there is a base value and a maximum value. The starting value is therefore 2 less than the reported value on p. 294 and the cap is three more than that. So the Vampire is 1/6 on most starts, but 3/8 on Agility, Reaction and Charisma, and 2/7 for Intuition and Willpower.
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Now Vampires have a lot of problems as PCs. The Regeneration and Magic boosts are frequently cited - and they are a really big deal. But the big killer for me is Mist Form. It's just really hard to have adventures where the Vampire can't just win all over everything with his magic power to walk through any wall thatisn't air tight.

-Frank

Actually, you are born as a vampire. Technically to create a vampire you kill a human and then literally create a vampire. It's similar to how you might kill a human and conjure an Insect Spirit. The new creature may have some or all of the memories of the previous human - but it is still a new creature.

-Frank

It is also described as being at a state of near death. However:

So yeah, the creature sits there in a state of near death, but the original character died and a newly created critter is going n a rampage.

Adept Abilities are exactly whathtey shouldn't be like, because Vampire Adepts are really broken. They can kill a human and spend the extra Essence they get for six extra Magic points for 12 hours. That allows them to have a full compliment of newly chosen Adept powers every day by draining a victim each time.

-Frank

I had always interpeted it in the more SR3 version (it sounded very similar)... aside from bone lacing and such... but I can understand that version. Very New World of Darkness-y. XD

Where'd you hear that?

Taking someone to zero Essence is the definition of them dying. You have to be dead to become a vampire; it's just how it works.

I wouldnt say theyre actually dead, even after being drained to zero essence, else vampires and ghouls would come about through the transformation of corpses, not living beings. It is, after all, a virus that is transmitted through infection.

I play it that way also. The infection power says enters a state of near death and I treat it as a pretty clear modifier of the more general essence drain rules. That's the way things are normally done: say something is so, and then state exceptions later / elsewhere. You can't say everything in every place or you're just endlessly repeating yourself.

Shadowrun has a long tradition of showing "the truth" behind the myth.

Yep, but if GMs still want reasons ot take HMHVV infected characters away from their players, there is nothing that says who they were isnt changed by the process, except with ghouls.

We know that ghouls do lose something(mental statistics) during their transformation, and for some people that makes them pretty much animals(in SR3 those are the people who fell to 0 or less in their stats that received penalties).

Perhaps unfortunately, it is already canon that a vampirized dude with cyberware keeps the cyberware. There was a cybernetic vampire in an official FASA adventure as well as the whole novel thing.

As to not spitting out cyberwares that are implanted under a knife made of wood or cut with a focused beam of sunlight, that follows naturally from the limitations of regeneration.

For that matter, if you bust out a magical incision, that isn't regenerated, but rather healed normally. And normal healing means normal cybernetic implantation.

Don't talk about "ghouls and vampires" because they are very very different in absolutely everything they do. Ghouls do not have the Infection power and do not spread through that vector. They do not drain Essence, and new ghouls do not ever spend time as an Esssence drained corpse.

Vampires are created from corpses. Ghouls are transformed from living metahumans. Vampires drain Essence from living sapient people. Ghouls eat decaying metahuman flesh. Don't confuse them when talking about generalities of the infected, because the morality and identity issues surrounding the two critters aren't even remotely similar.

-Frank

Whilst I'm sure that everyone here is willing to do our best to help make a vampire PC work, I think it really is a very difficult thing to do. If the problem is political will the vampire thing definitely sort things out? It could be a real frying pan to fire migration. Maybe if you told us a bit more about the situation, we could offer some different, non-boosting attributes to 12 suggestions.

-K.

I think that as close as a character comes to death during the vampire creation process is analoguous to how close someone comes to "death" when they experience a heart-attack or similar, before the doctors manage to revive that person. It's not death in any meaningful way. It's a little disingenuous to say that vampires are created from corpses. The vampire is not draining someone dry, wandering off, coming back later that evening to turn the mortal remains into its kin. SR4 clearly refers to a token amount of blood being taken to accompany the essence drain, so there's hardly any reason for the victim to die through physical causes, either. The vampire finishes the draining process, the victim hovers along at 0 essence in a state the book mentions - "near death" - before going back up to essence 1 with a huge appetitie. It's misleading to call that a corpse. Shedim are the animated corpses. Vampires clearly have continuity with their pre-infections selves. Shadowrun vampires are the victims of some magical disease, not living corpses.

theyre transformed by different strains of the same magical virus: HMHVV

Right. Because the Infection power does that for him. Maybe we need to go back to the core statement:

"If a character's Essence is drained to 0, the character dies."

Maybe we should bold that:

"If a character's Essence is drained to 0, the character dies."

Maybe we should check some of the other statements in the book:

"Under the basic Shadowrun rules, characters can never have an Essence of 0 or less. If they do, they die."

Maybe we should size that up a bit:

"Under the basic Shadowrun rules, characters can never have an Essence of 0 or less. If they do, they die."

OK? You hit zero, you're dead. The only exceptions are specifically not in the basic book. That's a reference to cybermancy of course, and that's not in the basic book. Vampirism is in the basic book, so it is definitionaly not an exception.

Infection, on the other hand, only takes effect if the victim has already been drained to 0 Essence. Which means that they are dead. First they die, then you roll an Infection check, and if the Infection succeeds a newly "created" critter rises up later.

So do Fleshform Insect spirits. What's your point?

-Frank

Tone it down please. I think you've made your point.

Please to give exact sources. This is not me being snarky, this is me doing some ressearch.

you're not the only one.

still...

hey, Patrick, when you're done converting the guy over to SR4 stats, could you PM them to me?

I've seen a number of people say this, but don't vampire adepts have to deal with the same magic cap of 6+initiation grade that most other things have to deal with? I'm honestly wondering about this because I can't find anything that says they can exceed the normal cap.

Not the way I read it. Go and read the Essence Drain power again; any creature with this power can use drained Essence to increase any of their abilities over the cap. At least that's how I'm reading it.

I also don't believe that vampire adepts are any more broken than vampire mages, but that's a separate conversation altogether, and one I really haven't time for this evening.

Patrick Goodman rides again?

Wow! I would hate to be your keyboard. Lets all take a deep breath (except for the vampires amongst us).

Now, lets return to what I said earlier:

I actually can read, so your repeated, bolded, capitalised quotes from the book aren't necessary. What I said is that a little after the part you quoted, it goes on to say more about it under the infection power where there is a more specific case listed as an exception. That's the normal way that well-organised information works.

That is not a statement of fact. That is your opinion. Infection clearly states that the victim enters a state of "near death." To me that sounds like an exception. The tone of your post is that of someone laying down the law. I would like you to concede that my interpretation is a perfectly valid one. It also fits nicely with the cannon flavour of vampires in Shadowrun who are portrayed as victims of some magical disease.

No. An insect spirit is demonstrably a different entity to the host that it took over. It is also explicitly stated in Street Magic to be the case. A vampire is apparently the same person that was there before due to (a) the lack of any suggestion that it is otherwise in the SR4 book, (b) various bits of flavour that imply it, such as the retention of the original character's personality and ( c ) the fact that unlike shedim and insect spirits, there is no outside entity taking over the character - vampirism is explicitly the effects of the HMHVV infection.

Sorry, but given Shadowrun's common practice of re-inventing myths to show the truth behind various legendary critters, there's no reason to bring our baggage from other systems that vampires are risen corpses. We need to look for evidence within Shadowrun that this is so, and no matter how many times you repeat the same single line from pg. 288 of the SR4 BBB, there's still a line elsewhere and a whole lot of flavour text that tells us otherwise. Sometimes you have to read the whole thing, not just the part that suits your needs. Down that dark path lies a career in law.

That is how well organized information that has an exception works. In this case however, it specifically notes that there is no exception in the book. It states this twice, both on page 68 and 288, and even italicizes the word never in order to highlight the lack of exceptions present in the book.

It says it both under the rules for Essence in general and under the Essence Drain power that is being used, it is emphasized and stated redundantly. Your character is dead. Nothing in the basic book can prevent or reverse that, and the statement you are tryig to finagle into preventing that is in fact in the basic book.

Infection is not an exception to the Essence Drain power, it is a consequence of the Essence Drain power.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I submit that you slow down and actually read the no exceptions clause which has now appeared in this thread five times:

"Under the basic Shadowrun rules, characters can never have an Essence of 0 or less. If they do, they die."
-Page 68, Emphasis as written on the page.

See, the Infection Power is a basic Shadowrun Rule because it's in the basic book. So it's actually included in the statement that says that you can't have an Essence of 0, and if you do get an Essence of 0 you die.

I have reservations about the current Essence Drain power. As it currently stands, Vampires spend their time hopping between Essence 12 and Essence 6, because they can give themselves one bonus at a time, that bonus can be up to half their Essence, and they lose an amount of Essence equal to the bonus at the end. But there's little incentive to grant themselves a bonus other than the biggest they could possibly get, just as there's little incentive for a Vampire to spend much time messing around with intermediate levels of Essence Draining. I have difficulty imagining a situation where you would meet a Vampire with an Essence of 5 or 8.

And I am honestly pissed off that Vampires get "A +6 Magic Boost". That's murder on a Shadowrunner team, but not actually particularly interesting. It's a numerical bonus that is directly replicable by just having arbitrarily more Initiate Grades. A Vampire is an NPC, he could just have more Initiate Grades.

Part of the Shadowrun Vampire Flavor was the fact that Vampires were crazy strong. Hell, Nemesis was misprinted with a Strength of "only 12" and a Quickness of 30, but he's supposed to have a Strength of 30 under the rules he was written under. Seriously. Thirty. This back in the day when a Rhinocerous had a Strength of 25. He was supposed to be able to pick up and throw a tractor. I miss that.

While we're on the subject: anyone else notice that as written Vampirism is a one-way ticket to burnout if you don't spend your time maxxing out the Essence? Essence Loss states that you suffer the normal rules for MAgic reduction when your Essence falls. The normal rules for Magic Loss are that you lose a point of Magic permanently every time you lose a point of Essence below 6 (SR4, p. 62). S as long as you bounce from 6 to 12 like a good little min/maxxer there's no problem. But if you drop to 5, your base Magic attribute drops by 1 forever. You don't get it back if your Essence goes back to 6. But if it drops to 5 again, you lose again. And so on until you don't have a Magic Attribute and can no longer drain Essence. A few months later, you'll hit 0 and of course die.

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Now don't get me wrong. Essence Drain could be way worse. You should have seen the keyboard diarrhea I got when Lars pushed through his special Force Adjusting Essence Drain for Blood Spirits (hint: the cap on Essence Drain is Force dependent: the Street Magic write-up is a one step infinite power loop). But I would like it to be tightened up a bit on multiple levels. The write-up is overly long, prone to abuse, and confusing as hell.

It's not as bad as Bloodzilla, but I argued against including that too.

-Frank

Page 62, actually. You don't seem to believe that I have read the line you keep quoting endlessly. I have. And I'm saying that elsewhere in the book it says there is a more specific use case and that specific exceptions trump general statements every time. I'm also pointing out at some length that my interpretation is well-supported by the flavour and apparent intent of the setting.

Your beloved line (and the one under the essence drain power too), says that a character with 0 essence dies. But it doesn't say 0 essence = dead, in the same way that characters who have their throat slit die, but throat slit does not equal dead. They both kill you, but they can both be survivable if there is a remedy immediately on hand. And Infection offers a remedy by giving the victim a chance to make a roll to save themselves when they reach 0 essence, and which, if successful, will bring their essence back up to 1 so that they don't die.

I can't make this any clearer to you. If you had wanted vampires not to be animated corpses then you would be endlessly quoting the other line at me. The one that says the character doesn't die. I'm not telling you how you have to interpret the rules, but my interpretation is a perfectly valid one supported by the RAW and, perhaps more importantly for purposes of deciding which way we should interpret it, it is quite substantially supported by all the flavour text.

You have skipped over a lot of what I have posted. I do not think you are weighing up all the arguments and deciding which you think is the correct interpretation. I think you have a made up mind and are trying to support your preconceptions. I disagree with your adherance to one line without context and to the exclusion of counter-information. I disagree with your tone of "I AM THE LAW" also.