Precisely

Over here, soylent green day is two days after an American tourist comes to our part of Australia and goes bush without proper supplies.



No Problemo
My thought was I can choose to live off a couple of cannibals a year who I did not create (places like redmond can be a breeding ground for some serious sickos). In addition, although less flavorful, many different food choices like rapists, toxic shamans, and pedophiles can be an acceptable food suppliment.

Annoying and sickly?

Dammit you made me hunt around my storage boxes
Ok SR1 p189 references most Wendigo as following a predatory totem such as wolf, but apparently SOME (not most, or all) follow as yet unidentified totems. This is one of the first hints of toxic totems, or of horror totems.



Shadowrunners are not nice people. They aren't even citizens. They are a virus that absorbs the wealth of society whose soul it devours through the medium of enabling corporations to do secret harm. An act it generally performs after it uses its illegally acquired skills and webs of influence to acquire agreements from rogue elements in corporations to fund these diabolical schemes. The 'fixers' which guide shadowrunners are totally crazy evil fucks by any decent citizen's standard. Every single one of them qualifies as a twisted monster.

Do you understand yet?

Let me make it simple. I, as a human being, have no real life qualms with the idea of a being who gets a disease. Furthermore, I have no problems if this disease requires him to consume human flesh and souls. The above two sentances are contingent on the person choosing to satisfy his new necessity by feeding on the sickest fuckers he can find.

The fact that I have no problems sharing a house with such a guy in real life means that, by at least some human standards, his way of life can be acceptable.




That too, but i meant living on less than ideal food

The thing is that it's not some guy who gets a disease and is tragically forced to wander the lands eating the bodies and souls of people and then trying to figure out how to make the best of a bad lot. The ork in question is dead. The new creature is no more the ork in question than a fleshform ant spirit would be. It's a new creature with powerful magic and knowledge that the template ork never had. And this new creature likes corrupting innocent people into murder and cannibalism and it likes betraying its minions and then torturing them to death once they have fallen. By any human standard, a wendigo is an evil fucker. It's not misunderstood, it's not tragic, it's not sick, it's fucking evil. And it likes being evil.

If you meet a wendigo who is trying to better society and right wrongs while still being forced by its nature to do depraved acts and so on and so forth in all its emo glory, that is a creature which is sick. That's a creature which like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is confused by the memories it has absorbed and is temporarily trying to be something it is not - a metahuman with a conscience and a sense of community with other metahumans. When you see that, you are seeing a delusional Wendigo - one which believes itself to actually be some dead ork rather than what it actually is: a soul stealing virus which had already gleefully murdered the ork it transiently believes itself to be.

---

Wendigo are often quite intelligent and they are brutally powerful. You can work with them on those grounds despite the fact that they evil and naturally treacherous. You can work with ant mages too. Hell, you'd be better off working with ant mages because ant mages are purely motivated by power and growth, rather than gaining sexual gratification from betraying their allies and then torturing them to death by eating them alive. Last I checked, Lofwyr keeps a wendigo (used to be defined as a toxic shaman, now could go either way: toxic or twisted) on staff because the guy is such a badass that Lofwyr is willing to accept the guy eating the occasional employee. Damien Knight keeps Ant Magicians on staff as well, and to the best of my knowledge those guys actually don't eat any of Damien's other employees.

And from the stand point of a completely amoral shadowrunner, working with a wendigo is on the short list of extremely bad ideas. The guy literally betrays and murders team mates as part of his fucking mating dance. Working with one is worse for your health than anything else.

---

Now the other infected, those guys are horrible abominations too. But they are naturally inclined to prey upon strangers rather than allies. That makes working with them a much more attractive proposition. A Banshee is totally hard core and it periodically kills and eats its enemies. If you're a soldier or a gangster or something, it's basically just like having a Gurkha or an Angama on your team - yeah what he does is considered a crime against humanity, but he's doing it to the other guys so you can probably rationalize that away.

If I was running a mercenary company in Congo, I'd take on a Banshee in a New York Minute. The fact that he feasts on the souls of the fallen is of way less concern to me than the fact that he can take a full burst from a machine gun to the stomach and be back up in seconds without even needing to be looked at by a medic and that damnit he kills a lot of enemies. It's morally problematic, but it's the kind of thing that makes sense in a Machiavellian fashion. But Wendigo will in fact cause my troops to eat each other and then eat my troops. Bringing a wendigo on team would be a very very hard sell.

-Frank

Not at all.

If it pisses you off that much that they have a 'dietary requirement' for exactly the same amount of blood they'd always needed to facilitate essence drain - that is to say 'a token amount' - then I think you're perfectly within your rights to simply ignore the line. The fact of the matter is that they drink just as much blood now as then, but it's been clarified rules-wise that they do, in fact, have to drink blood. Without the dietary requirement line, the amount they have to drink (re: 'token') was somewhat confusing. I had a player tell me that as long as a vampire just licked a spot of blood they could drain all the essence they wanted.




If you're not gonna bother to try and support your arguments, you shouldn't make outlandish claims. Dead and cold to the touch =/= rotting. I'm also not gonna argue this any further because you obviously don't feel like checking for facts to support your POV. So we can agree to think different things.

Are you purposefully dense? The dietry requirement forces them to consume blood not only while draining essence, but to survive. They actually need blood. To survive. On top of the need of blood to transfer essence. Is anyone reading the BBB nowadays before spouting opinions?


Would you please stop with this theory of yours? It's fine if you use it to comfort yourself, but it is not supportet by anything I have read about vampires or other Infected in SR. And I have read anything I could get my greasy hands on. A virus is not an organism that takes over it's host like a puppeteer. HMHVV is a virus that fucks with the metagenes, not some alien invader from outer space. This is SR, not Body Snatchers. Also, this is not D&D, where vamps eat people because they are evil. In SR vamps are evil because they eat people. Huge difference.

I bet Tony Gonzalez (NFL player and vegan) or one of those vegan triathletes would agree. Although triathletes are a bit annoying sometimes in the way they seem to always talk about nothing but triathlons. Yes, I get it, you ran, you swam, you biked.

Is that true, or is FrankTrollman just going overboard?

I believe he is using the theories put forth by Martin De Vries. The famous SR vampire hunter.

That is the only book support for his interpretation. The Irony is that Martin De Vries is a fragging Vampire himself. As such, if he was right, he would not be hunting Vampires.

Be aware that Frank has "insights" into SR4 things that the rest of us do not.

But he like the rest of us is free to express his opinions/ideas/concepts here too.

WMS

no idea about the wendigo, but ares does have a bunch of insect spirits/shaman. i don't know that damien knight *personally* has any of them reporting to him, but it's a pretty sure thing he knows and approves of the fact that Ares has a number of insect shaman (and naturally insect spirits to go with them), and that he could have one on his personal staff if he wanted to quite easily.

You may wish to look at NAGEE #9 has some interesting views on Vampires, yes it is SR3 but still interesting ideas.

WMS

It is no longer productive to try and discuss this with you. I am going to accept that I cannot understand why you are upset that in 4th edition they have to drink blood to survive or they will sicken and die from a dietary requirement ALONG with sickening and dying from essence loss, as opposed to in 3rd edition where they would sicken and die without drinking blood because they couldn't drain essence without doing so.

I know the rules quite well, thank you.

No. It's what the rules actually say. The basic book says that a character "cannot survive" being Essence Drained to zero. It says that a creature taken by the Infection power is a "newly created critter." If you are an Ork and you are Essence Drained to zero by a critter with Infection, then by the rules you die and then a new critter is created out of your body. That's the actual fucking rules on pages 62, 288, and 289. Do not pass go, do not collect 200¥.

This is also known in character. Martin DeVries is a vampire and realized that he personally was no longer "Martin DeVries" but rather an entirely new and somewhat evil monster instead. As a sapient creature he subsequently decided to take on the other vampires in open conflict. But that doesn't make him a nice person, nor does it make him the human whose memories he has. He has published his findings and the Vampire =/= You rubric is as well known to the public as the Flesh Form Mantis =/= You paradigm is.

You are welcome to play a Vampire. It's a sapient creature with hands that can pass for a metahuman with no direct sunlight around. But you can't keep playing a human character who gets infected with vampirism - because the character you were playing is dead and now there is a new sapient creature running off with his body.

-Frank

Unless the GM allows you to play the new creature (that has access to your memories, and may internalize them).

Yeah thats fine, but in SR metaphysics character A died when his essence hit zero and it was not part of a cybermantic ritual.

Having your essence score -> 0 means you are dead (unless you are now a cyberzombie, which is a very specific way not to become dead). When your corpse gets up and walks around again, it is now a new entity that has certain elements in common with you, like all your memories.

But *you* died.

The Wendigo (a female, if I recall correctly) in S-K's employ shows up posing as an albino Sasquatch in a novel I believe, and passes her ability to talk off as having an implanted voice modulator. I don't recall which novel though.

it is one of the three in the power trilogy, but i ain't sure which one at the moment . .
other question, cybermancy being mentioned . . does one HAVE to have cyber in his body? and if so, does one have to die from essence-loss of CYBER-ware to become a cyber-zombie? else: what would happen, if a cybermancer-magician-vampire sucked somebody dry and then cast cybermancy upon him? would the now empty human become a new vampire or get changed into a cyberzombie?

It seems that the surgery and the ritual have to be performed concurrently, and essence drain would seem to screw the pooch.

The huge glaring problem with this theory, which frankly is laughable IMO, is that runs in the face of some basic facts about biology and identity. Fact one, virii aren't sentient. Metahumans are. Fact two, to all purposes that matter, (meta)humans are the sum of their memories and personality. If something has my memories and my personality, and thinks it's me, then it's me. That is why there can never be a brain transplant, only a body transplant. The person moves with the consciousness. Even radical changes to the body cannot change this. In SR4, this is exemplified by cyberzombies and cyborgs. As things go, HMHVV only brings moderate changes in comparison, some innate magical powers and activation of the magus factor, which are essentially analogous to becoming a changeling and Awakening to be a mystic adept. The fact this change comes with some new instincts and cravings does not make one a different individual, not any more than developing an addiction makes one an alien. That's all HMHVV does. It works a process quite analogous to the cyberzombie ritual, (as a matter of fact, my long-standing pet theory about the origin of HMHVV is that it is a partially successful magical-genetic experiment to replicate the effects of the cyberzombie ritual and make it automatic at infection, back then in the Fourth World, eg. from the Therans or the Blood Elves. It almost worked, giving the host immortality, resiliency, various magical powers, but it is flawed as it makes the patteren instable, it leaks Essence, and it requires periodic infusions from donors. Luckily for the host, it also provides the abilities to arrange for the Essence transfer). When the subject hits Essence 0, the virus puts the body in animated suspension, a death-like coma, keeps the spirit linked, and reworks the genome of the subject, until it awakens in a new form. But it's still the same person, with the same memories and basic personality. The virus only adds a craving for the new food, Essence, and the related hunting instinct, but to assume this makes one a monster from outer space is ludicrous. One might as well declare that heroin addicts are body snatchers.

Sincerely, in order to explain to explain the biology of the Infected, there is no need to take as fact the ridiculous self-loathing delusions of Martin DeVries, who could not reconcile himself with his new cravings, and concocted this obvious delusion about him not being him, but an alien double, to appease the inner conflict. They are "new critters" just the same way that newly Goblinized orks, trolls, and changelings, are: i.e. not at all. They are the same persons, with a somewhat changed body, from the expression of a pack of Awakened genes. The wording of the BBB is simply to mean that (until RC is published, when it will become just the matter of paying the appropriate Xp, likely to buy a Quality) PCs were forbidden to mess with game balance from getting a bunch of new nifty powers from getting Infected with HMHVV. Just that.

Flesh Forms are wholly different, they are pre-existing consciousness and sentient entity which subsumes the memories of the host. HMHVV is a string of RNA which resonates with the Astral plane, gets transcribed and inserted in the host's DNA, and gives it some new perks and weaknesses, and a couple new cravings and instincts. There is no pre-existing consciousness or subsumption. A couple new addictions and phobias, that's all HMHVV creates at the psychic level, and it's ridicolous to assume that such makes a Body Snatcher.

The problem with saying 'virii arn;t sentient' should be obvious on first principles. We don't have magical viruses running around either. Also, I'd dispute people have a soul if you want to discuss metaphysics, but in 2070 there is undeniable proof that they have one. Its health is both measurable and quantifiable too. With discreet units. When your essence is sucked out your actual soul is consumed.

While I agree today that if you take me, add some random powers and keep the same memory and personality, that is me. However, in 2070 it is not me, as my soul (measured by essence) has gone, and something else has replaced it. I am dead.

Also, the game clearly states that when you die when your essence reaches zero. Several times.

Applying real world metaphysics like you are is not a good move when the metaphysical system under discussion actually has measurable and quantifiable 'facts' forming its foundation.

Every dedicated sportsman can get annoying at some point. But so can role players, musicians or car drivers too.

My problem is, what you still ignore, is the fact that vampires now have to consume blood outside of the Essence Drain procedure. They need to drain every few months, but the need blood as regular food. Like daily.

Bah, whatever.

Back to the virus stuff. Martin deVries is a nutjob. If he actually thinks he is not Martin deVries, that is most likely simple alienation. A mental disorder, not proof for his ridiculous theory.

Ok, a drained person dies (almost). HMHVV brings them back, but that does not mean the person is now the Virus. The creature has the same body, memories, which make it for all purposes the same person. Now just add the experience of near-death with, and I qoute, "physical, mental and siritual transformation" and any change of personality can be explained without going into nutjob-country. The Virus transforms, it does not take over the reigns.

So, the newly created critter is still controlled by the same person, not by the Virus.

Also, this is not D&D. The Infection Power description does not effect all Infected equally, the wording cannot be exactly used to describe every possible outcome of the infection. Like Vamps seem to retain their personality and can restrain themselfs, but Wendigos turn into canibalistic cult leaders (sometimes) and Dzoo-Noo-Whatever turn retarded.

This Virus theory sounds more like "I found a badly worded passage, now I will twist it a lot and make fun of it as much as I can".


Actually, there is no such proof. The debates are raging. Astral Projection is proof that the conciousness can be seperated from the body, but there is no actual proof of an afterlife or souls. Just hints like the ex-bloodspirit gal in the Dragonheart Trilogy.

Sure, but its not actually near death. The book leaves no wiggle room on this matter. You are dead.

And it's not a badly worded passage, it is multiple passages that repeatedly reference the fact you die. Your soul is completely smashed by the process of essence drain. What comes afterwards is something else, and while it has much in common with you, it is certainly not you.

Edit: SR metaphysics

You have a soul. It is your essence score. It can actually be scientifically measured and has units and everything. It is exactly as real as tables, chairs and coffee mugs.

When a vampire essence drains you, and your essence score hits zero, you are dead. Do not pass go, do not collect 200yens. You have passed over. The only known process that stops this is a very complicated magically ritual that binds your soul to your body. This does not happen in this case.

After a vampire has killed you a new creature with a new essence pool (and thus a new soul!) inhabits the emptied vessel. The resultant magically created creature *does not* have your soul, your essence of being, it has a new one. It has a new essence pool it is a new entity, like the product of a fleshform merge. It is another creature entirely. This is specifically reference by the books too.

Dammit, another one, sheesh, do I have to quote?


Yeah, no wiggle room. You are almost dead.


Care to prove that? Essence is most of the time a Metagame mechanic and the rest of the time the abstract integrity of your being, which some will surely call the soul. But that does not make it so, like some claim spirits are the souls of the dead. There is just no proof. And Essence can be measured magically, which is not exactly science, since even astral space is not even proven to exist (scientifically). Science only knows when Essence drops to 0, but they don't measure it in-world on a scale from 0-6, or something. More like "OK", "not OK", "almost gone", "gone" and "beyond gone".

Hell that is the essence drain description which explicitly kills you

And of course you can measure it. Science can record the astral perceptions of a magician, and magicians have the power to exactly and precisely quantify the amount of essence an entity has. This allows you to do repeatable experiments, allow others to examine the results, and run double blind tests with multiple instruments of observation. Just think of the magician as an electron microscope.

No, Infection is scissors, and your quotes are mushroom.


Er, no? Astral Perception is a psychic sense. Science does not cover physic senses. Also, it is not science if you need to be one out of hundred to be able to prove it. If every person on the planet can prove it with training, not with inborn ability, it is science.

How many people house ruled vampires in their campaigns? Not as PCs, but also as NPCs?

In my game, Vampires are NPCs, but they are not dependent on essence, but blood. Essence drain is what they do to create new Vampires, blood is what they need to survive. It makes them a bit more like some of the modern vampire novels (Anita Blake, "Dead Witch Walking", and similar series).

*laughs*

Sure its a psychic sense, but I can dump all the sensory information received by a person out a datajack, chop it up, and then feed it back to other people, so everyone has access to that data. I can actually measure the psychic stimuluses the guy is receiving. It is measurable and quantifiable. Hypothesis' are also falsifiable. Not a problem. We can do controlled experiments, double blind tests, all that good stuff.

That aside, you are thinking about the magician the wrong way. He's not the scientist, he's the electron microscope or the supercollider. You use him as a lens to see the world via sensory uplinks.

However, if you want to get really picky there are semi permanent astral shallows in many areas so you the 99 out of 100 can go learn assensing if you want to push the boat out, in the same way we can all work at CERN.

Psychic sense are not recorded by SimSense. Remeber how nobody beside mages can understand astral space? That is because no one else can see it. Not even with SimSense.

A psychic sense is a sense that does not exist, in a way.

To shoot down shallows too, yes, other people see astral space, but it cannot be proven, since there is no corresponding brainfunction. Science is about hard proof, not eyewitness reports.

You still need to beat the astral shallows point to invalidate my theory, because it says in runner havens that mundanes in astral shallows can do exactly that.

Edit: I can see that we are not going to agree about science. Eyewitness reports ARE hard data. Just you need enough of them, you need to be able to quantify them (often hard, but can do with enough successes on an assensing test!) and you need to be able to reproduce them, both things you can do with an astral shallow no problem. Then you can statistically analyze them and frankly that is a process we apply to pretty much everything.

Got a page reference for that simsense doesn't record astral perception? I was under the impression that they could dump everything out of their brainz.

A few other notes...

Yes, it is theoretically possible that sentient magical virii might exist in the SR universe. However, there is no direct or indirect evidence which that be the case, apart from abritrarily making it so on the spot for HMHVV, so good reasoning must lead to refute the hypothesis. The most simple explanation (and therefore the preferable one) is that HMHVV works just like RL virii, only being an Awakened one (ie its DNA/RNA structure being resonant with Astral space) is able to induce chamges in the person's makeup akin to metagenes, whose working it closely mimics. Differently from the Body Snatcher hypothesis, there is ample evidence that in SR setting certain genes may induce magical changes.

Available evidence indicates that in the SR setting Essence is the holistic integration of body, mind, and consciousness. It is a finite quantiy, and when it's exausted, the person cannot survive for long, barring extreme magical and technological remedies. There is also convincing evidence that the consciousness may temporarily separate from the body in a non-material (or better astral-stuff) state. Whether, after death, consciousness may continue to exist, self-aware, independent from the body, well it's uncertain. However, there is no decent evidence that such "spirit" being separate in nature from the mind, as opposed to be an "emerging product", the spiritual record or engraving on the astral stuff of the mind.

The problem that at Essence 0 the body/mind dies, and the "spirit" departs, is easily solved by reminding that some magical foces, as proven by the cybermantic ritual, can block permanently the lethal effects of Essence exaustion, and force body, mind, and "spirit" to say together.

Available evidence



indicates that HMHVV works just like the cybermantic ritual, being able to prevent total loss of Essence. It causes a little repair of Essence integrity, during the transformation, so the subject never truly dies but enters a death-like state, it causes the Essence loss to "rebound" to a little degree. HMHVV is able to change the way Essence works to a large degree, as proven by the existence of Essence Drain. During this death-like coma, the virus reworks the biological and magical makeup of the subject to a large degree, and makes some mental changes as well (the instinctual craving for Essence). But it is always the same person that undergoes a metamorphosis.

Again, the more I look at it, the more I get convinced that HMHVV was a partially successful attempt to engineer the cybermantic ritual into something that could work automatically on an infected subject without the need for the cumbersome magical and technological procedure. The anologies are too striking.

That is a very easy request, let's start with my latest favorite hobby, quoting BBB, since a lot of people don't bother reading it before spouting nonsense. But don't feel sad, you're not alone.


Psychic is not physical nor emotive, but let's continue.


Yes, that is five senses, like not six, the sixth being psychic.

If you wish I can go on how Astral Perception is not a physical sense, or how it is not even a signle sense at all, but let's just stop here, since I made my point.

Oh, and eyewitness reports are bogus. A lot of people saw nessie, alien spaceships, apples falling from trees etc. Proving and disproving those reports is science. You cannot prove or disprove the existance of astral space. Just a bunch of people claim it exists, and a lot of stuff points in that direction, but science is at a loss to interact with it, so it cannot prove or disprove it. Welcome to the Sixth World.

while we're at it . . what happens if a vampire manages to find enough flesh to sink it's teeth into a cyber-zombie? does he get any essence out of them? probably not, but i still find it funny if i think of it *g*
Vampire:*goes chomp*
Zombie: *droools*
Vampire:*ptuey* "ick, yuck, dried up and foul"

It was the first I believe.

God damn it Wanderer. The basic rules say that there is no way to not die from having an Essence of zero in the basic rules. Infection is a basic rule, Cybermancy is not a basic rule. The rule that says a character cannot not die with an Essence of 0 does not apply to Cybermancy but it does apply to Vampiric Infection.

Do try to keep up. Actually read the whole section. The fact that he enters a state of near death for some period of time in no way obviates the fact that he actually dies.



The fuck it does.




You aren't a little bit alive. You are dead. In fact, the Infection power isn't even usable until the target is already dead.

-Frank

Are you ignoring the near-death exception thingy in the Infection powers description on purpose? Sounds like raving geek syndrome to me.

Got a quote for that?

Aside from what the book says, what makes you (meta)human? Is it your brain? your body? your past? your motivations for the future? your genes? In a sense, what you are is a result of all of these things. Your genes are influenced in the womb and ends up with a certain base brain and body structure. It is then influenced by the social environment it develops within. Our desires/dreams/goals are also a result of all these things.

When a being is infected with HMHVV, this balance changes. Assuming the resulting being has the intellectual capacity to choose their way of life, you now require a different method of living, and your lifestyle and culture must change to fit this. Whether this change is like a new spirit possessing a body it is completely new to, or whether it is the same body/mind but with such a radically different outlook as to be considered different from the original is still up in the air.

The magical-virus HMHVV is now an integral part of this new being, this cannot be denied. For Wendigos, and others who did not retain their higher thought processing, they are now very much a new being. The virus has completely changed their mind, and their memories of the past are all but forgotten; they are truly no longer what they once were. Whether you can say that that being's "soul" no longer inhabits that body is completely dependent on your religious view of the relation between body/mind/soul.

PS - Watch/read Ghost in the Shell

EDIT - I feel there is a gap in the rules when it comes to death and it's relation to magic and the soul. This issue recently came up when we were wondering if you could still Mind Probe a recently dead body. You can technically die (heart stopping) and yet still be revived. As far as I know, SR has never taken a stance on the soul and it's relation to the body (with the exception of astral forms). Can you assense a dead body? For how long after it has died (psychometry metamagic not included)?

AFAIK, the medical definition of death death is not your heart stopping, but your mind stopping.

There is no exception. Nor can there be. Infection is a basic rule.



So no, I'm not ignoring anything. The rules are quite explicit on this point.

You.
Are
DEAD.

Get over it.

-Frank

Different, it is surely a different outlook, as per any radically different experience. The point is, it is not a new self-awareness, a new person. It certainly a life-changing experience, and it may change the personality in some ways. But it is not an alien parasite subsuming the mind of the host.



BZZTT!!! Basic masitake. Wendigoes, like vampires, very much retain their sentience and their memories (they are magicians by default, remember ?). So this point is wholly invalid. You're mistaking wendigoes and dzoo-no-qua.

Sure, and it says explicitly: "The victim enters into a state of near-death, as the infection initiates physical, mental, and spiritual transformation. Within 24 hours the newly created critter revives at 1 Essence and must immediately drain Essence from another being."

It indicates that the subject never dies, it enters a "near-death" state, and it remains in suspended animation as the virus works its transformation. After a day, the process is complete, the character awakens at Essence 1. It never dies, because the Infection power does not allow the character to do.



Indeed, and it looks like someone in his dogged crusade to make HMHVV the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is willfully ignoring the rule above, which is a basic rule, and since it is specifically about the Infected, it trumps the general rule about Essence 0. Specific rules always trump general ones.

Really though. I hate to break it to you, but Infection makes that exception. I know, you will need a moment to find back your composure, but don't worry, games will go on.

[edit]And you know why this excpetion does not even break the rules? Because those Infected are NPCs, so you still can't play a character that went 0 Essence with basic rules.


I actually have. Earlier in this very thread even, I think. If I wasn't a lazy jerk I would repeat it. Look it up, under the Infection power in the BBB.

Wanderer, what partof NEWLY CREATED CRITTER do you not understand?

You are dead. It is alive. End of discussion.

----

Malicant: While the rules do say that you spend a period "near death" the rules say that you "don't die" a grand total of zero fucking times. They say that you do die unambiguously three times. Furthermore, the basic rulebook also says specifically and exhaustively that there is no rule in the basic rulebook that would allow you to not die. It's extremely open and shut.

I honestly don't know how the rules could possibly have been written more clearly. You. Die.

-Frank

Frank, I think the big sticking point here is that people don't agree with your view that the virus is somehow the sum total of what this new HMHVV infected critter is, rather than simply a force animating their corpses and giving them powers.

Part of that probably stems from the fact that people are 'infected' with HMHVV and not 'taken over by' HMHVV.

(I don't have a stock in it either way, so I don't care.)

Also, they don't die in the process. Just in case anyone missed that

And just to add something a little more serious, if Frank was remotly right, Energy Loss would be another mistake, not an exception, since it gives a critter a few hours time bevore dying when it hit's 0 Essence. Weird that. Gee, I wonder if someone interprets something in a way out of context here. Might be me, but somehow I feel safe on this one.

Okay, I'm trying to pave a middle ground here, but so be it. Anyways, maybe not all wendigos, but most and some ghouls/vampires/banshee loose their minds. I know the trolls (dzoo-no-qua) and whatever dwarves become also loose their mind. At that point I just say that whatever was the thinking metahuman is now just an animal. Whether some Wendigos avoid this, I don't know. If they do retain their memories, then you must wonder how much of what they were is still their after their transformation.

And Frank, please quit shouting, you are better than that.

I don't think this is a rules issue, as whether or not PCs can play the resultant critter is completely up to the GM. This is a fluff argument. And would someone please address what you define as dead, and what you define as "entirely new critter" outside of the narrow scope of the rules?

This seems to be a nature vs nurture argument, and I don't think either side is necessarily wrong. Sure a wendigo is very fucked up and would not be so if it weren't for the virus. However, its behavior is not entirely a result of the virus, as it is piggybacking off many learned experiences/reflexes. It does not get reborn as a baby, it is a changed adult with aspects of it's being coming from both the adult that was infected and the virus which changed said adult.

I just can't resist to take another punch at the "It's the rules" angle.

Ok, the rules say a character dies if reduced to 0 Essence. I don't even argue that. But what do those rules don't say? Right. Does the character die instantly, or does it take minutes, hours, days until his system, soul or whatever finally kicks the bucket? No one knows. Which leaves room for Infection to work without being an exception. And the character still leaves the game, so nothing really changed.

Once again, SR is not D&D. Rules, especially something written outside the actual rules sections, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Also, Martin "I don't feel like myself, which proves my theory" deVries is still a nutjob. Just in case anyone missed that. Anything that supports that loon is to be disregarded.