So vampiric pawns are kinda weird, and I got a few questions about 'em.

First off, Euphoria. Does it have stats anywhere, or is it just handwaved as the character being in a great mood? It's mentioned tangentially for certain drugs, but always as being a brief effect, and I can't seem to figure out if it has any actual in-game effect. The big reason I'm asking is that Renfield lasts for a full week, so it'd be a little weird if that meant a user was constantly giddy no matter what during that time.

Secondly, once Addicted, the user gains the Carrier negative quality for HMHVV I, which makes sense thematically, but when I look at the rules for Carrier it gets wonky. Emphasis on the parts that I'm having trouble with.


So... how does this work if a Vampire makes a human into their vampiric pawn?

They take Renfield and become addicted, becoming a carrier of HMHVV I. But you're only a carrier if you can't express the virus, and humans can express HMHVV I, so...? And then HMHVV I is only spread via the Infection power, but the human pawn isn't an Infected with the Infection power, so again, they can't be a carrier...? And the major downside of being a carrier is that you can pass the virus on, except that as a mere human you can't pass the virus on, because you don't have the Infection power to spread it with...? And the mechanical effect this has in terms of game systems is that you lose 2 dice on Social tests with metahumans and sasquatches who know you are a carrier, presumably because you are frightening as a potential vector for infection... except that you aren't because you don't have the Infection power and can't spread the virus which you can't be a carrier for but which you are?

What the hell is going on here?

Third. How does the "Addiction" work? I get the Addiction Test threshold of 3. So you can theoretically just take Renfield for the beneficial effects, and if you manage to beat the tests, never get addicted. But you're kind of supposed to get addicted, since the only real way to get a hold of the drug is from a willing Infected, and since the entire point of the drug is to give them a stable supply of Essence, and since it costs them Essence to create it (which they get back from feeding off of the excess Essence you receive from the Renfield). You basically can't get the stuff unless you're in a symbiotic relationship with an Infected who needs the spare Essence, so NOT being addicted isn't really an option.

I suppose the more important question is this - can you get rid of the addiction? If you go cold turkey and tough it out, what happens? Do you lose the negative qualities (Carrier, Dietary Requirement: Renfield, Essence Loss) that you gained when you first became addicted? Do you keep them, but no longer suffer addiction cravings? And what about the Essence gains? I assume that you don't actually gain Essence from Renfield until you are "addicted" and transform into a full fledged pawn, but if you kick the habit (and especially if you keep the Essence Loss), can you still gain fresh Essence from taking more Renfield without actually becoming addicted again?

Back to cravings for a moment. The frequency of cravings for the various levels of the Addiction negative quality is clearly tuned for ordinary drugs with short durations measured in mere hours or minutes, not days. The only other drugs with comparable durations are Longhaul and Oxygenated Flourocarbons, and those both have special rules for overdosing. I dunno. It just doesn't make any damn sense to suffer cravings for a drug that is currently in effect. How can you be jonesing for a fix while you're actively high on one?

How should this be handled? Custom craving frequencies per GM fiat? Or perhaps only apply cravings when the character is between fixes? The latter option seems simpler and flat out more logical to me, and it makes it much more reasonable to imagine vampiric thralls who live with their masters longterm (thanks to Immunity: Age) and with a decent body and willpower aren't utterly ravaged by the effects of addiction.

Fourth, and I think finally...

Can a human vampiric pawn later become a full fledged vampire? Do they lose the Addiction to Renfield if they do, as well as the negative qualities that addiction imposes? For that matter, can other Infected benefit from Renfield? A Renfield empowered ghoul sounds interesting enough, but what about Special Infected? Can two vampires mutually addict each other, feeding off each other? There's absolutely no mention of any limitations as to whom Renfield may affect, after all.

~Umi

Renfield's six kinds of messed up. Some of that is legacy, some of it is my fault, some of it was after-it-left-my-hands-editing. I'm working on it.

Ooh, it's actually being worked on! Neat!

I'll leave you to that, then, and in the meantime I'll try to get some discussion and ideas from the usual suspects.

~Umi

Euphoria isn't statted out to my knowledge. When I had players get addicted to Renfield, I had it express as a constant rush and it amplified the sharp points of their personality. The risk-taker felt invincible and took bigger risks, the street sam went from an asshole to sociopathic.

Carrier -- I had it travel in their blood. When they were assensed, the disease showed up. One of the players was working on finding a way to Infect people with it, and I sent him down the Arcana and Enchanting mine to develop a unique enchantment for the Infection power.

The Addiction--once you start losing Essence, IMO, you may be able to kick the habit but you won't lose the Essence Loss and Carrier problems. Kicking the habit is basically just going to mean that you are in control while your body withers and dies on you. As far as, taking Renfield after you broke the Addiction, I'd allow it for the boost, but increase the Addiction threshold since addicts who return to their drug of choice usually get addicted again. I had daily jonesing after the week of high wore off.

A constant rush and amplified personality? Sounds like a week long cocaine hit. Not sure that seems right to me.

Having the disease be present in the blood and noticeable with assensing makes sense, but anyone with a knowledge of how the disease is spread should be able to easily recognize that it can't be spread without actually being Infected, so maybe the social modifier should be dependant on whether someone understands that fact or not. So if Dr. Magicstuff assenses the carrier, he'll be intrigued but not alarmed, but if Joe Janitor overhears that the character is a carrier, he's gonna treat them like a leper.

As for addiction, I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to simply maintain a mild addiction, rather than break the addiction and stay clean? Although if you're going to keep suffering Essence Loss even once you kick the habit, you should also keep getting fresh Essence from new doses of Renfield if you do manage to avoid becoming readdicted.

~Umi

I'd say the intent is that you get the carrier negative quality because you've got the virus running around in your system, but since you havnt been essence drained to 0 essence, it cannot express and make you a vampire. Its just there, in your system, dormant.

I think that if you ever get essence drained by anything at that point to 0 essence, the infection power should be a nonissue. Youre already infected and your body is now in pretty much the exact condition the virus needs to express. You wake up a vampire, wether you like it or not. I think this should also be the case if you let the drug take you to 0 essence.

Spotted something else - technically all "Advanced Character Options" carry the Distinctive Style penalty. Since Carrier is technically an Infected quality, it's technically an Advanced Character Option, and by strict interpretation should suffer Distinctive Style.

Obviously, however, this makes no gorram sense, as carrying a virus that you are unaffected by doesn't produce any sort of visible physical effects that could qualify as a Distinctive Style. If anything, it might make you Astrally Distinctive (since a strong enough Assensing can detect the virus), but Distinctive Style doesn't apply to astral or matrix searches, and there is no other separate quality to represent that effect.

~Umi

The distinctive style rule makes no sense, because a Class 1 Surge Character with Biocompatibility and an Allergy should not be more distinctive than one without SURGE and just these qualities.

Another thing I'd like to know is how to actually make the stuff. It mentions some "minor enchantments" performed by the Infected, which I take to be some application of Enchanting, perhaps along the lines of a magical compound.
Which species of Infected can produce it? Banshees, nosferatu?
What about buying or selling it? If there's demand for it, there has to be supply.

1. No stats are given for euphoria, so I'd default to the definition of intense happiness and confidence.

2. Any blood test would show them carrying HMHVV. The fact that the rules for Renfield came out later than the rules for Carrier allows Renfield to supersede the limitation that you must be an Infected to be a Carrier. This is how all games ever have run their rules - the latest rule is the most correct one (until Errata comes out).

3. You can get rid of addictions just like any other Negative Quality. You pay karma = twice the BP of the Addiction and you're addiction free. It's that simple. Technically you'd still be left with Essence Loss, but since that is a result of the Addiction that (and the Immunity to Age and a couple other things) should disappear also. Also remember that while addicted they gain a Dietary Requirement for Renfield - they must eat 5% of their bodyweight of Renfield per week (Runner's Companion, page 78, Dietary Requirement, first sentence) or they'll starve to death.

4. Of course an addict could become a vampire. They would not lose the Addiction to Renfield (and actually there's nothing to stop the Infected from being Addicted to Renfield). Yes, two vampires could addict each other and siphon each other, just like a vampire and a wendigo could eat each other for eternity because of their Regeneration. They still count as metahuman, remember?


Apparently since the enchantments are so minor, simply being an Infected allows you to perform them (no Enchanting skill required at all). Any Infected with HMHVV I can make Renfield (Running Wild, page 68, Renfield, first sentence), which means banshees, dzoo-noo-qua, goblins, nosferatu, vampires, and wendigo can make it (Runner's Companion, page 83, HMHVV I, first sentence). Since there's no listed price or demand it lies to the GM to determine.

That is, until we get errata.

Someday in my copious unstructured free time, I'll address all of this post because it deserves it. Not a lot of free time at the moment.

I had some serious space issues to contend with, and the sad fact is, I wasn't yet aware of all the implications of what I was doing. I'd come back from a long dry spell, and things weren't going at an optimum level. It was ... ugly. A lot of the confusion is still my fault, but there were outside influences on what I was able to do, both from my side and from development's side.

That said, it was supposed to be a bigger deal, and the Dietary Requirement (as a fer-instance) wasn't quite what I was actually going for. I messed that up big-time. The fix isn't as easy as I'd like it to be, either. Not trying to make excuses, just trying to explain why some things are so messed up, and why fixes aren't as forthcoming as I'd like them to be. This is definitely, however, one of those cases where RAW came out so far off of RAI, and I apologize for that.

Working on that. And then I'm going to have to figure out how it works in SR5 when I get that opportunity.

Just know that I know it's a fiasco, and as the guy who wrote it, I'm sorry.

It seems workable, at least, Patrick. No need to apologize so much. I know from personal experience that putting out work you aren't happy with is a bummer, but don't beat yourself up so much.

Half the reason Dumpshock is a community is to quibble over the rules. Sometimes it isn't even just for absurd optimization and exploitation, too! There have been far more broken rules that were far more core to the game experience. We kind of... not sure if this is the right word, but... enjoy poring through the rulebooks and asking each other, "Wait, does this mean what I think it does?" and then contending with each other over how best to read and interpret a rule, and then once we reach some form of consensus, how best to make use of that interpretation to make more interesting characters/NPCs/adventures/etc.

I'm personally prepared to stat up a Renfield character just from the discussion materials I've garnered in this thread. It may not work exactly as intended, but it at least works, and doesn't seem overpowered.

~Umi

I just wanna know so I can have a vampire PC who goes around doping up his own minions whenever he likes.

I absolutely understand, and we've talked about it before. I was simply laying out how the rules currently work with the addendum of "'till errata."


As one who is going to be getting into practicing law soon, I do enjoy the debates. I view it as before-the-job training. I currently have a brain-bending concept that I have to double-triple-upteen-check before I launch it on here - it'll completely change the way you view anything with Regeneration.

Oh great. Now I feel a strong compulsion to pore through the books to find what possible clever tricks you might have in mind. There goes the rest of my evening.

Edit: My preliminary searching has provided two interesting, if not terribly helpful, tidbits. First, the Regeneration power for Spirits who possess or inhabit a corpse will return that corpse to "the semblance of life". I did not know this, and it sounds awesome! Second, since the actual critter power Regeneration doesn't regenerate certain types of damage, would it not be possible to exploit that fact? Enchanted surgical tools, perhaps? Or because the brain and spinal cord cannot be regenerated, maybe that makes certain headware viable?

~Umi

No. What I had in mind did not check out. It was based around how Damage Overflow worked, by which the rules do not exactly provide us much to go with. When your character goes to Overflow +1 you die. Critters with Regeneration, however, are not dead until they make a Regeneration Test. Theoretically, if you do not count the excess damage that's over your Overflow meter (like, you take a bajillion stun, it overflows physical, goes to Overflow, then fills that, and you ignore the rest) then critters with Regeneration would be nigh-invincible. For example: Body 3 vampire takes 30P damage from I-don't-care. It fills his 10 boxes of Physical, then his 3 boxes of Overflow, and you ignore the other 17 because there isn't a track for them. Next Combat Turn, all he needs to do is get one hit on his Regeneration Test to get back up fine from the encounter. The only way to make sure they're dead is by doing neural damage, or killing them with magic. Exposing them to their allergy only prevents Regeneration Tests but doesn't make them dead (since they haven't taken the Test yet) so you get the thematic take-stake-out-of-vampire-brings-it-back scenario.

I still think I can make an argument for it, but because of the non-existent elaboration on Physical Damage Overflow (the majority of the text only handles with taking and tracking it, with one part of a sentence devoted to "if you take one point of damage more you die") it would be largely outside the realm of provability.

Oh, another thing that makes no sense with Infected is that while Vampires are Hibernating (lack of air) they don't suspend their Essence Loss. Trap a Vampire in an airtight chamber for a year and you're guaranteed a dead vampire.

Last addendum to Infected - all infected ever should get into blood magic because a 1,000,000 live capture bounty is better than a 500-15,000 dead bounty.

Why would you ignore the 17 leftover points of damage? It's still overflow damage, it just overwhelmed the overflow monitor something fierce. The vamp in question is, well, toast.

I've said it before: The best way to kill a vampire is a solid head shot. The next best way is brutal, overwhelming force. Your example is fine one of the latter.

More later.

I personally would rule that, no, you should not Lose Essence while hibernating. You're already "dead" for all intents and purposes. You cannot act in any way until an outside force exposes you to oxygen. And that's right in line with classic vampire lore, with vampires being sealed away in airtight caskets and reviving centuries later.

As for dabbling in Blood Magic, sometimes death is preferable to what awaits you should you be captured alive. Plus, with that big of a bounty on your head, you're gonna be motivating a lot more people with a lot more skill and resources into hunting you down.

~Umi

What possible purpose would there be behind being captured alive other than having the satisfaction of killing them yourself? The bounty is placed by the Draco Foundation, yes? Since such a large body would not be motivated by the need, there must be something that they think they can learn from blood mages that is extremely valuable. Thats a story hook for your blood-mage PC right there.

Hmmm... Blood-Mage PC... That is a monumentally Bad Idea right there. *shrug*

MEH.

*shrug* They are antagonists for a reason, in my opinion; much like the Infected.

If i were a PC, i would find a fellow blood mage PC a great idea. Never earned that much money in such a short time-span.

Heh... Indeed...

Hence why I said the rules don't really support it either way. If you look closely a character doesn't even have a tracking method for Physical Damage Overflow - it's just a "number of boxes equal to your Body" that you have to remember. Damage done past your Overflow has only one half of one sentence devoted to it - which makes sense, because only in fringe cases would you need that ruling, but I've found that fringe case. The RAW simply does not provide enough RAW to unquestioningly answer this either way.

Again, I'd like to reiterate what I said at the very beginning of that post - it didn't pan out, mostly due to a lack of information. We can try to RAI it and we can use "Common Sense House-Rules," but at the end of the day those are just suppositions.