Interesting... I find myself beginning to get less use out of these things. In this case, not only is it information that I don't personally use in my campaign (not many monsters, which is not a big deal), but it's trying to give me official rules. The best part of the article was him saying, "Okay, but if you want vampires to work like that in YOUR world, just change it."
I'd rather read an article that says, "Okay, to answer your question: Do it however you like. This is how the default vampire works -- we did it this way because it's easy to keep track, because it used a familiar mechanic, and because it let PCs get blood-drained without risk of vamping out. If you want to change it to something more complicated, that's fine, provided that you're playing a vamp-centric game so that the complicated rules are worth it. If you want to remove vamping due to negative energy slams and make it due to Con drain, that's fine, but it does mean that your blood-drinking just got a LOT more scary, and you'll have to explain why the entire world hasn't been vamped by now. And if you want to ditch the negative energy drain altogether, as it doesn't fit your idea of vampires, that's great, but consider adding in other abilities to compensate, since a vampire without negative energy slams isn't really that dangerous." That would give novice GM's a tool to use to make their own games.
I dunno. Maybe I'm not the target audience.
