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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Taraxia" data-source="post: 3142889" data-attributes="member: 42426">The idea that just *anyone* who *ever* gets killed by a vampire turns vampire themselves is a somewhat modern twist on the tale, and one that doesn't work for a lot of dramatic reasons that go beyond the math of the matter. Certainly ancient vampire myths didn't work that way, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, White Wolf and other famous modern vampire mythmakers don't portray vampires that way, and WotC created the spawn/true-vampire distinction for exactly this reason.Besides, the exponential growth only really works if vampires *must* feed on a regular basis and are always successful if they attempt doing so (as opposed to vampires who are portrayed as "sleeping" for long periods of time until they awaken and get hungry) and that once created a vampire never dies of accidents or being killed. (If vampires did work this way, then the smartest thing for a vampire to do would be to immediately attempt to kill its vampire "children" before they could compete with him -- and vampires are, after all, heartless and evil, and capable of simple math.)I mean, it's a cute way to teach people a certain way to think about numbers, but it hardly constitutes any kind of "proof" that vampires don't exist, if you happen to believe in vampires. It just says that this simplistic schoolyard theory for how vampires work is probably false.BTW, Libris Mortis gives rules on how to handle Vampires' dietary needs. A Vampire has to drink once every three days, but this does *not* even necessarily involve the death of the human he feeds from -- it's 1d4 Con damage, which isn't enough to kill the average healthy adult in D&D (who has, on average, 10 Con), just enough to make him feel quite ill.Unfortunately, D&D also gives vampires a "soul energy" draining attack, and *that* is an itch they have to scratch every day, and that is much more likely to kill the target since it drains 2 levels and most peasants only have 1 HD.This wouldn't result in an exponential increase in vampires, since all victims of energy drain rise as spawn, but it would result in a vampire having to carry out a quite astonishing rate of murders and not be caught in order to survive, which means, no matter how careful the murders were, also quietly spiriting away or killing off quite a few annoying spawn.In a world where vampires are not a cautious secret society that lurks in the shadows of all civilization but instead this rare and terrifying great big fortress-in-the-wilderness capture-a-whole-wagon-train-and-eat-them antisocial menace, this makes sense, and that's why this is how vampires generally are in D&D. D&D worlds, after all, do *not* usually posit an ecology of vampires making more vampires endlessly in the shadows of the city underworld a la Vampire: the Masquerade, but of vampires being rare events, really evil souls who turn vampire, become scary menaces in the countryside for some time, and then are eventually killed (which is also what the authentic vampire myth is like).In the Eberron setting, where vampires are more integrated into the whole secret-society mindset of the Blood of Vol religion, Keith Baker, the Eberron creator, has recommended adapting the Libris Mortis rules so that the hunger for soul energy only comes once a week. With that amendment, it becomes easy for a vampire to go underground and remain hidden almost indefinitely, as long as he has a plentiful supply of strong humans to drink from and can get away with, say, one murder a week -- or not even that, if he can find people of great spiritual force (i.e. higher levels) to target with his drain. One per day is hard to find, one per week, not so much, especially if he has some kind of mortal servant or consort who can regularly provide this service. *One* high-level character, given a week between feedings, could easily regenerate those negative levels for him. And with two or three high-Constitution cattle to drink from, a three-day feeding period is plenty of time for them to recover from ability damage.</blockquote>

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