Green Knight said:
Because they're still mortal. A Commoner turned into a Vampire will become a lot stronger. Likewise, a 10th-level Fighter turned into a Vampire will also become a lot stronger. Is there any reason to think that they wouldn't get stronger? Have you ever seen a case in fiction where someone who was turned into a vampire didn't become superhuman in comparison to what he was, before? According to your argument, if a character gains enough levels, then becoming a vampire won't be much of an advantage. If one were to continue that train of thought, then if one were to gain even more levels, then there would come a point at which gaining vampire abilities would become a hindrance. Neither of those examples makes any sense at all. If you get turned into a vampire, then you're going to become superhuman in comparison to what you were, before. Plain and simple. And if you're NOT becoming superhuman because of the sake of game balance, well, that's not the vampire, anymore. In which case you may as well slap a different name on the critter, cause it ain't a vampire.
In most vampire fiction, people who are much weaker than vampires get turned into vampires and thus become stronger. What happens if you are already stronger than them, why should you become stronger?
In most stories, the heroes are the only ones who can compete with the vampires, and the heroes rarely get turned. And if I'm not mistaken, if they do, they do get stronger, but not terribly much. They still need to remain weaker than the BBEG, so if they were close before, they cannot get much of a boost. What powers he does get can be handwaved with a free level gain for NPCs.
And that sort of thing is usually tied to age, not class levels. The vampire gains his abilities after centuries of undeath, not after a couple weeks killing kobolds in dungeons.
And a wizard's advancement is usually tied to his studies, not killing a few kobolds in the dungeons. D&D works oddly in the regard of advancement, but it needs to.
Besides, I'm talking about the BASE vampire. The things which most vampires have in common, which they get right out of the gate the moment they become vampires. And that's superhuman speed, superhuman strength, superhuman reflexes, and so on. A vampire gets a large suite of abilities the moment he becomes a vampire. He doesn't get his abilities incrementally in small doses. Has that ever been the case, anywhere?
Actually, super strength and the like, though common, is not present in all vampire fiction. A Ventrue vampire in VtM is not that terribly strong for example.
Those would be oddball cases best represented by some vampire variant, and not the baseline vampire. When people think of vampires, bursting into flames under sunlight is one of the things that comes to mind. One could say it's iconic. Therefore, it's something that should be part of the 4E vampire. You really want to see an iconic creature like the vampire have his abilities based off of a couple of corner examples? May as well have a red dragon that doesn't breathe fire.
Not all that "corner case". It has been done a couple of times before, especially in fiction with dominant vampires, or different kinds of them. In older novels, the sun vulnerability isn't nearly as prominent as in film. Carmilla, 1872, the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula, and thus one of the most important works in vampire fiction, the titular vampire doesn't turn into ash when exposed to sunlight. She still sleeps most of the day and is most active during the night, but she has no fatal weakness either.
So a regular vampire can survive under the sun with only some disadvantages, but a vampire with the ability to turn into a bat and a wolf would burst into flames?
Exactly. It's the road that is taken less often, but it would work fine.
Green Knight said:
Superhuman in comparison to what you were, then. It's always been the case with vampires that the boost in strength is proportionate to your original strength. A small girl turned into a vampire, for instance, isn't as strong as a grown man turned into a vampire. However, that little girls' strength is still superhuman, as she's stronger then any other child around, and far stronger then her frame would indicate.
Since when? I'm more familiar with the idea that even vampire children, or former weakling are supernaturally strong, no matter what they were before.
The "proportionate boost" is completely alien to me. I cannot come up with any example. Care to give one? Where there clearly is a "proportionate boost"?
Thinking about it, there was Interview with a Vampire, and I think Claudia didn't become super powerful. But I cannot remember that the other vampires there had super strength either, so it would be a moot point.
Once again, point out an example in which a person doesn't become superhuman in comparison to what they were before becoming a vampire. Yeah, turning an old lady into a vampire doesn't amount to much. But that old lady is still superhuman, as she's far stronger then any other crones can possibly imagine, and probably stronger then most grown men. Likewise, a body builder is also gonna become massively stronger then what he was, before. It makes no sense for the old ladies strength to go from 6 to 14, while the body builders strength goes from 18 to 20. In the latter case, he didn't become superhuman. He just added a dash of steroids to his diet.
Most Vampires in Vampire the Masquerade are more detailed, so for many clans, what additional powers they do get are based on stealth or charisma, and not on brute strength or even reflexes.
And in many of the old stories, vampires flee from humans attacking them. Even completely ordinary humans can fight with vampires without getting immediately killed by their "superhuman strength". Buffy and Blade and the like have popularized the vampire as the brute, but in the early stories, they were more about their shapeshifting, passing through walls
Nevermind that such a system would lead to ridiculous situations like a Str 14 Commoner and Str 16 Fighter being turned into vampires, and the Commoner ends up being stronger then the Fighter.
And I have already addressed it.
As we can see from this, there are very different concepts what a vampire actually should be. We certainly disagree on that. Your version seems more like the modern vampires of films and comics, whereas I tend to like the older versions more. That's not meant as an insult, I don't think you are wrong, but as we can see, it is very hard to do vampires proper justice.
D&D could include a lot of options and make everyone happy, but I think that would require a seperate splatbook. We will definitely see a monster entry for Vampires in the MM, and there will definitely be rules for combining class levels with them. What remains to be seen is if they devoted enough spaces to make them work with PCs and then have a "Vampires as PCs" sidebar, or if they didn't. My money is on the latter option, for what it's worth.
edit: Oh, d'oh. Stoker's vampires walk in daylight to. So as we can see it's a fairly recent development and not part of the genre-defining works.
