I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
 - Aleister Crowley

Nightly Feeding Tests

FEEDING SYSTEM:

The Conservation aspect (Your PC's "Base Blood" upon start of game) is based off your characters social and mental attributes.

The Hunting aspect (How successful your PC is when attaining blood during game play) is taken straight out of the book.

Part 1: Conservation

This system for your character can be documented on the first (left side) section of a notecard and lists the following:

• Your character's Social Attributes
• Your character's Merits/Flaws which affect feeding (listed farther down below).
• Your character's Herd rating.
• Your character's Generation

Here's how it works.

Quite simply, add up all your social and mental attributes. Divide by three. Round up if you have any fraction.
That is your base number of blood that your character will have retained.
Add to this number each dot of generation your character has, if applicable.
Add to (Or subtract from) this number any modifiers from Merits or Flaws, if applicable.
Add your Herd rating to this number, if applicable.
The total is the number of blood points your character will enter play with on Saturday night.

Here's an Example:

Steven V. Sample has 2 dots in Charisma, 4 dots in Manipulation and 3 dots in Appearance for social scores.
He has 3 dots in Perception, 3 dots in Intelligence, and 4 dots in Wits making up his mental scores.
Adding these together, he has 19 dots in Social and Mental attributes.
Divided by three, this rounds up to 7.

Steven has the Flaw "Shy" which has a modifier of -1 to feeding.
Steven is compensating for this with his Herd rating of 3.
Steven is 13th Generation and has 0 dots in Generation.

7 - 1 + 3 + 0  = 9

Thus, Steven's base number of blood points is 9.

At the beginning of the night, Steven's player throws two tests with the storytellers to see how well the world of darkness has treated him over the last week. He tests down once.

Steven starts game with 8 Blood Points to spend during the night.

Back to some mechanical points:
* You cannot botch this mandatory test.
* You simply test twice and add or subtract the test results from your base number.
* The minimum base value possible from attributes in this system is 5, if you assigned Social and Mental attributes as your secondary and tertiary groups at character generation (IE: they got the 5 and the 3 from the 7/5/3)

Part 2: Hunting

This system is documented on the second (right side) section of the card and lists the following:

• The territory your character is feeding in
• The difficult of hunting in that territory
• Your character's Perception + Herd score
• The modifiers from merits and flaws that apply to feeding.
• Your adjusted dice pool for the Perception + Herd roll
• Your base number of successes as standard in the Mod Dot system we use for everything.

Here's an Example:

Steven V. Sample is having a rough night and has spent 6 of his 9 blood after escaping from a Gangrel that tried to mug him and take his PETA T-Shirt.
Steven brings his card to a staff member to do a hunting roll.
Steven is feeding in Bellevue, and his difficulty is 8.
Steven's Perception + Herd score is 6.
The difficulty of 8 takes away 2 dice.
His "Shy" flaw takes one die away.
Steven's adjusted Hunting dice total is 3.
Rounding up, this is a base of two successes.

Steven does better on this test than he did with either his WOD test earlier or with the Gangrel and tests even. Steven adds 2 blood to his pool.

Steven now has 5 total blood points. If he feels the need to, he can continue to hunt and make another roll, but Steven's player has had enough excitment for one night and doesn't want to botch, so he opts to stop hunting at that point.

Some mechanical points here:
* You can botch this test.
* This test is done in secret with one exception, which is detailed below.
* Since this is a standard test, remember that die pool penalties from damage apply as well.

The Exception: Racks.

"The Rack" is defined in the vampire setting as a bar or other establishment (not a neighborhood, that's called "the Barrens") where feeding is easy and relatively safe. Since these are enclosed and fairly well-traveled places, everyone who chooses to feed in the rack will be free to find out how well the other people feeding in the rack are doing, as far as hunting goes. This will open the door for more roleplay and social maneuvering in general, as the VIPs of these clubs will be in close proximity to one another in another venue than Elysium.

Feeding modifiers - Hot Eats! Ghoul Treats!

The results of your nightly feeding test may be modified by merits, flaws, and your character's Clan or Personal Domain modifier, or other factors, described below:  

Domain feeding modifiers

The Domain feeding modifiers will be on this messageboard post, and on a whiteboard held high at announcements, and available at the bookkeeping table for later perusal. Characters are assumed to be feeding in their Clan or Personal Domain, or The Rack if they have neither.  If you'd like to have your character feed somewhere else, please see an ST prior to the feeding test.

Merit and Flaw modifiers

Ventrue and Giovanni clan flaws, such as Conspicuous Consumption and others may effect feeding for your Kindred. Those mentioned above add an automatic -1 feeding modifier to all feeding tests. If you think a merit or flaw other than those listed above may effect your Kindred's feeding, please see an ST. Here is a complete list of the Merits and Flaws that will affect your character's feeding (Please note, there are other Merits and Flaws that can effect your character's appearance of Humanity as well - discussed in the Humanity section):  

How Influences Can Affect Feeding in Domains

You can wield your character's Influence to affect how easy it is for Kindred to feed in a group of neighborhoods.  This is a "Use" action, and you can find these effects on the Influence Grid as well.

In general, you can either wield Influence to change feeding in a group of neighborhoods dramatically but temporarily, or slowly but permanently.  There are limits as to what you can do -- don't expect to empty Downtown permanently, for example, but your Kindred can make it much less hip to be there.

Keep in mind that when one neighborhood's feeding difficulty goes up, another neighborhood's feeding difficulty has to go down and vice versa.  This represents people flocking to the new hotspot or fleeing from the "killer rampaging bear on speed" or whatever danger your Kindred has sold to the press.

Dramatic and temporary feeding difficulty changing Influences types are: High Society, Street, and Media.  

For all of these, the following table shows the level of the Use action and its effects:

• Level 3 : Raise the diff to feed in a group of neighborhoods by 1
• Level 4 : Raise the diff to feed in a group of neighborhoods by 2        
                 Or lower the diff to feed by 1.
• Level 5 : Raise the diff to feed in a group of neighborhoods by 3
                Or lower the diff to feed by 2 and choose where 1 point of that came from.

These effects begin immediately and last for a number of weeks equal to the level of the influence spent.  You can continue to spend influence to keep the effects going.

Slow but permanent feeding difficulty changing Influence types are Politics and Bureaucracy.

• Level 4 : Raise the diff to feed in a group of neighborhoods by 1 permanently.
• Level 5 : Raise the diff to feed in a group of neighborhoods by 2 permanently,
          Or lower the diff to feed by 1 permanently.

These effects do not begin until the action completes, which per the Influence rules is 4 or 5 weeks (1 week per level).  Unlike the "dramatic and temporary" influences, if you complete this kind of action, you reap the benefits until some other force changes them.

Go to the next Rules section: Status