How to handle lowering Generation to third or lower with Blood of Potency?

Question

Blood of Potency (Path of Blood •••) allows lowering one's Generation, and this power is very underestimated: noone among those who I asked has seen it's great potential.

With appropriate optimization, one may have 11 dice + 2 automatical successes on this power: Willpower of 10, True Love 4-pt merit, Path of Mars • power, and lower his or her Generation to 3d or lower (expected amount of successes is 6.4). A player could use one success to prolong the power and make it last 2 hours, and use 5 successes to lower his Generation by 5 -- to 3d. However, stats of such low Generations aren't published -- what should I do?

How should I handle such a situation if a player attempts to do it while I am the GM? What should I suggest to the Storyteller if I try something like this and he has no idea what to do?

Please, don't forget to back your answer up with playing/GMing experience or books.

Answer 1

I'm going to challenge your question a bit.

Why would you do it?

I don't understand why your character would cast this power as you describe it.

• The only increase you experience is a bigger blood pool (once you have slacked your thirst) and you can spend more blood points per turn than before.
• You can pump your physical attributes to a higher level
• None of your stats (Attributes, skills or disicplines) are increased.
• The ritual can't be used to learn more advanced disciplines / rituals.

Which leads me to the True Love merit. As an ST I would require a good explanation for your character to be so focused on power. It takes actual play time to learn how to cast this in an optimal way (paid for in failed attempts and favors / lessons from other Tremere). Time spent on studying means time away from your True Love.

A merit is a boon for your character, but it still has strings attached to it. Ignore them for too long and the merit is gone.

A more practical application?

What about:

• Lower your generation by two steps (costs two successes): you go from 8th to 6th. This effectivly doubles your blood pool (I hope you have some snacks nearby) and the number of blood points you can spend each turn.
• Use the remaining successes (about four)to extend the duration of the power. This gives you four more hours, for a total duration of five.

Now you can run around as a 6th generation character (with regards to bloodpool and blood point/turn) for half a night. This gives you a lot of options* if you know that you're heading towards a combat heavy zone, such as:

• The chantry is attacked by a Sabbat war party!
• You're on the trail of a Sabbat party and are going to smoke them out.
• The city is under siege and your True Love is in danger, go forth and be the Knight in Shining armour!

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Vampire doesn't really lend itself to throwing around Antediluvean levels of power. Which is reinforced by them generally not being described in much detail. Some things are better left unexplored.

If you do want some descriptions, then it's best to check the Time of Judgement: Gehenna book. On p 181- 182 they summarize all level ten discipline powers as Plot Device.

Cain can be boiled down to: You * lose.

If you want to throw this level of power around, then I suggest to talk about this with your ST and fellow players (to see if they are on the same page). If they agree, you can start a new chronicle in the Second City, Carthage (as 4th or 5th generation childer) or start with either the Transylvanian or Giovanni Chronicles (were you start as 6th generation).

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*I'm assuming that you character has some physical disciplines. In our group it was common that each character had some points in Celerity, Fortitude and Potence.

Answer 2

Back in the 90s when our group played V:TM to death and beyond, we treated anything antediluvian as essentially godlike. To be honest, 4th & 5th gens were pretty godlike as well in comparison to what characters could be at the time (max 7th gen at creation IIRC).

3rd Gen and lower are kindred whose torpor dreams can shape actions and destinies, whose conscious or semi-conscious presence in the world turns it into their own personal chessboard. We had one such possible kindred show up in a campaign and once the players suspected what generation might be in play, we agreed on a meta level to basically handwave all the necessary powers. To assign numbers a) instantly makes players want to kill whatever it is and b) usually can't match up to the 'reality' of what the character is capable of. The implied disparity always seemed to me to be so great that it would be pointless to quantify it.

But we weren't playing murderhobo V:TM; other groups' mileage may vary.

If you really need numbers, you could start by at least doubling what Methuselahs can do (4th & 5th Gen). At that point you're well into buckets o'dice territory, which is another argument in favour of no numbers. ;)

From the player side: If one of my Seattle or NY campaign players had managed to simulate or become that generation, I would pretty much have given them free rein. At that point you need to be a responsible player and not trash the fun of the rest of the table -- but such a situation can be awesome RP and fun as well.

And as it occurs to me that this might not be as evident as I think it is -- you should discuss the possibility with your ST, partly to make sure it won't be overly disruptive, but mostly to engage in a conspiracy of fun so that you, the ST and the rest of the group can get as much mileage out of such an action as possible.

Dang, now I want to play V:TM again.

Answer 3

How should you handle it? Say no....

Generally, I would simply not allow this. As others have mentioned, this is only questionably within the rules as written and clearly an abuse of the rules. The lack of published stats for those generations also implicitly goes against it. As a Storyteller, I would simply forbid the path of blood from lowering generation below 4th and as a practical matter I would discourage going below 6th.

Also, true love's extra dice can only be invoked if the true love is involved....

Unless...

Under the right circumstances, I might make an exception and allow it. Imagine that the true love is being held hostage but instead of deciding to pay the demanded ransom our Tremere hero decides they want to do a little preparation and then charge in and rescue the True Love.

Then, the true love merit's extra dice are fully justified. I might even decree the character's willpower pool is temporarily at 10 and completely refilled without other shenanigan's because our character is just that focused and that desperate. If the dice are with them, I would let the generation drop to 3rd for a short term. Mechanically, I would say that a 3rd generations maximum blood pool is so vast as to be effectively unlimited and that the maximum blood spent per turn is limited only by the available blood pool.

But this is a rare and short term situation. For a limited time, that character has exceeded their normal limits so they can be an Unholy Avenger. That night they will rain down death on those that have chosen to threaten their true love or die in a fiery blaze trying... As the storyteller, I might put on Disturbed's Vengeful One as background music and indulge in ample purple prose such as referencing Poe about how neither the angels in heaven above nor the demons down under the sea could ever dissever the soul of our hero from the True Love.

But that is the climax of a chapter in the Chronicle. It is a special situation. The next session would probably be denouement about the characters dealing with the fallout of the rivers of blood they created in the last session and the session after that would move to a new chapter with the spotlight shifting more onto a different character.

Why the resources spent don't change this...

The self answer suggests that this trick should be allowed because of the resources it takes to get there. The problem with this suggestion is that barring this would not mean those resources were wasted at all. Willpower is almost universally useful. Thaumaturgy is a powerful discipline that I have invested all three starting dots into as a Tremere without thinking about shenanigans like this...especially if I know the storyteller will be lenient in letting me learn the rituals which are often more useful than the main path power...

The only investment we are talking about that is really situational or of questionable value without tricks like this is the True Love Merit. And while I do think that merit is highly overpriced, it is by its nature meant to be situational. A player would sooner talk me into house ruling a reduction in True Love's price then they would convince me to let them pull off this type of trick unless it was the dramatic climax to a chapter where the trick was actually appropriate...

Answer 4

So I have consulted my fellow oWoD veteran who had read pretty much every book on vampires, and most of books on other creatures. He told me that, assuming his experience, this is not that bad to allow such an abuse of Thaumaturgy.

Why is this ok?

1. A character has to be built in a very specific way for this to work reliably. He is likely to be very limited in many other actions. For example, True Love costs 4 pt, Willpower costs at least 5 pt, all 3 starting dots have to go into Assamite Sorcery/Thaumaturgy, and Path of Mars would require spending XP during the game, even though it's not that important.

2. This power basically allows a cainite to spend tremendous amounts of vitae on all his needs without thinking, and buff his physical Attributes to 10 for the entire scene. But he has to aquire it firstly! Such extensive feeding would drive attention to the character -- if he is Camarilla, it is a strong breach of the Masquerade. If he is Sabbat... they are still not stupid, so the character is even more likely to get into a trouble. Plus, he may just meet vampire hunters in the process. If the character has such a big quantity of stored vitae in his possession, it takes time and effort to (re)gain his stock, which in turn makes a good story. Why not?

3. Since this is mainly going to happen before very important battles... Why not allow the character to win them? The character, with his huge need in blood and Willpower, will become like D&D Wizard who sits back during all the battles while his spell slots are empty, and after 1-2 times this becomes very boring. Maybe that's what the character needs to protect his True Love?

The stats

What goes to the Blood Pool -- each "group" of Generations has different increasing trends. Thin-Blooded vampires+13th Generation all have 10 BP and may spend 1 per turn. "Neonates" from 12th to 9th Generations get +1 BP per Generation step. For 8th till 4th Generations the rule is "You may spend your entire Blood Pool in 5 turns", with Blood Pool growing by 10 per step for 7th-4th Generations. Expanding that trend, 3d to 1st Generations would increase those Traits even faster. The easiest bet for the Storyteller is to simply allow the Blood Pool to be as high as the character wants, why limit it if he is techically limited by how much blood can he aquire?

Blood per turn for 4th Generation is already 10, and it is damn a lot! It is actually already hardly possible to hit the limit, unless using some specific Disciplines that can soak up as much blood as can be invested, like Quietus •••••, and to get it one needs 60 XP on top of everything else. If player would want to spend more than 10 Blood per turn, simply allow it. Again -- look at the resources he has used to do that!