Markdoc

I really loved the speed chart when I first came to Hero, but gradually fell out of love with it for two reasons. First off, it slowed combat, especially when you had people aborting, holding actions and blocking (none of them particularly unusual things) and then losing track of when they had acted/should act. I ended up noting down who had done what, and that slowed things even more. I am just absolutely not a fan of "one big combat and you're done for the evening's play". I like combat to fast and furious. And fast, did I mention that?

The second thing that bugged me is that the predictable nature of the SPD chart made it very easy for cunning players to game the system.

At the same time, I really like the SPD characteristic (the idea that a faster character gets more actions) and the abort/hold mechanism which solves a lot of problems encountered in other games, so I was not prepared to dump those.

In the end, I went for functional over elegant. I simply roll a dice to determine what phase it is. If your SPD is equal to the number or higher, you get to act, in DEX order.This can be a d6 or a d8 or a D12 - the only requirement is that it can generate numbers higher than the highest SPD in the fight, so that here are "empty" phases for people with held actions to exploit, when nobody is currently acting. When I roll a 1, everybody gets an action and then there's the "post 12" recovery. It's fast, works very well, and generates an action economy similar to, but less predictable than, the current SPD chart.

Another possibility that I played with (but eventually discarded) is simply to give everyone a number of chips equal to their SPD. In this mechanism, I call each round and say "who's in?" Everyone who wants to take an action puts a chip in the pot, and then we run it by DEX. If you want to abort, you can do so by throwing a chip in the pot at that point. When everyone is out of chips, you do a "post-12" recovery and then deal out chips again. This is even faster and more intuitive than rolling a die (and also opens the possibility of introducing a SPD-gamble system), but generates an action economy far different from that you get off the SPD chart or a D6, because it becomes essentially possible to hold multiple actions.

cheers, Mark

He doesn't do enough, in either D&D or Hero terms, to gain any worthwhile XP in the first movie. While the intent of the film is to show him growing as a character, in game terms he's gonna gain like maybe 5 XP in Hero before the end of the film. Not enough to go from zero to hero. So he needs to start with a better character sheet.

Eh. He fights Tuskan raiders, evades stormtroopers, gets into a bar fight, escapes stormtroopers again, is captured by bad guys, evades them again, penetrates a high security prison, escapes again, shoots up some tie fighters, then takes part in a giant space battle. Depending on how they played it, you've got enough material there for a year of gaming sessions and plenty of Xp.

In our last FH campaign, the PCs started by taking part in a religious festival that lasted a week, during which they caught a murderer. Pretty straightforward right?  No significant XP? That turned out to cover 6 months of regular play (detailed here) and a fair amount of XP.

Deciding how much XP was gained in the course of a story is purely a matter of perspective. You think that in Star Wars, that it's not very much and that's cool. I think it's a lot ... and that's equally cool.

cheers, Mark

This is one way we can take a steer from FATE.

 

I think it is helpful for things to be explicitly laid out on the table that highlights the environmental factors that might be used and allow players to define others.  

 

That spilled petrol might be useful for the additional damage to the fireblast but may also be used to change the environment for an enemy speedster.  it is amazing how often players have to be 'given permission' to do sstuff like that.

Probably scarred by previous GMs who always said "No!" when people tried to do something inventive - because the GM was afraid to improvise. One of the reasons I love Hero is that the mechanics are simple and (for the most part) explicit, so it's easy to improvise without fear of consequences.

I've never had a problem with my players using the environment to their advantage - they do so freely. On the other hand, because I have always had to teach people Hero to get a game going, I often have had players who have never roleplayed before, and therefore no preconceptions about how you "should" play.

regards, Mark

They don't want Conan, Ladyhawk or Aladin - we've done campaigns like that many times.  They want to try a true Zero to Hero campaign. Starting off as 25+50=75 point slaves is exactly what my players want. They originally wanted 25+25=50 point characters but when I explained that you have to pay for racial templates in FH6, they agreed that 75 was better.

 

Here is what I am thinking of so far:

 

Campaign Name: Fragments of Hope

 

Initially, the characters will be skilled normals and have no magic or abnormal powers at all.  After the accidental death of their master, which would most likely be seen as their fault, the characters must flee for their lives or be executed. Sessions 1 and 2 will focus on running/hiding from slaver and pure survival.  In session three, the characters stumble/fall into the lost tomb of Anteele, a benevolent lesser deity who perished at the end of the last age. While hiding in and exploring the tomb, they find fragments of an artifact that still contain a tiny bit of the Anteele's essence.  These fragments, when willfully attuned to (a 12- EGO roll), are absorbed into the character's flesh becoming a Tattoo (IIF)  that imbue the characters with 10 CPs spend on powers not allowed by "Normals".

 

As the campaign progresses, the "Awakened" characters must research and travel to the locations of other ancient sites that may contain additional Fragments of Hope as they come to be called. Each fragment can be absorbed granting additional character points.  As they gain in power their exploits will eventually raise the attention of the Overlord who will send lackeys to dispatch the trouble makers. Hopefully, if the characters do thing smart, the Overlord will realize too late that they have amassed enough power to pose a threat.

 

Each session will only give 2 experience point on average, but locating fragments ever 3 sessions or so for 10 CPs will average things out to the 2-8 per session the players want.

 

When a character dies, the fragments that had been absorbed excise themselves from the corpse and are once again fragments that can be used by a replacement PC.  Only one Fragment of Hope may be absorbed from a single source (broken artifact, mystical pool, crystals of power, etc.).  That keeps the balance and the characters searching for additional fragments.

 

Thoughts?

I'd play that.

cheers, Mark

Starting out as a nobody slave, and then growing into a badass is something that really only happens in D&D.  It's not common in other types of fiction.  Usually the nobody actually turns out to have a lot of potential, but not in a "gaining XP" kind of way.

 

Think Luke Skywalker.  From an in game perspective, the first session he buys some droids and then fights sand people, ending with him meeting Kenobi.  In the second session, he finds out his aunt and uncle are dead, fights a guy in the bar, and then hitches a ride into space.  In the third game session, he sneaks around the Death Star, shoots some stormtroopers, gets half-drowned by a sewer tentacle, and shoots TIE fighters as they escape.  Fourth game session he blows up the Death Star.  He goes from "normal kid" to "galactic hero" in 4 sessions.  And I'm being very generous with what he does in some of those game sessions.  Long story short, Luke probably started out as a fully fleshed out character, instead of gaining XP to get there.

Whereas I see him going from barely competent hick farmboy to decent fighter pilot with a few funky powers and some minor combat skills, as he gains XP. In the second film, his powers and control get greater, he starts to gain renown, a bit of charisma and some social skills and improved combat skills. In the third film he has developed further, gaining greatly improved tactical abilities, greatly improved force powers and greatly improved combat abilities. It's literally impossible to imagine the slightly bumbling character from the first film, pulling off the competent force-powered rescue of his friends from the third. To me, that is in fact a pretty classic zero-to-hero progression.

Really, D&D just formalized what was already a common trope in fantasy literature, whether it is the 13th century Saga of Gunnlaugr Serpent-Tongue (he goes from familial shame and useless layabout to skilled craftsman, famed poet and finally renowned warrior before dying a heroic death over the course of the saga) or the more recent Prydain series (From assistant pig-keeper to warleader and High King). Bilbo, Ged of Earthsea, Jack the Giantkiller - even if you restrict yourself to pre-D&D literature, the examples are numerous - and of course they exist outside of the fantasy genre as well. The idea was common and famous enough that Campell formalised (perhaps over-formalised) it in his mythological analyses.

cheers, Mark

Thanks Lucius - I may consider that, but with 7 players it could get very crowded.

The substitute PCs do not have to be actually present: as long as they have a link, they can reasonably turn up (and also you have an in-game excuse for them to "inherit" the deceased PCs's gear). For example in our samurai campaign, when one samurai died a heroic death in battle, the next session, a ninja turned up with an important message for the group's leader. He was immediately adopted into the group, because he had been introduced to the campaign earlier as a spy in the far north, so the PC group already knew him as a trusted retainer. He also had an approved character sheet, so he could simply be added to the game with no delay.

In our current pathfinder campaign, our PCs are part of a larger group sworn to a particular task. Most of that group is somewhere else - but if one PC bites the big one, another of the sworn and trusted brethren will be magically informed in their dreams, and step up to fill the gap (and being magically informed will have a pretty good idea of what has gone down before their arrival). In fact, that has already happened once.

cheers, Mark

If every GM/player interaction went like this, we would not need rules at all. Long ago in the days of AD&D we used that pretty combat-oriented ruleset to run a game where PCs attended court, were involved in intrigues, wooed partners, built estates, got married and had kids. No kidding - when my PC's wife had twins, another PC gave them teddybugbears. There were no rules for that sort of thing, so we just winged it.

But even leaving aside antagonistic relationships or raw powergaming, there come times when even well-behaved players and the GM simply disagree strongly, each feeling that they are right. I've seen that damage a game to the point of disintegration (more than once, in fact). Good rules prevent that, by providing everybody clear guidelines in advance. It's all about managing expectations.

So I worry that allowing players to buy undefined adders will give them the expectation that they they have a right to do weird (and potentially unbalancing) things, because dagnabbit, they paid for it. The water in the brain example you give is one such - a simple globe of water around the head so the opponent cannot breathe is another.

I do agree that the way forward is not to try and give a definitive ruling on every edge case. You simply cannot do that, no matter how huge the rules become, and besides, like you, I think it is antithetical to fun. What we can do, though, is provide clear guidelines - statements of principle - to help manage expectations, and actually try to simplify the rules, removing odd constructs, going for unified approaches, etc, to help players know in advance what sort of things to expect.

In this case, instead of paying for an adder, I simply allow players to use their powers in inventive ways using a power skill, but with the explicit caveat that they cannot expect to gain advantages greater than they could purchase with 3-5 points* Essentially the "power skill" is a little naked variable advantage with the limitations "requires a skill roll" and "subject to environmental constraints". In this case, the general principle "You cannot get something you did not pay for" is made explicit, which does a fine job of managing expectations

cheers, Mark

*the exception being when the GM gives them something explicit to work with - a slick of spilled gasoline + Fireblast can reasonably be expected to give you a big explosion, for example.

Technically, it's already possible to Block an attack directed at an adjacent target.

 

The better question might be - Would his cutting action actually prevent the attack from hitting him if it WAS aimed at him to begin with?

Yes, in the slo-mo you can see the pellet ricochet off to one side. I'm not even sure that the pellet is not aimed at him, to be honest. It's certainly aimed close to him, at any rate.

Anyway, if you look up several of his other videos, where he is chopping arrows out of the air, there the arrow is aimed at him, and he is hit by the remnants of the arrow - but the cut causes the arrow to fold up as he hits it, so the point of the arrow is deflected.

cheers, Mark

Mark - I really like the magic costing BODY instead of END it adds a very good balance to things.  Kind of reminds me of Lay Healing in RoleMaster. And if you use an ability to draw BODY from others as a sacrifice, it has a gradual side effect that slowly turns one very evil or an undead as in Lucius' Way of the Lost idea above.

 

Thanks again and keep lets keep the dialogue going please.

A side effect would certainly be appropriate, but in my case, I did not bother.

PCs rarely had the luxury of dragging sacrifices around to pump themselves up, and in the few cases where it was possible, the whole "killing people to power my magic" has enough of an evil vibe that I did not feel the side effect was needed. The fact that PCs could not use this approach under normal circumstances while the evil cult could and did, meant that players wholeheartedly accepted the "magic is evil" trope without anything in the way of GM prodding and where PCs used it at all, it was in a limited  "fight fire with fire" way restricted to desperate circumstances.

However, in the last campaign, I allowed a form of magic that did warp the user, if abused. The players saw that as evil, but half of them succumbed to the lure of more power and ended up using a version of it anyway (just cautiously: none of the PCs magic-mutated too seriously) . The climax of that game was confrontation where they had to choose to retain their newly-gained power or toss it away to allow the city they lived in to start rebuilding.

They did the right thing in the end, though their curiously evasive answers to the local worthies about what, exactly had just happened were hysterically funny to me as GM.

cheers, Mark

Why would you want to penalize PC death? Why would I want to play in a game where my play experience becomes limited because my character chose to sacrifice himself to save the others, and my next one must be weaker than the rest of the group? It creates a metagame where I'm forced to weigh my future play experience against my character's psychology, and you don't want that. If the players are invested in their PCs, the loss of a PC is penalty enough. If the players aren't invested in their PCs, this won't make them and you still have that problem.

In some settings an XP penalty is not appropriate - heck in my samurai game, I gave Xp bonuses to players  whose PCs who died in an appropriate fashion (including suicide!) Heroic death was part of the subtext.

But where you are looking for a dark and gritty feeling, an XP penalty gives players a strong "survive at all costs" motivation. I find that games work best when the metarules underlying a campaign support the feel you want. In this case, you're right: the metarules discourage the "My character chose to sacrifice himself to save the others" trope and that may be exactly what's wanted, going off the original discussion.

cheers, Mark

I've run plenty of zero-to-hero campaigns (in fact, it's our preferred style). Typically I start at 75-100 points (total) with 50-75 base and 25 points of complications. For a grimdark campaign like this, it might be appropriate to start with 75 points and up to 50 in complications, both to boost survival chances (if these are slaves, they are unlikely to start out with much in the way of cool gear, so decent stat.s will help) and the higher complication burden also fits the fact that they are likely starting from severely messed-up backgrounds. On the other hand, I ran a gritty game starting with 25 point base and 25 points in complications and that also went really well.

If they are going to be taking on the dark, world-ruling warlord then aiming to end at 3-400+ points is not unreasonable if you want them to go mana-a-mano with him, but that's a pretty fast progression (my campaigns typically end up with around 300+ Xp characters, but run 4-5 years). One alternative is to slow the progression and make obtaining and using a McGuffin a central plot goal (carry this ring to the volcano in the centre of the Dark Lord's domain, for example ) so that they can 'win' without having to have huge point totals.

As far as optional rules go, hit locations are a must, disabling seems appropriate, and as a good general rule don't allow items bought with points and mundane items to stack.

The biggest deal though, will be magic. You need to decide how that works, first and foremost. One really good way to enforce the Grimdark feel is to make magic difficult and dangerous. Some kind of side effect works, but you can choose to be more adventurous.

I actually ran one game where casting magic cost BOD instead of END (inspired by the wizard in the Golden Voyage of Sinbad, who got older and more feeble each time he cast a spell). This had some interesting effects - it ensured a low magic world, generally, making magic very powerful. Even a 5 point flight spell can get you inside a heavily-guarded fortress, if magic is rare enough that the world is not set up with magicusers in mind - but it might cost you 5 BOD to get your whole party inside. In a setting such as this, magic users tend to be more "sword and sorcery style" favouring one-shot spells with longer effects like summoning that give them minions or scrying to gather information rather than wading into combat casting firebolts from behind a magical forcefield. Magic is a support, and can be a game-changer, but combat is mostly about fighters. The exception, of course is eeeeevil magic-users, who can use other people's BOD (ie: sacrifice) to pump up their BOD before casting. In this case, casting is typically more a ritual thing than a personal combat thing. This also supports the grimdark feel and explains how at the end of the campaign a rag tag bunch of heroes can take down the dark lord .... IF they can get to him. If you do this, of course, you need to design adventures that don't assume the PCs will always have access to magic.

Last of all, if you have PC death as a real risk - and occasional occurrence - what I did was to allow the new PC to start at the same general level as the other PCs but with an XP penalty (10 points, in my case). In other words, if a 230-point PC died, the replacement would be built on 220. That was a significant hit, but not crippling. I also only awarded XP to players if they turned up for a session, and very occasionally gave bonus XP for brilliant ideas/play, so over time there was always some heterogeneity in the exact point totals. After a few months of play, the PCs were not all built on exactly the same amounts of XP, even if they started off the same.

cheers, Mark

As an aside, I should note, that when I and my college gaming buddies started shooting bows and slings, I was astonished (having grown up with guns) how short the usable ranges actually are on traditional missile-powered weapons. It was a bit of an eye-opener, and explained a lot about medieval ancient battles to me: when you are in range to actually sink an arrow deeply into something - never mind penetrate armour - you are really, really close. Close enough that they can sprint at you - close enough to literally see the whites of their eyes. It explained readily why in so many accounts of ancient battles the archers ended up in melee, even when pretty obviously they didn't want to be - to get close enough to hurt (rather than just distract) you have to move right into the danger zone.

cheers, Mark

350 km/h is a bit over 300 feet per second, which is only a little hotter than we used to run in airsoft. This man is in no danger of serious damage.

 

Typical arrow velocities are on the order of 350 fps. Typical arrow sizes are just a bit larger than 6mm diameter spheres.

I agree that's he's in no danger of damage - these are BB pellets, fer pete's sake. But 350 fps is scorching for a bow. "Speed bows" are typically designed as those firing above 320 fps, and the fastest bows on the market (compound bows firing thin, stiff graphite shaft arrows) top out a bit less than 350 fps. Bow nerds obsess about breaking 350 fps (http://www.huntersfriend.com/bow-review-400-fps-bow/400-fps-compound-bow.htm) the same way gun nerds obsess about muzzle KE. So 350 fps is not typical, that's as fast as bows get with the newest, bestest technology.

The fastest traditional-style bows (recurves) top out  around 200 fps, but that's using a modern carbon fibre technology and light arrows designed for speed, and target shooting, not for wounding. Using a traditional bow and 150 gram arrows (about 5 ounces: the old standard for hunting and a bit lighter than war arrows) 140-150 fps is considered pretty damn good - typically they fall around 120-140 fps.

So Isao is drawing his sword from the scabbard and swatting away missiles about 2% of an arrow's size (if you look at slo-mo videos of people cutting arrows, they hit the shaft, not straight onto the tip), which are travelling about 2-3x the speed of an arrow fired from a traditional style bow and he's doing it at about 20 metres. Even taking into account the fact that the videos are staged to give him a really good chance at it, it still demonstrates that he'd have no problem hitting a larger, slower target (in fact, he gave up cutting arrows for démonstrations like this precisely because it was too easy, and too many other people are doing it now).

cheers, Mark

For what it's worth, claiming that 'real people' can't hit or block arrows with a weapon kind of runs up against the fact that in real life, people do, and in historical references they did so in real battles. Google up Gojin-no Tajima, for example. Musashi also claimed to have done it when attacked by archers after killing Matashichiro Yoshioka. If you want a more modern example, you can also check out Isao Machii, whose shtick is not cutting arrows in flight (too many people are doing that these days) but defecting BB pellets in flight (for example,

These are both much smaller and much faster than an arrow. And he does it at much shorter ranges than 100 yards, giving him a great deal less time to react.  Historically, in Japan, the technique was called Yadome no Jutsu or yagiridome.

Now, the stunts on Youtube can be - reasonably - faulted for being staged: the sword-wielder is prepared, the missile is travelling on a known path ... and yet. The sword-wielder has very little time to react, prepared or no. And they still have to hit a tiny target travelling at very high speed (in Isao's case, starting with the sword in his scabbard). Given that highly skilled martial artists in the real world can deflect missiles with their weapons, it's not a great stretch to allow the even more highly-trained warriors typical in fantasy games to learn to do so.

cheers, Mark

It looks like things are exciting in Haiti right now. 

Haiti is unfortunately, one of those countries where things are exciting pretty much all the time, and rarely in a good way.

cheers, Mark

Since arrows can be visible in flight, the latter is possible at sufficient range. I would expect it to be impossible to hit a person at 100 yards with one arrow if that person is paying attention.

Or closer - Miyamoto Musashi, who had a deal of practical experience, noted that bows had the weakness that arrows can be seen and dodged. Blocking arrows with a shield or a weapon is not only historically described, you can see it being done on youtube.

In terms of distance the very fastest high tech bow and arrows can shoot an arrow at around 350 fps (but that speed falls off rapidly with distance - at 100 yards, it's doing about half that speed) so they take over a second to hit their target. Traditional bows in the hands of professional archers manage about about half to two thirds of that. So an arrow is going to take about 2 seconds to reach a target at 100 yards. So you are absolutely right - at that range, you don't even have to be an experienced warrior to simply dodge the arrow - as long as you are watching. Even at 30 yards, you will still have enough time to dodge/block if your reflexes are really good.

cheers, Mark

HAs the new season started showing over there yet? If yes, are you enjoying it?

 

Not yet, but I'll keep an eye out for it - or maybe just get the season on disc or download, the way we do GoT.

Cheers, Mark

AoS was pretty uneven, especially in Season 1 where it seemed like there was nothing interesting going on for a while.  It got better.

 

I haven't watched any Agent Carter, Flash, or Supergirl so I have no opinion on those, other than to note that they all seem to be well received.

I'm not generally a TV guy, so take this as you will, but Agent Carter was the only show I actually made an effort to watch last year. I can't see any basis to describe it as 'Bad TV'.

Cheers, Mark

I think Markdoc hit on one aspect, which is the initial mortality rate. The sun, alone, is a pretty bad vulnerability. Dracula was nobility, but the lesser spawn he put out were not often as safe as him.

This is the most awesome Complication I have ever seen:

 

Compelled to Invent Things That Don’t Actually Help

My wife actually has that one, in real life: I am not kidding. I saw it on the sheet and instantly knew exactly what it meant.

Cheers, Mark

But if vampires don't die (which is a feature of the undead) then no matter how slowly the population grows, it never shrinks. And if you have a good run of fecundity you can accelerate that growth, but nothing reverses it.

Right, which is why any sensible vampire fiction (and I am including RPG storylines in the mix) has to have a reason why that doesn't happen. In the game world I described, vampires are harder to kill than humans - they don't age, they don't get sick, they heal what would be mortal wounds to a human, and they are in general, a little stronger, and faster and they can see in the dark - plus they have a few other tricks up their sleeves. But although they don't die of natural causes, they can still know the eternal rest that comes from being hacked into a hundred, bloody, quivering pieces. In addition, they burn in sunlight, and they need to feed. Vampires don't die of starvation, but they do have a low level berserk that is triggered by not feeding - eventually an "abstinent" vampire is going to flip out and start feeding on the first warm thing it comes across - in fact, in my game, that's how most newly-created vampires actually get into the business. They hold off murdering people as long as they can until the Red Thirst overwhelms them ... at which point there's usually no way back.

Think about that for a minute. Let's say you are a simple carpenter who gets drained one night by a passing posse of vampires, who toss your body in the river. You wake up a few nights later possessed of a raging thirst for blood. What are you going to do? If you go back home, how are you going to explain that now you can't go out into the sunlight. How are you going to deal with the Red Thirst? Start preying on hobos and passing travellers? How long before people start noticing your victims? You might be physically superior to what you were, but you can't hold off a raging mob with pitchforks and fire, which is what is going to happen if your neighbours work out what is going on. And you know that vampire hunters exist - and you know that your family knows, too.  How long are you going to be able to hide? On the other hand, if you just run, how are you going to live without any resources except some muddy grave clothes?

A wealthy merchant might be able to call on more resources at short notice, but the whole "can't go into the sunlight thing" is pretty hard to hide, even if you can smooth over the awkward "Yeah, I was dead, but now I'm better, thanks" conversation.

The mortality rate (or un-mortality rate, or re-mortality rate ... whatever) among newly-created vampires is pretty high. So the population grows slowly, and is subject to sharp reversals when people work out that there are vampires around.

cheers, Mark

As a recent convert to FATE, I wonder how heavy those rules would be to lift?

 

That said in all snarkiness, I love the "re-skin" you did to Hero. I've personally all but given up on trying to run a Hero game. I just don't have the patience for creating characters with Hero anymore. This kind of inventiveness almost makes we want to consider doing something similar. Almost.

After more than 30 years of Hero GM-ing, I have a big backlog of Hero stuff (both published and my own), so it takes relatively little effort to create "new stuff". That takes a lot of the sting out of it

I've tried FUDGE and despite me really, really wanting to like it, it just didn't light any sort of fire for me, so I've never looked at Fate.

cheers, Mark

I did a similar thing a couple of years ago - that's discussed here.

Basically I left the mechanics untouched, but simply put a "skin" over them, so that the players did not have to deal with Hero mechanics at all. It was such a huge success that I have been thinking that I will use a similar (more finished) approach for my next FH campaign. As a GM, I liked one particular aspect, which is that by hiding the mechanics, the players did not waste any time in trying to finesse the game system, but simply went for flavour .... while at the same time, I remained able to tweak the system to produce whatever I needed, which is Hero's strong point.

For the next game, I am almost certainly going to make one house rule, which, interestingly enough, is one you chose to implement too, which is getting rid of killing attacks as a seperate mechanism and just rebalancing AVAD to use that instead. The more I play around with it, the more I am convinced that we don't actually need two mechanisms to resolve "I hit him with the thing", and that all we get out of it is needless complication. That's discussed in more detail here.

cheers, Mark

I think the show Supernatural is a good model for this sort of thing (at least the early seasons). Yes, vampires (and werewolves and lots of other things that go bump in the night) are deadly threats, and one-on-one probably superior to humans in many ways. BUT...a motivated human, who knows the score, is nonetheless a mortal to them. Humans don't have fangs or claws or the strength, speed, toughness and so forth of the monsters--but they can use weapons and tactics, and exploit the monster's known weaknesses, and will. Hunters aren't a threat (just) because they're experienced adventurers--they talk to one another, and leave records for their colleagues (and later generations) to find, which helps negate the monsters' key advantage: secrecy and non-belief in them.

And of course, in a fantasy setting, they don't even have the non-belief thing going for them - in fact, the reverse: many a normal person has met a grisly fate because his neighbours thought he was a vampire or a werewolf.

Paladin. "But how do you know he was a vampire?"

Mob: "Well, he stayed dead when we cut his head off, drove a stake though his heat and stuffed his mouth with garlic!"

Paladin: "OK. Seems legit"

cheers, Mark

There's an urban fantasy series (Women of the Otherworld--all the protagonists are women) in which there are vampires. They can drink blood without killing...but once a year they MUST kill someone. It's the price of their extended lives; it's paid for with other peoples' lives. So even the "good" vampires are killers.

Yeah, in my game, vampires extend their lives by taking other people's life force, so it's not possible to drink blood without harming someone. You might not kill them, but at the very least, you are going to make them very ill. In this setting there are no "good" vampires as such. Even those who are not overtly evil still feed on sentient beings - the best you can hope for is that they feed on your enemies, but if there are no enemies at hand, they are going to feed on you. 

As to the vampire ecology thing, vampires in this setting have powers that give them advantages over normal humans, but they're more like the Dracula of Bram Stoker than the mary-sue invincible monsters of Ann Rice or modern vampire films. If they were so powerful, they would have destroyed human societies long ago.

What makes  them potentially fearful foes is not their vampiric powers - but the fact that they can live for centuries or even millennia: the Vampire Queen of Vulea isn't feared because she's a vampire (or at least not just for that) but because she's an 800 year-old sorceress, with all the power and knowledge accumulated in that time.  Most newly-created vampires are more powerful than ordinary people, but are no match for an experienced adventurer. In addition, in my game, a victim only rises as a vampire if killed by feeding. That requires either a vampire completely gorging itself, making repeated visits to one victim, or a group feeding. These things happen, of course, but in general a vampire's feeding will leave its victim enfeebled, but they'll recover in a few weeks - if the vampire does not physically kill them to cover its tracks. Vampires have the problem that they need to feed every day or so - even in a large city, killing or making severely ill a couple of hundred people a year is going to risk drawing attention, and there are plenty of monster-killing heroes out there. That gives a vampire a strong incentive not to leave new vampires lying around.

cheers, Mark