Wait, Vampires aren't undead?
- Thread starter Bringa
- Start date
Nikis-Knight
Deity
Shock promoted macemen? I *believe* that they are still melee units.
Vampires aren't undead, think of them more as parasites.
Vampires aren't undead, think of them more as parasites.
Silverkiss
NekoChan
And the reason they aren´t undead is because Kael thinks of them more like humans that suck life away from other humans to extend their own.
Well, okay, I'm gonna step away from game balance now because I haven't played a fraction of the games most people here have played and as such my insight into balance is probably going to be lacking.
I'll approach this from an angle I know: from the storytelling angle. You can still say that all my arguments here are irrelevant because game balance demands that Vampires aren't undead, and that's cool, but hear me out:
When you create a fantasy setting, you don't build in a vacuum. Not only is there a huge body of literature written in the genre, but fantasy is also peculiar in that it is based to a high degree on the first kind of storytelling there ever was: myth. Of course you can do things differently; the most interesting fantasy books are those that take a central concept and turn it upside down. Point in case: John M. Ford's "The Last Hot Time", a gangster story in a Chicago in which the gates to Faerie had opened again. His elves torture humans to gain magical power, shoot at each other with tommy guns and are generally ****ing sinister. This works because we don't expect elves to be that way.
To turn a concept upside down works very well. To change a concept just a little bit, not so much.
It's like in music. If you construct your chords out of notes that are distant from each other, if you set your main melody to let's say a counterpoint melody, that tends to work. If you just move off by a half-note, though, you're gonna get some ugly disharmonies. People expect vampires to be undead. This doesn't need to mean that people think in a mythopoeic microbiological way; it may simple mean that they apply some of the most salient features of the undead (no natural aging, no death through starvation (at least not NORMAL starvation), no soul) to vampires. If you just take this aspect of vampirism away and if there are no consequences, you have a messy 2nd chord. It'll be easier to make your readers/players accept that YOUR vampires **** flowers and live on trees than to just slip in a little "oh and btw my vampires are actually people, but they still drink blood and they're still sinister etc". You know that truism about people being more prepared to believe the impossible than the improbable? That's where it comes from.
So in short: a little change (especially one which doesn't have further consequences in your world) is a dirty, unclear story-telling mechanism. (rereading this post I feel the need to explain my use of "dirty" here; I looked for a better adjective but couldn't find one. What I mean is that there is CLEAN story-telling, where the concepts fit together and everything feels just right, and there's the kind where there must be sand between the wheels and cogs because the entire machine makes unhappy noises and you just feel that something's not QUITE right; I'm a little bit too philosophically inclined, and in these last 15 years or so that I've been creating fiction in one form or another (I'm explicitly counting the years in which I "only" created content for my rpgs) I've been thinking about these strange feelings a lot. WHY does a certain plot work, why does another not work? I don't think I've quite arrived at any final answers, but these approaches I have right now seem to make at least some kind of sense to me)
However you can of course say that they need to be not-undead because of game balance, OR you can say that the consequences of them being not-undead are still forthcoming. Both are good
--edit: haha, I **** asterisks ;P
I'll approach this from an angle I know: from the storytelling angle. You can still say that all my arguments here are irrelevant because game balance demands that Vampires aren't undead, and that's cool, but hear me out:
When you create a fantasy setting, you don't build in a vacuum. Not only is there a huge body of literature written in the genre, but fantasy is also peculiar in that it is based to a high degree on the first kind of storytelling there ever was: myth. Of course you can do things differently; the most interesting fantasy books are those that take a central concept and turn it upside down. Point in case: John M. Ford's "The Last Hot Time", a gangster story in a Chicago in which the gates to Faerie had opened again. His elves torture humans to gain magical power, shoot at each other with tommy guns and are generally ****ing sinister. This works because we don't expect elves to be that way.
To turn a concept upside down works very well. To change a concept just a little bit, not so much.
It's like in music. If you construct your chords out of notes that are distant from each other, if you set your main melody to let's say a counterpoint melody, that tends to work. If you just move off by a half-note, though, you're gonna get some ugly disharmonies. People expect vampires to be undead. This doesn't need to mean that people think in a mythopoeic microbiological way; it may simple mean that they apply some of the most salient features of the undead (no natural aging, no death through starvation (at least not NORMAL starvation), no soul) to vampires. If you just take this aspect of vampirism away and if there are no consequences, you have a messy 2nd chord. It'll be easier to make your readers/players accept that YOUR vampires **** flowers and live on trees than to just slip in a little "oh and btw my vampires are actually people, but they still drink blood and they're still sinister etc". You know that truism about people being more prepared to believe the impossible than the improbable? That's where it comes from.
So in short: a little change (especially one which doesn't have further consequences in your world) is a dirty, unclear story-telling mechanism. (rereading this post I feel the need to explain my use of "dirty" here; I looked for a better adjective but couldn't find one. What I mean is that there is CLEAN story-telling, where the concepts fit together and everything feels just right, and there's the kind where there must be sand between the wheels and cogs because the entire machine makes unhappy noises and you just feel that something's not QUITE right; I'm a little bit too philosophically inclined, and in these last 15 years or so that I've been creating fiction in one form or another (I'm explicitly counting the years in which I "only" created content for my rpgs) I've been thinking about these strange feelings a lot. WHY does a certain plot work, why does another not work? I don't think I've quite arrived at any final answers, but these approaches I have right now seem to make at least some kind of sense to me)
However you can of course say that they need to be not-undead because of game balance, OR you can say that the consequences of them being not-undead are still forthcoming. Both are good
--edit: haha, I **** asterisks ;P
Silverkiss
NekoChan
Bringa said:
In FfH, Vampires do age, if they don´t consume the souls (not the blood, they don´t need the blood, only the soul if I understand correctly from the Pedia entrys, they only consume the blood to do a little terror on the normal people) and I think they do starve... They are just like you and me, but use of a unnatural way to extend their own life.
Bad Player
Deity
Is that for real that in FFH2 vamps starve to death if they don't feast? How do you know when they are starting to starve?
Kael could make vamps undead if you like but anti-melee promotions give you +80% instead of +40% and can be used on a wider variety of opponents. Do you still want to make them undead (and remove melee of course )?
Kael could make vamps undead if you like but anti-melee promotions give you +80% instead of +40% and can be used on a wider variety of opponents. Do you still want to make them undead (and remove melee of course
)?
Silverkiss
NekoChan
No, that doesn´t affect game o.o
Im talking about the flavor of the unit... No game mechanics involved...
Im talking about the flavor of the unit... No game mechanics involved...
loki1232
Loki
Bad Player said:
That would be cool though.
Bad Player
Deity
Don't nerf vamps any more than they have been!
JuliusBloodmoon said:
I read the pedia entry on Alexis, and yes, that does seem to be the way Kael thinks of his vampires. I like the flavour, but still I think it's a little off. It throws off your expectations when you read the word vampire. I still don't see HOW they should eat the souls of their victims; the runes Alexis used merely to imprison the spirit, but then? I still think there should be something special about them to allow them to absorb spirits.
Unser Giftzwerg
UgLe Game Promoter
Bad Player said:
Vampires have been nerfed?
BCalchet
Human, all too human.
Unser Giftzwerg said:
Plain vampires lost a point of strength at some point, and I believe the experience from feasting was dropped by 1 as well.
Moon Hunter
FfH2 addict
Unser Giftzwerg said:
original vampires had 7 strength and feeding was population=exp gained
now they have 6 strength, just as regular macemen and feeding yields population-3 exp... was nerfed 3 times
Bringa said:
Seems to me like you're overreacting. Sure, I originally assumed vampires to be undead too, but when I read that they weren't undead I just went "okay, cool - makes these ones a bit more original than most". Besides, I don't even know if undeath is that essential to the concept of a vampire - a lot of works depict vampirism more as a contagious disease than anything.
The image of vampires has been in a constant change for the last couple of hundred years, anyway. Vampires of folklore were thought to be ugly and hideous creatures that rose from the grave to slaughter the living, now they're good-looking, sexy intellectuals. It's not like the undead -> living change would be the biggest one ever.
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