Vampires and fangs.

[theweaselking]

I'm thinking Vampire: The Masquerade (althought Requiem works just as well).

I'm thinking about what happens when you get a pair of pliers and pull a vampire's fangs.

By default, by the rules as written, you've just done a Bashing damage, *maybe* a Lethal. The fangs you extracted crumble to dust in a few minutes or hours, the victim regrows them as soon as he has some blood in his system to spare to heal the damage, and life goes on.

And this displeases me. I don't like it, at all. It lacks style. It lacks *cool*.

I'm thinking, of all things, of the Vampire card game card "Pulled Fangs", which prominently features a pair of pliers, and which causes an Aggravated damage. I'm thinking I don't want pulling fangs to do Agg - I mean, if for no other reasons than a guy with Potence breaking your jaw and sending teeth flying could do Agg, and I think the idea of yanking the fangs out of a torporous opponent causing them to crumble to ash is slightly absurd - but I think it should do more than just be another Bashing damage to heal instantly. These are your *fangs*. They are, fundamentally, the physical reflection of the essence of what it is to be a vampire. They're your tokens and your focus, and treating them like the were your fingers, or your ears, or your phlegm? That doesn't sit right.

And, really, what greater humiliation can there be for a vampire than having your fangs pulled? Trespass in another vampire's territory, get grabbed, your fangs pulled, and you left kicked to the curb at the outer edge of it? And how cool is it, really, for said vampire to hold on to your fangs and be able to produce them to taunt you, or as a show of menace?

What if the fangs don't regrow until they're healed *as if* they were Agg, even though they don't cause Agg when removed? Growing back after a day, a Willpower, and 3 blood?

Maybe your fangs shouldn't grow back at all, until the original set are restored (and then they re-root themselves and work normally again) or the original set are destroyed (and they don't crumble, outside your body). Maybe they should never grow back *at all*, leaving you fangless and showing your shame for the rest of your life, like a scar.

What do you think, oh fellow geeks?

EDIT: anivair presents an obvious method that I didn't think of: a very long time that is not permanent, say, a year and a day. Heal the "damage" immediately, lose the fangs for a year.

Comments

[anivair.livejournal.com]

If this were, say, a larp with other people playing by vampire rules, I'd say heal them as if they were agg, even though they don't do agg (i made the same ruling when Alex's character's stomach died).

OTOH, if this is a smaller game, tabletop, or a larp setting that i created, then I say you have to get the originals back of it takes a year and a day.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Not a bad suggestion.

[kookiemaster.livejournal.com]

I think they should not disintegrage and take a while or lots of blood to grow ... simply for the fashion accessory / humiliation / drama potential. I've used them as a deterrent / pretty strong message in a non-masquerade game.

It makes little sense that this would be aggravaged damage specifically. Like you said maybe heal it as such.

[dolston.livejournal.com]

Simply put it is another mechanic that adds and extra layer of complication that will rarely come up but when it does is overly annoying to keep track of out of game and a severe penalty in-game because some idiot (or group of idiots) with a pair of pliers decided to rip another character's teeth out.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

So you're in the "regular damage, regular healing, they crumble to dust, fuck the style points" camp on this one?

I can respect that.

[dolston.livejournal.com]

If a mechanic is required, yes.

[jl-williams.livejournal.com]

Back in the days of LotN 1st Ed, I was in a game in which a vampire was de-fanged as a punishment for attempting to ruin the Prince socially.

Imagine a Ventrue with no fangs! Mwahaa!!

...but yeah. Heavy drama, little attention paid to how it might actually works. When the vampire in question said, "I'll just heal it with blood," about forty people said, "No, you won't. Because doing that would be completely lame, and you know it."

And despite the rules not preventing him from doing so, the poor guy AGREED that it would be lame, and left himself de-fanged until it didn't matter to the story anymore.

An important lesson was learned there. Too bad it didn't perpetuate fast enough for the rest of LARPdom to notice.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

I do agree that there ought to be something special about the particular humiliation of having your fangs extracted.

In Werewolf, what would happen for an equivalent humiliation (say, getting declawed by an enemy) is that you'd lose a cart-load of Renown points, which would have very direct impact on everything else. Even if you could heal back the claws like any other damage, the particular circumstances would by themselves have a major impact on your reputation, which in Werewolf mechanics has a very real impact on your actual abilities. Vampire doesn't have such a neat mechanic; what you'd be looking at is some kind of Social penalty, but the only way anyone would know that such a penalty ought to be in place is when they looked at you and saw no fangs. Which would argue for special rules regarding those.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Vampire has a mechanic like that - Status - but Status doesn't dictate your Abilities the way Rank does for werewolves. Now, it's pretty obviously going to cause a loss of Status if you get your fangs pulled, but the trick is *proving* that it happened, and proving that it actually affected you. Being able to say "yeah, so what? I grew 'em back, he had no trophy, and I got off *totally scot free* apart from a few moments of pain that was no worse than a trip to the dentist? That's PUNISHMENT? Dude, I win. In fact, I'm going to go do what I did to cause that, again, twice, because I can, and if that's the only punishment? That's nothing" goes a very long way towards mitigating any damage to your Status.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

We have always worked under the rule that an actual REMOVED body part counts as an aggravated wound so takes 5 blood points and a nights sleep to deal with. Sometimes we wouldn't even consider it DAMAGE for the purpose of the damage chart (after all, removing teeth is not going to throw a vampire into torpor and certainly not cause final death) but that penalties would occur (pain, loss of appearance and obviously unable to use the kiss or bight attacks) until the damage is restored. We applied the same ruling to extreme Tzimisce fleshcrafting

I'm not sure how we came to this conclusion but I think there is some ruling somewhere about regrowing body parts (I THINK it comes from a Thaumaturgy power that rots away body parts but I'm not sure)

So basically, no the vamp doesn't die and not the vamp doesn't even take a little point of bashing damage on his penalty chart, but he does have to heal it like agg and he loses the use of his fangs while its done

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Edit to add:
They wouldn't disintegrate anyway. When a vampire dies or their body part dies it rots quickly to the state it WOULD have been in if the vampire had actually died and started rotting at their embrace. So a 10,000 year old vampire would quickly rot to dust. A 20 year old vampire would just go REALLY manky really quickly.

Teeth are some of the hardest parts of the body. I think we have non-preserved bodies from millenia ago where the teeth are still there. Unless the vamp is an Antedeluvian (in which case, how are you pulling his teeth without him squishing you, your bloodline and everyone within the city on sheer general principles?) the teeth aren't going to rot

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Before third edition, that was never specified in the main book and was the rule assumed in a lot of supplements. In third edition, it was explicitly specified that vampires crumble completely to powdery, dusty ash, with a time still dependent on the age of the vampire but with "8 hours or so" being the absolute upper limit for 15th Generation vampires embraced on the day they died and "seconds to minutes" being what an elder could expect.

And that this rule applied, as well, to severed body bits that were not immediately reattached and healed into place.