So, how do Dhampirs actually feed at your table?

[TerrorSweats]

Like, I'm assuming meat & bodily fluids can get scooped out after/ during a bite attack or with a knife/spoon & are reflected in hp damage, but the kind that need dreams, life essence or psychic energy. Ehemeral concepts.

How you get at them? What do you do to them to make them be in you now? What does that do to their owner?

Also, why didn't they bother finishing the thing they wrote? Wotc seem to solve every second problem by calling "that's just in our game, you can imagineer whatever makes you happy" & making people pay to write chunks of their books for them at home like mad libs. Yes, homebrew is part of the game, but it shouldn't be so necessary for the rules to work properly or make sense as often as it is.

I put in the ua questionnaire that psychic & dream vampires getting juiced up from biting stuff made no sense, but without a source of psychic or necrotic damage, what even does? You bite open a head to get the thoughts out? Feeding & hunger are RP only & don't actually have any mechanical effect on snacker or snackee, but bites do for some reason?

This is half question half rant, but I am mainly genuinely curious how people handle this. Changing the damage type of the bite, which seems potentially op, filling in the gaps with feats or class features, which can eat into design space for character concepts, some combination of the two, or something cooler.

[PhantomSoul]

It hasn't come up for me, but I'd tie it to the soul in my setting, where souls have three parts and so the more abstract things may be fluffed as being carried through the blood or the result of piercing into the creature when you're of a vampiric nature. With that fluff, it's not that you're actually hematophagic in a typical sense, it's just that the blood is part of drawing on the soul and, as a vampire, you need to consume souls because yours is ever-decaying. Which one you're trying to consume could even create meaningful subtypes of vampires, since you'd expect differences based on which part of the soul they need to consume. (It could even be a misconception that all of them even are vampires; maybe only one is a true vampire and others are actually different creatures with different ways to be created.)



Also, why didn't they bother finishing the thing they wrote? Wotc seem to solve every second problem by calling "that's just in our game, you can imagineer whatever makes you happy" & making people pay to write chunks of their books for them at home like mad libs. Yes, homebrew is part of the game, but it shouldn't be so necessary for the rules to work properly or make sense as often as it is.

This. So much this. (And it could entirely solve many issues in so many threads, e.g., the attunement thread that's ongoing if they just gave a motivation for three attunement slots ... but WOTC could have given at least [I]one motivation...)

[Psyren]

As long as they land a bite once I'm okay with them eating whatever else they want. Also goodberries work on them by RAW.

[Pooky the Imp]

Like, I'm assuming meat & bodily fluids can get scooped out after/ during a bite attack or with a knife/spoon & are reflected in hp damage, but the kind that need dreams, life essence or psychic energy. Ehemeral concepts.

How you get at them? What do you do to them to make them be in you now? What does that do to their owner?

I asked almost the same thing recently and the answers were vague at best.

(Not faulting those here who took the time to answer, just that there seems to be very little guidance on the matter.)

Even the bodily-fluids thing is pretty damn vague. There's nothing in the rules that says your bite attacks counts as feeding, even for blood. And does it work for spinal fluid? if not, can I extract spinal fluid from a creature I've just killed? What sort of check would that be? And if it has to be from a living creature, how do I go about extracting it? I think I must have missed the page of the rulebook that details how to extract spinal fluid from a still-living (and very much unwilling) creature, along with the page for how to eat another creature's dreams. :smallconfused:




Also, why didn't they bother finishing the thing they wrote? Wotc seem to solve every second problem by calling "that's just in our game, you can imagineer whatever makes you happy" & making people pay to write chunks of their books for them at home like mad libs. Yes, homebrew is part of the game, but it shouldn't be so necessary for the rules to work properly or make sense as often as it is.

Couldn't agree more. So many of their recent rules just feel half-arsed. Like they came up with some vague concepts but couldn't be bothered fleshing them out into anything mechanically usable.

Yes, WotC, we get it, we can tweak or homebrew stuff to suit our needs. However, the phrase 'when you know the rules, you can break the rules' comes to mind. Hence, it would help to have more initial guidance about you envisioned the more esoteric Dhampir feeding methods being handled. This would, in fact, be far more helpful if a player/DM wanted to change that method or if they wanted a Dhampir that feeds on something not mentioned or by a different means (as you'd have a range of mechanics to gauge your homebrew ones against).




I put in the ua questionnaire that psychic & dream vampires getting juiced up from biting stuff made no sense, but without a source of psychic or necrotic damage, what even does? You bite open a head to get the thoughts out? Feeding & hunger are RP only & don't actually have any mechanical effect on snacker or snackee, but bites do for some reason?

Yeah, the Dreams one is probably the worst of the lot. At least with blood/flesh you have examples to draw on. With dreams... I got nothing. It's just so far removed from other game mechanics that I have no idea whatsoever how to handle it.




This is half question half rant, but I am mainly genuinely curious how people handle this. Changing the damage type of the bite, which seems potentially op, filling in the gaps with feats or class features, which can eat into design space for character concepts, some combination of the two, or something cooler.

For the psychic energy thing, the only thing I could think of was a character using spells like Mind Sliver and Mind Spike to drain a victim's psychic energy. However, it's pretty dodgy as we're now having to get to mechanics that are entirely unrelated to the Dhampir race. Plus it probably makes feeding too easy.

Honestly, trying to work out how to handle the mechanics of Dhampir feeding was enough to just make me abandon the idea completely.

[PhantomSoul]

Couldn't agree more. So many of their recent rules just feel half-arsed. Like they came up with some vague concepts but couldn't be bothered fleshing them out into anything mechanically usable.

Yes, WotC, we get it, we can tweak or homebrew stuff to suit our needs. However, the phrase 'when you know the rules, you can break the rules' comes to mind. Hence, it would help to have more initial guidance about you envisioned the more esoteric Dhampir feeding methods being handled. This would, in fact, be far more helpful if a player/DM wanted to change that method or if they wanted a Dhampir that feeds on something not mentioned or by a different means (as you'd have a range of mechanics to gauge your homebrew ones against).

Well, 5e was designed around favouring rulings over clear content! xD

Not blue. Not even close to blue. :P