2) Why are the Tattoos of St. Giles restricted to the Red Court?
I'm actually surprised that a search didn't turn up a previous discussion of this here on the forums. Every effect under the tattoos is effortlessly transferable to the White Court, mechanically at least, yet the books seem uncharacteristically adamant about that Red Court restriction, mentioning it quite a few times in very strong language, while never even hinting at the possibility of sticking them on a WCV/v/v+. It's as if Tattoos-on-a-WCV/v/v+ never even occurred to the authors. This concerns me... have I walked into some subtle game-unbalancing trap by doing just that?
1) How does vampire hunger work?
We spent quite a while bouncing back between Emotional Vampire and Feeding Dependency, trying to figure out how they worked. Here's what we couldn't figure out:
How effectively does Emotional Vampire let a Skavis sense, detect or gauge despair? YW 189 describes WCVs being "drawn" to things like orgies or mobs, so does that mean they can sense these big events going down from a distance? I tend to think yes, because it's interesting, but a more difficult question arises at the small-scale: In close proximity to a potential victim, does a Skavis WCV need to rely on Empathy to detect despair like anyone else would, or can she "smell" it in some supernatural fashion? The latter seems to be implied by the Feeding Frenzy effect, but it's never really stated outright and it struck me as something that would be.
Am I making "feeding failure" too weak?
How DOES one clear out that hunger stress? The powers section describes only two ways to clear out hunger stress — skip an equivalent number of whole scenes of play, or kill. Am I missing the part in the rules that describes how shifts on a feeding attack clear a certain amount of hunger stress? Skipping scenes can't be the only way to clear hunger stress without killing: This I know for a fact, because the designers are clearly too bright for that. But I also figure it's so fundamental that it has to be included in the rules somewhere... we found it very weird that both Feeding Touch (YW 189) and Drink Blood (YW 188) describe "feeding" to deal stress to an opponent, but make no mention of how the vampire benefits from that feeding.
2) Why are the Tattoos of St. Giles restricted to the Red Court?
I'm actually surprised that a search didn't turn up a previous discussion of this here on the forums. Every effect under the tattoos is effortlessly transferable to the White Court, mechanically at least, yet the books seem uncharacteristically adamant about that Red Court restriction, mentioning it quite a few times in very strong language, while never even hinting at the possibility of sticking them on a WCV/v/v+. It's as if Tattoos-on-a-WCV/v/v+ never even occurred to the authors. This concerns me... have I walked into some subtle game-unbalancing trap by doing just that?
Then there's the game element to look at. The Tattoos are all about repressing the hunger.
In theory a WC version would be about repressing that emotion - rendering the character emotionally numb. Unable to sense or react to the emotions of others. Suppressing the powers of the demon inside them - crippling their vampiric side.
Any hunger stress that is not absorbed by physical or mental consequences remains on your sheet into the next scene, AND you must lose access to powers with refresh equal to the hunger stress you have taken.That AND is the part I hadn't understood previously. Rereading with it in mind, though, I agree that's what it says. It does sort of seem to match Thomas's observed behaviors in the books I've read.
Are the tattoos really about repressing the hunger? My interpretation was that they were like an adrenaline shot to your human side, or maybe an "aura of protection" for your soul, as opposed to dampening the hunger. This way, they are focused on the human and not the hunger, which I figured was an "off-limits" zone to magic (for the same reason that curing vampirism is). This would also explain why the tattoos stop working entirely when the RCI completes the change: Their human side is gone, leaving nothing for the tattoos to do. Otherwise, the tattoos would arguably continue to have some effect on the hunger, perhaps weakening the RCV until s/he found a way to remove them.
And, I agree that wading into the "how many WCVs are there?" debate is an issue for another thread. (It's quite an issue, too, IMHO.)
Too lenient? Feeding Dependency is only worth +1 refresh, at most canceling the cost of Blood Drinker or Emotional Vampire. It's not much of a rebate, and not worth losing powers just because you looked at them funny.