Attacking Hunger Track with Evocation

[Wolfwood2]

Could Evocation be used to attack a vampire's hunger stress track directly?  It seems to me that Water ought to be able to do it for Red Court and Black Court (as they use physical blood) and Spirit ought to be able to do it for White Court (as they use emotion).  In narrative terms it seems simple enough to describe what you're trying to do, which is to destroy the 'fuel' the vampire is using to power their supernatural abilities.

Do you think it would be defended against with Discipline, or would Endurance or something else be more appropriate?

[luminos]

Honestly, I think the hunger track is too debilitating to allow it to be attacked by anything external.  Stress doesn't disappear after a scene, and powers will go away when hunger stress shows up.

[FangGrip]

Perhaps work it like a transformation and require a number of shifts to avoid possible consequences?  I think it would make sense to have a warlock keeping a vampire hungry to do his bidding.  In fact I like that so much I may make it a scenario.

[Lanir]

I would tend to shy away from doing that in a game. I think Luminous is right but there are also story reasons why it doesn't sound like a great idea. The hunger track feels a lot more like the way to track the struggle with your personal demons. It's not really the kind of story you can add an outsider to without rearranging the whole dynamic. If someone wanted to do this I think I'd have them target the mental track and go for hunger-based consequences. Then just state you want your free tag to happen the next time the vampire has to roll Discipline for using their powers in a scene, increasing the attack value. Letting someone freely inflict hunger stress is not so much like a normal attack. It's more like letting someone nuke the whole power base of anything with a feeding dependency. On a more practical level I'm not sure what you'd roll to defend against such an attack either.

[Wolfwood2]

I have to admit, I was thinking about this almost entirely from the perspective of a PC with Evocation using it on NPC vampires, not the other way around.  From that perspective, where the NPC's internal story doesn't matter all that much and they can be assumed to kill somebody off-screen to empty their stress track, it didn't seem like a big deal.

I thought hunger track stress didn't take away powers on its own, though.  Only special Consequences taken when you can't take more hunger stress does that.

[Belial666]

If you take stress in your hunger track for failing a discipline roll to control your hunger you do lose powers.


If you take stress in your hunger track from some other reason, there is no rule that says you lose powers.

[Lanir]

The hunger track doesn't have any consequences. You choose take mental or physical consequences instead or lose powers. Since if you fail your Discipline roll you lose powers, you can effectively think of this track as always inflicting consequences on a successful attack, even if you don't blow past the end of your stress track. I didn't think to explain it very well earlier but I was kind of thinking that the combination of either accepting consequences or losing powers on every attack that lands basically loads you up with magic bullets if you can attack it directly. It's totally cool if you want to do this for your game but your PC is going to be able to wade through vampires (and anything else with a feeding dependency) easier than he could handle a group of pure mortals.