Ryan B. Caveney wrote:

> We've seen a roleplaying answer; now I'll toss in a
> pseudoscientific one. In official rules, bloodstrength is heritable (100%
> so: no environmental variance) and exhibits (again 100%!) regression
> towards the mean (i.e., the average value of childrens' bloodstrength is
> the average value of the parents'), as is characteristic of polygenic
> traits. ("Polygenic" means controlled by more than one gene, like height
> is. This is why height looks normally distributed: it's like flipping 20
> coins, some of them two-headed or two-tailed.) Let's think about what
> modelling it as one suggests.
> What do I mean by this? For computer types, it means combination
> of bloodline strengths is not by mathematical addition, but rather by
> bitwise OR(see footnote). In less technical terms, imagine a card game
> (standard poker deck) in which the point value of a hand is the number of
> distinct face values it contains: e.g., 10 J Q K A evaluates to 5, but J J
> J J Q Q Q evaluates to only 2. In this model, bloodline strength by name
> (e.g, major) is the number of cards in your hand, and bloodline point
> score is the value of your hand. I suddenly begin to like this idea more,
> as I have just explained how "great, 8" is possible and even probable in
> inbred families. Imagine this expanded to whatever number of bloodline
> points you think it takes to make a god (a thousand? a million?), and put
> that many distinct cards per derivation (suit) in your hypothetical deck.
> When the gods exploded, their "cards" were scattered randomly between the
> people close to them. Going back to "great, 8", this model can also be
> easily extended to explain why there are rules for losing blood points for
> bad actions, but not for gaining them by good ones: to lose a point, the
> land, through the magical link that provides RPs, can simply erase one of
> your existing cards; to gain one, you have to steal a new card from
> somebody else's hand.
> When you have children, they get copies of half your cards,
> selected at random. When you kill a blooded scion, you get 1, 2, 1/5 or
> 1/2 of their cards, also chosen randomly. Thus, if you kill your own
> child, you stand a fair chance of getting a copy of one of the cards you
> already hold, and thus not getting an increase; indeed, if you kill a
> child you had by a commoner, you are guaranteed to not get any new cards.
> This model does not limit the number of people who can be blooded (there
> can be arbitrarily many cards in the deck), but it does limit (albeit to
> an operationally infinite number) the number of blood points (the number
> of distinct types of cards in the deck) anyone can conceivably have.
> How would one modify existing rules to use this model? Almost not
> at all, except to say that killing your blood relatives gets you little or
> nothing. It should also mean that there is a slight chance that
> bloodtheft of anybody gets you nothing, but since even the strongest
> bloodlines around today are much less than the total power of the original
> gods, the chance of this is extremely small unless you are very closely
> related to someone. On the other hand, it does provide (and justify) a
> way to slow down the people at the top (e.g., the Gorgon) relative to
> others: for example, you might choose to say that since the Gorgon has
> killed so many scions of Anduiras that he has collected a fair portion of
> the cards of that suit, he should gain only half as many bloodline points
> from bloodtheft of one as he would from someone with the same strength but
> different derivation.
> Thank you for asking that question! I might never have thought of
> this otherwise. Yay BR discussion list! Now I know how bloodstrength
> works IMC, and what it is. =)

Strangely, I was thinking about something like this as a response to the
problem with the Gorgon being able to commit bloodtheft on his children as a
way of increasing his own abilities. My answer was a bit less erudite. It
went more along the lines of, "Well, uh, maybe you can't do a bloodtheft on
your offspring, because, you know, it's the same stuff in the blood if it's
your kid, right? I mean, by half or whatever. It's less of the same stuff, so
it wouldn't be able to effect your bloodline, because your's is more, and less
can't effect more, right? Unless less is really secretly more, but it can't be
because it all came from the same more, so it has to be less... Er, can it?"
At this point in the argument I wander off and sit in the corner and play with
blocks.

The reason I decided against it, however, is because I liked the possibility of
a Caine/Able conflict in a family unit, especially if the transfer of actual
mystical power was involved. If one can commit bloodtheft on a relative it
makes for a much more villainous kind of person don't you think?

- -Gary