Actualy you would have a fair amount of control. Just stay fed. It takes THREE DAYS of starvation to reach that breaking point. More then fair in my opinion, and knowing that murderous outburst is just a day or even hours away give you all the motivation you need to stay well fed. That or to kindly remove yourself to the nearest bandit camp and have your breakdown there. lol. I play a LOT of table top games. When the player is no longer playing their chkinaracter properly (vampire hasn't eaten in a month?! WTF!) the Game Master, in this case kindly old bethesda, is perfectly with their rights to take over the character for a few seconds and remind the player they've chosen to be a monster, rather then say a leper.
At the least I'd say after three days with no blood a vampire should start losing health. If I could i'd get the darn mod that reverses the scale, making you stronger the more you feed.. but i'm on an xbox and microsoft has a healthy hatred for so much as modding save files never mind changing core elements of a game. -mutters-

This is what I do, with Better Vampires Mod I can reverse the feeding (stronger as I feed) I can set drastic sun damage (I have it set to only stage 1 doesn't have sun damage) and with other mods I keep my vampire looking normal enough that I can believe that she can walk around town without people trying to kill her.

I don't think you should lose control, but you should definitely be "strongly encouraged" to feed (like the werewolves in Bloodmoon). I still don't like that vampires lose their powers when they feed, which actually discourages you from feeding like a vampire should. Particularly now with Dawnguard, you don't get attacked as a monster for not feeding anymore either, so there's even less incentive to do so. From a gameplay perspective, this feels completely backwards.

That's the biggest reason I've never considered playing a vampire in Oblivion and Skyrim. To get vampire powers you have to not act like a vampire. If you act like a vampire, then you don't have any good vampire powers. Made worse by the fact that a single feed will undo all your powers, and there's no risk associated with feeding other than an assault charge if caught (hello, a monster just attacked you and could've turned you into a monster too, and all you give him is a fine?).


IMO, feeding on someone should damage their health. Do it too much in a short period of time, and they'll die. Getting caught feeding should give you a (temporary) death penalty. When you feed you'll grow strong with new powers, but also become more monstrous (with the strongest stage being an automatic attack-on-sight). Not feeding makes you weaker and more like a diseased person. One feeding for one stage of vampirism.

I never quite understood why people say the powers you receive as a vampire from not feeding are sole reasons why you shouldn't feed, I mean...the only thing you get from not feeding is more weakness to fire and more resistance to frost.

The powers themselves are strong indicators for you to feed.

I mean Embrace of shadows is there so incase you have terrible sneak you can still break into a house and bite some sleeping NPC and feed off him/her.

Like 100% of the Vampire powers you receive from not feeding all are there to help you feed if you svck at sneaking and such.

I mean they even gave Vampiric seduction a new function so you can feed on conscious people.


Then again...I like to roleplay my character as a vampire..ya' know, travel only at night, feed regularly, find a place to sleep during the day (making people your fledglings off the Volkihar radiant quests..helps a lot, always nice to have fledglings in cities who willingly offer you their coffins)

Makes it a lot more fun, in my opinion.

Also, the accidents of the Volkihar bloodline are what they call thin-bloods, if you are turned by Harkon or Serana you are instantly welcome in the clan.

I mean the Feral vampire in the undercroft of the Castle even references she was a accident and when she wanted to join they denied her and said if she returned they would kill her so she plotted her revenge in the undercroft..til you kill her.
(Sneak and stand still in sorta close proximity to her and she'll start talking to herself)

If you use Dead thrall on Volkihar vampires..the random enemy thin-blood ones they give you a similar story and the occasional hatred of the Volkihar clan for lording over them and looking down on them.

May have to travel a while with them though, they only go "Uuuuuuh" like a zombie for quite a while.

So there you go..some dialogue to prove Harkon's bloodline is the true Volkihar clan, unless you can prove that the thin-bloods hatred for the Volkihar clan is misguided somehow.

They're useful to help you feed, but that doesn't mean they're only useful to help low-skilled characters feed, nor does it mean they should only be available when you haven't fed. Why can I only have those abilities if I have "trouble" feeding?

Some of the abilities aren't related to feeding, either. Vampire's Servant and Vampiric Drain, for instance, get stronger the less you feed, and as you get higher level, you'll want those abilities to be stronger. In Oblivion there was also Reign of Terror, a somewhat useful crowd-control spell, which you only got at stage 3.


If you're a vampire, one would think you'd want to use vampire abilities to do vampires things. But once you feed, all your abilities are either removed or strongly weakened to near uselessness. What's the point in being a vampire if all you do with it is stealthily "assault" someone once a day (at no risk of harm to them)? Contrast that with being a werewolf, where being in beast form greatly changes how you play to be more like a savage beast, and is not limited to specific quests or quest lines. You can choose to use your lycanthropic abilities to deal with many quests or just at random times. Being a vampire barely affects your gameplay at all, though. Feeding is an extremely minor thing comparatively, and the only way you get decent vampire powers is by not feeding. So either you prey on NPCs and don't get any good vampire abilities, or you get good vampire abilities but can't use them to prey on NPCs.

If they had reversed the stages, it'd work more like how lycanthropy does. You use your unique and enhanced abilities to do what you're expected to so you can keep using those abilities, which makes you feared and hated. Stop using your abilities and you lose them, allowing you to work with peaceful NPCs again.

Bringing this back on topic:

Sybille Stentor in the vaniila game: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:SR-npc-Sybille_Stentor.jpg

Sybille Stentor with her eyes corrected by the Unofficial Skyrim Patch: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198052260730/screenshot/921238949684120328

Sybille Stentor with Dawnguard installed*: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198052260730/screenshot/921238949556508083?tab=public

She never was a "Cyrodiilic" vampire, and though her new eyes aren't super-subtle, they're not a neon "vampire here" sign like some would have you believe. Note that her hood does a good job of shading the upper part of her head.

*This one is a little farther away than I would like. I might re-do it later.

What is she then? A mistake?

In a word: yes.

All human vampire races and orc vampires had the female eyes set to hazel; however, one would notice by attempting to choose a difference default eye that the only available one was EyesFemaleHumanVampire -- so, in other words, those races had incorrect eyes set.

Sybille Stentor (and Hert) had the default eyes for their race and so had hazel eyes rather than red-and-black vampire eyes.

Alva, though, intentionally does not have vampiric eyes, though I wouldn't go inventing lore-based reasons -- it would simply ruin "Laid to Rest" if you could easily see that she was a vampire from the get-go (similar to Seridur in Oblivion, unique even among Cyrodiil's vampires for his green eyes).

I somewhat like the feeding method of 'drinking to seem human' that Bethesda have used. I didn't for a long time, but it grew on me. As we was with Lord Lovidicus; a Vampire can go without blood for decades without dying. But they will become feral. The beast comes to the surface, as do all the supernatural abilities. Blood doesn't so much give the vampire power, that is already inside the vampire, but allows them to subdue the beast and blend into mortal society. It almost works like a seal on their innate supernatural abilities. They can choose not to, and rarely feed, giving into the monster and gainign their full potency. Or they can continue to live amongst mortals, a wolf among sheep.

It's simply a different take on vampires, actually somewhat closer to some of the original stories than most modern ones.

I don't believe Carmilla ever goes into it, and Nosferatu is more out and out monster anyway, but next time you watch Dracula look at Vlad before he devours a shipful of people (and how he looks after), at Lucy before her first meal, and so forth. There are big differences of course.

Another vampire much like those Bethesda are using are those of Warhammer. To blend into human nobility they have to drink copius ammounts of blood; otherwise they look horrific and yet lose none of their potency unless they are downright starved.

Also. I've got a pet theory that there is illusion magic that a fed vampire gives off subconsiously that masks their eyes and fangs from humans, and that drops away as they feed or get hungry. As noted above its ingame reason is likely just for player benefit, but its nice to have a reason in roleplay why my fangs and glorious glowing eyes don't immediatly give me away. Another explination is that used by Hassildor; the eyes could simply be explained away as sorcery.

I am on the PC and Sybille in the Blue Palace has normal eyes to me. Not got any mods that changes the vampires either. Yet Alva had the glowy eyes for me. Now I am confused.
Went to the Blue Palace and cast detect life and Sybille has a blue aura yet everyone else in there doesn't show up unless I use the shout Aura Whisper. So in my Dawnguard game she seems to be human according to the spell.

You've got something seriously wrong with your game if Elisif's court isn't showing up with "Detect Life."

Sybille Stentor sent me, a Volkihar Vampire Lord, to kill a Volkihar Master Vampire. When I got there the Volkihar Master was hostile to me, a fellow Volkihar. I had to defend myself and kill him so I used my Vampire Lord form to see if he would back off. He didn't. He's now an extinct Volkihar. Seems to be something wrong with the game logic here. What does this make Sybille? A killer of Volkihars? The whole thing seems messed up to me. ...Unless Sybille is on a power trip and wants to be a supremo over the Volkihar and she didn't get along with this Master Vampire? Or, Sybille is NOT a Volkihar?

She's covering for herself.

"We seem to have something of a vampire problem. Bodies have been found with blood drained. I know of a cave nearby that you can wipe out as a precaution..."

Yup, I mean the guys in the volkihar court send you on side quests to kill vampires all the time if they start rilling up the herd or try to start a coven.

Even in oblivion the vampires send you to kill other vampires one made a vampire hunting group to cover him self lol.

Vampires are territorial.
And sometimes protecting yourself means eliminating whomever is being loud and stupid about being a Vampire.

Its long been my theory that the vamps outside of Harkon's court are either 1) different "breeds" of vampire (i.e. Cyrodillic), 2) rebels from Harkon's court who want to start their own courts. This second one has some validity in that both Dawnguard and Volkihar send you to take out vampires who have joined groups of necromancers etc "before they turn them".