Influences General

Source: https://vamp.bynightstudios.com/vampire/library/influencesgeneral

Influences

Vampires have lived alongside mortals since antiquity, subtly influencing human civilization. A vampire can easily control a single person, perhaps manipulate a dozen discreetly, but thousands upon thousands of mortals pose a threat too large to be restrained directly. To aid in their dominion over mortal culture, vampires learned to leverage institutions, societies, and other agencies to influence the population to react according to their designs.

The Influence background mechanically expresses the series of social connections, business transactions, and personal favors that make up a vampire's influence in the mortal world.

Influence Categories

There are two broad categories of influences: Elite and Underworld. Each influence category is a unique background that must be purchased separately (from levels 1 to 5).

The Elite: You have influence over the upper crust: those who are wealthy, hold legitimate power, own corporations, or control noteworthy institutions.
The Underworld: You have influence over those who work outside of the law: working class people looking the other way, and those who live on the street, rule gangs and drug cartels, run networks of thieves, or control intricate cultural bureaucracy.

Influence Specializations

For every dot of influence that a character possesses, you must choose one category in which to specialize. These specializations help to define the nature of your character's social network.

System Rules

Influence Actions

Each dot of an influence background gives your character one influence action per month. Record these influence actions separately; although influence actions are occasionally interchangeable, the origin often makes a difference regarding how that influence action can be spent.

There are two types of influence actions: targeted and general. Targeted actions affect other influences: your own or those belonging to other individuals. General actions affect the world around your character, providing tangible benefits or causing events to happen (or not happen).

Targeted Influence Actions

Targeted influence actions can perform the following activities:

Attack: Temporarily reduce another character's total influence levels.
Block: Prevent other characters from taking certain influence actions.
Boost: Temporarily loan your influence actions to another character.
Defend: Lessen the impact of attacks against your influences.

Attack

You may spend influence actions to attack, and potentially reduce, another character's influence level. To lower an influence in the same category (Elite to Elite or Underworld to Underworld) you must spend 2 influence actions for each point you wish to remove. To lower an influence in the opposing category, you must spend 3 influence actions for each point to be removed.

Defend

By spending influence actions to defend, you protect your influence from attacks for one month. Each defend action you spend reduces a potential influence loss by 1 level.

Block

You can spend influence actions to increase the difficulty of general influence actions. Each action spent on a block removes 1 action from attempts to use influence to perform the specified activity.

Boost

You can spend targeted actions to temporarily increase another character's influence level. Players may boost an influence up to a maximum level of 10.

General Influence Actions

In addition to targeted actions, players may also use their influences for general actions. Each influence category has its own list of general actions, delineated by the level of influence required to perform specific activities.

Indirect Influence Attacks

General influence actions are best used when interacting with plots, but players will occasionally use the benefits of general influence actions to cause trouble for other characters. If the Storyteller chooses to apply a mechanical penalty, the target of an indirect attack loses 1 downtime action for every 2 levels of influence used for the general action.

Source Book: MET - VTM - Core Book