DT: Social Actions

A variety of things can be done under the banner of social actions, these are listed below.

Blood Bonds

Growing or Maintaining Bonds (with another character - background ghouls are automatically maintained)

Where a character has a blood bond in place with another character (either PC or NPC) they may wish to maintain or even to grow the strength of the bond. If an action is not spent to maintain or grow a bond then there is a chance that it may degrade over time naturally if the characters do not have regular contact, for instance if they live in different locations and do not see one another.

This action will attempt to maintain as many active blood bonds as your character has in place, and your character can attempt to increase one of them per downtime action spent in this way. However, maintaining blood bonds at the maximum level or increasing blood bonds will have an impact on feeding checks. If the thrall is attempting to break the bond by avoiding their regnant then a test will be made to see if the bond is maintained.

Breaking Bonds

This is an action taken by a thrall to attempt to break any blood bonds that are currently holding power over them. With this action the character is making an active attempt to avoid making contact with anyone that has a bond over them, or is taking actions to prevent themselves from being called upon by their regnant. Taking this action will force a test for any blood bonds that are currently holding sway over the thrall.

Status

Increasing Status

This can be done either for your character or somebody else’s, and requires that the write-up for the action details specifically what the character is doing to improve their/the target’s standing in the vampire community. Bear in mind that while other actions both in session and in other downtime actions may also affect a character's standing in society,  this action is specifically focused on that objective and so will not grant any additional effect to those changes.

Reducing Status

This action also requires the same kind of detailed explanation of what is being done to slander the target. Unless the character’s plan deliberately includes declaring the slander loudly and publicly, or the character fails and suffers it as a consequence, the identity of the slanderer will not be public knowledge.

However slandering, by its nature, involves sharing negative opinions with others in the vampire community. As such there will be a trail of who heard the slander from whom. The character can put effort into concealing their place in that trail, but this is likely to greatly reduce the chance of success and is not guaranteed to protect anonymity.

Teaching

With this action, the vampire or ghoul attempts to tutor another in growing their student's ability with a Discipline, either to increase their power or teach them new Keywords, Masterwords or Rituals.

Unless gained through Diablerie, to learn the first point in a non-clan Discipline requires both the blood of someone who has that Discipline and a teacher to provide an action to train the basics of the Discipline. Even after this, a teacher’s guidance will make a positive impact on the learning check.

It is worth reminding here that for teaching a ritual, an action must be put in both by the tutor for teaching it and by the student for learning it.