House Rules: Humanity Penalties (nWoD VtR LARP)

Social Penalty rather than Cap when dealing with mortals;

The penalty a vampire experiences is 10 minus their own Humanity. Thus a vampire with 7 Humanity would have a -3 penalty to Socialize, Persuasion, and Empathy against mortals. This still represents the growing ascendancy of a beast in low-Humanity vampires, and the resulting discomfort in mortals, but does so equally for vampires with both low and high social skills and abilities. 

Starting Blood

At the start of play draw a card, that is how many Blood points your character was down from max when they went to sleep for the day. To rise that night a vampire must spend an amount of blood equal to 10 minus their Humanity.

Rising With Insufficient Vitae

A character may suffer three points of bashing damage per point of blood they do not spend to rise. Thus a character requiring three points of blood to rise one night may take 9 points of bashing damage to expend no blood to rise for whatever reason. Alternately, the character could suffer 6 bashing damage and spend 1 point of Vitae, suffer 3 bashing damage and spend 2 points of Vitae, or simply spend the 3 Vitae.

Coil of Blood

Characters with the Blood Seeps Slowly power benefit by adding the character’s Resolve to their Humanity rating when calculating the amount of blood needed to rise. A character with Blood Seeps Slowly and a Resolve + Humanity of greater than 10 may actually have more blood than they drew (but not more than their full blood pool) because of their reduced blood usage.

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These are alternate rules for I came up with for a Vampire the Requiem LARP. They were meant to address a fundamental problem I had encountered repeatedly across several such games, both as a player and narrator and in both Masquerade and Requiem; The sense that Humanity was something that required extra tests when engaging in combat or other "vampy" activities. This bothered me intensely, as one of the strong themes is supposedly clinging to Humanity. My hope is that by giving that loss a mechanical "bite" I might make it something valued rather than disdained.
This, not incidentally, also addressed the prevalence of combat in Vampire LARP, a type of game which is intended to be a strongly social and non-combat event. 

These changes didn't all start out together, the Social Penalty and Vitae rules specifically were separate originally. Some very clearly necessitated others; the excess blood use to rise required additional rules for going to sleep without sufficient blood, since that suddenly became far more likely, and changed the Coil of Blood. I still may not ever institute the Social Penalty rules, because they require extra math in an active LARP environment (even if the math is spectacularly tame by tabletop standards). The Vitae rules don't take any less math, but math during prep is a far easier hurdle than math during play.

Apparently I'm cursed when it comes to LARPs, though, because every time I've tried to set one up external forces have conspired to keep the game from ever starting.