So in theory, how much blood would you say a vampire has in their body? Same as an adult human? Half that?...
I don't need to know how much they consume. I don't need to know the speed at which it is consumed. I just need a rough number for how much of "their own blood" remains in their bodies.
*edit* had to refocus the question, on what i'm actually asking.
It would really depend on how long the blood lasts in their system. That’s what would dictate how much and how often they need to feed.
What I can tell you is that in the lore put forth by Stoker, it took Dracula 3 consecutive nights feeding to drain Mina to near death. The average woman (5’ 5” tall and 165 lbs) has approximately 9 pints of blood in her system.*1 Exsanguination (death by blood loss) occurs if a person looses more than half their blood supply.*2 That means he drained her of approximately 1.5 pints per feeding. Now, did Dracula really need to drink that much blood to sustain himself? Likely not. I believe he only needed to drink that much of Mina’s blood for the dual purpose of almost exsanguinating her and fortifying himself so he had excess blood to feed her for the purpose of turning her into a creature of the night like him.
By my estimation, barring injury an average vampire could likely sustain itself on as little as a ½ pint to a 1½ pints per week. Newer vamps would likely need more, older ones likely less.
I mean i guess that's one possible answer. Feels like they would run out of victims pretty fast though. Killing 180 people a year feels pretty unsustainable (at least in medieval times)
I mean i guess that's one possible answer. Feels like they would run out of victims pretty fast though. Killing 180 people a year feels pretty unsustainable (at least in medieval times)
They wouldn"T necessarily kill them. They could feed on mAny people And still keep them like cattle.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
This is entirely world dependent. Most people think of vamps as killers. I do not. In my worlds, vampires are like most real world blood drinker - parasites, not predators: Mosquitos, leeches, fleas, lampreys, vampire bats, etc.
Blood has two advantages over meat 1) Liquids can be removed from the body fast and 2) It does not have to kill the victim. This makes for a sneaky creature that can get in, get a meal quick and get away without the victim even realizing what happened. If you are killing the victim then why don't you eat as much of it as you can? Would you buy a hamburger and eat everything but the meat?
The average humans has about 10 pints of blood. If you lose 2 pints, you might feint. If you lose 5 pints, you might die, you might not. I would expect anyone that has lost even 7 pints to be definitely die - you need enough to fill your brain, heart, lungs, and the arteries in between.
I would assume that a standard vampire would drink about 2-3 pints as a meal. A starving vampire might drink 6 pints, risking killing his human.
In this specific situation, I think the best way to describe the vampire's mindset would be "Why hunt prey, when you can get people to willingly give you their blood"
As i said, i already have the timing down. These vampires need to feed about once every 3 months (It's closer to 4, but 3 leave some wiggle room so a forgetful vampire doesn't risk their safety if they don't eat right away). I'm mostly trying to figure out how much blood they would "NEED" to consume. Like i can't imagine most vampires (even right after a feeding) are lugging around 1.2-1.5 gallons of blood, but I would also assume it's more then a pint pumping through their body.
There are about 6500 calories in ten pints of blood/ one human. That's roughly double the minimum daily caloric intake for the average male. This would mean that say a vampire is consuming blood for nutrients, you have to decide how many calories plus vitamins and stuff a vampire would need in comparison to a human. I would say the vampire would probably consume over 5 pints of blood every day. There's one problem, it's said vampires are cold to the touch, which means they probably have a slow metabolism. Overall, it's up to you, but I'd say over the course of three days they would consume the blood of 1-2 humans. This assumes the vampire drains almost all the blood in the body. Hope this helps. Good luck!
There are about 6500 calories in ten pints of blood/ one human. That's roughly double the minimum daily caloric intake for the average male. This would mean that say a vampire is consuming blood for nutrients, you have to decide how many calories plus vitamins and stuff a vampire would need in comparison to a human. I would say the vampire would probably consume over 5 pints of blood every day. There's one problem, it's said vampires are cold to the touch, which means they probably have a slow metabolism. Overall, it's up to you, but I'd say over the course of three days they would consume the blood of 1-2 humans. This assumes the vampire drains almost all the blood in the body. Hope this helps. Good luck!
Maybe things are different in D&D, or in any one person’s particular campaigns, however in traditional vampire lore they really can’t drain a victim of all their blood like that. Traditionally speaking, a dead person’s blood is like poison to vampires, so they have to stop drinking the moment before a person dies. Since people die if they loose half their total blood volume or more, at most a vampire could only drain a victim half their blood at any one time. Again, things can be different if the DM decides, I’m just letting folks know what the folklore states. (I once did a paper about the folklore of vampires way back in the day, but I still remember some of the folklore.)
There are about 6500 calories in ten pints of blood/ one human. That's roughly double the minimum daily caloric intake for the average male.
It is worth noting that the historical vampire lore D&D is based on does not really look at blood in terms of its pure nutrients and caloric value. Since antiquity, blood has been viewed as having its own mystical power, with vampires combining this mysticism with the erotic (the formation of a new vampire occurs when a vampire drinks of the victim's blood and the victim drinks of the vampire's--the commingling of blood is a euphemism for sex dating back at least to the 15th century). When vampires feed on a person's blood, they are feeding on the corporeal representation of a person's essence--consuming something other than pure calories. As supernatural creatures requiring the supernatural essence in blood to survive, calories are not the metric by which to measure blood's nutritional value, and there is not a great metric for measuring how many "supernatural calories" something has.
Fortunately, the magic of bored undergraduate students comes to the rescue. A group of University of Leicester students considered how much blood a vampire could drink from a given host before there was a significant change in heart rate that would cause the pressure to drop--you can lose about 15% of your blood before this occurs. This makes sense--after all, in most vampire feedings (unless the vampire is starving and overconsumes), the prey is relatively fine after-the-fact, if a little light headed and woozy from blood loss. With two fang-sized puncture wounds on the carotid artery, they estimated a vampire could drink 15% of a person's blood (1.6 pints) in about 6.4 minutes--a bit faster if they were actively sucking the blood out. Between a minute and 6.4 minutes seems like a pretty reasonable time for a predator to feed--this is in line with the time of feedings in the vampire movies that played a part in D&D's inspiration.
I think that probably makes a good metric for how much a vampire needs to feed in a given night--they need to consume the disposable portion of a person's life essence every night.
Repeated feedings on the same individual--like Mina in Dracula, might require more and more blood on each subsequent night--while your body can generate a pint of plasma in 48 hours-ish, all those red blood cells and other things that make up blood take a few weeks to fully regenerate, so feeding before that regeneration is done will result in lower quality, more diluted blood. This dilution could also play some kind of part in the transformation process--after all, their weaker blood is being supplanted by the unholy communion of consuming their sire's blood.
There are about 6500 calories in ten pints of blood/ one human. That's roughly double the minimum daily caloric intake for the average male.
It is worth noting that the historical vampire lore D&D is based on does not really look at blood in terms of its pure nutrients and caloric value. Since antiquity, blood has been viewed as having its own mystical power, with vampires combining this mysticism with the erotic (the formation of a new vampire occurs when a vampire drinks of the victim's blood and the victim drinks of the vampire's--the commingling of blood is a euphemism for sex dating back at least to the 15th century). When vampires feed on a person's blood, they are feeding on the corporeal representation of a person's essence--consuming something other than pure calories. As supernatural creatures requiring the supernatural essence in blood to survive, calories are not the metric by which to measure blood's nutritional value, and there is not a great metric for measuring how many "supernatural calories" something has.
Fortunately, the magic of bored undergraduate students comes to the rescue. A group of University of Leicester students considered how much blood a vampire could drink from a given host before there was a significant change in heart rate that would cause the pressure to drop--you can lose about 15% of your blood before this occurs. This makes sense--after all, in most vampire feedings (unless the vampire is starving and overconsumes), the prey is relatively fine after-the-fact, if a little light headed and woozy from blood loss. With two fang-sized puncture wounds on the carotid artery, they estimated a vampire could drink 15% of a person's blood (1.6 pints) in about 6.4 minutes--a bit faster if they were actively sucking the blood out. Between a minute and 6.4 minutes seems like a pretty reasonable time for a predator to feed--this is in line with the time of feedings in the vampire movies that played a part in D&D's inspiration.
I think that probably makes a good metric for how much a vampire needs to feed in a given night--they need to consume the disposable portion of a person's life essence every night.
Repeated feedings on the same individual--like Mina in Dracula, might require more and more blood on each subsequent night--while your body can generate a pint of plasma in 48 hours-ish, all those red blood cells and other things that make up blood take a few weeks to fully regenerate, so feeding before that regeneration is done will result in lower quality, more diluted blood. This dilution could also play some kind of part in the transformation process--after all, their weaker blood is being supplanted by the unholy communion of consuming their sire's blood.
A pint and a half per night seems reasonable to me given my calculations based off of Dracula and Mina too.
So in theory, how much blood would you say a vampire has in their body? Same as an adult human? Half that?...
I'd say undead don't have any blood in them, whatever left in them is blood no more.
Thank you for for answering the ACTUAL question at hand. Since i continue to not care about the how much they consume/ the rate at which they consume it.
So in theory, how much blood would you say a vampire has in their body? Same as an adult human? Half that?...
I'd say undead don't have any blood in them, whatever left in them is blood no more.
Thank you for for answering the ACTUAL question at hand. Since i continue to not care about the how much they consume/ the rate at which they consume it.
a vampire might actually have some. Obviously a skeleton wouldn't, and it'd be up to a Dm whether or not a zombie does, depedning on how old the corpse, but given that a vampire drinks blood, it would make sense that there is some in their system (if you want to REALLY get into the thick of it biologically, you might have to think if the blood is something they consume, or if it magically goes to their veins and heart as some sort of magic replenishable life support). vampires are probably one of the most human-like undead, in the sense of physiology, so it's really up to you. knowing the purpose of your question would help...
Vampires have to have blood because it takes vampire blood to turn a mortal into a vampire. They would have he same amount as a comparably sized human.
In D&D, how does a vampire avoid killing someone? In combat, where it can't easily target veins, a vampire is still losing 10 hit points of blood every six seconds.
a vampire might actually have some. Obviously a skeleton wouldn't, and it'd be up to a Dm whether or not a zombie does, depedning on how old the corpse, but given that a vampire drinks blood, it would make sense that there is some in their system (if you want to REALLY get into the thick of it biologically, you might have to think if the blood is something they consume, or if it magically goes to their veins and heart as some sort of magic replenishable life support). vampires are probably one of the most human-like undead, in the sense of physiology, so it's really up to you. knowing the purpose of your question would help...
So as for the point. I'm using the idea that Vampires are unable to create their own blood, so (at least in part) they use their victims blood to help replenish, as their own blood cells die off. Due to their mystical nature, they are immune to any blood transmitted ailments or the side effect of receiving the "wrong kind" of blood.
I need an idea for how much blood would be in their system, so that i can do the math to figure out how many vampires could reasonably exist in a village/town/city/etc... It also helps me figure out how much *hand waving magic* i need to use, to justify how they keep access to viable blood.
IamSposta has a point vampires have some ammount of blood in them to produce true vampires.
Born from Death. Most of a vampire’s victims become vampire spawn — ravenous creatures with a vampire’s hunger for blood, but under the control of the vampire that created them. If a true vampire allows a spawn to draw blood from its own body, the spawn transforms into a true vampire no longer under its master’s control. Few vampires are willing to relinquish their control in this manner. Vampire spawn become free-willed when their creator dies.
There is no 5e RAW or IRL basis to determine how much life sustaining sanguine vigor a vampire needs to be in peak combat shape or some degree between that state and torpor. This question is sort of like "assign me a limitation so I can do world building math" where the simple answer is: 1.) how big do you want the the community of potential food sources to be for story purposes? and 2.) how many "victims" do you want to maintain as food sources collectively dined on as courses during a single feeding cycle or maybe kept in a sort of rotation as a farmer would crops? Once you have those numbers figured out that allow you to start the story you want to play out you can then determine "how much" whatever metric you're using of blood the vampire needs to sustain itself and for how long that sustenance lasts. Maybe your vampire needs to feed on a victim once a night, a pint that would leave the provider feeling a little drained, so to speak, for a day or two. And if the vampire misses enough feedings, maybe there's some sort of exhaustion type mechanic you could use till the vampire compensates or maybe has to overcompensate to make up for the deficit. These deeper feedings are what actually give the community a sense that there's something amiss.
At the end of the day, it's your game and you get to set the parameters of how every monster ecology works. Back in the day, Dragon magazine used to have these "ecology of [insert monster name]" articles that got a DMs gears turning on how a monster may actually interact with a given ecosystem, which is what you're trying to figure out here. There's no set way for a vampire to act, since as the stuff of fiction, the word vampire is a tool which the author or GM/DM can flesh (and blood) out on their own terms to tell the story you want. So if there's a "blood game" in your story, there's no imperative other than making sure it makes for an entertaining session and not some sort of deep dive into hematology.
Vampires, in my game, are inconsistent in terms of this ecology, because they're not at all common so there's no real vampire "culture" or "way" for them. Some are voracious and some are more selective or even reluctant. It's almost like a lot of modern humans' current relationship with food. In many parts of the world, there's such an abundance, nutrition for basic sustenance is just not a concern, so the degree to what you eat is literally a matter of taste and personality. Vampires, with a degree of caution for obvious reasons, would obviously seek out environments with similarly abundant blood resources. Some may sparingly or with very refined fussiness drink infrequently. Others may strive for some internally determined sense of moderation. And still others may be outright gluttons.
I'd only be deeply worried about how a vampire may accomplish feeding in some sort of spartan environment where there's just not a lot of blood to go around, maybe in such an anemic world the vampire would actually seek out work in exchange for feeding, etc.
I would say that each vampire would require a stable of 200 potential food sources (people) to avoid being detected, and that a comunity could only support a 50% population of food sources to keep things on the DL. So a comunity of 20k people could at best support a total of 50 vampires.
I'm just imagining the day the vampire visits to drain your blood, being treated like a birthday. throw a bit old party each year (or couple of years depending on the frequency the vampire needs to eat).
I do agree that if you need to remain hidden, that about 200 food sources per vamp does seem reasonable. I'd think maybe 5-10% of that if the people were just giving the vamp their blood.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
So in theory, how much blood would you say a vampire has in their body? Same as an adult human? Half that?...
I don't need to know how much they consume. I don't need to know the speed at which it is consumed. I just need a rough number for how much of "their own blood" remains in their bodies.
*edit* had to refocus the question, on what i'm actually asking.
I don’t know if it is officially answered somewhere but i would go a gallon every 2 days.. So one human every other night.
It would really depend on how long the blood lasts in their system. That’s what would dictate how much and how often they need to feed.
What I can tell you is that in the lore put forth by Stoker, it took Dracula 3 consecutive nights feeding to drain Mina to near death. The average woman (5’ 5” tall and 165 lbs) has approximately 9 pints of blood in her system.*1 Exsanguination (death by blood loss) occurs if a person looses more than half their blood supply.*2 That means he drained her of approximately 1.5 pints per feeding. Now, did Dracula really need to drink that much blood to sustain himself? Likely not. I believe he only needed to drink that much of Mina’s blood for the dual purpose of almost exsanguinating her and fortifying himself so he had excess blood to feed her for the purpose of turning her into a creature of the night like him.
By my estimation, barring injury an average vampire could likely sustain itself on as little as a ½ pint to a 1½ pints per week. Newer vamps would likely need more, older ones likely less.
I hope that helps.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I mean i guess that's one possible answer. Feels like they would run out of victims pretty fast though. Killing 180 people a year feels pretty unsustainable (at least in medieval times)
They wouldn"T necessarily kill them. They could feed on mAny people And still keep them like cattle.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
This is entirely world dependent. Most people think of vamps as killers. I do not. In my worlds, vampires are like most real world blood drinker - parasites, not predators: Mosquitos, leeches, fleas, lampreys, vampire bats, etc.
Blood has two advantages over meat 1) Liquids can be removed from the body fast and 2) It does not have to kill the victim. This makes for a sneaky creature that can get in, get a meal quick and get away without the victim even realizing what happened. If you are killing the victim then why don't you eat as much of it as you can? Would you buy a hamburger and eat everything but the meat?
The average humans has about 10 pints of blood. If you lose 2 pints, you might feint. If you lose 5 pints, you might die, you might not. I would expect anyone that has lost even 7 pints to be definitely die - you need enough to fill your brain, heart, lungs, and the arteries in between.
I would assume that a standard vampire would drink about 2-3 pints as a meal. A starving vampire might drink 6 pints, risking killing his human.
In this specific situation, I think the best way to describe the vampire's mindset would be "Why hunt prey, when you can get people to willingly give you their blood"
As i said, i already have the timing down. These vampires need to feed about once every 3 months (It's closer to 4, but 3 leave some wiggle room so a forgetful vampire doesn't risk their safety if they don't eat right away). I'm mostly trying to figure out how much blood they would "NEED" to consume. Like i can't imagine most vampires (even right after a feeding) are lugging around 1.2-1.5 gallons of blood, but I would also assume it's more then a pint pumping through their body.
There are about 6500 calories in ten pints of blood/ one human. That's roughly double the minimum daily caloric intake for the average male. This would mean that say a vampire is consuming blood for nutrients, you have to decide how many calories plus vitamins and stuff a vampire would need in comparison to a human. I would say the vampire would probably consume over 5 pints of blood every day. There's one problem, it's said vampires are cold to the touch, which means they probably have a slow metabolism. Overall, it's up to you, but I'd say over the course of three days they would consume the blood of 1-2 humans. This assumes the vampire drains almost all the blood in the body. Hope this helps. Good luck!
Maybe things are different in D&D, or in any one person’s particular campaigns, however in traditional vampire lore they really can’t drain a victim of all their blood like that. Traditionally speaking, a dead person’s blood is like poison to vampires, so they have to stop drinking the moment before a person dies. Since people die if they loose half their total blood volume or more, at most a vampire could only drain a victim half their blood at any one time. Again, things can be different if the DM decides, I’m just letting folks know what the folklore states. (I once did a paper about the folklore of vampires way back in the day, but I still remember some of the folklore.)
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
It is worth noting that the historical vampire lore D&D is based on does not really look at blood in terms of its pure nutrients and caloric value. Since antiquity, blood has been viewed as having its own mystical power, with vampires combining this mysticism with the erotic (the formation of a new vampire occurs when a vampire drinks of the victim's blood and the victim drinks of the vampire's--the commingling of blood is a euphemism for sex dating back at least to the 15th century). When vampires feed on a person's blood, they are feeding on the corporeal representation of a person's essence--consuming something other than pure calories. As supernatural creatures requiring the supernatural essence in blood to survive, calories are not the metric by which to measure blood's nutritional value, and there is not a great metric for measuring how many "supernatural calories" something has.
Fortunately, the magic of bored undergraduate students comes to the rescue. A group of University of Leicester students considered how much blood a vampire could drink from a given host before there was a significant change in heart rate that would cause the pressure to drop--you can lose about 15% of your blood before this occurs. This makes sense--after all, in most vampire feedings (unless the vampire is starving and overconsumes), the prey is relatively fine after-the-fact, if a little light headed and woozy from blood loss. With two fang-sized puncture wounds on the carotid artery, they estimated a vampire could drink 15% of a person's blood (1.6 pints) in about 6.4 minutes--a bit faster if they were actively sucking the blood out. Between a minute and 6.4 minutes seems like a pretty reasonable time for a predator to feed--this is in line with the time of feedings in the vampire movies that played a part in D&D's inspiration.
I think that probably makes a good metric for how much a vampire needs to feed in a given night--they need to consume the disposable portion of a person's life essence every night.
Repeated feedings on the same individual--like Mina in Dracula, might require more and more blood on each subsequent night--while your body can generate a pint of plasma in 48 hours-ish, all those red blood cells and other things that make up blood take a few weeks to fully regenerate, so feeding before that regeneration is done will result in lower quality, more diluted blood. This dilution could also play some kind of part in the transformation process--after all, their weaker blood is being supplanted by the unholy communion of consuming their sire's blood.
I'd say undead don't have any blood in them, whatever left in them is blood no more.
A pint and a half per night seems reasonable to me given my calculations based off of Dracula and Mina too.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Thank you for for answering the ACTUAL question at hand. Since i continue to not care about the how much they consume/ the rate at which they consume it.
a vampire might actually have some. Obviously a skeleton wouldn't, and it'd be up to a Dm whether or not a zombie does, depedning on how old the corpse, but given that a vampire drinks blood, it would make sense that there is some in their system (if you want to REALLY get into the thick of it biologically, you might have to think if the blood is something they consume, or if it magically goes to their veins and heart as some sort of magic replenishable life support). vampires are probably one of the most human-like undead, in the sense of physiology, so it's really up to you. knowing the purpose of your question would help...
Updog
Vampires have to have blood because it takes vampire blood to turn a mortal into a vampire. They would have he same amount as a comparably sized human.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
In D&D, how does a vampire avoid killing someone? In combat, where it can't easily target veins, a vampire is still losing 10 hit points of blood every six seconds.
I have a weird sense of humor.
I also make maps.(That's a link)
So as for the point. I'm using the idea that Vampires are unable to create their own blood, so (at least in part) they use their victims blood to help replenish, as their own blood cells die off. Due to their mystical nature, they are immune to any blood transmitted ailments or the side effect of receiving the "wrong kind" of blood.
I need an idea for how much blood would be in their system, so that i can do the math to figure out how many vampires could reasonably exist in a village/town/city/etc... It also helps me figure out how much *hand waving magic* i need to use, to justify how they keep access to viable blood.
IamSposta has a point vampires have some ammount of blood in them to produce true vampires.
There is no 5e RAW or IRL basis to determine how much life sustaining sanguine vigor a vampire needs to be in peak combat shape or some degree between that state and torpor. This question is sort of like "assign me a limitation so I can do world building math" where the simple answer is: 1.) how big do you want the the community of potential food sources to be for story purposes? and 2.) how many "victims" do you want to maintain as food sources collectively dined on as courses during a single feeding cycle or maybe kept in a sort of rotation as a farmer would crops? Once you have those numbers figured out that allow you to start the story you want to play out you can then determine "how much" whatever metric you're using of blood the vampire needs to sustain itself and for how long that sustenance lasts. Maybe your vampire needs to feed on a victim once a night, a pint that would leave the provider feeling a little drained, so to speak, for a day or two. And if the vampire misses enough feedings, maybe there's some sort of exhaustion type mechanic you could use till the vampire compensates or maybe has to overcompensate to make up for the deficit. These deeper feedings are what actually give the community a sense that there's something amiss.
At the end of the day, it's your game and you get to set the parameters of how every monster ecology works. Back in the day, Dragon magazine used to have these "ecology of [insert monster name]" articles that got a DMs gears turning on how a monster may actually interact with a given ecosystem, which is what you're trying to figure out here. There's no set way for a vampire to act, since as the stuff of fiction, the word vampire is a tool which the author or GM/DM can flesh (and blood) out on their own terms to tell the story you want. So if there's a "blood game" in your story, there's no imperative other than making sure it makes for an entertaining session and not some sort of deep dive into hematology.
Vampires, in my game, are inconsistent in terms of this ecology, because they're not at all common so there's no real vampire "culture" or "way" for them. Some are voracious and some are more selective or even reluctant. It's almost like a lot of modern humans' current relationship with food. In many parts of the world, there's such an abundance, nutrition for basic sustenance is just not a concern, so the degree to what you eat is literally a matter of taste and personality. Vampires, with a degree of caution for obvious reasons, would obviously seek out environments with similarly abundant blood resources. Some may sparingly or with very refined fussiness drink infrequently. Others may strive for some internally determined sense of moderation. And still others may be outright gluttons.
I'd only be deeply worried about how a vampire may accomplish feeding in some sort of spartan environment where there's just not a lot of blood to go around, maybe in such an anemic world the vampire would actually seek out work in exchange for feeding, etc.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'm just imagining the day the vampire visits to drain your blood, being treated like a birthday. throw a bit old party each year (or couple of years depending on the frequency the vampire needs to eat).
I do agree that if you need to remain hidden, that about 200 food sources per vamp does seem reasonable. I'd think maybe 5-10% of that if the people were just giving the vamp their blood.