Alicornutopia

Average lifespan of meals over lifetime = vampire lifespan. Pretty simple.

Rhysel would be Super Mad.

I imagine you'd get a dragon with an increased minimum lifespan.

I was assuming a volume-weighted average of natural lifespan of the owners of all blood ever consumed, counting life already lived as lifespan. This has a lot of convenient properties, like nibbling on two people who both live exactly 100 years being equivalent to nibbling on one such person twice as often, and allowing nibbling on the elderly.

With one vampire, assuming the scheme started when the vampire is born and you always concentrate all lifespan available in the kama before the feeding (and ignoring that the vampire will need some of that for life already lived and for surviving the feeding), assuming meal size is constant, you get a converging series approaching (IIRC; it was a while since I did the math) four times the kama’s initial lifespan (twice each for the kama and vampire). Not bad, if the kama was already a dragon, but not great.

I'm totally imagining someone* trying to convince Rhysel that if there's a real legitimate use for a forbidden working, one that could help a lot of people, then surely it's worth at least trying to get it unforbidden even if people have good reason to be scared of it because of previous uses... XD

The two things I was thinking about wrt exact details are (1) if a kama reads a vampire's lifespan before that vampire has drunk any blood, what number shows? and (2) if a kama takes years of lifespan away from a vampire, how does that affect what happens the next time that vampire drinks blood?

I can see two possibilities for the second one:
(2a) Vampire lifespan is (average lifespan of meals vampire has had) plus-or-minus-as-appropriate (years taken or added to this vampire via kamai).
(2b) Vampire lifespan becomes [(current lifespan number you would get from a kamai reading) plus (lifespan of new meal)] divided by (total number of meals vampire has had) every time the vampire has a new meal.

2b seems like it would make for easier lifespan hacking.

*Mairon. It's Mairon. It's absolutely Mairon.

Kappa wrote: *Mairon. It's Mairon. It's absolutely Mairon.

Who?

The results of a lifespan read on a brand new baby vampire are undefined. They are known to live long enough to starve to death rather than dying of something else if you don't feed them.

2b sounds right to me but we're getting a bit mathy for my, uh, blood.

"Undefined" is interesting. Does that mean you haven't defined it because it's never come up, or that the actual working would behave strangely around baby vampires?

I don't know, Kappa, I think it might be [spoiler-box= ]Talyn, for obvious reasons.[/spoiler-box]

I haven't defined it because it's never come up; the working might also behave strangely around baby vampires.

I was assuming 1 would be NaN, but it is actually irrelevant (any number could be transferred to the kama) unless the answer is +∞ (which would allow an arbitrary amount of lifespan to be taken, but based on the description of the ritual wouldn’t actually allow the kama to get infinite lifespan), and I was assuming 2a (which is the more generous assumption).

The problem, even with plural vampires, is that each of the vampires also wants infinite lifespan. I’m not sure if the further multiplication ability would counteract this need for more lifespan, but my intuition is “yes, even with just two vampires available”.

EDIT TO ADD: For the less mathy, summaries of Kappa’s 2a and 2b:

2a is basically “calculate age as you otherwise would for vampires, then add or subtract the lifespan change from kama”. 2b is basically “Pretend that, up until now, your previous meals have left you at your current lifespan. Maybe everybody you nibbled on had exactly this lifespan and you still had the same amount of blood. Now recalculate based on your new meal”. The difference is illustrated with the following scenario:

You are a vampire. You have had exactly two meals, both from a dragon kama (2000 years). They steal 1000 years of your lifespan. You have another meal from them (now 3000 years). Under 2a, you calculate your expected lifespan from your meals (average of 2000, 2000, and 3000 is 2333⅓), then subtract the 1000 for a total of 1333⅓. Under 2b, you calculate your expected lifespan from your current lifespan and your new meal (average of 1000 and 3000, with the 1000 weighted at twice the 3000 because you’ve had two meals, is 5000 / 3 = 1666⅔).

I was wrong above; 2b is more generous. It also seems more reasonable; it requires less “memory” for vampire lifespan calculations.