How long would it take for vampires to convert the human race into other vampires?
It’s an academic question unless you’re writing a book or planning a roleplaying campaign. Given that both those scenarios are quite common, it’s handy that we know have an academic answer too.
Dominik Czernia is a physicist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków decided to research different types of vampire from myth ad fiction and then apply their modelling skills to build a calculator.
Czernia told Science Alert;
It was quite a time-consuming project. I started by finding an interesting paper regarding vampires, where the authors subtly suggested the existence of vampires based on real-life data,”
That drew my attention and I decided to test it out in a scientific way with the well-known theory predator-prey model, based on game theory. All of this was challenging and, because I focused on the calculator in my free time, it took me about a month to finish everything.”
The calculator supports various different vampire scenarios;
- Stoker-King model
- Rice model
- Harris-Meyer-Kostova model
- Damped oscillation
- Dusk of humanity
- and custom models
You can use the calculator here.
To use the calculator, adjust the left sidebar to create your initial world population of humans and the chances of a vampire bite turning them into a vampire. You can toggle annual growth and whether smaller population grows faster.
Next, you set up your initial population of vampire, how often they attack humans, how often they attack slayers, and whether smart vampires are a thing.
Lastly, you can configure slayers. Are they rare, do they recruit often or rarely and how dedicated are they in their vampire hunting?
Have a play. You’ll find that it’s quite easy for the vampires to win out against humanity unless there are very many active slayers on quite a few of the models. Food for thought and campaign planning.
Check out the Humans vs Vampire calculator here.
Creative Commons credit: A pompus little vampire by duskdog1.
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