Slaking Hunger
Drinking blood reduces a vampire’s Hunger level by a fixed amount. Only draining a human of blood, thereby killing them, can reduce Hunger to 0.
It takes time to drink blood and care to do it properly. The bite of a vampire can seem downright euphoric to the victim; vampire fangs produce a supernatural intoxicating effect while opening up a blood vessel. Assuming the vampire takes the time to hit a vein or artery correctly and licks the wound closed afterward, the victim may only remember the encounter as a drug trip, an interlude of weird rough sex, or just a delirious fog of drunken intimacy. Even a closed wound and happy hallucination for the victim might still leave behind an air embolism, to say nothing of long-term anemia.
As a general rule, attempting to preserve the victim’s life, health, or blissed-out screen memory (all of which of course also preserve the Masquerade) takes longer than simply ripping open an artery and slurping down the red stuff. On the other hand, a victim who fights back slows things down and endangers the Masquerade. A vampire can drain and kill a helpless or otherwise unresisting human in roughly five turns.
