In my past playthroughs it did work quite well. Diablerie in this mod is quite different from the pen and paper V20 variety. An individual act is way less impactful. Less rewards, less risks and social consequences. If you commit a lot of them they do become quite relevant, though.
On how to capture your target: Try going for prisoners. Diablerie is an execution option.
The "find lair" journey can be a little tricky. At least murder schemes are not just a dice roll. They give you a scenario, like "mobilize angry mob" or "witchhunter attack" and then you have to assess whether such an approach would work against your target. Strong NSCs can pop abilities liek auspex and obfuscate to block your schemes. Sometimes friends and lovers get in the way. Also, the game does not do truly random dice rolls. The 50% success chance is also more like a guesstimate, before the target starts using powers of his own.
In conclusion, just cause a target to rebel, defeat the rebellion and suck your prisoner immediately. High level obfuscate gets targets out of prison cells.

Also, don´t eat people with the "unconquered soul" ability.
In general, keep in mind that your enemies have disciplines too.

hmm.. ok, if its working for some I will keep trying. But he doesn't have unconquered soul and repeatedly failing 50/50 rolls (just happened again at 50/50), over and over and over and over... It really feels like either there's something wrong in this version or the numbers aren't displaying properly or the RNG is broken or something and dying from it... Worse comes to worse I'll try to abduct I suppose

nvm, got it! Finally. Thank y'all for letting me know. With that knowledge I got into a tourney (to have multiple quick events clearing stashed dice rolls) and then just save scummed over... and over... and over..... for about another hour.... and finally it worked out that I got to the actual fight with the dude and ate him. Still think the RNG or Something is busted (there is no statistical way I should've failed this many rolls) but eventually save-scum for the win. Also really feels like all that prep should play a roll in the follow-up events after catching the guy. Thanks all!

Yes, there is something wrong with RNG or something. My bet is on "something" because it's possible to fail an action you can't possibly fail.

50/50 could be written off as bad luck, there is nothing impossible about hitting tails 20 times in a row. Failing the Grail trials when traits guarantee 100% success can't be explained at all and yet it happens too. It's like the outcome is precached somewhere since the start of playthrough and my attempts to tailor my traits for success don't matter at all.

It seems like the end result rolls might be seeded when the journey is begun to prevent savescum. I repeatedly failed a 5% roll.

I also had some attempts auto-fail although the predicted probability of success was at 100%. It happens somewhat regularly with seduction or romance attempts against powerful elders with opposing paths/alignments. My guess is that the 100% number does not reflect some mental perks against manipulation attempts.
Savescumming works in this game, but only with some time delay and/or actions between the save and the roll. There is a scummy way around bad rolls that have been locked in. I lined up several murder schemes at once (Ancoran Sarcophagus etc give you additional hostile schemes) and failed one at 95% success rate. After reloading I executed another murder scheme with like 80& success chance, got the same botched result, then succeeded in the 95% success case.

POD scheme's success rate is of course unrelated to scheme's success, devs said it few times. I am talking about instances that are coded to certain success under certain conditions and yet sometimes fail anyway.

I am not saying that everytime you fail it happens because "something". No, more often than not the reason is you. That obviously is never true in my case.

"POD scheme's success rate is of course unrelated to scheme's success, devs said it few times."
Really? I hope that you are joking. Otherwise I would just not show that faulty number at all.

Yea... I hope this all changes a bit. For one thing its just a little unrealistic that you cannot prepare for a better success rate (perfect 3 year long plan with 5 other elder vampires help you, and you forgot the target can turn into a pigeon / couldn't prep for that by packing a bow?

Or just turning into hawks and flying the dude down?) As for numbers being pre-cached, given that you can blood-surge at the last minute having the 'success' pre-cached instead of the number.. Meh. In general anti-save-scumming stuff seems.. meh. Its a single-player game (no one gets hurt if someone wants to save scum), and there is already a great anti-save scum mechanism - the load time for this game + this mod. I have a pretty super gaming computer and dear lord my blood freezes when I have to save/load.

Anyway, glad to know the system overall works.

Pushing your attributes last minute before you select an option acutally works sometimes.
The murder etc. mechanic is kind of silly considering that hunters have a more detailed approach in their "find lair" journey. Once you get to your target you can choose between different approaches like organizing a mob against disliked rulers, beating your target physically yourself etc. Then again the devs nerved the murder scheme in the past. People called it OP or whatever.

Previously, there was no defense against Unconquered Soul, except for RNG. But now it seems like if you have Fortitude, you can fight back against their attempts to seize control.

I STRONGLY suggest picking up this discipline, if you plan to diablerize any of the Antedeluvians. Especially if you're targeting Tremere, where you have to contest against 3 Unconquered Soul checks back to back.

Yeah, I wouldn´t target Tremere for many reasons.

So I did the "eating my way up the ladder" achievement and got an unconquered soul event from gen 6 to gen 5. Firstly, it did not trigger immediately but years later, so props to the devs for this neat anti-savescumming technique. Secondly, I could buy my way out with several decisions.

Either you adopt the road of your victim or your realm does. Either you eat tons of stress or you adopt your target´s appearance/characteristics etc. It was costly but doable.

Lastly, if you were to get an unconquered soul event with f.e. Lasombra, would you even want to resist? Theoretically, you would continue playing as Lasombra and have a much stronger character.

Originally posted by random encounter:

Yeah, I wouldn´t target Tremere for many reasons.

So I did the "eating my way up the ladder" achievement and got an unconquered soul event from gen 6 to gen 5. Firstly, it did not trigger immediately but years later, so props to the devs for this neat anti-savescumming technique. Secondly, I could buy my way out with several decisions.

Either you adopt the road of your victim or your realm does. Either you eat tons of stress or you adopt your target´s appearance/characteristics etc. It was costly but doable.

The length of time it takes for Unconquered Soul to happen seems to be randomized. I'm pretty sure that in previous ones, I've had it prompt almost immediately after committing diablerie.

Near as I can tell, having a high stress level increases the chances of it happening, as you become more prone to mental breaks and instability.

As I said in my previous post, there used to be no defense against this. When an Unconquered Soul happened, you were forced to accept it. But now, you can resist it with a high enough level of Fortitude.

So, if your character does not already start with such a discipline, you should go on a journey to learn it as quickly as possible, before you start your soul sucking spree.

Originally posted by random encounter:

Lastly, if you were to get an unconquered soul event with f.e. Lasombra, would you even want to resist? Theoretically, you would continue playing as Lasombra and have a much stronger character.

For me, I like the idea of at least one vampire actually managing to succeed in their plan to devour a clan founder and usurp their power. I know that in the canon lore, every single one of these failed; even the ones that look like they succeeded.

Brujah escaped by jumping forward through time, Giovanni only managed to devour half of Cappadocious, and Tremere has been rendered comatose as he desperately fights for control of his own body.


Though I will say that I'm disappointed we only get to select a few of the Antedeluvians to go after. Would have been cool if we had the chance to target any of them. Like, maybe go after Ravnos, who was presented as being a member of the 2nd generation back in 1st edition.

My character didn´t put any points in fortitude. The one incident wasn´t too bad. Half of Europe converted to Via Mithras over night, then switched back to Eindherjar due to true faith 5 or 6.

There is one major problem for the devs with writing plots for other Antediluvians. The source material doesn´t offer much to go on. For Cappadocius, Saulot, Tzimisce and Lasombra you had the officially successful attempts. The beef between Baba Yaga and Nosferatu is well established. They had to improvise with Seth and Troile. What do we know about Ventrue or Arikel, f.e.? Where do they rest, what does their defense look like, do they have loyal guardians or watchdog children?