How much do the Bone Gnawers factor into vampire behaviors?

[Heavy Arms]

Bone Gnawers aren't everywhere.

There's a lot of Gnawers by the books, and they have one of the largest kin populations on top of that. There might not be any Garou in Stony Point, but I find it a tough case to make that there's zero Gnawer kin, and none of them are kenning, and thus they couldn't give their big city cousins a call for some back up if they needed it. The Garou are capable of traveling very quickly in a large number of ways. Getting to a town an hour north of the city to deal with some young punk leeches is something a pack of Gnawers could handle in less than a day with ease (and it's not like some powerful Elders are going to be causing that sort of trouble).

2) Bone Gnawer numbers are overstated. A large number - perhaps up to half - are "Rabble" - meaning werewolves who are absent from any involvement in the tribe or Garou Nation. They're basically Ronin who've been given the tribal Rite of Passage because the tribe doesn't care. While supposedly the Rabble would come a running if the tribe needed help, we have no evidence at that. The actual number of Bone Gnawers are much smaller than is nominally accepted.

3) There is a fair number of non-Rabble Bone Gnawers that basically don't fight for Gaia. There's an entire camp of Man Eaters. Others are just looking out for themselves and their own interests. They have no real protectorates.

I don't think these apply to the situation at handle.

The whole reason the Tribe keeps the Rabble in, is to count on them for precisely this sort of situation: defending their turf. If the Rabble don't want to suffer getting turned into Ronin by the Bone Gnawers - and lets face it that's going to end poorly if people found out you couldn't cut it with the omega wolves - this sort of situation is exactly when they have to do some work for the Tribe. They don't get a free pass because the Gnawers are just swell folks. The Gnawers recognize that the Garou Nation chases off Garou that can still be useful, and keeps those Garou around with the understanding that the Rabble don't have to deal with the Nation, but they have to put in the work to make safe territories for the Tribe if they want to share in have a safe place to rest their heads.

The "evidence" standard here is a bit ridiculous. If we did that for everything the games "tell" instead of "show" we'd be tossing out 75% of the setting as only "supposedly" being the case.

The Man Eaters are almost entirely in Egypt as this point, and were kicked out of the Tribe; making that a very location specific issue where the rest of the Gnawer camps aren't disconnected like you're implying. Yes even the Gnawers will kick you out of the Tribe if you cross certain lines.

And the Gnawers that are "just looking out for themselves and their own interests," are still ones that are going to have a problem with vampires eating their people. They might not care about killing vampires because Gaia said the Wyrm is bad and leeches smell Wyrmy. But they're definitely going to care if some kindred are munching on their family, trying to take over/evict their businesses, and so on.

[Lysander]

Do vampires have some sort of understanding that the homeless population is off the menu? Do they consider sections of the city with large amounts of homeless people to be a de facto part of the forest? Does anyone, even the Nos and Gangrel, ever claim domain over areas that include clusters of homeless people?

I doubt that most kindred have any clue about who the Bone Gnawers are among the lupine society. They don't hang out sipping tea and eating biscuits and most high clans would view the homeless as belonging to the Nosferatu.

[Devidramoth]

Having run VtM, i read the w20 book with certain expectations of what does and doesn't t-off garou.

Having read W20, Umbra, World of Rage and Kinfolk, it seems as though, for most garou, most of the time, killing low level leeches is maybe a good way to earn some temporary renown and other than that there are bigger fish to fry.

Older or higher ranked Garou have more reason to live and let live because they know what a pain in the butt it can be to get caught up in a long term contest with wyrm-creatures that can have such long and specific grudges. Exceptions abound where it turns out that garou are pretty good at long term grudges themselves, see Silent Striders and Shadow Lords

[Random Goblin]

For me the question is how much do I want them to factor into vampire situations in my game? It makes sense that the canonical answer is at best ambiguous--you can run a Vampire game without involving Werewolves at all if you want, and I think that's right and should be an option. But if you want them? The potential existence of Bone Gnawers, Glass Walkers, and Black Spiral Dancers in urban environments means you have more to play with that's a little bit outside of the box. You don't have to be running a crossover game to have a Bone Gnawer sept or a pack of Glass Walkers rubbing up against whatever your Vampire PCs are doing. You don't even really have to use the words "Bone Gnawers." But if you want them in your game you have a great template for potential allies, adversaries, competition, or obstacles in your city's landscape, with their own set of wants and needs that open up interesting avenues of gameplay.

[Heavy Arms]

I don't think anyone here really disagrees with the idea that the games "should" provide a level of ambiguity that allows multiple approaches without running afoul of individual table desires as much as possible. Running VtM with zero input from WtA, to full crossover chronicles, should in theory be a fully supported spectrum for the WoD.

The issue at hand though, is that it's really easy to make the case that the WoD is structured very poorly (both in setting and mechanics) to facilitate that spectrum.

[Newb95]

All this problems are inherently tied to the metaplot as a whole so short of going the way requiem did and getting rid of it altogether, I would only use the core book for whatever gameline I plan to run (a single gameline, you couldn't pay me enough to try and run an oWoD multisplat game) and ignore the rest, the campaign is set in New York? Fuck it, unless the core says otherwise then vampires/werewolves/whatever are the majority and the others are non existent or present in such small numbers to be insignificant.

[Newb95]

For me the question is how much do I want them to factor into vampire situations in my game? It makes sense that the canonical answer is at best ambiguous--you can run a Vampire game without involving Werewolves at all if you want, and I think that's right and should be an option. But if you want them? The potential existence of Bone Gnawers, Glass Walkers, and Black Spiral Dancers in urban environments means you have more to play with that's a little bit outside of the box. You don't have to be running a crossover game to have a Bone Gnawer sept or a pack of Glass Walkers rubbing up against whatever your Vampire PCs are doing. You don't even really have to use the words "Bone Gnawers." But if you want them in your game you have a great template for potential allies, adversaries, competition, or obstacles in your city's landscape, with their own set of wants and needs that open up interesting avenues of gameplay.

Are you talking about V5? If you are talking about V20 or revised, getting your players to butt heads with werewolves is a sure way to end the game prematurely by TPK.

[Mizu]

About as much as they should worry about it turning out that the person they are trying to snack on is going to turn out to be a mage and start throwing fireballs at them? Its pretty unlikely unless a player goes out of their way to look for one/has really annoyed the ST.