So I have played a fair amount of vampire the masq. I understand the core concept of humanity, but from my best understanding vampires view humans as barely better then cattle. While that may not be true for all vampires, I feel like a semi reasonable number of vampires view them that way.
I am noticing that in the rule books, the examples they give for “inuring stains” does include embracing someone as a 2 stain penalty, but they also talk about rationalizing the kill and how with proper rationalization you can lower the amount of stains or even negate them in general.
At humanity 6, it even says a a quote. from the 5e book "You might not go out of your way to wreck things or kill people, but you don’t cry bloody tears over it either."
So my coterie is planning on starting a "blood cult’ i personally like the idea of the cult of lillith which says and again its a direct quote “Never feel remorse for serving Lilith:The Bahari cannot afford to dwell in remorse, be-cause remorse is the thread by which self-doubt and artificial morals are sewn to the soul. Remorse creates hesitation.” and followed up with "Only kill in sacrifice to Lilith : Killing is made sacred by being part of worship, learning, and growth. Sacrifice can be about holy vengeance. Sacrifice can mean volunteering your body to be the feast, to die in the hands and mouths of other Bahari. All deaths must have meaning to the Dark Mother."
So my question is, if you are killing for the explicit purpose of serving lillith would you still incur stains? Our faction also has a never hurt the innocent coterie ruling, aka don’t have babies or children, try to avoid killing the avg human adult. So if we only sacrificed bad guys and gang bangers in our garden would our clan incur heavy stain gains.
The core concept of humanity is a very well fleshed out example of one path/road/morality track that new kindred could be on. Likely the most common path to be on actually. Even in older editions of the game, the majority of players would choose a path closer to humanity. The humanity path is also the simplest path to grasp for new players.
If you are playing in a campaign that is not using fledgling vampires, and all the players are comfortable with playing something a little more monstrous, then check out Cults of the Blood Gods. Cults contains example convictions for the major Kindred religions as well as goals for each and their actions in current nights.
Convictions do indeed negate stains, provided that they are followed and permitted by the Storyteller. Tenants on the other hand, function more as hard stop lines. Tenants (hurting children/innocents) are actions that everyone does not want to be allowed in game. Thus, when a tenant is broken, even by oversight or mistake, you get additional stains as a result.
In your example, a Bahari type coterie would not be getting an unusually high number of stains, unless they just kill every person they feed from. Vampires don’t have to kill to feed, but if they do, that’s when the stains start adding up.
Don’t forget the importance of the remorse test either. After a long night hunting “predators”, it should be common practice for believers to pray to Lilith for guidance, triggering the remorse test.
Characters who openly kill, for no justifiable reason will loose their humanity/road/path quickly, and their beast will be more likely to rise and take control.
So i guess what I’m trying to come to understand though is as a vamp, i view that people are cattle, and are my food source, if i kill as long as they are not an innocent i don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong.
Embracing a mortal is +2 stains, but if i justify it, via my ^^^ concept of humanity, that should lower it to +1 stain, but IF I kill in the name of Lillith then I won’t get any stains.
That’s how I interpret the rules, yes.