Evaluating the Vampire

 So, I'm currently writing a novel whose protagonist is a dhampir, and I'm also finally reading Dracula as research for the story (though my novel uses gothic horror tropes, the overall narrative is more weird fantasy.) Anyway, while I intended to make one a major villain in my original campaign, the game sort of fell apart before I could get to the confrontation, and so I've never run a Vampire (except briefly as a friendly NPC) in D&D before.

Vampires are iconic, and in D&D none are as iconic as Strahd von Zarovich (who is considered the first vampire in the D&D multiverse). Now, Strahd has a unique stat block in Curse of Strahd, though it's not too dissimilar to the standard Vampire. He's effectively the Spellcaster variant vampire with a couple of different spells and several lair actions (something that the standard vampire oddly doesn't have).

Vampires CR 13 (Strahd's spell choices and lair actions upgrade him to 15, along with some bonus necrotic damage and, of course, a lot of stuff from the adventure that makes him tougher to take down (and as a Darklord, never permanently).

However, a close reading of the stat block reveals some surprising things:

The first is that their damage output is laughably low. Their unarmed strikes deal only 1d8+4 bludgeoning damage, and their bite does only 1d6+4 piercing and 3d6 necrotic - and they can only bite once per turn. That amounts to a total (when striking and biting) of 25 damage in a turn - way below what we'd expect from most CR 13 monsters.

Now, I brought this to the attention of a friend who is also a forever-DM (we only play in one anothers' games) and he pointed out that there are factors in the CR calculation that manage to bump the thing up to its 13 level, including its 20-HP regeneration per turn (shut down with radiant damage or some of the vampire weaknesses,) along with legendary resistance (something I often don't include in my CR calculations) and, most importantly, the wording of its Charm ability.

Also, we had a somewhat heated discussion of Misty Escape, where I argued it was confusingly worded, but we'll talk about that later on (and I think to a large extent it serves as a less-impenetrable version of a Lich's Rejuvenation trait, allowing the DM to mostly get to have a recurring villain as long as they want, though there are player work-arounds).

But, if you glance at the Charm ability, you know that it's an action that causes the target to need to make a DC 17 (pretty high DC in any scenario) Wisdom save or become charmed by the vampire. The thing is, this is not just the charmed position - the target isn't dominated, but it will "take the vampire's requests or actions in the most favorable way it can" and treats the vampire as someone to be heeded and protected.

And this, I think, is the key to making the Vampire a properly scary challenge - indeed, you can do all the grappling and biting with legendary actions, but the Charm effect (which has no 24-hour immunity) can potentially be devastating.

I'd argue that it doesn't necessarily force a player character to attack the party, but it could force them to, say, restrain other players - you charm the fighter and have the vampire tell them to drag the blade-lock away.

Now, there's a sort of interesting question about the bite - the damage it does is not that scary to a party high enough to fight a vampire - though the max HP reduction does give it a bit more of a sting. However, if we imagine the vampire is mainly preying on commoners, this is a lethal threat the vast majority of the time (actually, it's always lethal to someone with 4 HP, and will only miss on a nat 1). The bite creates vampire spawns, so in a way I think we're seeing the vampire biting NPCs and thus creating all manner of "Bloofer Ladies" (what the child victims of the vampiric Lucy Westenra, Dracula's initial victim, call her) to vex the party. Notably, a vampire spawn does nearly as much damage as the vampire itself (though with only a +6 to hit and no charm ability).

Now, let's talk Misty Escape. The vampire can turn to mist normally with its Shapechanger ability, but as my friend argued, and I came around to believing his was the correct interpretation, when the vampire uses Misty Escape, damaging the mist form even with radiant damage doesn't do anything - it's already at 0 HP, and it simply returns to its resting place. Now, even if the party follows it there and drives a wooden stake in its heart, this doesn't actually kill it.

The only permanent way to kill a vampire is to prevent it from getting to its resting place within 2 hours. And that's actually super difficult to do, because unless you keep it in an airtight chamber for the duration (Otiluke's Resilient Sphere only lasts a minute - Magic Circle could work, though you'd need to get them more than an hour from their resting place first, and somehow get them inside of it before you put them to 0).

In other words, I think the Vampire is designed in a way to let you fuck with the party - you can send one against them at much lower levels than a CR 13 monster would usually imply, but it won't be the last time they face off. Misty Escape isn't as ironclad as a Lich's Rejuvenation (where it's fully at DM's discretion to just say "nah, you don't know where the Phylactery is,") but it's close to being a way for the DM to be able to use the vampire as long as they want to in the story.

As a combat threat, the Vampire is not actually that scary - a tier 3 party would blast it apart in a round with relative ease, and it's not going to take anyone down. But it can be used to harass and torment a lower-level party - I honestly think you could even have a tier 1 party face one (though DM should show restraint because they could, honestly, kill a PC) and maybe escape after demoralizing the party.