By what measure is a (hu)man?: On mutants and vampires...

[Winterous]

I've always stood by vampires and zombies being human, but dead humans. Nothing you can do can harm somebody who's already dead.

I very much disagree with this, and I think it's extremely important to have an official ruling.
They're humans, they're OBVIOUSLY humans, but the matter of whether or not they can be harmed is very much less clear.

Wikitionary defines 'harm' as...
1. Injury; hurt; damage; detriment; misfortune.
2. That which causes injury, damage, or loss.

Now obviously we can't consider damage to a corpse to violate law 1, because otherwise the AI must take great pains to completely prevent decay in a body, and that's just ridiculous.

However vampires are undoubtedly SENTIENT beings, and I'm not even sure if they're dead; has anyone ever measured the body temperature of a vampire? The med-scanner tells you temperature, are vampires colder than normal?
If vampires have a regular human body temperature, then I don't think they can be considered dead at all; how do we define death, anyway?

Traditionally death is defined as a stopped heart, and if a vampire's body temperature is normal then clearly their heart HAS NOT STOPPED, because blood circulation is how heat is distributed throughout the body.
Additionally, injecting drugs works on vampires, how can the drug circulate around their body if they have no pulse? Furthermore, vampires can suffocate, meaning they require oxygen, meaning blood is distributing oxygen around their body, preventing cell death.

I think it is overwhelmingly clear that vampires are in fact living beings, otherwise they would be immune to suffocation, have low body temperature, and would constantly be in a state of rotting; this is of course if they don't have a completely alien physiology, in which case they are certainly not human, and a health scanner would pick this up easily.

So vampires, dead or not, are able to feel pain, able to experience emotion, and since they are sentient beings, able to be injured.


Either vampires are human, and anyone who says they can't be harmed is absolutely wrong, or vampires are not human and the game doesn't make sense because they would have been found out by now.


Now zombies are another matter entirely, they're obviously not alive, but we have no ideas about their psychology, or by what nature they are animated.
Are they animate in and of themselves, or are they animated by an outside force? It's an important distinction between a human being moving by themself, or a human corpse being used as a puppet.

I think the most reasonable assumption (since any non-telesci zombies are wizard-made or void-possessed) is that they are animated by an outside force, and as such there's no reason to consider they might be sentient, and can therefore not be harmed.



So can we PLEASE get a ruling by the admins about this?
I think it's clear that vampires are living, but ultimately it's you guys' decision, it's a point of controversy every time it comes up in game, and often vampires will get screwed over by an AI not having a definite reference for whether they're human.