Possession

Starting Possession

You begin possession by chosing the "<Possess>" option from your travelling companions dialog.

Possession Details

When you possess a companion you gain their body, stats and powers. You may also spend any XP that you currently have or gain while possessing on the companion. However XP spent on companions only allow temporary stat increases. When you unpossess, their stats will reset and you will be reimbursed any XP you spent on them.

You are not responsible for what a possessed companion does. If you kill a human or break the Masquerade while possessing a companion, the humanity loss or violation is incurred by the companion. When you un-possess, it will be as though you did nothing wrong.

While possessing someone, you can try to start a dialog. Most the time the game will treat you as if you are the same gender, clan, etc... as the possessed NPC. In some cases the game will auto-unpossess, and in some rare cases you will get new custom dialog because the NPC you are talking to recognizes the NPC you are possessing. (See the Spoilers section for more details.)

Ending Possession

There are 3 ways possession can end:

1) You talk to the Protagonists body and end possession manually

This one is pretty self explanatory

2) The possessed companions health drops to 0 for more than 3 seconds

When the body of a possessed NPC takes too much damage, possession automatically ends. In most cases, The NPC's body falls and you are teleported back to the PC's body (where ever you have stashed it). During boss fights, you will not teleport. You will simply become the PC again and continue fighting from your current location. This is because Boss Fights generally lock the doors behind you and I didn't want players teleporting outside of the area with no ability to get back in.

3) You begin a dialog with someone that possessed NPC is not allowed to talk to.

Explanation: If you possess the owner of a bar and talk to the bartender, you would expect the bartender to recognize you. However, if you talked to the prostitute outside, it wouldn't really matter who you are. The Compmod uses pre-defined reaction tables to decide who is allowed to talk to who. If it detects a conflict between the person you are possessing and the person you are talking to, it will auto-end possession. It happens most often when talking to main characters such as LaCroix or Nines who always talk to you as though you are the protagonist.

Malkavians are an excpetion to this rule. Possessed Malkavians will rarely if ever auto-unpossess when beginning dialog. If you want to get philosophical, then just pretend they make everyone see the protagonist. But in reality I wanted to provide access to their Dementation discipline during dialog for those clans without mind-control abilities.