Split up vampire dominate into two separate versions of verbal suggestion, slight expansions off both.

[Scheveningen]

Alrighty. Big thing with vampire dominate: It sucks. Pun intended.

While alberyk did adjust it to come far later in the vampire progression system, it's still extremely potent, and Dominate allows a vampire to force anyone to do just about anything within the near future of 15 minutes.

That is pretty significant when you think about it. It is otherwise not regulated ICly as to what its limitations are. There are basically no limitations aside from what it says currently. While I think that's okay, I'd prefer if it came way later in the power chain. Instead, vampires should still get a weaker form of mental pull over mortals, though.

As such, I suggest a couple progression changes be done. Firstly, Dominate needs to be split in two versions of it. Dominate will come much later in the progression tree, almost last before ancient vampire status, but it can affect loyalty implanted individuals and has zero conditions aside from having to type up a legible command. More on the conditional part of it in a bit.

Suggestion

Through a dark enchantment of the humanoid mind, you suggest a course of activity to the victim (limited by a sentence or two) and magically influence their mind. Characters that cannot be charmed (this largely applies to those with loyalty implants or robots) are immune to this effect. The suggestion must be worded in such a manner as to make the course of action sound reasonable. Asking the individual to stab itself, throw itself onto a spear, immolate itself, or do some other obviously harmful act terminates the validity of the suggestion. Your vampire powers are too weak to force people to be violent!

You can, however, influence people to think a certain way about some other person or convince them that something happened to them as done by another person. Afterward, it is up to the discretion of the individual what to do. This allows more creative individuals to potentially get the impact of a real dominate through cleverly posing a certain situation to a person that may drive them to violence. You can tell someone that the HOS killed your dog back home but you can't tell someone to take a stroll out an airlock.

Unlike dominate, you must be within 3 tile vicinity of the person you plan on suggesting, and you do not whisper the command. You say it aloud. You gotta be discrete up until you rank up. Also unlike dominate, this is a concentrated AOE. You begin the suggestion, surrounding people with weak minds get a feedback to listen closely to the person, the vampire says it and toggles it off to enact the effect. You can't walk out after you're affected, you MUST stay within the area or listen closely to the source until it's toggled off. This expends the blood pool (2 every second it's on) and whoever was in that AOE needs to abide by the suggestion if it acted within accordance of the suggestion rules.

The suggestion condition always expires after 20 minutes if it is not fulfilled. The individual remembers nothing as to why they were influenced into it.

In my opinion, suggestion should come fairly early and it should be cheap enough to convince people to follow you into a maintenance shaft to "play doctor."

Dominate

You throw your conscious thoughts from a whisper into the feeble humanoid mind of another individual and break their will. You may suggest any course of activity, violent or not. However, the command must be concise, constructed in a way that sounds as if it is driven by a sense of urgency (i.e., "You must kill X person and chop their head off," or "kill yourself" even) but you may not command the person to obey you for a long period of time. Unlike suggestion, this isn't concentrated and can only affect a single person, but you don't need to be close to them. This supercedes loyalty implants, antagonist status, even robot status (they got the command daedra/constructs/things perk from skyrim), and the condition must be met within 20 minutes. If the individual does not meet the condition due to circumstances preventing them from carrying it out, they are required to punish themselves by serious self-maiming. If the individual does meet the condition, they immediately can snap back to normal. The individual does not remember who gave them the dominate command or any specifics pertaining to it happening.

[Kaed]

Eeeh. This just feels like you're managing to both water down dominate and managing to make it even more potentially whine inducing than it was before.

Dominate is actually an ability I really enjoy using, and being used on me, and I didn't super care for it being gated behind a higher tier, but I can live with it. It's fun to have your character forced to do something unusual and weird, barring something tedious and unoriginal like (murder everyone do it huehuehue). As far as I'm concerned the ability isn't unbalanced so much as people often resort to trite nonsense like inducing murder sprees.

Also, this thing about making them self-harm is pretty much out, the admins are super against people being dominated into self-harming themselves for any reason, and specifically built in no-suicide exemptions from Dominate.

And to be frank, the Presence power is already supposed to roughly work like you've written out suggestion, it's just kind of not well implemented? People rarely react to it in a meaningful way, so I guess reworking it to have a bit more impact than spamming people with Vampy McBludsuk looks like a friendly guy... would be interesting.