Childmind
This dread ability allows the Malkavian to give another person the equivalent of a psychic lobotomy. By focusing the power of Dementation, the Lunatic can strip away much of a target's power of reasoning, reducing his victim to a childlike state.
System: The Malkavian must make eye contact with his victim in order to use this ability. Once eye contact is established, the player rolls Intelligence + Empathy, difficulty of the victim's Self-Control or Instinct.
The player can choose to reduce the victim's mental Attributes by up to seven points, as long as the vicitm is left with at least one dot in each. The Storyteller is under no obligation to reveal the victim's actual Attributes, however; the player must guess which Attributes to reduce and by how much. The victim also gains the derangement Regression for as long as the childlike state lasts.
For example, Hoxha, played by Ben, uses Childmind on Lauren-Bess. Hoxha (and by proxy, Ben) knows that she has a reputation for being intelligent and cunning, so Ben announces that he intends to drop her Intelligence by three, her Wits by three and her Perception by one. Lauren-Bess normally has Intelligence 5, Perception 3, Wits 3; she's rather more intelligent and a little less cunning than Hoxha guessed. Her intelligence falls to 2, as does her Perception. Her Wits becomes a 1, as the power cannot reduce any Attributes to zero. Laruen-Bess still retains some of her acuity and is as intelligent as the average person, but her decision-making faculties are severely impaired, and she will still regress to childlike behavior under the proper stimuli. At least she's still somewhat functional some of the time...
The number of successes determines the duration of the Childmind's effects.
| 1 Success | 1 turn |
| 2 | 1 night |
| 3 | 1 week |
| 4 | 1 month |
| 5+ | 1 year per success above 4 |
