Jedi Mind Trick. If you need a guard to take a nap, or an enemy to go home and rethink his life, that's where you use it. Also, get Dominate 3 as soon as you can; it's your one-stop-shop for cleaning up Masquerade violations.
At your Humanity, Dominate is not a social skill. As you said, it's a hammer; use it to take enemies out nonharmfully. Ordering someone to donate blood can be iffy, though this one depends on your Storyteller.
Yeah, I'm saving up XP for that 3rd dot, but I don't think I'll go any higher unless I change my mind about keeping humanity. (Levels 4 and 5 are just too insanely cruel). All us PC's have probably been hit pretty bad with memory wipes before the story's opening, so there's that added incentive.
Using it on muggers and guards to peacefully (or at least non-violently) de-escalate a conflict does seem like a good bet for my character at the moment. I'm actually planing to use it to plant subconscious commands in all our neighbors (we have separate havens) to tell us if they see suspicious activity or the people we have reason to think are our sires.
Hi y'all, I've been lucky enough to find a regularly gaming group of Vampire The Requiem. We're doing the starter New Orleans adventure, and being the last one to join the group I got "stuck" with being Ventrue.
While Ventrue isn't my first pic for a clan, I made a character that I think can work for it (the ST had us make our own chars). He's a struggling Latino installation artist, always striving to make a name for himself. He's got 2 dots in Dominate and enough in attributes and skills to wield a pretty good dice pool of 8 for Dominate powers.
Anyhoo, here's the meat of the topic: I've had a lot of fun these two sessions but haven't used Dominate at all yet, and I'm starting to worry that I'm not thinking "Ventrue" enough. Most situations that I could use Dominate in I've just used "mundane" social skills to get through and tried to leave Dominate as a "backup" hammer so to speak. I'm going to try and be as humane as possible to avoid getting derangements, so no Mind Rape if at all possible.
So, do y'all have any suggestions for ways I could use Dominate that aren't likely to cause degeneration?