Rules Question: Vampires and Running Water

[Abstruse]

My players are in Ravenloft and about to go up against a vampire. They're 7th level, so they've got a massive toolkit and they've had a week to plan out of character. Two groups have been plotting and they've both decided independently on strategies involving the running water weakness, forcing me to make a ruling on what "immersed in running water" means. Here is the definition I've come up with pending an official ruling that doesn't seem to exist on Google:

To be considered running water, the water must be in steady motion. To be considered immersed, at least half the vampire's body must be in the water (requiring the water be at least two feet wide and three feet deep).

Now, running water does 33% of the vampire's max HP in damage per round and it destroys the vampire (no gaseous form to escape, no nothing). The vampire they're going up against is...well, it's Lyssa von Zarovich from Ravenloft and she's proven herself a metagaming munchkin (she let a ghost use its aging powers on her so she could get the effects of being a 300 year old vampire without having to wait 300 years). She's going to have come up with a way around the running water problem.

So here's my rules question for you: The only solution I can seem to find is an exception to the running water weakness which states "if the base creature has a swim speed, it is not affected by running water". Does this mean that I can give her a Pearl of the Sirines (which grants a swim speed of 60ft) to get rid of the weakness or would that not be considered the "Base creature" (human) having a swim speed?

If not, what the hell can I do to keep Aqueous Orb from being a 3-round instadeath to a major NPC?

 

[billd91]

If it takes 3 rounds and she gets a Reflex save every round to escape it, it's not really an instadeath. Most vampires have good Ref saves with all the stat increases and bonus feats they have. That's a pretty good start.

Consider getting a ring of counterspells.

 

[Abstruse]

If it takes 3 rounds and she gets a Reflex save every round to escape it, it's not really an instadeath. Most vampires have good Ref saves with all the stat increases and bonus feats they have. That's a pretty good start.

Consider getting a ring of counterspells.

She's an 11th level sorcerer with a 30-something Charisma and "Dispel Magic" on her spell list. I'm not worried about that specific spell. It's also the Decanter of Endless Water they want to buy combined with the Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals and spamming Create Water and all the other wacky water-based ideas.

This is a 100 year old vampire who's been playing political chess with Strahd von Zarovich for her entire life. She abused the rules on ghost and tried to create vampire-illithads. She's going to have at least three different ways to negate the running water vulnerability assuming they exist. I've got about three hours to work on finding them and the Pearl above is option 1.

First, I want to have my legal brief prepared in advance when the table's Rules Lawyer tries to talk me out of it since that's someone ambiguous. Second, I want to find at least two other ways to negate that vulnerability (she has three different ways to survive being in direct sunlight too...the fourth one I passed on was having Gloves of Storing just to keep a massive parasol in).

I'm not trying to hamstring the players (they're taking a big players vs. DM attitude about it and leaving me out of their email and Facebook strategy sessions), I'm just trying to present the NPC as a legitimate challenge and play her character. If she knows she can be killed by a piddling 3rd level spell or a combination of 1st and 2nd level spells, she's going to have devoted a good bit of time into getting around it.

 

[billd91]

With the talk of a decanter of endless water and creating water with magic, I think you need to be a little stricter on "immersion" in water. The dimensions you specify may be generally OK, but don't allow them to only have her half in. Immersion means being completely covered. Getting her to that state should be pretty hard, particularly if she has dimension door, a good concentration check, and/or the silent spell feat.

I would definitely not allow the blast from a decanter of endless water to count as full immersion.

 

[Abstruse]

With the talk of a decanter of endless water and creating water with magic, I think you need to be a little stricter on "immersion" in water. The dimensions you specify may be generally OK, but don't allow them to only have her half in. Immersion means being completely covered. Getting her to that state should be pretty hard, particularly if she has dimension door, a good concentration check, and/or the silent spell feat.

I would definitely not allow the blast from a decanter of endless water to count as full immersion.

I think the plan with that one is to use the decanter and Create Water to quickly get a crapload of water in the room with her, then have the water elemental summoned with the Bowl of Commanding Water Elementals to use its vortex power to put her in the whirlpool (which would be considered "running").

 

[paradox42]

The Pearl definitely will not work, nor will any other means of getting a Swim speed magically or with Extraordinary abilities. When the template says "the base creature," it means the base creature before any alterations from anything else. Without her class levels and munchkinesque use of spells and items, not to mention without the Vampire template, a Human woman does not have a racial Swim speed. Therefore, as a Vampire she's vulnerable to running water.

The only way she could get around it is by some sort of permanent transformation into a Mermaid or something similar, which would require a Wish or something of that power level in most campaigns; she has to directly and permanently alter the race on her basic character stats line in order to negate the weakness that way (i.e. instead of Female Human Vampire Sorcerer X, it changes to Female Merfolk Vampire Sorcerer X). That's not an easy thing to do, nor is it worth the trouble to just get rid of a weakness like this IMO.

Use of her spells, particularly such as having a Dimension Door or the like always ready to go, is the best bet. She's probably acquired Contingency scrolls and cast a few on herself, like "If I am ever immersed in running water, this goes off."

 

[Abstruse]

I'm trying to find something other than Contingency because it's SUCH a cop-out DM trick. I hate hate hate hate hate using it. It's the magic Get My DMPC Out of Death Free card and it's like Lawful Good Drow Rangers struggling against their chaotic evil nature or the "I was orphaned at a young age but I'm secretly the long lost heir of a far-away kingdom" PC backstory or "You all meet in a tavern" or any of the other cliches except it's worse because it's railroading. If it were tied to a different spell other than teleportation, sure. But using it like that is like a slap in the face to the players and I refuse to use it if there's any other options.

Here's what I don't get after four hours of searching the SRD today...there are spells that will let you walk through fire and pass through stone without harm and be invisible to the naked eye and even to fly, all at relatively low levels. But there's not a single fragging spell in the entire game system - even including third-party stuff - that keeps you from getting wet!

Edit: Also, Contingency - Dimension Door isn't going to work since they'll just move the water to whereever she goes the next round, either because it's part of the Aqueus Orb spell or through Water Control, which is a domain spell for the cleric. And I WANT to treat her like a munchkin because that's how she's been presented canonically. She advanced herself to Ancient Vampire status by murdering her lover to turn him into a ghost, then taunting him until he used his aging power on her to age her 200 years in a single night. That's a munchkin if I've ever seen one!

 

[paradox42]

Given that she's that munchkin, I say abuse the unliving hells out of Contingency. You don't like it, sure; but isn't it exactly what a munchkin uses in situations like this?

As for spells to not get wet, really, the rules are built to assume living humanoid PCs. For living humanoid PCs, getting wet isn't remotely dangerous unless the liquid is acid or magma or something else that directly deals damage, and in that case it specifically deals energy damage, so you have Resist [X] and Protection From [X] spells. Of course, if she's had 100 years, she probably researched spells to stop herself from getting wet, but then you're almost directly Rule-Zeroing the PCs out of a win (and the rules lawyer is going to know it).

Edit: Also, how exactly will the PCs know where she goes when she uses Dimension Door, assuming that's her Contingency plan? And what if she teleports to a room or space that's totally inaccessible by any other means, or which can only be accessed via beings that are Incorporeal or Gaseous? That's the sort of escape hatch I'd have, if I were a being that could turn into a cloud of mist at will.

 

[Abstruse]

Finished the session, it didn't come up really. They did a good job sneaking around and only ran into Lyssa late. They used a ball of water from Dust of Dryness with Control Water to make it move. I argued the Pearl, they said racial swim speed. So I went with Robes of Blending and changed her to a Kelpie. If they didn't work, she would've used her own Dust of Dryness or her Boots of Levitation to get out of it. As it stands, they got 1/3 of her HP in exchange for a Cloudkill, a Glitterdust (half the party was under an Invisibility Sphere including the noisy dwarf cleric), and a thankfully saved Feeblemind on said cleric. Then she left it to her guards to finish as one of the party members turned out to be working for her all along. She figured after they were bottlenecked by the guards and her Barbarian was raging and took down the monk and a good chunk of the rogue, there wasn't much need for her spells anymore.

 

[Ramaster]

In my opinion, the right way to go about it is to analyze WHY vampires can't cross running water and then attack the weakness from there (since, in my opinion, being washed over with a torrent from a fully powered Decanter of Endless water DOES constitute as being half-submerged in running water).

Well, Wikipedia didn't have much information about the running water weakness... so I went ahead and committed a sin... I checked on YAHOO answers (Dun dun dun)!

Some guys there said that vampires can't cross running water because Running Water is considered Holy since Jesus was baptized on a river, but obviously, we can't use that for games where there is no Jesus mythos (like your game, I assume).

If we extrapolate and say that running water is a representation of the pureness of the world (and purity in general), then I would argue that Extraplanar Water (The one called or created by conjuration effects) is not, in fact, part of the natural world, therefore making it unfit as a vampire repellant.

If you were to implement this rule, however, I would suggest letting your players know (or at least let them do research on the subject properly). Because, if you are playing the "PCs vs DM" game and suddenly inform them of this, they would see this as a Cheap Asspull (Tm) and the situation might escalate into a TPK quickly.