Alternate Revenant

[Xeviat]

I saw someone mention this in passing on the UA Gothic Heroes thread, but I think it deserves it's own. I don't care for the way the Revenant is being presented, as an alternate subrace. Some races have more abilities in their subrace than others, other races don't have a subrace at all. They clearly believe that the revenant abilities are comparable to the human's feat and skill. Revenant gives +1 Con and the Relentless Nature ability. +1 Con is half a feat. A feat gives 3 skills. 1 skill is worth "almost" half a feat. So the Relentless Nature ability is worth slightly more than a feat. Okay.

Relentless Nature
Your DM assigns a goal to you—typically, one related to your character’s death. The goal must be a specific task you can complete, such as slaying an enemy or liberating an area and its people. Until you fulfill that goal, you gain the following benefits:

• If you are below half your hit point maximum at the start of your turn, you regain 1 hit point.
• If you die, you return to life 24 hours after death. If your body is destroyed, you reform within 1 mile of the place of your death at a spot determined by the DM. If your equipment was also destroyed, you do not regain it.
• You know the distance and direction between you and any creature involved in your goal, such as a person you seek vengeance against or someone you pledged to defend. This awareness fails if the creature is on another plane of existence.

When your goal is complete, you finally find rest. You die and cannot be restored to life.

The idea for how to fit this into the game is simple: make it cost a feat. But rather than directly cost a feat, because not everyone has one, make it cost something that's worth a feat.

When someone becomes a revenant, they gain the Relentless Nature ability and suffer -2 Constitution. They gain some regeneration when they're "bloodied" and limited immortality, but at the cost of 1 hp per level.

I didn't see if there was too much discussion about this on the original thread. So what do others think? I really love this. I think it's balanced. The regen is only better than the Con in combat at very low levels; after that, the -1 hp per level will be felt more than the regen within combat. Out of combat, they'll have quite a lot of recovery, but it still only brings them up to half hp.

 

[77IM]

This is fantastic. Consider it stolen.

I would recommend scaling the regen with level. As you point out, it's potent at low levels and not so great at high levels. I'd say you heal 1/10 your maximum hit points (round down; minimum 1 point).

Also consider whether this regeneration should function when you are at 0 hit points. The ability to stand back up, round after round, is incredibly powerful. I think it's easier to balance the regeneration if you take that part away, because then the regen is more analogous to hit points and not really part of the action economy.

You might want to give your revenant the Undead type. This renders you immune to some humanoid-only spells (like charm person and hold person and not a whole lot else), and immune to a bucketload of illusion and enchantment spells. However, you also can't benefit from cure wounds and healing word and most other healing magic, which is a pretty big deal. This forces the revenant character to rely on regeneration for their healing, plus potions of healing still work. It may balance out the regeneration functioning while at 0 hit points: your party cleric can't heal you up, but it's OK, because you'll just keep standing back up and attacking every time you get knocked down.

 

[Xeviat]

The "if you die" line makes me think that you're down at 0 HP. I'd probably track negative HP for a Revenant to keep them from getting up. I wouldn't want that. Scaling the HP is probably a good idea too. 1/10 may be good. Level divided by 2, round up, could work too (it would be fairly similar).

I'm looking at giving this "template" to a whole party for a Planescape: Torment kind of game.

 

[VoodooSpecter]

A whole bunch of comments on this post:

Lowering the player's constitution when they take the homebrew feat version of this racial subtype seems like a bad idea. Here's why:

Undead very specifically rely on their HIGH constitution and regenerative capabilities. The Revenant even gets +1 con to help represent how hardy and difficult to kill the Undead are. That's also what the recovery aspect of their Relentless Nature is all about. Even if you look at Zombies (16 Con), they have a chance of rising back up with 1hp when you reduce them to zero hit points. So lowering the player's constitution, unless you have a really good reason, doesn't fit.

Necrotic damage tends to result in reduced max HP, forcing constitution saves, etc. but the character in question is not being hurt by necrotic energies, they are being strengthened by them.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as negative HP. When you drop to 0, you total the remaining damage. If this overkill damage is more than your HP maximum, you are dead, outright. No chance to recover. Otherwise, you fall unconscious and make death saving throws. Any damage you take at that point is STILL not negative damage, it just counts as a failure on one of your death saving throws (2 failures on a critical hit, instant death if any damage dealt is greater than your HP maximum).

The special ability of the Revenant, unless some errata or future update indicates otherwise, seems specifically intended to be a more powerful version of the Zombie's ability to restore itself to 1hp when it is reduced to zero. Nowhere does it specify that this ability stops when you are unconscious. Therefore a Revenant never makes death saving throws - it always pops back up with 1hp on its turn. THIS is the primary strength of that ability. In general it is a fairly underwhelming heal. Increasing it to 1/10 max HP is not the right call. It does what it's supposed to do: Bring you back up when you fall unconscious. Additionally it can be used to heal your character back up to half health for free in a matter of minutes out of combat at a rate of about 10hp a minute.

Not too shabby.

HOWEVER a Revenant can still be killed by overkill damage if it is attacked between the moment when it falls unconscious and the start of its turn. It can also be killed by any attack that would cause sufficient damage to trigger instant death. In some cases, such an attack would obliterate its body and equipment completely, which is why there are rules about how to handle that in the text.

This is tough to work as a feat. The narrative of the Revenant is that it is a spirit that has come back from the grave to achieve a singular purpose. From the moment a character becomes a Revenant onward, they exist to finish out their primary narrative arc, and then finally rest in peace. This concept is pivotal to their relentless nature. It doesn't make a lot of sense for the player to take a feat like this if they didn't die first, unless one of your players happened to die just as they became eligible for an ability score increase (so they could take the feat and revive). If you did want to include it as a feat, however, I have some thoughts:

The human variant rules I think are +1 to two attributes, one skill proficiency, and you get a feat.

The revenant rules are +1 to two attributes, +1 Con and you get relentless nature.

Therefore, you could consider relentless nature essentially equivalent to a feat.

If you want to remove the dying / reviving part entirely, let me tell you what our GM did: He removed the following parts of "Relentless Nature" (a radical move, but I will explain why I think it works in spite of my initial reservations):

• If you die, you return to life 24 hours after death. If your body is destroyed, you reform within 1 mile of the place of your death at a spot determined by the DM. If your equipment was also destroyed, you do not regain it.
• You know the distance and direction between you and any creature involved in your goal, such as a person you seek vengeance against or someone you pledged to defend. This awareness fails if the creature is on another plane of existence.

When your goal is complete, you finally find rest. You die and cannot be restored to life.

The interesting thing to note here is that the two primary parts that were removed are in fact in opposition to each other, a benefit and a curse: Being restored to life for free is a pretty big deal, but so is being unable to be revived once your narrative arc concludes. Assuming your GM lets you pursue it with appropriate urgency and doesn't tie it into the main plot so you can't die until the end.

In general I think the third part tries to prevent his by making sure a player can't cop out of following that arc - they're constantly, inescapably compelled toward their goal.

The only pure benefit of this entire feature is the healing ability (which our GM kept). SO if you wanted to allow your players to take on some aspect of the undead as a feat without actually dying, this is a way you could make that happen. I think you lose a lot when you rip out the character's revenge motivation though, and there's got to be a way to bring that back without going to such an extreme with the resurrection rules.

Ultimately though how you use this in your own campaigns is up to you but I hope this was helpful.

Also the rules don't seem to explicitly say that revenants are undead, but it is heavily implied. If they ARE undead, then most resurrection spells won't work on them anyway. Which is interesting, but not super relevant iunless you start removing the resurrection rules from Relentless Nature.