Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="coyote6" data-source="post: 257077" data-attributes="member: 1225">Actually, that's not necessarily a problem. I don't see anything in the vampire description that says they have to drain blood! They don't actually seem to get anything out of it, oddly enough.The energy drain does restore hp, so that's of some use. Fortunately, it's also not necessarily permanent -- the victim can recover, if they're lucky enough to make the DC. And they can always get more XP and regain any lost levels . . .My pet dire peeve about D&amp;D vampires is that, barring extremely powerful clerics (or merely powerful clerics with the Sun domain) or a couple of spells (sunbeam, sunburst), there's no way to kill them in a fight! You have to beat them up, then play follow the fog back to the coffin where you wait for 'em to reform, so you can stake, behead, and burn 'em, or drag 'em into the sun or dunk 'em in running water. Oh, if you could somehow manage to make a vamp helpless in a fight, you could stake him. But how're you going to manage that, given undead immunities and the gaseous form ability?Before I saw SKR's variant, I was toying with the idea of allowing a critical hit on a vamp (or what would be a crit, if the target weren't undead) with a wooden stake to count as a stake to the heart, forcing the vamp to make a Fort save (a la coup de grace, or Sean's vamp rules). A crit-only approach makes it much harder to stake a vamp in a fight than SKR's rule -- I kind of like that, at least for non-mook vamps. Otherwise, the PCs will dust Gulthias in the first round . . .But anyways.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="coyote6, post: 257077, member: 1225"] Actually, that's not necessarily a problem. I don't see anything in the vampire description that says they have to drain blood! They don't actually seem to get anything out of it, oddly enough. The energy drain does restore hp, so that's of some use. Fortunately, it's also not necessarily permanent -- the victim can recover, if they're lucky enough to make the DC. And they can always get more XP and regain any lost levels . . . My pet dire peeve about D&D vampires is that, barring extremely powerful clerics (or merely powerful clerics with the Sun domain) or a couple of spells ([i]sunbeam[/i], [i]sunburst[/i]), there's [b]no[/b] way to kill them in a fight! You have to beat them up, then play follow the fog back to the coffin where you wait for 'em to reform, so you can stake, behead, and burn 'em, or drag 'em into the sun or dunk 'em in running water. Oh, if you could somehow manage to make a vamp helpless in a fight, you could stake him. But how're you going to manage that, given undead immunities and the gaseous form ability? Before I saw SKR's variant, I was toying with the idea of allowing a critical hit on a vamp (or what would be a crit, if the target weren't undead) with a wooden stake to count as a stake to the heart, forcing the vamp to make a Fort save (a la coup de grace, or Sean's vamp rules). A crit-only approach makes it much harder to stake a vamp in a fight than SKR's rule -- I kind of like that, at least for non-mook vamps. Otherwise, the PCs will dust Gulthias in the first round . . . But anyways. [/QUOTE]

Verification