D&D 5E Death and 0 Max HP

[Oofta]

I'd probably have them come back as a Vampire.

Their hp maximum is 0 so they can't be alive, so if they come back it'll be as undead. I guess the kindest would be to let them return as a Revenant.

Why would they come back as undead? If they were undead, raise dead won't work. The vampire power is pretty specific: "A humanoid slain in this way and then buried in the ground rises...". So yes, they died, but unless they're buried they don't come back as a vampire.

EDIT: In addition, gentle repose specifically states that while the spell is still in effect the corpse cannot become undead.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Unless of course the group buries them just so they have a vampire spawn to kill for XP.

Hmm... I don't think any one mentioned that option.

MWAHAHAHA! *rubs hands greedily* I LOVE IT!

 

[LordEntrails]

Seems like the character needs a blood donation! (After all, that to me is what the reduced HP max of a vamp is, a blood drain.)

I like [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] 's idea. Sounds like fun to me *EG*

To me, Raise Dead alone would not be sufficient, after all, the character only would have 0HP. Maybe they would be alive but in a coma until some means is found to raise their HP max. Does that imply RD is needed before the Greater Restoration? Hmm...

Of course, wraith's have similar impacts on 'dead' characters. So maybe instead of the chance of becoming a vampire, maybe some sort of wraith/ghost/specter undead...

Seem to me like lots of opportunity for fun and unusual things to happen.

 

[Maxperson]

So an interesting thing happened in our game yesterday. One of the characters was killed by a vampire and had her maximum hit points reduced to 0 by the bite. A couple rounds later (vampire defeated), our bard with Revivify tried it and the DM ruled it failed (due to her maximum hp at 0). Now it is a race against time as the party has about 20 days (gentle repose) to find a priest to cast Raise Dead.

Our group is wondering will it work? Or is she doomed to remain dead? After all, she is still with maximum hp of 0. She is dead so she can't really rest to recover those hit points. We were thinking maybe we would need a Greater Restoration to restore the maximum hp first and then cast Raise Dead.

I don't know how our DM will rule it so I am thinking of getting compelling argument material in case he rules unfavorably. Thoughts?

My first thought was corpse seems like it should be an object, not a creature, so Greater Restoration wouldn't work. However, when I read Raise Dead, it mentioned needing to cure magical diseases on the target prior to being raised, so it does seem like a corpse can be the target of such spells.

 

[MarkB]

With some DM buy-in you could make some sort of blood-ritual, maybe involving combining Raise Dead and Greater Restoration along with donated blood from other party members, to infuse new blood into the body as it is raised.

 

[S'mon]

Why would they come back as undead? If they were undead, raise dead won't work. The vampire power is pretty specific: "[FONT=&]A humanoid slain in this way and then buried in the ground rises..."[/FONT]. So yes, they died, but unless they're buried they don't come back as a vampire.

EDIT: In addition, gentle repose specifically states that while the spell is still in effect the corpse cannot become undead.

Once they're Raised the Gentle Repose would not be in effect.

They've been infected with vampirism, a magical disease, so they come back vampirised. I'd have them turn into a vampire later, as happened to my first PC in ES IV: Oblivion. She completed the game without feeding, then after failing to find a cure she walked into the sunlight.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Okay, so here is what I see. (I had to stop and rewrite multiple times as I ran across more subtleties, but hopefully this is now all accurate.) I’m going to try to stick with RAW as I’m interpreting it.

1) Greater restoration on a dead body straight up can’t work because they aren’t a valid target.

2) When you are dead you cannot normally have 0 hp. Your body is no longer a creature, so it has a null value of hp. It can have hp as an object, but that doesn’t matter here.

3) If you came back to life with 0 hp the worse that should happen (assuming trying stick as close to RAW as possible) would be that the DM could rule that you aren’t stable and someone needs to stabilize you with a healer’s kit or a Wisdom (Medicine) check.

4) The rules don’t allow you to take a long rest with 0 hp, so if you came back to life with 0 hp you would need a greater restoration to be cast afterwards to restore your hp maximum.

5) Raise dead says if the effects aren’t removed prior to the spell, they “take effect” *when* the creature returns to life. It doesn’t say they “remain in effect”.

6) The hp reducing effect cannot and does not apply to a a dead creature. It can only take effect again when the character returns to life.

7) The phrasing of the attack in question is slightly ambiguous as to whether the state of having a max hp reduction itself is the “effect” that kills you when your hp is reduced to 0, or it is the actual reducing of max hp caused during the attack. I’m going to assume it means the effect caused during the attack, because otherwise these attacks aren’t directly killing you, and also because otherwise you would be treating someone who just benefitted from a raise dead spell as if they were being hit from an attack, rather than under the ongoing results of a state initially delivered by that attack. This is the only real point of ambiguity I’m seeing in the RAW.

8) Therefore what should happen when you cast raise dead on the dead body is that the creature returns to life with 1 hp, then the state of having a max hp reduction until completing a long rest (but not the attack that reduced the the max hp) “takes effect”, dropping their hp to zero. They are now dying due to the normal game effect of having your hp reduced to 0, and cannot gain hit points (including by rolling a 20 on a death save) due to the state of having a max hp reduction that took effect when they came back to life, but can be stabilized normally, either through death save successes, healer’s kits, Wisdom (Medicine) checks, or the spare the dying cantrip. You can now cast greater restoration to remove the max hp reduction effect and they can then recover hp normally.

I seriously doubt that design intent is to make it any more difficult than that, but if someone wants to go with a ruling that really puts (IMO unwarranted and out of harmony with general 5e philosophy) an extra difficulty in recovering from this not terribly uncommon way for an adventurer to die, you could rule that true resurrection is required and works because the spell’s wording implies that it is intended to remove all of the things that raise dead and resurrection cannot. If you want to both stick with a RAW interpretation like I did above in 8, and be harsher than I was (killer DM that thou art), you could require the only other RAW option I can immediately think of, which would be a wish spell’s non-basic usage, with all of the listed risks and penalties.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

Casting Aid on someone living with 0 max HP is a good way of getting them conscious enough to take a long rest to get rid of the max HP reduction.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Casting Aid on someone living with 0 max HP is a good way of getting them conscious enough to take a long rest to get rid of the max HP reduction.

Since Aid has to be cast on a living target, it won't help here since the vampire's bite kills the target when their maximum hit points are reduced to zero. Nice thought, though.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

Since Aid has to be cast on a living target, it won't help here since the vampire's bite kills the target when their maximum hit points are reduced to zero. Nice thought, though.

But there's no rule that you need more than 0 hp to be alive, so a Revifiy or Raise Dead cast on the corpse will restore them to life with 0 HP, and then it's time for Aid.