Rules Question: Vampires and Running Water

[Loren Pechtel]

I wouldn't allow the Pearl, either. It's not the base creature. I'm not even sure on the robe.

On the other hand, dimension door is a very good approach. I would expect her to have some sort of dimension door contingency up.

 

[Scott DeWar]

somebody mentioned dispel magic. A sorceress 6 could cast this spell as it is a level three spell and is supposed to be a major play in counter spelling. meta magic feats such as heighten, quicken and silent spell feats can prove useful. clairvoyance/clairaudiance is a useful divination spell.

there is also disguise undead to make a zombie appear like her to see if there is some sort of a trap. using a fast zombie template would defeat the slow zombie lurch.

 

[Squire James]

I don't really recall aging effects being outlined in the Pathfinder rules, but I certainly wouldn't allow those effects to bring about any increases in maturity like mental score bonuses or age adjustments for dragons. I also don't recall anything special about old vampires being powerful, except it may be a wee bit more likely for a vampire that has actually lived 300 years to attain level 20... all this sounds more like a 1e game than a Pathfinder game.

As a DM, I don't feel constrained to create monsters that follow the books. For instance, maybe not all vampires have the traditional weaknesses, but have different ones instead (those are all over the place in literature). It would need to be established early on, though, or it WILL seem like an arbitrary effect.

I think the vampire weaknesses are deliberately stated in a way that encourages out-of-box thinking to solve the problem, and those solutions tend to be hard to apply rules to.

 

[Scott DeWar]

crossroads: can't walk through an intersection, mus back track and go crss country out of sight of the intersection.

or

instead of going the desired direction, choose a random direction and not realize the wrong direction taken for 1 hour!

 

[paradox42]

Ravenloft as a setting was mostly detailed during 2nd Edition, so the details of this particular vampire most likely came from that period. And the 2E Ravenloft guides to various Undead (Van Richten's Guides) did indeed provide sort-of pre-template mechanics for making older Undead more powerful. Adapting those to 3E and subsequently to PF would not be difficult. It makes sense from a folklore perspective, too, as older vampires typically are more powerful in fiction.

That said, I wouldn't allow the trick with the ghost to work either. It's cheesy, and the cosmos (via Rule Zero) doesn't let cheesy things work.

The old Guide to Vampires did likewise suggest making vamps that had different abilities from standard, such as with different weaknesses or (perhaps more intriguingly) feed on different fluids thus having different effects on their victims than level loss and CON drain.

 

[Scott DeWar]

Dresden files novels have the Whit court who feed on the psichy[sp?] of their victim (wisdom and int. drain?)

 

[Squire James]

I was looking at 1e because that particular edition had all sorts of things that caused unnatural aging, such as the Haste spell (1 year per spell). So unless the cosmos has some robust "no cheating" policies, every dragon who could cast a level 3 spell would learn Haste and therefore attain Great Wyrm status within a year or so! I responded to that problem by making Dragons immune to Haste, and threw in other spells that affected time (Slow, Temporal Stasis, Time Stop) as well.

Now, if some enterprising vampire or dragon found a demiplane where time passed 100 or 1000 times slower than normal, and "stuff happened" on that demiplane so they weren't just sitting there getting older, that's a different story!

 

[Scott DeWar]

Ok, I have been musing on this for a bit and here is what i have come up with.

There should be no problem with redoing that weakness as long as you do two things.

1] create some backstory why she is different - so she can taunt / gloat about the ignorance of the adventurers.

2] the different weakness needs to be just as violnt to her: 1/3 hp/round.

it could be that her coffin needs to have the dirt in it laced with soil from the consecrated grove of a n.g. druid, and if they can slam the lid on her coffin, she is stuck in the toxic [to her] dirt.