Temporary Hit Point Question

[KarinsDad]

I am running a psion with the Vigor power. With that power, I often walk into battle with additional temporary hit points.

In a recent session, my PC got hit by a contagious creature and took damage off the temporary hit point total, but not off of real hit points.

So my question is: are you or are you not really damaged when you take temporary hit point damage?

For example, could you catch a disease from a Dire Rat if you didn't take real hit point damage?

My contention is that it is protection magic. It absorbs the damage you took and you didn't take any real damage.

My DMs contention is that you do actually take damage, it is irrelevant that it is temporary hit points.

According to the rules, which is it?


On a side issue, I am running an Elan. If I "absorb" damage by expending power points, again, do I actually take damage and have to make saving throws versus disease, etc. if no actual hit points of damage is taken?

 

[AuraSeer]

While temporary hit points are in effect, they work exactly like regular hit points. A rat bite that removes one of your 8 temp hp causes disease in exactly the same way as if it had removed your last real hit point.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Agreed with AuraSeer.

You'd have to provide more info on the Elan's abilities before I could help you with that.

EDIT:

Regarding Elans, a quick reading of the Elan section of the SRD indicates that their Resilience (Su) ability works like "super DR," in that it seems to apply to any damage source (rather than strictly physical sources as normal DR does).

Following such a ruling, if you reduce the damage done by an attack to 0, the majority of special effects of that attack are also eliminated. In other words, an Elan who zeroes out the damage from a rat bite ignores any possible disease chance, just as a character with DR 10 / bludgeoning would ignore the injury poison on a shortsword attack which did 5 damage.