Temporary hit points

[Iku Rex]

Does anyone have a rule quote to back up their opinion?

A spell won't stack with itself, sure, but what about temporary hit pounts from different spells?


An example:

Joe the mage has gained 20 temporary hit points from Vampiric Touch and 10 from False Life.

He is hit for 15 damage.

• ? Temporary hit points stack. He now has 15 temporary hit points left.
  
• ? Temporary hit points "overlap". The attack removes 15 of the temporary hit points from the Vampiric Touch spell, leaving him with 5 and 10 (separate) temporary hit points. (In effect, temporary hit points stack.)
  
• ? Temporary hit points "overlap". The attack removes 15 of the temporary hit points from the Vampiric Touch spell, and 5 from False Life. He is left with 5 and 5 (separate) temporary hit points. (In effect, temporary hit points don't stack.)
  
• ? Other.

 

[Mr.Binx]

From the D&D FAQ:
In general, any effect that allows you to gain temporary hit
points over time allows you to stack those points, but only
those points. For example, if you use the vampiric touch spell,
the temporary hit points you gain from that particular casting of
the spell stack. They don't stack with the temporary hit points
you get from an aid spell, nor would the effects of two
vampiric touch or aid spells stack.

Come on people, read your resources. Alot of questions asked on this board have already been answered multiple times and are in the Official D&D 3rd Ed. FAQ. For those of you that still don't have a copy of this handy document, you can download it here.

 

[Iku Rex]

Thank you Mr.Binx.

For some reason I didn't think to look for generic information about common spell effects in the "Magic Items" section of the FAQ under a question about a weapon ability from the Psionics Handbook...

 

[Mr.Binx]

No prob! When ever you open up the FAQ (or most any other .PDF for that matter) just hit CTRL-F (on Windows OS anyhoo) and you can search the entire document for any keyword. In this case I just keyed in 'temporary hit points' and voila! Now if only I could do that in the core books themselves that would just soooooooooooooooooo rock!

 

[James McMurray]

Actually, it won't work on every PDF. Some pdf creators elect to remove searchability (I think it saves space). also, some pdfs are simply scaned images (such as the many pirate versions of splatbooks floating around). since those images weren't scanned using OCR software, a textual search is impossible.

By the way, the Control-F trick works in most any windows document software as well, including Ofice suite, etc. Finally, if control-F doesn't work, see if perhaps an edit or a search menu has a find function. It greatly saves time when looking for things in documentation.