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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 5526675" data-attributes="member: 63763">Unless the epic trap room drains surges or knocks the vampire unconcious ... it's fine. As long as it can stay alive, it has the smallest post-fight clean up of anyone else. So, DEADLY epic trap room to start the day can be bad. Again, it has to take out 2 surges (or more, between durable, racial options,   How many adventuring days have multiple encounters that damage and drain surges without any monsters showing up? That's nowhere near conventional, and a corner case that could easily be overlooked. The Vampire's surge gaining drain power doesn't require you use specific monster types. As 'odd' as it may seem, he can drain constructs, undead, etc. If it's an enemy, he can get a surge off it. So vampire food involves having encounters where the characters actually fight something.  A monster that steals surges is going to be more annoying to the rest of the party. The vampire can get those surges back, his allies can't. If it limits your freedom as a DM so much, you can either ban it, or tell the player you won't be pulling any punches and let him play it if he still wants. Regardless, if you are REGULARLY coming up with situations where the vampire is especially bad, you are already playing something that is very different from what most would expect when walking into a game of 4e.   And so too does the vampire have access to a lot of skills. And utility powers, paragon path features, etc that make those skills even better. And yet THEY are a horrible albatross on the party because it's possible that if they are in a specific situation AND have some bad luck, they may go into an encounter with no surges (which they have a way of getting around). They may take a lot of damage (which they can heal using a single surge that YES, another character has to contribute, but then in a normal encounter, the vampire can, through thp generation and regeneration NOT take up the leader's time being healed). In the big picture, the Con based Shaman's horrible AC is a much bigger problem than the vampires' surges. Durable doesn't require you put points into what would likely have been a dump stat, and the different those two surges make it huge compared to getting your AC up to mediocre by grabbing chain. And, maybe it's just me, but generally I see PCs getting into fights with things trying to hit their AC more often than death marches through the forest or rooms of traps. Those things happen (and in my Dark Sun game, once they leave the city, there will likely be more skill challenges than usual), but ultimately, monster fights are the 'norm' ... other types of encounters are just less common.</blockquote>

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