Undead hitpoints

[Grishnak]

Other than blatantly cheating ang giving the undead more hit points, what can they get to improve them?
Does toughness work if it was taken as a class feat before they became undead?
Why hasn't a Lich/vampire wannabe, before he becomes undead created something that sorts out the health (Making himself weaker interms of hp's only before you nerf me) Obviously zombies, skellies etc don't have a clue and are not bothered.
I know con is shown as - for undead but would they benefit from an amulet of health?

Please don't just nerf me, I would like some of my undead to stand longer than 2 rounds against a hardened warrior or be able to take a fireball without turning to dust.

 

[hong]

One of the sillier 3E design decisions in hindsight was to give nonliving creatures no Con score. It results in fragile monsters, as you've found out.

Possible fixes (you may or may not consider these "cheating"):

- Give all undead maximum or 3/4 max hit points per HD, instead of the average

- Use the Cha bonus in place of the usual Con bonus for hit points, at least for intelligent undead

- Bump up the natural armour bonus to AC for all undead by 5 points

- Give all undead DR 5/- or hardness 5 (subtract 5 points damage from all attacks, physical or magical)

 

[alsih2o]

use bigger undead a skeleton or zombie may fall too fast for you, but a giant skeleton or zombie will last a bit longer, and can be a much more horrific image

 

[bwgwl]

as far as i know, Toughness still works for undead.

the lack of a Con bonus is supposed to be balanced by the larger hit die (d12).

on average, a d12 hit die is the equivalent of a d8 with a 14 Con. that's one way of looking at it.

if you roll hit points for them (or just go ahead and give a few max hps), you'll have skellies with 12 hp and zombies with 24. that's pretty tough for their CRs.

i like the idea of giving them some hardness, too.

 

[hong]

as far as i know, Toughness still works for undead.

the lack of a Con bonus is supposed to be balanced by the larger hit die (d12).

on average, a d12 hit die is the equivalent of a d8 with a 14 Con. that's one way of looking at it.

if you roll hit points for them (or just go ahead and give a few max hps), you'll have skellies with 12 hp and zombies with 24. that's pretty tough for their CRs.

The problem isn't at the low end, it's at the high end. When you get to CR 10 or higher, a lot of creatures (PCs and monsters both) will have Con 20 or more. Basically the Con bonus starts to outweigh the actual hit die in terms of contributing to the total.

Consider a 20th level human wizard with 14 Con (practical minimum for a PC), and a +6 Con boost item. That's an average of 150 hit points. Now consider that a 20 HD lich has an average of 130 hit points. The lich has fewer hit points despite having a CR 3 levels higher. The difference is even more stark if you look at a high-level human fighter, and the same fighter transformed into a vampire or death knight.

 

[Sejs]

-for the most part I do (Max -2) Hp / HD for my monsters and NPCs rather than straight average. I've found it to be a nice medium that also lets you adjust up or down without it being too much of a jump if you want to give a Boss type max Hp/Hd, or a weenie average or less.


-for Undead I give 'em bonus Hp based on Charisma. Helps to make them more dangerous.

-for Constructs and Ooze I give 'em flat bonus Hp based on size.

 

[HellHound]

At the high end, a majority of undead have either regeneration or are incorporeal. Incorporeal especially is a major booster for them.

High-CR undead just need more Hit Dice. When designing high-CR undead for a game, be sure to not base the CR on Hit Dice the way you would for the larger monsters out there. A 36 HD Undead will probably have a lower CR than an 18 HD dragon.

 

[Grishnak]

Thanks for the replies.
The main reason of this post was down to a little chat between myself and a mate who thought that a ghostly vampire would be dead hard, well I'd been reading the Quintessential Kraken book and saw the half Kraken template and thought that would be cool aswell so off I went made a half human/ half kraken and then using ravenloft rules for the undead side of things.

Well it turned out to be a 20 CR creature (8th level fighter +2 cr Half Kraken template, + 5 cr rank 5 Ghost Template & +5 cr Ancient vampire template) Now in theory this is 1 hell of a beast to face with all the abilities it has but look at the hp's even if every die rolled were maximum (96hp's) now the average for this creature is a whopping 48 hp's or in game terms 1 round of combat for most classes that face cr 20!
There should be a weakness for a creature for the players to exploit but the fact of the matter is I'd have to give this creature immunities to a lot of things for it to stand a chance facing off against the group.

The only other alternative is to say that for every + of cr (from the half kraken, ghost and vampire = +12 cr) give it an extra d12. Now you say this sounds fine to me but look at the maximum hit points again (240hp's) with the average being 120hp's. Still rather poor considering I've got a 13th level minotaur, barbarian/frenzied berzerker with 209 hp's obviously rolling d12's with a nice con of 24 (+7). So lets say from now until 20th level I manage to roll maximum each time my hp's will be on 342 that's already shown that a maximum undead will still be 102 hp's less than me with only about 8 maximums on my side and that I lose d12's for the creation of the char for the d8's of the minotaur race.

Anyway rant over, I think I'll dump the con loss for undead and give them a -6 con in the creation meaning they can at least get a 12 (18 rolled on 4d6 lowest dumped) + any magic items (Amulet of health)

 

[the Jester]

Templates very often tend to increase the CR much more than the hp would seem to warrant. I sometimes advance templated creatures a few HD to try to 'make up' for this.

 

[Zappo]

The problem with no con is that creatures with low con lose little or no HP in becoming undead, while creatures with high con lose a lot. The CR increase is the same, but the creature's toughness increase isn't.