Vulnerability Questions

[Caliber]

Hey everyone. Two questions came up for me while DMing my weekly game last night. I made a call on the fly, but want to see if I was right at the time.

1) When an Insubstantial creature takes damage it is also Vulnerable to, do you add the Vulnerable extra damage before or after halving it?

2) When a creature takes damage it is Vulnerable to from an attack that does half damage on a miss, does the extra Vulnerable damage get added before or after it is halved?

Thanks for your help in advance!

 

[Mort_Q]

A creature that is vulnerable to a specified damage type usually takes a specific amount of extra damage when it takes damage of that type, or it suffers a specific effect. For example, a creature that has vulnerable 10 radiant takes 10 extra radiant damage when an attack deals radiant damage to it or when it takes ongoing radiant damage. (emphasis added)

If you go by what they have in the glossary on D&DI, which is from the MM2, the vulnerable damage is not halved.... it's added outside the brackets, as it were.

 

[ForbidenMaster]

Q: What happens when damage is dealt to a creature with both insubstantial and vulnerability? For example, let’s say I deal 1 radiant damage to a specter (who has vulnerability 5 radiant). What happens?

A: You apply the vulnerability first, bringing the total up to 6 damage, then apply the insubstantial, cutting it by half for a final total of 3 damage. You would do the same with resistance, so a specter taking 12 necrotic damage first reduces it to 2, which then gets cut in half to 1 because it’s insubstantial.

 

[Mort_Q]

Or that.

 

[Infiniti2000]

Q1 was answered above, but not Q2.

2) When a creature takes damage it is Vulnerable to from an attack that does half damage on a miss, does the extra Vulnerable damage get added before or after it is halved?

The attack is resolved first. The half-damage for the miss is applied as part of the attack. The attacker should not account for vulnerability or resistance directly, that's up to the monster to apply.

Regarding Q1, FWIW I agree with Mort_Q's original response and not the link from ForbidenMaster.

 

[Flipguarder]

Think about it this way. A fire elemental is attacked by ice. Normal attacks don't effect him as much but ice makes him go "EEEEEK!" It don't matter how powerful the attack is, or that he is insubstantial.

 

[ForbidenMaster]

Insubstantial is simply a mechanical illusion. A monster with 20HP and a monster with 10HP but is insubstantial are mechanically the same. Now if you were to apply vulnerabilities such that 1HP damage becomes 6 for the monster with 20HP and 1HP damage becomes 5 (1/2+5 rounded down) for the monster with insubstantial then the monster with insubstantial is taking a lot more damage in comparison to the other monster. But if you apply it such that all damage is added up and then halved ((1+5)/2=3) then in effect they both took the same amount of damage. Now granted (AFAIK) monsters with insubstantial tend to have more than normal HP/2, but they do have less HP.

 

[DracoSuave]

All extra damage is applied before the miss's half damage applies. Vulnerability is extra damage, therefore is applied beforehand.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Regarding Q1, FWIW I agree with Mort_Q's original response and not the link from ForbidenMaster.

You're certainly welcome to play that way--as always --but ForbiddenMaster has it right.

This is one of the first questions I asked Andy Collins when I first began working on 4E. He told me specifically that insubstantial halves everything, vulnerability damage included.