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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VenerableBede" data-source="post: 8451138" data-attributes="member: 7032917">The Wicked Youth warlock invocation (Adventurer's Guide, 278) is an invocation that you can take at 15th level, but only if you are a Diabolist warlock. The spell grants you immunity to necrotic damage (potentially big, especially in campaigns that feature a lot of undead or shadow-based monsters), immunity to disease (ditto), and prevents you from being magically aged (a ribbon ability with the exception of niche circumstances). Most interesting, however, is this line: "When you would die of old age, you instead become undead, gaining the skeletal or zombie template... with no changes to your ability scores."I can't decide if this is something that I should submit to the bug report or not, and here's why: "no changes to your ability scores." That strongly suggests, to me, that this Invocation is intended to provide a class feature that allows your character to transform into a playable zombie or skeleton as a class feature by removing a penalty that would make no player want to become a zombie or skeleton. However, this Invocation does nothing to remove the myriad of other penalties that come with the skeleton and zombie templates:Skeleton (Monstrous Menagerie, 393): lose all of your skills, lose the ability to speak, lose all spellcasting abilities and abilities that create magical effects (90% of the warlock class).Zombie (Monstrous Menagerie, 435): lose all of your saves, shorten your base movement speed, lose all of your skills, lose all traits (I assume Heritage, but could be interpreted to refer to class features), lose all spellcasting abilities and abilities that create magical effects (90% of the warlock class).I would consider a character that became a zombie or skeleton under these conditions unplayable, and I don't think that the few benefits of being a zombie or skeleton outweighs these costs, and I don't think that being immune to Necrotic damage makes up for losing all of your spellcasting and spellcasting features. Either this ability is not working as intended, or this ability doesn't actually intend for any Diabolist warlocks to become zombies or skeletons until the campaign is over.So weigh in, everyone else that has read this Invocation and given it some thought: is this Invocation actually intended to allow a Diabolist warlock to become a playable undead creature as a class feature, or is the real Invocation just immunity to Necrotic damage and diseases and the rest of the Wicked Youth invocation is just a ribbon feature that you're not actually intended to make use of? Personally, I really hope the former, as it sounds very fun and flavorful.</blockquote>

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