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M Placeholder
2015-02-13, 02:06 PM
When I was starting a campaign as the DM, I was sitting with the players and creating characters when one of the players mentioned that he had became a Vampire in another game. I told him that if his character died in my campaign, then he would have to create a new one, unless it was raised and was actually alive, not as a grotesque mockery of the natural order. Not to mention that the other PC's could go Van Richten on his ass.

Personally, I disallow undead PC's, as they are more often than not, 1 - Evil and 2 - Overpowered.

What are your rules on Undead PC's

Satinavian
2015-02-13, 02:19 PM
Obviously depends on the game. We are in the general roleplaying section, so both games like WoD:tM where undead PCs are the default mode and games like SIFRP, where they really aren't, have to be considered.


For various D&D variants i allow and even encourage undead PCs. They are different enough to remain interesting but still have a good grasp on the default culture and the needs of their fellow PCs.

Have no problem with evil PCs, as long as they are reasonable. Not that sentient undead always have to be evil. As with every other being behavior determines alignment in my games. And undead are usually pretty far from overpowered considering other monster-race options.

Kid Jake
2015-02-13, 02:29 PM
I personally have no problem with them; in fact I had one in my Pathfinder campaign recently. Oftentimes the drawbacks (crazy dietary restrictions, LA, inherited weaknesses) offset the gains enough to keep them from being unbalanced and evil doesn't have to equal stupid, assuming you force the alignment change at all. I enjoy the roleplay opportunities that can come from watching a once noble character transform into a monster and try to retain that little spark that made him him.

But then my motto is 'Anything goes, so long as it's cool.'

Brookshw
2015-02-13, 02:29 PM
I find them anachronistic in most games or at least unsuitable. Sometimes though they're fine.

Beta Centauri
2015-02-13, 02:37 PM
Personally, I disallow undead PC's, as they are more often than not, 1 - Evil and 2 - Overpowered.

What are your rules on Undead PC's I allow undead PCs, because in 4th Edition they're balanced* and not required to be evil. Even if they were evil, I'll allow them, as long as no one (that player or the other players) will use it as an excuse to be disruptive.

* The revenant is the only undead race, and I think the vampire (or hybrid vampire) - which is considered weak - is the only class that makes a character undead. Even the archlich isn't technically undead as far as I can see. The Vampiric Heritage feat makes someone a vampire for the purposes of effects that relate to vampires, but also doesn't make someone undead.

sakuuya
2015-02-13, 03:45 PM
I find them anachronistic in most games or at least unsuitable. Sometimes though they're fine.

What do you mean by anachronistic? I get why they would be unsuitable, but it's not like vampires are a modern invention.

Ashtagon
2015-02-13, 06:35 PM
My rule of thumb is that if a king from a mix of high fantasy Arthurian legend and Beowulf were to meet the character, would that king regard the character as a monster? If so, then the character is no longer PC material.

Tarlek Flamehai
2015-02-13, 07:00 PM
Meh, undead doesn't bother at me all. They have so many drawbacks in most systems that they don't pose a problem. Evil PCs on the other hand.... If I am running a heroic campaign, and I usually am, I ban evil PCs. Unless it's a system lacking alignment, in which I case I simply allow the PCs enough rope to hang themselves.

Urpriest
2015-02-13, 07:01 PM
My rule of thumb is that if a king from a mix of high fantasy Arthurian legend and Beowulf were to meet the character, would that king regard the character as a monster? If so, then the character is no longer PC material.

...so no Elves in your campaigns, I take it?

Anyway, if the game allows PCs to play undead then either they're not overpowered or the game itself is unbalanced and that lack of balance probably manifests in other areas as well. Evil isn't necessarily a problem either depending on the plot you're running.

In general, everything depends on the story. If you're running a story where undead PCs don't make sense, then yeah, you shouldn't allow them...but in that case, if you've communicated your plans well enough to your players, they won't want to play undead in the first place.

dream
2015-02-13, 07:14 PM
Like most of the posters are commenting, it depends. On the group and system mainly. I think a fun idea would be if there was a TPK, the party is revived as undead somehow & must quest to regain their normal lives.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-13, 07:44 PM
If I am running a heroic campaign, and I usually am, I ban evil PCs.Guess it really depends on what you mean by "heroic."

"Hero," in the traditional sense, meant a person who did big important things, and usually of divine descent.

Conan was a hero who saved some kingdoms, toppled others, betrayed allies, strangled a king on his throne, and chased a woman across miles of tundra after killing her brothers with the intent of having his way with her; Sun Wukong was a hero who led Sanzang to the Western Heaven, killed demons, beat up gods, ate the peaches of immortality, antagonized dragons, and ate "fruit" that looked suspiciously like human babies; Heracles was a hero who slew monsters to atone for having murdered his family, got the Queen of the Amazons killed, killed his music teacher, and got Pholus the centaur killed (and dealt Chiron the centaur a wound that never healed); Odysseus spent more than half of his titular Odyssey cheating on his wife (yet opined that if his wife wasn't faithful to him, he'd kill her), blinded a cyclops and then taunted him about it once he thought himself safe, and murdered over a hundred men upon his arrival at home; Elric of Melniboné was a hero who saved and remade the entire world, but killed everyone he knew and loved with a cursed, soul-drinking blade.

Heroes are great people, but they're hardly required to be good people.

Tragak
2015-02-13, 08:43 PM
Personally, I disallow undead PC's, as they are more often than not, 1 - Evil and 2 - Overpowered.

What are your rules on Undead PC's 1) If one of my players want to create a Good character, s/he has to promise not to use it in a way that makes the game frustrating for everybody else. The same rule applies to Neutral and Evil characters.

2) If a player wants to play a race/class that's "overpowered" at some task (dealing HP damage, gathering information, sneaking into an area, socially manipulating people who can do any of the previous, resisting others' attempts to do any of the previous to them), then I ask if the person finds the task boring and/or frustrating.

If the person does not enjoy said task, and the "overpowered" race/class is protection from boredom/frustration, then I ask what challenges the person would enjoy more so that I can give him/her fun challenges instead of frustrating ones. Furthermore, if the person didn't even like the "overpowered" race/class in the first place (only taking it because s/he thought being being exposed to the boring/frustrating scenario would be even worse), then s/he now knows that s/he can take a more fun race/class and not be punished.

If the person enjoys the task, and the "overpowered" race/class features would make the challenge less exciting, then I would ask if the player had ideas for how NPCs might take said features into account when making plans that the PCs will need to foil (making the scenarios challenging/fun again).

It's surprising how many so-called "mechanical" problems go away when gamers agree to talk to each other like grown-ups.

Brookshw
2015-02-13, 09:45 PM
What do you mean by anachronistic? I get why they would be unsuitable, but it's not like vampires are a modern invention.

Heavily dependant upon setting I suppose and there's probably overlap. A mech BESM game could conceivably have a Victorian era vampire running about it it would be very removed from an expected tone for such games. Or a necropolitan in Dark Sun feels quite out of place (though admittedly could be interesting).

Karl Aegis
2015-02-14, 03:01 AM
Your character already had a chance at life and failed at it. If you want to be an embodiment of failure, that's your choice, but it's ironic that you want another chance to fail. At least it's better than playing some sort of Mary Sue archetype race, like elves.

BWR
2015-02-14, 03:15 AM
Depends on the game. In Vampire: the Masquerade I'd certainly allow undead PCs. most D&D variants, probably not unless the setting explicitly allows undead PCs or I'm running a game where it doesn't matter. For the most part, my D&D games are rather traditional in that undead are foul mockeries of life and need to be put down.

Ashtagon
2015-02-14, 04:05 AM
...so no Elves in your campaigns, I take it?

Yes elves. That king's first reaction wouldn't be "kill it with fire" after all.

Karl Aegis
2015-02-14, 04:24 AM
Yes elves. That king's first reaction wouldn't be "kill it with fire" after all.

Oh, so your king is more of the "enslave them all" type rather than the "kill them all with fire" type? Good business sense that one.

Ashtagon
2015-02-14, 04:28 AM
Oh, so your king is more of the "enslave them all" type rather than the "kill them all with fire" type? Good business sense that one.

Ok, fine, let's be silly. This king came from Talislanta. NO ELVES!

Flashy
2015-02-14, 05:07 AM
My rule of thumb is that if a king from a mix of high fantasy Arthurian legend and Beowulf were to meet the character, would that king regard the character as a monster? If so, then the character is no longer PC material.

I also think this is a sort of overbearing rule, particularly if you were playing 5e D&D. No warlocks with a Faustian bargain? No dragon ancestry sorcerers? No half orcs?

I get that what you're saying is that you don't allow anything axiomatically evil, that just seems a poor way of stating it.

Urpriest
2015-02-14, 09:46 AM
Yes elves. That king's first reaction wouldn't be "kill it with fire" after all.

Well no, everyone knows you use Cold Iron for that sort of thing.

ExLibrisMortis
2015-02-14, 06:31 PM
Your character already had a chance at life and failed at it. If you want to be an embodiment of failure, that's your choice, but it's ironic that you want another chance to fail. At least it's better than playing some sort of Mary Sue archetype race, like elves.
Except that a lot of people are deliberately undead. Necropolitans and liches, mainly. And if you're allowing 'creator with corpsecrafter feats' cheese - which is pretty much RAW legal, though DM dependant, given that necropolitans are always made - it pays to be extremely careful about how and when you become undead. Undeath is not a second chance, it's an upgrade. If you want second chances, though, undead do it better as well: liches have plenty of second (or third) chances as a racial (templatial?) ability.

Solaris
2015-02-14, 10:41 PM
When I was starting a campaign as the DM, I was sitting with the players and creating characters when one of the players mentioned that he had became a Vampire in another game. I told him that if his character died in my campaign, then he would have to create a new one, unless it was raised and was actually alive, not as a grotesque mockery of the natural order. Not to mention that the other PC's could go Van Richten on his ass.

Personally, I disallow undead PC's, as they are more often than not, 1 - Evil and 2 - Overpowered.

What are your rules on Undead PC's

While I can definitely dig your Rule 1, why Rule 2?

For my part, if a player wants to run a vampire-with-a-soul or something similar to get a non-evil undead character, I'd let them. I'd also reduce the vampire template to something far more manageable, with the option of taking a prestige class (call it the Disciple of Drakul or something of the like) for getting him the fancier vampire powers without utterly killing his ability to do something useful in a fight.

Gritmonger
2015-02-15, 01:26 AM
I'd ask why they wanted to play undead. Was it vampires in particular, or would a zombie or a mummy or even a sentient skeleton do just as well? Perhaps another kind of undead that wasn't evil or cursed?

If it's just for mechanical reasons, there are other races and custom races they could take that might fit in better with the campaign.

Or if that was the flavor of the campaign, fallen trying for redemption, it might be entirely appropriate - it would depend on the group, as I end up getting character concepts after a loose sketch of the scenario and tailoring the world to that.

Maybe they like playing outcasts or shunned folk, which can be worked in without invoking undeath.

I still might end up tempering it so that it was more akin to a race or subrace than a full fledged thing from the Monster Manual.

Currently I have a pretty good feel for my players, and none of them are metagamers or griefers looking to ruin everyone else's fun with broken characters. I'd look first at that aspect, and decide based on conversations with the player, before invoking an ironclad rule.

M Placeholder
2015-02-15, 05:32 AM
1) If one of my players want to create a Good character, s/he has to promise not to use it in a way that makes the game frustrating for everybody else. The same rule applies to Neutral and Evil characters.

2) If a player wants to play a race/class that's "overpowered" at some task (dealing HP damage, gathering information, sneaking into an area, socially manipulating people who can do any of the previous, resisting others' attempts to do any of the previous to them), then I ask if the person finds the task boring and/or frustrating.


Thats part of the problem with the evil character. Having them promise not to use the evil character in a way that makes the game frustrating for everyone else is a promise that is very hard to keep for Neutral Evil and Lawful Evil characters, and impossible for a Chaotic Evil character, as promises are there to be broken for the Neutral and Chaotic Evil characters. For the Lawful Evil character, finding loopholes should be an art form, and they should live for abusing them at all times.

Not to mention that the process of becoming undead is pretty frustrating for everyone else. Finding a vampire so you can get turned, creating a phylactery, filling a pit full of good alligned NPC's and pouring acid into it are all pretty frustrating for good alligned and neutral PC's. Not to mention that many undead are by their very nature, evil (Feeding on the blood and souls of the living, sacrifices to Orcus etc).

I run games where the PC's are expected to be good, or at least anti heroes, and in pretty much all of those cases, undead PC's spoil it.

Ehcks
2015-02-15, 05:40 AM
Thats part of the problem with the evil character. Having them promise not to use the evil character in a way that makes the game frustrating for everyone else is a promise that is very hard to keep for Neutral Evil and Lawful Evil characters, and impossible for a Chaotic Evil character, as promises are there to be broken for the Neutral and Chaotic Evil characters. For the Lawful Evil character, finding loopholes should be an art form, and they should live for abusing them at all times.

An intelligent evil character should know that, while they don't like it very much, working with their non-evil party has a better return on investment than betraying them for someone even more evil.

Especially since that without their party to back them up, this evil boss character is going to just kill them and steal their stuff. Everyone should know that much, since that's what they were planning to do anyway.

Brookshw
2015-02-15, 07:44 AM
Hmmm, I just noticed something. Our OP is named Dark Sun Gnome. But the gnomes in Dark Sun are all dead.......

Is he, possibly, undead himself? :smalleek:

Dun dun dun!

Necroticplague
2015-02-15, 09:36 AM
I've never found undead PCs to be problem, regardless of system. The closest thing I've ever seen was a Harrowed in a game of deadlands d20, but he was actually a pretty good guy when the demon in his head wasn't in charge.

Komatik
2015-02-15, 09:40 AM
I'd ask why they wanted to play undead. Was it vampires in particular, or would a zombie or a mummy or even a sentient skeleton do just as well? Perhaps another kind of undead that wasn't evil or cursed?

If it's just for mechanical reasons, there are other races and custom races they could take that might fit in better with the campaign.

Or if that was the flavor of the campaign, fallen trying for redemption, it might be entirely appropriate - it would depend on the group, as I end up getting character concepts after a loose sketch of the scenario and tailoring the world to that.

Maybe they like playing outcasts or shunned folk, which can be worked in without invoking undeath.

I still might end up tempering it so that it was more akin to a race or subrace than a full fledged thing from the Monster Manual.

Currently I have a pretty good feel for my players, and none of them are metagamers or griefers looking to ruin everyone else's fun with broken characters. I'd look first at that aspect, and decide based on conversations with the player, before invoking an ironclad rule.

This is one of the worst things ever. If I can't have fun with the real thing, why bother? It's like getting to play an actual ogre, but it being some medium-size character with powerful build and +2 Str -2 Int. It doesn't feel like an ogre at all.

Same kind of thing as when people decry optimizing and say you should just pretend to be a good swordsman with Fighter X and Weapon Focus feats instead of the character being one.

I don't want to ruin campaigns, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't attracted to character concepts with a high amount of personal power in addition to the flavor. Diluting that too much just ruins a good part of the feel of whatever the thing I was wanting to play was.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm not in it for the flavour - I'm very much a flavour nut, but the power is part of the feel I'm going for usually. If I am not, I probably would make a human or something else. But if I'm going for a vampire or the like, you can bet your ass the power is a key part of the concept.

Tragak
2015-02-15, 10:08 AM
Thats part of the problem with the evil character. Having them promise not to use the evil character in a way that makes the game frustrating for everyone else is a promise that is very hard to keep for Neutral Evil and Lawful Evil characters, and impossible for a Chaotic Evil character, as promises are there to be broken for the Neutral and Chaotic Evil characters. For the Lawful Evil character, finding loopholes should be an art form, and they should live for abusing them at all times. Good characters can be used in the same ways to cause the same problems.


Not to mention that the process of becoming undead is pretty frustrating for everyone else. Finding a vampire so you can get turned, creating a phylactery, filling a pit full of good alligned NPC's and pouring acid into it are all pretty frustrating for good alligned and neutral PC's. Not to mention that many undead are by their very nature, evil (Feeding on the blood and souls of the living, sacrifices to Orcus etc). By "is" I presume you mean "can be"?


I run games where the PC's are expected to be good, or at least anti heroes, and in pretty much all of those cases, undead PC's spoil it. That doesn't mean that everybody has to. Tons of people enjoy Villain Protagonists like Michael Corleone, Jayne Cobb, Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan, Walter White, Belkar Bitterleaf

Ashtagon
2015-02-15, 10:47 AM
Belker actually illustrates my original point well. I do allow evil pcs. But they must be able to blend into a major cinventional human city without arousing a mass panic reaction.

Gritmonger
2015-02-15, 11:52 AM
This is one of the worst things ever. If I can't have fun with the real thing, why bother? It's like getting to play an actual ogre, but it being some medium-size character with powerful build and +2 Str -2 Int. It doesn't feel like an ogre at all.

Same kind of thing as when people decry optimizing and say you should just pretend to be a good swordsman with Fighter X and Weapon Focus feats instead of the character being one.

I don't want to ruin campaigns, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't attracted to character concepts with a high amount of personal power in addition to the flavor. Diluting that too much just ruins a good part of the feel of whatever the thing I was wanting to play was.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm not in it for the flavour - I'm very much a flavour nut, but the power is part of the feel I'm going for usually. If I am not, I probably would make a human or something else. But if I'm going for a vampire or the like, you can bet your ass the power is a key part of the concept.

Then that's your choice, and you'd have to live with a DM that might level everyone else up accordingly to match the abilities in the Monster Manual, to six or seven while you're a first level vampire.

It's not a case of badwrongfun, but if you'd expect to be a vampire with a bunch of first level characters around, it'd be not much of a campaign for everybody else.

I might not be your kind of DM - I did allow a half-ogre, a wemic, and a quarter-treasure-troll so, your mileage may vary. An at-will Wish was a bit much, so I made it a one a day 25% ability that had to be activated by another player's action.

M Placeholder
2015-02-15, 12:35 PM
Hmmm, I just noticed something. Our OP is named Dark Sun Gnome. But the gnomes in Dark Sun are all dead.......

Is he, possibly, undead himself? :smalleek:

Dun dun dun!

Nah, just took a wrong turn in The Cage and ended up Portal Hipped on Athas:smallwink:

Urpriest
2015-02-15, 02:43 PM
Thats part of the problem with the evil character. Having them promise not to use the evil character in a way that makes the game frustrating for everyone else is a promise that is very hard to keep for Neutral Evil and Lawful Evil characters, and impossible for a Chaotic Evil character, as promises are there to be broken for the Neutral and Chaotic Evil characters. For the Lawful Evil character, finding loopholes should be an art form, and they should live for abusing them at all times.

...it's the player promising not to be a ****, not the character. It's trivial for a player whose character is of any alignment to not be a ****, they just...don't be a ****. Unless you think the player is chaotic evil, and will break their promise?



Not to mention that the process of becoming undead is pretty frustrating for everyone else. Finding a vampire so you can get turned

In D&D 3.5 at least, it's a backstory thing, not something you'd be doing in-game, since it results in a rather substantial change in LA.


, creating a phylactery,

Not really any harder than creating most magic items.


filling a pit full of good alligned NPC's and pouring acid into it

Which type of unead is that?


are all pretty frustrating for good alligned and neutral PC's. Not to mention that many undead are by their very nature, evil (Feeding on the blood and souls of the living, sacrifices to Orcus etc).

I run games where the PC's are expected to be good, or at least anti heroes, and in pretty much all of those cases, undead PC's spoil it.

Yeah, but in games where it actually matters that the PCs are good-aligned (and you've actually communicated the reason why to your players in a way they can understand), they won't ask to play undead PCs. The times they'll ask to play undead PCs are precisely those times where either it won't cause this kind of disruption, or where they think it won't. In the first case, you should let them, in the second case you can just explain why in that particular case it won't work.


Belker actually illustrates my original point well. I do allow evil pcs. But they must be able to blend into a major cinventional human city without arousing a mass panic reaction.

Oh sure, an undead PC without a hat of disguise in many settings is going to be a problem. Then again, in many settings the same is true of living PCs. It's not like all campaigns take place in conventional human cities, or that all human cities follow the same conventions.


Then that's your choice, and you'd have to live with a DM that might level everyone else up accordingly to match the abilities in the Monster Manual, to six or seven while you're a first level vampire.

It's not a case of badwrongfun, but if you'd expect to be a vampire with a bunch of first level characters around, it'd be not much of a campaign for everybody else.

I might not be your kind of DM - I did allow a half-ogre, a wemic, and a quarter-treasure-troll so, your mileage may vary. An at-will Wish was a bit much, so I made it a one a day 25% ability that had to be activated by another player's action.

TBF, I'm pretty sure Komatik wasn't proposing to start at first level as a vampire (especially since you can't make vampires out of people below 5th level, so it wouldn't be "playing an actual vampire" anyway). Presumably the idea was to play one in a campaign that's starting at level 13+. And hey, if the LA were actually balanced, would you disallow it?

Komatik
2015-02-15, 03:27 PM
TBF, I'm pretty sure Komatik wasn't proposing to start at first level as a vampire (especially since you can't make vampires out of people below 5th level, so it wouldn't be "playing an actual vampire" anyway). Presumably the idea was to play one in a campaign that's starting at level 13+. And hey, if the LA were actually balanced, would you disallow it?

LA is the devil, and to be ignored with extreme prejudice.

That said, obviously hell no, at least not with the current template. I love ignoring LA, but ignoring LA (especially large amounts of it, many LA +1/+2 races are quite fine at low levels too IMO) is only smart once people have some class levels (=the stuff that really matters in this game) under their belt. Any kind of powerful vampire template sure as hell doesn't belong in a level 1 game.

Wardog
2015-02-15, 03:40 PM
Your character already had a chance at life and failed at it. If you want to be an embodiment of failure, that's your choice, but it's ironic that you want another chance

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable character concept and motivation.

You failed at something important (protecting an artefact, stopping the BBEG, keeping an oath), and need to complete your mission in order to find peace.

(Also, given that - in D&D at least - its perfectly possible to be killed and resurrected, the only "failure" inherent in being undead is "failure to be resurrected in a socially acceptable manner").

Broken Twin
2015-02-15, 03:54 PM
As long as their character is at the same relative power level as the other characters, and makes thematic sense for the campaign, why not let them play an undead? It's not like there's a set in stone list of rules as to how undead have to be handled. Determine why they want, then work with them to build something appropriate for your game.

endur
2015-02-16, 10:27 PM
I would only allow undead PCs if the party is evil.

If the party is good or neutral, I do not allow evil PCs.

I have had too many issues with Good and Evil PCs in the same party in the past (or neutral and evil).

Gritmonger
2015-02-16, 10:57 PM
Want to be a Revenant? Go nuts. But tick-tock, you've got likely one in-game year or less before you expire... and no, it would not be polite for your friends to murder somebody 'suitable' for you to reincarnate if you expire before the year is up.

goto124
2015-02-16, 10:58 PM
I'm assuming you have worlds where undead = evil, or at least the world treats undead as the same as evil?

I can see how troublesome it would be, for the PC to be constantly attacked the moment she enters town. 'BURN THE UNDEAD WITCH!'
'Guys, calm down, I'm goo-' 'SHE'S A LIAR!'

Thrudd
2015-02-17, 12:05 AM
Depends on the game and the setting. In D&D it is a no, for the most part. Undead are monsters that prey on civilization. They are terrors that are whispered about, lurking in dark places and waiting for the unwary. the PCs are adventurers who rely on and defend civilization. Even evil PCs depend on being able to do commerce and fit in to some extent.

I don't roll with the "but my undead is special and isn't evil" excuse. No, your undead/Orc/drow/whatever monster you think is cool is not special, and it isn't playable in my setting.

But such a conversation never need happen, because anyone playing in my game would be clear about the setting and what is available to them from the beginning.

goto124
2015-02-17, 12:11 AM
Undead PCs would work a lot better in a setting where they're accepted. Maybe a necropolis, or graveyard, or undead dungeon. A world where enough people are familar with the undead that the undead PCs can be treated like people and not 'DON'T TRUST IT KILL IT!'

Otherwise, it's just really hard.

Another possibility, is that the undead PC hides his undead-ness most of the time. The skeleton or zombie might be able to wrap herself in enough cloth to pass off as human.

Alex12
2015-02-18, 12:08 AM
There's degrees of undead. In D&D 3.5, for instance, there's Necropolitans, which are basically "whatever you were before, but undead" which are actually pretty well-balanced even in low-level play (though Dread Necromancer makes this somewhat less so)
I wouldn't allow a vampire or lich PC unless the other PCs were at a level to make this reasonable.

That said, as far as I'm concerned, tying Good/Evil and Positive/Negative energy together is dumb. Undead can be evil, or used for evil, and most people see them as creepy, in games I GM, they're not intrinsically evil. Undead-creating spells lose the [evil] tag (though they can still be evil acts, the spell just isn't automatically evil), and all clerics choose if they want to channel positive or negative energy, which doesn't change except in very extreme circumstances.

etrpgb
2015-02-18, 04:02 AM
It depends on the rules actually, but at least on D&D 3 often undead are not so strong. Sure they got the d12 and some nice immunities, but a random cleric can destroy them without any save or hope, they cannot be resurrected, the lack of constitution often make the d12 actually weak, and usually they have problems in any kind of urban or social situation.


About the "being evil," traditionally it is the case as undead were monster plain an simple. But nowadays it is plenty of alternatives, the a good one is the Necropolitan from Libris Mortis.

hifidelity2
2015-02-18, 08:32 AM
As long as their character is at the same relative power level as the other characters, and makes thematic sense for the campaign, why not let them play an undead? It's not like there's a set in stone list of rules as to how undead have to be handled. Determine why they want, then work with them to build something appropriate for your game.

This is what I did. One PC in a major campaign died. Party was unable to resurrect but could animate dead – so they did that in a very holy place to the guys god and rolled a critical. God bought him back but as “unloving” (rather than undead)

He lost a level (seemed reasonable to me) and had some extra guesses placed on him.
The Advantages was that he was immune to poisons etc (and didn’t need to breath)
But could not be healed. He took tailor as a skill so he could do “invisible mending”. Also repair item also helped keep him looking “normal”

He was not an evil PC to start with and did not change alignment just because he died

Mastikator
2015-02-18, 09:06 AM
To be honest I'd consider any undead that isn't basically a monster to be trespassing on Mary Sue territory. And unless the game is about monsters then I wouldn't be OK with it as a GM, if another player did a Mary Sue of any kind I would cease to take the game seriously.

I've never played D&D for more than a few sessions, we didn't leave the single digit levels and so anything exotic was out of the question. I've never been in a group that did something like playing an undead.

Edit- The closest thing would be me playing a human cursed with being a werewolf, but there were no Mary Sue traits, the transformation happened in the least opportune moments and always did more damage than good (if any good at all). The PC got split up with the rest of the group when they fled from the werewolf.
I played a werewolf because of a random character generation, I didn't get to choose to be some kind of "reformed" or "good" werewolf, I played it as a hungry wolf that tried to eat his friends.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-18, 09:45 AM
I have a long-standing love affair with ghosts of various sorts, as can be witnessed by me having spent years on a Bleach freeform game. I disagree with the notion that non-monstrous undead are necessarily Mary Sues, as that requires disregarding pretty much all traditional limitations of such beings. Though pop culture does have a sad tendency to do just that whenever undead beings become player characters or protagonists.

Not that I really have anything against playing actual monsters, whether we're using "monster" in the mental or physical sense of the word.

goto124
2015-02-18, 09:55 AM
Depending on system, undead races may be meant for NPCs, not PCs, bringing in a lot of trouble when playing as a 'monster race'. The Mary Sue part is understandable when undead have significant advantages over the standard races. If ghosts are immune to all physical attacks, it can be considered Mary Sue to play a PC ghost. Or the DM just throws lots of magic users at the party, which can get problematic.

The problem is less 'undead race PC' and more 'non-standard race PC'

Which systems have undead PC races built into them as a 'standard race'?

PersonMan
2015-02-18, 09:58 AM
I'm assuming you have worlds where undead = evil, or at least the world treats undead as the same as evil?

I can see how troublesome it would be, for the PC to be constantly attacked the moment she enters town. 'BURN THE UNDEAD WITCH!'
'Guys, calm down, I'm goo-' 'SHE'S A LIAR!'

To be fair, a lot of games have some kind of disguise/cover mechanic. I doubt anyone would walk into a village showing off their rotting internal organs and expect to be let into the tavern with the others (who may or may not be soaked in blood and armed well enough to supply twice the local militia). It'd be less 'undead witch' and more 'quiet, cloaked person who sticks to their weird friends'.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-18, 10:12 AM
Which systems have undead PC races built into them as a 'standard race'?

Various White Wolf games, from Vampire to Geist. I can also think of a load of CRPGs where undead are a basic option, but not as many tabletop games.

Thrudd
2015-02-18, 11:07 AM
Which systems have undead PC races built into them as a 'standard race'?

Feng Shui doesn't really have "races", but character archetypes. Ghost is one of the archetypes in the core game, they have flight and are insubstantial (which actually means they can pass through all but some very specific substances), could potentially be immune to specific types of damage, and have some magic attack powers. Think more like Lo Pan from "big trouble in little china", than a haunting, moaning kind of ghost.

But Feng Shui is a very different type of game from D&D. the characters are supposed to be heroes in an action movie setting that crosses genres, and kicking butt in the most creative and cinematic ways possible.

Beta Centauri
2015-02-18, 11:14 AM
Which systems have undead PC races built into them as a 'standard race'? D&D 4th Edition has the revenant, which is an undead race (which also counts as a living creature), and the vampire class (which makes any character race undead). These are "standard" in the sense that they're in official works, and are designed to be balanced against other player options. Apparently the vampire is rather underpowered, though.

ExLibrisMortis
2015-02-18, 11:24 AM
To be honest I'd consider any undead that isn't basically a monster to be trespassing on Mary Sue territory.
I think you're confusing Mary Sue-ness and powergaming/powerfulness. Liches and necropolitans do not become undead because they are painfully perfect self-inserts, but because they desire power and immortality. Which is a perfectly acceptable (and non-evil, though probably also non-good) motivation for a PC. In addition, trying to mitigate the downsides of being undead is, again, a perfectly sensible in-character decision for any 'good' undead. That magic in 3.5 makes it almost trivially easy to overcome certain challenges, does not mean that any character who uses magic to do so is a Mary Sue.

goto124
2015-02-18, 11:26 AM
Less trespassing, and more veering into. In danger of going into Mary-sueness, but not necessarily so. Mary-sueness may be the wrong word here. It's more of simply being plain overpowered for the campaign, making the game unfun by overshadowing the other players and busting through battles/situations like it's no business.

If I trust the player not to do the above, I'll allow it. Otherwise, no.

Solaris
2015-02-18, 01:00 PM
Twilight vampires are a Mary Sue race. They're also arguably fey, too, but that's another discussion.

While it's possible to have a non-monstrous undead character as a Mary Sue (especially if they're more attractive than the living), it's not inescapable. "Mary Sue" as a descriptor for a character is really heavily overused; it should only apply if we're talking about undead that have no weaknesses, no flaws, no foibles, (unless they make the character more attractive, of course), and is superior to ordinary humans in every way possible - and they're socially infallible, with everyone opposing them being utterly wrong for doing so.

That's not the case in D&D-style games. A character can try playing a Mary Sue vampire - but they can try playing Mary Sue elves, werewolves, and humans, too. It's a problem with the player still being stuck in the awkwardly graceless wish-fulfillment stage rather than with the undead in particular.

Urpriest
2015-02-18, 02:34 PM
I think the "Mary Sue" objection is that an undead PC would be more "unique" than the other PCs, but this fails to take into account the fact that it's a pretty small deviation compared to what the rest of the party would be doing. Unless you're playing a retclone, you're not going to see many parties of generic Tolkien-esque fighters and wizards and such. People will put their own spins on their characters, generally in tandem with the DM putting their own spin on NPCs, and most of the time that's going to be more radical than "is also undead". Heck, most DM-created settings have at least one undead nation anyway, since fantasy fans tend to like exploring the whole "what measure is a non-human" thing in the most superficial way possible.

Almarck
2015-02-18, 02:51 PM
Which systems have undead PC races built into them as a 'standard race'?

To elaborate, you have vampires, giests (ghosts bound to a human host), mummies, various flavors of Prometheans (essentialy Frankensteins, but sometimes people run golems of a variety of flavors), and that's just covering the ones that have a whole book series dedicated to each one.


Anyways, I like the idea of undead player characters might self. They're not too gamebreaking depending on the racials attached honestly.
In 3.5/Pf specifically, I'd argue that just being undead in of itself is a pain that justifies that sort of weakness. Just off the top of my head:
-No healing from positive energy. Complicates the matter of maining party health
-Inability to use spells that target "humanoid" enlarge person if you're big beefy fighter no longer works if he's undead.

Sure, you get some immunities to potentially fatal things, but those only matter if the DM uses them against you. If you're an undead in a party full of living people, it means the DM can single you out by having holy water traps and bombs everywhere...

And that's not dealing with the social conditions or whether or not racial level adjustment is involved.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-18, 07:00 PM
Twilight vampires are a Mary Sue race. They're also arguably fey, too, but that's another discussion.I'd say "cyborgs" would be a more accurate description. They're pretty clearly the result of alien-made nanites. It's the most rational explanation, since Meyer persists in insisting that there's science behind all this, not magic.

Either that, or assume Meyer's an awful hack, but sometimes theorycraft is fun.

Kid Jake
2015-02-18, 07:58 PM
Meyer persists in insisting that there's science behind all this, not magic.

I'd just assume she's referring to the Mass Hypnosis Device she used to grow so popular.

Gritmonger
2015-02-18, 10:28 PM
I'd say "cyborgs" would be a more accurate description. They're pretty clearly the result of alien-made nanites. It's the most rational explanation, since Meyer persists in insisting that there's science behind all this, not magic.

Either that, or assume Meyer's an awful hack, but sometimes theorycraft is fun.

Good... no. There is no science. None. Not a jot. Not an iota. It's like slapping "Quantum!" on the outside of a black box and claiming that's a succinct explanation for how it works.

"So, the effect where it..."
"QUANTUM!"
"But what we're talking about is creating a precipitate when the solution..."
"QUANTUM!!"
"I don't get how an effect like that comes into play in the concretion..."
"Don't you get it?!? Q-U-A-N-T-U-M~!"

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-19, 05:44 AM
Like I said, it's fun to theorycraft. Reconciling it not being magic with the apparent disregard Meyerpires have for the laws of conservation of energy and mass leads to my alien-forged nanites idea.

Mastikator
2015-02-19, 06:57 AM
I think you're confusing Mary Sue-ness and powergaming/powerfulness. Liches and necropolitans do not become undead because they are painfully perfect self-inserts, but because they desire power and immortality. Which is a perfectly acceptable (and non-evil, though probably also non-good) motivation for a PC. In addition, trying to mitigate the downsides of being undead is, again, a perfectly sensible in-character decision for any 'good' undead. That magic in 3.5 makes it almost trivially easy to overcome certain challenges, does not mean that any character who uses magic to do so is a Mary Sue.

It's not about the power. It's about the fact that undead are a fictional monster used to scare children, they are monsters in every sense of the word, supernaturally evil beyond anything humanely possible (which is a lot). And here this player comes with his special snowflake undead who isn't like the rest and is a decent person who is in control of his supernatural desire to end all life, I mean cooooommmoooonnnnnn. Give me a break.
If all the vampires in this world are basically psychopaths in their relation to humans and then suddenly your vampires isn't, especially without some special shenanigans to explain it, then I can't take you seriously. I just can't.

Milo v3
2015-02-19, 07:21 AM
If all the vampires in this world are basically psychopaths in their relation to humans and then suddenly your vampires isn't, especially without some special shenanigans to explain it, then I can't take you seriously. I just can't.

I think the bolded part is the most important factor of this post. Because it shows how the first part of the post is actually setting specific, and doesn't actually have to apply at all.

Gritmonger
2015-02-19, 07:50 AM
I think the bolded part is the most important factor of this post. Because it shows how the first part of the post is actually setting specific, and doesn't actually have to apply at all.

Ah. So you're saying it's okay as long as they're VINO's*.
*That's "Vampires In Name Only" in case you're wondering. Not referring to how tanked on wine the DM would have to be to hand-wave and go "Sure, sparkly 'vampires' in D&D. Let's go with it."

Brookshw
2015-02-19, 07:59 AM
I think the bolded part is the most important factor of this post. Because it shows how the first part of the post is actually setting specific, and doesn't actually have to apply at all.

While I see your point, undead lacking a certain level of humanity is an extremely common occurance in just about any game and system I can think of. Even WOD vamps had a "humanity" score, the very existence of which seems a strong indicator that trying to "have a heart" is sort of a thing.

Milo v3
2015-02-19, 08:00 AM
Ah. So you're saying it's okay as long as they're VINO's*.
*That's "Vampires In Name Only" in case you're wondering. Not referring to how tanked on wine the DM would have to be to hand-wave and go "Sure, sparkly 'vampires' in D&D. Let's go with it."

Just because a setting doesn't have "Vampires are auto evil" doesn't mean they are vampires in name only :smallannoyed:


While I see your point, undead lacking a certain level of humanity is an extremely common occurance in just about any game and system I can think of. Even WOD vamps had a "humanity" score, the very existence of which seems a strong indicator that trying to "have a heart" is sort of a thing.
Lacking a certain level of humanity doesn't mean they are automatically complete evil monsters in every setting.

Necroticplague
2015-02-19, 08:23 AM
To be fair, Maskitator, that argument isn't really undead specific, it can be said of literally any non-human creature.

Satinavian
2015-02-19, 08:24 AM
Last i checked, we were talking Undead in general, not specifically vampires.

Of course a pc works better with an undead kind that does

- not need to feed on sentient beings
- is not threatened by going into the sun
- has no supernatural desire to end all life

The last one isn't even common with vampires.

As long as the setting has this kind of undead, the pc isn't even special at all.

Gritmonger
2015-02-19, 08:37 AM
I would think that the defining trait of a traditional vampire, that is drinking the blood of the living, would be the minimum qualification for being termed a "vampire." Vampiric, vampire bats; the term refers to consuming a resource, normally unwillingly, from a living victim, and then usually qualified with a substance if it is not the default one of blood.

If you really want to go into the original definitions and folklore of the term "vampire" you end up seeing that the primary qualifications were not drinking blood, but being an animate thing that should not be animate; i.e. a dead body, a hammer, a watermelon, all animated by a malevolent force, usually due to the act of being discarded or disposed of improperly. In any case, they were essentially there to torment the living.

Even in some bizarre folk etymologies, such as one I recall from the Polish immigrants of Canada, a "vampire" in their mythology did not drink blood, but rather after their death rose and marched to the church and if they successfully rung the church bell caused the remainder of their extended family to expire. They were born vampires, didn't bite anyone, but were doomed by the nature of their birth.

The classic definitions are ones of either assault and theft, or animation by a malevolent force - neither of which is very conducive to a PC, the latter by the nature of the malevolent force.

Lacking either one or both of those qualifications, I'm not sure something could take the moniker of "Vampire."

Mastikator
2015-02-19, 08:40 AM
To be fair, Maskitator, that argument isn't really undead specific, it can be said of literally any non-human creature.

But it is especially true for the undead. In virtually every single piece of movie, book, comic, word-by-mouth story, bedtime story, song, game, etc the undead is a monster that will kill you and feel either good about it or nothing at all.
To go against that is basically to redefine what "undead" is. I mean you could do that with some other traditionally evil creature, like for example the werewolf. Lets say you redefine werewolf into a wolf that turns into a human under the full moon, ok you can do that and call it a werewolf, but it's not. Nobody is going to think of that when they hear "werewolf". That's not what people mean when they hear "werewolf", what they hear is "man who turns into a wolf under the full moon and murders his friends and family", the point is that it's a terrible curse and when you take it away you're redefining werewolf at the core. It's only superficially a werewolf, but really it's not.

Same goes with undead, if you decide "our undead aren't necessarily evil" then you're defining them as something other than what people think about when they think about zombies and vampires. If the vampires are nice then it's only superficially a vampire. And that's what makes it tread on Mary Sue territory. Extracting the "cool" parts of a monster for the sake of "being cool". It's not about power.

Edit- my point is that "drinks blood, is afraid of garlic" isn't what defines a vampire, what defines a vampire is "monster in the shape of a man that will drink your blood if you go out at night", it's defined by the role it plays, the role as a monster, if it plays a different role then it's not really a vampire.
Or a zombie, or lich, or mummy, or some other undead creature.

Grim Portent
2015-02-19, 08:45 AM
So... Am I one of the only people who doesn't see a player having to eat a person every week or so as a problem? :smallconfused:

In D&D 3.5 I'm pretty sure a vampire only needs to drain levels once a month and drink blood once a week, so that's four commoners/kobolds/bandits/paladins/whatevers a month. Seems reasonable to me.

In nWoD vampires need to feed at least every three days or so unless they tend to binge a lot in one night which can stretch it up to a week and feeding is only lethal if they go overboard.

Other undead are different of course, 3.5 ghouls have to eat sentient flesh every few days for example, which is harder to manage discretely but still isn't really an obstacle in a game where killing sentient creatures is pretty standard fare.

Satinavian
2015-02-19, 09:02 AM
Same goes with undead, if you decide "our undead aren't necessarily evil" then you're defining them as something other than what people think about when they think about zombies and vampires. If the vampires are nice then it's only superficially a vampire. And that's what makes it tread on Mary Sue territory. Extracting the "cool" parts of a monster for the sake of "being cool". It's not about power.Undead is a very wide wide set of things. And to tell the truth, "evil" is not, whot most undead of legend are. Most legends are more similar to what in D&D are revenants and ghosts. Curses and revenge are common themes, as are "fullfilling a certain task even from beyond the grave". Sometimes there are even forces of the natural order of things, rising from the grave and reversing some mistake the hero (or fool) of the story has done.

But legendery undead exist in a multitude of forms. We even have the Koschei, which is more or less the origin of the lich and while certainly not a nice perason with all this "abducting the hero's wife" stuff, is far from "hating the living" or "being sustained from their substance"
Edit- my point is that "drinks blood, is afraid of garlic" isn't what defines a vampire, what defines a vampire is "monster in the shape of a man that will drink your blood if you go out at night", it's defined by the role it plays, the role as a monster, if it plays a different role then it's not really a vampire.
Or a zombie, or lich, or mummy, or some other undead creature.That is you. For me it's the former, a creature defined by certain differences to normal humans that makes its decisions based upon them. Even if we go to the most iconic vampire story ever (Dracula), be is not just "a monster in the shape of a man that will drink your blood if you go out at night".

GungHo
2015-02-19, 09:20 AM
1) If one of my players want to create a Good character, s/he has to promise not to use it in a way that makes the game frustrating for everybody else. The same rule applies to Neutral and Evil characters.
Yeah, you can play an outright demon, the holiest paladin, and a druid who makes the ALF seem moderate, and honestly as long as you guys don't conspire to screw up the game, we'll find a way to make it happen. Granted, some things can be a little harder to make compatible than others, but we can figure it out. What we can't do is have one guy run roughshod over the entire game because "my character is a jerk who doesn't like playing with others". That guy dies first or is zapped by a beholder with permanent personality adjustment eyes.

Brookshw
2015-02-19, 09:55 AM
Lacking a certain level of humanity doesn't mean they are automatically complete evil monsters in every setting.

Certainly true, you could very well have any kind of setting you like and that's certainly fine. What I'm getting at rather is they would be more a specific exception to the general application and concept. What I'm hearing, possibly incorrectly, is the counterpoint to that is because specific exceptions can exist there's no general principle, aka, our common and collective narrative concerning the undead.

+1 internet cookies to Mastikator.

Satinavian
2015-02-19, 10:02 AM
As for "levels of humanity" :

For me undead are far closer to humans than robots are. And while evil-robot-stories are far from uncommen, good-robot-stories are not exactly unheard of either.

Less humanlike does not equate to evil.

Karl Aegis
2015-02-19, 10:11 AM
Necropolitans and Liches don't get more powerful when they become undead. They don't even get immortality. They just reduce their options in which they can die.

Necropolitans actually become weaker when they become undead. They lose substantial amounts of their memories (experience points) and they lose a not insignificant portion of their wealth. They abandon life in a ritual suicide, but are too afraid to go to the afterlife. They failed at what they wanted to accomplish: Abandonment of life and gathering of power. Now they must race against time to accumulate enough power to actually live longer than they would have because there are outsiders(super-powered aliens) that hunt you down and kill you for extending your life.

Liches failed to discover the secrets of true immortality, so they had to hash together a plan to achieve their failed attempt at immortality. They also have to deal with super-aliens hunting them down and killing them with the added downside of being hunted by crazed dudes in wizard robes trying to use their life-force-in-a-box as batteries for their animated trash heap. They don't even get a massive boost in power to compensate for their dramatic loss in wealth. They get piddly bonuses to skills they would auto-succeed at with spells.

Gritmonger
2015-02-19, 10:21 AM
The point of much undead mythos comes down to hubris, as does the trope of the evil construct.

At some level, any animating force that moves what should not by rights of a deity's edicts of life, death, and unlife be animate is the tool of the dark.

This is a fundamental part of the societal reaction.

The other part is the human or primate reaction to the appearance of illness or wrongness.

A dip into the uncanny valley (appearing almost alive but somehow wrong) coupled with the ages old tradition regarding hubris provides the stigma that powers the perception of robots and the undead.

The original "R.U.R." from which we derive the term was more along these lines, with the fundamental flaw of the robots being that they were animate, but not by a soul granted by a creator deity. They were therefore "not good" because they could not be moral. The context of the wrongs of slavery aside, which formed the other portion if the sandwich of evil leading to the downfall of all mankind.

If somebody wants to play undead, that is a valid roleplaying choice. But I would question attempts to rewrite the societal stigma of being an animate corpse moved by creator knows what unnatural will without some very good cause, rather than people "hating them because they are beautiful" or some other sparkly vampire hokum.

ExLibrisMortis
2015-02-19, 10:41 AM
@Karl:
Now you're arguing mechanics. That the lich template isn't too great, sure, though LA buyoff might be in play - the lich is aiming for epic levels, of course - and in any case various classes exist that grant the template. The super-aliens hunting you down - I'm guessing you mean the Inevitables? - are a danger, but only if you're in that kind of setting, and it's not exactly relevant to the discussion of undead PCs in general nor unique to undead PCs - all planar binding has the same issues, for instance. A DM continuously hitting his necropolitan players with CR +5 inevitables is just being annoying, unless it's the point of the campaign. And I could damn well ask Wee Jas for aid against these machines, at a reasonable level.

Considering that necropolitans have several extra lifetimes to regain the lost experience and wealth, the temporarily loss is hardly an obstacle - call it an investment. If you're arguing mechanics, you have to admit that many effective builds use undeath to boost their strength - by becoming immune to things, or healing off uttercold spells, or more cheesily (but no less RAW legal), by using a corpsecrafter in a desecrate area. Simply a Dread Necromancer 8 with Corpsecrafter in a desecrated area is +6 hp/hit die, +8 strength and +4 dexterity. To a d6 hit die caster, that's a nice effective 9 constitution modifier, which most likely beats what they had before, not even counting all the other bonuses.

The bit about being afraid to continue to the afterlife - that's nowhere in the description of necropolitans, you just made it up for your setting.

Tragak
2015-02-19, 10:49 AM
And here this player comes with his special snowflake So what should he play instead?

Mastikator
2015-02-19, 11:01 AM
So what should he play instead?
Something that is a fair representation of what he's playing. Being a race, or some special creature shouldn't just be the clothes you wear. (Or rather if you are then I don't believe you're roleplaying)
If you play some undead creature and ignore all of the narrative and historical context that undead creature has been used as then you're ignoring 99% of the content of that creature and basically just playing yourself wearing an undead suite, that, to me isn't roleplaying.
If you want to play as a ghost, were all ghosts are ghosts because they're hung up on some event or task that needs to be finished, except you who can do whatever you want then there's nothing ghostlike about your character in any meaningful way. If you're gonna call that "roleplaying a ghost" then I don't believe your definition of roleplaying has any overlap at all with my definition of roleplaying.

Tragak
2015-02-19, 11:15 AM
Something that is a fair representation of what he's playing. Being a race, or some special creature shouldn't just be the clothes you wear. (Or rather if you are then I don't believe you're roleplaying)
If you play some undead creature and ignore all of the narrative and historical context that undead creature has been used as then you're ignoring 99% of the content of that creature and basically just playing yourself wearing an undead suite, that, to me isn't roleplaying.
If you want to play as a ghost, were all ghosts are ghosts because they're hung up on some event or task that needs to be finished, except you who can do whatever you want then there's nothing ghostlike about your character in any meaningful way. If you're gonna call that "roleplaying a ghost" then I don't believe your definition of roleplaying has any overlap at all with my definition of roleplaying. If I wanted to play a Human in your game, how would I be required to do so?

Thrudd
2015-02-19, 11:46 AM
The whole undead issue is really just a question of setting. What does it mean to be "undead" in the game world, and how does that mesh with the role and goals players are supposed to have in that game.

The same goes for questions of allowing any specific type of character.

Aside from questions of mechanical balance/fairness, "Should I allow this?" Is always answered by "does it make sense for your setting and the game you are playing?"

Should I let my players pick anything out of the monster manual and use it as a pc? Only if it makes sense in the game world, and that monster can fill the role and has the goals needed to participate in the game you are planning.

Almarck
2015-02-19, 12:29 PM
I agree about the setting issue. Some settings easily support undeand monster PC's to the point it's common place or even expected to be an undead as an option.


In World of Darkness while playing a cross splats game, just under half of the "race" options are undead, some of it overlapping with "monster". In short, vampires are nothing special, mummies are a little neat, ect. In either case, being undead is has established rules and societal concerns that each book makes you well aware of.

Now, the traditional D&D world might not have the same level of expectation about undead players, but many homebrew settings make undead a reasonabl option by some method.

Perhaps, maybe for the sake of discussion should we narrow the topic down? To this I propose two subtopics

-Playing an undead in a setting it's not an expected part of the setting? Or not at a standard option provided by the DM?
-Playing an undead where it is an established part of the setting that it is possible? Or even the the default assumption, in the case of New and Classic Vampire games.

Mastikator
2015-02-19, 12:45 PM
If I wanted to play a Human in your game, how would I be required to do so?

I'm not requiring anything. The question is whether your roleplay breaks my immersion. If you're just gonna do yourself, a modern man, in a medieval setting then I'll do the same. I'm not gonna go the extra mile to get into the head of a medieval warrior or elven wizard and do a convincing roleplay of that if I'm the only one.

Unless I'm the GM, in which case I'll hold the players to a certain standard, if your character is just a race/class combo avatar of yourself then I'll require you to do a fully fleshed out and believable (no matter the race/species/template) character. If you don't like that then maybe you and I simply shouldn't be in the same group. I won't degrade my enjoyment for your sake nor do I expect you to do the same.

Solaris
2015-02-19, 01:13 PM
Something that is a fair representation of what he's playing. Being a race, or some special creature shouldn't just be the clothes you wear. (Or rather if you are then I don't believe you're roleplaying)
If you play some undead creature and ignore all of the narrative and historical context that undead creature has been used as then you're ignoring 99% of the content of that creature and basically just playing yourself wearing an undead suite, that, to me isn't roleplaying.

Considering D&D dwarves, elves, and goblins do that too, I'm just not seeing the problem here.

Broken Twin
2015-02-19, 04:16 PM
I can think of plenty of contexts where undead as we consider them were used as neutral or positive figures in historical and popular fiction. Ghosts that hang around to expose the person that murdered them. Mummies that have been tasked with protecting the seal on the Great Evil. Vampires struggling against their feeding urges is damn near the norm at this point.

You're rallying against a specific type of monster race for no reason besides your hatred of 'snowflake PCs'. Let me tell you, it's just as easy to make special snowflakes out of any of the races. It's a player mindset, not a racial selection.

And the concept of forcing people to adhere to a specific historical context for their make believe fantasy creations is hilarious. I mean, to each their own, but presenting your preference as fact is a little dishonest. In some campaigns, undead PCs work. In others, they don't.

Urpriest
2015-02-19, 04:33 PM
It's not about the power. It's about the fact that undead are a fictional monster used to scare children, they are monsters in every sense of the word, supernaturally evil beyond anything humanely possible (which is a lot). And here this player comes with his special snowflake undead who isn't like the rest and is a decent person who is in control of his supernatural desire to end all life, I mean cooooommmoooonnnnnn. Give me a break.
If all the vampires in this world are basically psychopaths in their relation to humans and then suddenly your vampires isn't, especially without some special shenanigans to explain it, then I can't take you seriously. I just can't.

Again, ELVES.

In legends and folktales, elves are bogeymen who kidnap children and replace them with changelings, beings with no regard for human morality. In fantasy from Pratchett to Gaiman, elves are one step short of Lovecraftian horrors, beings whose thought processes are so orthogonal to ours that they consign mortals to torture on a whim. It's pretty much only Tolkien where elves are the good guys, and even then they're not exactly PC material.

Brookshw
2015-02-19, 05:32 PM
Again, ELVES.

In legends and folktales, elves are bogeymen who kidnap children and replace them with changelings, beings with no regard for human morality. In fantasy from Pratchett to Gaiman, elves are one step short of Lovecraftian horrors, beings whose thought processes are so orthogonal to ours that they consign mortals to torture on a whim. It's pretty much only Tolkien where elves are the good guys, and even then they're not exactly PC material.

The collective narrative surrounding elves is quite different from the undead. Elves in some instances are godlike beings, magical, aloof, analogous for satan or demons, steal children as you mention. It's really a very interesting history of how the conceptualization has evolved depending on when in history and what area you pull from. I'm actually at this point a bit skeptical that the undead have the same vague nature in their history that elves enjoy, the hopping vampire and undead described in the Epic of Gilgamesh are close enough to one another and represent substantially more isolated areas, while the zombies of Haiti and Africa are doing their own thing but also seem to represent a much smaller portion of the literature on the subject traditionally. I can recall some modern tales regarding ghosts helping avenge their murder and mummies guarding evil seals, but I can't seem to recall any older works that follow in that vein. if anyone knew of some offhand I'd be very curious and much appreciative.

Satinavian
2015-02-19, 05:59 PM
The collective narrative surrounding elves is quite different from the undead. Elves in some instances are godlike beings, magical, aloof, analogous for satan or demons, steal children as you mention. It's really a very interesting history of how the conceptualization has evolved depending on when in history and what area you pull from. I'm actually at this point a bit skeptical that the undead have the same vague nature in their history that elves enjoy, the hopping vampire and undead described in the Epic of Gilgamesh are close enough to one another and represent substantially more isolated areas, while the zombies of Haiti and Africa are doing their own thing but also seem to represent a much smaller portion of the literature on the subject traditionally. I can recall some modern tales regarding ghosts helping avenge their murder and mummies guarding evil seals, but I can't seem to recall any older works that follow in that vein. if anyone knew of some offhand I'd be very curious and much appreciative.
For ghosts you can find a lot of those. It's actually one of the more common tropes for this kind of undead in central Europe. I am not aware of older stories about mummies. The ancient Egypt folklore is too different and other mummy stories are pretty modern.

Slightly rarer you will find European stories of corporal undead doing good things. For example there is a series of stories about one or more lazy monks which skipped their duties only to be shamed by the skelletons of former members of their cloister rising and doing it instead.

Gavran
2015-02-19, 06:45 PM
There seems to be an argument here that the way certain posters see vampires is the way vampires are "generally" and the way they are "supposed to be." It is true that the existence of one setting where those traits are bucked does not mean those traits are no longer the norm - however - I question that those traits are the norm in the first place, and the entire argument is meaningless until that can be demonstrated. By a vast majority, the interpretations of vampires that I'm familiar with portray them not as "anti-human" but instead as intelligent predators of humans. I genuinely can't think of a single example where a vampires primary motivation was the destruction of humanity, and generally they seem to mostly just be interested in self-preservation and sometimes elevation. Much as there are humans who have decided that eating meat is immoral, I see no reason there can't be vampires who have decided pragmatism and co-operation is superior to being a monster. If your vampires are just another flavor of mindless undead evil, that's your choice, but that would be a very odd interpretation of say... Dracula.

Brookshw
2015-02-19, 07:12 PM
For ghosts you can find a lot of those. It's actually one of the more common tropes for this kind of undead in central Europe. I am not aware of older stories about mummies. The ancient Egypt folklore is too different and other mummy stories are pretty modern.

Slightly rarer you will find European stories of corporal undead doing good things. For example there is a series of stories about one or more lazy monks which skipped their duties only to be shamed by the skelletons of former members of their cloister rising and doing it instead.

Oh I'm certain they exist, hamlet's one such example. I'm curious what other historical stories people may be aware of. A way of gauging commonality of sorts and the role and function undead serve. Thanks for mentioning the skeletons, if you or anyone else, knows what story it is I'm very curious. Canterbury tales perhaps?

Mastikator
2015-02-19, 07:39 PM
Again, ELVES.

In legends and folktales, elves are bogeymen who kidnap children and replace them with changelings, beings with no regard for human morality. In fantasy from Pratchett to Gaiman, elves are one step short of Lovecraftian horrors, beings whose thought processes are so orthogonal to ours that they consign mortals to torture on a whim. It's pretty much only Tolkien where elves are the good guys, and even then they're not exactly PC material.

Those elves still exist in games and stuff, we call them Goblins.

Milo v3
2015-02-19, 09:58 PM
{scrubbed}

Gritmonger
2015-02-19, 10:55 PM
Dracula, as written by Brahm Stoker, was most certainly evil - a particularly selfish, childish sort of evil as described in the book. Vlad Tepes, one of the sons of Vlad Dracul, is still looked on with fondness in his native region of Wallachia, partly because he decimated the nobility and disposed of the vagrants and criminals. Among other things. He was demonized by the Germanic peoples after he obliterated two of their colonial cities in succession.

Vampires, as described in classic myth, are not reasoning creatures like Dracula of Brahm Stoker.

Depending on the mythos, they were ravenous diseased possessed corpses, sometimes due to the circumstances of their burial, and were a side step from witches in deals with the devil and his minions. They were also dispossessed spirits of discarded or wasted things, whether it was people or things. They were evil by nature as a form of retribution for not following tradition, without the official divine mission; rather, they were plagues unleashed by man by means of some oversight.

The only mythos (and when I say mythos, I mean tales of folklore from before the common era and that of even Brahm Stoker) that I can recall that does not have a vampire as evil are those where the subject is unaware they are vampires.

If you want to count the modern era, then you are dealing with the post movie era where the vampire is framed as outcast and afflicted rather than doomed by fate or apostasy or demonic courting to be what they are: evil.

Classically, vampires are evil. This can be reversed in anybody's fiction, but not retconned out of actual historic folklore.

Gritmonger
2015-02-19, 11:05 PM
{scrubbed}

Milo v3
2015-02-19, 11:14 PM
{scrubbed}

Gritmonger
2015-02-20, 12:06 AM
That is D&D specific, outside of D&D there isn't really any difference between resurrection in such a manner and undeath.

That was... sigh.

Solaris
2015-02-20, 01:19 AM
That is D&D specific, outside of D&D there isn't really any difference between resurrection in such a manner and undeath.

"Restored to life" is a very different trope than "Walks on in undeath", and one is at least as old as the other.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-20, 03:13 AM
That is D&D specific, outside of D&D there isn't really any difference between resurrection in such a manner and undeath.Wrong; Exalted differentiates very highly between the two. As does Shadowrun. As does the various flavors of the World of Darkness. As does actually quite a bit of fantasy and folklore.

Forrestfire
2015-02-20, 03:13 AM
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised by the undertone of "PCs cannot be special" in many posts in this thread. In many games (especially D&D), by definition, player characters are as special of snowflakes as you can get without actually being made of ice and snow. Where's the issue with someone playing an undead creature? There's plenty of walking corpses in mythology and fiction that aren't capital-E evil... And even if there weren't... Where's the problem with someone playing an evil character? :smallconfused:

Are your groups seriously so immature that there cannot be any sort of alignment conflicts in the party without it breaking down? Or that any hint of "special snowflake" in a character concept means you have to shoot it down or it ruins all your verisimilitude? I shudder to think about how some of you would react to, say, the Forgotten Realms, or Greyhawk, or Eberron, each of which have a decent pile of examples of non-monstrous horror undead. Or various other fantasy settings, really. It's not an especially uncommon characterization, really.

(Personally, I don't mind undead if a player wants to play one in a game I run. I generally run D&D, so there'd be some rejiggering of LA probably, and maybe some social downsides, but overall, it's not as if that's the strangest thing you could easily be in a D&D game. A good-aligned vampire or something is definitely far from the strangest character I myself have played in a game... Which itself is extremely far from the strangest thing I have allowed a player to play in a game I DM'd.)

Satinavian
2015-02-20, 03:28 AM
Oh I'm certain they exist, hamlet's one such example. I'm curious what other historical stories people may be aware of. A way of gauging commonality of sorts and the role and function undead serve. Thanks for mentioning the skeletons, if you or anyone else, knows what story it is I'm very curious. Canterbury tales perhaps?Not Canterbury tales. I think, it was something German. But i was a child, when i read it.

Overall, the undead are actually pretty rare in stories.

You have the ghosts, most of them are victoms of some crime, a few are bad people punished after death. They hount a certain place and do things related to the cause of their death. Some are dangerous, others not.
There are hundreads of ghost stories. E.g. if i take my hometown alone, i can find several of them in it or on one of the surrounding castles.

Other than that we have stories about Wiedergänger. But those are not really common. I have heard, they are more prevalent in Slavic stories, but i can't remember to have read a single Slavic story featuring one. Distinguishing between them and vampires is extremely difficult because the modern vampire concept is based on western stories from the 18th century and later which are only vaguely based on the east European vampire whose defining features could also be found on Wiedergängers.

Everything else is more or less singular stories. Yes, you get a whole group of "ghostships" and cursed villages/towns appearing/vanishing but it's not that different from normal ghost stories.

Tragak
2015-02-20, 08:25 AM
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised by the undertone of "PCs cannot be special" in many posts in this thread. Especially since it is mathematically impossible to create anything that isn't special:

If 70% of the people in a particular setting are Humans, 20% are Orcs, 5% are Lizardfolk, and 5% are other, then a player who wishes to role-play a Dwarven character would be told "Stop trying to be a special snowflake and make a human already!"

If 75% of the Humans in a setting live in Nation A, 10% live in Nation B, and 15% live in others, then a player who wishes to role-play a "B"sian character would be told "Stop trying to be a special snowflake and make an 'A'nian already!"

If 70% of the Humans in Nation A are Fighters, 10% are Rangers, 5% are Wizards, and 10% are other, then a player who wishes to role-play a Sorcerer character would be told "Stop trying to be a special snowflake and make a Fighter already!"

If 80% of the Human Fighters in Nation A have STR as their highest physical stat, 10% have CON, 5% have DEX, and 5% have other, then a player who wishes to role-play a quick and nimble DEX-based character would be told "Stop trying to be a special snowflake and make a STR-based hitter already!"

The player now has an STR-based Human Fighter from Nation A. Does it sound like the DM did a good job of getting his player to make a "correct" character instead of a special one? Unfortunately for him, only 29.4% of the characters in his precious setting are "STR-based Human Fighters from Nation A," as opposed to 70.6% being "anything else." The DM tried to make the player accept a majority character (even if the player didn't like it) instead of a minority character (even if the player liked it), but they ended up with a minority character that the player didn't like.

Forcing a player to create something that isn't special is mathematically impossible, so why do so many DMs try so hard? :smallfrown:

Urpriest
2015-02-20, 08:38 AM
The collective narrative surrounding elves is quite different from the undead. Elves in some instances are godlike beings, magical, aloof, analogous for satan or demons, steal children as you mention. It's really a very interesting history of how the conceptualization has evolved depending on when in history and what area you pull from. I'm actually at this point a bit skeptical that the undead have the same vague nature in their history that elves enjoy, the hopping vampire and undead described in the Epic of Gilgamesh are close enough to one another and represent substantially more isolated areas, while the zombies of Haiti and Africa are doing their own thing but also seem to represent a much smaller portion of the literature on the subject traditionally. I can recall some modern tales regarding ghosts helping avenge their murder and mummies guarding evil seals, but I can't seem to recall any older works that follow in that vein. if anyone knew of some offhand I'd be very curious and much appreciative.

Elves have some vagueness, sure, but I can't think of any pre-modern depictions of elves that make them viable PCs.


Those elves still exist in games and stuff, we call them Goblins.

...no? I mean, maybe there are some games that treat goblins like that (WoD? MTG, but only Lorwyn/Shadowmoor?), but it's certainly not true in general.


Dracula, as written by Brahm Stoker, was most certainly evil - a particularly selfish, childish sort of evil as described in the book. Vlad Tepes, one of the sons of Vlad Dracul, is still looked on with fondness in his native region of Wallachia, partly because he decimated the nobility and disposed of the vagrants and criminals. Among other things. He was demonized by the Germanic peoples after he obliterated two of their colonial cities in succession.

Vampires, as described in classic myth, are not reasoning creatures like Dracula of Brahm Stoker.

Depending on the mythos, they were ravenous diseased possessed corpses, sometimes due to the circumstances of their burial, and were a side step from witches in deals with the devil and his minions. They were also dispossessed spirits of discarded or wasted things, whether it was people or things. They were evil by nature as a form of retribution for not following tradition, without the official divine mission; rather, they were plagues unleashed by man by means of some oversight.

The only mythos (and when I say mythos, I mean tales of folklore from before the common era and that of even Brahm Stoker) that I can recall that does not have a vampire as evil are those where the subject is unaware they are vampires.

If you want to count the modern era, then you are dealing with the post movie era where the vampire is framed as outcast and afflicted rather than doomed by fate or apostasy or demonic courting to be what they are: evil.

Classically, vampires are evil. This can be reversed in anybody's fiction, but not retconned out of actual historic folklore.

Sure. And the same is true for elves.

Gritmonger
2015-02-20, 08:48 AM
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised by the undertone of "PCs cannot be special" in many posts in this thread. In many games (especially D&D), by definition, player characters are as special of snowflakes as you can get without actually being made of ice and snow. Where's the issue with someone playing an undead creature? There's plenty of walking corpses in mythology and fiction that aren't capital-E evil... And even if there weren't... Where's the problem with someone playing an evil character? :smallconfused:

Are your groups seriously so immature that there cannot be any sort of alignment conflicts in the party without it breaking down? Or that any hint of "special snowflake" in a character concept means you have to shoot it down or it ruins all your verisimilitude? I shudder to think about how some of you would react to, say, the Forgotten Realms, or Greyhawk, or Eberron, each of which have a decent pile of examples of non-monstrous horror undead. Or various other fantasy settings, really. It's not an especially uncommon characterization, really.

(Personally, I don't mind undead if a player wants to play one in a game I run. I generally run D&D, so there'd be some rejiggering of LA probably, and maybe some social downsides, but overall, it's not as if that's the strangest thing you could easily be in a D&D game. A good-aligned vampire or something is definitely far from the strangest character I myself have played in a game... Which itself is extremely far from the strangest thing I have allowed a player to play in a game I DM'd.)

I don't object to undead.
I don't object to being special.
I don't object to a unique interpretation of a standard trope, trope inversion, and even evil player characters.

What I object to is the concept that somehow actions and choices have no consequences.

I have the same objection to players in games that have a perk/flaw system insisting that the flaw never come into play, or that they really shouldn't suffer from the flaw, or that somehow no decision they make has a downside. Or that they should be allowed to junk the rules when they don't get what they want. Or that other player characters shouldn't play true to type if they start behaving and playing in a means that makes it clear that they consider it "their" game and the others are merely there to watch and appreciate.

I.e. playing a vampire, and being surprised when people react negatively, taking the flaw "poor" and "disrespected" and complaining when they aren't afforded the respect they think they're due, insisting that the limitation they explicitly take (say, being an animal and all the baggage that goes with it like no thumbs, a limited capacity for understanding people, not being able to talk without assistance or magic) suddenly doesn't apply.

The whole point of a common framework for storytelling is so that everybody has some rules and some restrictions on the narrative. Whether that is controlled by dice or a point-buy system or by turns or by cards isn't the absolute point, but explicitly ignoring that framework or what it's designed to do because somebody considers themselves "special" is the objection. Not to Sesame-Street it, but Everybody is Special. It's when somebody goes "more special" than the rest and ruins the fun that I object.

If the framework of the narrative is that "Vampires, as defined RAW are this" - then wanting to play one generally means you accept them RAW, or you aren't really playing one. Both good and bad. If somebody wants all of the powers with none of the associated baggage, are they really playing an [insert thing here]? Are you really a zombie if you still have your intellect? Are you really a Vampire if you aren't associated with the Negative Material Plane? Are you really limited to being a cat if you don't ever admit maybe you can't use doorknobs, or even behave as if they present an obstacle?

If you want to play somebody with all of the Vampire upsides and none of the downsides, that's a new type of character probably not covered in the rules. At which point negotiations start. But it's disingenuous to claim you just want to play them RAW at that point.

Urpriest
2015-02-20, 09:03 AM
I don't object to undead.
I don't object to being special.
I don't object to a unique interpretation of a standard trope, trope inversion, and even evil player characters.

What I object to is the concept that somehow actions and choices have no consequences.

I have the same objection to players in games that have a perk/flaw system insisting that the flaw never come into play, or that they really shouldn't suffer from the flaw, or that somehow no decision they make has a downside. Or that they should be allowed to junk the rules when they don't get what they want. Or that other player characters shouldn't play true to type if they start behaving and playing in a means that makes it clear that they consider it "their" game and the others are merely there to watch and appreciate.

I.e. playing a vampire, and being surprised when people react negatively, taking the flaw "poor" and "disrespected" and complaining when they aren't afforded the respect they think they're due, insisting that the limitation they explicitly take (say, being an animal and all the baggage that goes with it like no thumbs, a limited capacity for understanding people, not being able to talk without assistance or magic) suddenly doesn't apply.

The whole point of a common framework for storytelling is so that everybody has some rules and some restrictions on the narrative. Whether that is controlled by dice or a point-buy system or by turns or by cards isn't the absolute point, but explicitly ignoring that framework or what it's designed to do because somebody considers themselves "special" is the objection. Not to Sesame-Street it, but Everybody is Special. It's when somebody goes "more special" than the rest and ruins the fun that I object.

If the framework of the narrative is that "Vampires, as defined RAW are this" - then wanting to play one generally means you accept them RAW, or you aren't really playing one. Both good and bad. If somebody wants all of the powers with none of the associated baggage, are they really playing an [insert thing here]? Are you really a zombie if you still have your intellect? Are you really a Vampire if you aren't associated with the Negative Material Plane? Are you really limited to being a cat if you don't ever admit maybe you can't use doorknobs, or even behave as if they present an obstacle?

If you want to play somebody with all of the Vampire upsides and none of the downsides, that's a new type of character probably not covered in the rules. At which point negotiations start. But it's disingenuous to claim you just want to play them RAW at that point.

Right, but nobody else on this thread is suggesting anything different. If you play a Vampire, you do the responsible thing and make sure people don't find out, or you play it in a setting where Vampires are more accepted. The only people trying to avoid any and all downsides are people who you don't really want to play with anyway.

Milo v3
2015-02-20, 09:05 AM
What I object to is the concept that somehow actions and choices have no consequences.

*SNIP*

I'm not sure anyone has argued against this.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-20, 09:24 AM
I'm not sure anyone has argued against this.The term you're looking for is "Goalpost shifting." :smallwink:

Tragak
2015-02-20, 09:35 AM
What I object to is the concept that somehow actions and choices have no consequences. What should be the consequences of choosing Human?

Humans are traditionally tribalistic, xenophobic, and violently intolerant of other groups of humans, let alone non-humans. Any Elves/Dwarves/Halflings in their right minds would have to be afraid of such a violent people: would I really expect to be able to being a Human character into an Elf settlement without them becoming afraid?

Gritmonger
2015-02-20, 09:39 AM
The term you're looking for is "Goalpost shifting." :smallwink:

Sigh.


No, I'm the one if you look upthread that said "sure, if you don't mind some changes to make it fun for everybody."

The counterobjection was if it wasn't RAW, then there was no point in playing a vampire or undead with toned down powers.

At which point it devolved into a dissertation on whether or not you are undead if you are not evil.

I am guilty of many things.

I do not think this accusation is fair or appropriate however.

Mastikator
2015-02-20, 10:53 AM
...no? I mean, maybe there are some games that treat goblins like that (WoD? MTG, but only Lorwyn/Shadowmoor?), but it's certainly not true in general..

Pixies occupy this role too. Elves weren't generally depicted as Lovcraftian eldricht horrors, I think you're exaggerating them quite a bit. They're closer to the common goblin than Cthulhu.

The trope that elves represent has been radically shifted by decades of Tolkien and Tolkien imitators. The same is not true for undead, the closest that has had a similar effect is Twilight changing what Vampires are. But zombies are still firmly on "always evil" ground. Ghosts that isn't Casper are generally malevolent and will attack anyone that enters their haunted area, mummies have no qualms about killing intruders. The undead are still quite evil.

Almarck
2015-02-20, 11:24 AM
Pixies occupy this role too. Elves weren't generally depicted as Lovcraftian eldricht horrors, I think you're exaggerating them quite a bit. They're closer to the common goblin than Cthulhu.

The trope that elves represent has been radically shifted by decades of Tolkien and Tolkien imitators. The same is not true for undead, the closest that has had a similar effect is Twilight changing what Vampires are. But zombies are still firmly on "always evil" ground. Ghosts that isn't Casper are generally malevolent and will attack anyone that enters their haunted area, mummies have no qualms about killing intruders. The undead are still quite evil.

This might have less to do with undead themselves... and rather that undead are a pretty big and diverse group featuring different spins and twists on the concept.

In short, comparing undead's societal role and presentation in a media (which tends to vary depending on which undead creature is being used), is like trying to track all the general treatment of all humanoids as one. Zombies for instance rarely have their alignment and function change, but vampires are way more fluid about it than them.

Ghosts enjoy a middle ground. In general I think it's a case on whether a ghost is evil or not is dependant on the circumstances of death and the person's on sense of morality. And then there's the ghosts who are basically just recording set to autoplay...

Necroticplague
2015-02-20, 11:42 AM
Even if all undead are evil (and that's a big if), that isn't really much of a reason to stop them from being in a party with good or neutral people. As long as they all have the same goal to attempt to work towards, than their motives for doing so are kinda irrelevant, as far as party cohesion is concerned. If all of you want the town to stay on the map, you can work together, regardless of whether you do it out of obligation, the fact you live their, or the fact its been a good feeding ground.

Solaris
2015-02-20, 11:48 AM
Pixies occupy this role too. Elves weren't generally depicted as Lovcraftian eldricht horrors, I think you're exaggerating them quite a bit. They're closer to the common goblin than Cthulhu.

The trope that elves represent has been radically shifted by decades of Tolkien and Tolkien imitators. The same is not true for undead, the closest that has had a similar effect is Twilight changing what Vampires are. But zombies are still firmly on "always evil" ground. Ghosts that isn't Casper are generally malevolent and will attack anyone that enters their haunted area, mummies have no qualms about killing intruders. The undead are still quite evil.

Your point here is basically that, despite Tolkien doing it with elves, other modern authors cannot in the slightest redefine undead.
That's something of a non-starter, especially given how ambivalent undead and elves both are in historical fantasy and mythology. Really, elves being Good is a thing that started with Tolkien - in the source mythology, they were called the Fair Folk to placate them so they didn't do horrible things to humans.

Gavran
2015-02-20, 03:04 PM
Pixies occupy this role too. Elves weren't generally depicted as Lovcraftian eldricht horrors, I think you're exaggerating them quite a bit. They're closer to the common goblin than Cthulhu.

The trope that elves represent has been radically shifted by decades of Tolkien and Tolkien imitators. The same is not true for undead, the closest that has had a similar effect is Twilight changing what Vampires are. But zombies are still firmly on "always evil" ground. Ghosts that isn't Casper are generally malevolent and will attack anyone that enters their haunted area, mummies have no qualms about killing intruders. The undead are still quite evil.

If your best example for "not mindless evil vampires" is Twilight, you're honestly just kind of out of touch with the subject. Ghosts I think are far more often neutral than evil, and zombies are "always evil" because they're (very nearly) always mindless.

Urpriest
2015-02-20, 03:40 PM
Pixies occupy this role too. Elves weren't generally depicted as Lovcraftian eldricht horrors, I think you're exaggerating them quite a bit. They're closer to the common goblin than Cthulhu.

Things referred to by the word "Elf", sure. On the other hand, D&D elves also cover much of the Faerie shtick, depending on edition.



The trope that elves represent has been radically shifted by decades of Tolkien and Tolkien imitators. The same is not true for undead, the closest that has had a similar effect is Twilight changing what Vampires are. But zombies are still firmly on "always evil" ground. Ghosts that isn't Casper are generally malevolent and will attack anyone that enters their haunted area, mummies have no qualms about killing intruders. The undead are still quite evil.

In the last fifty years or so, vampires have pretty much always been "decadent, amoral noblemen", not "savage murderers". Even Dracula isn't a bloodthirsty animal. Selfish and evil, sure, and with bouts of irrational behavior, but no moreso than human villains of his era. "Decadent, amoral nobleman" is a pretty decent description of a lot of PCs, and a high proportion of the kinds of evil PCs that work fine in most groups.

The mechanics of ghosts don't work if they just attack anyone who enters their haunted area, at least in D&D 3.5. Since they can typically only be killed by solving the issues that plagued them in life, DMs are incentivized to make it possible to communicate and negotiate with them, talking them down from their "kill everyone stance" in the way mediums do pretty often in stories. This means that in practice, the rules make ghosts into traumatized people who when given enough care and attention can be productive members of society...which is another pretty common type of PC origin.

Zombies tend to be evil, yeah, but they also tend to not be PCs.

Mummies tend to have no qualms about killing intruders, but the same tends to be true of angelic guardians of holy sites, so that doesn't really say much about alignment.

To pick an undead type that's actually likely to have PC usage in D&D 3.5, Necropolitans mostly borrow from transhumanist tropes, generally of the "oh god what have I done?" variety. That's a bit trickier to link to historical legends (you could maybe link it to legendary dystopias, like the Lotus-Eaters), but in a modern context it's a fairly common perspective for protagonists, and doesn't seem like an unreasonable trope for a PC.

Mastikator
2015-02-20, 03:52 PM
I never said vampires are bloodthirsty animals, I said they are monsters. Even a bloodthirsty animal you can empathize with, you can kind of understand a bear or a tiger. Tigers are bloodthirsty animals, they are not monsters. Vampires are monsters.

Urpriest
2015-02-20, 04:20 PM
I never said vampires are bloodthirsty animals, I said they are monsters. Even a bloodthirsty animal you can empathize with, you can kind of understand a bear or a tiger. Tigers are bloodthirsty animals, they are not monsters. Vampires are monsters.

Ah, I think I see the issue. I'd been assuming that when you said "monsters" you meant "not suitable for PCs". If you just meant something more vague like this, I don't necessarily disagree. Monsters are a reasonably common PC trope from this point of view.

Gavran
2015-02-20, 04:25 PM
I never said vampires are bloodthirsty animals, I said they are monsters. Even a bloodthirsty animal you can empathize with, you can kind of understand a bear or a tiger. Tigers are bloodthirsty animals, they are not monsters. Vampires are monsters.


[...]the undead is a monster that will kill you and feel either good about it or nothing at all.How exactly is that different from a tiger?

Now, onto the actual differences between tigers and vampires:

- Vampires used to be human
- Vampires have human or better intelligence
- Vampires may or may not have whatever constitutes a soul within that setting

I'm pretty sure the vampire is more relatable than the tiger.

Anyway, it's not important really. I just wanted to say that your interpretation of the undead isn't mine, and I'm certainly not the only one. In your games/settings you can of course do whatever you want. I just wish you'd be a little less dismissive of people who don't agree that the undead are that way.

hamishspence
2015-02-20, 04:27 PM
Ah, I think I see the issue. I'd been assuming that when you said "monsters" you meant "not suitable for PCs". If you just meant something more vague like this, I don't necessarily disagree. Monsters are a reasonably common PC trope from this point of view.
A great quote from The Dresden Files, when Ghost Harry is told "I think you shall be ... a monster" by a fellow ghost, and objects.



“Oh," the girl said, shaking her head. "Don't be so simple. People adore monsters. They fill their songs and stories with them. They define themselves in relation to them. You know what a monster is, young shade? Power. Power and choice. Monsters make choices. Monsters shape the world. Monsters force us to become stronger, smarter, better. They sift the weak from the strong and provide a forge for the steeling of souls. Even as we curse monsters, we admire them. Seek to become them, in some ways." Her eyes became distant. "There are far, far worse things to be than a monster.”

― Ghost Story

Satinavian
2015-02-20, 04:54 PM
Sigh.


No, I'm the one if you look upthread that said "sure, if you don't mind some changes to make it fun for everybody."

The counterobjection was if it wasn't RAW, then there was no point in playing a vampire or undead with toned down powers.The counterobjection was that it made no sense to remove the defining traits. If i recall, the example was a medium sized giant (an ogre).

Mastikator
2015-02-20, 07:20 PM
Ah, I think I see the issue. I'd been assuming that when you said "monsters" you meant "not suitable for PCs". If you just meant something more vague like this, I don't necessarily disagree. Monsters are a reasonably common PC trope from this point of view.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18839205&postcount=45

I never argued that you can't ever play as an undead, you can totally do it if that's what the game is about, if we're all playing as a group of vampires of zombies or liches or ghosts or what have you then that's totally cool. If one is a paladin and one is a "reformed vampire" then I merely won't take the game seriously.
And if I'm the DM then I will have certain restrictions on what you can and can't play, you can't play an elf in a game where elves don't exist, you can't play a lich in a game where liches are pure evil and the other players aren't.

That's the only thing, I don't take reformed undead seriously (unless they're all reforming and that is a thing). I don't, it's Mary Sue-esque for me for reasons I've explained, again and again (and again).

Forrestfire
2015-02-20, 08:40 PM
Well, given that in many works of fiction (and especially in D&D) reformed and even never-having-been-evil undead are a thing, I don't see where you have a leg to stand on there. The concept isn't really close to "Mary Sue," and even if it was, it'd be a low enough level of special snowflakiness that it's irrelevant.

Hell, in that example party, the paladin is probably more of a special snowflake sue than the reformed undead. Paladins are rare individuals called to duty by a force that sits above the gods themselves, have a divine mandate for what is considered "good", and are (at least in fluff) the ultimate champions of all that is right and holy. Reformed vampires are just especially-strong-willed vampires who have managed to keep a hold on their humanity for the time being. Which do you think is more special? Because when I look at that, the vampire doesn't really compare, if we're just going by Sue traits.

Mastikator
2015-02-20, 08:49 PM
What "many works of fiction"? The only I can think of is Buffy and Twilight.

Edit- I take that back, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer every single vampire is a monster (except for Spike and Angel, but only when they have their souls back). In Supernatural every vampire (and undead in general) evil. Vampire Chronicles, they're all evil save for one or two characters, Bram Stokers Dracula evil everyone of them. True blood, every vampire is evil. Charmed, every vampire is evil.

I have quite a few legs to stand on.

Almarck
2015-02-20, 09:31 PM
Dresden Files has a vampire for a protagonist for one. In fact, several vampire/half-vampire (not offspring, just midway turned) people.

Thomas struggles with his hunger. He's an incubus, and feeds off of lust instead of blood (Dresden has multiple types of vampires) and is trying hard to stay "human".

There was an organization made up of half-turned that rebels against the true full blooded Reds (who do drink blood). The main character's Love Interest joined the order.

However the good people are in the minority.

Note that there's alot of vampires who atleast seem to try to be reasonable, in their own way. Though morality for many of them is questionable.

Forrestfire
2015-02-20, 09:38 PM
What "many works of fiction"? The only I can think of is Buffy and Twilight.

Edit- I take that back, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer every single vampire is a monster (except for Spike and Angel, but only when they have their souls back). In Supernatural every vampire (and undead in general) evil. Vampire Chronicles, they're all evil save for one or two characters, Bram Stokers Dracula evil everyone of them. True blood, every vampire is evil. Charmed, every vampire is evil.

I have quite a few legs to stand on.

I hate to link tvtropes, but for the sake of saving time, have a list (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FriendlyNeighborhoodVampire). It's quite long. Many examples might not be of the sort who would share a party with a badly-played paladin, but overall, there's a significant amount. And that's just for vampires. Here's a decent list of non-vampire ones.
(http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AscendedDemon)
In, for example, D&D, there are numerous examples of nonevil undead. There are several player-accessible templates that do not affect alignment, more non-player-accessible ones, and even undead that are outright, capital-G Good (the Baelnorns and Archliches). A small minority of all undead creatures are also non-evil, even the Always Evil ones.

Also, you still have yet to address why you seem to have such a fear of "mary sues". Is there a particular reason for this, or do you merely dislike character concepts that aren't cut from the same cloth as everything else?

Solaris
2015-02-20, 09:46 PM
I'm still having difficulty with Mastikator's premise of refusing to permit players doing something unless it has a strong basis in mythology... while playing D&D.
So basically, if the idea wasn't developed and explored three hundred years ago or by Tolkien, it's a bad idea?

Wardog
2015-02-21, 06:09 AM
What "many works of fiction"? The only I can think of is Buffy and Twilight.

Edit- I take that back, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer every single vampire is a monster (except for Spike and Angel, but only when they have their souls back). In Supernatural every vampire (and undead in general) evil. Vampire Chronicles, they're all evil save for one or two characters, Bram Stokers Dracula evil everyone of them. True blood, every vampire is evil. Charmed, every vampire is evil.

I have quite a few legs to stand on.

I've read lots of traditional ghost folktales that featured non-evil ghosts.

Good or neutral skeletons are rarer, but this is a show I used to watch as a kid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnybones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfpk8QEhK1c


Also, Discworld.

Brookshw
2015-02-21, 09:51 AM
I'm still having difficulty with Mastikator's premise of refusing to permit players doing something unless it has a strong basis in mythology... while playing D&D.
So basically, if the idea wasn't developed and explored three hundred years ago or by Tolkien, it's a bad idea?

It seems like a versimultude matter (I'm sure I mispelled that). It's a matter of setting premise, something that's going against the grain. At this point we're getting kinda silly honestly, wherever the perception comes from his comments still amount to "I don't find this suitable due to my default setting", regardless of how that default is arrived at just about everyone here's admitted undead can be unsuitable for some games.

Personally though I'm finding the side discussion and evolution of folklore myths interesting. Back to Tolkien's elves, I'm starting to think he cherry picked certain middle age Germanic elements describing them as aloof, coupled with late Anglo-saxon writings where they were portrayed almost as near gods (i interpret this to be their immortality-thing with their magical nature). Does anyone else get the impression they were partially re-envisioned between the hobbit and LotR? The books that is.

Satinavian
2015-02-21, 10:01 AM
At this point we're getting kinda silly honestly, wherever the perception comes from his comments still amount to "I don't find this suitable due to my default setting", regardless of how that default is arrived at just about everyone here's admitted undead can be unsuitable for some games.Humans are unsuitable for some games. That is not really a criterion.

Yes, it comes down to setting and expectation. If they fit, it is ok, if they don't, it's not ok.

People just don't agree, what the general expectations for undead actually are and if they generally are compatible with PCs in typical scenarios where undead exist.


Personally though I'm finding the side discussion and evolution of folklore myths interesting. Back to Tolkien's elves, I'm starting to think he cherry picked certain middle age Germanic elements describing them as aloof, coupled with late Anglo-saxon writings where they were portrayed almost as near gods (i interpret this to be their immortality-thing with their magical nature). Does anyone else get the impression they were partially re-envisioned between the hobbit and LotR? The books that is.For elves and Tolkien i would reference his first age works in various versions.

BeerMug Paladin
2015-02-21, 11:06 AM
I have no particular objection to a player being an undead for a game. I'd merely want them to make a character that is likely to be reasonable about it and would fit in with the party as well as a non-undead would.

On a related note, I'm playing a fel in a game, am lawful good and hide my condition from other players as well as NPCs. Choosing to be so was presented as a player option by the DM, which seemed like the most interesting option at the time.

For those who don't know what the fel in the Midnight setting are, they're basically sentient zombies who rot and eventually decay into mindless zombies if they don't feed on the living. If they feed, they remain unrotted and retain their intellect.

I wrote my character's alignment on the sheet as lawful good mostly as a joke to the DM (which I think he didn't notice), but I also imagine the character really wants to match that alignment. They're pretty solidly lawful neutral, though. I'm just waiting for the DM to say my alignment has finally changed, since for some reason he doesn't want me to change it once the game started.

You would be surprised how much living flesh adventurers just let go to waste! Random people are still alive after fights and if the party just moves on without doing anything about them, they'll probably end up dead anyway. Point is, even undead with specific, nasty feeding constraints can fit in an otherwise normal adventuring group just fine.

Necroticplague
2015-02-21, 11:20 AM
You would be surprised how much living flesh adventurers just let go to waste! Random people are still alive after fights and if the party just moves on without doing anything about them, they'll probably end up dead anyway. Point is, even undead with specific, nasty feeding constraints can fit in an otherwise normal adventuring group just fine.

Given the amount of normal killing adventurers tend to do, having to feed off others is just an efficient use of all the corpses you end up making.

Urpriest
2015-02-21, 07:05 PM
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18839205&postcount=45

I never argued that you can't ever play as an undead, you can totally do it if that's what the game is about, if we're all playing as a group of vampires of zombies or liches or ghosts or what have you then that's totally cool. If one is a paladin and one is a "reformed vampire" then I merely won't take the game seriously.
And if I'm the DM then I will have certain restrictions on what you can and can't play, you can't play an elf in a game where elves don't exist, you can't play a lich in a game where liches are pure evil and the other players aren't.

That's the only thing, I don't take reformed undead seriously (unless they're all reforming and that is a thing). I don't, it's Mary Sue-esque for me for reasons I've explained, again and again (and again).

So as one scenario, what if one is a Paladin and one is a non-reformed vampire? In 3.5, this requires a particular interpretation of the Associates rules or a good disguise, but in other editions it's perfectly fair game. "Good siding with evil to accomplish a broader purpose" is a pretty common trope, after all.

This is my objection to the whole "you can't play a lich in a game where liches are pure evil and the other players aren't" thing...the thing is, being "pure evil" isn't really a barrier to being an effective PC in most plots, as long as you don't play it as Compulsively Stupid Evil.

The prevalence of reformed undead has already been covered ably by Forrestfire.

Edited to add: One of the reformed vampires in the list Forrestfire linked...is from Ravenloft!!

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-21, 07:10 PM
Doesn't D&D source material up and say that liches aren't always Evil? Baelnorns are Good, so are archliches. And in Eberron, the Undying are totally a type of liches, regardless of what they try and tell others.


This is my objection to the whole "you can't play a lich in a game where liches are pure evil and the other players aren't" thing...the thing is, being "pure evil" isn't really a barrier to being an effective PC in most plots, as long as you don't play it as Compulsively Stupid Evil.
As to be expected from an "urpriest". :smallwink:

Evil is hard to play in a party with Good. Because Good characters are largely required to intervene against Evil, so acting Evil as an Evil character, subtle or not, pits the two against each other like a thief versus a soldier. Plus Evil, by its very definition, runs fast and loose with concepts like trust and loyalty. Even the most Lawful of Evils would think very little of a betrayal which suits them.

Forrestfire
2015-02-21, 07:30 PM
Not really. Evil has loved ones, and people they're loyal to. Someone who is undyingly loyal to the evil empire is still somewhere in the Evil spectrum. Personally, I've had great success with mixed-alignment parties, from both types of skew. It's really not that hard to do when you have players playing characters instead of alignment descriptors.

goto124
2015-02-21, 10:34 PM
Or have a character whose alignment is Evil because she's willing to do horrible things for loved ones and friends. Very pragmatic and will do anything to achieve her noble ends. Kill all the guards and torture some to get to her fellow party members who've been kidnapped? No problem!

This was assuming a cosmic alignment where doing Evil things for good reasons is still Evil, just less Evil than 'for the evulz'.

Satinavian
2015-02-22, 05:27 AM
Evil is hard to play in a party with Good. Because Good characters are largely required to intervene against Evil, so acting Evil as an Evil character, subtle or not, pits the two against each other like a thief versus a soldier. Plus Evil, by its very definition, runs fast and loose with concepts like trust and loyalty. Even the most Lawful of Evils would think very little of a betrayal which suits them.You just have to make sure, that the particular kind of evil that is the reason for the characters "evil" tag is something that the good characters are not that opposed to.

Examples :
- The PC is evil, because he frequently uses [Evil] spells.
- The PC is on a vengeance trip and it is not completely justified in scale of retribution
- The PC is a racist and acts very nasty to certain races
- The PC was an official who abused his power, accepted bribes, didn't do his work... before unfortunately he was forced out of his cosy position into some adventure

Most "good" characters might not exactly like the evil stuff (if they know of it), but are hardly reqúired to act on it.

Or what do you think should happen the next time the evil clerics gives out "protection from good" to help the party against the coming mind-controlling enemy and thus does quite a number of evil deeds before the eyes of every one else ?

Necroticplague
2015-02-22, 08:16 AM
Evil is hard to play in a party with Good. Because Good characters are largely required to intervene against Evil, so acting Evil as an Evil character, subtle or not, pits the two against each other like a thief versus a soldier. Plus Evil, by its very definition, runs fast and loose with concepts like trust and loyalty. Even the most Lawful of Evils would think very little of a betrayal which suits them.

Not really. People can be Evil for a wide variety of reasons (some of which include 'arbitrary divine fiat', notably), and being Evil doesn't have to include being a backstabber. After all, even if we go with the basics of what it is, Evil is out for itself, first and foremost. As long as it remains advantageous to stay with the party, there's no reason for backstabbing.

BeerMug Paladin
2015-02-22, 11:03 AM
I've only ever been backstabbed once (that I recall off hand). I was a chaotic evil warlock, and used my nice new dark animating dead powers on a fresh corpse to create an undead minion and hopefully help the party in a desperate fight we were at the time losing.

The good-aligned party cleric immediately charge-attacked me. While we were still losing the battle. To be fair, the cleric did worship a fervently anti-undead god. But still, we were in a life and death struggle when I broke out the new power. I was backstabbed by a good aligned character I had been adventuring with for a while up until that point.

I've only ever backstabbed once (again, that I recall off hand). It was an evil game (inevitable that backstabs happen in those, right?). It was the end of the story arc. I was more or less the party leader and a few other players were trying to usurp my leadership role. They wanted the evil party to go off and do some random genocide instead of consolodating our control over a country that the entire campaign had been about conquering.

Once the army was routed and the former ruler was dead, the fools were no longer useful (and the campaign was likely over with anyway) I uttered the keyword to trigger the coup, killing the pesky former-allies and ensuring my role as leader was cemented. This was done only once the very next thing the party was going to do was randomly leave their long-time goal half-completed to go faff about somewhere thousands of miles away. (Calling them fools is in-character, not personal malice towards the players.)

Point is, Evil does not backstab just for the sake of it. It requires their personal desires or goals (if they have any) to be threatened. Good is not incapable of backstabbing, either (but that example might just indicate bad roleplaying). It really depends upon what character goals you set, and how the characters mesh together in general.

It's a total misapprehension that Evil = backstab fellow PCs.

Forrestfire
2015-02-22, 11:12 AM
Amusingly, I think the only time I've outright betrayed a fellow PC was as a Lawful Good character. The other character was a follower of Falazure, who got a dragon they party had killed animated as a Corpse Creature to do Falazure's bidding. This dragon was a personal enemy of my character's, though, on account of being a terrible jerk and destroying the ghost of her great-great aunt (and very honored ancestored) before she managed to meet said ghost.

I'd forgotten the dragon's corpse still had its magic items, though, so my disintegrate pinged off her scintillating scales item, and my character promptly got hit with several poisons and disables to make her stop attacking. The dragon flew off while she was unconscious XD

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 12:34 PM
Arch Whitman was one of the most traitorous bastards I've ever had the joy of playing.

A vampiric New Yorker with psychic powers and rather eccentric behavior (something that won't get a second glance in NYC), Arch was annoyed at getting snubbed by another PC (and an elder vampire to boot!) who had been assigned a task by no less than the Prince himself, for the chance to blow off said task and spend the night schtupping his boyfriend (another PC). For several nights in a row. :smallannoyed: Arch decided to take matters into his own hands, and by that I mean "trick the dim-witted Gangrel into committing drive-bys in the elder's area of influence by convincing her that it's somehow helping."

Gangrel inevitably breaks the Masquerade by standing there and letting bullets bounce off her when the police shoot her ass, the elder is given hell from Anarchs and Camarilla elders alike having to bust their butts to cover the Masquerade breach in his area because he's too busy screwing his boyfriend to have noticed it, the Gangrel is given more hell when she admits her actions were taken under the advisement of a Malkavian (and has her ghoul executed in front of her), and Arch gets a phone call from elder's boyfriend asking if this was indeed his plan.

"Ah, yes, my plan. See, the Prince graciously appointed an elder with the responsibility of wiping out the Sabbat. I was shocked to find that said elder wasn't taking his mission seriously, so my plan was to get him to take some initiative and do his job," Arch replied, before hanging up.

Needless to say, the next night the elder went Sabbat-hunting, and Arch went on to betray another PC for doing the dirty work of an NPC who treated Arch like dirt, selling him out to the Anarchs and blowing the NPC's scheme blown wide open.

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 02:37 PM
@TheCountAlucard: From what I've seen and read of Vampire games, if you're not betraying people, you're doing it wrong. Good read. ^_^

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 09:19 PM
@TheCountAlucard: From what I've seen and read of Vampire games, if you're not betraying people, you're doing it wrong. Good read. ^_^Really, Arch only betrayed PCs who weren't "team players."

"Hey, wanna go do this thing we were ordered to do by the Prince and is probably important and the rest of us are already working on?"
"Nah, I'm gonna spend the week screwing my boyfriend."
"Hm, okay..."

"I know he's got the deed to that building and all, which is important to you because it sits on a confluence of ley lines or whatever, but there's gotta be a better way of getting it than letting him make you sneak around and put up hidden cameras in the Anarchs' lair... plus, he's a total ****. And you're not even a Kindred - getting mixed up in our politics isn't the best idea for you."
"Eh, I can do this."
"Hm, okay."

Most notably, none of his betrayals resulted in PC deaths.

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 10:46 PM
That is impressive. I never got too deep into Vampire (not much for heavy politics in my games), but I do enjoy reading some of the chronicles.

endur
2015-02-23, 10:16 AM
In D&D 3.5 I'm pretty sure a vampire only needs to drain levels once a month and drink blood once a week, so that's four commoners/kobolds/bandits/paladins/whatevers a month. Seems reasonable to me.

Libris Mortis
Vampires have inescapable craving for life force (energy drain) and diet dependent for blood. They need to drain levels every day or face a dc25 will save to avoid ability damage. They need to drain blood every three days or face a dc15 will save to avoid ability damage.

So 3.5 vampires can avoid drinking blood for a while, but they need to drain levels pretty much every day. Change that to 30 or so commoners/x a month.

Satinavian
2015-02-23, 10:22 AM
Or you could just use summons with all this "automatically healing when going back". Also it doesn't have to be humans. I have seen vampires using a bag of tricks for their dependencies.

But i never liked the D&D vampire rules anyway.

Grim Portent
2015-02-23, 10:59 AM
30 commoners is a touch more problematic, but a 3.5 vampire could supplement their diet with animals, bandits and vampire hunters, so it's still manageable.

Solaris
2015-02-23, 11:26 AM
Wait, there are adventurers who don't fight at least one thing a day?

Worst-case scenario, make friends with the party and level-drain the fighter before the cleric hits him with a restorative spell.

Almarck
2015-02-23, 11:31 AM
Unless I am missing something, wouldnt raising chickens work for more sedentary vampires?

You are kinda going to kill them anyways and they have 1 hit dice. And you will probably drain blood or whatever when you cook or sell the meat. Its perfectly understandable for people to just buy live hens to feast on too so secrecy isn't a major issue.

In short a vampire farmer isn't going to massively change his life style, just use the leftover bloood. For a different purposes.

Karl Aegis
2015-02-23, 12:39 PM
Man, energy draining chickens just raises them as wights within 24 hours. Wights go through food like hillbillies at a family reunion.

Almarck
2015-02-23, 01:01 PM
How thuroughly does avamp need to destroy the corpses tp prevent wights from coming up?

Broken Twin
2015-02-23, 01:07 PM
Yeah, but a horde of rampaging chicken-wights sounds hilarious. Be like Legend of Zelda all over again.

Solaris
2015-02-23, 07:16 PM
... Aaand there's next weekend's adventure. I dedicate my players' facepalms to you lunatics.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-23, 07:30 PM
How thuroughly does avamp need to destroy the corpses tp prevent wights from coming up?My general ruling is that unless it's one of those "ambulatory pile of parts" undead, once you bludgeon or hack it apart enough for it to no longer move on its own, you don't have to worry about it coming to "life." So if you carve it up enough to go into an 8-piece bucket, you should be fine.

Talakeal
2015-02-26, 12:30 PM
So I have a vampiric PC. Where do you think this falls on the redemption / special snowflake spectrum:

She does not kill for the sole purpose of feeding, rather she kills people who she thinks need to die. This is no different than when she was alive, death did not change her alignment. She is simply too stubborn to change her ways. Likewise she does not seek redemption, because much like the late Miko, she is too stubborn to admit that she has ever done anything wrong.

hamishspence
2015-02-26, 12:32 PM
Depending on how "accurate" her assessments are, some flavour of Neutral might be in order if you're ignoring "Vampire template changes base creature's alignment".

Talakeal
2015-02-26, 12:46 PM
Depending on how "accurate" her assessments are, some flavour of Neutral might be in order if you're ignoring "Vampire template changes base creature's alignment".

I don't usually play with listed alignments or forced changes, it seems artificial and against role-play (and is a great way to get into arguments around the table); however I believe that even in RAW 3.X undead can still make a Will save to avoid the alignment shift.

Note that I do think most undead would end up in the deep end of the alignment pool eventually. Seeing everyone you know and love grow old and die for a couple of centuries, combined with the need to feed on the living and near constant fear and persecution, will tend to sever any emotional ties you might have be inclined to make with the living in the end, resulting in seeing them as little more than cattle imo.

hamishspence
2015-02-26, 12:53 PM
In Savage Species - the "Freed Spawn" sidebar states a spawned undead "can choose to revert to the alignment the character had when he or she was alive."

I don't remember reading anything in MM about Will saves to avoid changing alignment when gaining an undead template though. But "Always X alignment" allows for rare exceptions.

Talakeal
2015-02-26, 01:42 PM
In Savage Species - the "Freed Spawn" sidebar states a spawned undead "can choose to revert to the alignment the character had when he or she was alive."

I don't remember reading anything in MM about Will saves to avoid changing alignment when gaining an undead template though. But "Always X alignment" allows for rare exceptions.

IIRC it is in Libris Mortis.

hamishspence
2015-02-26, 02:11 PM
Couldn't find it there - did find it in Savage Species after a lot of searching.

p146:


If a character transforms to a kind of monster that always has a particular alignment, and the character did not have originally have that alignment, the transforming character makes a Will save (DC 10 + 1/2 goal monster's Hit Dice + goal monster's WIS modifier) to avoid an involuntary alignment change. Modify DC as follows:

-5 (1 step (e.g. LG to NG)
+5 (2 step (e.g NG to LN, or NG to NE)
+10 (Diametrically opposed e.g. LG to CE, LE to CG)