Dead Player Character turned Big Bad - CR?

[Helliquin]

Evening all

Last Thursday we had a player go rogue (in the sense that he went off the rails, the character was a warlock) and he killed, without reason, an innocent villager - in full sight of an inn full of people, 2 of his colleagues (party members).

Players have been recruited in to the City Watch and were in the village, to gather information to assist their campaign, by the request of the local Duke and Duchess - coincidentally the Duke is also their employee.

The players actions resulted in his death (at the hands of the other party members and the inn full of enraged villagers). He had previously knocked out party members on several occasions through the use of Thunderwave in enclosed spaces so they were pretty swift to put him to the sword.

Shame - the villager he killed was only just introduced and would have been an amazing ally for them and source of information.

However it does give me the opportunity to bring player character back as the big bad in a few (many) sessions time. Character was playing a Vampire (home brew rules here: (https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/rJb76kNPFZ))

Now this character (and player) in question had been cheating outrageously (either by accident or on purpose) so the level 3 warlock - Lurker of the Deep - had access Vampiric Touch.

Do you think having the Vampire out of the book (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Vampire#content) with the addition of Vampiric Touch and Lurker of the Deep skills (primarily the tentacle and thunderwave) would increase the CR much?

The vampire would not attempt to Charm or use the bite action - the player played with zero thoughts on his self preservation so the Vampire wouldnt either. More concerned with dealing damage.

[Ninja_Prawn]

cracks knuckles Right, let's see here.

First off, the monster building guidelines in the DMG give the vampire a CR of 14, by my calculations. So it's already a little under-CRed in the MM. However, the vampire's CR is propped up by its enormous defense & healing abilities and it is perhaps fair to dock it a point for being hopeless on the attack. I would note that, if it refuses to bite, it loses 18 DPR and 75 effective HP, which costs it at least one point of overall CR, maybe two.

Adding in the Lurker's tentacle does raise the overall CR by half a point, since its basic DPR of 50 is right on the borderline of the next level up. Vampiric touch changes nothing, since it's weaker than the vampire's multiattack (unless you let it mutliattack with the vampiric touch AND were refusing to bite, neither of which I would recommend). On the flip side, if you treat the vampire as a 3rd level warlock and therefore count all of its spells as being cast at second level, thunderwave (3d8 x 2 = 13 x 2 = 26) is marginally stronger than a full multiattack (17 + 8 = 25). However, that 1 point of additional damage won't push the CR any further than the tentacle already does.

So. The vampire starts at CR 13 but it's right at the top of its bracket. The extra damage potential you're adding with the class levels, though small in absolute terms, is enough in my book to justify bumping the CR to 14. Especially since you're giving it control utilities it didn't have before.