Should undead be immune to Exhaustion

[Throne12]

So I'm co-DMing and the another player was talking to the main DM about trying to apply levels of Exhaustion on the bbeg vampire. That we are planning on fighting soon. I thought undead creatures where immune to Exhaustion but they arnt. So what are yalls thoughts

[5eNeedsDarksun]

Interesting you mention this. I'm DMing DiA and one player has skeletons animated and travelling with the group. I have ruled that they are immune to Exhaustion; just makes sense to me and my players.

[Wizard_Lizard]

I feel like animated undead should definetly be immune, as I see them not as their own creatures but as bones and dead bodies being animated by necromatic energies, things like vampires idk tho

[SharkForce]

I would be inclined to rule that vampires are not necessarily subject to exhaustion from the same natural sources as a living creature, but are potentially subject to exhaustion for other reasons.

[Greywander]

vampire
So funny thing: there are two undead monsters in the Monster Manual that are not immune to exhaustion. One is zombies. Care to guess what the other one is?


I thought undead creatures where immune to Exhaustion but they arnt.
Creature types no longer have any intrinsic traits; it's basically a meaningless label by itself. What gives creature types meaning are the various spells and effects that interact differently with different creature types. There are certain traits that most undead share, but simply being undead does not by itself impart those traits; they must be written into the stat block or description of the monster.

Here's another one: There is one single undead in the Monster Manual that is not immune or even resistant to poison. Can you guess which it is?

As for the question, "Should undead be immune to exhaustion," I've done a bit of work on creating playable undead, and as part of that I created a generic undead template that includes all the traits that almost all undead have. Exhaustion is a tricky one, because allowing a player to be straight up immune to exhaustion has the potential to break certain mechanics (e.g. the Berserker barbarian's Frenzy), so I found a compromise. While the context of your question is about an NPC, not a PC, I think the greater question still applies. Anyway, for your reference, here's my undead template (you can slap it onto monsters just as easily as players, so you might find it useful):


Undead Nature. You don’t require air, food, drink, or sleep. Your creature type is undead instead of humanoid (or whatever you were when you were alive).
Although you don’t require food or sleep, nothing prevents you from eating or sleeping.

Undead Biology. You are immune to poison damage and the poisoned condition.

Tireless. You are immune to most mundane forms of exhaustion. Character features (such as racial traits or class features) and magical effects that cause exhaustion still affect you normally.

Crypt Guardian. As you don’t require sleep, you can stand watch or engage in light activity for the entirety of a long rest.

Darkvision. Even the most elementary undead are able to see in the dark. You have darkvision out to 60 feet.

[Gale]

Vampires are one of the few undead creatures that aren't immune to exhaustion, and I believe this is due to the fact that they are most seemingly alive of all of them. In fiction they often require sustenance (blood) and seemingly need to sleep in a coffin. If they didn't do these things then they would likely suffer exhaustion like any other humanoid would. So it makes sense then they would be vulnerable to exhaustion effects.

Similarly, most zombies are also vulnerable to exhaustion. This might be because they are often depicted as needing to eat (brains.) But this could also simply be due to the fact that they still have a somewhat functional body, and that body is therefore vulnerable to becoming exhausted, either through magic or some other means.

The other members of the undead are either seemingly sustained by a supernatural force, such as skeletons; extremely powerful, such as a lich; or ghost-like. These types of creatures don't require any sustenance and don't usually sleep, so it makes sense that they can't become exhausted.

Personally, I'm in favor of keeping vampires' vulnerability to exhaustion. But it wouldn't be out of place for an especially powerful vampire to be immune to it.

[JackPhoenix]

Vampires are one of the few undead creatures that aren't immune to exhaustion, and I believe this is due to the fact that they are most seemingly alive of all of them. In fiction they often require sustenance (blood) and seemingly need to sleep in a coffin. If they didn't do these things then they would likely suffer exhaustion like any other humanoid would. So it makes sense then they would be vulnerable to exhaustion effects.

Not only in fiction. They are also the only undead whose undead nature trait does not say they don't require to eat or sleep, only that they don't need air. Also only undead not immune to poisons.

[MrStabby]

I could see exhaustion for undead as being magical exhaustion rather than physiological.

So an undead that is exhausted has simply run down the magical binding energies keeping it from death. A pause to recharge these just let's it fit in with the rest cycle of anyone else.

[Sigreid]

I could see them being tireless, but wouldn't make them invulnerable to all forms of exhaustion. Getting exhaustion from sickening radiance, for example seems good to me.

[JackPhoenix]

I could see exhaustion for undead as being magical exhaustion rather than physiological.

So an undead that is exhausted has simply run down the magical binding energies keeping it from death. A pause to recharge these just let's it fit in with the rest cycle of anyone else.

Three most mundane sources of exhaustion are lack of rest, food and water, and most undead don't need to sleep or eat... not even the zombies. Meanwhile, ghouls lack undead nature trait completely, but are immune to exhaustion, so they suffer no penalties from not resting or eating anyway. They can still suffocate, though.

The only one who are affected are vampires, which can starve to death, which is kinda fitting.

[Greywander]

Oh, another interesting fact, and one that I was unaware of for quite some time, is that undead aren't immune to disease. I'm not sure any monster is.

[Zhorn]

Oh, another interesting fact, and one that I was unaware of for quite some time, is that undead aren't immune to disease. I'm not sure any monster is.
huh, I would have thought at the very least Otyughs would be disease immune, but nope. How about that.

[Angelalex242]

Undead should indeed be immune to exhaustion (and poison, and disease, and anything else based solely on biology.)

In short, if it doesn't work on a corpse, it shouldn't work on the mindless undead.

And for undead with minds, they should only be subject to things designed to work on undead.

[kingcheesepants]

Oh, another interesting fact, and one that I was unaware of for quite some time, is that undead aren't immune to disease. I'm not sure any monster is.

The Warforged Solider from the Eberron book is immune to disease. But other monsters you would expect to be such as constructs, celestials, most undead, monsters based off of the paladin. Are all able to get sick. I think it was an oversight in the making of the stat blocks because how could animated armor or a skeleton get sick?

[JoeJ]

The Warforged Solider from the Eberron book is immune to disease. But other monsters you would expect to be such as constructs, celestials, most undead, monsters based off of the paladin. Are all able to get sick. I think it was an oversight in the making of the stat blocks because how could animated armor or a skeleton get sick?

The same way anybody else does; by being exposed to extremes of heat/cold/moisture/dryness that cause its humours to become unbalanced. Or else by magic.

[No brains]

Oh, another interesting fact, and one that I was unaware of for quite some time, is that undead aren't immune to disease. I'm not sure any monster is.

Disease has become something of a story mechanic rather than a rules-thing. Hard rules on diseases can complicate things like asymptomatic carriers, vectors, and other weird bits that make the drama of disease "fun".

On topic, vampires and zombies not being immune to exhaustion makes sense to me. Vampires are suspiciously close to being alive and zombies are probably too close to still being dead. It's easy to imagine a 'worn out' zombie and vampire for various reasons. A vampire can get exhausted from a lack of feeding or by chasing down prey that manages to elude it. A zombie can be ordered to march until it falls apart so the wizard who made it can scry on it and see how far the lil trooper goes before it totally falls apart.

Now what's really interesting here is that these two creatures are functionally immune to some of the causes and effects of exhaustion. This got kind of involved, so I broke it into spoilered sections. It's worth reading about the weirdness where undead ecology runs aground on the rules.

Not requiring food, drink, or sleep means that by the rules, zombies can't be waited out through starvation or sleep deprivation. A zombie in a crypt is going to sit "pretty" until something takes it apart.

What they aren't immune to is exhaustion from a forced march. If my math is right, this means that a zombie has an approximate half-"life" of 18 hours of uninterrupted marching. Where this gets weird is that once a zombie gets to level 5 exhaustion, it no longer can walk to exhaust itself further. Depending on the DM, it may auto-rest off a level of exhaustion after 8 hours, or it will sit there restless but undying for eternity.

The exception is that areas of extreme heat, extreme cold, or frigid water can still "kill" a zombie through exhaustion. Beware freezer-burning your zombies. Or just burning them. The spell Sickening Radiance also microwaves zombies to death through damage and exhaustion.

Vampires still need to eat/drink (does drinking blood count for both?) and can be starved out. Similarly, marching and hostile environments can wear a vampire down, with the exception of high altitudes. Weirdly, a vampire requires sleep, so depriving one of rests can exhaust it. Ah, the oft-forgotten vampire hunting tactic of the all-night party.

Where things get funny is that a vampire at level 6 exhaustion arguably doesn't "die" since death takes it to 0 hit points, triggering Misty Escape. However, the vampire still has at least 5 levels of exhaustion, so it can't move back to its resting place. Unless someone fans it along or puts it in an airtight jar, it gets an extra 2 hours to sit there and think about what it's done before it dies.

Stranger still, if it can get back to its resting place, it still can't recover from exhaustion. It will sit in an ill-defined limbo state where it tries to regain 1 hp despite being stuck in death from level 6 exhaustion. Even assuming someone feeds it, if a vampire can't have at least 1hp, it can't gain the benefit of a long rest and therefore stays in this state until hit with Greater Restoration. This isn't something a vampire wants to count on.

Assuming feeding the vampire works well enough to allow it one long rest, it will need to complete two long rests over the course of two days before it has the possibility of hunting for itself again. It's also worth noting that by RAW, a vampire needs a gallon of the blood of the living a day to drink for it to rest, even when healthy. How do these things live so long again?

To note some things in a resourceful vampire's favor, it's possible that an immobile vampire at level 5 exhaustion in its resting place could use Children of the Night to get a blood meal from a swarm of rats/ bats or a summoned wolf. There's no clause about these creatures turning against the vampire, even if bitten. However, even if a vampire were also to change into its bat form, being a tiny creature doesn't change that it needs to extract a gallon blood from these creatures to get the benefit of a rest. Outside of the mandatory bedrest scenario, a vampire can be functionally immune to exhaustion from starvation because it can summon food for itself once a day.

If sunlight, running water, or wood don't exist anymore, Sickening Radiance and a pile of rocks can keep a vampire bound to its resting place.

Tracking down all of these rule interactions was a fun distraction and hopefully I didn't make any mistakes in there.

[Greywander]

if a vampire can't have at least 1hp, it can't gain the benefit of a long rest
It can, however, gain the benefits of a short rest. As long as it has hit dice remaining, it can escape from that limbo state.

But this is actually a moot point because 6 levels of exhaustion doesn't drop you to 0 HP, it just straight up kills you. Misty Escape only activates on dropping to 0 HP, so anything that can kill the vampire without reducing its hit points to 0, such as Power Word Kill, will bypass Misty Escape.

Coincidentally, my homebrew undead race has a feature that auto-stabilizes them on dropping to 0 HP, and they can only be killed by specific methods (including some common methods, such as fire). One of those methods is also anything that kills them without reducing HP to 0. I didn't even have Misty Escape in mind when I wrote that, but it makes sense since these are both features designed to save the undead creature from death.

[kingcheesepants]

It's also worth noting that by RAW, a vampire needs a gallon of the blood of the living a day to drink for it to rest, even when healthy. How do these things live so long again?


A gallon a day? That's way more than I would have thought. For contrast in actual blood donation you'll give about an 8th that amount and at about half a gallon the average adult will be in danger of death. Most folks have a little over a gallon of blood so if a vampire didn't mind finding new people every day he could drink 1 person dry per day but if he had a stable of folks that he sipped from each day he would need quite a few "volunteers" to keep him afloat at those rates. On a related note where did you pull that gallon figure from?

[Zhorn]

It's also worth noting that by RAW, a vampire needs a gallon of the blood of the living a day to drink for it to rest, even when healthy.
Are you sure you're not getting that mixed up with the water requirements medium creatures?
I'm all for consistency of rule, and vampires are blood drinkers, but I'm not seeing anything in 5e's rules saying they must subsist off blood alone, nor the requirement for 1 gallon of blood per day.

[No brains]

It can, however, gain the benefits of a short rest. As long as it has hit dice remaining, it can escape from that limbo state.

But this is actually a moot point because 6 levels of exhaustion doesn't drop you to 0 HP, it just straight up kills you. Misty Escape only activates on dropping to 0 HP, so anything that can kill the vampire without reducing its hit points to 0, such as Power Word Kill, will bypass Misty Escape.

Coincidentally, my homebrew undead race has a feature that auto-stabilizes them on dropping to 0 HP, and they can only be killed by specific methods (including some common methods, such as fire). One of those methods is also anything that kills them without reducing HP to 0. I didn't even have Misty Escape in mind when I wrote that, but it makes sense since these are both features designed to save the undead creature from death.

I was worried I made a mistake regarding dead = 0hp. I may have misremembered a sage advice or an older edition.

It's possible that I am again thinking in the mindset of an older edition, but undead may have a de-facto immunity to "death" because they are already dead. The Lich, Revenant, and Vampire entries describe them as being "destroyed" instead of being killed or dying. This is in contrast with a Troll, which "...dies only if it starts its turn with 0 hit points and doesn't regenerate." It's possible that the effect of "death" may not actually have any meaningful consequence for an undead creature; it's already in a state of death.

Although that ignores the colloquial usage of 'death' as describing something losing any animating force, whether life, unlife, or construct animating forces. It's the DM's call, but it would likely be seen as a stretch.

In such a case, level 6 exhaustion would just mean that a zombie or vampire needs two long rests before it can move again.


Are you sure you're not getting that mixed up with the water requirements medium creatures?
I'm all for consistency of rule, and vampires are blood drinkers, but I'm not seeing anything in 5e's rules saying they must subsist off blood alone, nor the requirement for 1 gallon of blood per day.

I stated that assuming that 1 gallon of blood could stand in for both the 1 gallon of water a vampire needs as well as the 1 pound of food it needs. There's probably a calculation for a volume of blood that contains a gallon of water and a pound of 'food', but I figure calling it at a gallon of blood would be close enough.

There's also the matter that while the vampire isn't specifically exempt from drinking water, it's possible that drinking regular water could be considered them being 'in running water'. Without clear guidance, I decided that vampires probably are able to get by with blood standing in for water. Again, I don't have the wherewithal to look up at what point water stops counting as water depending upon its concentration, so I got lazy there.

I'm not really sure how often 'creatures' need to eat and drink and at what volume. The rules for thirst and starvation are written to apply to 'characters', who are typically assumed to be small-to-medium and living humanoids. Maybe a vampire can nurse one person for their entire life if they were careful, maybe the need for a gallon of blood is what makes them dangerous to an individual and a manageable nuisance for a group of people.

I have a weakness for interpreting the rules in a way that seems amusing to me. Experience with glitchy video games makes me expect to find missingnos and collision clips in TTRPGS. I figure that if the rules should break, they should break spectacularly.:smallbiggrin:

[Greywander]

I was worried I made a mistake regarding dead = 0hp.
I believe 0 HP leads to bleeding out/dying, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Being reduced to 0 HP is just one way you can die, but there are others that don't affect your HP. In theory, this could lead to a case where a dead creature still has HP, but the moment they die their body becomes a corpse, which is an object, and ceases to be a creature. In other words, you might have HP left, but those HP are no longer attached to anything.


It's possible that I am again thinking in the mindset of an older edition, but undead may have a de-facto immunity to "death" because they are already dead. The Lich, Revenant, and Vampire entries describe them as being "destroyed" instead of being killed or dying. This is in contrast with a Troll, which "...dies only if it starts its turn with 0 hit points and doesn't regenerate." It's possible that the effect of "death" may not actually have any meaningful consequence for an undead creature; it's already in a state of death.
This is probably from an older edition, perhaps even your own houserule or interpretation of the rules. I'm pretty sure death vs. destroyed is just a matter of flavor, and there are no rules that change how undead react to dying. An undead who dies ceases to be a creature and becomes a corpse, just like any other creature. Certain specific creatures, including some undead, do have a specific special reaction to dying, such as disintegrating into a pile of dust, or having their soul withdraw to a safe area while they revive themselves, but these are written into the descriptions or stat blocks for those creatures.


In such a case, level 6 exhaustion would just mean that a zombie or vampire needs two long rests before it can move again.
Perhaps, but this doesn't seem to be the case. It's easy to interpret hitting 6 levels of exhaustion as the zombie finally running out of steam and falling apart, or the vampire losing enough power that it can no longer sustain it's unlife. Whatever the reason, nothing in the rules seems to prevent zombies and vampires from dying of exhaustion.

[Angelalex242]

...I feel comfortable rendering undead immune to biological problems, even if it must be a houserule.

No, you cannot exhaust the zombie, or most every zombie movie ever makes no sense.

You cannot exhaust a vampire either. Or most films and tv shows make no sense.

[Zhorn]

I have a weakness for interpreting the rules in a way that seems amusing to me. Experience with glitchy video games makes me expect to find missingnos and collision clips in TTRPGS. I figure that if the rules should break, they should break spectacularly.:smallbiggrin:
Nothing wrong with that. if it makes the game more interesting for you and your table, you are doing it right as far as I'm concerned. :smallsmile:
But that doesn't make the altered headcanon into RAW.


I stated that assuming that 1 gallon of blood could stand in for both the 1 gallon of water a vampire needs as well as the 1 pound of food it needs.
... not an attack, but no that wasn't said either (not unless you are thinking of another thread entirely)

Disease has become something of a story mechanic rather than a rules-thing. Hard rules on diseases can complicate things like asymptomatic carriers, vectors, and other weird bits that make the drama of disease "fun".

On topic, vampires and zombies not being immune to exhaustion makes sense to me. Vampires are suspiciously close to being alive and zombies are probably too close to still being dead. It's easy to imagine a 'worn out' zombie and vampire for various reasons. A vampire can get exhausted from a lack of feeding or by chasing down prey that manages to elude it. A zombie can be ordered to march until it falls apart so the wizard who made it can scry on it and see how far the lil trooper goes before it totally falls apart.

Now what's really interesting here is that these two creatures are functionally immune to some of the causes and effects of exhaustion. This got kind of involved, so I broke it into spoilered sections. It's worth reading about the weirdness where undead ecology runs aground on the rules.

Not requiring food, drink, or sleep means that by the rules, zombies can't be waited out through starvation or sleep deprivation. A zombie in a crypt is going to sit "pretty" until something takes it apart.

What they aren't immune to is exhaustion from a forced march. If my math is right, this means that a zombie has an approximate half-"life" of 18 hours of uninterrupted marching. Where this gets weird is that once a zombie gets to level 5 exhaustion, it no longer can walk to exhaust itself further. Depending on the DM, it may auto-rest off a level of exhaustion after 8 hours, or it will sit there restless but undying for eternity.

The exception is that areas of extreme heat, extreme cold, or frigid water can still "kill" a zombie through exhaustion. Beware freezer-burning your zombies. Or just burning them. The spell Sickening Radiance also microwaves zombies to death through damage and exhaustion.

Vampires still need to eat/drink (does drinking blood count for both?) and can be starved out. Similarly, marching and hostile environments can wear a vampire down, with the exception of high altitudes. Weirdly, a vampire requires sleep, so depriving one of rests can exhaust it. Ah, the oft-forgotten vampire hunting tactic of the all-night party.

Where things get funny is that a vampire at level 6 exhaustion arguably doesn't "die" since death takes it to 0 hit points, triggering Misty Escape. However, the vampire still has at least 5 levels of exhaustion, so it can't move back to its resting place. Unless someone fans it along or puts it in an airtight jar, it gets an extra 2 hours to sit there and think about what it's done before it dies.

Stranger still, if it can get back to its resting place, it still can't recover from exhaustion. It will sit in an ill-defined limbo state where it tries to regain 1 hp despite being stuck in death from level 6 exhaustion. Even assuming someone feeds it, if a vampire can't have at least 1hp, it can't gain the benefit of a long rest and therefore stays in this state until hit with Greater Restoration. This isn't something a vampire wants to count on.

Assuming feeding the vampire works well enough to allow it one long rest, it will need to complete two long rests over the course of two days before it has the possibility of hunting for itself again. It's also worth noting that by RAW, a vampire needs a gallon of the blood of the living a day to drink for it to rest, even when healthy. How do these things live so long again?

To note some things in a resourceful vampire's favor, it's possible that an immobile vampire at level 5 exhaustion in its resting place could use Children of the Night to get a blood meal from a swarm of rats/ bats or a summoned wolf. There's no clause about these creatures turning against the vampire, even if bitten. However, even if a vampire were also to change into its bat form, being a tiny creature doesn't change that it needs to extract a gallon blood from these creatures to get the benefit of a rest. Outside of the mandatory bedrest scenario, a vampire can be functionally immune to exhaustion from starvation because it can summon food for itself once a day.

If sunlight, running water, or wood don't exist anymore, Sickening Radiance and a pile of rocks can keep a vampire bound to its resting place.

Tracking down all of these rule interactions was a fun distraction and hopefully I didn't make any mistakes in there.
I agree with the general idea that the extrapolations are based on.
Had a conversation a few weeks back on the topic of 'how much water' and 'at what speed' would qualify as 'running water', and this is the kind of thing that'd have fit right in.
But the point still stands that there doesn't appear to be a RAW requirement for vampires to consume a specific volume of blood each day.

The rules on food and water requirements are a decent baseline for player characters, and work as a general concept for living creatures, but applied across the board i think is a mistake. Be that the intent or not, RAW be damned on that matter.

Sorry about this little tangent-rant. Again, not meant to be coming off as an attack. Thumbs up for however you want to run things.
Just reading a lot of threads where posts are made about "such and such is RAW" when it either doesn't come from the books at all, or the books say the exact opposite of what the poster is arguing for.
I'm all in favour of folks running and changing the game to suit their own tables for the sake of fun, but claims of something being RAW when it isn't nettles me.
Happy for folks to push RAW aside with the "while the books say X, I prefer Y", as long as we can leave claims of "this is RAW" for what is actually is written and can be cited.

[micahaphone]

Undead creatures are reanimated by foul necromantic energies, that energy can be sapped leaving them exhausted. They won't necessarily get exhausted by the usual stuff of an adventurer, but it's possible.

[Greywander]

No, you cannot exhaust the zombie, or most every zombie movie ever makes no sense.
In what way? Zombies already don't require air, food, drink, or sleep, so they should have no problem standing in one spot for years without becoming exhausted. The things they need to worry about are stuff like extreme heat, extreme cold, and forced marches.


You cannot exhaust a vampire either. Or most films and tv shows make no sense.
Remember that the rules don't always perfectly reflect the reality they are attempting to simulate. There are a lot of things you can do that would be exhausting in real life, but don't cause exhaustion in the game, and this would allow a vampire to get away with a lot of activities that would exhaust a normal person but the rules don't actually inflict exhaustion for. The things a vampire does need to worry about are not drinking enough blood, or forcing themselves to stay awake during the day (remember, vampires are nocturnal).

[Segev]

While I believe the specific volume is not from the rules, it is still interesting to note that a gallon means a vampire either kills one person each night, or has a stable of around 450 donors who he feeds regularly but safely on. The latter case requires roughly one pint from each of eight donors each night, with 56 days between any given donor providing a donation.

[No brains]

I apologize if my tone seemed combative. I didn't take any part of this conversation as an attack and I probably could have made it more clear what thoughts of mine were believed to be RAW and what was admitted inference. I think I could use some practice establishing tone.

I merely wanted to share my crazy interpretations in the hopes it could enrich the game. Looking into edge cases like these is good practice for when I may need to make a call as a DM. I've rather enjoyed this discussion, even if my interpretations were not persuasive. It's interesting to hear how others see the game, even when it's not the view I have.

[Nagog]

So funny thing: there are two undead monsters in the Monster Manual that are not immune to exhaustion. One is zombies. Care to guess what the other one is?

Here's another one: There is one single undead in the Monster Manual that is not immune or even resistant to poison. Can you guess which it is?


That's really interesting: Vampires aren't immune to anything at all. No damage immunities, no condition immunities. That's... odd.

[stoutstien]

That's really interesting: Vampires aren't immune to anything at all. No damage immunities, no condition immunities. That's... odd.
IMO vampires are iconic in the fact they are powerful but have easy to target and well known weak points for the players to use to allow them to punch above thier current level. Werewolves and flesh golems are the same way.

[Willie the Duck]

So I'm co-DMing and the another player was talking to the main DM about trying to apply levels of Exhaustion on the bbeg vampire. That we are planning on fighting soon. I thought undead creatures where immune to Exhaustion but they arnt. So what are yalls thoughts

I can't, off the top of my head, thing of a particular reason why making vampires immune to exhaustion would cause a problem. I will, however, caution against applying a 'well it just makes sense that...' mentality to monster types. 3rd edition did that, and it ended up filing a bunch of nuance off of them. Undead are a huge category of roles, from high-offense, high-defense combat bruisers like death knights, not-especially great offensively but extremely resilient creatures like zombies, ephemeral and potentially fragile creatures with no set basic attack but a lot of special abilities (most of the ghost and incorporeal type undeads), and things that act 'like people, except that...' like vampires and liches. Giving them a one size fits all set of qualities can lead to some downright nonsensical results (like, again in 3e, where zombies and vampires -- two monsters where targeting a specific part of their anatomy is the primary way of dealing with them -- are immune to precision attacks).

Vampires, in my mind, are very much 'people, except that...' -- they could be immune to exhaustion, but there's no particular reason that they should be. Whatever force keeps them animated keeps their skin hydrated, has them see through their eyes, has them move with their muscles, so why not have them have physical limitations? Perhaps Bela Lugosi's Dracula, the Nosferatu, Lestat, Twilight dude, Vampire Diaries guy, and Spike & Angel all would get winded going up too many stairs (or if they didn't, it's because they are in excellent shape, not because they are vampires). I certainly can see them being susceptible to blood-born poisons or the like.

One thing that I learned about D&D undead talking to some of the earliest players -- when first conceived, undead were not immune to each other's drains. If an undead was hit by another undead, it would lose HD (and, because why not, change what type of undead they were). This lead to a playtest scenario where two groups of vampires started dueling (Sharks vs. Jets style) high above the ground. If a Vampire was hit, it would turn into a Spectre. If a Spectre was hit, it would turn into a Mummy -- and plummet to its demise. Honestly, the game needs more absurdity like that. :smallbiggrin:

[KorvinStarmast]

One thing that I learned about D&D undead talking to some of the earliest players -- when first conceived, undead were not immune to each other's drains. If an undead was hit by another undead, it would lose HD (and, because why not, change what type of undead they were). This lead to a playtest scenario where two groups of vampires started dueling (Sharks vs. Jets style) high above the ground. If a Vampire was hit, it would turn into a Spectre. If a Spectre was hit, it would turn into a Mummy -- and plummet to its demise. Honestly, the game needs more absurdity like that. :smallbiggrin: That it does. :smallcool:

[Mellack]

While I believe the specific volume is not from the rules, it is still interesting to note that a gallon means a vampire either kills one person each night, or has a stable of around 450 donors who he feeds regularly but safely on. The latter case requires roughly one pint from each of eight donors each night, with 56 days between any given donor providing a donation.

If we instead allow vampires to drink water and say they only need the blood as food, about 1 pint of blood would equal one pound. That makes their requirements much more manageable.

[greenstone]

Oh, another interesting fact, and one that I was unaware of for quite some time, is that undead aren't immune to disease. I'm not sure any monster is.

As if undead aren't gross enough already.

GM: The zombie advances, bits of rotting flesh falling from its corpse as it lurches forward. Suddenly, it sneezes on you! Bits of, well, you don't want to think about what they are bits of, are now all over your face.

*evil grin* Next session, I'm going to have the PCs encounter ZOMBIES WITH COVID-19!!!!

[Zhorn]

If we instead allow vampires to drink water and say they only need the blood as food, about 1 pint of blood would equal one pound. That makes their requirements much more manageable.
In regards to volume I agree and I think that is a very reasonable quantity, but I still think trying to apply rules for daily food/water needs across the board on all creatures is a mistake.
Less of a RAW matter, and rather just because it can get in the way thematically for some monster ecologies, and the general fiction in other areas.

Vampires as specific to the conversation has a common theme of going into a deep sleep/hibernation while food is scarce, and having a hard limit of feeding minimums gets in the way of that.

Other creatures have lore relating to eating habits that also don't mesh with the rules. Mind Flayers for example don't need to eat every day, and can get by with a minimum of one brain per month without suffering debilitation.

A mind flayer must have a minimum of one fresh brain per month. Any less than that and it suffers physical debilitation, becoming so weak that it could die. Its ideal diet is one brain per week. A mind flayer that consumes one brain a week does not feel deprived. It can eat more than that for enjoyment and for the psychic boost, and it will if brains are plentiful.

[Greywander]

"Guys, we need to ration our brains," seems like a great out-of-context quote.

If hibernation is a thing, then it could be written up as a trait that allows the creature to pass large amounts of time without needing to eat or drink as long as they remain asleep. Then again, this is starting to get a bit too detailed, and would likely lead to needing to have a rule for every little thing.