Werebeagle's page

Out of curiosity WolfMunroe, what date did you buy your Bestiary 2? I've had mine for several years now, and the text is slightly different than what you quoted, and the words "reacts to" definitely appear there, as quoted below:

"Negative Energy Affinity (Ex) The creature is alive, but reacts to positive and negative energy as if it were undead--positive energy harms it, negative energy heals it. Format: negative energy affinity; Location: defensive abilities" (Bestiary 2 p.299) Direct word for word quote. I also looked it up in the Advanced Race Guide, and found those words "reacts to" in their description as well.

This leads me to believe that it is possible this grammar issue may have been altered in subsequent releases of the Bestiary 2 after I bought mine. Possibly Paizo put out an official erratum on this issue, but if so, where would we find it?

Either way, I think we can agree to disagree, and personally I'd go with the good ol' role playing game standby: It's the DM's call how he wants to handle it. Either interpretation could be correct, technically, it's a question of how you understand the sentence, which is ambiguous enough to lend credence to either interpretation.

"but one with Negative Energy Affinity, which specifies that it is treated as undead for certain effects. "

The actual text of Negative Energy Affinity states that a Dhampir reacts to positive and negative energy as if it were undead. Positive energy heals it and negative ebergy harms it. The key word here is reacts to. Since it's not a conscious reaction, but an automatic one, the creature will only react to an effect or stimulus that targets it. Therefore to affect a dhampir with an effect of any kind, including channel energy, the cleric needs to target the living. My point stands.

A Dhampir is clearly a living creature, not an undead. If it were an undead, then the long list of abilities on page 310 of the Bestiary that apply to all undead, from the lowly zombie to the mighty nightshades, like having no constitution score, being immune to mind-affecting effects, not being subject to non-lethal damage, and so on and so forth would be applied to dhampirs, but it's not. Concordently, weapons of Disruption or Undead Bane have no special effect against them, nor do spells like Undeath to Death.

When a cleric of any alignment chooses to channel energy, he makes a desicion to either target the living or to target the undead. Since the dhampir is not an undead, any attempt to use channel energy to target the undead automatically fails on him, while any attempt to channel energy on living targets automatically will affect him.

This basically results in a sort of "double whammy" effect. A dhampir who is in a group with an evil cleric is laughing, because whenever that evil cleric channels energy to harm the living, it also heals the dhampir simultaneously. The reverse is also true, though, and dhampirs should take special care when encountering enemy good-aligned clerics (or paladins), for those can heal themselves and their allies as well harm the dhampir in the same single channel burst.

Basically a dhampir is a living thing with its polarity reversed due to its strange blood disorder.