This came up in another thread that contained spoilers. With the introduction in Adventurer's Armory of the wooden stake as a weapon, the idea of staking a vampire in combat came up. Currently, the rules to do so assume the vampire is helpless. Since there are no rules to target a creature's heart, I threw this together.
VAMPIRE HUNTER
You are adept at fighting and killing vampires quickly.
Prerequisites: Weapon Focus (wooden stake), Undead favored enemy.
Benefit: On a critical hit with a wooden stake against a vampire, vampire spawn, or any undead that suffers a special condition from a wooden stake through the heart, your attack has a chance of striking the undead's heart even if the undead is not helpless. After confirming the critical hit, make a combat maneuver check that does not provoke an attack of opportunity. If it succeeds, the stake has pierced the undead's heart, and it suffers the effects of such an event as detailed in the monster's description.
Normal: To drive a wooden stake through an undead's heart, the undead must be pinned (as by a grapple) or helpless.
Would anyone take it? In a normal campaign it probably would only come up once or twice in the campaign, but you could say the same of a lot of favored enemy choices. Who favors oozes? I'd assume that a Ravenloft campaign would see more use out of it.
Comments? Does it exist? Is it useless? My first posted version had Weapon Finesse as a prereq because the feat implied precision over force, but as I said there, if you have focus in wooden stake, you probably know what you're doing. What do you think?
I like it, but I think it's a little weak. If the entire campaign was going to be fighting vampires it would be worthwhile, but it doesn't quite measure up if vampires are going to be appearing less than once a level.
The main problem is that the way you have it working requires a lot of things to go right. First you have to roll a natural 20, then you have to confirm the critical, and then you have to succeed at a CMB check. So even if you can only miss on a natural 1, the feat only has a 4.5% chance of working on any given attack. I would suggest having the feat also triple the critical range of a stake (to 18-20) and removing the CMB check. That brings you up to 14.25% odds per attack against an AC 0 vampire.
The only other thing I'd suggest is changing the favored enemy prerequisite to Knowledge: Religion ranks, so it's available to non-rangers.
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There was a feat called Vampire Hunter in Libris Mortis... It allowed you to take a move action to determine whether or not a creature was a vampire, and it made you immune to the dominating gaze of vampires.
Also, in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, there were Alchemical Flare stakes, which were wooden stakes (treated as daggers for damage/proficiency purposes) that were one-use items. Once you hit someone with it, you would leave it in them. When they came into contact with undead flesh, they would ignite, dealing 1d6 fire damage per round until they were pulled out (a standard action to pull out all embedded stakes). Needless to say, a really cool trick for a quick-draw twf-ing vampire hunter, however rare they may be. 100gp for 10 of them.
I think that an issue of Dragon had an undead slayer prestige class.
I was thinking it was around issue 350 or so.....
Yeah, there was a Hunter of the Dead or something like that in Complete Warrior, as well.
I was thinking of requiring Favored Enemy because NOT everyone should be able to do it. It's pretty much for people who spent a lot of time specifically training for and hunting down vampires. That sounds a lot like the favored enemy feature, and I would think that anyone with that kind of singleminded dedication would take a level of a class that grants such a favored enemy bonus. Ranger is the one that springs to mind, but ISTR prestige classes had it without having a ranger prereq.
I like it. You would only take it in a very vampire-heavy campaign.
It is a little weak, sure, and requires a lot of things to go right, but it amounts to an automatic win against a vampire. I like that it requires a critical hit, but also requires a CMB check. You wouldn't want what is effectively a vorpal effect vs. vampires to just be a basic feat.
Of course, there should be a companion feat for vampires that helps protect them against this. And any vampire worth his salt will have a great CMD.