Quoting the bestiary
"Each round of immersion in running water inflicts damage on a vampire equal to one-third of its maximum hit points—a vampire reduced to 0 hit points in this manner is destroyed."
what if i use the hydraulic torrent spell against a vampire? Is it considerated "running water"?
Dah..... GM call? Sounds like a RAI call to me.
I would say no too but I think that is a fun use of the spell and might suggest to my gaming group that maybe it did double damage to vampires or something.
Hence the statement of RAW. RAW it works as it is running water. RAI probably not although I've known a gm or two that would dictate that it works because it is running water.
No damage. It takes a round of immersion to deal the 1/3 HP, the spell has a duration of instantaneous.
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advanced/spells/hydraulicTorrent.html
Frankthedm is right about the timing. However, if you mainly have problems reconciling the game-world logic of it, you could say that it requires a natural stream of water because fey creatures live in such things, and that tie to natural fey-magic is what actually does the work.
That took me 0.02 seconds to think up, so you could probably work around it.
Materials called forth in evocation spells come from the elemental planes, so the water from Hydraulic Torrent comes from the plane of water, where there are absolutely NO impurities in the liquid, so you could say that it's the natural minerals in stream water that carry the effect; trace amounts of silver and such?
Brainstorming!
GUYSGUYSGUYSGUYSGUYS!
Aqueous Orb!
I don't know if you could consider the water itself to be running in a current.
Yeah, I'm still 99% sure that the water has to be a naturally occurring stream with enough volume to completely immerse said vampire. It's all well and good if you want to give your players a reward for clever thinking, but this could get old fast, especially if vampires are a common monster in your current game.
Maybe just apply a condition to the vampire for a round or two, depending on the level of the spell used, if you feel compelled to allow something.
Yeah, Aqueous Orb isn't running water... it's a bubble of water that rolls around. They need to have a stream of water running past them for at least a full round before they start losing hitpoints from it.
Even the decanter of endless water can only produce a 1-foot wide stream of water per round at max... that's not exactly "immersed".
Here would be my ruling -
It's not full immersion, no damage, you will just annoy and piss him off :).
With the decanter of endless water you wouldn't be able to hurt him with the water (at least not immediately, it would need to be in a confined room until full immersion takes place) but you might be able to create a barrier that he couldn't move across.
