Im playing through Carrion Crown and our party is surrounded by vampires...so the cleric wants to drop an Undeath to Death to thin out the herd a bit. In trying to figure out what happens we've come up against some confusing stats, wanted to get the community's take on things......
- the spell has no affect on creatures 9HD or more
- the bestiary entry for a standard Vampire says 8d6+72 leading us to believe it would be 8HD and therefore affected by the spell
- BUT it also says "sorcerer 8", and since the Vampire template says CR+2 doesn't that mean the vamp is a 8 class levels +2 = a 10HD creature? The bestiary listing is CR9 which seems to agree its a level 10 creature and therefore NOT affected by the spell.
So the core of the question is.......if the creature says "8d6+72" does that make it an 8HD creature, or do things like templates etc need to be taken into account beyond that hit points entry to determine 'true' Hit Dice for spell effects etc?
thanks as always!
Templates =/= Hit Dice.
HD dependent effects only check HD, not CR, so the 8HD is what's important.
(Assuming they're all standard Vampires with 8 Sorcerer levels so 8HD, and +2 CR Template on top of that, for a total CR of 9.)
A vampire is a template creature so its HD are equal to the level of the base creature. The Vampire in the books was a sample using an 8th level sorcerer as the base. The base creature has to have at least 5 HD or levels , so a vampire could have as few as 5 HD, or as many as 20.