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It doesn't specify, but they should not be immune to things PCs are normally not immune to. Automatons for example don't "breathe" in the same way a human does, but more like how a plant breathes. The same should go for Skeletons. They should need breathable air, or it starts interfering with the necromantic energies or something. They are also not immune to anything Undead are normally immune to, so they can and should be affected by Cloudkill. The same goes with bleeding, you could say the damage causes their necromantic energy to start leaking or something.
Basically, unless it explicitly says otherwise, every PC Ancestry should follow the same rules.
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Also on the topic of the other heritages bleeding:
Leshies are plants and therefore have fluids inside them transporting nutrients around their bodies. Losing this fluid will cause them to die.
Androids have a fluid that transports their nanites around their bodies. It's not as thick as blood but functions the same.
Conrasu are actually "an abstract chunk of spiritual essence", and the plant around that chunk is just an exoskeleton. The bleeding of that spiritual essence would kill them.
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On matters like this, Pathfinder/Starfinder has gentle handwaving in the general direction of simulationism, but no more than that. The gamist effects (and associated game balance) are significantly higher priority.
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So unless the undead feats specifically say you bleed then a skeleton doesn't.
While that is reasonable logic from a simulation perspective, it introduces balance problems, as well as rule-writing problems.
First, it makes certain ancestries silently immune to bleed damage. Skeleton, Automaton, Poppet, maybe Leshy and Conrasu as well. 'Silently' because the stat blocks for those ancestries don't actually list immunity to bleed damage as part of their benefits.
The precedent that this sets is that the developers have to list out everything that the Ancestry doesn't do or change from the baseline. That is a nearly impossible task, because the options are endless. A much better approach is to explicitly list out everything that the Ancestry does change.
So since Skeleton, Poppet, and Automaton don't list that they are immune to bleed damage, then they are affected by it as is normal for a player character. Flavor it however you wish.
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But honestly if the designers wanted Skeletons to bleed they should state it otherwise the perfectly reasonable assumption is creatures without blood don't bleed.
And the statement:
The archetypes and skeleton ancestry that follow can give the basic undead benefits detailed here. These are somewhat different from the normal undead creature abilities to better fit player characters.
Isn't sufficient to do exactly that?
There is a trait for NPC creatures named 'Undead'. (Which is what the Bleed damage rules are referring to.)
There is also a trait 'Undead' meant specifically for player characters. It has different rules attached to it. That is the only meaningful reading of that quoted sentence from Book of the Dead that I can come up with.
If you come to a different conclusion when reading that quote, what conclusion do you come to? What does that rule do if not separate the rules for Undead players from Undead monsters?
Okay, so looking at the Core Rulebook reference on Nethys, I get the following quote:
"This is persistent damage that represents loss of blood. As such, it has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don't need blood to live."
That seems pretty straightforward. It also seems like the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be included in a racial block explicitly. At bare minimum, asserting that a certain race was no longer living seems like it would handle the issue.
That said, the "Skeleton Mechanics" section of the Skeleton Ancestry says nothing about being unliving. It says you have the Basic Undead Benefits. The Basic Undead Benefits imply heavily that you're undead ("because you're undead" is literally in there), but don't explicitly state it as a difference. Regardless, it also states that you're a special kind of undead that has effects somewhat different from standard undead (with such effects listed in the Basic Undead Benefits) and the word "nonliving" doesn't show up once in the text. Further, nothing in the mechanical text (either Skeleton or Basic Undead Benefits) says anything about not needing blood. Nothing in the Advanced Undead Benefits does anything to change any of that.
Conclusion: By pure RAW, PC Skeletons are living creatures who require blood, and are therefore vulnerable to bleed damage.
Now, it is reasonable that some might find this conclusion unsatisfying. The standard and appropriate action for players who find rules unsatisfying in this way is to request a houserule from the GM. Given that you're playing a rare ancestry, you should probably be talking it out with them anyway.
"Conclusion: By pure RAW, PC Skeletons are living creatures who require blood, and are therefore vulnerable to bleed damage."
That seems like a stretch. You're undead, so by definition you're nonliving.
Could it be RAI that undead PCs bleed? Maybe. Is it RAW? No.
By standard definition of undead, yes... but the Basic Undead Benefits explicitly state that those that are undead by BUB do not have all of the effects of standard undead. "Not living" is one of the effects of standard undead.
Heck - as a skeleton PC, you even still have a con score. So....
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What? CON score? All sorts of undead have CON mods. Not having those is a 1E thing.
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I think it's intended that ancestries do not grant really significant advantages to a player because they chose that one and not another one. Having "complete immunity to bleed and the ability to just walk around underwater without needing to breathe" is sort of like "giving Strix PCs full flight at level 1" as in "it makes sense, but it's potentially game breaking."
I think it's best left up to GMs who are best positioned to determine whether it will break this particular game.
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The main fun of being an undead is doing undead stuff like strolling along a riverbed with weights tied to your feet to ambush people pirate of the Caribbean style, if your not willing to explore the fictional reality of an undead then I don't see the point. What's the point of being undead if live, breath, bleed and need to eat. It spoils the fun if being undead doesn't have a very big effect on the practicalities of your adventuring un-life.
But that is the purpose of houserules.
If you and your group want to run a game where everyone is undead and you all do stuff like that, that is great.
But for general purpose play - especially PFS or other games among near strangers - it becomes really difficult if one player is playing a Skeleton and says,
'Hey, we need to go board that ship without being seen. I'll go walk along the ocean floor and do that.'
And everyone else is like,
'Uhh... OK. I guess the rest of us will just call it a day then.'
So either your Skeleton still can't do all the cool Carribean Pirate Skeleton stuff because you can't leave the rest of the players behind, or else you are just solo'ing the entire game.
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Conclusion: By pure RAW, PC Skeletons are living creatures who require blood, and are therefore vulnerable to bleed damage.
It feels weird to specifically reference a sentence that outright says "you are undead" and then tell people that proves they aren't undead as the only objectively correct way to interpret the language.
... The reality is though, the rules on bleeding are vague at best and give the GM extreme leeway in determining what can and cannot be bled. That's not a houserule, that's how PF2 is designed.
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I think that since the Book of the Dead very clearly lays out what the basic and advanced undead benefits are, RAI is clearly not to infer additional benefits by virtue of being undead.
The GM can add them at their discretion, but that's not really a rules issue.
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I feel the undead race is out their enough that is going to get very selective use. They are mainly going to see play from people who want to tell stories about undead and given they don't even do a great job of that as they function identically to living pcs.
Which leaves them as a somewhat sad or forlorn filler content existing to take up space, failing to be suitable for most games despite all its comprimises but not evening being great for the one time you want it.
Book of the Dead has a whole side bar (actually it might be multiple sidebars) acknowledging that while these options are reined in for balance you could run a game without those limits... You just need to be ready for some normal balance points to break.
If a GM wants that full-blown undead experience nothing is stopping them. If the GM doesn't want to remove those limits... Well, clearly their values didn't align with your own.
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I love the skeleton ancestry. I also love that it's balanced for general use!
For an "in world" interpretation, a skeleton PC can drown because they still retain some semblance of their living self. This means that they either remember, or believe on a subconscious level that they can drown, similar to phantom limb syndrome. No amount of logic can shake this irrational belief.
A lot of the Basic Undead Benefits can be rationalized this way. I mean, how else would poison work on a skeleton?
This all ends up a little more comical than I think anyone intended though.
"Dude, the poison is just sitting there on your femur. Get a rag and wipe it off. it wasn't even a contact poison."
"Nooo! I need the antidote, pleeeease!!"
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The undead and construct eidolons have a feature explaining in the game world why they are susceptible to mortal requirements like breathing etc.
The undead races in the book of the Dead don't have this built in narrative justification for why they are the way they are. What they get is a side bar saying we accepts these race and archetypes don't really work like undead but balance.
Which leaves us in the place that somewhat can argue reasonably that Skeletons are living creatures that need blood to live. Basically from my perspective the undead in the books needed a feature explaining why they are the way they are in the game world otherwise they exist in a farsical state functioning nonsensincally.
"why does the skeleton need to breath ?"
"Game balance"
"But why in game does he need to breath and how does he breath without Lungs"
"Game balance"
The game rules and mechanics don't need to provide lore and in-world explanations. It is convenient when they do - it means that the players don't have to create their own lore and explanations for everything. But it isn't necessary. And there are plenty of rules or interactions between rules that don't have an explanation.
Why do mindless creatures still get a choice when a Redeemer Champion uses Glimpse of Redemption against them?
Why are zombies not immune to precision damage? Does stabbing them in the kidney actually do anything more than stabbing them anywhere else?
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Conclusion: By pure RAW, PC Skeletons are living creatures who require blood, and are therefore vulnerable to bleed damage.It feels weird to specifically reference a sentence that outright says "you are undead" and then tell people that proves they aren't undead as the only objectively correct way to interpret the language.
... The reality is though, the rules on bleeding are vague at best and give the GM extreme leeway in determining what can and cannot be bled. That's not a houserule, that's how PF2 is designed.
I never said that they weren't undead.
- I said that it was heavily implied that they were undead.- I said that they were living.
So far as I can tell, by a strict reading of the rules, they are both.
Yes, this is silly. Pure RAW is often silly. That's why we have houserules. That doesn't make it not what it is.
... So far as I can tell, by a strict reading of the rules, they are both...
So... living dead...
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I feel the undead race is out their enough that is going to get very selective use. They are mainly going to see play from people who want to tell stories about undead and given they don't even do a great job of that as they function identically to living pcs.
Which leaves them as a somewhat sad or forlorn filler content existing to take up space, failing to be suitable for most games despite all its comprimises but not evening being great for the one time you want it.
Book of the Dead has a whole side bar (actually it might be multiple sidebars) acknowledging that while these options are reined in for balance you could run a game without those limits... You just need to be ready for some normal balance points to break.
If a GM wants that full-blown undead experience nothing is stopping them. If the GM doesn't want to remove those limits... Well, clearly their values didn't align with your own.
This. IMO, when a GM decides to allow undead PCs, they have to make a choice considering what's best for their game: they can choose between better game balance or greater narrative consistency. There isn't an option that gives both.
Easy solution for undead archetypes: you're only mostly dead. You're teetering over the edge into undeath, but still have a spark of life in you. This can also explain why you get more undead abilities as you level up as the corruption spreads and you lose a grip on the person you once were.
It doesn't work for skeletons, but honestly it is a compelling roleplay challenge for the archetypes.
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First, it makes certain ancestries silently immune to bleed damage. Skeleton, Automaton, Poppet, maybe Leshy and Conrasu as well. 'Silently' because the stat blocks for those ancestries don't actually list immunity to bleed damage as part of their benefits.
The precedent that this sets is that the developers have to list out everything that the Ancestry doesn't do or change from the baseline. That is a nearly impossible task, because the options are endless. A much better approach is to explicitly list out everything that the Ancestry does change.
So since Skeleton, Poppet, and Automaton don't list that they are immune to bleed damage, then they are affected by it as is normal for a player character. Flavor it however you wish.
I'm going to disagree with this. It's not "silent" at all - it's explicitly how the rules for bleed damage work.
Or rather, if it is "silent" then so are monster skeletons which don't list immunity to bleed damage.
The rules for bleed damage say that creatures that don't need blood to live are immune to bleed damage. Because those are the rules for bleed damage, creatures don't always list that they are immune to bleed damage. In fact, the rules are pretty inconsistent here - most constructs list bleed immunity, but undead mostly don't. And there are plenty of creatures that obviously are immune but don't list it - is a carnivorous crystal immune to bleed damage? What about a lantern archon? A cassisian? An animate dream?
Almost certainly yes in every case (okay, the carnivorous crystal is arguable I suppose), but none of them list bleed immunity.
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With regards to the undead trait, I don't see Book of the Dead explicitly saying the undead trait works differently.
The "undead benefits" are different, but again it's not 100% clear whether that should be understood as "this is all you get from being undead" or "you get the usual undead stuff, except these things which are different".
I suspect that not all writers interpreted this the same way, and that they didn't realize other writers were interpreting it differently, so it's all not 100% consistent.
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That said, automatons explicitly describe how bleeding works for them. Bleed damage itself says creatures without blood aren't subject to bleed damage, and it's obvious skeletons don't have blood. Which is different from say, vampires; even NPC vampires can bleed. They have blood and they don't have a listed immunity. Bleed immunity isn't an undead benefit per se so the "these are your different undead benefits" section doesn't really cover it.
So the skeleton ancestry really should have had some explanatory text, without that I think the reasonable thing is to assume they're safe.
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Whether that's too strong, I dunno. In general I think it's dangerous to give some ancestries big abilities (permanent flight, comprehensive immunities) but it also doesn't make sense not to give them. So I would have rather seen a real effort to give them a fair downside to compensate.
For lack of breath for example: they could have written a rule that since your memories are still of needing to breathe, that being stuck without breath underwater is scary, so you'll be constantly frightened 2 without being able to reduce that. Unless you either get an item/spell to breathe underwater or maybe take a feat to overcome your panic response.a
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Another problem Ancestry; Poppets have the construct trait, which say this: "When reduced to 0 Hit Points, a construct creature is destroyed" but unlike Automatons they do not have a rule like Automaton Core that contradicts this.
This falls under too bad to be true IMO, so I think it's safe to say that there are some mistakes in how some Ancestries are written RAW.
It seems like there ought to have been a "Living" trait which applies to most creatures that makes them need to breathe, sleep and have blood. It'd be nice if what it meant to be "Living" was explicitly described somewhere, it would be a little too onerous to add living to all those stat blocks now.
Maybe there should even be a defined baseline (you breathe, you eat, you sleep, you bleed etc.) for what PCs are that you do not deviate from no matter your traits unless you get an actual ability from your Ancestry or elsewhere that tells you to. I know that sort of thing annoys some people though.
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Another problem Ancestry; Poppets have the construct trait, which say this: "When reduced to 0 Hit Points, a construct creature is destroyed" but unlike Automatons they do not have a rule like Automaton Core that contradicts this.
This falls under too bad to be true IMO, so I think it's safe to say that there are some mistakes in how some Ancestries are written RAW.
It seems like there ought to have been a "Living" trait which applies to most creatures that makes them need to breathe, sleep and have blood. It'd be nice if what it meant to be "Living" was explicitly described somewhere, it would be a little too onerous to add living to all those stat blocks now.
Maybe there should even be a defined baseline (you breathe, you eat, you sleep, you bleed etc.) for what PCs are that you do not deviate from no matter your traits unless you get an actual ability from your Ancestry or elsewhere that tells you to. I know that sort of thing annoys some people though.
Dang, I think conrasus would die at 0 hp by RAW too.
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There are gaps in the game. This is one of them.
The designers have said what these different ancestries get. They have gone through and given each a very specific list, Poppets have Constructed, Skeletons have Basic Undead Benefits, Automaton have Constructed Body, Androids are Constructed, Construct Eidolons have a Construct Heart.
Some of them like Leshys and Fungus Leshies don't need to eat normal food. They designers have described similar dependancies for Undead, such as Skeletons collect bones, Zombies eat brains. But what about Androids? Nothing. Do they need to eat? Maybe, maybe not.
Some like Azarketi can breathe underwater. Its specified. Elementals and Time creatures don't need to breathe. They say that, but they don't say Undead don't need to breathe. Yes that is annoying but this is Paizo's game, every game/mythos does it a bit different. At least vampires don't sparkle in sunlight.
The Undead Trait doesn't specify no bleeding, but then again neither does Spirit or Incorporeal and they don't even have a physical form. Some Undead like Vampire can have a blood dependancy.
Then there are Constructs that are neither living nor undead. What do they do? Well they are immune to bleed damage because the Construct Trait says that.
The rule says: Another special type of physical damage is bleed damage. This is persistent damage that represents loss of blood. As such, it has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don't need blood to live.
The rule doesn't say that non living creatures don't take bleed damage. It really says creatures without blood don't take bleed damage. But it doesn't specific what blood is. Some Ancestries describe blood equivalents like sap, quintessence, hydraulic fluid, microscopic nanites... does that count?
There are a range of positions here. From
(1) everything which has actual blood bleeds. Through
(2) everything with some reasonable mentioned blood equivalent bleeds. To
(3) everything bleeds. All the ancestry options. It loses something, anything, take a guess. Unless the GM says it doesn't.
I prefer (3) becauses its easier and I think thats what the designers intended. You get what it says you get from your ancestry and nothing from your traits bar the label. I think most people do (2), but they rarely agree on whats included and what is not.
But lets have a look at that list. By default its only Construct. But if we try to specifiy what doesn't have blood. By default I think that all creatures of Construct, Dream, Elemental, Fungus, Negative, Ooze, Plant, Positive, Spirit, Time, Undead (excluding Vampires), that is 11 out of 24 creature types in the game don't have blood. Thats too much immunity to be handing out. Then the player options some but not all of: Leshy, Fungus Leshy, Skeleton, Dhampir, Conrasu, Anadi (spiders don't have arteries or real blood but does hemolymph count?), Android, Poppet, Automaton. Then there are the undead archtypes ...
Choose.
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Another problem Ancestry; Poppets have the construct trait, which say this: "When reduced to 0 Hit Points, a construct creature is destroyed" but unlike Automatons they do not have a rule like Automaton Core that contradicts this.
This falls under too bad to be true IMO
Completely agree. It would be nice for Automaton and Poppets to pick up bleed immunuty but dying at zero is a deal breaker.
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It really says creatures without blood don't take bleed damageIncorrect, it says "it has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don't need blood to live.". A creature needs to be A) alive and B) need blood to live to take bleed damage.
Undead of all types don't meet this.
You missed the most important part loss of blood. You are over analysing one sentence, and missing the meaning of the paragraph.
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Yeah. It really makes no story sense whatsoever that skeletons could take bleed damage. There's a game balance concern that handing out a lot of immunities would be bad. But you could address that concern in several different ways, and I don't think this kind of technical fudge is an elegant, enjoyable way.
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I don't think it's overanalzying. Bleed is the only damage type that includes a description like that describing conditional immunity, basically empowering the GM to make a judgement call as part of how the ability functions.
I actually think "everything bleeds" is the better solution. It's clean, easy to handwave, and makes the game much better for players who might want to incorporate bleeding into their build (same reason why precision damage immunity is obnoxious).
But it's still worth noting that Paizo instead chose to go with this open ended language with bleed instead.
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I actually think "everything bleeds" is the better solution. It's clean, easy to handwave, and makes the game much better for players who might want to incorporate bleeding into their build (same reason why precision damage immunity is obnoxious).
I think that goes counter to a pretty pervasive, although rarely outright stated design philosophy: no trick will work all the time.
The game is full of different ways in which no particular weapon, build, feat, spell or whatever is always going to work. There'll always be some class of enemies or encounters when your standard tactic is not the right one. "Everything bleeds" would be a lot broader than most other things.
"Anything with juice bleeds" I think is reasonable and generic enough.
Regarding precision damage: I think it's telling that the amount of immunities in the game has been scaled back drastically. Only a handful of creatures are still normally immune to precision damage, mainly incorporeal and oozy creatures. But for those creatures it really makes sense. For every class there's some kind of monster intended to be outside their comfort zone.
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Not really. Most combat tricks, especially primary combat gimmicks for a class, are reasonably reliable. There's no monster that turns off a fighter's to-hit bonus, or is immune to the hunt prey action.
Even creatures like Golems incentivize spellcasters to approach the problem differently by providing unique weaknesses and don't full stop shut down magic.
Something like precision immunity on the other hand is just "your character sucks a bit this fight" with no inherent design for counterplay nor interesting gameplay ramifications. Liberal application of bleed immunity is similar, though less crippling since currently there's no class that relies on bleed.
"Makes sense" in this case is a weak argument too, because it makes sense only within the context of the mechanical and narrative devices the developers chose. It would also "make sense" if they had instead chosen a narrative and mechanical framework where it didn't feel s$+!ty to be a rogue or swashbuckler in a fight with an ooze.
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It would also "make sense" if they had instead chosen a narrative and mechanical framework where it didn't feel s~#$ty to be a rogue or swashbuckler in a fight with an ooze.
Also Investigator and Precision Ranger.
But what about Androids? Nothing. Do they need to eat? Maybe, maybe not.Androids breathe, eat, and sleep like a human, although they're incapable of biological procreation.That part was clear. I agree that a lot of the rest of this can get murky.
Thankyou