Except a zombie is not alive, and Revivify returns a creature to life. Returning a zombie to life as a zombie is an oxymoron. Oh, Crawford.
Yup. But it's still probably a good indication that likely RAI is that Revivify doesn't destroy new undead (which seems to agree with RAW from MM p.315)
Some additional research for anyone that likes to know how things worked in previous editions (either for RAI purposes or historical consistency): the 3.5e version of Revivify indicated that it worked like Raise Dead (except as noted otherwise), and the 3.5e version of Raise Dead didn't work if you had been turned into undead.
As far as the rules specify, a creatures with HP are not dead. Undead are creatures. So you can revivify a zombie and it come back as an undead. It sounds weird logically, but is exactly how the rules describe.
My personal ruling is to allow slain undead to be resurrected as non-undead as long as all other requirements are met. So as long as it is less than 1 minute since the PC died, they can be revivified to their normal non-undead selves. If it has been more than a minute, you revive the undead, oops.
I'm trying to think of a situation where this applies, but the best I can think of is a Shadow Dragon. Even then, however, it states that a shadow rises from the corpse... not that the corpse/PC turns into a shadow. The Raise Dead spell takes a minute to cast (putting it out of Revivify's scope) so wouldn't apply either. My follow up question is: Regardless of language, when would this situation arise? I might be missing something obvious, but I've never run into this situation.
Edit: Is the question 1 minute from character death, or 1 minute from being raised as undead? I take Revivify to apply only to the former, not the latter.
Certain monsters have attacks which if they kill a player, will raise that character's corpse as a zombie or wight or something. I think that's the main scenario we're talking about.
The situation was simple enough...my group was fighting some kind of Undead creature. It attacked me with a weapon and dropped me to below 0 HP. My DM asked me to roll a d6, and after the result informed me I was now a ghoul. 1 round later my group killed the creature and our cleric cast Revivify on me. Our DM informed the cleric that the spell was unsuccessful.
For my own peace of mind I went looking for what Undead creature is able to kill a PC simply by dropping its HP to 0, and then turning it into a ghoul. I found nothing. So I asked my DM if he wouldn't mind telling me. He suggested that such knowledge would impact the storyline, which I understand. But I asked if he could show me the blurb in the creature description that allowed for what I said above. He edited it down, but it read exactly like Life Drain. And those mechanics work differently. So I posted a separate thread asking if anyone knew what it was. I've now been informed by the DM that it's a custom monster. That's as much as he'll tell me. So then I was curious why Revivify didn't work and figured I'd ask here to get a dialogue going.
The situation was simple enough...my group was fighting some kind of Undead creature. It attacked me with a weapon and dropped me to below 0 HP. My DM asked me to roll a d6, and after the result informed me I was now a ghoul. 1 round later my group killed the creature and our cleric cast Revivify on me. Our DM informed the cleric that the spell was unsuccessful.
For my own peace of mind I went looking for what Undead creature is able to kill a PC simply by dropping its HP to 0, and then turning it into a ghoul. I found nothing. So I asked my DM if he wouldn't mind telling me. He suggested that such knowledge would impact the storyline, which I understand. But I asked if he could show me the blurb in the creature description that allowed for what I said above. He edited it down, but it read exactly like Life Drain. And those mechanics work differently. So I posted a separate thread asking if anyone knew what it was. I've now been informed by the DM that it's a custom monster. That's as much as he'll tell me. So then I was curious why Revivify didn't work and figured I'd ask here to get a dialogue going.
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Unless your DM allows something less to bring you back, your only chance is true resurrection or wish. Depending on DM's rulings, being turned undead is almost as permanent as a death can be made to be (the one thing worse is if a god or powerful magic traps or destroys your soul).
That is why I think it makes sense to use rulings that allow a less than level 17+ party to be able to be able to do something.
To your point, it's a homebrew effect from your DM. From a RAW perspective, I don't think any monster as written would prompt the situation you're in. (Again, though, I could be wrong... long time 5e DM, but memory fails enough to eliminate certainty)
I have seen similar questions in the past in these forums and others, but Revivify specifies character death as the start of the "timer". I can't think of any (non-homebrew) monsters that would put you in the situation you ran into.
Bottom line: your DM intentionally made it to where you had to roll a new character.
True, but if your only raise spell option is Revivify, you shouldn't be facing 7th level spells or CR13 monsters. I get it...at any time, any party can meet any enemy...but still.
True, but if your only raise spell option is Revivify, you shouldn't be facing 7th level spells or CR13 monsters. I get it...at any time, any party can meet any enemy...but still.
Those were just some examples I could think of that could cause the change in 1 turn before they could be revived. I managed to find this Rutterkin that has a similarly revivify breaking ability, makes the change in 0 turns, the monster doesn't even have to be present, and is only CR 2.
But even the Rutterkin needs a confluence of events to take place first. Has to hit with the bite attack, then the PC needs to fail the ST, and then needs to drop to 0 HP.
In my scenario I had 11/48 HP remaining. I got hit with a weapon attack for 18, which put me unconscious. And boom dead/transformation. There were no ST's before or after, and I was under no Conditions at the time. *shrugs* I've had many PCs die before in D&D, such is the game. This just left me more unhappy than most due to the abrupt nature of it.
Revivify probably shouldn't be allowed to turn an undead creature back into a it's previous form. In my opinion.
Reasons: 1. The text of the spell is lacking, relative to this topic. AKA we could debate semantics and interpretations of rules and words literally indefinitely and not get a satisfactory answer. 2. Revivify's time restriction justifies it's existence and isn't really an argument that the spell should be more useful or powerful than stated. Again in my opinion, sorry if misinterpreting. 3. Game balance, should a 3rd level spell be able to do what a 5th level spell cannot?
I think this is a question that depends on how the DM regards the relationship between being undead vs. a living creature vs. being a soul recently detached from the corpse. So this is a world-building question. In older editions of the game, negative energy associated with being undead was the direct opposite of the life energy associated with the living. That allowed undead to be harmed by spells like Cure Light Wounds and conversely healed by a spell like Cause Light Wounds. 5e got rid of some of those associations, so now the relationship between the undead and the living are more muddled.
Personally, I think it's fair to consider Revivify as a weaker form of Raise Dead and therefore if Raise Dead cannot restore your zombified friend back to living original humanoid status with positive hit points, then neither can Revivify since Raise Dead is the higher level spell.
Since the wording of the spell doesn't specifically disallow it, I might ask for a melee spell attack to be able to affect the zombie/ghoul/undead dude, and on a successful attack allow revivify to take effect.
Except a zombie is not alive, and Revivify returns a creature to life. Returning a zombie to life as a zombie is an oxymoron. Oh, Crawford.
Yup. But it's still probably a good indication that likely RAI is that Revivify doesn't destroy new undead (which seems to agree with RAW from MM p.315)
Some additional research for anyone that likes to know how things worked in previous editions (either for RAI purposes or historical consistency): the 3.5e version of Revivify indicated that it worked like Raise Dead (except as noted otherwise), and the 3.5e version of Raise Dead didn't work if you had been turned into undead.
Please keep conversation on-topic. Speaking to the capacity or ability of WOTC is beyond the scope of this thread and not needed.
As far as the rules specify, a creatures with HP are not dead. Undead are creatures. So you can revivify a zombie and it come back as an undead. It sounds weird logically, but is exactly how the rules describe.
My personal ruling is to allow slain undead to be resurrected as non-undead as long as all other requirements are met. So as long as it is less than 1 minute since the PC died, they can be revivified to their normal non-undead selves. If it has been more than a minute, you revive the undead, oops.
I'm trying to think of a situation where this applies, but the best I can think of is a Shadow Dragon. Even then, however, it states that a shadow rises from the corpse... not that the corpse/PC turns into a shadow. The Raise Dead spell takes a minute to cast (putting it out of Revivify's scope) so wouldn't apply either. My follow up question is: Regardless of language, when would this situation arise? I might be missing something obvious, but I've never run into this situation.
Edit: Is the question 1 minute from character death, or 1 minute from being raised as undead? I take Revivify to apply only to the former, not the latter.
Certain monsters have attacks which if they kill a player, will raise that character's corpse as a zombie or wight or something. I think that's the main scenario we're talking about.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
The situation was simple enough...my group was fighting some kind of Undead creature. It attacked me with a weapon and dropped me to below 0 HP. My DM asked me to roll a d6, and after the result informed me I was now a ghoul. 1 round later my group killed the creature and our cleric cast Revivify on me. Our DM informed the cleric that the spell was unsuccessful.
For my own peace of mind I went looking for what Undead creature is able to kill a PC simply by dropping its HP to 0, and then turning it into a ghoul. I found nothing. So I asked my DM if he wouldn't mind telling me. He suggested that such knowledge would impact the storyline, which I understand. But I asked if he could show me the blurb in the creature description that allowed for what I said above. He edited it down, but it read exactly like Life Drain. And those mechanics work differently. So I posted a separate thread asking if anyone knew what it was. I've now been informed by the DM that it's a custom monster. That's as much as he'll tell me. So then I was curious why Revivify didn't work and figured I'd ask here to get a dialogue going.
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Unless your DM allows something less to bring you back, your only chance is true resurrection or wish. Depending on DM's rulings, being turned undead is almost as permanent as a death can be made to be (the one thing worse is if a god or powerful magic traps or destroys your soul).
That is why I think it makes sense to use rulings that allow a less than level 17+ party to be able to be able to do something.
To your point, it's a homebrew effect from your DM. From a RAW perspective, I don't think any monster as written would prompt the situation you're in. (Again, though, I could be wrong... long time 5e DM, but memory fails enough to eliminate certainty)
I have seen similar questions in the past in these forums and others, but Revivify specifies character death as the start of the "timer". I can't think of any (non-homebrew) monsters that would put you in the situation you ran into.
Bottom line: your DM intentionally made it to where you had to roll a new character.
There are a few rare examples of official monsters that can cause slain players to become undead (finger of death or a devourer for example).
Giving the DM the benefit of the doubt, I think they were using a prewritten adventure (probably from DMs guild).
True, but if your only raise spell option is Revivify, you shouldn't be facing 7th level spells or CR13 monsters. I get it...at any time, any party can meet any enemy...but still.
Those were just some examples I could think of that could cause the change in 1 turn before they could be revived. I managed to find this Rutterkin that has a similarly revivify breaking ability, makes the change in 0 turns, the monster doesn't even have to be present, and is only CR 2.
But even the Rutterkin needs a confluence of events to take place first. Has to hit with the bite attack, then the PC needs to fail the ST, and then needs to drop to 0 HP.
In my scenario I had 11/48 HP remaining. I got hit with a weapon attack for 18, which put me unconscious. And boom dead/transformation. There were no ST's before or after, and I was under no Conditions at the time. *shrugs* I've had many PCs die before in D&D, such is the game. This just left me more unhappy than most due to the abrupt nature of it.
Nice catch.
Now, assuming it doesn't work, does it set the ghoul's hp to 1?
Revivify probably shouldn't be allowed to turn an undead creature back into a it's previous form. In my opinion.
Reasons:
1. The text of the spell is lacking, relative to this topic. AKA we could debate semantics and interpretations of rules and words literally indefinitely and not get a satisfactory answer.
2. Revivify's time restriction justifies it's existence and isn't really an argument that the spell should be more useful or powerful than stated. Again in my opinion, sorry if misinterpreting.
3. Game balance, should a 3rd level spell be able to do what a 5th level spell cannot?
In the end a DM's gotta make a call.
I think this is a question that depends on how the DM regards the relationship between being undead vs. a living creature vs. being a soul recently detached from the corpse. So this is a world-building question. In older editions of the game, negative energy associated with being undead was the direct opposite of the life energy associated with the living. That allowed undead to be harmed by spells like Cure Light Wounds and conversely healed by a spell like Cause Light Wounds. 5e got rid of some of those associations, so now the relationship between the undead and the living are more muddled.
Personally, I think it's fair to consider Revivify as a weaker form of Raise Dead and therefore if Raise Dead cannot restore your zombified friend back to living original humanoid status with positive hit points, then neither can Revivify since Raise Dead is the higher level spell.
Since the wording of the spell doesn't specifically disallow it, I might ask for a melee spell attack to be able to affect the zombie/ghoul/undead dude, and on a successful attack allow revivify to take effect.
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RAW revivify ONLY works on undead.
I think you might want to reread that rule.
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