Temporary Hit Points Causing Death

[noah25]

Where: Mist Walking

Conditions: Character typically has 180 HP. Had tensers and bard song brining the character to 216. She had 47 HP remaining.

Problem: Tensers wore off and bard song wore off seconds after. Lost 36 HP from tensers (con increase fading) which should have left me with 11 HP. Bard song passed and it killed the charater. Rather unfortunate temporary HP mishap.

[zDark Shadowz]

Did it send you to a bleedout state or was it an outright death when it faded in that order?

[noah25]

went -1

[zDark Shadowz]

Seems working as intended then.

It's awkward but intended that Constitution bonuses fading can down a character since total HP is reduced. The bard song temp HP still being active had bought extra moments.

[noah25]

My understanding is temporary HP from bard song should never drop you beneath 0 but I may be mistaken its not like a con debuff its extra HP.

[Merry Munchkin]

When was the bard song added?  The temporary hit points get added to the top of whatever your current HP total is and get lost first in combat, so if you were already in potentially negative territory without the CON buff, and then the Bard Song was activated, it would have temporarily buffed you above that, but those temporary HP would still be lost when the Bard Song expired.

[noah25]

It was used in combat, lost some of them, ran. So no new song to add new HP. Lost the con buff. Then losing bard song resulted in death.

[Merry Munchkin]

I am as perplexed as you are then -- this ordinarily should not happen.  Temporary hit points are lost first, CON based hit points are lost last.  The only possible scenario I could think of is that it would be possible to buff someone who's near-death with temporary hit points, then lower that someone's constitution (lose a buff or actual ability drain), and get into this "life only by temporary hit points" situation.  But this is not what happened, as you describe it.

The only way I can think to test the temp hit point + constitution decrease would be to do something like activate barbarian rage, take damage, drink a potion of aid, wait for the rage to wear off, and all you have left health-wise is temp hit points, then see what happens.  It could be that the bard song buff is uniquely scripted in PoTM (since the description in the wiki is different from the vanilla game) and it adds HP differently (or is buggy).

[Maffa]

the only wait it makes sense to me is that bard song ended before than CON buff...