What is your opinion on necromancers?

I fuckin' love necromancers. The more cliche the better.

I used to love them. These incessant threads have turned that love into the blackest hate.

I'm down for necromancers, but I find Veeky Forums's obsession with misunderstood good and/or industrious necromancers to be amazingly irritating.

>Play necromancer
>Party collectively hates me in character
>Fuckin whatever haters
>Come across some farm
>Dudes Oxen dies in the field
>Raise them
>Hungerless tireless oxen
>Your welcome peasant
>Peasant fuckin hates me
>Party hates me

What the fuck?

I have never played one or seen one played despite hundreds of different group campaigns. Seen them as villains a plenty but never even an allied npc let alone a player character. What am I missing out on?

To be honest, a lot of book keeping and micromanaging. They're also big action economy hogs, so be prepared for the other players to get annoyed as you and your warband of skeletons take up a shitload of initiative turns.

Despite that they're pretty fun to play for the above reasons. Getting to play Pokemon with the corpses of your enemies is pretty satisfying. That said, I'd be best to know your group before deciding to play one.

They don't hate you because you're a necromancer. They hate you because you don't know the difference between your and you're.

you are missing out on a batman style pc who strikes terror and fear into the hearts of his foes, using flesh melting beamd of darkness, and the skeletal remains of his enemies

who is a total sweetheart, with a caring family and friends, who loves making bone puns and parlor tricks, and uses his knowledge of life and death to act as a legit doctor when he punches that clock

This.

Helpful necromancers are the fucking worst, no Paul it's not some amazing twist that the necromancer is a good guy. Doubly so when they decide that they have some super unique and awesome idea for a phylactery, like inside a child or as a city or some other dumb shit designed either to make the guy unkillable because the GM likes him too much, or for muh moral quandary to destroy it.

You turned his oxen into a murder machine that will kill him once you stop exerting direction control on it.

Honestly? It never made sense to me why people seem to be under the impression that animated dead are somehow indestructable or eternal. I mean, they're powered by SOMETHING.
The only thing going for a skeleton over a regular body is that the skeleton doesn't feel pain. If anything breaks it (which is a shitton easier because it's not actively repairing itself) it's as good as useless. Plus you have to keep constantly commanding the damn things.
Golems are leagues better, it's just the construction time is such a complete bitch nobody bothers to use them outside of massively wealthy or governments.

>not wanting to have necromancers/liches be the primary antagonist for all your parties
>not having the evil party go against the not!Dr.Doom lich with undead instead of Doombots in not!Latveria

Rotting corpses..I would spend the entire session making a zombie that doesn't smell.

Hell, it works on multiple levels.
Dr. Doom is an insufferable genius who's convinced he's the good guy, whose primary rival is arguably worse than he is, and who might be able to fix everything if he just pulled his head out of his ass.

If you're going for pure money efficiency human labor is still better than both just on a pure cost basis.

I'm not even talking slavery either. Human labor in D&D is just so dirt cheap that there's little reason to use anything else outside of breeding some sort of subservient race, but even then if you pay them you won't have to deal with any uprisings outside of unions, and unions are much easier to deal with magically.

Only thing overdone are morally good necromancers.

Sssshhhhhhhhhhhh shshshshshshhh
thats what makes it fun

but arent neutral evil "I want to become master of death" necromancers also cliche?

How about a "I just want to have a kingdom of undeath and chill" necromancers? You know, true neutral ones who don't really care to kill everyone but just one to chill out for all eternity with their family and apprentice, with an army of undead slaves to tend to their every need?

I dislike Necromancers mostly because I dislike most magic and most undead.

I love magic itself- and I love monsters. But the way they are usually done could not be more boring. It raises more questions then answers.

A Necromancer should not raise someone's body as a dumb skeleton minion that has X and Y health and attack values and he can control X many for Y length of time; no. That shit is lame. It takes all the mystery out of magic, death, and the areas in between.

The Necromancer should be like a wish master, who sees you mourning over your lost love when and brings them back for you. But they don't come back quite right, and they need the flesh of newborns every full moon to stay alive. They beg you to help them feed themselves- "Please Brother, it hurts, I'm hungry, please let help me, I'm dying please. It was cold and dark, I don't want to die." That's a good kind of undead, or something a bit like Frankenstien; a twisted soul fully born with all the facilities of a human but unable to ever truly fit in.

Such creatures should be rare, fleeting things. Not armies of stat-blocks to throw at adventures. Monsters are not things to throw dice at, they are characters 100%. Only then will you go from playing a game to telling a story.

You want an entirely different kind of magic than what most RPG's have and would almost be freeform if you were to try and run it. I would love to see a bit more magic be strange and mysterious than pure science too but you'd have to build the entire setting around it. Having the devil be so vain he literally gets trapped in a mirror would be neat but also exploited by the players the very first time they learn about it.

I disagree. There are several games that do similar things, or there are ways to split it up.

For instance; Ars Magica has a robust magic system where you can basically do anything, but you could easily add in a 'failing spells leads to chaos' sort of thing like MAGE has.

Another method is simply to split them up. Magic that the players use commonly works like traditional gaming magic; using mana points or number of spells per day. However really special things, like magic items or summoned creatures, have special and sometimes random rules that feel very folklore esque.

Like you said; whenever you summon a demon it may have a weakness of being vain and being trapped in a mirror. So you could do something like rolling a d6 with random weakness the players weren't allowed to know about until they started to research it, so they wouldn't know all of the possible outcomes of the dice roll, they'd have to get clues from the world instead.

Im currently playing a guy who stumbled into an ancient evil ritual and accidentally became a necromancer. He's kinda powerful but he's shit scared of skeletons, yet its the only thing he knows how to summon. Im having fun.

I love necromancers, but so few games do them right. They're so much more than flesh/bone manipulators, stapling dead memories together with remains to create subpar servants.

Look to Earthdawn where the Nethermancer takes tea with the ghosts that train him and casts his gaze into far realms to bring back secrets of beyond in his efforts to safeguard the world.

Look to the Old Kingdom Trilogy where they walk the precincts of death and use bells to call back the dead with the taste of life.

The whole deal of Necromancy is delving into the worlds beyond. Stopping at skeleton and zombie minions is like getting a full PHD/Doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry and making nothing but meth and chloroform.
A waste.

this was the biggest issue playing a dread necro in pathfinder.

action economy was banana's. I essentially had multiple PC power undead parties for specialty issues.

bloody Bulette skeleton, dread knight, halfling bard slaymate, and 20 hovering belching skull.

I also had a bag full of shadows. called it my murderous bag of mystery. (no I didnt. wish I had)

I would lend it to the rogue on a case by case basis so he could perform assassinations that required utmost subtly. He would put them in the bag, add to my collection of shadows, and collect their belongings instantly.

That was a long campaign. I bitched about it being ruined in another thread a little while ago.

one of my favourite book series had necromancers be essential to the well-being of the world, because the only way to put down the restless dead for good was using dark energies. While incredibly powerful windmages were almost useless against a horde of undead, who would keep on moving even as little chunks of flesh, a young necromancer could sacrifice a few cats, cast a spell, and make the bodies fall to dust and never rise again, while even a cleared cementary could start spewing undead again if done so by any other force.
Then there was a huge war against a shadow faction using the same dark energy used for necromancy, and mages stopped learning necromancy, until the main character drops in from another universe and becomes the first necromancer in a while.

#triggered

Sorry fair user forgive me.

>Stopping at skeleton and zombie minions is like getting a full PHD/Doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry and making nothing but meth and chloroform.

Good point, how about playing a necromancer like he was some sort of CSI forensic that can sometimes speak with the victims to get certain clues? The rare times I got to play DnD and somebody rolls a necro just makes them so that they are magicians that can summon a shitload of undead minions

i like to think that being able to animate dead, and fire flesh-meting beams is merely a side effect of a necromancers study into the secrets of life and death, and that their studies include things like anatomy, life processes, and medicine, making them excellent doctors and biologists

Right now I'm playing a foppish archaeologist who just stumbled onto old death magic, and uses it to survive. He doesn't raise undead ever. Based roughly on pic related.

A recurring NPC in my game is a necromancer who wants to be a big bad undead conqueror, but only knows how to conjure intelligent undead that don't listen to him and always call him a dork.

>the only way to put down the restless dead for good was using dark energies

What's this series called? Sounds neat.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Perumov
keeper of the swords, written by this guy. Sadly, not translated to english yet.

The thing with necromancy in this setting is the source of the energy used for it - the death around you, and suffering. So for a strong spell a necromancer could torture a few hundred animals, or a person, or save the ambient energy of decay for a few weeks. Its pretty neat, just (typical for russian novels) trails off in far to many directions at the same time.

I play the Necrodancer in every game where I can get away with it.

Otherwise, the Necbromancer.

TO KNOW DEATH, OTTO

YOU HAVE TO FUCK LIFE

IN THE GALBLADDER

>Necromancer is just trying to summon an army of darkness and curse the land
>keeps summoning heroes who keep going and being heroic and saving the land

I play the NecRomancer.

I think my favorite Necromancer character I played was one who went full "arrogant artist" with it.
Skeletons? Zombies? Ghouls? EVERYONE makes those. No he's going to make his own new kinds of undead, and call it artwork.

The BBEG in my first campaign was a druid who flipped out at how nature wasn't as tranquil as he expected and decided to turn his entire forest undead so he could get some peace and quiet.

I like to play a Necromancer that simply offers a sort of closure for living family of the deceased.

So, I'd raise the corpse of a woman's husband so she could give him one ladt farewell and tell him things she meant to.

Woman: "It was my fault pur son went off to the city. I shouldn't have been so hellbent on getting him a wife."

Deadman: "No, honey, it's my fault. He was raised around us arguing since I was a stubborn fool and never listened. Send him letters, but let him make his choices on his own now. He'll be back soon enough."

These are the stories I want to make from being a Necromancer, and if anyone brings up the "alignment is X because of Y class", they're honestly too narrowminded.

I wanted be Johnny Apple seed but with zombie trees

And this is how you play a necromancer.

>Undead hero gives credit to the Necromancer for keeping him raised while he saves a town that the Necromancer wanted to destroy
>Necromancer awkwardly accepts a medal of honour in town from greatful townsfolk
feels like The Grinch

I prefer necromancy as being something explicitly evil and fucked up.

But I prefer necromancers to be the sort of people who do explicitly evil and fucked up things because they think it's funny, or because they hate being told what to do. I want necromancers to not merely be rebels from society, but rebels from the entire theme of the setting. Necromancers are people who say "no, fuck you, I do what I want," and then raise an army of skeletons to burn down the world.

I hate it when necromancy is treated as this sort of neutral force that could totally be used for good, guys, but society just doesn't approve. That's gay as fuck. Necromancy is EVIL in all caps, and it should be evil in all caps. Necromancy as a nerd version of the industrial revolution is lame as fuck and must be discouraged at every turn.

I don't like necromancy as a sole defining character trait, unless it's a cultural thing where the character comes from. Dragon Age had a nation that revered the dead and built elaborate crypts and shit to house them, which were staffed by a mage or two trained in necromancy who could raise the dead for ceremony or whatever. The necromancy in that setting is relatively shit and can only be used for very short periods of time. Mostly good for parlor tricks or turning a commander's dead against him for a few minutes while your real plan goes into action, unless the necromancer is approaching physical god-tier magical ability.

I would rather necromancy just be another tool in the cleric or magician's arsenal, something with a use in some situations but not strong and flexible enough to be their primary weapon. I've never liked the absolute evil-with-a-lower-case-e idea of necromancy just like I've never liked the misunderstood hero necromancer who just wants to improve everyone's lives by raising the dead to turn a system of cranks that power the street lamps or whatever.

I just think it would be nice to have some skeleton friends.