The True Cost of Undead

Counter question:
Why are so many people assravaged by the idea of necromancers that aren't baby-eating villains? I get that in some versions of DnD it's explicitly an evil act but there seems to be unreasonable hostility to the concept in general.

Undead armies are like new charcoal grills. If you can have one, you tend to contrive excuses as to why its a good idea to have one. That said, if you replace traditional backbreaking labor with guided skeleton armies and pay supervisors asmuch as laborers, your already ahead. Run a gold mine on skeleton labor rather than slaves to your doom empire and add a law putting all corpses of citizens to use for the grater good. A fully fleshed out (ha) version of this is a creative writing piece I can remember from user Hiver on Spacebattles.

Yes. It was just a one on one campaign.

My world my rules. Animated dead had spirits bound to them and they don't like it. So they turn on you. His goal was to find a way to make deals with willing spirits which I let him pursue and eventually have. He founded a domain with a small army and a few apprentices before a group of paladins and clerics invaded and purged them all.

because it's ingrained in pretty much every culture throughout history and the modern day that disturbing the dead is NOT COOL with a capital NOT COOL, and that translates into fiction because fiction is created by humans who grew up in human cultures

Yet adventurers traditionally spend their waking hours raiding tombs and crypts.

And killing the undead lurking around in those tombs and crypts.

Because it can easy in 3.5

If you get animate dead as a spell like you can laugh at anyone who doesn't want to have a zombie army.

Just become a spellstiched necropolitian.

yeah...

>My world my rules
This is acceptable I suppose.

>24/7 concentration check to keep your minion from attacking you.
Why would anyone even bother? Ever?

>giving crippling mechanical nerfs to an actual game mechanic instead of simply removing it.
>What a shit DM
This would seem to be true...

>His goal was to find a way to make deals with willing spirits which I let him pursue and eventually have.
Yet there's this.

>I didn't make him do the belly tap everytime
Bit of an idiot though.

>easy in 3.5
Lots of things are easy in 3.5, that doesn't mean they're a good thing.

Probably the truth of where the attitude comes from though.

I just don't understand you. It's a one on one campaign. So your player came to you and was like

"I want to play a campaign where I am a Necromancer."

and you responded

"Okay sure, by the way here's my setting, Necromancy sucks and is shit, also fuck you."

Why would you do a one on one campaign and nerf the specific thing your player was interested in playing?

It's cheaper and easier to have hordes of the living forced to do what you want

Skeleton armies are a mercy to its people

>Undead armies are like new charcoal grills. If you can have one, you tend to contrive excuses as to why its a good idea to have one.
OP here.
Aa a connoisseur of analogies, I have to say that this analogy alone has justified the creation of the thread.
Solid points too.

Undead are nothing compared to what other spell casters can pull out of there butt.

Basically the best undead class(the dread necromancer) is squarely at tier three.

Are you autistic or something jesus.

He wasn't a necromancer. He was an evil sorceror who wanted to raise a million undead to conquer the world. I roleplayed him through learning that raised dead are spirits of the once living bound to a body that is preserved with magic. He followed through learning the ritual to summon a spirit and bind it to a person he killed that day. He then learned that he could only control one undead at a time because his character couldn't devote enough concentration to more yet. Gotta up the INT you psycho I told him. He also then learned that his preservation magic was weak because the body decayed in a couple weeks and became a skeleton basically. He didn't want that, he wanted a stinking shambling warrior hoard to be his army to conquer the world. This happened over the course of several games which he enjoyed playing.

Or I guess I could have been a non-shit DM and just let him control a massive army right off the start, run one game where he uses it to destroy the world.

You do realize that undead are generally really nice to evil sorcerers right?

And that necromancy is already worse than straight off not being a spell caster.

You really didn't have to worry.

>The cost is the spell slots and material components.
Difference between cost and True Cost.
But yeah.

>who cares, not our problem
Great contribution to board discussion.

>I'll just open a few portals to the PEP and it'll all balance out in the long run
Not a poorfag transmuter, but I'm not certain that "There's a wildfire? Start a flood!" is the most responsible approach.

Plus the planes have this great way of balancing themselves out.

Which is why if you are an undead keep a garden that way you balance the NE and the PE

They negate and cancel each other, as you'd know if you had finished the second week of a junior apprenticeship. It's not fighting fire with a flood, it's fighting fire with antifire.
I'd also like to note that you're not bitching about healing spells despite the lethal dosage of positive energy being LOWER for any given subject.

I didn't want to make it easy for him, where's the challenge. Undead in my world were bound spirits. Only powerful sorcerors could make a deal with a willing spirit. This is because any willing spirit wants to make sure who they deal with is powerful enough to make sure they stick around in a decent body and not rot away or get slaughtered by a cleric day one.

Necromancers in my world are the good guys, they guide the spirits to their gods in the afterlife where they wander lost. They do not raise dead or summon spirits, actually they can but only if they go on a quest to help that spirit first to resolve some event in their life they were unable to do themselves, like bury thier body, avenge their death or care for their loved one by giving them gold coins. My psycho friend sorcerer actually had to deal with and kill these necromancers before he could rule his domain. The son of the last old necromancer he killed was a paladin and killing that necromancer caused the backlash from the paladins and clerics that ended in his character getting btfo.

Any more questions?

This man brings a good point

The PEP is actually more harmful to living creatures than the NEP is to undead creatures.

Why would they be restricted to negative energy? I prefer Frankenstein version, through lightning life is reanimated.

You really could have just told him that his concept really couldn't have worked.

Instead of hogtieing him. That's no fun for anyone.

>Necromancers create undead to do all the work
>Millions of peasants starve, having lost their jobs to cheaper undead labor

>What people think and what the costs are is up to you. What are your setting goals?
Great point and great question.
I intended the thread to be in regards to fantasy in general, but to answer your question, my setting goals could be summed up as "Incorporate as much D&D fantasy elements and aspects as possible while crafting a world that makes sense internally from start to finish."

Man I hope you both had fun but I would not have.

It couldn't work, but he wanted to do it, so I made it work. t.shitdm

>Not starting an artistic revolution.
>not training people as priests or necromancers or bards.

What are you stupid?

>Why are so many people assravaged by the idea of necromancers that aren't baby-eating villains?
Subverting tropes and ideas simply to do it is bad writing or bad writing tritely reversed.
Subverting what is considered good or evil in a shsllow attempt to place the intended audience on the wrong side of morality is hack garbage.
A good necromancer isn't necessarily either of those, but it could easily be and that is enough to trigger some and caution others.

It's hardly a subversion there's good necromancers everywhere.

Don't quote me on this but I think there is one in the Bible

The PEP is also more harmful to living creatures than the NEP is to living creatures.

I'm pretty sure there's no good guy in the Bible who raises undead. Unless you're being edgy and referring to resurrection as necromancy in which case all clerics are necromancers.

No like a dude who raises spirits.

Which falls under necromancy.

1. Cheaper than making golems
2. Safer than summoning demons and elementals (lasts longer too)
3. I don't play 3.PF so the negative energy bullshit doesn't exist.
4. Aesthetically cool
5. Recycling

Negative energy literally doesn't matter in 3.5.

If it mattered the inevitables would get involved.

And demons require a high social build, but can be quite useful so don't could them out yet.

>They negate and cancel each other, as you'd know if you had finished the second week of a junior apprenticeship.
Opposing elements negate each other?
Interesting.

>It's not fighting fire with a flood, it's fighting fire with antifire.
Antifire is the opposing element of fire?
Huh.
I wonder if there's another name for that force that quenches flame.
It's damn surprising that nobody has ever wondered about this before.
Perhaps we could ask a bunch of wise sages what element negates fire, and see if they know another name antifire might go by.

What do you think user?

>Why would they be restricted to negative energy?
I prefer other types, myself.

>I prefer Frankenstein version, through lightning life is reanimated.
>1.21 gigawatts of undead
Dr. Von Braun the Necomance

Either they were poorly educated or you're a dunce unaware of the fact that necromancy was indeed the only conventional solution available to them at the time.

Seems cool to me user why wouldn't you have fun?

Sure hope you don't need gigawatts because lightning bolts don't approach that at all.

Ah, I see I'm speaking with somebody who went to a mage's tower not to learn magic, but instead to learn rhetoric.

Positive and negative energy are not elements. They do oppose, cancel, and negate each other. Basic math fact, 1 + -1 = 0. Can't say I expected you to know that though.

At this point, everything is a subversion.

Subvertception.

Oh boy.

I recall reading DnD books about evil stuff and there are zombie creating machines designed for pumping out undead.

>secondly, there is any reason to think creating persistent undead comes at zero cost?

Is there any reason to think that they come at any cost? It's a fantasy game dude. It's all made up. Zombies aren't real. Undead don't exist. Necromancy doesn't exist.

What you are really asking is 'how do I make Necromancy balanced?'

If your player wants to run a evil campaign where he is a diabolical necromancer there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Gimping the player with tedious rules and limiting his power is the easiest and laziest way to do it. It sounds like you have a very competitive attitude where you are desperate to win as a DM. It might make you feel good to stomp a gimped necromancer, but undeniably it's not very fun for the player. At least I would think.

What are alternatives to challenge a unbalanced necromancer? Let's say a necromancer grows unhindered and gets a couple hundred zombies and skeletons, maybe a vampire, wight and skeleton dragon.

You can always field an army of 500 peasants, cavalary, and knights to wage war against him, as apposed to having a boring cleric fighter raiding party gangrape a bunch of helpless undead and necromancer. No matter the amount of undead he summons, you can always create an army to equal or surpass him.

Another thing you can always consider is using time as a factor. Sure, the necromancer can spend time pumping out zombies, but in the mean time factions of humans gather power and form alliances to make things much harder for the evil doer.

The approach you took is the most unimaginative one, in my eyes. If you hold contempt for the player and are just plotting to over throw him, while gimping him with tedious rules, you are not a good DM.

>Unless you're being edgy and referring to resurrection as necromancy in which case all clerics are necromancers.
How are they not?
Don't they communicate with holy spirits?
No joke: In my system, literally all cleric power is technically a form of necromancy.

Was Lazarus undead?

He was dead, and then stopped doing that.

So undead, in a certain perspective.

What does the "E" in PEP stand for again?

Positive energy plane.

Negative energy plane.

Energy.
Man, you REALLY didn't learn anything, did you?

I... went to community mage school.

Diablo 2 has a good description of the necromancer.

Although their art is considered “dark,” and the people of the outside world shun the priests who practice these arts, these mysterious cultists never suffered the epidemic of corruption that plagued the ancient Mage Clans. Pragmatists in the truest sense, they are above temptation. They see death merely as a natural part of life and do not seek to deny its arrival. Their singular knowledge of the unknown allows them to face death without fear. These ideals, coupled with an understanding of the natural balance between Order and Chaos, explain why they have not fallen prey to the influences of evil.

Their desire to uphold this balance has brought the Necromancers forth from the isolation of their remote, dank homeland to destroy Diablo and his brethren. For the mere presence of these Prime Evils on the mortal realm upsets the natural symmetry of not only the mortal realm, but also the Great Cycle of Being, itself. The followers of Rathma seek to right the balance by ridding the mortal realms of non-mortal intervention altogether. They resent any force that would treat humans as pawns in a cosmic game, though they are apparently willing to ally with the forces of Order but only until such time as the balance is restored.

As might be expected, the devotees of magic are a segregated lot. They are as leery of students of rival disciplines as a layperson is of all arcane practitioners. None, however, are so widely maligned and misunderstood as the Priests of Rathma.

As with most users of magic, the priests of the cult of Rathma hail from the far Eastern jungles. They reside in a vast underground city located deep within those jungles. Their specific geographical locale is particularly secluded, however, preventing their assimilation into a formal mage clan. But it is this same isolation that allowed them to pursue their distinct kind of arcane science. For it is through the teachings of Rathma, as well as through years of research and physical experimentation, that these men have come to understand and hold sacred the delicate balance of life and death and are able to twist the line that borders the two. For although the minions of Hell have long possessed this power, among mortals the knowledge to reanimate and control the dead belongs to these priests alone. It is this practice that has lead outsiders to refer to them as Necromancers. They truly comprehend the balance of all things, and understand and accept their place in what they refer to as the Great Cycle of Being.

Their culture has subsisted in the shadow of the great mage clans from the earliest days, and in most ways their practice reaches back to a time before magic was formalized into strict disciplines.

Depends on setting

Do you even read what you type out?

>Gimping the player with tedious rules and limiting his power is the easiest and laziest way to do it.

>You can always field an army of 500 peasants, cavalary, and knights to wage war against him, as apposed to having a boring cleric fighter raiding party gangrape a bunch of helpless undead and necromancer. No matter the amount of undead he summons, you can always create an army to equal or surpass him.

Literally the most boring, unimaginative and predictable thing a DM can do to gimp the player with tropic plot and limiting his power

Also the body is already design by nature to function good enough. It not like they have free will and will need to put some basic script in to mimic troop.
Always have a parasitic electric eel inside an undead
It's magic.

In D&D it's literally a non-issue.

If it's a different setting, work out a solution or just say no. Don't make him weak for some false sense of balance.

Capacitors in the neckbolts, didn't Frankenstein need 3 or so strikes to animate the body?

I don't know how many watts a lightning bolt has exactly I assume at least 10 billion maybe?

10 billion per bolt.

It looks like.

A watt is a measure of speed, you idiot.

wat?

You should read more carefully. I suggested the opposite of limiting his power.

My entire post argued against limiting his power. It contains a reference to a zombie making machine.

No idea what you mean by tropic plot. There is nothing wrong with matching an undead force with an even opponent.

A watt is one joule/second. Seriously, retake middle school physics.

>Always have a parasitic electric eel inside an undead

>tropic plot
>There is nothing wrong with matching an undead force with an even opponent.

cliché, expected, predictable, boring. IMHO
I guess it would depend on the situation though and the players.

The hell are you on? A watt is a unit of power used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. A measurement of speed is miles or kilometers per hour.

That's true, but it's not correct to say it's a messure of speed.
Joule is a unit of energy, watt is a unit of power.

I will give you that it is cliche and expected.

Can you suggest alternatives, generally speaking?

I mean what other trajectory can the campaign go?

Reanimating the dead is an outdated and obsolete practice of necromancy, friend.

We necromancers fully acknowledge the ethical and indeed practical superiority of the artificers and summoners in this regard.

This thinly-veiled attack suggesting that we are all chomping at the bit - awaiting with glee the opportunity to get our hands on a corpse so we can meddle with it like a puppet - ignores the fact that in the Last War it was the king's degree that our powers should be used this way. Few among us now even remember this time, but we have stopped teaching innervation tehcniques to acolytes so that our powers might never be used that way again, no matter which way political winds blow.

You ignore our contribution to medicine, countermagic, and forensics at your own peril. Find me a necromancer that wishes to raise a corpse and I will find you ten evokers who have lit their own pet on fire just to watch it burn, ten enchanters who use their magic for rape, and ten illusionists who have stabbed a man wearing his friend's face.

Each corpse is an epilogue to a life story, writ in scar and sinew, tattoo and toenail. We are the tenders of those stories. To ruin this history by turning it into a mindless monster is far more abhorrent to myself than it could even be to you.

Now run along and think about what you've done, I've got a plague to tend to.

>Muh necromancers can't sleep, cause I don like undead and it's wrongbadfun!

>Necromancer learns 'Keep Watch'

Well, I don't know what you'd do about that shit, but otherwise you're a right bucket o' fun, ain'tcha OP?

I'm flummoxed that warlocks can't become necromancers like a wizard can when their class is so much better for it flavor-wise, and they can even have a fucking lich for a patron. For God's sake.

Lol, all these necrophiliac apologists and their beta cucks...

Golems are superior in ever way to rotting corpses and piles of bones.
>Need a guard?
>My steel golem is nigh impossible to beat.
>Need a more subtle guard?
>We have wood, stone, crystal, and many other types.
>Is that a statue? Nope. It's a golem.
>Never betrays, never gets turned by a good cleric, or over taken by an evil one.
>They're expensive tho, say poorfags
>I turn lead into gold, wtf do I care about gold costs?

t. Transmuter master class

Suck it, necrolosers

Well lets say you have a group of magic users or necromancers that raise up an army of undead. Lets assume there's pretty much every type that can be made or summoned. They have an army and plan to do nasty things.

This can go a lot of different ways.
.) The Gods might take notice and send avatars to intervene. This results in an opportunity for a powerful force to take over a Gods place in the Heavens. One of the players? An evil demon? Some outside BBEG who helped the players along this whole time with this exact plan in mind?

.) Some nation might want to hire the players to conquer their enemys. This can lead to your mass battle option or a huge world war when the "enemy" country has many powerful allies that come to it's aide. The players might not have expected this much resistance.

.) The natural order intervenes. The syphoning of negative energy causes the planets natural balence to go haywire, positive energy overpowers the planar realm and as a result, bleeds uncontrollably into the realm the players have their dead army in, the result that it becomes extremely difficult to raise or maintain undead if not outright destroying them. Also causes a cataclysm on the living, aI plague maybe?

Go on?

Transmutation doesn't work like that.

Plus golems cost xp and undead don't.

Technically, if all those peasants starve, then they have an exciting new job opportunity in undead labor.

Thanks Mr. Necrophiliac Loser.

If I need xp, I take a couple golems and go slaughter a couple monster lairs.

>Never betrays
>1% cumulative chance of going berserk per six seconds
>your average golem can't contain its elemental hateboner for you for much longer than 2 minutes of fighting
>your servant is a prematurely majaculating lump of shit
>meanwhile corpses don't need to be loyal because they're busy exploding in your midst
>meanwhile ghosts hang around forever just being assholes right where you killed them
>meanwhile vampires take care of their own business, don't shit where they eat, and can discuss literature and history from ages past with you

I know you got into transmuting so you could be the little girl, and you feel like you need a big metal guy to protect you from the big wizards on the playground. Have you ever considered that nobody bothers you and your stupid madeup boyfriends because they think you're fucking weird and want nothing to do with you?

I literally don't have to get anything but a corpse.

Or do anything.

And transmutation doesn't work like that.

Not that user but you were playing a one on one game and instead of saying "alright, we can have an undead hordes v. Crusaders of light game" you were like "let me just make that idea impossible", and when you finally do manage some semblance of your goal you just get immediately hatefucked by the local chapter of Justice and Pals.

I am that user and this:

>parasitic electric eel powering zombie slaves
that's really gross. that's my kind of shit, user. thank you.

>undead hordes v. Crusaders of light game

but thats exactly what became of it in the end. Just instead of doing that from the get go I dm'd a big campaign out of it where he earned the ability to achieve his goal. He got the big battle at the end but it was beyond his skill to keep from getting his empire beat down.

Basically, while I understand and agree that the joy of being a DM is bringing *your* setting to life, as a player I don't give a shit and if your game can't provide me with what I need (in this instance, raising an undead horde) then I'm gonna move on, no harm no foul.

Well that's not really how you characterized it before. What were the relative strength of the combatants? Did he have a chance or did you do the Crusader equivalent of "rocks fall, everyone dies"?

Well the first one is interesting and one I haven't considered.

The second one is as cliche as my suggestion.

The third one just sounds like a DM getting mad and having the players get killed by falling rocks without a roll.

I would argue that in terms of fun my suggestion is better and getting hired out as mercs for a foreign power isn't any more creative. The third option is interesting but I don't see how that would be any fun for an evil campaign.

Except that you can get your skellyman armada after like, 3 years of necromancy, then go on to something else.
You are in transmutation for the long haul.

% cumulative chance of going berserk per six seconds
Says who?
The latest literature mentions nothing of the sort.

>undeadfags
>golemfags
>enchanters probably about to show up too

haha nigga how is it hard just form yourself a servant from the basic elements of life haha

grow it in a tube nigga haha

You can have character progression and earning abilities to achieve his goal without gimping him with tedious gimmicks just because of balance and that you want to end up winning in the end.

For you it might have seemed 'realistic' (even though it's completely fantasy to begin with) but gimping him to move at a snail's pace is not fun. Undead have a ton of weaknesses, it is the do-gooders that are over powered. It should not take much imagination to keep the undead threat in check if you have to.

It sounds like you just gimped him then raped him with higher level adventurers. You shouldn't view it as a competition or threat. He's the protaganist, not the do gooders. The do gooders are the antagonists in the story.

Who cares about 5e?
And you roll a d6 when it is below 60 HP in 5e