Necromancer issue

[IFCC]

So here is the deal. I am currently running a game where one of the players has created a thri-keen necromancer (specialist wizard; an odd choice i suppose).
He has endeavoured a scheme to conquer the world and its modus operandi is as follows:
1. Gain access to the (allegedly) highly unbalanced spell "Command Undead" + "Animate Dead".

2. Gain neccessary feats;
Craft Wand
Corpsecrafter (Undead gain +4 Str an +2 hp per HD)
Destruction Retribution (Undead minions explode when destroyed, dealing 1d6 [+1d6/2 HD] negative energy damage [thereby healing other undead].

3. He plans to use "Animate Dead to create undead zombies/skeletons above the limit of what he can control (4 x lvl). Then he must forfeit control of some of the undead until he once again controls a number of undead in accordance with said limit.
But the forfeited undead have been created nontheless. And with "Command Undead" (which is a 2nd-lvl spell that allows no save for mindless undead, has no limit to controlled undead, and has a duration of 1 day/lvl) he can reassume control of his forfeited minions, circumvent the limit (especially equipped with about 10 homemade wands with the spell) and create a horde of enhanced, exploding/healing undead minions (a lot of spellcasting is involved, i know) which could then attack a city.

The most troubling aspects of this "master plan" are as follows:
1. He would be seemingly all-powerful while the other PCs would be left in the dirt behind him.
2. (and probably the worst) Does he gain xp for the enemies that his minions take down (that hardly seems fair, being comparable to a general that gains xp for every man in his army)?
3. Let me just point out that there is a reference to "Charm Person"(which apparently has the same "no-limit" problem) in the spell description of "Command Undead". In a similar spell, "Command Plants", the spell description is the EXACT SAME as in "Command Undead", EXCEPT for the HD limit of controlled creatures (which appears in "Command Plants" as being 2 x lvl).

Please help me in counteracting this RPG conundrum, seeing as I am nothing but an inexperienced DM.

[Drynwyn]

#1: Shut him down with a cleric.

#2: Only if he participates directly in the fight.

#3: You could house rule a limit.

[ahenobarbi]

Firstly this will not work as well as the player may expect

Spoiler

Show

4(spell level)*7(minimum caster level) * 750gp = 21000gp

in addition he will have to spend material component 50 times. So if the wand will create (very weak) 1HD undead it will be

50*25*1 = 1250 gp

Base cost of Command Undead wand will be 11250gp. And will control undead only for 3 days.

He will have to spend 17375gp, 1290xp cost and a month of crafting to get 50 very weak undead for 3 days.

If he wanted strong undead (up to 14HD) the cost of matrial component goes up significantly:
50*25*14 = 17500 gp
He would have to spend 33625gp, 1290xp cost and a month of crafting to get 50 rather strong weak undead for 3 days.

Secondly there are ways to deal with undead (with cleric spell level 1 enemies can ignore his unintelligent undead and go directly to hurt him).

Thirdly you really should talk to the player that while it's possible to do what ([s]he|it) wants it will make game less fun so could ([s]he|it) please don't do it.

[ArcturusV]

When dealing with summoned monsters, companions, followers, etc. I always give the player benefit of XP gained for defeating an enemy if the character was a part of the battle/action.

For example:

If said Necromancer is chilling out in his private chambers, napping before he can get his spells per day back, and during this time some peasants wander in and are scared off/eaten by his undead? No, he gained no XP for that.

If said Necromancer is riding an undead warhorse, commanding his undead in person, throwing out spells to bolster them, and giving will/control to otherwise mindless undead so they fight effectively rather than just horde tactics? Yes, he gained XP for that.

Honestly though the cost of doing this, GP wise, treasure, XP to craft items, etc, is high enough that your Necromancer isn't likely to do this until high level. At such a point this plan of his might be the Retirement and NPCification of his character. I wouldn't mind saying, "Okay, big bad is dead, Necromancer is doing his life's work and kicking over towns. Everyone roll me up a 1st level character, we have a new bad guy to quest after."

But that's also a very old school style approach.

[MukkTB]

#1 The local heroes will rise up against him. Clerics can fight undead moderately well. So instead of all powerful lets say very powerful. What are the other players playing? If its him a fighter and a rogue then yes he has pretty much obsoleted them.

I'm pretty sure animate dead isn't a cheap thing to do. Something about diamonds in the eye sockets- let me go check.

"Material Component: You must place a black onyx gem worth at least 25 gp per Hit Die of the undead into the mouth or eye socket of each corpse you intend to animate. The magic of the spell turns these gems into worthless, burned-out shells."

Ok so 25gp/HD. That's not too expensive. 5KGP will net you An army of 200 1HD uncontrolled undead. Why 1HD? Well as far as I can tell skeleton is a template you apply to something. It throws away class HD. So human skeletons will clock in at 1HD. You need to find the skeleton of a monster that naturally has multiple HDs if you want a bigger nastier skeleton. You might find that there is a limited supply of that kind of thing. To reliably acquire it you probably have to go kill some monster. That takes time and effort. If you want an army you're going to have to hit a graveyard.

But we don't want uncontrolled. Let me go check the cost/charge of the wands he intends to use- Wait, Command Undead lasts 1 day per caster level. In wand form that comes to 15GP/day. That terrible. A trained hireling comes in at 3sp per day. For every skeleton shambler you could have hired 45 bloodthirsty mercenaries.

Eck. Ok lets try going back to uncontrolled undead. An uncontrolled undead really isn't any worse than a unsupervised controlled undead. Either way they're not getting new orders. An undead that isn't under control will keep doing the last thing it was ordered to do + it will try to eat people. I'm a little unclear on how that works. But you could send a bunch of uncontrolled undead to attack a town by giving them that order before losing control.

I don't think an army of unthinking undead would be very useful. Sure they would eat a lightly defended town, but a little town with a palisade is going to be hard for mindless creatures to do much with. Imagine a zombie movie where the survivors are camped on the roof of a mall and the zombies are running around below.

#2 If he's in the fight. If he sends them off over the hill at some town he probably deserves some experience for wrecking the town if he succeeds.The experience shouldn't be a ton. CR 5 town anyone?

#3 As I said above, I'm reading (15GP and 3/5 of an XP)/day if you craft your own wand. That gets expensive fast.

[Talderas]

To the OP. He created an inferior Dread Necromancer... basically...

Firstly this will not work as well as the player may expect

Spoiler

Show

4(spell level)*7(minimum caster level) * 750gp = 21000gp

in addition he will have to spend material component 50 times. So if the wand will create (very weak) 1HD undead it will be

50*25*1 = 1250 gp

Base cost of Command Undead wand will be 11250gp. And will control undead only for 3 days.

He will have to spend 17375gp, 1290xp cost and a month of crafting to get 50 very weak undead for 3 days.

If he wanted strong undead (up to 14HD) the cost of matrial component goes up significantly:
50*25*14 = 17500 gp
He would have to spend 33625gp, 1290xp cost and a month of crafting to get 50 rather strong weak undead for 3 days.

Your costs are wrong. I'm not sure what you're trying to do but it's wands of Command Undead which are 2nd level spells and not Animate Dead which are 4th level spells.

Command Undead has a material component without a listed cost and it's certainly not listed as a per hit die cost.

So his cost per wand is 2 (Spell Level) * 3 (Minimum Caster Level) * 750 = 4,500gp per wand if he were to buy the wands, which he is not. A higher caster level could be used for a longer duration but given the exploding corpse feat I doubt that is necessary. However, he has Craft Wand which means the material component for the wand is 2 * 3 * 375 = 2,250gp and 180xp per wand.

That said. It's still inferior to Dread Necromancer. There's also inherent risk since he does need both LoS and LoE to the target undead to command so if he's overcreating undead he'll likely need a holding area with an elevated platform to safely command the undead and his trick is very flimsy as well. The explosion is nice but the most damaging usage of that feat is to go with fractional HD on skeletons. That means you'll end up with very flimsy undead that can easily be killed.

For ways to easily counter this trick.
* Trips that take more than X days to reach their destination where X is the caster level he's crafting his command undead wands at. This will force him to burn through charges on his wand to take any commanded undead with him for adventures.
* Intelligent foes with ranged attacks. They can kill the walking bombs before they're a threat. If they're AoE attacks even better.
* Clerics with turn undead. Likely low HD walking bombs means they can be turned without much difficulty. For double the nasty, make it a neutral or evil cleric with Rebuke and Command undead instead.

[Fouredged Sword]

Wait until he realizes that skeletal rats explode and take negligible amounts of his control pool. Nothing like 20 stack them on his tougher undead and let them act as bombs/healing poitions.

Also he can get around the cost of raising them by fell animating a bag of rats using fell animate burning hands. Get some metamagic reducers and you can do that at not too high of level to be useful.

[Wookie-ranger]

As has been said before.
If the Character is part of the action and participates in the fight/battle then he should get xp. For very large battles (like in the siege of a city) he would only gain xp for either (1) enemies killed in his immediate vicinity or for enemies that he would kill himself.


I am not entirely sure in understand the problem though.
1) This plan is VERY expensive! The onyx alone would bankrupt most PCs if you follow the normal WBL. All the equipment that his minions need, some amounts sum up quickly!

2) What kind of undead are we talking about? Lvl1 commoner skeletons? A level 4 Cleric should not be too hard to find and then they his lovely necromantic automatons are no more.
Or are we talking about Fire-giant skeletons and 6 headed cryo-hydra zombies? First of all, then he would not have too many of those (see point 1) and WHY did you give those to your player????? You can control what kind of monsters are running around. IF there happens to be a Fire Giant town nearby and your PC when grave robbing then the Fire-giants that are left probably don't feel too good about it.

3) Undead are stupid. Very very stupid. So stupid infect that they have no Int score. Think about what an skeleton knows and can do.
"Go there and kill everything that is alive!" simple enough until they arrive at the city gates, which in fact are not alive and there fore the undead would not do anything. (also, they might attack every tree on the way)
"Go through the Streets and bread down every door!" well, first of all you did not tell then to kill anything, second, the will only attack doors, not barricades, draw-bridges, etc.
"Fight everything that attacks you!" Welcome to Peace Town, the first all pacifist community.
As the DM you can be an A** and simply make the mindless undead misunderstand orders, this may not be very classy, but mindless is mindless.
To solve this the undead need to get orders on a constant basis. Your Necro PC could order his skeletons to "obey all commands by PC X until I say other wise". This would divide up the forces, and give the other PCs something to do. The Necro PC would still be the leader of the army, but the other PCs would be sub commanders.

4) A horde of 4000+ skeletons is attacking a big city. First of all, see 1. Second if the City does not have a few mid-high level characters then they deserve to die. Third even a Low-op Character of level 12-16 should be able to handle a BIG chunk of those undead (well, unless he is a fighter). NPCs should be smart, don't just have the Level 15 Royal Court Wizard walk outside and try to stop the hordes of undead with Fireballs from his prepared spells. Why? Because he wouldn't do it!
IF there are mid to high level NPCs in the City then the whole siege could be more of a setting and the PCs need to find and disable said NPCs before/during the actual attack.

Necromancy is relatively balanced in D&D and if you PC WIZARD wants to go that route i am not sure if you should stop him. There are easier ways for a Tier 1 PC to wreck the multiverse and make every pantheon his person lap dog then with the use of undead.

[Talderas]

"Go through the Streets and bread down every door!" well, first of all you did not tell then to kill anything, second, the will only attack doors, not barricades, draw-bridges, etc.

Bread down doors? Why would the attack the door? They'd locate mounds of a bread and stack them in front of doors.

As the DM you can be an A** and simply make the mindless undead misunderstand orders, this may not be very classy, but mindless is mindless.

Misunderstand the orders, like you told them to bread down the doors?

[Wookie-ranger]

Bread down doors?

ok. I LOLed!

Reminds me of the story where a PC handed a note to the DM that wanted to hide in the crowd "disguised as a pheasant".

[The Viscount]

OP, I suggest you have a talk with your player and explain that such huge numbers of undead would be a huge pain to deal with on both sides. He will be using money that could be spent on items and other useful things. Also, explain that he is adding many players to any fight, which will make combat very slow. Suggest he instead focus on making a few potent undead and keeping them alive. What he is doing is legal, but not very considerate.

[Urpriest]

On the other hand, it will be a long time until he can manage it. As a thri-kreen he's got two racial hit dice and at least LA +1 (probably +2) on top, so he won't be getting any undead at all until 10th-11th level.

[Crake]

Let him take the first town with ease. Maybe even the second too.

But then the next town will have had word and will be prepared to deal with a horde of weak undead. A single fireball canon should suffice I'd say? Perhaps they will have consecrated the nearby area. Or hallowed the town and had hide from undead as the auto-cast spell. Or all of the above.

Also, where is he planning on getting the bodies? In a world where necromancy is a thing crypts and graveyards aren't going to be left completely open and available to raid.

[Garan]

One word: Supply.

Where is he going to get all these resources from? From what I see, he needs the materials for the wands, but doesn't he also need corpses? From what I understand, other than humanoid (just knock over the local graveyard) and rats, he isn't going to have a very powerful army. A few wizards casting Fireball in their midst will clear out most of them, and Clerics can mop up the rest.

And as a DM, I would probably have someone notice that there are a rather large amount of undead creating materials being shipped to one place, and sent some kind of task force to deal with him. Maybe that could be an adventure by itself.

[Magesmiley]

One thing to be very strict on when using undead minions is the actions required to command them. This is actually a limiting factor that many players (and Dms TBH) neglect to consider and enforce. During combat it can often be a major decision for a controller whether to spend his/her action to change the minions' orders. Doing so limits what he/she can do in a round. This gets particularly hard when the situation shifts radically.

General orders don't aways cut it - ordering a band of mindless skeletons to attack a city leaves a lot of room for interpretation too. Ordering them to attack a specific objective will net better results, but if the situation changes or the defenders do something smart, they'll still keep mindlessly attacking unless the controller spends his/her actions changing the orders.

Example: a mob of skeletons are supposed to go attack a gate. They charge up and the defenders throw alchemist's fire on the spaces in front of them. The skeletons will keep charging through the fire unless the controller spends his/her actions to tell them to stop. If he/she doesn't, they aren't going to care about the fire - they're mindless.

[Toy Killer]

These are players I long for, right after the ones with arm and a half long back stories.

Relax, he's handed you the keys to a great game.

This is the kind of thing I've never understood to be a 'problem' Player. He wants power, has a plan to get it, and has alerted you to his intentions.

How hard would it be to get him to follow any quest line you put in front of him? Zero complications as soon as he realizes he has something to gain from it. He wants to make wands, he needs wood (Typically, you can adjust the material whenever he needs a new kind, level or type of wand he's trying to make) but oak and balsa aren't going to cut it. Green Yew, would be necessary for process unless he wants to engineer a new way to make this wand.

He wants to make undead? Fine, but he's not the only man (Bug? o.O) to want to do something of this kind and resources are scarce For that reason. Rival Necromancers can provide all sorts of adventures as motivation alone. He gets pulled along for the ride with the party to an adventure and the party notices an arcane mark left on a zombie, a brand of sorts, and boom, he knows that mark, it's Malitio. There is bound to be Onyx in here!

Seriously, we (DMs) call them hooks because we want the players to get caught on them. Hes basically walking around with his mouth flailing and sticking anything in it. Limit his power, give him a few moments of glory, let him impact the story and give him rivals on both the clerical side (Palor is Pissed!) and the undeath Side (Malitio just realized her cache of Onyx is missing!). Random encounters don't have to be so random after all. he's provided enough enemies to make this a cake walk.

[drack]

These are players I long for, right after the ones with arm and a half long back stories.

Relax, he's handed you the keys to a great game.

This is the kind of thing I've never understood to be a 'problem' Player. He wants power, has a plan to get it, and has alerted you to his intentions.

How hard would it be to get him to follow any quest line you put in front of him? Zero complications as soon as he realizes he has something to gain from it. He wants to make wands, he needs wood (Typically, you can adjust the material whenever he needs a new kind, level or type of wand he's trying to make) but oak and balsa aren't going to cut it. Green Yew, would be necessary for process unless he wants to engineer a new way to make this wand.

He wants to make undead? Fine, but he's not the only man (Bug? o.O) to want to do something of this kind and resources are scarce For that reason. Rival Necromancers can provide all sorts of adventures as motivation alone. He gets pulled along for the ride with the party to an adventure and the party notices an arcane mark left on a zombie, a brand of sorts, and boom, he knows that mark, it's Malitio. There is bound to be Onyx in here!

Seriously, we (DMs) call them hooks because we want the players to get caught on them. Hes basically walking around with his mouth flailing and sticking anything in it. Limit his power, give him a few moments of glory, let him impact the story and give him rivals on both the clerical side (Palor is Pissed!) and the undeath Side (Malitio just realized her cache of Onyx is missing!). Random encounters don't have to be so random after all. he's provided enough enemies to make this a cake walk.

While I quite fervently agree with this I would point out a few reasons why the player's actions are not so terribly unbalanced.

1) This does entail heavy costs as mentioned above. 50gp/HD, with the cost to put it in a wand on top of that.

2)The player will only have aces to these minnions for a short while if he needs wands to maintain them. How many days does it take to reach town, and what CL wands is he using? Oh you don't say, then he's got a ticking time bomb that will blow in his face in ________ days.

3) Commanding undead is a standard action, and every time he wants to direct them to do something he has to use a standard action.

4) well I don't want to make a huge list if you don't need it (tell me if you need more), but nothing defends a city from a horde of undeads quite like a moat of holy water...

[Twilightwyrm]

As noted, the cost in treasure and XP for creating many small undead, is quite high. When looking to ravage cities, he would be much better advised to take Complete Mage's advice, and use his spell casting to create a few super-powered undead minions which he could then use to Godzilla cities into submission, than try to create enough skeletons to swarm the place. There is a reason only mad necromancers try an create an "army" of undead; all the sane ones with designs on world conquest are waiting to trap and kill a true behemoth to reanimate.

[drack]

As noted, the cost in treasure and XP for creating many small undead, is quite high. When looking to ravage cities, he would be much better advised to take Complete Mage's advice, and use his spell casting to create a few super-powered undead minions which he could then use to Godzilla cities into submission, than try to create enough skeletons to swarm the place. There is a reason only mad necromancers try an create an "army" of undead; all the sane ones with designs on world conquest are waiting to trap and kill a true behemoth to reanimate.

I seem to have misunderstood... he' not making big ones?

then just toss some level 5 commoners at him and be done with it. if he raises them they raise at their RHD or in the case of these blokes default to 1 I believe...

[WhatBigTeeth]

At a certain point in D&D, usually around ecl 9, characters start to be able to do all sorts of zany stuff like ride dinosaurs, boss dragons around, and change the nature of the campaign with an unexpected morning spell selection. If your campaign can't grow to accommodate that, you're going to have even more trouble than some player-controlled skeletons.

If he tries to take over the world, great - that's just begging for plot hooks.

Even if the necromancer gets his undead production system off the ground, look at th other abilities D&D characters can throw around: maybe a titan opens gates for armies of celestials or devils to rise in opposition, maybe a church rallies opposition under its high-level cleric leaders, maybe a druidic sect opposes the necromantic methodologies, maybe he's stepping out of line with the predominant wizarding group's bylaws and he needs to be reigned in, maybe aboleths use the chaos of the necromancer's war to mask their own rise to power, and so on

If you throw a preliminary assassination team from some sort of opposing group, and build that group into a comparably-powered threat, you'll be able to keep your campaign moving, without stepping on the player's ideas of what the game should be about.

[drack]

I think it's more a matter of him dwarfing the other players so that they can't do jack...

[WhatBigTeeth]

Oh. Right. That thing.

I think this is where we look at our edition choice and laugh a forlorn laugh.

[drack]

lolz, mayhaps. Though I think there's enough in this thread to cripple him more then enough to get him back at the right strength.

[Kelb_Panthera]

On the note of making the other players feel useless, since it hasn't been addressed by anyone yet; an undead army needs its generals, doesn't it.

The necromancer can command detachments of his undead "army" to obey one of the other pary members. If you're tracking XP seperately for each character's defeated enemies (gods why?) then the each party member gets xp for the enemies defeated by the undead under his command.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Swarms of lesser minions aren't too effective without something like a Bard + Requiem to boost them. At this point, a single low-level cleric can completely shut him down, and all that onyx he spent is completely wasted.

Oh sure, the Destructive Retribution is perfect for temporary disposable minions, getting something out of it, but you're effectively paying 25 gp in onyx for every 1d6 damage of area effect. That's a sucker's bet that will leave him bankrupt in short order.

If he was getting skeletons of things that have a lot of natural attacks (hydras) or Pounce (most of the large cats), that might be a little more troublesome. As it is... he's just arbitrarily nerfing himself.

[Garan]

As noted, the cost in treasure and XP for creating many small undead, is quite high. When looking to ravage cities, he would be much better advised to take Complete Mage's advice, and use his spell casting to create a few super-powered undead minions which he could then use to Godzilla cities into submission, than try to create enough skeletons to swarm the place. There is a reason only mad necromancers try an create an "army" of undead; all the sane ones with designs on world conquest are waiting to trap and kill a true behemoth to reanimate.

Why do you think Sauron focused on the Witch King of Angmar and other powerful spirits (and we never see hordes of undead)?