fun with corpses

out of curiosity, i've been playing around with a necromancy-style cleric.

(i looked through the SRD and PHB and couldnt find a duration for commanded undead, im pretty sure that the duration is permanent)

butttttt, upon resting i found that undead minions (and this applies to ones created with animate dead as well) get paralyzed (they can still move out of combat, but thats it) for some reason - this doesnt happen ALL the time, but rest a few times and they'll get it...

can anyone else try this out? or is it already a documented bug...

 

argh... my bad sorry, that was really easy to find too... :sadblinky

did a little more looking into it; animate dead is meant to affect more than one creature at once - provided you have sufficient corpses, you can animate up to 2 x caster level HD worth, according to PHB, per cast (4xcaster with desecrate), and can control up to 4 x caster level HD total. This total is seperate from the rebuking total.

With rebuking, its possible to roll a solo cleric, travel to emridy meadows, and without landing a single blow in the game, suddenly grab 6 minions.

Now, im assuming that they've gone by the formula that a cleric can turn/rebuke, with a turn check of 22+ up to 4HD more than the clerics level, with improved turning adding one more level to that, for a total of 6.

However, in the PHB p159 under the 'commanded:' heading for evil clerics, there is the following sentence:

"At any one time, the cleric may command any number of undead whose total Hit Dice does not exceed his level"

While the rebuke check does allow up to 6HD to be affected as shown above, this sentence means that even if improved turning is being counted towards this... which i'm not sure about, 6 minions is way off.

at level 1 you should have max 1HD of minions (2 if you count improved turning)

The rest of the undead should be rebuked, right? I would assume that this is a way of balancing the power that an army of minions entails - where a good cleric basically nukes undead of half his level, the evil one gets to control some - arguably more powerful, but only rebuke others.

Anyone an expert on evil clerics that might know more about this?

 

fyi - I am finding this line of questioning by vampiricpuppy to spur a particular interest for an answer concerning my MOD, as well.

 

create undead/create greater undead would be cool, if potentially unbalanced even if the casting time is an hour and needs to be done at night >_>

also, in pnp you can animate pretty much anything, they just need to be corporeal and have bones - skeletons would be impossible without access to animations, but zombie skins maybe? :icon_chuc

 

Hmm... a zombie would make a perfect mummy. :]
There are also wraiths and other things, so I am sure
we could make new undead.

 

Would access to minions' inventories be impossible/ridiculously hard to implement?

 

lol, i was thinking more of a 'hand over item' command

changing the amount to obscene levels would make it ridiculous when you killed one of them and no longer needed to worry about ammunition for the rest of the game

 

Why couldn't you give them a rusty dagger to use when the bolts ran out? Might be just as easy to script a "switch weapons" order.

 

would there be a way of testing whether the paralysis bug is a result of the undead being 'commanded' or not?