As a summoner... ALWAYS have the darn stat blocks for your summons, it's a pain to set up but oh gods the relief when you just have to pick out the booklet and go some five pages through for your Summon Creature 3 statblocks to appear. I did this as a Wizard, categorized my spells by school, damage type and level of casting. Lotsa work at first but so happy.
Whenever I played a caster I always had a copypasted booklet of my spells and statblocks for critters. DMs have enough to do already and I didn't want to slow down the table. I did the same for feats, racial traits, and class features, too. My fellow players usually did something analogous or bribled/wheedled me into assembling it for them. We were able to concentrate on roleplaying and smoothly transition into the crunchy bits when necessary.
@@juliandacosta6841 Now i think so, back when i was Wizard'ing it up we were doing 3.5E so i'm a bit fuzzy on the details of all the spells. I jsut remember i had the pages of Creature stat blocks for each summon on hand along side all my spells. :D
As someone who had lowest initiative three sessions in a row in one campaign, I will personally execute anyone who introduces a large amount of enemies or allies into a fight. *BE CONSIDERED TO THE LAST PERSON IN INITIATIVE YOU TWATS*
Also, lots of shiny click-clacks to roll (?) Unironically the reason why I like playing a summoner druid. I once managed to do 15 rolls to attack in a round, while still at level 5. I was grinning so much.
I find using home brew stat blocks for large blobs to be easier than having the turn order of death and dullness. They have a over reaching and controlling to some degree over mind so why not?
As a former Necromancer player myself… Swarms. Just use swarms. Have them attack at the same time, just up the damage and health according to size. Do NOT try to be the guy who has to spend an hour rolling for every zombie in his horde. It’s not fun and your DM will absolutely be ready to murder you, and your party will let him.
Or, just begin using 'macros' What I mean is, if you have 15 zombies, just use something like Avrae. "What's their AC? Ah, 17, well my zombies have a +6 to hit now, so they only need 11 or higher. So, let's roll 15d20 and have it tell me instantly how many rolled 11 or higher. Oh look, 7 hits, one of those is a critical, nice. I'll roll damage." but faster. "AC 17, +6 to hit, so 11 or higher. Hey avrae, "!rrr 15 1d20 11" - (avrae rolls 15 sets of 1d20 DC 11, says how many succeed) - so that's 7 hits, one of those is a crit, rolling damage now...."
@@g80gzt the problem is the individual movement you really have to turn them into a blob swarm or formation at some point also tracking hp is a problem when enemys dont oneshot them turning them into a swarm, formation,blob or minions can really help with that The individual attack and dmg rolls are pretty much the least important thing if your dm doesnt care about you knowing ac which he really shouldnt anyway since with this many attacks ac will be pretty obvious based on what hit and what didnt hit
Me? I just have my necromancer adding new parts to his familiar which he's just slowly making stronger, with the occasional side undead as a repeatative miner. The big guy can easily kill a dragon by level 20, while the lower ones just make a check each hour to see how much ore they've dug up
To generalize, the solution to all the problems is to homebrew, combine groups of skeletons into units manning a ballista. let your players summon stronger undead instead of many weaker, etc etc
I feel like it would work well to treat it kinda like playing guardsmen in warhammer. Basically move them in squads and when attacking just mass roll. As long as the decision making is quick the turn should roll by fast
I made it fun by playing my necromancer as an antique dealer.. I never used my undead for combat, as a DM I know it's a waste of table time and resources. My undead were there to help me steal all the furniture and help carry the party's extra loot when needed. Usually played it for comic relief, so the party would jokingly ask for undead to help (we had talked about it ahead of time as an inside joke) then the DM or I would follow up with a hilarious situation. "You see Korhagen's skeletons run by carrying an armoire" or "They're a little busy, that wiring desk is a Viridianleaf original, do you have any idea how rare those are!". Good times. 😂
Gotta admit i LOVE this. Now i wanna play a Necromancer thats a pickpocket/thief. He thinks hes amazing but its the skeletons that wont stop following after he stole a book giving a passive intimidation to let him do what he wants.
Mine was a take over a lords estate and use undead to mine and cut wood 1000 skeleton workforce unloading from the back of a wagon like battle droids from starwars.
@@c.g.278 it does in baldurs gate 3, i also came to dnd recently after playing bg3 myself and found out danse macabre doesn't summon ghouls in the og tabletop and i was bummed
The only rule that we switched out when I played a Grung necromancer is instead of micro-managing 10 zombies, my necromancer would make a zombie or skeleton swarm that would get more powerful or weaker based on current HP. Speeds up necromancer combat so much by only needing to action 1 mob instead of 10.
@valanshard2105 sure. I built a table to track it all. So the raise dead spell would work as intended, giving a single zombie or skeleton to start. Once there were multiple zombies, it turned in a zombie swarm. Take the base zombie stats, and for every extra zombie, add +1 hit die (1d8) to HP, +1 to attack, +1d6 to damage, size increased after every 3 zombies. I think for undead fortitude, we did roll +CON after taking damage to heal 1d8 HP to mimic zombies getting back up. The hard part was tracking the swarm getting weaker and smaller as HP was chipped away. I think we connected this to failed undead fortitude saves. Remember, it's a whole swarm, so flavor wise, multiple zombies were sharing damage.
I ran a campaign once that had a necromancer in a party with a fighter, cleric, and paladin. Had such wonderful and deep arguments amongst my players about the morality and sanctity of life and death. Then there was me the dm who just lost his father a few months back. I never told them but those arguments they had in character helped me a lot.
Yes, I am playing a druid in a 3.5 Play-by-Chat land online and my "Notes" section on the virtual Character Sheet is just Eagles, Wolves, Hippogriffs and Crocodiles, all with the appropriate buffs already inserted.
It's the summoner's job to bookkeep and do the research for their style. If you start to bog down the game by not knowing how your character works, you should hold off on playing it until you can smooth it out
new D&D UA, when it comes out, is hopefully going to just straight up fix the necromancer subclass, and animate dead spell, I'm playing a necromancer in an upcoming oneshot with just the changes to the base class, (summon undead spirit helps a ton), but I really want to see animate dead have some justice done to it
As a GM of over two decades, I've never had a summoner-type character in the party that didn't take about as much time to run their turn as the entire rest of the party combined. Sometimes the player is great at it, describing everything in a way that makes their turn fun to even just watch, but far more often it turns into just spending time discussing rules or not being able to decide on an action, forcing the rest of the party to just wait for ages on end. I don't ban those kinds of builds from my games, but I do try to steer them towards a more manageable character build that would still fulfill a similar fantasy - preferably one that includes and takes the party into consideration, as TTRPGs tend to be co-op, and not single player - when we have our session zero. There was once a player who wanted to make a beast summoner, but we ended up reflavoring a sorcerer and their spells to fit that idea, instead. I think he liked that one more than the druid he had been considering, but that's conjecture.
TI be fair that's just being a good player in general I've seen too many people sit there taking 5-10 minutes to go threw a turn in combat. Read you class and skills when not playing people it doesn't take long
Had a necromancer that thought he was just a really bad Cleric. It was cool bc the dm just looked at me while we were trying to save the king from dying, side note the party Cleric was in jail for refusing to pay for health potions. The king died, the dm looked at me after I cast raise dead on him and said thanks to the kings ring that completely stops spells that charm or give the player control over him so the king was using grunts and moans to have us executed for fraud and attempting to control the king.
@matt81093 yeah we died, but the cool part is I just made another necromancer, got rewarded my previous characters gear plus a couple other items I used a skeletal rat to steal from the treasury. I'm not saying I'm petty but we did get revenge for our previous characters, we went from adventurers to the new royal family, we even found out the court wizard was actually a litch holding the necronomicon. Needless to say the campaign didn't end there we ended up being more beloved than the king was so we abolished the royalty system and used a massive horde of undead as guards. It was going smoothly until the turrasc attacked, but the 2 rings of wish I stole paid off killing the turrasc and making its body the new city. The dm loves using said mobile city for new players.
Tbh, I just want to play an undead necromancer that only ever summons the same two skeletons with tommy guns.🗿 *_"The name's Bones Malone, and these here are my spooky boys, see? 🗿🚬 RATTLE 'EM, BOYS!!"_*
As a DM, if your player wants to play a necromancer, id say let them homebrew undead summons. For example, maybe the necromancer could patchwork a bunch of skeletons into a giant skelly with an spacious ribcage, and the necromancer can sit inside of it like a mech. Stuff like that is what I want from a necromancer power fantasy, just tampering with the dead to further my own goals.
My DM has given me permission to take control of undead at 2 levels under my own. What this means is that I can summon significantly stronger creatures in smaller quantity. I keep 1 or 2 summons on the board at a time, but dealing with those 2 is almost worse than dealing with a horde of small skeletons. It makes me feel a lot stronger too, so we’re all happy
I'm messsing around with the idea of taking my warlock necromancer into Artificer for the +1 weapons, shields and con saves. Go Archanomechanist and...
That last bit was really what it comes down to. If you're willing to do the work to streamline things and keep track of the numbers fairly. I would absolutely have no issue with it. For example my brother likes playing a fighter like a company commander, so he typically rolls around with a squad of guys we tracks, maintains and replaces when one of them gets killed.
The necromancer also can explores way more layers of the necromancy outside of just raising the dead. In a fantasy story I’ve read, they were the greatest medics and biologists in all of realms. You can also use the “toying with life” aspect to explore more the undead nature inside a necromancer and how they slowly disconnect themselves and others from life.
Tbh the best way I ever ran a Necromancer was a Hobgoblin Wizard who kept a contingent of skeletons buffed with high quality equipment. Basically an armored goon squad of a dozen or so skeletons armed with crossbows and sword and board. They were simple, inexpensive, all had identical statblocks, and were totally replaceable. But damn they were always useful, our party basically almost never got ambushed, and while combat slowed a bit, the party got to be very tactical with a fearless, well organized unit of skeletons to play with.
If you have good players you can use them to control the summons too, that will give you the feeling of controlling an army that follows your orders and make it way faster while also giving the other players something to do during your 20 minutes turn.
In my experience players (myself included much of the time) can barely remember to keep track of the actions and such of a familiar or animal companion, so summoned things are often not only a pain but end up being forgotten to some extent at times, which ends up frustrating the summoner player.
if i ever play a necromancer i'll try to make it a business necromancer, someone signs a contract, they come back, finish whatever business they have, and i send em back
The campaign I'm running right now my necromancer PC is a white necromancer that deals in soul contracts. They will only bring back willing "champions" to fight along side the party or help villages. Not meat sheilds or trap bate.
An idea I saw was to just give your summons to other players. This reduces the time of each turn and gets them involved with the undead army. The summoner is the resurrecting general, and the PCs are the commanders.
I thought this would be a video about making them work at the table or in the world, but I really appreciate a video on physically making them work for the person playing them because I just got done writing one. My sights are not set on raising an army; I see Animate Dead as much more of a utility spell than a combat spell, and hope to keep ~4 as body guards that provide cover and attack anything which moves into melee range with me. I look forward to sending them down trapped hallways, and leaving them outside of any towns we enter.
I play a necromancer in a recorded game called virgidad trails. His focus as a black dragon necromancer, he was a doctor. Studied hard for that. Kept his practices hidden, had his "nurses" covered head to toe in plague doctor gear with signs. Had the three undead summons named: Gran the zombie, cryptic the ghost, and moss the skeleton.
I’ve commented this before, IDK if it was another channel, but my partner made a necromancer with a gun using the wizard class twice. Both times they somehow made infinite undead who made the PC infinite ammo, and once the DM loved the character’s story so much he made the PC a demi lich. My partner is basically a forever DM so it was fun for them to break two different campaigns twice with the same character when they could finally play
I really wish official 5e DnD had a good necromancer. Like they can do what you want if you put a stupid amount of time and work into it but it becomes tedious rather than fun at a certain point and it takes to long to get to the point where you no longer just a wizard who knows about necromancy and become an actual necromancer.
3.5e sorta did it but didn't got much time to develop sadly Called the deathless they are good undead essentially Erebon has done stuff with them. Or is it you not like the animate dead necromancer? Which is just one aspect of magic of death, unlife and life
The spells aren't very fleshed out besides Necrotic damage dealt, and the Animate Dead is kinda boring. But I like to homebrew a bit of flavor to Animate Dead, letting you get stronger undead types based on the spell level, at DM's discretion. Just be careful with the Wights, those can get out of hand pretty quickly.
How I managed my undead was I only made one type, skeletons, and usually used them at range. Kept track of their hp in a notebook, and I used dice to keep track of them on the battlemap. And the number that was up on the dice is which skelly they were
I played a druid summoner at a table. With DM approval, I ran it so that I always summoned the amount of creatures equal to the number of party members. Each member got a stat card and could run one creature on their initiative turn (before or after). had a lot of good synergy with wolves and frontliners
I have a homebrew that seems to work for ne and my group. Instead if having an army of undead i have either a "monster" called an undead swarm with a single stat block (makes it much easier to manage) or for flavor a single mega skeleton.
This makes a lot of sense! It reminds me of Pathfinder 2E's "Troop" trait, which is a Gargantuan creature taking up an ooze-like set of 16 spaces that don't have to be a 4x4 square and represents a whole passel of small- or medium-sized creatures. It's a way to make a platoon of skeletal knights a single easy-to-adjudicate CR11 creature instead of an ungodly mess of die rolls. Troops also have weakness to AoE damage and lose size categories at various hp thresholds. It's really clever!
I feel that you could try doing some homebrew stat blocks for your zombies and skeletons so they become more powerful depending on your level so instead of having a big hoard of zombies and skeletons that usually just get defeated in 1 hit at a certain level you have a couple of them that can do more then just take a single hit, which would make combat not take aslong since you have less creatures to control.
Baldurs Gate came up with grouping to handle mass of unimportant units that are similar, they act as an unit, they take their action together and attack the same target, so you roll for all of them doing the same thing... as a single entity. That saves a ton of time and is something that can be brought back to dnd to handle a ton of summons. Add to that pooling their health, and as the unit as a whole loses hp, you remove individuals from the total.
Sort of home brewed a necromancer as a unique casting class alongside sorcerer, cleric, etc. How the class worked was that it scaled off con and you had a necrotic energy pool to cast spells. You could sacrifice your own life to fill the pool or harvest small amounts from enemy corpses. You could even use necrotic energy to summon units and then extract that energy at any time to use it killing the summon. I also made it so that rather you needing to make summons that required stat blocks from yourself you could use the stat blocks from defeated enemies you raised and modify their strength based on your con value and your necromancer level.
As a guy who has done summons, have your sheets ready, quickly designate how many attacks are going where, and roll them all at once. Mostly one it online, so just spamming the attack button on say roll20, the amount of times that the attacks are being done, can help speed things up. I usually designate the attacks in order from left to right or vise versa, so that it's easy to keep track. Using this, can make the summon's turn very quick.
My first and current character is a necromancy wizard. I have two skeletons that act kind of like the pill bugs from A Bug's Life. I've played with little to no evocation, never even taking fireball at any point, and still have a lot of fun. The skeletons were recruited and have been changed over the course of the campaign, they've become their own little characters.
I made a variation of a Necromancer I called the Grey Ward. He used zombies as healing packs as well as a combination of Life transference and vampiric tough to heal allies and keep him topped up. The zombies were decked out in well made plate armor and would form a Testudo formation around the Necromancer who would hurl powerful spells from the saftey of the necrowall. It was a fun day in Barovia.
Imagine, instead of a melee hoard, it's just a bunch of skeletons with guns they got from an artificter, so it was just a firing squad of pirate skeletons
Thank you for expressing how hard this is, and how much work it took an experienced player to make it work. Summons, minions, and pets are one of the mechanical areas I supervise a lot. It's so easy for one players turn to spiral out of control if they start summoning groups of creatures and trying to direct them individually. The easiest solution I find is people can only have one helper/summon, and their actions have to be relatively limited in scope. Complex summons or helpers that amount to an NPC have to be discussed prior to game time. It can feel draconian, but sometimes you only have 2-3 hours and 13 crows is just the whole session
Tip for necromancer wizards: Always summon skeletons, never zombies. Skeletons do much more damage, have higher survivability due to being ranged, and also are easy to manage due to being ranged. Simply give your horde the order "Spread out and target whom I target" and you will focus fire on one enemy at a time quickly and efficiently.
One of my favorite houserules that I got from youtube is that instead of summoning/controling specific undead (zombies, skeletons, and ghouls) the undead creation spells allow you to create/control a undead creature up to a certain cr depending on your number of casts of the spell. So, for instance, you expend 4 3rd level casting of animate dead at once to summon a cr1 undead like a ghoul instead of 4 cr1/4 zombies. You can basically create undead up to the total cr of undead creatable by the spell, so a 4th level cast of animate dead could create up to 3/4cr worth of undead or a 5th level would make up to 1 1/4 cr worth. Also create undead can create up to 3cr worth of undead per casting and so on and so forth. With some limitations on not being able to create undead that it wouldn't make sense for a necromancer to be able to make, e.g., shadows, it makes it way easier to have a cool and varied groups of fewer but more powefull/intresting undead which makes it take way less time per turn to deal with versus just having a swarm of zombies.
I have this houserule mechanic called group attacks, which is basically a special action I normally use for my *monsters* which helped keep combat quick. It was essentially a hoard of monsters combining their action to replicate a spell like effect, such as a group of pirates creating a "conjure barrage" or a group of cultists replicating a "fireball". The difference is, the group attack's damage die scales with the number of enemies in the hoard. Like a d6 for every cultist! And from my experience, its been able to keep even the lowliest goblin scary in all levels, because the DC and damage scales with EVERY minion. I think this could be cool to adjust and give to a necromancer wizard or shepherd druid. Imagine this necromancer using their action and saying "kill" as a hoard of skeletons unleash a hail of arrows onto a group of enemies, and the damage is _scales_ with the hoard, so undead never become weak at higher levels. And heck, the player wont be rolling like 10 different attacks for every skeleton once they get into high levels.
Got a dhampir necromancer that reappears in one shots (kind of having his own mini story alongside the main campaign). He travels with a small group of armored 'bodyguards' that serve as servants, bodyguards and cannon fodder. They go around dressed in armored disguises to hide what they are.
in my home game, dm made a "universal" battlemage. he, with the help of cunning or dexterity, applied marks to the team, among other battle mage chips. summoned high-level elementals at the same time as small "search" summons that followed the tag. thus, the enemy, being miles away, could successfully attack us. there were a lot of small ones, they did not do much damage, but they threw debuffs, new marks and made us miss blows. in general, a very unpleasant opponent, we died before we could find the magician, we had no way to find him. it was possible to follow the elementals, but because of the small ones it was impossible to concentrate.
One of the characters I made at one point was just a straight up lich. I wasn't focused on the summoning part of the necromancy spells, but more of the just straight up draining life force side, though in that session I got to play it, we did end up in the situation where we had the option of me resurrecting two of our players as a zombified version of themselves. We unfortunately didn't get to explore how that would go because we haven't had time for a session since. The biggest issues I found with the lich necromancer thing (again, not looking at it as a summoning necromancer) was just the lich side and the guy whose turn it was to DM just not having the motivation to create issues for my lich to overcome, being an undead spending a decent amount of time in towns without any disguise.
In our campaign my necromancer had a soul point system which revolves around reviving any creature that is dead, to make it balanced the creature summoned gets an value needed for animate dead for example resurrcting a fighter character would take 5 animate dead undead slots kinda like the oathbreaker paladin
I feel like a good way to do an “army builder” sort of summoner would be have the summons be single stat blocks until a certain number, where they merge into a single stat block that’s just their combined stats, you can summon 2-3 skeletons that are separate and do their own thing, but when you hit 4 they “combine” into like a little squad, just to help mitigate the issue of a single player rolling for 8-10 different creatures and taking and hour per turn but keeping the power and feel of a necromancer controlling an army of the dead
I currently have an evocation wizard who doesn’t go all in on an undead army, but does have Animate Dead because he sees the usefulness of it. I’ve only ever raised one skeleton with the spell so far, but I still have that skeleton. I’ve been able to outfit it with new weapons, armor, and magic items and even with the limitations of their skeleton statblock, by deploying them strategically and not risking them needlessly they’ve been a valuable and well-rounded addition to the party who can stay back shooting arrows and slinging a limited range of spells (by using a circlet of blasting and a wand of magic missiles) or get up close and personal using their gauntlets of ogre strength and the Lightbringer mace to bash in other undead. We even got really lucky on a random loot table and happened to find an Amulet of Protection from Turning, so not even clerics can instakill him. I call him Cada (short of cadaver), and he’s my lad.
I like the leadership feat from 3.5 for this style of thing. You CAN have a veritable ARMY, but most of them are weak nobodies, and ultimately you have them perform much of your maintaining, and can have them doing recon. but you have 1 or 2 characters that can legitimately participate in the levels of combat that you do that join you when initiative is rolled.
I play necromancers whenever I can, and once you get used to the spell slots you have to allocate to your band, and how to properly store the bodies you want to use, it just becomes a matter of how well you can plan out the turns. As someone who loves XCOM and the types of games, speeding through turns is fun
I'm also playing a druid in my game. It's a wildfire druid and we reached a high enough level for me to summon elementals or draconic spirits. So I am controlling myself, a wildfire spirit and either a fire elemental or a draconic spirit and it's super fun for me and my party. I am checking in like every 4th session with them to know if they think my turns take to long. After a while you are pretty familiar with the statblocks of your summons and if you think about what to do on your turn while the other players have theirs, it actually makes dnd combat super fun for me. I can do all sorts of cool shit together with my fiery buddies and I feel really powerful because of it.
I feel a closet necromancer with like a pet skeleton would be fun. I can imagine all the disguises and aliases for him. Telling everyone he is just your hireling who is a mute. That way if you have a party who is not fond of undead doesn't cause too much trouble and townsfolk don't cause witch hunts and maybe a challenge could be someone finds out your secret and now you have to go on the run maybe even go rogue from the party for a bit if the dm is ok with it.
I would highly recommend checking out treantmonk's table friendly summoner/necromancer builds! They are designed to maximize power and usefulness of the character while maintaining ease of play and the feel of a summoner/necromancer. It does heavily use the new spells from Tasha's however
At our table we give the option to either make a necrocraft with a number of features based on expended spell slots or we make them a swarm with hitdie and damage dies equal to 5 plus X number of undead
With how animate dead works, if you devote most of your 1st/2nd lvl spell slots, just to upkeeping skeleton archers, and a pack of zombies. Just your basic boys. You can easily manage about 10. 5 of each. While individually they are pretty weeny, having a wall of zombies that can take a beating while your squad of skeleton archers peppers enemies with arrows from the back means a pretty solid setup( in my group i just roll all their attacks and damage at once to save time.) Later you can use higher slots to summon wights, who get their own little crunchy crews. Ive also found spells like essence transfer let you take advantage of the necromancer regaining health when killing enemies with necro spells to essentially funnel their own health to the party as a backup healer. Its a blast, one of my favorite characters.
Thing I did, is I was playing a Sorceress of a cursed bloodline that slowly turns those who have inherited the magic into Arch Liches. She has a bag of holding for bodies of criminals the party had taken out. She sees dead bodies as not a person anymore, it is just a shell that once held a soul. Out of all the characters I played she is one of my favorites, most likely do to the fact that she ended up marrying a Brass Dragon.
I've always wanted to do something like a necrodin. It's a paladin but armor and weapons made of bone and thanks to the power gifted to him through his patron it's more durable than normal. He can create them through the bones around him so even if he crit failed, breaking his weapon as long as there's a body around he can spend an action to create a new weapon. His patron wishes for him to aid in the path of a reaper, bring those whose souls who have escaped death to their rightful realm. Just replace light with death like abilities
One party I adventured with included a necromancer. We were all friends per our backstories, and were helping him channel his evil impulses into acceptable behavior like monster hunting and bandit busting. At one point we slew a chimera which he promptly raised as a skeleton. We Crafted a sturdy leather covering for its ribcage with lacing that permitted us to use it as a pack animal. We also crafted an exotic saddle allowing our necromancer to "drive" it as a combat mount. We referred to it like a car complete with trunk...which ended up with us calling it our "Bitchin' Chimera." The first time it was used in combat we played "Bitchin' Camaro," causing much laughter and choking on drinks all around. Our necromancer had decent Charisma, of course, plus ranks in Diplomacy. Our party spent part of our spring and summer downtime in a village that had lost a lot of laborers (to hobgoblins before we destroyed that particular scourge) and was in need of plowers, sowers, and then harvesters and threshers. Skeletons and zombies can perform such tasks, so he raised those hobgoblins to help the village. Funny how flexible morals can be...
I played with a necromancer that would raise enemies we had killed. The dm would just give him the stat blocks, and he saved our skin quite a few times.
I never got to play much of them but I had a necro who acted more as a ceremonial undertaker than a standard "do my bidding" kind of necro. He had a desire to experiment with where the energies that motivated the body after the life was gone came from and what it could do. His people had an interesting relationship with undead as well, making clay statues of their dead and placing their departed's bones in them. Keeping an undead skeleton of their loved ones in shrines to hold remembrance ceremonies. My necro was going to try and see how an undead's personality develops, since undead behave as their living counterpart did when not controlled and with no living around. Sort of a Matter vs Antimatter thing where the nature of undead is destroying the living but also how the living have an instinct to revile and destroy undeath.
Also, I like making undead reflavors depending on circumstance. I'm a big fan of giving the circle of spores druid a different kind of zombie that forms like a communial gestalt similar to myconids that get more intelligent the more you have of them.
My first character to live past level 1 was a necromancer. (My lv1 guy tried to save a lv4 from a trap meant for a lv4) having one or two undead was fine the problem was managing them on a physical board and time in combat. Pairing them up for attack rolls helps cut down time and once you get the higher level spells replace them with the smaller number of stronger undead. Using your 8 and 9th lv slit you can summon 5 wights each get a dozen zombies from there kills. I recommend saying you send your zombies off to your base for some kinda labor and keeping your wights as commander/ generals.
I just got a character idea of an isolated necromancer who lives in the woods and has a few undead, and when the other players meet him for the first time he's just having a tea party with corpses while one of the zombies his braiding wilted flowers into his hair. 😂
What you described for the druid was me but as a necromancer, we also had some extra necromancy spells that let me summon stronger undead in lower numbers to cut down even more on the time spend on my term. Pretty sure I even tried to set up a macro to cut a couple seconds of clicking the hit into just one click to really narrow it down even more but I wasn't tech savvy enough. Would also have my turn actually ready before it became my turn and any missed undead or if I couldn't adjust for a sudden change made in the turn before me it would just be played as my necromancer struggling to keep track themselfs. Like he's just a necromancer, not some arch lich, he loses count some times. Also they all did everything either on the same turn if low in number or as a swarm if high in number.
I find it funny. I’ve played a necromancer usually had around 4-5 zombies and every fight I would be like battle tactic moving them around and stuff and then when it was my actual turn I was like “uhhhhh… I didn’t think of that, melf’s acid arrow”
The last time I played a necromancer I made him look like Adam Gomez through a mask I bought that could give me an illusion. I would raise the most powerful monsters I could at the time and I was able to get a zombie hydra in 3.5 . I was also the groups negotiator which made it hilarious since I had to use magic to hide my summons since people aren't usually on board with the dead stuff. Fun campaign.
From what I understand from what you're putting down: is that it is very much so the player's responsibility to basically be a sudo DM for your own creatures and preplan your own turns as to not take up too much space or time within combat
I’ve wanted to play a necromancer that used a possess-able armor or mannequin, and shuffle around spirits he’s bought timeshares from in and out of it.
One of my top favorite characters is my necromancer! She was the daughter of 2 highly respected "doctors" that were clerics who dipped into necromancy....hence her being raised around dead bodies, making it normal in her eyes. I played her with the idea of she was "helping bad souls redeem themselves through good deeds." She had a belief she could redeem the souls of the bad people (bandits etc.) post death. I made a point to collect all armor and weapons (especially nonattunement magical weapons) I'd find after battles, including dead bodies. I kitted out all my undead with chainmail (ac 16 now) 2 short swords each, equalling 2 attacks each (yes, the offhand attack did not gain the modifier, and simple weapons didn't require proficiency, according to my DM) I'd specifically buy perfume & soap to literally clean my undead weekly (undead have a natural bad smell....DM was strict on that). I would drape my undead in fully covering gowns with masks & gloves, and even specifically stuff them with fragrant herbs to assist with smell AND the natural "jangling bones" sounds skeletons & zombies gave off. The bag of holding would hold most of my "souls of redemption" when we were in towns. I have a special goliath undead follower, named Roger, who we flavored as the Noble background servant wearing Demon Armor as my "long time trusted family friend". (Cursed items like demon armor specifically state that the curses do not effect undead types) Long story short....Holy fuck the micromanaging was intense but I loved every minute of playing her!! She had a sweet personality and I tried my best to play her as lawful good or lawful neutral.
I DM for a necromancer (2nd edition game). It actually rocks. He doesn't have any undead minions yet and his spells are more just creepy utilitarian type things, but he does have some powerful spells that are not direct damage. He's actually very creative and not just a, "I want to dig up the graveyard" type. He also has a bit of love for divination too. So, the way he plays is a bit different than most.
I played a necromancer inspired on Diablo 3. used a combination of homebrew stuff. He started as an alived character and slowly became a Litch. He had zombie companion as his main zombie, that would become stronger similar to druid companion. If this pet died the lich proccess would slow down or delay (needed the pet to collect souls, negative energy, etc) later I would summon small armies of undead but used them as "swarms" so I didnt had to keep track of so many. as the swarm grew in number of zombies thet would deal more damage, but would always be east to hot/defeat. by X ammount of damage the swarm loses X amount of zombies and deals less damage, similar to previous Lvs. main character had spells more similar to a priest, dealing damage, dealing negative energy, and ocationaly placing curses.
Having stats (I recommend cards for live sessions) and one initiative role and one attack role (with advantage coz it’s assumed they try to circle the target of choice so a lot of them would have advantage) for the pack of undead really streamline’s this. Works when they get attacked too, if a quarter of health is down, one of the undead is down in a group of 4 for example. There’s situation where this won’t work, but for your average encounter, really makes things easier and faster for everyone.
Fyi i know 5e doesn’t really consider flanking an advantage situation… but try to get your necromancer to accept losing 4-5 attack roles without throwing ‘em a bone 😂
A friend and I are actually homebrewing a necromancer class. It is a lot to work out for balance issues. First playtest starts in a few weeks after I finish DMing this campaign ark. I'm stoked!
The Dread Necromacer from 3.5 was about the only fun way to play a necromancer. It started you right away with summoning undead, and that's basically all you did. As levels progressed you could either caster stronger undead or more of the weaker dead
I like to have them start operating more like swarms once they get enough lower undead. Makes it easier to go about in combat and it can make it more fun when he tries to get them to do stuff for him. It’s much funnier to see a group of skeletons failing to dig a hole or wildly succeeding then to see a bunch of varied results.
I did that as a druid for my combat wild shape in the first combat we had. Made a combined stat block ahead of session since we keep some of our own stats and take on some of the creature's. The DM was very pleased with my preparedness. I didn't think it all that uncommon, but then my second DM was also pleasantly surprised that I keep my own set of notes 🤷♀️. I thought organization and preparedness was part of D&D and I was just going a little bit further with the stat block because its a tool for my ADD, otherwise I'd forget everything (notes) or get flustered and confused trying to play the wild shape 🤷♀️.
We have a friend that plays a bard necromancer and he treats his undead like they are still alive and are his « friends » 😅 he gives them names and all. It seriously gives a whole other flavour to the whole raising the dead thing! We always make fun of the smell and he sometimes hide them in a portable hole he has (you know when we go to cities and stuff)!
With experience and a little prep it’s definitely do-able , just have the stat blocks for any undead u want to summon and really pre plan your turns while the rest of the party is , that way you can just grab the dice and roll on your turn (if u want an individual initiative for undead have them all roll as one , or what my table does is have them go immediately after the player on their initiative) roll all attacks at once ideally the dm gives us the ac then u just roll dmg for any attacks which went through, little bit of quick maths and boom , currently at my table ( in a game of 3 yrs ) my turns are often the fastest despite walking around with a standing army of 30 undead . Note : it helps to have experience in wargames (warhammer etc.) or at least that attitude to rolling dice for them.
Had a druid/sorcerer joke concept for 3.5 that revolved entirely around summoning chickens. The Poultrymancer. He believed that he was a reincarnated rooster king of an ancient chicken empire. All because of a hallucination he had while dangerously ill one time as a kid.
Игры
As a summoner... ALWAYS have the darn stat blocks for your summons, it's a pain to set up but oh gods the relief when you just have to pick out the booklet and go some five pages through for your Summon Creature 3 statblocks to appear. I did this as a Wizard, categorized my spells by school, damage type and level of casting. Lotsa work at first but so happy.
And yes... I had a seperate page for prepared spells for the day. Ended up having five pages for variations.
Whenever I played a caster I always had a copypasted booklet of my spells and statblocks for critters. DMs have enough to do already and I didn't want to slow down the table.
I did the same for feats, racial traits, and class features, too.
My fellow players usually did something analogous or bribled/wheedled me into assembling it for them.
We were able to concentrate on roleplaying and smoothly transition into the crunchy bits when necessary.
Don't most non-necromancy summon spells require the dm to choose what gets summoned?
@@juliandacosta6841 Now i think so, back when i was Wizard'ing it up we were doing 3.5E so i'm a bit fuzzy on the details of all the spells. I jsut remember i had the pages of Creature stat blocks for each summon on hand along side all my spells. :D
This is one of the many things DDB should have but doesn't. The "extras" section is kinda weak.
*Action economy has entered the chat*
As someone who had lowest initiative three sessions in a row in one campaign, I will personally execute anyone who introduces a large amount of enemies or allies into a fight.
*BE CONSIDERED TO THE LAST PERSON IN INITIATIVE YOU TWATS*
This, it's exactly why I roll my eyes when people complain about Animal Companion accuracy in PF2e, like BITCH YOUR GETTING EXTRA ACTIONS!
Also, lots of shiny click-clacks to roll (?)
Unironically the reason why I like playing a summoner druid.
I once managed to do 15 rolls to attack in a round, while still at level 5.
I was grinning so much.
I find using home brew stat blocks for large blobs to be easier than having the turn order of death and dullness. They have a over reaching and controlling to some degree over mind so why not?
@@delmattia96 Your party members probably got their degrees in the time it took you to take a turn.
As a former Necromancer player myself…
Swarms. Just use swarms. Have them attack at the same time, just up the damage and health according to size. Do NOT try to be the guy who has to spend an hour rolling for every zombie in his horde. It’s not fun and your DM will absolutely be ready to murder you, and your party will let him.
Or, just begin using 'macros'
What I mean is, if you have 15 zombies, just use something like Avrae.
"What's their AC? Ah, 17, well my zombies have a +6 to hit now, so they only need 11 or higher. So, let's roll 15d20 and have it tell me instantly how many rolled 11 or higher. Oh look, 7 hits, one of those is a critical, nice. I'll roll damage." but faster.
"AC 17, +6 to hit, so 11 or higher. Hey avrae, "!rrr 15 1d20 11" - (avrae rolls 15 sets of 1d20 DC 11, says how many succeed) - so that's 7 hits, one of those is a crit, rolling damage now...."
@@g80gzt the problem is the individual movement you really have to turn them into a blob swarm or formation at some point also tracking hp is a problem when enemys dont oneshot them turning them into a swarm, formation,blob or minions can really help with that
The individual attack and dmg rolls are pretty much the least important thing if your dm doesnt care about you knowing ac which he really shouldnt anyway since with this many attacks ac will be pretty obvious based on what hit and what didnt hit
Me? I just have my necromancer adding new parts to his familiar which he's just slowly making stronger, with the occasional side undead as a repeatative miner. The big guy can easily kill a dragon by level 20, while the lower ones just make a check each hour to see how much ore they've dug up
To generalize, the solution to all the problems is to homebrew, combine groups of skeletons into units manning a ballista. let your players summon stronger undead instead of many weaker, etc etc
I feel like it would work well to treat it kinda like playing guardsmen in warhammer. Basically move them in squads and when attacking just mass roll. As long as the decision making is quick the turn should roll by fast
I made it fun by playing my necromancer as an antique dealer.. I never used my undead for combat, as a DM I know it's a waste of table time and resources. My undead were there to help me steal all the furniture and help carry the party's extra loot when needed. Usually played it for comic relief, so the party would jokingly ask for undead to help (we had talked about it ahead of time as an inside joke) then the DM or I would follow up with a hilarious situation. "You see Korhagen's skeletons run by carrying an armoire" or "They're a little busy, that wiring desk is a Viridianleaf original, do you have any idea how rare those are!". Good times. 😂
That's got big studio ghibli energy for some reason. Respect. 👊
Gotta admit i LOVE this. Now i wanna play a Necromancer thats a pickpocket/thief. He thinks hes amazing but its the skeletons that wont stop following after he stole a book giving a passive intimidation to let him do what he wants.
brilliant :D !!
Mine was a take over a lords estate and use undead to mine and cut wood 1000 skeleton workforce unloading from the back of a wagon like battle droids from starwars.
Being a Necromancer antique dealer sounds funny. 🤣👍🏻
Dance macabre = all of the enemies getting ghoul hugs
I _wish_ Danse Macabre would make Ghouls.
You know what always gets me with that spell? I alwaus think it's a Bardic spell... as long as the necromancer plays, the slain shall rise again.
@@Maninawig I like the sound of that. 🙂
@@c.g.278 it does in baldurs gate 3, i also came to dnd recently after playing bg3 myself and found out danse macabre doesn't summon ghouls in the og tabletop and i was bummed
The only rule that we switched out when I played a Grung necromancer is instead of micro-managing 10 zombies, my necromancer would make a zombie or skeleton swarm that would get more powerful or weaker based on current HP. Speeds up necromancer combat so much by only needing to action 1 mob instead of 10.
I'd be curious on the specifics of these mechanics if you wouldn't mind elaborating
@valanshard2105 sure. I built a table to track it all. So the raise dead spell would work as intended, giving a single zombie or skeleton to start. Once there were multiple zombies, it turned in a zombie swarm. Take the base zombie stats, and for every extra zombie, add +1 hit die (1d8) to HP, +1 to attack, +1d6 to damage, size increased after every 3 zombies. I think for undead fortitude, we did roll +CON after taking damage to heal 1d8 HP to mimic zombies getting back up. The hard part was tracking the swarm getting weaker and smaller as HP was chipped away. I think we connected this to failed undead fortitude saves. Remember, it's a whole swarm, so flavor wise, multiple zombies were sharing damage.
@@panwall1327 I like this a lot!
Where did you get the player stats for a Grung? All I can’t find on D&D wikis are some wack homebrew with some weird features
@@metalgearsalad1204 one grung above page 4 on DND beyond, it's probably paid content though
I ran a campaign once that had a necromancer in a party with a fighter, cleric, and paladin. Had such wonderful and deep arguments amongst my players about the morality and sanctity of life and death. Then there was me the dm who just lost his father a few months back. I never told them but those arguments they had in character helped me a lot.
Last part is the most important. If you want to play a summoner be ready to put in the work by having the stat blocks ready
Well well well
@@CinderblocksallyWell Well Well.
@@thestranger954 Well well well.
Yes, I am playing a druid in a 3.5 Play-by-Chat land online and my "Notes" section on the virtual Character Sheet is just Eagles, Wolves, Hippogriffs and Crocodiles, all with the appropriate buffs already inserted.
It's the summoner's job to bookkeep and do the research for their style. If you start to bog down the game by not knowing how your character works, you should hold off on playing it until you can smooth it out
Yup. It also takes some preplanning with the DM to help things run appropriately, and a good report of trust. :)
new D&D UA, when it comes out, is hopefully going to just straight up fix the necromancer subclass, and animate dead spell, I'm playing a necromancer in an upcoming oneshot with just the changes to the base class, (summon undead spirit helps a ton), but I really want to see animate dead have some justice done to it
As a GM of over two decades, I've never had a summoner-type character in the party that didn't take about as much time to run their turn as the entire rest of the party combined.
Sometimes the player is great at it, describing everything in a way that makes their turn fun to even just watch, but far more often it turns into just spending time discussing rules or not being able to decide on an action, forcing the rest of the party to just wait for ages on end.
I don't ban those kinds of builds from my games, but I do try to steer them towards a more manageable character build that would still fulfill a similar fantasy - preferably one that includes and takes the party into consideration, as TTRPGs tend to be
co-op, and not single player - when we have our session zero.
There was once a player who wanted to make a beast summoner, but we ended up reflavoring a sorcerer and their spells to fit that idea, instead. I think he liked that one more than the druid he had been considering, but that's conjecture.
There's a lot of playstyles where the half-assed "make the sheet, then never think about it between sessions" approach works. Summoner ain't one.
TI be fair that's just being a good player in general I've seen too many people sit there taking 5-10 minutes to go threw a turn in combat. Read you class and skills when not playing people it doesn't take long
Had a necromancer that thought he was just a really bad Cleric. It was cool bc the dm just looked at me while we were trying to save the king from dying, side note the party Cleric was in jail for refusing to pay for health potions. The king died, the dm looked at me after I cast raise dead on him and said thanks to the kings ring that completely stops spells that charm or give the player control over him so the king was using grunts and moans to have us executed for fraud and attempting to control the king.
Oh dang lol
@matt81093 yeah we died, but the cool part is I just made another necromancer, got rewarded my previous characters gear plus a couple other items I used a skeletal rat to steal from the treasury. I'm not saying I'm petty but we did get revenge for our previous characters, we went from adventurers to the new royal family, we even found out the court wizard was actually a litch holding the necronomicon. Needless to say the campaign didn't end there we ended up being more beloved than the king was so we abolished the royalty system and used a massive horde of undead as guards. It was going smoothly until the turrasc attacked, but the 2 rings of wish I stole paid off killing the turrasc and making its body the new city. The dm loves using said mobile city for new players.
Ignore my previous reply if it posted - I misread and YT will not show me my reply to let me fix.
Tbh, I just want to play an undead necromancer that only ever summons the same two skeletons with tommy guns.🗿 *_"The name's Bones Malone, and these here are my spooky boys, see? 🗿🚬 RATTLE 'EM, BOYS!!"_*
*"Don't be afraid to use your nails, gurrrrrls!!!"* 😂
As a DM, if your player wants to play a necromancer, id say let them homebrew undead summons. For example, maybe the necromancer could patchwork a bunch of skeletons into a giant skelly with an spacious ribcage, and the necromancer can sit inside of it like a mech. Stuff like that is what I want from a necromancer power fantasy, just tampering with the dead to further my own goals.
My DM has given me permission to take control of undead at 2 levels under my own. What this means is that I can summon significantly stronger creatures in smaller quantity. I keep 1 or 2 summons on the board at a time, but dealing with those 2 is almost worse than dealing with a horde of small skeletons. It makes me feel a lot stronger too, so we’re all happy
I'm messsing around with the idea of taking my warlock necromancer into Artificer for the +1 weapons, shields and con saves.
Go Archanomechanist and...
That last bit was really what it comes down to. If you're willing to do the work to streamline things and keep track of the numbers fairly. I would absolutely have no issue with it.
For example my brother likes playing a fighter like a company commander, so he typically rolls around with a squad of guys we tracks, maintains and replaces when one of them gets killed.
The necromancer also can explores way more layers of the necromancy outside of just raising the dead.
In a fantasy story I’ve read, they were the greatest medics and biologists in all of realms.
You can also use the “toying with life” aspect to explore more the undead nature inside a necromancer and how they slowly disconnect themselves and others from life.
Tbh the best way I ever ran a Necromancer was a Hobgoblin Wizard who kept a contingent of skeletons buffed with high quality equipment. Basically an armored goon squad of a dozen or so skeletons armed with crossbows and sword and board. They were simple, inexpensive, all had identical statblocks, and were totally replaceable. But damn they were always useful, our party basically almost never got ambushed, and while combat slowed a bit, the party got to be very tactical with a fearless, well organized unit of skeletons to play with.
If you have good players you can use them to control the summons too, that will give you the feeling of controlling an army that follows your orders and make it way faster while also giving the other players something to do during your 20 minutes turn.
In my experience players (myself included much of the time) can barely remember to keep track of the actions and such of a familiar or animal companion, so summoned things are often not only a pain but end up being forgotten to some extent at times, which ends up frustrating the summoner player.
I'd love to hear you talk about the Monk in any capacity... Cos I feel like nobody ever talks about Monks
I think dragonborn make interesting monks because they have their own natural armor
Also the party size is important as well. It really makes a difference if you got 4 PCs or 6 PCs plus a bunch of familiars and animal companions
I would love to play a necromancer artificer that uses mechanisms and tiny nanobots to reanimated and manipulate the dead
if i ever play a necromancer i'll try to make it a business necromancer, someone signs a contract, they come back, finish whatever business they have, and i send em back
The campaign I'm running right now my necromancer PC is a white necromancer that deals in soul contracts. They will only bring back willing "champions" to fight along side the party or help villages. Not meat sheilds or trap bate.
An idea I saw was to just give your summons to other players. This reduces the time of each turn and gets them involved with the undead army. The summoner is the resurrecting general, and the PCs are the commanders.
When you said "bookkeeping" I couldn't help but think of a necromancer who can only raise accountants
On brand though… death and taxes
I thought this would be a video about making them work at the table or in the world, but I really appreciate a video on physically making them work for the person playing them because I just got done writing one. My sights are not set on raising an army; I see Animate Dead as much more of a utility spell than a combat spell, and hope to keep ~4 as body guards that provide cover and attack anything which moves into melee range with me. I look forward to sending them down trapped hallways, and leaving them outside of any towns we enter.
I play a necromancer in a recorded game called virgidad trails. His focus as a black dragon necromancer, he was a doctor. Studied hard for that. Kept his practices hidden, had his "nurses" covered head to toe in plague doctor gear with signs. Had the three undead summons named: Gran the zombie, cryptic the ghost, and moss the skeleton.
I’ve commented this before, IDK if it was another channel, but my partner made a necromancer with a gun using the wizard class twice. Both times they somehow made infinite undead who made the PC infinite ammo, and once the DM loved the character’s story so much he made the PC a demi lich. My partner is basically a forever DM so it was fun for them to break two different campaigns twice with the same character when they could finally play
I really wish official 5e DnD had a good necromancer. Like they can do what you want if you put a stupid amount of time and work into it but it becomes tedious rather than fun at a certain point and it takes to long to get to the point where you no longer just a wizard who knows about necromancy and become an actual necromancer.
3.5e sorta did it but didn't got much time to develop sadly
Called the deathless they are good undead essentially
Erebon has done stuff with them.
Or is it you not like the animate dead necromancer? Which is just one aspect of magic of death, unlife and life
The spells aren't very fleshed out besides Necrotic damage dealt, and the Animate Dead is kinda boring. But I like to homebrew a bit of flavor to Animate Dead, letting you get stronger undead types based on the spell level, at DM's discretion. Just be careful with the Wights, those can get out of hand pretty quickly.
I feel like we need a necromancer class that can have its own abilities to use and a system for controlling separate from normal spells
How I managed my undead was I only made one type, skeletons, and usually used them at range. Kept track of their hp in a notebook, and I used dice to keep track of them on the battlemap. And the number that was up on the dice is which skelly they were
I played a druid summoner at a table. With DM approval, I ran it so that I always summoned the amount of creatures equal to the number of party members. Each member got a stat card and could run one creature on their initiative turn (before or after). had a lot of good synergy with wolves and frontliners
I have a homebrew that seems to work for ne and my group. Instead if having an army of undead i have either a "monster" called an undead swarm with a single stat block (makes it much easier to manage) or for flavor a single mega skeleton.
This makes a lot of sense! It reminds me of Pathfinder 2E's "Troop" trait, which is a Gargantuan creature taking up an ooze-like set of 16 spaces that don't have to be a 4x4 square and represents a whole passel of small- or medium-sized creatures. It's a way to make a platoon of skeletal knights a single easy-to-adjudicate CR11 creature instead of an ungodly mess of die rolls. Troops also have weakness to AoE damage and lose size categories at various hp thresholds. It's really clever!
@@TheKarishi thank you! I actually plan to switch to pathfinder as soon as I can get a group so it'll be cool to play around with that
I feel that you could try doing some homebrew stat blocks for your zombies and skeletons so they become more powerful depending on your level so instead of having a big hoard of zombies and skeletons that usually just get defeated in 1 hit at a certain level you have a couple of them that can do more then just take a single hit, which would make combat not take aslong since you have less creatures to control.
More kinds of undead would be nice to. Being a level 20 Necromancer and being able to summon a Boneclaw would be sweet
Show me the math, or put a sock in your speculation hole.
Baldurs Gate came up with grouping to handle mass of unimportant units that are similar, they act as an unit, they take their action together and attack the same target, so you roll for all of them doing the same thing... as a single entity. That saves a ton of time and is something that can be brought back to dnd to handle a ton of summons. Add to that pooling their health, and as the unit as a whole loses hp, you remove individuals from the total.
Sort of home brewed a necromancer as a unique casting class alongside sorcerer, cleric, etc. How the class worked was that it scaled off con and you had a necrotic energy pool to cast spells.
You could sacrifice your own life to fill the pool or harvest small amounts from enemy corpses. You could even use necrotic energy to summon units and then extract that energy at any time to use it killing the summon.
I also made it so that rather you needing to make summons that required stat blocks from yourself you could use the stat blocks from defeated enemies you raised and modify their strength based on your con value and your necromancer level.
Treating the summons as a swarm seems to simplify things at my table.
As a guy who has done summons, have your sheets ready, quickly designate how many attacks are going where, and roll them all at once. Mostly one it online, so just spamming the attack button on say roll20, the amount of times that the attacks are being done, can help speed things up. I usually designate the attacks in order from left to right or vise versa, so that it's easy to keep track. Using this, can make the summon's turn very quick.
My first and current character is a necromancy wizard. I have two skeletons that act kind of like the pill bugs from A Bug's Life. I've played with little to no evocation, never even taking fireball at any point, and still have a lot of fun. The skeletons were recruited and have been changed over the course of the campaign, they've become their own little characters.
I was in a game with a necromancer - his skelebois were his dancing band of merry men.
Lol. Showing up to the table with a full on three ring binder! "That's my character sheet."
I made a variation of a Necromancer I called the Grey Ward. He used zombies as healing packs as well as a combination of Life transference and vampiric tough to heal allies and keep him topped up. The zombies were decked out in well made plate armor and would form a Testudo formation around the Necromancer who would hurl powerful spells from the saftey of the necrowall. It was a fun day in Barovia.
Imagine, instead of a melee hoard, it's just a bunch of skeletons with guns they got from an artificter, so it was just a firing squad of pirate skeletons
Thank you for expressing how hard this is, and how much work it took an experienced player to make it work. Summons, minions, and pets are one of the mechanical areas I supervise a lot. It's so easy for one players turn to spiral out of control if they start summoning groups of creatures and trying to direct them individually. The easiest solution I find is people can only have one helper/summon, and their actions have to be relatively limited in scope. Complex summons or helpers that amount to an NPC have to be discussed prior to game time.
It can feel draconian, but sometimes you only have 2-3 hours and 13 crows is just the whole session
My first character was a CG necromancer like this. He animated evil creatures believing that he could redeem there souls through their flesh.
Tip for necromancer wizards: Always summon skeletons, never zombies. Skeletons do much more damage, have higher survivability due to being ranged, and also are easy to manage due to being ranged. Simply give your horde the order "Spread out and target whom I target" and you will focus fire on one enemy at a time quickly and efficiently.
One of my favorite houserules that I got from youtube is that instead of summoning/controling specific undead (zombies, skeletons, and ghouls) the undead creation spells allow you to create/control a undead creature up to a certain cr depending on your number of casts of the spell. So, for instance, you expend 4 3rd level casting of animate dead at once to summon a cr1 undead like a ghoul instead of 4 cr1/4 zombies. You can basically create undead up to the total cr of undead creatable by the spell, so a 4th level cast of animate dead could create up to 3/4cr worth of undead or a 5th level would make up to 1 1/4 cr worth. Also create undead can create up to 3cr worth of undead per casting and so on and so forth. With some limitations on not being able to create undead that it wouldn't make sense for a necromancer to be able to make, e.g., shadows, it makes it way easier to have a cool and varied groups of fewer but more powefull/intresting undead which makes it take way less time per turn to deal with versus just having a swarm of zombies.
I had a friend he played a necromancer and he had one of our other party members to make the things he summoned into spell scrolls
That guy definitely watched the grey necromancer from all things dnd 😂
I have this houserule mechanic called group attacks, which is basically a special action I normally use for my *monsters* which helped keep combat quick.
It was essentially a hoard of monsters combining their action to replicate a spell like effect, such as a group of pirates creating a "conjure barrage" or a group of cultists replicating a "fireball".
The difference is, the group attack's damage die scales with the number of enemies in the hoard. Like a d6 for every cultist!
And from my experience, its been able to keep even the lowliest goblin scary in all levels, because the DC and damage scales with EVERY minion.
I think this could be cool to adjust and give to a necromancer wizard or shepherd druid.
Imagine this necromancer using their action and saying "kill" as a hoard of skeletons unleash a hail of arrows onto a group of enemies, and the damage is _scales_ with the hoard, so undead never become weak at higher levels.
And heck, the player wont be rolling like 10 different attacks for every skeleton once they get into high levels.
Got a dhampir necromancer that reappears in one shots (kind of having his own mini story alongside the main campaign). He travels with a small group of armored 'bodyguards' that serve as servants, bodyguards and cannon fodder. They go around dressed in armored disguises to hide what they are.
in my home game, dm made a "universal" battlemage. he, with the help of cunning or dexterity, applied marks to the team, among other battle mage chips. summoned high-level elementals at the same time as small "search" summons that followed the tag. thus, the enemy, being miles away, could successfully attack us. there were a lot of small ones, they did not do much damage, but they threw debuffs, new marks and made us miss blows. in general, a very unpleasant opponent, we died before we could find the magician, we had no way to find him. it was possible to follow the elementals, but because of the small ones it was impossible to concentrate.
you can do like a necromancer that only has one summon. like maybe a dead lover or a friend that you just wanna keep around
The man covered this topic from all angles
One of the characters I made at one point was just a straight up lich. I wasn't focused on the summoning part of the necromancy spells, but more of the just straight up draining life force side, though in that session I got to play it, we did end up in the situation where we had the option of me resurrecting two of our players as a zombified version of themselves. We unfortunately didn't get to explore how that would go because we haven't had time for a session since. The biggest issues I found with the lich necromancer thing (again, not looking at it as a summoning necromancer) was just the lich side and the guy whose turn it was to DM just not having the motivation to create issues for my lich to overcome, being an undead spending a decent amount of time in towns without any disguise.
In our campaign my necromancer had a soul point system which revolves around reviving any creature that is dead, to make it balanced the creature summoned gets an value needed for animate dead for example resurrcting a fighter character would take 5 animate dead undead slots kinda like the oathbreaker paladin
Thoughts on Eldritch Knights?! Please?
I feel like a good way to do an “army builder” sort of summoner would be have the summons be single stat blocks until a certain number, where they merge into a single stat block that’s just their combined stats, you can summon 2-3 skeletons that are separate and do their own thing, but when you hit 4 they “combine” into like a little squad, just to help mitigate the issue of a single player rolling for 8-10 different creatures and taking and hour per turn but keeping the power and feel of a necromancer controlling an army of the dead
Had a necromancer that i made who i loved to play who he was a necromancer with separation anxiety
I enjoyed wondering where you was gonna pop up next 🤣
Thanks for sharing ✌️💜
I currently have an evocation wizard who doesn’t go all in on an undead army, but does have Animate Dead because he sees the usefulness of it. I’ve only ever raised one skeleton with the spell so far, but I still have that skeleton. I’ve been able to outfit it with new weapons, armor, and magic items and even with the limitations of their skeleton statblock, by deploying them strategically and not risking them needlessly they’ve been a valuable and well-rounded addition to the party who can stay back shooting arrows and slinging a limited range of spells (by using a circlet of blasting and a wand of magic missiles) or get up close and personal using their gauntlets of ogre strength and the Lightbringer mace to bash in other undead. We even got really lucky on a random loot table and happened to find an Amulet of Protection from Turning, so not even clerics can instakill him. I call him Cada (short of cadaver), and he’s my lad.
I like the leadership feat from 3.5 for this style of thing. You CAN have a veritable ARMY, but most of them are weak nobodies, and ultimately you have them perform much of your maintaining, and can have them doing recon. but you have 1 or 2 characters that can legitimately participate in the levels of combat that you do that join you when initiative is rolled.
As a necromancy junkie, and whose first homebrew character was a necromancy wizard, necromancy can be fun!
Some of the beat advice I've heard l. Just play what you want. Well said Necromancy takes a special player to do it well.
Imagine a necromancer in a party with a grave cleric
I play necromancers whenever I can, and once you get used to the spell slots you have to allocate to your band, and how to properly store the bodies you want to use, it just becomes a matter of how well you can plan out the turns.
As someone who loves XCOM and the types of games, speeding through turns is fun
I'm also playing a druid in my game. It's a wildfire druid and we reached a high enough level for me to summon elementals or draconic spirits.
So I am controlling myself, a wildfire spirit and either a fire elemental or a draconic spirit and it's super fun for me and my party. I am checking in like every 4th session with them to know if they think my turns take to long.
After a while you are pretty familiar with the statblocks of your summons and if you think about what to do on your turn while the other players have theirs, it actually makes dnd combat super fun for me. I can do all sorts of cool shit together with my fiery buddies and I feel really powerful because of it.
I feel a closet necromancer with like a pet skeleton would be fun. I can imagine all the disguises and aliases for him. Telling everyone he is just your hireling who is a mute. That way if you have a party who is not fond of undead doesn't cause too much trouble and townsfolk don't cause witch hunts and maybe a challenge could be someone finds out your secret and now you have to go on the run maybe even go rogue from the party for a bit if the dm is ok with it.
I would highly recommend checking out treantmonk's table friendly summoner/necromancer builds! They are designed to maximize power and usefulness of the character while maintaining ease of play and the feel of a summoner/necromancer. It does heavily use the new spells from Tasha's however
At our table we give the option to either make a necrocraft with a number of features based on expended spell slots or we make them a swarm with hitdie and damage dies equal to 5 plus X number of undead
With how animate dead works, if you devote most of your 1st/2nd lvl spell slots, just to upkeeping skeleton archers, and a pack of zombies. Just your basic boys.
You can easily manage about 10. 5 of each. While individually they are pretty weeny, having a wall of zombies that can take a beating while your squad of skeleton archers peppers enemies with arrows from the back means a pretty solid setup( in my group i just roll all their attacks and damage at once to save time.)
Later you can use higher slots to summon wights, who get their own little crunchy crews.
Ive also found spells like essence transfer let you take advantage of the necromancer regaining health when killing enemies with necro spells to essentially funnel their own health to the party as a backup healer. Its a blast, one of my favorite characters.
Man I just wanna be sung Jin woo in a campaign
Thing I did, is I was playing a Sorceress of a cursed bloodline that slowly turns those who have inherited the magic into Arch Liches. She has a bag of holding for bodies of criminals the party had taken out. She sees dead bodies as not a person anymore, it is just a shell that once held a soul.
Out of all the characters I played she is one of my favorites, most likely do to the fact that she ended up marrying a Brass Dragon.
I've always wanted to do something like a necrodin. It's a paladin but armor and weapons made of bone and thanks to the power gifted to him through his patron it's more durable than normal. He can create them through the bones around him so even if he crit failed, breaking his weapon as long as there's a body around he can spend an action to create a new weapon.
His patron wishes for him to aid in the path of a reaper, bring those whose souls who have escaped death to their rightful realm.
Just replace light with death like abilities
One party I adventured with included a necromancer. We were all friends per our backstories, and were helping him channel his evil impulses into acceptable behavior like monster hunting and bandit busting.
At one point we slew a chimera which he promptly raised as a skeleton. We Crafted a sturdy leather covering for its ribcage with lacing that permitted us to use it as a pack animal. We also crafted an exotic saddle allowing our necromancer to "drive" it as a combat mount. We referred to it like a car complete with trunk...which ended up with us calling it our "Bitchin' Chimera."
The first time it was used in combat we played "Bitchin' Camaro," causing much laughter and choking on drinks all around.
Our necromancer had decent Charisma, of course, plus ranks in Diplomacy. Our party spent part of our spring and summer downtime in a village that had lost a lot of laborers (to hobgoblins before we destroyed that particular scourge) and was in need of plowers, sowers, and then harvesters and threshers. Skeletons and zombies can perform such tasks, so he raised those hobgoblins to help the village.
Funny how flexible morals can be...
I played with a necromancer that would raise enemies we had killed. The dm would just give him the stat blocks, and he saved our skin quite a few times.
So I played a Warforged Necromancer which was quite fun to play and loved moving meatbags around
I never got to play much of them but I had a necro who acted more as a ceremonial undertaker than a standard "do my bidding" kind of necro. He had a desire to experiment with where the energies that motivated the body after the life was gone came from and what it could do. His people had an interesting relationship with undead as well, making clay statues of their dead and placing their departed's bones in them. Keeping an undead skeleton of their loved ones in shrines to hold remembrance ceremonies. My necro was going to try and see how an undead's personality develops, since undead behave as their living counterpart did when not controlled and with no living around. Sort of a Matter vs Antimatter thing where the nature of undead is destroying the living but also how the living have an instinct to revile and destroy undeath.
Also, I like making undead reflavors depending on circumstance. I'm a big fan of giving the circle of spores druid a different kind of zombie that forms like a communial gestalt similar to myconids that get more intelligent the more you have of them.
My first character to live past level 1 was a necromancer. (My lv1 guy tried to save a lv4 from a trap meant for a lv4) having one or two undead was fine the problem was managing them on a physical board and time in combat. Pairing them up for attack rolls helps cut down time and once you get the higher level spells replace them with the smaller number of stronger undead. Using your 8 and 9th lv slit you can summon 5 wights each get a dozen zombies from there kills. I recommend saying you send your zombies off to your base for some kinda labor and keeping your wights as commander/ generals.
I just got a character idea of an isolated necromancer who lives in the woods and has a few undead, and when the other players meet him for the first time he's just having a tea party with corpses while one of the zombies his braiding wilted flowers into his hair. 😂
Laughs in karnathian blood of vol rituals.
The Druid friend seems really dedicated
What you described for the druid was me but as a necromancer, we also had some extra necromancy spells that let me summon stronger undead in lower numbers to cut down even more on the time spend on my term.
Pretty sure I even tried to set up a macro to cut a couple seconds of clicking the hit into just one click to really narrow it down even more but I wasn't tech savvy enough.
Would also have my turn actually ready before it became my turn and any missed undead or if I couldn't adjust for a sudden change made in the turn before me it would just be played as my necromancer struggling to keep track themselfs. Like he's just a necromancer, not some arch lich, he loses count some times.
Also they all did everything either on the same turn if low in number or as a swarm if high in number.
I find it funny. I’ve played a necromancer usually had around 4-5 zombies and every fight I would be like battle tactic moving them around and stuff and then when it was my actual turn I was like “uhhhhh… I didn’t think of that, melf’s acid arrow”
The last time I played a necromancer I made him look like Adam Gomez through a mask I bought that could give me an illusion. I would raise the most powerful monsters I could at the time and I was able to get a zombie hydra in 3.5 . I was also the groups negotiator which made it hilarious since I had to use magic to hide my summons since people aren't usually on board with the dead stuff. Fun campaign.
From what I understand from what you're putting down: is that it is very much so the player's responsibility to basically be a sudo DM for your own creatures and preplan your own turns as to not take up too much space or time within combat
I’m doing a necromancer style evil campaign . We had 20 skeletons at one point. All were wiped out in an instant during a boss fight lol fun stuff
The back of my character sheet is mostly statblocks for summons and undead.
I’ve wanted to play a necromancer that used a possess-able armor or mannequin, and shuffle around spirits he’s bought timeshares from in and out of it.
One of my top favorite characters is my necromancer! She was the daughter of 2 highly respected "doctors" that were clerics who dipped into necromancy....hence her being raised around dead bodies, making it normal in her eyes. I played her with the idea of she was "helping bad souls redeem themselves through good deeds." She had a belief she could redeem the souls of the bad people (bandits etc.) post death.
I made a point to collect all armor and weapons (especially nonattunement magical weapons) I'd find after battles, including dead bodies. I kitted out all my undead with chainmail (ac 16 now) 2 short swords each, equalling 2 attacks each (yes, the offhand attack did not gain the modifier, and simple weapons didn't require proficiency, according to my DM)
I'd specifically buy perfume & soap to literally clean my undead weekly (undead have a natural bad smell....DM was strict on that). I would drape my undead in fully covering gowns with masks & gloves, and even specifically stuff them with fragrant herbs to assist with smell AND the natural "jangling bones" sounds skeletons & zombies gave off. The bag of holding would hold most of my "souls of redemption" when we were in towns. I have a special goliath undead follower, named Roger, who we flavored as the Noble background servant wearing Demon Armor as my "long time trusted family friend". (Cursed items like demon armor specifically state that the curses do not effect undead types)
Long story short....Holy fuck the micromanaging was intense but I loved every minute of playing her!! She had a sweet personality and I tried my best to play her as lawful good or lawful neutral.
I DM for a necromancer (2nd edition game). It actually rocks. He doesn't have any undead minions yet and his spells are more just creepy utilitarian type things, but he does have some powerful spells that are not direct damage. He's actually very creative and not just a, "I want to dig up the graveyard" type. He also has a bit of love for divination too. So, the way he plays is a bit different than most.
I played a necromancer inspired on Diablo 3. used a combination of homebrew stuff. He started as an alived character and slowly became a Litch. He had zombie companion as his main zombie, that would become stronger similar to druid companion. If this pet died the lich proccess would slow down or delay (needed the pet to collect souls, negative energy, etc) later I would summon small armies of undead but used them as "swarms" so I didnt had to keep track of so many. as the swarm grew in number of zombies thet would deal more damage, but would always be east to hot/defeat. by X ammount of damage the swarm loses X amount of zombies and deals less damage, similar to previous Lvs. main character had spells more similar to a priest, dealing damage, dealing negative energy, and ocationaly placing curses.
Having stats (I recommend cards for live sessions) and one initiative role and one attack role (with advantage coz it’s assumed they try to circle the target of choice so a lot of them would have advantage) for the pack of undead really streamline’s this. Works when they get attacked too, if a quarter of health is down, one of the undead is down in a group of 4 for example. There’s situation where this won’t work, but for your average encounter, really makes things easier and faster for everyone.
Fyi i know 5e doesn’t really consider flanking an advantage situation… but try to get your necromancer to accept losing 4-5 attack roles without throwing ‘em a bone 😂
If i ever get to playing a dnd game, ive always really wanted to play necromancer
Necromancers in solo campaigns are awesome especially in ad&d
A friend and I are actually homebrewing a necromancer class. It is a lot to work out for balance issues. First playtest starts in a few weeks after I finish DMing this campaign ark. I'm stoked!
The Dread Necromacer from 3.5 was about the only fun way to play a necromancer. It started you right away with summoning undead, and that's basically all you did. As levels progressed you could either caster stronger undead or more of the weaker dead
I like to have them start operating more like swarms once they get enough lower undead. Makes it easier to go about in combat and it can make it more fun when he tries to get them to do stuff for him. It’s much funnier to see a group of skeletons failing to dig a hole or wildly succeeding then to see a bunch of varied results.
I did that as a druid for my combat wild shape in the first combat we had. Made a combined stat block ahead of session since we keep some of our own stats and take on some of the creature's. The DM was very pleased with my preparedness. I didn't think it all that uncommon, but then my second DM was also pleasantly surprised that I keep my own set of notes 🤷♀️. I thought organization and preparedness was part of D&D and I was just going a little bit further with the stat block because its a tool for my ADD, otherwise I'd forget everything (notes) or get flustered and confused trying to play the wild shape 🤷♀️.
We have a friend that plays a bard necromancer and he treats his undead like they are still alive and are his « friends » 😅 he gives them names and all. It seriously gives a whole other flavour to the whole raising the dead thing! We always make fun of the smell and he sometimes hide them in a portable hole he has (you know when we go to cities and stuff)!
With experience and a little prep it’s definitely do-able , just have the stat blocks for any undead u want to summon and really pre plan your turns while the rest of the party is , that way you can just grab the dice and roll on your turn (if u want an individual initiative for undead have them all roll as one , or what my table does is have them go immediately after the player on their initiative) roll all attacks at once ideally the dm gives us the ac then u just roll dmg for any attacks which went through, little bit of quick maths and boom , currently at my table ( in a game of 3 yrs ) my turns are often the fastest despite walking around with a standing army of 30 undead .
Note : it helps to have experience in wargames (warhammer etc.) or at least that attitude to rolling dice for them.
Had a druid/sorcerer joke concept for 3.5 that revolved entirely around summoning chickens. The Poultrymancer. He believed that he was a reincarnated rooster king of an ancient chicken empire. All because of a hallucination he had while dangerously ill one time as a kid.