What are the plans for animate dead while used on a PC?

Will Animate dead animate the PC in a skeleton/zombified form, but of a matching level of the PC with the same abilities? Would such a thing be possible?

Meaning, if Level 7 Wizard is killed and animated, will a skeletal mage of level 7 be under the Necromancers control until destroyed?

If It DOESN'T work this way, I'd have a suggestion for the Animate/Create Undead spells when used on PCs.

The suggestion would be for the spell to work as above in relation to class, but due to the estimated higher magic and power level of EFU I think a modification should be made so both spells can be used towards PCs.

When Animate dead is cast on a PC, it raises them in their skeletal form, but at half their "Living" level. If a level 6 Fighter is animated he'll be as powerful as a level 3 fighter.

When Create Undead is used on a corpse, it will animate the body at it's full level.

If such a thing is possible, I think it might be neat if the corpse was animated and used as a minion as if the character was dominated and under complete control by the Necromancer (IE: an NPC of the PC with all of it's equipment intact. Just as if the character was recently slain and then animated - the body perfectly or nearly preserved.) I actually think this is really unlikely, but it would make a higher level spell like Create Undead far more useful and aweaome. Perhaps this is something that a player might pursue as a plot if it's too difficult or awesome to script :P

If not, I'd like to see the character animated at it's full level and in skeletal form. Just like animate dead but with no level loss.

This is really more of a post about what's being done with Animate dead with what I think would be cool to see done with it, if anyone else wants to chime in they're more than welcome.

I think Arabels system works pretty well. Summoning pretty weak undead without a corpse and then, if a corpse is used, creating an undead of the same level as the corpse.

Just a shame that they had to be logged on at the time.

Dunno if that got changed, but it would be really cool if it was possible.

I don't know exactly how it works on coa or tabletop D&D, but in my opinion, animate dead might be too powerful if you can do it with a high level character, for example, and I'm not sure that's how the spell was meant to be.

I remember a case where a fairly high level wizard (9+, I think) was using a dead high level meleer (12-13), stealing/animating his body each reset to go on scripted quests/exp hunting spree, which looked fairly cheesy.

I don't know if there will be such a thing as "mangled corpses", but I believe this could play the role of limiting the power of that spell. At least there should have some persistance (ie. if the skeleton is destroyed, you can't reanimate it again, even after a reset, and require a ressurrection spell instead of a raised, due to the damages to the body).

Also, I'm not sure how Create Undead and it's Greater version differs from Animate Undead, but it should be taken in consideration too. I suppose that on City of Arabel those weren't changed, and it seems that there is even a possibility that you can animate something stronger than you can get with create greater undead, which is unbalacing, IMHO.

Traditoinally, Animate Dead animates a corpse as a zombie or keleton and gives it HD according to size, not what abilities it had while it was alive, so it'd be 1 HD skeletons or 2 HD zombies for PC characters. Create Undead makes more powerful undead than Animate Dead, like wraiths and ghouls, while Create Greater Undead creates even more powerful ones, like mummies and vampires.

Addendum: If you made the undead spawned with Create Undead and Create Greater Undead have HD equal to the caster level of the character, I think you'd see the spells becoming a lot more useful than they were previously.

I'd also like to suggest the ability to be able to animate multiple undead at the same time.