Undead Animation mega-thread

[Garem]

I've been tinkering with undead animation. This is my list so far after a few solid weeks of testing, playing, etc. on how to make the whole system work better. All in all, I've had a whole lot of fun with it and I strongly suggest players try it out sometime.

Some of this is meta-game exploitable information. Bear that in mind when reading through this.

Cheers.

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Corpses:

-The "Give weapon" feature is broken, and I've only gotten an animate to pick up a weapon one time. Then, he wouldn't equip it. Remove the "give item" feature in lieu of providing all animates with a reasonable weapon. Clubs for non-corpse zombies and goblins, giant mauls for ogres, etc.

-Give archers infinite ammo. They run out very, very quickly. Except for goblins and maybe kobolds, these corpses are almost useless. Alternatively, you could just give them a short sword or something so they aren't totally useless after running out.

-Corpses are extremely difficult to harvest, making skeleton in the closet direly necessary for any devoted animator. For example, I killed an entire camp of orcs. No corpses. I killed an entire tribe of goblins... and did not receive a single corpse. Making them 5-10% likely to drop would be reasonable I think. See next point for more thoughts on this.

-If someone wanted to put in the time, a system similar to skinning could be implemented called "Corpse Preservation". It would be a simple check off of lore and/or heal. Successfully beating the DC provides a corpse. The system could be expanded later to provide varying qualities of corpses, too! That's a lot of work though, but just an idea to throw out there. A passing thought- corpses might need to be preserved in the first 12-18 seconds of death instead of the 3-5 minutes for skinning, just so all these bodies don't just start piling up and causing crazy lag issues.

-This is more of a general note than a suggestion, but most animated corpses are not incredibly useful without a healthy amount of undead enhancement. The orcs are, and the jungle cats (probably) are because of sneaks, maybe ogres (although their downsides outweigh the positives right now) but the others are not.

-Skeleton warriors cost me as a GSF: Necromancy level 8 cleric five summoning points. I have a total of 160. That's 32 skeleton warriors I could control. That's far too little summoning point cost, because they're extremely useful when I get done fixing them up. I'd suggest making them cost twice as much as they do and giving them a small bonus, like one more level and/or better hp.

-Goblins and kobolds (probably, haven't found one yet) are relatively worthless, yet cost more summon points to animate than skeletons. That's a little silly. They're not totally useless, but should provide a good alternative to the crap non-corpse animates for low level necromancers without costing too many summoning points.

-Get rid of the visual effects for both the cloud of filth and the flies. Mechanically, they're not very useful. They also cause a great deal of lag. This may make a good "undead enhancement" feature, however, but it shouldn't be standard form.

Animation spells:

-Wizards are royally screwed over from becoming great undead animators. Because the spell comes at level 9, they can't ever have control of more than 1 undead minion. If items could be used to allow multiple summons, this would make the world much brighter for these folks. See next for a work-around.

-Why not allow a way to "detach" undead from your control via a convo? This would effectively make an animated corpse an NPC instead of a summoned creature. From there, via convo, an animator could choose to either make the zombie totally docile, without any will of its own at all, or totally hostile to all living things. A necromancer could set up a few of these bad boys near the super-secret back door that they want to protect, for instance.
If this could work, a necromancer could use an animation scroll, then detach, then use another, then detach, etc, making building up an undead force feasible. It would also allow them to go do something while they wait for another day to pray for spells/read their spellbook and they wouldn't lose their main animated corpse to resting. An important point, this would encourage necromancers to build secret lairs so that their unprotected docile creations aren't merely destroyed. Lairs are super rad.

-A note-- you always lose your first animated corpse when you rest. That really sucks. Yesterday, I hit a bug where it unsummoned all of my remaining four corpses when I woke up. That REALLY sucked.

-The Death Avatar is fun to play around with, but it's not particularly combat effective compared to its hang-ups, being the cost for summoning it (which rises with time, and is now higher than ANY of my animated undead) and its slow speed make it mechanically meh. Imo, give it some spellcasting powers instead of being a mindless brute. It IS the avatar of "The Archmage", after all.

-PLEASE fix the quest system so that undead minions don't make spawns harder. It makes quests much harder, making it a sort of zero-sum mechanical benefit because these things that are inferior to NPCs are adding too many enemies.

ADDED:

-Special corpses that required a whole ton of manipulation, but also provided more enhancement options, would be AWESOME. Bloated goblin corpses that spew acid on death, for example. Or abominations of the creatures, so they have like, 4 arms, 2 heads, shit like that.

[Thomas_Not_very_wise]

I am against the 'detached' undead suggestion.

A reset would make the effort pointless.

Invest in Divine Wands of Animation. They are three thousand after all.

[TheImpossibleDream]

-PLEASE fix the quest system so that undead minions don't make spawns harder. It makes quests much harder, making it a sort of zero-sum mechanical benefit because these things that are inferior to NPCs are adding too many enemies.

Its being worked on at the moment I believe as with animal companions and familiars who also bug spawns to be gigantic.

[Thomas_Not_very_wise]

Its being worked on at the moment I believe as with animal companions and familiars who also bug spawns to be gigantic.

The Animal and familiar bug was fixed a long time ago.

[Caddies]

All excellent points that I agree with, Garem. As always though, these things being fixed are dependent on a DM with the both the time, knowledge and willingness to improve the system. Usually this is Mort! But we can't expect too much from him. We'll see what he has to say, I doubt these improvements will come swiftly though as I know he is very busy IRL at the moment.

[TheImpossibleDream]

The Animal and familiar bug was fixed a long time ago.

It was not and still causes massive spawns. Tested it just last reset.

[Dr Dragon]

I agree wizards are royally screwed over by this system.

[Garem]

I am against the 'detached' undead suggestion.

A reset would make the effort pointless.

Invest in Divine Wands of Animation. They are three thousand after all.

You cannot summon more than a SINGLE animate/summon from items, just like how if a summoner brings out a bazillion oozes or whatever, but then uses a Tuft of Rat Hair, he loses them all but gets a ferocious warrior rat! Yip.

To Cads and DMs, oh yes, absolutely understand. Frankly, I'm not terribly dissatisfied with the system as it is, just posing these many thoughts to tweak things.

Cads, also, could use your help IG when you spot me. Not a major issue. Item loss bug, I think.

[Drakill Tannan]

I say give wizards/sorcerers animate death as a level 3 or 4 spell.

[AntoninD'Erlon]

Could always give wizards with SF necromancy a permanent item to summon an undead 1/day. Maybe 2/day with GSF. Then again you could always go for pale master or get level 9 by buffing your allies instead of that silly skeleton ;)

[Barehander]

I'm somewhat confused: you can only prepare, at level 10, a maximum of 10 Animate Dead (with Extend Spell and 18 Wis). How could you possibly animate 32 Skeletons, even presupposing you have that many corpses in store? It doesn't seem very decisive that you have the control points if you simply don't have the spells and corpses. And if you did have that many corpses and had somehow made the preparations to summon an army that large, it would make for some epic battle.

Or is it that you actually get to keep your summons if you rest? The OP said something like that, but it wasn't very clear. Even so, you'd need hours to rest and animate. Half of this stuff isn't documented anywhere I could find, which is rather lame.


From my limited experience, though, the suggestions are rather good. The "give weapon" feature would be really cool (you could also give ammo), but it's indeed broken.

What I really want to see is some way to leave the undead behind, hiding in some remote area while you go about your business. That doesn't seem possible with NWN's way of treating summons, though. I guess the "detach from service" option is one way around that.

[OneHeart]

Give weapon is working (though sometimes it demands a lot of patience) . Just use ordinary weapons.  

I can only secont those suggestions.   Animate dead as a 4th lvl spell would be nice.

Also "Deattach from service" could be one of the best features of the animations!   (or maybe some command like "Bury yourself!"  and the animation would dissapeared in the groud :)

Harvesting corpses - YES!
Releasing as NPC - quadruple yes, but only after really wise consideration. I can imagine huge benefits of this feature as well as a great risk of "Overboosted player spawn" ...

[Paha]

it works like this. You must right click and use drop weapon, right next to the being. Then it works.

Dropping weapon any other way does not work.

[Thomasjb]

Giving animate dead as a third or fourth level spell is a terrible idea.  We already have a server full of necromancers for some reason and the last thing I want to see is every bumble with a spellbook and a cloak being able to raise undead simply because he's level 5.

[Nightshadow]

Giving animate dead as a third or fourth level spell is a terrible idea.  We already have a server full of necromancers for some reason and the last thing I want to see is every bumble with a spellbook and a cloak being able to raise undead simply because he's level 5.

The funny thing is that all the necromancers on the server save two that I know of is a cleric or wizard/cleric or something like that. This lack of variety among us necromancers is, to say the least, getting a bit dull. 'Oh, hello servant of the Vaunted #57, welcome to our order.' I'd really like to see more arcane necromancers, as would seem to be more common in D&D.

Unfortunately, it isn't appealing in the slightest to be an arcane necromancer, as you can't actually animate the dead without reaching level 9, which is really, really hard usually, and for a wizard can become quite dull (Invis+Buff all the way to level 9, yay!). Lowering it down to level 7 would make it bearable, down to 5 would be preferred.