In Middle Earth a lot of Men don't even really think magic exists, or if it does they've literally never seen or heard of it, even if you live in Minas Tirith or whatever
In Waterdeep you can't swing a car without hitting someone who can at least chuck out a cantrip
A feat that itself requires a fair amount of magic.
ok maybe not middle earth magic levels, that's too far in the other direction, but running into an archmage every other week isn't supposed to be the norm
I hope they do a Dark Sun setting after Ebberon. Though Ebberon is my favorite setting ever, with Ravnica now nipping right at its heels (god I love Ravnica)
Middle Earth is really low magic. To the extent that I wouldn't use dnd for it
In Forgotten Realms magic is scarce in the sense that the vast majority of people can't do it, but it's not uncommon in society, it's just hard to do and mostly the purview of people from better off backgrounds who have the talent and time to learn it
Sort of like... Being a medical doctor? There aren't many doctors around as a proportion of the population but as an element of society they're not exactly uncommon, even if becoming a Doctor is sufficiently hard and time consuming that most people wouldn't or couldn't do it
I'm far from a Forgotten Realms scholar, but I do know that there was an entire civilization revolving around extremely heavy magic use (Netheril; not everyone there was a mage, but I'm preeeeetty sure everyone was at least a quarter-mage on their mother's side), and there's currently an entire nation ruled by wizards (Thay). And these weren't/aren't reclusive nations, either! Like it's not "Oh, there are stories of lands ruled by mages, but no one's ever been there"; it's "Oh shit, there's a Thay ambassador outside town hall, we gotta figure out how to turn down trade relations with them without getting our town enslaved and demolished".
Granted, that doesn't mean that everyone on Toril owns a Ring of Protection +1 and can cause fires by thinking warm thoughts, but also I don't think that "magical nation of wizards" can happen in a low-magic setting. If I recall, "magic" in Middle-earth is generally either non-specific power bound up into magic items (of which the Rings of Power are probably the most prominent and potent), or Gandalf lighting some pine cones on fire without using flint and tinder.
I'm sorry, no, you made this happen and how you have to write a series of articles about this.
Hey, which medical discipline corresponds to Necromancy?
Pathology. Divination would be radiology, evocation would be radiation oncology. Enchantment and illusion would be anesthesia or psych. Transmutation would be the surgical disciplines. Abjuration would be EM, trauma resus, critical care/ICU.
+3
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I mean even from a thematic and not mechanical standpoint I don't like the idea of a fighter using magic?
Like it isn't just "has a spell list" I'm talking about
I mean the source of a fighters abilities coming from something arcane makes them less interesting to me.
I kinda feel that a lot of the problems that rangers have stem from the fact that most of the fighters arcane arrows and bow skills are a lot cooler than anything rangers get to do.
I'm far from a Forgotten Realms scholar, but I do know that there was an entire civilization revolving around extremely heavy magic use (Netheril; not everyone there was a mage, but I'm preeeeetty sure everyone was at least a quarter-mage on their mother's side), and there's currently an entire nation ruled by wizards (Thay). And these weren't/aren't reclusive nations, either! Like it's not "Oh, there are stories of lands ruled by mages, but no one's ever been there"; it's "Oh shit, there's a Thay ambassador outside town hall, we gotta figure out how to turn down trade relations with them without getting our town enslaved and demolished".
Granted, that doesn't mean that everyone on Toril owns a Ring of Protection +1 and can cause fires by thinking warm thoughts, but also I don't think that "magical nation of wizards" can happen in a low-magic setting. If I recall, "magic" in Middle-earth is generally either non-specific power bound up into magic items (of which the Rings of Power are probably the most prominent and potent), or Gandalf lighting some pine cones on fire without using flint and tinder.
the netheril lived in ancient history when magic was easy and common and are directly responsible for it not being easy and common anymore because they overindulged and killed the god of magic or something, and the wizards who rule thay are a teeny tiny ruling class on top of a huge population of non-mages and slaves IIRC
Necromancers are the best wizards and most role playing games are really bad at them
I think part of the problem is the assumption that necromancers are just ordinary wizards using the same power source as wizards, so they have all the wizard tricks and also oh they summon an army of the undead.
What if we thought of necromancy as an entirely different magical discipline, like the difference between arcane and divine magic? Granted, 5E doesn't have a huge level of support for this since there isn't much difference between arcane and divine magic, but I think in general you can get a more interesting necromancer and related classes by treating necromancy as its own source of power separate from ordinary wizardry, with different resource management, different abilities, and so on.
Your ordinary wizard can animate dead and throw fireballs, but still just with spell slots. Your real necromancer can turn death into power, animate the dead then sacrifice them to regain the energy, rip someone's soul out and consume it, etc.
Welp, I expressed my issues with my problem player and explained that I had a problem with the way they were treating my sessions and their general attitude, and said that I was perfectly willing to keep playing with them if they addressed some behaviours but if not then it would be best if they took a break
I may have done it badly, or just confirmed my problem, because they no longer consider me a friend and I now may have lost two of the other players due to then being better friends with her than with me
Now I see why GMs put up with bad players for so long
Do Necromancers like a Warlock but without pact/patron (give them something but idk what, maybe power source?) And for the Invocations give them something closer to metamagic, to allow what few non-necromancy spells they get to get a bit more versatile as they level
Necromancers are the best wizards and most role playing games are really bad at them
It is really hard to balance "I have an army of the undead"
I feel like it's not THAT hard to balance at lower-mid tier levels at least
The thing with a necromancer is, realistically, if they're focused on the undead most of their magic should be about raising or supporting them. Make maintaining undead take up spell slots appropriate to their level or some other form of upkeep, make raising more than just your bog standard skeletons and zombies require rituals with rare or expensive components, and limit the number of fodder they can summon and control without going through these steps. etc. etc.
I mean yes, in the end, it is challenging, but I feel like there are definitely ways to make "guy who controls undead" balanced with "lady who shoots lightning bolts from her hands" and "Mystical monk who can beat up a giant with their fists"
Lord_Asmodeus on
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
Welp, I expressed my issues with my problem player and explained that I had a problem with the way they were treating my sessions and their general attitude, and said that I was perfectly willing to keep playing with them if they addressed some behaviours but if not then it would be best if they took a break
I may have done it badly, or just confirmed my problem, because they no longer consider me a friend and I now may have lost two of the other players due to then being better friends with her than with me
Now I see why GMs put up with bad players for so long
That super sucks!
Yeah, GM can be such a high stress tightrope of personal interactions and group dynamics.
Someone declaring "friendship over" for being called out as a troublesome table player is extremely childish.
My Shadowrun GM is a good guy and a lot of his countermeasures were well thought out in advance, but anytime we came up with a plan that he hadn't accounted for, he just seemed to say "Well, I didn't think of paragliding in, but I bet Ares did." and now there were drones in the sky that our 2 scouting trips never saw.
he
he is literally playing as Ares in this scenario
that's like
the whole point
what.
I will say, I’m sympathetic to the idea of “well this group is smarter than me so they could have thought of something” as the GM, similar to a player having that issue. However, that shouldn’t trump player agency and ingenuity.
I think a good middle ground here is that if the expected mode of play of your system is heist- or otherwise intrusion-based (so dungeon crawls, games about war and attacking bases, etc), you should give GMs strong guidance on what kinds of defenses are reasonable in what kinds of settings and situations and do so in the actual core book instead of a $40 supplement. Maybe even some advice on the sort of things people are likely to find in a dungeon/megacorp office tower/Chaos Marine stronghold/etc.
The DMG for 2E AD&D actually says, flat-out, in the beginning something like "there's lots of great advice and tutorial tips out there for budding Dungeon Masters, but this book isn't that! This is a collection of infrequently-used rules. Subscribe to DRAGON™ magazine if you want to learn how to be a better DM!" and it made me pretty mad, because sure enough, there were a bunch of rules that I rarely used and not enough practical advice about how this fucking game worked. (There was some good advice scattered about, but it's in unhelpfully weird places. There are some fantastic paragraphs about the core assumptions of D&D world design hidden in the section about Coinage and Economy.)
Modern games are better about this, sometimes, but I still think too often they're basically just like "fly, little bird!" and it's like fuck you no tell me what's an appropriate strength of office safe for this mid-level Aztechnology lab you goddamn fuckshit game.
In that kind of low-information environment I think it's really easy for GMs to just take their cues for what kind of opposition to create from what the players are doing, which is good to an extent but if overdone can quickly turn into just bullshit adversarialism even without meaning to.
+6
Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
One of the reasons I really like the homebrewed Tome of Necromancy for 3.5 even though I never got to use it is a lot of the flavor stuff that really added character to necromancy, like the ability to create and bless or desecrate tombs and crypts, and feats which let you make or command undead of a certain type, for a price. I think a lot of what would make Necromancers more fun, and would also help introduce more options for balancing them, would be to increase the depth of the character, give the player more interesting abilities and flavorful things to keep track of, but also make sure the tools they use to become more powerful require a commensurate amount of time and effort for their character, and can be an interesting bit of gameplay consideration for the player.
Like, I feel a big reason why the current treatment for necromancers feels more shit than most of the other disciplines, is even if you aren't focusing on the undead necromancers play, or should play, differently than other wizards, but the game just tosses you the ability to raise a couple more skeletons and zombies of the most generic type, and maybe some more high-level stuff down the line, and that's that.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
The five e necromancer in general is ridiculously badly done.
Weirdly though, the two necromancy cantrips are actually pretty great? Toll the Dead gives you ranged d12 damage, which is as strong as it gets for cantrips, and Chill Touch does d8 damage AND blocks the target from regaining HP until your next turn, which can really spoil things for regen-oriented NPCs.
Necromancers are the best wizards and most role playing games are really bad at them
It is really hard to balance "I have an army of the undead"
Necromancers don’t have to have a bunch of minions at all times. Corpse minions could fall apart after an encounter or day, be too slow to keep up or make it through difficult terrain.
Necromancers can also raise just a ghost to get intel from a baddie, or mainly be a death / shadow mage with the ability to occasionally revive a corpse or two
Creating a greater undead minion or powerful swarm should be costly and require a blood sacrifice and/or require a difficult and expensive ritual
They could also summon things other than zombies and skellingtons, like spying shadows or vampire thralls that can only act at night and require a shocking volume of blood to upkeep
Idk I feel there’s a lot of options
0
MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
I played an evil cleric in a very silly high-power Pathfinder campaign once
that was an extremely broken build
Animate Dead let you create and automatically, indefinitely command 4HD of skeletons or zombies per caster level, or 8HD per caster level if you use Desecrate as well, plus the 1HD/caster level of other undead you can control with the Command Undead feat, which I reserved for the results of my use of Create Undead.
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I think what I would want out of a necromancer is someone who powers their spells with injury and death. Either in an active form, like out there charging up their reaping scythe, or in a passive form, enchanting their allies (or their enemies) such that the damage they cause can be turned around into making cool skeletons and stuff.
Powerful enough necromancers might be able to do all of this from a great distance and keep their minions alive for an extended time, but most of them (as in, adventurers) need to be elbow deep in death to have any real efficacy.
0
Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
A necromancer with the mobile feat and Vampiric Touch in their spell book could be interesting. Zip around at 40ft per turn, doing 3d6 damage a turn for ten turns while healing for half that and incurring no opportunity attacks? Plus the looks on everyone's faces when they realise they're fighting a melee wizard.
My experience with magic in 5th edition was trying to create a non magical rogue because the entire rest of the group had access to spell lists.
And then eventually settling on just being a battlemaster with the criminal background and an extra skill proficiency bummed off a kind GM.
Weird how the fighter archetype that just has spells by another name is the best one for getting to feel like a dramatic and heroic rogue in combat with choices out side "I stab the monster".
Posts
A feat that itself requires a fair amount of magic.
In Forgotten Realms magic is scarce in the sense that the vast majority of people can't do it, but it's not uncommon in society, it's just hard to do and mostly the purview of people from better off backgrounds who have the talent and time to learn it
Sort of like... Being a medical doctor? There aren't many doctors around as a proportion of the population but as an element of society they're not exactly uncommon, even if becoming a Doctor is sufficiently hard and time consuming that most people wouldn't or couldn't do it
Granted, that doesn't mean that everyone on Toril owns a Ring of Protection +1 and can cause fires by thinking warm thoughts, but also I don't think that "magical nation of wizards" can happen in a low-magic setting. If I recall, "magic" in Middle-earth is generally either non-specific power bound up into magic items (of which the Rings of Power are probably the most prominent and potent), or Gandalf lighting some pine cones on fire without using flint and tinder.
Hey, which medical discipline corresponds to Necromancy?
Bone Magic - Also all types of doctorin
Fighter - surgery
Pathology. Divination would be radiology, evocation would be radiation oncology. Enchantment and illusion would be anesthesia or psych. Transmutation would be the surgical disciplines. Abjuration would be EM, trauma resus, critical care/ICU.
Abjuration -- Allergy, Immunology, & Internal medicine
Conjuration -- Obstetrics & Gynecology
Divination -- Diagnostic radiology
Enchantment -- Anesthesiology & Psychiatry
Evocation -- Surgery
Illusion -- Ophthalmology
Necromancy -- Pathology
Transmutation -- Dermatology & Medical genetics
Nah. Sorcerers actually affect their surroundings in a measurable way.
I kinda feel that a lot of the problems that rangers have stem from the fact that most of the fighters arcane arrows and bow skills are a lot cooler than anything rangers get to do.
Satans..... hints.....
the netheril lived in ancient history when magic was easy and common and are directly responsible for it not being easy and common anymore because they overindulged and killed the god of magic or something, and the wizards who rule thay are a teeny tiny ruling class on top of a huge population of non-mages and slaves IIRC
are you sure necromancers aren't dentists
That's an adventuring wizard right there.
It is really hard to balance "I have an army of the undead"
I think part of the problem is the assumption that necromancers are just ordinary wizards using the same power source as wizards, so they have all the wizard tricks and also oh they summon an army of the undead.
What if we thought of necromancy as an entirely different magical discipline, like the difference between arcane and divine magic? Granted, 5E doesn't have a huge level of support for this since there isn't much difference between arcane and divine magic, but I think in general you can get a more interesting necromancer and related classes by treating necromancy as its own source of power separate from ordinary wizardry, with different resource management, different abilities, and so on.
Your ordinary wizard can animate dead and throw fireballs, but still just with spell slots. Your real necromancer can turn death into power, animate the dead then sacrifice them to regain the energy, rip someone's soul out and consume it, etc.
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
I may have done it badly, or just confirmed my problem, because they no longer consider me a friend and I now may have lost two of the other players due to then being better friends with her than with me
Now I see why GMs put up with bad players for so long
I feel like it's not THAT hard to balance at lower-mid tier levels at least
The thing with a necromancer is, realistically, if they're focused on the undead most of their magic should be about raising or supporting them. Make maintaining undead take up spell slots appropriate to their level or some other form of upkeep, make raising more than just your bog standard skeletons and zombies require rituals with rare or expensive components, and limit the number of fodder they can summon and control without going through these steps. etc. etc.
I mean yes, in the end, it is challenging, but I feel like there are definitely ways to make "guy who controls undead" balanced with "lady who shoots lightning bolts from her hands" and "Mystical monk who can beat up a giant with their fists"
That super sucks!
Yeah, GM can be such a high stress tightrope of personal interactions and group dynamics.
Someone declaring "friendship over" for being called out as a troublesome table player is extremely childish.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
That means that either they have to use the non-raising spells until a combatant drops, or cart around a load of corpses
I guess that's a balancing mechanism?
I think a good middle ground here is that if the expected mode of play of your system is heist- or otherwise intrusion-based (so dungeon crawls, games about war and attacking bases, etc), you should give GMs strong guidance on what kinds of defenses are reasonable in what kinds of settings and situations and do so in the actual core book instead of a $40 supplement. Maybe even some advice on the sort of things people are likely to find in a dungeon/megacorp office tower/Chaos Marine stronghold/etc.
The DMG for 2E AD&D actually says, flat-out, in the beginning something like "there's lots of great advice and tutorial tips out there for budding Dungeon Masters, but this book isn't that! This is a collection of infrequently-used rules. Subscribe to DRAGON™ magazine if you want to learn how to be a better DM!" and it made me pretty mad, because sure enough, there were a bunch of rules that I rarely used and not enough practical advice about how this fucking game worked. (There was some good advice scattered about, but it's in unhelpfully weird places. There are some fantastic paragraphs about the core assumptions of D&D world design hidden in the section about Coinage and Economy.)
Modern games are better about this, sometimes, but I still think too often they're basically just like "fly, little bird!" and it's like fuck you no tell me what's an appropriate strength of office safe for this mid-level Aztechnology lab you goddamn fuckshit game.
In that kind of low-information environment I think it's really easy for GMs to just take their cues for what kind of opposition to create from what the players are doing, which is good to an extent but if overdone can quickly turn into just bullshit adversarialism even without meaning to.
Like, I feel a big reason why the current treatment for necromancers feels more shit than most of the other disciplines, is even if you aren't focusing on the undead necromancers play, or should play, differently than other wizards, but the game just tosses you the ability to raise a couple more skeletons and zombies of the most generic type, and maybe some more high-level stuff down the line, and that's that.
Weirdly though, the two necromancy cantrips are actually pretty great? Toll the Dead gives you ranged d12 damage, which is as strong as it gets for cantrips, and Chill Touch does d8 damage AND blocks the target from regaining HP until your next turn, which can really spoil things for regen-oriented NPCs.
Necromancers don’t have to have a bunch of minions at all times. Corpse minions could fall apart after an encounter or day, be too slow to keep up or make it through difficult terrain.
Necromancers can also raise just a ghost to get intel from a baddie, or mainly be a death / shadow mage with the ability to occasionally revive a corpse or two
Creating a greater undead minion or powerful swarm should be costly and require a blood sacrifice and/or require a difficult and expensive ritual
They could also summon things other than zombies and skellingtons, like spying shadows or vampire thralls that can only act at night and require a shocking volume of blood to upkeep
Idk I feel there’s a lot of options
that was an extremely broken build
Animate Dead let you create and automatically, indefinitely command 4HD of skeletons or zombies per caster level, or 8HD per caster level if you use Desecrate as well, plus the 1HD/caster level of other undead you can control with the Command Undead feat, which I reserved for the results of my use of Create Undead.
I... did not have to do much fighting myself.
Powerful enough necromancers might be able to do all of this from a great distance and keep their minions alive for an extended time, but most of them (as in, adventurers) need to be elbow deep in death to have any real efficacy.
I always like to play Pokémon battle music.
Satans..... hints.....
And then eventually settling on just being a battlemaster with the criminal background and an extra skill proficiency bummed off a kind GM.
Weird how the fighter archetype that just has spells by another name is the best one for getting to feel like a dramatic and heroic rogue in combat with choices out side "I stab the monster".