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XunValDorl of HouseKilsek wrote:

Actually programmers make great designers and video games don't exist without each other so your remark is irrelevant in this matter.

No most programmers, in fact most people, are terrible designers. Which is why designers get paid more and tell the rest of the programmers what to do. The fact that the designers frequently are also programmers has more to do with the way promotions and hiring go.

Lame encounter, you definitely don't know my DM.

I know he didn't use core rules to make his Lich's undead army. Lets take a 16th level Lich. He needs 3 CR 14 encounters to keep your party entertained and provide some semblance of a challenge.

Problem. None of the spells he has can create undead above CR 5. That's not even going to slow a party down. He needs to have found some Nightwings or Greater Wraiths just chilling about and burnt 3 to 6 of his spells making them his friends. So pure GM fiat there.

Then we have to have a nefarious goal for this undead master. Say attacking a city. That seems fair at level 16. Lets say he needs 500 zombies to pull this off. Using the core rules he needs 25000gp* to raise all those zombies, but he can only control 64 HD or 37 of them. Hm... Not doing well here. So you have to GM fiat his undead army too.

Oh and this assumes that the Lick is a chump meant to be killed in a single session. He's not even a campaign level villain. A campaign villain would need MORE undead. And would have to spend gold replacing undead killed.

In short your GM used pure GM fiat to make those necromantic villains work. Same as 4th ED.

* Edit: I just checked. That's 1/3 of the NPCs total wealth for that plot point. Not going to do so well for the magic items he needs to fight the PCs. Oh well...

XunValDorl of HouseKilsek wrote:

I'm not worried about it because most of it goes over their heads anyway. I've been gaming for 24 years, there is nothing out there that I don't already know. The point is, mechanics need to be there to back up the fluff. Yes I do know that DM's come up with theur own stuff, jesus some of you people really need to think with your brains once and a while. Some of you make dumb little comments, I guess to try and make others feel inferior or something. Well it doesn't work with this cat. I've been playing to long to listen to the worthless posts. So have a great day.

How incredibly mature of you.

Anyway, the point is that any mechanic for summoning undead armies would be stupid. Let's say it is a per day ability. That would mean that the enemy would become unstoppable in a few months. No one would be able to stop their undead hordes. It wouldn't really make for much of a story or game. "You are overrun by undead, you die."

Let's say there is a cap on it. That would still be like saying "The DM says how many undead he has". Only it wouldn't have the benifit of the DM being able to tailor the encounters to his game. It would basiclly be an encounter package for the monster. This seems strickly infirior to simply letting the DM do what he wants. As well, there are already "example encounters" for every monster, so I don't see the harm in suggesting the type of forces you'd find battling with the monster. It still wouldn't give you their entire army, which would be silly for reasons stated above. If you are going to regulate what monsters are allowed to be used, then it might as well be an adventure module instead of a monster entry.

Ontop of all that, if the type of monsters that can be created by the monster are set in stone, what happens if the party is higher/lower level than the level that those summoned monsters would be challanging? Wouldn't it be better to allow the DM to tailor the encounters to their game?

Does that sort of clear it up more? There are reasons that they don't give explicit rules for how the monsters under the control of other monsters come to be.