Spellbound
2013-06-25, 07:59 PM
Hello, I've been a long time lurker on these forums and I first feel I should thank all of you for an interesting year of reading. I've learned more from just reading through posts here then I have in my, admittedly short career in D&D. But this is actually part of my problem. Basically I'm playing with a group with a very low level of optimization apart from myself and one other person who's new but he's found some good resources and he's playing a cleric. I'm a dread necromancer and I'm planning to take the full twenty levels for fluff reasons, and I enjoy being in the realm of tier 3. But the problem right now is the interaction between myself and the DM.
As a dread necro one of the things I would love to do is animate a few undead to use as meat shields and beatsticks. Sadly as a level I have none to my name. I had a Minotaur zombie for a short period of time. (The DM sent it after us on its own so I cast command undead) but this was killed by DM fiat before I even got to use it in combat. I let this slide as I figured I'd find other corpses later. However in every instance of combat all of the corpses disintegrate after death. More frustrating is the fact that in our first session we killed a blue dragon (CR 4 from the draconomicon. We were level 1 at the time with a level 3 or 4 character who was there to assist) and I'd managed to take the corpse with me after bluffing my way out of town (the townsfolk tried to stop me under the assumption that I was a necromancer... something I feel they shouldn't have known from taking a dragon corpse).
The problem started when in the first session after we animated the dragon corpse (we were level 6) we encountered an anti-dragon field around the dungeon we were going into. It was apparently a mile around in a sphere. I made a snide remark about the epic magic required for that but went along with it. The cleric ordered the dragon to circle around above the dungeon entrance which we had to climb down a staircase to reach. So we entered the dungeon and as we were going through it the DM began describing what everyone at the table rapidly concluded was our dragon getting killed outside of the dungeon at the bottom of the stairs. However we gave him the benefit of the doubt and no one accused him of anything. When we left and he tried to say that sadly our pet had been destroyed I decided to call him on this. I didn't appeal to the fact that he never bothered to look at the stats so that he didn't have something blatantly weaker then the undead he was trying to kill do it in (the Minotaur died to corpse crawlers), or that he ignored the fact that we'd given the dragon commands to not wait around. I basically said that this is unfair and if you didn't want people playing this kind of character you shouldn't just deny us stuff.
He refrained from killing our dragon without our characters being around but I don't feel the problem is done with. So I was wondering if I could get some friendly recommendations on things I could try to do to put my DM at ease.
Gah! I just realized I completely forgot to add why he has been so worried about the corpses! His encounters have generally been pulled straight from books and he uses one big creature for each encounter. He's been frustrated because we've been blowing through them since we have a fighter and a party of spell casters who buff or debuff. And a beguiler who punches things...
As a dread necro one of the things I would love to do is animate a few undead to use as meat shields and beatsticks. Sadly as a level I have none to my name. I had a Minotaur zombie for a short period of time. (The DM sent it after us on its own so I cast command undead) but this was killed by DM fiat before I even got to use it in combat. I let this slide as I figured I'd find other corpses later. However in every instance of combat all of the corpses disintegrate after death. More frustrating is the fact that in our first session we killed a blue dragon (CR 4 from the draconomicon. We were level 1 at the time with a level 3 or 4 character who was there to assist) and I'd managed to take the corpse with me after bluffing my way out of town (the townsfolk tried to stop me under the assumption that I was a necromancer... something I feel they shouldn't have known from taking a dragon corpse).
The problem started when in the first session after we animated the dragon corpse (we were level 6) we encountered an anti-dragon field around the dungeon we were going into. It was apparently a mile around in a sphere. I made a snide remark about the epic magic required for that but went along with it. The cleric ordered the dragon to circle around above the dungeon entrance which we had to climb down a staircase to reach. So we entered the dungeon and as we were going through it the DM began describing what everyone at the table rapidly concluded was our dragon getting killed outside of the dungeon at the bottom of the stairs. However we gave him the benefit of the doubt and no one accused him of anything. When we left and he tried to say that sadly our pet had been destroyed I decided to call him on this. I didn't appeal to the fact that he never bothered to look at the stats so that he didn't have something blatantly weaker then the undead he was trying to kill do it in (the Minotaur died to corpse crawlers), or that he ignored the fact that we'd given the dragon commands to not wait around. I basically said that this is unfair and if you didn't want people playing this kind of character you shouldn't just deny us stuff.
He refrained from killing our dragon without our characters being around but I don't feel the problem is done with. So I was wondering if I could get some friendly recommendations on things I could try to do to put my DM at ease.
Gah! I just realized I completely forgot to add why he has been so worried about the corpses! His encounters have generally been pulled straight from books and he uses one big creature for each encounter. He's been frustrated because we've been blowing through them since we have a fighter and a party of spell casters who buff or debuff. And a beguiler who punches things...