justifying npc ability descrpencies with players

[wobner]

my apologies for the crappy title, best i could come up with,

I am looking for a system, or rules, or advice, on how to explain the abilities an NPC can have, that a player cannot. The most glaring example of the problem i want to address is the necromancer. I frequently find myself in games facing a necromancer seeking to raise an army of the dead, who i the player, am tasked with defeating. Often times i am a necromancer myself(or what passes for one.) Somehow i am able to defeat the necromancer and his undead horde, yet despite being more powerful(since i won), were i to attempt the same thing, more often than not i would create one undead, then on attempting to create a second, find the first automaticly is destroyed. At best, i might be able to summon as many as i have spells, but will find these have a duration, so i can never have more than the maximum spell slots i might have. regardless of the system i've come accross, its no where near an army, and never will be. if the npc were a player, at best, his undead horde would be a handful of skeletons, and hardly a concern of the neighboring villages.

if the game bothers to explain this gap in abilities, most don't, its usually some godly super weapon the NPC happened upon, that is destroyed with the death of necromancer. It destroys all immersion for me anymore, and i find myself audibly sighing and rolling my eyes whenever i come across necromancers, summoners, and similar villans. If i, the player, can't do it, i want a good explanation as to why the NPC can.

Now admittedly, my own attempts to handle the descrepency have come up short.
>Time doesn't exactly work since its usually meaningless from a player standpoint
>A rare component won't work in most scenarios, since necromancers and undead are just too common place in most games, they are the go to villan. the ingredient couldn't possibly be rare. Further the system would hopefully cover everything from undead, to summons, to constructs, to whatever. one ingredient works for all? they each have their own... i find that silly
>Expense doesn't work either, as money, in most games, quickly gets out of hand, and reaches a point where the necromancer would just hire an army, instead of creating one.
>An expenditure of 'experience' is an interesting idea, but makes the loss of a single undead soldier a costly loss(maybe thats a good thing?) It doesn't explain why the player can't build an army, just discourages them from doing so.
I had a few others, but a virus ate them, besides i am more interested in getting new ideas.

Anyone have any ideas? run across a game which actually provides an explanation? has there been a discussion my searches failed to find?. Any help would be appreciated if only to kickstart my own thought process.

Thank you for your time.

[Yakk]

The NPC is a different kind of necromancer.

The character is specialized in combat & immediate magic. The NPC is a long-form necromancer.

The NPC is actually the equivalent of a level 30 character in total "experience" invested. Despite this, the necromancer's combat capabilities are that of a ~10th level PC. Basically, by facing the necromancer "one on one", it is like fighting a king in a duel.

Your PC could go down that path. But at level 10, you'd have the combat stats of a 3rd level PC, and you could summon a few more undead.

As a concrete example, imagine 20 level PrC in 3e where each level "doubles the number of undead you can control" (geometrically!). It does not increase the effect of each spell cast, just the cap on how many undead you can control max.

With 20 levels in that PrC, you can control 1 million times more undead than you could otherwise. Horribly inefficient, because 20 levels in some other class would kick its ass, but a 7th level wizard/necromancer with 13 levels of that PrC can control 5*7*1024*8=a solid quarter million HD of undead.

On top of that, the NPC path does not advance with XP like a PC does. In order to advance, that necromancer studied, tore his soul open, tore other creatures souls open, traded with dark beings for favors, and generally did things the hard way. Your PC, meanwhile, can gain in power really easily.

You can view this as sort of like asking "if I'm a better boxer, why do more people follow Eisenhower? I mean, we are both combatants, and I'm a better boxer, shouldn't that mean more people will like me?" You are both necromancers: they are a different kind.

...

Yet another approach is the idea that the necromancer is basically selling their soul for the power they are getting (to raise more undead). You are free to do that, but you become an NPC, because the character you are playing's soul gets devoured in the process. This makes it extremely stupid to do what that necromancer did and create hordes of undead, as the being who started it off gets eaten before he gets the power he seeks.

...

Yet another approach is to embrace it. Give out the ability to change the world (like raise hordes of undead or whatever). Examine the game Exalted, where the "Fighter" types can even raise armies with their awesomeness.

...

And maybe it is more efficient to just raise an army of mortals. That is why doing so as a necromancer is so strange. That necromancer must either know something your PC does not, or maybe just doesn't like people, or maybe people don't like him.

[Extra Anchovies]

Maybe non-intelligent undead are tied to the site of their death? That way, necromancers would need to establish a base of operations, take people there, kill them, and then animate their bodies. You could still have PC necromancers, but their undead would mostly be stronghold guards/staff.

[Zale]

If we're talking 3.5 then there are ways to have what is effectively an undead army.

A level 5 wizard (specialist necromancer) with 16 Int could control up to 36 1 HD skeletons at a time. 16 of those could have a higher HD of course.

Animate dead gives control of up to (4 times CL) HD of undead, 20 single HD Skeletons in this case. You can make skeletons in excess of that, but you'd need to command them using some other spell. The 2nd level Command Undead works well in this case. A single casting gives you control over one skeleton for 5 days for this wizard, and they can fast up to four of these a day.

So the necromancer can just make sure to control a different four skeleton group everyday, refreshing that control every four days and have 16 extra skeletons.

Of course, they're paying all four of their second level spell slots everyday to retain those skeletons- it'd probably be a better idea to make each individual skeleton in the Control Undead group more powerful to make up for that, especially since their HD have no effect on the number of them you can control.

Better yet: You can take the Lich-Loved feat. Sure it's a Vile feat and requires you to do unpleasant things with undead, but it means that mindless undead (Such as skeletons) treat you as undead. Which means that if mindless undead are automatically hostile to living creatures, they'll quietly ignore you. This is tremendously useful to the sedentary necromancers, since if means they can just animate excess undead without much consequence. They won't obey you, but they won't attack you either, they will however maim anyone who wanders across them.

So a Necromancer who really wanted to could have a tower of evil filled with undead that will attack living invaders and keep a strike force of powerful undead to go out and raid things with, which isn't exactly a undead army but is fairly close.

[Amechra]

Alternatively, Chain that Command Undead.

Heck, let's take that same Specialist Wizard, but make them level 7. Grab them Arcane Thesis (Command Undead) - then they can Extend it as well as a 4th-level spell.

That 4th-level spell, by the way, can control up to 10 undead for 18 days; while Chain Spell does drop the DC, mindless undead don't get a save.

So, yeah, you can end up controlling armies of, say, Ogre Zombies without it cutting into your control pool. Then save your actual, permanent control pool for stronger stuff.

[Jormengand]

See, I solved this problem in my current RPG by having an association which grants no stat dice, no skill dice, no special abilities except for granting some pretty powerful spells... but with such long casting times that they're not actually useful in combat. For example, there's the "Animate horde" spells which do what they say on the tin, but they take up to ten rounds (down to 4 for highest-level characters summoning practically zero-level creatures) - still 10 times as fast as normal necromancy, mind - for each creature you want to raise. So if you want to sit around for 24 hours raising 1440 half-decent creatures or 3600 mooks, after having wasted your entire villaining career only being any good at necromancy and nothing else, then you can. You'll just be terrible in combat, and if you die, so does the entire undead army.

Again, it's a case of "You could do this, but you probably wouldn't actually want to."

[Grod_The_Giant]

See, I solved this problem in my current RPG by having an association which grants no stat dice, no skill dice, no special abilities except for granting some pretty powerful spells... but with such long casting times that they're not actually useful in combat. For example, there's the "Animate horde" spells which do what they say on the tin, but they take up to ten rounds (down to 4 for highest-level characters summoning practically zero-level creatures) - still 10 times as fast as normal necromancy, mind - for each creature you want to raise. So if you want to sit around for 24 hours raising 1440 half-decent creatures or 3600 mooks, after having wasted your entire villaining career only being any good at necromancy and nothing else, then you can. You'll just be terrible in combat, and if you die, so does the entire undead army.

Again, it's a case of "You could do this, but you probably wouldn't actually want to."
So the player says "OK, I spend a week raising undead. When that's done..." and then continues adventuring with a giant horde?

Personally, I prefer to smack the opposing player with a DMG and say "rule of cool, now stop slowing things down by trying to metagame the stats of everything." Failing at that, Yakk's suggestions are pretty good.

[Jormengand]

So the player says "OK, I spend a week raising undead. When that's done..." and then continues adventuring with a giant horde?

Well, there's always the risk of the Big Damn Heroes coming and ruining your zombie apocalypse. Hey, role reversal!

But the Undead Lord is intended as an NPC association, so the Arbiter should feel free to grab his copy of ARBITER and whack any player intending to use it, much as the DM might with the DMG.

Also, actually gaining levels in Undead Lord is really damn hard. The BBEG must have been a bit of a boss to do it, and if the PCs want a shot at that, they're welcome to slog through the neophyte rank and then decide that actually, it's easier to be a normal necromancer before they get anywhere near raising thousands of undead.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Fair enough. I apologize; I shouldn't have made assumptions without knowing the details of the system in question.

[Jormengand]

Fair enough. I apologize; I shouldn't have made assumptions without knowing the details of the system in question.

Don't worry. It's something I had to spend a while considering, too.

[wumpus]

One thing that the recent inclusion of ritual magic in D&D (as a late option in 3.5, and later incorporated into the base) gives is a way to power the "a wizard did it" NPC. Simply declare that these rituals require great time (research and preperation as well as actual casting) that could lock down your wizard for years at a time (you have to figure out when to cast based on the alignment of the stars for each location, then adjust materials, etc).

Another means is that an NPC may use riskier means to gain power (as evil is wont to). This is especially ideal for using a defeated minion or such as a later threat to the whole party. Magic that involves summing fiends is ideal for this (make it easier to summon, not any easier to control). Also, the necromancer may have sold his soul for some of his power. The PCs might be assuming he won't be raised (or might otherwise use some tricks to make it harder), but gaining his power in a way that assures the PC won't be raised might not be worth it.

Old school DMs will likely make such items* available to the party (especially after a long slog to learn what they are), and only letting them use them if "they are really sure they want to do that".

* not so much the super rituals. That would turn play more into a MMO-type grind.

[wobner]

I greatly appreciate all the replies


The NPC is a different kind of necromancer.

The character is specialized in combat & immediate magic. The NPC is a long-form necromancer.

The NPC is actually the equivalent of a level 30 character in total "experience" invested. Despite this, the necromancer's combat capabilities are that of a ~10th level PC. Basically, by facing the necromancer "one on one", it is like fighting a king in a duel.

Your PC could go down that path. But at level 10, you'd have the combat stats of a 3rd level PC, and you could summon a few more undead.

As a concrete example, imagine 20 level PrC in 3e where each level "doubles the number of undead you can control" (geometrically!). It does not increase the effect of each spell cast, just the cap on how many undead you can control max.

With 20 levels in that PrC, you can control 1 million times more undead than you could otherwise. Horribly inefficient, because 20 levels in some other class would kick its ass, but a 7th level wizard/necromancer with 13 levels of that PrC can control 5*7*1024*8=a solid quarter million HD of undead.

On top of that, the NPC path does not advance with XP like a PC does. In order to advance, that necromancer studied, tore his soul open, tore other creatures souls open, traded with dark beings for favors, and generally did things the hard way. Your PC, meanwhile, can gain in power really easily.

You can view this as sort of like asking "if I'm a better boxer, why do more people follow Eisenhower? I mean, we are both combatants, and I'm a better boxer, shouldn't that mean more people will like me?" You are both necromancers: they are a different kind.

and


See, I solved this problem in my current RPG by having an association which grants no stat dice, no skill dice, no special abilities except for granting some pretty powerful spells... but with such long casting times that they're not actually useful in combat. For example, there's the "Animate horde" spells which do what they say on the tin, but they take up to ten rounds (down to 4 for highest-level characters summoning practically zero-level creatures) - still 10 times as fast as normal necromancy, mind - for each creature you want to raise. So if you want to sit around for 24 hours raising 1440 half-decent creatures or 3600 mooks, after having wasted your entire villaining career only being any good at necromancy and nothing else, then you can. You'll just be terrible in combat, and if you die, so does the entire undead army.

Again, it's a case of "You could do this, but you probably wouldn't actually want to."

Its an option, but I personally dislike the concept of creating a class that either the player is forbidden from taking, or is so difficult, penalized, that the player wouldn't want to play it. you are trading one question for another, instead of asking why can they have an army of the undead and i can't, i am left either asking why can the npc take the class and i can't, or what possessed him to take it with all the penalties/how did they possibly live and level.



Yet another approach is the idea that the necromancer is basically selling their soul for the power they are getting (to raise more undead). You are free to do that, but you become an NPC, because the character you are playing's soul gets devoured in the process. This makes it extremely stupid to do what that necromancer did and create hordes of undead, as the being who started it off gets eaten before he gets the power he seeks.


This might work from a mechanical standpoint, but presents problems from a story telling standpoint. you have reasons why the npc became a necromancer, either they didn't know the consequences or had their reasons for saying "to heck with it", but now that they've sold their soul, if i understand you correctly, they are either a helpless servant of another, or a mindless evil entity, their personal motivations are gone and thats really limiting.




Yet another approach is to embrace it. Give out the ability to change the world (like raise hordes of undead or whatever). Examine the game Exalted, where the "Fighter" types can even raise armies with their awesomeness.



I'll be sure to check out exalted in more detail.
while i'm not opposed, there needs to be limiters, costs or consequences. You don't want your characters breezing through your dungeons with an undead horde, you don't want them more powerful than other classes. so what are the mechanics behind it?



And maybe it is more efficient to just raise an army of mortals. That is why doing so as a necromancer is so strange. That necromancer must either know something your PC does not, or maybe just doesn't like people, or maybe people don't like him.

A sort of leadership penalty forcing the npc/pc to seek mindless undead help, despite the drawbacks, works, but it still needs a system to go with it. hwoever, the npc knowing something i don't is just too similar to them happening upon a godly artifact to grant them power.


Maybe non-intelligent undead are tied to the site of their death? That way, necromancers would need to establish a base of operations, take people there, kill them, and then animate their bodies. You could still have PC necromancers, but their undead would mostly be stronghold guards/staff.

i was actually leaning towards something like this but it does have 2 problems, first it does nothing for demon summoners or armies of constructs(maybe its too much to hope that one system can cover them all) second, and more importantly, while it would make graveyards and battlefields places no one would dare venture, you don't get the army of undead marching accross the land seeking to snuff out all life.

The best i could come up with was some sort of conjuration/transmutation/summoning circle, that the creatures were bound to. while you could create it anywhere, it could not be moved, nor the creatures created with it transfered should you create another elsewhere, and you could only create the creatures at a circle. if the circle was destroyed, those creatures tied to it became uncontrolled, so you could leave with a force, but had best guard that circle or you may find your minions going feral and turning on you.
it would atleast require the player have a dungeon/tower/whatever under their control, as you'd never get away with this in a civilized town. but still, i don't quite like it, it needs something... alot really.


If we're talking 3.5 then there are ways to have what is effectively an undead army.

A level 5 wizard (specialist necromancer) with 16 Int could control up to 36 1 HD skeletons at a time. 16 of those could have a higher HD of course.

Animate dead gives control of up to (4 times CL) HD of undead, 20 single HD Skeletons in this case. You can make skeletons in excess of that, but you'd need to command them using some other spell. The 2nd level Command Undead works well in this case. A single casting gives you control over one skeleton for 5 days for this wizard, and they can fast up to four of these a day.

So the necromancer can just make sure to control a different four skeleton group everyday, refreshing that control every four days and have 16 extra skeletons.

Of course, they're paying all four of their second level spell slots everyday to retain those skeletons- it'd probably be a better idea to make each individual skeleton in the Control Undead group more powerful to make up for that, especially since their HD have no effect on the number of them you can control.

Better yet: You can take the Lich-Loved feat. Sure it's a Vile feat and requires you to do unpleasant things with undead, but it means that mindless undead (Such as skeletons) treat you as undead. Which means that if mindless undead are automatically hostile to living creatures, they'll quietly ignore you. This is tremendously useful to the sedentary necromancers, since if means they can just animate excess undead without much consequence. They won't obey you, but they won't attack you either, they will however maim anyone who wanders across them.

So a Necromancer who really wanted to could have a tower of evil filled with undead that will attack living invaders and keep a strike force of powerful undead to go out and raid things with, which isn't exactly a undead army but is fairly close.

i wasn't actually talking about any one specific system, but my 3.5 experience with undead and summons is mostly neverwinter nights 2 which is apparently far more bastardized than i thought(shame on me, i own the handbooks and the srd is free to download anymore anyway, i should read them more thorughly) Thank you for the breakdown, i appreciate that.
still, it seems you aren't the dreaded necromancer of most campaigns in this scenario. granted you are only talking level 5, but does it really scale up that significantly? and unless i misunderstand, relagates you to a zombie factory, which might not be a bad thing as far as tradeoffs go

its alot more than i thought you could do in 3.5, and i appreciate your pointing that out.

perhaps the point is no one person could summon that much alone and you need an evil cult or apprentices to fill otu the ranks?


again, thank you for the responses.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Its an option, but I personally dislike the concept of creating a class that either the player is forbidden from taking, or is so difficult, penalized, that the player wouldn't want to play it. you are trading one question for another, instead of asking why can they have an army of the undead and i can't, i am left either asking why can the npc take the class and i can't, or what possessed him to take it with all the penalties/how did they possibly live and level.
They leveled exclusively through non-life-threatening, quest/time based experience, the same as any other NPC*? Most people aren't advancing by life-or-death combat-- player characters lead ludicrously dangerous lives compared to everyone else. Five levels of wizard is more than enough to protect you from the occasional bandit or wild beast while you spend a few years picking up levels of Undead Warlord.


*If that bothers you, you can make the option available to players, but force them to roleplay it. As in, come up with some interesting adventures while they're being merchants or researching magic or whatever, and ta-da! Normal gameplay is maintained.


This might work from a mechanical standpoint, but presents problems from a story telling standpoint. you have reasons why the npc became a necromancer, either they didn't know the consequences or had their reasons for saying "to heck with it", but now that they've sold their soul, if i understand you correctly, they are either a helpless servant of another, or a mindless evil entity, their personal motivations are gone and thats really limiting.
The Dresden Files RPG (a Fate-based system) had an interesting take on this dichotomy. The basic idea was that the more powerful you were (ie, the lower your starting refresh), the more compels (ie, being forced to act according to your nature) you'd be forced to take. If you had zero or less refresh, you'd have no choice but to follow your raw instincts all the time-- in other words, you had no mechanical free will, and thus became an NPC. And yes, it's limiting-- that's the point. A monomaniacal character is a crappy PC, but a fine NPC.


I'll be sure to check out exalted in more detail.
while i'm not opposed, there needs to be limiters, costs or consequences. You don't want your characters breezing through your dungeons with an undead horde, you don't want them more powerful than other classes. so what are the mechanics behind it?
As I understand it, it's a combination of "everyone is that powerful; you're just replacing personal power with minion power" and a good mass combat system. (A tenth level character with a thousand minions is a problem, but not so much if they're treated as a single CR 8 creature in combat)


One additional idea: make it totally possible for players to raise giant armies of minions, but make the cost gameplay time. Make them quest for lost rituals, deal with offended demon lords, fend off interfering heroes. Make the army-raising a major focus of the campaign, and the army becomes a reward, a final goal, something to achieve, rather than something that gets handed to you when you learn animate dead. Gaining worldshaking power as a reward for adventuring is a time-honored RPG tradition.

[Amechra]

Alternatively, a rules-light system like Risus handles this pretty darn elegantly.

To explain:

In Risus, players are built on a freeform "Cliche" system. You might have Really Awesome Swordsman 3 while your friend next to you might have Sassy Hairdresser 3, and you are essentially mechanically equivalent.

Why is this relevant?

In Risus, you could represent that army of undead by having Army of Undead Slaves 1 (or 3 or 2 or whatever). Then, whenever you are in a situation where having an Army of Undead Slaves would be useful... you roll your dice and have done with it.



For a rules-heavier game, 13th Age replaces skills with a freeform Backgrounds system. So in a 13th Age game, you could put down Army of Undead Slaves 3 as a Background, and then would roll that whenever having an Army of Undead Slaves would be useful.

The SRD is freely available if you want to take a look; there's also a hack floating around that removes ability scores (it's a d20 derivative) entirely, so you could end up with a Sorcerer or Cleric whose spell damage is based off of the fact that they have an Army of Undead Slaves.

Fate can pull it off by writing down the Aspect "Has a freaking huge army of Undead", which you can tag for bonuses... and which your enemies can tag as well.

Heck, New World of Darkness can do it with a tender mix of the Allies and Staff merits, along with the right Specialties (if you want to use them to help out your actual rolls (Presence + Persuasion + ARMY OF THE HUNGRY DAMNED sounds fine to me!)).

Wushu can do it, I think GURPs can do it (wait, it's GURPs... of course it can do it), FUDGE can do it, Meikyuu Kingdom can do it (It's a dungeon crawler crossed with a city builder. It's just brill), Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine could do it (a bit off the focus of the game there...).

Costume Fairy Adventures, of all things, can do it, if you can reconcile wackiness and mischief with shambling corpses.



Basically, your problem here is that you've been playing the wrong games. :smallwink: OK, more seriously,
I'm sorta assuming that you've been playing mostly D&D (of some edition or another), which has the annoying insistence on statting everything. I mean, I love D&D to bits, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the rules are a bit behind the times (3.5 is about 10 years old. There has been A LOT of innovation since then.)

Though, looking back up at the examples I gave, you could do it with an appropriate background and a little hacking for 5e.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

How do I justify PC/NPC ability discrepancies? I don't. If there's a way in the system for a character to raise a huge undead horde, then any character--PC or NPC--can use said method to do so. Enjoy your armies of the dead and start practicing your maniacal laughter, but be prepared to not be invited to too many dinner parties

If there's not a way in the system to raise an undead horde already (and there usually is) and it's important that an NPC can do it, then I figure out a way to make it possible with the fewest and least drastic rules changes possible, and then implement that like any other houserules: the PCs can know how it's done (though they may have to figure out how in-game, if it's a heretofore-unknown ability in the setting) and spend the appropriate character resources to be able to do it themselves just as an NPC would.

My philosophy is that the PCs are not unique snowflakes; if there's something the NPCs can do in the setting and the rules, the PCs should be able to do it, and vice versa. PCs and BBEGs should be special because of their actions and choices, not because the mechanics or GM just declare that they are.


i wasn't actually talking about any one specific system, but my 3.5 experience with undead and summons is mostly neverwinter nights 2 which is apparently far more bastardized than i thought(shame on me, i own the handbooks and the srd is free to download anymore anyway, i should read them more thorughly) Thank you for the breakdown, i appreciate that.

Yeah, the D&D video games take out all the "interesting" abilities (summoning, teleportation, animation, illusions, basically anything that would be hard to program for or require too much design work), so you can't judge D&D necromancy by NWN.


still, it seems you aren't the dreaded necromancer of most campaigns in this scenario. granted you are only talking level 5, but does it really scale up that significantly? and unless i misunderstand, relagates you to a zombie factory, which might not be a bad thing as far as tradeoffs go

It does scale up quite a bit. There are many ways to raise effective CL to control more undead per casting, there are several ways aside from animate dead to gain undead minions, and there are a ton of ways to make your undead minions scarier.

Let's consider an 8th level character, this time a dread necromancer from Heroes of Horror, because wizard and cleric necromancers tend to go for the death spells and fewer more powerful undead rather than hordes of weker ones. The dread necromancer's 8th level ability, Undead Mastery, lets them control (4+Cha) HD of undead per level, not just 4, so if he has a 16 Cha that's 56 HD of undead. They have 7 2nd level spells per day, giving them 7 command undead spells; use a lesser metamagic rod of chaining or another means of chaining three of those per day to control an additional 31 undead per day, or an extra 248 1-HD undead if you cycle those spells each day as Zale described. Note that he's still just using 2nd level spell slots for all that; he can reserve his 9 3rd and 4th level spells for direct combat applications. Also throw in his Rebuke Undead ability (6 rebukes per day, minimum 13 HD per rebuke) for another 78 1-HD undead controlled. And all of those undead, if he animates them himself, get +4 Str and Dex and +2 HP/HD, so the more numerous, weaker undead pack more of a punch; taking the Corpsecrafter line of feat boosts them further.

That's the very basics of horde building, with the only non-built-into-your-class resource expenditure being a single magic item, and it gets you 382 1-HD skeletons or zombies that are the equivalent of 2 or 3 HD power-wise. You can do a lot better than that, if you really want to focus on it; for instance, take the Undead Leadership feat to gain 11 more low-level minions that don't count against any of those control caps and a loyal intelligent undead cohort of your level - 2, pick up the rod of undead mastery to double your animation cap to 112 HD, pick up a nightstick (only one, unless you want to dodge flying DMGs) to give you 4 more rebuke attempts (and thus 52 more undead), use desecrate and a deadwalker's ring to further enhance your undead, and so on and so forth. And again, none of that makes him a one-trick undead pony; when his horde is defeated, he's still a full arcane caster.

So don't worry, there's no justification needed for 3.5 NPC necromancer hordes. :smallwink:


Basically, your problem here is that you've been playing the wrong games. :smallwink: OK, more seriously,
I'm sorta assuming that you've been playing mostly D&D (of some edition or another), which has the annoying insistence on statting everything. I mean, I love D&D to bits, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the rules are a bit behind the times (3.5 is about 10 years old. There has been A LOT of innovation since then.)

As pointed out above, people like to complain that D&D doesn't handle undead hordes when in fact it's quite possible. The fact that 3e (and similar heavy games like GURPS and Shadowrun) stats as much as it possibly can is a huge positive, in my view, because it means that (A) you don't need GM permission to do things like raise massive undead hordes, since it's all in the rules for you, and (B) it feels meaningfully different that you actually raised an undead horde, as opposed to writing down whatever you want as an aspect or background or whatever and just flavoring the same ol' roll appropriately. The latter point is important to many players; while one of my groups loves Fate, most of one group that I introduced to Fate didn't want to play more than one campaign because there was very little mechanical variation between characters to emphasize the flavor variation.

[Debihuman]

How do I justify PC/NPC ability discrepancies? I don't. If there's a way in the system for a character to raise a huge undead horde, then any character--PC or NPC--can use said method to do so. Enjoy your armies of the dead and start practicing your maniacal laughter, but be prepared to not be invited to too many dinner parties

What do you consider a "huge horde" of undead? What kind of undead? According to DMG 2, a mob of skeletons (which would be 48) is CR 8. So how many mobs are you considering?

If the NPC is evil enough, he or she doesn't care that the members of his army USED to living people (in fact most likely they were members of his living army FIRST and he has access to loyal followers who would happily serve him in death as well if they believe in him and/or his cause). One presumes NPCs have been spending all their time plotting against the PCs, whereas the PCs have been doing a myriad of other things.

Most PCs don't even have loyal henchmen. Seriously, who are they gonna raise? Do you think they will just go to random graveyards and start stealing dead bodies from their graves? It's called grave robbing. Even if they do, what do you think the consequences of that action could be? Lots of peeved living relatives of those now desecrated graves.

Consequences. NPCs don't have to think about them and PCs should -- THAT's the difference.

Debby