Animate Dead/Create Undead on PC/NPC

[JackOfAllBuilds]

The vanilla zombie/wight block is a little lacking, in my personal opinion.

Bouncing off opinions here for a game I’m going to be running:

When one of the players or one of my NPC’s casts animate dead for a zombie on a non-human humanoid (elf, dwarf, dragonborn, gnome, kobold) would you apply the racial stats and features to the MM zombie, or apply DMG 282 NPC zombie features to the statblock of the dead creature?

What racial, npc, and/or class features could the zombie use? What would be lost/unusable? What proficiencies would apply?

I know it messes up the CR, but if you cast it on your dead lvl 6 fighter ally (that you can’t raise), should the zombie be barred from class features?

If you bar all of the above from zombies, what about Wights from an 8th Lvl Create Undead?

[Unoriginal]

None of the class/NPC features of the person you're using the corpse work for zombie/skeleton made of said corpse. It's explicitly not translated into the undead, because it's just the body being puppeteered by an evil spirit.

So yes, if you use Animate Dead on your dead lvl 6 fighter, you just get a regular zombie mook.

For the rest, I would just say you replace the NPC's original racial features by the zombie's. Unless you want to allow more exotic things like Dragonborn zombies with their elemental breath or the like.

[JackOfAllBuilds]

None of the class/NPC features of the person you're using the corpse work for zombie/skeleton made of said corpse. It's explicitly not translated into the undead, because it's just the body being puppeteered by an evil spirit.

So yes, if you use Animate Dead on your dead lvl 6 fighter, you just get a regular zombie mook.

For the rest, I would just say you replace the NPC's original racial features by the zombie's. Unless you want to allow more exotic things like Dragonborn zombies with their elemental breath or the like.

Thanks, that’s what I figured for all the class/npc features.

Slapping a race onto a zombie should be just fine though, right? What humanoid racial features would or won’t work on a zombie? (Zombie Tiefling hellish rebuke??)

[Throne12]

Zombies and skeletons are mindless undead they can only do the very basic of tasks and any abilities are not basic tasks. For other more powerful undead there are other spells.