Undead?

[puppyavenger]

[SIZE="1"]since I didn't really get an answerin the good necromancer thread..[/SIZE]
Something that's botheres me about D&D undead. Negative energy is the natural force of decay and entropy right? so how does one utilise the natural force of entropy to animate something? It's like trying to build something by digging. You can kill someone with positive energy of course, but thats like overstuffing a container, it will tear, putting a torn container in a vacum does not fix the tear.
so yah anyone have any explanation?

[Zenos]

since I didn't really get an answerin the good necromancer thread..

Something that's botheres me about D&D undead. Negative energy is the natural force of decay and entropy right? so how does one utilise the natural force of entropy to animate something? It's like trying to build something by digging. You can kill someone with positive energy of course, but thats like overstuffing a container, it will tear, putting a torn container in a vacum does not fix the tear.
so yah anyone have any explanation?

Well, a part of building buildings is to dig to make foundations.

But I see your point.

[Archangel Yuki]

I think that negitive energy is, perhaps, a granter of life, much like positive energy. It creates "False life".
It's maybe not the natural force of decay; maybe, instead, that is a by product. Instead, it is just another form of life. Not true life as we see it, instead, life by another means. It's just energy that powers a being. It has natural by products also; decay, as the bodys energy no longer needs parts, so the energy lets the pieces 'go'.
I guess. Thats what I think, if I make any sense at all.

[KIDS]

I don't have an answer but that's a really intriguing question, so a cookie to you. I can live with that amount of double standard in D&D though :)

[SilverClawShift]

Negative energy being entropy is only one aspect of it. The element of fire (in the classic "everything is made of these four things" sense) could be a candleflame or a raging inferno, but it could also be the warmth of a living body. Earth could be soil, stone, minerals...

So don't think of negative energy as nothing but distilled entropy. Think of negative energy as what it actually is: the exact opposite of positive energy.

Where positive energy suffuses life and is the driving force behind growth and thriving, negative energy is the exact opposite. Pump a shell full of enough negative energy, and you get a mockery of what life is to varying degrees.

[Wraithy]

It's like trying to build something by digging.

HEY! thats how I built my first house!


...and my first wife



Its probably because once the idea was had, it was not looked into much further.
As for explaining it in a campaign, you could make up something about how widthdrawing the natural force of decay from a corpse causes undeath, and this could also explain the aura of necromancy.

[Arakune]

Or, in this universe we use positive energy to create things. Perhaps in a different universe the living things are made from negative energy, but if you try to make it in our universe the overwhelming positive energy will 'null' the properties of the negative energy and it will occur decayment.

[Hectonkhyres]

I consider Negative Energy and Positive energy to be exactly the same thing seen from different sides. Like heat and cold are just slightly different quantities of energy bouncing around in a given medium. Lets run with this analogy.

Life is an aspect of dynamism. Just like convection currents between areas of hot and cold, arcane forces flow from the infinite light to the infinite darkness. And, as long as that energy flows, dynamism and life/unlife continue in one form or another.

We, human beings, bask and thrive in concentrations of energy that burn a member of the undead. Just as a elephant may do well on the equator where a polarbear dies or a deep sea fish explodes at sea level. We simply have different living requirements.

[Ganurath]

since I didn't really get an answerin the good necromancer thread..

You actually did. Also, you can build a tunnel by digging.

[Dausuul]

Yeah, this is one of the many problems with D&D's obsessive dualism. Everything good has an evil opposite, everything fire has a water opposite, everything lawful has a chaotic opposite, et cetera. It doesn't work very well since most of these concepts are not in fact simple mirror images of each other.

Still, it's not totally unworkable. The concept seems to be that negative energy is more than just entropy, it's an animating force of its own. That force is directly opposed to positive energy, so when you pump negative energy into a living (positive-energy) creature, the creature's life force weakens and it dies.

[Belteshazzar]

It's like the difference between being drawn to a midpoint of existence. This neutral midpoint is known as death. In death there is no movement and no potential energy. You have reached the bottom of the trough. In life you are constantly losing energy to the surroundings. When you reach to point of neutrality you are dead. Your internal positive energy level has reached the background level of whatever plane you are on.

However if I was to siphon off the little positive energy with a raise dead spell you would become a void. You actual energy is lower than the surroundings but your potential energy is higher. Your body has become a funnel into the negative energy plane and you now have a small energy vortex swirling around inside of you. The undead now can uses this energy vortex to motivate themselves like a turbine.

The positive energy gets siphoned off to the void and the corpse now ceases to decay further as any microbes have their feeble lifeforces whisked away. Undead can have their life vortexes clogged by too much lifeforce however, which will stop the hole and bring the undead back to background levels off energy, and this is why they can be destroyed by curing spells.

[Cespenar]

I think of it as a slider, with negative energy to the left side and positive to the right. In the middle there is "death", which is the status quo. If you go right, it's "life", and if you go left, it's "undeath". Nothing is "harmful" to the other, they just try to push you along the slider. Of course, the concept of undeath is a bit unfitting beside this half-scientific explanation, but anyway.

Edit: Talk about 7-minute long ninjas. Damn my internet connection!

(By the way, you explained it way more intricately, which kind of nullifies my post besides the fact that it means we think alike.)

[Yami]

You seem to be forgetting that Necromancy is the art of death and life.

Perhaps you use your magic to animate the corpse and you use the negative energy as a buffer to keep it going. It's not that you animate the undead with negative energy, but that you use it to protect your animating magiks?

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Positive Energy is not life
Negative Energy is not death

It's just that humans need one kind to live, and undead need another.

[Randel]

Well, I kind of think about it this way.

Any system needs energy to flow through it to work, like a water wheel needs water to fall over the top to rotate the wheel, and a steam boiler needs to burn wood to boil the water.

Living creatures eat food, water, air and generate positive energy which they 'radiate' to operate their life functions. Its like putting wood in a furnace, they extract positive energy from what they eat and then that energy goes thtough their body and some radiates out.

Undead work a little differently. They act more like a water wheel, they have a link to the negative enrgy plane in which positive energy from around them is being drained into. But in draining, it first goes through their system and powers them. So as long as there is positive energy around them (like that radiated by living things) then that positive energy is sucked into the undead, filters through their body, and drains to the negative energy plane.

So basically, an undead is powered not so much by negative energy but by the act of positive energy getting sucked into the negative energy plane. If there are no sources of positive energy around them, undead might get sluggish and run down like a windmill with no wind. If they get close to a living creature, they gain energy from it and get a 'burst' of energy if they decide to drain energy from the living.

But too much positive energy, or energy violently applied can damage them like putting too much wind towards a wind mill (or maybe that energy just bypasses their 'gain energy from' part and damages the link to the negative energy plane, causing damage via short-circuit or something)

But yeah, they don't get power from negative energy. They get it by sucking up positive energy. The more negative they have the easier it is to drain positive... or something.