bobthe's page

I'm currently playing a Wizard in an evil campaign in my Pathfinder group. Originally I was specializing in creating an Undead army, but we quickly realized that the ability to control undead by a party member is completely unbalanced. The ability to control four times your HD in undead is just insane. Consider that with Desecrate you can effectively have a single undead with four times the HD of each person in the party.

A great example came up in our last session. We killed a Marsh Giant with the Advanced template (so +4 to all stats) and 14 HD. What do you know, we're level 7, so I can animate it. Now I have a 14 HD undead giant in the party. It's attack bonus is almost a solid 50% higher than our main warrior-class character, not to mention the damage output, plus the fact that it will still benefit from party buff spells that aren't mental in nature (love those hasted undead giants). On top of this, it only takes up half my max HD I can control. So if we find another one I could control two of these beasts. Then there are feats that can increase the max HD you can control, plus Desecrate, which doubles the HD you can animate.

I guess my question is, how are other people balancing the ability for PCs to create and control undead in their campaigns? I haven't even touched on undead variants, which adds even more flexibility and power to the arsenal. On the NPC side each undead counts towards the encounter CR and is thus included in the encounter strength, but on the PC side they're basically free extra party members that you can replace even more easily than a PC. Oh, and those extra low-level enchanted weapons and armor found in loot that aren't worth a whole lot normally? My undead army just got stronger, plus the ability to overcome some DRs.