Dealing with a necromancer

[shadowlodgemember]

I decided to let a player play a Necromancer with the undead lord feat (for a hefty level adjustment). We agreed he won't count as undead nor benefit from his desecrate aura. However, he gets the ability to use animate dead once a day. The player has a higher CL than normal and is capable of animating 10HD worth of zombies.

I'm a bit scared that whatever strong bad guys I throw at them will now be thrown back at me through animate dead. How does game balance work with necromancy?

[beej67]

It's typically not near as bad as a well played Druid.

The only problem we have with it, is when the player wants to move 10 pieces on the board every time it's his turn to go, and it bogs the game down. Our solution, just to keep things rolling is that we only allow any player to bring one 'pet' along on dungeon crawls, and we reserve the vast army of monsters many of us have inked on our sheets to mass combat scenarios, where their contributions can be storylined by the GM.

[Zhayne]

Firstly, by not giving a PC the ability to do it for free every day.

[taldanrebel2187]

Zhayne wrote:

Firstly, by not giving a PC the ability to do it for free every day.

Seems to me any 5th level Wizard would have the ability to animate dead more than once per day... right? Surely there's another way?

[beej67]

Yeah, if I were you I'd just play it by the base rules, including requiring the mat components for the spell. If he wants to piss all that cash away on expendables (and zombies are definitely expendable) then let him.

[Count Coltello]

Be glad it isn't a vampire instead... then a free overwhelming vamp army of awesomeness
Due to
Bob is a vamp Bob changes his HD worth alotted including Fred and bill his team mates

Fred and bill change their HD worth of vamps and so on until entire campaign is under bobs rule