I've wanted to make a necromancer class for a while, I guess now's the time to start.
Now, what you're thinking, especially if you're in my target audience, is probably something along the lines of "there are already loads of options for necromancers, including many classes on these very boards." Well, my friend, I don't like those.
Much of the time, the necromancer classes I see revolve around animate dead. It's not a bad spell, but for me it falls short. You hunt around for big creatures with lots of hit dice, and make them into boring skeletons or zombies, which you then chuck at your enemies while doing normal, cleric or wizard related things. Never been a big fan.
I'm going to share my thoughts, and hopefully you'll help me find a way to make those a reality.
Here are my goals:
A Necromancer that's a bit like a puppetmaster, fight the puppets, the Necromancer wins. Get next to the Necromancer, she dies.
d6 hit points, low bab, 2+int skills, bad list, wizard proficiencies, bad fort and ref saves. This is the most stupidly awful chassis I can imagine, which makes room for lots of good class features.
6 level arcane spellcasting. Probably. Can't go any lower than that or else you're not a real necromancer, sorry. Can't really go higher than that or else you're a nine level spellcaster, which did I mention I wanted room for class features? It'd scale off charisma, for what I think are obvious reasons.
The main feature would be that you are the controller of a horde of undead. This is a bit of a summary of what I want from that feature, with only a few vague goals. Hopefully we can work together to solidify those goals and then come up with some ways to make them happen.
Ultimate goal: waste enemy actions, come back to life between combat, lockdown foes who use poor tactics
Minimum of two at first level, though I'd prefer three. Probably increasing by about one a level. I want to be able to break them into groups and have them still be effective.
Action economy fixes: 1) They're staggered. Means they can't move and lockdown in one round. 2) They don't do anything unless the Necromancer spends a standard action to control them. At level three (or whatever number ends up being correct) when the bony undead come online, this downgrades to a move action. They can be directed to do a task like "kill that one", freeing up later actions for spells.
They're slow: you can avoid them easily. If you a monster does nothing but move it can probably walk circles around them, and arrive at the Necromancer, who'll get cut up. But it's not Necromancer vs monsters, it's Party vs monsters, so if the monsters waste actions running, the Necromancer's party kills them and the Necromancer is happy.
They don't do damage: well, a bit of damage. I've already started work on this point, you can read about this later.
They're easy to kill: I want this to be the case because, as I said at the beginning, the goal with these guys is to steal opposing actions. If they're too tough, the actions they're stealing aren't doing anything, and they take too many. Making them worse at stealing actions means we can make them tougher.
Now I know what you're thinking: if there are like ten of these guys it's going to take a million rounds to kill them all even if they get one shotted every time. No matter how low their defences go, the limit at mid to high levels will be the number of attacks.
One solution to that problem is to make them provoke attacks of opportunity every time they move into a threatened space. A creature with lots of attacks will do less damage with these, and be less likely to kill, but will conversely be better at taking out lots on a full attack. The issue here is that many creatures don't have combat reflexes. Maybe we just give them a free extra AoO per round, perhaps re flavoring it somehow.
The poor, shackled souls shuffle forward, their moans growing ever louder as they surround you. They seem to offer themselves up, as though they're begging for your blade to end their miserable lives.
Something like that.
They can lock things down: like I said earlier, they shouldn't be too good at this. Basically, when they stand next to an opponent, that opponent has to spend some time killing them or something bad will happen.
Most melee lockdown is based around combat maneuvers like trip and grapple, which is a rough road to go down. Basically, humanoids of your size or smaller will be way easier to be successful against than giant, strong monsters. The standard deviation on CMD is typically in the range of about seven, so if I want them to be two standard deviations above the mean, I'm going to be giving them numbers which auto-succeed against most types of foes.
We can still use CMD, we just have to not do it in a traditional way. Instead of giving each fleshy undead a ridiculous CMB so that it isn't irrelevant against lots of big monsters, we give them a big bonus for acting as a group. If you get surrounded by these, it doesn't matter if you're a freaking Tetori, you're going down. But they're easy to kill, so as long as you keep full attacking them each round, you'll never get surrounded. The bigger you are, the easier it is for them to get more bodies adjacent, since you've got larger faces.
One issue here is that some creatures could just ignore them. A flying archer literally doesn't care that there's a horde of undead below him, he'll pincushion the Necromancer anyway. The solution to this is to give the Necromancer spells and other features which work well against these types of foes. Protection from arrows as a first level spell? Some sort of custom line to ground fliers?
You get a small force, maybe 1 every 3 levels, maybe it keys off an ability score somehow, like with bonus spells.
The ultimate goal: Can do some damage, are very frail but not when used in tandem with fleshy undead, fast enough to zip around the field and be reinforcements.
Perhaps they can use ranged attacks, but only against fliers? That'd shore up that weakness a bit.
Action Economy: because they participate more actively, they should take up standard actions. Probably shouldn't be staggered, and probably should also be directable in the "kill that one" vein.
They're fast: Think of these as the horses. They move around quickly and hit things when they aren't in a position to respond effectively.
Damage: I took a look at the fraction of hit points the most lethal summoned creature for a given level (summon monster spells) can do to a CR appropriate creature, using stats pulled from the guide to designing new monsters. I used several different monsters at each level, mostly so that I could include the option to summon multiple lower level creatures. I gave each creature its most powerful attack option, so the Babaus were flanking, the big cats were charging, and everything else was full attacking. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, since it's pretty rare that you'll 1) successfully cast summon monster, 2) have all of your cats live until they can act, and 3) all somehow manage to charge the same opponent. Still, it was a good way to see what the damage limits for spell that doesn't require a lot of work to cast are supposed to be.
The numbers vary from 50.89% with 1d4+1 pouncing dire tigers (summon monster eight) to 14.3% from the stupid Tyrannosaurus. Maybe I should've let it charge since it only had one attack, but it still wouldn't've been the best option at any level. Those numbers are pretty far out though, about eighty percent of my numbers were between 20-25%. So it's reasonable to say that a summoned monster is intended to be able to kill a CR = APL creature in five rounds of uninterrupted beating under good conditions.
That's what we use as the baseline for our damage. That's a reasonable starting point for our skeletons as a group. They don't control things, they hit them, and if they don't get answered, eventually the things they hit die.
I'm not sure how to flavor this, but basically it's a bard. It walks around slowly and makes nearby undead do a lot more damage. The idea here is to give some damage capacity back to the Necromancer, but to limit it behind a slow movement speed and small area of effect.
You can direct it as a move action, but only on rounds where you don't also direct fleshy undead, and you can't give it instructions. This ensures that, for at least the first few rounds of the fight, you aren't stealing the role of dedicated damage dealer from your teammates. It gives you some inevitability, so that if the enemy stands still and doesn't go down to the fleshy undead which converge on it, you can buff them all up a lot and then it will go down.
This undead should be durable, perhaps an insubstantial creature, so that many enemies simply can't deal with it quickly and effectively. It should probably come online in later levels. I don't have a clear concept of it yet.
So you're thinking to yourself, okay, this Gaurwaith dude is a real fool. He's spent all this time talking about stuff without acknowledging the fact that the undead are going to be dying left and right.
Well yeah, that's their job. They're like Zapp Branigan's best men. And when they're done dying, you just bring them back to life for the next combat. I'm thinking this should follow one of two templates. Either the Necromancer uses spell slots to do this, or she uses a pool of points.
Spell slots is a good option. As you use more spell slots to revive your dead soldiers, you have fewer to use on the enemy. This taxes your resources just like encounters are supposed to, and when you run out of spells for the day you have to rest.
There are some downsides, though, which could be fixed using a different system. The different system would be a separate pool of points, much like a ki pool, which is expended to revive the undead. I'd also need implement some sort of mechanic which makes the Necromancer somewhat less effective in combat as the points get depleted, which would mirror the depletion of spells in the above option. There are two upsides. The first is that this pool can key off a different ability score than the one used for casting, which helps avoid SAD. The second is that when this pool is exhausted the Necromancer isn't completely useless, she still likely has some spells to fall back on. Neither of these upsides exist when spell slots are used, so I think I prefer the pool system.
I hope that adequately summarized what I'm trying to accomplish. I have other class features in mind, but I'd like to see how the key core of the class pans out before I get too invested in working on those. Basically, some tentative ideas are as follows:
A bonus to charisma related activities. Maybe some skill checks, maybe it only applies on opposed checks. Who doesn't want to be a dashing count?
An Eidolon like set of abilities which can be added to customize the undead. Would use a pool scaling by level, but no one undead can benefit from too many points invested.
Some sort of battlefield control spell based around claws coming from other planes and trying to drag people into the ground. Modeled off black tentacles.
Fear Aura. It's been designed before, it's been done, I like it.
What you can do is offer your suggestions. Am I overlooking something major? Does one of my goals seem unrealistic? Impossible? Is it a goal which will invalidate other players in the party, or otherwise hurt play in some deeply negative way? Got some suggestions for how to achieve those goals? I'd love to hear them.
See if you can find the old first edition true necromancer it had some good idea's in it if memory serves. (I think there was a prestige class in 3.5 that was similar to it as well.)
Thanks for the suggestion, Vidmaster7.
I'm not really looking for new ideas, more trying to solidify the ones I already have. I'll keep that in mind if we can make the core of the class work, though.
Bump.
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The Dread Necromancer from 3.5 is a perfect class to just rip off.
3.5 had 2 classes the Beguiler (enchantment/illusion focus) and the Dread Necromancer (necromancy)
Both where 9th level spont casters, instead of picking spells like a sorcerer they got access to a large number of spells that fit the dark theme, animate dead, ghoul touch, black tentacles, etc and a few utility spells like dispel magic but would never have access to teleport or normal summon monster and every 4 levels it could add a necromancer spell to it's spells known.
One of the themes of the class is that over the 20 levels you where slowly turning into a Lich. You would gain DR, a fear aura and increasing resistances related to what an undead and Lich had.
It's most popular ability was at level 8 all undead you created got a +4 enhancement to strength and dexterity, 2 extra hit points per hit die and you got to add your charisma modifer per level to the amount of undead you could control.
Thanks NoTongue.
Like I think I touched on in my first post, I'm not a fan of a class that revolves around animate dead.
Incidentally, I'm not a fan of the turning into a lich thing either, although you had no way of knowing that. I'd like to try to keep this class from forcing the character towards a particular alignment.
I'll be posting a first draft of the fleshy undead portion of the class soon unless someone thinks that there's a significant design flaw.
How about a necromancer based on the summoner class?
I'm definitely vibing with what you're doing here. Evolutions seem like a solid way to go. You can grant your undead fiery, toxic, or frosty features. Maybe gnarled bones that harm attackers. Maybe they explode on death (for damage or a curse) or can vampricially transfer hit points when they hurt people.
This may seem small-scale for a lord of the undead, but you might have different 'squad sizes' depending on what type of undead they're using. So you can have 4-5 arthritic skeletons/zombies or you can go for 3 skeleton champions/ghoul type creatures. Or maybe you can stick with one or two stronger golem type creatures like
in diablo 2.
I think the biggest challenge of this class is controlling the amount of excess actions and time consumption that comes with a player who controls that many minions. I can't remember the name of the blog that did it, but they had a great idea for allowing players to have lots of player-controlled weakling allies in a fight without slowing down combat. Apply this to necromancer minions and you may have something that functions the same way narratively as a horde of undead but takes a lot less time to manage.
-Minions have no actions but can move twice (or just once if they're slow).
-Minions function without rolling dice. This means they have melee-range passive abilities like "-2 to nearby enemies rolls", "passive bonus to atks, dr, ac, saves or small amounts of healing".
-They have sacrificial effects. So the bonus to ac one might be sacrificed to absorb damage from an attack or the one that buffs attacks can be sacrificed to add bleed or some nasty effect to an allied attack that hit. This can keep in line with the constantly dying horde of skeletons without the enemy having to "choose" to waste actions to kill them. This also gives the player the strategic option of which passive buffs/debuffs they want to keep and which ones they want to sacrifice for burst's sake.
Source: https://rulesasunwritten.wordpress.com/tag/henchmen/
(I know it's 4e and that might scare people but their fan base had some of the strongest homebrewers around in terms of understanding what made combat and dungeons fun.)
