Animate Dead Initiative

[Hathdren]

Quick question regarding the Animate Dead spell since I wasn't able to find it in the spell description. When you raise a creature using this spell as a zombie or skeleton, whose initiative do you use. Do you use the caster's initiative, letting the creature act immediately after it's been raised? Do you use the caster's initiative, but force the raised creature to wait until the caster's next turn before it can act? Or do you roll the newly raised creature into initiative?

[zza ni]

it depend on the gm. technically all creatures that participate in a fight should have their own initiative, but most gm find it easier to group the ones being controlled by the character into that character turn (i follow that, having the creatures wait to get instruction etc).

animals that need to be guided with handle animal specifically use up the character's action to do so.

[Bjørn Røyrvik]

I use caster's initiative because it makes everything easier.

[Ryze Kuja]

I had a necromancer PC two campaigns ago and she had a veritable zoo of Juju zombies following her around. I found it to be much easier to have her type out notecards with her zombies' stats on them and then hand them out to the group, and then have the zombies act on the various PC's turns. So now you have 20 zombies being played by 5 people at the various initiatives of the PC's rather than 20 zombies all being played by the Necromancer on their turn.

Technically per RAW, each one of those zombies is supposed to have its own Initiative and to be controlled by the Necromancer PC, but frankly that's exhausting for keeping things organized. So rather than have the necromancer's turn take 30 minutes with her flipping through the info of 20 zombies or having me track initiative for 20 zombies + the PC's + the enemies, the zombies' turns were all staggered and played by the other PC's and on that PC's initiative. This alleviated a lot of taskmastering from the Necromancer PC, all the Initiative tracking from me as the GM, and kept the other PC's engaged when they would otherwise be bored. It was win-win-win.

[VoodistMonk]

Ryze Kuja you are an absolute gold mine for all things Necromancy! That system for handling Initiative with large numbers is genius.

[Azothath]

there are TWO options;
1) go just after the caster's initiative or at his current initiative score (the caster's initiative gets deprecated in this case). He cast the spell so it logically can't be at or before his initiative AND they need separate initiative scores. GMs allow the caster to lower his initiative to go somewhere in with his summons/creations.
2) at the top of the next round. This is treating them as "new" combatants entering/joining in the melee.

[Diego Rossi]

As I see it, they work as if they were summoned creatures and are immediately able to act after the spell was completed.
So, if the undead were raised during the combat, I would put them at the caster initiative (but sharing the handling of the NPC between different players is a good idea). The act in the round in which they are summoned, but they start prone and not clutching their weapons, if they have any.

If, instead, they were raised before the combat, they roll their initiative.

We use the initiative tracker with magnetic tiles, so, for simple humanoid skeletons or zombies, it is easy to simply give them a number or letter and keep track of their hp on the tile.
For more complex undead, like Juju zombies, Ghosts, etc., we prepare a character sheet for the NPC well in advance, if possible.