Wednesday, 2nd September 2015, 22:42 by Aethrus
From what I see with this debate, a lot of the arguments is based around two different looks at the spell animate skeleton.
For players using the spell from the beginning of the game (ie Necromancers, Kiku worshipers, those that find early spellbooks) the spell gives reasonable returns for reasonable investment... most characters that early need at least some spellcasting / necromancy to make the failure rate tolerable, especially if they're not a background that emphasizes Int. Hypothetical Optimal Players might posit that you can ignore any investment in the spell, cast at 58% failure with 0 spellcasting / 0 necromancy and just summon them at the end of fights, but I think that that's a waste of the spell's usefulness anyways, especially early on, as characters can benefit from getting a skeleton mid-fight as well. From what I understand, most are not arguing that the spell is a problem until around Lair.
In the middle-late game, there are a lot more creatures that are far stronger than hobgoblins and the occasional gnoll... elephants, death yaks, stone giants, etc. are the ones often pointed out to showcase that the spell gives too much reward for too little investment at that point in the game. I do think that the actual level of reward is somewhat overstated... animate skeleton requires you to still kill the monster tougher than the skeleton you get out of it, without that skeleton to help you. And late game, more and more enemies are going to have special features as living beings they lose as skeletons... a Titan skeleton isn't the same level of threat as a Titan, it's slower and lacks its threatening spells. It's still a useful cold body to soak damage, soften up opponents, and maybe even take some popcorn out...
I'm not convinced that animate skeleton gives too much power late in the game; while it does scale with enemy strength, it does not in fact scale as quickly as the enemies themselves do. Many highly threatening monsters don't drop corpses at all to use the spell on, but most importantly, while derived undead let you turn corpses of foes into strong allies, they won't help you actually get those initial kills (barring worshipping Kiku, in which case we're not really talking about using Skeleton anymore anyway). And that's where I hesitate. If players had to invest similar amounts of experience into necromancy to get hydra skeletons that summoners have to invest to summon Hydras out of nothing, the player who went into summoning has made summoning his primary source of killdudes. The player who went into necromancy isn't going to killdudes as well, is limited to whatever corpses he scrounges from the dungeon as allies, etc. Scaling animate skeleton on the basis of the golden dragon and titan skeletons players can get in the end-game I feel will likely make necromancy too much of an investment to justify.
My separate issue with the idea of raising the level of Animate Skeleton is, admittedly, one of flavor, but I feel like the idea of choosing a background called Necromancer, going into the dungeon, and not being able to make any dead rise until level 2 or 3 would be the wrong direction. Necromancers should be able to make spooky skeletons out of the gate, 'fixing' Animate Skeleton and making it a higher level spell, even assuming it is more balanced for the game as a whole, is a solution that takes away some of the character and fun of that background.
As far as what solutions, if any, might need to be implemented, I'm not terribly sure. Making them expire over time was a necessary change to limit the ability to snowball, and actually puts some time pressure on necromancers to make it to the next fight with as much of their undead horde as they can. Solutions that come to mind might be splitting animate skeleton into multiple spells, with higher level spells for higher hit dice monsters, but that seems a solution far worse than the cure.
One idea I particularly like is making animate skeleton destroy corpses if it is miscast. It would at least solve the issue of it being a spell that players can cast 'with any failure %' and mean that characters would need either significant spellcasting and Int or some level of necromancy investment to be able to cast it. Some of the complaints about Animate Skeleton seem to revolve around the fact that its only opportunity cost is a spell slot for any character who even considers casting and has a god that allows it. This would give it some (small) experience requirement for it to have significant usefulness.
Final thought I've had is making skeleton duration scale as a function of spellpower versus hit dice. If you've only got 2 pips in Animate Skeleton, a Titan Skeleton wouldn't last you the time to rest off the fight you encountered it.
- For this message the author Aethrus has received thanks:
- Berder