L&L Turning & Churning

[Jack Daniel]

Turning Undead is No Longer Necessary

I don't see the point. I mean, let's be honest here: why was turning undead added to the D&D game in the first place?

The game originally had two classes: fighting man and magic-user. The classic swords & sorcery archetypes. They went into dungeons to contend with monsters and deathtraps to take treasure and get rich and powerful. But fighting men and magic-users are not particularly well-equipped to always handle certain specific situations.

Deathtraps are one example. You can only get so far poking the corridors with a 10' pole. So these early players started hiring NPC "thieves" who functioned as trap-finding (and door-opening) specialists. It was quite a long time before the thief role became associated with the "Grey Mouser" character archetype and became a worthy PC class in its own right; originally, the thief was a tool added to the game so that fighters and mages could bypass a specific kind of problem.

Ditto for the cleric. Fighters were usually pretty good at handling most kinds of monsters, but undead were SCARY. They permanently drained you of experience levels, NO SAVE. The cleric was added to the game, once again, for the sole and specific purpose of countering this scary-ass problem. Clerics were the "turn undead" guys, based loosely on the Hammer Horror version of Dr. Van Helsing, with a bit of "Christian crusader" trappings layered on top to make it more palatable in a medieval setting. Their whole point was to give the real characters, the fighters and the mages, a chance to escape from level-draining undead with their lives and XP totals intact. End of story.

Now, what are the odds that D&D next is even going to include level-drain at all, never mind the nasty kind where it's permanent and doesn't allow a saving throw? Practically nil, right? So what need for clerics to drive off the undead, if they're not even all that scary anymore? If the undead are just monsters like any other monsters, giving the cleric a special means to drive them off just makes them... weaker and less interesting monsters than all the other monsters in the game.

So either drop turning undead, or make the blasted undead scary and effective again!

 

[Grogg of the North]

The problem I have run into in my 3.5 experience was that if we could turn the undead, we could usually just smack them until they just stopped moving. If we couldn't turn them, we shouldn't be fighting them.

And at least in 3.5, turning undead was a pain. I don't know how many times my groups had this conversation: "Okay, what do I roll? Where's that table again? So I can affect up to this many HD, but I only actualy turn this many. Did it work?" *Everyone stares at the confused DM*

And having to check every monster's entry to see what happens when it gets turned just seems like its going to be a pain and slow down combat.

Frankly, I like the way Pathfinder did it. Take damage; save for half. Quick and to the point.

 

[Mark CMG]

I prefer "turning" to work as spellcasting with three options: ward, turn, destroy. The tougher the undead, the harder it is to do any of the options. On any given undead, it is easiest to ward, to hold them at bay. They can be turned, sent running, for "twice the warding cost" and destroyed for "three times the warding cost." It's a scaled, intuitive system that makes sense in that same way the spell casting system works, so no need for an additional system to cover the feature.

Necromancer types can hold/bind, summon/send, and create in the same manner with additional costs for long term commands like, potentially, guarding an area until destroyed or seeking and pursuing a particular victim/target.

 

[Fanaelialae]

So either drop turning undead, or make the blasted undead scary and effective again!

If those are the choices, my vote is to drop turning.

They've stated, and I hope it will be so, that no individual class will be necessary in a DDN party. If undead are overpowered and require turn undead to be dealt with, either a cleric becomes necessary or a DM without a party cleric cannot use undead. Neither of those strikes me as a reasonable option.

 

[KidSnide]

I think that the turn undead option was a way to counter the SoD effects so many undead have--and yes, I am including paralysis as SoD, to say nothing of no-save level drain, aging touch, and mummy rot. In other words, there was a sort of arms race between undead and turn undead.

I think this is an excellent point. Undead tend to have particularly nasty melee-hit effects, so a weakness that can keep them out of melee for a few rounds is a useful counter-balance.

For those who think it's finicky for undead to have a special weakness line on their stat block, I disagree. I think more monsters should have explicit weaknesses that the PCs can exploit with the right combination of abilities. Why don't animals have a nature / wilderness lore DC that allows nature-oriented PCs to calm them with the right food offering? Why don't humanoid opponents have tactical weaknesses? Small humanoids might be vulnerable to bull rush and strength based push attacks? Should some humanoids be particularly vulnerable to taunting? Others to intimidation? As Mike suggests, maybe devils and demons should be vulnerable to arcane bindings?

The point isn't to create a massive store of metagame knowledge about individual vulnerabilities. (Some GMs will play it that way, while most will let the appropriate characters know...) The point is to give a wide range of character types an opportunity to shine when their strengths are particularly advantageous.

-KS

 

[Greg K]

I did like the proposal from the article that once a character's turn attempt fails against a specific undead creature, that creature can't be affected by a turning attempt from the same character for the next 24 hours.

The problem is that you, then, fail the classic trope where
1. The hero fails to turn the vampire;
2. The vampire tells, the hero, "You have to have *faith* for that to work on me!"; and
3. Suddenly, the vampire recoils and starts stepping back, because the hero found his faith and started pressing forward with the holy symbol held before him.

 

[Greg K]

I have two issues with turn undead.
1. I want it so that anyone with faith can turn a vampire; Charlie Brewster (Fright Night) and many other vampire hunters that turn undead are not clerics.
2. As a special cleric ability, I don't want it available to all clerics. As mentioned by some others, already, as an ability, it should be domain specific.

 

[Endur]

I really don't see much of a difference between what Mike Mearls is suggesting and the AD&D approach to turn undead.

AD&D had turn and destroy as two different areas on the chart. Mike is talking about have a spell set the DC for turning and destroying the undead. So Mike is giving the caster a bit more control over how hard it is to turn/vaporize the undead. Otherwise this is pretty close to AD&D.

His interpretation of how Ghosts, ghouls, zombies react to being turned is cool, but against its not too far from how AD&D handled it.

I won't comment on the 4e turn mechanics. The 3e turn mechanics seemed a bit more powerful than the AD&D turn mechanics.

 

[Greg K]

Whichever form Turn Undead takes, you can then add a feat or theme or whatevers like this:

True Believer [Divine, Good]
Requirement: you must worship a good or unaligned deity.
Benefit: You can use Turn Undead.
Special: Clerics and paladins get this feat/theme/whatevers as a bonus feat/theme/whatevers.

I like this, but I had posted the following on these boards back in 2004

True Faith: Turn Undead 1/day: Wis 13+ Cha 13+ Lawful Good

 

[n00bdragon]

As someone else on another board put it

This week on "4E Addressed It But We're Gonna Pretend It's 2007 Again": What would happen if a single feature of a single class had to be addressed over and over again in every single statblock of every monster it applied to? BRILLIANT GAME DESIGN, THAT'S WHAT!