D&D 5E Necromancer Management :) Please help :)

[FormerlyHemlock]

We play totally different games.

I know. I think the same thing every time you post about how you have 6-8 combats every game night. My players, on the other hand, sometimes spend half the session sneaking around and the other half running against each other for political office, trying to get various NPCs to vote for them over the other PCs. We play very different games.

But note that I'm also talking about someone else's game here, not mine--the OP has expressed a desire to have hundreds of skeletons at a time, and as you can see I've extrapolated from lesser numbers of skeletons. ("Normally... but if there are 100 then you probably can't...") At my table, I've never seen a Necromancer with more than two dozen, and the player eventually got bored with smashing everything to tiny bits and put the Necromancer on the back burner in favor of another PC.

Presumably I don't need to spell that out explicitly but I find that with some people it helps, to avoid miscommunication, to say that explicitly. The hypothetical situation you just asked for advice on is being answered based on my extrapolating from similar-but-not-identical experiences. Also, drawing upon my experience as a DM running large battles with tons of monsters, which is basically a Necromancer has to do.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

We play totally different games.

That's really what I should have said as my earlier reply, but it didn't quite occur to me until reading here.

 

[Flamestrike]

I know. I think the same thing every time you post about how you have 6-8 combats every game night.

Ive never said I have 6-8 encounters each game night because I dont have 6-8 encounters every game night.

I do average around 6 encounters per adventuring day. Some days it'll be more; some days it'll be less. Some days it'll just be the one encounter for the whole adventuring day.

As to the amount of encounters I run on 'game night' (game afternoon/ evening), it varies even more.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Ive never said I have 6-8 encounters each game night because I dont have 6-8 encounters every game night.

I do average around 6 encounters per adventuring day. Some days it'll be more; some days it'll be less. Some days it'll just be the one encounter for the whole adventuring day.

As to the amount of encounters I run on 'game night' (game afternoon/ evening), it varies even more.

My mistake.

It's still a huge difference, because sometimes we go for adventuring weeks at a time without a combat. (It may or may not take more than a single session to play through those weeks.) My impression of your game, from the way you've described it here and on GITP, is that it's all about constantly killing things. Or rather, long stretches of solitude broken by brief eighteen-to-thirty-second "encounters" in which you meet new creatures and then immediately kill them; maybe five minutes of "encounters" per adventuring day, during which time dozens of creatures die.

As you say, we play very different games.

 

[Flamestrike]

My mistake.

It's still a huge difference, because sometimes we go for adventuring weeks at a time without a combat. (It may or may not take more than a single session to play through those weeks.)

No, thats weeks of travel without a single adventuring day.

A 'adventuring day' is a period between long rests, featuring 1 or more combats. Downtime and long travel doesnt count.

My impression of your game, from the way you've described it here and on GITP, is that it's all about constantly killing things. Or rather, long stretches of solitude broken by brief eighteen-to-thirty-second "encounters" in which you meet new creatures and then immediately kill them; maybe five minutes of "encounters" per adventuring day, during which time dozens of creatures die.

No, my adventures are (usually) dungeons, ruined temples, dark forests or similar, populated with monsters, who are guarding treasure.

You know. 'Dungeons and Dragons'. That kind of thing.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

As an advice, after having many campaign ruined by a player with a tendency toward minion-hoarding, you may want to start by asking your Dm and fellow players to see if they (or their character) are ok with you having an army of undead in a demi-plane to drop on the bad guys or other goofy things like that. It may be dull for other player to have their immersion broken because another player wanted to test some theorycrafting on a real table for the lolz. Just give a warning to your Dm to tell him what you want to do as a character, just for fairness sake.

 

[LegionError121]

Well, I would just like to keep my corpse army around for "plot related events" As in, "Q: how are we going to break into the castle? None of us are sneaky. A: We use my army as a decoy" OR "Q:We've just been captured and we're about to be tortured, what do we do? A: I raise the corpses of the dead victims who starved to death in the torture chamber to free us" OR "S: There's a bridge we need to defend during this war but there's only 4 of us! R: Don't worry, we might have a chance against the snake people I don't like because I can bring out my army if you can give me a day to summon them all"

I might also make her a plot central character because she could ocuppy a big ass castle to protect an important religious territory, make peace with the undead so they're just following her orders rather than "I command you with thy magics!" and she could come out every now and again with a small guard unit of undead to do missions with various parties that a giant ass skele army could not succeed in doing

In other words, I wouldn't want to delay people by stopping to sleep every hour to reset my casting abilities, I wouldn't ask my small party to wait as I work out if my 168 odd army could kill 3 bandits and I would certainly like to make my character weight her assets effectivly as a means of maintaining a balance and teritorty so that there is a bit more reason than "I'm a complete dick who has a wopping big army lol lol loo lollolol"

I will ask you one thing though vincegetorix What do you feel is a healthy number of summons to keep around? I don't want to completely dominate but I don't want them to be worthless either