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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ryryguy" data-source="post: 4282196" data-attributes="member: 64945">Agree that the #1, primary reason for no Animate Dead ritual is the economy of actions thing, which generally precludes henchmen and so forth.I suspect, though, that good-vs-evil may have a little bearing too.  The 4e design philosophy, as stated, is to try to provide a baseline set of rules and fluff for a kind of lowest common denominator D&D campaign.  The designers might believe that evil PC's, and morally shady tactics like animating undead, are problematic and/or uncommon enough that they don't fall within the baseline.That doesn't mean that they think an evil PC campaign should never be run.  It doesn't mean that the campaign with the LN guy who animates dead to fight evil is badwrongfun.  But in the baseline game, the PC's are good or neutral heroes, and animating undead is not a standard tactic for those heroes.Of course I do not really know what the designers are thinking, I'm just guessing based on stuff like the PHB note that PCs should be good or neutral.  And I have no doubt that WotC will be happy to sell sourcebooks all about running campaigns with evil PCs who use kitten blood to power their undead minions, if they think people will buy such sourcebooks.  But with only so many pages in the core books, and so many potential problems with evil PCs(*), and Animate Dead generally something that would be used only by evil PCs, it makes sense to me to cut it out of the "baseline".* - Sure maybe there are no problems at your table, but if you don't think that there would be problems at many other tables, particularly with newbie players and DMs, you're kidding yourself.</blockquote>

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