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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6554741" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't have 5e experience, but I've been DMing 1e-3e for 30 years.Leaving aside the fact that at higher levels turn incinerates many lesser foes, forcing an opponent to panic with no saving throw allowed, is in my experience a win button against all corporeal undead.  It's then usually a trivial task to chase down and slay the cowering undead in a corner, or to pick apart the undead group in two smaller isolated groups.   Whether it's any good versus incorporeal undead depends on how you treat the ethereal plane.  By RAW, incorporeal undead can always easily flee as the ethereal plane has no interaction with the physical.(Side rant.  Ghosts, for example, by RAW don't see themselves as inhabiting a particular world with tangible features, but an entirely ghostly world letting them inhabit rocks quite freely and without discomfort.  Thus, by RAW the ethereal plane is not only intangible to those on the material plane, but intangible to its ethereal inhabitants as well, which makes no sense given that it is supposed to be made of the same substance that they are.) My problem with turn undead in 1e/2e/3e is that it's binary nature means that it either renders and encounter trivial, or else it is useless.   The problem isn't that it isn't good, but that it tends to be anticlimactic.  I don't have a problem with the turning not being useful.  It's that when its useful it wins the encounter all on its own, and when it isn't useful it's a wasted action.  In the long run, as the HD of undead increases exponentially, it becomes a non-factor.  But it's so freaking powerful that it dominates design of undead and basically forces you to shut it down at some point beyond occasionally doing something impressive but largely unnecessary to a horde of undead mooks.Doing something like your 'Radiance of Dawn' power is going to be useful only in those cases when the undead's effective HD is such to preclude turning.  In general, imposing a panic/cower condition on something is far more powerful than a relatively trivial amount of direct damage.  I've been weighing in my mind what to do about this, but for this campaign at least made no changes in the turning rules.</blockquote>

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