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The Turn Undead conundrum
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6555989" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Honestly, it's troubling. And if I knew a better way to handle it, I would. But mostly I handle it at present by metagaming.</p><p></p><p>1) Against masses of low HD undead, the party would generally not be severly troubled anyway, as the attack bonus of low HD undead is quite low. So mostly large numbers of skeletons and zombies are used as color or setting trappings after a while. It just helps establish, "Yes, this is a bad place."</p><p></p><p>2) When it is necessary or desirable to have undead be a challenge, there are number of mechanisms that can be used of quite old provenance to effect the outcome. So, as I would with any encounter, I do some math to make sure that the encounter is reasonable before steering the game in that direction (PC's can always go opening a lich's tomb if they want, but I try to avoid giving them in game motivation for doing so until they are capable of surviving the consequences.) First, most more powerful undead have some amount of Turn Resistance that makes it unlikely or impossible for the win button to work on a 'boss monster'. Secondly, spells like Desecrate or Unhallow can easily be applied as effects to areas that are sufficiently evil as to be teeming with undead - necromantic tainted catacombs, haunted houses, evil temples, demonic sacrificial altars, places where mass murder occurred, etc. These increase the turn resistance of monsters and consequently adjust the difficulty of the encounter. Finally, Gygax himself noted the problem here early on, and frequently outfitted his monsters with "amulets of turn resistance" that effectively adjusted the difficulty of the encounter. So for example, if you want something like a zombie to be a bit more challenging, you can up it to 4HD, put rusted platemail on it, give it a masterwork great axe, and an <em>amulet of turn resistance +2</em>, and put it guarding the door of a permanently <em>desecrated</em> tomb. The resulting monster turns as if it was 8HD, but isn't nearly as dangerous as an 8HD monster and as such is more appropriate of a foe to a 3rd or 4th level party. </p><p></p><p>I don't know the details of how 5e handles this, but presumably you could modify an encounter such that it read something like, "Evil Altar: This altar radiates evil and flickers with black shadows when observed. As long as this altar remains undamaged, any undead within 60' has advantage on their saving throws versus Turn Undead." That sort of thing lets you play with how much of the encounter you intend to be resolvable through turning.</p><p></p><p>3) Provide alternative uses for channeling divine power. For example, the PC cleric in my party has a feat that allows her to spend a channel divinity usage to temporarily give her weapon the 'flaming' property. The feat is open to clerics with either the Sun or Fire domain, and a large variety of other feats are open to other Domains that give options for using it. Using 'channel' in this way isn't OP in the long run, but keeps the cleric power to channel divine power relevant at times when turning undead isn't - including against undead. 5e seems to be doing something like this.</p><p></p><p>4) Generally never imagine for myself that lots of weak undead should be a very challenging encounter any way, any more than a room of kobold or goblins is supposed to be a very challenging encounter. I try to avoid making pets of my monsters, and look for alternative sources of challenge that are appropriate to the setting if I need a source of challenge.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6555989, member: 4937"] Honestly, it's troubling. And if I knew a better way to handle it, I would. But mostly I handle it at present by metagaming. 1) Against masses of low HD undead, the party would generally not be severly troubled anyway, as the attack bonus of low HD undead is quite low. So mostly large numbers of skeletons and zombies are used as color or setting trappings after a while. It just helps establish, "Yes, this is a bad place." 2) When it is necessary or desirable to have undead be a challenge, there are number of mechanisms that can be used of quite old provenance to effect the outcome. So, as I would with any encounter, I do some math to make sure that the encounter is reasonable before steering the game in that direction (PC's can always go opening a lich's tomb if they want, but I try to avoid giving them in game motivation for doing so until they are capable of surviving the consequences.) First, most more powerful undead have some amount of Turn Resistance that makes it unlikely or impossible for the win button to work on a 'boss monster'. Secondly, spells like Desecrate or Unhallow can easily be applied as effects to areas that are sufficiently evil as to be teeming with undead - necromantic tainted catacombs, haunted houses, evil temples, demonic sacrificial altars, places where mass murder occurred, etc. These increase the turn resistance of monsters and consequently adjust the difficulty of the encounter. Finally, Gygax himself noted the problem here early on, and frequently outfitted his monsters with "amulets of turn resistance" that effectively adjusted the difficulty of the encounter. So for example, if you want something like a zombie to be a bit more challenging, you can up it to 4HD, put rusted platemail on it, give it a masterwork great axe, and an [I]amulet of turn resistance +2[/I], and put it guarding the door of a permanently [I]desecrated[/I] tomb. The resulting monster turns as if it was 8HD, but isn't nearly as dangerous as an 8HD monster and as such is more appropriate of a foe to a 3rd or 4th level party. I don't know the details of how 5e handles this, but presumably you could modify an encounter such that it read something like, "Evil Altar: This altar radiates evil and flickers with black shadows when observed. As long as this altar remains undamaged, any undead within 60' has advantage on their saving throws versus Turn Undead." That sort of thing lets you play with how much of the encounter you intend to be resolvable through turning. 3) Provide alternative uses for channeling divine power. For example, the PC cleric in my party has a feat that allows her to spend a channel divinity usage to temporarily give her weapon the 'flaming' property. The feat is open to clerics with either the Sun or Fire domain, and a large variety of other feats are open to other Domains that give options for using it. Using 'channel' in this way isn't OP in the long run, but keeps the cleric power to channel divine power relevant at times when turning undead isn't - including against undead. 5e seems to be doing something like this. 4) Generally never imagine for myself that lots of weak undead should be a very challenging encounter any way, any more than a room of kobold or goblins is supposed to be a very challenging encounter. I try to avoid making pets of my monsters, and look for alternative sources of challenge that are appropriate to the setting if I need a source of challenge. [/QUOTE]
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