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Message: <blockquote data-quote="STARP_Social_Officer" data-source="post: 3817987" data-attributes="member: 41202">Zombies. Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't ignore 'em. But you can control 'em, with the help of a handy animate dead spell. But, there's a problem.In order to cast animate dead, you need to be a Cleric of at least 5th level or a wizard/sorcerer of at least 7th level. At which point, you can control 20 HD worth of zombies if you're a cleric (4 x level) or 28 HD worth if you're a wizard. 20 HD worth of zombies is 10 normal, human-sized zombies. 28 HD is fourteen.Now, here's the problem. 10 zombies are easy to kill. 16 hp each. No dramas. Once the PCs get to be anything close to the level of the zombie master, they can walk right over the zombies. Another example. If a 16th-level cleric casts animate dead, they can control 64 HD worth of zombies. That's 32 zombies. That's a lot of zombies. But zombies don't change HD, so 32 zombies is still only 32 easy to kill, 1/2 CR creatures. If the BBEG is a 16th-level cleric (CR 16), or even a lich of same (CR 18), the PCs can still plough through minions like they were harvesting corn. Even if the zombie boss has two hundred zombies, the zombies are still easy to kill.And the other problem is that if you make the zombies tougher, there can be less of them. If, instead of 32 2HD zombies, the boss controls 16 4HD zombies, or 8 8HD zombies, the CR goes up only slightly. 8HD zombies are only CR3. And even if the BBEG controls gray render zombies, with 20HD, they can only have three of them. Their combined CR is still way less than the PCs can realistically tackle at that level.Basically, the problem is zombies are too easy to kill and the bosses can't control enough of them. The exact same problem exists with skeletons and, for that matter, other undead too. The gist of the problem, for those who can't work out my reasoning, is that by the time the PCs are high enough to fight villains that control zombies, they are high enough to roll over the zombies, thus losing the entire point of the villain.So, here's my question. How do you overcome this? How do you make zombies more challenging without this meaning there has to be less of them?</blockquote>

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