Undead Apocalypse - How to handle clerics and paladins?

[LogantheBard]

This is good information for me, as well. I'm starting my own "undead-centric" game soon, as well. How unbalancing would it be to give a few other classes MORE options against undead? A specific example, one player wants to play a witch. I want to add Disrupt Undead to her spell list.

 

[Dingo333]

One way to mess with your players is good aligned undead (gave my paladin a headache trying to stop the cleric from murdering a vampire)

The Juju Zombie is a great way to scale a threat to challenge a party. It is a zombie that retains abilities from its former life (ie. class levels)

Anti-Paladin Juju Zombie leading a horde of zombies? Hell yes
Zombie clerics exploding in negative energy? Sound right to me

SkredlitheOgre If it's an 'undead' apocalypse as opposed to a 'zombie' apocalypse, you can use stronger and intelligent undead. Vampires. Liches. Devourers. Intelligent undead, like vampires, can also recruit/dominate/enslave human followers. Yeah, the Clerics, Paladins and Rangers will be effective against the undead, but what happens when the human followers of the undead, say made up to look like zombies, are hit with multiple healing bursts during combat? The group suddenly has to rethink their strategy.

Channeling energy causes a burst that affects all creatures of one type (either undead or living) in a 30-foot radius centered on the cleric.

This means that to affect the humans who look like undead, you need to channel positive and target living (thus healing them). If the Cleric targets undead (trying to hurt them) and there are no undead in range, nothing happens.

Now, if you used a cure spell to hurt a human disguised as undead, you would heal them

 

[Nookie]

Might i suggest the ZOMGzergrush!!! method. Their spells and uses per day of all that will eventually burn out giving the heroes are probably hopelessly outnumbered, there is a horde template you can slap on a critter somewhere too. Think Swarm but with medium creatures.

 

[BBQLord]

1) Don't care about what the players pick as long as it's balanced amongst themselves. A cleric, paladin, ranger (FE: Undead) are a good party. So are 4 paladins and 1 cleric. No problem, just have undead encounters be 4 or even more CR higher than normal but count as regular encounter.
You just need to look out for cleric/paladin/monk or something like that because the monk would be severely underpowered relative to the paladin and cleric (even more so than normal, that is).

2) Make positive energy (healing, channeling positive energy, turning), and perhaps even invoking divine powers of Good, attract more undead. So, a positive energy burst killed 10 skeletons? Excellent! In 1d6 rounds 10, 20 or 300 more skeletons show up to extinguish these positive energy channeling abominations. Make it something that the PC can use but at higher cost (or reduce its effects).

 

[axp_dave]

As everyone has said, you can only channel so many times and hordes of undead will use of those channels. You will still need the other classes though, just because it is an undead campaign doesn't mean that there will not be other monsters or NPC's to battle that a fighter will be needed, same for traps with rogues, and wierd situations that only a wizard can bypass. Paladin and cleric may be fun for the campaign, but a party will still need the other classes.

Dave

 

[Alzrius]

Have people come up with ways of dealing with this in their own games? I'm trying to aim for 50% of all encounters involving undead. The end goal is to be able to do a fantasy zombie apocalypse, but with all the other undead trimmings mixed in, and so there really needs to be a frequencies to undead.

I think the key here is not to make it about de-powering your positive energy-channelers so that they're less effective against the undead. It's about making the undead more resistant to those effects so that they're more able to withstand them.

Give your undead a high bonus to their channel resistance (even for undead with no channel resistance). This can be a flat number (e.g. +20 channel resistance) or a rubric (e.g. +2 channel resistance per Hit Die), as you think is more appropriate. Either way, this will make your undead a lot more threatening, since positive energy will suddenly be a lot less damaging to them.

Hence why it's an undead apocalypse.