How to Play a Necromancer in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

Montee it can be so hard to raise a family these days yeah does a dragon's fifth addition does not make it easy to play a necromancer does it but it can be done and today we're gonna show you how to raise your own little monsters my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelly McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we discuss everything Dungeons and Dragons including advice for players and guides for Dungeon Master's we upload new videos every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode in this series we take a classic fantasy archetype and discuss the different classes features abilities and spells that you can use in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition to realize that character concept in a playable form today the dead will walk the earth as we flip open the Necronomicon and talk about how you can play a necromancer in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition so let's get raising so Kelly when we think of the necromancer archetype what do we really want that character to be able to do I want to see this character who's using dark magic raising hordes of undead and just unleashing them upon their enemies a little bit of evil in there but they don't necessarily have to be but there is that dark element to a necromancer that I think is really important especially that idea of dark magic that drains the life from your foes but I do think the quintessential element of a necromancer is animating the dead eye I don't imagine a necromancer without first imagining them leading an undead horde yeah I think that's the most important thing for that character so when we're thinking about the abilities in class features we want to choose I think we want to put that front and center because there's many ways to play a blaster that uses necrotic damage but I think the difficult thing in 5th edition is having a horde of undead minions and as you said not the least of which because that's pretty evil yeah there's there's no real way to get around the fact that even if you're a good-natured necromancer undead or monsters and you don't really walk into towns in any D&D campaign that I've ever been in with a horde of zombies behind you and have the town's folk be like oh hey friendly neighborhood necromancer how are you today yeah yeah there's a bunch of creative ways around this and I think no matter the noblest intention that your character might have animating undead creatures still brings in this negative evil energy into the world and creates a monster that hungers for life energy and wants to kill the living and even if you do want to play a heroic necromancer it gives you this kind of antihero feeling behind your character yeah I I can think of many pop-culture references to characters who are good-natured but deal in dark magic I think of Claudia from Dragon Prince is actually a really great example of this character who's good natured generally kind but then does really dark magic that has a lot of the audience questioning whether she's good or evil but really it's about that evil magic that you're using that really does define that whole aspect of the necromancer I think no nowhere else do you see this any better than in the Diablo series which really for me I think defines what we think of as a necromancer and in the Diablo games the if you played the necromancer you were really representing the person that was willing to do anything to stop a greater evil so the idea that the forces of Hell and demons are way worse than just animating the dead to fight against them so that I think in addition to the just the Diablo necromancer being such a prevalent archetype and even necromancer is in the Blizzard games in general like Kel'Thuzad and the Lich King I think it's really defined in our public consciousness what it means to be a necromancer yeah I love these depictions because most of the time necromancer's are often spun as villains or evil characters and it is good to have a few references even if they're not specifically necromancer's and even like in the Diablo series to me that's one of the best examples because you are the hero though you're also a necromancer yeah and of course we can look at other more villainous characters as well like dark priests or drawing inspiration from famous necromancer's from D&D cannon like Vecna and a serac who went on to become Lich which is a big like motivating element as well for a necromancer I think that a necromancer always has this fascination with life and death they might really desire power over life and death and be striving for their own immortality because maybe if their very core they're afraid of their own death another two great examples for for just inspiration for necromancer's is dr. Frankenstein or the reanimate er both examples of people who went out of their way to learn what it took to bring somebody back from the dead and I actually think what's really cool is this this aspect of learning necromancy for the desire to bring somebody you care about back I think that that's a really cool way to actually make the anti-hero necromancer I also think that you can look at non-western sources like Egyptian mythology or Haitian legends look at the origins of how zombies were associated with Voodoo and really find lots of different sources for necromancer's that are more complex than just this grave robbing right minions architect not that there's anything wrong with that archetype but I think there's a lot of complexity and the personality of your necromancer that is worth exploring then then there's just like raw ambition for power and wanting to be a puppet master controlling an undead army that takes over the world if you want to go the complete opposite side the comical necromancer that I think of is the necromancer who was just lazy and decided that necromancy was an easy way to get everything done in his life because he just had a skeletons and zombies doing all those chores and worked for him well he got to sit back and relax maybe they're just an hour master that lost their beloved cat and wants to reanimate what classes and spells do we think are gonna combine together to make the best necromancer so because necromancer can run the spectrum from dark priests to mad scientists but the thing that they always have in common is animating the dead we want to look at the classes that have access to the animating dead spell because I think of that is just the quintessential element of the character and that puts us in to the territory of wizards and Claire I think the the most obvious choice out of anything would obviously be the wizard taking the necromancy school that one literally in the title says necromancer so it's it's an obvious go-to but a lot of people don't realize that there are other options out there that also allow you to create a necromancer ask character yes there is also the death domain cleric which is the cleric archetype found in the dungeon masters guide Zanna Thor's guide to everything introduced the grave domain cleric but that cleric archetype seems to be actually one that's a built around fighting undead rather than raising undead minions themselves yeah there are a few other archetypes that grant the animate death spell to other classes such as the circle of spores druid and the Oathbreaker paladin it's also possible for a divine soul sorcerer to take the animate death spell because they gain access to cleric spells but I think we're gonna focus on the wizard and the cleric predominantly the necromancer wizard because I think that that's the strongest archetype and the most classic one to build around and I think that this comes down to the anime dead spell in general is really good and so let's dive in and take a look at that spell itself and see why it's good and why it's the cornerstone for any sort of necromancer character that we want to play so anime dead is a third level necromancy spell that you can find on page 212 of the players handbook and it takes one minute to cast the important thing to know about anime dead is that its duration is instantaneous and its effects do not require concentration once you've cast the spell the animated creatures are under your control and don't require any more maintenance from you to continue existing this is very very important to the necromancer playstyle and why the spell is so powerful and efficient but it comes with some big costs and some major limitations as well so when you cast animate dead you choose a pile of bones or a corpse and you can animate one medium sized humanoid zombie or skeleton that pile it must be a humanoid creature and you're just gonna animate the standard zombies and skeletons found in the monster manual it does mean that they animate that spell actually can't animate beasts so you're not gonna be raising up your beloved dog nor can you use the spell to create things like zombie ogres or minotaurs or a zombie beholder it's just for humanoid creatures only yeah no Pet Sematary here so on your turn you can use a bonus action to control any of the creatures within 60 feet of you to follow your commands the creatures followed this command to their best of their ability including moving to the direction that you want them to go attacking creatures darting an area or whatever that command needs to be if you've created more than one undead creature with multiple castings of the spell you can command all of them but the bonus action does have to give the same command to all the creatures that you choose to command in this way at that time creatures that don't have a command either do the last thing you ask them to do or just stand there and defend themselves if they get attacked the last point about this smell is that the creatures remain under your control for 24 hours at which point before that 24 hours ends you need to either recast the spell to regain control or you need to cast it again to raise new creatures if 24 hours runs out and you don't cast the spell to reassert control over those creatures those creatures remain they aren't destroyed instantaneously but now they are hostile to all life and so they may attack you if you're in their vicinity when you cast animate dead you only animate one creature at a time but you're able to reassert control over four creatures and if you cast animate dead using a higher-level spell slot you get to animate or reassert control over two additional creatures for each level of the spell you use to cast it above third we did some quick math and if you wanted to use all of your spell slots from three four and five on a tenth level necromancer how many how many zombies are Scouts over 40 over 40 that's an army yeah that is a small army and definitely enough to take down a little or even a small town but also this makes me believe that necromancer's need to be the best time management skilled wizards out there because if they miss that appointment and we assert control if they're like alarm goes off and they're like oh no I forgot to emaan a forty skeleton army suddenly rips them apart I think a really important thing to note is that because you have control of your undead creatures for 24 hours it's best to animate and reassert control of the creatures at the end of the day rather than the beginning this means that if you're building up for a major offensive you can animate this big army of undead have them under your control take a rest get all your spell slots back send them into the meat grinder and then they're probably all gonna get destroyed when you do that big attack and then it doesn't matter that you didn't reassert control over them you have your spell slots available to you for the rest of that day during that really really big mission it does mean though that you're gonna have to spend a lot of time animating them and preparing them so a necromancer using their animated spell in this way is really good at taking a bunch of downtime animating a bunch of dead getting them ready and doing one big attack and then going back to the drawing board and getting more minions built up again this also means that as a necromancer your bonus action is basically claimed for almost every turn of combat because if you have an army of undead that's where your bonus action is going although you couldn't give a group of undead just a generic command and let them go off and do it but as we'll see depending on the types of undead creatures you animate some undead do better or worse with independent action you can animate skeletons or zombies with the animate dead spell and there's a pretty big difference between the tactical capabilities of both of those creatures another great option in an upgraded version of animate Dead is create undead which is a six level spell with create undead instead of creating zombies and skeletons you create three ghouls but when you upcast create undead you're able to now create ghasts whites and eventually mummies if you're willing to use your ninth level spouse a lot to do it I'm not entirely certain creating these upgraded undead is the best option compared to creating more zombies but the one thing that does interest me more than anything else are creating whites with create undead because whites turn those that they slay into zombies and each white can control 12 Dom bees so if you control a handful of whites that are your lieutenants who then each control their own little unit of zombies you've got quite a nice little chain of command there you could also combine animate dead and create undead have an army of skeletons or zombies have the whites leading the charge anybody that the whites killed join the ranks and now once again you're the necromancer sitting on the back line sipping a drink and watching your army sweep over the battlefield white is an undead creature that you might be able to animate it create it and not necessarily have full control over it but it might work with you yeah you might be able to at the end of the day say hey listen I'm gonna keep supplying you with fresh bodies for you to slay and raise up as your own army I'm gonna be your general you guys get to be my lieutenants what do you say I'll split the gold with you I don't know if White's like gold but maybe they do know they like Souls and draining life all right fine they can have thick enough 20% of the souls if you make your quota put them on Soul Commission there is an important note here for DMS the animate dad and create undead spells are definitely geared more towards balancing a player character your villains and NPCs do not need to follow the same rules of animate dead and create on dead yeah I ignore the animate dead spell and the Create undead spell for the purposes of my villains if you want to have a villainous necromancer that has an army of zombie bee holders you don't need to worry that the animate dead spell technically doesn't let them do that it's totally fine for the villains of your story as a DM to be able to create undead creatures that the players can't create under the rules you might give as treasurer to one of your players the secrets of animating a zombie beholder that would be a cool reward for a player at higher levels but then that ball is entirely in your court whether you want to give that ability of the players and whether or not they can animate an entire horde of zombies holders or not necromancy is one of the clearest cases of the asymmetry between player characters and NPCs there's certain abilities like raising a giant undead army with a wave of your hand that are totally fine for the villains to be able to do because that's the story but letting the players do that might not be a good idea another really excellent spell to throw into the mix is Danse Macabre which is a fifth level necromancy spell that was introduced in Zanna thar's guide to everything Danse Macabre allows you to animate five undead creatures as an action and then maintain the animation on those creatures using your concentration the main thing that makes dance with cops Peschel over animate dead is that those creatures add your spell casting ability modifier to their attack and damage roles and this stacks with the necromancer wizards class features giving you undead creatures that are adding your proficiency modifier and your intelligence modifier to their weapon damage rules which is really good the one thing to notice that this does require your concentration and but it does happen instantaneously on your action so what's great here is that if you have already risen up your army of skeletons beforehand using the anim dead spell you go into battle and a few of those skeletons get put out of the battle then you cast Danse Macabre raise them back up and they're even angrier now two main types of minions that you can raise with the animate dead spell if you're focusing on a pile of bones you're gonna be creating skeletons if you're looking at corpses you're creating zombies and there's some pretty distinct differences between these two that we should look at zombies are stupid and slow they don't move very quickly they have a pretty poor attack and damage bonus but they're pretty tough thanks to the undead fortitude trait which means that even if they do lose out all their 22 hit points they can make a saving throw and there's a chance that they're just gonna keep going 100% to mean zombies are your meat shield yeah they're not going to hit very hard they're gonna shamble forward and not really know how to perform complex tasks but they're going to slam into your enemies and they're going to soak up a ton of damage and maybe keep getting back up yeah I mean they only do have an armor class of eight so they're gonna be chopped down pretty quick but twenty two hit points is enough that they can probably survive an attack from even now maybe a hill giant and that's good yeah pretty good every attack on a zombie is an attack not on your party and that's important on the other hand skeletons are a little bit less on the hit points but better AC higher intelligence better dexterity can use weapons and they're not mindless meaning that they can perform some very interesting tasks yeah the monster manuals description of a skeleton is really impressive skeletons can do things like wield weapons and armor they can operate siege weapons scales siege ladders and will do more complex tactics like they won't just try to batter down down a door they'll use the handle because they have an intelligence score of 6 so while they do follow orders to the letter they are a little bit more flexible and they won't just do obviously stupid things like walk into traps or fall off cliffs or try to batter down a door when they can use the handles well when you think of all zombie movies zombies are just mindlessly running into everything though they'll get stuck in places they'll rip everything apart that gets on their path as cheesy as it is my best description for an army of skeletons is army of Darkness that movie is pretty silly mm-hmm but those skeletons do like raised ladders they're shooting catapults there's even one guy playing the flute it's it's they're smarter they're not super intelligent but they're smarter yeah I think that they make perfect soldiers and you can order them around to do a much wider range of tasks and he didn't probably use simple tools like if you want to order your skeletons to dig a ditch for you or maybe even command them to build a simple thing like a simple bridge or simple fortifications so there's some really interesting things that you can do with them and when you've got a group of five to eight minions that you can just order around and you don't have to worry about them getting tired that's excellent a very small thing that I actually love about the skeletons is that they can use boats yeah zombies just shamble forward but if you already have some decent frontline fighters in your party maybe you have a fighter and a paladin and you're the necromancer in the back lines having a row of skeletons firing arrows in a battlefield is just an extra blanket of damage that you get to apply to that battlefield and it's going to be even harder for enemies to get through your fighter and paladin to get back there and hit those skeletons yeah the fact that skeletons have a textarea 14 means that they are very good ranged attackers and so giving them short bows is a pretty decent ranged attack especially at the quantity that you can have with skeletons that's a lot of extra attacks on the board and as we look at some of the class features that we can use to augment our undead minions that's when it gets really impressive so let's talk about the wizard necromancer option Wizards who choose the school of necromancy as their archetype at second level get a really impressive class feature that bolsters their undead minions at level six called the undead thrall straight this feature has a few small benefits but two really really big ones first of all at six level when you get undead thralls you automatically obtain the animate dead spell on top of that you get to create an additional undead creature when you use the spell now you also bolster any undead creature you create whether or not that undead creature was created with animate or another spell such as create undead finger of death or Danse Macabre any undead creature that you create adds your proficiency modifier to its weapon damage rolls and it also increases its maximum hit points by an amount equal to your wizard level making your undead minions much tougher than they normally would be that row of skeletons now can take way more hits and can deal quite a bit more damage it may not seem like a lot to just add your proficiency bonus but when you're adding it over eight skeletons that really does add up in my experience as well once a creature has around 20 hit points that's about the point where it becomes very difficult for monsters to take them out in a single hit at level 14 you get an ability that is really too potent to ignore and this is called the command undead power the command undead allows you to target an undead creature and if it fails a Christmas saving throat it becomes under your control this is permanent if it fails the saving throw well intelligent undead with an intelligent score of 8 or higher gain advantage on their saving throw and intelligent undead with intelligences of 12 or higher can attempt to break out of your control every our other undead creatures that you command with this ability are your permanent thralls and there are some extraordinarily powerful undead creatures with very low charisma scores and very low intelligences that you can control indefinitely with the addition of volos guide to monsters and morden titans Thoma foes we actually have a large collection of undead creatures but there's one in particular that we want to shine the spotlight on right here and that is the knight walker which is a challenge rating 20 monster with a charisma of 8 and intelligence of 6 that is super vulnerable to this ability and does a monstrous amount of damage that's so the knight Walker to me is something that a party might face at the end of a campaign maybe not as the final boss but as a minion of the final boss and the idea that you have the necromancer in your party could quite easily point at it and have that thing turn around and start attacking your enemies under your control permanently that's insane I've read stories of players in cursive Strada and two of annihilation that use this ability against Radwan czarevitch or a serac and it worked I don't know if it would ever work against us or act because I think his intelligence saving Theory was really high I would have a hard time believing that to be a true story there could always be a one rolled but you theoretically could so I think the necromancer wizard archetype would be my go-to if I wanted to play a necromancer I would love to play a teeth winged necromancer that is just the complete embodiment of like the dark demonic wizard but the clerk does have some pretty compelling options yeah and clerics are a lot of fun to play and when you take the death domain mm-hmm you can actually get some pretty potent necromancer esque vibes going on this comes from the death domains Reaper and later at 17th level the improved Reaper feature which when you cast a necromancy cantrip allows that can trip to target two creatures instead of one the improved Reaper ability that you gain at 17th level allows you to target an additional creature with any necromancy spell that is fifth level or lower so well the cleric necromancer doesn't gain the benefits to the undead creatures that the wizard necromancer does I do think the cleric necromancer is probably better at wielding dark magic I see them as being more of the character that's like siphoning souls and life energy out of their enemies if which is also a portrayal of necromancer obviously the most iconic necromancer is the one with the army of undead but necromancer's are also well known for sapping the life force out of their foes would you multi-class this mmm it's two different spell casting it is which I don't usually like in a multi-class and I think the fact that you don't get those higher level features until very late in both subclasses I think what would be really tempting to do would be to take one level of cleric as a necromancer wizard because then you get the Reaper feature at first level you get a couple cute perks from your cleric level and then everything else is just straight wizard and that way you don't lose too much of your spell casting that badly I think that's a probably pretty decent multi-class let's just talk about a couple of the awesome tactics that we can pull off with one of our necromancer's necromancer's are great for having just extra battlefield control with yeah by being able to place these minions all over the battlefield stopping enemies from attacking your party or just in the back lines with skeleton archers to just load on extra damage into the battlefield the thing to never forget about your undead minions is that they are expendable they are there to be slain and beat up and take the damage so that your party doesn't have to take it well I would absolutely defend them against a AOE effects with counterspell and things like that they're otherwise their to get killed send them down the hallways that you think there might be a trap down if they fall into a trap oh well it was just a skeleton at least it wasn't a party member yeah and I think that you can also use them to block choke points and because undead obey your commands one of the interesting things about them is that even though they don't have very good attack bonuses and might not necessarily deal a lot of damage they still take up space on the battlefield and they have passable strength scores so one thing that you can do with your undead minions is order them to grab somebody and it's one thing if one undead creature with a strength score of 10 or 12 is trying to grab one creature but when you have your undead minions dogpile a single enemy and they now have to wrestle them all off that's much more difficult to escape from and so one of my favorite tactics is undead minions are immune to poison so get a bunch of undead minions to robbed your enemies and then drop a cloud kill spell on them so your undead minions are holding them in the poison gas while they choke to death now just if you have a cloud kill filled with zombies that's just great that's that's a great battlefield tactic here's a cloud kill here's some zombies and you know just grab their zombies we're gonna do much anyways damage wise they only have a +3 attack bonus but they can hold you but they're just gonna hold you there also when we were discussing skeletons and their intelligence which is higher than some than most people would think yeah if you're planning a siege against a castle you could have three ballistas manned by eight skeletons the fact that skeletons can use siege weapons and archery is amazing like just imagine having your skeletons equipped with bows and just trapping a bunch of enemies with a web spell or restraining them and now all those skeletons have advantage on their ranged attacks against them and they're trapped in place and your skeletons are just peppering with them with arrows until they're gone the range attacks that your skeletons can make and the ability that your zombies can use to grab things means that you can combine your minions with concentration spells in a bunch of really really interesting ways one thing that I will say about necromancer's is it is better suited for a player who has a strong grasp of the rules and is very decisive in their play style with so many minions on the board a new player who might have trouble figuring out what they want to do on their turn is gonna have a lot of things going on on the table a necromancer although it's a very appealing choice is difficult because if you have eight skeletons a few whites on the table it's kind of hard on your turn to be like okay how many attacks am I making which characters have this many hit points what's going on so you do want to have a good understanding of how all of this works before you dive into having an army I just think that as a player you need to be on point and you need to be fast with this because I have run games and adventurers League and other tables where I had a player come that was playing a necromancer and it took them like a half our to resolve all their attacks for their zombies and their minions and while it was effective and it was good it just made the game slow to a crawl and that alone to me is reason to be really careful about playing this archetype because that that's the disruptive thing it's not the fact that you have all these undead minions that are doing awesome things in combat it's that it makes you as a player take up more turns more time at the game table itself a simple idea to resolve that own a lot of D 20s and a just a lot of dice in general because if you're going to I would I would have all of the skeletons roll initiative together yeah and then if you have eight skeletons you grab eight d20 you roll them out you know which numbers are gonna hit in which aren't you grab all the ones that do grab that many dice roll all the damage at once and just count it as one action if you yeah you got to use that war gamer mentality of picking up a whole handful of dice rolling them together and knowing how to resolve your attacks really really quickly because otherwise it does make things just take too long I love this vision of the necromancer mm-hmm once again the the action economy of playing with them you need to be on point with that but I think that if you are setting out to play a necromancer there's a really good combination of spells abilities and if you think a little bit outside the box on what these rules say they can do there's a lot of amazing ways to bring your necromancer to life even the way the rules are presented I think it'd be really cool to have a solo evil campaign with one DM and one player where the player is playing a necromancer so this is better look at designing a necromancer in Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition if you have any awesome stories about the necromancers you've played let us know about them in the comments below if you're enjoying the show please consider supporting the channel on patreon you can find out how by following the links in the description below and if you want to see us deal with some undead you can check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern you can catch all the previous episodes right up over here we've also got an in-depth guide to every class in the Dragons fifth edition which you can find here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 769,752

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book, necromancer, undead, animate dead, necromancy, zombie, skeleton, lich, vampire

Id: Z41F6FsvEIE

Length: 33min 26sec (2006 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019