Well, I don't actually know how to feel. I should have expected something like this, but I was hoping for a bit of discourse as well. You see, I have taken an interest in pretty much all things D&D before 4e over the last couple years.
Today, Alexis over at Tao of D&D put up an entry A View To Turning Undead. I, in all my exuberance, wrote up what I thought was a decent idea(with my ignorance of a lot of D&D baked in, but acknowledged). You can see the comment I wrote up over there. Alexis comes back with his thoughts on my idea, so I post again, hoping to have him point out a lot more of the flaws in what I proposed. He shuts me down. Cold. Oh well. I know he is a busy man, and I understand how he can be from reading his blog. Still gonna continue reading, might restrain myself from commenting a little more in the future. Probably just killed all my chances of being a player in his online campaign. Nuts, I was kinda looking forward to that.
On second thought, I am going to post my proposed system here. Just so I have it myself and I can find it again. If anyone wants to critique the proposed undead turning rules below, go ahead. This has a good chance to become a house rule if I ever start playing the part of a DM.
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*Disclaimer: I have very little d&d experience. I also don't have a
rule book in front of me, so the appropriate dice/rules may not be
properly referenced.
From the way that I have seen other
d&d bloggers describe turning undead, it seems that Turning Undead
is an act of the caster to channel their god(s) will against un-life,
thereby making them run away or cower. Failure of conviction in their
god(s) causes total/partial failure.
Would an opposed roll
against the undead present in combat work? It could either be done as
total group turning for simplicity, with HD added up, or single target
turning. In the case of whole group turning, there should be no total
failure unless a very low number is rolled. There is bound to be a small
percentage that always will be affected.
Modifiers could be (Caster
Level*2HD) - total Monster HD. +1/difference rounded down for d20, 5% *
difference for d100. Obviously this can go negative modifiers as well
if it is a really big HD monster(Dracula, Lich, etc)
Example:
Group
encounters 8 undead of 1/2 HD each. So 4 total HD. Cleric is level 3.
Under Alexis' rules, he has the ability to turn up to 6HD worth of
undead. So his total bonus to turning the group would be 2 on a d20, or
5%*2 = 10% on a d100 with what I have proposed.
Now here is the
divergence. More or less work for the DM, depending on group or
individual rolls. Or it can be a lot of work for both, as straight up
opposed rolls are done with a modifier that decreases after each turning
attempt, by the HD of the undead. This means recalculation of the
modifier each time.
Whole Group turning: DM & Cleric
Roll, add bonuses, 79 and 53+10=63 respectively. We can say that the
whole group is not turned, but only the difference in the rolls. So, 16%
of the Undead would be affected. Well its hard to affect a partial, so
we will say rounded down. So,8*16% = 1 undead is turned. EDIT: I am actually going to change this to be all but 1 undead is turned. The caster had enough faith to affect all but one undead, so the rest cower/flee for an as yet to be determined amount of time.
Group individual:
We will give the Cleric the same attempt roll, 53, but the bonus is
bigger, as it is being applied individually as a negative modifier to
each undead. Some random rolls on a d100 later, we have 43, 44, 59, 68,
83, 18 ,82, 58. All of these rolls would be modified by Floor(6-1/2)*5% =
25%. So after the fact they are 18, 19, 34, 43 , 58, -7, 57, 33. So in
this application, all but 2 undead are turned.
