[deleted]

[gestalt11]

Grim dawn expansion will have necromancer.

 

[MRY]

(1) Because enslaving entire kingdoms is OP.

(2) The question is somewhat misleading IMO because it presumes that you can actually meaningfully play as a strong character types in most RPGs, which you can't. It's not like playing a cleric or a wizard or a thief in most RPGs feels meaningfully different from some generic "adventurer" class. The thing is, convention has made it relatively easier for those classes to be subsumed into "adventurer," whereas a necromancer entails different expectations about how the game as a whole would play out. If necromancer had been a class from Gold Box days, we'd certainly have necromancers in generic RPGs now, but they'd be generic necromancers devoid of the strong oomph that you're craving.

Even the strongest example of high fantasy character-definition that I can think of, DA:O (ironically, given #1), still has pretty bland differentiation between the classes: basically everyone class is a "march around the maps whacking foes" class. That's true of Geneforge, too. The only game that pulls it off is probably AOD, but that's a special case for lots of reasons.

 

[Lilura]

my fondest Morrowind memory was when I larped

 

[Black Angel]

What makes ToME4 negromancy good is not having to manually manage your crew. DCSS let you negromance to an extent but too much fuckery involved (AND they steal your XP ).

DCSS? Sadly, I haven't even finished the game once because I've died.... what, 8-9 times? So I haven't tried the other classes, let alone necromancer

I want to become a lich, too! More RPGs with such things pls!

Definitely. It's an awesome option in Might and Magic and... pretty much nowhere else

Iirc, long-term objective of being a necromancer in Tales of Maj'eyal is to become a lich. Can't confirm if it translate to the gameplay, though.

 

[gestalt11]

What makes ToME4 negromancy good is not having to manually manage your crew. DCSS let you negromance to an extent but too much fuckery involved (AND they steal your XP ).

DCSS? Sadly, I haven't even finished the game once because I've died.... what, 8-9 times? So I haven't tried the other classes, let alone necromancer

I want to become a lich, too! More RPGs with such things pls!

Definitely. It's an awesome option in Might and Magic and... pretty much nowhere else

Iirc, long-term objective of being a necromancer in Tales of Maj'eyal is to become a lich. Can't confirm if it translate to the gameplay, though.

You can be a lich in both DCSS and TOME4. However it is permanent in TOME4 and you kinda want highest skills when you attempt it. I wouldn't call being a lich the long term goal of TOME4 necro, its a decent option but there are good reasons not to do it and the class is very strong no matter what if you know how to use it. Becoming a Lich involves a particular spell you basically only cast once in a line you need to unlock. Necroumtation in DCSS is a temporary transformation that you can essentially stay in the whole game by recasting, it is used quite often by people doing 15 runes or ziggurat runs since it is one of the only ways to protect against mutation and torment.

There are no real classes in DCSS you may mean backgrounds which are not that important really. There are also multiple ways to be a necromancer in DCSS you can be just any old schmoe who finds the right books, you can worship Kiku as a god that makes doing spell based necro easier or you can worship Yred for divine based necromancy.

TOME4 necro is a good bit different vs DCSS necro specialists. Necro is in general quite useful in DCSS and kiku is considered a very easy start for many, being able to conjure your own corpses is quite useful.

Also dying 8-9 times is like nothing for DCSS.

 

[deuxhero]

It's sad all the 3E D&D crpgs just made the undead making spells into shitty summoning spells.

 

[Siobhan]

It's very hard to translate the concept into gameplay that is both unique and good enough to outweigh what you lose by foregoing the standard RPG mechanics.

Suppose it's a single-character RPG built around necromancy. If the summon limit is low, that will play the same as a party-based RPG with an endless supply of disposable NPCs. That's even the case in Diablo 2: if you could hire multiple mercs, there'd be very little reason to play a necromancer. If the summon limit is high, you end up closer to HOMM (and a complete clusterfuck if each minion has an automatic AI rather than being controlled by the player). Either way you've created a party-based RPG where you can easily reconfigure your party to some extent, but with the itemization and character progression of a single-character RPG. That doesn't sound particularly exciting.

Now consider party-based RPGs. There the summon limit must be necessarily low, otherwise a party of 6 necromancers could trivialize most encounters by spamming tons of shitty low-level summons. But if you can only summon a few minions, it doesn't quite feel like necromancy --- more like playing a rigger in Shadowrun where you can swap drones between battles.

A good necromancy game would have to take some hints from Wizardry 4 by being completely built around that character. And it would have to make you absolutely dependent on your minions and give you very few opportunities to replace them with new troops. That turns your whole party into a resource management problem. Another cool tweak would be corpse quality, where it is in your interest to efficiently take down enemies to be guaranteed a high level summon (that ogre won't do much if you've already chopped off both its arms). That could create some cool trade-offs, like avoiding too many powerful summons like skeleton dragons because their toxic breath attacks attacks only leave worthless piles of ash behind.

There could also be encounters that require you to completely retool your current party --- imagine making it to the boss with a powerful team of stone golems, only to realize that the fight takes place in an swamp where the movement penalties render the golems completely immobile so that you have to abandon them for fast but weak poison maggots or the more powerful swamp sharks, which you can only use in swamps. And once the battle is over, you immediately face another challenge where those golems would have been very useful, but converting weak minions to stronger ones comes at a severe penalty, so now you are looking at a really tough fight that will require smart use of your limited resources.

Along the same lines, dungeon exploration could come with puzzle rooms that require you to switch out minions, possibly weakening your party a great deal. Just imagine the butthurt when the player has to replace their bear squid chimera by a zombie rat to push an inaccessible switch. Or maybe the doors in a dungeon are locked by a special spell that only lets Garbage the Weak pass , so you have to kill the guy and then waste one of the spots in your party on that useless deadweight --- also have fun wasting all your buffs on keeping him alive undead while your quality troopers are going down one after the other. Or, even more dickish, imagine you are forced to solve a puzzle in a no-magic zone without any minions while frantically running away from a giant bat, which you could have easily wiped out with a single lvl1 summon in any other scenario.

And of course there could be more intricate party-internal dynamics. Just because the ogre is undead doesn't mean it won't follow its natural instinct of eating all those delicious corpses you summoned. A lich won't like being bossed around, so you should always be ready for mutiny. And it definitely won't fight together with lowly skeletons and maggots. A Frankenstein monster might be afraid of fire, so don't even think of pairing it with an undead dragon. Undead goblins, however, may happily ride those hellhounds, greatly amplifying their deadliness. And if you make sure your minions don't look too disgusting, you might be able to hire some human mercenaries, which has its own advantages (bye bye giant bat in the no-magic zone) and disadvantages (hmm, those silly humans need sleep, food, and they have this weird instinct to flee rather than defending you to their death).

But as you can see, all of that would require completely rethinking combat, encounter design, level design, and resource management. That's not gonna happen in an industry that's known for its aversion to experimentation, and RPGs are particularly dogmatic in this respect.

tl;dr: There's some good gameplay opportunities here, but the whole game has to be designed from the ground up for that purpose by a very talented and creative team. So it's not gonna happen.

 

[Sacred82]

You can try to heal yourself only with necromancy in Dungeon Siege II. Probably won't work though, I'd also use potions.

 

[Lacrymas]

Are any of the Dungeon Sieges good anyway?

 

[Sacred82]

Are any of the Dungeon Sieges good anyway?

II is really fun to fool around with different characters and parties, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes that but doesn't need TB combat. There are no other party based Diablo clones AFAIK so that alone makes it interesting. If you're a fanboy like me you may also dig the overall design, art direction and writing. The first one seems to be more of an acquired taste though, you really have to like the basic design tenets to get off on it.

I don't talk about the third one.

 

[thesheeep]

Thing is, a Necromancer powerful enough to be really interesting usually means a transition to a strategy game.

Yeah, this is the main problem.

It would have to be a game that significantly alters gameplay some way through the game.
Like Spore, just in good. And with necromancy.

It would have to be at least two good games in one. Can't say that would be easy to develop...

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Even a simpler implementation like TES does with vampires could be good, though. Give some odd bonuses, strong bonuses even but also drawbacks, a couple weird quirks and oddball features and it would be fine, IMO.

 

[thesheeep]

I feel like a game like Mount & Blade would lend itself pretty well to such a transformation.
You could start as some lowly cultist with a band of thugs and over time develop your powers, and you could end up in a situation where you amass undead and could command them Total War style, while still being on the battlefield. You wouldn't even have to create 2 games in one. More like 1.5.

Hmmm....

 

[Hobo Elf]

Necromancer class in Vanguard was cool in a "lemme stand here with invisibility on and watch my abomination and skeleton pets take out a full group of players on their own" way. Actually, Bonedancer in Dark Age of Camelot was exactly the same.

I also highly suggest the Illwinter games (Dominions, CoE) for realistic Necromancer physics.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Ah, Illwinter. I have to get into Dominions sometime, looks amazing. Played a bit of CoE3 and while that is supposed to be their "lite" game, I was pretty impressed by it as well.

 

[Maggot]

Are any of the Dungeon Sieges good anyway?

I see people shit on them a lot but I liked 1 and 2. You could have a party of 8 characters in the first game and the multiplayer map was different from the SP map. I always liked how the areas were done by hand instead of randomly generated and no load screens when moving from areas.

I feel like a game like Mount & Blade would lend itself pretty well to such a transformation.
You could start as some lowly cultist with a band of thugs and over time develop your powers, and you could end up in a situation where you amass undead and could command them Total War style, while still being on the battlefield. You wouldn't even have to create 2 games in one. More like 1.5.

Hmmm....

There's an unfinished Might and Magic mod for Warband that lets you raise dead and summon things like earth elementals. https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=256876.0

 

[Daemongar]

Anyway, The Necromancer in The Hobbit was called so because Tolkien thought it sounded menacing, before Tolkien realized he was Sauron.

You are probably right, but there is a certain thought: CRPGs are rooted in D&D. Gygax rooted D&D in Tolkienesque mythology. Tolkien.Wringwraiths == Gygax.wraiths.
If that's true, from a CRPG perspective, Wringwraiths are undead, since Gygax who pretty much defined the pantheon of undead in RPGs ipso fatso defined undead in CRPGS(!), it stands to reason that the Necromancer in Lord of the Rings was a necromancer in the CRPG vein, not in the historical vein.

It could work!

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I feel like a game like Mount & Blade would lend itself pretty well to such a transformation.
You could start as some lowly cultist with a band of thugs and over time develop your powers, and you could end up in a situation where you amass undead and could command them Total War style, while still being on the battlefield. You wouldn't even have to create 2 games in one. More like 1.5.

Hmmm....

There's a mood for original mount and Blade that revolved around being a necromancer, Solid and Shade its name, I think.

 

[Beastro]

Everquest: Necros are one of the most consistently OP classes:

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

That's Everquest? Looks great.

 

[Beastro]

That's Everquest? Looks great.

Back in the day, yeah. The UI's undergone a lot of changes, and rightfully so given the increase in resolutions since it came out.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

It reminded me of Wizards & Warriors at first glance. Neat.

 

[Lacrymas]

That's the ancient UI actually, they changed it 1 year after EQ's release. Even P1999 doesn't use that. It also depends on what you mean by overpowered, it had great solo potential, but it was outdps'd by many spellcasters in a raiding environment. I didn't mention EQ's necro because I never liked its implementation, you only ever had 1 minion up and it was always a skeleton. You could become a lich, too, but it just used the skeleton model again. Dark Age of Camelot has a similar premise with its necro.

 

[Beastro]

That's the ancient UI actually, they changed it 1 year after EQ's release. Even P1999 doesn't use that. It also depends on what you mean by overpowered, it had great solo potential, but it was outdps'd by many spellcasters in a raiding environment. I didn't mention EQ's necro because I never liked its implementation, you only ever had 1 minion up and it was always a skeleton. You could become a lich, too, but it just used the skeleton model again. Dark Age of Camelot has a similar premise with its necro.

It was pretty much that and switching between it and full screen (I loved when I got a mouse at the time with a side button to attach F10 to for that reason) until they put in the first "modern" UI in late Velious:

It also depends on what you mean by overpowered, it had great solo potential, but it was outdps'd by many spellcasters in a raiding environment.

Their DPS picked up with AA Dot crits and then really got good with the epic 2.0 and broken aug effect that made dots crit like 20% of the time.

They remained top tier dps until recently when the new devs terribly nerfed their dps.

Until then that DPS combined with a lot of utility spells and pet swarming allowed Necros to do things that would take an entire group of other classes to do, like the tiny Frost Giant in the the newish Kael Drakkel instance which a buddy would solo to sell the gear for krono. He had the market for that mobs items cornered until the nerfs came in and he could barely do anything on his own.

 

[daveyd]

Try Almraiven and Shadewood by Fester Pot: Auren Society of Weavers.

One of the best Role-playing games I've ever played. Really makes you feel like a necromancer... Apparently Fester is / was working on a third module. I hope it will still be completed some day.