Beyond that, whatever the players believe about zombies-whether they’re right or wrong-will make the experience of fighting them that much more thrilling. But you don’t need to tell your players that! Their one unique feature, Undead Fortitude, makes them frighteningly relentless (one way to emphasize it is to have them fall prone when damage would otherwise reduce them to 0 hp, then immediately get back up). And they’ll pursue their targets until either those targets are dead or their controller orders them to break off.ĭ&D zombies aren’t like TV zombies: they don’t eat their victims, and they don’t turn their victims into new zombies. They might break through a closed door, but they won’t ever think to unlatch it. They won’t pick up a dropped weapon (and if they’re not carrying one in the first place, they never will, unless their controller orders them to). They approach their targets by the most direct path, even if this means marching straight through an environmental hazard. Zombies retain no vestige of their former selves. Skeletons will retrieve dropped weapons, open doors, avoid hazards and approach their targets by the easiest path. Skeletons are vulnerable to bludgeoning damage, but they’re not independently reflective enough to avoid a PC with a mace. It won’t pursue, and it may even forgo an opportunity attack against an opponent who’s obviously leaving the scene, because it’s accomplished what it was ordered to do. That being said, a skeleton ordered to guard a room, for instance, will break off combat with any opponent who leaves that room. Most of the time, though, skeletons are former guards or other shlubs and will take a simple, direct approach to melee fighting: engage, swing sword, repeat. A former duelist will occasionally use the Dodge action to avoid incoming blows from multiple targets or the Disengage action to relocate to more favorable ground. A former archer, for instance, will instinctively know to maintain a certain range from its targets (40 to 80 feet, if possible). How a skeleton fights will depend on how it would have fought in its previous life. And both will fight until they’re destroyed, regardless of the amount or kind of damage they’ve taken or the strength of the opposition. Both are literal in their interpretations of instructions and lack independent problem-solving ability, though skeletons have an easier time circumventing obvious obstacles. When idle, a skeleton will revert to habitual behaviors from its former life (the Monster Manual offers, as an example, the skeleton of a former miner miming digging with a pick), while a zombie will just stand around. Their compulsion is obedience to the orders of their controller, which usually involves killing interlopers. Both are (usually) former humanoids, raised from death through necromancy to act as minions without free will or personality. Two types of undead that player characters will encounter often at low levels are skeletons and zombies. Consequently, how badly an undead creature is injured has nothing to do with whether it will flee, and the tactics it uses will have less to do with how to effectively guarantee its continued existence and more to do with the particular compulsion that drives it.
In fact, since the creature has already experienced death, the concept of “survival” is essentially meaningless to that creature. That is, whatever spell, influence or event caused a creature to rise from the dead also drives that creature to behave in ways that have nothing to do with its own self-preservation. Undeath is a curse, and as such, it creates what I think of as compulsions. The transformation to undead status doesn’t entirely erase what a ghost or zombie was in its previous life, nor does it necessarily come with a set of survival rules that any and every undead creature will adopt. The interesting thing about undead creatures, in this context, is that they’re not evolved creatures-at least, not anymore.
The premise of this blog is that evolved creatures know how to use the abilities they were born with.
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