Relevant xkcd

I know names of shades. I don’t know what exactly the difference is between teal, turquoise, cyan, and blue-green.

I learned it from the Verdant Flammable Device in A Series of Unfortunate Events.

OP made the meme while on a flight across the Atlantic ocean.

Does that mean black and white are the same color?

Poor. … A poor lifestyle means going without the comforts available in a stable community. Simple food and lodgings, threadbare clothing, and unpredictable conditions result in a sufficient, though probably unpleasant, experience. Your accommodations might be a room in a flophouse or in the common room above a tavern. You benefit from some legal protections, but you still have to contend with violence, crime, and disease. People at this lifestyle level tend to be unskilled laborers, costermongers, peddlers, thieves, mercenaries, and other disreputable types.

Mercenaries are a pretty unsafe job, and they can still only afford 2 sp a day, so I don’t think workplace safety factors in much.

If you can make ten times the employee’s pay, then human employees vs skeletons is just a question of 10% of your income. But high-level necromancers are going to be more expensive than just paying commoners.

I did list that, but doing the math is helpful. This is less useful for labor, but you could use executions or assisted suicide. If aging in their universe is anything like ours, I imagine there’d be no shortage of good people who’d rather go to heaven and donate their money to charity than spend it supporting themselves as they slowly and painfully die, but even in 3.5 where there were downsides to old age, the worst it got was +3 wisdom and -6 strength. Commoner was a class, so they’d roll ability scores and someone could have a Strength of 4, but they could also level up and improve their ability scores.

The other problem is that they’re making zombies, not skeletons, and there’s no rule that zombies decay into skeletons or anything like that. Though I suppose if we’re playing RAW, there’s no rule that zombies decay at all or are unsanitary.

Do they? In 3.5, undead didn’t need to sleep, but 5e doesn’t seem to have rules for that.

Even if you’re making 85.2 gp a day, that’s a pittance for a level 20 wizard.

You have to be a really good capitalist. If anyone could do that, they’d bid up the price of employees until the companies can barely turn a profit. And at that point, the skeletons barely help.

The problem is getting an army of undead. If a level 20 wizard uses all their spell slots on reasserting Animate Dead every day, that’s 128 skeletons. They’d presumably be untrained laborers making 2 sp a day, so it’s 25.6 gp a day. You’d be the world’s poorest level 20 wizard.

If you want a proper army, your options are having a whole bunch of necromancers, a Lich using its Lair Actions to regenerate spell slots, the Wand of Orcus, or using Finger of Death to murder people for years. And that last one only gets you zombies.

Edit: It’s 142 skeletons if you’re a necromancer wizard thanks to Undead Thrall giving you an extra pile of bones.

but it was in the original rules. Caster picks a category. GM has the statistics.

I see. I agree that the original rules pick the category and the GM does have the statistics. But it doesn’t say anything about the GM choosing which creature is summoned, which is what they were saying before.

Conjure Woodland Beings

Level 4 Conjuration Casting Time: Action Range: 60 feet Components: V, S, M (one holly berry per creature summoned) Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour

You summon fey creatures that appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. Choose one of the following options for what appears:

• One fey creature of challenge rating 2 or lower
• Two fey creatures of challenge rating 1 or lower
• Four fey creatures of challenge rating 1/2 or lower
• Eight fey creatures of challenge rating 1/4 or lower

A summoned creature disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.

The summoned creatures are friendly to you and your companions. Roll initiative for the summoned creatures as a group, which have their own turns. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them (no action required by you). If you don’t issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions.

The DM has the creatures’ statistics.

At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using certain higher-level spell slots, you choose one of the summoning options above, and more creatures appear: twice as many with a 6th-level slot and three times as many with an 8th-level slot. Classes: Druid, Ranger

The only mention of the DM is that they have the creatures’ statistics. It never says that they choose, or that the player doesn’t choose. It doesn’t specifically say that the player does choose, but that’s true of lots of things. For example, the rules say that you decide whether to move first or take an action first, but not that you decide whether or not to move or take an action, or where to move or what action to take. Nobody would say that that means it’s RAW that the GM decides all those things.

The original rules didn’t specify. I think they errata’d that in, and in the 2014 edition they replaced it completely with a damage-dealing Emanation so you don’t have to add a whole bunch of turns.

That’s how they did it in Watchmen, except the writer was in control of how long the battle lasted.

Or you could have the players find their journal with the plans written down after killing them.

Ideally all lowercase letters to make them easy to type when you need to use them in another device. Unfortunately, a lot of places don’t allow that, preferring less secure and more inconvenient passwords.

Any involving fey?

I don’t see fey mentioned in any of them. Why do I always hear about this in the feywild?

Source? I’ve heard people say that, but I don’t know of any stories where that happens. I’ve seen something saying Rumpelstiltskin is an example, but as far as I can find the queen got to keep her baby because Rumpelstiltskin agreed to let her if she guesses his name. It doesn’t look like knowing his name itself had any effect.

Also, if that is true, then this fey taking things literally would have the opposite effect. If you just tell the fey your name, or they find out through any other method, then they’d have power over you. But if they literally take your name, then it’s their name, and now you know their name and you can control them.