Turn Undead: now with a smoother curve
by Anarion_ElendiliHow about doing away with the different successes for the undead and simply looking at the HD turned (each star +1?), while ignoring the min of 1 creature, too?
So you'd roll, say, 2d6-7+lvl for the HD turned, which means that a first level cleric, with a roll if 9, would manage to turn 9-7+1= 3 HD worth of undead: three skeletons, 1-2 zombies depending if we round up or down, or 1 ghoul (2 HD +1 from special). A roll of 6 or less means that the cleric would fail to turn even one skeleton.
Additional benefit of this is that it can handle multiple different types of undead at the same time. As for Destroy, you can just rule that when the Cleric has +x (+4?) the modified HD of the undead, they are destroyed rather than turned.
The rounding we can check how this stands against vampires and such, i.e. how successful we'd like the cleric to be at a specific level. My gut feeling is that it might be best to use normal rounding rules: 0.5 or more rounds up, less rounds down.
This makes a lower level cleric more able to turn a single undead on a good roll, but less able to deal with hordes of them in one go.
I have reconsidered: it is better if we always round DOWN.
Let's test this quickly:
Undead HD = Modified_HD / minumum level of turning on a roll of 11 (= 4+lvl worth of modified HD) / comparison to RAW Turn Undead roll 11
Skeleton 1 = 1 / 1 / 1
Zombie 2 = 2 / 1 / 1
Ghoul 2* = 3 / 1 / 1
Wight 3* = 4 (should Wight be 3**, since they are immune to normal weapons and have level drain?) / 1 / 2
Wraith 4** = 6 / 2 / 3
Mummy 5+1** = 7 / 3 / 4
Spectre 6** = 8 / 4 / 5
Vampire 7** - 9** = 9 - 11 (more if spell user) / 5-7 / 6
Given that RAW Turn Undead turns 2d6 HD, so it is much more powerful against low HD Undead straight out the gate than my suggestion, I don't think it is a big issue that the ability to turn at least one creature is slightly easier at low levels.
As for Destroy, It seems that the appropriate scaling would be Cleric's level is equal or greater than Modified HD + 3. So Level 4 Cleric Destroys Skeletons, and Level 11 starts exploding Spectres.
One thing it also does is to make it harder to Turn Skeletons at higher levels, since the success chance improves as -1 per level rather than -2 per level. So maybe I should change the scaling slightly at the start. Instead of 2d6-7+lvl, if I make it 2d6-5+level, it does make it easier to turn a single creature at a lower level, but the cleric would have much harder time Turning several skeletons, still. I think this might work.
1st level: Roll 7 turns 3 skeletons vs. 2d6. On the other hand, a roll of 5 turns 1 skeleton instead of none.
2nd level: Roll 7 turns 4 skeletons vs. automatic 2d6
3rd level: Roll 7 turns 5 skeletons vs. automatic 2d6
4rd level: Roll 7 destroys 6 skeletons vs. automatic 2d6.
Seems fair-ish.
So I got the chance to test this out yesterday, in a fight against zombies, and it worked pretty well. The 1st level cleric was useful, but didn't manage to turn the whole zombie horde in one go. The rolls were relatively high (9+), so he would have easily succeeded even by RAW. He managed to turn an average of 2 zombies per round, helping the Fighters to establish better defensive positions and then it was a meatgrinder for the zombies when they came back the corridor for a new go, because as mindless undead, they just charged in one by one and allowed the PCs to hack at them from two sides.