In order to animate a corpse, the person needs to be already dead. As I said already, I could burn them and drag their corpse around until I logged, if I felt like it. There are rules against doing things simply to screw another player over.
True enough.
If there's a choice between Maria animating a corpse, and making it follow her back to town, or simply leaving it there for who knows how many more hours (because an 8 strength doesn't go very far), under the current system she's going to be leaving the bodies. Then, they're guaranteed to stay dead, until someone else, probably with less or no IC reason to be there, grabs their body.
I know that Maria's your character and you like her very much, but isn't it a bit disingenuous to assume that Maria has more IC reason to be anywhere at anytime than anyone else does?
Viorica has found plenty of dead people--usually lowbies--while wandering Vallaki's streets at night, including that halfling woman that she found in the Marketplace (and hauled off to the Ezrite cathedral) yesterday. Why does Viorica wander Vallaki's streets at night? She despises wererats--along with pretty much all other werebeasts--and gets a sense of satisfaction and/or personal vindication out of hunting and killing them. What is the leading cause of people dying in Vallaki's streets at night? Wererats. So wererats find lowbie, wererats kill lowbie, Viorica finds wererats, Viorica kills wererats and Viorica rescues lowbie out of the goodness of her werebeast-hunting, victim-protecting heart. Cause, effect and
countereffect...all perfectly in-character, at that.
But that's a minor quibble, I suppose. Next point thingie.
If they could make the spawned skeleton/zomibe somehow be PC controlled, sort of like spawniing it as an already possessed familiar of the PC, it would remove the negative aspects of it right there.
That would be an agreeable compromise, I think.
As for the PCs feeling they've been violated. This is Ravenloft. Unless they removed all the raping and torturing that goes on here when I wasn't looking, violation is inherent in the setting.
You know what I mean. Not violation as in "The moon is full but I went to Camp Crystal Lake anyway, and now Jason Voorhees is eating pieces of my brain? ARRRGH!" Violation as in "You took my car keys while I was in the hospital, and then
without my permission you drove my car down to Tijuana, got it a paint job with a horrible blue flame motif, bedded two hookers in the backseat and ran it into a telephone pole, then wandered off to find a bar while Mexican thugs stripped my car down to the chassis? ARRRGH!"
Horror settings don't justify slapping players with bad voodoo on a whim, unheeding of whether or not they might not be in a good enough state to deal with it. Call them Care Bears if you must, but it all boils down to whether or not you might be kicking someone when they're down, considering the circumstances.
This idea does have potential, if done right. But then again, the last thing that we warrior-lovers with the higher corpse-lugging Strength scores want is one
less reason for warriors to be useful or important on this magic-favoring server. A Strength-8 wizard may just come to enjoy the company of the Strength-16 fighter who agreed to help lug a corpse to the wizard's favorite temple, even if the wizard
did just spend 15 minutes hunting that fighter down.
