The fluff text for skeletons says they can perform fairly complex tasks, but require careful training to do so. It almost guarantees that not even a frost giant can insta-kill one of your minions, which means that attrition over time due to death will be low and morale will be high, and your minions will be more willing to do what you're ordering them to do.) (And BTW, Inspiring Leader is a terrific feat for anyone who wants to become a hobgoblin warlord. You don't need to be a necromancer to have an army of minions in 5E. Of course, the most useful hobgoblin equipment is the equipment still on a living hobgoblin-turning enemies into friends is generally more useful than turning them into corpses, especially with bounded accuracy. The PHB goes out of its way to claim that you won't be able to sell these weapons and armor for cash (which really makes no sense), but there's no reason they can't be useful anyway. Sure he can buy weapons and armor but then he'd have to potentially have people investigating why do you need so many weapons and armor.D&D players typically kill so many orcs and hobgoblins that getting weapons and armor shouldn't be a problem.

No one is right, there are analogs for everything, and there's no real point arguing about how other people like to play the game. You can run universes where necromancy is vile magic loathed by all, and you can run universes where it's basically a cheap source of unskilled labor. You can run universes where people have to deal with bureaucracy in order to buy lots of weapons and armor, and you can run universes where no one asks too many questions about what you want all that hardware for. If you actually make papers and do the proper channels to make your purchase seem legit then sure, arm up your guys but if you think a simple casual phrase will be enough to placate those who inquire then it will not.Can we not do the thing where we devolve into telling each other that our various homebrew campaign worlds and interpretations of offical campaign worlds are dumb and bad and wrong? If you are to make an excuse then I would hope you would put some effort into making the excuse plausible. If it gets out that he's buying it he really should not be surprised when the guards come along and ask him about it. Most footsoldiers probably don't have more than padded or leather, 8+ suits of mail are a massive warning sign, I'd rule that most armoursmiths wouldn't have it on hand. Who do you think bandits use axes, spears, and bows?Īrmour is even more suspicious. One or two can be interpreted as personal weapon+spare, but buying enough to arm a small squad is incredibly suspicious, especially if he leaves them with dead zombies and buys more from nearby towns.

Especially for swords, spears and bows are hunting weapons, daggers are useful in everyday life, axes can be used as tools, clubs can be made easily, war-scythes can be improvised from tools, but swords are weapons with few noncombat uses and also noble weapons, buying 8 of them means you expect to arm 8 (possibly trained) combatants. He doesn't have 8 retainers, so he gets called in for questioning due to being suspected of being with the local gang/rebellion. If the necromancer sticks to non-combat spells this shouldn't actually disadvantage him, so apply world-context. They also should not be able to use their bonus action for dual-wielding unless commanded (if at all).

I'd argue that, unless he gives up his turn to do nothing but command them and give them his proficiencies, they are non-proficient in any weapon they wield expect for fists.

Sword of the necromancer 5e