So if you are a necromancy wizard, you have band of skeletons to fight for you. If one of them goes down in a fight, providing they are still intact. (Not turned to dust or anything like that) can you theoretically keep using the same skeleton over and over again?
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I personally allow it because: 1) that's probably how Animate Dead was intended to be used; 2) the cost of using Animate Dead is high even without considering the corpses; and 3) ruling otherwise practically requires (or at the very least really encourages) necromancers to be evil. By allowing reanimation, even the most good-aligned player can obtain undead minions by killing existing zombies and skeletons.
So if you are a necromancy wizard, you have band of skeletons to fight for you. If one of them goes down in a fight, providing they are still intact. (Not turned to dust or anything like that) can you theoretically keep using the same skeleton over and over again?
Probably, but it uses another spell slot and you probably can't cast it during combat.
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Yeah, considering the minute casting time, meant more after combat.
If you want to get really technical, it depends on whether the DM considers the new corpse to be a dead humanoid, a dead undead, or both.
On the one hand Jeremy Crawford has said before that Animate Dead can bring back undead minions, but he's also said casting Revivify on a zombie revives it as a zombie. It's a bit hard to reconcile those two statements unless you treat a dead skeleton as both a dead humanoid and a dead undead.
I personally allow it because: 1) that's probably how Animate Dead was intended to be used; 2) the cost of using Animate Dead is high even without considering the corpses; and 3) ruling otherwise practically requires (or at the very least really encourages) necromancers to be evil. By allowing reanimation, even the most good-aligned player can obtain undead minions by killing existing zombies and skeletons.