Their diverse composition gives them the ability to form and reform, and makes them easily summoned, permitted there is adequate raw material at hand. Still, this is not to say that a skilled necromancer could not call forth a cadre of skeletal warriors to do his bidding anywhere he chooses. He merely requires less effort to construct a skeleton army in a graveyard than in the middle of a forest.

Furthermore, I have come to believe that a skeleton’s intelligence is limited by the power and scope of the spell used in the creature’s creation. Theoretically one could have a single astute skeleton servant or a rather dense army of a hundred for the same expenditure of magical energy. I am at a loss to explain the average skeleton’s somewhat ludicrous mental predisposition, however.

 Perhaps the implausibility of its own existence makes the skeleton think it hilarious to hide in a barrel, cackling intermittently for some three hundred years until a victim happens by?

“Contrary to what I had assumed, a reanimated skeleton is actually constructed from bits and pieces of any number of different skeletons, not a single one.”