New Wizard Summoning Spells!

[Trolls]

Fantastic article. Other than the succubus, the powers look mechanically sound, and are extremely evocative. This is the kind of power design that make me want to play a controller.

I don't care what class my character is, if I ever get to level 29 I'm multiclassing for Summon Balor.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

@Mort_Q, Yea, I read that and that makes sense, but what is confusing is the wording in the powers themselves. Lets take a look at the Dretch's Symbiosis entry:



A whole lot of confusing redundancy. They only really need the second sentence. The first one does not add anything. If they ripped out the first sentence on all of the entries except one, everything would be fine.

=)

No, it only needs the first sentence!

It seems the second one was there first. Then they decided to make it a paragraph under the header symbiosis. This header includes: "While the creatue is present..."

So it seems they forgot to delete the old one...

 

[RangerWickett]

A whole lot of confusing redundancy.

You can say that again.

 

[renau1g]

But one of the better Dragon articles in a while. Between this and the last two (elves & kalashters) I am feeling better about the magazine as for a while there was a lot of below-average (IMO) articles there. Maybe the holidays/tight deadlines put too much pressure on the authors.

 

[fuzzlewump]

Looking at it now, it looks like the properly edited article is now in place. I think this article is great, and really does a good job of exploring new mechanics and the "power for a price" trope that is common in magic.

Some of this stuff looks better than some wizard dailies, pretty obviously, but I really don't have a problem with that.

 

[renau1g]

Glad to see they fixed it up so quickly.

 

[mneme]

I don't have a problem with anything in there (yet, anyway) -except- the succubus. But compare to other dominate powers; the Succubus is -crazy- strong:

1. At-will dominate/1 turn for an encounter is stronger than save ends.
2. The lowest level save ends dominate is the Psion "Dominate" at 15th level (which does also have an aftereffect of ongoing 10 psychic (save ends)). And the next lowest are all 19th level powers. (effectively, Psions get Dominate 4 levels early because they're Psions. Mind control is what they do!)

Soyeah. Basically, you've got a high paragon-level power as a high heroic-level power--the same kind of gaffe that you've got with Sleep -- except that here, you don't have to cheese saving throws to make it gross; you just have to be able to hit reliably.

 

[Zaukrie]

Great article. I also loved the Kalashtar article.

 

[Saagael]

About the Succubus, I think what the designers intended was that the creature dominated due to the intrinsic effect is meant to be controlled by the DM. I'd argue that a summoned creature is only under player control if the player issues a command that round, and if the player does not issue a command, the summoned creature is no longer controlled by the player. Thus, the DM takes over and declares what it does based on the intrinsic description, which includes then dictating what the resulting dominated creature does on its turn.

I admit it might be a little weird, since the DM is dominating an NPC with another NPC, but that's not only more fair, but also adds a lot more potential danger to the summon. I'd imagine a summoned Succubus would take the first chance it could to dominate the summoner, thus making the summoner unable to give more commands (until the succubus misses). I don't know about anyone else, but that drawback is fairly balanced with being able to dominate at-will at level 9.

 

[mattdm]

Instrinsic nature: what the summoned creature does when you don't give it any command. For instance, if you don't give your Balor any commands and you are within its reach, the Balor makes a melee basic attack against YOU!

This idea is cool in general, and the example you've given makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, a lot of the others seem to be along the lines of "Summoned creature moves towards the nearest creature within sight. In addition, a piano falls on your head."

Okay, in fairness, the damage or penalty you take is usually thematically linked to the creature in question -- but the key point is that it usually has nothing _actually_ to do with line of effect to the creature, etc., and usually is completely automatic.

I don't have a problem with "it's magic!" as the answer, but, c'mon, there should be some sort of easy star-trek-style fantasybabble explaining what's going on. Since the damage isn't actually dealt by the creature, is it a side-effect of the summoning magic somehow? (How?) Is it direct-action karma? Punishment by the gods?