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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xeviat" data-source="post: 6897863" data-attributes="member: 57494">Hi friends.How powerful can/should summons be? We've seen various interpretations of summoning spells in the last 20 years or so. 3E had tables of preassigned monsters, and you could easily summon multiples. 4E had mostly single summons that consumed your actions to control. 5E, with its tighter CR rules, has CR levels for the summons, but they otherwise run independently.What is a summon? What does it do? Well, a summon is, at its simplest, a damage spell that's stretched out over a few rounds. So if a fireball does 8d6 damage to 2 targets, or +56 in total, a 3rd level summon can't do more than that over however many rounds it should be out for. Right?But there's more than that. A summon is an extra body. Every hit a summon takes is a hit your players don't take. If that summon isn't killed before combat is over, all damage dealt to them is wasted. If the summon is killed, then it's damage dealing ability is gone as well, but again, those were attacks that your party got to avoid.A summon is also an extra body in the playing field. They limit opponent movements, though merely taking up space and also threatening opportunity attacks.So, how good can a summon be? How have 5E's summons hit that mark? Honestly, I haven't seen them used in my game, and they're so complicated that I have no desire to white room them, even though I'm more than happy to white room analyze more simple things. I could eyeball a summon's potential damage over 3 rounds compared to an equivalent level spell, but that doesn't capture all that a summon is. They're a damage spell, they're like temporary HP, and they're like battlefield control.What do you think?</blockquote>

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