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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8711026" data-attributes="member: 6877472">"Minion-mancy" is pretty rough in D&D, overall.  I remember many threads being devoted to the summon spells in 5e, like whether or not you can call up a gaggle of sprites.  I was in a game where I got to use Animate Objects for one adventure before the DM told me he couldn't handle it (I was playing a Warforged Sorcerer- the DM had told us to roll our stats, so not having a Charisma bonus wasn't an issue really.  I had commissioned a local toymaker to make me a bunch of fairy dolls, using the sturdiest and toughest possible materials, and then I'd animate the pack of them in combat).I didn't see it myself, but one of my friends had been allowed to play a Death Cleric in a campaign, and had apparently wreaked havoc with his undead minions.Adding a bunch of NPC's to the field really changes up the dynamic of encounter design in ways the system doesn't account for- after all, if you use a spell to summon sprites, that doesn't change the math of an encounter any more than if you cast fireball, and the only real counter is to have enemy casters summon their own minions!And thanks to bounded accuracy, while summons would quickly fall off in usefulness in 3.5, for example, they remain effective for a lot longer.Personally, I think that having "companions" be represented by a stat block different from the MM critters is fine.  After all, MM NPC's don't resemble the player characters much, so it follows that player controlled minions shouldn't have to resemble their monstrous cohorts.If we can accept that a 112 hit point Gladiator is a CR 5, then I'm sure we can accept that a bear companion can be weaker than a real bear.</blockquote>

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