WoTC Rodney: Economy of actions

[Wolfwood2]

After all, wouldn't your players run past the orcs in the front line, even taking a few AoOs, to wipe out an orc shaman who is summoning something wicked, or is giving orders to something wicked he has already summoned?

Kill the caster is pretty much SOP anyway, whatever he's casting. If you're playing a wizard, summoning is actually one of the better attack options because you can do it without disrupting your invisibility. (You are invisible or blurred or mirror imaged or something, aren't you? If not, bad wizard. Look to defense.)

If you're a druid, anybody running up to melee your wildshaped self is probably going to be sorry they did.

That said, when playing a druid I found it pretty effective to just hang back to the rear of the party. Most opponents were much weaker on ranged attacks than melee, so the DM had the choice of targeting my summoner with weaker ranged or trying to take down the party members up in the monsters' face with good attacks. And being wildshaped and Longstridered made me quick enough to get into the thick of things quickly.

(snip a lot of logic trying to prove summoning isn't a big deal, which fails in that people who are annoyed by it in game aren't going to stop being annoyed because you logically proved they shouldn't be)

I don't go out of my way to destroy these spells. I let players use them, and enjoy them. I just let them discover the consequences, and weigh the pros and cons. It doesn't take them long to find out that good opportunities for summon spells are rare, and they don't rely on them very much.

Even druids with their spontaneous Summon Nature's Ally spells rarely go that route.

I find the summoning spells to be fun on occasion, but I wouldn't cry if they got rid of them. As far as I'm concerned, the genre tropes of conjuring up powerful beings to fight for a caster can be adequately represented by Planar Binding rituals and the like. I don't see that many fictional examples of being able to summon up beings with a snap of the fingers. Such things can probably be best reserved for a dedicated summoning class.

 

[KidSnide]

I think everyone here probably agrees that Leadership is broken. I never allowed the feat in my games. If a player asked me about it, I would tell him to take some other feat, then roleplay his character hiring or otherwise enticing NPCs to join the group. The benefit was that those NPCs could walk away or die at any time without leaving the player stranded with a wasted feat (Leadership with no cohorts isn't very useful).

No doubt we all agree on Leadership in particular. And, that is a perfectly reasonable way to handle the desire for a sidekick without resorting to the extremely unbalanced leadership mechanic.

But the OP's point extends beyond Leadership, which is just a partuclarly egregious example of the fact that extra actions are extremely powerful. One of the things I hated the most about 3.X combat was the proliferation of pre-combat buff spells. Even if you ignore the game-spotting effect of a 30-minute planning session to figure out who casts spells on whom, it is just really powerful to have all of these actions performed before the start of combat. It may be an interesting question whether to cast Haste or Fireball, but if you cast Haste right before the teleport/ambush/opening-the-next-door, you get all the benefits of doing both. The 3rd level spell resource is used, but you're effectively getting a free action by casting the buff before battle.

Similarly, pre-summoned creatures, animal companions and cohorts (through the leadership or not) are just powerful. Even if the weak creature or level-4 fighter isn't going to be able to take out an enemy monster on its own, an ally can still hold an enemy off while the party proper concentrates fire on the primary target. It's like a free action that combines immobilize with DoT. This can be fun - I enjoy combats where the PCs have to balance fighting the most dangerous enemies with supporting their low-level allied troops that are protecting the flanks and rear.

But, when balanced against other abilities, an ability that grants you free actions by summoning, recruiting or attracting an ally is either very powerful, or involves an ally that is so wussy that it hardly matters. That's why Rodney was speculating about creating allied creatures that "use up" their master's actions in some way or otherwise manifest as bonuses instead of actions.

 

[Hussar]

First, Mr. Summoner spends a whole round summoning. I ham up the visual, and describe it as standing there for a whole round, chanting and hand waving, and mystical ectoplamic fog swirls around the target space for the summon spell, and wisps of this fog trail from your hands to the main fog in the target space.

So, the solution to the problem is to change the rules? And, then to change the rules so that the action becomes substantially sub-par? After all, if casting fireball doesn't draw aggro (to use the MMORPG term) but summon monster III does, well, it's not too tricky to figure out which one I'm going to cast.

In other words, if you are going to make it suicidal to cast certain spells, why not just remove those spells from play?

 

[KarinsDad]

So, the solution to the problem is to change the rules? And, then to change the rules so that the action becomes substantially sub-par?

How is this changing the rules?

 

[Hussar]

How is this changing the rules?

Where in RAW does it tell us that casting a summoning spell causes all sorts of special effects and basically places a giant neon sign above the caster saying "HEY KILL ME!"?

One thing about it, with those rules, I'd be taking silent and still spell feats ASAP.

 

[med stud]

It seems like this debate is much about how much time the menagerie-guy takes with all his creatures. If you have a player that takes a long time thinking about the actions of each and every badger in his crew, that player becomes a pain. If you have a player that just moves all his creatures forward, rolls attack and damage dice at the same time and did his planning when it wasn't his turn, it's not much of a big deal.

Judging from some conversations on this forum and other forums, it seems like the slow-thinker is more common than I thought before I started going on RPG-forums.

Since you can make rules about managing action economy but you can't make rules making people think faster, I think cutting down on player controlled creatures is the way to go.

 

[small pumpkin man]

It seems like this debate is much about how much time the menagerie-guy takes with all his creatures. If you have a player that takes a long time thinking about the actions of each and every badger in his crew, that player becomes a pain. If you have a player that just moves all his creatures forward, rolls attack and damage dice at the same time and did his planning when it wasn't his turn, it's not much of a big deal.

Judging from some conversations on this forum and other forums, it seems like the slow-thinker is more common than I thought before I started going on RPG-forums.

Since you can make rules about managing action economy but you can't make rules making people think faster, I think cutting down on player controlled creatures is the way to go.

Actually, the only character we had which ever summoned things just used the creatures as essentially bags of hp to stand between him and monsters, he never did anything tricksy with them, but he still attacked with them and had to roll around 20 to hit rolls every turn. It took ages and it was a complete waste of everyone's time.

 

[med stud]

Actually, the only character we had which ever summoned things just used the creatures as essentially bags of hp to stand between him and monsters, he never did anything tricksy with them, but he still attacked with them and had to roll around 20 to hit rolls every turn. It took ages and it was a complete waste of everyone's time.

Yeah, it's a big problem with animals traditionally having lots of attacks in D&D (and other RPGs), especially in this context. Six cougars with six attacks would be one thing, six cougars with 18 attacks is an entirelly different thing.

 

[KarinsDad]

Where in RAW does it tell us that casting a summoning spell causes all sorts of special effects and basically places a giant neon sign above the caster saying "HEY KILL ME!"?

Nearly all spells have giant neon signs. Casters have to have strong verbal components (i.e. they cannot whisper) and somatic components that other casters can view to the extent that they can use Spellcraft to discern which spell is being cast before it is even cast. Additionally, summoning spells last for an entire round.

So yes, summoning spells have always had giant neon signs involved and because of this, many groups have played for years that the summoner becomes a quick target.

His description was a bit much, but not way beyond what is reasonable to describe a spell.

 

[med stud]

EDIT: Nevermind.