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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MarkB" data-source="post: 6101015" data-attributes="member: 40176">That was a good, if lengthy, analysis, Celebrim. A few more paragraph breaks would have been appreciated by my poor eyeballs.I did consider mentioning the impracticalities of summoned monsters as anything other than attack dogs previously, but it seemed too much like beating a dead horse.I do recall one example of a player surprising me and short-circuiting a major encounter. This was during a city siege scenario as part of the Red Hand of Doom campaign.As part of the scenario, the PCs can call upon city supplies for additional items to aid in the defense of the city. I don't recall the exact parameters, but it was something along the lines of any mundane or normal DMG magic items, with a 5000 gp budget.So one player blows most of the budget on a single item - a scroll of Prismatic Spray, which the party casters aren't close to being high enough level to cast normally - and he whips it out during the climactic boss encounter, makes his caster level check, and catches the entire enemy contingent in the spell while they're still flat-footed.Of the big bad's six lieutenants, all of them big, tough bruisers, two vanish to other planes, one dies outright, one is turned to stone and another goes insane. Even the boss was hit hard with a damaging effect. The encounter went from super-tough to very easy simply because one player had the novel idea of spending the party's budget on a single expendable item instead of the bunch of equipment the module's designers expected.At the time I was more relieved than anything else, as the campaign had been brutal on the players so far, but it did make for a bit of an anticlimax.</blockquote>

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