| Justin Ricobaldi |
These aren't dick moves so much as meta-pre-decided restrictions made for the sake of playing the game in a timely manner.
In no summons, do you mean the Summoner's Aedilon or summoned monsters in general? No summoned monsters in general maybe a little harsh.
I'd suggest leaving summoned monster homework duty up to the players. Like maybe if your player figured out or had a print off of the monsters he was summoning with each summon spell and stuck to those and was responsible for controlling and maintaining their statistics (you know cause they have templates like celestial on them sometimes).
As far as eating up table time goes, you got 7 players bro. I find 6 to be hard to work through. If you can do it, more power to you.
Other advice i have for smoother combat, includes but is not limited to:
1. Pre-rolling/ grouping monster initiative
2. Using base monster HP
3. Encouraging players to have an idea of what they are going to do on their next turn. While that sounds like a no brainer, getting the party to think about their next turn after they take is a good way to keep their minds on the battle at hand and make deliberate moves and actions when they get to go again.
4. Pre-rolling monster attacks. Now to be fair I haven't used this one but I thought of pre-rolling attack and damage rolls for a monster, about 20 or so, and just going down the line as combat progressed. The theory being that you turn as DM will be smooth and quick.
5. Kill half of party with Dragon, now you have only 3 pcs' to worry about and they now have a convenient quest for revenge to go on! Two birds with stone, er well, more like 4 poor suckers with one breath weapon.