So we're about 3 sessions in to our new AP (Kingmaker), and I'm trying to nip this issue in the bud before it gets out of hand.
We have a party of 6 and the person playing the Master Summoner is by far the most optimization-happy and smartest player at the table. I've already asked him to try and limit his usage of best-per-level summons unless the party is in a dire emergency (which he has already done). And further asked him to restrict his Eidolons combat usage (even though its 1/2 level its still quite useful the first few levels).
The party just reached level 3 at the end of last session. This will mean that the Master Summoner has 5+Cha * Lvl minutes of Summon Monster 2 (24 for him specifically). For Kingmaker (which is famous for the 15 minute workday issue) that is absolutely out of hand.
He is already using these summons to scout far ahead of the group (he even invested in handle animal for low levels), summon them ahead of time and send them in places first (trap goats included)..
Are these proposed changes too much of a power down, considering he is the smartest player in the group?
Limit usage to 3+Cha/day (benefit really becomes having Eidolon + 1 summon or multiple summons on the field.)
Limit duration of summons to 1 minute (does not scale with level.) Can scale to 1round/level after 10 so there is some advancement at higher levels.
This drops him from 8 uses of 3 minute duration summons (24 minutes) to 6 uses of 1 minute summons (6 minutes).
What else would you do to power this down? I think I would be less concerned if we weren't playing Kingmaker, honestly.. But for now he needs some reigning in before it gets away from me.
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Does he have the language of the creature he's summoning? If not, the creature will move to attack the nearest enemy, and that is it.
Handle animal will work with summon natures ally, but not summon monster. Those things are magical creatures by nature, not animals. (As far as I'm aware)
Also remember the range of the spell. I believe a summon can't get outside range, but could be wrong.
Also, when I ran kingmaker, I followed the random encounter design quite strictly. I was surprised by how often encounters turned up and how many turned up at night when the party were trying to rest. Casters get pretty exhausted in a hurry when their rest cycle keeps getting broken.
Have things ignore his summoned creatures at times, particularly smart enemies like bandits. Have them focus on casters and combatants instead. Remember that unless the summoned creature specifically has maneuvres like grapple or overrun etc in their profile, all they will do is attack, because that is what the spell description says.
Most people who summon seriously try to get more power from that spell than the spell descriptions says. Make sure you as DM understand the spells limitations and your home and hosed. We find summoned creatures are useful for blocking terrain and maybe setting up flanks, but in terms of damage output etc, they suck compared to players at the same level.
Cheers
Edit - the other thing that random encounters did for the group I ran was prevent the "I'm always buffed before combat starts" syndrome. When you don't know when or where an encounter is coming at you, it's hard to buff up first. This only works at low to mid levels though. Once you hit level 7 or so, long term buffs tend to last all day.
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I think it is too late per se. You should have nipped this in the bud by NOT allowing him to play this character.
Nerfing it now, even further than he is already limiting himself is not fair. Unless of course, he agrees with your ideas beforehand.
Really, the best thing IMO would be to have a talk with the player (who seems rather reasonable), tell him why you feel uncomfortable with his character and ask him to create a new character that you will feel okay dealing with.
I played a master summoner in pfs awhile back. I found my damage wasn't the biggest thing GMs had to watch for. It was me trying to divide up the enemies and soak up damage with my mini army.
I was surprised how quickly I burned through my summons per day. Many of the large number of attack summons were useless to me. Sure a cat got a ton of attacks, but none got through ac or damage reduction. That's while I mainly used earth elementals to give allies flanking and limit enemy movement. Most enemies did enough damage to one shot my summons or had ac so high the summons had trouble hitting.
Watch out when the player gets to summon hoards of lantern archons. Their attacks cut through all damage reduction. However, they dont make good blockers.
Summomers also get haste early, which is a massive buff for the party.
Make sure to enforce language rules and handle animal checks. Send smart enemies after the summoner and don't let them rest after each battle. If they get plenty of rest, a summoning druid or wizard will cause the same issues.
Having six players and a master summoner could cause time issues. Maybe enforce time limits to the summoners turn. You could have the enemies start using trained dogs or their own summons. That could tie up his resources.
I find a universal solution to almost any build to be:
Build the same thing, and enter it as an ongoing protagonist.
A couple years back, we ran the worlds longest dungeon for about 6 months. Problems kept popping up with the Synthesist. So the GM made a synthesist, and just added it to the hordes of mooks. We all played "keep the mooks away from our summoner!" and enjoyed our first battle in ages that wasn't just watching the ginsu of death in action while we sat around feeling useless.
The Summoner played an EPIC grapple/trip war with his evil doppelgänger. The evil synthesist recognized his own magics, and dismissed us as threats. It was pure epic on epic combat. By the end, both summoners were near dead, the rest of us got to fight our own battle, and the GM put it to the summoner by politely explaining each thing he was having difficulty with. The offer was something along the lines of:
"If you want to be the white knight and swoop in to save the day when all is about to be lost, that is great. If you want to keep pile-driving everything I can throw at your group without seriously endangering the fun of everyone else, and the fates of all their characters, then this enemy has crawled off and died, and his very angry brother knows who killed him. If you want to keep playing like you have been, he will randomly appear. I will always roll him fair and correct, just like I do everything else, and I won't pull any punches when you are dying. On the other hand, if we can come to a gentleman's agreement on how we can make this fun for everyone again, including me, then this poor soul crawls off to die alone, lost and forgotten. Let me know before the next session though."
We were all happy because we had one hell of an insurance policy, and we all got to be a little more goofy with out creation efforts because of the huge, six armed gorillion like guardian. He got lots of chances to save the day, and ended up kind of being the mother hen, trying to make us realize how we could improve (both in character and out of character). We got more optimization experience. Our GM got a lot more creative with combats, and honestly, I think it took all our gaming up a couple notches. We havent had a standard "the mindless monster charges! It missed! It is -2 Ac! You gut it like a fish! Next!" type battle since forever ago. Even rats use tactics!
Anyway, that was my intro into optimization. Good luck!
Handle animal will work with summon natures ally, but not summon monster. Those things are magical creatures by nature, not animals. (As far as I'm aware)
This is actually something I hadn't thought about, and I will make sure to enforce it. His summons will definitely be less powerful just with this.
As for the 'players have unleashed pandoras box so time to get even' scenarios, that's not really the type of GM I want to be. I'm wondering how to make an incredibly powerful resource (made even more powerful by a particularly smart player) more in-line with the rest of the party.
It's CHA *mod* not CHA score! If his CHA is a 19, then he's looking at 9 summons per day.
I would not power him down at all. I would, however, not let them know that there are very few combats per day. In fact you might want to alter that a bit so that the players look to hold things in reserve.
-James
Yes, I realize.. he has 16 Cha, so a modifier of 3, +5 = 8 * level (3) = 24 minutes of summon duration ;)
This is also definitely the character he wanted to play the most, so I'm trying to come up with middle ground where he is able to play what he wants, but doesn't dominate the entire party by scouting, combating, supporting, etc.
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rather than just look at the summoned creature and say it's around alot longer, they are trying to act incorporate the minute/lvl duration into their "this is crazy" equation.
Fact is when most fights are over, it's largely irrelevant if your summoned critters got another 2 minutes left on it, it'll poof before your next combat.
I am running Kingmaker now as well. I also have a six person party.
What you need to be doing is increasing the CR of all encounters by 50%.
Normally, that would be enough, but a master summoner is really a one man adventuring company. It was a really serious mistake to allow one in this particular A.P. (And I bet your player knew that.)
Here is how I would handle it. Double the percentage of wandering encounters when entering a new hex to 10% and increase the daily encounter percentage to 25%. This will quickly cause your players to begin averaging an extra encounter every four days on average. Now they can no longer reliably be sure there will not be two or even three encounters per day.
If you dont want to roll, then just start hitting them with an extra encounter every second or third day/night.
Do not forget to modify the bad guys. Example: Hargulka's Trolls are baseline trolls. I have a six person party so their CR needed to go up one. I made them 2nd level warriors as well. Gave them large morningstars, hide armor and a vial of alchemists fire, and used that new feat for Improved Natural Armor. So my party has to face AC21, 85 HP, fire-starting, touch attack flinging trolls!
Summoner, Schmummoner.
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Handle animal will work with summon natures ally, but not summon monster. Those things are magical creatures by nature, not animals. (As far as I'm aware)This is actually something I hadn't thought about, and I will make sure to enforce it. His summons will definitely be less powerful just with this.
IIRC you do need Handle Animal to deal with the Celestial/Fiendish versions of animals because they do not speak any language ;-)
Why nerf him? See if he is willing to sit down with the other players and help them with their characters?
Why nerf him? See if he is willing to sit down with the other players and help them with their characters?
This is probably the best solution. If all characters are equally optimized then no one outshines the other. The easiest thing to do is to optimize the weaker characters.
From what the original poster said part of the problem is not only the character but the player. If the player is better at tactics than the other players he will outshine them no matter what. Again the solution is simple. Ask the tactical player to use tactics that make use of not just his own character but all those of all the other players. Suggesting good tactics for other players should be done anyways. Sit down and talk about the tactics the group can use and plan them out ahead of time. Make the summoner's player the tactician of the group.
Do not nerf his character in any way. That is just the easy way out and proves you failed as a DM to forsee this problem and handwaved a horrible way of trying to simplify things with class nerfing. Whats next? Is the Mage tossing too many fireballs so you limit their spellcasting per day? I"m not trying to be rude but the nerfs you guys are talking about are extreme.
This is EXACTLY why my DM refused this class in his game (also it was Kingmaker AP)... The Summoner is just too powerful when compared to the other classes, especially if optimized and/or illegal Eidolon builds.
I really wanted to play a Summoner, but not a weakling mage (no offensive intended). A Summoner has a d8 hitdice and medium bab, just like a Druid or Cleric, So I came up with a Druid that Summons Nature's Ally instead.(with augment Summoning feat, and infact its one of my favorite characters now that I've ever made.
Is it weaker as a Summoner? Perhaps... but it takes me FULL Round actions to summon an animal, instead of standard actions and my critters only last 1 round per level.
Instead of nerfing his character, implement a house rule about Summoned creatures instead(that affects all summoned spellcastings from any party member). Limit summoning to one Summon Spell up at a time... so spamming the same thing over and over again is forbidden until the original spell/ability is over.
You can still summon more monsters via weaker ones with the option of the spell... for example a Monster Summoning 3 can summon 1d4+1 of the Summon Monster 1 list, but you could not cast another Summon monster spell until all those monsters were destroyed or the spell runs out.
The DM used the same rules for the NPCs to keep the game fair... it has made a huge difference in combat times
Edit: Spells like Mount should not be limited to one casting,ect... Only the SUmmoning monster or Summoning Nature's Ally or Summon Swarms..
Its really a house rule that will fix your problems at least for a little bit.
Man, Paizo makes it pretty clear in the class section for Summoners that this class in the hands of a skilled player can be pretty unbalancing...especially in a six-person party that is working through a campaign designed for four players.
Worse, allowing Master Summoner or Synthesist as archetypes pretty much is the equivalent of saying to your player "bring it, I've got the ioun stones to deal with this".
This player seems reasonable, so if you do not feel comfortable significantly upping the CR or modifying the encounters, you should ask them to reroll their character.
You live and learn.
Instead of nerfing his character, implement a house rule about Summoned creatures instead(that affects all summoned spellcastings from any party member). Limit summoning to one Summon Spell up at a time... so spamming the same thing over and over again is forbidden until the original spell/ability is over.
This is how the summoner's summon monster spell works.
Standard action summon, lasts 1 minute per level. If you cast summon monster again, the monsters you have already summoned disappear and the new summons take their place.
Note: for wizards and other arcane casters, their summon monsters stay when they cast their own summon monster 1
That's how the normal Summoner's SLA works, yes. But the Master Summoner's SLA doesn't work like that, and they can have as many instances of the SLA out as they want, so long as they don't have their Eidolon out.
Why don't you up what you are throwing at them in order to challenge?
Why don't you up what you are throwing at them in order to challenge?
This tends to kill the rest of the party. Upping the challenge just due to one single player is not the best idea in most (if not all) situations.
And it means more work for the GM!
But if the encounter is written for 4 and they have six I can see why there is no challenge, Cheapy.
Fair point.
To be honest, a master summoner could probably solo kingmaker without much issue.
I'd ask him to come up with a different character, one a bit more in line with the powerlevel of the rest of the group.
I do not see why punishing him is a good idea. I think that the other players might need help in their characters.
There's no punishing going on. It's just not working out.
This is the best player in the group, according to Mr. Dunebugg. The MS player giving the other players some advice is a good idea, no doubt. But at a certain point where this player is always having to give advice on what to do to get the rest of the party even close to what his master summoner is doing, there's a real loss of agency for the other players. Will this necessarily be the case? No, of course not. But going by what we know of the situation, if the player truly is "by far the most optimization-happy and smartest player at the table", I'd say that this scenario is pretty likely to happen.
Or he doesn't give enough advice and the problem persists.
This is the archetype where it straight up says that it's a "a strong candidate for “solo” adventuring by one player". It was already identified as being so strong as to let them possibly solo a campaign that there was a sidebar explaining that and other things, an extreme rarity. Combine this with Kingmaker's very nova-friendly encounters and we get a situation where the master summoner in this 6 person party can easily just dominate the 1 or 2 encounters that are thrown at the party.
For reference, I had a master summoner in a Kingmaker game with just 3 players (with I think 43 point buy, something that favored them far more than I) and amongst us 3 there was a level playing field of optimization and combat smartness. I still ended up dominating most encounters just through the summons. Ended up switching to a different class that focused more on buffing the others. So that's my experience as a master summoner in Kingmaker.
In large parties the Summoner should be avoided, and Master Summoners should be outright banned.
You just need to ask him to bring in another character as The Black Raven sez. Not only is he the most powerful member of the group, he’s like hogging the spotlight and table-time.
Cheapy is right. This just isn’t the right class for this group, and the fact that it’s being run by the more experienced player is just making things worse.
Optimize him a wiz or clr summoner and ask him to play that. Perhaps with some dm concessions to sweeten the deal.
I guess a little more background info and updates are always helpful.
During our last AP (where I was a fellow player), the other player was a Golden Legionnaire/Cavalier, who specialized in bossing the other players around with the incentive of bonuses to their characters if they followed his advice. So, our high level play was mostly dominated by him telling the entire party what to do in most combats. So this is something I'm trying to actively avoid, and have had conversations with him about.
I am using the 6 player conversion for KM posted on the boards so it's not so much encounter size being the issue. Yes, I suppose all in all it's my fault for allowing a MS into my game in the first place - I had not seen one in play before so was not aware of the level of issues they could cause (especially in larger groups).
RE: anybody saying "don't nerf him" - well the options are nerf him or ask him to re-roll, and he quite likes his character (we've all been planning this campaign for months now).
Update
The most frequent advice I see on the forums is "talk to your DM/player" and I did just that... Asked him to not use summons past 1 combat, and he agreed that it could become an issue of overshadowing the group and said he would stop.
I may still just take away his Master Summoner archetype... Having him be a crutch to the group that can go nova to save their butts does not make exciting play long-term (and indirectly tells the other PCs they don't really need to worry about character strength as much).
Dunebugg, a while ago I made a master summoner replacement. It focused less on flooding the battlefield and more on actually doing interesting things with the summons. It might work out for you.