You control how much influence your cohort/eidolon/animal companion has. If round times or power levels are getting out of hand, utilize your minions in a less overt way. Aid another is a valid support action. Have them hang back and protect their masters instead of dog-piling every fight. They can always jump in if the going gets tough.
The GM uses restraint all the time to keep the game flowing and interesting. The BBEG doesn't gather his entire army of minions, scry you out, then teleport in with a 30 CR fight. I feel like the players share some responsibility to keeping the game running smooth.
I'm an optimizer. I love building powerful characters. It's like a puzzle to me how to make some unique character concept as effective as possible. Not all the players at my table are. I could make builds that one-shot every encounter, but I don't because the game wouldn't be fun. Instead I sometimes make more interesting yet not 100% optimal choices in build and combat.
The point is this: if you feel like you need to be reigned in, reign yourself in. If you can't or don't want to, the only ways to restore balance are to rebuild the party or have the GM supercharge the encounters.
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personally, i don't think starting over would be necessary...
if the encounters are too easy the GM can always adjust them up (just add more baddies, switch in a couple with higher CR, and/or throw the advanced simple template on some of them).
plus, there are tactics that he probably hasn't thought of:
- an evil/enemy druid. hold animal (2nd) or dominate animal (3rd) are spells that could dramatically alter combat (if one of your companions starts attacking the party instead of the enemy).
- pretty much any caster with knowledge[planes]. summoned creatures can all (potentially) be dismissed with a single dispel magic, and you're high enough level now that the summoner/eidolon needs to worry about things like banishment (knowledge[planes] would provide the enemy with this knowledge and allow it to identify the eidolon and summoned creatures).
- environmental advantage. a fight in mist/smoke against enemies that can see through it is gonna be a huge challenge no matter how many pets are stumbling around missing things; a fight where PCs are attacked from the top of a cliff will take most pets out of the fight (or at least cost the party a couple rounds/spells to get fly on them).
- ranged combat. this is sort of connected to the previous one, but you're options for dealing damage at range seem pretty limited... any archers that start more than a round or 2 away from you will get to do quite a bit of damage before you even engage; add an environmental advantage (on a cliff, in trees, etc) and it'll be even worse; make them flying archers and you'll really be in trouble.
- targeted strikes. in a random skirmish the pets/summons are a big asset but against intelligent foes who can quickly make some judgements about the PCs they might not be as handy... archers/casters/ninja/whatever may just try to avoid them and focus fire on the summoner (since killing him gets rid of the eidolon for free, and he's easily identified by the glowing rune floating above his head), or the spell caster, or the guy who's song and dance routine seem to make the pets much more deadly...
How does the DM handle this?
Prevention is the best medicine. If it's too late for that, it's not too late for Fireball.
Haven't been gaming for very long myself, but it seems that if you guys are all so displeased with the imbalance it shouldn't be too hard to contrive a solution you all like.
Our game utilizes a lot of "Handwavium". With a bunch of new players we don't exactly have a problem with being too killy with optimized characters, but we're all super-strategists so the CR does have to be amped up a lot of the time.
If you guys are playing a Module I guess I should keep my mouth shut because I never have, but if you're not I don't see why a story event couldn't happen that might put some kind of curse on your group? I know that's a bit extreme but isn't it better than restarting?
Ranax, totally agree about the puzzles, but I'm hopelessly fond of putting crippling weaknesses on my characters. Addictions, phobias, one of them is a Suli Sorcerer that was cursed to be a genie-of-the-lamp, she's actually more like a wonderous item. I don't know why I love playing with such limitations.
Edit to add: Totally agree with nate lange's suggestion about environment. Forcing you guys into unfavourable terrain with enemies that aren't negatively affected is a great way. Or one time our GM decided the enemies had a wealthy benefactor and gave them MUCH better gear. It was almost TPK from a group of level 2 goblins.
Well I don't know what alignment your group is summoning but a protection from X will prevent any of those from being effective.
Protection from X is pretty standard on all peeps in our game; a potion of protection prevents mind control as well.
This is a partial help because if you don't summon alignment based creatures it doesn't help much; but most of those outsider summons are pretty boss.
If the combats are too easy, you can do one of three things:
You can have harder enemies. Could be easy or difficult, depending on if the GM is writing his own stuff or if you're running an AP or other prewritten adventures.
You can rebuild your characters to be weaker or less complicated. Give the Druid a domain instead of an AC, make the Master Summoner a regular Summoner, and so on. It's up to you to use your experience and judgment to figure out which characters to weaken and by how much.
Finally, you could accept easy combats, and be more involved in the story, roleplay, and problem solving aspects of the game.
As an aside, you can't really focus fire a Master Summoner, there's no glowing bullseye rune when you're just using your SMX SLA.
My own current GM has a simple rule: no more than 3 creatures per player on the field, INCLUDING summons. It just gets silly sometimes. I know I will restrict people purely on administrative reasons.
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Step One, BAN Master Summoner....
There is no step 2.
Pretty much you have discovered the issue with that poorly designed class.
My DM allows no more than one pet/companion/summoned creature per PC, and no more than one summon spell per side active at any one time.
But I think what you need to do is talk to the Master Summoner player, see how attached he is, then ask the DM if a new PC can be brought in, instead.
Am curious about the targeted strikes portion. With rules as written would spellcraft, knowledge, or something be needed? More specifically with four caster potentially casting in the same round would a NPC by RAW be able to identify which person cast what or be able to tell what class they were?
you can roll spellcraft to identify spells as they're being cast- its a non-action so you can roll for each caster and potentially identify all 4 each round (including who cast which). and, spellcraft or an appropriate knowledge should provide a decent guess at what kind of caster they are. spellcraft should tell you basically what classes can cast it, and let you pick up on things like whether they used a material component (most arcane casters), a divine focus (most divine casters), or nothing (sorcerers)... a knowledge check may be required to know those parenthetical facts, or to pick up on other clues like arcane + light armor=probably 6/9 caster (magus/bard/summoner), or floating rune=summoner, or divine + crappy leather/hide armor=druid.
Step One, BAN Master Summoner....
There is no step 2.
Pretty much you have discovered the issue with that poorly designed class.
My DM allows no more than one pet/companion/summoned creature per PC, and no more than one summon spell per side active at any one time.
But I think what you need to do is talk to the Master Summoner player, see how attached he is, then ask the DM if a new PC can be brought in, instead.
I'm les sure about this. The master summoner certainly brings the most summons and bodies but even as a regular summoner the group still brings 7 bodies.
Sure. But how about no summoner at all?
The DM just needs to send better enemies. Lots of enemies that have AOE attacks can clean up any party quite easily. He could send Ninjas that all use Vanishing Trick ninja trick.
I'd send more dragons, hell hounds, winter wolves, lycanthropes, and, above all, casters. Archer enemies can be overwhelmingly powerful at level 8.
To counter master summoners: many encounters instead of a single big encounter. Also, anti-magic fields. Poisons and diseases are all overwhelmingly powerful when used correctly.
I almost wiped a party of 7 with one shadow demon last week. Shadow evocation detonates FTW!
"KaaaAAAAAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOM!"
_
Hi all. My DM and group is in need of advice for a situation that got out of hand. We the players were told by the DM that he desired to have very challenging enemies that were well above normal CRs
This is the problem right here, IMO. The DM should adjust his encounters to the capabilities of the PCs, not the other way around.
Hi all. My DM and group is in need of advice for a situation that got out of hand. We the players were told by the DM that he desired to have very challenging enemies that were well above normal CRsThis is the problem right here, IMO. The DM should adjust his encounters to the capabilities of the PCs, not the other way around.
To a point, Zhayne, but that many critters really slows down combat- and other issues too. Note that it's one of the players who is posting and the rest agree : "The group feels that we have made a bad situation that we did not intend... "
Most of the suggestions we could reasonably make would be to the GM rather than the players. Are you sure your GM isn't lulling you into a false sense of security with some apparently too easy encounters? After all, your last few sessions should have shown him that you are ready for tougher encounters than he is currently giving you.
Is there any area your party has avoided because they seemed too dangerous? Now might be a good time to reconsider going there.