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Hi all,
Back story:
I'm running the Carrion Crown AP and the party has a summoning build druid, diviner oracle, rogue, paladin (hosp), wizard (abj).
Typically each person in the party takes 1-2 min of real-life time to handle their turn in sequence as there is a fair bit of messing about and chit chat as well as the dice rolling.
I don't have an issue with someone wanting to summon armies of critters, but it is beginning to bog down play.
For example:
Round 2 everyone save the druid takes 1 min. The druid now takes 6 min because he debates as to where to place the D4+1 critters, act with the critters, act with his companion and then act with himself (he summons again)
Round 3 everyone takes 2min (stuff is getting real!) save the druid who takes ~20min as he places D4+1 new critters acts with his now 10 critters and then takes his own action.
This trend continues...
Unlike undead which have a HD limit of amount that can be controlled, summoned creatures do not. So there is not really any upward limit on how many can be summoned.
Can anyone suggest a few ways that can allow him to still have fun with summoned critters but without monopolising the evening's game time?
Limiting players to one minion per person is probably your best bet to be honest. Choosing the 1D4+1 option for summoned creatures tends to bog down play. Beyond that the only thing you could do would be to allow the other players to roll for some of the creatures while the summoner is busy rolling for just one of them.
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If someone in our group spent 20 minutes taking their turn, as in your round 3, they would be told to change their character or leave the game as they were wasting everyone else's time.
Seriously, if a player takes more than a couple of minutes to take their turn then there is something wrong and that player should either play a simpler character or leave the game as they are wasting the other players' time. And ignore any whining such as "I'm only roleplaying my character" which more often than turns out to be an excuse for disruptive behaviour during a game.
Our group requires a player who is going to be summoning to make notes of the relevant statistics for creatures that they expect to summon. No exceptions.
If a player is too lazy or disorganised to spend a couple of minutes doing this they should not be running a summoner and our DMs will rule that none of their summoning spells work.
If a summoner insists on looking through the rulebooks when it is their turn, then you should rule that they are spending a full-round action doing nothing (because they are dithering). If you are feeling charitable you could let them delay their actions until later in the round, though from experience players learn to change their behaviour very quickly after being hit with a harsh penalty.
Our group dealt with slow play in general by banning players from looking through the rulebooks when it is their turn to act during combat. Players should look through the books during other players' turns and preferably have made notes of their more complex abilities.
In the rare games when I run a caster who summons then before the game starts I will have prepared notes about 3 or 4 creatures, each on its own index card, so that they are ready to use without having to spend any time looking through the rulebooks.
Tell your players you're not happy about how long each round is taking and want to speed things up.
Institute 3-5 mins per turn, use a timer and it if it goes off before you finish your turn then you lose the rest of your actions. Druid will learn to shape up quickly and concentrate on summoning less crap.
In my games redirecting an active spell/animal requires a move action anyway.
Good Option:
Distribute control over the summoned critters evenly among your players. That way, everybody gets something to do.
The only prerequisiite for that is that the stats are available to all players.
If the druid player complains about this, tell him that the other option is changing his character.
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OK, here is a number of suggestions.
Have print outs of the summons. With some copy, paste, and minor editing your player can have all it's summonable critters readily at hand. This is much faster than flipping through a bestiary and you can edit numbers for Augment Summoning and such.
Pre-roll. Easiest if you planning a straight out attack with your summons, but not much harder if your doing something else either. Ex: spells, combat maneuvers, etc.
If you allow electronics at your table, and your player uses Android I strongly recommend an app called Summoner PF RPG, made by Luigi Papino. There is a free version to try it out, and a pair version with a bit more functionality. It's only a couple bucks and makes your summoning life so so easy!
Summoning is awesome! With planning on your player's part it's turn should take no longer than another and you will not have to limit your player.
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Delenot has a good suggestion, and I'd make it into a table rule. If they want to summon something, they need to A) have minis ready to go and B) have the stat sheet/ability to track HP uniquely ready. Summoning is great, but if you want to spam a bunch of little things, you need to ensure you're not going to drag down combat. It's the player's responsibility to do this if they want to play a summoner.
I've had GMs track monsters a few ways, but the most impressive was colored sticky-dots on the mini base that match the color of index cards where you track health/status. Pop one more card in the stack as a "You're done!" and just flip through them taking actions rapidly. A build I'm getting rolling in PFS will be a summoning wizard, and my plan is to have print-outs of all my common summon stat blocks (probably on small little cards on a ring), minis on the table ready to go, and things to track who's who on index cards. I'm also planning on not calling more than a few at a time though to save on spells per day, but that's my personal call on keeping from becoming too unwieldy.
In a pinch, use the same X minis for your summons as stand ins, and differentiate between the minis on a card. I often do the same with a set of 4 small elemental minis I have when I GM.
Typically each person in the party takes 1-2 min of real-life time to handle their turn in sequence as there is a fair bit of messing about and chit chat as well as the dice rolling.
I think this is part of your problem. Just because someone has five miniatures on the board doesn't mean that they need five times as much time for chit-chat. Simply enforce a two minute per player time limit and much of your problem will go away.
The problem here is twofold:
First, as has been stated above, playing a summoner requires you to be extremely efficient. You need ready stats for ALL creatures you could want to summon. This means you will have to update them between sessions. It is a good strategy, some extra time will probably be okay, especially if control of the summons are spread out, but not too much.
Second, summoning 1d4+1 ANYTHING (except maybe lantern archons, which can be pretty much abstracted anyway) is useless. Yes, you can do it. No, it won't make a difference either way. At that point, the summons are too weak to be more than a nuisance. Either talk to the player about this, or enforce it by removing the 1d4+1 option.
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The problem here is twofold:
First, as has been stated above, playing a summoner requires you to be extremely efficient. You need ready stats for ALL creatures you could want to summon. This means you will have to update them between sessions. It is a good strategy, some extra time will probably be okay, especially if control of the summons are spread out, but not too much.
Second, summoning 1d4+1 ANYTHING (except maybe lantern archons, which can be pretty much abstracted anyway) is useless. Yes, you can do it. No, it won't make a difference either way. At that point, the summons are too weak to be more than a nuisance. Either talk to the player about this, or enforce it by removing the 1d4+1 option.
Efficiency is key. As a Summoner I have my own bestiary, custom made markers, reference material, and page numbers....for EVERYTHING. Even on the fly with a fully loaded summoning and Eidolon my turns rarely take more than 2 minutes. Unless another player pulls the "You can't do that" line. Which is why I do full research and have page reference numbers at the ready to cut down on that time sink too.
As for summons being too weak, opinions vary greatly. But if they are nothing more than a nuisance....you either have the wrong summon on the field, or you just doing it wrong. Again, just my opinion on that.
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Thanks for the tips guys, I'm sure the summoner won't be thrilled at doing the extra work outside the game session but I think he'll do it in the interest of speeding up the evening.
Regarding Sissyl and Delenot's comment: - the D4+1 is actually the most ridiculous part of the druid summoner thanks to a certain feat called "Greenbound Summoning" which the player was able to produce out of a Faerun sourcebook. Damn backwards compatible! *shakes fist*
While I thought the feat was ridiculously OP early on (early access to wall of thorns), it'll slowly fade over the rest of the campaign.
Go cards instead. No finding stats in books, which then have to be modified by Augment Summoning etc etc etc. Have ALL the maths done on a card and update that between sessions.
Go cards instead. No finding stats in books, which then have to be modified by Augment Summoning etc etc etc. Have ALL the maths done on a card and update that between sessions.
I can specifically recommend these cards by Purple Duck, which I use myself. There's another similar product for the summon nature's ally series.
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You can also print off excellent summon monster / nature's ally cards from this excellent free site.
Summoned monsters, cannily used, can be game changers. They can flank with party members, making the rogue shine. They can scout! They can heal and cast spells to aid the party (at higher levels.) They don't have to be annoyances!
What you need to do is ORGANIZE the player, and then enforce time limits. If they're disorganized, keep the SNA cards at the GM's house and just hand it to the player every time the game starts. I don't know why this is, but I've seen more disorganized summoner players than any other class. Maybe the class attracts the new and inexperienced? But with a little help, you can bridge the gap.
I've been debating printing out something like this as a PFS GM to keep in my GMing folder along with my magnetic initiative board.
Hmm
I thought Greenbound Summoning was 3.5, not Pathfinder?
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Ahh. Nice Feat and all, but might be a bit over powered for Pathfinder.
I tacitly discourage summoning classes, but not pet based ones or leadership, as a rule. If someone wants to summon something they must have the stats for the creatures ready to go immediately upon their turn or we move on till they find something. If a summon has multiple effects or creatures the summons rolls are distributed among the total players.
Just let them know what they are rolling against and just write down how much damage they deal. You could easily run many encounters while rolling very little dice.
As a general rule, if someone is going to play a conjuration focused character I usually ask them to have place the stats for all the monsters they intend to summon regularly on note cards, and if they intend to summon multiples of them to make multiple note cards and that summoned creatures beyond the first will be played by other players at the table.
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Going off original topic a bit, but regarding Greenbound Summoning: The author of the feat [Ed Bonny] has stated that it should be a meta-magic feat that modifies the spell level by 2.
While that would go some distance toward rebalancing it, it's the greenbound template that needs the most work. Because you effectively gain access to a level 5 spell with a level 1 spell slot. Level 3 slot if you apply the +2 spell level adjustment.
I'm in the process of discussing with the other players how to modify it, but we're thinking along the lines of applying the template in a similar fashion to the way the celestial/fiendish templates are applied to other summoned creatures with abilities based on HD.
EDIT: Once again, thanks all for the suggestions. I'm going to have a few of the other players take control of the extra critters and make sure everything he wants to summon is represented by a mini and with a card showing its stat block.
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Yep, hands are tied. Pathfinder core rule book page 5, completely backwards compatible with all 3.5 content. I hate that rule the most.
You're hands aren't tied! You're the damn GM! You don't have to allow anything from 3.5, and you will find that most people don't allow anything from 3.5 as most of the content (that people want to bring over) is pretty broken compared to Pathfinder content.
Yes it's backwards compatible, that means there is only a minimum of work that needs to be done to make it useable. Not that you have to use all content from 3.5.
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Yep, hands are tied. Pathfinder core rule book page 5, completely backwards compatible with all 3.5 content. I hate that rule the most.You're hands aren't tied! You're the damn GM! You don't have to allow anything from 3.5, and you will find that most people don't allow anything from 3.5 as most of the content (that people want to bring over) is pretty broken compared to Pathfinder content.
Yes it's backwards compatible, that means there is only a minimum of work that needs to be done to make it useable. Not that you have to use all content from 3.5.
When all the adventurers looks at me with "that face" with the big eyes and the pouty lips, I just fail my damn sense motive check every time.
However, when I'm a Player in someone else's campaign I avoid using 3.5 or older character options. I'll still use the source material for guidance though. For example, I still faithfully carry around my The Complete Paladin's Handbook so that when a paladin I'm playing strikes some moral dilemma I can consider: 'What would Sir Geffen do?'
Not only is the feat too powerful, but applying that template looks like it'd take a lot of time if done on the fly.
Many groups don't allow any 3rd party material, but that's up to each group and DM. Personally, I don't think a DM should allow any 3rd party material until reviewing it first for "compatibility" with his game.
Echoing the others here in that you don't have to allow 3.5 content. It's compatible sure but you don't have to use it. I would recommend treating 3.5 material like other 3rd party material. That is, make it subject to GM approval and open to removal/change if it causes problems.
If a player doesn't have the creature fully statted on an index card (or something similar), including any feat interactions, they cant summon that thing.
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When all the adventurers looks at me with "that face" with the big eyes and the pouty lips, I just fail my damn sense motive check every time.
Well, at least your honest about it.
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With the amount of splat that 3.5 has I've always found it hard to balance most things imported to Pathfinder. ( Of course, Pathfinder is starting to gain it's own splat )
One especially important rule of thumb I have for all my players but especially minion happy players is I keep initiative order in the open, they know when their turn is coming up. When their turn comes they must (within a few seconds) say what they are doing in words and point.
iE: 'i cast fireball here *points* hi charge that orc and attack it'. Etc
However long it takes to resolve afterwards is fine, but the moment they start uming, looking in a book or doing something other then telling me what they and any creatures they control are dpi g and then doing it, they delay until they have decided.
Good Option:
Distribute control over the summoned critters evenly among your players. That way, everybody gets something to do.
The only prerequisiite for that is that the stats are available to all players.
If the druid player complains about this, tell him that the other option is changing his character.
Actually, I dont care for running other peoples summoned monsters.
It's better for all if the player just learns not be to a spotlight hog.
One summoned thing per player at a time. Actually we say one extra combat entity per player at a time.
I thought Greenbound Summoning was 3.5, not Pathfinder?Yep, hands are tied. Pathfinder core rule book page 5, completely backwards compatible with all 3.5 content. I hate that rule the most.It is, but the GM allowed the feat in already.
Hmm
Not true. "Backward compatible" does not mean the DM has to allow everything in.
When all the adventurers looks at me with "that face" with the big eyes and the pouty lips, I just fail my damn sense motive check every time.
Allowing a player something that broken just means less fun for everyone else at the table, including the DM. The DM has to jack up the encounters to make it challenging which means the other PCs cant handle it... or die.
Just say no.
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If you have a party of 5, irrespective of how many critters the druid summons, there should be no need for each player to take 1-2 minutes for their turns. What are they doing while other players are having their turn, let alone the time the DM takes to run the monsters? That is 4-8 minutes, plus DM time, for them to think about their next turn.
If they are getting distracted and talking then the best thing you can do is cut their time. Either use a timer of some kind or just say "Druid Dave is unsure of what to do - he is delaying" or "Druid Dave is taking too long to decide what he is doing, that is a full round action gone". The players will get the idea and everything will speed up. Druid Dave might get grumpy but I bet the other players will be pleased.
My group uses a portable whiteboard for an initiative chart so it is easy to tell when each player's turn is coming up.
As for the problems of the summoning. Simply tell the druid that he can only summon creatures that he has pre-prepared stat blocks for in front of him - either printed out or on index cards. If her can't be bothered spending the time to prepare his character outside of game time then he should not be allowed to slow down the game and waste everyone else's time.
I fully agree with other suggestions above like only allowing one summoned creature at a time or limiting the "deployment pattern" for any multiple summons.
One summoned creature at any time is effectively shutting down the summoning strategy. Whatever floats your boat, though.
One summoned creature at any time is effectively shutting down the summoning strategy. Whatever floats your boat, though.
I guess my boat is floated by a play style that doesn't clog up the combats with a bunch of summoned critters that take up too much time to run and detract from the time the rest of the party gets to play.
To me swarming the field with summoned creatures is what it's all about. I got one session a week to play at 4 hours best. I take far longer than 4 hours every week learning, preparing, and planning my creatures. You do this for a number of reasons. Because you enjoy gaming. Because it makes your table time more constructive. Because it's respectful to the other players not to hog up excessive time. And others I'm sure. Summoning can make any class complex and you have to take the time to simplify it. If you have a player that is unwilling to do that don't change the class, pick a different one.
One summoned creature at any time is effectively shutting down the summoning strategy. Whatever floats your boat, though.
There are multiple summoning strategies, though.
If I were going to continue the houserule of only one summon at a time, then I'd do something to make summoning from the lower lists still viable. So, I would suggest that instead of summoning multiples, that summoning from a lower list allows you to apply templates to the lower list creatures. For instance, SM:2 could also summon a creature from SM:1, but with the addition of the Advanced Simple Template or the Giant Simple Template when summoning from that list. And SM:3 and above could work the same, but allow you to apply both templates to a creature 2 levels lower. So SM:3 could summon an eagle, from SM:1, with the advanced template and the giant template. This would make for a very hard hitting, but also very fragile summon. Being very fragile isn't all bad though. Enemies may actually have a good reason to go after the summon instead of the summoner in this case.