So I just spent the last couple hours making a lvl 12 Tabaxi Swashbuckler/Lore Bard. Do I get expertise from both the rogue and bard paths? If so most of my proficient skills are doubled at this point. Its crazy.
welcome to being the professional jobber!
No joke, and the skills I'm not proficient in I still get 1/2 proficiency bonus. Its nuts.
Looks like the Elemental Evil player's guide spells made their way in. And some nasty-sounding necromantic spells, like Negative Energy Flood and SOUL CAGE
Man, Abjuration always gets the shaft. I think this will let me have both Booming Blade and Absorb Elements on my fighter though, which is nice.
Edit - wait, no, I'm wrong. Oh well!
Jesus, you weren't kidding.
Two entire Abjuration spells: one at level 1, one at level 9.
Oh actually, that's a different price than I saw before. It was $50 on Wizard's own webshop and the same price on a Dutch webshop. Yeah see, even the German Amazon has it listed for roughly $50.
50$ is nothing when you have 150+$ built up in store credit (they give 10% of the price of anything you buy as a credit towards your next purchase and you can build it up with a store account)
I've got it pre-ordered through Amazon.
Just couldn't say no to the beholder on the cover. Dude just looks so happy.
Not just like, happy for a beholder, which are normally depicted as balls of anger, paranoia and an array of death laser tentacles. But just really happy to be there watching his crystal ball.
Sesion 3 report for tomb. 2 rolls for initiative, 1 sequence break, 30 days of nothing happening, 1 player obliterated, many failed saves.
After exiting the death cave, our party took to the river in hopes of getting to our destination more quickly and it was working good... right up until we got to a swamp, with a fortified camp near by. Feeling social, we stopped by to say hello and quickly learned that the camp was suffering from a shortage of able bodied defenders due to a "sickness", and that the captain of the guard wanted us to ferry his sick camp members back to the port... which was two weeks in the wrong direction.
It turns out that the "sickness" was something called dancing monkey fever, which you get from eating this wild fruit. Which the camp defenders had eaten intentionally because they were hungry and didn't care about the consequences. I can only presume that this base was established less as a forward staging ground then as a Quarantine zone for the most abjectly stupid people on Toril.
After threatening to arrest us if we didn't help we made a compromise where in we lent them our two rowboats and then stood watch in order to hold back the unending tide of the undead. Or perhaps I should say "Non-existent", since the terrible scourge of undead were nowhere to be found as the GM failed 14 straight rolls of 16 or better to spark a random encounter. For our efforts, we got 30 gold.
Things got much more interesting as we passed through a swamp and came across an earth mote, which immediatley caught peoples attention since hey check it out: it's a giant dirt clod floating 100 feet up in the air. Naturally, the party came to the conclusion that this was something we just had to interact with and we immediatley tried to figure a way to get up to it (For my part I made an offering of mayo to it), settling on a contrived plan of having our druid ride an arrow up to it while wild shaped into squirrel form.
Once up their, we realized that the druid neither had the ability to get us up to it nor did he have a way to get back down despite my two attempts to rules lawyer animals that could survive the descent (the ant because you can't kill one from falling and the sugar glider because it doesn't actually fly) so he instead chose to investigate an entrance into the mote... which had a lich inside of it that simply disintegrated him.
We were now up to two deaths but this one didn't hurt so much because the player at least got to roll for initative before getting reduced to a pile of dust. Progress!
Eventually though, we did make it to the mountains and after choosing to avoid going into a tower that was a stop over for a red dragon (wherein my kobold squeed like a child getting a puppy on christmas morning) met up with the dwarves and briefly learned of our reward (21 ingots of adamentine) before descending a lift into the heart of the mountains to stomp on some fire newts.
After a little bit of scouting (which netted me a lump adamentine ore, I headed back and found the rest of the party engaging 8 newts who had managed to flambe multiple party members who failed their DC 11 dex saves. Mustering all of my nerve and carefully noting the relative position of the Newts I dove into the thickest mass of them and then proceeded to grovel, cower and beg that they not murder us which had the GM smiling until he realized that this wasn't simply a case of cowardice but instead me activating a racial ability that granted advantage against all of them for a time for my companions, who proceeded to rapidly murder them.
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VizardObserverThe Duke of Ridiculous PoppycockyRegistered Userregular
Mearls you son of a bitch. Give up the goods if you know what's good for you.
So sunday came and went, and my group's managed to pull off a rather hilarious series of scummy tactics thanks to a combination of spells, equipment and out right scum baggery.
First off, we went to interrogate a rival merchant who we suspected was involved in the disapearance of titania the summer queen, and after sicking a bronze griffin on the mules for his wagon, we were confronted by his bouncer team of 2 flesh golems... Which would have been really bad, except Flesh golems have this pesky fear of fire which ensured they didn't do anything other then run away as we pelted them with fire bolts, a flaming sphere and a paladin swinging away with a flame tongue. All of this low stakes drama was only made more absurd by the staggeringly shitty initiative rolls of everyone at the table; the highest was a god damn 6 and neither of the golems got to do anything before they started running for the hills due to "fire bad!".
After we got some directions from the merchant, we did a little bit of investigation into the Spanning chasm (AKA the cliffs of insanity, The 4chan crevasse, The troll pit and a dozen other lowbrow references) and we wound up discussing all of our options for getting to the bottom, and let me tell you, due to the magics involved in our wagon (which shrinks everyone and everything around the wagon and puts it into a small terrarium that we can carry around) we had a few including but not limited to:
Seeing if we can get the wagon converted into a full on golem so that the thing can just climb down for us.
Ultimately, we proceeded to sneak our way through what appeared to be an open air mass grave before coming across titania in a cage and being held prisoner by some nefarious A-hole who intended to ressurect some dead gods and appeared to be in league with a Mage named Shade that we'd encountered earlier (and that lady had threatened to annihilate the feywild in Mabb's presence, with the queen of the unseelie court begging for our help) so putting the screws to this guy seemed like a good idea, and I announced to the GM that I would be casting a new spell for the first time.
There was a pause for a moment and a brief conversation that went like this:
"He's not high enough level to cast that"
"He is indeed"
"GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!"
"When this guy comes out I'm going to cast animal summoning"
"I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU SPAM WOLVES"
"Ok. I won't."
"Ok Good."
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
Because the best easiest way to balance something is...to not balance it at all, but include a special mention that technically the DM can always tell you to go fuck yourself by invalidating your character archetype.
Technically the spell description also says "up to x creatures of CR y or less", so the DM is also free to go "oh, you spent a level 5 spell slot on an upscaled Conjure Animals? The book says you should get 4 CR 2 creatures, like a bunch of rad polar bears? Well, a single CR 0 fish flops uselessly onto the ground instead. Your fish begins to suffocate." but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually do so.
If a DM doesn't like the impact of summoning spells, the correct(ish) solution is just to tell your players up-front "no summoning spells", not to arbitrarily post-facto fuck them over after they've built a summoner and prepped and cast some summons.
I've asked my DM repeatedly to tell me which spells my Mystic is not allowed to use (there is usually grumbles any time i pull out something i haven't done yet at the table usually mind reading or mind control related), and he tells me he doesn't want to do that, and instead he'll just silently fake pass the saving throw if he thinks it would mess up his story. He didn't say if he's done it yet, but i think he may have once so far.
I've asked my DM repeatedly to tell me which spells my Mystic is not allowed to use (there is usually grumbles any time i pull out something i haven't done yet at the table usually mind reading or mind control related), and he tells me he doesn't want to do that, and instead he'll just silently fake pass the saving throw if he thinks it would mess up his story. He didn't say if he's done it yet, but i think he may have once so far.
Always know your player's abilities, and take with good grace when you've totally fuckin forgot and their ability totally corn fucks your game. Don't worry the party will lead itself into calamity soon enough.
I've asked my DM repeatedly to tell me which spells my Mystic is not allowed to use (there is usually grumbles any time i pull out something i haven't done yet at the table usually mind reading or mind control related), and he tells me he doesn't want to do that, and instead he'll just silently fake pass the saving throw if he thinks it would mess up his story. He didn't say if he's done it yet, but i think he may have once so far.
Always know your player's abilities, and take with good grace when you've totally fuckin forgot and their ability totally corn fucks your game. Don't worry the party will lead itself into calamity soon enough.
Or if you don't want to put in the work balancing playtest material...just don't allow it.
Iirc atleast one if the psionics one is supposed to be broken AF.
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
Because the best easiest way to balance something is...to not balance it at all, but include a special mention that technically the DM can always tell you to go fuck yourself by invalidating your character archetype.
Technically the spell description also says "up to x creatures of CR y or less", so the DM is also free to go "oh, you spent a level 5 spell slot on an upscaled Conjure Animals? The book says you should get 4 CR 2 creatures, like a bunch of rad polar bears? Well, a single CR 0 fish flops uselessly onto the ground instead. Your fish begins to suffocate." but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually do so.
If a DM doesn't like the impact of summoning spells, the correct(ish) solution is just to tell your players up-front "no summoning spells", not to arbitrarily post-facto fuck them over after they've built a summoner and prepped and cast some summons.
What you describe is incredibly stupid and petty.
If a player cannot stop themselves from being cheesy then the DM has every right to step in and curtail it.
This does not break a character concept. Replacing the wolves or flying snakes with creatures that aren't gimmicky in some way doesn't make the ranger/druid any less rangery or druidy.
The correct solution is to let things run their course and adjust if it gets out of hand.
Outright banning spells indicates that either the DM or the player lack the maturity to handle any disputes and isn't a table I'd want to play at.
Honestly, the most irritating thing about the wolf spam I find, is that it slows the game down to a crawl since pack tactics affords you advantage and with 8+ attacks thats going to bloat out the turn really bad, though that's still not as migraine inducing as velociraptor spam; that shit gets you 16 attacks that you have to do 1 at a time due to pack tactics.
Further, the BBEG in this prticular scenario is almost assuredly a melee warlock who was running around with a belt of fire giant's strength during an earlier campaign, so for me it's more a case of infuriating the crap out of him with an enemy he either has to ignore, eat up precious spell slots/protections or do prepared actions against on his turn.
Also: me doing things like this ensures that the GM weeps for joy when I use moon beam.
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
Because the best easiest way to balance something is...to not balance it at all, but include a special mention that technically the DM can always tell you to go fuck yourself by invalidating your character archetype.
Technically the spell description also says "up to x creatures of CR y or less", so the DM is also free to go "oh, you spent a level 5 spell slot on an upscaled Conjure Animals? The book says you should get 4 CR 2 creatures, like a bunch of rad polar bears? Well, a single CR 0 fish flops uselessly onto the ground instead. Your fish begins to suffocate." but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually do so.
If a DM doesn't like the impact of summoning spells, the correct(ish) solution is just to tell your players up-front "no summoning spells", not to arbitrarily post-facto fuck them over after they've built a summoner and prepped and cast some summons.
What you describe is incredibly stupid and petty.
If a player cannot stop themselves from being cheesy then the DM has every right to step in and curtail it.
This does not break a character concept. Replacing the wolves or flying snakes with creatures that aren't gimmicky in some way doesn't make the ranger/druid any less rangery or druidy.
The correct solution is to let things run their course and adjust if it gets out of hand.
Outright banning spells indicates that either the DM or the player lack the maturity to handle any disputes and isn't a table I'd want to play at.
It is incredibly stupid and petty, yes. A better solution is to just follow the rules of the game, with the understanding that "but the DM can always change whatever they want, so really if something is poorly balanced or designed it's your fault, customer!" isn't actually a rule, but rather an option for ignoring the rules.
Banning spells is more reasonable and mature than 'allowing' them, but only with the caveat that you'll override their text to make them only as effective as you feel like letting them be at the time. Only letting your players summon shitty things they don't want until they decide they'd rather spend their spell slots on something else is functionally the same as banning the spell in the first place, but without the integrity or maturity of being up-front with your players about it.
See above, where a player is playing a mystic and the DM thinks it's overpowered so instead of being upfront with the player about which specific abilities he doesn't like and what to do about it, the DM is instead going to 'let' the player do whatever, but secretly neuter their effectiveness whenever they feel like it. That's a childish way to solve the problem, and it creates a toxic, frustrating play environment that wouldn't exist if the DM was willing to just hash out his concerns with the player until they arrived at a mutually equitable solution. "Nerfing" summoning spells by arbitrarily restricting what they summon when cast is exactly the same thing.
The best solution is to just let the players cast their shit without interference, but if a DM is unwilling to do that, explaining to players at the start of things what they're not going to let the players do and why is a much better solution than 'fixing' their spells as they cast them.
Frankly, I'd totes be down with altering the conjure zoo spells so that they eliminate fraction summons (thus cutting down on hordes) and/or require you to use an action to make them attack/cast spells ect (again, evening out the action economy).
Because the only other reliable counter to zoo spam is to start liberally passing out resistance and/or immunity and that's a truckload of suck in it's own right.
Frankly, I'd totes be down with altering the conjure zoo spells so that they eliminate fraction summons (thus cutting down on hordes) and/or require you to use an action to make them attack/cast spells ect (again, evening out the action economy).
This is half the problem and yet another hilarious example of 5e designers not understanding how 5e works.
You get 1 CR 2 creature, or 2 CR 1 creatures, or 4 CR 1/2 creatures, or 8 CR 1/4 creatures - all options nominally of equal strength because they all add up to CR 2, right?
Wrong!
The DMG encounter creation rules make it very clear that encounters with more monsters are harder (because they get more actions etc), and so the CR value of an encounter is based on the CR of the monsters involved multiplied by a number based on the number of monsters involved.
1 CR 2 creature is a CR 2 encounter, with a modified xp value of 450. 8 CR 1/4 creatures have a modified xp value of 1,000, roughly equivalent to 1 CR 4 monster.
They knew that power level didn't scale linearly with the number of creatures, wrote the encounter-building rules to account for it, and then still wrote the summoning spells wrong anyway, so that summoning the largest possible number of monsters is twice as powerful as summoning the smallest possible number of much stronger ones.
Summon spells would be much less disruptive and much closer to lining up with the encounter math if the options were "1 CR 2 creature, or 2 CR 1 creatures, or 3 CR 1/2 creatures. At higher levels: When you cast this spell with a higher-level spell slot, you choose one of the previous options and more creatures appear: One additional creature for each spell level above 3rd"
Because the only other reliable counter to zoo spam is to start liberally passing out resistance and/or immunity and that's a truckload of suck in it's own right.
This isn't really true, though - there are plenty of ways to design monster abilities to deal with hordes if you want to, starting with the simple expedients of fireballs and upleveled magic missiles from spellcasting monsters, or frightful presence-style effects from non-spellcasting ones.
It is a pretty comical oversight that summoning creatures is done by summing up their total CR instead of saying "you may summon up to X creatures which combine for an encounter of CR Y or less"
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
Because the best easiest way to balance something is...to not balance it at all, but include a special mention that technically the DM can always tell you to go fuck yourself by invalidating your character archetype.
Technically the spell description also says "up to x creatures of CR y or less", so the DM is also free to go "oh, you spent a level 5 spell slot on an upscaled Conjure Animals? The book says you should get 4 CR 2 creatures, like a bunch of rad polar bears? Well, a single CR 0 fish flops uselessly onto the ground instead. Your fish begins to suffocate." but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually do so.
If a DM doesn't like the impact of summoning spells, the correct(ish) solution is just to tell your players up-front "no summoning spells", not to arbitrarily post-facto fuck them over after they've built a summoner and prepped and cast some summons.
What you describe is incredibly stupid and petty.
If a player cannot stop themselves from being cheesy then the DM has every right to step in and curtail it.
This does not break a character concept. Replacing the wolves or flying snakes with creatures that aren't gimmicky in some way doesn't make the ranger/druid any less rangery or druidy.
The correct solution is to let things run their course and adjust if it gets out of hand.
Outright banning spells indicates that either the DM or the player lack the maturity to handle any disputes and isn't a table I'd want to play at.
It is incredibly stupid and petty, yes. A better solution is to just follow the rules of the game, with the understanding that "but the DM can always change whatever they want, so really if something is poorly balanced or designed it's your fault, customer!" isn't actually a rule, but rather an option for ignoring the rules.
Banning spells is more reasonable and mature than 'allowing' them, but only with the caveat that you'll override their text to make them only as effective as you feel like letting them be at the time. Only letting your players summon shitty things they don't want until they decide they'd rather spend their spell slots on something else is functionally the same as banning the spell in the first place, but without the integrity or maturity of being up-front with your players about it.
See above, where a player is playing a mystic and the DM thinks it's overpowered so instead of being upfront with the player about which specific abilities he doesn't like and what to do about it, the DM is instead going to 'let' the player do whatever, but secretly neuter their effectiveness whenever they feel like it. That's a childish way to solve the problem, and it creates a toxic, frustrating play environment that wouldn't exist if the DM was willing to just hash out his concerns with the player until they arrived at a mutually equitable solution. "Nerfing" summoning spells by arbitrarily restricting what they summon when cast is exactly the same thing.
The best solution is to just let the players cast their shit without interference, but if a DM is unwilling to do that, explaining to players at the start of things what they're not going to let the players do and why is a much better solution than 'fixing' their spells as they cast them.
But that's the design philosophy behind 5e.
Rulings, not rules. If you don't like it then you're in for a bad time with 5e.
And I simply don't agree with you on your points.
First, You're black and whiting the issue, for you there's OP critters (that the players want to play) and cr0 fish. There are a ton of options inbetween that don't make the DM's life (and ultimately, the players') miserable.
On top of that, your second argument makes no sense and doesn't correspond to what I'm suggesting.
Bleh I'm done with this topic, you're so far off the mark I can't see any middle ground.
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
Because the best easiest way to balance something is...to not balance it at all, but include a special mention that technically the DM can always tell you to go fuck yourself by invalidating your character archetype.
Technically the spell description also says "up to x creatures of CR y or less", so the DM is also free to go "oh, you spent a level 5 spell slot on an upscaled Conjure Animals? The book says you should get 4 CR 2 creatures, like a bunch of rad polar bears? Well, a single CR 0 fish flops uselessly onto the ground instead. Your fish begins to suffocate." but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually do so.
If a DM doesn't like the impact of summoning spells, the correct(ish) solution is just to tell your players up-front "no summoning spells", not to arbitrarily post-facto fuck them over after they've built a summoner and prepped and cast some summons.
What you describe is incredibly stupid and petty.
If a player cannot stop themselves from being cheesy then the DM has every right to step in and curtail it.
This does not break a character concept. Replacing the wolves or flying snakes with creatures that aren't gimmicky in some way doesn't make the ranger/druid any less rangery or druidy.
The correct solution is to let things run their course and adjust if it gets out of hand.
Outright banning spells indicates that either the DM or the player lack the maturity to handle any disputes and isn't a table I'd want to play at.
It is incredibly stupid and petty, yes. A better solution is to just follow the rules of the game, with the understanding that "but the DM can always change whatever they want, so really if something is poorly balanced or designed it's your fault, customer!" isn't actually a rule, but rather an option for ignoring the rules.
Banning spells is more reasonable and mature than 'allowing' them, but only with the caveat that you'll override their text to make them only as effective as you feel like letting them be at the time. Only letting your players summon shitty things they don't want until they decide they'd rather spend their spell slots on something else is functionally the same as banning the spell in the first place, but without the integrity or maturity of being up-front with your players about it.
See above, where a player is playing a mystic and the DM thinks it's overpowered so instead of being upfront with the player about which specific abilities he doesn't like and what to do about it, the DM is instead going to 'let' the player do whatever, but secretly neuter their effectiveness whenever they feel like it. That's a childish way to solve the problem, and it creates a toxic, frustrating play environment that wouldn't exist if the DM was willing to just hash out his concerns with the player until they arrived at a mutually equitable solution. "Nerfing" summoning spells by arbitrarily restricting what they summon when cast is exactly the same thing.
The best solution is to just let the players cast their shit without interference, but if a DM is unwilling to do that, explaining to players at the start of things what they're not going to let the players do and why is a much better solution than 'fixing' their spells as they cast them.
But that's the design philosophy behind 5e.
Rulings, not rules. If you don't like it then you're in for a bad time with 5e.
And I simply don't agree with you on your points.
First, You're black and whiting the issue, for you there's OP critters (that the players want to play) and cr0 fish. There are a ton of options inbetween that don't make the DM's life (and ultimately, the players') miserable.
On top of that, your second argument makes no sense and doesn't correspond to what I'm suggesting.
Bleh I'm done with this topic, you're so far off the mark I can't see any middle ground.
I know it's the design philosophy behind 5e. It's a bad design philosophy. It makes the gameplay experience inconsistent and increases the barrier to entry for new players and especially for new DMs. It's not even really a design philosophy, it's the absence of a design philosophy. Our system is whatever you want it to be! All the rules are optional, all the content is crowdsourced from the players and sold back to them, and the rulebook is made from material so fine that only the wisest can see it!
I'm not really reducing anything to black and white - the fish was an example of how just because the DM can do something doesn't mean the DM should. Sure, there are a bunch of middling monsters you could foist on your players, and if your player is okay with you taking away their agency to make their spells perform to mediocre effect maybe that's fine, but that's not something most players are likely to enjoy, and it relies on the incredibly unlikely scenario where your opinion of what is overpowered/good/bad and your players' opinions of what is overpowered/good/bad are all the same, and the end result is likely to be that the player just starts casting something else with a more reliable effect that they have more control over. At that point you've banned the spell in all but name.
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
Because the best easiest way to balance something is...to not balance it at all, but include a special mention that technically the DM can always tell you to go fuck yourself by invalidating your character archetype.
Technically the spell description also says "up to x creatures of CR y or less", so the DM is also free to go "oh, you spent a level 5 spell slot on an upscaled Conjure Animals? The book says you should get 4 CR 2 creatures, like a bunch of rad polar bears? Well, a single CR 0 fish flops uselessly onto the ground instead. Your fish begins to suffocate." but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually do so.
If a DM doesn't like the impact of summoning spells, the correct(ish) solution is just to tell your players up-front "no summoning spells", not to arbitrarily post-facto fuck them over after they've built a summoner and prepped and cast some summons.
What you describe is incredibly stupid and petty.
If a player cannot stop themselves from being cheesy then the DM has every right to step in and curtail it.
This does not break a character concept. Replacing the wolves or flying snakes with creatures that aren't gimmicky in some way doesn't make the ranger/druid any less rangery or druidy.
The correct solution is to let things run their course and adjust if it gets out of hand.
Outright banning spells indicates that either the DM or the player lack the maturity to handle any disputes and isn't a table I'd want to play at.
It is incredibly stupid and petty, yes. A better solution is to just follow the rules of the game, with the understanding that "but the DM can always change whatever they want, so really if something is poorly balanced or designed it's your fault, customer!" isn't actually a rule, but rather an option for ignoring the rules.
Banning spells is more reasonable and mature than 'allowing' them, but only with the caveat that you'll override their text to make them only as effective as you feel like letting them be at the time. Only letting your players summon shitty things they don't want until they decide they'd rather spend their spell slots on something else is functionally the same as banning the spell in the first place, but without the integrity or maturity of being up-front with your players about it.
See above, where a player is playing a mystic and the DM thinks it's overpowered so instead of being upfront with the player about which specific abilities he doesn't like and what to do about it, the DM is instead going to 'let' the player do whatever, but secretly neuter their effectiveness whenever they feel like it. That's a childish way to solve the problem, and it creates a toxic, frustrating play environment that wouldn't exist if the DM was willing to just hash out his concerns with the player until they arrived at a mutually equitable solution. "Nerfing" summoning spells by arbitrarily restricting what they summon when cast is exactly the same thing.
The best solution is to just let the players cast their shit without interference, but if a DM is unwilling to do that, explaining to players at the start of things what they're not going to let the players do and why is a much better solution than 'fixing' their spells as they cast them.
But that's the design philosophy behind 5e.
Rulings, not rules. If you don't like it then you're in for a bad time with 5e.
And I simply don't agree with you on your points.
First, You're black and whiting the issue, for you there's OP critters (that the players want to play) and cr0 fish. There are a ton of options inbetween that don't make the DM's life (and ultimately, the players') miserable.
On top of that, your second argument makes no sense and doesn't correspond to what I'm suggesting.
Bleh I'm done with this topic, you're so far off the mark I can't see any middle ground.
I know it's the design philosophy behind 5e. It's a bad design philosophy. It makes the gameplay experience inconsistent and increases the barrier to entry for new players and especially for new DMs. It's not even really a design philosophy, it's the absence of a design philosophy. Our system is whatever you want it to be! All the rules are optional, all the content is crowdsourced from the players and sold back to them, and the rulebook is made from material so fine that only the wisest can see it!
I'm not really reducing anything to black and white - the fish was an example of how just because the DM can do something doesn't mean the DM should. Sure, there are a bunch of middling monsters you could foist on your players, and if your player is okay with you taking away their agency to make their spells perform to mediocre effect maybe that's fine, but that's not something most players are likely to enjoy, and it relies on the incredibly unlikely scenario where your opinion of what is overpowered/good/bad and your players' opinions of what is overpowered/good/bad are all the same, and the end result is likely to be that the player just starts casting something else with a more reliable effect that they have more control over. At that point you've banned the spell in all but name.
Personally, I and my table love that design decision, and I have no problem pulling in new players.
The play experience between tables is always inconsistent, no matter the rules system being used because DMing is half performance art, and what you personally bring to the table in demeanor and delivery will have far more effect on the gameplay and player enjoyment than the rules will.
Also new players don't give a shit how summoning spells work. That is like the most minor of details next to, "hey read these thousands of pages spread across 3 $50 books in order to play this game about imagining you are an elf". There's already a lot of barriers, and it takes someone with advanced understanding of the system to notice that the summoning spells may need a little tweaking.
I mean, we've been through this conversation a number of times, but the problems with 'rulings not rules' are not restricted to arcane things like the particular mechanics of conjure spells.
The play experience is always inconsistent to some degree because the DM always has the option to ignore/alter/overwrite rules, in every tabletop system since the dawn of time. That's fine. The designers still have a responsibility to provide a coherent, consistent, balanced set of rules for DMs to start from, and making 'rulings not rules' the core philosophy of your design serves no purpose except as a permanent shield against fulfilling those responsibilities. Now, every time some part of your system is poorly designed or broken, you can just tell the customer 'rulings not rules, working as intended! you have the power to fix it!'...but the customer has always had the power to fix it, it's just that they're supposed to be paying you for your book so that you will give them something that doesn't need fixing. That's the fundamental point of a tabletop system, otherwise you might as well just play pretend by whatever rules you feel like making up on the spot and not shell out $90 for a set of rulebooks that explicitly don't want to provide you with rules.
The idea that the 'fix' for summoning is for the DM to determine what is summoned is a microcosm of the larger problem: Not only does it offload the responsibility of writing a 'fair' spell from the designers to the DM, and make the rules unclear, inconsistent, and likely frustrating for players, but it also means that there's a bunch of extra knowledge the DM needs to have in order to DM well and fairly - what is fair for a level 3 spell, how strong should the effect be, what's the difference in power level between summoning one large creature or eight small ones, how do all these different statblocks work, is two brown bears stronger or weaker than four crocodiles, what do my players think is fair and are they going to feel cheated if I give them three black bears instead of eight wolves, why does everyone want to summon wolves and flying snakes so badly, are pixies stronger than sprites even though they're both CR 1/4, and so on. And all of that is information that a new DM in particular might not have, and that no DM would need to run the game effectively if the spell had just been written correctly in the first place by the people who were selling it. Expecting the people at the table to 'fix' your game on the fly - and encoding that intent into your design philosophy as though it is a feature, and defending the broken parts of it as not really being broken because they can be repaired by someone else - is demanding a level of system mastery and a grasp of game design that the overwhelming majority of players simply do not have, and should not need when they're buying a product that is supposed to provide those things for them.
And a new player will absolutely give a shit how summoning spells work when they build a cool summoner druid and then when they go to summon something you tell them they can't summon what they want based on a 'rule' that incidentally isn't even in the rulebook but comes from an online advice column.
Theres no way to build your chatacter for summoning outside of using the spell. Theres no ability scores to aim for, there's no class features to take, there's no feats to take. Nothing really increases the effects of conjure animals/woodland beasts. By building a badass summoner you mean building a 5th level druid or a 9th level ranger and taking the conjure animals spell.
It's near impossible to make summoning 'fair'. You are essentially getting yourself extra turns with multiple characters. It totally wangs the game no matter what you do.
You can't even begin to compare that to say fireball or call lightning numerically because there are too many variables and effects and situational factors at play in the effectiveness of conjure animals.
However both a fireball and a conjure animals will drastically alter the balance of this current combat in favor of the person using it, and that's really the important factor there.
Also conjure spells are pretty easy to fuck with considering its a concentration spell, and the animals are terribly easy to kill. Like, conjure animals creates a round or two road block that's about it (Oh no the player's spell is effective what a shame). Basically I'm not seeing the essential need for that particular 'fix'. I thought it was just an idea for thematic control if you don't like them always summoning the same thing. I'm personally fine with players always summoning the same shit, it makes it easier to design encounters to counter or accentuate what is normally a curveball of a spell.
It is a pretty comical oversight that summoning creatures is done by summing up their total CR instead of saying "you may summon up to X creatures which combine for an encounter of CR Y or less"
Because then everyone would have to understand encounter math.
Anyway the real problem with summoning spells is needing the stat blocks for all the creatures. I don't think they're fun in combat because they slow things down.
Now outside of combat as a utility spell go wild. Then i don't really need statblocks(or to add up to 8 enemies to an encounter!) i just need to know how you're using the summon.
It's near impossible to make summoning 'fair'. You are essentially getting yourself extra turns with multiple characters. It totally wangs the game no matter what you do.
The Edition Which Must Not Be Named had done it immediately prior by having designers that understood what action economy meant.
Third (not 3.5) was generally fine because Summons generally brought in creatures that weren't terribly good. 3.5 wanged this hard by changing the creature list for druids and removing a big part of the opportunity cost for them.
It's near impossible to make summoning 'fair'. You are essentially getting yourself extra turns with multiple characters. It totally wangs the game no matter what you do.
The Edition Which Must Not Be Named had done it immediately prior by having designers that understood what action economy meant.
Third (not 3.5) was generally fine because Summons generally brought in creatures that weren't terribly good. 3.5 wanged this hard by changing the creature list for druids and removing a big part of the opportunity cost for them.
Yeah, it's super easy to make summoning fair. WotC literally learned how to do it in 4e, and then unlearned it again just for 5e.
It's even easier to at least make summoning non-disruptive by just not writing a summoning spell that allows you to summon 16 of something and then fucking up the math in such a way that you're almost always incentivized to do so.
Most of the actual complaints about summoning don't stem from it being unfairly powerful (although it generally is), but from it gumming up combat by adding a bunch of extra creatures that all have to be individually piloted and tracked. A summoning spell that could only summon 1-2 things at a time wouldn't have that problem even if the power level were the same (and it wouldn't be, because action economy).
Treating a summoned pack of wolves as some sort of horde would have probably been a better idea. Give it a single better attack, maybe a small damaging aura and let it take up more spaces to let it serve as a sort of terrain spell and it could be manageable. Of course, those sorts of abstractions are poison to the ideas behind how 5th models stuff.
If they made animal summoning a long cast time (like, a minute or more) I'd think that would also solve a lot of the abuse, while still allowing for cool non-combat uses and the occasional epic setpiece.
It is a pretty comical oversight that summoning creatures is done by summing up their total CR instead of saying "you may summon up to X creatures which combine for an encounter of CR Y or less"
Because then everyone would have to understand encounter math.
Anyway the real problem with summoning spells is needing the stat blocks for all the creatures. I don't think they're fun in combat because they slow things down.
Now outside of combat as a utility spell go wild. Then i don't really need statblocks(or to add up to 8 enemies to an encounter!) i just need to know how you're using the summon.
In practice I've never actually had summoning bog down an encounter in 5e, even adding 8 creatures to the board is fairly quick because all they are gong to do is attack, maybe with some kind of save inducing effect, and possibly provoke opportunity attacks if they are the first commanded to leave threat without dissengage, and then eat up a round or two of enemy attacks (The true benefit of conjure animal spells)
But I can also crush out a 40 member combat (including party and monsters with players multi sheeting) in under an hour so maybe my tables are just super efficient and the problem just doesn't present itself for us. I'm willing to admit that's possible.
It is a pretty comical oversight that summoning creatures is done by summing up their total CR instead of saying "you may summon up to X creatures which combine for an encounter of CR Y or less"
Because then everyone would have to understand encounter math.
Anyway the real problem with summoning spells is needing the stat blocks for all the creatures. I don't think they're fun in combat because they slow things down.
Now outside of combat as a utility spell go wild. Then i don't really need statblocks(or to add up to 8 enemies to an encounter!) i just need to know how you're using the summon.
In practice I've never actually had summoning bog down an encounter in 5e, even adding 8 creatures to the board is fairly quick because all they are gong to do is attack, maybe with some kind of save inducing effect, and possibly provoke opportunity attacks if they are the first commanded to leave threat without dissengage, and then eat up a round or two of enemy attacks (The true benefit of conjure animal spells)
But I can also crush out a 40 member combat (including party and monsters with players multi sheeting) in under an hour so maybe my tables are just super efficient and the problem just doesn't present itself for us. I'm willing to admit that's possible.
I, too, am willing to admit that maybe I'm just too great and that I don't experience the problems others do because I am so skillfully effective. This confession is a sacrifice that I am willing to make, because I am also selfless, and humble
and devastatingly handsome
unfortunately I am told that lesser folk still play DnD and so the game still needs to be designed around their feebleness and not the limitless capacities of ubermenschen like us
If they made animal summoning a long cast time (like, a minute or more) I'd think that would also solve a lot of the abuse, while still allowing for cool non-combat uses and the occasional epic setpiece.
keep in mind the spell lasts for an hour - all a long cast time is likely to do is encourage players to summon their stuff pre-combat and start fights with the summons already out. And they're already often incentivized to do that anyway, both because it frees up their round 1 action and because it gives them warm bodies to soak up missed traps. (Or in the case of conjure fey and pixies, because you want out-of-combat access to their spells)
Posts
No joke, and the skills I'm not proficient in I still get 1/2 proficiency bonus. Its nuts.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Jesus, you weren't kidding.
Two entire Abjuration spells: one at level 1, one at level 9.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Amazon says November 17th
https://www.amazon.com/Xanathars-Guide-Everything-Wizards-Team/dp/0786966114/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1507918889&sr=8-1&keywords=xanathar+guide+to+everything
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
To be fair, that 30 bucks on Amazon is marked down from a 50 buck MSRP.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Just couldn't say no to the beholder on the cover. Dude just looks so happy.
Not just like, happy for a beholder, which are normally depicted as balls of anger, paranoia and an array of death laser tentacles. But just really happy to be there watching his crystal ball.
Okay.
That just makes it better.
2 rolls for initiative, 1 sequence break, 30 days of nothing happening, 1 player obliterated, many failed saves.
After exiting the death cave, our party took to the river in hopes of getting to our destination more quickly and it was working good... right up until we got to a swamp, with a fortified camp near by. Feeling social, we stopped by to say hello and quickly learned that the camp was suffering from a shortage of able bodied defenders due to a "sickness", and that the captain of the guard wanted us to ferry his sick camp members back to the port... which was two weeks in the wrong direction.
It turns out that the "sickness" was something called dancing monkey fever, which you get from eating this wild fruit. Which the camp defenders had eaten intentionally because they were hungry and didn't care about the consequences. I can only presume that this base was established less as a forward staging ground then as a Quarantine zone for the most abjectly stupid people on Toril.
After threatening to arrest us if we didn't help we made a compromise where in we lent them our two rowboats and then stood watch in order to hold back the unending tide of the undead. Or perhaps I should say "Non-existent", since the terrible scourge of undead were nowhere to be found as the GM failed 14 straight rolls of 16 or better to spark a random encounter. For our efforts, we got 30 gold.
Things got much more interesting as we passed through a swamp and came across an earth mote, which immediatley caught peoples attention since hey check it out: it's a giant dirt clod floating 100 feet up in the air. Naturally, the party came to the conclusion that this was something we just had to interact with and we immediatley tried to figure a way to get up to it (For my part I made an offering of mayo to it), settling on a contrived plan of having our druid ride an arrow up to it while wild shaped into squirrel form.
Once up their, we realized that the druid neither had the ability to get us up to it nor did he have a way to get back down despite my two attempts to rules lawyer animals that could survive the descent (the ant because you can't kill one from falling and the sugar glider because it doesn't actually fly) so he instead chose to investigate an entrance into the mote... which had a lich inside of it that simply disintegrated him.
We were now up to two deaths but this one didn't hurt so much because the player at least got to roll for initative before getting reduced to a pile of dust. Progress!
Eventually though, we did make it to the mountains and after choosing to avoid going into a tower that was a stop over for a red dragon (wherein my kobold squeed like a child getting a puppy on christmas morning) met up with the dwarves and briefly learned of our reward (21 ingots of adamentine) before descending a lift into the heart of the mountains to stomp on some fire newts.
After a little bit of scouting (which netted me a lump adamentine ore, I headed back and found the rest of the party engaging 8 newts who had managed to flambe multiple party members who failed their DC 11 dex saves. Mustering all of my nerve and carefully noting the relative position of the Newts I dove into the thickest mass of them and then proceeded to grovel, cower and beg that they not murder us which had the GM smiling until he realized that this wasn't simply a case of cowardice but instead me activating a racial ability that granted advantage against all of them for a time for my companions, who proceeded to rapidly murder them.
Mearls you son of a bitch. Give up the goods if you know what's good for you.
First off, we went to interrogate a rival merchant who we suspected was involved in the disapearance of titania the summer queen, and after sicking a bronze griffin on the mules for his wagon, we were confronted by his bouncer team of 2 flesh golems... Which would have been really bad, except Flesh golems have this pesky fear of fire which ensured they didn't do anything other then run away as we pelted them with fire bolts, a flaming sphere and a paladin swinging away with a flame tongue. All of this low stakes drama was only made more absurd by the staggeringly shitty initiative rolls of everyone at the table; the highest was a god damn 6 and neither of the golems got to do anything before they started running for the hills due to "fire bad!".
After we got some directions from the merchant, we did a little bit of investigation into the Spanning chasm (AKA the cliffs of insanity, The 4chan crevasse, The troll pit and a dozen other lowbrow references) and we wound up discussing all of our options for getting to the bottom, and let me tell you, due to the magics involved in our wagon (which shrinks everyone and everything around the wagon and puts it into a small terrarium that we can carry around) we had a few including but not limited to:
Ultimately, we proceeded to sneak our way through what appeared to be an open air mass grave before coming across titania in a cage and being held prisoner by some nefarious A-hole who intended to ressurect some dead gods and appeared to be in league with a Mage named Shade that we'd encountered earlier (and that lady had threatened to annihilate the feywild in Mabb's presence, with the queen of the unseelie court begging for our help) so putting the screws to this guy seemed like a good idea, and I announced to the GM that I would be casting a new spell for the first time.
There was a pause for a moment and a brief conversation that went like this:
"He's not high enough level to cast that"
"He is indeed"
"GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!"
"When this guy comes out I'm going to cast animal summoning"
"I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU SPAM WOLVES"
"Ok. I won't."
"Ok Good."
The villain appears and gives a speech.
"I summon 8 flying snakes"
"I hate you so much"
Land druid is so much fun
not to put a damper on your spirits, but the DM decides which animals pop out.
Same with conjure fey.
Precisely because players tend to pick cheesy stat blocks.
Because the best easiest way to balance something is...to not balance it at all, but include a special mention that technically the DM can always tell you to go fuck yourself by invalidating your character archetype.
Technically the spell description also says "up to x creatures of CR y or less", so the DM is also free to go "oh, you spent a level 5 spell slot on an upscaled Conjure Animals? The book says you should get 4 CR 2 creatures, like a bunch of rad polar bears? Well, a single CR 0 fish flops uselessly onto the ground instead. Your fish begins to suffocate." but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually do so.
If a DM doesn't like the impact of summoning spells, the correct(ish) solution is just to tell your players up-front "no summoning spells", not to arbitrarily post-facto fuck them over after they've built a summoner and prepped and cast some summons.
Always know your player's abilities, and take with good grace when you've totally fuckin forgot and their ability totally corn fucks your game. Don't worry the party will lead itself into calamity soon enough.
Or if you don't want to put in the work balancing playtest material...just don't allow it.
Iirc atleast one if the psionics one is supposed to be broken AF.
What you describe is incredibly stupid and petty.
If a player cannot stop themselves from being cheesy then the DM has every right to step in and curtail it.
This does not break a character concept. Replacing the wolves or flying snakes with creatures that aren't gimmicky in some way doesn't make the ranger/druid any less rangery or druidy.
The correct solution is to let things run their course and adjust if it gets out of hand.
Outright banning spells indicates that either the DM or the player lack the maturity to handle any disputes and isn't a table I'd want to play at.
Further, the BBEG in this prticular scenario is almost assuredly a melee warlock who was running around with a belt of fire giant's strength during an earlier campaign, so for me it's more a case of infuriating the crap out of him with an enemy he either has to ignore, eat up precious spell slots/protections or do prepared actions against on his turn.
Also: me doing things like this ensures that the GM weeps for joy when I use moon beam.
It is incredibly stupid and petty, yes. A better solution is to just follow the rules of the game, with the understanding that "but the DM can always change whatever they want, so really if something is poorly balanced or designed it's your fault, customer!" isn't actually a rule, but rather an option for ignoring the rules.
Banning spells is more reasonable and mature than 'allowing' them, but only with the caveat that you'll override their text to make them only as effective as you feel like letting them be at the time. Only letting your players summon shitty things they don't want until they decide they'd rather spend their spell slots on something else is functionally the same as banning the spell in the first place, but without the integrity or maturity of being up-front with your players about it.
See above, where a player is playing a mystic and the DM thinks it's overpowered so instead of being upfront with the player about which specific abilities he doesn't like and what to do about it, the DM is instead going to 'let' the player do whatever, but secretly neuter their effectiveness whenever they feel like it. That's a childish way to solve the problem, and it creates a toxic, frustrating play environment that wouldn't exist if the DM was willing to just hash out his concerns with the player until they arrived at a mutually equitable solution. "Nerfing" summoning spells by arbitrarily restricting what they summon when cast is exactly the same thing.
The best solution is to just let the players cast their shit without interference, but if a DM is unwilling to do that, explaining to players at the start of things what they're not going to let the players do and why is a much better solution than 'fixing' their spells as they cast them.
Because the only other reliable counter to zoo spam is to start liberally passing out resistance and/or immunity and that's a truckload of suck in it's own right.
This is half the problem and yet another hilarious example of 5e designers not understanding how 5e works.
You get 1 CR 2 creature, or 2 CR 1 creatures, or 4 CR 1/2 creatures, or 8 CR 1/4 creatures - all options nominally of equal strength because they all add up to CR 2, right?
Wrong!
The DMG encounter creation rules make it very clear that encounters with more monsters are harder (because they get more actions etc), and so the CR value of an encounter is based on the CR of the monsters involved multiplied by a number based on the number of monsters involved.
1 CR 2 creature is a CR 2 encounter, with a modified xp value of 450. 8 CR 1/4 creatures have a modified xp value of 1,000, roughly equivalent to 1 CR 4 monster.
They knew that power level didn't scale linearly with the number of creatures, wrote the encounter-building rules to account for it, and then still wrote the summoning spells wrong anyway, so that summoning the largest possible number of monsters is twice as powerful as summoning the smallest possible number of much stronger ones.
Summon spells would be much less disruptive and much closer to lining up with the encounter math if the options were "1 CR 2 creature, or 2 CR 1 creatures, or 3 CR 1/2 creatures. At higher levels: When you cast this spell with a higher-level spell slot, you choose one of the previous options and more creatures appear: One additional creature for each spell level above 3rd"
This isn't really true, though - there are plenty of ways to design monster abilities to deal with hordes if you want to, starting with the simple expedients of fireballs and upleveled magic missiles from spellcasting monsters, or frightful presence-style effects from non-spellcasting ones.
But that's the design philosophy behind 5e.
Rulings, not rules. If you don't like it then you're in for a bad time with 5e.
And I simply don't agree with you on your points.
First, You're black and whiting the issue, for you there's OP critters (that the players want to play) and cr0 fish. There are a ton of options inbetween that don't make the DM's life (and ultimately, the players') miserable.
On top of that, your second argument makes no sense and doesn't correspond to what I'm suggesting.
Bleh I'm done with this topic, you're so far off the mark I can't see any middle ground.
I know it's the design philosophy behind 5e. It's a bad design philosophy. It makes the gameplay experience inconsistent and increases the barrier to entry for new players and especially for new DMs. It's not even really a design philosophy, it's the absence of a design philosophy. Our system is whatever you want it to be! All the rules are optional, all the content is crowdsourced from the players and sold back to them, and the rulebook is made from material so fine that only the wisest can see it!
I'm not really reducing anything to black and white - the fish was an example of how just because the DM can do something doesn't mean the DM should. Sure, there are a bunch of middling monsters you could foist on your players, and if your player is okay with you taking away their agency to make their spells perform to mediocre effect maybe that's fine, but that's not something most players are likely to enjoy, and it relies on the incredibly unlikely scenario where your opinion of what is overpowered/good/bad and your players' opinions of what is overpowered/good/bad are all the same, and the end result is likely to be that the player just starts casting something else with a more reliable effect that they have more control over. At that point you've banned the spell in all but name.
Personally, I and my table love that design decision, and I have no problem pulling in new players.
The play experience between tables is always inconsistent, no matter the rules system being used because DMing is half performance art, and what you personally bring to the table in demeanor and delivery will have far more effect on the gameplay and player enjoyment than the rules will.
Also new players don't give a shit how summoning spells work. That is like the most minor of details next to, "hey read these thousands of pages spread across 3 $50 books in order to play this game about imagining you are an elf". There's already a lot of barriers, and it takes someone with advanced understanding of the system to notice that the summoning spells may need a little tweaking.
The play experience is always inconsistent to some degree because the DM always has the option to ignore/alter/overwrite rules, in every tabletop system since the dawn of time. That's fine. The designers still have a responsibility to provide a coherent, consistent, balanced set of rules for DMs to start from, and making 'rulings not rules' the core philosophy of your design serves no purpose except as a permanent shield against fulfilling those responsibilities. Now, every time some part of your system is poorly designed or broken, you can just tell the customer 'rulings not rules, working as intended! you have the power to fix it!'...but the customer has always had the power to fix it, it's just that they're supposed to be paying you for your book so that you will give them something that doesn't need fixing. That's the fundamental point of a tabletop system, otherwise you might as well just play pretend by whatever rules you feel like making up on the spot and not shell out $90 for a set of rulebooks that explicitly don't want to provide you with rules.
The idea that the 'fix' for summoning is for the DM to determine what is summoned is a microcosm of the larger problem: Not only does it offload the responsibility of writing a 'fair' spell from the designers to the DM, and make the rules unclear, inconsistent, and likely frustrating for players, but it also means that there's a bunch of extra knowledge the DM needs to have in order to DM well and fairly - what is fair for a level 3 spell, how strong should the effect be, what's the difference in power level between summoning one large creature or eight small ones, how do all these different statblocks work, is two brown bears stronger or weaker than four crocodiles, what do my players think is fair and are they going to feel cheated if I give them three black bears instead of eight wolves, why does everyone want to summon wolves and flying snakes so badly, are pixies stronger than sprites even though they're both CR 1/4, and so on. And all of that is information that a new DM in particular might not have, and that no DM would need to run the game effectively if the spell had just been written correctly in the first place by the people who were selling it. Expecting the people at the table to 'fix' your game on the fly - and encoding that intent into your design philosophy as though it is a feature, and defending the broken parts of it as not really being broken because they can be repaired by someone else - is demanding a level of system mastery and a grasp of game design that the overwhelming majority of players simply do not have, and should not need when they're buying a product that is supposed to provide those things for them.
And a new player will absolutely give a shit how summoning spells work when they build a cool summoner druid and then when they go to summon something you tell them they can't summon what they want based on a 'rule' that incidentally isn't even in the rulebook but comes from an online advice column.
It's near impossible to make summoning 'fair'. You are essentially getting yourself extra turns with multiple characters. It totally wangs the game no matter what you do.
You can't even begin to compare that to say fireball or call lightning numerically because there are too many variables and effects and situational factors at play in the effectiveness of conjure animals.
However both a fireball and a conjure animals will drastically alter the balance of this current combat in favor of the person using it, and that's really the important factor there.
Also conjure spells are pretty easy to fuck with considering its a concentration spell, and the animals are terribly easy to kill. Like, conjure animals creates a round or two road block that's about it (Oh no the player's spell is effective what a shame). Basically I'm not seeing the essential need for that particular 'fix'. I thought it was just an idea for thematic control if you don't like them always summoning the same thing. I'm personally fine with players always summoning the same shit, it makes it easier to design encounters to counter or accentuate what is normally a curveball of a spell.
Because then everyone would have to understand encounter math.
Anyway the real problem with summoning spells is needing the stat blocks for all the creatures. I don't think they're fun in combat because they slow things down.
Now outside of combat as a utility spell go wild. Then i don't really need statblocks(or to add up to 8 enemies to an encounter!) i just need to know how you're using the summon.
The Edition Which Must Not Be Named had done it immediately prior by having designers that understood what action economy meant.
Third (not 3.5) was generally fine because Summons generally brought in creatures that weren't terribly good. 3.5 wanged this hard by changing the creature list for druids and removing a big part of the opportunity cost for them.
Yeah, it's super easy to make summoning fair. WotC literally learned how to do it in 4e, and then unlearned it again just for 5e.
It's even easier to at least make summoning non-disruptive by just not writing a summoning spell that allows you to summon 16 of something and then fucking up the math in such a way that you're almost always incentivized to do so.
Most of the actual complaints about summoning don't stem from it being unfairly powerful (although it generally is), but from it gumming up combat by adding a bunch of extra creatures that all have to be individually piloted and tracked. A summoning spell that could only summon 1-2 things at a time wouldn't have that problem even if the power level were the same (and it wouldn't be, because action economy).
In practice I've never actually had summoning bog down an encounter in 5e, even adding 8 creatures to the board is fairly quick because all they are gong to do is attack, maybe with some kind of save inducing effect, and possibly provoke opportunity attacks if they are the first commanded to leave threat without dissengage, and then eat up a round or two of enemy attacks (The true benefit of conjure animal spells)
But I can also crush out a 40 member combat (including party and monsters with players multi sheeting) in under an hour so maybe my tables are just super efficient and the problem just doesn't present itself for us. I'm willing to admit that's possible.
I, too, am willing to admit that maybe I'm just too great and that I don't experience the problems others do because I am so skillfully effective. This confession is a sacrifice that I am willing to make, because I am also selfless, and humble
and devastatingly handsome
unfortunately I am told that lesser folk still play DnD and so the game still needs to be designed around their feebleness and not the limitless capacities of ubermenschen like us
keep in mind the spell lasts for an hour - all a long cast time is likely to do is encourage players to summon their stuff pre-combat and start fights with the summons already out. And they're already often incentivized to do that anyway, both because it frees up their round 1 action and because it gives them warm bodies to soak up missed traps. (Or in the case of conjure fey and pixies, because you want out-of-combat access to their spells)