I am currently running TOA with a group of 6 players. They are all now level 5. The players always want to use a battle map and with so many of them, combat is getting very slow. And to me, it's becoming very laborious. One of the players is also Druid and likes to mass summon. They seem quite content in eating their way through most of the encounters so far and are taking away from the other players. What would you guys do without trying to taking away from the druid?
I have to agree with you, its hard to keep things moving with multiple enemies, 5-6 players, plus 4 or 8 summoned creatures!
Make sure you aren't letting your druid have too fine of control over the summon creatures:
The summoned creatures are friendly to you and your companions. Roll initiative for the summoned creatures as a group, which has its own turns. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them (no action required by you). If you don't issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions. The DM has the creatures' Statistics.
You as the DM, should be running the creatures, based on the verbal commands issued by the druid. If the druid summons 8 creatures, don't let them give out 8 different complicated verbal commands per round. A round is 6 seconds, they can issue a couple specific commands to individuals, or a general command or two to the group. Then it should be pretty quick for you, as the DM, to blast through the creatures' turns.
Make sure your players all know when their turn in initiative is. If they aren't ready skip them. ("the confusion of battle overwhelms you for a moment") TELL THEM AHEAD OF TIME though!!! I told my players I was going to start doing this - I've never have to skip anyone, they are ready when their turn comes up now.
Make sure, when you control the summoned creatures that you don't make them too smart - they ought to be getting in the way of the rest of the party, clogging up movement and blocking ranged attacks (not fully, I use the -2 to hit penalty for partial cover). The rest of the party will soon be voicing objections and the druid will likely switch to summoning 1 or 2 rather than 4 or 8 creatures more often than not.
Also don't forget summon is a concentration spell - the druid can't cast other concentration spells while maintaining the summon, and can lose all the summoned creatures if they take damage and fail the concentration roll - have that happen a time or two and they might start using other spells more often instead.
Also have the party roll damage dice at the same time as attack roll dice - it takes some getting used to but really speeds up turns.
Don't allow players to out-of-character talk tactics when it their turn " Ok guys, its my turn now, you think I should heal the barbarian, or I could..." - NOPE! You just got skipped. That kind of talk should be quietly done between players waiting for their turn, once your turn starts, its too late.
I can very much see why someone would want to do this in Tomb of Annihilation, it's a nasty campaign and ablative HP is always welcome. Could really help out with a lot of the combats. I HAVE a Druid in a different game and when I got access to Conjure Animals, I talked to my GM first. We play on Roll20, so it's actually pretty quick to make a macro for each creature. It's easy I have a Macro that says "/me 's Giant Owl attacks [[1d20+3]] and slashes for [[2d6+1]] damage" I just hit the button a number of as I have Owls left and the GM just look for success.
Generally most commands are going to be "attack my enemies", I don't think it's crazy to give the conjured fey spirits an IFF (identification of friend or foe) system. If you disagree with that let your player know so the whole party can buy red bandanas and tell them "attack anyone without a red bandanna" or "kill that guy", etc... I actually let my GM control the creatures. Then I don't have to worry about metagaming their intelligence. I give them a simple order and just go with whatever the GM decides they should do.
It sounds like your player IRL, so I'd say as courtesy the Player should make a provide you with cards that have the monsters's important stats. And think about the creatures they want to summon. IE: pick 1-3 Beasts per level to have cards pre-pepared. Otherwise there are 4 pages of Beast between CR:1/4 to CR:2 in DnDBeyond. In reality there are only a few roles and best creatures for each role. Sidenote: I recommend using Standard Damage instead of rolling for them if there are a lot.
It sounds like you're playing IRL. So, have the player set aside 8 D20s. Then he just rolls the 8 d20s... this is why I recommend "standard" damage.
Here are some examples of some of my favorites and their role. CR:1/4: The Giant Owl flies and as Fly-by attack. This makes it relatively easy in the outdoors to handle them, as they don't take up space ON the board. You just roll their "death from above" attacks every turn. CR:1/4: Wolf: pack tactics + knockdown. CR:1/2: Crocodile: swim speed, bite causes restrainment. CR:1: Brown Bear. Best damage/body block for it's CR CR:1: Dire Wolf: same as Wolf quality over quantity. CR:1: Deinonychus: has pounce with knockdown... a great striker lots of attacks make it a bit of a pain to keep track of. It has 3-4 attacks a turn! CR:1: Crag Cat is GREAT vs a spell-caster CR:2: Quetzalcoatlus. Everything that's the Giant Owl but quality instead of quantity. CR:2 Giant Constrictor Snake: same as Croc but quality over quantity. CR:2: most of the rest of the entires take up space and have lots of HP... for the most part I think 2 CR1s are better then 1 CR:2. (I'd take two Brown Bears over 1 Cave Bear any day) Although Allosaurs and Rhino are cool.
Swarms are also a decent solution for wanting to "summon a lot of". Although I wouldn't summon a swarm of poisonous snakes to fight the Yuan-ti!!!
I agree with the above. If someone summons 8 giant badgers, make sure they’re ready to run the 16 attacks and track all of their hit points and get through it fast. I summoned 4 bears in a fight to help lock down a dragon, but I managed to get through them fast enough.
And don’t forget that RAW doesn’t actually allow the Druid to pick the specific animals, just their challenge rating and number.
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I am currently running TOA with a group of 6 players. They are all now level 5. The players always want to use a battle map and with so many of them, combat is getting very slow. And to me, it's becoming very laborious. One of the players is also Druid and likes to mass summon. They seem quite content in eating their way through most of the encounters so far and are taking away from the other players. What would you guys do without trying to taking away from the druid?
I have to agree with you, its hard to keep things moving with multiple enemies, 5-6 players, plus 4 or 8 summoned creatures!
Make sure you aren't letting your druid have too fine of control over the summon creatures:
You as the DM, should be running the creatures, based on the verbal commands issued by the druid. If the druid summons 8 creatures, don't let them give out 8 different complicated verbal commands per round. A round is 6 seconds, they can issue a couple specific commands to individuals, or a general command or two to the group. Then it should be pretty quick for you, as the DM, to blast through the creatures' turns.
Make sure your players all know when their turn in initiative is. If they aren't ready skip them. ("the confusion of battle overwhelms you for a moment") TELL THEM AHEAD OF TIME though!!! I told my players I was going to start doing this - I've never have to skip anyone, they are ready when their turn comes up now.
Make sure, when you control the summoned creatures that you don't make them too smart - they ought to be getting in the way of the rest of the party, clogging up movement and blocking ranged attacks (not fully, I use the -2 to hit penalty for partial cover). The rest of the party will soon be voicing objections and the druid will likely switch to summoning 1 or 2 rather than 4 or 8 creatures more often than not.
Also don't forget summon is a concentration spell - the druid can't cast other concentration spells while maintaining the summon, and can lose all the summoned creatures if they take damage and fail the concentration roll - have that happen a time or two and they might start using other spells more often instead.
Also have the party roll damage dice at the same time as attack roll dice - it takes some getting used to but really speeds up turns.
Don't allow players to out-of-character talk tactics when it their turn " Ok guys, its my turn now, you think I should heal the barbarian, or I could..." - NOPE! You just got skipped. That kind of talk should be quietly done between players waiting for their turn, once your turn starts, its too late.
I can very much see why someone would want to do this in Tomb of Annihilation, it's a nasty campaign and ablative HP is always welcome. Could really help out with a lot of the combats. I HAVE a Druid in a different game and when I got access to Conjure Animals, I talked to my GM first. We play on Roll20, so it's actually pretty quick to make a macro for each creature. It's easy I have a Macro that says "/me 's Giant Owl attacks [[1d20+3]] and slashes for [[2d6+1]] damage" I just hit the button a number of as I have Owls left and the GM just look for success.
Generally most commands are going to be "attack my enemies", I don't think it's crazy to give the conjured fey spirits an IFF (identification of friend or foe) system. If you disagree with that let your player know so the whole party can buy red bandanas and tell them "attack anyone without a red bandanna" or "kill that guy", etc...
I actually let my GM control the creatures. Then I don't have to worry about metagaming their intelligence. I give them a simple order and just go with whatever the GM decides they should do.
It sounds like your player IRL, so I'd say as courtesy the Player should make a provide you with cards that have the monsters's important stats. And think about the creatures they want to summon. IE: pick 1-3 Beasts per level to have cards pre-pepared. Otherwise there are 4 pages of Beast between CR:1/4 to CR:2 in DnDBeyond. In reality there are only a few roles and best creatures for each role.
Sidenote: I recommend using Standard Damage instead of rolling for them if there are a lot.
It sounds like you're playing IRL. So, have the player set aside 8 D20s. Then he just rolls the 8 d20s... this is why I recommend "standard" damage.
Here are some examples of some of my favorites and their role.
CR:1/4: The Giant Owl flies and as Fly-by attack. This makes it relatively easy in the outdoors to handle them, as they don't take up space ON the board. You just roll their "death from above" attacks every turn.
CR:1/4: Wolf: pack tactics + knockdown.
CR:1/2: Crocodile: swim speed, bite causes restrainment.
CR:1: Brown Bear. Best damage/body block for it's CR
CR:1: Dire Wolf: same as Wolf quality over quantity.
CR:1: Deinonychus: has pounce with knockdown... a great striker lots of attacks make it a bit of a pain to keep track of. It has 3-4 attacks a turn!
CR:1: Crag Cat is GREAT vs a spell-caster
CR:2: Quetzalcoatlus. Everything that's the Giant Owl but quality instead of quantity.
CR:2 Giant Constrictor Snake: same as Croc but quality over quantity.
CR:2: most of the rest of the entires take up space and have lots of HP... for the most part I think 2 CR1s are better then 1 CR:2. (I'd take two Brown Bears over 1 Cave Bear any day) Although Allosaurs and Rhino are cool.
Swarms are also a decent solution for wanting to "summon a lot of". Although I wouldn't summon a swarm of poisonous snakes to fight the Yuan-ti!!!
I agree with the above. If someone summons 8 giant badgers, make sure they’re ready to run the 16 attacks and track all of their hit points and get through it fast. I summoned 4 bears in a fight to help lock down a dragon, but I managed to get through them fast enough.
And don’t forget that RAW doesn’t actually allow the Druid to pick the specific animals, just their challenge rating and number.