I have a player who wants to build a character focused solely on summons. The idea is to have PHB Beast Ranger, multiclass into Wildfire Druid, and take the Magic Initiate feat for Find Familiar. This allows him to have the companion act on his turn, the wildfire spirit act after his turn, and the familiar on its own initiative. On top of that he'll use spells like Infestation, Animal Friendship, and Conjure Animals.
Personally, I love the concept, and I want to let him run it. My concern is avoiding bogging the game down. Once he hits level 8 he can potentially have his companion, his wildfire spirit, his familiar, and 8 summoned beasts under his control at once operating on three different initiative orders, not to mention having up to three charmed beasts and Mage Hand active. At the same time, the idea of him wildshaping into a wolf and leading a dozen others into battle sounds pretty epic.
Any thoughts on how to make this more manageable in game without killing his character concept?
(it could be worse, at least he's not going Circle of the Shepherd and asking to dip into Alchemist to create a wooden "steel defender" lol)
Any thoughts on how to make this more manageable in game without killing his character concept?
I suspect the answer to a large degree is "You can't", but bunching up all their initiative will help, as would limiting the number of commands you can give (i.e. you're required to give all your allies the same command). Also note that Animal Friendship doesn't make an animal help you, it just applies charmed, you still have to convince it to actually help (likely also requiring Speak with Animals).
Splitting between both Wildfire druid and Beastmaster means both companions will have quite low hp, and the same goes without saying for a familiar. A single decent AOE is apt to wipe them all out. If the player really wants to have a lot of pets running around, just going Wildfire and using Conjure Animals will be a lot more effective.
How to make it work... that's somewhat limited. The concept demands that he has a lot of creatures and must control them all. You can't really use a spell like Conjure Animals without slowing down the game. It can help if he doesn't try to be some kind of hordemaster tactical genius - just having the summons attack the nearest hostile creature can cut down on a lot of decision time.
You (and he) will also need to consider the other players at the table. Surrounding an enemy with giant goats means it's got cover from your ranged allies and your melee allies can't reach it at all. This plus the sheer amount of time he'll spend on each creature's turn means it's very easy for this kind of build to become a spotlight-hog. Summoning the whole horde shouldn't happen every battle even if he's got the slots for it, and sometimes the horde needs to be hard-countered with AOEs or mental save spells.
I'd recommend this kind of thing for a one-shot or short adventure rather than a long-term build concept. It's fun but it really does bog things down and there's only so much you can do to streamline it. Sticking to one companion and the newer Summon spells that summon one creature is much more workable. Another alternative is to go swarm ranger and lean heavily on the flavor there - I have one that describes all his spells in terms of the swarm, in addition to the swarm features.
• All summoned creatures (including familiars) use average damage (to cut down on the amount of dice rolling).
• Summoned creatures are given orders in two groups (to cut down time spent deciding what summons to do). For example, if a druid cummons 8 creatures, they act as two groups of four, with all creatures in a group getting the same orders.
• When a caster summons 8 creatures, they are all medium sized or smaller. For my own sanity I'm not having 8 large creatures on the battle mat. :-)
In my current group I have two casters with polymorph as well as a sheperd druid. We have had fights with two giant apes and 8 hyenas. Play slowed down a bit, but not to any problem. The rest of the players ar really supportive of the druid, because having a horde of beasts to act as shields is (1) really useful, and (2) really dramatic.
• All summoned creatures (including familiars) use average damage (to cut down on the amount of dice rolling).
• Summoned creatures are given orders in two groups (to cut down time spent deciding what summons to do). For example, if a druid cummons 8 creatures, they act as two groups of four, with all creatures in a group getting the same orders.
• When a caster summons 8 creatures, they are all medium sized or smaller. For my own sanity I'm not having 8 large creatures on the battle mat. :-)
In my current group I have two casters with polymorph as well as a sheperd druid. We have had fights with two giant apes and 8 hyenas. Play slowed down a bit, but not to any problem. The rest of the players ar really supportive of the druid, because having a horde of beasts to act as shields is (1) really useful, and (2) really dramatic.
I agree with most of this, but I let them have the large animals. 90% of the time they’re not as useful as they sound and end up going down quickly as they usually have terrible AC. The small/medium creatures are so much more effective typically, or at least the Shepherd Druid has figured out in my campaign 🙂
I would agree that both you and this player need to consider the other players at the table and how the inclusion of this character might impact the opportunities for others to have their moment in the spotlight. If you can come to a compromise that will still allow for other's fun then run with it. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to prevent bogging the game down. You can do things to mitigate it, much like Greenstone_Walker has pointed out. But even then, when you have that many initiatives, it might upset the action economy and potentially skew combat challenges. And every initiative takes time. With three initiative turns per round, this player will have 3 opportunities for the spotlight, while others will get only one.
I might allow this build as a duet (1DM-1Player) or as part of a single or dual combat one-shot, but not as a long standing character in a long form campaign. I don't mind optomancers who want to make the ideal choice, but this feels a touch more than that. IMO, there are too many opportunities for, what I see as, gaming the system and trying to win D&D.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
I would not limit Animal companion or Wildfire spirit. These two features already have a cost in term of action economy. It takes an action from the PC to command the Animal companion to attack, and it takes a bonus action to command the wildfire spirit. The PC is already giving up actions to allow these companions to act.
For the familiar and the conjured animals: I would ask the player "Any commands for your other companions?" on their turn, and then allow them to tell me verbatim what they would yell to their pets. It can't be too long, though. The character has to be able to say it in 6 seconds. I would then interpret it for them and resolve what the conjured animals and the familiar do. In most cases, this should result in all the animals doing the same thing, simply because there isn't enough time to instruct every one individually. No need to introduce an artificial rule to split them into groups or something.
Recently made this! Hopefully it would help! It balances the obscenely overpowered conjure spells in the phb.
On the topic of summoning, allow mass summoning if both you and the rest of the party are fine with it. If people aren't fine with having to wait more turns, or you don't want summoning, then it's entirely fair to not allow the character concept. Summoning is typically controversial as it slows the game down. It may not be fun for you or the rest of the players.
A couple of extra actions for the wildfire spirit, familiar and the beast companion (consumes an action) aren't a big deal. Really it just comes down to the 8 conjured animals. Honestly, it's actually just a problem with the spell itself. In a previous campaign I ran, a druid used it as her go-to spell for combat and it was just extremely frustrating as the combat suddenly got bogged down with 8 wolves, each one moving, attacking with advantage, forcing saving throws over and over... There's also not much interesting about fights between monsters and summoned creatures, the attack rolls all feel quite meaningless.
There's not much that can be done about it unfortunately. The spell is core rules.
Recently made this! Hopefully it would help! It balances the obscenely overpowered conjure spells in the phb.
No offense, it's really great that you took the time to come up with this and write it up, but I feel like this really takes the fun out of it. On one hand, it removes the randomness of the spell by giving more control to the player (they get to choose the beast and how they behave), and then it nerfs the animals' offense and defense.
Recently made this! Hopefully it would help! It balances the obscenely overpowered conjure spells in the phb.
No offense, it's really great that you took the time to come up with this and write it up, but I feel like this really takes the fun out of it. On one hand, it removes the randomness of the spell by giving more control to the player (they get to choose the beast and how they behave), and then it nerfs the animals' offense and defense.
The hit point pool from summoning creatures with default conjure animals is insanely high. Giant owls for example (A very common summon for people to pick) have 19 hit points by default. Multiply that by 8 and surround enemies with a wall to entirely stop them, and you have 172 hit points which need to be dealt with by enemies at a 3rd level spell slot cost. Combine the wall tactic with the dodge action for disadvantage on attack rolls and that strategy becomes even crazier. The damage is pretty good with both the original and the new. The goal with the offense and defense of the revised version, is to have summoning more creatures being offensively viable, but summoning less to have more defense. With the original, it was way too optimal to summon 8 creatures and nothing else as it dealt the best damage, and had the best defense. Not to mention, the damage of the revised version is possibly better. If all animals use 1d20 for all attack rolls, then commanding them to take the attack action has a 1/20 chance for EIGHT CRITS. If that's not fun, I don't know what you are talking about.
With the original spell, it is fun to have to wait 8 turns or around 1 turn for the other players? The original was fun... for the summoner. But it downright wastes other player's time who want to be the heroes of the story, instead of having throwaway animals be the heroes in combat.
Most DM's and players just have the players pick summons anyways. And random summons could result in useless summons which still will bog down the game making it less fun for the player. Random summons also result in unfamiliar statblocks being used resulting in having to stop the game to read a stat block.
I dunno - I haven’t had any of these problems really. At 5th level the party is fighting a lot more enemies, and have multiple encounters each day. One enemy surrounded by 8 large owls? Why bother using a 3rd level spell at all in that case, Cantrips or Shove Prone+Grapple seems efficient enough.
I don't know how good of an idea this is, but something that came to mind was assigning some of the summoned creatures to the other players at the table. So you end up with a situation where, say... they conjure 8 creatures with Conjure Woodland Beings, then each member of hte 4-person party gets control of 2 of these creatures. This way everyone isn't just sitting on their thumbs while this Pokemon Trainer is out there being the very best. It might even end up with some fun roleplay things... some players might get attached to their specific allies and might even be begging for the summoner to bring out these fun little pets at every combat.
This... might backfire. You might end up really alienating the summoner, especially if even one of hte players doesn't really get into it and just has the summoned creatures do rock-stupid stuff that just gets them killed and wastes the spell. I can probably sit here and list a half-dozen ways this could go wrong, but I think it's an idea that's at least worth experimenting with.
It hasn't come up in my campaign, as no-one is using conjure spells in the first place, but my preferred simple fix is to just change the 1-2-4-8 progression to a 1-2-3-4 progression. That typically makes 2 x CR 1 the best choice, but there are situational uses for other combinations.
Recently made this! Hopefully it would help! It balances the obscenely overpowered conjure spells in the phb.
No offense, it's really great that you took the time to come up with this and write it up, but I feel like this really takes the fun out of it. On one hand, it removes the randomness of the spell by giving more control to the player (they get to choose the beast and how they behave), and then it nerfs the animals' offense and defense.
The hit point pool from summoning creatures with default conjure animals is insanely high. Giant owls for example (A very common summon for people to pick) have 19 hit points by default. Multiply that by 8 and surround enemies with a wall to entirely stop them, and you have 172 hit points which need to be dealt with by enemies at a 3rd level spell slot cost. Combine the wall tactic with the dodge action for disadvantage on attack rolls and that strategy becomes even crazier. The damage is pretty good with both the original and the new. The goal with the offense and defense of the revised version, is to have summoning more creatures being offensively viable, but summoning less to have more defense. With the original, it was way too optimal to summon 8 creatures and nothing else as it dealt the best damage, and had the best defense. Not to mention, the damage of the revised version is possibly better. If all animals use 1d20 for all attack rolls, then commanding them to take the attack action has a 1/20 chance for EIGHT CRITS. If that's not fun, I don't know what you are talking about.
With the original spell, it is fun to have to wait 8 turns or around 1 turn for the other players? The original was fun... for the summoner. But it downright wastes other player's time who want to be the heroes of the story, instead of having throwaway animals be the heroes in combat.
Most DM's and players just have the players pick summons anyways. And random summons could result in useless summons which still will bog down the game making it less fun for the player. Random summons also result in unfamiliar statblocks being used resulting in having to stop the game to read a stat block.
They are beasts. They wouldn't understand advanced tactics and formations. Sure, they obey your command, but that doesn't mean they are drones that you can mind-control.
If anything, the revised version where you do mind control them allows you to use such insane tactics.
And if most DMs have the players pick the summons... than it is that houserule that makes it boring. Why would you do that? It's SO much more fun (and so much less overpowered) if you ask for a number of monsters and get a fun unexpected combination that fits the environment instead of yet another wolf pack.
I like this "6 second order" rule. I know in the past I've generally played conjured animals as "go attack target A" or at most "A and B," maybe "Go stand in this space" in order to keep things flowing faster. This would help with that.
Also may have to go back to letting the player choose the summons. I know it can potentially lead to some cheese, but it also helps avoid the slowdown of unfamiliar summons or not knowing how to use them ideally in combat.
First, can the summoned critters act with any direction when you have used your action to control your Animal Companion and you bonus action on the Spirit Thingy?
If the summoned band can act in some coherent manner, I have developed a table for multiple critters attacking something or a group of somethings. As long as the "To-Hit" number is the same, you roll a single percentile check and look up how many hits and crits you deliver this round from the whole group. The next step is to "assign" the hits and crits, which can take time. But the plan is to develop it to speed up such combat situations.
The information is in an Excel spreadsheet. I developed it to run from one up to sixteen members of the group. I test ran it on a simulation with an AC 10 opponent and the offense had a +4 to-hit modifier, so there was a 25% chance to miss, a 70% chance to hit, and a 5% chance to crit.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I personally recommend halving the amount of creatures summonable. While they may complain you could explain that its more practical for the game, and keeps his own power under control mentioning the potential numbers as you said.
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DM: Ok you encounter a Bugbear.
Newbie: THAT SOUNDS AWFUL! its like a bear bug combo!
Veteran: No actually its-
DM: (scribbling furiously) The Bugbears mandibles click loudly! Roll initiative!
I personally recommend halving the amount of creatures summonable. While they may complain you could explain that its more practical for the game, and keeps his own power under control mentioning the potential numbers as you said.
Better to just explain to the player that you're not happy with having so many summoned creatures on the tactical map - so it is up to the player to revise their plan rather than changing rules to nerf their current plan.
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I have a player who wants to build a character focused solely on summons. The idea is to have PHB Beast Ranger, multiclass into Wildfire Druid, and take the Magic Initiate feat for Find Familiar. This allows him to have the companion act on his turn, the wildfire spirit act after his turn, and the familiar on its own initiative. On top of that he'll use spells like Infestation, Animal Friendship, and Conjure Animals.
Personally, I love the concept, and I want to let him run it. My concern is avoiding bogging the game down. Once he hits level 8 he can potentially have his companion, his wildfire spirit, his familiar, and 8 summoned beasts under his control at once operating on three different initiative orders, not to mention having up to three charmed beasts and Mage Hand active. At the same time, the idea of him wildshaping into a wolf and leading a dozen others into battle sounds pretty epic.
Any thoughts on how to make this more manageable in game without killing his character concept?
(it could be worse, at least he's not going Circle of the Shepherd and asking to dip into Alchemist to create a wooden "steel defender" lol)
I suspect the answer to a large degree is "You can't", but bunching up all their initiative will help, as would limiting the number of commands you can give (i.e. you're required to give all your allies the same command). Also note that Animal Friendship doesn't make an animal help you, it just applies charmed, you still have to convince it to actually help (likely also requiring Speak with Animals).
Splitting between both Wildfire druid and Beastmaster means both companions will have quite low hp, and the same goes without saying for a familiar. A single decent AOE is apt to wipe them all out. If the player really wants to have a lot of pets running around, just going Wildfire and using Conjure Animals will be a lot more effective.
How to make it work... that's somewhat limited. The concept demands that he has a lot of creatures and must control them all. You can't really use a spell like Conjure Animals without slowing down the game. It can help if he doesn't try to be some kind of hordemaster tactical genius - just having the summons attack the nearest hostile creature can cut down on a lot of decision time.
You (and he) will also need to consider the other players at the table. Surrounding an enemy with giant goats means it's got cover from your ranged allies and your melee allies can't reach it at all. This plus the sheer amount of time he'll spend on each creature's turn means it's very easy for this kind of build to become a spotlight-hog. Summoning the whole horde shouldn't happen every battle even if he's got the slots for it, and sometimes the horde needs to be hard-countered with AOEs or mental save spells.
I'd recommend this kind of thing for a one-shot or short adventure rather than a long-term build concept. It's fun but it really does bog things down and there's only so much you can do to streamline it. Sticking to one companion and the newer Summon spells that summon one creature is much more workable. Another alternative is to go swarm ranger and lean heavily on the flavor there - I have one that describes all his spells in terms of the swarm, in addition to the swarm features.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
My rules for summons:
• All summoned creatures (including familiars) use average damage (to cut down on the amount of dice rolling).
• Summoned creatures are given orders in two groups (to cut down time spent deciding what summons to do). For example, if a druid cummons 8 creatures, they act as two groups of four, with all creatures in a group getting the same orders.
• When a caster summons 8 creatures, they are all medium sized or smaller. For my own sanity I'm not having 8 large creatures on the battle mat. :-)
In my current group I have two casters with polymorph as well as a sheperd druid. We have had fights with two giant apes and 8 hyenas. Play slowed down a bit, but not to any problem. The rest of the players ar really supportive of the druid, because having a horde of beasts to act as shields is (1) really useful, and (2) really dramatic.
I agree with most of this, but I let them have the large animals. 90% of the time they’re not as useful as they sound and end up going down quickly as they usually have terrible AC. The small/medium creatures are so much more effective typically, or at least the Shepherd Druid has figured out in my campaign 🙂
^-------- +1 to both of the previous replies.
I would agree that both you and this player need to consider the other players at the table and how the inclusion of this character might impact the opportunities for others to have their moment in the spotlight. If you can come to a compromise that will still allow for other's fun then run with it. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to prevent bogging the game down. You can do things to mitigate it, much like Greenstone_Walker has pointed out. But even then, when you have that many initiatives, it might upset the action economy and potentially skew combat challenges. And every initiative takes time. With three initiative turns per round, this player will have 3 opportunities for the spotlight, while others will get only one.
I might allow this build as a duet (1DM-1Player) or as part of a single or dual combat one-shot, but not as a long standing character in a long form campaign. I don't mind optomancers who want to make the ideal choice, but this feels a touch more than that. IMO, there are too many opportunities for, what I see as, gaming the system and trying to win D&D.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
I would not limit Animal companion or Wildfire spirit. These two features already have a cost in term of action economy. It takes an action from the PC to command the Animal companion to attack, and it takes a bonus action to command the wildfire spirit. The PC is already giving up actions to allow these companions to act.
For the familiar and the conjured animals: I would ask the player "Any commands for your other companions?" on their turn, and then allow them to tell me verbatim what they would yell to their pets. It can't be too long, though. The character has to be able to say it in 6 seconds. I would then interpret it for them and resolve what the conjured animals and the familiar do. In most cases, this should result in all the animals doing the same thing, simply because there isn't enough time to instruct every one individually. No need to introduce an artificial rule to split them into groups or something.
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/1JHpjICjnKrFfMqM0p9804QEW3Xxs9ScY-ZINZ4kgCoix
Recently made this! Hopefully it would help! It balances the obscenely overpowered conjure spells in the phb.
On the topic of summoning, allow mass summoning if both you and the rest of the party are fine with it. If people aren't fine with having to wait more turns, or you don't want summoning, then it's entirely fair to not allow the character concept. Summoning is typically controversial as it slows the game down. It may not be fun for you or the rest of the players.
A couple of extra actions for the wildfire spirit, familiar and the beast companion (consumes an action) aren't a big deal. Really it just comes down to the 8 conjured animals. Honestly, it's actually just a problem with the spell itself. In a previous campaign I ran, a druid used it as her go-to spell for combat and it was just extremely frustrating as the combat suddenly got bogged down with 8 wolves, each one moving, attacking with advantage, forcing saving throws over and over... There's also not much interesting about fights between monsters and summoned creatures, the attack rolls all feel quite meaningless.
There's not much that can be done about it unfortunately. The spell is core rules.
No offense, it's really great that you took the time to come up with this and write it up, but I feel like this really takes the fun out of it. On one hand, it removes the randomness of the spell by giving more control to the player (they get to choose the beast and how they behave), and then it nerfs the animals' offense and defense.
The hit point pool from summoning creatures with default conjure animals is insanely high. Giant owls for example (A very common summon for people to pick) have 19 hit points by default. Multiply that by 8 and surround enemies with a wall to entirely stop them, and you have 172 hit points which need to be dealt with by enemies at a 3rd level spell slot cost. Combine the wall tactic with the dodge action for disadvantage on attack rolls and that strategy becomes even crazier. The damage is pretty good with both the original and the new. The goal with the offense and defense of the revised version, is to have summoning more creatures being offensively viable, but summoning less to have more defense. With the original, it was way too optimal to summon 8 creatures and nothing else as it dealt the best damage, and had the best defense. Not to mention, the damage of the revised version is possibly better. If all animals use 1d20 for all attack rolls, then commanding them to take the attack action has a 1/20 chance for EIGHT CRITS. If that's not fun, I don't know what you are talking about.
With the original spell, it is fun to have to wait 8 turns or around 1 turn for the other players? The original was fun... for the summoner. But it downright wastes other player's time who want to be the heroes of the story, instead of having throwaway animals be the heroes in combat.
Most DM's and players just have the players pick summons anyways. And random summons could result in useless summons which still will bog down the game making it less fun for the player. Random summons also result in unfamiliar statblocks being used resulting in having to stop the game to read a stat block.
I dunno - I haven’t had any of these problems really. At 5th level the party is fighting a lot more enemies, and have multiple encounters each day. One enemy surrounded by 8 large owls? Why bother using a 3rd level spell at all in that case, Cantrips or Shove Prone+Grapple seems efficient enough.
I don't know how good of an idea this is, but something that came to mind was assigning some of the summoned creatures to the other players at the table. So you end up with a situation where, say... they conjure 8 creatures with Conjure Woodland Beings, then each member of hte 4-person party gets control of 2 of these creatures. This way everyone isn't just sitting on their thumbs while this Pokemon Trainer is out there being the very best. It might even end up with some fun roleplay things... some players might get attached to their specific allies and might even be begging for the summoner to bring out these fun little pets at every combat.
This... might backfire. You might end up really alienating the summoner, especially if even one of hte players doesn't really get into it and just has the summoned creatures do rock-stupid stuff that just gets them killed and wastes the spell. I can probably sit here and list a half-dozen ways this could go wrong, but I think it's an idea that's at least worth experimenting with.
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It hasn't come up in my campaign, as no-one is using conjure spells in the first place, but my preferred simple fix is to just change the 1-2-4-8 progression to a 1-2-3-4 progression. That typically makes 2 x CR 1 the best choice, but there are situational uses for other combinations.
They are beasts. They wouldn't understand advanced tactics and formations. Sure, they obey your command, but that doesn't mean they are drones that you can mind-control.
If anything, the revised version where you do mind control them allows you to use such insane tactics.
And if most DMs have the players pick the summons... than it is that houserule that makes it boring. Why would you do that? It's SO much more fun (and so much less overpowered) if you ask for a number of monsters and get a fun unexpected combination that fits the environment instead of yet another wolf pack.
I like this "6 second order" rule. I know in the past I've generally played conjured animals as "go attack target A" or at most "A and B," maybe "Go stand in this space" in order to keep things flowing faster. This would help with that.
Also may have to go back to letting the player choose the summons. I know it can potentially lead to some cheese, but it also helps avoid the slowdown of unfamiliar summons or not knowing how to use them ideally in combat.
First, can the summoned critters act with any direction when you have used your action to control your Animal Companion and you bonus action on the Spirit Thingy?
If the summoned band can act in some coherent manner, I have developed a table for multiple critters attacking something or a group of somethings. As long as the "To-Hit" number is the same, you roll a single percentile check and look up how many hits and crits you deliver this round from the whole group. The next step is to "assign" the hits and crits, which can take time. But the plan is to develop it to speed up such combat situations.
The information is in an Excel spreadsheet. I developed it to run from one up to sixteen members of the group. I test ran it on a simulation with an AC 10 opponent and the offense had a +4 to-hit modifier, so there was a 25% chance to miss, a 70% chance to hit, and a 5% chance to crit.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I personally recommend halving the amount of creatures summonable. While they may complain you could explain that its more practical for the game, and keeps his own power under control mentioning the potential numbers as you said.
DM: Ok you encounter a Bugbear.
Newbie: THAT SOUNDS AWFUL! its like a bear bug combo!
Veteran: No actually its-
DM: (scribbling furiously) The Bugbears mandibles click loudly! Roll initiative!
Better to just explain to the player that you're not happy with having so many summoned creatures on the tactical map - so it is up to the player to revise their plan rather than changing rules to nerf their current plan.