That's pretty much my thought, as well. And when one messes with spells, one risks much.
Concentration is a different kind of mechanic in my house rules, and since I use a spell point system and custom classes, I am always more interested in the way spells work, since I try to leave them alone to a certain extent (but definitely not entirely). These all work well for me, and solve a couple problems that I have in terms of the nature and fabric of the worldsetting itself having to do with the whole challenge of summoning things.
I like them because they fit much better with the way my game world works. SImple as that. But I can also see how those who have done entire builds around commanding a small army of animals are going to be upset. I may not care, mind you, but I can see and sympathize.
These spells will absolutely be something "cool" -- the unreal engine can take this kind of thing and do some impressive stuff with it. So while I think a few folks will complain now, I also think that it will turn out that these become some of the most popular spells in the game.
If they want to have these effects, just give them another name and add them to the spell lists; no is objecting to the concept of adding some fancy AoE's to the game, we're objecting to being told to pretend that an AoE effect is equivalent to actually summoning and controlling magical creatures.
Which are balanced the same as the Tasha's summon spells, only removing the planar flavour of them. And I ask who would be excited to play a Fighter, Barbarian or Monk when your spellcaster buddy can use one of these spells?
Yes, we do need the Conjure spells, because there's a large difference between summmoning a generic entity that makes a few standard attacks and summoning some flavor of Hag, a Coatl, Hollyphant, one of the interesting Elemental variants, an Abashi, or any of the other fun options out there. You might be content with generic summons, but please don't try to speak for everyone that the ability to summon specific creatures with specific powers was just a meaningless ribbon. That's the entire appeal of the Conjure spells, and it's something Summon is wholly incapable of capturing.
The problem was that it's always been a horrifically broken ribbon, because CR does not reflect utility. Making something that looks like the 2014 summons not super broken requires
Either eliminating multi-summon, or changing it to be mostly unappealing in combat (for example, CR 2, or 2 x CR 1/2, or 3 x CR 1/4, or 4 x CR 1/8).
Which are balanced the same as the Tasha's summon spells, only removing the planar flavour of them. And I ask who would be excited to play a Fighter, Barbarian or Monk when your spellcaster buddy can use one of these spells?
...Is this supposed to be a pro-conjure argument? Citing some rando's homebrew?
I would be excited to play a Fighter, Barbarian or Monk (the UA one anyway) because they can do way more stuff than these.
It is an anti-Tasha's summons argument. I don't know why people think they "fix" summoning and having played with people using them (and having used them myself) ... they definitely make martials feel kinda obsolete. Conjure spells were interesting with risk/reward and creative uses, Tasha's Summon spells are replacement martials.
Yes, we do need the Conjure spells, because there's a large difference between summmoning a generic entity that makes a few standard attacks and summoning some flavor of Hag, a Coatl, Hollyphant, one of the interesting Elemental variants, an Abashi, or any of the other fun options out there. You might be content with generic summons, but please don't try to speak for everyone that the ability to summon specific creatures with specific powers was just a meaningless ribbon. That's the entire appeal of the Conjure spells, and it's something Summon is wholly incapable of capturing.
The problem was that it's always been a horrifically broken ribbon, because CR does not reflect utility. Making something that looks like the 2014 summons not super broken requires
Either eliminating multi-summon, or changing it to be mostly unappealing in combat (for example, CR 2, or 2 x CR 1/2, or 3 x CR 1/4, or 4 x CR 1/8).
Reducing options to a curated list.
I've repeatedly said that eliminating multi-summon would be a good thing, and the DM already has adjudication power over what's summoned, so your second point has already been covered.
I've repeatedly said that eliminating multi-summon would be a good thing, and the DM already has adjudication power over what's summoned, so your second point has already been covered.
"The DM decides what you get and you have no choice in the matter" doesn't play well and eliminates most of the interesting options anyway. Forcing the DM to curate the list manually is dropping a lot of work on the DM for no good reason. It should be "the player chooses from this list".
Right, the spell with even more hoops to jump through is the better option than "summon a creature for 1 hour or until your concentration ends". Planar Ally is a plot device spell, not a summoning spell.
I've repeatedly said that eliminating multi-summon would be a good thing, and the DM already has adjudication power over what's summoned, so your second point has already been covered.
"The DM decides what you get and you have no choice in the matter" doesn't play well and eliminates most of the interesting options anyway. Forcing the DM to curate the list manually is dropping a lot of work on the DM for no good reason. It should be "the player chooses from this list".
And "from this list" should not be in a DM-facing book. Which the MM is.
It is an anti-Tasha's summons argument. I don't know why people think they "fix" summoning and having played with people using them (and having used them myself) ... they definitely make martials feel kinda obsolete. Conjure spells were interesting with risk/reward and creative uses, Tasha's Summon spells are replacement martials.
They don't replace martials at all, unless the martial in question is very incompetently built, and no summon spell can fix that.
Why are the Tasha’s Summon spells superior to the 2014 Conjure Spells?
Any Conjure Spell that had a cast time longer than an action didn’t/doesn’t get a lot of use.
Conjure spells that have multiple creatures bog down the game.
Conjure spells required the DM to look in the MM for stat blocks.
The Tasha's summons also take their turn immediately after yours rather than rolling their own initiative as I think most (all?) conjure spells do; this makes it a lot easier to plan for how you're going to use them, and it feels more like part of that player's turn, also means it can immediately attack so there's no risk of you losing concentration before it can do anything (unless you hurt yourself somehow or walk into an antimagic field).
It's probably a more minor benefit though as they could easily update the Conjure X spells to match that Initiative behaviour.
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I've repeatedly said that eliminating multi-summon would be a good thing, and the DM already has adjudication power over what's summoned, so your second point has already been covered.
"The DM decides what you get and you have no choice in the matter" doesn't play well and eliminates most of the interesting options anyway. Forcing the DM to curate the list manually is dropping a lot of work on the DM for no good reason. It should be "the player chooses from this list".
Gee, if only it were possible for the player and DM to talk to each other like reasonable people, discuss expectations, and come to an accord. But that can't be guaranteed by a printed description, so I guess it's completely beyond the realm of possibility. And I said "the DM has power of adjudication", meaning "the DM can put the brakes on any particularly broken moves", not "you have to play 'mother may I' every time you want to use the spell". Player chooses from a list is decent, but leaves the spells stagnant as the monster roster expands, which is another shortcoming of the Tasha's options. And if the DM truly can't be bothered to put in a bit of legwork to let their players enjoy a more in depth summoner fantasy, the other spells are still there in any case.
Gee, if only it were possible for the player and DM to talk to each other like reasonable people, discuss expectations, and come to an accord.
If you're needing to do this for every single conjure spell anyway then you should have no problem negotiating a houserule to bring the old spells back in. The printed game should minimize these kinds of friction points.
AL especially is not designed around the DM stopping everything to discuss expectations with one summoner player, and there is frequently no session zero either.
I've repeatedly said that eliminating multi-summon would be a good thing, and the DM already has adjudication power over what's summoned, so your second point has already been covered.
"The DM decides what you get and you have no choice in the matter" doesn't play well and eliminates most of the interesting options anyway. Forcing the DM to curate the list manually is dropping a lot of work on the DM for no good reason. It should be "the player chooses from this list".
And "from this list" should not be in a DM-facing book. Which the MM is.
You know, despite you constantly buzzwording it, "DM facing" is not some vast and immutable barrier that says no player content should interact with stat blocks from the MM or other books. As I've already gone over, Moon Druids are already getting far deeper into your alleged "DM facing" content than any single Conjure spell, so claiming that the designers are intending for this stuff to only be used by DMs is demonstrably not true up to and including in the current playtest.
I will point out that all the books are DM facing, both functionally and factually. As a distinction, it is meaningless.
And the MM is also Player facing -- it would be a function of wealth, not access. If you want to keep monsters out of plyer's hands, you have to keep them hidden entirely, which means creating all of them from scratch, and if you are doing that, crafting a list isn't a problem.
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Gee, if only it were possible for the player and DM to talk to each other like reasonable people, discuss expectations, and come to an accord.
Yes, it's totally possible for the DM and player to work together to create a curated list... but that's a lot of work. It's much better to invert it: "Here is the default list. A particular campaign or setting may choose to alter or customize this list".
Nearly all the Beasts are in the Basic Rules so you don't need a MM at all for Conjure Animals or druid WS (or Polymorph for that matter). It is really Conjure Woodland Beings that had you digging through all the books to find something to summon since the Basic Rules Fey are all... kinda lame.
It is an anti-Tasha's summons argument. I don't know why people think they "fix" summoning and having played with people using them (and having used them myself) ... they definitely make martials feel kinda obsolete. Conjure spells were interesting with risk/reward and creative uses, Tasha's Summon spells are replacement martials.
Conjure spells are DM nightmares that are widely banned from actual play (as are Animate Dead and Animate Objects, for that matter), because however much some people like the fLaVoR of summoning random bullshit from the DMG/MM with a nigh-guaranteed chance of the spell either grinding combat to a screeching halt or the summon immediately flipping hostile and making a bad situation massively worse? Neither of those make for fun gameplay for literally bleeding anybody but the conjuror. The other players hate it because now the summoner's turn in combat takes forty-five minutes to resolve, or now the summoner's sicced a CR 12 Planar abomination on the party as well as whatever they were already struggling to fight and now it's either find a way to retreat and lose-yet-live, or wipe and TPK. The DM hates it because the very microinstant a 2014 "Conjure [X]" spell is invoked, the entire session and anything anybody else wanted to accomplish goes out the window because the whole-ass damn game is now about resolving whatever nonsensical edge-case janky foolishness the conjuror decided sounded like a Grand Old Time instead of whatever the party was hoping to do that session.
I don't think I've ever encountered a use of 2014 'Conjure' spells that didn't make me want to chew bricks. The 2014 versions will continue to be banned from my table and any other table run by anyone in our circle. The 2024 versions? Jury's still out, but thus far I see nothing that makes me feel like these would be bad to have. Which is an improvement from "yeah, this entire classification/type of spell is flat banned from my table, no appeal."
Which are balanced the same as the Tasha's summon spells, only removing the planar flavour of them. And I ask who would be excited to play a Fighter, Barbarian or Monk when your spellcaster buddy can use one of these spells?
As I am not a player, I recognize my voice is minimized here, lol.
However, I would totally love that. Mostly because of an idea I got in a different thread about making those people be someone, with a personality and name and a history.
That said, it also might as well be named Summon Lancer, Summon Archer, Summon Rider...
And, as a DM, one of the things I am well aware of is that anything the players can do, sentient monsters can do. I have Goblin mages and Goblin clerics, and they could readily have a summon beings, so it isn't as unbalanced as it seems to me, from a DM standpoint.
I will grant that Players who love their martials might feel like they are having their toes stepped on. But that is for the players to work out.
I also disagree with the idea of banning summoning or conjuration spells. The only spell I have banned is Wish, but that's a rule I've had since the 80's. What I would do is what I did -- changed the nature of such things to move them to longer casting times and more complex set ups ("protect me while I draw a circle and I'll bring in reinforcements!").
My problem with the older conjurations spells is more one of the crappy ass CR system than it is the addition of a bunch more slow down combat rolls that make stuff drag even though everyone also says combat's only two rounds, three tops (whereas my combats are much longer in rounds).
I would prefer they have a list if they are used (and did that). But like I mentioned earlier, I have giant versions and small versions of all the normal animals (including chickens and cows and pigs and goats and ducks and have you ever had to fight a six foot tall gander? Those birds are mean.) So they all would be included in those CR settings.
This doesn't make me less inclined to like the new spells, it makes me more inclined to like them.
Also, Imma use these.
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If they want to have these effects, just give them another name and add them to the spell lists; no is objecting to the concept of adding some fancy AoE's to the game, we're objecting to being told to pretend that an AoE effect is equivalent to actually summoning and controlling magical creatures.
Also for everyone who believes the Tasha's summon spells are better for the game than the Conjure spells let me present:
Summon Barbarian
Summon Fighter
Summon Monk
Which are balanced the same as the Tasha's summon spells, only removing the planar flavour of them. And I ask who would be excited to play a Fighter, Barbarian or Monk when your spellcaster buddy can use one of these spells?
The problem was that it's always been a horrifically broken ribbon, because CR does not reflect utility. Making something that looks like the 2014 summons not super broken requires
...Is this supposed to be a pro-conjure argument? Citing some rando's homebrew?
I would be excited to play a Fighter, Barbarian or Monk (the UA one anyway) because they can do way more stuff than these.
It is an anti-Tasha's summons argument. I don't know why people think they "fix" summoning and having played with people using them (and having used them myself) ... they definitely make martials feel kinda obsolete. Conjure spells were interesting with risk/reward and creative uses, Tasha's Summon spells are replacement martials.
I've repeatedly said that eliminating multi-summon would be a good thing, and the DM already has adjudication power over what's summoned, so your second point has already been covered.
That's Planar Ally spell
"The DM decides what you get and you have no choice in the matter" doesn't play well and eliminates most of the interesting options anyway. Forcing the DM to curate the list manually is dropping a lot of work on the DM for no good reason. It should be "the player chooses from this list".
Why are the Tasha’s Summon spells superior to the 2014 Conjure Spells?
Right, the spell with even more hoops to jump through is the better option than "summon a creature for 1 hour or until your concentration ends". Planar Ally is a plot device spell, not a summoning spell.
And "from this list" should not be in a DM-facing book. Which the MM is.
They don't replace martials at all, unless the martial in question is very incompetently built, and no summon spell can fix that.
The Tasha's summons also take their turn immediately after yours rather than rolling their own initiative as I think most (all?) conjure spells do; this makes it a lot easier to plan for how you're going to use them, and it feels more like part of that player's turn, also means it can immediately attack so there's no risk of you losing concentration before it can do anything (unless you hurt yourself somehow or walk into an antimagic field).
It's probably a more minor benefit though as they could easily update the Conjure X spells to match that Initiative behaviour.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Gee, if only it were possible for the player and DM to talk to each other like reasonable people, discuss expectations, and come to an accord. But that can't be guaranteed by a printed description, so I guess it's completely beyond the realm of possibility. And I said "the DM has power of adjudication", meaning "the DM can put the brakes on any particularly broken moves", not "you have to play 'mother may I' every time you want to use the spell". Player chooses from a list is decent, but leaves the spells stagnant as the monster roster expands, which is another shortcoming of the Tasha's options. And if the DM truly can't be bothered to put in a bit of legwork to let their players enjoy a more in depth summoner fantasy, the other spells are still there in any case.
If you're needing to do this for every single conjure spell anyway then you should have no problem negotiating a houserule to bring the old spells back in. The printed game should minimize these kinds of friction points.
AL especially is not designed around the DM stopping everything to discuss expectations with one summoner player, and there is frequently no session zero either.
You know, despite you constantly buzzwording it, "DM facing" is not some vast and immutable barrier that says no player content should interact with stat blocks from the MM or other books. As I've already gone over, Moon Druids are already getting far deeper into your alleged "DM facing" content than any single Conjure spell, so claiming that the designers are intending for this stuff to only be used by DMs is demonstrably not true up to and including in the current playtest.
I will point out that all the books are DM facing, both functionally and factually. As a distinction, it is meaningless.
And the MM is also Player facing -- it would be a function of wealth, not access. If you want to keep monsters out of plyer's hands, you have to keep them hidden entirely, which means creating all of them from scratch, and if you are doing that, crafting a list isn't a problem.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
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Yes, it's totally possible for the DM and player to work together to create a curated list... but that's a lot of work. It's much better to invert it: "Here is the default list. A particular campaign or setting may choose to alter or customize this list".
Nearly all the Beasts are in the Basic Rules so you don't need a MM at all for Conjure Animals or druid WS (or Polymorph for that matter). It is really Conjure Woodland Beings that had you digging through all the books to find something to summon since the Basic Rules Fey are all... kinda lame.
Conjure spells are DM nightmares that are widely banned from actual play (as are Animate Dead and Animate Objects, for that matter), because however much some people like the fLaVoR of summoning random bullshit from the DMG/MM with a nigh-guaranteed chance of the spell either grinding combat to a screeching halt or the summon immediately flipping hostile and making a bad situation massively worse? Neither of those make for fun gameplay for literally bleeding anybody but the conjuror. The other players hate it because now the summoner's turn in combat takes forty-five minutes to resolve, or now the summoner's sicced a CR 12 Planar abomination on the party as well as whatever they were already struggling to fight and now it's either find a way to retreat and lose-yet-live, or wipe and TPK. The DM hates it because the very microinstant a 2014 "Conjure [X]" spell is invoked, the entire session and anything anybody else wanted to accomplish goes out the window because the whole-ass damn game is now about resolving whatever nonsensical edge-case janky foolishness the conjuror decided sounded like a Grand Old Time instead of whatever the party was hoping to do that session.
I don't think I've ever encountered a use of 2014 'Conjure' spells that didn't make me want to chew bricks. The 2014 versions will continue to be banned from my table and any other table run by anyone in our circle. The 2024 versions? Jury's still out, but thus far I see nothing that makes me feel like these would be bad to have. Which is an improvement from "yeah, this entire classification/type of spell is flat banned from my table, no appeal."
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As I am not a player, I recognize my voice is minimized here, lol.
However, I would totally love that. Mostly because of an idea I got in a different thread about making those people be someone, with a personality and name and a history.
That said, it also might as well be named Summon Lancer, Summon Archer, Summon Rider...
And, as a DM, one of the things I am well aware of is that anything the players can do, sentient monsters can do. I have Goblin mages and Goblin clerics, and they could readily have a summon beings, so it isn't as unbalanced as it seems to me, from a DM standpoint.
I will grant that Players who love their martials might feel like they are having their toes stepped on. But that is for the players to work out.
I also disagree with the idea of banning summoning or conjuration spells. The only spell I have banned is Wish, but that's a rule I've had since the 80's. What I would do is what I did -- changed the nature of such things to move them to longer casting times and more complex set ups ("protect me while I draw a circle and I'll bring in reinforcements!").
My problem with the older conjurations spells is more one of the crappy ass CR system than it is the addition of a bunch more slow down combat rolls that make stuff drag even though everyone also says combat's only two rounds, three tops (whereas my combats are much longer in rounds).
I would prefer they have a list if they are used (and did that). But like I mentioned earlier, I have giant versions and small versions of all the normal animals (including chickens and cows and pigs and goats and ducks and have you ever had to fight a six foot tall gander? Those birds are mean.) So they all would be included in those CR settings.
This doesn't make me less inclined to like the new spells, it makes me more inclined to like them.
Also, Imma use these.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds