With the recent release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, there has been a noticeable shift in the way summoning and transformation spells work. The initial release of 5E brought with it spells such as Conjure Animals: allowing players to summon particular beasts from the Monster Manual to summon. In the more recent books, there seems to be a shift away from using the statblocks of particular monsters, and instead using template statblocks included in the spell's description. But is this shift good or bad? What will this mean for the future of abilities like Wild Shape? To answer these questions, it is best to first examine the issues of the old transformation and summoning spells, and how they could possibly be fixed:
Issues
Wildshape: Wildshape has always been a hit or miss ability for druids. With Moon druids, Wildshape is BUSTED at early levels, then evens out again at midlevels, and then skyrockets at end game. Moon Druids are also notorious for health tanking: dropping out of wildshape at low health, and then returning to all of their hitpoints. However for most Druids, Wildshape is only ever useful for scouting, tracking, or using some weird aspect of an animal's anatomy to do something cool. Normal druids can only Wildshape into CR 1 animals, so this ability has next to no usage. An easy fix for normal druids would be allowing normal druids to transform into higher CR beasts, or allowing them to Wildshape more often. Moon Druids should also have their own seperate table to follow for wildshape instead of using the "wildshape into a beast with a CR equal to your level divided by 3" rule
Conjure Creature Spells: There are so many issues with these spells. The fact that a player can summon EIGHT creatures with many of these spells is ridiculous. These spells slow down combat and make the entire battlefield a mess. There's also an innumerable amount of game breaking things you can do using Conjure Woodland Beings thanks to their innate spellcasting. Honestly, all of the new Tasha summoning spells should replace things like Conjure Woodland Beings and Summon Lesser Demon. But if you still want to keep these spells, I propose that players should be allowed to conjure only ONE creature at a time.
Polymorph: Polymorph is a terrifying spell. You can either transform a character into a rampaging elephant or a slug. I would say that this spell isn't so game breaking on willing creatures, but more so on UNWILLING creatures. If they fail the save for this spell, it effectively immobilizes them for a VERY LONG TIME. I really don't have a fix to this spell, except maybe make the transformation random (?). Polymorph is a very weird spell without an easy answer to it.
However, all of these spells/abilities have two glaring issues in common.
Players should not search through the monster manual during play. Searching through the monster manual for a particular creature slows down gameplay, and can ruin the magic of the game for new players. Granted, most long-time players probably know the stats for most of the monsters by now, but its nice to keep the magic alive for as long as possible. By using the templates provided in the spell, players do not have to journey into the Monster Manual in search of summons or transformations.
Power Scaling. As the characters of your game progress, creatures that were once quite strong become very weak. Summoning a wolf at level 3 is not the same as summoning it at level 10. This can be an issue for players who really like a particular wildshape or summon, but cant properly scale it up as they progress. With the new template spells, this issue is resolved and allows the spells to become powerful late game.
So this should mean that the old versions of these spells/abilities should be completely replaced by template spells? Well maybe, but lets not be too quick to judge. While I wholeheartedly agree that spells like Conjure Woodland Beings and Conjure Elemental SHOULD be replaced by versions that use templates, the issue becomes a bit more complicated with spells/abilities that use beasts. You see, there are only so many types of elementals or fey or aberrations that one could possibly ever summon; but with beasts, its a whole different story.
There are INNUMERABLE amounts of animals with their own adaptations and abilities that players will want to summon. A druid might want to Wildshape into a polar bear to survive the freezing cold, or a wizard using their owl familiar to scout during the night, or a particularly smart wizard polymorphing into an elephant to hear low frequencies. With a template, you don't get that type of creativity. With a template, you get creatures used almost exclusively for combat, which is kinda boring. Granted, you could always create several templates to use, but that still wouldn't cover every type of beast. It should also be noted that during the initial development of DND 5E (DND Next), they did plan on the druid using Wildshape templates, but was scrapped for whatever reason.
In short, there really isn't an easier answer to this problem. I want to hear everyone's opinion on this issue, and what possible solutions you might have on it.
I honestly don't see an issue except conjuring pixies.
Shouldn't have to search book midgame: true, but easily solved. Have a list of forms at the ready the same as a spell list. If players don't try to run these abilities properly, they shouldn't at all.
Power scaling problems: admittedly true, summoning spells don't gain scale that well when cast at higher level (the Tasha summoning spells are actually worse about this mathematically), but the ones worth casting at all are mostly fine the way they are.
Polymorph is fine. It sort of has the problem of scaling without having to use a higher level slot, but most of the best options are already available at the lowest level you can get the spell, so not really an issue.
The real problem in short, is that conjure animals and conjure woodland beings (and animate deadcreate undead) are the only summoning spells worth investing in. Way too many other summoning spells are either mathematically inferior to non-summoning spells of the same level, turn all your summons against you if your concentration breaks, or BOTH.
With the recent release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, there has been a noticeable shift in the way summoning and transformation spells work. The initial release of 5E brought with it spells such as Conjure Animals: allowing players to summon particular beasts from the Monster Manual to summon. In the more recent books, there seems to be a shift away from using the statblocks of particular monsters, and instead using template statblocks included in the spell's description. But is this shift good or bad? What will this mean for the future of abilities like Wild Shape? To answer these questions, it is best to first examine the issues of the old transformation and summoning spells, and how they could possibly be fixed:
Issues
However, all of these spells/abilities have two glaring issues in common.
So this should mean that the old versions of these spells/abilities should be completely replaced by template spells? Well maybe, but lets not be too quick to judge. While I wholeheartedly agree that spells like Conjure Woodland Beings and Conjure Elemental SHOULD be replaced by versions that use templates, the issue becomes a bit more complicated with spells/abilities that use beasts. You see, there are only so many types of elementals or fey or aberrations that one could possibly ever summon; but with beasts, its a whole different story.
There are INNUMERABLE amounts of animals with their own adaptations and abilities that players will want to summon. A druid might want to Wildshape into a polar bear to survive the freezing cold, or a wizard using their owl familiar to scout during the night, or a particularly smart wizard polymorphing into an elephant to hear low frequencies. With a template, you don't get that type of creativity. With a template, you get creatures used almost exclusively for combat, which is kinda boring. Granted, you could always create several templates to use, but that still wouldn't cover every type of beast. It should also be noted that during the initial development of DND 5E (DND Next), they did plan on the druid using Wildshape templates, but was scrapped for whatever reason.
In short, there really isn't an easier answer to this problem. I want to hear everyone's opinion on this issue, and what possible solutions you might have on it.
I honestly don't see an issue except conjuring pixies.
Shouldn't have to search book midgame: true, but easily solved. Have a list of forms at the ready the same as a spell list. If players don't try to run these abilities properly, they shouldn't at all.
Power scaling problems: admittedly true, summoning spells don't gain scale that well when cast at higher level (the Tasha summoning spells are actually worse about this mathematically), but the ones worth casting at all are mostly fine the way they are.
Polymorph is fine. It sort of has the problem of scaling without having to use a higher level slot, but most of the best options are already available at the lowest level you can get the spell, so not really an issue.
The real problem in short, is that conjure animals and conjure woodland beings (and animate dead create undead) are the only summoning spells worth investing in. Way too many other summoning spells are either mathematically inferior to non-summoning spells of the same level, turn all your summons against you if your concentration breaks, or BOTH.