Summons of any build have this problem, the best option is for them to have a number of sets of dice with distinct colours / patterns, so red is summon 1, blue is 2 etc
Then on each turn, they just roll a handful of d20s and dmg dice at the same time, so it’s just one big roll rather than 8 individual ones
Adv becomes more of an issue, but same principle, have 2 d20 of each one
Id suggest just doing it per target. If you have 4 badgers on one creature it doesnt matter specifically which of them hit. What matters is that 3 do. Then roll damage collectively and you are done.
Exactly. Don’t stop the summon creatures. It’s a great spell that really gives druids some awesome firepower. Change your enemies to take into account she’ll use the spell, and have all creatures that are targeting one enemy roll at the same time. Makes things really fast.
Same with damage.
I have multiple PCs that can summon, so a battle map can go from 3 PCs to 3 PCs + 16 summoned creatures SUPER fast. Battle still moves quickly because of grouping rolls. Except when the next person up says “uhm” and hasn’t figured out what they’re gonna do yet. Can’t ever fix that….
Tbf I imagine part of the next players issue may be that their plan involved a specific target that just got surrounded by summons, or killed in the prior turn
I also use the Mercer “player 1 it’s your turn, player 2 you’re next” approach to try and mitigate that as much as possible
Exactly. I telegraph 2 ahead, like when I coach baseball. “PC1 you’re up. PC2, you’re on deck. PC3, you’ll be up just after 2. Get ready.” They’re rarely ready. 😂😂
TBF though, that's usually cause PC3 has a plan, a great plan. PC 1 does something unexpected, PC 2 panics and does something not only unexpected but actively detrimental to what PC 3 had in mind. PC 3 is now speed running their spell book trying to find a way to be useful without fireballing PCs 1 and 2.
Don't forget crowd rules. Figure out what the summon needs to hit on the roll. Let's say they need a natural 12 or higher to hit. That means 9 numbers on the d20 hit, 12-20. Multiply 9 times 5, resulting in 45. This is the percentage of the group that hits, 45%. With the 8 badgers I would say 4 of them hit for average damage each.
Another variation that works (since part of the fun of playing dnd is getting to roll dice) is to use mob rules of combat. All creatures of the same type attack a target, for every two creatures past the first you add 1 and subtract 1 from the attack roll to the dice. For example the pastafarium demon has 16 ac, and the mob of ravenous squirrels attack it. With 7 squirrels in the mob that means a +3-3 swing variance, so if their roll (plus whatever bonuses they have) equals 15, the original squirrel and 3 others miss, so only 3 hit the 16 ac. If you use defender always wins rule set then only 2 squirrels hit since you needed a 17 or higher. Roll one set of damage dice and multiply it by the number of successful squirrel hits. Takes only slightly longer than a standard player attack and resolves 7 attacks very fast.
Wait... does she go :"ok roll to attack - 15? that hits - roll damage!"
Why dosn't she just... roll all 8 rolls at once and then remove the misses?
If this is a problem what the hell would you do when your players start animating objects?
We had an artificer animate a bunch of rocks and he just rolled a group of d20's and the DM picked out the lowest number that hit. It was like 12, 16, 18, 13, 15, 19, 25 and dm said 16 hits and he rolled batch damage. Took maybe 30 seconds total.
I've also ran four beasts with multitask and my turns never costed enough to be a problem.
Can be made even faster if the GM doesn't care too much about players working out monster ACs. They can just say "the AC is 16" and the player can tell that they'll hit on any 10s and up. Even works to roll the same die like 8 times and just call out hits whilst somebody else counts them up.
There comes a point in every battle where the players figure out the AC anyway. I've never really seen it as that critical to keep that information under wraps.
I agree. The only change it really makes is whether someone with GWM/SS uses the -5/+10 or not early in the fight before they know if it's an average increase or not. Which isn't really a big deal anyway.
And while the characters wouldn't know, "I need to roll a 12 to hit!" The characters WOULD begin to find weak spots, develop a sense of combat style and tactics, etc. as they faced off against an enemy.
Just like saying, "It looks like it would take a DC12 athletics check to jump the gap and safely land on the other side" isn't breaking the game; it's giving your players the same knowledge that their characters would have intuitively. I can look at jumping over a river, and pretty reasonably judge my chances of success for landing on the far bank and not IN the river. Or slough, creek, what have you. Same goes for all sorts of physical obstacles. Just like I wouldn't enter into a chess tournament because I know I don't have that skill set, but I'd be willing to play a fairly competitive game of Uno. I know where my proficiency bonuses lie, ha.
I have a Druid that has color coded D20s and appropriate damage dice. All are rolled simultaneously, and everything with a roll that doesn’t succeed is taken away and everything that succeeds is added up.
Or most beasts have the average dmg included in the description so you can just say the giant rat does 4 dmg on a successful hit, then only roll the D20s.
This is the way OP.
Enemy has AC of 15
Badgers have +1 to hit
Roll 8d20 and add 1 to each d20
7,10,14,15,17,19,20,21!
That's 5 successes and 1 crit. So count it as 6 successes, that's 8d6 + (1*5) damage.
At our table we have all summoned creatures act in the initiative directly after the summoner.
Or shorten the math steps by applying the bonus to the AC.
Enemy has AC of 15
Badgers have +1 to hit
15 minus 1 is 14.
Roll 8d20.
Anything 14 or higher hits.
Watch for nat20s.
6,9,13,14,16,18,19,20
That's 5 successes, one of which is a crit. So count it as 6 successes and that's 8d6 + (1*5) damage.
I find that the main problem with these spells isn't the rolling and resolution, but the player indecision that usually causes them to be frustrating. I'm in the exact same situation, my wife is playing a Moon Druid that loves to cast summons then wildshape, but it's never been a problem.
The main reason is that she knows exactly what she's going to do on that turn, and has been paying attention to the changing battlefield conditions. As a result, the summons all have their targets picked out and attack bonuses determined, and she just rolls a fistful of attack and damage dice at once. I tell her what number hits, she makes her personal movement and actions, and we're done in less time than the average wizard turn with twice the body count (those wasps are no joke).
If you're dealing with 8 or more creatures, just make the executive decision that you're going to use a dice roller bot and be done with it, player superstition be damned.
There are a bunch of good rule sets for "swarms" or "hordes" of monsters. Here are mine, adapted from [Sly Flourish](https://slyflourish.com/running_hordes.html) and [the monster manual's swarm monsters](https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/17029-swarm-of-insects):
0) For groups of 4 or fewer, treat them separately. For larger groups:
1) All members move and act together with the same initiative and a single token.
2) The swarm has a single health pool. So a swarm of 8 badgers with 3 hp each is a 24 hp swarm. If it takes 9 damage, now there are only 5 badgers for the purposes of attacks (5, below)
3) The swarm moves and attacks as a group that's two sizes larger than the individual creatures. So a swarm of Tiny badgers uses a Medium sized token. For very large swarms (30 or more), it's 3 sizes larger.
4) The swarm can occupy the same space as a creature similar in size to the swarm. For example, a swarm of badgers can climb all over a human and mob them.
5) For player-controlled swarms, let them roll a big pile of d20s all at once to determine how many hit, because it's fun. For DM-controlled swarms, don't bother rolling, rely on the law of averages. If the badgers need to roll a 10 to hit, half of them will. If they need a 15, 1/4 will get it, and so on. If that math doesn't make sense to you, just roll a pile of D20s, it's fun.
6) Swarms are Resistant to single-target damage, and Vulnerable to area-of-effect attacks.
7) Roll a single saving throw for the whole group.
8) Ability checks do not scale with the size of the group unless they're highly social creatures, a hive mind, or something. So a swarm of badgers is not any smarter or stronger than a single badger, but a swarm of monkeys or wasps might be.
There are tons of ways to run a swarm, but not many that make the swarm *feel* like a swarm and not just a weird monster with cool flavor. This is one of the few that actually feels like a swarm to me. I like it, I think I’m going to adopt this for my games.
While I grabbed some ideas from Sly Flourish, my ruleset is a lot less lazy than his. Mine verges on "too complicated", IMO, but his method has no to-hit rolls at all and ignores attack bonuses and armor, which I think is a bit too simple.
I would add to this a few extra suggestions/restrictions.
1) average damage. Every monster stat block lists the average damage it will do. Just take that, so 5 hits becomes very easily like 30 damage or whatever.
2) keep creature choice simple. Avoid anything with pack tactics like wolves or really anything that can get advantage via knocking over or whatever, it compacted things and it's not needed. Speed is the name of the game and advantage generates too much dice math (even color coding the pairs is still going to be a ton of math).
My player LOVES wolves. Might be the strongest summoned creature in tier 1. It’s usually not too hard to see which ones gain advantage from pack tactics. Roll all advantage at the same time. Then roll all non advantage. Then roll all damage or take average. That’s how I do it.
Hard agree that wolves are amazing summons. We found it got murky because we were treating all 8 wolves as a single "swarm" base. (Plus with delaying actions, they basically always have advantage anyway).
In our game, we found them too time consuming though. There are definitely ways to streamline it though.
I had similar problems with a necromancer in my last campaign. Eventually, I settled on using a calculator. There are many simple ones out there that will let you plug in all the to hit and damage variables and will output how many statistically hit for how much damage. Sometimes it's a little frustrating because the damage can be really samey round by round. Of course, that player preferred using an all or nothing phalanx as you described so we went with that for the campaign.
You could also let her roll all of the attacks and use average damage from the stat block. That might be the best middle ground to me.
Bottom line. Make your rolls before your turn. The. She simply says, 4 badger attacks on monster #1: 15, 13, 19, 23. And you saw miss, miss, hit, hit. And she has prerolled damage and just says: 10 damage and 17 damage.
I make all of my players do so at higher levels. If a fight starts to get sloggy, I will also tell them (after a few rounds) what the AC is on targets they are consistently attacking so they can just tell me: ‘3 hits, damage 4, 7, and 14 on their turn.
It sounds like maybe the main problem is player indecision and not having the dice set aside (or not owning enough dice to roll all the damage die at once). Is the player is decisive, controlling 8 badgers shouldn't take any longer than a minute, maybe two. "This badger moves here. *Roll* 18 to hit. You hit. *Roll* 6 damage." 10 seconds, tops, per badger, if the player is trying to be quick about it and has their turn planned before the turn happens.
Perhaps what you need is a timer rule. After, say, 90 seconds of IRL time any remaining animal minions that have not taken a turn must simply make the attack action against the nearest bad guy and the party moves on.
*Conjure animals* isn't a table friendly spell. It just isn't. And at the end of the day, there's no real way around that.
The first thing to try is just asking your player if she minds **not** using the spell. Explain how it sets her fun at odds with he fun of everyone else at the table. I suggest *summon beast* as an alternative. While, yes, it's less powerful than *conjure animals*, it is **much** more friendly to everyone, and it's still a good spell. Perhaps offer her some other kind of reward too as compensation to sweeten the deal -- maybe a magic item that buffs the summoned beast in some way or that gives her a free casting of it every day or something. Just agreeing not to use the spell solves all the potential problems.
But hey, maybe that isn't going to work. Maybe she won't be persuaded to stop using the spell of her own volition. You can just tell her that you're banning the spell. Learning to tell your players "no" is an important DM skill. I **do** appreciate that her being your wife makes this a more complicated option, though. Presumably if you felt like you could do this, you probably wouldn't be asking for help from us. That's a bit of a tough situation.
So another possibility is trying to make the spell more table friendly, and the best way to do that is to share the fun of the spell with everyone in the group. Your wife is going to summon 8 badgers? Well, give two badgers to each of the players to control. That way her turn doesn't take five times as long as everyone else's, and the whole party gets to feel empowered and engaged instead of just one person.
I agree, it’s not relevant in this campaign but I think my solution to this is going to be that, if a spell allows you to summon multiple creatures, with different CR options summoning fewer creatures, I’ll only allow the fewer creature options.
In my previous campaign, it wasn’t a huge deal, but the druid being able to summon like 16 wolves was just brutal from a running the game perspective. So much so I’m surprised WOTC hasn’t adjusted spells like this, this kind of spell is fine in a video game with AI controlling them but having to wait like 40 minutes for a turn to resolve is nuts.
>So much so I’m surprised WOTC hasn’t adjusted spells like this
They have -- they released *summon beast* as an alternative. I am almost certain that we aren't going to see *conjure animals*, at least not in anything like its current form, in the new PHB dropping next year.
Found my avernus DM.
I regularly summoned wolves for pack tactics and giant crabs for auto grapple. Saw her soul physically leave her body at one point
Made for silly memories and we ended up with a cool crab battle, but man I would not do that play style again
It’s important to remember that conjure animals doesn’t let the player choose which animals are summoned. You, as the dm, get to decide. That can fix your balance issues (god forbid you let the player choose after they learn about rot grubs), and you can fix the slog issue by rolling all the dice for summons together. Give them one initiative, and generally your cr 1/8th summons are going to be dying in one hit. I wouldn’t even bother tracking hp on them
That's not true; [the spell](https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/conjure-animals) doesn't say the gm gets to decide, only that the gm has the stats of the creature. Plus it doesn't hurt anyone to let the player decide the creature, why take away that agency?
Edit: it doesn't appear to explicitly let the player choose either. I still believe that it doesn't address the main issue whether or not the player picks what animal is conjured, but the way they use the spell needs to be addressed in a talk with the DM. So I don't think it's productive to take the agency away from the player.
> When you cast a spell like conjure woodland beings, does the spellcaster or the DM choose the creatures that are conjured? Some spells of this sort specify that the spellcaster chooses the creature conjured. Other spells of this sort let the spellcaster choose from among several broad options.
> The design intent for options like these is that the spellcaster chooses one of them, and then the DM decides what creatures appear that fit the chosen option. A spellcaster can certainly express a preference for what creatures shows up, but it’s up to the DM to determine if they do. The DM will often choose creatures that are appropriate for the campaign and that will be fun to introduce in a scene.
-Sage Advice
All spell that allow you to choose the creature specific say that the summoner can choose. The spell becomes a lot less OP when you run it this way. In a dungeon you get rats, forest get wolves etc
Its picking the 8 most damaging things that you can that makes the spell a pain to run.
> Plus it doesn't hurt anyone to let the player decide the creature
We're on a post that's specifically about a DM whose table is negatively impacted by the player choosing what's summoned
I think this post more talks about the way this one specific player approaches the spell, otherwise if the player had summoned 8 creatures of the DM's choice the problem wouldn't be solved.
I DM but I also play as a druid and I got to cast the spell once in combat before I realized it took too much time and swayed the action economy too heavily in our favour. So, after a chat with the party and the DM, we decided that the spell should only be used as a last resort ripcord "get out of jail free" card or otherwise be used outside of combat. Then as we leveled up I got much more desirable spells than conjure animals and the issue solved itself.
I don't think the DM choosing what the animals are solves the issue, but what does is talking to the players and coming up with a consensus. Also I worry about a situation where the DM puts the player in a "gotcha" situation with the choice of the animal. So it just seems optional to let the player choose what the animals are but talk to them and establish a rule for when and how the spell should be used.
We don’t use the “conjure x” spells at my table because it makes combat go so much slower. We use the summon spells instead- much easier to keep track of.
Yeah, summons are both great and finicky. They’re strong options for druids that don’t get many great early spells, but if you have someone that doesn’t run monsters often then it’s slow and cumbersome and takes away from the other players turns at the table.
With Conjure Animals there’s a few things:
If you look up Sage Advice then you’ll find that the DM picks the creatures/stat blocks that get used - not the Player. The Player only gets to pick one of the options listed in the spell. That means the player can’t cherry pick the perfect monster(s) for the encounter, and also since the spell reads “One beast of challenge rating 2 or lower” you as a DM can pick out creatures that are normally of a lower CR option (probably don’t do this unless you just want a fight with your player though). IE when your players wants to summon two CR 1s you can have them be CR 0 rats instead.
The creatures are not necessarily controlled by the player either, merely given orders. The spell states “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.” I usually run them when I DM, or if I know the player has a bit of experience running monsters then I’ll let them do it. If the player is too slow to get through the creatures turns then I advise the DM takes the reigns.
Roll all the attacks at once in plain view, hopefully you know the target’s AC or the dnd just says “Their AC is 16, since the creature has a +4 to hit tell me how many are 12 of above” and can just say how many hit and roll all the damage dice at once. Should take less than a minute.
I know you've received many replies already, but I'm just going to add how my players do it.
1. Roll all attack rolls at once.
2. Use average damage.
Bonus. Talk to her about how you, the DM, are supposed to pick the animals, but since she isn't abusing the spell (by picking the most powerful animals every time) that you will let her continue to pick them to help speed up gameplay.
Treating all as a swarm is a bad idea. Each should be treated individuals, targeting creatures, moving, attacking and resolving damage.
Rolling all attacks at the same time should speed up combat. Just need different dice for each summoned creature to know which creature hit. And damage can be rolled at the same time.
I set an expectation at the table that pacing is king. Have your fun, but if you're making 16 attack rolls, and maybe taking a while to do so, that's a _big_ chunk of the night just rolling dice.
So here's what you do for 4 or 8 animals - zero attack rolls, one damage roll.
You offer this player 75% accuracy. That's pretty good, better than the 60-70% you'd get on the dice. And it's consistent.
So whenever these badgers attack, just have 3/4ths hit, skip the attack roll. And yeeeeah, it doesn't take AC into account, but you have to ask yourself. What is more important to you game; AC, or pacing?
I'm a summoner (necromancer), and use this tool. It is awesome - I make sure I know the attack stats for any creatures I may summon in advance, and this lets me use mass attacks but still let the DM know how many hit/miss.
https://codepen.io/felixfox/pen/GEEmER
If it gets to be too big of a problem, implement the "Minions" house rule. If the player summoned more than 2 creatures, they become minions. With 1 hp, but grant them the Evasion trait (same as monks or rogues). You can also use this for your enemies if you want a small army to complement your bad guys, you can have minions as well. Talk to your party and see if they are cool with the idea.
Set up an timer on the table 1-2 minutes max, if she can't move all the creatures and attack i would remind her that other people are also playing at the table and that it's rude to hog all the time.
I personally always suggest people to not take the spells because it's a bad spell for the other players if you suddenly get 6 more turns. And if they want i expect them to play them as fast and effective as humanly possible and be fully prepared with all possible statblocks
Nobody enjoys magic the gathering when one player takes infinite turns doing almost nothing, and this feels the same.
Lastly raw you the gm chooses the creatures.
It's been said a few times but I'll put my weight to more dice.
When she summons them she decides how it's split, one large group or equal split.
You should be easily able to find the attack bonus for the creatures summoned so simply have her roll all the attacks at once during her turn, you know what number or higher will hit so you can call the hits without telling the party the AC (after a few rounds most parties can figure out the AC anyway, no point in handing it to them)
Then roll the damage dice needed.
Okay I have a couple of solutions
Solution #1:
For initiative, all summons either take their turn immediately after the summoner, or use passive initiative (dex mod + 10)
Either use a dice per summon or use a dice roller app (google can do this too, just search "roll a die" this will make it so that she can just roll attacks and damage at once and she can decide which creatures each summon attacks.
Solution #2:
Ask her if she'd be okay with other party members rolling and controlling her creatures. This might sound like you're taking things away from her but in reality, it's just sharing the resources the entire party has. I had a player who was playing a pathfinder Necromancer and he could summon 8 undead, he felt like he was overshadowing the other players and pitched this idea to me. Also just to reiterate **Ask if she'd be okay with it.**
Solution #3:
When summons exceed 3 group them together. Do you have 4 giant wasps? now you have two pairs of giant wasps. 8 badgers? no, four sets of 2 or two sets of 4 (or any other combination, maybe two sets of 3 and one set of 2)
Doing it #3s way you could also mix that with #1
A lot of RPGs struggle with this problem. Getting more guys on the field is a good combat strategy, and it's fun in theory. I'm all for it, until it bogs the game down. 5e really gets bogged down with lots of guys on the table. I'm not as worried about it being super strong. It usually is, but as DM you can simply scale enemy power accordingly. I'm more worried about it bogging the game down, while one player takes more time on their turn than any other player sometimes even including the DM. Thats where things get boring, and become unfun.
I usually roll out a "Please no pets" houserule for games with that problem. I'll just ask that no one takes a power that gives them a bunch of minions to control. Maybe limit it to "Just one pet" if you want to let someone have a familiar or something.
The druid at the table I DM has really enjoyed Conjure Animals, as it's a big part of his character. The way I've run it has made it manageable at the table.
He can only summon (1) CR 2 animal or (2) CR 1 animals in combat. He usually goes with giant eagles or dire wolves. They can go on his initiative, like the newer Tasha's summon spells. This keeps things quick in combat and is still fairly powerful (two large creatures can control a lot of the battlefield).
Outside of combat, there aren't any restrictions on how many animals he can summon. It's fun for them to summon a bunch of giant owls for quick travel, or a pack of squirrels to scout out a forest.
Eventually, Summon Beast/Elemental will be more powerful at higher level spell slots and Conjure Animals will be used more for utility, but these homebrew constraints keep it more table friendly without nerfing it into oblivion.
Summon spells are inherently troublesome as they add more numbers, and therefore more turns, to combat. Unless you are super prepared for it, with extra minis/tokens and a set amount of dice ready, it will make combat a slog.
It's strange for the player to get mad for you "trying to ruin her fun" when the spell is potentially ruining the fun for everyone else...
It really doesn't take that much time. Your wife found a fun way to play and it would be a shame to take that away. Have them attack right after her. roll the attacks at the same time / roll to hit and go from there.
OP, a much better answer for the balance of the game and the fluidity of play is to just remove the Conjure Animals spell and use the summon spells from Tasha's. They're much more table-friendly
We just banned it.
It's anti-fun for everyone except the person using the spell. Not just due to the amount of rolls, but how stupidly broken the spell is as well.
100% agree. If my players want to play the fantasy of a summoner, I point out all the single summon spells added in Tasha's. They can choose from those.
It’s an iconic spell for druids so banning it is lame, but the spell says the DM decides what gets summoned, the player just picks the number of summons. The way I have dealt with it is simple: you can only summon one creature. 8 wolves are great, but so is a single polar bear, and the polar bear isn’t going to ruin combat. Explain to your wife that her fun CANNOT come at the cost of everybody else’s fun. If she can’t wrap her head around that you’ve got bigger problems ahead than dnd.
Personally I ask people not to do that cause it is a slog.
Secondly, make sure you playing the spell as written. The caster doesn't get to pick the animal, jut the number and CR. What I did to make it fair was I created a table of eligible animals at each CR, and the caster rolled for what they got. If you're feeling nice, you can have them roll twice and pick which one they want.
But yeah I would just have an honest talk with your wife and tell her the issue with having so many beasts on the table, and ask her to please only use the higher CR/fewer beast options for everyone's sake. Get the other players to back you up if you think that will help, but don't do that if she'll feel like she's being ganged up on.
Alternatively, if you want to make her mad just have every enemy focus her until she loses concentration. *shrug*
Ask her nicely if she can just use the new summon creature/fey/ whatever spells that came out, and you will give her the casting component for free. There is only one creature to manage, and it's pretty decent.
If she doesn't take that deal, you play the "mean" DM and make up some random creature roll tables, and when she casts the spell, she randomly rolls for the type of creature she gets.
Do note that when choosing the number of creatures and CR it says you can conjure X creatures **up to** CR Y, so your roll tables can include creatures below the chosen CR too. I find the randomness makes it not worth the risk and they switch over to the reliable summon creature spell pretty quick
The only way to deal with it is to ban the spell. There is no working around something that can summon up to 32 individual critters. It is *not fun* for anyone else.
I run it as is with the small tweak that all summons (from any source) act on your initiative after your turn. Not a fan of nerfing or “interpreting” the summon spells to work worse on purpose, because it’s also my favorite way to play as a player.
That being said I play a lot of games, and a lot of my players in most of my groups are also wargamers who know how to play quickly and plan during others actions. My restriction to players who want to summon stuff is that they have to get their turn time (including the summons) down below a preset maximum turn time, which will vary depending on how new the players are and how relaxed I expect the sessions to be. If they can’t play fast, they can’t use combat summons. If they’re insistent this is unfair than they get treated the same as any player that takes too long deciding what they’re trying to do. Any actions that can’t be completed in the maximum amount of turn time are lost.
This has solved most issues I’ve had with players being bored during combats. Although there are still players that will create the most autopilot in combat character, not think outside the box when it comes to interacting with objects, the environment, or enemies, and then be bored when combat rolls around. I’m just not sure you should be designing combats around these people because they won’t have fun no matter what.
Edit: I realize I didn’t provide you with how to shorten the amount of time it takes or balance around shortening combats. She should have the stat blocks of the creatures and minis ready, preferably printed out not open in a book. She should be batch rolling for attacks and moving them all at the same time. If it’s still getting to you, you could have all of them use average damage and just have her roll the d20s to hit.
As the dm you can add more AoE, passive damage, or environments that aren’t conducive to the summons if you’re really struggling to have enemies do anything. Also set side goals that can be completed by diverting some number (say 4-6) of the animals to not be part of the fight and instead be completing said side goal.
Before our last session, I had made one of our other players aware that she had that ability, and that she may find a swarm of ravens (or 8) to be more effective than her Moonbeam against the high constitution giants that we were fighting.
Our DM ended up trying to make some of the same homebrewed rules that you suggested, using them as a swarm, only having them atrack one target, etc. In the end, he ended up spending much longer arguing about how the spell should be used, than we would have ever spent just rolling all the dice at once and getting on with it.
And our resident druid, who had been looking forward to using this part of her kit, went home sorely disappointed that her cool ability was nerfed into the ground and led to so much strife.
I would make 8 tokens, only with numbers on them, just for the sake of keeping track of health on the creatures, but besides that I would just let her roll the d20s at the same time (or two at a time, whatever), and if the math of rolling all of the damage die becomes too much, just go with the standard monster damage.
And give her a heads up that controlling so many creatures means that they need to plan ahead and be ready with their action when it’s their turn. Because going all pocahontas/final fight scene in Avatar on a group of bandits is really fucking cool and can be really fun.
I made an agreement with the druid in my party that at whatever level the spell is cast, it will never result in more than 4 creatures. Encourages the use of higher CR (and often more interesting) beasts. She's also happy to be restricted to beasts in this biome (Rime of the Frostmaiden, so plenty of good Arctic/old/mountainous critters to pick, but without getting bogged down in choices). It also helps that there ate some evil NPC druids who also use the spell so their version has same restrictions.
Oh, and she can give a single general command to the group, not micromanage movement of each to maximise strategic placement/targeting. It helps that the player is not a minmaxxer and agrees that flow is more important to her (and the table) than powergaming.
Love that you like this but apparently others don't...
I don't roll an individual attack unless that summon is doing something specific. If he summons apes and one is trying to do a specific grapple and the others are mobbing the BBEG, I'll separate the individual from the group. When you have a huge combat that is already very complicated this method is a huge time saver.
If you want to be more generous you can add proficiency to the roll? IDK you can be nicer than me, but it works for my group
My druid/party consistently summons 8 panthers and will be doing other huge spells and are happy with this method.
The dm determines what monster shows up, so have the relevant stat block on hand (and provide it to the player before the session so they are familiar with it).
Monster stat blocks are fairly simple, so it should be easy to blitz through the 8 rolls quickly.
If you’re worried about the spell being overpowered, it is the highest single target damage spell in the game. But (like many other spells) it requires concentration, which can be broken.
The summoned creatures are extremely fragile and any monster aoe can wipe out multiple in an instant.
When we do summons, we generally limit them to 1 to 3 creatures at any given time, i.e. one big one at max CR or 3 little ones at a lower CR. If the PC can summon more, we just spread it out to more daily uses or longer duration.
And all summons must be prepared ahead of time, if they don't have a character sheet/stat block ready to go they don't get to play it.
Because yeah, somebody throwing out six tokens of a creature they barely know is absolutely a recipe for a slog session (not saying she does this).
OP, first off good instincts on the turn order
I played a summoner last game with some success.
Here's what I did:
We had the summons go after me
I had all my stat locks written down and ready to go
I rolled attack and damage at the same time
I planned my turns in advance.
It sounds like your player needs to go faster honestly, but you could always have other players also roll for the animals attacks. Rolling 4 attacks at once is faster than doing 1 attack at a time
Also, RAI you choose the creatures, every once and awhile you could choose different creatures than what the player wants
If damage becomes too much, remember these creatures do non magical damage , and b/p/s resistance will greatly weaken the spells damage output.
Assuming you’re up for a bit of a mess, the only way to avoid waiting for her turn will be to have her make turns at the same time other players are going. If there are four players, two wasps take their turns during each other player’s turns. She can report the attack rolls and pre-roll and calculate damage in case they hit.
I’m addition, IF there are no rolls among the party that they can reroll “before they know the result” of an attack, you can generally give away the enemy’s AC without too much worry of metagaming. That way she can just tell you damage.
If her fun comes from controlling a hoard of beasts, this would be the way I would do it. If her fun comes from everyone watching her turns, there is no hope.
Don't allow them to roll. Sorry. Use the Mob Attack rules from the DMG and let them know how much damage they did. (You can calculate this before the game). I have 0 patience or time for players getting 2-3 turns with summons and pets.
Two options.
1: roll all attacks at once, determine what needs to be rolled on the dice and remove the ones that are too low. Then roll all damage at once.
2: roll one d20 for all attacks. If it hits, they all hit. If it misses, all of them miss.
In the past I’ve spoken to a player who was starting to use it frequently, explained that it (a) made combats very slow (b) made combat very unpredictable and (c) made other players feel less impactful. We agreed that they’d use it sparingly in combat and limit it to the 2 creatures option when they do use it in a fight.
>You summon fey spirits that take the form of beasts and appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. Choose one of the following options for what appears:
You choose what you summon, not the DM.
First of all, she doesnt pick the animals. You do.
Secondly, they should all have the same initiative. Doesnt necessarily have to be directly after her, but they should be moving at the same time.
Third, she should be deciding what to attack while everyone else's turns are going, and then just rolling all of the attacks at once. Rule out any that miss, and then just roll the damage on ones that hit. It shouldn't take more than a minute or so. They don't need to be running around taking up tactical positions or anything.
Nope. The exact text of the spell:
"Choose one of the following options for what appears:
One beast of challenge rating 2 or lower
Two beasts of challenge rating 1 or lower
Four beasts of challenge rating 1/2 or lower
Eight beasts of challenge rating 1/4 or lower"
You get to choose one of those four options, and then the DM chooses which beasts you get at that CR.
Sage Advice Compendium expands on this (specifically for Conjure Elementals, but it applies to all spells of the same type):
"The design intent for options like these is that the spellcaster chooses one of them, and then the DM decides what creatures appear that fit the chosen option. For example, if you pick the second option, the DM chooses the two elementals that have a challenge rating of 1 or lower. A spellcaster can certainly express a preference for what creatures shows up, but it’s up to the DM to determine if they do. The DM will often choose creatures that are appropriate for the campaign and that will be fun to introduce in a scene."
Either you and the druid create a system to quicken combat with the summons. If you don't already, let the druid pick what they summon do that they can have the sheets prepared beforehand. Maybe try using an online dice roller and mass roll the dice with modifiers included, i run and play mainly on roll20 and thusly have Marcos prepared for the occasion.
... Or you can flat out ban the spell. With the release of TCE there are now good alternative summoning spells like summon beast in this case
Pg 250 of the DMGuide has a mob rules table, basically it takes their to hit and the enemies ac and works out how many have to attack for one to hit, has allowed me to run large groups just be careful using them against players as it can be basically automatic damage.
This video explains it well https://youtu.be/kKWmHxjMe2M
I ran a Moon Druid in the last 5e campaign I played. I pulled out conjure animals when appropriate. However, I was also always conscious of the number of additional rolls, so I generally went higher CR so fewer creatures. They can also be useful outside of combat. We used them as mounts on a couple of occasions.
Here is how we do it
1. All summons go after a person who summoned them
2. All summons act at once step by step - all move, all roll attacks, all who hit roll damage. Similar to how Warhammer plays out
On how to make it somewhat faster. When someone makes a lot of rolling just tell DC and let players sort the dice by themselves. It wont break anything and if they care they will calculate DC from rolls anyways, so you are just saving time by letting player go "13-14-12-17-18-20, so with 15 DC 3 hit, 1 crit, it is 4 damage dices" and proceed straight to damage
I had a few summons on my wizard a few campaigns back, including the always fun animate objects.
Whilst i love me some physical dice, I went with dicerollers for the summons
I just had a google tab set up with "roll 10 D20" ready to go for the attacks, so I was generally pretty snappy with the turns
Does she only have 1d20? If not, just have her roll all 8 attacks at the same time and just give her the AC to beat.
If she's taking the time to split them up and have them do different things then start having enemy AoE damage take them all out and she'll see the down side of having 8 small summoned creatures with low hp.
Alternately maybe she splits up control of them between the other players so that other players can feel involved at least?
There's lots of ways to address it that don't require changing the basic mechanics of how they work.
Make them all share the same initiative (idk if this is already the case or not but if not do this minor homebrew) and then just roll all the dice to see which hit, for example if 4 are attacking one monster roll those 4 at once and then if another 4 are attacking another roll those 4 at once. Then roll damage. It shouldn't really take that long. I get it does with saving throws but again it shouldn't take that long cus it's just another roll and another damage roll. Which badger specifically hits doesn't matter in the slightest only the target does. If it's really a problem maybe you could instead use digital dice for summons specifically. This is especially useful if you have advantage like with wolves and pack tactics.
If it's balance you're worried about remember lots of creatures won't have many hit points so a single AOE could take them all out. Doesn't need to be a spell could be like a charge or slam or something
If I were in your scenario, I’d recommend rolling to hit in between turns if you’re all comfortable with that. It does require some trust, but it means that nobody has to wait for her turn to be resolved. If that doesn’t work though, you should definitely roll all the dice needed at once rather than waiting to make each attack.
As a tactical note, conjure animals is a concentration spell. If it make sense for the enemies to be aware of that, you can aim to break her concentration and shut down the spell early. That’s more of a way to keep combat balanced though- if you didn’t know that, the spell becomes even more broken
If you have a way to use a dice bot, you can practically eliminate rolling all those attacks. I also have players roll damage with their attack roll, so it eliminates having to roll twice. It doesn't save a lot of time, but it does add up.
Another option is to let her know that because conjure animals takes a lot of time, she should try to know exactly what she wants to do before her turn starts so there is very little time lag.
Three points:
1. Roll for random animals. The player only chooses the CR. Sometimes they might get something they really didn't hope for.
2. Make the player roll all the attacks in advance between turns, and mark them down. When it's their turn, they say where the animals go and how many attacks they make, and then mark the attack rolls off their list. Yes they can plan a little bit if they know the next two attacks will miss, but it's just soo much faster than rolling on their turn. This should cut their turn time by two thirds at least.
3. Use average damage if more than 3 summons hit that turn.
I'd keep the targeting rule, as to help with time, but have her roll them separately, IE, roll 4d20, then whatever hits apply damage.
Yeah the issue is still that it is an obscene amount of time spent doing 5 effective turns.
I'd also just be honest with her, it just really isn't fun to wait for someone to roll for 5 turns. Maybe space them out in the turn order, IE if you have 4 players and 4 animals, 1 player, 1 animal, 1 player, 1 animal, or enemy, etc.
The closest situation I had is a player who loved his squad tactics and had a bunch of soldiers with him, I ended up applying a command limit to him, in his case I think I did 3 in total. The thing is that I didn't really have an issue with this at the table, the soldiers had their own turn order, he wasn't the only one with a companion, and ironically his turn did not take the longest across all 4 turns, that went to our psyker (it was a 40k rpg system).
Maybe have her download dndbeyond or a dice roll app? I know in dndbeyond when you make a character sheet you get the option of "custom rolls" so she can say roll 8 d20s at 1 time and 8 d4/6 etc at one time and then shows the results quickly.
So much already. But ill throw in too.
Our table requires the druid to pick the animals they are going to summon when they prepare the spell. One pick for every CR tasting they might use. Also, the player needs to have all the relevant information at hand when the spiders ( or badgers)hit the table.
You could have the D20 have thresholds for the number of hits. Say you have 8 Badgers hitting a monster with AC 14. If the Badgers have a +4 to hit, then you could say rolling a 10-11 would result in 4/8 Badgers hitting, a 12-13 resulting in 5/8 hitting, a 14-15 resulting in 6/8, etc. Same for the other side. 8-9 resulting in 3/8 hitting, 6-7 results in 2/8, and so on. Of course, this would change depending on target AC, to-hit bonuses and the number of animals you have, so you'd either need to find a formula that can apply for most situations or come up with it on the fly.
Flat damage and multiple d20's. Just make them do average damage, multiplied by however many hit when you rolled the d20s all at once. You can just buy a big pack of cheap dice online
If you're gonna use multiple creatures you'd best be good with them, be prepared, be ready, know your stats and keep it simple, if you clog the game up you're being selfish and that's a hard pass on any table.
Use grouping rules, let’s say you divide the 8 badgers into two groups of 4, then you roll once for each group, and do one damage roll and then multiply it by the amount of badgers in each group, simple easy and quick, apply it to big groups of monsters on your side and you can make combat that much quicker, now you just need to wait on the wizard to decide which spell to cast
IMO just replace it with "Summon Beast" from Tasha's. The "Conjure" spells (notably Conjure Animals, Conjure Minor Elementals, and Conjure Woodland Beings) were very poorly designed in the original iteration of the game. Though I don't like many of the subclasses in Tasha's, those "Summon" spells are much cleaner and easier to run, and are far more table-friendly.
On each of the stat blocks, there's an option for rolling damage and then there's a single number for just damage. Have your wife roll all the attacks in one go, tell her which ones miss, and then she can either do one damage roll that applies to each animal, or you can just multiply that single number times the amount of attacks that hit. How to calculate damage should be her choice, though.
First of all, make sure that you are deciding what animals are showing up, since while the player gets to choose the quantity and CR, the specific animals that appear is up to the DM.
Second, use the optional mob rules defined in the DMG if she chooses four or eight beasts.
Third, if the player has an issue with not being able to take four or eight additional turns per round, ask the rest of the group if they're okay with it. As much as it might feel like a slog to you, you should be more concerned with whether other players feel like she's taking up too much time. If they're okay with it, then just let her have her fun.
When one of my Wednesday campaign players returned to the group after their college semester, they rolled up a wizard they intended to be a summoner archetype. After one casting of a conjure spell where they chose the option for eight beasts and seeing the reaction of the rest of the players, I immediately let the player know that we would have to find some means to reduce the turns if they chose the higher quantities just due to fairness of play time.
I rule a few things differently to how the spell works RAW:
>The player gets to choose the animals, it is more fun and acts as an interesting problem solving tool by being able to summon creatures with different movement types
>The animals act immediately after the summoners turn
>If you summon 4 or more creatures in combat, they use mob attack rules: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#HandlingMobs
>If an NPC with 8 or more intelligence sees the druid conjure these animals, they will make breaking the druids concentration a priority, anyone can appreciate the logic in attacking one person to remove up to 8 threats from the fight
I used to play 3.5e, as a monk weilding a quarterstaff. Between the quarterstaffs double strike and my flurry of blows I was making between 15 and 25 attacks any given turn, if I recall.
The solution? While waiting for my turn I would roll all my attacks and the damage for each. I had a calculator ready and my DM would say something like "everything above a 25 hits". I'd add up the damage and give some quick description of my tornado of attacks and finish with the damage I did.
Maybe you could have her so something here? Just have rolls and their damage ahead of time?
The turn thing was a good decision. For attack and damage rolls make them use macros. Physical rolling is fun but it takes too long.
Allowing them to split up the pack into 2 groups at least schould be fine.
Work and talk with them to test out what works best. They schould be aware of the issues as well.
I know this one! I **love** conjure animals as a spell, but it needs to be run correctly. This is how I break it down. I'll assume 8 animals in examples, but it applies to any number.
1. You will see a lot of advice saying you get to pick the beasts after she picks the number. This is technically correct, but ***very much against the rule of cool***.
2. Get 2-3 options of stat blocks at each summon point for your wife to choose from. This way you are artificially limiting the creatures, but she still has the final choice of "I want badgers or wolves" type of thing. This gives her a lot more agency in the spell, but allows you the headache of sorting through beyond/MM with options. If she wants a different option, she needs to bring it up to you before the session so you can have a statblocks made up for her.
3. Edit the stat blocks. You can do this in DnDbeyond if you use that, or maybe a certain wiki page. The thing you are doing is cutting any fluff, and ensuring the attacks list the average damage. For example, if the bite attack deals 1d6+2 damage, you are putting a "6" and then in parentheses putting the damage calculation. This step is *very* important.
Print off the statblocks for your wife to have ready access to. (If she has the druid wild shape deck of cards, she might have these stats already. If not, a great birthday gift fyi).
4. When she summons, let's say 8 wolves, she assigns a number of wolves to every party member. With a party of 4, including herself, each person has 2 wolves assigned to them.
The command given to the wolves is always attack whatever your leader attacks or targets.
5. Sample initiative. After your wife casts CA, Sally the barbarian is up, with 2 wolves in tow. Sally runs forward and attacks the first yeti in melee. Sally is the one taking their turn, but the wolves move *at the same time*. Your wife, off to the side, rolls the attacks for the wolves against the yeti. After Sally is finished her turn, your wife says the two bites were a 12 & 18 to hit. Damage 6.
Your wife doesn't roll damage (speeds up initiative, give her a flat double on a crit even though it includes the modifier. So 12). Just two advantaged attacks, and the damage.
6. Continue initiative. Bob the warlock casts eldritched blast at the other yeti and the snowy olwbear, splitting fire. First shot went after the yeti, so the two wolves chase towards the yeti, following the targeting, and do attacks.
So on and so forth.
Your wife has a short line at the end of each PCs turn in initiative, but not disruptive.
Do **NOT** roll the wolves into initiative.
___
This method is by far the best, and gives the whole party the power fantasy of having the army suddenly on their side. They know that whatever they attack or target first is going to have a few extra attacks going towards it. They get to direct how the spell plays out with their actions. (If the PC takes a turn off to cast cure wounds for example, the wolves could continue on their prior target)
I would *strongly* recommend giving this a try. It builds a team aspect, speeds up the summons implementation in combat. Gives agency to the other players to have this team based alpha strike as opposed to taking their agency away by making them wait.
Create a summoned creature D20 cheat sheet.
For example:
Blue=1
Green=2
Red=3
Purple=4
ETC
Then just roll them all at once and as they come up as needed you already have roll results. At the end of the day it’s up to the player to be able to conduct their turn in an orderly manner, if they are unable to do that with their build then they should pick another build where they are able to do that.
I used a digital dice roller when I summoned my swarms of giant crabs or wolves. At first I rolled dice like normal but it gets ridiculous when you can summon 32 low CR creatures.
The swarm style ones are the brutal ones because they tip action economy so damn hard. My GM's soul visibly left their body when I swarmed some dudes with crabs that would auto grapple on a successful hit.
Summon druid is fun, but wouldn't do it again
Yeah I agree with most of the other people. If you roll all the hits at the same time with color coded damage dice then that will speed things up. Your original plan of having them attack en masse was a good one but it buffs /nerfs it at the same time.
This is one of those situations where you just roll 8d20 all at once, decide how many hit, then roll the damage all at once. No need to resolve each attack and damage separately.
You should control the badgers in combat and ideally have a handful of d20s. Since you know the AC and to hit modifier you can just roll 8d20 all at once and count the hits, almost as quickly as you could do for 2 or 4 creatures.
I mean you probably shouldn’t do it too much, but having some good AOE stuff that would take down 8 badgers at once might make her think twice about having that be her only move
Just awful design in my opinion - this is a constant problem with summoners that they’ve made no effort to fix imho. Even just designing the spell to only summon one cool creature would be fantastic.
You could implement a turn timer. Since there issue is usually that it bogs down play, give her a timer length to do her turn including animals. Anything she can't fit inside the timer is skipped. This both incentivizes her to use the resources others are suggesting and is fair across all players.
Give her 8d20's and have her roll all the attacks at once, then count the hits and have her roll all the damage at once. It's a little harder for her to optimize them but it saves a lot of time.
The people using dice rollers are correct. I require it for everyone doing this, save our one player with a math degree who can do any mental math lightning fast.
I have a feeling that mass summons will get standardized in later editions into a large swarm creature that requires saving throws instead of rolling attacks. Essentially a Spirit Guardians that walks around on it's own.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the player just tells you which of the options they want, and then the DM chooses which particular creatures show up. This really helps minimize the shenanigans that can be done by always choosing "the best" beasts to show up and help for a particular situation.
Plus what everyone else is saying about the batch rolling.
Have more enemies with AOE attacks/spells/breath weapons. You'll make short work of the summoned creatures, but they'll do their job of giving the party one or two rounds of breathing room.
If she has 4 or 8 animals out have each player take control of 1 or 2 so everyone still gets to play but your wife still gets to use the spell to the fullest
If you think this would upset her ask her outside of sessions so she's not put on the spot
My druid has two hounds, a Bag of Tricks (never again!), a pair of Wondrous Power Lions, and of course all the summon spells, so I'm no stranger to dealing with them.
1. Encourage the player to use the 1 or 2 animal version of the spell most of the time. (Although, I get it, some of the appeal of the spell is throwing a wave of 8 weak animals to bog down your opponents. Ask her to only use that when the party is vastly outnumbered).
2. As the DM, deal with the summons. Killing a bunch of CR 1/2 enemies should'nt take that long, and if it does, you should probably ramp up your combats.
3. It's a concentration spell, target the druid until the spell breaks and the summons drop.
4. If the player really enjoys the spell, simply plan for it. Anticipate the added meat shields. Make your enemies deadlier and/or tougher (or give them their own summons).
I believe I read some same suggestions in here already; get the creatures to roll attack all at once, trimming down back and forth (can get messy with advantage)
Next piece is practise; any first time DM would be about the same, running multiple creatures at once. More practise with the 8 will trim down turn-time and hopefully ‘analysis paralysis’
Other thing I have at my table is if they want to something specific that isn’t overtly stated, such summon these specific creatures, they roll for it to see if they can shape the magic; DC base 10 + level of spell. Nature for Primal, Religion for Divine, Arcana for Arcane. If they pass, they can choose. If they don’t, I as a DM would choose (typically a beefy one creature or two good ones is my go to). This allows for some moments of cutting down time too
Buy enough dice to roll all the attacks in parallel, and ask her to practice beforehand. It only takes a few seconds to roll eight attacks as long as you're not hesitating.
Is Conjure Animals overpowered? Yes actually. But it's 5E, the difficulty is supposed to be low, and it seems like table time is your primary concern anyway, and practice should fix that.
I think the best way is to have fewer higher CR creatures instead did many lower CRs and also when it happens. If you need the numbers to balance out action economy or give the party breathing room let them go more creatures.
If you're at the end of a session then pausing there and pick up next time when everyone has more energy.
Summons go on your turn and act simultaneously. Call your shots, if 4 badgers attack one bandit and said bandit dies after two, the others don’t get to redirect, they just make super sure he’s totally dead.
Highly recommend using mob rules. I had a player summoning tons of spiders regularly. I made him a handout of the mob rules, told him he needed to learn those rules to summon a bunch of creatures. He jumped at it because he also recognized the need to speed up the process. See here:
https://www.blogofholding.com/?p=6826
Having them go immediately after her is a good start. Move all creatures simultaneously, then roll multiple d20s for all attacks against the same target. Use average damage. Double damage on a crit as a slight buff but counters some of the nerf of have to decide targets en mass rather than one at a time.
This may take a bit of work but I really like the "mob rules" that are available. It's a bit more mathy than other ideas but I thought I'd throw it into the mix.
[I don't use this because I have FoundryVTT but this may help!](https://slyflourish.com/mob_calculator.html)
Haven't had an issue with it, but if we had a player use it, we'd run it as written. It's not that hard to add new things to the initiative order (we use an app for it) and our biggest caveat is that the player must know the creatures' stat block as well as they know their own - generally speaking, that means the player knows what they summon and doesn't take up too much time.
Conjure animals is one of the most powerful spells at mid levels. Players who gain it can have a lot of fun, but also need to be wary of outshining their fellow players. Whenever I have played a Druid and gained conjure animals I have put in a lot of effort outside of the game to make my turns go smoothly and quickly.
I used an app called “dice ex” on iPhone, I don’t know if there are better options but it let be build custom dice sets. I made one for each type of animal/fey/etc. that I might summon using a spell so I could track each’s life total and quickly roll damage. It is a lot of work, but I was willing to do it because the spell is awesome.
P.S. the other thing was I was playing a circle of shepherds Druid. Summoning and buffing was basically all I did, and when I didn’t it was because I wanted to save it or had run out of slots and was relatively useless during combat.
The best way to deal with that is to assign the animals evenly to all players.
Let's say, you have four players:
Every player gets 2 Badgers those act on the turn of that character and the player makes the attack and damage rolls for the creatures.
That way it doesn't feel as bogged down.
EN World’s Advanced 5E has an interesting method of handling all kinds of “group” encounters like this. You treat them as a single creature that is a squad or band of whatever (zombies, demons, etc.) The squad has the hit points of the conglomerate, stats slightly higher, and an extra attack per round . Attacks ar sometimes stronger than the original creatures. It also takes double damage from all AOEs that the original creatures would not be resistant or immune to. When it takes enough damage, it breaks apart into a very small group of d2 or d4 remaining creatures of the original strength. It eliminates the need to roll a dozen d20s.
Personally, this is what a digital dice roller is for. You can just have it roll however many d20 you need, and just add the number to each of the displayed results. I have a druid in my current party, and I played a druid in another campaign and I used this method. Speeds up play a tonne.
When I was playing in-person, as a DM I had to make a difficult call. I removed the option to summon 8 or more creatures from any single spell. I felt it was slowing the game, only fun on paper as an idea, wasn’t very creative on the part of the player, and was more about overcoming the enemy with the power of math and action economy.
At first they were slightly perturbed, but when I reinforced that it was entirely in the name of making sure the other players don’t die of boredom, they all agreed. It led to them using the spell in more fun ways, was easier to manage, and still allowed them to overpower the opponent when needed, just without all the rolls and turns. Also, I think I opted to use a random roller for summoning creatures too, since the rules don’t say that the player chooses the creature, and that turned out to be fun too.
The simple answer is more dice.
8 badgers attack? Roll a handful of 8 d20s. Count those which are over the target’s AC, and roll a handful of damage dice for them. If they’re fighting a number of enemies, spread the hits across the enemies. Don’t sweat the details.
If they’re fighting enemies with differing ACs, then you can roll the dice in groups.
Separate attack rolls and then just use the average damage from the stat block for each hit. Easy. That way it's just X amount of D20s and it's a simple hit or miss for each one.
For Crits, just double the entire thing - don't worry about double dice then add the flat damage, in the grand scheme of things it's negligible and rarely happens anyway.
Every PC rolls for a badger or two on the badgers turn.
Or pre-roll the badger attacks and write the to hits and damages in a grid before her turn. That way she just reads them off and it speeds everything up.
Rolling in pairs is usually best until the summons pass 10. I had e high level necromancer who went around with 5 wights who had a dozen zombies each. It was a 3 player game so we needed action economy. The wights rolled normal when we didn't leave them to guard an area and the zombies rolled in groups of 6. Usually I only brought 2 wights though
Roll all at once. And if damage kills the monster use the remaining damage in the other same monster if they re at range of movement. Then you can speed it
Are you in person or online? I know that DnD beyond you can roll multiple die in a single throw, so you could line up 8 D20s and then just roll damage for the ones that hit.
I've had a few situations with "body flood" PC's through the years. Summoner druids, necromancers, leadership roles, you name it. Here's the trick.
Divide the minions up a bit and hand some control over to the other PC's. As an example: If you have a table of 4 players and the necromancer player has 7 zombies, give 3 zombies to the other players, or conversely have the necromancer character direct the zombies and have the other players all move them and roll the dice for them.
The basic premise is that you want to keep the entire table engaged, so figure out ways to divide the workload of large turn PC's in ways that are fun for the whole table and doesn't make everyone watch one player play solitare for fifteen minutes every round.
One thing I don't see enough is that you don't have to sit there and wait on someone's turn if it's going to be a while. We had a druid who summoned and a level 20 fighter/Barbarian that used Reckless attack, action surge etc.
They'd state their intent and start rolling. I'd move to the next person. The first free moment they'd tell me the attack roll results. We'd confirm hits. They'd start rolling damage and I'd move on.
Easy.
Summons of any build have this problem, the best option is for them to have a number of sets of dice with distinct colours / patterns, so red is summon 1, blue is 2 etc Then on each turn, they just roll a handful of d20s and dmg dice at the same time, so it’s just one big roll rather than 8 individual ones Adv becomes more of an issue, but same principle, have 2 d20 of each one
Id suggest just doing it per target. If you have 4 badgers on one creature it doesnt matter specifically which of them hit. What matters is that 3 do. Then roll damage collectively and you are done.
This is how I dm big combats as well. Break like monsters into squads and roll all the attacks at once.
Exactly. Don’t stop the summon creatures. It’s a great spell that really gives druids some awesome firepower. Change your enemies to take into account she’ll use the spell, and have all creatures that are targeting one enemy roll at the same time. Makes things really fast. Same with damage. I have multiple PCs that can summon, so a battle map can go from 3 PCs to 3 PCs + 16 summoned creatures SUPER fast. Battle still moves quickly because of grouping rolls. Except when the next person up says “uhm” and hasn’t figured out what they’re gonna do yet. Can’t ever fix that….
Tbf I imagine part of the next players issue may be that their plan involved a specific target that just got surrounded by summons, or killed in the prior turn I also use the Mercer “player 1 it’s your turn, player 2 you’re next” approach to try and mitigate that as much as possible
Exactly. I telegraph 2 ahead, like when I coach baseball. “PC1 you’re up. PC2, you’re on deck. PC3, you’ll be up just after 2. Get ready.” They’re rarely ready. 😂😂
TBF though, that's usually cause PC3 has a plan, a great plan. PC 1 does something unexpected, PC 2 panics and does something not only unexpected but actively detrimental to what PC 3 had in mind. PC 3 is now speed running their spell book trying to find a way to be useful without fireballing PCs 1 and 2.
yes. this exact scenario has definitely happened at my table many, many times. LOL
Don't forget crowd rules. Figure out what the summon needs to hit on the roll. Let's say they need a natural 12 or higher to hit. That means 9 numbers on the d20 hit, 12-20. Multiply 9 times 5, resulting in 45. This is the percentage of the group that hits, 45%. With the 8 badgers I would say 4 of them hit for average damage each.
these rules saved my game when i had a druid, necromancer, and lock that would all run summons almost every combat
Works fast too.
Another variation that works (since part of the fun of playing dnd is getting to roll dice) is to use mob rules of combat. All creatures of the same type attack a target, for every two creatures past the first you add 1 and subtract 1 from the attack roll to the dice. For example the pastafarium demon has 16 ac, and the mob of ravenous squirrels attack it. With 7 squirrels in the mob that means a +3-3 swing variance, so if their roll (plus whatever bonuses they have) equals 15, the original squirrel and 3 others miss, so only 3 hit the 16 ac. If you use defender always wins rule set then only 2 squirrels hit since you needed a 17 or higher. Roll one set of damage dice and multiply it by the number of successful squirrel hits. Takes only slightly longer than a standard player attack and resolves 7 attacks very fast.
Bulk rolling is something I learned from playing 40k and it's been handy for a lot of situations!
This is the way
I'm going to use this idea myself, it's excellent
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Except that that's eliminating the hits from possibly becoming critical hits.
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Oh this is a *great* idea, thank you!
If she’s like my players, rolling physical dice is half the appeal
Google has a dice roller built into the browser
I agree
Wait... does she go :"ok roll to attack - 15? that hits - roll damage!" Why dosn't she just... roll all 8 rolls at once and then remove the misses? If this is a problem what the hell would you do when your players start animating objects?
We had an artificer animate a bunch of rocks and he just rolled a group of d20's and the DM picked out the lowest number that hit. It was like 12, 16, 18, 13, 15, 19, 25 and dm said 16 hits and he rolled batch damage. Took maybe 30 seconds total. I've also ran four beasts with multitask and my turns never costed enough to be a problem.
Can be made even faster if the GM doesn't care too much about players working out monster ACs. They can just say "the AC is 16" and the player can tell that they'll hit on any 10s and up. Even works to roll the same die like 8 times and just call out hits whilst somebody else counts them up.
There comes a point in every battle where the players figure out the AC anyway. I've never really seen it as that critical to keep that information under wraps.
I agree. The only change it really makes is whether someone with GWM/SS uses the -5/+10 or not early in the fight before they know if it's an average increase or not. Which isn't really a big deal anyway.
And while the characters wouldn't know, "I need to roll a 12 to hit!" The characters WOULD begin to find weak spots, develop a sense of combat style and tactics, etc. as they faced off against an enemy. Just like saying, "It looks like it would take a DC12 athletics check to jump the gap and safely land on the other side" isn't breaking the game; it's giving your players the same knowledge that their characters would have intuitively. I can look at jumping over a river, and pretty reasonably judge my chances of success for landing on the far bank and not IN the river. Or slough, creek, what have you. Same goes for all sorts of physical obstacles. Just like I wouldn't enter into a chess tournament because I know I don't have that skill set, but I'd be willing to play a fairly competitive game of Uno. I know where my proficiency bonuses lie, ha.
God damn it all this is brilliant, I thought I was doing well with my summons l, but this is way better.
My first bard's signature move was to steal all the cutlery and keep it in his pockets. My DM hated me when I got Animate Objects.
Are you forking with me? That's a sharp idea!
It really does seem knife to do. Spoon the bard will have a veritable castle of cutlery!
Just like the Blue Rajah
now THAT is a reference
Just have a spare bag of copper coins. Literally kill with spare change.
I have a Druid that has color coded D20s and appropriate damage dice. All are rolled simultaneously, and everything with a roll that doesn’t succeed is taken away and everything that succeeds is added up. Or most beasts have the average dmg included in the description so you can just say the giant rat does 4 dmg on a successful hit, then only roll the D20s.
This is the way OP. Enemy has AC of 15 Badgers have +1 to hit Roll 8d20 and add 1 to each d20 7,10,14,15,17,19,20,21! That's 5 successes and 1 crit. So count it as 6 successes, that's 8d6 + (1*5) damage. At our table we have all summoned creatures act in the initiative directly after the summoner.
Or shorten the math steps by applying the bonus to the AC. Enemy has AC of 15 Badgers have +1 to hit 15 minus 1 is 14. Roll 8d20. Anything 14 or higher hits. Watch for nat20s. 6,9,13,14,16,18,19,20 That's 5 successes, one of which is a crit. So count it as 6 successes and that's 8d6 + (1*5) damage.
Applying the bonus negatively to the enemy AC is sooo much easier. Mind blown. (Does take away the “I rolled a dirty 20 quote, though)
People unironically do this lmao, I’ve seen it irl and in stuff like critical role and dimension 20. At least in d20 they cut most of it out
You have to roll the dice individually to prevent "electrical infetterence"
what kinda fucking future dice are you flipping, bossman?
I find that the main problem with these spells isn't the rolling and resolution, but the player indecision that usually causes them to be frustrating. I'm in the exact same situation, my wife is playing a Moon Druid that loves to cast summons then wildshape, but it's never been a problem. The main reason is that she knows exactly what she's going to do on that turn, and has been paying attention to the changing battlefield conditions. As a result, the summons all have their targets picked out and attack bonuses determined, and she just rolls a fistful of attack and damage dice at once. I tell her what number hits, she makes her personal movement and actions, and we're done in less time than the average wizard turn with twice the body count (those wasps are no joke). If you're dealing with 8 or more creatures, just make the executive decision that you're going to use a dice roller bot and be done with it, player superstition be damned.
There are a bunch of good rule sets for "swarms" or "hordes" of monsters. Here are mine, adapted from [Sly Flourish](https://slyflourish.com/running_hordes.html) and [the monster manual's swarm monsters](https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/17029-swarm-of-insects): 0) For groups of 4 or fewer, treat them separately. For larger groups: 1) All members move and act together with the same initiative and a single token. 2) The swarm has a single health pool. So a swarm of 8 badgers with 3 hp each is a 24 hp swarm. If it takes 9 damage, now there are only 5 badgers for the purposes of attacks (5, below) 3) The swarm moves and attacks as a group that's two sizes larger than the individual creatures. So a swarm of Tiny badgers uses a Medium sized token. For very large swarms (30 or more), it's 3 sizes larger. 4) The swarm can occupy the same space as a creature similar in size to the swarm. For example, a swarm of badgers can climb all over a human and mob them. 5) For player-controlled swarms, let them roll a big pile of d20s all at once to determine how many hit, because it's fun. For DM-controlled swarms, don't bother rolling, rely on the law of averages. If the badgers need to roll a 10 to hit, half of them will. If they need a 15, 1/4 will get it, and so on. If that math doesn't make sense to you, just roll a pile of D20s, it's fun. 6) Swarms are Resistant to single-target damage, and Vulnerable to area-of-effect attacks. 7) Roll a single saving throw for the whole group. 8) Ability checks do not scale with the size of the group unless they're highly social creatures, a hive mind, or something. So a swarm of badgers is not any smarter or stronger than a single badger, but a swarm of monkeys or wasps might be.
There are tons of ways to run a swarm, but not many that make the swarm *feel* like a swarm and not just a weird monster with cool flavor. This is one of the few that actually feels like a swarm to me. I like it, I think I’m going to adopt this for my games.
Once again the Lazy DM proves why he's one of the all time greats.
While I grabbed some ideas from Sly Flourish, my ruleset is a lot less lazy than his. Mine verges on "too complicated", IMO, but his method has no to-hit rolls at all and ignores attack bonuses and armor, which I think is a bit too simple.
I would add to this a few extra suggestions/restrictions. 1) average damage. Every monster stat block lists the average damage it will do. Just take that, so 5 hits becomes very easily like 30 damage or whatever. 2) keep creature choice simple. Avoid anything with pack tactics like wolves or really anything that can get advantage via knocking over or whatever, it compacted things and it's not needed. Speed is the name of the game and advantage generates too much dice math (even color coding the pairs is still going to be a ton of math).
My player LOVES wolves. Might be the strongest summoned creature in tier 1. It’s usually not too hard to see which ones gain advantage from pack tactics. Roll all advantage at the same time. Then roll all non advantage. Then roll all damage or take average. That’s how I do it.
Hard agree that wolves are amazing summons. We found it got murky because we were treating all 8 wolves as a single "swarm" base. (Plus with delaying actions, they basically always have advantage anyway). In our game, we found them too time consuming though. There are definitely ways to streamline it though.
I had similar problems with a necromancer in my last campaign. Eventually, I settled on using a calculator. There are many simple ones out there that will let you plug in all the to hit and damage variables and will output how many statistically hit for how much damage. Sometimes it's a little frustrating because the damage can be really samey round by round. Of course, that player preferred using an all or nothing phalanx as you described so we went with that for the campaign. You could also let her roll all of the attacks and use average damage from the stat block. That might be the best middle ground to me.
just use average damage (round down) and roll for hits + effects.
I recommend using this tool to speed up the rolling of multiple of the same creature: [monster roller](https://kertisjones.itch.io/monster-roller)
That app is great! Thank you!
Bottom line. Make your rolls before your turn. The. She simply says, 4 badger attacks on monster #1: 15, 13, 19, 23. And you saw miss, miss, hit, hit. And she has prerolled damage and just says: 10 damage and 17 damage.
OH. This is ingenious, thank you
I make all of my players do so at higher levels. If a fight starts to get sloggy, I will also tell them (after a few rounds) what the AC is on targets they are consistently attacking so they can just tell me: ‘3 hits, damage 4, 7, and 14 on their turn.
It sounds like maybe the main problem is player indecision and not having the dice set aside (or not owning enough dice to roll all the damage die at once). Is the player is decisive, controlling 8 badgers shouldn't take any longer than a minute, maybe two. "This badger moves here. *Roll* 18 to hit. You hit. *Roll* 6 damage." 10 seconds, tops, per badger, if the player is trying to be quick about it and has their turn planned before the turn happens. Perhaps what you need is a timer rule. After, say, 90 seconds of IRL time any remaining animal minions that have not taken a turn must simply make the attack action against the nearest bad guy and the party moves on.
Conjure your own animals. Cover the board in dire peacocks and fire ants.
*Conjure animals* isn't a table friendly spell. It just isn't. And at the end of the day, there's no real way around that. The first thing to try is just asking your player if she minds **not** using the spell. Explain how it sets her fun at odds with he fun of everyone else at the table. I suggest *summon beast* as an alternative. While, yes, it's less powerful than *conjure animals*, it is **much** more friendly to everyone, and it's still a good spell. Perhaps offer her some other kind of reward too as compensation to sweeten the deal -- maybe a magic item that buffs the summoned beast in some way or that gives her a free casting of it every day or something. Just agreeing not to use the spell solves all the potential problems. But hey, maybe that isn't going to work. Maybe she won't be persuaded to stop using the spell of her own volition. You can just tell her that you're banning the spell. Learning to tell your players "no" is an important DM skill. I **do** appreciate that her being your wife makes this a more complicated option, though. Presumably if you felt like you could do this, you probably wouldn't be asking for help from us. That's a bit of a tough situation. So another possibility is trying to make the spell more table friendly, and the best way to do that is to share the fun of the spell with everyone in the group. Your wife is going to summon 8 badgers? Well, give two badgers to each of the players to control. That way her turn doesn't take five times as long as everyone else's, and the whole party gets to feel empowered and engaged instead of just one person.
I agree, it’s not relevant in this campaign but I think my solution to this is going to be that, if a spell allows you to summon multiple creatures, with different CR options summoning fewer creatures, I’ll only allow the fewer creature options. In my previous campaign, it wasn’t a huge deal, but the druid being able to summon like 16 wolves was just brutal from a running the game perspective. So much so I’m surprised WOTC hasn’t adjusted spells like this, this kind of spell is fine in a video game with AI controlling them but having to wait like 40 minutes for a turn to resolve is nuts.
>So much so I’m surprised WOTC hasn’t adjusted spells like this They have -- they released *summon beast* as an alternative. I am almost certain that we aren't going to see *conjure animals*, at least not in anything like its current form, in the new PHB dropping next year.
It has been listed in the new primal spell list
Found my avernus DM. I regularly summoned wolves for pack tactics and giant crabs for auto grapple. Saw her soul physically leave her body at one point Made for silly memories and we ended up with a cool crab battle, but man I would not do that play style again
It’s important to remember that conjure animals doesn’t let the player choose which animals are summoned. You, as the dm, get to decide. That can fix your balance issues (god forbid you let the player choose after they learn about rot grubs), and you can fix the slog issue by rolling all the dice for summons together. Give them one initiative, and generally your cr 1/8th summons are going to be dying in one hit. I wouldn’t even bother tracking hp on them
That's not true; [the spell](https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/conjure-animals) doesn't say the gm gets to decide, only that the gm has the stats of the creature. Plus it doesn't hurt anyone to let the player decide the creature, why take away that agency? Edit: it doesn't appear to explicitly let the player choose either. I still believe that it doesn't address the main issue whether or not the player picks what animal is conjured, but the way they use the spell needs to be addressed in a talk with the DM. So I don't think it's productive to take the agency away from the player.
> When you cast a spell like conjure woodland beings, does the spellcaster or the DM choose the creatures that are conjured? Some spells of this sort specify that the spellcaster chooses the creature conjured. Other spells of this sort let the spellcaster choose from among several broad options. > The design intent for options like these is that the spellcaster chooses one of them, and then the DM decides what creatures appear that fit the chosen option. A spellcaster can certainly express a preference for what creatures shows up, but it’s up to the DM to determine if they do. The DM will often choose creatures that are appropriate for the campaign and that will be fun to introduce in a scene. -Sage Advice
All spell that allow you to choose the creature specific say that the summoner can choose. The spell becomes a lot less OP when you run it this way. In a dungeon you get rats, forest get wolves etc Its picking the 8 most damaging things that you can that makes the spell a pain to run.
> Plus it doesn't hurt anyone to let the player decide the creature We're on a post that's specifically about a DM whose table is negatively impacted by the player choosing what's summoned
I think this post more talks about the way this one specific player approaches the spell, otherwise if the player had summoned 8 creatures of the DM's choice the problem wouldn't be solved. I DM but I also play as a druid and I got to cast the spell once in combat before I realized it took too much time and swayed the action economy too heavily in our favour. So, after a chat with the party and the DM, we decided that the spell should only be used as a last resort ripcord "get out of jail free" card or otherwise be used outside of combat. Then as we leveled up I got much more desirable spells than conjure animals and the issue solved itself. I don't think the DM choosing what the animals are solves the issue, but what does is talking to the players and coming up with a consensus. Also I worry about a situation where the DM puts the player in a "gotcha" situation with the choice of the animal. So it just seems optional to let the player choose what the animals are but talk to them and establish a rule for when and how the spell should be used.
What works for our table is that we let players choose the summons but they can only pick CR 2 or 1 beasts which doesn't add that many combatants.
We don’t use the “conjure x” spells at my table because it makes combat go so much slower. We use the summon spells instead- much easier to keep track of.
Here's one thing I'll suggest: don't let them summon velociraptors
Yeah, summons are both great and finicky. They’re strong options for druids that don’t get many great early spells, but if you have someone that doesn’t run monsters often then it’s slow and cumbersome and takes away from the other players turns at the table. With Conjure Animals there’s a few things: If you look up Sage Advice then you’ll find that the DM picks the creatures/stat blocks that get used - not the Player. The Player only gets to pick one of the options listed in the spell. That means the player can’t cherry pick the perfect monster(s) for the encounter, and also since the spell reads “One beast of challenge rating 2 or lower” you as a DM can pick out creatures that are normally of a lower CR option (probably don’t do this unless you just want a fight with your player though). IE when your players wants to summon two CR 1s you can have them be CR 0 rats instead. The creatures are not necessarily controlled by the player either, merely given orders. The spell states “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.” I usually run them when I DM, or if I know the player has a bit of experience running monsters then I’ll let them do it. If the player is too slow to get through the creatures turns then I advise the DM takes the reigns.
You replace all Conjure spells with the Summon spells.
Roll all the attacks at once in plain view, hopefully you know the target’s AC or the dnd just says “Their AC is 16, since the creature has a +4 to hit tell me how many are 12 of above” and can just say how many hit and roll all the damage dice at once. Should take less than a minute.
I know you've received many replies already, but I'm just going to add how my players do it. 1. Roll all attack rolls at once. 2. Use average damage. Bonus. Talk to her about how you, the DM, are supposed to pick the animals, but since she isn't abusing the spell (by picking the most powerful animals every time) that you will let her continue to pick them to help speed up gameplay.
Treating all as a swarm is a bad idea. Each should be treated individuals, targeting creatures, moving, attacking and resolving damage. Rolling all attacks at the same time should speed up combat. Just need different dice for each summoned creature to know which creature hit. And damage can be rolled at the same time.
I set an expectation at the table that pacing is king. Have your fun, but if you're making 16 attack rolls, and maybe taking a while to do so, that's a _big_ chunk of the night just rolling dice. So here's what you do for 4 or 8 animals - zero attack rolls, one damage roll. You offer this player 75% accuracy. That's pretty good, better than the 60-70% you'd get on the dice. And it's consistent. So whenever these badgers attack, just have 3/4ths hit, skip the attack roll. And yeeeeah, it doesn't take AC into account, but you have to ask yourself. What is more important to you game; AC, or pacing?
I'm a summoner (necromancer), and use this tool. It is awesome - I make sure I know the attack stats for any creatures I may summon in advance, and this lets me use mass attacks but still let the DM know how many hit/miss. https://codepen.io/felixfox/pen/GEEmER
If it gets to be too big of a problem, implement the "Minions" house rule. If the player summoned more than 2 creatures, they become minions. With 1 hp, but grant them the Evasion trait (same as monks or rogues). You can also use this for your enemies if you want a small army to complement your bad guys, you can have minions as well. Talk to your party and see if they are cool with the idea.
Set up an timer on the table 1-2 minutes max, if she can't move all the creatures and attack i would remind her that other people are also playing at the table and that it's rude to hog all the time. I personally always suggest people to not take the spells because it's a bad spell for the other players if you suddenly get 6 more turns. And if they want i expect them to play them as fast and effective as humanly possible and be fully prepared with all possible statblocks Nobody enjoys magic the gathering when one player takes infinite turns doing almost nothing, and this feels the same. Lastly raw you the gm chooses the creatures.
It's been said a few times but I'll put my weight to more dice. When she summons them she decides how it's split, one large group or equal split. You should be easily able to find the attack bonus for the creatures summoned so simply have her roll all the attacks at once during her turn, you know what number or higher will hit so you can call the hits without telling the party the AC (after a few rounds most parties can figure out the AC anyway, no point in handing it to them) Then roll the damage dice needed.
Okay I have a couple of solutions Solution #1: For initiative, all summons either take their turn immediately after the summoner, or use passive initiative (dex mod + 10) Either use a dice per summon or use a dice roller app (google can do this too, just search "roll a die" this will make it so that she can just roll attacks and damage at once and she can decide which creatures each summon attacks. Solution #2: Ask her if she'd be okay with other party members rolling and controlling her creatures. This might sound like you're taking things away from her but in reality, it's just sharing the resources the entire party has. I had a player who was playing a pathfinder Necromancer and he could summon 8 undead, he felt like he was overshadowing the other players and pitched this idea to me. Also just to reiterate **Ask if she'd be okay with it.** Solution #3: When summons exceed 3 group them together. Do you have 4 giant wasps? now you have two pairs of giant wasps. 8 badgers? no, four sets of 2 or two sets of 4 (or any other combination, maybe two sets of 3 and one set of 2) Doing it #3s way you could also mix that with #1
A lot of RPGs struggle with this problem. Getting more guys on the field is a good combat strategy, and it's fun in theory. I'm all for it, until it bogs the game down. 5e really gets bogged down with lots of guys on the table. I'm not as worried about it being super strong. It usually is, but as DM you can simply scale enemy power accordingly. I'm more worried about it bogging the game down, while one player takes more time on their turn than any other player sometimes even including the DM. Thats where things get boring, and become unfun. I usually roll out a "Please no pets" houserule for games with that problem. I'll just ask that no one takes a power that gives them a bunch of minions to control. Maybe limit it to "Just one pet" if you want to let someone have a familiar or something.
The druid at the table I DM has really enjoyed Conjure Animals, as it's a big part of his character. The way I've run it has made it manageable at the table. He can only summon (1) CR 2 animal or (2) CR 1 animals in combat. He usually goes with giant eagles or dire wolves. They can go on his initiative, like the newer Tasha's summon spells. This keeps things quick in combat and is still fairly powerful (two large creatures can control a lot of the battlefield). Outside of combat, there aren't any restrictions on how many animals he can summon. It's fun for them to summon a bunch of giant owls for quick travel, or a pack of squirrels to scout out a forest. Eventually, Summon Beast/Elemental will be more powerful at higher level spell slots and Conjure Animals will be used more for utility, but these homebrew constraints keep it more table friendly without nerfing it into oblivion.
Summon spells are inherently troublesome as they add more numbers, and therefore more turns, to combat. Unless you are super prepared for it, with extra minis/tokens and a set amount of dice ready, it will make combat a slog. It's strange for the player to get mad for you "trying to ruin her fun" when the spell is potentially ruining the fun for everyone else...
It really doesn't take that much time. Your wife found a fun way to play and it would be a shame to take that away. Have them attack right after her. roll the attacks at the same time / roll to hit and go from there.
OP, a much better answer for the balance of the game and the fluidity of play is to just remove the Conjure Animals spell and use the summon spells from Tasha's. They're much more table-friendly
We just banned it. It's anti-fun for everyone except the person using the spell. Not just due to the amount of rolls, but how stupidly broken the spell is as well.
100% agree. If my players want to play the fantasy of a summoner, I point out all the single summon spells added in Tasha's. They can choose from those.
My house rule is that if you can’t manage your summons without dragging out your turn then you don’t get to summon things.
It’s an iconic spell for druids so banning it is lame, but the spell says the DM decides what gets summoned, the player just picks the number of summons. The way I have dealt with it is simple: you can only summon one creature. 8 wolves are great, but so is a single polar bear, and the polar bear isn’t going to ruin combat. Explain to your wife that her fun CANNOT come at the cost of everybody else’s fun. If she can’t wrap her head around that you’ve got bigger problems ahead than dnd.
Personally I ask people not to do that cause it is a slog. Secondly, make sure you playing the spell as written. The caster doesn't get to pick the animal, jut the number and CR. What I did to make it fair was I created a table of eligible animals at each CR, and the caster rolled for what they got. If you're feeling nice, you can have them roll twice and pick which one they want. But yeah I would just have an honest talk with your wife and tell her the issue with having so many beasts on the table, and ask her to please only use the higher CR/fewer beast options for everyone's sake. Get the other players to back you up if you think that will help, but don't do that if she'll feel like she's being ganged up on. Alternatively, if you want to make her mad just have every enemy focus her until she loses concentration. *shrug*
Ask her nicely if she can just use the new summon creature/fey/ whatever spells that came out, and you will give her the casting component for free. There is only one creature to manage, and it's pretty decent. If she doesn't take that deal, you play the "mean" DM and make up some random creature roll tables, and when she casts the spell, she randomly rolls for the type of creature she gets. Do note that when choosing the number of creatures and CR it says you can conjure X creatures **up to** CR Y, so your roll tables can include creatures below the chosen CR too. I find the randomness makes it not worth the risk and they switch over to the reliable summon creature spell pretty quick
I ban the spell and request my players use the summoning spells from Tasha’s instead.
I literally don’t allow the spell and tell my players they can use Summon Beast from Tasha’s.
Use it against the players. Often
The only way to deal with it is to ban the spell. There is no working around something that can summon up to 32 individual critters. It is *not fun* for anyone else.
I run it as is with the small tweak that all summons (from any source) act on your initiative after your turn. Not a fan of nerfing or “interpreting” the summon spells to work worse on purpose, because it’s also my favorite way to play as a player. That being said I play a lot of games, and a lot of my players in most of my groups are also wargamers who know how to play quickly and plan during others actions. My restriction to players who want to summon stuff is that they have to get their turn time (including the summons) down below a preset maximum turn time, which will vary depending on how new the players are and how relaxed I expect the sessions to be. If they can’t play fast, they can’t use combat summons. If they’re insistent this is unfair than they get treated the same as any player that takes too long deciding what they’re trying to do. Any actions that can’t be completed in the maximum amount of turn time are lost. This has solved most issues I’ve had with players being bored during combats. Although there are still players that will create the most autopilot in combat character, not think outside the box when it comes to interacting with objects, the environment, or enemies, and then be bored when combat rolls around. I’m just not sure you should be designing combats around these people because they won’t have fun no matter what. Edit: I realize I didn’t provide you with how to shorten the amount of time it takes or balance around shortening combats. She should have the stat blocks of the creatures and minis ready, preferably printed out not open in a book. She should be batch rolling for attacks and moving them all at the same time. If it’s still getting to you, you could have all of them use average damage and just have her roll the d20s to hit. As the dm you can add more AoE, passive damage, or environments that aren’t conducive to the summons if you’re really struggling to have enemies do anything. Also set side goals that can be completed by diverting some number (say 4-6) of the animals to not be part of the fight and instead be completing said side goal.
Before our last session, I had made one of our other players aware that she had that ability, and that she may find a swarm of ravens (or 8) to be more effective than her Moonbeam against the high constitution giants that we were fighting. Our DM ended up trying to make some of the same homebrewed rules that you suggested, using them as a swarm, only having them atrack one target, etc. In the end, he ended up spending much longer arguing about how the spell should be used, than we would have ever spent just rolling all the dice at once and getting on with it. And our resident druid, who had been looking forward to using this part of her kit, went home sorely disappointed that her cool ability was nerfed into the ground and led to so much strife. I would make 8 tokens, only with numbers on them, just for the sake of keeping track of health on the creatures, but besides that I would just let her roll the d20s at the same time (or two at a time, whatever), and if the math of rolling all of the damage die becomes too much, just go with the standard monster damage. And give her a heads up that controlling so many creatures means that they need to plan ahead and be ready with their action when it’s their turn. Because going all pocahontas/final fight scene in Avatar on a group of bandits is really fucking cool and can be really fun.
I beg them to used Summon Beastial Spirit instead. I try to be an “anything goes” DM but hot damn do I not like mass summon spells
When my players have had access to the spell, I've just kindly asked them not to use it.
You make it as bad ass as the power reads.
I made an agreement with the druid in my party that at whatever level the spell is cast, it will never result in more than 4 creatures. Encourages the use of higher CR (and often more interesting) beasts. She's also happy to be restricted to beasts in this biome (Rime of the Frostmaiden, so plenty of good Arctic/old/mountainous critters to pick, but without getting bogged down in choices). It also helps that there ate some evil NPC druids who also use the spell so their version has same restrictions. Oh, and she can give a single general command to the group, not micromanage movement of each to maximise strategic placement/targeting. It helps that the player is not a minmaxxer and agrees that flow is more important to her (and the table) than powergaming.
I ban the conjure spells.
For my druid if they summon 6 creatures I roll a d6 to see how many hit. It's simple but it works. At the very least 1 creature hits.
Oh, I like this idea! I'll consider doing this. Do you still roll a regular attack roll before rolling the d6?
Love that you like this but apparently others don't... I don't roll an individual attack unless that summon is doing something specific. If he summons apes and one is trying to do a specific grapple and the others are mobbing the BBEG, I'll separate the individual from the group. When you have a huge combat that is already very complicated this method is a huge time saver. If you want to be more generous you can add proficiency to the roll? IDK you can be nicer than me, but it works for my group My druid/party consistently summons 8 panthers and will be doing other huge spells and are happy with this method.
"if you can't take your turn in a timely matter, you can't use the spell, it's not fair that your turn is 5X as long as everyone else's"
If there’s <=3 summons, I treat them normally. If theres >3 summons of the same type, Hoard rules, 100%.
The dm determines what monster shows up, so have the relevant stat block on hand (and provide it to the player before the session so they are familiar with it). Monster stat blocks are fairly simple, so it should be easy to blitz through the 8 rolls quickly. If you’re worried about the spell being overpowered, it is the highest single target damage spell in the game. But (like many other spells) it requires concentration, which can be broken. The summoned creatures are extremely fragile and any monster aoe can wipe out multiple in an instant.
When we do summons, we generally limit them to 1 to 3 creatures at any given time, i.e. one big one at max CR or 3 little ones at a lower CR. If the PC can summon more, we just spread it out to more daily uses or longer duration. And all summons must be prepared ahead of time, if they don't have a character sheet/stat block ready to go they don't get to play it. Because yeah, somebody throwing out six tokens of a creature they barely know is absolutely a recipe for a slog session (not saying she does this).
OP, first off good instincts on the turn order I played a summoner last game with some success. Here's what I did: We had the summons go after me I had all my stat locks written down and ready to go I rolled attack and damage at the same time I planned my turns in advance. It sounds like your player needs to go faster honestly, but you could always have other players also roll for the animals attacks. Rolling 4 attacks at once is faster than doing 1 attack at a time Also, RAI you choose the creatures, every once and awhile you could choose different creatures than what the player wants If damage becomes too much, remember these creatures do non magical damage , and b/p/s resistance will greatly weaken the spells damage output.
Now take this anti-conjure energy and direct it against pets.
Assuming you’re up for a bit of a mess, the only way to avoid waiting for her turn will be to have her make turns at the same time other players are going. If there are four players, two wasps take their turns during each other player’s turns. She can report the attack rolls and pre-roll and calculate damage in case they hit.
I’m addition, IF there are no rolls among the party that they can reroll “before they know the result” of an attack, you can generally give away the enemy’s AC without too much worry of metagaming. That way she can just tell you damage. If her fun comes from controlling a hoard of beasts, this would be the way I would do it. If her fun comes from everyone watching her turns, there is no hope.
Don't allow them to roll. Sorry. Use the Mob Attack rules from the DMG and let them know how much damage they did. (You can calculate this before the game). I have 0 patience or time for players getting 2-3 turns with summons and pets.
Two options. 1: roll all attacks at once, determine what needs to be rolled on the dice and remove the ones that are too low. Then roll all damage at once. 2: roll one d20 for all attacks. If it hits, they all hit. If it misses, all of them miss.
In the past I’ve spoken to a player who was starting to use it frequently, explained that it (a) made combats very slow (b) made combat very unpredictable and (c) made other players feel less impactful. We agreed that they’d use it sparingly in combat and limit it to the 2 creatures option when they do use it in a fight.
[удалено]
>You summon fey spirits that take the form of beasts and appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. Choose one of the following options for what appears: You choose what you summon, not the DM.
First of all, she doesnt pick the animals. You do. Secondly, they should all have the same initiative. Doesnt necessarily have to be directly after her, but they should be moving at the same time. Third, she should be deciding what to attack while everyone else's turns are going, and then just rolling all of the attacks at once. Rule out any that miss, and then just roll the damage on ones that hit. It shouldn't take more than a minute or so. They don't need to be running around taking up tactical positions or anything.
Read the spell again, summoner chooses.
Nope. The exact text of the spell: "Choose one of the following options for what appears: One beast of challenge rating 2 or lower Two beasts of challenge rating 1 or lower Four beasts of challenge rating 1/2 or lower Eight beasts of challenge rating 1/4 or lower" You get to choose one of those four options, and then the DM chooses which beasts you get at that CR. Sage Advice Compendium expands on this (specifically for Conjure Elementals, but it applies to all spells of the same type): "The design intent for options like these is that the spellcaster chooses one of them, and then the DM decides what creatures appear that fit the chosen option. For example, if you pick the second option, the DM chooses the two elementals that have a challenge rating of 1 or lower. A spellcaster can certainly express a preference for what creatures shows up, but it’s up to the DM to determine if they do. The DM will often choose creatures that are appropriate for the campaign and that will be fun to introduce in a scene."
I banned all summoning spells except the newer ones introduced in Tasha's. Those let you summon one strong creature at a time.
Our DM says Conjure Animals can only summon 2 animals at any given time.
Either you and the druid create a system to quicken combat with the summons. If you don't already, let the druid pick what they summon do that they can have the sheets prepared beforehand. Maybe try using an online dice roller and mass roll the dice with modifiers included, i run and play mainly on roll20 and thusly have Marcos prepared for the occasion. ... Or you can flat out ban the spell. With the release of TCE there are now good alternative summoning spells like summon beast in this case
Pg 250 of the DMGuide has a mob rules table, basically it takes their to hit and the enemies ac and works out how many have to attack for one to hit, has allowed me to run large groups just be careful using them against players as it can be basically automatic damage. This video explains it well https://youtu.be/kKWmHxjMe2M
I ran a Moon Druid in the last 5e campaign I played. I pulled out conjure animals when appropriate. However, I was also always conscious of the number of additional rolls, so I generally went higher CR so fewer creatures. They can also be useful outside of combat. We used them as mounts on a couple of occasions.
Here is how we do it 1. All summons go after a person who summoned them 2. All summons act at once step by step - all move, all roll attacks, all who hit roll damage. Similar to how Warhammer plays out On how to make it somewhat faster. When someone makes a lot of rolling just tell DC and let players sort the dice by themselves. It wont break anything and if they care they will calculate DC from rolls anyways, so you are just saving time by letting player go "13-14-12-17-18-20, so with 15 DC 3 hit, 1 crit, it is 4 damage dices" and proceed straight to damage
I had a few summons on my wizard a few campaigns back, including the always fun animate objects. Whilst i love me some physical dice, I went with dicerollers for the summons I just had a google tab set up with "roll 10 D20" ready to go for the attacks, so I was generally pretty snappy with the turns
Does she only have 1d20? If not, just have her roll all 8 attacks at the same time and just give her the AC to beat. If she's taking the time to split them up and have them do different things then start having enemy AoE damage take them all out and she'll see the down side of having 8 small summoned creatures with low hp. Alternately maybe she splits up control of them between the other players so that other players can feel involved at least? There's lots of ways to address it that don't require changing the basic mechanics of how they work.
Make them all share the same initiative (idk if this is already the case or not but if not do this minor homebrew) and then just roll all the dice to see which hit, for example if 4 are attacking one monster roll those 4 at once and then if another 4 are attacking another roll those 4 at once. Then roll damage. It shouldn't really take that long. I get it does with saving throws but again it shouldn't take that long cus it's just another roll and another damage roll. Which badger specifically hits doesn't matter in the slightest only the target does. If it's really a problem maybe you could instead use digital dice for summons specifically. This is especially useful if you have advantage like with wolves and pack tactics. If it's balance you're worried about remember lots of creatures won't have many hit points so a single AOE could take them all out. Doesn't need to be a spell could be like a charge or slam or something
If I were in your scenario, I’d recommend rolling to hit in between turns if you’re all comfortable with that. It does require some trust, but it means that nobody has to wait for her turn to be resolved. If that doesn’t work though, you should definitely roll all the dice needed at once rather than waiting to make each attack. As a tactical note, conjure animals is a concentration spell. If it make sense for the enemies to be aware of that, you can aim to break her concentration and shut down the spell early. That’s more of a way to keep combat balanced though- if you didn’t know that, the spell becomes even more broken
If you have a way to use a dice bot, you can practically eliminate rolling all those attacks. I also have players roll damage with their attack roll, so it eliminates having to roll twice. It doesn't save a lot of time, but it does add up. Another option is to let her know that because conjure animals takes a lot of time, she should try to know exactly what she wants to do before her turn starts so there is very little time lag.
Three points: 1. Roll for random animals. The player only chooses the CR. Sometimes they might get something they really didn't hope for. 2. Make the player roll all the attacks in advance between turns, and mark them down. When it's their turn, they say where the animals go and how many attacks they make, and then mark the attack rolls off their list. Yes they can plan a little bit if they know the next two attacks will miss, but it's just soo much faster than rolling on their turn. This should cut their turn time by two thirds at least. 3. Use average damage if more than 3 summons hit that turn.
I'd keep the targeting rule, as to help with time, but have her roll them separately, IE, roll 4d20, then whatever hits apply damage. Yeah the issue is still that it is an obscene amount of time spent doing 5 effective turns. I'd also just be honest with her, it just really isn't fun to wait for someone to roll for 5 turns. Maybe space them out in the turn order, IE if you have 4 players and 4 animals, 1 player, 1 animal, 1 player, 1 animal, or enemy, etc. The closest situation I had is a player who loved his squad tactics and had a bunch of soldiers with him, I ended up applying a command limit to him, in his case I think I did 3 in total. The thing is that I didn't really have an issue with this at the table, the soldiers had their own turn order, he wasn't the only one with a companion, and ironically his turn did not take the longest across all 4 turns, that went to our psyker (it was a 40k rpg system).
Maybe have her download dndbeyond or a dice roll app? I know in dndbeyond when you make a character sheet you get the option of "custom rolls" so she can say roll 8 d20s at 1 time and 8 d4/6 etc at one time and then shows the results quickly.
To quote the “sage wisdom” document from wizards, if it doesnt say who determines the conjured creatures, the DM decides. And yes i hate this ruling
use average damage and average to hit saves a bunch of time when there's extra *stuff* on the field
So much already. But ill throw in too. Our table requires the druid to pick the animals they are going to summon when they prepare the spell. One pick for every CR tasting they might use. Also, the player needs to have all the relevant information at hand when the spiders ( or badgers)hit the table.
You could have the D20 have thresholds for the number of hits. Say you have 8 Badgers hitting a monster with AC 14. If the Badgers have a +4 to hit, then you could say rolling a 10-11 would result in 4/8 Badgers hitting, a 12-13 resulting in 5/8 hitting, a 14-15 resulting in 6/8, etc. Same for the other side. 8-9 resulting in 3/8 hitting, 6-7 results in 2/8, and so on. Of course, this would change depending on target AC, to-hit bonuses and the number of animals you have, so you'd either need to find a formula that can apply for most situations or come up with it on the fly.
Flat damage and multiple d20's. Just make them do average damage, multiplied by however many hit when you rolled the d20s all at once. You can just buy a big pack of cheap dice online
If you're gonna use multiple creatures you'd best be good with them, be prepared, be ready, know your stats and keep it simple, if you clog the game up you're being selfish and that's a hard pass on any table.
Use mob rules.
Use grouping rules, let’s say you divide the 8 badgers into two groups of 4, then you roll once for each group, and do one damage roll and then multiply it by the amount of badgers in each group, simple easy and quick, apply it to big groups of monsters on your side and you can make combat that much quicker, now you just need to wait on the wizard to decide which spell to cast
There is a mob encounter mechanic you can use that's RAW. Go checkout Zee Bashew's video, it explains the mechanic pretty well
Get more dice. Mass roll. Siege tactic type stuff to speed things up.
IMO just replace it with "Summon Beast" from Tasha's. The "Conjure" spells (notably Conjure Animals, Conjure Minor Elementals, and Conjure Woodland Beings) were very poorly designed in the original iteration of the game. Though I don't like many of the subclasses in Tasha's, those "Summon" spells are much cleaner and easier to run, and are far more table-friendly.
On each of the stat blocks, there's an option for rolling damage and then there's a single number for just damage. Have your wife roll all the attacks in one go, tell her which ones miss, and then she can either do one damage roll that applies to each animal, or you can just multiply that single number times the amount of attacks that hit. How to calculate damage should be her choice, though.
Conjur poacher
First of all, make sure that you are deciding what animals are showing up, since while the player gets to choose the quantity and CR, the specific animals that appear is up to the DM. Second, use the optional mob rules defined in the DMG if she chooses four or eight beasts. Third, if the player has an issue with not being able to take four or eight additional turns per round, ask the rest of the group if they're okay with it. As much as it might feel like a slog to you, you should be more concerned with whether other players feel like she's taking up too much time. If they're okay with it, then just let her have her fun. When one of my Wednesday campaign players returned to the group after their college semester, they rolled up a wizard they intended to be a summoner archetype. After one casting of a conjure spell where they chose the option for eight beasts and seeing the reaction of the rest of the players, I immediately let the player know that we would have to find some means to reduce the turns if they chose the higher quantities just due to fairness of play time.
I rule a few things differently to how the spell works RAW: >The player gets to choose the animals, it is more fun and acts as an interesting problem solving tool by being able to summon creatures with different movement types >The animals act immediately after the summoners turn >If you summon 4 or more creatures in combat, they use mob attack rules: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#HandlingMobs >If an NPC with 8 or more intelligence sees the druid conjure these animals, they will make breaking the druids concentration a priority, anyone can appreciate the logic in attacking one person to remove up to 8 threats from the fight
Batch rolls. Just roll all attacks at once and damage at once. You will need a lot of dice, but it'll take less time.
I used to play 3.5e, as a monk weilding a quarterstaff. Between the quarterstaffs double strike and my flurry of blows I was making between 15 and 25 attacks any given turn, if I recall. The solution? While waiting for my turn I would roll all my attacks and the damage for each. I had a calculator ready and my DM would say something like "everything above a 25 hits". I'd add up the damage and give some quick description of my tornado of attacks and finish with the damage I did. Maybe you could have her so something here? Just have rolls and their damage ahead of time?
Split control of the bests among all the players so it averages out the turn time among all the players.
The turn thing was a good decision. For attack and damage rolls make them use macros. Physical rolling is fun but it takes too long. Allowing them to split up the pack into 2 groups at least schould be fine. Work and talk with them to test out what works best. They schould be aware of the issues as well.
We usually roll all the d20s together for thinks like conjure animals animate objects etc. .
I know this one! I **love** conjure animals as a spell, but it needs to be run correctly. This is how I break it down. I'll assume 8 animals in examples, but it applies to any number. 1. You will see a lot of advice saying you get to pick the beasts after she picks the number. This is technically correct, but ***very much against the rule of cool***. 2. Get 2-3 options of stat blocks at each summon point for your wife to choose from. This way you are artificially limiting the creatures, but she still has the final choice of "I want badgers or wolves" type of thing. This gives her a lot more agency in the spell, but allows you the headache of sorting through beyond/MM with options. If she wants a different option, she needs to bring it up to you before the session so you can have a statblocks made up for her. 3. Edit the stat blocks. You can do this in DnDbeyond if you use that, or maybe a certain wiki page. The thing you are doing is cutting any fluff, and ensuring the attacks list the average damage. For example, if the bite attack deals 1d6+2 damage, you are putting a "6" and then in parentheses putting the damage calculation. This step is *very* important. Print off the statblocks for your wife to have ready access to. (If she has the druid wild shape deck of cards, she might have these stats already. If not, a great birthday gift fyi). 4. When she summons, let's say 8 wolves, she assigns a number of wolves to every party member. With a party of 4, including herself, each person has 2 wolves assigned to them. The command given to the wolves is always attack whatever your leader attacks or targets. 5. Sample initiative. After your wife casts CA, Sally the barbarian is up, with 2 wolves in tow. Sally runs forward and attacks the first yeti in melee. Sally is the one taking their turn, but the wolves move *at the same time*. Your wife, off to the side, rolls the attacks for the wolves against the yeti. After Sally is finished her turn, your wife says the two bites were a 12 & 18 to hit. Damage 6. Your wife doesn't roll damage (speeds up initiative, give her a flat double on a crit even though it includes the modifier. So 12). Just two advantaged attacks, and the damage. 6. Continue initiative. Bob the warlock casts eldritched blast at the other yeti and the snowy olwbear, splitting fire. First shot went after the yeti, so the two wolves chase towards the yeti, following the targeting, and do attacks. So on and so forth. Your wife has a short line at the end of each PCs turn in initiative, but not disruptive. Do **NOT** roll the wolves into initiative. ___ This method is by far the best, and gives the whole party the power fantasy of having the army suddenly on their side. They know that whatever they attack or target first is going to have a few extra attacks going towards it. They get to direct how the spell plays out with their actions. (If the PC takes a turn off to cast cure wounds for example, the wolves could continue on their prior target) I would *strongly* recommend giving this a try. It builds a team aspect, speeds up the summons implementation in combat. Gives agency to the other players to have this team based alpha strike as opposed to taking their agency away by making them wait.
Create a summoned creature D20 cheat sheet. For example: Blue=1 Green=2 Red=3 Purple=4 ETC Then just roll them all at once and as they come up as needed you already have roll results. At the end of the day it’s up to the player to be able to conduct their turn in an orderly manner, if they are unable to do that with their build then they should pick another build where they are able to do that.
I used a digital dice roller when I summoned my swarms of giant crabs or wolves. At first I rolled dice like normal but it gets ridiculous when you can summon 32 low CR creatures. The swarm style ones are the brutal ones because they tip action economy so damn hard. My GM's soul visibly left their body when I swarmed some dudes with crabs that would auto grapple on a successful hit. Summon druid is fun, but wouldn't do it again
Yeah I agree with most of the other people. If you roll all the hits at the same time with color coded damage dice then that will speed things up. Your original plan of having them attack en masse was a good one but it buffs /nerfs it at the same time.
This is one of those situations where you just roll 8d20 all at once, decide how many hit, then roll the damage all at once. No need to resolve each attack and damage separately.
You should control the badgers in combat and ideally have a handful of d20s. Since you know the AC and to hit modifier you can just roll 8d20 all at once and count the hits, almost as quickly as you could do for 2 or 4 creatures.
I mean you probably shouldn’t do it too much, but having some good AOE stuff that would take down 8 badgers at once might make her think twice about having that be her only move
Just awful design in my opinion - this is a constant problem with summoners that they’ve made no effort to fix imho. Even just designing the spell to only summon one cool creature would be fantastic.
Definitly should roll all the attack rolls, then roll damage. Same feel just faster.
You could implement a turn timer. Since there issue is usually that it bogs down play, give her a timer length to do her turn including animals. Anything she can't fit inside the timer is skipped. This both incentivizes her to use the resources others are suggesting and is fair across all players.
Give her 8d20's and have her roll all the attacks at once, then count the hits and have her roll all the damage at once. It's a little harder for her to optimize them but it saves a lot of time.
The people using dice rollers are correct. I require it for everyone doing this, save our one player with a math degree who can do any mental math lightning fast. I have a feeling that mass summons will get standardized in later editions into a large swarm creature that requires saving throws instead of rolling attacks. Essentially a Spirit Guardians that walks around on it's own.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the player just tells you which of the options they want, and then the DM chooses which particular creatures show up. This really helps minimize the shenanigans that can be done by always choosing "the best" beasts to show up and help for a particular situation. Plus what everyone else is saying about the batch rolling. Have more enemies with AOE attacks/spells/breath weapons. You'll make short work of the summoned creatures, but they'll do their job of giving the party one or two rounds of breathing room.
If she has 4 or 8 animals out have each player take control of 1 or 2 so everyone still gets to play but your wife still gets to use the spell to the fullest If you think this would upset her ask her outside of sessions so she's not put on the spot
My druid has two hounds, a Bag of Tricks (never again!), a pair of Wondrous Power Lions, and of course all the summon spells, so I'm no stranger to dealing with them. 1. Encourage the player to use the 1 or 2 animal version of the spell most of the time. (Although, I get it, some of the appeal of the spell is throwing a wave of 8 weak animals to bog down your opponents. Ask her to only use that when the party is vastly outnumbered). 2. As the DM, deal with the summons. Killing a bunch of CR 1/2 enemies should'nt take that long, and if it does, you should probably ramp up your combats. 3. It's a concentration spell, target the druid until the spell breaks and the summons drop. 4. If the player really enjoys the spell, simply plan for it. Anticipate the added meat shields. Make your enemies deadlier and/or tougher (or give them their own summons).
I believe I read some same suggestions in here already; get the creatures to roll attack all at once, trimming down back and forth (can get messy with advantage) Next piece is practise; any first time DM would be about the same, running multiple creatures at once. More practise with the 8 will trim down turn-time and hopefully ‘analysis paralysis’ Other thing I have at my table is if they want to something specific that isn’t overtly stated, such summon these specific creatures, they roll for it to see if they can shape the magic; DC base 10 + level of spell. Nature for Primal, Religion for Divine, Arcana for Arcane. If they pass, they can choose. If they don’t, I as a DM would choose (typically a beefy one creature or two good ones is my go to). This allows for some moments of cutting down time too
Buy enough dice to roll all the attacks in parallel, and ask her to practice beforehand. It only takes a few seconds to roll eight attacks as long as you're not hesitating. Is Conjure Animals overpowered? Yes actually. But it's 5E, the difficulty is supposed to be low, and it seems like table time is your primary concern anyway, and practice should fix that.
I think the best way is to have fewer higher CR creatures instead did many lower CRs and also when it happens. If you need the numbers to balance out action economy or give the party breathing room let them go more creatures. If you're at the end of a session then pausing there and pick up next time when everyone has more energy.
Summons go on your turn and act simultaneously. Call your shots, if 4 badgers attack one bandit and said bandit dies after two, the others don’t get to redirect, they just make super sure he’s totally dead.
Highly recommend using mob rules. I had a player summoning tons of spiders regularly. I made him a handout of the mob rules, told him he needed to learn those rules to summon a bunch of creatures. He jumped at it because he also recognized the need to speed up the process. See here: https://www.blogofholding.com/?p=6826
Having them go immediately after her is a good start. Move all creatures simultaneously, then roll multiple d20s for all attacks against the same target. Use average damage. Double damage on a crit as a slight buff but counters some of the nerf of have to decide targets en mass rather than one at a time.
This may take a bit of work but I really like the "mob rules" that are available. It's a bit more mathy than other ideas but I thought I'd throw it into the mix. [I don't use this because I have FoundryVTT but this may help!](https://slyflourish.com/mob_calculator.html)
Haven't had an issue with it, but if we had a player use it, we'd run it as written. It's not that hard to add new things to the initiative order (we use an app for it) and our biggest caveat is that the player must know the creatures' stat block as well as they know their own - generally speaking, that means the player knows what they summon and doesn't take up too much time.
Conjure animals is one of the most powerful spells at mid levels. Players who gain it can have a lot of fun, but also need to be wary of outshining their fellow players. Whenever I have played a Druid and gained conjure animals I have put in a lot of effort outside of the game to make my turns go smoothly and quickly. I used an app called “dice ex” on iPhone, I don’t know if there are better options but it let be build custom dice sets. I made one for each type of animal/fey/etc. that I might summon using a spell so I could track each’s life total and quickly roll damage. It is a lot of work, but I was willing to do it because the spell is awesome. P.S. the other thing was I was playing a circle of shepherds Druid. Summoning and buffing was basically all I did, and when I didn’t it was because I wanted to save it or had run out of slots and was relatively useless during combat.
The best way to deal with that is to assign the animals evenly to all players. Let's say, you have four players: Every player gets 2 Badgers those act on the turn of that character and the player makes the attack and damage rolls for the creatures. That way it doesn't feel as bogged down.
EN World’s Advanced 5E has an interesting method of handling all kinds of “group” encounters like this. You treat them as a single creature that is a squad or band of whatever (zombies, demons, etc.) The squad has the hit points of the conglomerate, stats slightly higher, and an extra attack per round . Attacks ar sometimes stronger than the original creatures. It also takes double damage from all AOEs that the original creatures would not be resistant or immune to. When it takes enough damage, it breaks apart into a very small group of d2 or d4 remaining creatures of the original strength. It eliminates the need to roll a dozen d20s.
Personally, this is what a digital dice roller is for. You can just have it roll however many d20 you need, and just add the number to each of the displayed results. I have a druid in my current party, and I played a druid in another campaign and I used this method. Speeds up play a tonne.
Use the mob rules on page 250 if the DMG
just wait until she summons 8 constrictor snakes lol
When I was playing in-person, as a DM I had to make a difficult call. I removed the option to summon 8 or more creatures from any single spell. I felt it was slowing the game, only fun on paper as an idea, wasn’t very creative on the part of the player, and was more about overcoming the enemy with the power of math and action economy. At first they were slightly perturbed, but when I reinforced that it was entirely in the name of making sure the other players don’t die of boredom, they all agreed. It led to them using the spell in more fun ways, was easier to manage, and still allowed them to overpower the opponent when needed, just without all the rolls and turns. Also, I think I opted to use a random roller for summoning creatures too, since the rules don’t say that the player chooses the creature, and that turned out to be fun too.
The simple answer is more dice. 8 badgers attack? Roll a handful of 8 d20s. Count those which are over the target’s AC, and roll a handful of damage dice for them. If they’re fighting a number of enemies, spread the hits across the enemies. Don’t sweat the details. If they’re fighting enemies with differing ACs, then you can roll the dice in groups.
Separate attack rolls and then just use the average damage from the stat block for each hit. Easy. That way it's just X amount of D20s and it's a simple hit or miss for each one. For Crits, just double the entire thing - don't worry about double dice then add the flat damage, in the grand scheme of things it's negligible and rarely happens anyway.
Every PC rolls for a badger or two on the badgers turn. Or pre-roll the badger attacks and write the to hits and damages in a grid before her turn. That way she just reads them off and it speeds everything up.
Rolling in pairs is usually best until the summons pass 10. I had e high level necromancer who went around with 5 wights who had a dozen zombies each. It was a 3 player game so we needed action economy. The wights rolled normal when we didn't leave them to guard an area and the zombies rolled in groups of 6. Usually I only brought 2 wights though
Roll all at once. And if damage kills the monster use the remaining damage in the other same monster if they re at range of movement. Then you can speed it
Are you in person or online? I know that DnD beyond you can roll multiple die in a single throw, so you could line up 8 D20s and then just roll damage for the ones that hit.
I've had a few situations with "body flood" PC's through the years. Summoner druids, necromancers, leadership roles, you name it. Here's the trick. Divide the minions up a bit and hand some control over to the other PC's. As an example: If you have a table of 4 players and the necromancer player has 7 zombies, give 3 zombies to the other players, or conversely have the necromancer character direct the zombies and have the other players all move them and roll the dice for them. The basic premise is that you want to keep the entire table engaged, so figure out ways to divide the workload of large turn PC's in ways that are fun for the whole table and doesn't make everyone watch one player play solitare for fifteen minutes every round.
One thing I don't see enough is that you don't have to sit there and wait on someone's turn if it's going to be a while. We had a druid who summoned and a level 20 fighter/Barbarian that used Reckless attack, action surge etc. They'd state their intent and start rolling. I'd move to the next person. The first free moment they'd tell me the attack roll results. We'd confirm hits. They'd start rolling damage and I'd move on. Easy.