Core Minion Master Cleric.

[Metahuman1]

Gonna be starting a game soon with a relatively new group. Books are restricted.

PHB, DMG, Monster Manual 1 on limited cases (Class has summoning spells, Wild Shape, Animal Companion of Familiar.), and Maybe PHB 2.

One of the players is a guy who's never really played before. He's been kicking around concepts and at my advice settled on a cleric cause he can shift gears as he goes if he get's overly board with something. For starters at least, he want's to try being a summoner, and bringing out lots of minions to do his bidding, and idea he got form some video games he's played.


I know the archatype, but I've never paid it much mind. Does anyone have any helpful advise to offer?

Assume 5th lvl start and standard WBL.

[ArcturusV]

Could maybe skimp on the personal items. Pick up Leadership as a feat. Get some cohorts/companions. Look towards spells in themes like Bless, Mass ____, Enlarge Person. Use some of your WBL to help outfit your cohorts with some bare minimal supplies if your DM doesn't.

It's simple, easy to run if your DM helps you NPC the cohorts. e.g: The cleric gives a general order and the DM decides how the NPCs enact it to the limits of their equipment, knowledge, and abilities.

It's simple. But a pain in the ass for a DM as it requires them to do a little more bookkeeping a bit. But it might be something he's interested in.

Of course there is the usual undead use. Though it gets really quite expensive so it's not really good for the "minion master" concept so much as it's good for the "Okay, and you may want to take up your complaints with my complaint department *reveals Draco-Zombie* You were saying?" concept.

[Psyren]

The main difficulty is that, if he focuses on summoning, his spells will take a round to cast instead of a standard. So he will need to be protected since it will be easy for enemies to focus fire him and disrupt his spells. Once he gets some meat on the field he should be able to hold his own.

He should also try to keep the stats of his favorite minions ready at a moment's notice. It can bog down play if you guys have to flip through the MM every time he summons something. Use bookmarks, flags, or the SRD to bring up summoned monster stats quickly.

Since you have the DMG, a great PrC for him to look into is the Thaumaturgist. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/prestigeClasses/thaumaturgist.htm)