Summoning Hordes...

[wookietek]

Do you guys have any strategies to streamline the play of summoned creatures? We were a party of 6 when we began to face the demons, but after a couple rounds of summoning to call in meat shields we became a party of 15, and then the demons summoned some help. It took 5 hours for the combat (albeit it a really tough one), and that became the entire session that night.

[sideswipe]

Do you guys have any strategies to streamline the play of summoned creatures? We were a party of 6 when we began to face the demons, but after a couple rounds of summoning to call in meat shields we became a party of 15, and then the demons summoned some help. It took 5 hours for the combat (albeit it a really tough one), and that became the entire session that night.

for the party, a 30 second turn limit including minions and summons that are under your control. for the DM as long as he needs. you can have a nice well thought turn for your character or summon 10 things and have to use them quickly. i personally have my turns pre thought and any minions i have take no time at all.

this obviously changes for rules queries, but...

my summoned fiendish tiger charges the ogre, roll attacks, resolve hits, roll damage. should not take more than 10 seconds.
so if you have 2-3 and yourself you can fit that in 30 seconds, if you want more characters to play your team should not suffer.

[sleepyphoenixx]

There's a couple things you can do to make summoners play more smoothly. The first and most important is to print out the statblocks of whatever you're going to summon, with all relevant feats/buffs included.
The second is to pre-roll a couple D20 for attack rolls, saves, etc. at the start of combat, while the other players have their turn. That way you can just line the dice up and read off the numbers left to right when they come up.
Third, have an idea what they're going to do before their turn comes up. You'll have to adjust to the moves of others sometimes but a general "Monster 1 is going to attack Y, Monster 2 is going to cast X, Monster 3 is going to use SLA Y" plan makes your turn go a whole lot faster.

[lytokk]

Something I'm getting ready to do for my games druid is putting together a set of notecards with the important stats for her summoned creatures. This way she doesn't have to find them in the monster manual every time she wants to summon a creature, just find the right card. I'm hoping this can speed her up a little bit.

[Brookshw]

Note cards, mass dice rolling (varied color dice help), or even online rollers that can handle mass rolls. Ask the party to control some of the summons for you so people aren't as sidelined and more hands for rolling.

Personally I always find it slows things down and ask my players to stick to 2-3 powerful creatures rather than weenie madness so people aren't sitting around forever.

[Lightlawbliss]

as a dm: aoe disable/damage does wonders against mass summons. It doesn't take long to figure out "it's stuck/gone so it can't do anything"

[wookietek]

I like the idea of note cards and using a different dice set for each summoned creature. Thanks, that should help move things along.

[Zaq]

Yeah, note cards are a huge help. Definitely make some note cards with all the relevant stats.

This has been suggested, but I'll reiterate it: consider coordinating with your partymates to have them control some or all of your critters. This takes come coordination ahead of time (it's not very helpful if they have no idea what your summons can do, after all), but if you manage to do it properly, it helps spread the spotlight around and makes it so that you're not the only one getting extra actions (and thus taking extra time). Just say "Okay Joe, you're in charge of the celestial tiger; Kate, you get the fiendish dire weasels" and pass out the cards as appropriate. Don't just spring this on them unannounced, but if they know it's coming and they're cool with it, it's a good way of making summons more fun for the whole party.

[StoneCipher]

I put things in loosely defined groups when DMing and give them all the same rolls.

Say for instance I have 10 soldiers attacking. 3 Attack one target, 3 attack another, and 4 attack a third.

I would roll 3 d20s for this situation, and roll only one set of damage dice and multiply by 3 (or 4) and crits I independently confirm if need be.

Now, depending on the significance and variance of the troops, I may decide to operate differently, but I try to clump mass amounts of attackers under as few dice rolls as possible.

Obviously if you summon a whole variance of monsters that would likely not have any similar battle strategies, you can't really do that. But it's worth going over with your DM as a potential option to expedite things.

[sleepyphoenixx]

Well it's kind of the polite thing to refrain from using your empowered maximized twinned SNA to summon a whole horde of critters that will bog down the game, no matter how effective it may be in a particular situation. The same applies to any kind of necromancer and hordes of low-HD zombies/skeletons.

Limit yourself to 1 or 2 monsters in most cases. If you let other players help control your summons stick to a maximum of 1 summon/player.
As a DM don't throw a ton of summoning enemies at the party or if you do, don't have them use their summon ability all at the same time. Stick to getting reinforcements when one set of summons dies.

You can do a lot of things as a summoner that would be useful IC that you don't (or shouldn't) use because it turns combat into a OOC nightmare. The same applies to those melee builds with maxed numbers of attacks. Nobody wants to sit through that.