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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next How does summoning affect a monster's Challenge?



quinron
2018-05-12, 12:42 AM
I'm curious if there's been any confirmed position from Mearles or Crawford on how a monster's ability to summon creatures affects its CR. I'm guessing the answer is no, because homebrewing is (somewhat understandably) not a priority for the creators, though they've given us a better toolset than in previous editions.

If that is the case, what are some of you folk's opinions? Not having a CR effect from existing summoning creatures, like devils, makes it hard to figure out how giving a creature a summoning spell will affect its per-round damage output or whatever.

theshadowcult
2018-05-12, 03:42 AM
Going into preparation, you know before hand what creatures your npc can summon and how many. Increase te challenge cr by the appropriate amount for the extra creatures.

quinron
2018-05-13, 06:37 PM
Going into preparation, you know before hand what creatures your npc can summon and how many. Increase te challenge cr by the appropriate amount for the extra creatures.

That was about the best guess I had. Thanks - guess that's as official as it's going to get.

Shades of Gray
2018-05-15, 12:25 PM
It's not quite perfect in all cases. Fighting four demons that can each summon an identical demon is a weaker encounter than just fighting eight of those same non-summoning demons for two reasons:

1) The creature might die or get crowd-controlled before they have a chance to use their ability. This essentially kills two birds with one stone, which wouldn't happen in the non-summoning case.
2) The creatures have to use a turn to summon, which takes up some of the action-economy. If a combat lasts three turns, there was 24 turns of demons attacking in the non-summoning case (assuming they all get killed at the same time) compared to 16 turns of demons attacking in the summoning case.

My intuition would be that you should ask yourself how long the encounter is going to last, and modify the challenge of the summoning creatures appropriately. If they're only around for two of the three combat rounds, they should be worth two-thirds experience. Or you can modify the challenge of the summoner by how much of the combat they're actively fighting for (in this case, subtract a third of the challenge because they miss out on a turn)