Player-controlled minions as slottable class features?

[PhoenixPhyre]

This is something I heard about and am not sure if I like the concept or not. But I figured I'd throw it out there.

Problem statement: Minionmancy is both thematic (yay!) and annoying (boo!). Necromancers, beast masters, hirelings--these are core parts of D&D's DNA. But at the table (especially in combat and with grids), they are at best a drain on time and at worst bring things to a screeching halt just due to bookkeeping and decision-making. And tend to distort action economy (and thus balance) tremendously, as well as spotlight time.

Now none of these problems are insuperable, and there are various options to mitigate them.

"Solution"? Turn minions into boon-like augments on the player character who controls them instead of separate stat blocks with actions, HP, etc. Every "companion" would have the ability to sacrifice themselves to negate some amount of damage (a hit that would drop you to 0? Any hit? Any turn worth of hits? Dunno.). Different "companions" (ie familiars, skeletal minions, zombies, summoned elementals, simulacra, beast companions, etc) would then have one or two things they add to the controller's sheet. Anything from

* Riders on regular abilities. Like "when you deal damage, you deal an extra X" from a fighty-type companion. Or "You can concentrate on two spells" from a simulacrum.
* Passive abilities. Like "advantage on Intelligence (Investigation) checks" from a familiar.
* Extra abilities. Like a dragon companion giving you access to a breath weapon. Or a beast companion letting you attack at a different range.
* Non-combat stuff. Access to information from a sage companion. Extra carrying capacity from a porter companion. Etc.

Pros : Seems much simpler to balance and run. No need to track their health, HP, AC, or roll a bunch of checks. No longer eats table time, as they're basically mobile class features.

Cons : Super gamey. A lot of work to set up--you'd have to write and balance all of the different "minion features". If not balanced right, could be useless. Doesn't quite have the same narrative flavor. Doesn't allow you to do the "wall of meat" approach for them to block off passages (as they don't take up extra space in this model).

Thoughts? Is it even worth pursuing further?

[stoutstien]

I've pondered on it myself. nothing concrete thus far but I've played with hordes (any groups of 3 or more similar minions) acting as a controllable environmental hazard.
A horde of zombies is DT that also has a chance to restrain and such.

[Sigreid]

What I do, that seems to work well, is have sidekicks controlled by a different player than the player of the character they have primary loyalty to.

[Amnestic]

Thoughts? Is it even worth pursuing further?

I would personally say...no.

Not because of mechanical/balance concerns, necessarily, but definitely on theme/feel.

Summoners/necromancers/beastmasters as a concept to me are there because you want the body as a separate creature. It needs to be able to act (pseudo-)independently, take up its own space, have its own action set, etc., otherwise it doesn't feel like you're 'summoning the dead' or 'commanding beasts'. The way you've framed it turns them closer to spells (in the case of active boons) or magic items (in the case of passive boons), so while it is certainly mechanically easier, it sacrifices everything interesting (again, to me) about the concept of being a 'summoner'/necromancer/beastmaster/etc. in the first place.

I think WotC missed a trick when they made the conjure stuff summon multiple individual creatures instead of turning them into Swarms, but with drakewarden, nu-BM ranger, wildfire druid, and the Summon X spells I think that generally the 'summoner' archetype is well-supported on both a thematic and mechanical standpoint post-Tasha's. It is still missing the 'horde' style stuff implemented in a satisfying way, so a "Summon Swarm of X" spell or two might not go amiss, but otherwise it's generally fine now - again, to me.

[Rukelnikov]

I would personally say...no.

Not because of mechanical/balance concerns, necessarily, but definitely on theme/feel.

Summoners/necromancers/beastmasters as a concept to me are there because you want the body as a separate creature. It needs to be able to act (pseudo-)independently, take up its own space, have its own action set, etc., otherwise it doesn't feel like you're 'summoning the dead' or 'commanding beasts'.

Basically this.

[Burley]

I played a game many years ago in 3.5e with a Dread Necromancer. The player and DM laid out some ground rules to speed up general gameplay.

1) The player would not do add units in the middle of a fight (like raise a half-dozen zombies) without the DM knowing beforehand. (We had a couple siege/counter-siege scenarios, so, adding troops was ok for that.) This was mostly managed by limiting the usable materials (corpses) available to the player.
2) The player would have direct control of his strongest undead (which was an undead golem, I think), but all smaller undead would be controlled by the DM using the player's orders. So, "Attack the humans in red" would be the player's directive and the DM would move the [zombies] and use averages for hit/damage during mob fights to keep the game moving.

I think it worked out pretty well and I can't remember them ever arguing at the table about it.

Edit: I know this isn't really what the OP was looking for. But, it's my experience with minion-omancy.

[da newt]

I've used the house rule - every PC is limited to 1 minion at a time with some success. If a PC wants to use something that allows for multiple summons (conjure animals), we treat it as a swarm. This seems to be a pretty decent middle of the road compromise that keeps things moving / balanced / allows the Player to feel powerful.

[OldTrees1]

What about Terrain rather than Buffs? Passive / triggered effects that effect the area rather than the controller.

At 1 minion, usually leaving it as a single creature makes sense.
(Although I once refluffed a telepathic minion in a backpack as telepathic graft buff for the character)

A couple minions might make sense as a individual creatures, or condensed into a swarm.

Dozens of minions probably should be condensed into a swarm, but maybe abstracting them as moving terrain might be more reasonable? Adapt the swarm rules to give the terrain some defensive stats that relate to the size of the areas they do and can cover (as they get hurt the area shrinks).



Quick idea:
A necromancer surrounded by 100 skeletons that act as difficult terrain (allies ignore this), can be commanded to form walls of bone (walking through a wall of bone requires a shove), deal minor damage every round, and trigger a Dex save vs Restrained whenever an enemy hits the necromancer. Damage to the skeletal mass reduces its area. Bone walls cost twice the area (since they need more skeletons).


This way you still have an independent entity that you are commanding, but you are condensing the time it takes to resolve the effect of the minions.

[Psyren]

This sounds similar to how 4e handled summoning.

Personally I think a lot of the problems with minions go away if players can only control 1-2 at most.

[PhoenixPhyre]

This sounds similar to how 4e handled summoning.

Personally I think a lot of the problems with minions go away if players can only control 1-2 at most.

I agree that limiting the number sharply reduces the issue overall.

My personal rules/requests go something like
* Use the Summon X line where possible, not the Conjure X line.
* If you have to use the Conjure X line, please get with me and decide what your "go to"s will be so I can have tokens ready (VTT mainly). In general, if you're going to summon and we're on a VTT, let me know ahead of time so I can prep the pieces. Physical play...just have some kind of counter/token.
* And please use the "summon 1" or "summon 2" options, even for things like animate objects. If you do, I'll let you pick pretty much anything you want. If you try to summon 8 pixies or wolves or a swarm of tiny animated objects...no. Just...no. And pixies don't exist in universe (for a complicated set of reasons).
* If you're going to use a combat summon or pet, please be on the ball. Have their actions ready to go, their stat blocks in front of you, and don't dither.
* No chaining summons. This is a hard (house) rule--no summoned, created, controlled or conjured NPC will ever use an ability that allows them to create, conjure, summon, or control another creature. Full stop. It will not happen. Consider that option greyed out on their stat block.
* Simulacrum is the caster for purposes of wish stress.
* Animate dead is possible, but see the limits above. And, in universe, it's the quickest way to get you and the entire party labeled as "kill on sight" in civilized areas--undead are inherently damaging to the life force of everything around them. Areas infested with undead become sterile, starting with reduced fertility of plants and animals and leading to complete sterility where even the rocks break down into featureless dust. This is because undead are powered by (effectively) entropy spirits that exist to consume all existence around them. You can get away with it short-term in isolated areas, but getting caught practicing undead-creation in a populated area, even one of the less nice ones, is an immediate death sentence, carried out by mob action if nothing else.

[Sigreid]

This sounds similar to how 4e handled summoning.

Personally I think a lot of the problems with minions go away if players can only control 1-2 at most.

Eh, the summoner is usually better off with one or 2 more powerful minions than a bunch of weaker ones except in specific circumstances where rolling it out isn't usually necessary. For example, a group of fire mephits is probably a better choice to burn down significant portions of the camp laying siege to your castle than a lone fire elemental, but there's not really any reason to round by round it out rather than have the DM maybe roll some dice and just decide what they manage.

For general use of summons, I've not noticed them slowing the game down all that much as long as the summoner is ready when the time comes to declare what they're ordered to do.

[Pex]

I effectively have this playing my Paladin with Find Steed and now Greater Find Steed. The DM did not like the Steed getting its own attacks and especially hated that it could take the Help action giving me Advantage on all my first attacks on my turn. He house ruled that all it can do is move and Dash but all attacks would be against me. The Steed would never be targeted for attacks or lose hit points from spell effects, etc. It essentially gave me very fast movement as a class feature. It has come in handy many times, especially considering my Paladin is a dwarf. It looks and feels broken, but the DM hasn't any issue with it. He's perfectly happy I get to enemies quickly to bash and smite.

Meanwhile another game another DM my Battlesmith Artificer has his Steel Defender using it as normal for the class, and the DM has no problem with it. A third attack, no problem. Give disadvantage on an enemy attack, no problem. Enemy takes its action to attack the Defender instead of a PC, no problem.

It's not a universal thing that DMs have problems with PC minions. I'm sure some people do, and if they need a solution to solve it that's their business. I only caution against the idea that minions are inherently a problem.

[OvisCaedo]

Hmmm. I don't know what it was like in 3.5 exactly, so I'll speak a bit about my experience in Pathfinder. There are a lot of options to make really cool, fun, unique minions, through necromancy and other methods. But the problem is that in most cases, you just don't really give up *enough* to get your super cool pets. A necromancer in PF can have a couple strong cool undead monsters traveling with them, and that's fine and fun, but the big problem is that... they're generally also a fully loaded spellcaster! It just doesn't really cost that much maintenance wise to have powerful minions.

5e... goes maybe too hard in the other direction on two fronts. Most of what you can summon or create in terms of minions will be much weaker, generic, shorter in duration, and have more resource upkeep to try to keep if being a pet owner is a big part of the desired fantasy. The new summon spells are a bit more unique, but definitely very impermanent. Swarms of skeleton archers are... technically numerically effective but a huge hassle to deal with, and also just kind of lame! Being a necromancer gets you almost nothing but... big groups of individually weak skeletons. Bleh. But they have a sort of interesting upkeep/duration; you effectively have to keep casting the skeleton spell every day to maintain control over them. You can just skip maintaining it if you expect them to die that day and still have the spell slot to use normally, though.

Anyhow, rant aside, I think there COULD be some angle for allowing stronger and more interesting long-term pets if you made them based on similar but more thorough spell-slot maintenance. Like, "while the creature created by this spell slot is still alive, the caster cannot recover the spell slot." But it'd still need a lot of systemic details to really keep up with level scaling in a natural way while also continuing to be a meaningful enough cost to ALLOW having strong pets, so it'd be... a lot of work to try to make and balance a real minionmancy subsystem! Probably not going to happen

edit: also i do have to admit simulacrum really needs to go or be heavily changed

[Damon_Tor]

At my table:
Five or more creatures can attack together as a unit, rolling one collective attack roll. The result determines how MANY of them hit. If the attack roll hits exactly the target DC then half the attacking creatures hit (rounded down). Every 1 point above or below the target AC means an additional 10% of the attackers hit or miss respectively.

There are no crits with this system. Instead the number of attacks which can hit in this way can exceed the number of attacking creatures. So if you beat the target AC by 7 points then the amount of damage dealt is as if "120%% of the attacking creatures hit.

The attacks have to have the same attack bonus and average damage to attack together as a unit.

[Snowbluff]

I've thought about it. Echo Knight takes inspiration from 4e Shaman, but I think we can pull another piece away and instead add damage thresholds. Instead of being destroyed in a single hit, the hit has to do a sufficient amount of damage to pass its damage threshold. They also just use your defenses, so no HP tracking and the same set of stats otherwise. 5e summons already use your attacking stat now, so that can just be brought forward.

4e's familiars also had a lot of effects, most of which sucked, or didn't work well, or would put them in a state where they were 1 HP and would die to stray AoEs. I used Familiar Mount on my familiar spiderling in one build so it wouldn't get splatted immediately.

[sambojin]

I quite like the idea, although as mentioned, it would take a lot of work to make it work well.

I wouldn't be surprised if 1dnd ends up with a max summons rule. Something like "you can only control summons up to your proficiency bonus".

So a lvl3 druid can have a familiar and a summoned beast, but when they hit lvl5 they can only have a max of 3 summons, so you may as well go for two CR1 beasts from Conjure Animals (or three CR1/2 warhorsies/ apes or something). By the time you can have true summon swarms, theyll be a bit redundant. Well, having 4-6 giant eagles is never truly redundant, but you'll never see 16-24 wolves or anything, which is a good thing.

Or they'll nerf the spell into the ground, which is pretty well justified as well.